فصل 01 - بخش 03

PART THREE BURNING MOON ONE

Jedediah and John rolled the last of six barrels down to John’s jetty, where Roger Williams was waiting in his biggest canoe. Williams scrambled out to help them angle it to the edge, and into the arms of the three Narrangansett Indians who would help him paddle the load to his trading post at Wickford.

“You are ready?” said one of the Indians. They were sturdy men; over the years since John and Huldah had come here, I had seen many of their tribe working with, and for, the independent-minded people of this settlement.

Roger Williams said in the Narragansett dialect, “Almost ready. I must bid farewell to the children.”

I felt John’s mind storing away the words; he was still endlessly fascinated by the connections between the Pokanoket he had learned from me and the tongues of other tribes. He had heard several of those by now. This was his fourteenth year in Providence Plantation, and of course Huldah’s, and it was their three children to whom Roger Williams wanted to say farewell.

The three Englishmen walked back up the hill. In the field above them, one of John’s two new cows lowed, a deep, mournful sound.

Williams glanced up at the field. He said, “Resolved Scott lost a calf to wolves three days since.”

“So I heard,” John said. “These two are shut in the barn every night.”

“That’s the third attack this year, and it won’t be the last,” said Jedediah. “Have you penned your sheep, Roger?”

“I have, for now. We have a mind to ship them over to the island where we keep the goats. Soon, before the ewes get closer to lambing.”

“Wolves can swim,” Jedediah said.

“Not that far,” said John. “The Lord is on Roger’s side. He gave wolves legs, not fins.”

They headed over the rough grass to the workshop, the piles of cut staves, then the house. Jedediah Watkins was John’s partner, a burly, amiable man who had been called in to witness John and Huldah’s wedding in Roger Williams’s living room the day after they had arrived. Williams often claimed cheerfully that he had given John two marriages that day.

John and Jedediah were the master coopers of New Providence, and they divided their time between two workshops: Jedediah’s, in the center of the fast-growing settlement, and John’s, here on the other side of the river. John had wanted to be able to supply people by boat, in this watery countryside. He and Huldah had also wanted more land; as he grew older, he found that he loved farming and fishing as much as making barrels.

Roger Williams looked back at the cows again. “There’s no help for it,” he said. “The community must begin paying a bounty for the head of a wolf. If we do that, the Narragansetts will be glad to help, I believe.”

“And Benjamin will be pestering me again for a gun of his own,” said John. “I beg you to set a limit on the age of bounty hunters.”

“Ten years,” said Williams.

John said, “Twelve.”

Roger Williams smiled. “Agreed,” he said.

The Wakeley children came running out from the door of the house—a shingled house, built around a massive brick hearth and chimney. There were three of them—Benjamin, Samuel, and Katharine—and they were rapidly growing. Benjamin had passed the height of his father’s shoulder.

Katharine reached up for one of Jedediah’s enormous hands. He had four sons and no daughter, and was always indulgent with her. “We have finished our lessons, and I learned a psalm,” she said.

“Very good,” said Jedediah. “Which psalm was that?”

Katharine said very fast, “O praise the Lord, all ye nations, praise him all ye people.” She paused. “Um . . . ,” she said.

“For his merciful kindness is great toward us,” said Samuel, with the confidence of his nine winters, “and the truth of the Lord endureth forever. Praise ye the Lord.”

“Yes,” said Katharine.

Benjamin patted his small sister on the head. “Mother said she chose the shortest psalm there is, so Katharine would remember it.”

Jedediah said, “Number one hundred and seventeen.”

John chuckled. “A good Baptist memory,” he said.

Katharine let go of Jedediah’s hand, to escape psalms, and moved to Roger Williams. She said in a loud whisper, “Mother made bread and she has some for Aunt Mary.”

They went into the kitchen. Three loaves of corn bread sat on the scrubbed wooden table, and Huldah was wrapping a fourth in a cloth. She held it up to show Williams.

“Keep it dry in thy boat,” she said. “And kiss Mary for me. Do you preach for us in town on Sunday?”

“The trading post needs me for some days, I fear,” Roger Williams said. He gave Huldah a curious look. “Th’art worshipping with Jedediah still?”

John sat on the edge of the table. He said amiably, “And Benjamin too. Every Sunday, over the river they go to Baptist meeting. I admire the dedication, even if I do not share it.”

Huldah put her hand on his, gratefully. “It is a sensible church, with no threats and punishments. I love the freedom of worship, that they call the priesthood of all believers.”

“Keep away from Boston, then,” said Roger Williams. “That’s precisely what they condemn. They would arrest you for unlawful beliefs.”

“They grow more severe by the month, it seems,” Jedediah said. “There are far more whippings and brandings in Boston than in Plymouth. Is it true they burned thy book, for preaching freedom of religion?”

