Harvard Yard (Peter Fallon)

by William Martin

  “The savages have made Sudbury already,” said the captain. “How many there be, I know not. But if you ride alone, you’ll die alone. Stay with the company, and we’ll march straight for the Haynes garrison, Lord willin’.”

  But the Lord was not willin’. Wadsworth and his men were no more than half a mile from the garrison, marching through a defile between two forested hills named for farmers Goodman and Green, when the Indians struck.

  One moment there was silence, except for the sound of horses breathing hard and men tramping heavy on the spring-soft ground. An instant later, muskets were roaring from both hills and Indians were exploding from the trees, like specters of the air taking human form, truly like minions of Satan.

  The English soldiers fought their way to the top of Green’s Hill and made their stand. But there were hundreds of Indians, and once they had surrounded the hilltop, Isaac knew there would be no escape until dark, if at all.

  Looking down through the branches, he could see his house, or the smoke where it had been. He could also see the Haynes garrison, also shrouded in smoke, but it was the white smoke of gunpowder, which meant the men were fighting. So Isaac fought, too, in hopes that his wife was inside the garrison, loading muskets for the men. And he prayed that they could hold their position on the hill until the sun had dipped below the trees.

  But about four o’clock, the Indians torched the dry brush on the side of the hill. Soon, a semicircle of living orange flame, driven by an easterly wind, was breathing in brush and exhaling heavy smoke that swallowed the top of the hill and forced the English to flee or suffocate.

  Wadsworth ordered his men to fall back and fight their way to the Goodenow garrison, across a cornfield to the south. But Isaac had had enough of orders. Besides, most of the Indians were sweeping left and right, behind the flames, cutting off any retreat and filling the air with their furious cries. So he dropped to the ground and pressed his face against the earth.

  The flames were coming closer, but he kept his head down and pulled his heavy cloak up over his neck. Most fitting, he thought, that Satan’s minions should send hellfire itself against him. But the fire was moving fast. He felt the flames pass over his cloak. He smelled his own hair singe. He wanted to run. But he held his breath and waited until he could hear nothing—no Indian war whoops, no screams from the whites—nothing except the roar of the flames around him. And then, throwing off his smoldering cloak, he rose and ran.

  But he did not retreat. He went east through the flames, out of the fire, straight toward a single Indian who stood on the smoking ground like a sentinel.

  Isaac raised his musket, the Indian his war club. And Isaac realized that they saw each other in the same way—as devils limned in fire and shrouded in smoke.

  The Indian mouthed the word “chepi.” Demon. “Run, white demon. Run on. No chief will strike a demon who runs.”

  Could these be the eyes of King Philip himself? Could Isaac end the war with a single blow? No, because other Indians were rushing back to protect their chief. So Isaac Wedge accepted the courtesy of one demon to another, of one frightened man to another, and went stumbling down the east slope toward the greening marsh.

  Soon he was hunkered in the strong-smelling mud, counting the columns of smoke, gauging the progress of the fight by the ferocity of the musket fire . . . from south of Goodman’s Hill, where Wadsworth’s men were being slaughtered; from east of the river, where the Sudbury settlement held out; and from the Haynes garrison, which Isaac could not reach for all the Indians around it. So he waited and prayed, and just before dark, a relief column from Boston reached the settlement. At the sound of their first volley, the Indians retreated . . . from the garrison houses and the settlements and all the other places where they had made their attack.

  Only then did Isaac emerge from the mud, slip along the edge of the marsh, and take the path toward the garrison. A dozen copper bodies lay about, and the fine barn that Isaac had helped raise was now a pile of smoking coals, but the house stood strong, and Isaac could hear voices within, which filled him with hope. So he hailed them.

  “Who is it?”

  “Isaac. Isaac Wedge.”

  The door swung open, and Deacon Haynes appeared. “Come in, Isaac. Come in to where ’tis safe.”

