followers agreed with their chief in this matter, and some now say that he himself did not fully understand that we meant to keep the land from them forever. Be that as it may, what’s done is done and it was done lawfully.”
I thought, but did not say, that grandfather could hardly have expected the fine points of English property law to count for much to some three thousand people whose reputation, prior to our landing, had been ferocious. If there was pride to be taken in the matter, it could only be pride in the canniness of grandfather’s plan, and of father’s courage and tact in executing it. Father had been but nineteen years old when he came here. Perhaps his youth and gentle temper had persuaded the sonquem that there was no harm in the “Coatmen,” as they called us. And what harm could there be to them, from just a score of families, setting down cheek by jowl along a little edge of harborfront, while their own bands ranged hundreds strong across the island wheresoever they would?
Father picked up the thread of his thought as if it were a tangled skein that he worried at. “We have been good neighbors, yes; I believe so,” he said. “And why should we not? There is no reason to be otherwise, no matter what slanders the Alden family and their faction concoct. ‘You may disturb and vex the devil, but you’ll make no Christians there’— that’s what Giles Alden said to me, when first I set out to preach at the wetus. And how wrong he is proven! For several years I drank the dust of those huts, helping in whatever practical thing I could do for them, happy to win the ears of even one or two for a few words about Christ. And now, at last, I begin to distill in their minds the pure liquor of the gospel. To take a people who were traveling apace the broadway to hell, and to be able to turn them, and set their face to God. . . . It is what we must strive for. They are an admirable people, in many ways, if you trouble to know them.”
How I could have astonished him, and my brother too, even then, had I opened my mouth and ventured to say, in Wompaontoaonk, that I had troubled to know them; that I knew them, in some particulars, better than father, who was their missionary and their minister. But as I have set down here, I had learned early the value of silence, and I did not lightly give away the state of myself. So I got up from the fire then, and made myself busy, wetting yeast and flour for a sponge to use in the next day’s bread.
Our neighbors. As a child I did not think of them so. I suppose, like everyone, I called them salvages, pagans, barbarians, the heathen. As a young child, in fact, I barely thought of them at all. I lived with my twin brother, at our mother’s hem, in those days, and their doings did not touch ours. I have heard tell that it was more than a year before any soul among them came near to our plantation, neither to hinder nor to help. If my father had business in their settlements on grandfather’s behalf, he went out to this or that otan alone and I knew nothing of it.
It was somewhen later— I am not sure, exactly, the date— but after the village of Great Harbor built its meeting house, that one poor despised fellow of theirs began to lurk about on the Sabbath. Of mean descent and unpromising countenance, he was an outcast among his own, deemed unfit to be a warrior and not privileged with the common right to hunt with his sonquem or share in the gatherings at which the sonquem gave generously of food and goods to his people.
That my father ministered to this man, I knew, and thought little of it. It seemed only a common act of Christian charity such as we are commanded: Whatsoever you do to the least of them . . . But it was from this unpromising metal that father began to forge his Cross. Mother was fairly taken aback, one Sabbath, when father presented this man, whose name was Iacoomis, as his guest at our board. It happened that this man’s unprepossessing body housed a quick mind. He learned his letters avidly and in return, commenced to teach father Wampanaontoaonk speech, to further his mission. As father struggled with the new language, so too did I learn, as a girlchild will, confined to the hearth and the dooryard as adult business ebbs and flows around her. I learned it, I suppose, as I was learning English speech, my mind supple then and ready to receive new words. As father and Iacoomis sat, repeating a phrase over and over, often it fell into my own mouth long before father had mastery of it. As father learned, he in turn strove to teach some few useful words to my grandfather’s clerk, Peter Folger, who was wise enough to see its value in trading and negotiations. For a time, when we were still very small, Zuriel and I made a covert game of learning it, and spoke it privily, as a kind of secret tongue between the two of us. But as Zuriel grew bigger he was less about the hearth, tearing hither and yon as boychildren are permitted to do. So as he lost the words and I continued to gain them, the game withered. I have often wondered if what happened later had its roots in this: that the Indian tongue was bound up in my heart with these earliest memories of my brother, so that, on meeting with another of his same age who spoke it, these tender and dormant affections awoke within me. By the time I met Caleb, I already had a great store of common words and phrases. Since then, I have come to speak that tongue in my dreams.
I remember once, when I was small, and had said “the salvages” in my father’s hearing, he reproved me. “Do not call them salvages. Use the name they give themselves, Wampanoag. It means Easterners.”
Poor father. He was so very proud of his efforts with those difficult words; words so long one might think the roots had set and grown since the fall of the Babel tower. And yet father never mastered pronunciation, which is the chief grace of their tongue. Nor did he grasp the way the words built themselves, sound by sound, into particular meanings. “Easterners,” indeed. As if they speak of east or west as we do. Nothing is so plain and ordinary in that tongue. Wop, related to their word for white, carries a sense of the first milky light that brightens the horizon before the sun appears. The ending sound refers to animate beings. So, their name for themselves, properly rendered in English, is People of the First Light.
Since I was born here, I too have come to feel that I am a person of the first light, perched at the very farthest edge of the new world, first witness to each dawn of the turning globe. I count it no strange thing that one may, in a single day, observe a sunrise out of the sea and a sunset back into it, though newcomers are quick to remark how uncommon it is. At sunset, if I am near the water— and it is hard to be very far from it here— I pause to watch the splendid disc set the brine aflame and then douse itself in its own fiery broth. As the dimmet deepens, I think of those left behind in England. They say that dawn creeps closer there even as our darkness gathers. I think of them, waking to another dawn of oppression under the boot of the reprobate king. At meeting, father read to us a poem from one of our reformed brethren there:
We are on tiptoe in this land,
Waiting to pass to the American Strand.
I was used to offer a prayer for them, that God hasten their way hither, and that he grant their morning bring not fear, but a peace such as we here are come to know, under the light hand of my grand-father’s governance and the gentle ministry of my father.
As I think of it now, I haven’t said that prayer in a while. I no longer feel at peace here.
Chapter III
The account of my fall must begin three years since, in that lean summer of my twelfth year. As newcomers will in a foreign place, we clung too long to the old habits and lifeways. Our barley did never seem to thrive here, yet families continued to plant it, just because they had always done so. At large expense, we had brought tegs from the mainland just a year earlier, mainly to be raised for their wool, for it was plain that we would need to make our own cloth, and linen did not answer in the foul winters here. But the promise of spring lamb at Eastertide proved very great, and so we put the ram to the ewes too early. Then we found ourselves in the grip of a stubborn winter that would not cede to milder days, no matter what the calendar might say on the matter. Though we all of us tried to keep the newborn lambs warm at the hearth, the bitter winds that howled across the salt-hay pastures, and the hard frosts that bit off the buds, carried away more than we could spare. All was common land then, and we had built no barns nor proper folds. With little store of
