and young together, their woven blankets pulled across their shoulders. They stood for a time, their hands raised up before them so that their blanket covered them entire. They looked like a flock of roosting birds. Then, as if to some invisible signal, they all began to move with the music. All my life I had been taught that dance was the devil’s business. Only whores, the daughters of Salome, danced, or so I had been instructed. But there was nothing lewd or wanton here. The women’s movements were stately, dignified, entirely graceful.
Much later, when I crept back to the beach, grazed, with runs in my hose and rips in my bodice and bits of bracken clinging to my hair, Makepeace’s face was thunderous with worry and rage. I concocted some lie about falling into a thicket and hitting my head.
The other women were solicitous, and bade me lie down upon the sand as dark fell and they lit the fires to try out the oil. But hours later, when the oil had been ladeled into the butts and everyone had settled wearily, I lay awake. My thoughts veered wildly. I turned on the sand, unable to find a comfortable position. I felt disgust at the behavior of those all about me, our low willingness to steal and deceive even as we preened and boasted of our godly superiority. Subdue the earth. So the Bible said, and so we did. But I could not believe that God meant us to be so heedless of his creation, so wanton and so cruel to those creatures over which he had given us dominion.
I knew I would not sleep. When the men’s snores competed with the beating of the surf and the rattle of the stones, I got up, standing still for a moment, to make sure no one stirred, and made my way across the dunes. As soon as I was away from the camp, I turned back to the path that led to the circle cliffs, and followed it by a moon so bright it threw my shadow clear before me on the sandy ground.
Their fires had blazed up against the night sky and the music had grown wilder. The animal self inside me responded to it. Now, remembering that night, I cannot say how, or why, I felt as I did. I only know that the beat of the drumming touched me in some deep, inner, unsounded place. There, in the dark, without even knowing my own purpose, I commenced to unlace my sleeves. The warm air caressed my arms. I let fall my hose and stood, bare armed and bare legged like the Wampanoag women in their short skin shifts. My toes dug down into the sandy, cooling earth, as my heartbeat matched itself to the drumming. The soul within me, schooled in what was godly, seemed to exit my body in great gasping exhalations as I began to move to the beat. Slowly at first, my limbs found the rhythm. Thought ceased, and an animal sense drove me until, in the end, I danced with abandon. If Satan had me in his hand that night, then I confess it: I welcomed his touch.
At dawn, they had to shake me awake. For a few moments I could not recall how I had made my way back to the campsite, and a hot dread seized me lest I remained unclad. But somehow in my ecstatic trance I had found my shed garments and put them back on. I got up and made myself busy with the others to cover the signs of our theft, dragging the remains of the butchered carcass into the surf, dousing the bloodied and fire blackened sands with buckets of sea water, and hoping the rising tide would do the rest of it.
All the long journey home in the oil-laden shallop, Makepeace berated me for my carelessness, my clumsiness and my lack of consideration. I barely heard the half of what he said. My mind was still in that circle under the cliffs.
Chapter V
He was the younger son of Nah noso, the Nobnocket sonquem, and his name was Cheeshahteaumauck. In his tongue, it means something like “hateful one.” When he told me this, I thought that my limited grasp of his language was defeating me. For what manner of people would name a child so? But when I asked if his father indeed hated him, he laughed at me. Names, he said, flow into one like a drink of cool water, remain for a year or a season, and then, maybe, give way to another, more apt one. Who could tell how his present name had fallen upon him? Perhaps the giver of the name had meant to trick Cheepi, the devil-god, into thinking him unloved and therefore leaving him alone. Or perhaps it had come upon him for cause. I had found him hunting alone, he reminded me, when the practice of his clan was to hunt communally. In a band that values the common weal above all, he chose to be chuppi, the one who stands separate. When his band set out towards sun rising, he struck off towards sun setting. It had ever been thus, as long as he could remember. While most babes still nursed at the breast, he had weaned himself, left the women and set about trailing after his mother’s brother, Tequamuck, who was their pawaaw. He would hide himself under mats or in thickets to hear the incantations and witness the dances. At first, he said, his elders had berated him for lacking respect, and the name might have fallen upon him out of their feelings at that time. But Tequamuck took a different view and said that such behavior presaged his destiny: to be pawaaw in his turn. So, he had gone to live in his uncle’s wetu, while his elder brother Nanaakomin was like a shadow at their father’s side.
Before my experience at the cliffs began to work its corruption upon my spirit, this news would have entirely dismayed me. Father called the pawaaws “murderers of souls.” He said they were wizards— kinfolk of those English witches whom we burned at the stake. He said they invited trance states, in which they traveled through the spirit world, communing there with the devil through imps that came to them in animal form. From these Satanic familiars, they drew power to raise the mists and the winds, to foresee the future and to heal or sicken people as the whim led them. Cheeshahteaumauk’s uncle Tequamuck was infamously powerful in these arts. When father first spoke of this, it frightened me, so that I could not look upon an Indian person without dread. But ever since the singing and dancing at the cliffs, my fear had given way to fascination, and Cheeshahteaumauk’s disclosures only made him more interesting to me.
As for my name, he found it equally peculiar, once I told him that Bethia meant “servant.” He said a servant was but a lowly thing— their servants being more like serfs, enemies captured in battle, who may be harassed and despised, even sometimes tortured where the enmity between tribes is most bitter. I, as granddaughter of the Coatmen’s sonquem and daughter of their pawaaw, should have a higher name, as he thought. I tried to explain that my father was no pawaaw, but I did not yet have subtlety enough in his tongue to convey the very great difference between mediating God’s grace and holding familiarity with Satan. I did struggle to make clear to him the nature and virtue of being a servant of God, but he would have none of it, and grew impatient. He set off down the beach with his long loping stride and I had to run to keep pace with him. Of a sudden he turned to me and announced that he had decided to name me over, in the Indian manner. He said he would call me Storm Eyes, since my eyes were the color of a thunderhead. Well and good, said I. But I will rename you, also, because to me you are not hateful. I told him I would call him Caleb, after the companion of Moses in the wilderness, who was noted for his powers of observation and his fearlessness.
“Who is Moses?” he asked. I had forgotten that he would not know. I explained that Moses was a very great sonquem, who led his tribe across the water and into a fertile land.
“You mean Moshup,” he said.
No, I corrected him. “Moses. Many, many moons since. Far away from here.”
“Yes, many moons since, but here. Right here.” He was becoming impatient with me, as if I were a stubborn child who would not attend to her lessons. “Moshup made this island. He dragged his toe through the water and cut this land from the mainland.” He went on then, with much animation, to relate a fabulous tale of giants and whales and shape-shifting spirits. I let him speak, because I did not want to vex him, but also because I liked to listen to the story as he told it, with expression and vivid gesture. Of course, I thought it all outlandish. But as I rode home that afternoon, it came to me that our story of a burning bush and a parted sea might also seem fabulous, to one not raised up knowing it was true.
One afternoon, not long after, we collected wild currents, tart and juicy, and gorged on them. I lay back on a bed of soft leaves, my hands under my head, watching a few fluffy clouds dance across the blue dome of sky. Behind me, I could hear the chink of stone on stone. He was never idle, not for a minute.
