“Then is this the way of a Christian, to behave like a savage but a hundred times worse?”
John dared not open his mouth, but he was full of wonder at hearing her say everything that was in his own mind.
Mistress Medlycott said with total proud conviction, “My husband would never have been party to such a slaughter of the innocents.”
There was a very long pause, and then Master Medlycott said quietly, “No, I would not.”
John said nervously, “Forgive me, Master Medlycott—I should have said nothing in public without your permission. I spoke from my heart and not my wit.”
Master Medlycott stood looking at him for a moment. John had grown so tall that they were almost eye to eye. Then Medlycott sighed, and put a hand briefly on John’s shoulder.
“Tha’ll be a good cooper, John,” he said, with the rounder English accent that came into his voice at certain moments. “But perhaps the best place for you will not be in this colony.”
“Yes,” John said. “I have thought about that.”
* * *
He came to see me one day a little while later. It was one of his visits early in the day, in the first glimmering of dawn. The salt marsh and its islands were less isolated than once they had been. More of the bordering woodland had been cleared for farming, and in season, the farmers cut salt marsh hay to feed their multiplying livestock. Men paused briefly on my island once in a while, though most avoided it because of the tangles of vines among its trees, which brought up fearsome blisters on their English skin.
The tide was low; only meandering little creeks remained in the marsh. John came along the stony ridge that I called the stem of the pear-shaped island, and I was there waiting for him.
“You asked the right question in the meetinghouse, John Wakeley,” I said.
He smiled a little. His gaze, as always, was a little indirect; all this time we had never looked each other straight in the eye. I felt he could see me only at the edge of his vision.
He said, “Do you know every single thing I say and do?”
“Not everything. I sense your thoughts. Some of them.”
“Do you guide them?”
“Oh no. You are your own man.”
“And full of horror at the massacre of the Pequots,” he said. “How can men listen to the screaming of children in agony, and have no pity?”
Some questions have no answer. In this world, one small thing leads to another small thing, and they twine within time to cause events, both good and terrible. We see this pattern only when we look back at the past, and though we talk of learning from history, we do not learn. And even a ghost cannot explain to the living why this should be so.
I said to John, “It is an endless river of conflict, that was set in motion by the first white man to set his foot on this land. And before that. By the first of my people to fire an arrow at another man, by the first Englishman to shoot a gun.”
“We should never have come here,” John said.
“There was conflict here between our tribes before you ever came.”
“But did any Indians ever cause a village of men and women and children to burn alive?”
“I think not.”
Grey light was washing into the sky above the sea, above the marsh, as the sunrise came close.
“I shall leave here as soon as I am done with my apprenticeship,” John said. “I shall go to join Roger Williams, who works against conflict.”
I had only a few moments left, to make a request.
“Will you do something for me, before that time comes?”
“I shall see you often before then,” he said. “But of course. Anything.”
“To remember something that has happened in a place,” I said, “my people make a memory hole in the ground. Two hands wide, two hands deep, lined with stones. It lies always beside a track, and is kept open by the generations after, and it holds . . . memories.”
“I’ll make one here,” John said eagerly. “Right here where I am standing.”
And as he was smiling at me, the edge of the sun flamed up over the sea, the first light of the new day, and I was gone from his sight, almost for the last time.
* * *
He came back to the island one afternoon, with a bucket of stones he had collected from the edge of the river that flows through the salt marsh. They were small, water-rounded stones, older than his people or mine. He had brought a short iron spade too. He would not be able to see me at this time of the day, he knew, but that was not why he had come.
At the beginning of the island, the place where the stem-ridge joins the top of the pear, he dug a memory hole. As he dug out the soil he tossed it into the marsh, where it disappeared among the grasses. The sides of the hole did not crumble, or collapse, because he was digging not into marsh mud but into solid sandy ground.
He lined the hole with his small stones, pressing them firmly into the sides. He gave it a stony rim as well. It looked beautiful. Watching him, I was suddenly back with Leaping Turtle, in our second village, digging the storage pit to keep corn for the winter. I wondered what had become of the pit and of the village, but I chose not to know. They too were almost certainly ghosts by then, replaced by an Englishman’s farm.
John stood back and admired his memory hole. A branch from a clump of scrubby oak put it in shadow; nobody would notice it.
“This is for you, Little Hawk,” he said to the air, and then looked up suddenly, as something out over the marsh caught his eye.
It was an osprey, broad wings lying on the breeze, coasting out toward the sea. He could just hear its strange, thin call.
Perhaps it was my Manitou. He is with me often, now as then.
John went back, along the ridge and across a field, and joined one of my people’s old tracks, now a white man’s road. Coming toward him he saw Thomas.
“There you are!” Thomas said. “I was looking for you—where did you go?”
John said, thinking fast, “I thought I’d pick blueberries. But it’s too early; they’re all still green.” He indicated his empty bucket, and hoped Thomas would not think to enquire about the spade.
Thomas didn’t. Like John, he was now a young man, but he still had his cheerful, uncomplicated disposition. “Th’art a solitary fellow, John. I shouldn’t do nearly so well without company. I used to wonder why you would creep away so early in the mornings sometimes, long before sunup.”
