Caleb's Crossing

by Geraldine Brooks

And so I commenced that very day to teach Caleb his letters:

had then to explain sin, of which he had no ready concept. He would not concede that he had ever sinned himself, and seemed much offended when I assured him of

it. His brow drew itself heavier and heavier, until he waved a hand as if sweeping away noxious smoke. “Your story is foolishness. Why should a father make a garden

for his children and then forbid them its fruit? Our god of the southwest, Kiehtan, made the beans and corn, but he rejoiced for us to have them. 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 kne...

The women 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.

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.

But they say that since adult life is full of hardship, childhood should be free of it.

had come to grasp that the chief principle of their grammar is whether a thing to them is possessed of an animating soul.

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.

In their minds religion and medicine mean much the same thing.

when they die, their souls go not to the southwest, as you have been taught.

“Then answer me this: why did God make a hell before Adam and Eve had sinned?”

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.

the third year of my friendship with Caleb.

“After today, I will not walk with you anymore. Do not look for me,” he said.

“This is no matter for tears,” he said. “It is my time to become a man.”

Tequamuck will take me to the deep woods, far from this place. There I will pass the long nights moon, the snow moon and the hunger moon alone.” His task was to survive and endure through the harsh winter months, winnowing his soul until it could cross to the spirit world. There, he would undertake the search for his guide, a god embodied in some kind of beast or bird,

who would protect him throughout his life. His spirit guide would enlighten his mind and guide his steps in myriad ways, until the end of his life.

Who are we, really? Are our souls shaped, our fates written in full by God, before we draw our first breath? Do we make ourselves, by the choices we our selves make? Or are we clay merely, that is molded and pushed into the shape that our betters propose for us? In the days following Caleb’s leavetaking, I turned fifteen,

learned much later that he had never been in Nobnocket during the season of sickness, nor even heard of it until its fury was spent and all his family killed.

That spring, mother went to her childbed and did not rise from it. We entered our own season of mourning,

if Caleb and Joel prove themselves as able to profit from his instruction as he expects, they will remove to the mainland with Makepeace, to be examined for matriculation to the Harvard College. It seems the college

has built a second house there, alongside the English one, exactly for the education of Indian youths, with the aim to make them into instruments for the propagation of the gospel among the tribes.

Father had fetched Caleb the day before, from Manitouwatootan, and brought him to grandfather’s house to pass the night.

“Always,” he replied. “Not a morning has passed, for as long as I can remember, that I did not sing a greeting to Keesakand upon his rising.”

what a vast thing it was that these boys were being put to—having, in Caleb’s case, no formal grasp of English grammar, and yet being called upon to master the peculiarities of Latin, with Greek and Hebrew to follow.

In truth I had not passed above a dozen sentences with him through the years, and had formed no opinion of his character.

We followed that with the squash as the heat increased, and presently the vines covered all the unploughed ground, smothering unwanted growth. If neighbors raised their eyebrows, I did not care. Their opprobrium was a small price for the many hours I no longer had to spend with a hoe, fighting back the weeds.

On other nights, talk at board might go on in Latin, as practice for the boys, who sorely needed it, since they would be allowed to speak nowt else at college.

Caleb and Joel believe the scale weighs fair. For they keep faith with my father’s ambition for them and work diligently at their lessons. They are each of them determined to matriculate to Harvard next leaf fall. They have taken to heart father’s belief that they are destined to lead their people out of darkness, and to do so they must endure hunger and cold as they press their understanding to its limits.

Yet tears filled my eyes. They come all too easily now. They come now, again, even as I write this. It seems I could weep forever, and yet not empty the reservoir of my grief.

On the day following her burial, upon her grave I found evergreen sprigs, which surely was no English doing. I feel sure Caleb was behind this, for Joel was not raised in the heathen traditions of his people, which say that their god made man and woman from a pine tree,

Father, it seemed, had become fierce, abandoning a gentle gospel of love and forgiveness in favor of fire-and-brimstone threats, promising hell and damnation and bloody vengeance to nonbelievers.

The Wampanoag, in ways which are not plain to me, in concert decided upon their own observance of father’s passing. They marked it in a most singular manner. As soon as father’s loss became known to them, each one, when traveling up or down the island, would fetch from the shore a smooth white

stone such as can oft be found there. These they carried until they passed the place where father had taken farewell of them. There they deposited them. Within days, there was a cairn.

The stones had a kind of inner radiance that answered to the sun’s changing light at different times of the day. It seemed a speaking sort of monument, unlike the mute gray headstones in the English burying ground.

Makepeace jumped to his feet. “I am to be a minister! It is all I have ever thought of. . . . Please, grandfather, you cannot mean to . . .”

And here grandfather’s gaze shifted, unexpectedly, to me. “If you, Bethia, agree to be indentured to Mr. Corlett, as housekeeper at the school.” “Indentured?” My face must have been a study in astonishment.

“We make slaves of our defeated enemies whom we hate, to avenge a death or the like grave wrong. How comes he to think it right that you, a sister, should be enslaved for his profit?”

We must find favor with your God, or die. That, Storm Eyes, is why I came to your father.”

“He said that of course all learning must have Christ in the bottom, as the only foundation. But since God had seen fit to give us Christ’s gospel in Greek, there was surely a sign for us in that. And then he told us the Greeks’ story, of how Prometheus stole fire from the gods. He said that fire represented the lamp of learning that had been lit by the ancient Greeks and passed to us, to keep alight.

the college was not a stone’s throw away. The older building was a large clapboard structure, which must have seemed very fine when they first built it on these wild coasts, almost twenty years earlier. It was a full three floors, with three wings set off at right angles to the main structure. In the center was a tall turret with a bell tower. It

“Then I hope you will not take it amiss if I, as you now know, the daughter of a minister, recommend to you some verses: Matthew, 21:26-28. You will note that Jesus does not enquire as to connections before he extends civility to those of a servile condition.”

“You will like, I am sure, to visit the college library—John Harvard’s books, you know, form the spine of the collection,

“Marriage is a heavy choice for an English woman.” “Why do you fashion it thus? Surely for any woman?”

“Not so, for ours. A woman does not cease to be a person, in our law, just because she has got herself a husband. In most cases, he will go to live with her family, not she with his, so her daily state changes little. And if, at some later time, she wants to leave him and be married to another one, then that can be settled through parley.”

I ran a hand along the tooled leather spines. Cicero, Isocrates, Virgil, Ovid. Luther, Aquinas, Bacon, Calvin.

“Caleb, no. You must put it behind you. I do not say forget it. Who could forget so horrible a crime? But set it by, for now, and get you to your books. That is the best thing you can do for her. Distinguish yourself, and then, one day, you might take your place among those whose word shapes justice here.”

even if I accepted him, we stood a year off the safe harbor of a marriage bed. An engagement, I reasoned, would create more, not less, temptation.

What need has a wife and mother to cudgel her faculties with the seven arts and the three philosophies?