Old Goody Clarke was screaming, “Get out, you filth! Get out of my house.”
I shall fear no evil….
“Granny Clarke! Help! No!” It was Abigail, the oldest granddaughter.
From the bloody safety beneath his mother’s body, Jeremiah peered across the floor at Abigail’s yellow dress. Moccasins moved toward her. Red splattered the yellow. The girl’s body struck the floor, and her lifeless eyes looked along the boards at Jeremiah.
“Lord have mercy!” screamed the old woman.
Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me….
The boy could see the feet of old Goody Clarke, stumbling and scuffling amidst moccasins and leather breeches. There came the
thwanging
of a pan against an Indian skull, a grunt of pain, then men laughing.
Thou hast prepared a table before me, against them that afflict me….
Then a pistol thundered. A table flew into the air, sending bowls of hot soup splattering across the floor. An Indian landed a short distance from the boy and his body curled itself around the hole in his belly.
Thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over….
His mother’s blood was trickling down his neck.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life
…. Surely. Surely this is a dream, a horror, from which my father will awaken me, will save me.
“Oh, you bloody savages,” shrieked Goody Clarke. “You have killed me! ‘The Lord is my—’ ” The old woman dropped to her knees, the pistol still smoking in her hand. A line of blood appeared at her throat. Her eyes opened wide and lost their luster. She tried to say more, but the line of blood widened into a grotesque gaping smile, and she fell onto the floor.
And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever
.
ii.
Wet snow swirled in from the sea and bent the pine branches close to the ground. Jonathan Hilyard nearly froze when he strayed from the planking and sank to his knees in the icy spring tide. He might have let himself settle forever into the ancient peat, except for his mission… and the boy walking behind him.
But what the boy was thinking he could not know, for the boy had spoken only in psalms since the attack. On the island, Jonathan took the path that led toward Nauseiput Creek and the tiny house where, he prayed, he would find light and warmth against this bitter darkness.
“Why, Jon!” cried Christopher. “Thou art a long way from home.”
“I no longer have home. Nor wife nor girls, neither.”
“God have mercy.”
“Aye. He had mercy enough to save my son.” Jonathan shoved Jeremiah through the doorway before him. “But no more.”
Jonathan told them that the Eel River settlement was gone, houses burned, livestock slaughtered, eight muskets with powder and shot stolen, every woman and child save Jeremiah tomahawked to death, and him spared only because they thought him dead. Then Jonathan collapsed into a puddle of melting snow by the fire.
Christopher and Patience had reached their sixties in the serenity of faith. Quakers had endured persecution for nearly a decade, but for the Quakers of the lower Cape, Jack’s Island had always been a charmed place. There they had held meetings that proclaimed their freedom of mind and spirit, yet known full well that they were protected from persecution by Simeon Bigelow’s singing Praying Indians and the blasphemous Jack Hilyard. In the bad times, Christopher and Patience had shielded many a branded Quaker. Now, it seemed, God was asking them to shield Jonathan and his son.
“God work in strange, awful ways,” said Patience.
Jonathan looked at her with hatred in his eyes. “ ’Tis thy people work in strange ways… monstrous ways.”
Christopher gripped Jonathan’s arm. For his age, he was still burly and powerful, and his fingers tightened like line around a loggerhead. “Hold thy tongue, brother. Tar not the good with the bad brush.”
But Patience was not offended. Her name fit well. She put her arms around Jonathan’s neck and told him he would feel better if he cried. He was a lost child, staying strong for his own child, and Patience made herself his mother. He had not cried since he was a boy, but he pressed his face against her breast and let the tears sting his eyes.
Christopher looked at Jeremiah. Most little boys were shocked when they first saw their fathers cry. Jeremiah simply picked at his stew.
“How be thee, son?”
“The Lord is my shepherd.”
“He is that.”
iii.
By morning, the world had been reborn in cold brilliance. Ice crystals in the new-fallen snow glittered like jewels. The green creek and blue bay danced with caps of white. It seemed to Christopher that God had scrubbed the darkness from the world before scrubbing the blood from the minds of Jonathan and Jeremiah Hilyard.
