Cape Cod (23 page)
But Geoff kept talking. About harpoons and whales. Not exactly pillow talk, and not very topical. He was looking for connections. “They say Jack Hilyard was a whaler.”
Janice twitched herself into the mattress like a dog tamping down the grass.
“He chased them in open boats and flensed stranders on the beach.”
“Hilyards… always chasing something,” she muttered.
That was a connection he would not dispute. “We used to kill them; now we try to save them.” He listened to the wind chimes playing in one of the apple trees by the door. He felt the sea breeze pushing in through the windows. “The Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown has a call list of volunteer whale savers. They help push pilot whales off the beach, cut humpbacks out of nets. I may join up.”
“You do that, Geoff.” She mixed annoyance and sleepiness in her voice, like a child nodding off to avoid something troubling. “Save the whales.”
“Save them… hunt them… either way, you’re just trying to be part of something greater.”
She lifted her head off the pillow and looked at him. “You save the whales. Let Rake save the log. I’ll save the family. Then we’ll see who ends up as part of something greater.” Then she went to sleep.
And Geoff dreamed of whales.
October 1650
“We got us a big one, lads. Humpback for certain.” There was no knowing the mind of a hungry whale, but Jack Hilyard had been watching a cloud of gulls, and from their motion had plotted the beast’s progress halfway across the bay. “He spouts black blood afore sundown.”
It was autumn, and for Jack, the high time had come, when the southwesterlies lingered like a maiden’s kiss on the land, when the blue water rolled in long, gentle swells, when the spouts blew up like little silver clouds above the bay.
His son Jonathan pulled at the first oar. Beyond him was a woman dressed as a man, a strong woman with big hands and a face marked by the scars of the pox… Amapoo. Burly, black-bearded Christopher sat forward of her. And in the harpooneer’s seat, wearing a necklace of whales’ teeth and a blue frock over his breechclout, sat the Indian called Autie.
“Humpback sink when dead,” he said. “Better chase onto flats.”
“Thou just worry ’bout the dart.”
“Last time, me dart good, humpback sink.” Autie, who still preferred to be called Autumnsquam, had learned many English words. A smart Indian had to, because the English used words like weapons.
It had been six years since the whites came to Nauset and asked to live on the land. They had given some good things—knives and copper, warm blankets, iron kettles, colored beads—and the Nausets had said yes, the white men could live there.
But when the Nausets tried to hunt in the places they had always hunted, the whites told them they could hunt no more. The Nausets answered that they could not be kept from their land. They were part of it and it was part of them. But the whites pointed to papers that the Nausets had marked and said the Nausets had sold them the land, and “sold” meant they could never use it again.
This “sold,” thought Autumnsquam, was a word more killing than a gun.
“Thou struck deep, but not deep enough,” said Jack. “Now, thou bloody heathen, now’s a chance to redeem thyself.”
“Redeem.” The worst weapon-word. They talked of a redeemer, the Son of God, sent to earth to die for men’s sins, before men had even committed them. What kind of god was this, who killed his own son because he was mad at sinful men? Some Nausets had accepted this strange story because the English sent good men like Simeon Bigelow to teach it. They promised that if the Nausets accepted the Jesus God Ghost, the Nausets would be accepted by the whites now flooding the land.
Autumnsquam accepted nothing. He believed in Kautantowit and the spirits of the sky and the earth. But he could throw a harpoon through the eye of a needle, so the Hilyards accepted him, no matter what he believed.
The Hilyards were the best whites to buy Nauset land. They traded fair and paid him a fair share of every whale they slaughtered. And in this New World a Nauset could buy much for his people with a fair share. So when Autumnsquam prayed to Kautantowit for the uprising that would drive the whites into the sea, he prayed also that the Hilyards would be spared.
The world had turned many times since he had seen the Hilyards on that sad day at Aptucxet.
Jack and Christopher served at the Kennebec trading post for seventeen years while Jonathan reached manhood in the home of a devout Plymouth Saint and boatwright. Jonathan visited his father each summer, but as his apprenticeship came to demand more of him, his visits grew shorter. As his training in the faith revealed his father’s failings and his brother’s profane ways, his visits grew shorter still.
