“Even Ezra is generous,” he said in wonder. “They are all warmhearted; they work so hard for us.”
“It is a village, a larger family,” I said, thinking of my own.
John said, “But they still need warmer hearts for people outside the family. They need to understand.” He grinned at me. “Teach me some more words, Hawk.”
So our lessons went on, after the house was finished, and in the years after that, and while John learned words we were each learning the mind and feelings of the other. We were truly friends.
And from this ordained distance that I did not understand, tied to the island and to John Wakeley, I watched my people. My own village, my own family. I could not speak to them, but I watched them with love, and longing, and concern.
My grandmother had taken my death very hard. She knew that One Who Waits valued her greatly as a wise woman in our village, trusting her advice and judgment, but her attachment to this world began to grow thin. I believe she felt that when I had come home after the plague destroyed our village, I had brought her back from the edge of death, and now that I was gone she saw no reason to stay. So before many moons went by, Suncatcher died too, and there was a greater mourning. But hers was a gentle and dignified death, and she traveled quietly into the west, into the mystery that I have yet to solve.
And as the years went by, Quickbird married not Wolfchaser, as I had thought she might, but my friend Leaping Turtle. Though they had grown up like brother and sister, violence and grief had turned them separately into different older people, and it was those two people who came to love and live together.
I watched them, and wished them happiness. But their lives were changing. Thousands more of the white men continued to arrive from over the sea, and their settlements multiplied and spread, as our father Yellow Feather and other sachems sold them the use of land. This selling was not what either side thought it should be.
For my people, the land and the sea belonged to the Great Spirit, and all that could be bought or sold, attacked or defended, was a share in its use. For the white man, the land itself could be owned, as a man owns his hand or his foot, and therefore they now believed themselves owners of the land on which we used freely to live and plant, fish and hunt.
So gradually my people moved south, or west, away from the new houses and farms—and away from the greed of the great hogs that the white men released into the forest, who would gobble up not only the acorns that were food for the deer, but often the crops that we were growing too.
This I watched. So did John.
Most of his time was spent in the house, the workshop, and the meetinghouse. William Medlycott worked hard, and expected the same from them all. Gradually, steadily, John was becoming a cooper. He had gone from making simple pails and tubs to the much more complicated art of making casks, and even shaping his own staves.
He had grown stronger too. He was taller than Thomas now, and his shoulders were broad, his hands big enough to keep tight hold of the stave he was shaping at the draw bench. Mistress Medlycott, who felt her life’s work was to nourish the young, gave him second helpings at every meal.
Whenever he could get away at dawn or twilight, he made his way to the island and to me. He took great care that nobody should see or follow him. Each time I taught him more of my people’s language, and he grew more and more fluent. But while he lived at the cooperage, this was a dangerous secret—for there was no living person who could have taught him. And he could hardly explain that he had learned from a ghost. The white men believed that only witches could speak to ghosts, and in the land they came from, witches were tortured and killed.
He made a mistake only once.
When he was in the workshop one morning splitting hickory poles, to make the hoops that would hold a cask together, he heard voices raised outside. Two were the deep voices of Medlycott’s English workmen, accented and familiar, but with them was a lighter, questioning voice, using what sounded like a word of Pokanoket.
“Please,” he heard. “Please . . .”
John put down his drawknife and went outside.
Large, bearded Edward and Isaac had paused in loading a cart with oak staves and were trying to understand a young Indian, neat in deerskin tunic and leggings, who had emerged from the trees edging the yard. He had something in his hand, holding it out hopefully, but he had very few words of English.
“Borkid,” he was saying. “Need borkid.”
“Thinks we’re a farm, does he?” said Edward amiably. He said very loudly to the Indian, “No! Not here!”
“Down the road!” boomed Isaac, pointing to the gate.
“Borkid!” said the Indian insistently. His face lit up as he saw Ezra emerging from the kitchen with a bucket in each hand, and he pointed. “Yes!” he said. And added, in Pokanoket, “I want to trade for a bucket, if you will allow me.”
John opened his mouth, and quickly shut it again.
“He knows you, Ezra!” Edward said in relief. “Ask him what he wants.”
Ezra’s few words of my language had made him the house translator, in spite of his low opinion of my people. He looked with distaste at the young Indian and said in Massachusett, “Want trade?”
The young man’s face lit up. “Yes, please,” he said. “I have more to carry than I expected. I should be grateful for a bucket.”
Ezra looked at him blankly. He said again, “Want trade?”
The young Indian’s smile faded. “Borkid,” he said again in his attempt at English, and reached helpfully for one of the buckets in Ezra’s hands.
Ezra angrily jerked it away from him.
Isaac said mildly, “Perhaps he is asking to buy a bucket.”
“To steal one, more like,” Ezra said. He gave the young Indian a sour look and said again, “Trade.”
“Of course,” said the young man politely in Pokanoket. “I’m afraid I have only what I was wearing, because this was unexpected, but here it is.”
He held out his opened palm, and on it was a necklace, a string of beautiful small fish carved from bone. Stepping forward to peer over Ezra’s shoulder, John caught his breath in admiration.
