فصل 04 - بخش 02

FOUR

A few days later, John left Plymouth. Daniel had arranged for him to travel in a cart drawn by two large oxen and driven by Goodman Bates, who was taking a load of timber and vegetables to settlements thirty miles away, near the North River. John could have gone up the coast by sea, since boats had begun to ply regularly out of Plymouth Harbor, but by land the trip would cost nothing, because Goodman Bates owed Daniel a favor.

The little girls were crying again, and Margaret held John very close, her own eyes full of tears. He had grown to look so much like his father that she felt she was losing Benjamin all over again, as well as her son.

John’s face was wet too. “I will send you messages when I can, Mother,” he said.

Margaret could hardly speak. She said, “God bless you, my dear one.”

John scrambled up into the back of the cart and Daniel handed him up his bundles, one large, one small. The smaller one held food packed by Margaret for the journey; the bigger held John’s clothes, nightshirt, slippers, and winter coat—the only things he owned, besides the clothes on his back, the shoes on his feet, and the jackknife at his belt.

There was one other thing in the bundle, tucked inside his good shirt. Very early that morning, before anybody was awake, he had crept out to rescue my tomahawk from its hiding place under the woodpile.

Mercy had opened her eyes as he was tying up his bundle again. She was a grown girl now, nine years old.

She lay there looking at him very sadly, and she whispered, “Don’t forget us.”

John leaned over and kissed her forehead. He whispered back, “Never.”

Now Goodman Bates called to his oxen and shook the reins. The cart creaked off. Margaret, Mercy, and Patience waved, and John waved back until the fence that enclosed New Plymouth cut them off from his sight. I could feel the mixture of sadness and excitement in his mind. He was eleven years old—the same age that I had been when my father took me into the winter woods and left me there.

Trees shaded the beaten dirt of the road, which like all their roads had been made from one of our old tracks. John soon pulled off his jerkin, though, because this was late August and the air was hot. He pulled off his hat, too, to fan himself and chase away the flies. Up there in the back of the cart, he was sitting on an enormous log; there were three of these, three sections of a tree trunk. They were wedged tight by other chunks of wood to keep them from rolling, but John watched them cautiously. If any one of them got loose, it could crush him flat in a moment.

Above him, at the front of the cart, the broad back of Goodman Bates swayed to the rhythm of the big, slow oxen—mild, patient beasts, in spite of their impressive horns. Sitting next to him was a small woman; John could see only the back of her brown doublet, and her neat linen cap.

When they stopped to eat, two hours later, and Goodman Bates went to fetch water for the oxen, John found that the other passenger was not a woman, but a girl about his own age. She had a pretty, pointed face, and she gave him a small nervous smile. Her name was Huldah Bates; she was Goodman Bates’s niece and she too was being sent away, to live with a family who had farmland in a new settlement near where John was going. Like him, she had no idea what to expect.

“The work will be just like at home, I suppose,” she said. “But at home there were six of us children and another on the way, so my mother said there was no help for it, my brother and I had to go. He’s off to be a ’prentice, next week.”

“So am I!” said John. “To a cooper, Master Medlycott. Where will your brother go?”

“To the smithy near the harbor,” Huldah said.

“My father let me watch the sparks there sometimes, when I was a little lad.”

Huldah sighed. “Edmund is lucky, he will be near home. But he has to live over the smithy. He says his first job of the day will be lighting the fire before anyone else is awake. What will you do?”

“I don’t know,” said John, and felt suddenly alarmed.

Goodman Bates loomed over him with a dripping bucket; he had been down to a stream to dip up water for the animals. “Tha’ll make buckets like this,” he said. “Or maybe tha’ll just fetch and carry, for a few years.” He gave a great bellowing laugh and went off to his oxen.

John and Huldah stared out at the trees and the stream, thinking about their uncertain futures. But hunger drove out anxiety, and soon they were both munching stale crusty bread, and discussing the people of Plymouth, not always with reverence. Each of them had found a friend.

Not for long, however. After another hour Goodman Bates headed the cart up a side track, through woodland and then cleared fields, and they came to a house with a wooden roof, as big as the grander houses in Plymouth. There were two outbuildings as well. Beside them was an enclosed field with four cows and two horses, and chickens were pecking the ground outside the house. None of these were creatures native to our land; like the oxen, they had been brought from across the sea in the white man’s ships. There were more and more of them now.