But after breakfast, Jonathan prepared to leave.
“Thou cannot go now.”
“I must.”
“Stay and visit Father. He speaks of thee often.”
“No time. Let him know nothin’ of what’s happened. ’Twill kill him for certain.”
“Where thee go?” asked Patience.
“Captain Pierce raises a company to pursue the raiders. I come to raise Cape volunteers and Praying Indians for scouts. We’ll find these savages and kill ’em.”
Christopher held up his Bible. “The Lord saith, ‘If thine enemy strike thee, turn the other cheek.’ ”
“ ‘I will pursue after mine enemies and overtake them.’ ” Young Jeremiah spoke for the first time that morning. “ ‘And I will not turn again until they are consumed.’ ”
Christopher recognized the Eighteenth Psalm and was chilled to hear such words from a boy. In Plymouth, they were taught the Old Testament well, he thought. Pray they were taught the New Testament also.
Jonathan embraced his son. Then he and Christopher went out into the snow-blinding sunlight. “Should I not come back, raise the lad up as a soldier of Christ, a good Reformist. ’Twill give him more better chance than the Quakers of Dartmouth ever had. Or my women.”
Christopher saw a misery in his brother’s eyes that faith would never relieve. No man could lose his children so horribly and still look kindly upon God’s inscrutable ways.
For all the women he had lain with, Christopher had fathered no children. It was the only regret of his life. But if God had given him his brother’s fate, he would gladly have taken childlessness in its place. As it was, he felt that his heart had been torn from his chest, but his grief could be nothing as to what his brother now bore.
Then, through a stand of trees, Christopher and Jonathan saw their father slouching along the beach, as he did each day.
“Does he come to visit thee?” asked Jonathan.
“Some mornin’s, aye, ’less Autumnsquam be with him.”
“Autumnsquam? He disappeared fifteen year ago.”
“Sixteen. Yet each mornin’, Pa pisses on the tree where Autie harpooned the squirrel. Then he asks the tree if his harpooneer wishes to go a-whalin’. Should Autie come to his mind’s eye, he will walk the beach, watchin’ for drifters or spouts, chatterin’ the whole time to his friend. Then will he home, where my mother or yourn await him.”
“He’s lived too long. Pity he did not die afore this.”
“Aye,” said Christopher. “Pity us all.”
“Tell him not. God may have the mercy to take him afore he hears.” Jonathan strapped his musket to his shoulder and trudged off through the early spring snow.
iv.
The first warm day made Autumnsquam sweat. He limped, though he was not lame. The one beside him held a poultice to his ribs, though he was not wounded. The three with them showed elaborate concern, though they were in truth more worried about the column of white soldiers now rounding the riverbank bend.
“They see us,” said the youngest warrior.
Autumnsquam glanced over his shoulder. Five Indian scouts were moving out ahead of the column while the rest quick-marched after. To their left, the last chunks of ice were breaking up in the Pawtucket River. To their right rose the forest where the whites would die.
“The dogs send their Wampanoags out first,” said the youngest warrior.
“Those are Nauset Wampanoags,” said Autumnsquam. “Nausets who pray to the white man’s God.”
“Are you not a Nauset?”
“I believe in Kautantowit and the spirits of the sky and earth. I am a true Nauset.”
This true Nauset had come far from his Cape Cod land. His wanderings had taken him through forests, across rivers, and finally to the sachemdom of the one for whom he had bought sugar at Aptucxet. He had never forgotten the strong cry and stronger grip of the baby Metacomet, and he had prayed that Kautantowit would not let Metacomet’s generation pass without an uprising. Kautantowit had heard his prayers, and Metacomet had heard his warnings of a white wave sweeping westward, carrying the old customs and the old spirits away.
When the war began, Autumnsquam went to the Narragansetts as Metacomet’s envoy, to bring them into an alliance. The Narragansetts said no. They had signed a treaty with the English of Boston. But while Autumnsquam stayed at their stockade town in the Great Swamp of Rhode Island, the English of Boston attacked and slaughtered three hundred, by shot, by cutlass, by sharpened pike. They killed men, women, and children without distinction. Then they burned all the dwellings, so that none would know shelter there again.