But Ezra snorted in disdain and shook his head violently. “These heathens think only of vanity,” he said. “Is that his idea of a fair exchange? A bauble for a craftsman’s bucket? Amongst devout God-fearing folk?”
“ ’Tis a pretty thing,” said big Isaac unexpectedly.
Ezra ignored him. He was full of righteous indignation, his tufty yellow beard jutting. “No!” he said to the young Indian.
“But it’s all I have with me,” said the young man. “It’s very valuable. I had it from my grandmother, and if she knew I were offering it for trade, she would eat me alive.”
Ezra understood none of this; he heard only argument and threat. He dropped one of his buckets and pointed imperiously at the trees. “No!” he shouted. “No trade! Go!”
The young man blinked at him.
“Get rid of him!” Ezra snapped at Edward and Isaac. He picked up the bucket and stalked off into the workshop.
The big workmen loomed over the young Indian, but he was already turning away, his back very straight. Uncomprehending and dignified, he stalked away into the woodland from which he had come. Edward shrugged at Isaac, and they went back to loading their cart.
And John, distressed, darted back into the workshop, seized a bucket he had made the week before, and ran across the yard and into the trees.
He was at once on one of the old paths made by my people, leading to the lake, but it was a while before he caught up with the young Pokanoket. He found him with a girl, both of them staring at him in alarm.
In an instant John was babbling in Pokanoket, without thinking. “Forgive me, I had to follow you to apologize for the rudeness of my fellow. I know he sounded hostile, but he did not understand what you were saying.”
The young man was so astounded at this fluency that he didn’t think to question it. “I meant no
harm,” he said. “I simply wanted a container. I came with my sister to help her gather cattails; we filled our baskets and Small Dove was so excited, she wanted to carry more.”
“See how many there are!” said Small Dove to John happily. She was very young, he saw now, with gleaming black hair down her back. He saw too that cattails stood in a great fringe at the end of the pond, round which he and Thomas annually gathered willow shoots for Mistress Medlycott.
“Grandmother sent us to this pond,” said Small Dove. “She knew of it from when she was a girl. She will be so pleased!” A heap of cattail heads lay at her feet, beside two grass-woven baskets brimming with the long rushes.
John said, “That’s an excellent harvest.”
“I knew the barrel-maker lived nearby,” said the brother, “so I thought I could get something for her. But—” He shrugged.
John held out his bucket to Small Dove. “Here. For you. For your cattails.”
Delighted, the girl reached out a hand; then she paused and looked up at her brother. “Fast Cloud?” she said.
Fast Cloud reached up to his neck, and John saw that the string of intricate little carvings was back around it. The young man started to pull it over his head.
“No,” John said. “This is a gift. An apology.”
“We must trade,” Fast Cloud said, trying to maneuver the necklace over his scalp lock.
John said, “I have sisters too. Please.”
They looked at each other, and I could feel Fast Cloud noticing, as once I had, the honest appeal in John Wakeley’s blue eyes. There was a moment’s tension, and then the young Indian smiled, let the necklace drop back, and held out his hand. John took it.
“We thank you,” Fast Cloud said.
“Go well,” said John.
Small Dove happily took the bucket, and they all inclined their heads to one another. Then John went back along the faint trail through the trees. He reflected as he went that the grandmother of the two Indians had lived in a different time. Today that pond was considered to belong to Master Medlycott, as part of the land granted him by the Plymouth Court.
When he emerged into the Medlycott yard, Ezra was waiting for him. He confronted John, furious, his bearded chin thrust out like a weapon.
“You went after the Indian, didn’t you? Did you trade that bucket with him?”
“It was my bucket,” John said. “I made it.”
“Have you no shame? To trade for a decoration! Do you pay no attention to the preacher? The Lord requires modesty of apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety, the Bible says. Not necklaces!”
John said patiently, “I listen very carefully to the preacher, Ezra, but his care is my immortal soul, not the rules of trading. In any case I didn’t trade for the bucket. I gave it to him.”
“What?” Ezra said.
Isaac and Edward paused in their loading, and looked at John with astonishment.
John said, “It was a gift.”
“To the heathen,” Ezra said, dangerously quiet now. “I send away a begging heathen boy, and you deliberately reverse that decision. And go after him with a gift.”
John’s patience was starting to fray. “He wasn’t begging, he was trying to trade. You were too hard on him. He needed a bucket, and the necklace just happened to be all he had with him to offer you.”
Ezra said, “And how do you know that?”
And to this, John suddenly realized, he could give no answer. No answer that might not lead to his being hanged as a witch.
There was a long pause.
John took a deep breath, and he said, “I’m sorry, Ezra. I suppose I was guessing. I behaved foolishly. I’m sure you were right. I beg your pardon.”
So Edward and Isaac went back to moving the pile of staves, and the incident faded from their minds very soon. But in Ezra’s tight, pious mind, John was confirmed as a soft young man on the slippery path to becoming, like Roger Williams, an Indian-lover.