A woman and two small children came out of the house to greet Goodman Bates, and he helped Huldah down to her new home. Huldah just had time to look up at John for a moment, a silent farewell, before she had to turn and curtsy. The woman had a kind face, John thought hopefully—and then there was the sound of hooves behind him, and a man rode up on a horse and the children shrieked in excitement. It was clearly the father of the family. John was too busy handing down Huldah’s bags to pay him any attention. After that he had to climb out of the back of the cart and get up to sit beside Goodman Bates, who liked company.

It was only as they left, and he looked back and saw the father dismount and hand his horse’s reins to a servant, that John saw the man’s face. He was a small man, but strong; he grabbed one of the children and hoisted him up onto his shoulders.

He was the man who killed me.

“Do you see? Yes, it’s Master Kelly,” said Goodman Bates with pride. “Our Huldah is a lucky girl to be coming to this household.”

John said, “Where are we?”

“They are calling it Duxbury,” Bates said. “Only an hour’s ride from Plymouth. Captain Standish is building here too. The leaders among us deserve to have more land and some peace. Governor Winslow has the same, up beyond where you’re going, in the place they call Marshfield.”

He called to the patient oxen, and they lumbered off again.

I knew this land, but it was changed. If I had been living, I would not have been there. My people were no longer there. For thousands of years, we had hunted and lived and farmed on the land over which John was now passing. Already, after less than one man’s lifetime, these invaders from across the ocean felt that it belonged to them.

Goodman Bates’s cart took John some miles further north, to a house that had been built on flat fertile land in this wide river valley. He gazed at the house, the place where now he would live.

It was a good sturdy building, on land rising above the track, and it smelled like a farmyard. Unlike the Duxbury house, it had a thatched roof. Beside it was another building, about half as big. The track up to them was steep, and the oxen hesitated; Goodman Bates yelled at them and for the first time cracked his whip over their backs. They strained hard, their hoofs churning up the dirt. The cart creaked up toward the smaller building and finally stopped.

Three men came out into the sunshine, and John had his first sight of his new employer, William Medlycott. He was a big broad-shouldered man wearing leather britches and a dirty white shirt, and his beard was flecked with grey; he raised an arm to Goodman Bates and went round at once to the back of the cart. His first interest was clearly the three massive logs wedged in there.

“Ah, very nice, very pretty, Richard,” he said. His voice had a deep burr of an accent; John had never heard anything like it before.

Goodman Bates heaved himself down and they both stood studying the logs. John scrambled off the cart and stood at a respectful distance. One of the oxen, less respectful, let loose a pile of steaming droppings.

“A good straight oak it was,” Bates said. “Fifteen feet or more without a knot, likely. This one came down last fall, and there are more on that island, for when you want them. I thought it worth the carrying.”

“Very well worth,” said Medlycott. “And there’s a shipbuilder up the river will be glad to hear of them. Let those poor beasts of thine loose and Ezra will take them. Then come tell Priscilla all the news from Plymouth.” He looked across at John. “And this is my new apprentice?”

John ducked his head awkwardly. “John Wakeley, sir,” he said.

Medlycott looked him up and down. “Eleven years old, they said?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Th’art small for a cooper,” said Medlycott, frowning. Then his mouth gave a merciful twitch. “But Priscilla will fatten thee up. Go with the boys, now. Come, Dick.”

The younger of the other two was a boy a head taller than John, with a friendly grin, and dark hair so short that he looked as if his head had been shaved. He grabbed one end of John’s bundle and they carried it together.

“I’m Thomas,” he said. “And that’s Ezra Clark, he’s my father’s journeyman.” He jerked his head at the young man helping Goodman Bates unyoke the oxen, who seemed untroubled by the beasts’ size and horns even though they towered over him. Ezra Clark had spiky yellow hair and a wispy beard, and did not smile.

“What’s a journeyman, please?” said John.

“Served his apprenticeship, works as a cooper—tha don’t know that much?”

It was not an unkind question, and John smiled.

“I know nothing,” he said.

“Well, come on, Know-nothing,” said Thomas cheerfully. “Let’s get this to the back—we sleep in the lean-to.”

