Caleb's Crossing

by Geraldine Brooks

I picked up scallop shells in diverse colors and sizes—warm reds and yellows; cool, stippled grays—and reflected on the diversity of God’s creation, and what might be the use and meaning of his making so many varieties of a single thing. If he created scallops simply for our nourishment, why paint each shell with delicate and particular colors? And why, indeed, trouble to make so many different things to nourish us, when in the Bible we read that a simple manna fed the Hebrews day following day? It came to me then that God must desire us to use each of our senses, to take delight in the varied tastes and sights and textures of his world. Yet this seemed to go against so many of our preachments against the sumptuary and the carnal.

Their fires had blazed up against the night sky and the music had grown wilder. The animal self inside me responded to it. Now, remembering that night, I cannot say how, or why, I felt as I did. I only know that the beat of the drumming touched me in some deep, inner, unsounded place.

Father called the pawaaws “murderers of souls.” He said they were wizards—kinfolk of those English witches whom we burned at the stake. He said they invited trance states, in which they traveled through the spirit world, communing there with the devil through imps that came to them in animal form. From these Satanic familiars, they drew power to raise the mists and the winds, to foresee the future and to heal or sicken people as the whim led them.

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. . . .”

Worse, perhaps, she feared that such talk of Satan might embolden that emissary of darkness to enter her womb and make a monstrous birth of that which grew there. I repented my question, and pressed no more. Although Solace was born unblemished five months later, there is no doubt: that ill-judged conversation and all that followed from it caused my mother’s blighted childbed, and her death.

The intensity of his prayers was such that had they been to the true God, it would have been a prayer exceeding the most devoted I had ever heard.

As all know full well, one must plant pease on the New Moon,

Since I came here I have heard that some learned men think that the Indians are the lost tribe of the ancient Hebrews, because of this similarity in the tongues. He went carefully, sounding each word in his head before he spake it aloud.

“Do you think that pawaaw killed our father?” I looked at my hands and tried to still a slight tremor. “I think . . . I believe he meant to. But surely we must hold that it is the Lord who dispenses tragical providences. Father is not the first of his faithful servants to be the subject of a dismal dispensation. To concede unto the pawwaw such a prodigious mastery . . .” “I think he did,” Makepeace interrupted. “I think he killed him as surely as if he had raised a warclub and stove in his skull.” “But Makepeace, think what you say. If the mist and gale rose to his order, it means Satan’s diabolical designs o’ermaster those of God. Can that be? You surely cannot believe so. . . .” “I think he should be brought to account for these awful works of wizardry. I have said as much to grandfather. As magistrate, he should act. . . .”

utterly rudderless.

So, this do I see: We must find favor with your God, or die. That, Storm Eyes, is why I came to your father.” His

He has patience enough with these mewling schoolboys, because he sees their promise. But he never had that degree of patience with her. He would dismiss her attempts in a most painful and belittling way.

He told me, also, that he had accepted that the power of our God was a greater power than any he possessed. I asked him then why he did not join his people in the Christian meeting. “How should I worship your God, no matter how powerful, when I know what he will allow to befall us? Who would follow such a cruel god?