Ezra knew the psalm by rote, as he knew most of the Bible. But he held the book when he prayed, because the book told their reason for being, and their reason for being
there
, and it would be their salvation. With the book to guide them, they could climb from the valley of the shadow of death to this hilltop of death itself and know that God would not desert them. He had a purpose for both the living and the dead.
A young woman named Priscilla Mullins, who had already buried her brother and would soon bury her father, stared at the body of her mother. Simeon Bigelow stood with his arm around Christopher. Master Jones folded his hands and bowed his head. And Jack Hilyard, stock-still and wordless, leaned on his shovel at the foot of his wife’s grave.
“ ‘Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.’ ”
Ezra glanced across the open grave mouth and told Jack to turn the first shovel. But Jack neither looked up nor moved.
Ezra whispered, “Jack, the first shovel.”
Jack still stood motionless.
“The Indians may spy, and the dead must be buried,” Ezra said more urgently.
Jack simply looked at Ezra, and his breathing grew harder, so that steam came in long freezing plumes from his nose.
Ezra then asked Master Jones if he would do the burying. Without a word, Jones took the shovel that young Christopher held and dug it into the sand.
None by that frigid grave mouth would ever forget the sound Jack Hilyard then made.
“It was as if,” wrote Jones in his log, “the shovel struck Jack’s belly rather than the earth.”
Christopher, hearing the sound again decades later, would remember the hopelessness he felt on that dark and grieving hill. Priscilla Mullins cried out in sympathy with Jack. Simeon Bigelow heard the cry of Job, so utterly human that it made him wonder that he had not cried out himself at his own wife’s death. And Ezra Bigelow heard the sound of Satan bursting forth, not simply a cry of grief but an utter denial of the psalm’s power and God’s plan.
Jack jumped at Jones and grabbed the shovel. “I be the gravedigger! I know death better than any of you.” And he sent the sand splattering onto his wife’s legs.
“Jack,” said Simeon, “let me do it for thee.” He reached for the shovel, and Jack pulled it back with such force that Simeon nearly fell into the hole.
“I be the gravedigger. Me and me boy.” Jack thrust the shovel upon his son, then picked up his own. “Come on, lad, help me bury thy mother and them other poor dumb souls what come here thinkin’ God was watchin’ over ’em.”
At that, Priscilla Mullins began to sob.
“Shovel, boy.” Jack Hilyard whacked his shovel against his son’s.
Christopher looked down at the shovel, then into the hole. “I can’t, Pa. I can’t bury her.”
“Shovel the sand, damn thee!”
“Jack!” cried Simeon.
“Have respect for the dead,” said Ezra Bigelow.
“I respect ’em. I respect ’em more ’n thee. I
do
somethin’ for ’em. I
bury
’em.” Then sand and ice crystals flew in the moonlight. Faster and faster Jack’s arms went, as if he had been seized by madness. Had this colony the time to worry over witchcraft, he might have been burned on the spot as the warlock priest of some black coven, doing his evil ceremony in the moonlight.
Jones tried to grab him, but Jack pushed away and held up the shovel like a club.
“I
be the gravedigger,” he cried. “I bury the dead, so’s them what prayed the dead would live don’t waste their energy as well as their breath.”
“ ’Twas God’s will,” said Ezra. “All is God’s will.”
“Why do you talk like this over my mother and your own good wife?” Priscilla Mullins wiped her tears from her eyes. “I’ve lost two dear ones, but my prayers were not wasted.”
“Mayhap not. But mine were,” answered Jack.
“Damn you, Jack.” Simeon Bigelow ripped the shovel from Jack’s hands. “Take your boy home and grieve this venom out of you.”
But before Simeon’s words could calm him, Ezra Bigelow put himself between Jack and the grave mouth. “Aye. Go home. Stay longer, you coast too close to blasphemy.”
“Blasphemy?” cried Jack. The word was a quick match striking powder in his brainpan. “Blasphemy? God treats me prayers like dung and I fear blasphemy?”
Ezra Bigelow looked at his brother and the others. “If you care for this man’s soul, quiet him.” Then he took Priscilla by the elbow and started down the hill.
