The Dumb Shall Sing

by Stephen Lewis

  "You might as well take the chains and ropes off of him," Catherine said to the soldier.

  "I cannot until the lieutenant so orders me, and I don't think you should want me to."

  "If I am not safe with him here, how am I going to be safe with him ashore. Untie him."

  "Ashore he'll knock you over your head when you sleep."

  "Then you are talking to a ghost. Let him go."

  "Do as Mistress Williams says," the lieutenant commanded as he emerged from below. "This savage is no longer our responsibility, and now as passengers on Mistress Williams' ship we need to act the guest."

  The soldier unsheathed a short sword from its scabbard. He held the blade in front of him, and then pressed it against the wound on Massaquoit's chest. The Indian did not respond, nor did he take his eyes off the blade. The soldier then lowered the blade to the rope binding Massaquoit's hands, and with one sharp movement he sliced it apart. He knelt and cut the ropes around Massaquoit's feet.

  "Into the boat, then, if you don't mind," the lieutenant said. "You first Mistress Williams."

  The lieutenant helped her onto the rope ladder that hung over the rail and down to the shallop. The soldier nudged Massaquoit forward with the flat edge of his sword's blade. They clambered down the ladder and into the shallop. Catherine sat on the long bench that ran on one side of the vessel. Massaquoit stood at the stern.

  "Do not worry," he said. "I have lost my taste for a swim in these waters."

  "I never feared it," she replied. "I hope you do not think that I enjoyed the spectacle we just witnessed.

  "You did not stop it."

  She stared at this proud man, who stood with his back to her, glancing over his shoulder as he spoke.

  "You think I should thank you," he said, "but I should have died with the others. I fear their spirits will haunt me."

  He turned back to face the waters that were now the graves of his companions. She turned her attention to the two sailors, one on each side, who plied the heavy oars. One was an older man, his face badly scarred from smallpox, whom she did not recognize. The other was young Ned Jameson. Her late husband had hired Ned to learn how to be a sailor on the sloop after extensive conversations with Henry Jameson, Ned's uncle, who was the boy's guardian since both his parents had been killed by Indians at the beginning of the war. Henry Jameson had five daughters and was happy to take in the young man as his son. When Henry's wife Martha, now in her late thirties became pregnant again, the house seemed to become too small for Ned, and so Henry convinced Catherine’s husband to have him train as a sailor on the Good Hope. Two weeks ago, Catherine had helped Martha deliver a son. Just before he boarded the sloop as it carried the captives to Newbury, Ned learned that his uncle now had the son he so earnestly desired.

  The craft slid over the waves into the breakers. Ned hopped over the bow and his companion threw him a line with which he could haul the shallop onto the sand. When the boat was beached, the older sailor offered his arm to Catherine, but she scrambled over the bow unassisted. The sailor shrugged and looked back at Massaquoit whose eyes had not left the point in the now distant waters where the others had disappeared.

  "What about him?" the sailor asked. Without waiting for an answer, he clambered out of the boat and onto the sand. "He makes me nervous, he does, that one."

  Ned, who was still holding the bow rope, now handed it to his companion.

  "Have you decided what you are going to call him?" he asked Catherine. "The lieutenant told us we were not to use his heathen name, nor was you."

  "Matthew," Catherine said simply, "only he does not yet know it."

  Massaquoit gave up his vigil and made his way to the front of the shallop. His intense eyes held each of the English in turn, starting with Catherine and then resting on first one sailor and then the next. The sailors took a half step back, their hands reaching for the knives they had in their belts. Catherine smiled.

  "Are you ready to see your new home?" she asked.

  Massaquoit lowered his eyes and nodded.

  "I will do what I must."

  "What you must do, then," said Ned, "is get off our boat so we can head back to the ship where we belong, and leave you here, where you ought to be, but as far as that goes, I don't know why we didn't send you after your friends."

  "Enough," Catherine said. "He is now a member of my household, and you will treat him with the same respect you would me."

  "As you wish, Mistress," Ned said. "Begging your pardon, but I won't be bowing my head before no savage."

  "Then when you reach your vessel, be so kind as to tell the Captain that he, your uncle, and I, will discuss your continued employment on my vessel. If you do not know how to heed me as your mistress, perhaps you need to feel your uncle's hand."

  "I am a grown man, Mistress," Ned said. The color had risen to his cheeks, and he pulled the knife out of his belt. Massaquoit's eyes fastened on the blade, while the other sailor stepped several paces back.

  "Maybe I should just finish what we should have finished out there," Ned said.

  "I don't think so," Catherine said. She held out her hand. "Give it here."

  "Stand aside Mistress," Ned said.

  "I cannot do that."

  "At your peril, then," and he lunged at Massaquoit. The Indian brought his forearm up hard against the sailor's arm, and the knife went spinning into the sand. They grappled and rolled after it. Massaquoit's hand recovered the weapon first, and he held it to the sailor's throat.

  "Go ahead, then," Ned said. "You might as well, just like you did my family."

  Massaquoit stared hard at the boy, and then stood up.

  "You are still a child," he said. He handed the knife to Catherine. "He needs a spanking."

