Here’s what we’ll do, Billington heard himself say. That tree’s mine, and we’ll say your stake begins on the other side.
He pointed just past the parcel he wished to purchase.
Newcomen seemed to think on it.
But it’s not, Newcomen said. Or rather, that’s not what Captain Standish has told me.
Billington smirked.
I don’t want trouble, Newcomen said and went back to his chopping.
Billington took longer than he wished to regain his composure. When his breath was steady he told Newcomen to be careful and rode hotly onward to Billington Sea.
He met the young Wampanoag man at the eastern edge of the lake named after his son.
The two nodded.
The young man said, Hello.
He spoke in English, likely informed by two decades—his entire lifetime—of contact with English fishermen, trappers, seamen, and traders.
Billington brought out the powder and motioned for a show of payment.
But something gave Billington pause.
Billington was not sure how much English the young man would know, but he asked, anyway, How will you use it?
Was Billington’s concern valid or was this the colony speaking, was this some English loyalty, the disastrous loyalty that never gives anything back, beat into the lower classes? Was this the fear, the wretched fear the hypocrites had so much of, leeching into him?
For defense, the young man said. The clear, obvious answer.
No matter, Billington told himself, when the beaver pelts were in his hands. Over went the powder, over went the pelts and wampum, and none would be the wiser.
The two men nodded, and each man turned back toward the way they came—Billington on horse, the other man on foot.
He’d done it. He’d saved enough to purchase the parcel adjacent to his property out in the fields. But that elation was short-lived. He was struck with fear. What if they’ve already given it away?
He finally had the means to pay for it. Of course it would disappear.
He had to go at once to Standish, or Bradford, and as kindly as he could muster—given their wretchedness—inquire about purchasing the land.
Alice Bradford
I picked up the rising loaves from the house and walked toward the outdoor ovens. Beneath the roof where my husband worked, William the younger held the ropes to two little goats. I left two slices of bread and meat folded in cloth at the base of a tree for both of them and told them not to work too long without eating. I tried not to dote too much on William the younger. My husband cautioned me that it would be the cause of his ruination.
Dorothy and William’s son John had a grievous temperament, William had said. But I’d known him for four years. Perhaps he was just shy. I witnessed William’s scolding of Dorothy for letting John hide under the table during celebrations and under his mother’s arm during sermons, to which Dorothy always replied, Yes, Good Husband, but kept her son close, stroked her son’s hair.
I wish to obey my husband, but my body says otherwise, she had confessed to me.
I told her I understood, but I did not. A child was a child, a thing to be molded by his parents. She was encouraging his reticence. I had never had a child such as he.
I hoped John’s grandparents had been more fair in their teachings, pushing him out into the world. I hoped, for my sake, that John had changed.
My children were not thus, but from their births, my first husband, and then my second, disagreed with me about them. Where would they sleep? I preferred to keep them close, to feel the rise and fall of their chests. When William the younger could talk, I was content to let him play toy soldiers and horses after he finished his morning chores, while William said we must raise his mind above the sillier diversions of childhood.
He must be taught geography, astronomy, history, and Scripture to ward against every child’s sinful nature, William said.
William the younger walked before his first year. All my boys were more apt to try something before they knew how to do it than observe from afar, like John was, like his mother, Dorothy, was, too. When William, at three, jumped into the ocean before he knew how to swim I soaked my clothes saving him and predicted, correctly, this would not be the last such occasion.
At the ovens, Mistress Billington looked toward me, then quickly inserted her own loaves. There were half a dozen loaves of bread and seven meat pies, lined up on the tables, cooling, and at least a dozen more to cook before dinner time.
No more room, she said.
Her voice so cheery to disrupt the day’s work. I might have put my hands on my hips.
If we can’t eat with ye’s, I still must feed my family, she called.
Honestly, I said, and turned to go.
The ocean glistened in the sun. The ship was getting closer, but I had been wrong about how long it would take for them to arrive. They seemed to be stalling there, not moving toward us. Was something wrong?
What had Dorothy seen when first her eyes set upon this place? Arriving in November, with snow falling, three dead already, and half the people too weak to stand. With the Master of the Mayflower urging all hundred passengers out, out, in a hurry, so he could get back to England. While the snow melted on her eyelashes. With no shelter. While she drew her thin wool coat to her neck. Plymouth was a sandy beach and the terrifying unknown behind a thick forest.
The crew was sick by then. Scurvy ran through all of them. Old wounds, long thought healed, reemerged. Hers, too, I’m certain.
I imagined her huddled with the infirm, her teeth wobbly, her gums bleeding. Seven damp weeks on a ship designed for cargo, not people. She left Holland in June and thought she’d be here by mid-July. Instead, there were two delays and a change of ships. She arrived in winter. Months in the tween deck and six weeks of waiting for a house to be built had moved them all—or perhaps just her—toward a reckless mind.
Once, in Leiden, when we were gathering the hens’ eggs, the week after her daughter had been born, unbreathing, she told me she felt that suddenly she would die. She did not want to die, she said, and she lay down in the stiff yellow hay of the chicken coop. I listened to her and had on my sympathetic face, but as I did so I also wanted to yell, Get up! Get up!