“That was in England,” Roger Williams said. “In Boston they merely call me heretic.” He smiled. “They would banish me, but they did that long since.”

“They call us all heretic,” John said.

“I despair of them, these self-righteous men,” Roger Williams said. He shook his head despondently. “All these years, and they have learned nothing from their own history. Nothing. They have escaped repression in order to repress others—not just Indians, but good Christian folk. There is a line my father used to quote, of which they would heartily disapprove because he heard it in a playhouse. I think of it often now. ‘Lord, what fools these mortals be!’?”

“They be indeed,” said John.

The children were standing in a group, quiet, listening.

“In a playhouse?” said Katharine to Roger Williams. She had heard of plays, and secretly wished she could see one some day.

“Hush,” said Huldah, but Roger Williams was smiling at Katharine’s small, wide-eyed face.

“We lived in London, in Holborn,” he said. “My father was a merchant tailor. Across the river was a playhouse called the Globe where they played the works of William Shakespeare.”

“I have heard of him!” said Samuel. “I think.”

“One night in particular my father never forgot,” Williams said, his face creasing in affectionate memory. “He would tell it over and over when I was a little boy. It was before I was born—a performance of Shakespeare’s play ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ Attended secretly by Queen Elizabeth, my father claimed. And he remembered a sprightly boy actor saying that line, playing Robin Goodfellow, making fun of a bunch of folk like us. ‘Lord, what fools these mortals be!’?”

He laughed ruefully.

“Dangerous fools, I fear,” Jedediah said.

“The danger of the wolves is closer to us,” said Roger Williams. “They eat our calves and our lambs. Let us defend ourselves from the wolves, and hope that the Lord will defend us from the men.”

One Sunday Huldah came home flushed and agitated from attending the Baptist meeting with Benjamin. It was summer; John was sitting in the house with the door open, reading the Bible to Samuel and Katharine and his journeyman, Peter. He looked up in concern.

Huldah flopped into a chair, and Benjamin fanned her with his hat.

“Mother and I have been having an argument,” he said rather guiltily. “About something I want to do, and she thinks I shouldn’t.”

Huldah sighed. She said to John, “Do you remember Roger’s friend Peregrine Barrett, who was the other witness at our wedding?”

“Of course,” John said. “A kind, happy man, I haven’t seen him for a long time. The Barretts went to settle Aquidneck Island, did they not?” He grinned at her. “More of your Baptists, I believe.”

Huldah said bleakly, “He grew old, his wife died, he lost his sight. He sold his house and had to go live with his daughter in Boston. So he is cut off from his own way of worship and I am very sorry for him—” Suddenly her voice rose, and she thumped the arm of her chair. “But I do not think Benjamin should be concerned in this—he is far too young and it is dangerous!”

“Benjamin?” said John, bewildered. He looked at his son.

Benjamin looked down at his hat. “Jedediah is going to visit Master Barrett in Boston and worship with him, and I want to go too,” he said. “Master Barrett is a poor blind old man with no Baptist friends and I think it is a shame.”

There was a pause.

“Well,” said John, “perhaps you may go.”

Benjamin’s head jerked up, and Huldah stared at John reproachfully. John stood up and came to put a hand on her shoulder.

“Jedediah and I are both going to Boston,” he said. “Next week. We have had word that our shipment of iron will be arriving. So Jedediah is not making a Baptist pilgrimage to save old Peregrine from isolation—first of all, it is a journey for work.”

Huldah relaxed a little. “He didn’t mention that,” she said.

“Well, he was speaking to Baptists and not coopers. But however warmly Jedediah may feel toward a lonely old man, he wouldn’t make so long a trip just to say a prayer.”

“That would be a great risk,” Huldah said.

“I would be willing to take Benjamin with us,” John said. “He would be an extra pair of hands.”

“I would!” said Benjamin eagerly.

“And we will make time to visit Peregrine, of course. Poor soul.”

Huldah said uneasily, “Please be careful. Please.”

John said, as a sudden realization blazed into both his consciousness and mine, “We might visit the Medlycotts, too, on the way.”

And so we were able to see each other, he and I, just once more.

Their long journey took them first to Plymouth, where Jedediah took a boat to Boston. John’s mother had been dead for some years, but he and Benjamin paused to visit his sister, and then they took the wide, busy road to Marshfield. The Medlycott house was still wrapped in its farmland and trees, though there were more farms nearby now, and it was still a busy cooperage, bustling and noisy. John led his horse through a working yard far more crowded than before, with Benjamin following, and at last found himself facing the outstretched arms of Thomas Medlycott, a big man so like his father that John thought he had gone back in time.

