He dried the mutilated foot, and was struggling with the cloth, making an awkward business of bandaging. “Shall I do it?” I said. “I have a light hand.” He made way for me, and I wrapped the foot as I had seen mother do when we had cuts or burns. Father nodded his approval and the man rose awkwardly. His face, though drawn and sweaty, had betrayed no sign of discomfort even though he must have been in great pain.
As he hobbled away, father looked after him and shook his head. “God in his wisdom has not done so much for these as he has for our nation. Satan has had full charge of them. It is a blessing that God now brings us here. We are uncommonly fortunate to be able to bring that little mustard seed of the gospel, and watch it take root here.”
It was getting near to the noon hour, when father was accustomed to preach. The women were setting down their hoes and the men coming out of the wetus. There were just seven or eight of these huts in the little settlement, domes of bent sapling branches covered in sheets of bark and woven mats, each housing just a family or two. But at the center of the clearing was a long house, with an English door rather than a mat for an entry way. Father said that when the weather was hard he would preach in there, amid a great press of bodies.
This day was fine, so he asked the people to meet him about a great, swaybacked rock, worn smooth through the years to a kind of curved platform. Upon this, he was accustomed to stand to give his sermon.
By noon, some twenty souls had gathered, and I stood at the edge of the group, and tried to look at my father through their eyes. He was a lean man, for unlike Makepeace he worked hard on our farm and did not scruple to chop wood or carry water or do any of the several tasks that eased mother’s lot. He favored the sad colors, blacks or dark browns, as befit a minister, and wore his fair hair modestly cropped above the collars that mother kept spotless and starched for him. Though the day was warm, he did not remove his coat; since the Wampanoag set much store in their own regalia when they met in ceremony, he felt that he should retain some formality in dress, as he would if he preached in church or meetinghouse. First, he prayed, putting our familiar forms into their tongue. These he had by rote, well taught him by Iacoomis, and he uttered them without error. Next came his sermon.
“Friends, hearken to me,” he began. “When we have met here before, we have agreed two truths: That God is, and that he will reward all those who diligently seek him. That the one God is the source of all manit. My friend Iacoomis has shown his heart to you, how it stands towards God, and you have seen how, when he cast off all other false worships, so he has prospered, and gained in health, he and all his family. You have asked what will happen to you when you die, and today I will answer you. Englishmen, and you and all the world, when they die, their souls go not to the southwest, as you have been taught. All that know the one God, who love and fear him, they go up to heaven. They ever live in joy. In God’s own house. They that know not God, who love and fear him not— liars, thieves, idle persons, murderers, they who lie with other’s wives or husbands, oppressors or the cruel, these go to hell, to the very deep. There they shall ever lament.”
Beside me, two men started muttering together, thinking that I could not understand them.
“Why should we believe our English friend, when our own fathers told us that our souls go to the southwest, to the lands of Kiehtan?”
“Well, but did you ever see a soul go to the southwest? I have not.”
“No, and when did he, yonder, see one go up to heaven or down to hell?”
“He says he has it from the book, which God himself has written.”
“What he says may be true for English, but why should I want to go to this God’s house if only English are there? If God wanted us in this house then he would have sent our ancestors such a book.”
Listening to this exchange, I realized my difficulties were no different in kind to my father’s, and that I should just have to persevere, and trust that in time God would give me the words that would turn Caleb’s heart to him.
About midway through my father’s sermon, I noticed that the people seemed restless of a sudden, their eyes glancing from father and over to the place where the clearing ended in dense oak woodland. I followed their gaze, squinting in the sunlight. Soon enough, I saw what they saw: A man, very tall, his face painted and his body decked in a great cloak of turkey feathers. He stood stock still, his arm raised, and in his hand some kind of mannekin or poppet, I couldn’t clearly see. Then, from the trees beside him, another appeared. A youth, also painted garishly.
Some of the crowd started to edge away from father. The man who had remarked about Kiehtan elbowed his companion. I heard him say the name Tequamuck. I flinched, recognizing the name: Caleb’s uncle. I squinted even harder, to discern the features of the wizard and his apprentice. But their faces were so fully painted over I could not tell if what I feared was true or not. Their presence clearly agitated the crowd. Father had long held that the pawaaws were the strongest cord that bound the Indians to their own way, and that breaking their spiritual power mattered far more than interfering with the ways and privileges of the sonquems.
The man who spoke Tequamuck’s name was the first to leave. Soon, five or six more followed. They headed towards the woods, greeting Tequamuck with great deference. When I looked again, all of them were gone.
Chapter VII
I never did ask Caleb if he was the painted youth at the right hand of the pawaaw. I did not want to hear his answer.
As that ripe summer turned to autumn, the sunlight cooled to a slantwise gleam, bronzing the beach grass and setting the beetle-bung trees afire. Caleb learned his letters faster than I could credit. Before the singing of the cider, he could read and speak a serviceable kind of English. I think that because he had learned from childhood to mimic the chirps of birds in order to lure waterfowl, his ear was uncommonly attuned to pitch and tone. Once he learned a word, he soon spoke it without accent, exactly as an Englishman would. In a short while, he would not have me speak Wampanaontoaonk to him except to explicate something he could not grasp, and before long we had switched from communicating with each other only in his language, to conversing most times in mine. But as much progress as we made in that direction, in the matter of his soul he resisted and mocked me, using wit that seemed to me devil-inspired. One day, when we had been discussing Genesis, he turned to me with a gleam in his brown eyes. “So you say that all was created in six days?”
Yes, I said.
“All?” he repeated.
So the Bible instructed us, I said.
“Heaven and hell, also, were created then?”
So it says, and so we must believe. The look on his face was the very same as when he had speared a fine bass. “Then answer me this: why did God make a hell before Adam and Eve had sinned?”
This had never occurred to me to question, but I thought quickly, and replied to him. “Because God knows all, and he knew that they would.”
“Then why did he not scotch the snake before it tempted them?”
“Because he had endowed them with free will,” I said.
“And so do we endow our children with free will, yet you English chide us, and say they are unruly and should be flogged.”
Oftentimes, these exchanges vexed me, and I broke off and rode home struggling for self mastery and resolving to have no further relations with this hard-headed pagan. Yet within a sennight, I would seek him out again, lingering in the places which by now were familiar haunts to both of us until he sprang up in his sudden way, materializing in the tall grasses or beech groves. And so it went on, as another year turned. We each of us grew and changed, gaining new responsibilities in our separate worlds, but always making a space where those worlds could collide and intertwine. As time passed it became harder for me to keep a bright line