Caleb's Crossing

by Geraldine Brooks

  Anno 1715

  Aetatis Suae 70

  Great Harbor

  I

  This morning, light lapped the water as if God had spilt a goblet of molten gold upon a ground of darkest velvet.

  I was awake to see it, as I generally am at sunrise. I do not know when it was I last lay down my head and slept through the night. I doze merely, night or day without distinction, in the brief intervals when pain ebbs and I can steal some rest. The deepest featherbed may as well be a gibbet for all the comfort I can find upon it. I gave up the idea of lying down to sleep some weeks since, because I cannot turn myself from that position and I will not trouble the others to be in constant attendance upon me. I have a chair and a footstool, quilts and pillows, and these I can arrange as I need, to ease an ache here or a teasing pain there.

  I will die soon. I do not need the funeral looks in others’ eyes to tell me this. I have seen enough of death to know its signs. I can read my failing body in the laceration of every labored breath. When one of the children comes in, to see how I do, I no longer open my arms to invite an embrace. They are kind children, and would, if I signed to them, come and rest their sweet heads on my breast for a polite moment or two, but I will not subject them to the stench of my decay. In any case, these days, even a well-meaning caress leaves purple bruises on my skin.

  God is gathering me, little by little. He has already taken much, but he has left me my sight, and for that I am thankful. I can still see the glory of his sunrise through the wavy panes of my chamber window. I can still watch the wind riffle across the water, the osprey’s sudden plunge from the sky, the thunderheads gathering in billowing, wine-dark blooms. I sit here, propped up like a poppet, and I watch. I watch, and I remember. Now, when everything else has gone, this is what remains: vision and memories.

  Yester eve I asked them to bring me my inlaid box, the one I got in Padua the year of my marriage to Samuel. It had been an age since I had thought to look inside it. The sea air had rusted the clasps and the hinges, and my stiff hands fumbled for a while before I could prise it open. But the pages were there. The earliest, mere scraps, crumpled and stained, some with a few Latin sentences from Makepeace’s boyish hand, errors struck out with furious pen strokes before the spoiled sheet was tossed aside. Then the later pages with a few words in Elijah Corlett’s fair script, discarded perhaps for a small ink blot or an imperfect pen stroke. And on every sheet, my own scrawls, writ dense front and back.

  My hand aches now, as I write these spidery lines. With each press of the pen, pain grinds the bones in my wrist. But I must write. Now, near the end, I feel an urge to finish the story I began, so many years since, when this new world and I were young and all things still seemed possible. I need, I suppose, to account for my life, and for my part in Caleb’s crossing from his world into mine, and what flowed on from it. Time is short, but I pray that he in whose hand my life rests will grant me days enough to make this accounting.

  It took me the better part of this day to read over the faded dispatches from my girlish self. I had to stop many times, as memories crowded upon me and tears blurred my sight. Once, though, I came to a place where I laughed out loud—and paid for the mirth in the stinging spasm that followed. The lines that provoked me were those that my seventeen-year-old self had set down, foreseeing my old age and death.

  Oh the self-weening certainty of the young! Frail old crone— she wrote. Well and good—she foresaw that fairly enough, but this next: … good fruit ripened … I smile again, as I copy down the words. I could tell that fatuous girl a thing or two about ripe fruit. Maggots and rot. Putrefaction and waste. A sour taste that lingers in the mouth.

  Is it ever thus, at the end of things? Does any woman ever count the grains of her harvest and say: Good enough? Or does one always think of what more one might have laid in, had the labor been harder, the ambition more vast, the choices more sage? I read on, and I find myself smiling at that sound-fleshed young girl, her daring and her folly and her many fears.