Master Medlycott was dead, but Mistress Medlycott wept with the pleasure of seeing John, and Benjamin was swept up by Thomas’s sons. Ezra was no longer there; he had become so rigorous a Puritan, they told John, that he had a government post now in Boston. They all talked deep into the night until weariness forced them to stop.

And in the early morning, when everyone else was still asleep, the moon gone, the sky still dark, the stars not quite yet beginning to fade, John went out walking down to the salt marsh and its faint ocean horizon.

The tide was low; nothing stood in his way. He walked along the stony ridge until he reached the island. Somewhere nearby was the memory hole he had made for me long before, with my tomahawk buried beneath it. Lacking any care, the memory hole had silted over, but he knew it hadn’t gone.

Nor had the memories.

He crossed the island, through the scrub oaks and the black cherry trees and the great tangles of brier and poison ivy, until he was on its far slope, facing the eastern marsh and the sea.

He turned back toward the trees.

“Hawk?” he said. “Are you there?”

Very faintly, a glimmer of light was coming into the dark sky. There I was, looking at him, just as he had seen me when he was young.

“I am very glad you came, John Wakeley,” I said.

John let out a breath, and smiled. “Hawk,” he said. “Little Hawk.”

“I told you. Even though this place holds me, I told you I should always be at your side.”

“I know you are. I feel you, often. But it’s not as good as talking to you.” He stood gazing at me for a moment, that off-center gaze that was the only way to see me, and then he sat down suddenly on a rock.

“Oh, Hawk,” he said, “what is to be done? Do you see all that happens? The fury that killed you was bad enough, but it never goes away—it grows worse.”

I said, “I see much. And I wonder why I am left here to see, with no power at all to help the good or hinder the ill.”

“And can you always tell one from the other?” John said. “Sweet Thomas Medlycott over there, he gave us so warm a welcome, we were so close as boys—there is no malice in him. But when he took me to my bed at night, he showed me the gun that was close to hand, against attack from the savages. No, he said, they had never been attacked yet, but no savage could be trusted.”

I said, “My people do not always trust each other. Our father Yellow Feather has had to strive always not just to pacify the colonists with land, but to keep peace between the tribes.”

John thought about this for a moment, but then he shook his head. “I think I fear my own people more,” he said. “Sometimes I fear this journey I am making with my son. When we stopped in Plymouth, I went to see my sister Mercy. She is married to a man as devout as my stepfather, Daniel, and she has children the same ages as my own. Benjamin was out in the garden with them while Mercy and I talked. And within an hour we heard a terrible shouting outside the door, and there was Benjamin with the biggest boy, Jonas, rolling on the ground, fighting. They wouldn’t stop, I had to separate them. Ben’s face was covered in blood.”

He paused. “He is a peaceable boy,” he said. “But he said Jonas had called me a heretic and an Indian-lover, and said I would go to Hell. And Jonas shouted that these things were true because his father had said them, and I could see from my sister’s face that this was true.”

He shook his head unhappily. “My own sister’s son,” he said. “I wonder what it will be like in Boston. I wonder if we are walking into danger.”

“I wish I could tell you,” I said.

“These people, they have no charity either for the Indians or for Christians who do not follow their own harsh rules. They talk about the word of the Lord, but they do not listen to it. Shall we all destroy each other, in the end?”

I knew no more of the answer to that question than he did.

“Change is made by the voice of one person at a time,” I said. “Like our great sachem Yellow Feather. Like your friend Roger Williams. Like you.”

John said bleakly, “You think that will be enough?”

“It’s all we have,” I said.

Light was growing in the sky.

John said, “This is a blessing. I needed to see you.”

“Here I am. Older and younger than you. With the scar on my face that tells you who I am.”

“The wolf scar,” John said.

“The wolf I had to kill in order to stay alive, even though he was only trying to do the same thing.”

“But you had no choice. We too kill wolves, to keep them from eating the animals that we want to eat. We choose to do it. We have choices all the time, and so often we make the wrong ones.”

I said, “I have not seen you make a wrong choice yet.”

“Except calling you for help, that day.”

“Who is to tell whether that was wrong?”

“Yes, all is mystery,” John said. “That’s what you always say, in the end. But you are my Manitou, Little Hawk. Guide me.”

“Treasure your uncertainty, then,” I said. “Wrong choices come out of strong convictions that will not bend. You have always known that by instinct, on your way through this beautiful, dangerous world. You are a good man, John Wakeley. Follow your instincts.”

“As my friend Hawk followed his,” John said. He looked at me with a wry smile, and got to his feet.

Behind him, dawn was bringing color into the sky, a faint blue, streaked below with red and pink and gold.

“I would do it again,” I said. I put my arm up to the sky. “Look. Look at the beauty.”

John turned his head, and as he looked, on the horizon a sliver of scarlet light blazed out of the sea and the sun came up. And when he looked back, I was gone.