Caleb's Crossing (40 page)
“Let’s leave this place now,” I said to Noah. “I’m chilled to the bone.” It was not a particularly cool evening, but my blood felt like ice, and I wanted to be back in a familiar place, one where ghosts and spirits were not swirling all about me.
W
hen I walked into Caleb’s room, in the home of Thomas Danforth, I feared I had come too late. He lay with his face to the wall, and the coverlet barely seemed to rise, so slow and shallow had his breathing become. But I bent down, and whispered to him. The words, in Wampanaontoaonk, were for Caleb’s ears, alone. As soon as I began upon the first of the verses, he turned, and stared at me, his eyes wide with surprise. When I had done, he laid a hand—light, hot—on my arm.
“Who?” he rasped.
I gave him the name.
His face smoothed, the lines of pain of a sudden all erased. He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, they were like dark coals aflame in their sockets, great orbs in a skull whose flesh was all wasted away. He gestured me to help him to sit up, so I went to the door and called upon Thomas Danforth, who was hovering, although as soon as I put a hand to Caleb’s back I knew I could have easily managed alone. He was spare as a child, by then. Danforth fussed a little about the pillows and bolsters, until I gave him a meaning look. He took the hint and retired again, leaving me alone with Caleb. There was a good fire in the grate; Danforth had insisted that it be kept lit and well fed if the weather was the least bit cool. I walked over to the hearth and held the bundled herbs over the flame until they caught. The scent, clean and sharp, seemed to carry the air of the island into the room. Caleb’s eyes followed my gestures as I waved the bundle in a slow arc. He seemed to breathe easier. I came back to his bedside and drew out the wampum belt. The whole history of the Nobnocket band was encoded in its pattern, for any wise enough to read it.
I laid the belt across Caleb’s heart, as a sonquem might wear it. His hand closed on the smooth-polished shells. He let his fingers travel across the rows of purple and white. His lips moved, and I knew he was reciting parts of the story, as he had heard it years earlier. At last, when his lips and his hands grew still, I knew it was time. I knelt down beside his bed. His hair had grown long again, since his illness. I lifted a dark strand and smoothed it back from his face. He raised his hand and touched his fingertips to my fingertips. Then I brought my lips to his ear and whispered to him the last of the words that Tequamuck had given me.
Caleb raised his chin, and made a mighty effort to gather his breath. Then his lips parted, and though the sound that uttered forth was strained at first, his voice gained strength until I felt his hymn like a paean, resonant in my soul. He sang out his death song, and died like a hero going home.
Caleb
was
a hero, there is no doubt of it. He ventured forth from one world to another with an explorer’s courage, armored by the hope that he could serve his people. He stood shoulder to shoulder with the most learned of his day, ready to take his place with them as a man of affairs. He won the respect of those who had been swiftest to dismiss him.
All that is true and certain. But what I do not know is this: which home welcomed him, at the end. Whichever it was—the celestial English heaven of seraphim, cherubim and ophanim, or Kietan’s warm and fertile place away in the southwest, I believe that his song was powerful enough for Joel to hear and to follow him there.
T
hey pulled the Indian College down. It was, you could say, a victim of the war. After such bloody fighting, there were few who cared if Indians lived or died, were converted or languished pagan. The building fell into disrepair. And then, in 1698, whatever ambitions had once been lay scattered and broken in the yard, reduced to a pile of rubble and a cloud of dust. They took the bricks, as many as were fit to save, and used them to build another hall. When I heard of it, I was not angry, though once again what was rightfully Indian had been taken for English use. It is an old story to me, by now. And that college had proved itself the greatest thief of all. It was, I now think, a cursed place. How to see it otherwise, since every Indian scholar who stayed within its walls perished untimely. Others came there after Caleb and Joel, but no sooner did word come to us of these young men and their great promise than the black-bordered message followed to tell us they were dead. I know of only one that may yet live: John Wampus, who tarried in the college but a little while, before setting off for healthier climes. He became, they say, a mariner. I hope he prospered.
