by Susan Cooper
Daniel Smith was younger than John’s father and mother. He was tall and broad-shouldered and did not often laugh. As a member of the colony’s militia, he was often in uniform, and on Sundays he was part of the armed guard that marched down the aisle of the meetinghouse, three abreast, when the congregation was all gathered. Behind them came the governor, the preacher, and Captain Miles Standish, officer’s cane in hand—and after that, the long service began.
The rest of the time Daniel worked as pitman for Goodman Webster, who was the community’s sawyer; they made the wooden planks used for every house in this village. The trunk of a tree was set over a great pit with a man in it, and between him and another man above, a toothed metal saw was pushed up and down to cut the trunk into planks. So much sawdust got into Daniel’s hair and clothes that he wore his hair very short, and always had the faint sweetish smell of maple wood. He felt his was a manly and useful occupation, and suggested to Margaret that John should help around the saw pit, but to John’s great relief Goodman Webster—a very large, muscular man—said he was too small.
John spent his days doing the work his father had taught him—tending plants in the field and the garden and collecting shellfish on the seashore. One day he came home with a basket of clams to find Daniel Smith’s heavy flintlock rifle propped against the wall inside the door, even though it was the afternoon of a working day. Daniel was coming out of the inner room, smiling. His face tightened into its usual stern lines when he saw John.
But to John’s amazement, he nodded at the basket and said, with some effort, “Thou hast a good catch.”
Then he took his rifle and marched out. Over his shoulder he said, “Thy mother has something to tell thee.” Then he was gone.
John turned; his mother was behind him.
She reached for the basket. “Well done—this is a feast,” she said warmly, but she was not looking at him.
John said, “What did he mean?”
“Daniel and I are to be married,” said his mother. “Next week.”
John couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Out of the whirl of emotions in his head, only one found words.
“They killed Hawk!” he said.
“They did their best to save thy father, John,” his mother said. “Put the Indian out of your mind. All death is hard. I have spoken to Daniel about that terrible day. He and Master Kelly truly believed that you were being attacked.”
“Hawk was trying to help,” John said.
His mother said, “And they have spoken to Captain Standish about the matter, and he agreed that it was best forgotten.” She put out her hand to him. “Come in and wash yourself, my dear.”
John stood there for a moment, and in his mind I could hear the words he did not say.
My father scorned Miles Standish for his arrogance toward the Indians. And you are marrying another such, with my father just three months dead.
The day before the wedding Mistress Saxon, who lived nearby, came upon John collecting kindling. She saw the look on his face, and was wise enough to know what it meant.
“John,” she said, “thy mother loves thee. And Daniel Smith is a good, devout man who will work hard for the family. In this place, it is sorely difficult for one person to raise children alone.”
John said, “I work hard too.”
“Th’art a good boy,” said Mistress Saxon, “but th’art ten years old.”
“I am near eleven,” John said.
She patted him on the shoulder, and went on her way to check a woman who was about to have a baby.
After the wedding Daniel Smith moved into the house, and John, who before had slept at the end of his parents’ bed, had to share one with his sisters. His stepfather was indeed a devout man; very soon they were all praying far more often than before. They prayed together every morning and every evening and before every meal, and Daniel Smith’s prayers were very long and eloquent and full of quotations from the Bible.
John found this a burden, especially when he was very hungry. He felt that surely God must be satisfied with all the praying they did on Sundays, when everyone gathered to listen to the minister preach for at least two hours in the morning, and then another two hours in the afternoon.
His mother said gently to him one day, when he was clearing ashes from the fireplace, “I need thee to be a good example to the girls, and not fidget when Daniel is saying grace. We all need to show gratitude to the Lord for what we are given.”
“I am very grateful,” John said. “But my father used to say thank you much more quickly.”
“Daniel is a very devout man,” his mother said.
John said, “I miss my father.”
“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” said his mother, as if reciting a lesson, and she handed him a bucket for the ashes. But she ran her hand across his hair as she left.
John could read the Bible for himself; his mother had taught him how. It was a wonder for me to see language turned into signs called letters; my own language had never been written down. Sometimes John gave his sister Mercy lessons, drawing the letters in the dirt outside the house with a stick; she was an eager pupil, and loved to practice. If Daniel Smith caught them doing this he was angry, and instantly found work for them both to do. The third time he came across them writing, he even hit John across the head, though not very hard because Margaret was watching.
“This is vanity,” said Daniel Smith. “Margaret, have you no useful occupation for your daughter? And John, you should be in the field, keeping the birds from the corn. Go!”
“Mercy is very good at her letters,” John said.
“Hush,” said his mother nervously.
“Do not argue with thine elders,” Daniel Smith said, though John had not felt he was arguing. “Mercy is a girl, and should be learning to sew and to cook. After that she will have time to learn to read the Bible. Now do what I tell thee!”