  In the morning, Isaac walked to the charred pile that had been his house. He could not have expected that grief would feel so heavy. In his younger days, it had seemed a thing to be cried away in a day or two. But this weight lay on his shoulders like the yoke and pails that now lay on the ground before the house.

  “She was fetching water from the river when we rang the bell,” said Haynes.

  “I promised that this year, we’d dig a well,” answered Isaac.

  “We saw Injuns comin’ through the fields, heard ’em across the river, too. She dropped her yoke and began to run to us, then she was took by some contrary thought, and run back to her house. I cried that there was no time. But she went in, and that doomed her. The first Injun to the door she killed with your old blunderbuss, but . . .”

  Beneath several smoking timbers, Isaac saw fluttering a few strips of unburned fabric, part of the dress that now covered the charred body of Rebecca Wedge.

  Deacon Haynes took Isaac by the arm and said, “Let thy neighbors do this task. ’Twill be hard enough to tell your son.”

  And it was. Isaac rode all the way to Cambridge and returned with young John late in the afternoon. Along the road, the boy cried, sometimes silently, sometimes loudly enough for his father to hear. Isaac, who had not cried, who found that he could not cry, did his best to console the boy. And they prayed to strengthen each other, reciting Rebecca’s favorite psalms and the Lord’s Prayer.

  It was a small grace of God that by the time they reached Sudbury, the remains of wife and mother had been placed in a pine box. Neither husband nor son was made to look upon her scalped head, her crushed skull, her blackened body. It was a smaller grace that the stench of charred flesh was swallowed by the stronger smell of burned wood.

  There were burials in many corners of the town the next morning. Captain Wadsworth and twenty-eight of his men went into a mass grave near the Concord Road. Farmers and their wives were buried in plots behind their homes. And Rebecca Watson Wedge was returned to the earth in the church plot just east of the river.

  Afterward, Isaac and his son went back to the ruins, to see what could be salvaged of axheads, knife blades, and other metal things.

  “The Lord’s ways are past our knowing.” Isaac could think of nothing else to say.

  “And yet, we must try to know,” said John, “for this is a struggle with evil itself.”

  “’Tisn’t evil to fight for your world and your god,” said Isaac. “All men do it.”

  “Even men whose world is dark and whose god is Satan?”

  Isaac made his way through the rubble to what had once been his hearth. How strange it seemed that this place, where he had warmed himself on so many black winter nights, was bathed now in bright sunshine. He stood over the only section of flooring that had not been burned, the section that had been beneath Rebecca’s body. And in the middle of it, a plank had been lifted. It was the plank beneath which he had hidden the book. Had it been stolen? Burned? Its fate would be the Lord’s will, thought Isaac.

  Then John knelt, reached in the hole, and pulled out a box. “What’s this, Father?”

  So, thought Isaac, it was the Lord’s will that the book be saved. “’Tis living proof of what I have always told you, son. A man will be known by his books.”

  John pried the top off the box, revealing the brown leather. Then he flipped through the handwritten pages and stopped at the signature. Will. Shakespeare.

  “Your mother came back for it,” said Isaac. “Perhaps a woman will be known by her books, too.”

  “But this is by Shakespeare,” said John. “If Mother came back for this, it was this that gave those red devils time to take her life.”

  “Men
took her life . . . not devils.” Isaac slipped the book from his son’s hands. “She came back for this because she knew it to be the work of a man, not a devil.”

  “That’s not what I’ve heard about this Shakespeare.”

  “Have you ever read a play?” asked Isaac.

  “I’ve read Aeschylus . . . in the Greek.”

  “And were you moved?”

  “Well . . . yes. But this—”

  “There may come times in your life when the words you read or the ideas you confront do not glorify God but man . . . his vanities . . . his passions . . . his appetites . . . his dreams . . . all the things that lead us toward sin, yet all the things that make us human.”

  “Reverend Mather speaks strong words ’gainst theater. Cotton quotes ’em often.”

