Cape Cod (33 page)

“This one is mine,” said Autumnsquam.

The young
pinse
jumped up. There was blood on his blackened cheek and across his bare chest. “This one killed my brother. He is mine.”

“I set the trap. I baited it. I choose him.”

The young
pinse
held his knife under Autumnsquam’s nose. “Can you stop me from taking his hair, old man?”

“If I go to Canonchet, he will give me what I ask and you will get nothing. If
you
give me what I ask, you may take this man’s musket and go well armed to the next fight.” Autumnsquam picked up the gun and put it into the young man’s hands as a peace offering. It was enough.

“Respect your white warrior. I will go and find
his
brother and kill
him.”
He shook the musket and ran off.

Autumnsquam crouched down and whispered, “Your brother, he still stupid damn Quaker?”

Jonathan Hilyard’s eyes flickered. An arrow had passed under his collarbone, close to his heart. He bled from slash wounds in his legs and belly, and the side of his head had been bashed by a tomahawk.

“Thick-headed stupid bloody Christian Hilyard,” said Autumnsquam. In all his prayers to Kautantowit, he had asked for the safety of these bloody Christian Hilyards. Now Kautantowit had put the safety of one of them into Autumnsquam’s hands. Answer your own prayer, the Great Spirit was saying. You have helped to start the war you prayed for. Now help to save the whites you prayed for. If you ask for opposite things, it is up to you to make them come to pass.

v.

After a few days, the boy Jeremiah began to speak without psalms. It would not be long, Christopher knew, before he spoke of the massacre at Clarke’s garrison house. Others were speaking of it already, as a few local Indians—well known to the Clarkes and unknown to King Philip—had been arrested, convicted, and executed.

So early one March afternoon, when the wind was lighter than usual, Christopher went to his father’s house with a bucket of beer. Jack was splitting logs, small ones, piling them neatly as he went. He seemed glad for a reason to stop. Father and son, now both old men by the calendar, sat on the woodpile, and the son told the father of the bloody doings at Clarke’s garrison house.

As if he had not the strength to grieve, or perhaps to comprehend, Jack sipped his beer and said simply, “Our women, they all be taken afore their time. Why does God do this to us?”

“He works his good in awesome strange ways.”

“I been alone forty years. Where be the good in that?”

“Job has the answer, I think.”

Then Jack studied the smoke curling from the tryworks, “Think thou we’ll see more blackfish afore Easter?”

The next morning, the Hilyards sailed their shallop up to Barnstable, the center of the whale oil trade among the bay towns. Boston oil dealers came regularly because the harbor was deep and the spit that protected it was the site of the best tryworks on Cape Cod. At the dock, the Hilyards got a fair price for the fifteen barrels they brought. Then they went up to the village.

Barnstable was becoming a prosperous place, as colonial towns went. The cattle had good forage in the salt marshes. The tryworks supported the church. The shipmen had the harbor, and the merchants and tradesmen served a growing population. Along the County Road, there were fine two-story homes with real glass windows, a meetinghouse, a blacksmith, a trading post, and Crocker’s, the most famous tavern on the Cape.

Jack wished to go straight there, but Christopher waved the supply list. “We need molasses, cloth, nails…”

As they rounded the corner from the Millway Road, they were struck by a strange quiet. Ordinarily the dust of business hung thick above the County Road, but today the townspeople were clustered in front of Crocker’s, listening to a man read solemnly from a sheet of paper.

Christopher asked the blacksmith what passed.

“The marshal reads the list of the dead.”

“Dead?”

“The Pierce Massacre.”

“Pierce? Massacre?” The words struck Christopher Hilyard like a lance.

Before he could usher his father and nephew away, Christopher heard his brother’s name tolled out over the crowd. Then he heard his father’s scream of horror at all they had lost, a cry of fury at God, a sound that echoed across fifty-five years. And once more, Christopher knew the hopelessness he had felt on that dark and grieving hill in that terrible first winter.

vi.

It began to rain that afternoon. Autumnsquam thought the rain might soothe Jonathan’s fever, so he kept moving. He had taken a horse from a field in the town of Rehoboth and made a pallet of a blanket and two saplings which he could drag over the sandy roads.

