Caleb's Crossing (38 page)
I left Samuel and the babe at the Cutters’ house and walked directly to the Indian College. It fell to me to carry the news to Caleb. I was his friend: it was right that I should do it. Samuel wanted to go with me, but I said no. Howsoever my friend received this blow, the fewer witnesses the better, as I thought. The worst of it was that his face was all joy when first he caught sight of me. He hurried out into the yard to greet me. He looked as well as I had seen him since my return from Padua, all alight with anticipation of the celebration to come.
I had thought, all through the journey, of what words I could say to him. I had turned and shaped them and spoken them in my mind many times. In the end, all my rehearsals were for nowt. Where one loves another as greatly as Caleb loved Joel, the soul does not need words to bring fell tidings. My face, my body, the heaviness of my step—all these things carried the news to him plain. Before any word passed my lips—“shipwrack” or “murther”—Caleb knew Joel was dead.
He did not cry out. He stood, and the hand that had been extended to greet me fell heavy to his side. His face twitched from the effort of self-control. I was struggling to form words, my throat closed by my own tears. I do not know what I managed to choke out in regard to the events, but after a moment he raised a hand and hushed me.
“Bethia.” He took a deep, ragged breath. “I will trouble you to hear this anon. Please leave me now.”
“Caleb, if I—”
“Please, Bethia. As you care for me. Go.”
So I went. I do not know if he sought the details, some later time, from Samuel or any other. But to me he never spoke of Joel’s death again.
I
will not say the Harvard commencement of the Year of Our Lord 1665 was joyless. That would be false. There
was
joy, a moment of sweet festivity, even for those of us who mourned. In this fallen world, such is our condition. Every happiness is a bright ray between shadows, every gaiety bracketed by grief. There is no birth that does not recall a death, no victory but brings to mind a defeat. So was that commencement a celebration. I believe Joel wanted it so. His spirit, insofar as I felt its light touch that day, was no unquiet ghost but a warm and benign companion. I think—I hope—that Caleb felt this too.
I close my eyes, and I remember that sun-dappled day. The paths were crowded from early morning with visitors from Boston, Watertown, Charlestown and every outlying farm or plantation. Families of the commencers jostled jib by jole with Indians, farmers, clergymen, and vendors loudly hawking their diverse wares, come to profit off the throng. It seemed that many folk thirsted not for learning but for beer and wine, for the taverns did brisk business, and public drunkenness was evident in some raucous antics among the crowd.
When I had worked in the buttery, the preparations for the feasting and bevering had consumed us for many weeks prior to the day itself. By long custom we engaged two Indians from Natick who were adept at the turnspit to roast beeves, and in the great fireplace all manner of kettles brimmed with pottages and puddings. We had rolled out no less than twelve barrels of wine that year, and I lost count of the amount of cider and beer that was also consumed, and that just within the college precinct. I had thought the fest ill-named that year, for this
inceptio
, or beginning, seemed more apt to be the end of those of us tasked to provision it.
Samuel and I were abroad early, to assure a good vantage point for the academical procession. Even so, many had come before us. I could see the governor, mounted and flanked by his pike-bearing guards, and also the sheriffs providing escort to the Board of Overseers. But the honorable members of the Great and General Court and the reverend clergy of the six leading towns I could not see, since they were on foot. I tugged on Samuel’s hand and we wove our way, with some difficulty in that dense throng, until we found a higher vantage point. I was determined to see Caleb marching with his classmates. I glimpsed Chauncy, and Dunster, the former president, in the ermine-trimmed robes and velvet bonnets of their English colleges. And then came our scholars in their plain gowns, their own glowing faces the only adornment they required. They were all grave looks one moment, joyful smiles the next when perhaps they caught the eye of a parent in the crowd. I saw Eliot and Dudley, handsome Hope Atherton and a smiling Jabez Fox. Then Caleb, marching last, taller than the next by a good half a head, stately in his bearing, as one raised to ceremony. He did not look all about him, as some of the others did, but kept his eyes ahead, his gaze intense and focused, as if he truly could see the future towards which he walked.
