Caleb’s Crossing. Geraldine Brooks

If he gave you a quick mind, be sure of it, he wants you to use it. It is your task to discern how to use it for his glory.” She did not have to add the words: “and not merely for your own.” I heard them in my heart.

      I took my mother’s words as license enough to continue to study in secret. If it had to be alone and unassisted, so much the worse. But study I would, till my eyes smarted from the effort. I could do no other.

      I do not mean to say that all my stolen hours were spent at book. I learned in other ways, also. I thought upon what father had said in regard to herbs, and began to ask Goody Branch and others who were wise in such things. There was a prodigious amount to know, not just the centuries-old lore of familiar English herbs, but the uses just now being found out for the new country’s unfamiliar roots and leaves. Goody Branch was pleased to have me at her side as she collected plants and made her decoctions. She told me, too, all she had learned of how a child is fashioned and grows within the womb. She said that every woman should be wise in the things that belong to her own body. Somewhen, she would take me with her to visit a goodwife who was with child. If the woman did not mind it, she would lay my hands on the swollen belly and show me where to feel for the shapeling that grew within. She taught me how to reckon, from its size, the exact number of weeks since the child was got, and to figure when she would be called upon to midwife it. I became skilled at this, judging several births to the very week. When I was older, she said, I might attend the confinements and assist her.

      On days when the fishing boats put out, I would beg a place on-board, the better to learn the farther reaches of the island, where even the weather might be different from Great Harbor’s, even though the miles in distance were but few. The plants, also, were various, and if we put ashore I would gather what I could and study them. Goody Branch had said that we must pray to God that he let us read his signature, written plainly for the pious, in telltale markings, such as the liver-shaped leaves of liverwort, which might hint at what ailments each was good for.

      There were other days, when I did not seek out Goody Branch or any other person, but just rambled, using the island as my text, lingering to glean what lessons each plant or stone might have to teach me. On such days, I missed Zuriel most. I longed to have him by my side, to share my finds, to puzzle out answers to the questions the world posed to me.

      On one bright day, when the weather had warmed and steadied, I rode Speckle to the south shore. The prospect is remarkable there, where the wide white sands run uninterrupted for many leagues. I watched the heaving waves, smooth as glass, unspooling down the rim of my known world. I dismounted, untied my boots, stripped my hose and let the seafoam froth about my toes. I led the mare along the wrack line, studying white shells shaped like angels’ wings, and bleached bones, light as air, which I took to be from a seabird. I picked up scallop shells in diverse colors and sizes— warm reds and yellows; cool, stippled grays— and reflected on the diversity of God’s creation, and what might be the use and meaning of his making so many varieties of a single thing. If he created scallops simply for our nourishment, why paint each shell with delicate and particular colors? And why, indeed, trouble to make so many different things to nourish us, when in the Bible we read that a simple manna fed the Hebrews day following day? It came to me then that God must desire us to use each of our senses, to take delight in the varied tastes and sights and textures of his world. Yet this seemed to go against so many of our preachments against the sumptuary and the carnal. Puzzling upon it, I had walked some good distance, head down, inattentive to all but my thoughts, when I glanced up and saw them, far off; a band of them, painted strangely as I had been told they did for war, running headlong up the beach in my direction. I grasped Speckle’s bridle and urged her in all haste into the dunes, which were high and undulant and concealing. I was cursing my folly, to find myself alone, far from help, and my mare, hard ridden, fairly spent. My boots I had tied together about my neck but my hose, knit by my own hand, I lost a grip on as I struggled with the horse, and watched several hours toil and several skeins of scarce, good yarn blow away into the sea.

      In the lee of the dune, protected from the wind, the voices of the band carried toward me. They were laughing and calling out one to another. The sounds were of merriment, not warfare. Taking care that Speckle remained well concealed, I fell down upon my belly and crept along to a parting between the sand hills from whence I could look back along the beach. I saw then what my first fear had obscured from me: they were unarmed, carrying neither bow nor warclub. I raised a hand to shade my eyes against the glare and could make out a small sphere of tied-up skins, which they were kicking high into the air, and I knew then that they were about some kind of game. I had to look away then, for they were clad in Adam’s livery, save that their fig leaf was a scrap of hide slung from a tie at their waists. And yet, neither could I unsee them. They were about the age of Makepeace, perhaps a little older, but their form was nothing like— they were another sort of man entirely. Makepeace, who farms as little as he must and cannot forebear from shearing the sugarloaf anytime he feels himself unobserved, is of milky complexion, slight at the shoulders, soft at the middle and pitifully tooth shaken.

      These youths were all of them very tall, lean in muscle, taut at the waist and broad in the chest, their long black hair flying and whipping about their shoulders. The colored stuff they had used to decorate their bodies must have been made with grease, for they gleamed and shone in the sunlight, so that you could see the long sinews of their thighs working as they ran.

      Fortunately, they were so intent on their game that they had not seen me. I led Speckle some distance to where I was sure the height of the dune would conceal me if I remounted. I urged her to a gentle canter with my bare heels. We headed away from the beach, skirting the shore of one of the salt ponds that fingers into the land from the sea. I needed to do the chore I had been sent out for, to gather sufficient clams for our chowder kettle, so when I had put some distance between myself and the beach, I tied Speckle to a great piece of drift-wood, unfastened the rake from the saddle, hitched my skirt high and waded into the brine. It soon proved a poor place, and my rake was uncovering few shellfish worth placing in my basket. I was about to give up and try another spot when I felt eyes upon me. I straightened and turned, and saw him for the first time— the boy we now call Caleb.

      He was standing in a thicket of tall beach grass, his bow slung over one shoulder and some kind of dead water fowl in the bag at his back. Something— perhaps the expression on my face, perhaps my frantic tugging at my skirt, which unfurled into the water to preserve my modesty at the cost of being soaked entirely— amused him, for he smiled. He was, I judged, and it later proved, a youth of my own age, some two or three years younger than the warriors at play upon the beach. Unlike them, he was clad for hunting, wearing a kind of deer-skin breechclout tied with a belt fashioned of snake skins. To this was laced a pair of hide leggings. Around his upper arms were twines of beadwork, cunningly worked in purple and white. All else about him was open and naked, save for three glossy feathers tied into a sort of topknot in his thick, jetty hair, which was very long, the forelock pulled hard back from his coppery face and bound up as one might dress a horse’s mane. His smile was unguarded, his teeth very fine and white, and something in his expression made it impossible to fear him. Still, I thought it prudent to retrieve my mare and get away from this place, which seemed to be teeming with salvages of one sort or another. Who could say what outlandish person might next appear?

      I gathered up my soaking skirt and made for the shoreline. Unfortunately in my haste I caught my toe in a thicket of eel grass and tripped into the water, spilling the few clams I had gathered and soaking my sleeves and bodice to match my sodden skirt. He was beside me in a few long strides, a hard brown grip on my forearm as he pulled me out of the water.

      In his own language, I asked him to let go. His hand dropped from my arm. I made my way, dripping, to shore. He stood where he was, fixed to the spot by his own astonishment. It was my turn, then, to struggle against a smile. I think it would not have surprised him more had my horse addressed him.

      He followed me out of the water then and started to speak to me in a great rush of syllables, and I could not make out more than a word or two of it. My father had told me that they loved any person who could utter his mind in their tongue, and this boy kept exclaiming, to my discomfort, “Manitoo!” which is their word for a god, or something godlike, miraculous.

      Slowly, in my simple