Ghost Hawk

by Susan Cooper

  The big man said to Ezra as they left, “A good sermon. And a good man, with proper opinions.”

  “Some may think so,” said Ezra.

  Master Medlycott was beside them, but before he could add his own judgment, they were at the door of the meetinghouse, where Roger Williams was bidding his congregation farewell. John was dispatched to fetch his horse.

  The young minister swung himself up into the saddle and glanced down at John. Thomas was waiting nearby, though the Medlycott family had gone ahead on its way home.

  “Well, John,” said Roger Williams, “what’s thine opinion?” He was smiling, but it was a serious question.

  “I think everything you said was right,” said John. He added recklessly, even though Thomas could hear him, “Especially about the Indians.”

  The bright eyes considered him with interest for a moment. “Good boy,” said Roger Williams. “I hope we meet again.”

  He rode away toward Plymouth, and Thomas and John set off on the rough track to the Medlycott house.

  Thomas said, “What was it he said about Indians?”

  “Didn’t you hear him?” said John.

  Thomas grinned at him. “Th’art better at attending to sermons than I am. I like watching people instead. That Huldah girl was looking at thee a lot, John Wakeley, from across the room.”

  “Was she?” John said.

  “She’s pretty. But she never smiles.”

  “I think she’s homesick.”

  “If I worked for Master Kelly,” said Thomas, “I wouldn’t smile either.”

  * * *

  At home, William Medlycott was not pleased with the new minister. “A preacher should preach,” he said irritably. “This Master Williams is too fond of expounding his own peculiar ideas.”

  “He is a good Christian,” Mistress Medlycott said mildly.

  “And an Indian-lover,” said Master Medlycott. “The man’s a fool. A savage is a savage until he is converted. And even after.”

  John listened to them all and said nothing. But he was restless. He thought about the dignified older Indian who came to trade and was turned away. He thought about Roger Williams. He thought about me. Within a few days he woke very early, before anyone else was stirring, before dawn, and slipped outdoors. A half moon was still shining on the snowy yard.

  Huddling his jacket round him, John made for the salt marsh—and found it covered by the sea. He had forgotten that the tide came in at times which changed by an hour or so every day. The water had brought little chunks of ice with it, broken from the edges of the little creeks in the marsh that froze on cold low-tide nights.

  He stood there, cross with himself, looking out across the icy water. Then he set off round the edge of the marsh to try to get closer to the island, and after much hard scrambling he found that it was not properly an island at all. It was the shape of a pear, with its top facing the land on this side, and the stem of the pear was a low ridge of land emerging from the water now as the tide went down.

  The light of dawn was starting to creep into the sky, behind the cold bright moon. John splashed along the ridge to the island, soaking his shoes and hose. And the moment that he reached the first trees, he saw me there, waiting for him.

  This time he felt no fear at all.

  “Good morning, John Wakeley,” I said.

  John’s thin, intent face broke into a smile. “I knew you’d be here,” he said, and then, in a hurry, “Hawk, will you teach me your language? Prithee?”

  “Why?”

  “I want to be able to talk to your people. I want—I want—” and it all came pouring out: his stored-up horror of the man who had killed me, and of all those around him who talked as if they might do the same to others of my people. Roger Williams had unlocked it. Like Roger Williams, John was in search of tolerance. He talked and he talked, and begged me again to teach him our language.

  “How will people ever understand each other without words?” he said. “Master Williams meets with Indians to learn their tongue, Ezra says—though of course Ezra doesn’t approve. And how could you and I be talking now, if you hadn’t learned English so well?”

  I laughed. “I have never learned English, John Wakeley.”

  He looked at me blankly. “But—” He stopped. I could feel his mind reaching for reason and sliding back again, like a man climbing a muddy slope. Then he gave up, and began to smile again.

  “If the Lord hasn’t explained to me how it is that I can see a ghost,” he said, “I suppose he’s not going to explain how I can talk to him either.”

  I spread my hands. I knew no more than he did.