He had not removed the arrow, as that might have caused its wound to bleed more. But he had dressed the other wounds with boiled moss and put a poultice of herbs on Jonathan’s head. For the fever, he had made a broth of red cedar leaves and maple twigs, but that had done little good.

Near the headwaters of the Scusset, Autumnsquam stopped and looked for a canoe. In the old days, the Scussets always left their canoes, and a man in need might borrow one to get to the bay. But the old days were gone.

vii.

Jack Hilyard listened to the rain pound upon his roof. Night came fast, and with it, he prayed, sleep. And if the sleep were forever, he would pray for nothing else. These last two days had been enough to make any man look warmly upon his own death, even a man who had come at last to believe that God lived only in the minds of men.

The cold rain that fell upon the sea fell also upon the body of his son somewhere to the west, and it cared nothing for either of them. Of those who had gone before, of his two good women and Ezra Bigelow, all that was left moldered in the sand of Plymouth Colony. No heaven greeted Elizabeth or Kate. No hell burned Bigelow for what he might have done to Dorothy Bradford. There was no heaven or hell but here, and no devils but those that walked the earth.

And Jack would make the earth a better place if he killed one. So he climbed out of the bed where he had tried to numb himself with beer and sleep and with the feeling of his own ancient body reshaping itself for the womb. Then he went downstairs and loaded his pistols. They would be good for killing devils.

viii.

Before nightfall, Autumnsquam passed through Moskeetuckqut, the Great Salt Marsh, where the whites now fed their cattle. He could see them in the fields, big shadows clumped dumbly together in the darkening rain, like land whales, but without the dignity or courage.

Autumnsquam had taken this road when he left Cape Cod. Then it had been a sleeve of sand through the tall trees. Now the trees between the road and the bay were near gone, cornfields rolled away to the south, and there was not a quarter-mile distance between any of the houses.

At the supper hour, he came to the village of Barnstable. It had grown mightily since the day he followed the flight of the gull. For near half a mile, the white man’s buildings stood side by side, staring out at him, wondering at him. If someone challenged him, he would tell the truth: he had fought at the Pierce Massacre and was taking a white survivor to his family. He would not say he had fought on the other side.

But cold rain and good-smelling stews kept the people by their fires. Not even the marshal came out as Autumnsquam went by.

East of the village, the land rose, and the horse labored to pull the pallet. His flanks were lathered and his gait uncertain. If he faltered, Autumnsquam would have to seek help in the village. And some Praying Indian might say that this one did not march out with Captain Pierce. And Jonathan might not remember old Autie through the heat of the fever. And then the whites would know.

So Autumnsquam jumped down to lighten the load, and when they reached the top of the rise, he let the animal rest. He could see the harbor and the tip of Cummaquid itself, the wild stretch of sand that protected the salt marsh. In the Indian language, Cummaquid meant “long point,” but the whites called it Sandy Neck. Where once the Nauset had met the Cummaquid to trade and feast, an orange trying fire fouled the sky.

Even the land had lost its dignity.

ix.

“I worry for Father Jack.” Patience stirred clam chowder over the fire.

“I put him to bed and gave him beer. He will sleep.” Christopher warmed his hands, then his backside, over the flames, but he knew that this night, nothing would warm his soul.

“Still I worry for him.”

“I worry more for
him.
” Christopher looked at the boy, who sat on a stool, rocking back and forth, speaking again and again the first verse of the Twenty-third Psalm. “He has not the strength of experience nor the resignation of age. Me and thou, we know of God’s ways. And Father knows enough to sleep.”

“No man sleep on the night he learn his son dead.” She wiped her hands on her apron. “I go to him.”

“He curses Indians, and God, too. He curses them for taking all the Hilyard women.” Christopher slipped his arms around her girth. “I did not remind him that one Hilyard woman remains, and she is an Indian.”

Amapoo smiled. Though her hair had gone gray, her teeth were still even and straight, and her pockmarks had faded into soft wrinkles on her face. “A Quaker Indian.”

x.