Her elbows rested on a hay bale wet with hen dung. Her dress was turning yellow at the hem from muck.
I thought of all the rose-colored ways of speaking, how I could affirm to her what she did not believe about herself. That she would have another child one day, if God deemed it so. That William could have married anyone but choose her. He had his choice of women in the congregation, but he chose you.
Why is God punishing me? she asked me, and I thought about how beautiful she was. She shook her head, as if to shake away a second version of herself. I didn’t mean that. Don’t answer my vanity thus.
One cannot reason a person out of something they did not reason themselves into. I see that now. My father was a solemn man. But her tendency toward sadness benefited me as much as I was agitated by it. Her belief in me was tied to her disbelief of herself. It was not just her I missed. It was myself, who I was in her eyes. Except at the end.
Before William married her, she predicted he would marry me. I always thought her grander than myself, but never said it. I should have. I accepted the good light she shined on me, too, as I had with William, hoping it would or could be true. In doing so, though, I took too much of what she needed. Like a cat I purred, ignorant of how she gave me the belief she needed for herself.
It was easier as girls to worry together and perhaps easier for her to dream then, too. All that future out there, untried. In youth, nothing significant had been lost. I could still sweeten the smell of her future. She was not yet standing on a vacant shore with everyone around her dying.
Maybe we are made with these tendencies toward sadness. She took my leaving with grace. Perhaps I’m thinking too highly of myself, anyway, to think it mattered. Perhaps her acceptance of my betrayal wa
s necessarily tied to her tendency toward gloom—she had expected all along I would leave her.
But that day in Leiden, with the chickens, she got up from the hay, and brushed off her elbows, and did her share of the chores.
At the nearby table, Susanna set her loaves down to cool. She leaned over them, inspecting, and frowned. She was as critical of herself as she was of others. Elizabeth sat darning a man’s sock, preparing for the ill condition of the new colonists’ clothes, as she wished there had been someone on the shore to do the same for her own family when she had arrived here.
The bread sizzled and cracked, one of my favorite sounds, as we women worked.
What say ye, an hour before we must feed them? I asked the women, though my intention was not to know the answer—which I knew myself. My intention was to remind the women the haste at which we needed to keep working.
Susanna nodded and pointed to the bloody linen waving high above the meetinghouse.
Nice welcoming sign, isn’t it? Susanna said, more to Elizabeth than me, for it was a criticism of Captain Standish, perhaps, and by extension, my husband.
Four years ago, Susanna’s husband had helped heal our Indian ally Massasoit from death with fruit preserves and chicken broth. Susanna’s husband had scraped his tongue clean with his knife, and the man lived. After, Massasoit had told Susanna’s husband that the Wessagusset sachem Wituwamat did not like us. Twenty-five miles to the north, in Wessagusset, was a trading post settled by rowdy Englishmen, led by Thomas Weston’s less-equipped brother, Samuel.
When Susanna’s husband came back with the news of Wituwamat’s dislike, Captain Standish said that we must counterattack to signal to our neighbors that we were not a meek, fearful group. Prior to this, my husband had worked to maintain distance from the settlers at Wessagusset, Englishmen who, when they first arrived in Plymouth, ate two months’ worth of our meals from our storehouse, stole our unripe corn on their way out of town, went to Merrymount, and drank their money away. Some had become slaves to the Massachussett, so destitute they were, and sold the clothes off their backs for a peck of corn. It was not the way for Englishmen to be.
William agreed to Standish’s request, I believe because of loyalty to his English brethren, however heathen they be, and to quell what confidence it might give the Massachussett. One evening Standish invited seven Massachussett men to Wessagusset under the pretense of trade. Pecksout, who Myles Standish had not met before, laughed at the sight of Standish.
You are no taller than a sapling, he said. Are you a man?
It could have been a joke, but Standish never took well to criticism, especially about his height.
Standish chuckled, but within minutes he locked the door behind them and gave the elders the cue. They stabbed the Indians with the knives around their own necks. One boy who would not cease to go away was hanged. But a boy hanged is not a thing to speak pridefully of so that part of the event was not much spoketh. Standish rode back on his horse into the colony at dusk, with the head of the eldest Massachussett, Wituwamat, wrapped in white linen. It was a joy to see Standish arriving home with the head of an Indian and not his own gone. He erected Wituwamat’s head on a pike at the apex of our fort—a warning for all the tribes to see.
Standish took pride in his own might, and a week after the head was erected, the bloody white linen was erected alongside it. The rumor in the area then became that we in Plymouth were violent, unpredictable, and vindictive. This was the intention.
Let them think that, William said. If it keeps us alive.
My husband sent good news to Leiden, along with the invitation, yet again, for our pastor John Robinson to join us. In an earlier letter, Robinson had inquired about the Indians. Now my husband had good news: By the good providence of God we killed seven of the chief of them.
