Caleb's Crossing (16 page)
Makepeace, too, felt the weight of responsibility. His faith, as ever, instructed him to bear God’s will without complaint. When we wept, he prayed. But this time his body proved less mighty than his will, so that his very skin broke into canker sores and his hair commenced to fall out in small clumps.
Joel and Caleb also mourned. Although they prayed our Christian prayers with us, I am certain that the two of them went to the woods, after her funeral, and daubed their faces with charcoal as they would for a child who died among their own kin. On the day following her burial, upon her grave I found evergreen sprigs, which surely was no English doing. I feel sure Caleb was behind this, for Joel was not raised in the heathen traditions of his people, which say that their god made man and woman from a pine tree, and even if he did know of them in a general way, I do not think he would have felt moved to perform such things unprompted. If father was aware that they had done pagan rites, he said nothing of it in my presence. But it was plain enough to me, who emptied the washtub and laundered their sleeves and collars.
And this too I will set down: father was sitting up with Solace, the night before we buried her. I had washed her tiny body for the last time, my tears mingling with the bathing water. I had made a simple dress for her, and trimmed it with the lace from our baptisimal gown. Mother had made it for me, and Solace had worn it on that day when, still grieving for mother, we took her to the meeting house to wet her head. While I sewed, father and Makepeace together had fashioned her tiny box, and the scent of planed pine filled the room. We had laid her in it, but had not yet found the heart to nail up the lid. So we sat in prayer until finally, as the hour drew late, father sent us all to our shakedowns. My arms were so empty, I could not sleep. In the small hours I heard a stirring in the room below, and thought that father must be restless and troubled. I threw my shawl about my shoulders and was going to descend when I saw that the person moving about was Caleb. Father, exhausted, had fallen asleep with his head upon the table. Caleb was standing by Solace. I saw him lift her tiny hand and slip something into her fingers.
In the morning, I went privily to Caleb and asked what he had done, fearing that whatever he had put into her hand might be an un-Christian thing. He told me that it was a scrap of parchment on which he had made a fair copy of the scripture of our Lord,
Suffer the little children
… He had tied it up with his own wampum-beaded thong of deer hide, around the peg doll that Makepeace had fashioned for her and that had been her chief plaything in her last month among the living.
“A medicine bundle, such as the pawaaws use?” I said, troubled.
“No,” he replied calmly. “Not quite.”
“But surely something very like…,” I said, wringing my hands.
He reached out and put his hands on mine, unclenching them gently. His own hands had grown less rough in the months since he had come to us.
“Why send her into the earth without some token of the love we all of us bear her? Your father preaches that not all the old beliefs are evil. If, as he fashions it, Kiehtan our creator god is Jehovah by another name, then why shun the customs we have that come from him, to give the departing a small gift of comfort from this world as they pass into the next? A piece of gospel scripture, a few beads, and her doll. What harm is in it?”
I could not say. But my mind remained uneasy, weighing the matter like a scale that cannot find a balance point.
After her burial, we embarked once more upon a time of hard soul-searching, seeking to know where each of us had failed in the eyes of God. I saw more punishment for my idolatry, the truth of which I still could not bring myself to confess. Makepeace, for his part, went to meeting and accused himself in public of an inventory of offenses, from gluttony to sloth—flaws of character of which I had been aware—but then also lust, which did surprise me, until I looked at him with something other than a sister’s eyes, and reflected that he was in truth a boy no longer. I found myself wondering if his lust had an object, and if so, who it might be. I followed his gaze after with greater attention, but did not learn anything by it. He made strenuous efforts to reform himself of the first two categories of sin, becoming quite abstemious at board and applying himself in an uncommon way to his chores. I do not know how he fared with regard to the other, and if his affections were engaged somewhere, I was not sharp-eyed enough to discern it.
