GERALDINE

BROOKS

CALEB’S CROSSING

For Bizuayehu, who also made a crossing.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Anno 1661 Aetatis Suae 17 Cambridge

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Chapter XX

Chapter XXI

Chapter XXII

Chapter XXIII

Anno 1715 Aetatis Suae 70 Great Harbor

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Afterword

Author’s Note

Also by Geraldine Brooks

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter I

He is coming on the Lord’s Day. Though my father has not seen fit to give me the news, I have the whole of it.

They supposed I slept, which I might have done, as I do each night, while my father and Makepeace whisper together on the far side of the blanket that divides our chamber. Most nights I take comfort in the low murmur of their voices. But last evening Makepeace’s voice rose urgent and anguished before my father hushed him. I expect that was what pulled me back from sleep. My brother frowns on excessive displays of temperament. I turned on my shakedown then and wondered, in a drowsy way, what it was that exercised him so. I could not hear what my father said, but then my brother’s voice rose again.

“How can you expose Bethia in this way?”

Of course, once I caught my own name that was an end to it; I was fully awake. I raised my head and strained to hear more. It was not difficult, for Makepeace could not govern his tongue, and though I could not make out my father’s words at all, fragments of my brother’s replies were clear.

“Of what matter that he prays? He is only— what is it?— Not yet a year?— removed from paganism, and that man who long had charge of him is Satan’s thrall— the most stiff-necked and dangerous of all of them, as you have said yourself often enough. . . .”

My father cut in then, but Makepeace would not be hushed.

“Of course not, father. Nor do I question his ability. But because he has a facility for Latin does not mean he knows the decencies required of him in a Christian home. The risk is . . .”

At that moment, Solace cried out, so I reached for her. They perceived I was awake then, and said no more. But it was enough. I wrapped up Solace and drew her to me on the shakedown. She shaped herself against me like a nestling bird and settled easily back to sleep. I lay awake, staring into the dark, running my hand along the rough edge of the roof beam that slanted an arm’s length above my head. Five days from now, the same roof will cover us both.

Caleb is coming to live in this house.

In the morning, I did not speak of what I had overheard. Listening, not speaking, has been my way. I have become most proficient in it. My mother taught me the use of silence. While she lived, I think that not above a dozen people in this settlement ever heard the sound of her voice. It was a fine voice, low and mellow, carrying the lilt of the Wiltshire village in England where she had passed her girlhood. She would laugh, and make rhymes full of the strange words of that place and tell us tales of things we had never seen: cathedrals and carriages, great rivers wide as our harbor, and streets of shops where one who had the coin might buy all manner of goods. But this was within the house, when we were a family. When she went about in the world, it was with downcast eyes and sealed lips. She was like a butterfly, full of color and vibrancy when she chose to open her wings, yet hardly visible when she closed them. Her modesty was like a cloak that she put on, and so adorned, in meekness and discretion, it seemed she passed almost hidden from people, so that betimes they would speak in front of her as if she were not there. Later, at board, if the matter was fit for childish ears, she would relate this or that important or diverting news she had gleaned about our neighbors and how they did. Oft times, what she learned was of great use to father, in his ministry, or to grandfather in his magistracy.

I copied her in this, and that was how I learned I was to loose her. Our neighbor, Goody Branch, who is midwife here, had sent me off to her cottage to fetch more groaning beer, in the hope that it would cool my mother’s childbed fever. Anxious as I was to fetch it back for her, I stood by the latch for some minutes when I heard my mother speaking. What she spake concerned her death. I waited to hear Goody Branch contradict her, to tell her all would be well. But no such words came. Instead, Goody Branch answered that she would see to certain matters that troubled my mother and that she should make her mind easy on those several accounts.

Three days later, we buried her. Although it was spring according to the calendar, the ground was not yet thawed. So we set a fire on the place my father had chosen, between the graves of my twin brother Zuriel, who had died when he was nine years old, and my other infant brother who had not tarried here long enough for us to name him. We tended the fire all through the night. Even so, at dawn, when my father and Makepeace commenced to dig, the shovel rang on that iron-hard earth. The sound of it is with me, still. The labor was such that father trembled all over afterward, his limbs palsied with the work of putting her to rest. So it is, out here on this island, where we dwell with our faces to the sea and our backs to the wilderness. Like Adam’s family after the fall, we have all things to do. We must be fettler, baker, apothecary, grave digger. Whatever the task, we must do it, or else do without.

It is near to a year now since my mother’s death, and since then I have had charge of Solace, and of the keeping of this house. I miss my mother, as I know father does, and Makepeace too in his way, although his affections are less warmly worn than ours. His faith also seems stronger in the way he is able to accept what befalls us as the working of divine will. We have all spent many sore days and nights examining our souls and our conduct to read what lesson the Lord intended for us in taking her so soon; what failings and sins he did mean to punish in us. And though I sit in prayerful reflection with my father on this matter of our spiritual estate, I have not given to him the ground of what I know to be true.