“Go!” screamed Jack. “Go back and watch more of ’em die, and pray in their ears while they do. Then pray over their meat when they’re dead.”
“Pray for yourself.”
“God damn you Ezra Bigelow, and God damn your prayers.”
“Quiet yourself,” urged Simeon. “Think of the boy.”
“I do think of him, all the time.” Jack strode to the top of the hill and shook his fist at the moonlight. “I do think of him, ‘cause God won’t, God damn him.”
“Blasphemy.” The word rushed out of Ezra Bigelow as though Satan were crushing his chest. “Blasphemy!”
“I blaspheme the blackness!” shouted Hilyard.
“Quiet afore the whole colony suffers!” Ezra cried.
“How much more can the colony suffer?” Hilyard looked again at the sky. “God damn thee, thou cold, heartless, hidden bastard of a God.”
“No more of this!” cried Ezra Bigelow in a voice as terrifying as Hilyard’s own.
“God damn thee for lettin’ us think thou hear our prayin’ whilst the best of us”—Jack’s voice cracked—“the best of us”—he dropped to his knees—“whilst the best of us goes into the ground.”
Jack’s blasphemy was finished, and the terrible pain of faithlessness now poured forth in great gulping sobs. The others were running up the hill to comfort him, but Ezra went no farther than the grave mouth. He knew that God would not hold the grieving words of a Stranger against the colony, though Ezra would hold them against the Stranger himself.
iv.
By the time the sun was up full, its light dancing like quicksilver on the sea, Jack Hilyard and his son were four miles south of the settlement, on an Indian trail that curved along a high bluff. They carried what they could of blankets, clothes, a hammer and saw, some dried beans, and a greasy duck. The boy wore Jack’s cutlass, and Jack kept a match smoldering in the metal box on his belt.
He had decided he could pay no heed to love or sentiment. He had good friends in the colony, for certain. They had comforted him in the night, given him what beer they had, and stayed with him until he slept. But they could not protect him or the boy from the sickness. And while Kate’s last request had been for them to stay with the colony, Jack believed the sickness had clouded her mind. In health, she would have told him to heed the voice inside him, especially when God left him to his own devices. After last night, Jack expected little help from God, and even less from those who held regular conversations with him.
He wondered if God had bothered to tell Ezra Bigelow where sickness came from or where it went. God had offered no answers to Jack on the matter. He could think only to get himself and his son away. Better to chance savages and starvation than scurvy and the coughing death.
He looked over his shoulder. Christopher was striding steadily along the path, his hand on the sword hilt, his head tilted slightly to keep the boil on his neck from rubbing against his collar. The boy was acting the brave soldier and Jack’s chest filled pride.
Christopher had not spoken since they slipped away. That was not unusual. He was a quiet lad, and any twelve-year-old with any sense listened more than he spoke. Indeed, anyone of any age who had seen what Christopher had might have been struck dumb as a stone. But there was strength in youth, and even in the worst of times, Christopher watched and listened and sought to understand what passed before him.
He now had no mother, no confidence in God, and no community beyond his father and the stunted pines along the path. His sense of the uncertainty of things was great. But he found meaning where he could, and like all boys, he seized on physical things, on the pain of the boil, on the weight of his pack, but most of all on the cutlass hilt in his hand. His father had shown confidence enough to give him a man’s weapon, and pride overcame his fear.
Just before nightfall, they reached the north bank of a tidal river that snaked from the bay into the pine-covered hills. They were at the shoulder of the Cape, in the sachemdom of the Scussets. And here the boy saw his first Indians.
They came on the flood tide, driving their canoe upstream through the last red glow of dusk. The canoe was laden with pelts, but the Indians did not labor at the paddles. They steered with short, powerful strokes and let the current sweep them toward the campfires glimmering in the valley.
This world belonged to them, thought the boy. They rode like spirits on the water. One wore a loose deerskin shirt, the other nothing more than a coating of grease, as though neither felt the cold that made Christopher’s knuckles ache. And the colors of the canoe and the deerskin and their copper adornments, indeed the color of their very flesh, seemed to be drawn from the reds and deepening browns of the dusk around them.
This world belonged to them, he thought again. And they belonged to it.