  “So I remember. But whilst a man may be known by his books, people are known by their love for one another. I loved John Harvard, so I promised I would protect this book. Your mother loved me, so she tried to save the book. If you love her, think hard on what she did. Then, if you ask me to destroy it, I will. If you ask me to save it, we’ll find a way to return it to John Harvard’s library, as I promised your mother I would do.”

  And that night, John Wedge read the play.

  iii

  On a June morning a year later, Isaac Wedge returned Love’s Labours Won to its rightful place. He did not do it with ceremony, for he still feared the consequences. Indeed, the only person who knew was junior sophister John Wedge.

  “Do you truly think that you can hide this volume in plain sight, Father, right in the new library?”

  “I’ve thought hard on it.” Isaac slipped the nondescript volume between two other books in a larger pile that was one of a score of piles arranged in neat rows on the table in the Old College library. “The new library is where it shall be safest.”

  A sheet of paper lay beside the pile of books. On it were listed the names of all the books in that particular pile. At the bottom of the sheet, Isaac wrote the words “Corporei Insectii, by Walter Shackford, gift of Isaac Wedge,” and the numbers 12.8.6.

  “The Bodies of Insects? By Walter Shackford?” said John. “That would be a work of natural philosophy, if such a book existed. Or such an author.”

  “So, we put it in case twelve, the natural philosophy case, eighth shelf, sixth space.”

  “And what if someone reads it and finds its true nature?”

  “My hope is that a student seeking a work on insects will be put off by Shakespeare’s scrawl. He’ll put this book back and find something else to copy from.”

  “When a new keeper of the library is appointed, he must examine every volume.”

  “The new keeper must note only that a volume be in its proper place. And all the keepers have proved to be liberal-thinking young men like Sewall, the sort who’d think twice before destroying any volume.” Isaac picked up the pile of books and put it into his son’s hands. “Besides, my name be set down as donor. Should any find it, they will come to me before they destroy it . . . or to you. Then we will speak our piece.”

  “Leave me no piece to speak, Father,” said John. “Speak it now.”

  “In a colony where the performance of plays is prohibited, would you challenge the court over the keeping of one in their college?”

  “I respect the beliefs of our fathers. ’Twas faith brought us through the crisis with the Indians. And ’twill see us through the next crisis, whatever it might be.”

  “You’ve spent too much time in the presence of Cotton Mather and his father.” Isaac slipped another pile of books from the table and said, “Come along.”

  They went down the creaking stairs, out the back door of the Old College, past the well sweep, past the pigpen and outhouses, across the Yard to Harvard Hall, now the largest and most impressive structure in all the English colonies.

  How solid and yet how fantastical it was, thought Isaac—the several tones of red brick laid in several bonds, the white pilasters around the entries, the straight cornices over the first-floor windows contrasting with the arches of header-bond brick over the second, and the whole structure yearning upward in fourteen steep-sloped gables, upward toward two massive chimneys, upward toward the sky, toward God Himself—a building that expressed Isaac’s belief that all learning should be a flight of fancy set solidly upon a foursquare foundation.

  Of course, no man who stopped before Harvard Hall would stand there for long, because the south and west sides were each adorned with a sun clock—a white square painted with red Roman numerals, a delicate wrought-iron arrow raised at the proper angle to show the sun’s movement, a reminder to all who passed that time was our greatest and most fragile gift.

  Samuel Sewall met the Wedges in the library. “Welcome, gentlemen. John Harvard must look down and smile.”

  “More than you could know,” said Isaac.

  Sewall took their catalog sheets and perused them quickly. “Books for case twelve. Natural philosophy . . . and a list inscribed by the man who first cataloged John Harvard’s books. A good sign.”

  “I am most fortunate to be able to help,” said Isaac.

  “As are we all,” answered Sewall. “Keeper Gookin honors the alumni.”

  The new room was twice the size of the old, with windows north and south, two fireplaces, and space for six thousand volumes, three times more than in the old library. And no chains, for though Harvard followed European customs wherever possible, the books in the library would never be chained to the shelves. The walls were painted robin’s-egg blue, and above each bookcase was a white Roman numeral. The Wedges went for Section XII and shelved the books, including Corporei Insectii, leaf-side-out, the number six written on the page edge.