I killed my mother. I know that some would say I was a child who Satan, trickster, toyed with. But as to soul, there is neither youth nor age. Sin stains us at our birth and shadows our every hour. As the scripture tells us: Their foot shall slide in due time. Loose one’s footing, as I did, and age matters not. One cedes all claims to childish innocence. And my sins were not mere nursery mischief but matters etched in stone upon the tablets of mortal error. I broke the Commandments, day following day. And I did it knowingly. Minister’s daughter: how could I say otherwise? Like Eve, I thirsted after forbidden knowledge and I ate forbidden fruit. For her, the apple, for me, the white hellebore— different plants, proffered from the same hand. And just as that serpent must have been lovely— I see him, his lustrous, shimmering scales, pouring liquid over Eve’s shoulders, his jewel eyes luminous as they gazed into her own— so too did Satan come to me in a form of irresistible beauty.

Break God’s laws and suffer ye his wrath. Well, and so I do. The Lord lays his hand sore upon me, as I bend under the toil I now have— mother’s and mine, both. The tasks stretch out from the gray slough before dawn to the guttered taper of night. At fifteen, I have taken up the burdens of a woman, and have come to feel I am one. Furthermore, I am glad of it. For I now no longer have the time to fall into such sins as I committed as a girl, when hours that were my own to spend spread before me like a gift. Those hot, salt-scoured afternoons when the shore curved away in its long glistening arc toward the distant bluffs. The leaf-dappled, loamy mornings in the cool bottoms, where I picked the sky-colored berries and felt each one burst, sweet and juicy, in my mouth. I made this island mine, mile by mile, from the soft, oozing clay of the rainbow cliffs to the rough chill of the granite boulders that rise abruptly in the fields, thwarting the plough, shading the sheep. I love the fogs that wreathe us all in milky veils, and the winds that moan and keen in the chimney piece at night. Even when the wrack line is crusted with salty ice and the ways through the woods crunch under my clogs, I drink the cold air in the low blue gleam that sparkles on the snow. Every inlet and outcrop of this place, I love. We are taught early here to see Nature as a foe to be subdued. But I came, by stages, to worship it. You could say that for me, this island and her bounties became the first of my false gods, the original sin that begot so much idolatry.

Now, here, in the scant days I have left before Caleb comes to us, I have decided to set down my spiritual diary, and give an accounting for those months when my heart sat so loose from God. I have gathered what scraps of paper I could scavenge from my brother’s store, and I intend to use whatever moments I can eke out before each day’s weariness claims me. My hand is unlovely, since father did not school me in writing, but as this relation is for my own eyes, it makes no mind. Since I cannot say, yet, whether I will find the courage to stand in meeting some day and deliver an accounting of myself, this will have to do. In my affliction I have besought the Lord but I have had no sign that I am saved. When I look at my hands and wrists, marred by the marks of small burns from cook pots and flying embers, every red weal or white pucker brings to my mind’s eye that eternal fire, and the writhing masses of the damned, among whom I must expect to spend eternity.

God alone ordains the damned and the saved and naught that I set down on these pages can change that. But since Caleb is to come here, trailing about him the smoke of those heathen fires and the scent of those wild, vision-filled hours, I need to be clear in my own mind and honest in my heart where I stand with regard to such matters, so that I can truly put them from me. I must do this for his sake, as well as for my own. I know that father sets great store in Caleb. He sees him, more than any other here, as a great hope to lead his people. Certainly Caleb seems to want this also; no one toils at his book more diligently; no one has gathered such a rich harvest of knowledge in the scant seasons he has had to study these things. But I also know this to be true: Caleb’s soul is stretched like the rope in a tug o’ war, between my father and his own uncle, the pawaaw. Just as my father has his hopes, so too does that sorcerer. Caleb will lead his people, I am sure of it. But in which direction? Of that, I am not in the least bit certain.

Chapter II

Once, on a stormy night two winters since, when we had toiled through the rain and wind to pull out the boats and lash them safe, we came back to the house with water lacquered to our cloaks and frozen strands of hair clinking each against each as we moved. Our hands were numb as we crammed daub into the cracks and chinks of the house and battled to repair the oil paper that had torn loose on the windows. (We had no glass, then.) Later, as I sat by the fire, the ice melting from my person, the water pooling about my feet, Makepeace asked father the question that was even then forming in my own mind: why was it that grandfather had sought the patent to this island? Why put seven miles of confounding currents between himself and the other English, at a time when there was land and to spare on the mainland for any who wanted to hive out a new settlement?

Father said that grandfather, as a young man, had served others, putting his skills to work as factor for a wealthy nobleman who rewarded him by laying baseless charges against him. While grandfather was able to exonerate himself, the experience left him bitter, and he resolved to answer to others no more. That included John Winthrop, the governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony, a man of estimable parts, but a man increasingly willing to wield cruel punishments against those whose ideas did not accord with his own. More than one man had had his ears cut off or his nose slashed open; a dissident woman, pregnant and trailing a dozen children, had been expelled into the wilderness. And those were his Christian brothers and sisters. What he had allowed in regard to the Pequot was, my father said, not fit for our hearing.