It was father whose season of reflection led to the greatest change in our condition. His conscience prompted him to conclude that he had been insufficiently zealous regarding the pawaaws and the breaking of their hold on the people. “They are the strongest cord that binds these people in darkness,” he said. “I must sever it. There is no other way.” He decided to stop waiting for converts to come in, and to take his message beyond Manitouwatootan. He began traveling to the non-Christian settlements, begging the sonquems for permission to preach. One or other, Makepeace, Joel or Caleb, was always at his side during these ventures, and from their talk at board I conceived a picture of the encounters. What I learned troubled my mind.
Father, it seemed, had become fierce, abandoning a gentle gospel of love and forgiveness in favor of fire-and-brimstone threats, promising hell and damnation and bloody vengeance to nonbelievers.
One day, he arrived home after preaching to the stiff-necked sonquem of Chappaquiddick. He was spattered in sand and muck and wet through from the crossing to the smaller island, and as I warmed water for his wash, I saw that he could not move his right arm, and when I asked, he told me that indeed he had been dealt a blow from the sonquem’s warclub, but that the arm, though sorely bruised, was not broken.
“Do not concern yourself, daughter,” he said. “I have one arm for receiving injuries and another arm to lift up in praise of God. While I received wrong to one, I raised the other higher to heaven, and truly, when the sonquem saw that I did not fear him, but stood firm, he consented to listen to my words in full, and bade his pawaaw do so, which he has never countenanced heretofore.”
Father’s preaching became ever more firey as the summer reached its height. This was so even in the staid confines of our own meeting house. He would work himself up to a pitch of passion, the sweat flying from his brow as he gesticulated wildly, declaring at the last that he would put all of the island’s pawaaws under his heel. This drew approving looks and cries of “Amen!” from the Aldens, but when I ventured a glance back toward the Iacoomis bench, the family looked pained, and, in the seat by Makepeace, Caleb’s brow was drawn.
In mid-August, father consented to meet a challenge from the pawaaws, to confront five of them, who said they would jointly try their power against his. I overheard Joel and Caleb speaking of this, their voices low and troubled. I passed the news to Makepeace and asked him to persuade father against this venture, which I thought fraught with danger, for himself and for the gospel also. Anything might thwart him on the given day. He might be served some tainted bever or by chance develop an ague, and everyone would take it as a sign that the pawaaws had o’ermastered him.
Makepeace took my point, I must say, most civilly, and thanked me for my counsel. I overheard as he and father talked late into the night, Makepeace urging him to caution, but to no effect. That night, it was father who could not command his tongue. I could hear him quite clearly through the blanket that divided us, his voice growing louder in his ardor: “Makepeace, you must see that if I do not go, then they will conclude that I quailed. I will not have them think that of me, or of the message of the Lord.”
Father rose on the appointed morning and set off for the meeting place. He had told Makepeace he was not to accompany him; he wanted to face the pawaaws quite alone, so that it would be clear that he did not fear them. But Caleb and Joel went, privily, taking secret ways that Caleb knew. They returned, much excited, and in the brief moment we had alone told me that father had prevailed mightily, and this before a large crowd of Wampanoag who had gathered to witness the confrontation.
At board, Makepeace pressed father into an accounting. Father said he had stood in a circle formed by the painted sorcerers, and for some hours all, together and severally, had tried their most malign spells, cursing and execrating, dancing and chanting, drumming and shaking their gourds. Father had only laughed, which enraged them, and never ceased to raise his voice, preaching the power of the one true God. At the end of it, he had gone untroubled on his way.
Converts flocked to him in the weeks that followed, as news of the encounter spread from one end of the island to the other. When one of the five pawaaws fell ill with spotted fever, and then another, the remaining three came into Manitouwatootan and accepted the gospel of Christ.
But there was one who remained beyond father’s reach: Caleb’s uncle, Tequamuck. Father did not speak ill of him before Caleb, but when I overheard him in conversation with grandfather, he fretted and railed at the reports which reached him of that pawaaw’s teachings. Tequamuck continued to put fear into the people, spreading outlandish and dreadful prophecies about the English that he claimed had come to him in visions, the gift of his familiar spirit. Tequamuck hated father’s prayers, saying they were spells crafted to lead the people away from their own gods. He warned that once father had contrived to strip them of their protecting spirits, the English would destroy them utterly. I do not know if Tequamuck truly thought my father so malign. I do think he hated him, as one man will hate another who draws off the affections of a beloved. Tequamuck burned with a jealous rage that Caleb studied with father to serve the English God. Word came to us from time to time of terrible threats against my father’s life. But if these troubled father, he gave no sign of it.
