embodied in some kind of beast or bird, who would protect him throughout his life. His spirit guide would enlighten his mind and guide his steps in myriad ways, until the end of his life. In those cold woods, he would learn his destiny. He said that if the spirit guide came to him in the form of a snake, then he would gain his heart’s desire, and become pawaaw.
I thought of the quarantine of Jesus, a similar harsh and lonely trial of character and purpose. But that vigil passed in searing desert, not snowy wood. And when, at the end, the devil came with his visions of cities and offers of power, Jesus shunned him. Caleb desired to bid him welcome.
And have no fellowship with the unfruitful ways of darkness. So said the scripture. I had no choice. This marked the end of our friendship. I had to take leave of him. But before I did, I looked down at the catechism he had returned to me. No matter that he lived in a bark hut, his hands ever soiled from bloody hunts and greasy common pots, he somehow had kept the book in the exact condition I had given it him. I pressed it back into those rough hands. “Do not close your heart to Christ, Caleb,” I whispered. “Perhaps he is the one awaiting you out there in the dark.”
I turned away then because I knew I was about to cry in earnest, and I would not have him see me so. I mounted Speckle and threaded a careful way through the trees, but the world was a blur. I felt sick at heart. I told myself it was wounded pride, merely. I had falsely hoped to turn him from the path he was born to follow, and had failed. I told myself it was natural to regret that this pagan ceremony, whatever its nature, would set him at even greater remove from the gospel.
But this, also: I burned to know what he would know when he entered that spirit world. I recalled, too well, the alien power I had felt that long ago day and night on the cliffs. I have said that I would write only the truth here, and the truth is this: I, Bethia Mayfield, envied this salvage his idolatrous adventure.
That night, as I sat with mother at our mending, I had to use every shred of my will to keep my hands at their task. Generally, I could mend or needlepoint or embroider without the least difficulty, my fingers finding their own way over the cloth. But that night the task seemed so friggling to me that I had to concentrate on every stitch. I noticed mother glance at me from time to time as I sighed and fidgeted and tried to hide my cackhanded work. Somehow, she always sensed when something was amiss with me.
Finally, I did something most unlike myself. I asked father a question.
“Does it trouble you, father, that the people of this place are so slow to embrace the gospel?”
Father put aside his bible. “I do not see it so, Bethia. We must not be willful in this matter, but patient, as God is. Did he not abandon these people to Satan all these many ages past? We must not want a convert more than God wants him. It must not be that we, in our pride, attempt to make a convert of one who is not among the elect. We are instruments, but if there is not an influence from God, the work will not be done, nor should it be.”
“But what of the satanic rites that they persist in? Is there no way to disrupt them?”
Father looked grave. “It is my chiefest concern,” he said. “The devil drives on their worship so pleasantly— as he does many false worships. The gift-giving at gatherings, the feasting and the dancing— these ceremonies are, I must own it, much beloved of the people. They do not like to hear me preach against these things.”
“I was thinking particularly of the trial by ordeal that I have heard their youth are subject to . . . surely those rites are not so pleasant?”
“Who has told you of such things?” he said sharply. I made my face a blank mask of indifference, as though it was a small matter, and shrugged. I felt mother’s eyes on me. “I do not rightly know. It is just something I overheard.”
Makepeace interjected, looking up over his book. “They force the strongest and ablest of their male children to swill down poison— the white hellebore is one plant they use— and when they cast it up, they must drink it down again, and again, until what they cast is merely blood. Then, when they can barely stand, they are beaten with sticks, and thrust out into the icy night to run naked through cat briar till the devil catches them and makes covenant with them in their fainting fit.”
“But why do they subject their youth to this? Surely there is danger in drinking such poison?”
“Oh, they know how to decoct so as to bring on the visions they seek to have, short of a killing dose. They do it to get power, sister. Diabolic power. Some of them learn thus to call on the force of Satan to summon the fogs and whip up the seas.”
I felt the hot blood creeping up my neck. Mother placed her hand protectively on the arc of her belly. Although it had not been spoken of, we all of us knew her condition. “Enough!” she interjected. “This is not fit talk for a Christian hearth. I 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
