Caleb's Crossing (7 page)
I had no answer. I felt rebuked for my pride. Clearly this undertaking would be harder than I had reckoned. My father must truly be a marvelous preacher if he had to answer such as this. I resolved to go with father when next he visited a Wampanoag otan. I would listen to him sermonize, to find out if his flock had so many vexing questions, and if so, how he answered them. I realized I should have to devise a pretext for this, since father was unaware I knew the Indians’ language and would think I understood nothing of what passed between him and his listeners. So, at home, I began to hint that I had a curiosity to see how they arranged an otan, to visit the wetus and to meet the squas who lived in them (which was no more than the truth). After a time, I asked father if I might go with him, the next time he had a mind to it. He seemed pleased by my interest, and said he could see no harm if mother could spare me from chores. “For they hold family very dear, and count it a slight that we English do not foster more ties of affection between our families and their own.”
A few days later, we went together on Speckle, and as we approached the settlement, we dismounted and walked so that father could greet everyone and tell them that he proposed to preach to them when the sun was at its highest. The praying village was for those who had been convinced by my father to embrace Christianity, and was called Manitouwatootan, or God’s Town. Despite its godly name, father worried that the old ways still had a strong hold there, and that the people remained confused about the truth of Christian teaching. Some families who had removed there remained divided between the convinced and those who were not ready to yield the old ways. Some were conflicted in their own hearts, halting between two opinions. Some came only to see and hear what was done, yet though they heard the word of the one God of heaven, remained thralls to sin and darkness. “They say that their meetings and customs are much more agreeable and advantageous than ours, in which we do nothing but talk and pray, while they dance and feast and give gifts one to the other. I try, Bethia, to explain that this is the way of the Great Deluder, Satan. But I have found no words in their language to answer our English words—faith, repentance, grace, sanctification…. Well, you will see for yourself, soon enough, how it is….”
The first thing that struck me was the peace of the place. In Great Harbor, on every day except the Sabbath, there is noise from first light to last light. Someone is always splitting a shingle, hammering a nail into the latest new dwelling or enlarging an existing one. The smith’s mallet rings from the forge, the pounders hammer at the fulling mill and the stone mason worries at his rocks with all manner of iron tools. There was no such English factory evident here.
The squas were in the gardens, weeding with hoes made of clamshells. In truth, they had little to weed, for the planting was contrived cunningly, with beans climbing up the cornstalks and the ground between each hillock covered in leafy squash vines that left scant room for weeds to grow. The menfolk were about the wetus, some casting jacks in a game of chance, others lying idle upon their mats. I saw father draw his brows at this. I had heard him opine that too much toil fell to the women. It was they who tilled the soil, ground the corn, foraged for wild foods, made the mats for the shelters and the baskets for the stores, and bent their backs under loads of wood for the cook fires. The men, warriors and hunters, had little to do in the way of daily drudge-work. “Of course, you should know that bow hunting is no lordly game such as an English shooting party might make of it, Bethia. It is a wearying endeavor, without beaters to drive and gamekeepers to ensure the quarry. Still, I think the men might do more to lessen the women’s burdens.”
To make his point, father sat down with some old women who were shelling last year’s dried beans, and took a share before him, to shell himself as he talked with them. When he went to another group who were hoeing, he reached down and gathered out the weeds they had turned over.
There were some half-dozen children running in the fields or about the wetus—fewer than you would expect, given the size of the settlement, which was more than a dozen and a half families. It was just as well they were few, because those there were seemed to run entirely wild, with no check or correction, barreling through the fields in the way of the hoes, interrupting the men’s talk, or snatching at their jacks so as to disrupt the game, piercing the quiet with loud hallows and curdling shrieks. An English child would have been whipped for half of what these were about. Yet I saw no elder do so much as wag a finger at them. I remarked on this to father. He nodded. “They are, as you say, remarkably indulgent. I have remonstrated with them on the matter, asking them why they do not correct their children. But they say that since adult life is full of hardship, childhood should be free of it. It is a kindly view, even if misguided.”