  Now, when perhaps I should be most afraid, I find that there is very little left that can put me in dread. Not my death, surely; though a lifetime’s sermons tell me I have earned the hard judgment of an angry God. I do believe that God appointed the moment of my birth and the instant of my death and all the circumstances of my life in between. I wish I could say, as the elect among us are wont to say, that I would not turn a finger to alter his dispositions. But I cannot say so, for there is much I would change, were it within my power. Perhaps this is why God has not spoken to me. I do not expect that my salvation will be revealed to me in what little time remains. As I sit here, awake and aching, I am aware that this pain may be but a foretaste of what awaits me in eternity. Still, I do not choose to fear what I cannot know.

  This I do know, for the surfeit of loss in my life has convinced me: it will be easier to be grieved for than to grieve.

  II

  I worked for one year in the buttery of Harvard College. Through those thin walls drifted every kind of knowledge. I learned with freshmen and with seniors, imbibing the work of their four years in one, as Chauncy stood and gave his morning lectures to each successive class. I do not say that I understood all that I heard; how could I? One cannot place a pediment when one has not yet laid the foundation. Much of what was given out to the senior sophisters remained obscure to me. But I hoarded a sherd here and there, as I could, and as the year wore on some kind of odd edifice assembled itself. While I did not have the benefit of the scholars’ daily tutorials in which to interrogate what had been said, when I could snatch an hour with Samuel and his father, I plied them with questions. From them I was able to borrow books, and I would read till the Whitbys snuffed their candle. So was I able to make my way in several subjects.

  For Hesiod, that ancient poet-farmer, I conceived a particular affection. Like me, he loved the natural world, and strove to find the words to set down what he saw. I could say that I learned my Greek memorizing the lines of his “Works and Days,” because they lodged in my mind so naturally it was as if he gave word to my own thoughts. It is his night sky that I see now, through the seasons: Arcturus rising brilliant from the ocean stream at dusk, Pleiades like a swarm of fireflies, Sirius parching the hayfields on hot late-summer nights, and Orion striding across the winter sky.

  I had much to be thankful for that year. My toil was undemanding compared with what I had been used to do, and the Whitbys so agreeable and good-humored that I soon felt as at home with them as if they had been kinfolk. Of course, I missed the island, but I felt that what I gained each day, in learning, somehow compensated for that loss. Only two circumstances marred that time for me.

  The most troubling concerned Caleb and Joel. Their first months at the college were harsh and bitter. The other students spurned them. It was not an overt shunning, such as one could have described and chastised and thereby put an end to. Rather it was that their fellow scholars did nothing to make them welcome, and instead contrived an array of small slights, such as leaving no place for them to sit upon the forms in the hall and never addressing a remark to either one at dinner or during the brief recreations in the yard. Somehow—I do not know what means were used—it was made plain that they were not welcome to join in the hour of fellowship around the fire after supper, but were expected to retreat to their cheerless room in the Indian College, where the large printing press occupied what might have been a pleasant hall. Later they would be obliged to hear the English students who shared the building—some five or six of them there were, in two chambers that flanked theirs—amble in, still wreathed about with the warm wood smoke, carrying on some congenial conversation from which they had been excluded.

  So Caleb and Joel took comfort one in the other, becoming, each for each, an indispensable support. They walked in each other’s shadow by day, finished each other’s sentences in conversation, and would retire together to their room at night, watching by the light of tallow dips and helping each other to furthe
r their understanding of the days’ texts. If I was watching late myself, I would see the pale light flicker in their chamber window until the college rule required it be extinguished, at eleven o’clock.

  These social hardships transcended the mere lack of fellowship. They had a practical consequence. It was common for the better off scholars to receive from their families gifts of food—a round of cheese, a sausage or the like. These they would share out during the evening fireside revels. It was a rare night when someone did not have some kind of victual to add some heft to the scant supper fare. Caleb and Joel, deprived of this fellowship and meat, went hungry to their bed each night. And cold too—since the ration of wood for the Indian College was paltry. I feared for their health and their spirits. So I began to slip some extra food to them, whenever I could do so: an egg here, a dried fish there, a smear of sweet butter upon their portion of bread. If Maude Whitby knew of it, she was kind, and did not say.