  Ned leaped to his feet and lunged at Massaquoit, but the Indian sidestepped him and tripped him down into the sand. Ned got up spitting sand out of his mouth. The pock marked sailor grabbed him by the shoulders and led him back to the shallop, which was now being lifted by the incoming tide.

  "Get in," the sailor said. "I'll push us out."

  Catherine and Massaquoit watched as the sailor put his shoulder to the boat and shoved it out into the water. Then he hopped in and grabbed an oar to pole them out to deeper water. In the meantime, Ned sat sullenly in the stern. Finally, he took his place on the bench and picked up his oar. The shallop made slow but steady progress against the tide. They stood watching in silence until they saw the rope thrown up from the shallop and caught by a sailor on deck of the sloop.

  Catherine put her hand on Massaquoit's arm and turned him toward her. He did not resist.

  "That lad, "she said, "his mother and father were killed at Wethersfield, and his sister, a girl of twelve, was carried away. He was working in the field with his father when the village was attacked. His father told him to hide in the corn, which he did. When he came out he found his father dead, with an arrow in his chest, and then at his house he saw his mother, who had been knocked on the head. He did not speak for two weeks after he came to live with his uncle."

  She still had her hand on his arm, and he lifted it off, gently, but irresistibly.

  "Yes," he said. "He is angry at all Indians for what those did. But what do you think he should say to me? My wife and son were at the fort in Mystic when the English came."

  "I cannot talk for him, but I can say that I am sorry. For both of you."

  She began the walk up from the beach and toward the town of Newbury. Massaquoit waited a moment or two, and then he followed. Neither of them found use for further words until they reached Catherine's large house, set on a hill. She went inside, and he sat down in the shade of a maple.

  Massaquoit remained sitting under the tree long after the activity in the house had stopped, and the last candle had been extinguished. Catherine had come out once to invite him in to supper, but he had refused.

  "You know, I don't consider you a servant," she had said. "Calling you that, and agreeing to take you into my househ
old as such, is the only way I could secure your freedom."

  At the word "freedom," Massaquoit barely raised his eyebrows as though wondering how the word applied to him. Then he resumed staring in the direction of the harbor.

  "You are more than welcome to join me at the table. It's a big house, bigger still, now that my children have moved on and my John is dead." When Massaquoit still did not respond, she turned back into her house.

  He looked up through the branches of the maple to the sky, which glowed softly from a full moon. The air was warm and humid. He remembered how on nights such as this he would press against the sweet damp flesh of his wife while their son slept soundly a few feet away. But now he remembered how he had last seen them. She was lying on top of the boy. The broken blade of a sword protruded from her ribs, and her blood pooled an inch deep over her punctured heart, and then it spilled over onto the face of the boy, or what was left of his face, as fire lit by the soldiers had reduced his skin to little more than ash. It looked as though she had tried to smother the flames when she was stabbed, for her flesh was scarcely singed. He squeezed that memory from his mind, and instead recalled the pressure of his wife’s thighs, and he heard again his son’s sleep laden words in the morning, even as he sat outside the white woman's house, and he felt his heart harden into a clenched fist of hatred.

  He thought about killing the woman who had saved his life. It would be very easy to do, even though he had no weapons. There were only two servants in the house. He had watched and counted as he sat. He had seen the man going out to the garden. He was stooped, and his step was slow. Later the girl had walked toward him a few tentative paces, and then she had placed something on the ground, covered in a cloth, and beckoned him to take it. Neither the old man nor the young girl would put up much resistance if he sneaked into the house and found the woman in her bed.

  For a moment, his heart rose at the thought. His hands felt her neck in his tightening fingers, and that feeling drove away the memory of his wife's body as this woman's dying gasps would erase his son's words. And then he could flee into the woods.

  There his thoughts stopped. He had nobody to seek in those woods. Who would take him in? Uncas and the Mohegans, or Miantonomi and the Narragansetts? Hadn't they both fought with the English? Hadn't they proved they were happy to cut off the head of a Pequot and carry it on a stake to their English masters? He knew that some of his companions had been given to Uncas and Miantonomi as slaves in payment for their service to the English. Any others of his people, such as his wife’s mother, who had survived the slaughter at the fort or the flight into the swamp must now be in hiding, perhaps across the water on the island called Munnawtawkit, or even further on Paumonok. He would have to bide his time.

  And yet none of these reasons by themselves stopped him from climbing in through a window and putting his hands around the white woman's neck. He had seen the others drop into the water. The first, the one who had been shot, was his cousin. He had grown up with the others, fought and hunted with them. Their blood called to him. The problem was he could not make himself believe that the woman whose life he contemplated taking was responsible for their deaths, nor would killing her ease the pain in his heart. There was something about her that impressed him; perhaps it was her courage in speaking her mind to the English men who would have been just as happy to see him drown.

  He stretched out beneath the tree with his eyes fixed on the moon and watched it as it sank toward the horizon. He slept, briefly, between the moon's setting, and the sun's rising.

