John’s smile began to fade, but he still spoke civilly.
“We are infected with thoughts as Christian as your own, I can assure you, my friend,” he said. “And should be very grateful for directions, if you please.”
So Ezra gave them directions and a cool farewell, and he and the militiaman strode away.
And John, Jedediah, and Benjamin found their way to Peregrine Barrett, who was so pleased to hear their voices that he wept. He was a melancholy, bent old man, very fragile, with a widowed daughter who looked almost as old herself, but tended him with close devotion and had food and three beds carefully prepared for their visitors. They ate a soup of peas and onions, of which Benjamin had three helpings, and they drank cider that had been made from last year’s apples, gathered by Mistress Wilton from the two trees in the house’s little garden.
Then they prayed, and Jedediah preached a little, and old Peregrine was so moved and grateful that he shed a few more tears. His daughter’s eyes were moist as well.
“May God bless you all,” she said to John afterwards. “We go to the meetings on Sundays, of course, else we would face a whipping. But my father is Baptist in his heart and soul, and he has been so starved of his church’s company. However long he has left to him, now he will go to the Lord a happy man.”
John and Jedediah found this so touching that they took Peregrine’s Bible, made a selection of readings, and decided that next morning, before they left, they would give him a short service just as if it had been a Sunday. In freethinking Providence, members of the Baptist church apparently did this often in their own homes, with no need for a minister.
“I’ll turn thee Baptist yet,” said Jedediah to John cheerfully.
John smiled at him. “Never!” he said. “But I believe in freedom of worship. Like Roger. And like our Lord.”
* * *
So they all praised their God together the next morning—six of them in all, since Mistress Wilton’s neighbor had once been a Baptist and had asked if she might join them. They stood in a group in the little living room and Benjamin read from the Bible. But as I could see, and could not tell them, there were two men in the street outside, who had been peering in at the window the day before and were back again this day. When Jedediah was reading a last long prayer, the door of the house was suddenly flung open and the two men burst in, shouting, “Shame! Shame!”
They were carrying heavy sticks, with which they thumped the walls and the floor, looking as if they would prefer to be thumping the people. They were the constables of New Town, they said, and they arrested John and Jedediah for conducting a religious service in a private house, without being ministers of the colony’s church, and for preaching heretical beliefs.
“Did Ezra Clark send thee?” John said.
“Silence!” shouted one of the constables, and he banged his stick on the floor again. He glared at Mistress Wilton and her father. “And shame on thee too! Shame!”
Old Peregrine groped for John’s hand. “These are good Christian men,” he said tremulously to the constables.
“They would lead thee to Hell, old man,” said the second constable. He reached into his big pocket and produced two lengths of rope.
Then they tied John and Jedediah’s hands behind their backs, and took them to jail.
Mistress Wilton looked after Benjamin, who was both frightened and indignant. Two days later John and Jedediah were taken before the Boston magistrate and fined thirty pounds each, in English money. This seemed to be a huge sum, more than the cooperage earned in a year. I could sense John’s anger; it was a kind of cold fury, deep and passionate, and I had never felt it in him before.
“I will not pay it!” he said.
Jedediah said heavily, “We must. The alternative is a whipping, and you know what that does to a man’s body. My friends will raise the money, we can repay them over time.”
“No!” John said. “They must pay for thee, certainly—one of us must be able to work. But I will not bow to them, I will not! Trust me, Jedediah—I have reasons of my own. I will not submit to these men, who come to this land in the name of freedom and impose their own rules. Trust me. Let me do what I must do.”
And though Jedediah pleaded, and Benjamin, and blind Peregrine begged him to accept money for the fine, John would not change his mind. Jedediah’s fine was paid, and he was released. He was able to arrange for the shipment of their iron, but he was powerless to reach the only man who might have been able to intervene for John, Roger Williams, because Williams had gone to England seeking a charter for their colony and might not be back for a year.
A few days later John was taken before the governor at the General Court, and he was sentenced, with no opportunity for any defense, to thirty lashes of a whip.
John stared at the governor’s icy face and did not say a word.
They took him to the whipping post in the center of Boston one fine morning, stripped him to the waist, and tied his hands to the top of the post. A crowd of the good people of Boston came to watch. Whippings seemed to be fairly common among these English, for the breaking of one rule or another, and there were always people who would flock to see another being punished.
Among my people, our sachem administered punishments, but this colony had one man whose particular job it was to whip, or to brand faces with a hot iron, or to cut off ears, or to kill. They called him the executioner. He was, Mistress Wilton said bitterly to Jedediah, a devout Christian who went to church at every opportunity and prayed more loudly than anyone around him.
The executioner’s whip had a heavy handle and three very long thin strips of leather, each knotted at the end. He took it in both hands, raised it over his head, and lashed the three whips at John’s back with all his might. He did this very slowly, pausing between each lash to collect his strength.
After the first few lashes John’s back began to bleed. By the end it was a dreadful, bloody mess, but the executioner had not been able to make John so much as whimper.