  “So, ’tis done,” said Isaac.

  “It does not set well with me,” whispered John.

  Just then, there came a commotion at the door. A tall gentleman with long face and shoulder-length reddish hair stepped into the library, followed by his son, Cotton.

  “’Twill not set well for either of us,” whispered Isaac to his son, “should the Reverend Increase Mather decide to read Corporei Insectii.”

  Sewall went to greet them, but Increase Mather raised a finger for quiet, then surveyed the library and whispered, loudly enough for all to hear, “The Lord’s gift. He is great and powerful.”

  “Indeed,” said Sewall.

  “A year ago, we could only pray that this room would come into being. Now we have vanquished the heathens whose land the Lord God of our Fathers gave us to possess and”—Mather’s eye fell upon Isaac—“Master Wedge, who didst preach to the heathen and fight him, too. The news is good, is it not?”

  “None better,” said Isaac. “King Philip’s head on a pike at Plymouth. His hand preserved in a bucket of Boston rum. The rest of him feed for Rhode Island crows—”

  “And his followers as scattered as himself,” said Increase Mather.

  “The Lord is great and powerful,” said Isaac.

  “And the d-d-d-devil knows a mighty defeat,” said Cotton.

  “Aye,” said Increase. “But the devil will not rest. We must remain ever vigilant. Wouldn’t you agree, young John Wedge?”

  “If we are not vigilant,” answered John, “Satan may yet know the victory he sought through King Philip, for he is a relentless spirit.”

  “John Wedge speaks well,” said Increase Mather. “He will be one to watch.”

  Isaac hoped that it would be so, but for his part, he would watch the Mathers.

  iv

  It was not the Mathers, however, who finally paid Isaac the visit he feared. It was a Harvard man, Reverend George Burroughs, Class of 1670, who came to Sudbury on a May afternoon some five years later.

  Isaac was writing a proof on a blackboard. He had rebuilt his house on its old foundation stones and now kept a school in the great room. The sight of an old friend such as Burroughs brightened his prospects for a pleasant evening after a tiresome day of Euclidean geometry and L
atin declensions.

  So they supped together, then they sat in front of the house, drank beer that Isaac had brewed, and watched the river wind through the marsh. And Burroughs said, “I’ve visited the college library of late. I’ve read an interesting book on insects.”

  Isaac gagged his beer down and said, “Insects?”

  Burroughs chuckled. “’Tis a fine book. Since you be listed as donor, I came to thank you in person.”

  Burroughs—a compact, muscular man, dark-haired, dark-browed—was the sort who looked as if he meant what he said. And Isaac knew that, in this case, looks did not deceive. So he decided to tell Burroughs the whole story, from the day he met John Harvard until he cataloged the book in the new library.

  Burroughs said, “God would not have given Shakespeare such a gift had He not intended it to be used. John Harvard must have known it, just as he knew that the safest place for a book is a library, even in a colony where God’s gifts are not always understood.”

  “Has anyone else read it that you know?”

  “I saw no other names set down. But now that I’m settled in Salem, I shall visit the library from time to time. Should I see or hear anything, I’ll let you know.”

  “Sudbury be a far piece from Salem . . . or Cambridge.”

  “Count on me, Isaac. I love a good story, whether from the Bible or elsewhere. But you must tell me, who else knows of this book?”

  “Only my son. He serves in Jamaica as agent for his new father-in-law, John Cogswell, in the purchase of molasses for rum. He has never approved of my deceit.”

  “Tell him, ’tis deceit in service of a greater truth.”

  At that moment, in a fine house on the island of Jamaica, John Wedge was enjoying the pleasures of a new-married man, wrapped in a cool sheet and the soft, smooth legs of Mary Cogswell Wedge.

  When his thrusting was done, she kissed him and said, “Perhaps this is the time.”

  “Do you think so?”