Simeon Bigelow shuddered to hear the awful news, and he sorrowed to go among the
wetus
and tell the women that their men had died with Captain Pierce and Captain Hilyard.

That night, he convened a service to remember the dead and pray for a just end to the war. But among the Nausets who gathered in the candlelight of the little meetinghouse, Simeon heard as much anger as grief. Their men had died for those who did not trust them enough to let them leave Cape Cod alone, who thought them better off in Praying Towns and plantations than living free in the land of their fathers.

One young man, named Keweenut, was bold enough to say that King Philip might even have had the right idea.

Simeon Bigelow sensed that a single small incident might make his Portanimicut Plantation explode, and if the Nausets joined the fight, so might all the other Cape Cod Indians, and then there would be disaster for all.

When he had comforted his people as best he could, Simeon resolved to go and comfort his old friend Jack. He asked Keweenut and some of the others to accompany him on the four-mile walk, so that they could see that the suffering of the war touched both races.

xi.

Jack put on his cloak and felt hat, shoved the pistols into his belt, and lit his whale oil lantern.

In the barn he reached under the floorboards and pulled out the axe. He had found it in the mud, though he no longer remembered where. He had used it to chop off an Indian head and bring peace that had lasted fifty years. He would use it now to bring peace again.

He unwrapped the canvas and wiped off the oil that protected the axe head against rust. The metal glittered in the lamplight. He ran his thumb over the blade, then across the strange letters engraved in the iron. He wondered what devil god they paid worship.

A bloody cold night it was, and rainy, too… a miserable night to walk to Portanimicut, but the perfect kind of night to kill devils.

Autumnsquam tethered his horse to a tree near the edge of the marsh. He had not forgotten his last sight of this place, red and gold in the warm October sun. He had thought never to see it again. Now it appeared like death, a black mass in the sheeting rain, a sodden bog surrounding it.

He could not cross the marsh on horseback. The tide was high and the animal too exhausted to pull himself through the muck. Nor could Autumnsquam carry Jonathan on his back. He was an old man, after all. He would need help. He covered Jonathan as best he could, then stepped onto the planking.

Meanwhile Patience came through the woods to Jack’s house. It was raining so hard that several times the flame in her lantern was splashed and guttered.

But she had been right about Jack. No man could sleep on the night he had learned of his son’s death. Lamps glowed in every room, and sad light slanted from every window. She pushed open the door and called, but there was no answer. Up the narrow stairs she went to the bedroom. The bed was turned down and rumpled. Then she glanced out the window and saw the light moving south toward the marsh.

She lowered her own lantern and threw open the window. She called Jack’s name, but the rain washed away the sound.

When Autumnsquam was halfway across the marsh, he saw the lantern swinging toward him. It stopped for a moment at the top of the island path; then it descended. At first, the old Indian felt the urge to run. Instead, he waved and called, “Hallooo!”

Above the steady pounding of the rain, Jack thought he could hear voices. It might be the wind, or it might be the devils. If he put out his lantern, he could see into the distance, but then he could not see the way in front of him, and if he stepped off the planking, he would sink into the mud and they would kill him.

Then, more clearly, he heard a man shouting “Halloo!” Then he heard a woman calling his name from behind. A light was appearing at the top of the island path, and two more lights were glimmering to life on the far side of the marsh.

The devils… surrounding him. But Jack Hilyard was too old to feel panic. He gripped the handle of one of the pistols and prepared to fight.

The woman on the island path was coming after him. Her lantern was descending… but she was an Indian. She would try to stop him from doing what he had to do.

He pulled a pistol and fired. Her lanternlight disappeared. Then he drew the other pistol and turned toward the shadow now stopped no more than twenty feet away.

“Who’s there?” shouted Jack. “Speak or I’ll shoot you, too.”

“It Autumnsquam. Old Autie, Jack Stupid Bloody Christian Hilyard.”

Jack remembered. He almost smiled. But no. It was a trick… a devil Indian who knew an old name… a devil whose friends were now hurrying after him with their lanterns.