Caleb’s Crossing

That night, as I sat with mother at our mending, I had to use every shred of my will to keep my hands at their task. Generally, I could mend or needlepoint or embroider without the least difficulty, my fingers finding their own way over the cloth. But that night the task seemed so friggling to me that I had to concentrate on every stitch. I noticed mother glance at me from time to time as I sighed and fidgeted and tried to hide my cackhanded work. Somehow, she always sensed when something was amiss with me.

Finally, I did something most unlike myself. I asked father a question.

“Does it trouble you, father, that the people of this place are so slow to embrace the gospel?”

Father put aside his bible. “I do not see it so, Bethia. We must not be willful in this matter, but patient, as God is. Did he not abandon these people to Satan all these many ages past? We must not want a convert more than God wants him. It must not be that we, in our pride, attempt to make a convert of one who is not among the elect. We are instruments, but if there is not an influence from God, the work will not be done, nor should it be.”

“But what of the satanic rites that they persist in? Is there no way to disrupt them?”

Father looked grave. “It is my chiefest concern,” he said. “The devil drives on their worship so pleasantly— as he does many false worships. The gift-giving at gatherings, the feasting and the dancing— these ceremonies are, I must own it, much beloved of the people. They do not like to hear me preach against these things.”

“I was thinking particularly of the trial by ordeal that I have heard their youth are subject to . . . surely those rites are not so pleasant?”

“Who has told you of such things?” he said sharply. I made my face a blank mask of indifference, as though it was a small matter, and shrugged. I felt mother’s eyes on me. “I do not rightly know. It is just something I overheard.”

Makepeace interjected, looking up over his book. “They force the strongest and ablest of their male children to swill down poison— the white hellebore is one plant they use— and when they cast it up, they must drink it down again, and again, until what they cast is merely blood. Then, when they can barely stand, they are beaten with sticks, and thrust out into the icy night to run naked through cat briar till the devil catches them and makes covenant with them in their fainting fit.”

“But why do they subject their youth to this? Surely there is danger in drinking such poison?”

“Oh, they know how to decoct so as to bring on the visions they seek to have, short of a killing dose. They do it to get power, sister. Diabolic power. Some of them learn thus to call on the force of Satan to summon the fogs and whip up the seas.”

I felt the hot blood creeping up my neck. Mother placed her hand protectively on the arc of her belly. Although it had not been spoken of, we all of us knew her condition. “Enough!” she interjected. “This is not fit talk for a Christian hearth. I beg you, hold your peace.” She feared to miscarry, as she had, just a year since, on a terrible afternoon of blood-soaked rags, whispers, groans, and then silence, for the lost babe, if mourned by mother, was never spoken of. Worse, perhaps, she feared that such talk of Satan might embolden that emissary of darkness to enter her womb and make a monstrous birth of that which grew there. I repented my question, and pressed no more. Although Solace was born unblemished five months later, there is no doubt: that ill-judged conversation and all that followed from it caused my mother’s blighted childbed, and her death.

But I did not see that danger then. My mind was brimming with corrupt fancies. That night, I lay upon my shakedown, and though it was a night crisped by the chill of early fall, I tossed in my own heat, consumed by what Makepeace had said. I thought of that familiar chestnut-brown body, pared by ordeal, naked in the darkness. And of Satan, in his serpent form, twining about those bruised thighs, hissing out his tempting promises of potency.

Chapter VIII

Who are we, really? Are our souls shaped, our fates written in full by God, before we draw our first breath? Do we make ourselves, by the choices we our selves make? Or are we clay merely, that is molded and pushed into the shape that our betters propose for us?

In the days following Caleb’s leavetaking, I turned fifteen, and my narrow world became ever more straitened. I began to feel more and more like clay, squeezed flat under the boots of other people. I went to meeting on the Lord’s Day, raised my eyes and hands to God, joined in the hymns and let the words of scripture pour into my ears. But my mind was elsewhere. What choice had I ever made that was fully my own? From birth, others had ordained my life’s every detail. That I should be a colonist and an islander, a dweller on these wild shores, all this was the product of choices my grandfather had made before I was even thought of. That I might be literate but not learned was the choice of my father; the lot of a girlchild. It was around that time that I heard father and grandfather speaking together of Noah Merry, the second son of the miller who lived south of us on the island’s swiftest brook, saying that he was a godly boy, a stout worker, and in time a likely husband for me. So even this choice, it seemed, would be made by others. There was a little ember of anger inside me when I thought this: a hard black coal that could be fanned into a hot flame if I chose to let my thoughts give it air. Most of the time, I did not do so. I went on, dutiful, trying to keep in mind what father preached, that all of this was God’s plan, not his, not his father’s, nor any man’s. A small part of a grand design that we could not fathom. “Consider your mother’s needlework,” he said once, taking a piece from her hands. “The design is plain to us, when we examine the front, but the back of the piece does not reveal it.” He turned it. “Here, you see the knots and the dangling threads. There is an outline of the pattern, but if we guess— is it a bird? Is it a flower? We might easily be mistaken. So it is with this life— we see the knots, we guess at the whole. But only God truly sees the beauty of his design.”