By 1644, Jonathan had grown into a fine boatwright and an upright member of the church. In that year, young Plymouth men formed a parish in Nauset, which they renamed Eastham, and Jonathan bought forty acres of white cedar marsh from Autumnsquam. Not long after, in hope of bringing his father back to the breast of the church, Jonathan invited him to Eastham. And Jack dreamed once more of the whales.
“ ’Tis time for thee to go,” Christopher told Jack, “afore thou grows too old for the hunt.” But Christopher would not go back to Plymouth with his father. He left the trading post and disappeared into the Maine wilderness.
Little was known of Christopher’s doings after that. From time to time, he appeared at trading posts with pelts, but soon disappeared again. It was said that he pursued Indian beliefs and lay with Indian women, though none had conceived by him. It was even whispered that he had taken an Abenaki wife. This was the truth, and it was good that it could not be proved, or he might have been hanged.
On Cape Cod, Jack Hilyard began as a drift whaler, flensing humpbacks that floated ashore or blackfish that beached in herds like cows. But as more men wandered the wrack line, carving their initials into stranded blubber, there were fewer whales to go around. Then Cape towns put a tax on drifters, because ministers, with the inspired logic of holy men, declared such whales to be gifts of God, thus the property of God’s church. And Nauseiput Island, where pilot whales most often stranded, now belonged to Ezra Bigelow.
But each fall, a man could stand anywhere on the bay and count spouts the day through. All he needed was a boat and the courage to use it.
Jack had the courage, and Jonathan built him the boat. It had to be light because it would be launched from the beach, so Jonathan made it of white cedar, light yet tough. It had to be maneuverable, because a wounded whale was a dangerous creature, so Jonathan gave it double ends to change direction in an instant. And it had to be big enough to stand up to the waves that roiled the bay in whaling season, so Jonathan made it a full twenty-four feet long, with five thwarts for five oarsmen and a fore-and-aft sail for swift running.
Then Jack raised a tower on the tip of Billingsgate Island, the place promised him that sad day at Aptucxet, and from there he watched the horizon for whales. One morning in 1650, as he shielded his eyes from the sun, he saw a familiar brawny figure striding over the sand.
It was Christopher, wearing two feathers in his hat and a necklace of wampum around his neck. He said his Abenaki wife had died and it was time for the Hilyards to hunt the whale together. The first day that Christopher and Jonathan hunted with their father, tears nearly ran down Jack’s cheeks, but he looked at the sea and blinked them away.
Autumnsquam envied Jack his sons, even if one was too holy and the other not holy enough. He had only his niece, who dressed now in a man’s clothes so that the elders would not know of her doings with Christopher.
“Me bloody good heathen, Jack Bloody Christian Hilyard. Me no need no bloody redeemin’.”
“That’s foul talk, Autie,” said Jonathan.
“Aye.” Jack laughed. “Foul talk from a foul old
pinse
—”
“Who needs no redeemin’,” said Christopher, “so long’s he can dart the iron and bring his niece whalin’.”
Amapoo glanced over her shoulder and gave him a smile. They were both in their forties, had both lost spouses, and had come once more to care for each other, though they were now old enough to be circumspect in their affections.
Jack held the steering oar and watched the whale. “A big ’n, lads, awesome big. I swear, if God come back tomorrow, he’d come as a whale, not some holy man.”
“God’s come already,” said Jonathan, “as a simple carpenter.”
Autumnsquam grunted.
At the oars they kept the cadence. The gentle swell rolled, the gulls circled, the smooth black body surfaced and spouted and sank again. Then the water ahead of them went rough, the dark blue beneath it turning to green, then to a milky white.
“Stoppin’ for a little lunch, he is,” said Jack.
Autumnsquam shipped his oar and looked over the side. “Silversides come!”
“Amapoo, fill your bucket,” said Jack, his voice now tightening. “The rest mind your tasks.”
“Mind the line!” added Christopher calmly.
“Big mouth come,” Autumnsquam hefted his harpoon.
Jack peered into water. “Aye, a big ’n for certain!”
The whale was rising through a green cloud of sand. The great maw was open. The surface was boiling with thousands of fish driven upward. And then—
“He breaches!”
