Cape Cod (14 page)
What the hell. He’d make the gesture, maybe break the ice. He moved his foot across the floor and touched hers. She was wearing sandals, and he had on Converse basketball shoes with soles like steel-belted radials. It just wasn’t the same.
Her eyes flitted toward him, as though he had brushed her arm. Then she looked back at Jimmy.
“These Indians didn’t know about glaciers and erosion and so forth, so they invented the legend of Maushop the Giant to explain things. Maushop pricked his finger once, and his blood fell on the Great Salt Marsh, and that’s where the cranberry came from. And he knew a magic song to lure the whales into the bay and… unh…”
“Oh, Christ,” cried George. “They’re at it again.”
Samantha giggled. She was slightly drunk and very giddy. “If we can’t do this here, where
can
we do it?”
“Certainly not at Pride’s Crossing,” said Jimmy.
Samantha pulled a long face and sat up primly. “But of course not, Mr. Little.” She was fair and blond and very delicate, and there had been hell to pay when she announced to her social-register family that she was marrying a Mashpee Indian.
Jimmy had the copper skin, the high cheekbones, the almost Oriental eyes, the straight black hair of the Wampanoag. He had grown up never trusting the treaties, as he said, and his cynicism had been an invaluable tool on his journey from the ponds of Mashpee to a corner office in a New York law firm.
“Would Maushop object if we built a development on Nauseiput Island?” asked Geoff.
Jimmy grabbed his beer can. “Don’t ask me a serious question when I’m playing footsie with my wife.”
“So ask him a
stupid
question,” said Janice. “Did you know that the only wood remaining from the
Mayflower
is a piece of timber that Rake Hilyard is using for a doorstop?”
“What?” cried George.
“Baloney,” said Geoff.
“Really.” Janice laughed. “The old man thinks it’s going to save the island. I’m afraid he’s getting senile. Geoff hates to hear me say it, and I hate to say it myself, but…
senile.”
Geoff waved his fingers, as if to tell her to shut up. But he had brought the whole thing up in the first place.
“We can’t leave important decisions in the hands of someone who may not be competent,” she said. “Can we, Jimmy?”
Jimmy squared himself to the table, a good lawyer listening to a client. But Samantha sabotaged him with her foot. Jimmy’s face cracked; then he began to laugh.
“There she goes again,” said George.
“We can’t carry on a serious discussion when everyone’s horny,” said Janice.
“So, we either talk about sex, in which case you four go off to the dunes and leave me to choke the chicken, or we discuss something stupid, like a doorstop.”
“Stupid is right,” said Geoff. “A piece of varnished firewood is all it is. The plaque calls it a
Mayflower
log.”
“A log,” said George, “or
the
log?”
“It’s just an old joke. What does it matter?” Geoff held out his glass.
“Does this mean I’m driving?” asked Janice.
“If you’re not careful, you’ll be walking.”
“Before you two whisper any more sweet nothings,” said George, “are we talking log as in piece of timber from a ship the fate of which no one knows? Or log as in captain’s diary?”
“If no one knows where the ship ended up,” said Geoff, “how in the hell would they know where the log went?”
“Bradford’s diary disappeared before the Revolution. Seventy-five years later someone found it in England and bang!” He clapped his hands. “Big sensation.”
“Where is it now?” asked Janice.
“In the state archives.”
“What’s it worth?” asked Geoff.
“Millions.”
George gestured to the bookshelf where he kept his research material for a play on the Quakers and a signed studio photo of Bette Davis. “I have the Morison edition. Good footnotes, good job of modernizing the spelling without spoiling the antiquity of the syntax.”
Geoff locked his fingers behind his head and rocked back in his chair. “Did you ever read the part where they find the kid screwing the turkey?”
“In a famous document of history,” said Janice, “you remember
that.”
“Spare us the details,” added Samantha.
“The details are amazing.” George went to the bookcase. “I’ve heard the details of what they did to the Indians a hundred times,” she answered.
