the sky, Storm Eyes? Are you looking for your master up there?” I could not tell if he was mocking me, so I turned over, resting my chin in my hands, and gazed at him to better read his expression. He was looking down, concentrating on aiming the sharp, deft blows that sent tiny shards of stone flying. He had a piece of leather, like a half glove, wrapped around the hand that held the arrowhead he was making. “That is where he lives, is it not, your one God? Up there, beyond the inconstant clouds?”
I did not dignify his ridicule, for so I deemed it, with any answer. This merely emboldened him.
“Only one god. Strange, that you English, who gather about you so many things, are content with one only. And so distant, up there in the sky. I do not have to look so far. I can see my skygod clear enough, right there,” he said, stretching out an arm towards the sun. “By day Keesakand. Tonight Nanpawshat, moon god, will take his place. And there will be Potanit, god of the fire . . .” He prattled on, cataloguing his pantheon of heathenish idols. Trees, fish, animals and the like vanities, all of them invested with souls, all wielding powers. I kept a count as he enumerated, the final tally of his gods reaching thirty-seven. I said nothing. At first, because I hardly knew what to say to one so lost.
But then, I remembered the singing under the cliffs. An inner voice, barely audible: the merest hiss. Satan’s voice, I am sure of it now, whispering to me that I already knew Keesakand, that I had already worshipped him many times as I bathed in the radiance of a sunrise, or paused to witness the glory of his sunset. And did not Nanpawshat have power over me, governing the swelling, salty tides of my own body, which, not so very long since, had begun to ebb and flow with the moon. It was good, the voice whispered. It was right and well to know these powers, to live in a world aswirl with spirits, everywhere ablaze with divinity.
Chapter VI
Not long after, Caleb came upon me reading, before I had a chance to put the book by. He had the habit of appearing suddenly, springing up out of dune or thicket. He could move on feet silent as a stalking cat’s, and walk so lightly in his thin, deer-hide shoes that he barely left a footprint in sand or leaf litter to mark where he had trod. With his instruction, and with practice, I was learning to do the same, walking softly on my heel so as to touch less of the earth. At home, I would entertain myself by stalking Makepeace, finding him resting, indolent, in the fields when he should have been about his chores. This vexed him, but he could hardly complain of it without revealing himself. I took a vast amusement from this.
On this particular day, I had made off with a new tract of my father’s, New England’s Prospect, by one William Wood, who had traveled on the mainland in 1633 and described for English readers what he had found there. I held it out and Caleb took it. This was the first book he had held in his hands. He made me smile, opening it upside down and back to front, but he touched the pages with the utmost care, as if gentling some fragile-boned wild thing. The godliest among us did not touch the Bible with such reverence as he showed to that small book. He ran a brown finger across a line of type.
“These snowshoe tracks,” he said. “They speak to you?” I smiled. I could see how, to his unschooled eyes, the page might resemble a snowy field hatched by the crisscross of snowshoe sinews when the low winter sun lights up their edges. I said that they did, and pointed out to him the word for “deer,” at which he scoffed, and said it looked nothing like a deer, but more like a snail. That 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
