Caleb's Crossing

by Geraldine Brooks

In the morning, I did not speak of what I had overheard. Listening, not speaking, has been my way. I have become most proficient in it. My mother taught me the use of silence. While she lived, I think that not above a dozen people in this settlement ever heard the sound of her voice.

Like Adam’s family after the fall, we have all things to do. We must be fettler, baker, apothecary, grave digger. Whatever the task, we must do it, or else do without.

For her, the apple, for me, the white hellebore—different plants, proffered from the same hand.

Known as an abortifacient and

I made this island mine, mile by mile, from the soft, oozing clay of the rainbow cliffs to the rough chill of the granite boulders that rise abruptly in the fields, thwarting the plough, shading the sheep. I love the fogs that wreathe us all in milky veils, and the winds that moan and keen in the chimney piece at night. Even when the wrack line is crusted with salty ice and the ways through the woods crunch under my clogs, I drink the cold air in the low blue gleam that sparkles on the snow. Every inlet and outcrop of this place, I love. We are taught early here to see Nature as a foe to be subdued. But I came, by stages, to worship it. You could say that for me, this island and her bounties became the first of my false gods, the original sin that begot so much idolatry.

My hand is unlovely, since father did not school me in writing, but as this relation is for my own eyes, it makes no mind. Since I cannot say, yet, whether I will find the courage to stand in meeting some day and deliver an accounting of myself, this will have to do.

where

I know that father sets great store in Caleb. He sees him, more than any other here, as a great hope to lead his people. Certainly Caleb seems to want this also; no one toils at his book more diligently; no one has gathered such a rich harvest of knowledge in the scant seasons he has had to study these things. But I also know this to be true: Caleb’s soul is stretched like the rope in a tug o’ war, between my father and his own uncle, the pawaaw. Just as my father has his hopes, so too does that sorcerer. Caleb will lead his people, I am sure of it. But in which direction? Of that, I am not in the least bit certain.

It is a matter of pride to me, son, that your grandfather insisted, even though he had paid the English authorities for the patents, on paying the sonquem of this place also.

Seems to be a variant of sachem, or chief/leader.

You will hear, perhaps, that not all the sonquem’s followers agreed with their chief in this matter, and some now say that he himself did not fully understand that we meant to keep the land from them forever. Be that as it may, what’s done is done and it was done lawfully.”

I thought, but did not say, that grandfather could hardly have expected the fine points of English property law to count for much to some three thousand people whose reputation, prior to our landing, had been ferocious. If there was pride to be taken in the matter, it could only be pride in the canniness of grandfather’s plan, and of father’s courage and tact in executing it. Father had been but nineteen years old when he came here. Perhaps his youth and gentle temper had persuaded the sonquem that there was no harm in the “Coatmen,” as they called us. And what harm could there be to them, from just a score of families, setting down cheek by jowl along a little edge of harborfront, while their own bands ranged hundreds strong across the island wheresoever they would?

How I could have astonished him, and my brother too, even then, had I opened my mouth and ventured to say, in Wompaontoaonk, that I had troubled to know them; that I knew them, in some particulars, better than father, who was their missionary and their minister. But as I have set down here, I had learned early the value of silence, and I did not lightly give away the state of myself.

As father struggled with the new language, so too did I learn, as a girlchild will, confined to the hearth and the dooryard as adult business ebbs and flows around her. I learned it, I suppose, as I was learning English speech, my mind supple then and ready to receive new words. As father and Iacoomis sat, repeating a phrase over and over, often it fell into my own mouth long before father had mastery of it.

I have often wondered if what happened later had its roots in this: that the Indian tongue was bound up in my heart with these earliest memories of my brother, so that, on meeting with another of his same age who spoke it, these tender and dormant affections awoke within me. By the time I met Caleb, I already had a great store of common words and phrases. Since then, I have come to speak that tongue in my dreams.

As if they speak of east or west as we do. Nothing is so plain and ordinary in that tongue. Wop, related to their word for white, carries a sense of the first milky light that brightens the horizon before the sun appears. The ending sound refers to animate beings. So, their name for themselves, properly rendered in English, is People of the First Light.

I was used to offer a prayer for them, that God hasten their way hither, and that he grant their morning bring not fear, but a peace such as we here are come to know, under the light hand of my grandfather’s governance and the gentle ministry of my father. As I think of it now, I haven’t said that prayer in a while. I no longer feel at peace here.

Aside from the Bible and Foxe’s Martyrs, father held that it was undesirable for a young girl to be too much at her book.

my thoughts turned again to my lessons, and I finally felt able to ask father when they might resume. He told me then that he did not intend to instruct me further, since I already had my catechism by heart. But he could not stop me overhearing his lessons with Makepeace. So I listened and I learned. Over time, while my father thought I was tending the cook fire or working on the loom, I shored up my little foundations of knowledge: some Latin here, some Hebrew there, some logic and some rhetoric. It was not hard to learn these things, for although Makepeace was two years my senior, he was an indifferent scholar.