  John shook his head, and I could see him deliberately push the problem out of his mind. “Well,” he said firmly, “if I am to speak your language to real people, I need to be taught your words. And your customs, too, and the things you believe. Please, Hawk. Please teach me!”

  So I did. I began to teach him our dialect of the Algonquian tongue—then, and often afterward, whenever he could come to me. He had a true gift for language, and he soaked up the words fast, fast. He learned the names of everything we could see on the island: the trees, the water, the rocks, ourselves. Our time was short, as it would always be.

  In the last moment before the sun came up, that first day, I taught him to say his first full sentence: “I am the friend of Little Hawk.” His smile was an echo of the sunrise.

  I pointed him the way he must run, from this part of the island, if he was to get home before trouble greeted him. When he turned back to wave, he could no longer see me.

  In the yard of the Medlycott workshop, John found Thomas staring at his tracks in the snow.

  “Where have you been?” Thomas demanded.

  “I couldn’t sleep. I went out to look at the moon.”

  “You’re all wet. Did you fall down?”

  “The fire will dry me,” John said, and they went indoors for the bowl of cornmeal mush that would fuel them for the morning. John’s shoes and hose steamed in the heat from the fire, and Mistress Medlycott scolded him thoroughly for risking an attack of the ague.

  But from this day onward, he and I began to use words to shape our mysterious gift of understanding.

  EIGHT

  The winter wind was howling like an animal. All night long it had been growing stronger, blowing from the sea, across the salt marsh, through the trees. The four winds rule the coast, as they rule the sea itself. The white men knew them even better than my own people did; it was by catching the wind in the sails of their ships that they had come here. But though they were brave in chancing their lives to the sea and the winds, they would never be able to control them.

  As the wind grew louder and louder outside the Medlycott house, I could feel its voice driving into John’s sleep. He woke, suddenly, like a fish jumping. The dark little room that he shared with Thomas and Ezra was creaking under the force of the gale.

  Ezra was snoring, oblivious. Thomas lay silently asleep. The air was very cold. John curled himself into a ball under his rough blanket and tried to go back to sleep, but his body began to tell him that it required him to get up. He ignored it. He curled himself tighter. Get up! said his body. Get up, or I’ll have you piss the bed!

  John sighed. He rolled sideways out of the blanket, to sit on the wooden platform that he shared with Thomas, and he reached for the chamber pot that waited in a corner of the room for their nighttime emergencies. It wasn’t there. Somebody had taken it away to be emptied, and forgotten to bring it back.

  The wind moaned through the chinks in the planked wall of the house. Thomas made a snuffling sound and turned over, taking much of the blanket with him. John sighed again. He pulled on his jerkin, pushed his feet into his shoes, and lifted the bar that held the outside door shut. The wind snatched the door so fast that he was outdoors in an instant, pushing it back, reaching for the bar that would hold it shut from the outside. When it was secure he pushed his way against the wind to the trees at the edge of the y
ard, where he could relieve his insistent body without the piss blowing back at him.

  Buttoning his pants, he looked up at the clouds scudding across the starlit sky—and suddenly froze. Up on the roof of the Medlycott house, sparks were showering out of the log chimney, a long stream of sparks like a blazing fountain. The wind caught them up, whirled them about, dropped them on the roof. As John watched, paralyzed, he saw a flame leap up with the sparks.

  And the wind whirled the flame down from the chimney to the thatch, and in an instant the roof was ablaze.

  “Fire!” John yelled. “Fire!”

  He ran forward to the bucket of water that stood always outside the door, but the water was solid ice.

  “Fire!” he yelled again.

  There was a banging inside the door in front of him, and he realized that he had shut Ezra and Thomas in. Hastily he pulled up the wooden bar, and they came tumbling out.

  “Never latch that door with folk inside!” Ezra yelled at him angrily—and then he saw the burning roof, and his voice changed. “Thomas, wake everyone, get them out! John, buckets from the workshop—come with me!”

