فصل 03 - بخش 02

THREE

Four young men carried John’s father on a litter made of linen cloth strung between two poles. It was a bumpy journey but he did not wake. They were following one of the old paths of my people, leading to what was once the village of Patuxet, before the plague killed everyone in this part of the land. Now the white men from England had their own big village there. They called it Plymouth. At its center was a fort built on a hill, and all round the settlement there was a wooden wall taller than a man, broken by a pair of great gates.

In through the open gates they went, and children ran up the center street, calling of their arrival.

The houses were shaped like boxes, with slanted roofs of reed thatch. A chimney of stones and dried mud rose from one end of each roof, to carry away the smoke from the fire inside, and beside each house there was a small garden, edged with boards so that the soil was higher than the ground all about. People stopped digging their gardens and came running as the litter bearing John’s father arrived. So did others watching from the houses. The young woman who ran fastest, anxious, was John’s mother, Margaret Wakeley.

The litter was taken into her house, and she followed it in, with two of the women and the tall young man who witnessed my death, Daniel Smith. He appeared to be full of concern. The women were both older; like Margaret and all these women, they were dressed in heavy clothes with long sleeves, and full skirts down to the ground, in spite of the spring sunshine.

Nobody noticed small John pause for a moment to drop my tomahawk behind the woodpile before he went into the house.

The men carrying the litter moved Benjamin Wakeley very carefully onto a bed. He was still unconscious. He lay there pale and motionless, even when one of the older women took hold of his broken leg. The other woman helped her, with a skillful touch. The two of them must have been the nearest thing these people had to a medicine man. They did the right thing, putting the broken bone in line and tying the leg with straps to two pieces of wood, which would have been so painful if Wakeley were awake that it was a good thing he was not.

More than anything, I could feel the fear and grief in John’s mind as he watched.

This little room had boards as a floor and a bed at either side, without much space in between. The house was very crowded with all these people. From the other room two small girls were peeping wide-eyed; I guessed that they were John’s younger sisters, with a neighbor woman holding their hands.

Daniel Smith said, “It was a large tree to be taken down by only two men. I fear he hit his head most grievous hard when he fell.”

“His head hit a rock,” John said. “The tree knocked him down.” He gave a great sob, and his mother put out a hand to him.

“And killed poor Goodman Ford,” said one of the two older women. “Goody Ford is in great grief, I must go to her. God bless you all.” She gave Margaret a hug, squeezed John’s shoulder, and went out.

The other woman was feeling all round Benjamin Wakeley’s head with gentle fingers.

“A damp cloth on his forehead, my dear,” she said to Margaret, “and the Lord willing, he will wake in good time. The sleep will help him heal.”

But it didn’t, and he did not wake. The religious leader of this colony, a white-bearded man they called William Brewster, came with his wife, and with them was the man who had killed me, Walter Kelly. They all prayed to their God over Benjamin Wakeley, and Daniel Smith and Master Kelly prayed as loudly as any.

“And the Lord be praised that you came upon this sad accident in time to save him,” Master Brewster said to them.

“Praise him too for preserving us from attack by Indians,” said Master Kelly. “Who were close by, but went away when we fired our guns.”

His eyes were on John, but John would not look at him.

“Amen,” said everyone in the room.

With help from her neighbors, Margaret fed soup to her children and put them to bed. Then she sat on the bed where her husband lay propped against pillows, and held a cloth moistened with cool water against his head.

John stayed beside her, exchanging the cloth for a cool one when it grew warm.

She said softly, after a while, “Thy shirt is bloody. Give it to me tomorrow.”

And the words came spilling out of John in an urgent whisper, because he had to tell her.

“Mother, there was one Indian, but he came to help, after the tree fell. He had his axe out, to cut Father free—and Master Kelly shot him. And it was Hawk, the Indian with the scar, that I told you of, who was good to me, at the fishing—”

He broke off, as the tears came into his voice.

“What?” said Margaret, bemused.

“That’s Hawk’s blood on my shirt,” John said, trying to whisper, trying not to cry. “I tried to stop Master Kelly, but he killed him.”

All this ran through Margaret’s mind like water; she could spare no thought for anything but her husband. She heard only John’s distress, and she reached for his hand.

“I know you did all you could, my dear,” she said.

“Father will tell them Hawk was our friend,” John said. He choked on the words, and tried again. “Father will tell them, won’t he?”

“Of course he will,” said his mother. She kissed his forehead. “Hush now. You must rest. Try to sleep.”

So together they said one more prayer for Benjamin Wakeley and then John curled up in the covers at the other end of the bed, and in a while fell asleep.

Margaret stayed awake, sitting wrapped in blankets beside her husband. Just before dawn her eyes closed out of sheer fatigue, and for a few minutes she too slept.