I think my elder brother carried a great burden, knowing that all of father’s hopes for a son who would follow him in godliness and learning now rested on him alone. There were times I worried for my brother. At Harvard College, the tutor surely would not be so forbearing as our patient father. But I must own that my envy overleaped my concern most of the time.

The more I allowed that I had learned what my older brother could not, the more it began to vex father. His mild countenance began to draw itself into a frown whenever I interrupted. For several months this was so, but I did not read the lesson he intended for me.

“Bethia, why do you strive so hard to quit the place in which God has set you?” His voice was gentle, not angry. “Your path is not your brother’s, it cannot be. Women are not made like men. You risk addling your brain by thinking on scholarly matters that need not concern you. I care only for your present health and your future happiness. It is not seemly for a wife to know more than her husband . . .” “Wife?” I was so taken aback that I interrupted without even meaning to speak. I was but recently turned twelve years old.

But it is your destiny to be married to a good man from our small society here, and I would do you no favor if I were to send you to your husband with a mind honed to find fault in his every argument or to better his in every particular. A husband must rule his home, Bethia, as God rules his faithful. If we lived still in England, or even on the mainland, you could have your choice of educated men. But on this island, that is not the way of it. You can read well, I know, even write a little, sufficient to keep a day book, as your mother does, for the benefit of the household. But ’tis enough. Already it sets you far apart from most others of your sex. Tend to your huswifery, or look to developing some herb lore, if you must be learning something. Improve your wits usefully and honorably in such things as belong to a woman.”

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.

So many things grew and lived here that were strange to us, because they had not been in England. We named the things of this place in reference to things that were not of this place—cat briar for the thickets of vine whose thorns were narrow and claw-like; lambskill for the low-growing laurel that had proved poisonous to some of our hard-got tegs. But there had been no cats or lambs here until we brought them. So when he named a plant or a creature, I felt that I heard the true name of the thing for the first time.

I justified the hours with him in the baskets of delicacies that I carried home. It was my duty, was it not, to help provide for my family? As I watched the jars of preserves fill the shelf, the strings of drying cranberries crisscross the rafters, and the strips of smoked shellfish laid in against a hungry winter, I felt satisfied in my self-deception.

At first, I followed this wild boy hungering after his knowledge of the island—his deep understanding of everything that bloomed or swam or flew. Soon enough, a curiosity about an untamed soul had kindled, and this, too, caused me to seek him out. But it was his light temper and his easy laugh that drew me close to him, over time, until I forgot he was a half-naked, sassafras-scented heathen anointed with raccoon grease. He was, quite simply, my dearest friend.

It was many weeks before he would even give me his name, that being considered a grave intimacy among his people. And when he did finally confide it to me, I understood why it is that they feel so. For with his name came an idea of who he truly was. And with that knowledge came the venom of temptation that would inflame my blood.

I misliked the work, and not just for the blackened, greasy air. It is one thing to butcher a deer killed with a swift arrow or blast of musket shot, or to wring a hen’s neck, as I have done often enough, delivering the bird to a death sudden and unforeseen. But the whale was generally alive when they commenced to carve it, and the eye, so human like, would move from one to another of us, as if seeking for some pity. I wanted to tell the creature that pity costs dear indeed when the oil of one Leviathan could yield near eighty barrels and keep our village bright throughout a long dark winter without mess of pitch pine knots or the rancid stink of cods’ liver oil.

I am sure father would have counseled against Nortown’s plan. But Makepeace saw no flaw in it, and readily agreed to go with the other men. “Bethia, you shall come also, and do a share at the try pots, and make my meal for me,” he said. All my life I had been schooled that it was not my place to argue with him, but as I hastily packed what we would need to spend a night on the open beach, and later, as our boat beat up the coast amid that small fleet of thieves, I felt a great heaviness, as one does, when one knows oneself engaged in an act of greed and sneakery.

We moored the boats in the lee of the cliff, where they could not be sighted from Nomin’s island, and commenced to unload them.

Showing consciousness of guilt...

driftwood to feed the fires, which would not be set until nightfall, so that the Indians on Nomin’s island would not descry the smoke.

As I walked away, I heard the men’s voices shouting in coarse merriment even as they hewed at the whale’s living flesh. I thought of the shining bass in my friend’s hands, the raised rock, and his gentle words of thanks to the creature. This no longer seemed outlandish to me, but fitting and somehow decent. The idea that this heathen youth should show more refinement than we in such a matter only added to my leaden mood.

My first thought was to drop my burden of wood and run back to the beach, to warn the others that the Wampanoag were not on distant Nomin’s island, but nearby, and in numbers large enough to threaten us if they caught us red to the elbows with the blood of a whale that was rightfully their own.

