فصل 10 - بخش 02

TEN

Two winters had passed, and it was spring. At the meetinghouse every Sunday, John and Huldah managed at least to smile at each other, and at the best of times to sit and talk for a few moments. These moments were often quietly engineered by Mistress Medlycott or Mistress Kelly, both kind-hearted women who could sense the emotions involved.

But one day there was a meeting full of unexpected turmoil. When everyone was seated, waiting for worship to begin, the minister unexpectedly introduced Miles Standish, the military leader of the Plymouth Colony, who lived nearby in Duxbury.

“Captain Standish has some events of importance to us all to report,” he said. “And Master Kelly, too.”

Standish came to the lectern; he was a short, muscular man, wearing the padded jacket of the militia, and his reddish hair and beard were flecked with grey. Kelly followed and stood nearby; since he too was short, stocky, and in uniform, they looked almost like brothers. John had not seen Master Kelly in the meetinghouse for some weeks—which had greatly helped his chances of speaking to Huldah.

“By the providence of our Lord, brothers and sisters, we have had a great victory,” Standish said. His voice was clear and forceful, and carried round the room, over the attentive heads. “As you know, our brother Walter Kelly here and others have been helping to defend the Connecticut colonists against the warlike Pequots of that coast. The Pequots are among the boldest and bloodiest of the savage tribes, and have sought to ally the Narragansetts with them to drive all Englishmen out of this land.”

He paused, eyes roving over his silent audience.

“But the Narragansett Indians and the Mohegans, having had many past quarrels with the Pequots, chose to join with the English. And in this latest assault, God gave us such good fortune that these Pequots are almost totally destroyed!”

Voices murmured through the room. There were a few calls of “Amen!”

Standish said, slowly and with ceremony, “Master Kelly is but newly returned from the battle, and will relate all to you.”

The congregation murmured again and then hushed, as Kelly stood up at the front. He was less eloquent than Captain Standish but no less self-confident.

“Our company under Captain John Underhill being arrived to join our Connecticut brothers,” he said, “the hasty Narragansetts directed us to surprise the Pequots before dawn, in a village where many of the tribe lay sleeping. And so we did, creeping up silently on their fortifications. Then our men attacked with great speed and courage. Those Pequots who fought, we slew with the sword. The rest died by fire. The Connecticut captain John Mason had us set fire to their wigwams.”

John was sitting behind Mistress Medlycott. He saw her shift uneasily on her bench, and she bowed her head.

“The flames spread fast through the whole village, and the savage devils screamed long as they died,” said Master Kelly with satisfaction. “We were all around the wall, waiting to stab any who ran outside. And the Narragansetts were there to kill them too, though they did little except to jeer at the Pequots as they burned. Thus the God of Battles gave us triumph over those who would murder good Christian men and women! In this and other attacks it is thought that seven hundred Indians died. The good Lord be praised!”

There was a rumble of agreement in the room.

John clenched his fists in an effort to stay silent, and felt his fingernails cut into his palms.

“Where were the other attacks, Master Kelly?” called out Master Medlycott, sitting beside John.

“I was present only at one of them,” said Master Kelly, “when we drove the people of a smaller Indian settlement into a swamp. There we beset them all day and all night. We killed many, but so miraculously did the Lord preserve us that their arrows wounded none of our men. I had an arrow through my sleeve with not so much as a scratch.”

“God be praised,” said a woman’s voice from among the listeners.

“Amen,” said some others.

“Those Pequots who survived from the swamp, we took prisoner,” Master Kelly said. “The women and the maid children were disposed about in the towns. All the male children have been set on a ship to Bermuda, for the plantations there.”

John could bear this no longer. He spoke up, suddenly, his voice shaking.

“Master Kelly,” he said, “may I ask a question?”

Walter Kelly heard his voice but did not recognize him, out there in the audience. “Of course,” he said.

John stood up. He said, this time loudly, clearly, “Were there not innocent women and children in the village of people that you burned alive?”

There was a long silence in the meetinghouse. Some heads turned.

John sat down again, but not before Kelly had recognized him.

“Yes, John Wakeley,” he said coldly. “There were many. You call them innocent? As our captain has said, they belonged to a people grown to a height of blood and sin against God and man. And do you think the Indians would have spared English women and children from death?”

The minister was on his feet at once, headed for the lectern. “Brothers and sisters,” he cried, “let us give thanks for Master Kelly and Captain Standish and all our brave soldiers, and praise God for our triumph over the murderous heathen! In the words of the Bible, the Lord was pleased to smite our enemies, and to give us their land for an inheritance. Let the whole earth be filled with his glory!”

So they were launched into the long customary pattern of worship for the day, with a break between the two sermons for eating and talking—from which John deliberately kept away, taking a long time to check on the welfare of their horses. And Master Medlycott said not a word to John until they were all back at home, away from the congregation, when he erupted in furious rage.

