Caleb’s Crossing. Geraldine Brooks

the long journey home in the oil-laden shallop, Makepeace berated me for my carelessness, my clumsiness and my lack of consideration. I barely heard the half of what he said. My mind was still in that circle under the cliffs.

      Chapter V

      He was the younger son of Nah noso, the Nobnocket sonquem, and his name was Cheeshahteaumauck. In his tongue, it means something like “hateful one.” When he told me this, I thought that my limited grasp of his language was defeating me. For what manner of people would name a child so? But when I asked if his father indeed hated him, he laughed at me. Names, he said, flow into one like a drink of cool water, remain for a year or a season, and then, maybe, give way to another, more apt one. Who could tell how his present name had fallen upon him? Perhaps the giver of the name had meant to trick Cheepi, the devil-god, into thinking him unloved and therefore leaving him alone. Or perhaps it had come upon him for cause. I had found him hunting alone, he reminded me, when the practice of his clan was to hunt communally. In a band that values the common weal above all, he chose to be chuppi, the one who stands separate. When his band set out towards sun rising, he struck off towards sun setting. It had ever been thus, as long as he could remember. While most babes still nursed at the breast, he had weaned himself, left the women and set about trailing after his mother’s brother, Tequamuck, who was their pawaaw. He would hide himself under mats or in thickets to hear the incantations and witness the dances. At first, he said, his elders had berated him for lacking respect, and the name might have fallen upon him out of their feelings at that time. But Tequamuck took a different view and said that such behavior presaged his destiny: to be pawaaw in his turn. So, he had gone to live in his uncle’s wetu, while his elder brother Nanaakomin was like a shadow at their father’s side.

      Before my experience at the cliffs began to work its corruption upon my spirit, this news would have entirely dismayed me. Father called the pawaaws “murderers of souls.” He said they were wizards— kinfolk of those English witches whom we burned at the stake. He said they invited trance states, in which they traveled through the spirit world, communing there with the devil through imps that came to them in animal form. From these Satanic familiars, they drew power to raise the mists and the winds, to foresee the future and to heal or sicken people as the whim led them. Cheeshahteaumauk’s uncle Tequamuck was infamously powerful in these arts. When father first spoke of this, it frightened me, so that I could not look upon an Indian person without dread. But ever since the singing and dancing at the cliffs, my fear had given way to fascination, and Cheeshahteaumauk’s disclosures only made him more interesting to me.

      As for my name, he found it equally peculiar, once I told him that Bethia meant “servant.” He said a servant was but a lowly thing— their servants being more like serfs, enemies captured in battle, who may be harassed and despised, even sometimes tortured where the enmity between tribes is most bitter. I, as granddaughter of the Coatmen’s sonquem and daughter of their pawaaw, should have a higher name, as he thought. I tried to explain that my father was no pawaaw, but I did not yet have subtlety enough in his tongue to convey the very great difference between mediating God’s grace and holding familiarity with Satan. I did struggle to make clear to him the nature and virtue of being a servant of God, but he would have none of it, and grew impatient. He set off down the beach with his long loping stride and I had to run to keep pace with him. Of a sudden he turned to me and announced that he had decided to name me over, in the Indian manner. He said he would call me Storm Eyes, since my eyes were the color of a thunderhead. Well and good, said I. But I will rename you, also, because to me you are not hateful. I told him I would call him Caleb, after the companion of Moses in the wilderness, who was noted for his powers of observation and his fearlessness.

      “Who is Moses?” he asked. I had forgotten that he would not know. I explained that Moses was a very great sonquem, who led his tribe across the water and into a fertile land.

      “You mean Moshup,” he said.

      No, I corrected him. “Moses. Many, many moons since. Far away from here.”

      “Yes, many moons since, but here. Right here.” He was becoming impatient with me, as if I were a stubborn child who would not attend to her lessons. “Moshup made this island. He dragged his toe through the water and cut this land from the mainland.” He went on then, with much animation, to relate a fabulous tale of giants and whales and shape-shifting spirits. I let him speak, because I did not want to vex him, but also because I liked to listen to the story as he told it, with expression and vivid gesture. Of course, I thought it all outlandish. But as I rode home that afternoon, it came to me that our story of a burning bush and a parted sea might also seem fabulous, to one not raised up knowing it was true.

      One afternoon, not long after, we collected wild currents, tart and juicy, and gorged on them. I lay back on a bed of soft leaves, my hands under my head, watching a few fluffy clouds dance across the blue dome of sky. Behind me, I could hear the chink of stone on stone. He was never idle, not for a minute.

      “Why do you look at the sky, Storm Eyes? Are you looking for your master up there?” I could not tell if he was mocking me, so I turned over, resting my chin in my hands, and gazed at him to better read his expression. He was looking down, concentrating on aiming the sharp, deft blows that sent tiny shards of stone flying. He had a piece of leather, like a half glove, wrapped around the hand that held the arrowhead he was making. “That is where he lives, is it not, your one God? Up there, beyond the inconstant clouds?”

      I did not dignify his ridicule, for so I deemed it, with any answer. This merely emboldened him.

      “Only one god. Strange, that you English, who gather about you so many things, are content with one only. And so distant, up there in the sky. I do not have to look so far. I can see my skygod clear enough, right there,” he said, stretching out an arm towards the sun. “By day Keesakand. Tonight Nanpawshat, moon god, will take his place. And there will be Potanit, god of the fire . . .” He prattled on, cataloguing his pantheon of heathenish idols. Trees, fish, animals and the like vanities, all of them invested with souls, all wielding powers. I kept a count as he enumerated, the final tally of his gods reaching thirty-seven. I said nothing. At first, because I hardly knew what to say to one so lost.

      But then, I remembered the singing under the cliffs. An inner voice, barely audible: the merest hiss. Satan’s voice, I am sure of it now, whispering to me that I already knew Keesakand, that I had already worshipped him many times as I bathed in the radiance of a sunrise, or paused to witness the glory of his sunset. And did not Nanpawshat have power over me, governing the swelling, salty tides of my own body, which, not so very long since, had begun to ebb and flow with the moon. It was good, the voice whispered. It was right and well to know these powers, to live in a world aswirl with spirits, everywhere ablaze with divinity.

      Chapter VI

      Not long after, Caleb came upon me reading, before I had a chance to put the book by. He had the habit of appearing suddenly, springing up out of dune or thicket. He could move on feet silent as a stalking cat’s, and walk so lightly in his thin, deer-hide shoes that he barely left a footprint in sand or leaf litter to mark where he had trod. With his instruction, and with practice, I was learning to do the same, walking softly on my heel so as to touch less of the earth. At home, I would entertain myself by stalking Makepeace, finding him resting, indolent, in the fields when he should have been about his chores. This vexed him, but he could hardly complain of it without revealing himself. I took a vast amusement from this.

      On this particular day, I had made off with a new tract of my father’s, New England’s Prospect, by one William Wood, who had traveled on the mainland in 1633 and described for English readers what he had found there. I held it out and Caleb took it. This was the first book he had held in his hands. He made me smile, opening it upside down and back to front, but he touched the pages with the utmost care, as if gentling some fragile-boned wild thing. The godliest among us did not touch the Bible with such reverence as he showed to that small book. He ran a brown finger across a line of type.

      “These snowshoe tracks,” he said. “They speak to you?” I smiled. I could see how, to his unschooled eyes, the page might resemble a snowy field hatched by the crisscross of snowshoe sinews when the low winter sun lights up their edges. I said that they