I could feel John’s pain, and over it all his absolute determination not to utter a sound. And I knew that this was his answer to all of them: his refusal to be vanquished not just by the executioner, but by Ezra Clark, by Daniel Smith, by all those who harmed others in the name of their God, and above all by that devout man Walter Kelly, who had killed his friend.
I do not know how the news of John Wakeley’s cruel punishment reached the ears of my people. Nor did Jedediah, Benjamin, and the group of friends who carried him to Mistress Wilton’s house, for the one day that they were allowed to wash his wounds before taking him into banishment. They knew only that when they reached the outskirts of Boston the next morning, carrying John out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in a cart over bumpy, potholed roads, they were met by a large group of Pokanokets carrying a litter. One of them was Stardancer.
He reached out to Benjamin, whom he had known since he was a baby, and put his hands on the boy’s shoulders. He had a little English, these days. He said, “The Massasoit sends us to help you fetch the Speaker home.”
Benjamin looked at him with his eyes full of tears, and nodded, because he was too grateful to speak.
Their litter looked to me very much like the one on which Leaping Turtle and I and our fellows had carried Suncatcher out of our old dead village and into a new life. This one, however, was carried by eight men spaced round its four sides, and it was skillfully designed to give support to the body of a man able only to lie facedown, or propped on his hands and knees.
Very slowly and gently, they took John out of the cart and put him on the litter. The friends from Boston took their leave of Benjamin and Jedediah, and turned back. And at a slow, smooth pace, the Pokanokets carried John all the way to Sowams and beyond, to his own house and family. One of them was the son of a medicine man, and tended his back and gave him the juice of certain plants to drink, to help the pain.
The journey took three days.
Huldah was distraught, but she unders
tood what John had done. She would not let Benjamin or Jedediah say a word of self-reproach.
“He went there for Peregrine,” she said. “But the rebellion was his own. Refusing to pay their fine was his blow against their arrogance. He was fighting for freedom of belief.” She looked at Benjamin’s grim face, and at Samuel and Katharine. “Remember that,” she said.
And as Stardancer and his companions prepared to leave, in trying to express her gratitude she told him that they had acted with true and wonderful compassion, as her Lord would have done.
Stardancer smiled, and made his farewells. He made no comment, but I could see in his face the puzzlement that I still share. How could all these people have a religion that valued compassion and respect so highly, and yet so often treat each other with neither of those things?
THREE
Slowly, John’s back healed. Huldah gave birth to their fourth child, a boy whom they named Roger. The work of the coopers grew, as the town grew. John’s journeyman, Peter, moved south to Aquidneck Island to start a cooperage in Portsmouth, but Benjamin would soon be done with his apprenticeship and take Peter’s place. Samuel was apprenticed too. The family divided its time between farming and the making of casks, once in a while even fishing from a canoe, almost as Leaping Turtle and I had done.
Roger Williams came back from England with his charter, and was named president of Providence Plantation. More English families were arriving every year, and in all the existing towns around Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, a new generation of white men was taking over from the first. Like Benjamin, like my people, they were born here; they had never known any other home. But unlike my people, they were not born with the deep inherited sense of connection to this land, and the life lived upon it for centuries. Land, for most of them, was property, opportunity, and a source of wealth. And once my people too had begun treating the land as property to be sold, or exchanged for the white man’s goods, it was too late to stop.
Our father Yellow Feather had kept the peace by selling land, for a long time. He and Wamsutta even sold the land round their own village, to a group of the Plymouth leaders, and moved a little way south to Mount Hope, overlooking the bay. As the years went by, Yellow Feather, grown older and wearier, retired fifty miles northward to live a quiet life among the Quabaugs of the Nipmuck tribe. There he died, and Wamsutta became sachem of the Pokanokets as his father had been for so long.
The people from my village had long drifted in this direction, as the English settlements spread out from Plymouth and Boston to cover the land where once we hunted and fished and farmed. Leaping Turtle and Quickbird and their children were among those who had joined the groups moving nearer to Mount Hope, away from the “praying villages” in which the Indians had turned Christian, and they kept to the old ways. I watched them, and I watched as their children grew up, but I was bound more closely to watching John.
He spoke to me often, if he was alone in the woods or the fields. Whether or not he still believed that I could hear him, he spoke to me. He would tell me what he and Huldah and his children were doing, as he would have told a living friend. I think he could sense my presence, and he still missed talking to me, as I missed talking to him.
Our leader Wamsutta was not so intent on peaceful dealings with the English as his father had been, but he did his best. He even requested that he and his younger brother Metacom should henceforth be known by the English names of Alexander and Philip. But though the colony’s diplomatic governor Edward Winslow had been a good friend of Yellow Feather, his son Josiah Winslow was a very different man. He was now leader of the Plymouth militia. One dark day he came with ten armed men to confront Wamsutta, now Alexander, for having twice sold land not to Plymouth, but to the people of Providence Plantation.
Josiah Winslow arrested Alexander, our sachem, at gunpoint. After being held for a night at Winslow’s house in Marshfield, Alexander became ill, and a few days later he died. Many of my people believed he must have been poisoned, including his brother Philip, who succeeded him as leader of the Pokanokets.
