Cape Cod

by William Martin

  “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.
r />   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.

  “This one is mine,” said Autumnsquam.

  The young pinse jumped up. There was blood on his blackened cheek and across his bare chest. “This one killed my brother. He is mine.”

  “I set the trap. I baited it. I choose him.”

  The young pinse held his knife under Autumnsquam’s nose. “Can you stop me from taking his hair, old man?”

  “If I go to Canonchet, he will give me what I ask and you will get nothing. If you give me what I ask, you may take this man’s musket and go well armed to the next fight.” Autumnsquam picked up the gun and put it into the young man’s hands as a peace offering. It was enough.

  “Respect your white warrior. I will go and find his brother and kill him.” He shook the musket and ran off.

  Autumnsquam crouched down and whispered, “Your brother, he still stupid damn Quaker?”

  Jonathan Hilyard’s eyes flickered. An arrow had passed under his collarbone, close to his heart. He bled from slash wounds in his legs and belly, and the side of his head had been bashed by a tomahawk.

  “Thick-headed stupid bloody Christian Hilyard,” said Autumnsquam. In all his prayers to Kautantowit, he had asked for the safety of these bloody Christian Hilyards. Now Kautantowit had put the safety of one of them into Autumnsquam’s hands. Answer your own prayer, the Great Spirit was saying. You have helped to start the war you prayed for. Now help to save the whites you prayed for. If you ask for opposite things, it is up to you to make them come to pass.

  v.

  After a few days, the boy Jeremiah began to speak without psalms. It would not be long, Christopher knew, before he spoke of the massacre at Clarke’s garrison house. Others were speaking of it already, as a few local Indians—well known to the Clarkes and unknown to King Philip—had been arrested, convicted, and executed.

  So early one March afternoon, when the wind was lighter than usual, Christopher went to his father’s house with a bucket of beer. Jack was splitting logs, small ones, piling them neatly as he went. He seemed glad for a reason to stop. Father and son, now both old men by the calendar, sat on the woodpile, and the son told the father of the bloody doings at Clarke’s garrison house.

  As if he had not the strength to grieve, or perhaps to comprehend, Jack sipped his beer and said simply, “Our women, they all be taken afore their time. Why does God do this to us?”

  “He works his good in awesome strange ways.”

  “I been alone forty years. Where be the good in that?”

  “Job has the answer, I think.”

  Then Jack studied the smoke curling from the tryworks, “Think thou we’ll see more blackfish afore Easter?”

  The next morning, the Hilyards sailed their shallop up to Barnstable, the center of the whale oil trade among the bay towns. Boston oil dealers came regularly because the harbor was deep and the spit that protected it was the site of the best tryworks on Cape Cod. At the dock, the Hilyards got a fair price for the fifteen barrels they brought. Then they went up to the village.

  Barnstable was becoming a prosperous place, as colonial towns went. The cattle had good forage in the salt marshes. The tryworks supported the church. The shipmen had the harbor, and the merchants and tradesmen served a growing population. Along the County Road, there were fine two-story homes with real glass windows, a meetinghouse, a blacksmith, a trading post, and Crocker’s, the most famous tavern on the Cape.

  Jack wished to go straight there, but Christopher waved the supply list. “We need molasses, cloth, nails…”

  As they rounded the corner from the Millway Road, they were struck by a strange quiet. Ordinarily the dust of business hung thick above the County Road, but today the townspeople were clustered in front of Crocker’s, listening to a man read solemnly from a sheet of paper.

  Christopher asked the blacksmith what passed.

  “The marshal reads the list of the dead.”

  “Dead?”

  “The Pierce Massacre.”

  “Pierce? Massacre?” The words struck Christopher Hilyard like a lance.

  Before he could usher his father and nephew away, Christopher heard his brother’s name tolled out over the crowd. Then he heard his father’s scream of horror at all they had lost, a cry of fury at God, a sound that echoed across fifty-five years. And once more, Christopher knew the hopelessness he had felt on that dark and grieving hill in that terrible first winter.

  vi.

  It began to rain that afternoon. Autumnsquam thought the rain might soothe Jonathan’s fever, so he kept moving. He had taken a horse from a field in the town of Rehoboth and made a pallet of a blanket and two saplings which he could drag over the sandy roads.

  He had not removed the arrow, as that might have caused its wound to bleed more. But he had dressed the other wounds with boiled moss and put a poultice of herbs on Jonathan’s head. For the fever, he had made a broth of red cedar leaves and maple twigs, but that had done little good.

  Near the headwaters of the Scusset, Autumnsquam stopped and looked for a canoe. In the old days, the Scussets always left their canoes, and a man in need might borrow one to get to the bay. But the old days were gone.

  vii.

  Jack Hilyard listened to the rain pound upon his roof. Night came fast, and with it, he prayed, sleep. And if the sleep were forever, he would pray for nothing else. These last two days had been enough to make any man look warmly upon his own death, even a man who had come at last to believe that God lived only in the minds of men
.

  The cold rain that fell upon the sea fell also upon the body of his son somewhere to the west, and it cared nothing for either of them. Of those who had gone before, of his two good women and Ezra Bigelow, all that was left moldered in the sand of Plymouth Colony. No heaven greeted Elizabeth or Kate. No hell burned Bigelow for what he might have done to Dorothy Bradford. There was no heaven or hell but here, and no devils but those that walked the earth.

  And Jack would make the earth a better place if he killed one. So he climbed out of the bed where he had tried to numb himself with beer and sleep and with the feeling of his own ancient body reshaping itself for the womb. Then he went downstairs and loaded his pistols. They would be good for killing devils.

  viii.

  Before nightfall, Autumnsquam passed through Moskeetuckqut, the Great Salt Marsh, where the whites now fed their cattle. He could see them in the fields, big shadows clumped dumbly together in the darkening rain, like land whales, but without the dignity or courage.

  Autumnsquam had taken this road when he left Cape Cod. Then it had been a sleeve of sand through the tall trees. Now the trees between the road and the bay were near gone, cornfields rolled away to the south, and there was not a quarter-mile distance between any of the houses.

  At the supper hour, he came to the village of Barnstable. It had grown mightily since the day he followed the flight of the gull. For near half a mile, the white man’s buildings stood side by side, staring out at him, wondering at him. If someone challenged him, he would tell the truth: he had fought at the Pierce Massacre and was taking a white survivor to his family. He would not say he had fought on the other side.

  But cold rain and good-smelling stews kept the people by their fires. Not even the marshal came out as Autumnsquam went by.

  East of the village, the land rose, and the horse labored to pull the pallet. His flanks were lathered and his gait uncertain. If he faltered, Autumnsquam would have to seek help in the village. And some Praying Indian might say that this one did not march out with Captain Pierce. And Jonathan might not remember old Autie through the heat of the fever. And then the whites would know.