فصل 26 - بخش 03

TWO

John, Benjamin, and Jedediah spent two days in the busy harbor of Boston, where Benjamin gazed in wonder at the ships that plied the Atlantic or sailed down to Bermuda or more faraway islands. Watching, I felt wonder of my own, at the size and bustle of this growing town. Our land was being changed into a new and different world.

John and Jedediah found the agent from whom they were buying their iron, and they hired a ship to take it, and them, back down the coast toward home in a few days’ time. Then they set out to find the house of Jedediah’s blind old friend, which was across the Charles River and its marshes, in an area called New Town.

Confused by the streets that masked the way to the river, Jedediah stopped to intercept two men walking toward them.

“By your leave, friends—”

The men paused. The taller of the two was in the uniform of the militia; the other was muffled in a cloak, even though the day was warm.

“If you please, we seek the crossing for New Town,” Jedediah said politely, but the smaller man stepped past him, staring at John.

“John Wakeley!” he said.

It was a moment before John recognized the narrow, foxy face and the intent eyes, but the years had changed them very little.

“Ezra!” he said warmly. “I was speaking of you just the other day, with Mistress Medlycott and Thomas! How do you? My son Benjamin, my partner Jedediah Watkins—Master Ezra Clark.”

Ezra nodded to them briefly. “I do well,” he said.

John said to Benjamin, “Master Clark was journeyman in Marshfield when I was first an apprentice—he taught me many things.” He turned back to Ezra. “But you have changed your calling, I hear.”

“I assist at the governor’s office,” Ezra said with a touch of self-importance. His face was more lined, his hair more grey than yellow; he smiled no more than he ever had. He was looking carefully at John. He said, “Are you not still a member of Roger Williams’s colony? In Providence Plantation?”

The militiaman turned his head to look at John.

“Yes indeed!” John said. “We have the cooperage for New Providence—we are in Boston for a shipment of iron hoops.”

“I hear that you people have great dealings with the Indians,” Ezra said.

There was a moment’s pause.

John gave him a broad smile. “So must your governor, indeed, and with such good result—the praying villages multiply wonderfully!”

Ezra sniffed. His gaze flickered over Jedediah and Benjamin, then back to John. “What do you seek in New Town?”

“Garden Street, if you please,” Jedediah said.

Ezra kept his eyes on John. He raised an eyebrow.

“We are visiting a friend,” John said.

“You are in luck,” Ezra said. “Garden Street is close by the new meetinghouse, you may hear Pastor Mitchel preach, a most devout and learned man.”

“Ah,” said John. “We will be sure to attend.”

“And who is the friend you visit?” Ezra said.

His voice was casual, but the persistence made John uneasy. Before he could answer, Jedediah said, “Mistress Wilton is her name.”

The militiaman turned his head again. He said to Ezra, “The widow Wilton. You recall?”

“I do,” Ezra said. “Her father has come to live with her of late, from the Providence Plantation.”

He paused, deliberately, and John knew this required a reply. He said, still smiling, “Yes indeed—Peregrine Barrett, a good friend. He was a witness at my wedding to Huldah, long ago.”

“I hear he is a Baptist,” Ezra said.

The words hung in the air, cold as icicles.

Jedediah said, “He is an old man, and not well.”

“Baptists deny the whole structure of our colony’s church. I hope you are not infected with those same heretical thoughts,” Ezra said, his voice rising a little.

John’s smile began to fade, but he still spoke civilly.

“We are infected with thoughts as Christian as your own, I can assure you, my friend,” he said. “And should be very grateful for directions, if you please.”

So Ezra gave them directions and a cool farewell, and he and the militiaman strode away.

And John, Jedediah, and Benjamin found their way to Peregrine Barrett, who was so pleased to hear their voices that he wept. He was a melancholy, bent old man, very fragile, with a widowed daughter who looked almost as old herself, but tended him with close devotion and had food and three beds carefully prepared for their visitors. They ate a soup of peas and onions, of which Benjamin had three helpings, and they drank cider that had been made from last year’s apples, gathered by Mistress Wilton from the two trees in the house’s little garden.

Then they prayed, and Jedediah preached a little, and old Peregrine was so moved and grateful that he shed a few more tears. His daughter’s eyes were moist as well.

“May God bless you all,” she said to John afterwards. “We go to the meetings on Sundays, of course, else we would face a whipping. But my father is Baptist in his heart and soul, and he has been so starved of his church’s company. However long he has left to him, now he will go to the Lord a happy man.”

John and Jedediah found this so touching that they took Peregrine’s Bible, made a selection of readings, and decided that next morning, before they left, they would give him a short service just as if it had been a Sunday. In freethinking Providence, members of the Baptist church apparently did this often in their own homes, with no need for a minister.

“I’ll turn thee Baptist yet,” said Jedediah to John cheerfully.

John smiled at him. “Never!” he said. “But I believe in freedom of worship. Like Roger. And like our Lord.”

So they all praised their God together the next morning—six of them in all, since Mistress Wilton’s neighbor had once been a Baptist and had asked if she might join them. They stood in a group in the little living room and Benjamin read from the Bible. But as I could see, and could not tell them, there were two men in the street outside, who had been peering in at the window the day before and were back again this day. When Jedediah was reading a last long prayer, the door of the house was suddenly flung open and the two men burst in, shouting, “Shame! Shame!”