The pawaaw was calling upon his gods, praising, thanking, beseeching. The drums beat in tempo to the rhythm of my heart, which seemed to be swelling at the sound. I felt my soul hum and vibrate in sympathy with his prayers. There was power here; spiritual power. It moved me in some profound way. I had striven for this feeling, week following week, as the dutiful minister’s daughter at Lord’s Day meeting. But our austere worship had never stirred my soul as did this heathen’s song. Thou shalt not have strange gods before me . So I had been instructed all my life. Still, it was to those strange gods that I wanted to cry out with the same abandon as the pawaaw.

My thoughts veered wildly. I turned on the sand, unable to find a comfortable position. I felt disgust at the behavior of those all about me, our low willingness to steal and deceive even as we preened and boasted of our godly superiority. Subdue the earth. So the Bible said, and so we did. But I could not believe that God meant us to be so heedless of his creation, so wanton and so cruel to those creatures over which he had given us dominion.

Of a sudden he turned to me and announced that he had decided to name me over, in the Indian manner. He said he would call me Storm Eyes, since my eyes were the color of a thunderhead. Well and good, said I. But I will rename you, also, because to me you are not hateful. I told him I would call him Caleb, after the companion of Moses in the wilderness, who was noted for his powers of observation and his fearlessness.

He went on then, with much animation, to relate a fabulous tale of giants and whales and shape-shifting spirits. I let him speak, because I did not want to vex him, but also because I liked to listen to the story as he told it, with expression and vivid gesture. Of course, I thought it all outlandish. But as I rode home that afternoon, it came to me that our story of a burning bush and a parted sea might also seem fabulous, to one not raised up knowing it was true.

I kept a count as he enumerated, the final tally of his gods reaching thirty-seven. I said nothing. At first, because I hardly knew what to say to one so lost. But then, I remembered the singing under the cliffs. An inner voice, barely audible: the merest hiss. Satan’s voice, I am sure of it now, whispering to me that I already knew Keesakand, that I had already worshipped him many times as I bathed in the radiance of a sunrise, or paused to witness the glory of his sunset. And did not Nanpawshat have power over me, governing the swelling, salty tides of my own body, which, not so very long since, had begun to ebb and flow with the moon. It was good, the voice whispered. It was right and well to know these powers, to live in a world aswirl with spirits, everywhere ablaze with divinity.

did not know enough, then, to have an opinion. But what I have learned since tells me that neither Makepeace nor father truly grasped the root of the matter, which is that we see this world, and our place in it through entirely different eyes. When father had first come to negotiate for some land here, the sonquem had laughed at the notion that anyone thought they might “own” land.

I might—I should—have echoed him back at once: “My father forbids it.” It had been instilled in me often enough that preaching was not women’s work. No woman was to think of giving prophecy in meeting, though any unlettered cowcatcher might exercise his gifts there, so long as he be a man. A woman might not even ask a question in meeting, if some matter was obscure to her. I had been instructed to ask at home, privily, if I needed scriptural guidance.

And in any wise, even if this man Adam and his woman displeased your God, why should he be angry with me for it, who knew not of it until today?” 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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

Oftentimes, these exchanges vexed me, and I broke off and rode home struggling for self mastery and resolving to have no further relations with this hard-headed pagan. Yet within a sennight, I would seek him out again, lingering in the places which by now were familiar haunts to both of us until he sprang up in his sudden way, materializing in the tall grasses or beech groves. And so it went on, as another year turned. We each of us grew and changed, gaining new responsibilities in our separate worlds, but always making a space where those worlds could collide and intertwine. As time passed it became harder for me to keep a bright line between my English self and that girl in the woods, whose mouth could utter the true name of every island creature, whose feet could walk trackless through leaf bed, whose hands could pull a fish from a weir in a swift blur of motion and whose soul could glimpse a world animated by another kind of godliness.

“It is a good thing—for a girl,” she said. “It will not be so, when you are become a young woman.”

It did not seem pressing then, this truth that my mother had voiced, that one day I would have to leave my other self behind forever: that it could not go on, this crossing out of one world and into another, that something was bound to happen to put an end to all of it. If I had thought clearly, and considered, and prepared my mind for it, I could not possibly have fallen so easily into the sin that brought God to smite us such a terrible blow. Looking back, it is hard to imagine how I could have been such a fool.

lappity

According to Brooks in a broadcast interview, lappity is Wiltshire dialect for uncertain or unreliable character.

But this, also: I burned to know what he would know when he entered that spirit world. I recalled, too well, the alien power I had felt that long ago day and night on the cliffs. I have said that I would write only the truth here, and the truth is this: I, Bethia Mayfield, envied this salvage his idolatrous adventure.

I thought of all the hours I had spent alone with Caleb. Innocent hours that would make a harlot of me in my father’s reckoning, and in the eyes of our society. It was well that no one knew of them.