“That’s so I can make you feel guilty whenever we have a fight.” Jimmy slid his foot across the floor to her.
“The Indians got off easy compared to the adulterers and the turkey-fuckers and—God forbid—the committers of other unnatural practices,” said George.
“I don’t suppose you mean the gays,” said Janice.
“ ‘Sodomists’ is the word they used.” George reached for the Bradford diary, but another book caught his attention. He pulled it down and began to riffle through it. “Samuel Eliot Morison is the only one who mentions the log, as far as I know.
Ah.”
George found the place and held up the book.
“The Story of the ‘Old Colony’ of New Plymouth
, published 1956 by Knopf.” And he read, “ ‘It is too bad that we have no log or sea journal of the
Mayflower;
it would be priceless now. Master Jones doubtless kept one, but as he died shortly after returning to England, his widow probably used it for wrapping paper.’ ”
“Typical male remark,” groused Samantha.
“Priceless?” said Geoff.
“Lost and gone forever.” Janice held out her glass. “Pour me some more wine.”
Outside, the breeze blew and sand grains rolled down the dune.
April 1621
April 5, 1621
. Wind steady, WNW, sky clear. The Cape slips below the horizon. The seas rise. The ship takes life. The men go to their tasks with fresh spirit, well pleased to be shed at last of Plymouth and the Saints.
Springtime comes and with it gentle winds to push us home. Gentle may they remain, for we are undermanned and topheavy, with half the crew dead and naught but ballast stones in the hold. I crowd no sail. I’ve not the sailors for it, nor confidence that even so sturdy a ship as this won’t pitchpole with an empty hull.
I be more confident that them I leave will survive empty bellies and half-empty plantation. Fifty souls, sturdy in constitution and faith, have lived through the winter.
And in these last weeks have they made a treaty with Massasoit. Though his stronghold is well SW of Plymouth, he is chief of all the tribes to the tip of Cape Cod. He sees in the white settlers, or more truthfully in their ordnance, an ally against the Narragansetts, his enemies to the west.
This is to the good. But the grace of God must continue to pour down on them, so that they may grow their corn and fill their larders and unburden themselves of the debt they owe the London Adventurers. Their work in the wilderness is barely begun. But God will help them. Of that I doubt not….
“God
damn
them,” boomed Thomas Weston.
“I know now I be in London,” said Jones, “as if noise and stench weren’t reminder enough.”
“God
damn
them, I say. And if you like it not, sir, God damn you, too.” Thomas Weston circled his desk like a bear in a pit, looking to lash out at one of the dogs.
Christopher Jones sat calmly in a chair by the window.
Neither Weston’s bulk nor his anger moved Jones, who understood as well as Weston the theatrical use of the temper. He studied Weston’s cheap finery—red hose, port-stained red waistcoat, plumed red cap hanging on the peg—and concluded that the Saints’ agreement with Massasoit was surely more honorable than the dealings they must have had with this man.
“They sent nothin’? Nothin’ at all?” cried Weston. “Not a single bloody pelt? Nor yard of cedar? Nor even a few roots of sassafras? Nothin’?”
“They be near half of ’em dead. And the rest of ’em be half dead. Thanks be to God you got plantation at all, weak as ’tis.”
Weston dropped into his chair, hooked a leg over the arm, and swung it in annoyance.
“ ’Tis their weakness,” continued Jones, “has kept ’em from answerin’ their agreement.”
“More weakness of judgment than of hands, I’d aver.” Several pieces of pork were tangled in Weston’s beard, and the real food was garnished with a carbuncle that looked like a red cherry at the corner of his nose.
As an apprentice blacksmith, Weston had learned that in the modern world, iron could do more than gold to better the lot of the common man. Now he did his ironmongering at a hall in Aldergate Ward while, in the barn behind, a dozen bellows fired furnaces in which smiths fashioned the ingots and the implements he sold.
