Ezra pulled open the barn door and cast his eyes on Jack for what would be a final time. “Watch for the sheriff on the next Sabbath, and if thou holds more Quaker meetin’s in this barn, watch that thou don’t lose this island.”
ii.
Four times the following week, Jack went through the woods to the house on Skaket Creek to beg Christopher and Patience to move their meeting to some patch of off-island woods. But they refused.
It had been the marshes, more than whales or white cedar, that drew settlers to Cape Cod. Most colonists were farmers before anything else, and the marshes that spread for miles behind the beaches and around the creek mouths yielded fodder for all the cattle from Sandwich to Eastham. It was true that cattle fed on salt hay needed more fresh water, but on Cape Cod, there was an abundance of that as well.
On Saturday Christopher and Patience went onto the marsh to cut hay. Jack knew they were doing it not to feed their forty head of cattle, but for a better view of Marshal Barlow, should he come riding over the marsh. At the end of the day, they brought a cart of hay up to the barn and loaded it into the loft. Then they took out the benches and arranged them in a square. In a Quaker way, they were preparing for war.
From a perch atop his woodpile, Jack watched them go arm in arm down the path. It was good that they had each other and their faith, he thought, because they seemed intent upon losing everything else.
He was not one for musing, but the strangeness of these Quaker ways lay heavy on his mind. Though his hair had long since whitened and his skin had been boiled red by sun and incessant wind, he had reached threescore and ten without feeling old. Wisdom, a grandchild, and the gaining of Nauseiput had kept him vibrant. Now age was descending as quickly as night.
With the russet oaks fading into shadow, Autumnsquam brought Jack a bucket of beer, the great leveler of men.
“I do need a draft,” Jack said. “Sometimes methinks I’ve nothin’ else left.”
“Thee got good land,” said Autumnsquam. “Thee got two son.”
“I may have to fight for the land ’cause of the sons.”
“Once this land belong to Indian. Once I have son. Now Nausets is children who pray at white man’s feet, and land…” Autumnsquam dipped the tankard into his bucket and drank. “Thee got what me dream of.”
Jack looked out onto the darkening ocean. Not a light shone anywhere on the water or along the north-running coast. It was the time of day when Jack felt most alone, yet most surely in the presence of God. For who, other than God, could turn the great blue bay to blackness so easily? What more devotion did men need make than to do their work each day and watch God darken the world each night, to see in the coming of the night what came at last to all men? There was simplicity beyond anything his sons now sought.
“Autie,” he said, “thou hast
friends
. Friends be better’n sons sometimes. Thou fights all thy life to get thy sons together in a good place, and one decides to raise his childrens in Plymouth, while the other goes about challengin’ the law…”
High above them, a gull squawked and dropped a long white stream that splattered onto the roof of the barn and trickled down the shingles. Jack sipped his beer and studied the stain. “Autie, that barn be good for nothin’ but catchin’ gull shit and Quakers. What say we burn it down?”
“I say you stupid Jack Bloody Christian Hilyard.” Autumnsquam drained his beer and got up. “Go to bed.”
“Where you goin’?”
“Sick of stupid bloody Christians. Go to Portanimicut. See some Indian.”
“They’re all Christian Indians there. Simeon Bigelow’s done a fine job in his prayin’ town.”
Autumnsquam grinned. “Some still make fuck with free Nauset.”
“Thou old cock. I’d like a bit o’ that meself.”
“Thee too old.” Autumnsquam shouldered his harpoon. He always carried it in the woods because there were wolves in the woods and wolf heads brought bounty from the colony. “Thee no burn barn, I find ugly squaw make fuck with thee.”
By the time Autumnsquam reached the King’s Road, the moon was up full, a big yellow hunter’s moon that blotted up the stars and warmed the black ground. But even in the moonlight Autumnsquam saw the orange glow in the sky above the island.
“Jack Stupid Bloody Christian Hilyard,” he muttered. Then he made for Portanimicut and the best bloody Christian he knew.
iii.
Marshal George Barlow of Sandwich relished his work. No man doubted that. He gave out punishment with a smile and sought out Quakers as though charged by God himself. But there were some in the colony, and not all of them Quakers, who gave the devil more credit for George Barlow.