John blinked at him. He had always taken such care to be sure nobody noticed his visits to the island, so that nobody would follow him.
“But then I realized,” said Thomas amiably, “that you just wanted some time to be on your own. After all, you are never alone even in sleep, with Ezra snoring next to your ear.”
Ezra’s snores were legendary between them. He was not a large man, but the sounds that issued from his throat every night were like the grunts of an ox.
John grinned. “If Ezra marries,” he said, “I hope he finds a young woman whose hearing is dull.”
“Ezra is too much in love with casks to marry,” Thomas said. “Casks and the meetinghouse. I think he will be my father’s journeyman for the rest of his life. But you and I will not.”
They were walking back along the rutted track toward the workshop, since the two hours of freedom William Medlycott had granted them (at his wife’s request—it was her birthday) were almost up.
“We have a year of apprenticeship yet,” John said. When he had first arrived, Thomas was already working for his father, but Medlycott had soon put them both on the same level. He had said Thomas always treated cooperage as a chore until he saw John so clearly enjoying it.
“And then you will marry Huldah Bates and fly away,” Thomas said. “And perhaps I shall fly after you.”
John looked at him in surprise. His feelings for Huldah were no secret in the house, but he had never heard Thomas talk of leaving before.
“Surely your father hopes you will take over from him one day,” he said.
; “My father is a cautious man,” Thomas said cheerfully. “That’s why he has made Willie apprentice—he wants to feel there will still be a Medlycott cooper if I don’t fulfill his hopes.”
Of the six Medlycott children, Willie was the third son; a chubby thirteen-year-old often to be seen sitting at the workshop’s grindstone, solemn and intent, sharpening the cooper’s tools. He was a helpful, hardworking boy, though slower-witted than his big brother. Thomas often teased him, but gently.
“But of course you’ll fulfill his hopes,” said John, as they turned past the field where the four new Medlycott cows were grazing. He looked at Thomas a little uncertainly. Did he not really want to be a cooper?
Thomas said, as if reading his mind, “It’s not that I don’t want to be a cooper, but I have a mind to do it on board ship.”
“On a ship?” said John in horror.
Thomas snorted with laughter. “Tha looks as the minister would, if I said I coveted his wife! What’s wrong with a ship?”
“You can’t swim, for one thing.”
“I should be inside the ship, not towing it. That sea captain who came after casks the other day, he said the bigger vessels have their own cooper aboard. Think of it, John! Voyages to other countries! Maybe the West Indies! Adventure!”
“And a very uncomfortable death!” said John. He made a deep gurgling sound, and punched Thomas in the ribs.
Thomas punched him back, still laughing—and then added in a hasty whisper, as they came to the workshop door. “It’s a secret! Remember! Don’t tell!”
“Not I,” John said. It was a very small secret to keep, he thought, compared to the risk of being hanged for the Devil’s work of communicating with a ghost.
ELEVEN
The seven years were up and John was a journeyman cooper, skilled at making not only pails and tubs but every size of cask, with their quirky names: pin, firkin, kilderkin, barrel, hogshead, puncheon—even the enormous 108-gallon butt. From the beginning he had loved this occupation: the cooper’s craft of making circles. He was more skilled than Thomas, but they could both now call themselves coopers.
Master Medlycott and Ezra told them horror stories of their own graduation from apprenticeship, in large cooperages back in England.
“Very rough and rude it was,” said Ezra. “With all my fellows pulling off my clothes and rolling me down the bank into the river. In winter.”
“Praise the Lord there is no river by our workshop,” said Thomas.
Ezra said gravely, “But the pond is not far away.”
“They stuffed me naked into a great butt,” said Master Medlycott, “and poured more nasty kinds of liquid on me than I care to remember. The smell was in my hair for weeks.”
John and Thomas became nervous after this, and kept a cautious eye on Ezra and Master Medlycott at the start of every day. But in the end there was no ritual, just a family dinner in their honor, and Master Medlycott presented each of them with a signed letter called a Certificate of Craft. The children cheered—particularly Willie, who had by now realized, to his dismay, what a vast amount an apprentice had to learn to become a journeyman.
* * *
The community had grown, with its center still the meetinghouse, and I could sense that the elders who were its most important people did not admire John. He was known as a skilled craftsman, but they still remembered his challenging question to Walter Kelly—who had now become an elder himself, much given to expressing firm moral pronouncements on the behavior of his neighbors. It was felt by the elders that John Wakeley, by some accident of nature, shared some of the disturbing opinions of Roger Williams. Nobody would have been surprised or grieved if he were to leave to join the new community that Master Williams was said to have founded—along with a trading post—some seventy miles to the south.
This was exactly what John had in mind. He had written a letter to Roger Williams, sending it by a Marshfield merchant who was headed for the trading post, but he had no idea whether it ever arrived. Also he had no intention of leaving alone; he wanted to marry Huldah and take her with him. He confided this to Mistress Medlycott—choosing a day when her husband was away, since they both knew Medlycott’s mistrust of Roger Williams’s ideas.