Often, my mind wanders to that warm day, so very long ago. If I had turned away from that boy, at the edge of the pond, mounted Speckle and ridden back to my own world and left him in peace with his gods and spirits, would it have been better? Would he yet live, an old man now, patriarch of a family, a leader of his tribe? Perhaps so. I cannot see.
He visits me, in my dreams. They say it is a gift his people have. At times, he comes to me as the boy I knew; other times, he lets me see him as he might have been. In one dream, he is a man in his prime, trained in the law, high in the governor’s favor, appointed to negotiate with Metacom. He wins for his people a measure of justice, turning hearts from war and the devastation that has flowed from it. It was a good dream. I was sorry, when I awakened.
I grieve, also, for Joel, who might have returned here as the most educated man on the island, to stand between his people and the unscrupulous English who ensnare them into debt peonage. All too often now, one sees a Wampanoag child serving in an English house or upon an English vessel, indentured away from family in payment of some murky obligation.
These are all of them dreams, waking or sleeping, and no one can truly say what might have been. But dreams and memories are all that sustain me now. When, from time to time, I open my heart on these matters to Samuel, he smiles at me patiently. But I know he thinks I am become a fond old woman, my mind wandering, addled, between an unchangeable past and an unfathomable future. I told him not long ago that I dream of a time when the scars of war will heal, and the hearts of our people will soften again, one to the other, and other young Indians like Caleb and Joel will take their places at Harvard, in the society of learned men. He shook his head and said he cannot see such a thing in half a hundred years. And then he touched my face, and kissed me. All this long time we have loved each other, and we love still, even as the ties that bind us to this world have frayed and worn, and are become fragile now as a spider’s thread.
He will be here soon. He comes to see to my comfort many times each day, but always at this time, as the light fades. He brings me a draft of laudanum—I am beyond help of his chirurgical skills now—and then we sit together, hand in hand, and watch the last light dance upon the water.
I will put these pages by before he comes. I do not wish to speak to him this night about these matters, things over and done; none of it to be mended. Yet it has eased my heart to make this accounting. I am not a hero. Life has not required it of me. But neither will I go to my grave a coward, silent about what I did, and what it cost. So, let these last pages be
my
death song—even if at the end it is no paean, but as it must be: a dissonant and tragical lament.
C
aleb’s Crossing
is inspired by a true story. It is, however, a work of imagination. What follows is the history, insofar as it is documented: the slender scaffolding on which I have rested my imaginative edifice.
The “college at Newtowne,” which would be named Harvard, was founded in 1636, just six years after the establishment of the Massachusetts Bay colony. The total number of its graduates in the seventeenth century was only 465. Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk was a member of this elite.
He was born circa 1646 on the island then known to its Wôpanâak inhabitants as Noepe or Capawock, just five years after the arrival of a handful of English settlers. Caleb’s father was sonquem, or leader, of one of the smaller Wôpanâak bands whose lands were in Nobnocket, now generally known as West Chop. Since the tiny English settlement was ten miles away, it is reasonable to suppose that Caleb had little contact with the English in his earliest years, and was raised in his people’s language and traditions.
The English patent to the island now known as Martha’s Vineyard was bought by a Puritan businessman, Thomas Mayhew, from the Earl of Sterling and Sir Fernando Gorges in 1641. His son, Thomas, Jr., then negotiated to buy a parcel of land from a sonquem, Tawanticut, to the east of the island. The sale was opposed by a number of Tawanticut’s band but went ahead after the sonquem ceded some of his lands to the dissidents and sold to the Mayhews from what remained under his control. Thomas, Jr., then led a small party of settlers to found Great Harbor (now Edgartown). Thomas, Sr.’s motivation in settling the island appears to have been the creation of an independent manorial estate outside the purview of the Massachusetts Bay colony; Thomas, Jr., by contrast, was a religious man whose life’s work became the conversion of the Wôpanâak. To that end, in the winter of 1652, he founded a day school with thirty Indian pupils. It is possible that Caleb was among them, and that he learned to read, write, and speak English there. In 1657, Thomas, Jr., died in a shipwreck en route to England. His father, his son Matthew, and his grandson Experience, among others, continued his missionary and educational work.