  * * * *

  In a window on the second floor of her house, Catherine sat in her rocking chair and stared at the unmoving shape of her new servant. She wondered just how she was going to deal with him. She had told Phyllis, her servant girl, to leave a plate of food on the ground where he could see it, even though she knew he would not accept the offering, not tonight, and maybe not for days, if ever. Still, she knew she had to try. Now, she saw the white cloth that Phyllis had set over the plate lift in a sudden breeze and fall half off. It did not matter, for Massaquoit had glanced once when the plate was set down, and had not looked at it again.

  She did not fear him, although others did. In her own way, which was not always consistent with the Word as preached by Minister Davis, she relied on her understanding of her God's will. She depended on her intuitive understanding of the deity's intentions in a particular circumstance rather than the applications of the minister's sermons in which, she felt, mere language was squeezed into dogma that suited the convenience of both ministers and magistrates and had very little to do with God as she liked to think she experienced Him. And so now, without being able to put into words her own thoughts, she somehow still knew that Massaquoit was not going to knock her over the head, whatever his hatred of the English might be, and she did not doubt that he had cause for his rage.

  She was not so presumptuous to think that in saving Massaquoit from the watery grave to which his comrades had been sent that she was serving God's will, that she had become, in a phrase she detested hearing from the pulpit, "an instrument of His will." No, she did not feel that way at all. She had merely done what she thought was the right thing to do, and something she was sure her late husband would have agreed to, once she had taken the time to explain why he should.

  This thought took her mind away from the Indian sitting beneath her tree and to her husband, dead these three months, a man with whom she had lived for thirty years, and with whom she had borne six children, all of whom had survived into adulthood and now lived scattered in different towns up and down the river valley that cut a long line from the north through the hills down to Newbury Harbor where it emptied into the sea. None of her children, two daughters and four sons, and their families were now close enough to see more than occasionally. She reasoned that the next time they would be together would be to bury her. That thought gave her ironic comfort.

  John had been a kind and gentle husband, conscientious, even aggressive, in business but neglectful at home, so that he had given the management of the household over to his wife to an extent that caused tongues to wag behind their backs. She sensed these criticisms; if John did, however, he did not seem to pay any attention. When he died suddenly of a fever which took him from active middle age to the grave in two days, she had been shocked into numbness from which she recovered into a thankfulness that their lives had been so accommodating to each other, even though their relationship had never burned with much passion.

  She turned her attention back to the crouched figure, now just visible in the shadows beneath the tree. There was so much she would have to teach him, and she knew how recalcitrant a student he would surely be.

  She must start on the morrow by telling him that his name was now "Matthew." If he did not approve, he could choose another Christian name, for the "treaty" imposed on the surviving Pequots after their disastrous war forbade their language, including names, from being spoken. If she succeeded in convincing him to accept a Christian name, at least for the benefit of their neighbors in the tight, gossipy community that was Newbury, she could then begin the much more arduous process of making him a Christian not just in name, but in some semblance of practice, or appearance, if not belief. She found it almost amusing that she, whose love of her church was far less than her love of her God was now forced to proselytize, to make a convert of one whose stubborn heart would make him an implacable enemy of that very church.

  * * * *

  Massaquoit awoke, still sitting squat legged beneath the tree, his back pressed against its rough bark, when a twig brushed against his cheek on its way to the ground. He looked up through the branches to find the bird whose housekeeping had dislodged the twig. Halfway up the trunk, he saw the flutter of wings as the brown-feathered female robin flew off. He stood up slowly against the ache in his legs and back. The bird circled overhead, but did not leave the area. After a few moments, it landed on the ground near the plate of food. He heard the door of the hou
se open and saw the same servant girl, who had left the food, looking at him. Although he was too far to see her eyes, he knew they were fearful by the timid movements of her head as she glanced in his direction. He wondered why she was so afraid of him, but then he realized they all were. He found it strange that the defeated captive should excite such terror among those who had defeated him. He watched as she walked ever so slowly toward the plate of food. Her eyes remained on him, and so she did not notice the bird, which had lifted the cloth entirely off the plate, and was now pecking at a crust of bread. The bird, testing the limits of its courage, stayed with its task as the girl approached, until it succeeded in ripping off a piece of the bread. Then, the crust protruding from both sides of its beak, it launched itself with a flutter of wings that brought it dangerously close to the girl's head. She raised her hands to her mouth as though to shriek, but no sound came out. In a quick motion, her eyes still on Massaquoit, she stooped down and lifted the plate, and then hastened back into the house.

  He felt the smile form on his lips, and realized that he had not smiled in many weeks. Still, the ache in his muscles, and the emptiness in his belly told him that he must do something to find a way to survive in this strange and hostile environment of the English. He would begin by providing himself with a place to sleep.

  Of course, he realized that he was not absolutely free to go. He was not restrained by ropes or chains, as he had been, but he was the white woman's property. If he just left, she could order the soldiers to come after him. He had no stomach to become the hunted animal again, as he had been when he led his people into the swamp. He would wait for the white woman to come out of her house, and then he would tell her what he intended to do. He did not mean to seek her permission, but to inform her of what he needed to do, so she would let him go in peace into the woods.

  He did not have long to wait, for Catherine, who had been watching him and Phyllis again from her window, now stepped out of her house, and with her bold stride, which belied her plump body, strode toward him.