“Your grandfather felt he could do better. So he bought these patents, which were outside the purview of Winthrop’s governance, and gathered several like-minded men who were prepared to accept the light hand of his direction. Me, he sent— in 1642— to make the first crossing. It is a matter of pride to me, son, that your grandfather insisted, even though he had paid the English authorities for the patents, on paying the sonquem of this place also. Every hut and house we have built here is on land willingly sold to us through negotiations that I conducted honorably. You will hear, perhaps, that not all the sonquem’s followers agreed with their chief in this matter, and some now say that he himself did not fully understand that we meant to keep the land from them forever. Be that as it may, what’s done is done and it was done lawfully.”

I thought, but did not say, that grandfather could hardly have expected the fine points of English property law to count for much to some three thousand people whose reputation, prior to our landing, had been ferocious. If there was pride to be taken in the matter, it could only be pride in the canniness of grandfather’s plan, and of father’s courage and tact in executing it. Father had been but nineteen years old when he came here. Perhaps his youth and gentle temper had persuaded the sonquem that there was no harm in the “Coatmen,” as they called us. And what harm could there be to them, from just a score of families, setting down cheek by jowl along a little edge of harborfront, while their own bands ranged hundreds strong across the island wheresoever they would?

Father picked up the thread of his thought as if it were a tangled skein that he worried at. “We have been good neighbors, yes; I believe so,” he said. “And why should we not? There is no reason to be otherwise, no matter what slanders the Alden family and their faction concoct. ‘You may disturb and vex the devil, but you’ll make no Christians there’— that’s what Giles Alden said to me, when first I set out to preach at the wetus. And how wrong he is proven! For several years I drank the dust of those huts, helping in whatever practical thing I could do for them, happy to win the ears of even one or two for a few words about Christ. And now, at last, I begin to distill in their minds the pure liquor of the gospel. To take a people who were traveling apace the broadway to hell, and to be able to turn them, and set their face to God. . . . It is what we must strive for. They are an admirable people, in many ways, if you trouble to know them.”

How I could have astonished him, and my brother too, even then, had I opened my mouth and ventured to say, in Wompaontoaonk, that I had troubled to know them; that I knew them, in some particulars, better than father, who was their missionary and their minister. But as I have set down here, I had learned early the value of silence, and I did not lightly give away the state of myself. So I got up from the fire then, and made myself busy, wetting yeast and flour for a sponge to use in the next day’s bread.

Our neighbors. As a child I did not think of them so. I suppose, like everyone, I called them salvages, pagans, barbarians, the heathen. As a young child, in fact, I barely thought of them at all. I lived with my twin brother, at our mother’s hem, in those days, and their doings did not touch ours. I have heard tell that it was more than a year before any soul among them came near to our plantation, neither to hinder nor to help. If my father had business in their settlements on grandfather’s behalf, he went out to this or that otan alone and I knew nothing of it.

It was somewhen later— I am not sure, exactly, the date— but after the village of Great Harbor built its meeting house, that one poor despised fellow of theirs began to lurk about on the Sabbath. Of mean descent and unpromising countenance, he was an outcast among his own, deemed unfit to be a warrior and not privileged with the common right to hunt with his sonquem or share in the gatherings at which the sonquem gave generously of food and goods to his people.

That my father ministered to this man, I knew, and thought little of it. It seemed only a common act of Christian charity such as we are commanded: Whatsoever you do to the least of them . . . But it was from this unpromising metal that father began to forge his Cross. Mother was fairly taken aback, one Sabbath, when father presented this man, whose name was Iacoomis, as his guest at our board. It happened that this man’s unprepossessing body housed a quick mind. He learned his letters avidly and in return, commenced to teach father Wampanaontoaonk speech, to further his mission. As father struggled with the new language, so too did I learn, as a girlchild will, confined to the hearth and the dooryard as adult business ebbs and flows around her. I learned it, I suppose, as I was learning English speech, my mind supple then and ready to receive new words. As father and Iacoomis sat, repeating a phrase over and over, often it fell into my own mouth long before father had mastery of it. As father learned, he in turn strove to teach some few useful words to my grandfather’s clerk, Peter Folger, who was wise enough to see its value in trading and negotiations. For a time, when we were still very small, Zuriel and I made a covert game of learning it, and spoke it privily, as a kind of secret tongue between the two of us. But as Zuriel grew bigger he was less about the hearth, tearing hither and yon as boychildren are permitted to do. So as he lost the words and I continued to gain them, the game withered. I have often wondered if what happened later had its roots in this: that the Indian tongue was bound up in my heart with these earliest memories of my brother, so that, on meeting with another of his same age who spoke it, these tender and dormant affections awoke within me. By the time I met Caleb, I already had a great store of common words and phrases. Since then, I have come to speak that tongue in my dreams.

I remember once, when I was small, and had said “the salvages” in my father’s hearing, he reproved me. “Do not call them salvages. Use the name they give themselves, Wampanoag. It means Easterners.”