At the bend of the river the Indians were met by others, who helped them lift the canoe out of the water and carry it up the valley.
“What are they doin’, Pa?”
“Makin’ a portage, it looks like.”
“Where are they goin’?”
“With all them pelts, they must be traders. May be an easy way to get that canoe into the water on the other side.”
Not far beyond the hills were the headwaters of another tidal river that flowed southwest. But Jack’s thoughts were on another place.
He pointed beyond the mouth of the river, to the beach that ran east into the gathering night. “Once it’s dark, we’ll take to the strand. And keep to it we will, so’s not to miss the place or stumble into any villages. In a day and a half, we’ll be there.”
“Will the Indians let us stay where the whales beach?”
Jack gave out with a short laugh. “I seen what a piss-poor job they done flensin’ a blackfish. When I show ’em how to do it proper, they’ll make me lord bloody mayor.”
v.
February 15, 1621
. Seas calm, air cold, damp mist freezes on rigging and decks. This may prove the worst month yet. Three more have died, another half dozen have taken to beds. Even William Bradford is laid low, feverish and unmindful of anything but his own misery.
And Simeon Bigelow now brings distressing news. The day after his wife’s burial, Jack Hilyard and his lad went hunting, promising return when they had a full sack of ducks. After four days, Simeon grew worried and went to Jack’s house, where he found missing Jack’s hand tools and other truck which would not have been taken hunting. Simeon reckons that Jack and his son are run off and asks me to fetch them back.
Had Hilyard jumped ship, I would have punished him myself. But Simeon is made of kinder stuff. He says only a man who has lost a wife can know the pain of a man who loses one, and this colony cannot lose strong males like the Hilyards.
These words do not move me, but Simeon believes Jack has gone to a place where whales strand. If I am to whale here next year, I must needs know where the beasts are to be found, ’specially stranders, which are good as gold sovereigns on the beach. So I send word ashore that I go on another seal hunt. In truth, ’twill be a manhunt.
vi.
It had been several days since Autumnsquam went into the woods, to a place of tall trees near a creek. He had chosen a pine with a wide girth and chopped it off as close to the ground as he could. He had stripped it of bark, which he could use as covering for his
wetu
, pushed the log into the creek, and floated it to the beach where he had fought the white men. There he had spread dry pine boughs and wood chips across the top of it and started his fire. Ever since, the fire had been smoldering into the log, slowly hollowing out the center, while he shaped the outside with a stone ax.
He was sharpening one of the ends, so that it would go smoothly through the water, when Aspinet came out of the woods. Two others were with him, and Autumnsquam’s first thought was for his woman. Her time had nearly come. If they brought news of her, their faces said that it was not good.
Instead, they told him that the Namskakets had seen a white man and boy building a
wetu
on Nauseiput, the place between two streams. A few days earlier, runners from the sachem Iyannough had brought word of a white man and boy walking east along the Great Salt Marsh. Iyannough knew they were not the whites who stole people from his village, and so he let them pass. The next day, the Nobscussets had seen them near Sesuit, and the Setuckets as well.
“Iyannough could have killed them,” Autumnsquam grunted. “Or the others. But they wait for the Nausets.”
“Iyannough saw no reason. He is young like you, but he may be wise.”
“If Iyannough had been our sachem, white men would live here now, on our land. But we”—Autumnsquam thumped his hand on his chest—“taught them fear.”
“Fear drove them no farther than the Patuxet land. And now they are back.”
“So we kill them. We kill any who try to settle.”
The old sachem shook his head. The sinews in his neck stood out like pieces of twine. The copper pendants glittered in his ears. “They may come to trade knives or metal or because other whites do not like them.”
Autumnsquam poked at the smoldering coals in his canoe. “There are more of us, so we should kill them, or soon there will be more of them, and they will kill us.”
“They have powerful weapons,” said one of the others.
“Clumsy weapons,” said Autumnsquam. “A Nauset can shoot five arrows for every shot from the white man’s gun.”
“But in the Patuxet land they have put up guns as long as canoes, guns like those
les françaises
shot from their boat. They say that with these guns, the white man can sit in the Patuxet land and shoot all the way across the bay.”