فصل 07 - بخش 02

SEVEN

A week went by, with the cooperage so busy that John had no chance to do anything but work, eat, and sleep. Then Roger Williams burst into his life, on the back of a horse.

It was Sunday again, a crisp day with the sun glinting on a thin overnight snowfall that had turned the whole village white. Everyone was arriving at the meetinghouse. William Medlycott greeted Master Kelly, who was bustling about outside the door welcoming people and looking important. John kept out of his way, while peering unsuccessfully for a glimpse of Huldah.

“He should have been here an hour since!” Master Kelly was complaining.

“I hope he has come to no harm,” said Master Medlycott. “Wouldst like me to send after him?”

But then a horse came cantering up from the snow-streaked road, ridden by a young man in a long black coat; he jumped off in a hurry. “Master Kelly!” he cried. “Master Medlycott! Lord be praised, I am not too late!” He offered no explanation, but beamed round at them all; he had a bright, open face and was probably the only man in sight without a beard.

“Welcome, Master Williams,” said William Medlycott. “My boy will take your horse.”

He reached out his big hand, took the horse’s rein, and handed it to John, who was delighted; he was used to horses now, and this was a handsome one.

“Tie him with the others,” said Master Medlycott, and turned back to Roger Williams. But Williams had his keen eyes on John.

“Thank you, my boy,” he said. “What’s thy name?”

“John Wakeley, sir.”

“Well, John, tha must lead me to my horse at the end of the day, and I hope our Lord will keep me from sending thee to sleep.”

“Yes, sir—no, sir,” said John, entranced with this unusual preacher, and he led the horse away, rubbed the sweat from it with a handful of hay, let it drink at the horse trough, and tied it with the other patient Sabbath steeds. He slipped into the meetinghouse just in time to hear Roger Williams begin.

The sermon was as unusual as the speaker. He told them his life story. He said that he had been born, raised, and ordained as a minister in the Church of England—which meant, I now saw, the Christian religion as it was practiced in the land from which all John’s people came. Their worship was overseen not only by ministers but by bishops over those, and then archbishops, and at the head of all, the country’s king. They read and prayed from the book they called their Holy Bible, and from a book of prayers, and no other way of worship was allowed.

But, said Roger Williams, he had come to feel that this system was too severe, and that men should be allowed to worship their God in whatever way they felt best. So he and his young wife—like all here in this room, he said to them—had crossed the great ocean to find a place where they would be free. He described his fifty-six days at sea, and John felt they sounded far nastier than the voyage he and his family took when he was four years old—though he could remember little of that except tossing about in a dark enclosed space full of bad smells.

“Yet though we be in the Promised Land,” said Roger Williams, “our brothers and sisters in Boston have failed to take up that promise, and theirs is an unseparated church still in communion with the Church of England. We should be separate,” he said firmly, and thumped the lectern in front of him, and there was a rumble of agreement in the meetinghouse.

“Aye,” said a large man next to John, loudly, and his wife gave him a quick nervous glance.

“Thus I declined the offer to become pastor in the Boston church on my arrival,” said Roger Williams, “and said further that I believed the people in this new land should have soul liberty. By this, I mean that religious opinion is one thing and civil authority is another, and the two should be kept apart. Idolatry and false worship are wrong, and so are blasphemy and the breaking of the Sabbath—but they should not be punished by order of a magistrate. The authority of our religious belief belongs not to any magistrate, but to the Lord Jesus Christ.”

“Aye,” said the man next to John again, and a few others too. But when John glanced at Ezra, he saw that he was frowning.

“As you may know,” said Roger Williams, “the good people of Salem, sharing my beliefs, asked me to come and minister to them, but certain of the elders in the Boston church petitioned the governor against my settling there. And then”—he paused, and his face lit up with a smile—“to my great fortune, I was invited instead to the Plymouth colony, whose elders would brook no rule from the governor, feeling like me that church authority is separate. So here my dear wife Mary and I live henceforth amongst you all, and I rejoice to be preaching today in this church of the colony for the first time.”

And he went on for a long time with quotations and stories from the Bible, as an encouragement to all these people to live a good life and please their God, so that when they died they might go to Heaven. Before too long, however, he was back to giving them his own opinions on freedom of religion, which seemed to John very different from anything he had heard at the cooperage. He was astonished. Roger Williams didn’t even refer to Indians as heathens.

“Brothers and sisters,” he said, “we are all the children of God. We are all born with a chance for redemption, in the eyes of the Lord. Let us never forget the cruel divisions that befell our Christian forefathers, in the land from which we all came. The bloody tortures, the men and women burned alive for heresy—and still, the persecution of all freethinkers by the Church of England of today.”

He spread his hands to them in appeal.

“Brothers and sisters, let us not follow in their footsteps. Let us not persecute the people we find here in this new world! Just as we should pay the Indian for his land, but not steal it, so we should offer him the love and worship of our Lord Jesus Christ, but not force it upon him.”

The big man said to Ezra as they left, “A good sermon. And a good man, with proper opinions.”