So then, what of Caleb, or Cheeshahteaumauk, shivering out there alone, night following night? Was it part of God’s beautiful design to leave him there in the winter darkness, waiting for the devil to snatch away his soul? Or did God make no designs for the heathen? If so, what was father about, in his ministry to them? Perhaps it was pride, merely, to seek these souls that God had chosen to abandon. Perhaps it was in itself a sin. . . . But no. Surely my wise father could not err so. And why had God brought Caleb into my path if I was not meant to save him? Why had he set us down here at all? I could no longer even guess at the whole, no longer even glimpse an outline amid so many dangling threads.

I was sorely troubled by these things, and did not eat or sleep well, and could give no convincing account of what distressed me. I told myself that I wanted father to go and find Caleb, wherever he was in the wild woods, and deliver him from evil. Yet where he slept that night, in all those heaths and thickets, that only God— or Satan— knew.

Chapter IX

As it happened, father did propose a journey, around that time, although not the one I longed for him to make. Grandfather was interested in acquiring a share in the Merrys’ grist mill and, as ever, he looked to father to be his negotiator.

“I thought to take Bethia with me, if she cares to go,” father said to mother, quite suddenly, at our breakfast board. “She is looking rather wan of late and I think a long ride in the fresh air might be good for her.” He spoke lightly, but I saw the meaning glance exchanged as mother handed him a hot corn cake. “You will like to see the Merrys’ farm, Bethia; I hear it has a pleasant prospect with the brook running through, which he has dammed up for a millpond, and he has built his house well, I’m told. They say, who have seen it, that he has a number of glass windows, and has installed a wainscot.” Makepeace looked up at that, and made a disapproving snort. “Sumptuary affectations and an affront to plainness,” he said. Me, I thought it none of my brother’s affair. If a man wished to glaze his windows or line his walls, then he might face fewer drafts when the icy air of winter probed through every chink and crevice. And what harm if he have the skill to make it look well?

The appointed morning was cold, but fine and crisp. Mother touched my face before I set out, and looked at me kindly, but with searching eyes. “I rejoice that you will get out of this house for a time, into the healthful air,” she said. “You have not been abroad lately, as has long been your wont. I have wondered at it.” I looked down, and said nothing, but I felt the heat in my face. Mother’s toil-roughened fingers caressed my cheek. “I do not ask you to account for the change in your ways. You have reached a time in your life when many things must change. You will find, perhaps, that what seemed good occupation to you one day may loose its luster the next, and seem but a child’s errand. I have been glad of your help about the house; you must not think I do not rejoice to have you more often by me. But neither do I think these last weeks have agreed with you. Try to enjoy your visit to the Merrys. And whatever it is that weighs so heavy with you, try to set it by.” She kissed me then, and I returned her embrace with a full heart.

I do not know if she had said aught to father about raising my spirits, but he seemed uncommonly lighthearted as we set out. In the summer, I had suggested that our tegs might do better on some higher pastures that I had found in my explorations. The sedges were lush and various there, and father, having inspected the place, had decided to try it. The ewes had thrived and put on condition and were well set now for the coming winter, when we would bring them down into the folds. Father took the opportunity of our ride to inspect them, and later to give me credit. “You will make some farmer a fine wife someday, Bethia.” He meant it kindly.

As we made our way through the woods, he began to talk about Jacob Merry in a way unlike him, who did not stoop to gossip. But now, unprompted, he offered up opinions about his character, and described how he was perceived by others in the settlement. “Just as your grandfather’s views were moderate by the lights of the Massachusetts Bay colonists, enough to push him to this island, so Merry’s are looser still. I will be frank with you, Bethia; he struggled against adverse opinions in Great Harbor. His first wife died of consumption when his youngest children were but two and three years old and the older boys just nine and twelve, I think it was. He married again within a six month— a young girl, Sofia, who had been an indentured servant in their household. There were some who judged him for that, but I was not one of them, for those children needed mothering more than they needed mourning rites. Merry grew up a miller’s son in England, so, on finding a stream fast-running enough to fill a millpond, he considered it an opportunity, and did not scruple to bring his family to a place so many miles distant from the rest of us. I do not say that he is a radical or a non-conformist as we commonly understand such things. He is a sound and godly man. But perhaps more his own man than most people find acceptable.”