Father had a friendly greeting for everyone, and I was impressed at how much he knew of their doings, their families and their concerns. I learned that he did a great many good turns for them, of a practical nature, and I thought it might be that these preached to them more loudly than his sermons. More than once, I had to suppress a wince when he dropped a word into the mangle of his dreadful pronunciation, so that the meaning came out quite changed from what I knew he had intended. Over time, I had come to grasp that the chief principle of their grammar is whether a thing to them is possessed of an animating soul. How they determine this is outlandish to our way of thinking, so profligate are they in giving out souls to all manner of things. A canoe paddle is animate, because it causes something else to move. Even a humble onion has, in their view, a soul, since it causes action—pulling tears from the eyes. Yet as I had begun to see this strange, incarnate world through Caleb’s eyes, my grammar had much improved, and it pained me to hear father expose himself with his many errors. I blushed when he used an indecent word, quite innocently, thinking he was uttering a beautiful compliment. But these Wampanoag, who clearly loved him, kept their countenance and strove mightily to make out his meaning, so as not to shame him.
At mid-morning, a man was brought to him who was not of the settlement. He came hobbling, supported by two others. It seemed he was a fugitive from the wrath of the Narragansett, a tribe often at odds with the Wampanoag whose lands touched theirs on the mainland. This man had been captured by the Narragansett in a raid, and because one of his captors had had a brother killed in some prior skirmish, this captive had been marked for a slow death by ritual torture. He had somehow escaped when the work was only part done, stealing a mishoon and paddling to the island. The praying Indians had taken him in and now they asked father if he might treat the man’s wounded foot. They described how four of his toes had been severed, one by one, then roasted and given him to eat. I felt my gorge rise at this, and turned my face away lest father divine from my expression that I understood what was being said.
Father, for his part, looked ashen. He murmured to me in English: “They
will
believe that I have healing skills, no matter what I tell them. It is because of their pawaaws, who profess to be healers. In their minds religion and medicine mean much the same thing. Since they have given up their pawaaw in coming here, I suppose I must do what good I can….”
The injured man had been eased down onto the mat, and now father tried to remove his moccasin, dark with dried black blood. When he saw that the hide was adhered to the man’s flesh, he called for some warmed water. He soaked off the moccasin and set about cleaning the pus from inflamed, swollen flesh, muttering to himself about the barbarity of such wounds. “To do such as this, not in heat of battle, but deliberately…. Bethia, it must be granted that these are a very sinful people. Iniquity does abound among them. As the scripture says,
the love of many waxeth cold
.”
I could see that he needed some clean linen cloths to bind the injured foot, but there were none here. “Should I tear some strips from my placket?” I whispered. He nodded, so I went off into the shelter of some high blueberry bushes and shredded the lower part of my undershift, and brought the cloths back to him.
He dried the mutilated foot, and was struggling with the cloth, making an awkward business of bandaging. “Shall I do it?” I said. “I have a light hand.” He made way for me, and I wrapped the foot as I had seen mother do when we had cuts or burns. Father nodded his approval and the man rose awkwardly. His face, though drawn and sweaty, had betrayed no sign of discomfort even though he must have been in great pain.
As he hobbled away, father looked after him and shook his head. “God in his wisdom has not done so much for these as he has for our nation. Satan has had full charge of them. It is a blessing that God now brings us here. We are uncommonly fortunate to be able to bring that little mustard seed of the gospel, and watch it take root here.”
It was getting near to the noon hour, when father was accustomed to preach. The women were setting down their hoes and the men coming out of the wetus. There were just seven or eight of these huts in the little settlement, domes of bent sapling branches covered in sheets of bark and woven mats, each housing just a family or two. But at the center of the clearing was a long house, with an English door rather than a mat for an entry way. Father said that when the weather was hard he would preach in there, amid a great press of bodies.
This day was fine, so he asked the people to meet him about a great, swaybacked rock, worn smooth through the years to a kind of curved platform. Upon this, he was accustomed to stand to give his sermon.