Poor father. He was so very proud of his efforts with those difficult words; words so long one might think the roots had set and grown since the fall of the Babel tower. And yet father never mastered pronunciation, which is the chief grace of their tongue. Nor did he grasp the way the words built themselves, sound by sound, into particular meanings. “Easterners,” indeed. As if they speak of east or west as we do. Nothing is so plain and ordinary in that tongue. Wop, related to their word for white, carries a sense of the first milky light that brightens the horizon before the sun appears. The ending sound refers to animate beings. So, their name for themselves, properly rendered in English, is People of the First Light.

Since I was born here, I too have come to feel that I am a person of the first light, perched at the very farthest edge of the new world, first witness to each dawn of the turning globe. I count it no strange thing that one may, in a single day, observe a sunrise out of the sea and a sunset back into it, though newcomers are quick to remark how uncommon it is. At sunset, if I am near the water— and it is hard to be very far from it here— I pause to watch the splendid disc set the brine aflame and then douse itself in its own fiery broth. As the dimmet deepens, I think of those left behind in England. They say that dawn creeps closer there even as our darkness gathers. I think of them, waking to another dawn of oppression under the boot of the reprobate king. At meeting, father read to us a poem from one of our reformed brethren there:

We are on tiptoe in this land,

Waiting to pass to the American Strand.

I was used to offer a prayer for them, that God hasten their way hither, and that he grant their morning bring not fear, but a peace such as we here are come to know, under the light hand of my grand-father’s governance and the gentle ministry of my father.

As I think of it now, I haven’t said that prayer in a while. I no longer feel at peace here.

Chapter III

The account of my fall must begin three years since, in that lean summer of my twelfth year. As newcomers will in a foreign place, we clung too long to the old habits and lifeways. Our barley did never seem to thrive here, yet families continued to plant it, just because they had always done so. At large expense, we had brought tegs from the mainland just a year earlier, mainly to be raised for their wool, for it was plain that we would need to make our own cloth, and linen did not answer in the foul winters here. But the promise of spring lamb at Eastertide proved very great, and so we put the ram to the ewes too early. Then we found ourselves in the grip of a stubborn winter that would not cede to milder days, no matter what the calendar might say on the matter. Though we all of us tried to keep the newborn lambs warm at the hearth, the bitter winds that howled across the salt-hay pastures, and the hard frosts that bit off the buds, carried away more than we could spare. All was common land then, and we had built no barns nor proper folds. With little store of salt-meat after so long a winter, and no promise of any fresh, fishing and daily foraging became our mainstay.

First feast, then famine. Then out on the flats a’clammin’. Such was the doggerel that year. Since clamming was a despised chore, Make-peace ensured that it fell to me. He was always quick to assert his rights, he who was both eldest, and, since Zuriel’s death, the only son. If that was not enough to secure his liberty from whatever task he shirked, he would plead the heavy demands of his studies, with which, as he put it, “my sister is not burdened.” This last stuck in my craw like grit, for I coveted the instruction that Makepeace found so troublesome and he well knew it.

Father permitted me to take the mare, since the best clamming flats were off to the west. I was meant to seek out my Aunt Hannah, and go in her company. It was a rule that none might walk nor ride alone more than one mile from the edge of our settlement. But my aunt was harried to a raveling by all her other chores, and was more than happy, one mild day, when a softer air had touched my cheek and I offered to do her clamming for her. That was the first time I broke the commandment of obedience, for I did not tarry for another companion as she bade me, but rode off by a new way, alone. It is no easy thing to be forever watched, and judged, as I must be as the minister’s daughter. When I was out of sight of the settlement, I hitched my skirt and galloped, as fast as Speckle would consent to carry me, just to be free and gone and away.

I grew to love the fair, large heaths, the tangled woods and the wide sheets of dune-sheltered water where I had the liberty of my own company. So I would strive to get away to such places every day, excepting on the Sabbath (the which we observed strictly and prayerfully, my father adhering to the letter of the commandment— a day to be kept— not an hour or two at meeting and then on to other pursuits).

As often as I could, I would hide in my basket one of Makepeace’s Latin books, either his accidence, which he was meant to have had by heart long since, or his nomenclator, or the Sententiae Pueriles. If I could get none of these unnoticed, then I would take one of father’s texts, and hope my understanding was equal to it. Aside from the Bible and Foxe’s Martyrs, father held that it was undesirable for a young girl to be too much at her book. When my brother Zuriel was alive, he had instructed us both in reading. These were sweet hours to me, but they had come to a sudden end, the very day of Zuriel’s accident. We had been at our books for some hours, and father, pleased with our progress, offered to take us for a ride on the hay wain. It was a fair evening, and Zuriel was in high spirits, plucking hay from the bales and forcing it down my collar so that it tickled me. I was squirming and laughing merrily. Reaching behind me to fetch out an itchy stalk, I did not see Zuriel overbalance on the bale and so I could not cry out to father, whose back was turned to us, driving the cart. Before we knew that Zuriel had fallen, the rear cartwheel, made of iron, had run right across his leg and severed it to the bone. Father tried with all his strength to stanch the bleeding, all the while crying out prayers to God. I held Zuriel’s head in my hands and looked into his beloved face and called to him to stay with me, but it did no good. I watched as the light in his eyes drained out of him with his life’s blood.