We saw the farm from better than a mile off: a large tract of low-slung land protected from the winds in the lee of gentle hillocks, hugging a shallow, shimmering pond. The Wampanoag, who had a settlement not far distant— from where we were we could see the curls of smoke from their fires— had gardened some of the land before Merry offered for it, so there were clearings. In between, stands of dead trees stood, girdled by the Merrys a year or more since, so as to let the light pass through to the crops. They were a forlorn sight, the tree skeletons, but as we lacked oxen or draft beasts then, to pull out stumps, there was no better way to make cropland. Merry had harvested early and the shocks were many, large and well made. As we approached, we could see three men— Jacob, Noah and his elder brother, Josiah— toiling to raise a wall from the granite stones they had wrestled out of the path of the plough. They left off readily, as soon as they saw us, and came forward with cheerful greetings.

I had not seen Noah for more than two years, since the family left Great Harbor. Because of what I had overheard regarding him, I felt conscious as he greeted me. But I also felt inclined to take more notice of him than I might have done. I observed him as we walked toward the house (which was indeed a fine one— easily the finest yet built on the island— of two full floors and an attic). He and his father and brother put off their soiled smocks and hung them on a peg rail. We sat at board in a large and sunny room with not less than four diamond-paned glass windows, and, yes, a handsome wainscot.

I decided that Noah Merry suited his name. He had a ready laugh and a mop of yellow curls that he wore rather too long, so that he tossed them back out of his eyes when he spoke. This mannerism was part of a general restless animation of his person, and as he helped himself to his young stepmother’s excellent seed cake, his stream of good humored banter was as uninterrupted as the flow of the brook that plashed and glinted outside the windows.

We were still at board when two young Wampanoag presented themselves at the door. Jacob Merry rose and welcomed them and, somewhat to my surprise, as I thought we were the only English household that did such a thing, offered them a place at board while Sofia Merry heaped their plates with seedcake and poured each a tankard of small beer.

As part of the bargain that had been struck for the farmland, the Indians were to have their corn ground at no cost and to have certain youth instructed in the ways of milling. Merry explained that these two youths had been chosen by their sonquem to learn the trade, “and likely millers they are, the pair of them.” Father nodded approvingly at this. “Wisely done. This is exactly as we should be going on, as the settlement grows beyond Great Harbor. If they see a benefit in our presence, then we will have a true commonwealth of interests.” He turned then to engage the youths, who seemed a little shy of him, in pleasant conversation in their own tongue. I listened to their account of themselves and their village with half an ear while pretending to be fully absorbed in talk with Sofia Merry and her stepsons.

I had a tankard, which was sweating from the coldness of the beer, raised to my lips when one of the young men, whose name was Momonequem, asked father if he happened to have any English remedies with him, for there was a sickened man in their settlement.

“He is not one of us. He is Nah noso, sonquem of Nobnocket, come to parlay with our sonquem, and we fear if it goes ill with him his people will say our pawaaw cast a spell on him. Our pawaaw has tried to heal him, and, failing, sent for Nah noso’s own, Tequamuck, who we deem the strongest of the pawaaws. But for all he has danced and chanted, he has not been able to spear out the sickness.” At that moment the wet tankard slid from my hand and clattered onto the board, slopping its contents.

I got up, in agitation, and helped to mop my spill. I heard father say to Momonequem that he had brought no medicines save some salve and bandages and that he did not think he could be of help in such a grave case.

I could not contain myself. “Do you not think you should see this man, at least?” I said. “I’m sure the Merrys have aught for a poultice, if that be what is needed. If nothing else, you could pray for him . . . and if you can help him, where the sorcerers have failed, it surely would further the mission.”

Father answered, “Perhaps I . . . ,” and then he broke off and looked at me strangely. “Bethia, how is it that you . . . ?” He glanced up at the Merrys, and decided that this was not the time or place to pursue the matter.