I could not peel my eyes from him, even as he walked on and past me. The set of his shoulders, the ceremonial cap squarely upon his head—and I thought of turkey feathers and raccoon grease, purple wampum and deer hide. I thought of the hands, dirt engrained, reaching so avidly for the book I held. I had begun this journey following him into the hidden corners of his world and here it ended with him crossed over into the brightest heights of mine.
Samuel touched my arm then and signaled that we needed to make haste into the hall. I had arranged with the Whitbys to spy upon the ceremony from the buttery and had promised to stay well out of their way on this, the busiest day of their year. From my peephole I saw Samuel take his place at the front with the distinguished alumni. The hall was crowded and all abuzz with excited chatter until the minister stood to deliver his invocation. Then Benjamin Eliot was called forth to deliver the Greek oration. He had been named valedictorian. Nothing was said about Joel’s untimely and tragic death, and if the honor would have gone to him, no sign of it was given. I do not know why they did not acknowledge him; it seemed to me then a grave misjudgment, so much so that I felt my face burn hot with the injustice of the omission. Surely, had such a tragic fate overtaken an Eliot or a Dudley, we should have heard of it, and offered up a prayer. I expect Chauncy did not wish to darken the merriment of the day, or to belittle young Eliot by making it plain that he was a second choice. Especially since his renowned father sat smiling proudly in the first tier of distinguished guests. Still, it sat ill with me, and it does so even to this day.
I believe Benjamin Eliot had not had much time to prepare his words, for he fell back on the stale and oft-rehearsed theme of salvation by grace, and although it was a competent oration, none would have called it brilliant or memorable. Of course, young Eliot did not have to use the occasion as others did, to catch the eye of those in the illustrious audience who might have a pulpit or a schoolroom on offer. His path was already set out for him; he would go to assist the work of his father. Later, I learned that a stern providence awaited him. At a young age, he became quite lunatic, unable to govern his tongue or his actions.
Dudley rose next, to take the secondary honor of the Latin oration. This was wittily and prettily done, Dudley taking as his subject the Golden Mean and the desirability of moderation, and then, when he had the audience lulled into acceptance of the proposition, upending the argument by asserting that in truth God allowed of no moderation. Between good and evil, truth and falsehood, there lay no mean, and the least moderate fact of existence was the existence of God himself. When he had done, the approbation voiced in the hall was itself quite immoderate, thus furthering young Dudley’s case. I need not write of what became of
him
, his fame—or infamy—depending upon one’s faction, having set his name before us oft enough. But when I learned he had penned an account of his adventures in the Great Swamp campaign of King Philip’s War, I sent away for it. I read it with dismay, surprised that one who had known Caleb and Joel could gloat upon the murder of Indian women and children as he did.
I felt rather for young Jabez Fox, having to follow on from Dudley with the Hebrew oration. He also resorted to a well-masticated topic: whether goodness manifested itself always in the beautiful. I found my mind drifting to other times when that issue had been probed, and thinking it was a missed chance indeed not to have had Caleb speak to this theme. His might have been a lively exegesis, drawing as it did on a very different experience of what was good and beautiful, and how beauty might be perceived quite differently by foreign souls in unalike times. Although in his work he had been the peer or better of Fox, Samuel had told me that Chauncy thought it unwise to have Caleb and Joel honored with two of the three orations. He said Chauncy had invited Caleb to speak, once the news of Joel’s death reached him, but Caleb had declined, saying he was not in heart for it.
While I attempted to keep my concentration upon the speakers, my gaze kept drifting to Caleb, where he sat in the graduates’ place of honor upon the dais. He held himself, as ever, very erect. I tried to see him as others in the hall must—this great curiosity, the salvage plucked from the wilderness and tamed so thoroughly into a scholar. In truth, he looked almost indistinguishable from his fellow graduates. His dress mimicked theirs in every particular. If anything, his grooming was even more particular. He was taller, as I have said, but he had shed that breadth of chest and arm that had once marked him out as a different style of man. If his hair was a darker hue than the others’, it had lost some of its distinctive thickness and sheen. His skin, though olive tinged, was several shades lighter after the years of indoor life. Only the planes of his face—the high, broad cheekbones—had become more pronounced and foreign the leaner he had become. Caleb’s face was tilted towards the speaker’s podium, but his expression was very distant. I supposed that he thought of Joel; how could he not?