  Thomas dived back to the room and through its inside door, shouting urgently. John ran across the yard with Ezra to the workshop. The wind blew billows of black smoke around them from the burning thatch, and the flames crackled in the chimney-top. Inside the workshop, John groped up at the wall where the buckets hung, and began pulling them down.

  “The ladder first!” Ezra shouted to him, and together they hauled a short heavy wooden ladder out into the yard.

  William Medlycott came rushing out of the house holding a musket, his jerkin flapping, his hair wild. He headed for the trees.

  “Are we attacked?” he called.

  “The roof!” John yelled. “It’s on fire!”

  For a second Medlycott gazed uncertainly into the darkness, then swung round to where John and Ezra were propping the ladder against the edge of the burning roof. The flames roared in the wind.

  Ezra ran back to the workshop, grabbed an axe, and began chopping at the layer of ice on the giant water butts that stood near the well and its pump in the yard. They were kept always filled; it was one of John’s regular tasks every evening.

  “Buckets, John!” Ezra shouted, and John ran for them.

  Medlycott, bigger and stronger than either of them, dropped his gun and came to dip the buckets and swing them down. Turn by turn John and Ezra carried them to the ladder and tried to throw the water up at the flames. Much of it splashed back at them, soaking them, ice-cold. The fire blazed on.

  “Stop!” Medlycott yelled. He turned back toward the house, where smoke was starting to drift out of the door. “The house is beyond help, in this wind—come, make sure everyone is out!”

  So they ran through the smoky back room and into the kitchen, where Mistress Medlycott and Thomas were herding the children through the front door, grabbing blankets off the beds to wrap round them. The younger boys were seizing pots, clothes, furniture—anything movable that could be saved from the fire. Small Sarah was sobbing. Her mother gave her a quick hug, then looked round, alarmed.

  “Matthew! Where’s Matthew?”

  John was standing beside the ladder that led to the upper floor; he knew the children slept up there. He stared up, and could see only smoky darkness. Taking a big breath, he clambered up the ladder and into the low room; it was filled with smoke and very hot, and he could see streaks of fire through the planks above him. He crawled all round the space, but found nobody—only two blankets, which he dragged out behind him.

  “He’s not here!”

  Choking in the smoke, he dropped the blankets down the ladder and followed after them. Ezra, waiting, looked wildly round kitchen and bedroom, and saw that a corner of the big bed was still covered by the curtain that these people hung round their beds to keep out the winter cold. He pulled down the curtain and found the little boy hiding terrified behind it, curled into a ball.

  “Matthew! Come out!”

  John was bent over, coughing. With his free hand Ezra grabbed him by the sleeve and dragged him, along with small Matthew, outside into the air. The yard was full of the snapping of the fire now, and flames were licking up into the sky, blown sideways by the wind. It was not blowing directly at the other buildings, but in the flickering red light of the flames the roof of the workshop looked perilously close.

  Medlycott came rushing out of the house with a great armful of metal plates and mugs. “That’s the last! Priscilla, no one must go in anymore—the smoke can kill.” He stared up at the roof, his face glistening with sweat. “We must wet down the workshop roof, so that the fire will not spread. Ezra, Thomas, come with me. Willie, help thy mother with the little ones. John—are you all right?”

  John took a wheezing breath. “Yes,” he said hoarsely.

  “Run to the farm for help. Though only the good Lord can help us now, I believe.”

  John was halfway out of the yard when he heard Ezra yell after him, “Be careful of the ice!”

  Even so, he slipped and fell twice on the uphill track to the farm of their nearest neighbor. In winter, even the swiftest runners of my own tribe were slowed down by the frozen earth. The track was dark, but he could see his way by the glow from the burning roof. At the farmhouse, John yelled, “Fire! Help! Fire!” at the top of his voice, and because there was a constant danger of fire amongst these people, as amongst my own, the instant the farmers heard him they knew what to do.

  In a very short time several men were running back down the hill with John, carrying a cluster of buckets made not from wood but from deer hide, as we make ours, and with long twig-brooms. The farm must have been the community’s center for the fighting of fire. Two of the men even pushed a great tub already filled with water, set in a frame with a wheel on either side.