“Shame on you!” he shouted. “Shame on you for slandering a brave man who defends our safety! And in public! And bringing shame to this house, as my apprentice!”

“I did but ask a question,” John said coldly.

“A question—it was an accusation! Who are you to question the actions of your betters, of a good devout Christian?” He was on the brink of striking at John. “Ezra warned me of thy foolishness, I should have listened! Out of here! Away with thee! I’ll have you no more in my workshop or my home!”

“William—” said Mistress Medlycott.

“Out!” bellowed Medlycott, his face scarlet. The children had crept away outdoors, frightened by his anger, and Ezra was drifting toward the back room.

But cosy Mistress Medlycott, never known to raise her voice in anything except merriment, was standing foursquare in the middle of the room facing her husband, beside John, like a mountain lion defending her cub. And though she was a good Puritan wife, she was shouting right back at him.

“William! What is this rage? Tha know’st this boy—he has been part of this family for five years and more!”

“He is a fool!” roared Medlycott.

“He is no fool, but a good devout Christian too! Can you not recall the nature of the question he asked?”

Medlycott paused, for a crucial second. He was so taken aback at the fury bursting out of his tranquil wife that he actually found himself hearing what she said.

Mistress Medlycott pressed on. “He asked us to consider that our soldiers burned alive hundreds of women and children! Burned them alive! Children like your own! Not fighting men, our enemies, but innocent children! Have you ever heard of Indians doing that to us?”

“Indians have killed white women,” Medlycott said. “And children too. And tortured them, they say.”

“Then is this the way of a Christian, to behave like a savage but a hundred times worse?”

John dared not open his mouth, but he was full of wonder at hearing her say everything that was in his own mind.

Mistress Medlycott said with total proud conviction, “My husband would never have been party to such a slaughter of the innocents.”

There was a very long pause, and then Master Medlycott said quietly, “No, I would not.”

John said nervously, “Forgive me, Master Medlycott—I should have said nothing in public without your permission. I spoke from my heart and not my wit.”

Master Medlycott stood looking at him for a moment. John had grown so tall that they were almost eye to eye. Then Medlycott sighed, and put a hand briefly on John’s shoulder.

“Tha’ll be a good cooper, John,” he said, with the rounder English accent that came into his voice at certain moments. “But perhaps the best place for you will not be in this colony.”

“Yes,” John said. “I have thought about that.”

He came to see me one day a little while later. It was one of his visits early in the day, in the first glimmering of dawn. The salt marsh and its islands were less isolated than once they had been. More of the bordering woodland had been cleared for farming, and in season, the farmers cut salt marsh hay to feed their multiplying livestock. Men paused briefly on my island once in a while, though most avoided it because of the tangles of vines among its trees, which brought up fearsome blisters on their English skin.

The tide was low; only meandering little creeks remained in the marsh. John came along the stony ridge that I called the stem of the pear-shaped island, and I was there waiting for him.

“You asked the right question in the meetinghouse, John Wakeley,” I said.

He smiled a little. His gaze, as always, was a little indirect; all this time we had never looked each other straight in the eye. I felt he could see me only at the edge of his vision.

He said, “Do you know every single thing I say and do?”

“Not everything. I sense your thoughts. Some of them.”

“Do you guide them?”

“Oh no. You are your own man.”

“And full of horror at the massacre of the Pequots,” he said. “How can men listen to the screaming of children in agony, and have no pity?”

Some questions have no answer. In this world, one small thing leads to another small thing, and they twine within time to cause events, both good and terrible. We see this pattern only when we look back at the past, and though we talk of learning from history, we do not learn. And even a ghost cannot explain to the living why this should be so.

I said to John, “It is an endless river of conflict, that was set in motion by the first white man to set his foot on this land. And before that. By the first of my people to fire an arrow at another man, by the first Englishman to shoot a gun.”

“We should never have come here,” John said.

“There was conflict here between our tribes before you ever came.”

“But did any Indians ever cause a village of men and women and children to burn alive?”

“I think not.”

Grey light was washing into the sky above the sea, above the marsh, as the sunrise came close.

“I shall leave here as soon as I am done with my apprenticeship,” John said. “I shall go to join Roger Williams, who works against conflict.”

I had only a few moments left, to make a request.

“Will you do something for me, before that time comes?”

“I shall see you often before then,” he said. “But of course. Anything.”

“To remember something that has happened in a place,” I said, “my people make a memory hole in the ground. Two hands wide, two hands deep, lined with stones. It lies always beside a track, and is kept open by the generations after, and it holds . . . memories.”

“I’ll make one here,” John said eagerly. “Right here where I am standing.”

And as he was smiling at me, the edge of the sun flamed up over the sea, the first light of the new day, and I was gone from his sight, almost for the last time.

