فصل 05 - بخش 02

FIVE

Master Medlycott’s workshop was a noisy, bustling place, and he employed three general workmen as well as Ezra, Thomas, and John. On John’s first morning, two of the workmen had unloaded the enormous tree-trunk logs from Goodman Bates’s cart and rolled them to the yard behind the workshop. Other logs from local trees lay here too, waiting to be sawed into chunks and then split lengthwise with axes, first into quarters and then eighths, then thinner still. Lengths of wood like this sat weathering in the yard in tall neat stacks—chestnut, red oak, and pine. They would sit there for months or years, until Master Medlycott felt they were ready to become the staves out of which all barrels were made.

I watched all this with fascination. In the life I had lived, our pots and containers were made from bark and skins and clay; we wove baskets from reeds and wood, but we had no need for these massive containers, nor for the great wheels of the carts that had to carry them, nor the great beasts that pulled the carts. The skills of the cooper belonged to a different life, in which the bark of a tree was often thrown away, and all its wood chopped into these prized flat pieces called staves.

John would learn someday to make staves, but he had a long way to go. It took him weeks even to learn the names of Master Medlycott’s tools, all of which had come over with him from England. To begin, John was put at the grinding wheel, to learn how to sharpen the blades of planes and spokeshaves and axes. There he sat, in a little cloud of sparks, while he watched the others making casks: bending staves into shape while heating them over a small fire, damping them with water, and whacking iron hoops down over them to hold them together.

They were always busy; there was a great demand for barrels and casks, to carry almost everything the people ate or drank. Many more English families were coming in ships, spreading through this open forest land where my people had hunted and grown crops for so long. Instead of hunting and trapping, they raised animals that ate up everything green, and they were cutting down all the trees. Their buildings were made with deep stone-lined cellars and thick sturdy walls, and once a settlement was built, it did not move. It just grew bigger.

Because of his staves, Master Medlycott had respect for the trees. He would gaze up in admiration at a tall straight white oak and feel that the casks he made from its wood should be worthy of the splendid tree. But even he treated the tree not as a living creature but as a thing. This was how they thought of our mother the earth, these white men: as a place full of things, put here by their God for them to use.

“Is it not wonderful,” Master Medlycott said at dinner one summer day, “the bounty of this land that gives us unlimited timber? My old father would scarce have believed it. He was always scouting about for new wood.”

“He’d not believe our stacks of firewood, either,” said Mistress Medlycott. “For all the harsh winters, this house is warmer than the last, praise the Lord.”

Ezra speared a piece of meat with his knife. “My granddad held it was the shipyards ate up the timber. The Queen’s ships kept out the Spaniards, he used to say, but every one of ’em used up twenty-five hundred trees.”

“And all of oak,” Master Medlycott said. “Small wonder it was hard in England to find trees like the one Richard Bates brought us this year. He carries another soon, I believe—we need all we can get, for the tight work.” He looked down the table at John, who was sitting dutifully mute with the children, chewing. “Ask me for a sheet of paper and a pen tomorrow, John Wakeley, and tha canst send a letter to thy mother by Goodman Bates.”

John stared at him in happy disbelief, and Mistress Medlycott smiled. And the next day, Medlycott set John to cutting staves of white pine to make a simple bucket, so he would be able to write to his mother that he was indeed becoming a cooper.

Sundays, for John, were just as they had been at home: everyone went to the meetinghouse for worship, all day. The minister read from the Bible and preached a long sermon in the morning, and Ezra kicked John if he saw his eyelids droop. Then all the families of the community gathered in another room and ate heartily together, from dishes brought by all the women, and went back to the meetinghouse in the afternoon for the sermon to begin all over again. By this time Ezra’s eyes too were in danger of drooping, and John had to resist the temptation to give him even the smallest nudge with a foot.

The meetinghouse and gathering room were much smaller than those in Plymouth, and in summer the air was hot. But it was the only time of the week for people to exchange news and gossip, and often John caught sight of Huldah sitting obediently with the Kelly family. He tried not to look at Master Kelly, though the man was hard to avoid because he was clearly a pillar of the community. Quite often he and Captain Standish were called on to stand up and read from the minister’s big Bible.

One summer Sunday, after the meal, John came across Huldah sitting on a boulder at the edge of the common, beside the meetinghouse. She was in charge of two small Kelly children, who were intently watching a row of ants carrying seeds to their nest, and she was wearing a neat dark dress and a little white cap on her head. She looked up and smiled at him.

“Has t’a learned to be a cooper yet?” she said.

John said solemnly, “I have made a bucket of pine, that you can carry vegetables in.” He grinned. “But it leaks. I can’t do tight coopering yet—that’s barrels and such, to hold water.”

Huldah said, “Are you happy?”

John blinked. He was not used to direct questions.

“They are good people,” he said. “And you?”

Huldah wrinkled her nose.

A man’s voice called sharply, “Huldah?”

John looked round and saw Master Kelly striding out of the gathering room onto the grass, looking around him, and he caught Huldah’s eye again just for a second before he ducked out of the way and was gone.

He thought of her often, and tried not to imagine the reasons why she was not happy. Perhaps, he hoped, she simply missed her family.

One afternoon in the autumn, before the leaves began to fall, before the Hunter’s Moon, Mistress Medlycott asked her husband’s permission to send John out into the fields gathering sassafras root for her. The English knew something of using herbs and plants as medicine, especially the women, and those of them who talked to my people were learning more. And Mistress Medlycott had already discovered that her husband’s new apprentice was good at gardening; sometimes he even asked if he could help to weed or plant. He recognized as many trees and plants as she did herself.

So John set off, carrying a Pokanoket basket that had come to the family as part of a trade, and he headed in a direction he had never taken before. It was a beautiful calm fall day; the sky was blue and the sun was halfway down the sky.

I watched him.

He threaded his way through the trees behind the house and found himself going downhill, down through the woodland to a small pond. The water was very still, filled with red and gold reflections from the blazing colors of the maples and oaks and ash trees all around it.

John found a stand of small sassafras trees beside the pond, and dug out some roots with his knife. When he had filled the basket, he straightened his back, stretched, and looked around. He had not been here before.

But I had. I had lived here, alone, one winter when I was younger than he was now.

John looked across at the opposite side of the pond—the steep, rocky place where in unthinking rage I had killed a wolf whose only crime was trying to stay alive. I hoped he would not go there. After a moment he turned away, and headed instead to the land beyond the pond, where he could hear a sound like a long, distant sighing. He passed a stand of oak trees—scrubby red oak, not of interest to his master for its timber, but filled with acorns that would attract squirrels and deer.

The trees grew sparse as he went on. Then ahead, suddenly, he saw a great green stretch of salt marsh, broken by three island hummocks of trees. Way out across the marsh, on the horizon, he could see the sea.

High in the sky above him, coasting out from the trees, he saw a red-tailed hawk lying on the wind. He heard its harsh thin cry, and it headed for the nearest of the three islands.

John hesitated. But he had fulfilled his errand and the afternoon was not over yet; he had some time to himself, which was very rare. So he followed the hawk. He walked down into the marsh, careful to tread on hummocks of grass and to hop over the small creeks without filling his shoes with water. Gradually he made his way toward the higher ground of the island, where tall trees rose, cherry and maple, hickory and oak. Somewhere in those trees the red-tailed hawk might be perched high on a branch, watching for small birds or scurrying voles.

Over to his right, hidden behind the mainland trees beyond the marsh, the sun went down. The light was golden now over the marsh. The sky was still blue.

John stepped onto the firm grass of the island, where the trees gradually rose, and ahead of him, in a shadowy gap between two trees, he saw me.