He was a glutton and carried a glutton’s bulk about on the back of his horse. He was a drunkard and wore a monstrous red nose as a badge of dishonor. But worst of all, he was an abuser of the office given him by the magistrates.
While collecting fines for the colony, he collected tribute for himself—a bolt of good cloth from this Quaker, a bolster tick from another, a copper kettle from a Quaker woman who had nothing else in which to cook. And around the pommel of his saddle he carried a whip of three knotted leather strands that he was more than happy to use on the backs of Quaker men or women.
They were the perfect fugitives. When chased, they did not run, and when captured, they did not resist. He could not be certain that the other inhabitants of Jack’s Island would be as docile. That cantankerous old rodent Jack Hilyard was better with a lance than most men were with a musket. And living with him was the Indian harpooneer in the whales’-teeth ornaments. Barlow unfurled his whip, then urged his horse ahead.
But before he went far, he heard…
singing
.
Quakers did not sing. At some of their meetings, they barely spoke. And these voices were behind him, sounding loud and off-key, in no way pleasing to a Christian ear. No more than half the singers seemed to know the words to the hymn they sang, because the singers were Indians. A procession of perhaps fifty was marching down the path from the King’s Road, and leading them, like Moses, was Simeon Bigelow.
“Good mornin’, Marshal Barlow.” Simeon cradled the holy book in his right arm, while in his left hand he swung a walking staff. His wild beard and mighty girth were known to praying Indians from Portanimicut to Sandwich. For his work among them, he was near as revered in this colony as Moses had been in his.
“Reverend Bigelow—”
“Not Reverend. Never been ordained. Just a Christian spreadin’ the good news.”
Simeon Bigelow stopped beside Barlow’s horse, while the Indians paraded onto the marsh, led by one in a blue coat who wordlessly bellowed out the tune to the Fifteenth Psalm. As he went by, this Indian gave Barlow a smile and a broad wave, and the bracelet of whales’ teeth jangled at his wrist.
“Who is that?” Barlow demanded.
“One from my Portanimicut Plantation. A fine prayin’ Reformist.”
The Indian took to the planks that led across the marsh, spun back to the others, and swung his arms as though directing a chorus. He sang and shouted and jumped from one foot to the other, like some long-legged bird.
“A lively old Christian,” said Simeon.
“Aye,” answered Barlow suspiciously. “Does he know there’s a Quaker meetin’ goin’ on over there this very minute?”
“Quakers?” Simeon threw back his head and gave a laugh. “We been invited for an orthodox service.”
Barlow leaned down, bringing his veined red nose close to Bigelow’s beard. “I got this knowledge from your own nephew Brewster.”
“A lad of strong imagination. But look you at my Indians. For every one in leather breeches or deerskin dress, there be another in a cloak or woolen skirt. I spent twenty years teachin’ ’em to be good Christians. Wouldst I be so dumb as to expose them now to”—he nearly spat—“Quakers?”
In the middle of the island, Jack Hilyard was watching the smoke rise from the foundation hole into which his barn had collapsed. His head throbbed, less from beer than from shame, and he struggled to compose words that would explain what he had done.
“Thee son love thee much.” Amapoo came up behind him.
Jack turned. “And I love him. That’s why I done this, Amapoo… Patience.”
“I think he know, but he still mad.”
“I don’t want to lose this island.”
“Him neither. But he no want lose his soul.”
“Do you Quakers… do you forgive folks?”
“Christ forgive his killers.”
Then Jack heard a strange sound… singing. He took Patience by the arm and went toward the marsh.
First he saw his son and the Quakers, clustered at the top of the path. Then he saw a long line of Indians winding across the marsh. He could not believe that it was Autumnsquam who was leading them, cutting antic capers in the mud and acting as though he were plainly out of his head. Nor could he believe that Marshal Barlow, after a last look across the marsh, was going back the way he had come.
“Friend Bigelow!” Christopher shouted, his voice echoing joyously through the woods. “Thou art friend indeed.”
“The Lord’s house has many mansions.” Simeon came up the path behind his Praying Indians. “I see no reason for the Quakers not to live in one. Any more than I would deny my flock their holy songs.”
“Nor do I,” shouted Jack Hilyard, pushing his way through the Indians and Quakers now gathered at the top of the path. “The Portanimicut Prayin’ Injuns be invited to feast with us this afternoon, and the Quaker families be invited to meet in me
house
if they can find nowheres else.”
