“Autumnsquam’s dead,” he said.
“No.” The shadow came toward him.
Jack lowered his lantern so that he could better see in the dark rain.
“I bring your son to—”
Jack fired. In the muzzle flash, he saw white whales’ teeth shatter as the ball struck the Indian’s throat. White whales’ teeth… Autumnsquam… The devil was the great dissembler. Autie was not coming back….
Now Jack pulled the axe from his belt and rushed toward the lanterns entering the marsh from the mainland.
“Jack! Stop!” someone was shouting at him, a familiar voice, a white man’s voice, but the only face he could see in the lanternlight was Indian.
Satan took many forms… and spoke in many voices.
“Stop!”
Jack barreled into the Indian, swinging the axe as he went. The Indian shouted and tried to sidestep, but Jack swung hard and felt the blade bite into flesh and bone.
“Jack!” screamed one of the others. “God has given us a miracle.”
“Tempt me with no miracles. Satan tempted Christ with miracles in the desert. See what happened to him!” Jack knew that the Indian was not dead, so he raised the axe again.
“No, Jack! Thou’ll start a war!”
Jack recognized the voice of Simeon Bigelow. “I finish one.”
Simeon grabbed Jack’s arm.
Jack pushed him back and swung the axe. If Satan could take the form of Autumnsquam, he could as easily become a white preacher. “Get back.”
“But Jack, thy son—”
“You’ve killed him—” And the grief-mad old man turned his axe at another old friend.
Simeon was bigger than Jack, but near as brittle, and as he tried to wrench the axe away, he slipped, pulling the axe and Jack with him into the soaking marsh.
The black rain poured down. Its black sound roared down. And the blade of the axe split Jack Hilyard’s breast.
xii.
It had begun in blood, and that was as it ended. It had begun in horror, but for the Hilyards, some small measure of order was restored, some sense of God’s mercy remained. An ancient father died before his son after all. A son returned from the land of the dead to raise up his own son in the name of the Lord. A wife survived the pistol shot that shattered her lantern. And two old friends, one who brought the future, one who had been the past, were laid side by side in a small grove of pines near Nauseiput Creek.
Young Jeremiah read from the Twenty-third Psalm as though he truly understood it. Jonathan leaned on Patience and she upon Christopher. And Praying Indians filled the woods.
Simeon prayed once more for a just end to a terrible war. He thanked God for his goodness, and then, as an afterthought, he thanked Kautantowit. He knew it was a small blasphemy, but it seemed to please the older Indians, and it would have pleased Autumnsquam.
Then the strange funeral procession wound its way back through the woods and cut-over meadows to Jack’s house, where Patience had prepared a repast in honor of the dead.
“Thou shalt never know how pained I am at killing thy father,” said Simeon to Christopher before they went in.
“ ’Twas an accident.”
Simeon shook his head. “Had he killed an Indian, or an Indian killed him, there would have been terrible days on Cape Cod, days to make Satan happy.”
“Thou hast done more than any man to keep Satan at bay. My father said thou wert the most best man he ever knew. And he kept somethin’ I think it meet for thee to have.”
Christopher led Simeon to the new barn that had been built on the site of the first one. Pulling back a trapdoor, he climbed down into the ancient hole, and after a few moments he found the ballast stone that his father had split in half many years before. Fitted neatly behind it, the color of the earth into which it had been pressed, was a wax-sealed box. Stamped in the corner was the foundry mark of a man long dead. Inside was the narrative of a people who would grow large in the memories of their children.
He pressed the box into Simeon’s hands. “Read this, old friend. Then do with it what thou wilt.”
“What is it?”
“The sea journal of Christopher Jones.”
Simeon hefted the box as if to feel the weight of history. “Jones was a rough man, but a good’n.”
“He admired the First Corners, though he spoke as well of their failings.”
Simeon looked into Christopher’s eyes. “Did he speak of my brother and Dorothy Bradford within the same pages?”
Christopher could not tell what Simeon knew or suspected, and so he merely nodded.
“Is that the reason thou now owns this island?”
“We went through much hell to get this place. If God favor papists, we may burn in hell for our effort. But that book worked its magic upon thy brother… rightly or wrongly.”