John went off to their allotted acre of land beyond the houses, where corn and pumpkins were growing. He did not point out to Daniel Smith that the swelling ears of corn were at more risk from night-prowling raccoons than from daytime birds. He tried to think of work that he and Mercy could do together, so that he could teach her to write when Daniel Smith was not looking. He had noticed that though Daniel knew a great many pieces of the Bible by heart, he was very rarely to be seen reading it, and indeed tried to avoid opportunities to do so. Perhaps, thought John, Daniel didn’t want a little girl to be good at something he couldn’t do very well himself.
He knew this was an unworthy thought, so he said a small private prayer apologizing to his God. He found, however, that this didn’t make the thought go away.
As time went by Daniel decided that John would be better occupied by helping him move the family privy. Like my people, these English did their business into a hole in the ground at a decent distance from the house, but they felt it necessary to build a little house over the hole. It was always a smelly little house full of flies, and John hated his job of carrying buckets of earth from the new hole Daniel was digging, and emptying them into the reeking old one.
Between carrying buckets, he had to dig shallow trenches beside the walls of the little house, so that beams could be slid underneath it for men to pick it up and move it, in due course, to sit on top of the new hole.
“Th’art a slow worker,” said Daniel, watching John struggle to pick up a bucket of stones and earth.
Their neighbor Goodman Evans was passing by, with a big wooden spade in his hand. He paused, and considered John’s efforts.
“Perhaps the man does not match the task, Daniel,” he said. “This boy of yours is a good little gardener—I would trade you his time for my big strong Ethan, who has just destroyed a whole row of carrots as weeds.”
John smiled at Goodman Evans, who often used to exchange seeds and plants with his father.
Daniel did not smile. He said, “John must follow the ordinance of our Lord in the Bible—whatsoever thy hand find
eth to do, do it with all thy might. Thank you for your interest, Thomas Evans, but we have a family task to accomplish here.”
“As you wish, neighbor,” said Goodman Evans amiably, and he went on his way with his spade.
So John went on straining to lift heavy buckets—and at intervals, glancing across at the stone on the ground beside the woodpile, where my tomahawk was buried. It was as if all the opinions he had learned from his tolerant father were buried there with it.
He was learning secrecy. The image of my body tossed into the undergrowth haunted him so constantly that one day, when Daniel was away with the militia, he went back alone to the clearing where his father’s friend and I had died. It was a hard journey for a boy to make, and he had no idea what he might do when he got there. When he found no sign of my body at all, he was glad, because he knew that my people must have come and taken it away.
He saw few of my people in Plymouth, then. The severed head of Wituwamet, now a blackened skull, had been set on a pole above the colony’s fort ever since Miles Standish’s ferocious attack on the Massachusetts. For a long time after that, not one of the Indians—as they called us, using one name for all the peoples of this land—would come near this town to trade.
For my own people, though, our father Yellow Feather’s agreement with the white men still held, keeping friendship between them and our tribe. All the past was clear to me now, all that he had done. He had come to the wedding of their leader Bradford, bringing more than a hundred people with him to help celebrate. Since then he had been making more agreements, through which the English gave us their knives, tools, cloth, and other goods in exchange for the right to build houses and farms on our land.
There were white men in the colony, like John’s father Benjamin Wakeley, who tried to respect the beliefs of my people, and to keep the peace, but there were also those like the captain Miles Standish, who thought of all Indians as ignorant savages. As the months went by, every day John heard words from Daniel Smith’s mouth that were the opposite of everything he had heard before. He tried to say nothing in argument, because he knew he would cause a problem for his mother.
But one day it was all too much for him.
They were walking home from the meetinghouse on Sunday with their neighbors Robert and Abigail Turner, after a sermon devoted to the mission of converting the heathen to the Christian religion.
“In God’s good time,” said Robert Turner, “we shall spread the word and there will be whole villages of praying Indians.”
“Amen,” said Abigail and Margaret hopefully.
“It is a wishful thought,” Daniel Smith said, “but they are a barbarous and savage people, and in their fury they not only kill but torment men in the most bloody manner. There are many reports. They even eat human flesh, they are the children of the Devil.”
Walking silently in the rear with his sisters, John let out a small infuriated noise and clenched his fists. Only Mercy heard; she looked up at him nervously.
“The love of God can reach out even to convert savages, surely,” Robert Turner said. He was a large man and it was a warm day; his red face was glistening under his tall black hat.
“I fear Satan reached them first, long since,” said Daniel.
From behind, John said suddenly, very fast, and more loudly than he had intended, “When my father took me to see the Indians fishing, they were very kind to us, and they showed the grown-ups how to fish, and I played with their children.”
There was a silence. They had reached the family house, and Robert and Abigail Turner did not pause. “Good day, neighbors,” they both said politely, and walked hastily on.
Daniel Smith glared at John. “It is a sin to tell lies,” he said. “A wicked sin. And on the Sabbath!”
Before John could open his mouth again, Margaret said quickly, “It’s true, husband—Benjamin did take him. It was at the very beginning, when Squanto showed us ways to plant and farm this land.”
“No proper child interrupts the conversation of his betters,” Daniel said angrily.
“No, indeed,” Margaret said, and she looked at John for his apology.
John looked up at Daniel Smith.
“One of the Indians was called Hawk,” he said. “But now he is dead.”