“The marshal may come back,” warned Simeon.
“Let him come.”
“You’ll not burn your house if he approaches?”
“ ’Twas not me what burned the barn, Simeon. ’Twas fear.” Jack looked at Christopher. “This island be a free place, free for any faith me son wants to follow. Free for as long as I can keep it so.”
From the marsh, Autumnsquam watched Jack Hilyard and his son shake hands. It made him glad. He had saved his friends and their land another week. But it was their land now, not his or his children’s.
He had let the procession go by, let them continue to sing the white men’s song even after Barlow was gone, and as he watched them going up from the marsh, he knew that they were all lost to him now, Amapoo and all the praying Nausets. They were all bloody Christians. They had forgotten Kautantowit. But none of them knew that it was Kautantowit who had saved the island, Kautantowit who had sent the shitting gull to warn him.
The old Nausets had believed a man could know the way of life by watching the passage of the seasons. In October, while the sun still warmed the earth, mellow reds came into the oaks and crept through the bear grass and bogs. Old age came to the year, and serenity descended on the land.
Autumnsquam had seen sixty cycles pass. The landscape had turned red around him. But the sky had turned to smoke above him, because in October the white farmers burned off the tall trees to widen their fields. Autumnsquam felt no serenity, nor was he a part of anything, not even of Jack Hilyard’s little island. And the gull was circling above him once more, crying its lonely cry.
Jack wondered why Autumnsquam was still standing like a scarecrow out on the marsh. He waved, but Autumnsquam did not move.
“Chris,” said Jack, “go tell him we be butcherin’ one of the swine. That’ll get him up here.”
Christopher loped down onto the marsh. “Autie—”
Suddenly the Indian’s hand shot into the air, and the whalebone bracelet rattled at his wrist. “So long, stupid bloody Quaker!”
“Autie!” Christopher started after him.
But Autumnsquam turned and ran toward the mainland. When he reached the edge of the marsh, he waved again. “Go back. Plenty good bloody Christian squaw back there now. They no care what color their god. They no care what color their babies!”
“Autie, wait!”
“Me follow gull.” Autumnsquam glanced again at the bird, which had wheeled west, and then he was gone.
July 9
Conceived by the Pilgrims, idealized by Jefferson, admired the world over… Geoff Hilyard sometimes thought the town meeting had as much in common with Franz Kafka as it did with the Founding Fathers.
In the old days, it had been held in the Victorian town hall, an intricate filigree of rooflines and turrets, delicately shingled and painted in warm tones of cream and yellow, a perfect symbol for the mingling of Gothic complexity and American optimism in small-town politics.
But small towns got bigger, and now the meeting was held in the gymnasium of the new school up in the scrub pine. There was nothing wrong with it, as school buildings went—a lot of interconnected brick boxes with big casement windows and plenty of parking—but it could have been anywhere in America. After it got dark and the quartz lamps threw that vibrating orange light onto the grounds, it could have been anywhere in the solar system. And the gym smelled of jockstraps.
The only town official expected to support Rake was Bill Rains, a member of the Conservation Commission.
“Hello, Geoff.” Rains was standing at a table on which were piled pamphlets: Don’t Let This One Get Away! “Where do you stand?”
“On the floor.”
“This development is going to meet some stiff opposition, Geoff. I’m going to lead it.”
Rains was a sixties radical from Chicago, with a potbelly and a little Cape ancestry. He had come in the mid-seventies to paint driftwood and mellow out and had seen, even then, that development was turning parts of the Cape into a giant suburb. Now he made his living as a naturalist on a Provincetown whale watch vessel and spent the rest of his time, so Dickerson Bigelow said, stopping other people from making
their
living. Geoff knew that was a bit strong. He liked Bill Rains, but he thought the nature-boy beard and flannel shirt were as much of an affectation as the new look on Doug Bigelow, who was just coming in the door.
Doug wore a dark shirt, a dark sport coat, and a silver-buckled western belt, and whatever he put on his hair made it shine like the hood of the black BMW he had bought after his divorce. There was no question that he looked better in his mid-forties than he had ten years before. Was it the golf-course casual by day and the Mel Gibson—cool by night? Or his second wife, the blonde with the attention span that did not distinguish between a town meeting and
Moby Dick
. Doug had come alone.