As the dinner hour approached, Chauncy rose to open the feast, craving a blessing on the young men commencing their roles as leaders of educated society. The governor stood next, and sent around the grace cup, with a warm little speech about the college and the pride that he took in the fact that the universities of Oxford and Cambridge recognized our scholars’ first degree as equal with their own.
The feast itself was ample, the beeves succulent, and as the cups were filled and filled again, the noise in the hall became such that folk could not hear the speech at their own tables without leaning in almost to their neighbors’ laps. In the end, the clamor and the stifling heat drove me out of the buttery and into the yard, where the air was cooler, if the revels no less raucous. By the time I had recovered sufficiently to go back inside, the disputations were already under way. Although I was keen to hear Caleb, I knew he would do admirably with the hoary old topics of theses
philosophicae
and
philologicae
. Indeed, nothing was said that afternoon that had not already been said a dozen times previous in the same place, the only difference being the occasional interjections from an audience whose spirits had been elevated by a bibulous luncheon. Caleb acquitted himself with distinction; I saw Chauncy beaming every time he spoke, his Latin eloquent and his allusions apt. Once or twice I caught Thomas Danforth, leaning across his fellows to garner agreement from some distinguished person or other as to Caleb’s ability.
Well, I thought. You have done it, my friend. It has cost you your home, and your health, and estrangement from your closest kinsman. But after today, no man may say the Indian mind is primitive and ineducable. Here, in this hall, you stand, the incontestible argument, the
negat respondens
.
Finally, Chauncy stood and signaled for quiet. The hall hushed. He adressed himself, in Latin, to the Overseers: “Honorable gentlemen and reverend ministers, I present to you these youths, whom I know to be sufficent in learning and in manners to be raised to the First Degree in Arts according to the custom of the Universities in England. Doth it please you?”
The voices rang out:
“Placet!”
One by one, the graduates rose up and stood before Chauncy to be handed the book that signified their degree. As Caleb took his from Chauncy’s hand, I thought that the old man’s voice shook with emotion as he said the rote words, “I hand thee this book, together with the power to lecture on any one of the arts which thou has studied, wheresoever thou shalt have been called to that office.”
Later, when all the formal business had been concluded, the graduates stepped down from the dais and into the embrace of their families. The women—mothers, sisters—joined the press now, entering the hall all smiles for their graduates. I moved forward, trying to reach Caleb, to offer him the congratulations the day deserved. But the crowd was so dense and unyielding I could hardly make my way. It parted for him, however, as he made his way directly for the door. I called out, trying to attract his attention. He did not turn, but kept walking. I looked back over my shoulder to where Samuel was similarly encumbered by knots of revelers. He raised his shoulders, to imply that he was pinned, for the moment, in his corner of the hall. I pushed my way through, elbowing honorables and reverends with no regard for mannerliness, and finally attained the door. I looked in all directions, trying to descry Caleb in the crowd.
Finally, I made him out. He was halfway across the yard, leaning heavily against a tree. His back was to me, but I could see that his shoulders shook. For a moment, I considered whether or not to go to him. If he was in grief, he would not want me, perhaps. But then feeling overwhelmed prudence and I hurried on. As I drew near, I realized that it was not grief that wracked him, but a violent coughing spasm. He had a linen hankin I had sewn for him pressed to his mouth. When he drew it away, I saw that it was speckled with blood.
I
expect that every person alive today has sat with someone dear to them through the rigors of the consumption. So I will not recount the long days and nights, except to say that my friend suffered, and through all of it evinced the stoicism that befit both a sonquem’s son and a convinced Christian. Which part of himself he called upon for patience and courage, I do not know.