“Why give it to me?”
“ ’Tis an ode to faith and bravery, written by a man of little faith. Thou art a man of faith and bravery preachin’ to those with little faith.” Christopher patted the box with his hand. “Thy faith and bravery saved this Cape from the horror that Jonathan’s family suffered at Plymouth. This book is an ode to thee.”
Simeon looked at the box, then at the axe that lay against the grindstone. “I will take the box if you rebury the axe, as once I asked your father to do.”
“Done.”
“The axe is not somethin’ I care to look on again.” He held up the box. “But this will I read.”
And he read both the good and the bad of it. And yes, it told of his brother and Dorothy Bradford dallying on the deck of the
Mayflower
. Yet it spoke most delicately of delicate matters. And during the dying time, Jones spoke of Ezra, of all the First Comers, as men of strong faith and Christian kindness.
When King Philip’s War ended, however, their descendants proved that for all God’s interest in their affairs, they had learned little of God’s mercy.
King Philip was run to earth in August, in the same Rhode Island swamplands where he had heard the warlike counsel of Autumnsquam and the others. What hopelessness he felt for his race when the whites at last encircled him would never be known. He was shot, beheaded, drawn, and quartered. His hands were sent to Boston, his head to Plymouth. The four pieces of his torso were hung in the trees.
This did not shock Simeon. He had seen Witawawmut’s head rot in the sun. He knew the language of war. But he could not understand the new path to peace. He was in Plymouth, when the captives of the last battles were brought through. Wampanoag men and women, linked by chains and rope, their children clutching at their sides, had less the appearance of beaten enemies than of broken hearts. Most of the men sensed that they were leaving their land forever, and this journey was their last walk with their loved ones.
Plymouth had suffered greatly, though in truth no worse than the Indians. The colony had incurred bills of great magnitude, 27,000 pounds in all. The tax levy had been enormous. But still the debt remained. So it was decided that those who had caused the war—or, more truthfully, those who had lost it—would pay for it.
The proposal, forwarded by many of the most learned men of the colony, and most vociferously by Brewster Bigelow, was to sell the captured Wampanoags into slavery.
Simeon never forgot the sight of families broken up on the hallowed ground of Plymouth, within the shadow of the burial hill where the First Comers lay. This was not what God had wanted, nor what William Bradford would have permitted. But it was done.
Some of the luckier Indians were given to Plymouth men in payment for wartime loans. These might be well treated and see their loved ones again. A few might even gain freedom and move to the Mashpee Plantation on Cape Cod, where many Wampanoag families had fled. But the rest were marched on to Boston. From thence would they be shipped to the West Indies, to be sold and to die in the pestilent climate.
“ ’Twas not necessary, nephew,” Simeon told Brewster as they watched the Wampanoags straggling sadly north under the muskets of the Plymouth militia. “A hand of peace would have done you better.”
“ ’Twas Satan put ’em here, uncle. Every minister believes that. They proved it at Clarkes’ garrison house. We do the Lord’s work in wipin’ ’em from the earth.”
“They be humans, no different from us in their hearts.”
At the sound of Brewster Bigelow’s laughter, Simeon resolved that he would not share with such men the story of their fathers’ faith. He saw, in that beaten chain of Indians, the perversion of the beliefs that had driven the First Comers across the Atlantic. Christopher Jones’s journal of faith and sacrifice could never restore what was lost when those Indians were sent to the slave ships, nor could it inspire men who would make such a terrible choice.
So he went back to Portanimicut and wondered what he would do with the sea journal.
At Jack’s Island, Christopher Hilyard wondered what he would do with the axe. He thought to bury it again in the marsh mud where his father had found it. It was the beheader of Witawawmut, the killer of his father and perhaps of many others unnamed. But he could not deny the strength he felt when he held it. And in the wilderness, even the most peaceable Quaker admired strength.
July 11
“Shouldn’t you do something to protect the axe?” said Douglas Bigelow. “Encase it in Lucite or something?”
“Then I couldn’t touch it.” John M.—for Manuel—Nance pushed a button pad to disconnect the alarm, then took the axe out of its case. “I like to touch it.”