They were carrying heavy sticks, with which they thumped the walls and the floor, looking as if they would prefer to be thumping the people. They were the constables of New Town, they said, and they arrested John and Jedediah for conducting a religious service in a private house, without being ministers of the colony’s church, and for preaching heretical beliefs.

“Did Ezra Clark send thee?” John said.

“Silence!” shouted one of the constables, and he banged his stick on the floor again. He glared at Mistress Wilton and her father. “And shame on thee too! Shame!”

Old Peregrine groped for John’s hand. “These are good Christian men,” he said tremulously to the constables.

“They would lead thee to Hell, old man,” said the second constable. He reached into his big pocket and produced two lengths of rope.

Then they tied John and Jedediah’s hands behind their backs, and took them to jail.

Mistress Wilton looked after Benjamin, who was both frightened and indignant. Two days later John and Jedediah were taken before the Boston magistrate and fined thirty pounds each, in English money. This seemed to be a huge sum, more than the cooperage earned in a year. I could sense John’s anger; it was a kind of cold fury, deep and passionate, and I had never felt it in him before.

“I will not pay it!” he said.

Jedediah said heavily, “We must. The alternative is a whipping, and you know what that does to a man’s body. My friends will raise the money, we can repay them over time.”

“No!” John said. “They must pay for thee, certainly—one of us must be able to work. But I will not bow to them, I will not! Trust me, Jedediah—I have reasons of my own. I will not submit to these men, who come to this land in the name of freedom and impose their own rules. Trust me. Let me do what I must do.”

And though Jedediah pleaded, and Benjamin, and blind Peregrine begged him to accept money for the fine, John would not change his mind. Jedediah’s fine was paid, and he was released. He was able to arrange for the shipment of their iron, but he was powerless to reach the only man who might have been able to intervene for John, Roger Williams, because Williams had gone to England seeking a charter for their colony and might not be back for a year.

A few days later John was taken before the governor at the General Court, and he was sentenced, with no opportunity for any defense, to thirty lashes of a whip.

John stared at the governor’s icy face and did not say a word.

They took him to the whipping post in the center of Boston one fine morning, stripped him to the waist, and tied his hands to the top of the post. A crowd of the good people of Boston came to watch. Whippings seemed to be fairly common among these English, for the breaking of one rule or another, and there were always people who would flock to see another being punished.

Among my people, our sachem administered punishments, but this colony had one man whose particular job it was to whip, or to brand faces with a hot iron, or to cut off ears, or to kill. They called him the executioner. He was, Mistress Wilton said bitterly to Jedediah, a devout Christian who went to church at every opportunity and prayed more loudly than anyone around him.

The executioner’s whip had a heavy handle and three very long thin strips of leather, each knotted at the end. He took it in both hands, raised it over his head, and lashed the three whips at John’s back with all his might. He did this very slowly, pausing between each lash to collect his strength.

After the first few lashes John’s back began to bleed. By the end it was a dreadful, bloody mess, but the executioner had not been able to make John so much as whimper.

I could feel John’s pain, and over it all his absolute determination not to utter a sound. And I knew that this was his answer to all of them: his refusal to be vanquished not just by the executioner, but by Ezra Clark, by Daniel Smith, by all those who harmed others in the name of their God, and above all by that devout man Walter Kelly, who had killed his friend.

I do not know how the news of John Wakeley’s cruel punishment reached the ears of my people. Nor did Jedediah, Benjamin, and the group of friends who carried him to Mistress Wilton’s house, for the one day that they were allowed to wash his wounds before taking him into banishment. They knew only that when they reached the outskirts of Boston the next morning, carrying John out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in a cart over bumpy, potholed roads, they were met by a large group of Pokanokets carrying a litter. One of them was Stardancer.

He reached out to Benjamin, whom he had known since he was a baby, and put his hands on the boy’s shoulders. He had a little English, these days. He said, “The Massasoit sends us to help you fetch the Speaker home.”

Benjamin looked at him with his eyes full of tears, and nodded, because he was too grateful to speak.

Their litter looked to me very much like the one on which Leaping Turtle and I and our fellows had carried Suncatcher out of our old dead village and into a new life. This one, however, was carried by eight men spaced round its four sides, and it was skillfully designed to give support to the body of a man able only to lie facedown, or propped on his hands and knees.

Very slowly and gently, they took John out of the cart and put him on the litter. The friends from Boston took their leave of Benjamin and Jedediah, and turned back. And at a slow, smooth pace, the Pokanokets carried John all the way to Sowams and beyond, to his own house and family. One of them was the son of a medicine man, and tended his back and gave him the juice of certain plants to drink, to help the pain.

The journey took three days.

Huldah was distraught, but she understood what John had done. She would not let Benjamin or Jedediah say a word of self-reproach.

“He went there for Peregrine,” she said. “But the rebellion was his own. Refusing to pay their fine was his blow against their arrogance. He was fighting for freedom of belief.” She looked at Benjamin’s grim face, and at Samuel and Katharine. “Remember that,” she said.

And as Stardancer and his companions prepared to leave, in trying to express her gratitude she told him that they had acted with true and wonderful compassion, as her Lord would have done.

Stardancer smiled, and made his farewells. He made no comment, but I could see in his face the puzzlement that I still share. How could all these people have a religion that valued compassion and respect so highly, and yet so often treat each other with neither of those things?