He turned back to Momonequem and said he would go with them and do what he could. I acted as if it were natural to assume I was to go also, and asked Sofia Merry to show me what she had in her herb store that she might spare me. Even though the damage was done with father, I thought it best that I not speak Wampanaontoaonk in front of the Merrys, so I asked father to question the youths about the signs of the sonquem’s illness. They said fever, a red rash and convulsing cough. So I took onions and mustard seed, willow bark, and from the garden some broad leaves of comfrey and peppermint.

Momonequem and his friend Sacochanimo each had a mishoon pulled up on the bank of the pond. These canoes were hollowed out from burned tree trunks, broad enough in the fore to carry sacks of corn to the mill. They unloaded this cargo and carried it to the mill house, then indicated that each of us should take our place where the sacks had been. Father stepped uncertainly into Momonequem’s canoe and I into Sacochanimo’s. The youths slipped in behind us and paddled with swift strokes across the wide pond. The water was shallow enough to reveal the bright leaves settled at the bottom. Rich colors of bronze and deep crimson layered upon each other like the intricate pattern of the Turkey carpet that warmed my grandfather’s floor. The youths paddled at speed, without effort, covering the short distance between farm and settlement in no time at all. From my canoe I could see the muscles working in the arms of Momonequem as he paddled ahead with father. His oar pierced the water without a splash, sending ripples arrowing back to shore, where turtles catching afternoon sunlight slid from the banks as we approached. Momonequem turned sharply, into the river that fed the pond, and we followed his lead through the high marsh grasses towards their settlement.

There were many mishoons beached there. We stepped ashore and at once heard the unholy commotion coming from within the ring of wetus. This was the winter settlement of a large band, five or six times the size of the praying hamlet. We made our way toward the source of the noise.

They had the sick man laid out on a mat, his face painted over completely with charcoal or black clay. Set on the earth around him were all kinds of talismans of bones and fur, shell and hide and dried plants. He was a big man, powerfully built, yet his ribs seemed about to erupt from his chest as he labored to breathe in shallow, rattling gasps. The pawaaw who had stood in silent challenge to my father when he had sermonized the praying Indians was a blur of frantic motion. He cried out, leapt, beat on the ground, then shook his gourd rattles at the sky with frenzied gestures. Foam dangled from his lips as if he were a horse hard-ridden, and strands of it flew off his chin as he leapt and twirled and then fell upon the prone figure, making spearing gestures and wild, fierce faces.

It seemed impossible that any man could go on so for an extended time, but he did, seemingly tireless. He stopped only to turn aside and cast up some brownish bile, then he reached for a gourd and downed a liquid of such a sharp odor I could smell it from where I stood, many yards off. He was a very tall man, even by the lofty standards of the Indians, and though painted garishly I could see now that his nephew’s features favored him. The intensity of his prayers was such that had they been to the true God, it would have been a prayer exceeding the most devoted I had ever heard.

Father had been transfixed by the spectacle but suddenly he recovered himself. “Turn your face away, Bethia. Do not gratify Satan by giving his rites your attention.”

The discipline of a lifetime compelled me to do as he bade me. When had I ever, in his presence, refused a direction from his lips? But it was like tearing a nail from a board, to pull my eyes away from the ritual. Father’s hand was at my back, pushing me towards the nearest wetu as he said shortly to Momonequem that we would wait within until the pawaaw was finished, after which they might fetch us to attend the sick man and see what, if anything, might yet be done.

The wetu was a well-made dome of bark with a hide drawn across its entrance to keep out the fall chill. Father lifted the hide a little, asking leave to enter. A young woman’s voice civilly assented. Father signaled me to go before him, so I bent and stepped inside, waiting for my eye to adjust to the low light. It was well I entered first, for the woman within was casually shrugging a deerskin blouse over her bare breasts, in no great urgency to cover her nakedness. She was not much older than I, with long, strong legs and glossy hair tied in a single thick braid, all threaded through with turkey feathers. She gestured to us to sit, and I did so, sinking into a dense pile of fur pelts laid over timber benches. It was warm in the wetu, and the bark gave off a faint sweet smell of resin.

She offered us a mash of parched corn, which we ate with our hand from the common pot. Her cook fire was small and its smoke drew directly upward to a hole in the bark ceiling. Outside, a kind of sail could be moved this way and that to draw the smoke and keep out rain. In the dimness, I could see father staring at me with a hard, un-yielding look as I fingered the mash between my lips. Knowing it was coming in any case, I thought I might as well get to it. I turned to the young woman and thanked her civilly in Wampanaontoaonk, at which she started and exclaimed. I explained to her, with my eye on father, that I had learned her speech during my father’s lessons with Iacoomis. In English, I added: “Please do not be vexed with me, father. All those many winter months by the hearth when I was a babe— I could not shut my ears.”