This also baffled John, but he followed, and they had just dropped the bundle inside a small door at the back of the house when there was a yell from Ezra. It was a surprisingly deep voice.

“Thomas!”

They both ran. Ezra had led the oxen into an enclosed piece of the yard and was pulling a hurdle to shut them in. “Straw from the loft for the animals,” he said. “And pump them some water.”

“This is John, the new apprentice,” Thomas said.

Ezra looked John over, from hooded eyes in a long, lugubrious face. “Well, John,” he said, jerking his head, “over there is the manure pile, and that’s where tha can take the beasts’ leavings. We keep a tidy yard.”

So John fetched the long-handled wooden shovel that was sticking out of the manure pile, and spent the first half hour of his seven-year coopering apprenticeship carrying mounds of fresh ox manure, of which there were now three. He found himself wondering if his life had changed after all.

But before long, after washing at the pump in the yard, he was inside the house, at the table that covered the length of one room. Though he was here to work, he found he would eat with the family. It seemed a pattern not very different from his life in Plymouth—and here he was free of Daniel Smith.

There were four other young Medlycotts, all of whom had the same bright eyes and dark hair as Thomas: in descending order they were Joseph, Sarah, William, and Matthew. Mistress Medlycott called William “Willie,” to avoid confusion with his father. She was a buxom, welcoming lady who somehow seemed to give off as much warmth as the enormous hearth on which she cooked. To John’s great astonishment she gave him a hug when they were introduced, and he liked her immediately. Master Medlycott and Goodman Bates teased her over the hug.

“What shall I tell them in Plymouth?” roared Goodman Bates merrily. “Thy wife makes free with the apprentice!”

“To the stocks with her!” said Master Medlycott.

John blushed, and looked at the floor.

“Stop thy nonsense, he’s the size of Matthew,” said Mistress Medlycott. “And missing his mother already, I’ll be bound.” Her deep voice had the same rounded accent as her husband’s. She plunked a large loaf of bread in front of Medlycott, and he attacked it with his knife.

Ezra was not smiling. John wondered if he was as strict as Daniel. But then he forgot everything except the food, which was plentiful at this long table. They had delayed their dinner until the arrival of Goodman Bates, who was an old friend and would stay the night, and the children were all ravenous. Like all the Plymouth children, they ate in silence unless spoken to, standing with Ezra and John at the foot of the table. Thomas stood beside John, and they shared a trencher, the hollowed wooden plate that all these people used.

The talk was all between Bates and the Medlycotts, who were thirsty for gossip about Plymouth, and its relations with the new Puritan colony in Massachusetts Bay. John paid this little attention until a question was directed at his end of the table.

“Ezra,” Master Medlycott boomed, “tha shut the oxen safe inside, I trust?”

“They are indoors,” said Ezra. “And fed and watered.”

“I thank you,” said Goodman Bates. “Is there fear of Indians at night?”

“Wolves,” said Master Medlycott. “My neighbor saw one on his land last week. But it would take a big pack of wolves to bother an ox, I think.”

“And a big pack of Indians,” said Goodman Bates comfortably.

“No—one arrow would do it.” Master Medlycott shook his head. “Satan gave those savages a deadly aim. And now we are selling them guns, heaven preserve us. There’ll be a bloodbath one of these days.”

“William,” said Mistress Medlycott rapidly, “prithee cut some more meat for Goodman Bates. And the children if they need it.” And she launched into a description and discussion of the sermon preached in the local meetinghouse the previous Sunday, so that there was no more talk of savages.

But when John went to bed that night, on a mattress on the floor of the back room that he was to share with Ezra and Thomas, he took nothing but his nightshirt out of his bundle of possessions. For all the friendliness of this household, he was greatly afraid of what would happen if anyone were to find that his private treasure was an Indian tomahawk.

The next day he watched and waited for a chance to slip away from the house to hide it, and before long he managed to bury it in the ground behind a clump of birch trees edging the yard. There it lay, safely hidden again. Chickens trotted and pecked above it, the roots of wildflowers grew down around it, but nobody knew it was there except John.

The thing he did not yet know was that very close to the Medlycott house, out on the salt marsh, waiting for him, was the place that holds me—the place where my tomahawk was born.