It was late summer, and Mistress Medlycott was sitting on her porch in the sunshine, shucking beans. John sat on the edge of the porch, his long legs dangling.
“I know Master Medlycott will let me go,” he said. “But asking for Huldah is not so easy.”
Mistress Medlycott said, smiling, “Will she have you?”
“Yes, she will,” John said. “I’m very fortunate.” He smiled too, but then worry took over again. “But Master Kelly will never agree to it. He refused ever to let me visit her, as you know.”
Mistress Medlycott had already discussed this possibility with Mistress Kelly while sewing a quilt, though she wasn’t going to admit that. “Huldah is twenty years old, John,” she said. “A good age to know her own mind. And she is not an indentured servant—the arrangement between the two families was informal, I believe. I think you should be bold, and at Sunday meeting ask the Kellys for a chance to discuss this with them.”
She nodded her head firmly. She knew—though John did not—that Master Kelly was away for a week or more on business for the militia.
So it was Mistress Kelly to whom John nervously spoke after the sermon on Sunday morning, with Huldah hovering in earshot, and to his amazed delight she instantly gave them both her blessing.
“You must both go to Plymouth and ask permission of Huldah’s family, of course,” she said. “And you of yours, John Wakeley, though I know your mother will be pleased. I shall miss you sorely, Huldah, but out of affection, not need—the girls are of an age now to do all the chores for which you came. And so they should, to learn to be good, accomplished wives when they too leave home.”
And before long the Kelly daughters, now ages nine and twelve, were abuzz with excitement at the prospect of Huldah being married—though among these sober Puritan people, a wedding was a quiet civil matter and not a cause for a festive or even religious celebration.
* * *
And so John came to see me.
He told me everything that had been happening to him, as he always did. Even though he knew that I could sense his mind and his heart and every moment of his life, the telling was important to him. And to me. It was the way things might have been between our peoples, if they had not been so aware of difference.
We talked for a long time, for the last time, until it was almost the moment for the sun to rise beyond the salt marsh.
He said to me, “There’s no help for it—I have to leave this colony. I can’t live with the way they treat your people. Will you come with me?”
It was hard to explain to him.
“This is the only place where you may see me,” I said, “but still, wherever you go, I shall see you. I shall be with you. We are friends.”
John said, “I can tell nobody about you. Even Huldah would think me mad, or a witch. Why in the name of God are you still here, to be my friend?”
He spoke Pokanoket to me deliberately all the time now, even though he knew we could understand each other whatever language we used. He spoke it as if he had known it since childhood.
He put out a hand toward me, beseeching, something he had never done before in all this time, but there was no substance that he could touch.
And I had no answer for him, or for myself.
I said, “It is mystery.”
* * *
That afternoon, John found Goodman Bates sitting in the Medlycott living room with a mug of beer; he still spent the night there whenever he made a delivery. Mistress Medlycott was sitting at the table beside him, shelling beans.
The settlement had grown so much that Goodman Bates carried goods and people to and from Plymouth every week now. He had a grander wagon, covered in canvas over metal hoops, though it was still drawn by slow, sturdy oxen. Other drivers carried passen
gers much faster in carts and carriages drawn by horses, but they were also more expensive.
Goodman Bates raised his mug in salute. He had a great private disdain for the severer members of the colony, and was as genial to John as he had always been.
“Congratulations, free man,” he said. “I have just come from Duxbury, and I leave for Plymouth in the morning. I shall be glad to carry you and my niece with me at no charge, if that would please you. It is my gift to you both.”
John gazed at him, startled. He saw Mistress Medlycott smiling at her beans, and began to feel, rightly, that he was the object of a benevolent plot.
“I am most grateful,” he said. “But is not tomorrow very short notice for Huldah and Mistress Kelly?”
“Not at all,” said Goodman Bates. “Mistress Kelly said her girls were all cock-a-hoop at the thought of a wedding.”
He took a long draft of beer.
“Master Kelly is still away with the militia,” he added blandly, “but she said she was sure he would agree. We shall leave before dawn.”
Mistress Medlycott caught John’s eye, smiled a little, and looked away again.
John was thinking rapidly, and trying not to shout with delight. He was overjoyed at the thought of leaving with Huldah, but there were things he would now have to do in a hurry. He said, “Thank you again, Goodman Bates. If you will excuse me for a while—I have some work to finish.”
“Tell them all I require them within the hour,” Mistress Medlycott said, turning the spit over her fire. “This meat will be spoiled if it cooks too long.”
“I will,” John said.
And he left the old friends to their gossip, heading not for the noisy workshop, but for the barn. He checked Goodman Bates’s oxen, contentedly eating in their stalls beside the Medlycott horses, and then he took a spade and made his way through the trees to a clump of birch trees that he knew very well.
It was a grey, misty afternoon and a fine rain was falling. John cleared away a layer of dead leaves and dug the spade into the ground behind the birches. The soil came out easily, because he had dug here every few months for the past seven years. Once more he uncovered the familiar sight of my tomahawk, still intact, its blade still tightly embedded in the wood of the bitternut hickory tree. For the last few years it had been folded inside an old piece of leather for protection.