So much for English treaties and English treachery, said Autumnsquam, and he brought the survivors, vengeful and vicious, into the fight. Now an alliance of Narragansetts, Wampanoags, and Nipmuks was driving the whites back all along the frontier. They struck from out of the forests like the wind. They burned towns, massacred garrisons, killed livestock, and left the whites to stumble about like fools in the forest. Or they led the whites into their traps.
This one had been set by Autumnsquam himself, and so certain was he of success that he offered himself as bait. After all, he was old, and should the trap fail to close, his death would be of no great loss. Yet so impressed were the Narragansetts that several had volunteered to help him.
Now the small band went along the riverbank with their “wounded ones,” moving slowly enough that the whites could keep them in sight, but not so slowly that they would be caught. At the place where the river bent again, they took a path into the woods, and the whites followed.
The Nauset scouts called for the Narragansetts to stop, but Autumnsquam’s friends hurried him toward a boulder that sat like a
pauwau’s wetu
in the middle of the woods. Beyond the boulder, the land sloped to a gully in which lay three hundred Narragansetts, their faces painted black to distinguish them from the Nausets, their weapons ready in their hands.
The whole of the white column, sixty or seventy in strength, had entered the woods now. Their cartridges dangled like baubles from their bandoliers. Their corselets glimmered like silver in the sunshine that slanted through the bare trees.
At the boulder, Autumnsquam fell to the ground, making a great show of rubbing his leg and motioning for the others to go without him.
The English were so close now that he could hear the jangling of their cutlasses, smell the stink of their white bodies, see their faces. Though he had lived his life, his heart pounded hard in his chest, for every man wanted another day. And though his eyes sometimes played tricks on his mind, he thought he saw a familiar face near the front of the column. But all whites were big and wore hair on their faces. And he was an old man.
He could worry no more about the tricks of his eyes. It was his voice that worried him now. It was an old voice, not used to the war cry, and to spring the trap he would have to be heard all the way to the riverbank. He breathed deep. He prayed to Kautantowit. Then he leaped to his feet and cried “Hi-hi-hi-hi-yeah!”
As a flock of starlings took flight, the Narragansetts rose screaming from the gully.
The whites stopped like men who had seen the earth open before them. The leader called for retreat, and his soldiers pivoted smartly, straight into a wall of arrows and musket fire from the Indians who had sneaked up the riverbank behind them.
That the fight went on for two hours was tribute to the bravery of the enemy. Each time that Autumnsquam fired his musket, he was secretly proud of the Praying Indians and sobered by the ferocity of the whites. Even when surrounded by five hundred they fought like demons, back to back, first with deadly musket fire, then with cutlasses and knives, and finally, as the circle closed around them, with bloody bare hands.
When it was over, Autumnsquam went among the dead, not to scalp them, but to pay them tribute. The smell of gunpowder hung like a bad spirit cloud in the air. Tree trunks all around had been splintered by lead shot. The ground was a bloody red mud. And now the victorious Narragansetts were sharpening their knives for the stripping.
Autumnsquam did not know any of the Nausets who had fallen, but he was drawn to the body of the familiar white. He had not shot at this one, though each time he looked during the fighting, there were more dead Indians around him.
A young
pinse
reached the white man first. He pushed aside the bodies of two Narragansetts to get at the man’s bandolier, which he slung over his shoulder. Then he picked up the man’s hat and put it on his head. “How do I look?” he asked Autumnsquam.
“No good.”
The young
pinse
took off the hat and threw it away. Then he pulled out his knife and grabbed the white’s forelock.
“Not this one,” said Autumnsquam. “He fought bravely. Show him respect.”
“No respect for the enemy. I claim his things and his scalp… and his balls if I want. It is the way of war.”
Autumnsquam could not deny that. Many of the warriors were now wearing warm woolen coats and felt hats. Sachem Canonchet was trying on a shiny corselet. Two dogs were rooting around in the bloody crotch of a dead white man. And those unlucky enough to be alive were screaming as the stripping knives went to work. It was the way of war. But this was no nameless white, and he was still alive.