* * *
Sometimes, in the warmer half of the year, John was able to talk to Huldah Bates at the meetinghouse. She too was growing taller, and she was prettier than ever; she looked like a woman, and because they liked each other, they were awkward in talking together. He did learn that although she was fond of the children who were her charge, and of Mistress Kelly, she was made miserable by Master Kelly, who was a bullying, demanding man.
And one magical day, John was able to spend more time with her.
“John,” said Mistress Medlycott early one morning, “wouldst like to visit thy family today?”
He stared at her in wonder. She smiled.
“Goodman Bates will come this morning with a load of timber,” she said. “He’ll take Master Medlycott back to Plymouth with him for a day and night, for business—and you shall go too. Thy mother needs to see how her boy is becoming a man.”
John knew this must be her doing; Master Medlycott had released him to see his mother and sisters only a very few times in the last four years. “Thank you,” he said. “Oh, thank you!”
“Goodman Bates will be carrying his niece, too,” Mistress Medlycott added, deliberately casual.
“Huldah Bates?” John said. He was trying very hard to sound casual too, as his spirits leapt like a deer in spring.
“The very same,” said Mistress Medlycott, and she went off to feed the hens, smiling to herself.
It was a sunny day in late summer, before the fall of the leaves; the trees overhead glowed red and orange among the green. John and Huldah shared the back of Goodman Bates’s cart with a dozen small barrels called firkins, sent from the cooperage to a Plymouth customer, and they talked and talked, and laughed, and enjoyed being together. Even William Medlycott, when Goodman Bates paused to water the oxen, chatted amiably with them as they all ate their bread and cheese. He talked about England, something John had never heard him do before.
“The autumn leaves are gaudier here than where I grew up, that’s for certain,” he said, the rich, rounded accent more marked in his voice than usual. “But you should see the bluebells in the spring, back there. Blue as the sea, all over the ground, like nothing you’ll see here. A Devon spring is beautiful, and after that it’s never so hot as here, and never so cold, though we have our storms, oh dear me yes, roaring in off the Atlantic.”
“You sound homesick, Master Medlycott,” said Huldah, who had been born in England but couldn’t remember it.
“Not I,” said Medlycott. “I left an ungodly land to have freedom to worship with the Saints, and to live without rule of bishops or fear of a monarch—and so shall my children and their children, by the grace of God.”
“With more chance to thrive,” said Goodman Bates, getting to his feet and brushing off crumbs. “As shall we this day, if we set off again now.”
And the cooper and the carter discussed business the rest of the way to Plymouth, while John and Huldah sat together among the barrels, talking their way into a relationship that would last as long as they lived.
Plymouth was far bigger and busier than they remembered. They could see a bristle of ships’ masts in the harbor. John climbed down from the cart at his family’s house, and his mother wept happily at the sight of him. Her three-year-old son Samuel was afraid of him and hid his face in her skirt. There was another new baby too, a girl, whimpering in a cradle that was being rocked by John’s youngest sister, Patience. Patience jumped up to greet him, and for a moment he did not recognize her, because she was no longer the little girl he knew.
Now she was thirteen years old, and her older sister Mercy was sixteen—and living on the other side of town, caring for a sick neighbor. John wouldn’t be able to see her this time. He begged paper from his mother and wrote a note for Patience to carry to Mercy later. Then Daniel Smith came home from work, covered in sawdust as usual, and was not pleased to find paper used for so frivolous a reason. He gave John a cool welcome and warned him that he would sleep that night on a wooden shelf in the storage room behind the kitchen. r />
When Daniel had washed, he reported to the family that there was excellent news in the town today: Roger Williams had been called for reprimand by the General Court in Boston.
John said impulsively, “But he is a good man!”
“Indeed? Have you met him?” Daniel enquired loftily.
“Yes, I have. He came to preach in Marshfield when he was pastor here in Plymouth.”
“Then you should know better,” Daniel said. “He has dangerous ideas, and is a peril to the young. All through his two years here he was consorting with the savages as if they were Christians—and now he is attacking King Charles’s charter for presuming to grant us their land! Governor Bradford sent him back from Plymouth to Salem because of his strange opinions, and clearly he has grown worse.”
“His thinking is very advanced,” said John’s mother unhappily.
“Advanced!” said Daniel. “It’s ridiculous!”
John swallowed down the angry words that wanted to spill out of his mouth. He said, “What else has he said?”
Daniel made a noise like a snort. “He questions the very basis of our government! All God-fearing men swear allegiance to the colony, but Roger Williams holds it is not proper for them to use the words ‘So help me God.’ Nor should the magistrates enforce our rules to keep the Sabbath Day holy, he says—or even to worship!”
It was like listening to the spluttering of Master Medlycott. I was constantly amazed by the heat with which Englishmen talked of their religion.
John said, “This is what he called the separation of church and state, is it not?”
Daniel scowled. He said curtly, “The court has called his opinions erroneous and very dangerous, and they are right! They may well banish him.”
“Where would he go?” said John.