When she woke, Benjamin’s breathing was very faint and slow, his closed eyes deep and shadowed.

“Ben!” she said in alarm.

John scrambled up and came to her. There was no time to call for help, nor could any help have been given. Each of them had a hand softly touching Benjamin Wakeley’s face when he stopped breathing altogether and his spirit went away.

Now John had watched three men die in the space of a day and a night, and this third death was by far the most terrible, because he loved his father dearly.

Margaret’s friends and neighbors came in and out of the house all day to give help and offer sympathy. One of them was Daniel Smith, and with him once more was Master Kelly, who clearly had high rank in this community even though he was so small a man. They both said kind words to Margaret and her two little daughters, and on their way out of the dark house they came face-to-face with John, who was carrying in some logs from the woodpile.

He looked up at them with no expression on his face.

Daniel Smith said, “Your father has gone to the Lord, John. He is in a better place, and free from all pain.”

Master Kelly said, “We mourn the passing of a God-fearing man, for only such are welcomed to the arms of the Almighty. As the psalmist says, ‘the Lord is King forever and ever; the heathen are perished out of his land.’?”

He looked very hard at John, as if he were challenging him.

“Yes, sir,” John said. He was looking straight back at Master Kelly without respect, and his voice was cold. Kelly frowned, but others were coming, so he walked on. John went into the house with his firewood.

When he was sure the two men had gone, he went back out to get more wood. He looked carefully round to make sure nobody was watching, and he slipped behind the wood-pile to the place where he had dropped my tomahawk, and used his father’s wood-splitting axe to dig a shallow hole in the ground. Then he took my tomahawk and buried it there, putting a rock on top so he could find the spot again.

He looked quickly all around him, and he said unhappily to the air, in a voice hardly above a whisper, “I’m sorry, Hawk.”

I sent him comfort silently, and perhaps my Manitou put a little of it into his mind.

The next day two graves were dug in a piece of land not far from the community’s meetinghouse, where they gathered to worship their God, and with a few solemn words from Master Brewster, the people buried the bodies of Benjamin Wakeley and the other man who was killed by the tree, Goodman Ford. There were wooden markers set nearby to remember other people who had died—men, women, children, babies. Though the white man’s plague didn’t hurt the white men, they had had a hard time learning how to survive in this land.

In the weeks after that John’s mother, Margaret, wept often, and had the two little girls and John kneel down with her as she called on God to help her feed and clothe them. She and John worked hard in their garden, digging and planting, and the little girls did their best to pull weeds in spite of their long sleeves and skirts. These people’s stern religion seemed to demand that they cover as much of the body as possible, as if it were a shameful thing. The women were not even allowed to show their hair, and wore close little caps on their heads indoors and out, and even when they slept.

The man Daniel Smith came often to offer help, when he was not working with Master Kelly and Captain Standish on building fortifications. John tried to avoid him, and was not happy when his mother smiled gratefully at Daniel and began calling him by his Christian name as if they were friends. He couldn’t look at Daniel Smith without being back in the bloodiest day of his life, when his world had changed.

And all the time he remembered me. Whenever his father’s death came into his mind, he thought too of mine. Hawk . . . If I hadn’t called out . . . If I hadn’t said his name . . . Hawk . . . Hardly a day went by when he didn’t glance to make sure that the place where he had buried my tomahawk was still undisturbed.

Daniel Smith was younger than John’s father and mother. He was tall and broad-shouldered and did not often laugh. As a member of the colony’s militia, he was often in uniform, and on Sundays he was part of the armed guard that marched down the aisle of the meetinghouse, three abreast, when the congregation was all gathered. Behind them came the governor, the preacher, and Captain Miles Standish, officer’s cane in hand—and after that, the long service began.

The rest of the time Daniel worked as pitman for Goodman Webster, who was the community’s sawyer; they made the wooden planks used for every house in this village. The trunk of a tree was set over a great pit with a man in it, and between him and another man above, a toothed metal saw was pushed up and down to cut the trunk into planks. So much sawdust got into Daniel’s hair and clothes that he wore his hair very short, and always had the faint sweetish smell of maple wood. He felt his was a manly and useful occupation, and suggested to Margaret that John should help around the saw pit, but to John’s great relief Goodman Webster—a very large, muscular man—said he was too small.

John spent his days doing the work his father had taught him—tending plants in the field and the garden and collecting shellfish on the seashore. One day he came home with a basket of clams to find Daniel Smith’s heavy flintlock rifle propped against the wall inside the door, even though it was the afternoon of a working day. Daniel was coming out of the inner room, smiling. His face tightened into its usual stern lines when he saw John.

But to John’s amazement, he nodded at the basket and said, with some effort, “Thou hast a good catch.”

