Caleb’s Crossing. Geraldine Brooks

beg you, hold your peace.” She feared to miscarry, as she had, just a year since, on a terrible afternoon of blood-soaked rags, whispers, groans, and then silence, for the lost babe, if mourned by mother, was never spoken of. Worse, perhaps, she feared that such talk of Satan might embolden that emissary of darkness to enter her womb and make a monstrous birth of that which grew there. I repented my question, and pressed no more. Although Solace was born unblemished five months later, there is no doubt: that ill-judged conversation and all that followed from it caused my mother’s blighted childbed, and her death.

      But I did not see that danger then. My mind was brimming with corrupt fancies. That night, I lay upon my shakedown, and though it was a night crisped by the chill of early fall, I tossed in my own heat, consumed by what Makepeace had said. I thought of that familiar chestnut-brown body, pared by ordeal, naked in the darkness. And of Satan, in his serpent form, twining about those bruised thighs, hissing out his tempting promises of potency.

      Chapter VIII

      Who are we, really? Are our souls shaped, our fates written in full by God, before we draw our first breath? Do we make ourselves, by the choices we our selves make? Or are we clay merely, that is molded and pushed into the shape that our betters propose for us?

      In the days following Caleb’s leavetaking, I turned fifteen, and my narrow world became ever more straitened. I began to feel more and more like clay, squeezed flat under the boots of other people. I went to meeting on the Lord’s Day, raised my eyes and hands to God, joined in the hymns and let the words of scripture pour into my ears. But my mind was elsewhere. What choice had I ever made that was fully my own? From birth, others had ordained my life’s every detail. That I should be a colonist and an islander, a dweller on these wild shores, all this was the product of choices my grandfather had made before I was even thought of. That I might be literate but not learned was the choice of my father; the lot of a girlchild. It was around that time that I heard father and grandfather speaking together of Noah Merry, the second son of the miller who lived south of us on the island’s swiftest brook, saying that he was a godly boy, a stout worker, and in time a likely husband for me. So even this choice, it seemed, would be made by others. There was a little ember of anger inside me when I thought this: a hard black coal that could be fanned into a hot flame if I chose to let my thoughts give it air. Most of the time, I did not do so. I went on, dutiful, trying to keep in mind what father preached, that all of this was God’s plan, not his, not his father’s, nor any man’s. A small part of a grand design that we could not fathom. “Consider your mother’s needlework,” he said once, taking a piece from her hands. “The design is plain to us, when we examine the front, but the back of the piece does not reveal it.” He turned it. “Here, you see the knots and the dangling threads. There is an outline of the pattern, but if we guess— is it a bird? Is it a flower? We might easily be mistaken. So it is with this life— we see the knots, we guess at the whole. But only God truly sees the beauty of his design.”

      So then, what of Caleb, or Cheeshahteaumauk, shivering out there alone, night following night? Was it part of God’s beautiful design to leave him there in the winter darkness, waiting for the devil to snatch away his soul? Or did God make no designs for the heathen? If so, what was father about, in his ministry to them? Perhaps it was pride, merely, to seek these souls that God had chosen to abandon. Perhaps it was in itself a sin. . . . But no. Surely my wise father could not err so. And why had God brought Caleb into my path if I was not meant to save him? Why had he set us down here at all? I could no longer even guess at the whole, no longer even glimpse an outline amid so many dangling threads.

      I was sorely troubled by these things, and did not eat or sleep well, and could give no convincing account of what distressed me. I told myself that I wanted father to go and find Caleb, wherever he was in the wild woods, and deliver him from evil. Yet where he slept that night, in all those heaths and thickets, that only God— or Satan— knew.

      Chapter IX

      As it happened, father did propose a journey, around that time, although not the one I longed for him to make. Grandfather was interested in acquiring a share in the Merrys’ grist mill and, as ever, he looked to father to be his negotiator.

      “I thought to take Bethia with me, if she cares to go,” father said to mother, quite suddenly, at our breakfast board. “She is looking rather wan of late and I think a long ride in the fresh air might be good for her.” He spoke lightly, but I saw the meaning glance exchanged as mother handed him a hot corn cake. “You will like to see the Merrys’ farm, Bethia; I hear it has a pleasant prospect with the brook running through, which he has dammed up for a millpond, and he has built his house well, I’m told. They say, who have seen it, that he has a number of glass windows, and has installed a wainscot.” Makepeace looked up at that, and made a disapproving snort. “Sumptuary affectations and an affront to plainness,” he said. Me, I thought it none of my brother’s affair. If a man wished to glaze his windows or line his walls, then he might face fewer drafts when the icy air of winter probed through every chink and crevice. And what harm if he have the skill to make it look well?

      The appointed morning was cold, but fine and crisp. Mother touched my face before I set out, and looked at me kindly, but with searching eyes. “I rejoice that you will get out of this house for a time, into the healthful air,” she said. “You have not been abroad lately, as has long been your wont. I have wondered at it.” I looked down, and said nothing, but I felt the heat in my face. Mother’s toil-roughened fingers caressed my cheek. “I do not ask you to account for the change in your ways. You have reached a time in your life when many things must change. You will find, perhaps, that what seemed good occupation to you one day may loose its luster the next, and seem but a child’s errand. I have been glad of your help about the house; you must not think I do not rejoice to have you more often by me. But neither do I think these last weeks have agreed with you. Try to enjoy your visit to the Merrys. And whatever it is that weighs so heavy with you, try to set it by.” She kissed me then, and I returned her embrace with a full heart.

      I do not know if she had said aught to father about raising my spirits, but he seemed uncommonly lighthearted as we set out. In the summer, I had suggested that our tegs might do better on some higher pastures that I had found in my explorations. The sedges were lush and various there, and father, having inspected the place, had decided to try it. The ewes had thrived and put on condition and were well set now for the coming winter, when we would bring them down into the folds. Father took the opportunity of our ride to inspect them, and later to give me credit. “You will make some farmer a fine wife someday, Bethia.” He meant it kindly.

      As we made our way through the woods, he began to talk about Jacob Merry in a way unlike him, who did not stoop to gossip. But now, unprompted, he offered up opinions about his character, and described how he was perceived by others in the settlement. “Just as your grandfather’s views were moderate by the lights of the Massachusetts Bay colonists, enough to push him to this island, so Merry’s are looser still. I will be frank with you, Bethia; he struggled against adverse opinions in Great Harbor. His first wife died of consumption when his youngest children were but two and three years old and the older boys just nine and twelve, I think it was. He married again within a six month— a young girl, Sofia, who had been an indentured servant in their household. There were some who judged him for that, but I was not one of them, for those children needed mothering more than they needed mourning rites. Merry grew up a miller’s son in England, so, on finding a stream fast-running enough to fill a millpond, he considered it an opportunity, and did not scruple to bring his family to a place so many miles distant from the rest of us. I do not say that he is a radical or a non-conformist as we commonly understand such things. He is a sound and godly man. But perhaps more his own man than most people find acceptable.”

      We saw the farm from better than a mile off: a large tract of low-slung land protected from the winds in the lee of gentle hillocks, hugging a shallow, shimmering pond. The Wampanoag, who had a settlement not far distant— from where we were we could see the curls of smoke from their fires— had gardened some of the land before Merry offered for it, so there were clearings. In between, stands of dead trees stood, girdled by the Merrys a year or more since, so as to let the light pass through to the crops. They were a forlorn sight, the tree skeletons, but as we lacked oxen or draft beasts