He came back to the island one afternoon, with a bucket of stones he had collected from the edge of the river that flows through the salt marsh. They were small, water-rounded stones, older than his people or mine. He had brought a short iron spade too. He would not be able to see me at this time of the day, he knew, but that was not why he had come.

At the beginning of the island, the place where the stem-ridge joins the top of the pear, he dug a memory hole. As he dug out the soil he tossed it into the marsh, where it disappeared among the grasses. The sides of the hole did not crumble, or collapse, because he was digging not into marsh mud but into solid sandy ground.

He lined the hole with his small stones, pressing them firmly into the sides. He gave it a stony rim as well. It looked beautiful. Watching him, I was suddenly back with Leaping Turtle, in our second village, digging the storage pit to keep corn for the winter. I wondered what had become of the pit and of the village, but I chose not to know. They too were almost certainly ghosts by then, replaced by an Englishman’s farm.

John stood back and admired his memory hole. A branch from a clump of scrubby oak put it in shadow; nobody would notice it.

“This is for you, Little Hawk,” he said to the air, and then looked up suddenly, as something out over the marsh caught his eye.

It was an osprey, broad wings lying on the breeze, coasting out toward the sea. He could just hear its strange, thin call.

Perhaps it was my Manitou. He is with me often, now as then.

John went back, along the ridge and across a field, and joined one of my people’s old tracks, now a white man’s road. Coming toward him he saw Thomas.

“There you are!” Thomas said. “I was looking for you—where did you go?”

John said, thinking fast, “I thought I’d pick blueberries. But it’s too early; they’re all still green.” He indicated his empty bucket, and hoped Thomas would not think to enquire about the spade.

Thomas didn’t. Like John, he was now a young man, but he still had his cheerful, uncomplicated disposition. “Th’art a solitary fellow, John. I shouldn’t do nearly so well without company. I used to wonder why you would creep away so early in the mornings sometimes, long before sunup.”

John blinked at him. He had always taken such care to be sure nobody noticed his visits to the island, so that nobody would follow him.

“But then I realized,” said Thomas amiably, “that you just wanted some time to be on your own. After all, you are never alone even in sleep, with Ezra snoring next to your ear.”

Ezra’s snores were legendary between them. He was not a large man, but the sounds that issued from his throat every night were like the grunts of an ox.

John grinned. “If Ezra marries,” he said, “I hope he finds a young woman whose hearing is dull.”

“Ezra is too much in love with casks to marry,” Thomas said. “Casks and the meetinghouse. I think he will be my father’s journeyman for the rest of his life. But you and I will not.”

They were walking back along the rutted track toward the workshop, since the two hours of freedom William Medlycott had granted them (at his wife’s request—it was her birthday) were almost up.

“We have a year of apprenticeship yet,” John said. When he had first arrived, Thomas was already working for his father, but Medlycott had soon put them both on the same level. He had said Thomas always treated cooperage as a chore until he saw John so clearly enjoying it.

“And then you will marry Huldah Bates and fly away,” Thomas said. “And perhaps I shall fly after you.”

John looked at him in surprise. His feelings for Huldah were no secret in the house, but he had never heard Thomas talk of leaving before.

“Surely your father hopes you will take over from him one day,” he said.

“My father is a cautious man,” Thomas said cheerfully. “That’s why he has made Willie apprentice—he wants to feel there will still be a Medlycott cooper if I don’t fulfill his hopes.”

Of the six Medlycott children, Willie was the third son; a chubby thirteen-year-old often to be seen sitting at the workshop’s grindstone, solemn and intent, sharpening the cooper’s tools. He was a helpful, hardworking boy, though slower-witted than his big brother. Thomas often teased him, but gently.

“But of course you’ll fulfill his hopes,” said John, as they turned past the field where the four new Medlycott cows were grazing. He looked at Thomas a little uncertainly. Did he not really want to be a cooper?

Thomas said, as if reading his mind, “It’s not that I don’t want to be a cooper, but I have a mind to do it on board ship.”

“On a ship?” said John in horror.

Thomas snorted with laughter. “Tha looks as the minister would, if I said I coveted his wife! What’s wrong with a ship?”

“You can’t swim, for one thing.”

“I should be inside the ship, not towing it. That sea captain who came after casks the other day, he said the bigger vessels have their own cooper aboard. Think of it, John! Voyages to other countries! Maybe the West Indies! Adventure!”

“And a very uncomfortable death!” said John. He made a deep gurgling sound, and punched Thomas in the ribs.

Thomas punched him back, still laughing—and then added in a hasty whisper, as they came to the workshop door. “It’s a secret! Remember! Don’t tell!”

“Not I,” John said. It was a very small secret to keep, he thought, compared to the risk of being hanged for the Devil’s work of communicating with a ghost.