Daniel’s face flushed with repressed rage. “Get to bed!” he said. “And be glad I do not whip thee!”
It was the moment, no doubt, at which he determined to remove John from his sight.
A week later Daniel informed the family that John had reached the age where he should learn a trade, and that he had found him a place as apprentice to a cooper, a maker of barrels, whom he had met through his work as a sawyer. The cooper’s name was William Medlycott, and his home was not in Plymouth, but in a new settlement a day’s journey to the north. The apprenticeship meant room and board and the learning of the craft, and it would last unbroken for seven years.
Margaret, who had already been told this news, heard it in silence with her eyes cast down. Mercy and Patience stared at Daniel Smith in horror, and began to cry.
John said nothing. He could think only of finding a moment to dig up my tomahawk, and take it with him when he left home.
FOUR
A few days later, John left Plymouth. Daniel had arranged for him to travel in a cart drawn by two large oxen and driven by Goodman Bates, who was taking a load of timber and vegetables to settlements thirty miles away, near the North River. John could have gone up the coast by sea, since boats had begun to ply regularly out of Plymouth Harbor, but by land the trip would cost nothing, because Goodman Bates owed Daniel a favor.
The little girls were crying again, and Margaret held John very close, her own eyes full of tears. He had grown to look so much like his father that she felt she was losing Benjamin all over again, as well as her son.
John’s face was wet too. “I will send you messages when I can, Mother,” he said.
Margaret could hardly speak. She said, “God bless you, my dear one.”
John scrambled up into the back of the cart and Daniel handed him up his bundles, one large, one small. The smaller one held food packed by Margaret for the journey; the bigger held John’s clothes, nightshirt, slippers, and winter coat—the only things he owned, besides the clothes on his back, the shoes on his feet, and the jackknife at his belt.
There was one other thing in the bundle, tucked inside his good shirt. Very early that morning, before anybody was awake, he had crept out to rescue my tomahawk from its hiding place under the woodpile.
Mercy had opened her eyes as he was tying up his bundle again. She was a grown girl now, nine years old.
She lay there looking at him very sadly, and she whispered, “Don’t forget us.”
John leaned over and kissed her forehead. He whispered back, “Never.”
Now Goodman Bates called to his oxen and shook the reins. The cart creaked off. Margaret, Mercy, and Patience waved, and John waved back until the fence that enclosed New Plymouth cut them off from his sight. I could feel the mixture of sadness and excitement in his mind. He was eleven years old—the same age that I had been when my father took me into the winter woods and left me there.
Trees shaded the beaten dirt of the road, which like all their roads had been made from one of our old tracks. John soon pulled off his jerkin, though, because this was late August and the air was hot. He pulled off his hat, too, to fan himself and chase away the flies. Up there in the back of the cart, he was sitting on an enormous log; there were three of these, three sections of a tree trunk. They were wedged tight by other chunks of wood to keep them from rolling, but John watched them cautiously. If any one of them got loose, it could crush him flat in a moment.
Above him, at the front of the cart, the broad back of Goodman Bates swayed to the rhythm of the big, slow oxen—mild, patient beasts, in spite of their impressive horns. Sitting next to him was a small woman; John could see only the back of her brown doublet, and her neat linen cap.
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sp; When they stopped to eat, two hours later, and Goodman Bates went to fetch water for the oxen, John found that the other passenger was not a woman, but a girl about his own age. She had a pretty, pointed face, and she gave him a small nervous smile. Her name was Huldah Bates; she was Goodman Bates’s niece and she too was being sent away, to live with a family who had farmland in a new settlement near where John was going. Like him, she had no idea what to expect.
“The work will be just like at home, I suppose,” she said. “But at home there were six of us children and another on the way, so my mother said there was no help for it, my brother and I had to go. He’s off to be a ’prentice, next week.”
“So am I!” said John. “To a cooper, Master Medlycott. Where will your brother go?”
“To the smithy near the harbor,” Huldah said.
“My father let me watch the sparks there sometimes, when I was a little lad.”
Huldah sighed. “Edmund is lucky, he will be near home. But he has to live over the smithy. He says his first job of the day will be lighting the fire before anyone else is awake. What will you do?”
“I don’t know,” said John, and felt suddenly alarmed.
Goodman Bates loomed over him with a dripping bucket; he had been down to a stream to dip up water for the animals. “Tha’ll make buckets like this,” he said. “Or maybe tha’ll just fetch and carry, for a few years.” He gave a great bellowing laugh and went off to his oxen.
John and Huldah stared out at the trees and the stream, thinking about their uncertain futures. But hunger drove out anxiety, and soon they were both munching stale crusty bread, and discussing the people of Plymouth, not always with reverence. Each of them had found a friend.
Not for long, however. After another hour Goodman Bates headed the cart up a side track, through woodland and then cleared fields, and they came to a house with a wooden roof, as big as the grander houses in Plymouth. There were two outbuildings as well. Beside them was an enclosed field with four cows and two horses, and chickens were pecking the ground outside the house. None of these were creatures native to our land; like the oxen, they had been brought from across the sea in the white man’s ships. There were more and more of them now.