But Pastor Robinson, the man who knew I had been untrue in my confessions as a girl, but never stated so directly—just a lift of the eyebrow—sent his regrets. He was much too needed in Holland, he said. But he also sent his admonishments: Oh how happy it would have been if you had instead converted some … where blood has once begun to be shed, it is seldom staunched for long time after … you will say they deserved it, but it is a thing more glorious in men’s eyes than pleasing to God to be a terror to poor, barbarous people. Once there is bloodshed, there will be more.
My husband did not expect such reproach.
How doth he? Judge me thus from halfway around the world, knowing not what we experience, said William.
This was, I know now, a premonition.
Pastor Robinson also warned of Standish.
Pecksout’s taunt of Standish’s stature was hardly cause for murder, Robinson said.
Standish’s problem, according to Pastor Robinson, was pride and self-love. I did not disagree. Pastor Robinson cautioned William, saying Standish’s temper was an outward sign of his ungodly heart.
But Captain Standish and my husband were not dissimilar. Quick to see threat and quick to act upon it. I did not doubt my husband was godly, though sometimes he seemed to have an excess of yellow bile. When a man betrayed him, he did not forget. When a man spoke ill of him—like the lusty seaman aboard the Mayflower who had bragged about hoping to throw half of the Leiden pilgrims overboard before landfall—William said that God would place a just hand upon him. The seaman was the first to fall ill and be thrown overboard, so God did what William predicted. But John Billington?
Well, God tests.
On my first twenty-fifth of December in Plymouth, instead of building the palisade, like the rest of the men, the strangers said it was against their conscience to work on the Lord’s Day. By noon the strangers were out in the grass playing stoolball, drinking beer to excess, and laughing as we worked. By early afternoon, William stepped down from his ladder, marched over to them, and grabbed every bat he could reach.
He held them in the air, shook them, and yelled, This is not the time for leisure!
The strangers stopped their laughing and looked at him.
He flung the bats as far as he could. One landed near a bassinet and the baby screamed.
I’m sorry, but it is against my conscience that some should work while others play the devil’s games. No more revelry or gaming as we work. If Christmas is so important to you, stay in your houses.
Master Billington said, Master Bradford, we always celebrate Christmas this way. After all, this is an English colony.
The crowd grumbled their agreement.
William stood very still and said, That was England. This is Plymouth.
So you can see, there was the choleric about my husband. I hoped the arrival of the new colonists would not provoke him. Perhaps Pastor Robinson thought my husband’s motivations were too base, for how he also behaved when instigated. Would my husband give in to the earthly wish for dominance? I wished to speak these thoughts to someone, but Dorothy was not here and it was my role to remain quiet.
Alice Bradford
In the afternoons, William often read Scripture. He liked to convene with God before taking his daily walk around the colony, then getting back to his labor.
Instead, on the day of the newcomers’ arrival, I found him at his desk writing. A letter, it could have been, but I sensed something else. He stopped with haste at the sound of me kicking the dirt off my boots. He put the quill back as if he had done something wrong, or I had. That he had been immersed and inured to sound. He closed the pages of a book.
Good Husband, I asked. What mischief are you inviting?
He turned, but not with the kindness I knew him to have. Rather, with agitation.
’Tis nothing.
He got up and took his cup out to the front of the house, where I had set up the pails for washing. So many dishes to clean before the newcomers arrived and so many to wash a second time that evening whence they finished. They said fifty were coming, mostly from Leiden, but always the investors seemed to sneak a few in from London, and those few grew our profane lot. S
ome brought their own bowl and cup, but many owned not even that. I had learned to be prepared for the people who took more than their share of pie and did not offer to help with the dishes. Whatever my husband was writing, I suspected it was intended to uproot the problem colonists.
He came back in, said, Mind me, Good Wife, and dashed his eyes in the direction of his desk.
I’ll be at the water, he said, and shut the door.
Joseph was hungry. I lifted the oiled cloth so I could watch the sky as I nursed. William was going toward the shore. I settled Mercy with a slice of bread and a bucket of blocks and went to the rocking chair. So close to the desk. The book William was writing in, I could see, was beneath pamphlets and maps. It was an untidy desk, whereas when it had been Dorothy’s father’s desk, its surface had gleamed and was nearly empty. More for decoration than use.
In the drawing room, we girls once pulled out the drawers when her father was at the market, or away, anyway, anywhere but near the house. Inside was snuff, letters with red wax seals, and a secret stash of tea. That combination of scents was stirring, and I hadn’t thought to smell it again here in Plymouth. I leaned forward, my left arm cradling Joseph, my right arm long enough to reach the drawer. I pulled it open, inhaled. Still there, that smell, and I was back in the drawing room, back with Dorothy telling me about Johannes. The pink ribbon her mother braided her hair with was highlighting the natural flush of her cheeks, and I begged her to tell me more and more, though she promised it was only one kiss, only that once.
He was Dutch. He wanted to be a painter. She met him at the market. She told her father he was tutoring her in Latin. She liked to press her head against his chest, to sneak his smell in alleyways and shaded corners of the house.
As Dorothy spoke, she pinched some tea from her father’s drawer for us to share.
She said her father would forbid the union. I asked why, naive as I was then about loyalties and lineage.
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