Cape Cod

by William Martin

  Only one was buried last night. Simeon Bigelow turned the first shovelful of sand onto the body of his own wife Anne. “She is with God now,” he said. “She has finished her work. We yet have much to do.” In the Indian fight, it is said that Simeon showed great fear afore saving the day. No man who has looked so bravely into the mouth of the grave could ever be called coward.

  Surely God guides these people, else they could not endure. As my sailors die, their friends desert them, steal their victuals, take their blankets. As the passengers die, their friends show love and faith that surpass anything in my knowledge. They show it even to the dying sailors who mocked them for their piety and prayers. This is charity. This is Christianity.

  ii.

  Jack Hilyard was not a prayerful man, but each night he bowed his head and said his amens, because prayer was all they had, prayer and the slow lengthening of the days. No man could warm the winter. No man could stop the snow. And no man could avoid the sickness, unless protected by God or in a place far away.

  When he lay by Kate’s side in the night, he begged her to leave the dying and go with him to the land between the creeks. But she said no. They had signed the agreement. They could not survive without the community, nor the community without them.

  And so the Hilyards did what they could, until a miserable sleeting afternoon in late February when Jack came to the common house. He stood at the door until his eyes made friends with the gloom. He held his breath, for the smell of death was as bad as the sight of it. Then he stepped over bodies and beds and looked about for his wife. She should have been at the chimney, bent over the stockpot.

  “She’ll be on the pallet in the corner.” Simeon Bigelow put a hand on Jack’s shoulder, and Jack felt the chill travel from the hand down the length of his spine.

  She had been coughing more of late, her clothes hung looser around her frame, and at night, the heat from her body was enough to warm him without blankets.

  “Coughin’ blood, she is, Jack,” said Simeon, “but she’s hardy, like thee and the lad.”

  Jack knelt beside her and took her hand. Her skin was flushed from fever and the heat of the fire, so that she looked to be filling with life rather than losing it.

  “See what thou’s done to thyself,” he whispered.

  She gripped his hand, and her breasts shook with the coughing that raised a foam of red spittle to her lips.

  What a bitter place he had brought them to, thought Jack. What hell he had put them through. What foolish dreams he had dreamed.

  William Mullins, who lay in the next bed, was suddenly seized by a spasm that sat him up and doubled him over and left him weak and wheezing when it was finished. Jack knew that before long, he would be dumping sand onto the waxen face of Master Mullins, and he resolved that his wife would see no more death.

  “Simeon, I’m takin’ her to her own house,” he said.

  “Jack, thine own house… thou hast not finished the roof. Think of the night wind blowin’ through the thatch.”

  “We’ll keep a fire, day and night.”

  “I’ll stay here,” said Kate. “Be about the business of buildin’ houses, or there’ll none of us survive.”

  But Jack would hear no argument. With the help of the Bigelows, he carried her across the path they had hacked in the sand, and named Leyden Street, to one of the half-dozen dirt-floored houses that formed the settlement.

  He knew she would live. She was as solid as others who had survived. And what’s more, he was praying for her, on his knees, with his head bowed and his hands folded. God would not desert them.

  It did not bother Jack that people who had prayed harder than he every day of their lives were dropping like geese in flight above a starving village. That simply affirmed his belief that God favored most those who bothered him least.

  Day and night, Jack mopped Kate’s brow, held her, prayed for her. Christopher piled wood to keep the fire high. Simeon Bigelow brought goose broth from the common house. And on the third day, Jack went out to hunt.

  Though this would later be called the Starving Time, there was game in the woods and marshlands, but seldom enough healthy men to hunt. There were fish in the waters, but they had not brought hooks of the proper size to catch them. Wild blueberry and blackberry formed the underbrush, but birds and winter winds stripped them bare before the settlers. And the red fruit that the Indians called crane berry, which grew wild in the sandy lowlands and might have saved those who died of scurvy, went unpicked for its bitterness.

  That night Jack brought back three ducks. Two he gave to the common house and one he roasted for his family. As he turned the duck on the spit and the fat sizzled in the fire, he spoke of spring.

  “Never mind spring. Just care for the boy,” said Kate.

  Jack went to her pallet. “We’ll both care for the boy. God’ll see to that.”

  She gripped his hand and pulled herself up to a sitting position. Her face and neck reddened with the effort, and her eyes opened wide, as though she were seeing beyond them, into a future she would never know. “God have his own plans—”

  “I’m prayin’, darlin’.”

  “Do right by the boy.”

  Jack tried to make a joke. “It’s him what has to do right by us. Don’t thee, lad?”

  On a stool in the corner, Christopher eyed the duck. He was scrawny like his father, tall like his mother, and a greasy shock of black hair scraggled down his neck. “ ’Tis what you say, Pa.”

  “There,” said Jack. “He knows.”

  “He trusts, but I know. I know what thou’s plannin’… to go off alone and look for drift whales. But thou signed…” The cough was starting again. She clutched at Jack’s forearm. “ ’Tain’t time…. Thou needs help.”

  “I’ve thee to help.”

  She struggled to keep the cough down. “There’s good men here, good teachers for the boy. Help ’em start their future, and they’ll help you build—” The cough exploded like a shot from a minion.

  Jack drew her to him and told her she would be fine. And he told her again, and again and again, while the little room filled with smoke and the smell of sizzling fat.

  Finally Christopher said, “The duck, Pa. ’Tis burnin’.”

  But Jack held his wife until the coughing stopped. He could feel her bones now, poking through in places he had never felt them before. He shut his eyes tight, but tears began to trickle down his cheeks, into his beard.

  And Kate whispered, “The duck, Jack. ’Tis burnin’.”

  iii.

  “ ‘Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I fear no evil. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me….’ ”

  They had buried so many here that they no longer missed lanterns, especially on nights when the full moon spilled its freezing light onto the snow. Three bodies went into the graves that Jack Hilyard insisted he dig, although Myles Standish and William Brewster had offered to do it for him. Degory Priest and Alice Mullins were placed in their holes. Then the body of Kate Hilyard, wrapped in her best cloak, was lowered into the ground.

  Ezra Bigelow recited the psalm. Though the Saints did not believe in elaborate remonstrations over the dead, Ezra knew the comfort the Twenty-third Psalm could bring, and in these terrible days, all needed comfort. He had tried to quote the psalm to Dorothy Bradford on that awful night, but she would not listen. He had offered it to her husband, and it had soothed him. Even a Stranger like Jack Hilyard could feel its power and promise.

  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 shoul
der 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.