  At this same time, Caleb suffered persecution for his intransigent refusal to take part in the custom by which freshmen served as errand boys for the older scholars. The sophisters exacted retribution upon him in sundry ways, blotting his copybook or making away with his pens. Once, they hid his bonnet, thinking he would have to appear for commons uncovered and so be humiliated. But they underestimated him there. He simply found some dried grasses in the yard and deftly wove them into a passable cap. When it became clear that none of their pranks had succeeded in humbling him in the least degree, the older scholars eventually wearied of oppressing him, and went on, as youths of that stripe will, to search out an easier victim.

  I was not the only one to note that this was the way of things. Young Dudley, the proudest of all the freshmen, and Benjamin Eliot, who also was somewhat jealous of his own station, soon took in the fact that Caleb was neither in thrall to a sophister nor suffering greatly for his failure to be so. They, in their turn, began to rail against the custom, until you could say a general rebellion was afoot. In time, a group of them, led by Dudley, screwed up their courage and brought their grievances to Chauncy. He listened, considered, and ordered the practice done away with.

  This outcome had the effect of raising Caleb’s stature with some among the freshmen, especially when Dudley made a point of publicly thanking him for his example. Slowly, one scholar, and then another, began to look past Caleb’s skin to the man within it. And as they accepted Caleb, so Joel also won acceptance, since the two were by then so close that one was like a side to the other. Amity did not come in a day, but, by slow stages, it came at last.

  And all this while they had another, graver struggle. This concerned the tutor that Chauncy had given inspection over them, a recently arrived Trinity graduate named Seward Milford. The man was a drunken reprobate who misliked Indians and had taken the position only because it paid better than any other tutorship. Caleb and Joel had to make shift to learn what they could while he pursued every gaiety and dissipation the town allowed. When they came to his rooms after morning lecture, he would still be abed, often insensible from previous evening’s revels upon the town, and would call down curses at them for troubling his sleep. Instead of educating them as he was charged to do, he tried instead to seduce them to his own dissolute state. He would smuggle hot waters into the Indian College and then mock them as mewling infants when they refused to join in his drunken excesses.

  I was dismayed and heartsick when, one night, making my way back from the necessary, I saw a figure stumbling in the dark, and recognized Caleb. He made a weaving way from tree to tree, until he stopped, and propped himself up against a young oak. He bent over and cast up, noisily. I hurried to aid him, hoping to get him back to his room before anyone caught him violating a half dozen college rules for which the punishment was a flogging.

  I gave him my arm and tried to hush him. He was babbling, and loudly. His words were slurred—Wampanaontoaonk one sentence, Latin the next, and I could make no sense of his rambles. He was almost shouting. I recoiled from his breath, so hot with spirits I could have lit a torch from it.

  “Hush!” I said. “Don’t speak now.” He staggered, and I thought we would both fall. Then I heard a twig crack behind me and turned, afraid. By great good fortune it was Joel, come to the aid of his friend. Somehow he managed to get him up the stairs, the sick and spittle cleaned off his face, and into bed without waking any other student who might have been glad to carry a damaging report to the monitors. The next day, a pale, bloodshot-eyed Caleb crept to class, wincing at the scraping of forms across the floor and the thud of books dropping upon tables.

  He apologized to me, some days later.

  “But why did you do it?” I asked. “You see your tutor often enough, unmanned by strong drink.”

  “I needed to know,” he said. “I needed to know what it was, and if it brought any vision. I thought that perhaps the outer signs might mask some inner effect that was not apparent to any but the imbiber. I thought there must be some good in it, since so many seem enslaved to it.”

  “And did it bring you anything?”

  “Nothing.” He smiled. “Nothing but a loss of my dignity and a cloven head.” To my knowledge, neither he nor Joel ever touched any form of hot waters again.