A hole opened in the sea, curtained with living baleen fabric, alive with sand eels. The water splattered and danced with silver panic, and the hole in the sea made a sound, a great snort that resounded in the chests of every person aboard. Then the curtain closed over the fish and the whale showed himself full to the boat.
There was a smell about the beast, rank and fresh at once, a smell of land and of sea, of past and future. And there was a majesty about him, for certain. Like a king reclining after a meal, he settled back and set his eye upon his tiny subjects.
This was the moment to fill Jack Hilyard with awe. What madmen they were to challenge His Majesty the Whale. What fools… Then he shouted, “Strike ’er, Autie!”
And the Indian darted his iron deep into the rich black blubber.
For a moment, the whale stopped, as though shocked by the arrogance of such an attack. He swung his long armlike flipper to pluck out the harpoon. Then he raised his flukes and slammed the water in insult, sending up a wave to capsize the boat and chastise the boatmen.
Then he sounded in a forty-ton dive.
The harpoon line screamed around the loggerhead at the stern, slapped over the thwarts, and tore through the chock like a saw hacking the boat in half. It played out with such speed that the loggerhead began to smoke. Jack shouted for Amapoo to wet it and she splashed water everywhere.
In an instant, two hundred feet of line went as taut as a bowstring. Then it began to play a strange groaning tune as the boat was pulled from a northeast heading due north. Then they were off. The flying spume soaked them all. The air rushed past like a gale. And as the little boat pounded against the waves, every backbone pounded against the base of every skull.
The whale hauled them north eight miles, all the way to the tip of the Cape. Then he stopped. The long, low rays of the October sun burnished the sandhills and glistened on the back of the beast. When he spouted, a little rainbow danced in the mist above him.
“Out with the oars,” said Jack. “Now, he be ourn.”
Then the whale gave another great snort and sounded with such force that Jack nearly tumbled overboard. The loggerhead was torn from the cuddy board and flew down the length of the boat, smashing this way and that, knocking Amapoo senseless and cutting a deep gash beneath Jonathan’s eye. Then the whale was gone, line, loggerhead, and all.
“Bloody Christ,” said Jack Hilyard.
“Bloody Christ no redeem us, Jack Bloody Christian Hilyard. Me throw good, me stick good. But thee make damn bad boat.” Autumnsquam put his hand under the cuddy board and waved his fingers through the loggerhead hole.
“ ’Twas God, not the boat. God wished the whale to live.” Jonathan wet a cloth and held it to his cheek while his brother splashed water onto Amapoo’s face to bring her around.
“I suppose God wished us to live on Billins’gate ’stead of Nauseiput,” muttered Jack.
“I know not God’s mind on that matter,” said Jonathan, “though he saw fit to give the island to Ezra Bigelow.”
Autumnsquam’s eyes shifted from father to elder son. Talk of Nauseiput often came after they failed to catch a whale, or missed a stranding, or spent a day hauling wood to barren Billingsgate. And such talk brought out an old anger. But today, Christopher was not listening. He was studying a curl of smoke at the tip of the Cape.
It was a wild and a desolate place where men cut wood and ran cattle, but where none chose to live. Still, the harbor it encircled was the safest refuge between French Acadia and Dutch New Amsterdam, and many flags had been seen there, among them the fleur-de-lis of the French privateer… and the skull and crossbones.
Jack called for his glass.
“No pirate would want us,” said Christopher. “We got nothin’.”
“We got a damn good boat.”
“We got damn no-loggerhead boat,” said Autumnsquam.
Jack swept the glass over the harbor but saw not a single mast. Then he settled on the smoke. “Bloody Christ.”
“Pirates?”
“Men pilin’ green brush to make smoke.”
“How many?”
“Four. Two in breeches and two… in dresses!”
“Men in dresses?” said Jonathan. “Sodomists?”
“Frenchmen, methinks.”
French papists is what they were, two sailors and two shipwrecked Jesuits in black robes. Jack had never seen papist priests before and was greatly surprised that they smiled and shook hands like ordinary men. Their leader, Father Gabriel Druillettes, said they were on diplomatic mission when blown off course, and he begged passage to the place he called Pleymout.
“It be twenty mile to Plymouth,” whispered Jack to his sons, who stood by the boat, “and I don’t much trust papists, or men in dresses.”