Instead, he set about even more diligently to win converts. He began to correspond more regularly with John Eliot, who conducted a mission on the mainland and was, as far as we had heard, the only one among the elect of the entire colony who laid himself sincerely to this sacred duty. From this correspondence, father took great heart, and conceived a desire to bring a second missionary to the island. Particularly, he talked of what more he could do if he was in purse to employ a schoolmaster for the Indian children. Yet we could offer no such salary as would invite either a trained minister or master to embrace such a troublesome employ.
It was grandfather who said that father must consider making a voyage to England to solicit funds for the effort from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the Indians. That group had been most openhanded with John Eliot. The English—wealthy folk and ordinary yeomen alike—who banded together under the name of that society were ardent to win converts and impatient of New England’s lack of success in this.
Grandfather had ever been shrewd when it came to funds. But as I look back upon it now, I think that he also feared for father’s state of mind. He had seen the change in his mild son since Solace’s death, and perhaps felt he had embarked on a dangerous course with regard to his preaching, for all its early successes. I think he wanted to divert my father by setting a new task before him.
At first, father would not hear of such a journey, saying that he had undertaken to prepare Makepeace, Caleb and Joel for their matriculation and could not leave them at the midpoint of the endeavor. We had gone to grandfather’s to take dinner between our Lord’s Day meetings, and were walking back to the meeting house. Makepeace had gone on before, and Caleb walked with the Iacoomis family. I was a few paces behind father and grandfather, and I am sure they had forgot that I was there.
“Think on it, my son,” said grandfather. “You are putting the needs of three above the souls of three thousand. If you wait until these boys are prepared, a year or more will be lost. Go soon, and you return in good time to put the final touches to the edifice of learning that you have built together. Surely Makepeace is advanced enough to continue the two hopeful young prophets in their Latin.”
“Maybe, in Latin, he might manage something, but the younger boys are well set to outpace him in no great length of time. As to Greek, he struggles. Makepeace has a plain mind, moved from the pages of the Bible. There is nothing wrong in that; such a man can make a useful minister. But I fear he is too apt to feel that all other letters are a vanity and a snare for the soul.” Father laid out his concern that without diligent guidance and constant instruction Makepeace might easily fall short of what would be required of him. “And who will instruct him, if I do not?”
“If he cannot get on for a few short months, then it hardly seems likely he will profit from an education at the college,” grandfather replied. “Better to face that truth sooner than later. The Lord makes all kinds of clay, does he not? Some may be shaped into delicate porcelains, others a serviceable slipware. There is a use for each, but not even the most skillful potter can make the one do the work of the other….”
They turned into the meeting house then, and I was obliged to go and sit with the women, so I did not hear how the conference concluded. But by that evening it was decided that father would indeed set sail for England as soon as it was practicable to go. Father solicited letters of introduction from John Eliot and received back such encomiums as were hard for a modest man to read. For propriety’s sake—meaning mine—Caleb was to board with Joel during father’s absence, and Makepeace would oversee lessons, with grandfather reviewing the work as and when his heavy obligations allowed. I was left to keep house for Makepeace. It would be but light huswifery, tending to the needs of one other only. I hoped we would do tolerably together, and resolved to help him in whatever manner I could and to give him no cause for complaint.
O
n the morning of the day he was to sail, father rode out to Manitouwatootan to preach a last sermon and make his farewell. I begged to go with him, wanting to keep by him as long as I might. When we came into the clearing father pulled up Speckle and gazed out, full of amazement. The clearing was crowded with Wampanoag from every part of the island, convinced Christians and heathen all alike. Some in English dress, others in deer hides. Men, women and children, some whom he had helped through a sickness, others he had never set an eye upon. Hundreds had gathered. He dismounted and moved through the throng, speaking a word to as many as he could.