I watched tensions rising between the multiplying English and the Indians, over the years that followed. Neither side was seeking war, but one incident after another brought the danger of it closer. When three Pokanokets were hanged by the English for a murder that some thought they had not committed, the tension rose to a peak.
I watched, and I ached for my people. And for John’s people too.
Philip, once Metacom, did not remember the day when John Wakeley rescued little Trouble from the trampling hooves of an English horse. He had been told about it, of course, but had forgotten it long since, and he had never really known John, the friend of his father’s once called the Speaker because he had a gift for speaking our language. That gift was no longer remarkable. Many Indians now spoke at least some English, and an English minister had even translated their Bible into the Massachusetts dialect of our language.
The problem between our peoples was rooted not in language but in many things that Philip could not control, on either side: greed, resentment, arrogance, pride. Along with the new generation of colony-born Englishmen there was a new generation of Pokanokets, younger, driven by the same high emotions. I saw many of them begin to collect around Mount Hope, and I saw the colonists in Providence Plantation begin to feel fear.
* * *
A meeting was called at the Wakeleys’ house, because everyone knew that John had had more dealings with Indians in his lifetime than anyone but Roger Williams. His four closest neighbors were there; they were gathered on benches outside the house, because it was summer, and two had brought their wives. Jedediah was there too. They were anxious to make a plan in case of an emergency; there was talk that Philip might declare war on the English, and Philip’s village was only a few miles away.
“He is an intelligent leader in a very difficult position,” John said, “and I don’t think he wants war. But I hardly know Philip—not as I knew his father.”
Jedediah sighed. “Plymouth planted the seed of this when they forced him to sign that treaty. Asking a sachem to become their subject—and to give up all his tribe’s muskets, which their own people had sold him!”
“He has been replacing them through land sales ever since,” said a grey-haired farmer, bent but still brisk.
“Of course,” said Jedediah.
A younger man said, “And these executions of Indians for murder—it was a bad business. I heard tell Josiah Winslow made their trial uncommon swift.”
“Plymouth has a lot to answer for,” John said.
Standing behind him, Benjamin glanced down. Inside John’s shirt collar he could see the edge of the long-healed scars. “And so does Boston,” he said.
The grey-haired farmer said, “Blaming does us no good. What are we to do if we are attacked?”
“We have muskets, and a good supply of powder and shot,” said the young man.
“If your farm is surrounded,” said the grey-hair, “that supply may not last long.”
“We shall all be scalped!” said one of the wives, and she started to cry.
Huldah came across and put an arm round her. I could feel the warmth in her that always reminded me of Quickbird.
“We shall not be scalped, nor killed,” she said. “We shall trust in the Lord, and devise the best way we can of warning each other in case of attack. So that if one family is in trouble, all the rest can come to its aid.”
The young farmer said, “A bonfire in each yard, ready to be lit. To send up a smoke signal, as they say the Indians used to do.”
“There is a garrison at Bourne,” said another. “The best thing if attacked would be to flee there, on horses. The Indians will likely be on foot.”
“Bourne is too far,” said the grey-hair. “My house is the largest here—perhaps we should fortify it into a garrison.”
Jedediah said, “A town is safer than a garrison. Perhaps you should all consider moving to Providence town.”
“Roger Williams has said the same,” John said. “He feels that we should all be prepared to leave now, in case things grow suddenly worse.”
The others all stared at them.
“But this is our land,” the young farmer said.
In an oak tree beside the house, a mockingbird was singing its loud double, triple song. On and on it went, a new phrase each time and yet on and on, on and on.
* * *
Among all the Pokanokets gathered at Mount Hope, I saw now the start of something I had never seen in life. They began the war dance, to the beating of drums, that goes on and on for days and weeks to bring courage and fierceness to a peak before an attack is launched. In the summer heat the young men danced, sweating, angry, aching for action. There were calls to attack the English. There were prophecies that no war would succeed unless the English attacked first. Dust swirled round the moving feet as the dance and the drumming went on.
My sister’s children were grown men and women, and their parents were dead. The oldest son, named for me, was a strong, tall warrior, respected by his fellows. He was there among the dancers, stamping, swaying. He knew nothing of John Wakeley; he knew nothing of me, except that long ago I had been killed by an Englishman. Like his brothers and all the men of his generation, Running Hawk was part of the force that began this war.
I watched, and I listened, with dread.
The English knew that the drums were beating, and they continued to fortify their largest homes into garrisons, where people might take shelter with soldiers to defend them. But they did nothing in attack.
An Indian messenger came to Roger Williams in Providence.
“Your people have driven us too far,” he said. “You must know that you yourself will never be harmed. But be warned that peace can no longer be maintained.”
Roger Williams sent at once for John and Huldah, and some other friends in outlying farms, begging them urgently to come at once and take refuge in his house. One of his sons thundered up to the Wakeleys’ door on horseback, shouted his message to Huldah when she ran out, and then cantered off again to the next farm.