That was at harvest time. Throughout leaf fall and winter, we all did nought but mourn him. We walked through the chores that must be done, and then sat to pray, although often enough my mind was too clouded by grief and memory to do even that. It was late spring before my thoughts turned again to my lessons, and I finally felt able to ask father when they might resume. He told me then that he did not intend to instruct me further, since I already had my catechism by heart.

But he could not stop me overhearing his lessons with Makepeace. So I listened and I learned. Over time, while my father thought I was tending the cook fire or working on the loom, I shored up my little foundations of knowledge: some Latin here, some Hebrew there, some logic and some rhetoric. It was not hard to learn these things, for although Makepeace was two years my senior, he was an indifferent scholar. Past fourteen then, he might have been well begun at the college in Cambridge, yet father had determined to keep him close, in the hope of better preparing him. I think that Zuriel’s death made father all the more determined in this, and I think my elder brother carried a great burden, knowing that all of father’s hopes for a son who would follow him in godliness and learning now rested on him alone. There were times I worried for my brother. At Harvard College, the tutor surely would not be so forbearing as our patient father. But I must own that my envy overleaped my concern most of the time. I suppose it was pride that led me into error: I began to chime in with any answers that my brother could not give.

At first, when I gave out a Latin declension, father was amused, and laughed. But my mother, working the loom as I spun the yarn, drew a sharp breath and put a hand up to her mouth. She made no comment then, but later I understood. She had perceived what I, in my pride, had not: that father’s pleasure was of a fleeting kind— the reaction one might have if a cat were to walk about upon its hind legs. You smile at the oddity but find the gait ungainly and not especially attractive. Soon, the trick is wearisome, and later, worrisome, for a cat on hind legs is not about its duty, catching mice. In time, when the cat seems minded to perform its trick, you curse at it, and kick it.

The more I allowed that I had learned what my older brother could not, the more it began to vex father. His mild countenance began to draw itself into a frown whenever I interrupted. For several months this was so, but I did not read the lesson he intended for me. In time, he took to sending me to outdoor tasks whenever he intended to instruct Makepeace. The second or third occasion, when I perceived this was to be the way of things, I gave him a look which must have revealed more than I intended. Mother saw, and shook her head at me in admonishment. Nevertheless I let the door fall heavily behind me on my way out. This caused father to follow me into the yard. He called me to him, and I came, expecting to be chastised. My cap was a little askew. He reached out a hand and straightened it, then he let his fingers brush my cheek tenderly.

“Bethia, why do you strive so hard to quit the place in which God has set you?” His voice was gentle, not angry. “Your path is not your brother’s, it cannot be. Women are not made like men. You risk addling your brain by thinking on scholarly matters that need not concern you. I care only for your present health and your future happiness. It is not seemly for a wife to know more than her husband . . .”

“Wife?” I was so taken aback that I interrupted without even meaning to speak. I was but recently turned twelve years old.

“Yes, wife. It is early to speak of it, but it is what you will be, and soon enough. Daughter, you, in your proper modesty, cannot know it, but those with eyes see in you the promise of a comely womanhood. It has been spoken of.” I think I blushed russet; certainly my skin burned so hot that even the ends of my hair felt as if they were alight at my scalp. “Do not concern yourself. Nothing improper has been said, and I have answered what was necessary, that the time to think about such things is still years off. But it is your destiny to be married to a good man from our small society here, and I would do you no favor if I were to send you to your husband with a mind honed to find fault in his every argument or to better his in every particular. A husband must rule his home, Bethia, as God rules his faithful. If we lived still in England, or even on the mainland, you could have your choice of educated men. But on this island, that is not the way of it. You can read well, I know, even write a little, sufficient to keep a day book, as your mother does, for the benefit of the household. But ’tis enough. Already it sets you far apart from most others of your sex. Tend to your huswifery, or look to developing some herb lore, if you must be learning something. Improve your wits usefully and honorably in such things as belong to a woman.”

There were tears starting in my eyes. I looked down, so that he would not notice, and scuffed at the ground with the toe of my clog. He rested a hand on my bowed head. His voice was very gentle. “Is it such a terrible thing, to contemplate a useful life such as your mother leads? Do not belittle it, Bethia. It is no small thing to be a beloved wife, to keep a godly house, to raise sons of your own . . .”

“Sons?” I looked up at father, and the word caught in my throat. Sons like Zuriel— bright, sunny boy, cut down in childhood. Or like the babe who also would have carried that name, had he lived but an hour in this world. Or sons like Makepeace, slow of wit, stinting in affection.