  The absence of capable guidance stalled their advancement, no matter how they plied their books by night. I knew what the lack of a tutorial meant and how it hindered understanding. I spoke to Samuel, to see if he could influence the situation, but he begged off, saying Chauncy had tender family ties to Milford’s people and had long since proven deaf to any ill word of him. Meantime, those in the college, student and master, who had set their faces against the Indian project thought to see their views confirmed by the boys’ seeming failure to advance in their studies.

  It might have gone on so, had not Milford overreached himself and pilfered a butt of sack from Goodman Whitby’s closely held stores. Whitby did not concern himself with dissolute conduct in the college. If it came to his notice, he turned a blind eye, believing that a man or boy’s behavior was a matter for his maker, his minister and the appointed college monitors. But the supplies were another gate’s business. It was a point of pride to him that he managed to husband an insufficiency and stretch meager rations further than any other might do. This made pilfering a particular affront to him. He laid the suspected theft before Chauncy, and the president, who set great store in the steward, went at once to confront Milford in his rooms. By happy chance, he came upon the scoundrel tutor in the drink, and abed with a hackney wench from the Blue Anchor.

  I expect that Chauncy heard, that day, the groans of the sinking college if word of such a scandal should come to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, and their funds be withdrawn. He resolved to take no further risks with these, his long-awaited Indian scholars. He dismissed Milford and took charge of Joel and Caleb personally at that time. This brought about a remarkable change in their condition. From barely tolerable obligations, the youths in time became Chauncy’s proud obsessions. He schooled them as carefully as he had his own sons. By year’s end he had remedied the defects in their instruction, so that when the examination results were posted, they overpeered not a few of their classmates.

  III

  The second, and lesser, shadow upon my life that year was my own struggle with ungirt desire. After that Lord’s Day assignation in the library, Samuel and I took care never again to meet, the two of us alone, but only when others were present. It was necessary that it be so; we both of us knew our own weakness in this matter. After that day in the library I had several sleepless nights, awaiting the onset of my courses, and knowing if they did not come I would have ruined not myself only, but Samuel’s life and the babe’s as well, on the shoals of a moment’s unrestrained appetite. As decayed as I am now, and as long as that carnal life has been over and done with, I can still recall, with the greatest vividness, what it felt like that year, to flail and struggle against tides of wanting that would tug at me, sweeping away lucid thought,
judgment and propriety. It did me one good, at least, and that was to strip away from me, then and thereafter, all sanctimony regarding sins of the flesh.

  Samuel waited, as I had asked, a full six months before he renewed his suit for my hand. During that time his behavior made clear that he accepted my character as it was, and did not hope to somehow refashion me as a more compliant bride. My fear, that he would seek to stifle my mind, proved to have little foundation. Although we saw each other in passing every day, we had speech together only on the Lord’s Day, when we sat together after meeting with his father present as chaperone. If I asked for explication of some matter from the week’s lectures, his father would draw a brow, but Samuel would smile, and gladly lead me in discussion of whatever topic I had raised. Soon enough, his father would forget his disapproval and join in the debate, until such informal seminars became a settled thing.

  So it was that we married during the festive commencement week, with Samuel’s merry young graduates as our witnesses. My brother and my grandfather made the crossing and joined in the revels. Even Makepeace suspended his dour judgments for once, and smiled on the carousing afoot in the town. Grandfather and Makepeace gave me to understand they were well content in my choice of husband, and the three of them fell easily into civil discourse on a range of topics.

  Makepeace brought news that Caleb and Joel were glad to hear, of how Anne had settled with the Takemmy people and was loved by them. I was pleased to know that she had found a use for her studious mind as tutor to the younger Merry girls, who otherwise would have gone without instruction. (Their stepmother, Sofia, was unlettered and their father barely so; what learning Noah and his brother could boast had come from their natural mother, product of a Herefordshire dame school, and had ended with her untimely death.)