I do not know what father would have replied. He did not speak his mind to me because at that moment the sonquem of that place entered the wetu, with several of his senior men. When I looked up, the food dropped from my fingers. One of the men looked so like Caleb that I thought for a happy instant it was he, fetched back from his lonely ordeal. But a second’s further scrutiny showed the likeness was inexact. This was the face of a man, not a youth, weathered and coarsened by several extra years. It came to me then that this must be the elder brother Caleb had spoken of: Nanaakomin, the dutiful son and favored heir of their father Nah noso. Since his attention was upon my father, I was free to study his features, so like the ones that had become familiar, even beloved, to me. Nanaakomin’s eyes were watchful and intelligent, like Caleb’s, but darker and more opaque. His lips were thicker and more sensual.

The young woman gestured to me that she and I should go out and leave the men to conference with my father, and so we did. The settlement was quieter now. They had carried the sick man away to shelter. Only the pawaaw remained in the circle. He lay there, in the dust, spent at last, or in some kind of praying trance, I could not be sure. The people of the settlement, in any case, had given him a wide berth, and the woman at my side held her face away so as not to look at him. I sensed her fear. She walked quickly past, disappearing into some other wetu. There was no one left outside. The pawaaw lay all alone, with his sorcerer’s paraphernalia— that no one else dared touch— scattered about him. Walking on silent feet as Caleb had taught me, I approached more nearly to him. His eyes were open, but glassy and unseeing. The gourd from which he had drunk his potion was set upright, just a few inches from his strange, expressionless face.

We reach, now, the place where I cannot account for my own behavior, save to say that Satan truly had his hand upon me. For I walked over to that gourd and peered in. It contained the remains of a greenish brew, the scent of which was pungent enough to burn the nostrils. I could guess what it was. A decoction from the root of white hellebore, of which Makepeace had spoken; the poisonous path to visionary power. I looked about to see if I was watched, but there was no one by me save the pawaaw, supine and insensible in his fit.

I picked up the gourd. My hand trembled. I set it down again, and went to step away. But I could not. I lifted the gourd and walked off with it, into the shelter of a concealing thicket. I set it down again and sat there, considering it. There was not a great amount of liquid left. Makepeace had said they knew well how to decoct a dose that would not poison. What matter if I tasted it? What harm? Perhaps I would gain by it. I yearned to experience, once again, that sense of holy ecstasy that had fallen upon me at the cliffs.

I raised it to my lips and took a sip. The flavor on my tongue was sweet at first, so I tipped the gourd and swallowed what was in it, down to the dregs. A moment later my mouth and throat felt seared. Then there came a bitter aftertaste. My gorge rose, wanting to cast it up. I set the gourd down on the ground and ran back to the edge of the pond, where I knelt down and quaffed water by the handful. That clean sweet liquid might have been gall ink, for all the relief it brought. Soon, I could not feel my tongue, so numb had it become. I felt my knees buckle as if someone had struck me a sharp blow from behind. I sank down by the pond side.

Time slowed. I felt the blood beat in my head. Each breath became effortful, each slower and more rasping than the last. The throb of my blood also slowed, until I felt like an age passed between each beat of my heart. I tried to raise my hand, but between the thought and the act seemed an eternity. My hand weighed heavy as an ingot. As it moved through space it seemed to leave impressions of itself behind, serried rows of hands ascending in the air. I touched my hand to my burning, swollen lips, but there was no sensation in my fingers and I could not feel my face.

The sun was low in the sky, setting the trees alight and sending their red reflections dancing across the pond like the lick of little flames. And then, all at once, the pond was on fire. The tongues of light were not reflections, but real flames, running hot across the surface of the water. Soon, they melded into great sheets of fire, leaping and roaring, taking shapes of giants whose blackened hide coruscated like gashed coals. I buried my head in my arms, but the visions forced their way behind my closed eyelids. There was a terrible noise: thunder claps and great cracking sounds as if the very earth was rending open beneath my feet. I started to pray, but the words came off my thickened tongue strangely; uncouth, guttural words whose meaning I did not know. The taste in my mouth was metallic now, warm and viscous, like clotted blood. The blood of Christ. No, not that. No sacred wine from Satan’s chalice. This was the blood of some demonic sacrifice; some gentle innocent impaled upon the devil’s trident, bled to desiccation. My head was about to split, so severe was the pain that wracked me.