My brother had come out from the house. He stood behind father, his brows drawn and his arms folded across his chest. Despite his frown, I sensed he was taking a vast pleasure in observing father reduce me.

Father, for his part, looked suddenly weary. “Yes. Sons. And daughters, too, as you know full well I meant. Be content, I beg you. If you must read something, read your Bible. I commend to you especially Proverbs 31: verses 10 to 31. . . .”

“You mean Eshet chayil? ” I had learned the passage because father recited it for mother, for whom it might well have been written, she truly being a woman of valor, her long days consumed with just such unsung tasks as the lines described. Father would look into her face and chant the Hebrew, and its hard consonants brought to my mind the beating of a hot sun on the dry stone walls of David’s city. Then he would say the words to her in English.

Two sins, pride and anger, overmastered me then. I could not govern myself, but spoke out petulantly. “Shall you have it in Hebrew? Eshet chayil mi yimtza v’rachok . . .”

Father’s eyes widened as I spoke, and his lips thinned. But Make-peace erupted, loud and angry. “Enough! Pride is a sin, sister. Beware of it. Remember that a bird, too, can imitate sounds. You can recite: what of it? For at one and the same time, you reveal that you know nothing of the lessons of the very text you parrot. Your own noise is drowning out the voice of God. Quiet your mind. Open your heart. Do this. You will soon see your error.”

He turned on his heel and went back into the house. Father followed him. They were both of them angry that day, but not so angry as I. I was so eaten with it that I broke the handle on the churn from thumping it so hard. I still have the scar on my palm where the splintering wood tore my flesh. Mother bound up my hand and salved it. When I looked into her kind, tired eyes I felt ashamed. I would not, for all the world, have her think that I belittled her, in thought or word. As if she knew my mind, she smiled at me, and held my bound hand to her lips. “God does all things for a reason, Bethia. If he gave you a quick mind, be sure of it, he wants you to use it. It is your task to discern how to use it for his glory.” She did not have to add the words: “and not merely for your own.” I heard them in my heart.

I took my mother’s words as license enough to continue to study in secret. If it had to be alone and unassisted, so much the worse. But study I would, till my eyes smarted from the effort. I could do no other.

I do not mean to say that all my stolen hours were spent at book. I learned in other ways, also. I thought upon what father had said in regard to herbs, and began to ask Goody Branch and others who were wise in such things. There was a prodigious amount to know, not just the centuries-old lore of familiar English herbs, but the uses just now being found out for the new country’s unfamiliar roots and leaves. Goody Branch was pleased to have me at her side as she collected plants and made her decoctions. She told me, too, all she had learned of how a child is fashioned and grows within the womb. She said that every woman should be wise in the things that belong to her own body. Somewhen, she would take me with her to visit a goodwife who was with child. If the woman did not mind it, she would lay my hands on the swollen belly and show me where to feel for the shapeling that grew within. She taught me how to reckon, from its size, the exact number of weeks since the child was got, and to figure when she would be called upon to midwife it. I became skilled at this, judging several births to the very week. When I was older, she said, I might attend the confinements and assist her.

On days when the fishing boats put out, I would beg a place on-board, the better to learn the farther reaches of the island, where even the weather might be different from Great Harbor’s, even though the miles in distance were but few. The plants, also, were various, and if we put ashore I would gather what I could and study them. Goody Branch had said that we must pray to God that he let us read his signature, written plainly for the pious, in telltale markings, such as the liver-shaped leaves of liverwort, which might hint at what ailments each was good for.

There were other days, when I did not seek out Goody Branch or any other person, but just rambled, using the island as my text, lingering to glean what lessons each plant or stone might have to teach me. On such days, I missed Zuriel most. I longed to have him by my side, to share my finds, to puzzle out answers to the questions the world posed to me.

On one bright day, when the weather had warmed and steadied, I rode Speckle to the south shore. The prospect is remarkable there, where the wide white sands run uninterrupted for many leagues. I watched the heaving waves, smooth as glass, unspooling down the rim of my known world. I dismounted, untied my boots, stripped my hose and let the seafoam froth about my toes. I led the mare along the wrack line, studying white shells shaped like angels’ wings, and bleached bones, light as air, which I took to be from a seabird. I picked up scallop shells in diverse colors and sizes— warm reds and yellows; cool, stippled grays— and reflected on the diversity of God’s creation, and what might be the use and meaning of his making so many varieties of a single thing. If he created scallops simply for our nourishment, why paint each shell with delicate and particular colors? And why, indeed, trouble to make so many different things to nourish us, when in the Bible we read that a simple manna fed the Hebrews day following day? It came to me then that God must desire us to use each of our senses, to take delight in the varied tastes and sights and textures of his world. Yet this seemed to go against so many of our preachments against the sumptuary and the carnal. Puzzling upon it, I had walked some good distance, head down, inattentive to all but my thoughts, when I glanced up and saw them, far off; a band of them, painted strangely as I had been told they did for war, running headlong up the beach in my direction. I grasped Speckle’s bridle and urged her in all haste into the dunes, which were high and undulant and concealing. I was cursing my folly, to find myself alone, far from help, and my mare, hard ridden, fairly spent. My boots I had tied together about my neck but my hose, knit by my own hand, I lost a grip on as I struggled with the horse, and watched several hours toil and several skeins of scarce, good yarn blow away into the sea.