Caleb was probably sent off the island to attend Daniel Weld’s school in Roxbury. Nine Indian students (including, intriguingly, “Joane the Indian Mayde”) were under Weld’s instruction there in 1658. In 1659 he and fellow Vineyarder Joel Iacoomis were among five Indian scholars who joined Matthew Mayhew at Elijah Corlett’s grammar school in Cambridge, adjacent to Harvard College. Matthew left the grammar school before matriculating and returned to the island.
Harvard’s 1650 charter describes its mission as “the education of the English and Indian youth of this country.” At least one Indian scholar, John Sassamon, received some education at Harvard before the construction of the Indian College, a two-storey brick building erected in 1656. John Printer, a Nipmuc, ran the printing press housed in the college, where the first Indian bible and many other books in Algonquin were published. Other Native Americans, named Eleazar, Benjamin Larnell, and John Wampus, are known to have been associated with the college.
Caleb and Joel were admitted to Harvard in 1661, where they completed the rigorous, classics-based four-year course of study for a bachelor’s degree. On his way back from Martha’s Vineyard to Cambridge for the 1665 commencement, Joel Iacoomis was shipwrecked and murdered on Nantucket and never received the degree he had earned. Caleb marched with his English classmates in 1665, received his degree, but died just a year later of consumption. Thomas Danforth, the noted jurist and politician, cared for him during his final illness.
Sources on Caleb’s brief, tragic, and remarkable life are sadly scant. Most of the known primary sources are in the writings of Daniel Gookin (c. 1612–87), superintendent of the Indians in Massachusetts, and in those of certain overseers of Harvard College in correspondence with the London-based Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England. The New England Company, as it was also sometimes known, raised donations to educate and convert Indians, funds which were vital to the survival of Harvard in its early years.
In a search through the few surviving writings penned by notable classmates of Caleb and Joel, I was able to find no mention of their Indian colleagues. One hypothesis to explain this omission is that the native youths, by the time they reached Harvard, were so assimilated into English society that they were unremarkable to their fellow scholars. Certainly they were as highly educated as any of their colonial peers, having attended the finest prep schools then available. An alternative possibility is that the two Wôpanâak youths were kept socially and academically isolated by racial prejudice and did not truly share in the college life of their peers. My imagined version of their experience has tried to take account of both theses.
While I am indebted to Wolfgang Hochbruck and Beatrix Dudensing-Reichel for their close analysis of the Latin in the one surviving document from Caleb’s hand (in
Early Native American Writing
, Helen Jaskoski, ed., New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), I take issue with their attempt to cast doubt on its authorship. The errors in the Latin, which they portray as evidence that the text may have been dictated to Caleb, can just as easily be read as evidence of authenticity—the kind of mistakes that any second- or third-year arts student might make in penning a scholarly exegesis. Furthermore, the essayists err in the one piece of evidence they offer in support of the proposition that colonists readily falsified accounts to extort money from England. They conclude that the Iacoomis referenced in an admitted falsification by John Eliot is Caleb’s fellow student Joel, when it is certain from the context that Eliot was referring to Joel’s father, the first Indian convert to Christianity on Martha’s Vineyard, who served for many years as a missionary and ordained minister here.
I found the secondary sources, especially Samuel Eliot Morison’s many books on early Harvard, in equal parts indispensable and hair-tearingly aggravating. Morison’s reflexive racism makes his choice and use of sources highly unreliable. To give just one glaring example: citing President Dunster’s early, failed attempt to prepare two young Indians sent to him by John Eliot in 1646, Morison quotes Dunster: “[T]hey are uncapable of the benefit of such learning as was my desire to impart to them, and therefore they being an hindrance to mee…. I desire they may be somewhere else disposed of with all convenient speed.” Perusal of Dunster’s actual letter in the Massachusetts Archives discloses that Morison has omitted Dunster’s crucial prefatory words: “Whereas the Indians with mee bee so small as that they are uncapable….”