Then he took his rifle and marched out. Over his shoulder he said, “Thy mother has something to tell thee.” Then he was gone.

John turned; his mother was behind him.

She reached for the basket. “Well done—this is a feast,” she said warmly, but she was not looking at him.

John said, “What did he mean?”

“Daniel and I are to be married,” said his mother. “Next week.”

John couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Out of the whirl of emotions in his head, only one found words.

“They killed Hawk!” he said.

“They did their best to save thy father, John,” his mother said. “Put the Indian out of your mind. All death is hard. I have spoken to Daniel about that terrible day. He and Master Kelly truly believed that you were being attacked.”

“Hawk was trying to help,” John said.

His mother said, “And they have spoken to Captain Standish about the matter, and he agreed that it was best forgotten.” She put out her hand to him. “Come in and wash yourself, my dear.”

John stood there for a moment, and in his mind I could hear the words he did not say.

My father scorned Miles Standish for his arrogance toward the Indians. And you are marrying another such, with my father just three months dead.

The day before the wedding Mistress Saxon, who lived nearby, came upon John collecting kindling. She saw the look on his face, and was wise enough to know what it meant.

“John,” she said, “thy mother loves thee. And Daniel Smith is a good, devout man who will work hard for the family. In this place, it is sorely difficult for one person to raise children alone.”

John said, “I work hard too.”

“Th’art a good boy,” said Mistress Saxon, “but th’art ten years old.”

“I am near eleven,” John said.

She patted him on the shoulder, and went on her way to check a woman who was about to have a baby.

After the wedding Daniel Smith moved into the house, and John, who before had slept at the end of his parents’ bed, had to share one with his sisters. His stepfather was indeed a devout man; very soon they were all praying far more often than before. They prayed together every morning and every evening and before every meal, and Daniel Smith’s prayers were very long and eloquent and full of quotations from the Bible.

John found this a burden, especially when he was very hungry. He felt that surely God must be satisfied with all the praying they did on Sundays, when everyone gathered to listen to the minister preach for at least two hours in the morning, and then another two hours in the afternoon.

His mother said gently to him one day, when he was clearing ashes from the fireplace, “I need thee to be a good example to the girls, and not fidget when Daniel is saying grace. We all need to show gratitude to the Lord for what we are given.”

“I am very grateful,” John said. “But my father used to say thank you much more quickly.”

“Daniel is a very devout man,” his mother said.

John said, “I miss my father.”

“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” said his mother, as if reciting a lesson, and she handed him a bucket for the ashes. But she ran her hand across his hair as she left.

John could read the Bible for himself; his mother had taught him how. It was a wonder for me to see language turned into signs called letters; my own language had never been written down. Sometimes John gave his sister Mercy lessons, drawing the letters in the dirt outside the house with a stick; she was an eager pupil, and loved to practice. If Daniel Smith caught them doing this he was angry, and instantly found work for them both to do. The third time he came across them writing, he even hit John across the head, though not very hard because Margaret was watching.

“This is vanity,” said Daniel Smith. “Margaret, have you no useful occupation for your daughter? And John, you should be in the field, keeping the birds from the corn. Go!”

“Mercy is very good at her letters,” John said.

“Hush,” said his mother nervously.

“Do not argue with thine elders,” Daniel Smith said, though John had not felt he was arguing. “Mercy is a girl, and should be learning to sew and to cook. After that she will have time to learn to read the Bible. Now do what I tell thee!”

John went off to their allotted acre of land beyond the houses, where corn and pumpkins were growing. He did not point out to Daniel Smith that the swelling ears of corn were at more risk from night-prowling raccoons than from daytime birds. He tried to think of work that he and Mercy could do together, so that he could teach her to write when Daniel Smith was not looking. He had noticed that though Daniel knew a great many pieces of the Bible by heart, he was very rarely to be seen reading it, and indeed tried to avoid opportunities to do so. Perhaps, thought John, Daniel didn’t want a little girl to be good at something he couldn’t do very well himself.

He knew this was an unworthy thought, so he said a small private prayer apologizing to his God. He found, however, that this didn’t make the thought go away.

As time went by Daniel decided that John would be better occupied by helping him move the family privy. Like my people, these English did their business into a hole in the ground at a decent distance from the house, but they felt it necessary to build a little house over the hole. It was always a smelly little house full of flies, and John hated his job of carrying buckets of earth from the new hole Daniel was digging, and emptying them into the reeking old one.

Between carrying buckets, he had to dig shallow trenches beside the walls of the little house, so that beams could be slid underneath it for men to pick it up and move it, in due course, to sit on top of the new hole.

“Th’art a slow worker,” said Daniel, watching John struggle to pick up a bucket of stones and earth.