In the lee of the dune, protected from the wind, the voices of the band carried toward me. They were laughing and calling out one to another. The sounds were of merriment, not warfare. Taking care that Speckle remained well concealed, I fell down upon my belly and crept along to a parting between the sand hills from whence I could look back along the beach. I saw then what my first fear had obscured from me: they were unarmed, carrying neither bow nor warclub. I raised a hand to shade my eyes against the glare and could make out a small sphere of tied-up skins, which they were kicking high into the air, and I knew then that they were about some kind of game. I had to look away then, for they were clad in Adam’s livery, save that their fig leaf was a scrap of hide slung from a tie at their waists. And yet, neither could I unsee them. They were about the age of Makepeace, perhaps a little older, but their form was nothing like— they were another sort of man entirely. Makepeace, who farms as little as he must and cannot forebear from shearing the sugarloaf anytime he feels himself unobserved, is of milky complexion, slight at the shoulders, soft at the middle and pitifully tooth shaken.

These youths were all of them very tall, lean in muscle, taut at the waist and broad in the chest, their long black hair flying and whipping about their shoulders. The colored stuff they had used to decorate their bodies must have been made with grease, for they gleamed and shone in the sunlight, so that you could see the long sinews of their thighs working as they ran.

Fortunately, they were so intent on their game that they had not seen me. I led Speckle some distance to where I was sure the height of the dune would conceal me if I remounted. I urged her to a gentle canter with my bare heels. We headed away from the beach, skirting the shore of one of the salt ponds that fingers into the land from the sea. I needed to do the chore I had been sent out for, to gather sufficient clams for our chowder kettle, so when I had put some distance between myself and the beach, I tied Speckle to a great piece of drift-wood, unfastened the rake from the saddle, hitched my skirt high and waded into the brine. It soon proved a poor place, and my rake was uncovering few shellfish worth placing in my basket. I was about to give up and try another spot when I felt eyes upon me. I straightened and turned, and saw him for the first time— the boy we now call Caleb.

He was standing in a thicket of tall beach grass, his bow slung over one shoulder and some kind of dead water fowl in the bag at his back. Something— perhaps the expression on my face, perhaps my frantic tugging at my skirt, which unfurled into the water to preserve my modesty at the cost of being soaked entirely— amused him, for he smiled. He was, I judged, and it later proved, a youth of my own age, some two or three years younger than the warriors at play upon the beach. Unlike them, he was clad for hunting, wearing a kind of deer-skin breechclout tied with a belt fashioned of snake skins. To this was laced a pair of hide leggings. Around his upper arms were twines of beadwork, cunningly worked in purple and white. All else about him was open and naked, save for three glossy feathers tied into a sort of topknot in his thick, jetty hair, which was very long, the forelock pulled hard back from his coppery face and bound up as one might dress a horse’s mane. His smile was unguarded, his teeth very fine and white, and something in his expression made it impossible to fear him. Still, I thought it prudent to retrieve my mare and get away from this place, which seemed to be teeming with salvages of one sort or another. Who could say what outlandish person might next appear?

I gathered up my soaking skirt and made for the shoreline. Unfortunately in my haste I caught my toe in a thicket of eel grass and tripped into the water, spilling the few clams I had gathered and soaking my sleeves and bodice to match my sodden skirt. He was beside me in a few long strides, a hard brown grip on my forearm as he pulled me out of the water.

In his own language, I asked him to let go. His hand dropped from my arm. I made my way, dripping, to shore. He stood where he was, fixed to the spot by his own astonishment. It was my turn, then, to struggle against a smile. I think it would not have surprised him more had my horse addressed him.

He followed me out of the water then and started to speak to me in a great rush of syllables, and I could not make out more than a word or two of it. My father had told me that they loved any person who could utter his mind in their tongue, and this boy kept exclaiming, to my discomfort, “Manitoo!” which is their word for a god, or something godlike, miraculous.

Slowly, in my simple words, I tried to make it plain that there was nothing so very extraordinary in my knowing some of his speech. I told him who I was, for all of the Wampanoag by that time had heard of the praying Indians and their minister, my father. I explained that I had learned something of his tongue by listening to the lessons of my father with Iacoomis.

He made a face at that, as if he had sucked on a gallnut. He hissed out the word they use for the product of the bowel, a vile or stinking thing, and it made me blush to hear him say such a thing of a helpful man so well beloved by my father.

He looked down then at my empty clamming basket.

“Poquauhock?” he asked. I nodded. He closed his fingers to his upturned palm, beckoning me, and turned back into the beach grass from which he had appeared.

I had a choice then, to follow or not. I wish I could say that it cost me more struggle. As I scrambled along trying to keep pace with his swift steps, I told myself that it would be a great thing to know of a better clamming place, so that I might do the chore with dispatch in future days and have more time for my own pursuits.