By noon, some twenty souls had gathered, and I stood at the edge of the group, and tried to look at my father through their eyes. He was a lean man, for unlike Makepeace he worked hard on our farm and did not scruple to chop wood or carry water or do any of the several tasks that eased mother’s lot. He favored the sad colors, blacks or dark browns, as befit a minister, and wore his fair hair modestly cropped above the collars that mother kept spotless and starched for him. Though the day was warm, he did not remove his coat; since the Wampanoag set much store in their own regalia when they met in ceremony, he felt that he should retain some formality in dress, as he would if he preached in church or meetinghouse. First, he prayed, putting our familiar forms into their tongue. These he had by rote, well taught him by Iacoomis, and he uttered them without error. Next came his sermon.
“Friends, hearken to me,” he began. “When we have met here before, we have agreed two truths: That God is, and that he will reward all those who diligently seek him. That the one God is the source of all manit. My friend Iacoomis has shown his heart to you, how it stands towards God, and you have seen how, when he cast off all other false worships, so he has prospered, and gained in health, he and all his family. You have asked what will happen to you when you die, and today I will answer you. Englishmen, and you and all the world, when they die, their souls go not to the southwest, as you have been taught. All that know the one God, who love and fear him, they go up to heaven. They ever live in joy. In God’s own house. They that know not God, who love and fear him not—liars, thieves, idle persons, murderers, they who lie with other’s wives or husbands, oppressors or the cruel, these go to hell, to the very deep. There they shall ever lament.”
Beside me, two men started muttering together, thinking that I could not understand them.
“Why should we believe our English friend, when our own fathers told us that our souls go to the southwest, to the lands of Kiehtan?”
“Well, but did you ever see a soul go to the southwest? I have not.”
“No, and when did he, yonder, see one go up to heaven or down to hell?”
“He says he has it from the book, which God himself has written.”
“What he says may be true for English, but why should I want to go to this God’s house if only English are there? If God wanted us in this house then he would have sent our ancestors such a book.”
Listening to this exchange, I realized my difficulties were no different in kind to my father’s, and that I should just have to persevere, and trust that in time God would give me the words that would turn Caleb’s heart to him.
About midway through my father’s sermon, I noticed that the people seemed restless of a sudden, their eyes glancing from father and over to the place where the clearing ended in dense oak woodland. I followed their gaze, squinting in the sunlight. Soon enough, I saw what they saw: A man, very tall, his face painted and his body decked in a great cloak of turkey feathers. He stood stock still, his arm raised, and in his hand some kind of mannekin or poppet, I couldn’t clearly see. Then, from the trees beside him, another appeared. A youth, also painted garishly.
Some of the crowd started to edge away from father. The man who had remarked about Kiehtan elbowed his companion. I heard him say the name Tequamuck. I flinched, recognizing the name: Caleb’s uncle. I squinted even harder, to discern the features of the wizard and his apprentice. But their faces were so fully painted over I could not tell if what I feared was true or not. Their presence clearly agitated the crowd. Father had long held that the pawaaws were the strongest cord that bound the Indians to their own way, and that breaking their spiritual power mattered far more than interfering with the ways and privileges of the sonquems.
The man who spoke Tequamuck’s name was the first to leave. Soon, five or six more followed. They headed towards the woods, greeting Tequamuck with great deference. When I looked again, all of them were gone.
I
never did ask Caleb if he was the painted youth at the right hand of the pawaaw. I did not want to hear his answer.
As that ripe summer turned to autumn, the sunlight cooled to a slantwise gleam, bronzing the beach grass and setting the beetlebung trees afire. Caleb learned his letters faster than I could credit. Before the singing of the cider, he could read and speak a serviceable kind of English. I think that because he had learned from childhood to mimic the chirps of birds in order to lure waterfowl, his ear was uncommonly attuned to pitch and tone. Once he learned a word, he soon spoke it without accent, exactly as an Englishman would. In a short while, he would not have me speak Wampanaontoaonk to him except to explicate something he could not grasp, and before long we had switched from communicating with each other only in his language, to conversing most times in mine. But as much progress as we made in that direction, in the matter of his soul he resisted and mocked me, using wit that seemed to me devil-inspired. One day, when we had been discussing Genesis, he turned to me with a gleam in his brown eyes. “So you say that all was created in six days?”