Their neighbor Goodman Evans was passing by, with a big wooden spade in his hand. He paused, and considered John’s efforts.

“Perhaps the man does not match the task, Daniel,” he said. “This boy of yours is a good little gardener—I would trade you his time for my big strong Ethan, who has just destroyed a whole row of carrots as weeds.”

John smiled at Goodman Evans, who often used to exchange seeds and plants with his father.

Daniel did not smile. He said, “John must follow the ordinance of our Lord in the Bible—whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might. Thank you for your interest, Thomas Evans, but we have a family task to accomplish here.”

“As you wish, neighbor,” said Goodman Evans amiably, and he went on his way with his spade.

So John went on straining to lift heavy buckets—and at intervals, glancing across at the stone on the ground beside the woodpile, where my tomahawk was buried. It was as if all the opinions he had learned from his tolerant father were buried there with it.

He was learning secrecy. The image of my body tossed into the undergrowth haunted him so constantly that one day, when Daniel was away with the militia, he went back alone to the clearing where his father’s friend and I had died. It was a hard journey for a boy to make, and he had no idea what he might do when he got there. When he found no sign of my body at all, he was glad, because he knew that my people must have come and taken it away.

He saw few of my people in Plymouth, then. The severed head of Wituwamet, now a blackened skull, had been set on a pole above the colony’s fort ever since Miles Standish’s ferocious attack on the Massachusetts. For a long time after that, not one of the Indians—as they called us, using one name for all the peoples of this land—would come near this town to trade.

For my own people, though, our father Yellow Feather’s agreement with the white men still held, keeping friendship between them and our tribe. All the past was clear to me now, all that he had done. He had come to the wedding of their leader Bradford, bringing more than a hundred people with him to help celebrate. Since then he had been making more agreements, through which the English gave us their knives, tools, cloth, and other goods in exchange for the right to build houses and farms on our land.

There were white men in the colony, like John’s father Benjamin Wakeley, who tried to respect the beliefs of my people, and to keep the peace, but there were also those like the captain Miles Standish, who thought of all Indians as ignorant savages. As the months went by, every day John heard words from Daniel Smith’s mouth that were the opposite of everything he had heard before. He tried to say nothing in argument, because he knew he would cause a problem for his mother.

But one day it was all too much for him.

They were walking home from the meetinghouse on Sunday with their neighbors Robert and Abigail Turner, after a sermon devoted to the mission of converting the heathen to the Christian religion.

“In God’s good time,” said Robert Turner, “we shall spread the word and there will be whole villages of praying Indians.”

“Amen,” said Abigail and Margaret hopefully.

“It is a wishful thought,” Daniel Smith said, “but they are a barbarous and savage people, and in their fury they not only kill but torment men in the most bloody manner. There are many reports. They even eat human flesh, they are the children of the Devil.”

Walking silently in the rear with his sisters, John let out a small infuriated noise and clenched his fists. Only Mercy heard; she looked up at him nervously.

“The love of God can reach out even to convert savages, surely,” Robert Turner said. He was a large man and it was a warm day; his red face was glistening under his tall black hat.

“I fear Satan reached them first, long since,” said Daniel.

From behind, John said suddenly, very fast, and more loudly than he had intended, “When my father took me to see the Indians fishing, they were very kind to us, and they showed the grown-ups how to fish, and I played with their children.”

There was a silence. They had reached the family house, and Robert and Abigail Turner did not pause. “Good day, neighbors,” they both said politely, and walked hastily on.

Daniel Smith glared at John. “It is a sin to tell lies,” he said. “A wicked sin. And on the Sabbath!”

Before John could open his mouth again, Margaret said quickly, “It’s true, husband—Benjamin did take him. It was at the very beginning, when Squanto showed us ways to plant and farm this land.”

“No proper child interrupts the conversation of his betters,” Daniel said angrily.

“No, indeed,” Margaret said, and she looked at John for his apology.

John looked up at Daniel Smith.

“One of the Indians was called Hawk,” he said. “But now he is dead.”

Daniel’s face flushed with repressed rage. “Get to bed!” he said. “And be glad I do not whip thee!”

It was the moment, no doubt, at which he determined to remove John from his sight.

A week later Daniel informed the family that John had reached the age where he should learn a trade, and that he had found him a place as apprentice to a cooper, a maker of barrels, whom he had met through his work as a sawyer. The cooper’s name was William Medlycott, and his home was not in Plymouth, but in a new settlement a day’s journey to the north. The apprenticeship meant room and board and the learning of the craft, and it would last unbroken for seven years.

Margaret, who had already been told this news, heard it in silence with her eyes cast down. Mercy and Patience stared at Daniel Smith in horror, and began to cry.

John said nothing. He could think only of finding a moment to dig up my tomahawk, and take it with him when he left home.