It was the first of many times I followed that feathered head through eel grass and over sand dune, to clay pit and to kettle pond. He showed me where the wild strawberries sweetened and fattened in the sunshine, some of them above two inches around, and so numerous that I could gather a bushel in a forenoon. He taught me to see where the blueberry bushes dapple with fruit in summer and the cranberry bogs yield crimson gems come fall.

He walked through the woods like a young Adam, naming creation. I learned to shape my mouth to the words— sasumuneash for cranberry, tunockuquas for frog. So many things grew and lived here that were strange to us, because they had not been in England. We named the things of this place in reference to things that were not of this place— cat briar for the thickets of vine whose thorns were narrow and claw-like; lambskill for the low-growing laurel that had proved poisonous to some of our hard-got tegs. But there had been no cats or lambs here until we brought them. So when he named a plant or a creature, I felt that I heard the true name of the thing for the first time.

Always, we made a great pretense that we had met by chance, and feigned amazement that our tracks had crossed each other’s. And yet he was certain to let me know, in such a way as to make nothing of it, where he had a mind to be fishing or hunting at this or that phase of the moon, and such or so height of the sun. Every time, I would tell myself some falsehood as to why my day’s wanderings took me in that very direction at that very hour. Once I was in the general place, it was a small matter for him to track me: he told me, later, that I left a trail plainer than a herd of running deer.

I justified the hours with him in the baskets of delicacies that I carried home. It was my duty, was it not, to help provide for my family? As I watched the jars of preserves fill the shelf, the strings of drying cranberries crisscross the rafters, and the strips of smoked shellfish laid in against a hungry winter, I felt satisfied in my self-deception.

The truth, now, set down here, before God: I loved the hours I spent with him. In very short season he had filled the empty space that Zuriel had left in my heart. I had never had such a friend before. As a child I had not needed any, since Zuriel was always at my side, all the companion I wanted. When he died, I was without whatever knack it requires to draw someone close. In any case, the only girl of an age to have been my friend was an Alden, of the one family in the settlement with which we Mayfields were at odds. To have formed any kind of easy association with the few English boys my age would have been an unthinkable affront to modesty. But this boy was a different thing entirely. He had soon become more of a brother to me than Makepeace, whose concern for my proper bearing made him severe. I had learned to expect no word from Makepeace but to correct or to command. No playful banter, no genuine opening of our heart one to the other.

At first, I followed this wild boy hungering after his knowledge of the island— his deep understanding of everything that bloomed or swam or flew. Soon enough, a curiosity about an untamed soul had kindled, and this, too, caused me to seek him out. But it was his light temper and his easy laugh that drew me close to him, over time, until I forgot he was a half-naked, sassafras-scented heathen anointed with raccoon grease. He was, quite simply, my dearest friend.

And yet, I told no one this, not even myself. I knew that I deceived others, but the extent of my self-deception only became patent to me much later. I took pains that no one ever saw us together, forgoing meeting him if I thought there was the slightest chance that someone might come in our way. I did not take home the cuts of venison he offered, when he had killed and dressed a deer, since I could not have explained how I came by them. But I ate from a roasted haunch with him, and it was delicious. Another day, he led me to dunes rich with ripening beach plums, and as I picked them, he waded out, spear in hand, to inspect his fish traps, returning with a fine bass writhing in his hands. I heard him thank the fish for its life as he dispatched it with a quick blow. I had never thought of such a thing, and that day, I recall that it seemed to me outlandish. He said we would eat it, and I said it was not meal time. He laughed at that, and said that he had heard that the English needed a bell to tell them when they were hungry. Even as he mocked me, I realized that I was, in fact, ravenous. So we gathered some kindling and a little driftwood; he used his flint to strike a flame. We skewered the flesh on twigs and seared it, one succulent piece after another. I ate till I was sated. Later, at board, my mother commended me for my continence, and father chimed: “Son, you would do well to emulate your sister.” Makepeace liked his food too well and struggled against the sin of gluttony. I colored, thinking guiltily of my full belly, and mother’s eyes smiled at me, misperceiving that my pink flesh bespoke a modesty like her own; a fine quality that I did not in fact possess.

Day following day, I grew in knowledge of the island, as we foraged in one place more remarkable in prospect or abundance than the last. For him, it seemed that every plant had some use, as food or medicine, as dye or weaving matter. He would snap the heads off sumac and douse them in water to make a refreshing drink, or reach up into trees to gather rich nutmeats— white and creamy. He was forever chewing upon one or another fresh green leaf from some plant that I had thought a weed, but which, when he gave it me, proved most palatable.

As I grew to know places and plants, so also I grew to know my guide, though this came more slowly. It was many weeks before he would even give me his name, that being considered a grave intimacy among his people. And when he did finally confide it to me, I understood why it is that they feel so. For with his name came an idea of who he truly was. And with that knowledge came the venom of temptation that would inflame my blood.

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