  But no men and no water could help the Medlycott house by the time they arrived there. It was fully ablaze, with flames leaping out of its windows, and the voice of the fire was triumphant and loud. Mistress Medlycott and the children had retreated to the barn where the animals were kept, dragging all their saved possessions with them, and that was a good thing, for very soon, with a great whoompf sound, the roof of the burning house fell in. Scraps of burning wood flew all over the yard like fiery birds.

  The men scattered, but not for long. Within moments they joined the work of wetting the roofs of the other buildings, with a chain of people moving buckets of water from the well, where John and Thomas were taking turns at the pump. And together they saved everything that the Medlycott family owned, except the house in which they had lived. The strong wind that had spread the fire also drove it to burn down very fast, so that the blazing walls shrank lower and lower, and the danger to the workshop shrank with them.

  Outside the barn, Mistress Medlycott began to sob as her house disappeared, and the youngest children clustered round her and tried to make comforting noises, as if they were the parents and she the child.

  The chain of buckets stilled and the farmer came to the pump to stop Thomas and John. “Well done,” he said.

  “James Burton, I am greatly in your debt,” said Master Medlycott wearily.

  Burton put a hand on his shoulder. He was a heavyset man with thick white hair, full of cinders now. “We are all children of the Lord,” he said. “And praise God that nobody is hurt. Take heart, William—we shall all help thee rebuild.”

  Where there had been a fine tall house, there was now a great wide mound of glowing embers, with flames still ruffling to and fro as the wind blew. John could see the stars again now, prickling the dark sky; all the clouds had blown away, and the wind was not so strong as before. Master Burton set two of his men to watch the embers, and the animals in the barn, who had been to leeward of the fire and smoke but made restive by the noise and light. William Medlycott insisted on staying too. John saw that he had his musket with him again.

  Burton took everyone else to his farm, where his wife made hot
drinks and bundled the children into bed with her own. The others crowded round the wide fireplace, looking with new eyes at the log chimney above it. In all these houses, as in our own, people could only survive the winter cold by keeping a fire banked with dirt overnight, sleeping but alive.

  “You must build your new chimney of stone,” said Mistress Burton to Mistress Medlycott, “and so should we.”

  Priscilla Medlycott nodded. She sighed, and sipped her chamomile tea. “Stone was too costly and too slow when first we came,” she said. “But if we had not built our chimney out of logs and clay, the house would still be there.”

  Ezra was sitting on a stool in the shadows, with John and Thomas. “The chimney may not have been at fault,” he said. “Perhaps a savage set the fire. They have been known to fire burning arrows at thatched roofs, Master Medlycott said.”

  “Not here in Marshfield,” Mistress Burton said.

  “Nor in Plymouth,” said John. “And I saw our chimney catch fire tonight.”

  “In other places,” Ezra said doggedly.

  “I heard that too,” said one of Burton’s sons. “We kept watch every night against savage attack, when first we built our house.”

  Ezra said, “We should keep watch still. The heathen is not to be trusted.”

  John had been feeling friendly toward Ezra for the way he had rescued him from the smoke, but the friendliness suddenly faded. He said, surprised by his own boldness, “In Plymouth I saw a house burn down, but that was the same, a chimney that caught fire at night, and no Indian came shooting burning arrows ever.”

  Ezra turned his head and looked at him with scorn.

  “John Wakeley,” he said, “you are a child.”

  NINE

  Time went by, and John ceased to be a child.

  With the help of all the community, the Medlycotts’ home was rebuilt. At their meetinghouse on the Sunday after the fire, they had thanked their God for preserving everyone from death that day, and all of them without exception took on responsibilities for helping to replace the house. Carts creaked their way to the nearest beaches to collect stones the size of a man’s head to build the new chimney, and a house rose around it with remarkable speed. For a while John could seldom escape, but he came to talk to me whenever he could. He was full of astonishment.