“Some may think so,” said Ezra.

Master Medlycott was beside them, but before he could add his own judgment, they were at the door of the meetinghouse, where Roger Williams was bidding his congregation farewell. John was dispatched to fetch his horse.

The young minister swung himself up into the saddle and glanced down at John. Thomas was waiting nearby, though the Medlycott family had gone ahead on its way home.

“Well, John,” said Roger Williams, “what’s thine opinion?” He was smiling, but it was a serious question.

“I think everything you said was right,” said John. He added recklessly, even though Thomas could hear him, “Especially about the Indians.”

The bright eyes considered him with interest for a moment. “Good boy,” said Roger Williams. “I hope we meet again.”

He rode away toward Plymouth, and Thomas and John set off on the rough track to the Medlycott house.

Thomas said, “What was it he said about Indians?”

“Didn’t you hear him?” said John.

Thomas grinned at him. “Th’art better at attending to sermons than I am. I like watching people instead. That Huldah girl was looking at thee a lot, John Wakeley, from across the room.”

“Was she?” John said.

“She’s pretty. But she never smiles.”

“I think she’s homesick.”

“If I worked for Master Kelly,” said Thomas, “I wouldn’t smile either.”

At home, William Medlycott was not pleased with the new minister. “A preacher should preach,” he said irritably. “This Master Williams is too fond of expounding his own peculiar ideas.”

“He is a good Christian,” Mistress Medlycott said mildly.

“And an Indian-lover,” said Master Medlycott. “The man’s a fool. A savage is a savage until he is converted. And even after.”

John listened to them all and said nothing. But he was restless. He thought about the dignified older Indian who came to trade and was turned away. He thought about Roger Williams. He thought about me. Within a few days he woke very early, before anyone else was stirring, before dawn, and slipped outdoors. A half moon was still shining on the snowy yard.

Huddling his jacket round him, John made for the salt marsh—and found it covered by the sea. He had forgotten that the tide came in at times which changed by an hour or so every day. The water had brought little chunks of ice with it, broken from the edges of the little creeks in the marsh that froze on cold low-tide nights.

He stood there, cross with himself, looking out across the icy water. Then he set off round the edge of the marsh to try to get closer to the island, and after much hard scrambling he found that it was not properly an island at all. It was the shape of a pear, with its top facing the land on this side, and the stem of the pear was a low ridge of land emerging from the water now as the tide went down.

The light of dawn was starting to creep into the sky, behind the cold bright moon. John splashed along the ridge to the island, soaking his shoes and hose. And the moment that he reached the first trees, he saw me there, waiting for him.

This time he felt no fear at all.

“Good morning, John Wakeley,” I said.

John’s thin, intent face broke into a smile. “I knew you’d be here,” he said, and then, in a hurry, “Hawk, will you teach me your language? Prithee?”

“Why?”

“I want to be able to talk to your people. I want—I want—” and it all came pouring out: his stored-up horror of the man who had killed me, and of all those around him who talked as if they might do the same to others of my people. Roger Williams had unlocked it. Like Roger Williams, John was in search of tolerance. He talked and he talked, and begged me again to teach him our language.

“How will people ever understand each other without words?” he said. “Master Williams meets with Indians to learn their tongue, Ezra says—though of course Ezra doesn’t approve. And how could you and I be talking now, if you hadn’t learned English so well?”

I laughed. “I have never learned English, John Wakeley.”

He looked at me blankly. “But—” He stopped. I could feel his mind reaching for reason and sliding back again, like a man climbing a muddy slope. Then he gave up, and began to smile again.

“If the Lord hasn’t explained to me how it is that I can see a ghost,” he said, “I suppose he’s not going to explain how I can talk to him either.”

I spread my hands. I knew no more than he did.

John shook his head, and I could see him deliberately push the problem out of his mind. “Well,” he said firmly, “if I am to speak your language to real people, I need to be taught your words. And your customs, too, and the things you believe. Please, Hawk. Please teach me!”

So I did. I began to teach him our dialect of the Algonquian tongue—then, and often afterward, whenever he could come to me. He had a true gift for language, and he soaked up the words fast, fast. He learned the names of everything we could see on the island: the trees, the water, the rocks, ourselves. Our time was short, as it would always be.

In the last moment before the sun came up, that first day, I taught him to say his first full sentence: “I am the friend of Little Hawk.” His smile was an echo of the sunrise.

I pointed him the way he must run, from this part of the island, if he was to get home before trouble greeted him. When he turned back to wave, he could no longer see me.

In the yard of the Medlycott workshop, John found Thomas staring at his tracks in the snow.

“Where have you been?” Thomas demanded.

“I couldn’t sleep. I went out to look at the moon.”

“You’re all wet. Did you fall down?”

“The fire will dry me,” John said, and they went indoors for the bowl of cornmeal mush that would fuel them for the morning. John’s shoes and hose steamed in the heat from the fire, and Mistress Medlycott scolded him thoroughly for risking an attack of the ague.

But from this day onward, he and I began to use words to shape our mysterious gift of understanding.