Caleb’s Crossing. Geraldine Brooks

in turn made me laugh, for he was right, and I could see that snail, its pronged head raised in the letter d, its shell curved in the double e that followed it. I explained to him that the letters were a kind of code, like the patterns worked into the wampum belts the sonquems wore, that told some kind of abbreviated history of his tribe. But unlike the belts, which were rare and each unique, there were many hundreds of copies of this book, each just the same.

      “Manitoo!” he exclaimed. “So those Coatmen across the sea, they can know of the plants and animals here, so many months’ journey from them?”

      Yes, I said, exactly so. And men might know each other’s minds, who had never met one another. “Even those who lived many, many years ago may leave behind their learning for us.” I told him how we knew of great cities, such as Rome and Athens; how we read of their warriors and the wars they had fought, and how their wise men had argued with each other about how to live a goodly life. “And now, though their cities are fallen into ruins and the warriors are dust, yet they live for us still in their books.”

      I was enjoying this. For the most part, it was he who taught me. For once, I was able to play the instructor. I held out my hand for the Wood volume. “Would you care to hear some of what he has to say of your people?” He nodded, frowning slightly.

      “So, you can make it out— all of it— from those tracks?” Indeed, I said. “Perhaps, from time to time, I might come upon an unfamiliar word, whose meaning is strange to me. But generally one can make it out from the other words about it. . . .” I was searching for the place as I spoke, and when I found the passage, pointed to the lines as I read them aloud, translating into his tongue as I went. “Here, he has set down that you are courteous and hospitable, helpful to wandering benighted coasters who are lost. He says you can do that which we cannot, such as catch the beaver, who is too cunning for the English.”

      I had thought he would be pleased by these and other such complimentary references, but as I read on, his frown only deepened. He tugged at his long braid. When I ceased reading, he said nothing. I asked what troubled him. “My father says that a long time ago, before those of us across the water walked with the first of the Coatmen, we had wise ones, who taught the people knowledge, but they fell dead of invisible bullets that the Coatmen used against them, and died before they could pass those wise ways on. If we had had this manit of the book, that knowing might not now be buried with them.” He seemed downcast and distracted, and he kept stroking the book as if it were alive. “Give me this,” he said.

      I felt the ground shift uncertainly. That book was not mine to give. But I feared he would not understand this. Father had spoken often about his difficulties with Indian ideas about gift giving. For them, personal property had but little meaning. A man might easily give away every bowl or belt, canoe or spear he had and think nothing of it, knowing that soon enough he would receive goods in turn from his sonquem at a gathering or from some other person seeking a god’s favor, which they held might be won by such generosity. Father and Makepeace had argued, once, when father had mused that in this, the Indians were more Christ-like than we Christians, who clung to our possessions even as we read the gospel’s clear injunction to give up all we owned. Makepeace challenged father and said that the Indian generosity was nothing more than the product of a pagan superstition, not to be likened to Christian agape, or selfless love of others.

      I did not know enough, then, to have an opinion. But what I have learned since tells me that neither Makepeace nor father truly grasped the root of the matter, which is that we see this world, and our place in it through entirely different eyes. When father had first come to negotiate for some land here, the sonquem had laughed at the notion that anyone thought they might “own” land. “If I have said that you might use it to hunt and fish and build your dwellings, what more do you need?” he had asked. Although father maintains to this day that he explained it, I am still not convinced in my own mind that the sonquem fully understood what we proposed to do here. To be sure, there had been enough confusion between Caleb and myself, somewhen from my inability to put my whole thought into his tongue, and somewhen simply because even when I had the words, the thing itself that they described was not in the compass of his experience.

      I gazed at Caleb with the book in his hand and the asking on his lips, and did not know how to answer him without making a rift between us. There were so few books in our settlement, each of them was held to be very precious and handled only with the greatest of care. So I told him I could not give away this book, that it was not mine, and that I had erred even to have taken it from the house without father’s consent. As I struggled to explain, he looked at first baffled, then, as I had feared, angry. “Since you love this thing, then love it.” He thrust the book back into my hands and turned away, as if to leave.

      “Wait!” I said. “I have another book. My own book. You can have that.” My catechism, which I had by heart. “It is a more powerful book than this one. You would call it filled with manit. I will fetch it hither. And if you wish to learn your letters, you should know that my father teaches this to the praying Indians and to their children. I am sure he would be glad for you to join the lessons.” Father had, with the help of Peter Folger, established the day school in the winter of 1652. He was talking now of building a schoolhouse, which would be the first such on the island. I had been filled with envy, when I heard him speak of it, for there was not even a dame school for the English. Parents schooled their own children or not, as they chose. “Iacoomis also teaches there. His son Joel, who is junior to you, already knows his letters. . . .”

      He frowned, and made a snort of disgust. “Iacoomis has nothing to teach me, and neither will I sit down with his son who has walked with the English all his life.”

      “Why do you say so?” “Iacoomis was nothing. His own people cast him out. Now, since he walked with the Coatmen and learned your God, this man who could barely pull a bowstring speaks as if he were a pawaaw. He walks tall now, and says his one God is stronger than our many, and foolish men listen, and are drawn away from their sonquems and from their families. It brings no good to us, walking with Coatmen.”

      “You say so, and yet you walk with me,” I said quietly. He had pulled a bough from a nearby tree and was stripping the bark roughly. He lifted the bare stick and sighted along it, to see if it might make an arrow, then thrust it away.

      “Why do you not ask your father, Nah noso?” I said. “As sonquem, he might welcome it, if you told him you wished to learn your letters so as to safekeep the knowledge of your people.” I swallowed hard, knowing the freight of what I was about to say. “You say you aspire to be pawaaw— does not a pawaaw seek familiarity with every god? If so, then why not the English God as well?” I was not so lost, then, that I was deaf to the heresy I had just uttered. I formed a silent prayer for forgiveness.

      His brown eyes regarded me fiercely. “My father forbids it. And my uncle hates those who listen to the English. But since, as you say, I do walk with you, Storm Eyes, you might teach me this book of yours, and so get for me this manit that you say comes from your one God.”

      I should not have been my father’s daughter if those words had failed to open to me the possibility that before me stood a brand needing to be plucked from the fire. For if I taught him to read from the pages of the catechism . . .

      I might— I should— have echoed him back at once: “My father forbids it.” It had been instilled in me often enough that preaching was not women’s work. No woman was to think of giving prophecy in meeting, though any unlettered cowcatcher might exercise his gifts there, so long as he be a man. A woman might not even ask a question in meeting, if some matter was obscure to her. I had been instructed to ask at home, privily, if I needed scriptural guidance.

      And yet how could I turn my back on a soul that might be saved? Had not everything in my life inclined to teach me that this, of all good works, was the highest and best of all? Perhaps, I thought, if I could teach this boy— son of a chief, apprentice to a wizard— bring him to father as a convert, versed in scripture— father might see the worth in me, and consent to instruct me again, in those higher learnings that he labored over with my dull-witted brother.

      And so I commenced that very day to teach Caleb his letters: “A,” I said,