The blade passed under Doug’s nose. He was supposed to admire it while sensing the subtle threat.
“You could shave with it”—Nance twisted his wrist, causing the blade to flash and the strange letters to flicker—“or chop off a head.”
Doug looked out at the fog on Pleasant Bay and wondered what he was doing in Nance’s library. But he already knew. He was surviving.
John M. Nance—from Provincetown to Chatham in one generation, from the home of fishing boats and bohos, where the houses were small and the streets were crowded, to the Cape Cod capital of preppy, where even some of the
locals
wore lime green trousers with their blue blazers. John M. Nance, son of a Portagee and a Pilgrim, great-grandson—so the rumor went—of a runaway slave, looking as respectable as the dining room at the Chatham Bars Inn…
And as white. White Lacoste shirt, white tennis shorts, white sweat socks. The only color the little Union Jack on his Reebok sneakers. But for all the whiteness, he tanned as well as anyone Doug had ever seen. He didn’t burn and peel like his English ancestors or darken to Portuguese olive. He
browned
, like a good American who’d never heard of skin cancer or the thinning of the ozone layer.
He admitted to being sixty-two, though people took him for forty-five or so. His hair was black, no dye job, his current wife was thirty-two, and his features were as smooth as the bow of his cigarette boat.
He lived on Shore Road in an enormous Colonial Revival with black shutters, twelve-over-twelve windows, wings like studding sails, views of Pleasant Bay, and a secretarial staff so he didn’t have to go to Boston but once a week.
“This axe reminds me of how hard I had to fight to get here… and who I had to chop up.”
Doug uncrossed and recrossed his legs, as if to say he was a busy man.
“Nice pants,” said Nance.
Doug was wearing lime green pants with little blue whales spouting red steam. Good golf-course pants.
“So Clara’s dead. One down, one to go.”
“That’s cold-blooded,” said Doug.
“
I
say what
you
only think. The privilege of money.”
Doug hated to admit it, but Nance was right.
“Now that we’re over the eminent-domain hurdle, you’re looking better.” Nance twirled the axe in his hands. “But it would be nice to have Rake Hilyard’s piece, too.”
“We may not have much choice.”
Nance spoke very softly and pointed the axe at Doug, “I didn’t save you from the banks to hear you say
that.
”
Iron Axe Ventures was a major player, known for shopping malls in Maine, ski condos in Vermont, strip malls everywhere, money, limited partnerships, tax shelters, accelerated depreciations, smart lawyers, money, deals, deep pockets, more smart lawyers, more money, smart investors, smart advertisers, smart sales force, and even more money for all the smarts.
Bigelow Development was small-time by comparison. To win the game on Cape Cod, they needed the backing of the big boys, especially now that the business cycle, rather than the tree-huggers, had cooled the development fervor on Cape Cod.
Nance’s company had targeted Jack’s Island during the early eighties. Nance had proposed a joint development—ninety condo units, conference center, tennis courts. Dickerson Bigelow turned him down. After all, there was a… history between them.
And Dickerson had never needed partners. He had developed only his own land, with short lines of credit and no interference, building a company with twenty million dollars in equity and a reputation to match. Then, as the Reagan recovery began, Dickerson had started listening to his son.
Leverage
. That was the word Douglas used. Leverage that turned twenty million into fifty or sixty or more. Big developers did it in Boston with every project. Big business did it on Wall Street every day. And they did it in Washington every fiscal year. The whole damn country was leveraged. So why not Bigelow Development?
With Douglas making more decisions and Dickerson deferring to him, the Bigelows had built all over the Cape—big condos near the water, small subdivisions in the scrub pine, strip malls along Route 28. And they were not alone.
For a while, builders couldn’t build fast enough, and environmentalists couldn’t stop them. The Cape population jumped—retirees, construction workers following the work, commuters who claimed they didn’t mind the two-hour drive to Boston, people who needed no more than a terminal and a fax to work anywhere. Somewhere along the line, Douglas had divorced and remarried. His father questioned his personal sense but not his business sense. After all, the banks were leveraged, the builders were leveraged, the buyers were leveraged, everybody was making money. And then it stopped.