He had made good from humble beginnings and looked to do better. Into his circle he had drawn others of like mind, men of commerce who sought to become men of speculation and, perhaps, of wealth. They called themselves the London Adventurers, and they looked across the sea, to a land where the woods were endless and the beaver roamed by the millions. There would always be men like the Saints, who wished to cultivate such a place, and they would always need men like the Adventurers, who let their money do their cultivating for them.
Weston pulled a quill from his inkwell and wrote out a letter of credit. “You’ll give over your sea journal and anything else you got in writin’ ’bout this voyage.”
Jones laughed as he would at a sailor questioning an order. “Not only does the ale make your nose red, it clouds your brain, sirrah.”
“Sirrah?” Weston stalked across the room and stood over Jones. “I be a man of business. You call me ‘sirrah’ once more, I’ll bake your head in one of me furnaces. Teach you some manners and a bit of sense.”
Christopher Jones stood slowly. His clothes now hung upon his body, and circles had darkened under his eyes. Though he now felt the full weight of his fifty years, he was not yet one to threaten. “Me journal be me own business, me own and any barrister what calls for it in law court. That’s why I keep it. If you want to see it, that’s where you’ll see it…
sirrah.”
“Very well,
Master
Jones.” Weston went back to his desk and picked up the letter. “Let us not forget our business be undone till I pay you the last part for your ship.”
Then, outside the window, there was a great commotion of flutes and tambourines. A clown carried high a placard: At Two of the Clock this Day,
The Taming of the Shrew
, by the late Will. Shakespeare, Royal Globe. And behind came actors costumed as Italian nobles and harlequins, dancing and singing to the delight of the crowd that was as perpetual in these narrow streets as the waves at Cape Cod. It was May, and the spirits of London were near as high as its smell. Jones realized how seldom he had heard laughter the last ten hard months.
Waiting for him at Rotherhithe was a woman who was anything but shrew. He longed to laugh with her and lie with her and feel her soothing hand upon his brow. And after a few days at her side, his cough would fade and his strength, which now he showed in sham, would come back to him in earnest. So he sat again, to conclude this business quickly.
“I be but one man.” Weston’s voice lost all threat. He simply waved the letter in the air as if to dry it. “I must answer to others, who worry for their money.”
“As do we all.”
“Then you see me predicament. A glimpse of the journal can hurt no one, but only bring them sympathy.”
“What beyond sympathy do you seek?”
Weston stroked his beard, and a piece of the pork came away in his hand. He studied it for a moment, then popped it into his mouth. “A narrative of the winter. Aye, just that. So’s I know what they face and know better the way to help ’em.”
Jones did not believe this scheming ironmonger for a moment. Weston would seek in the log some piece of knowledge to use against the settlers, something to make them redouble their efforts. But there was nothing he could bring to bear upon them that they would not bring upon themselves. It had been his good fortune to have made a covenant with honorable men. Even Ezra Bigelow had proven his constancy in the miserable first winter.
Outside, the parade had gone past. Laughter and music had been swallowed by the din of the streets. Jones wished simply to go home, and he had some small sympathy for Weston. Just as Weston would face difficulty convincing his partners that the Plymouth settlers still deserved their support, Jones would face it from his should he fail to deliver final payment for the voyage.
So he left for Rotherhithe that afternoon. He coughed much of the way home, but in his pouch he carried Weston’s letter. Weston, for his part, now had the log.
ii.
It was during the warmest days that Autumnsquam finally met one of the whites. It was his bad fortune that he met a boy, for he had sworn that he would kill any white who came within shot of his arrow, no matter the agreements that the far-off Massasoit had made.
He was digging quahaugs near the place of the winter fight when he saw four runners far out on the flats. It seemed that they were floating above the sand, on a layer of water. But that was just some magic of Geesukquand, the sun spirit, who played this trick on everyone’s eyes in the warm months.
When the runners came close, their feet touched the ground, and they looked like ordinary men—two Manomets, one of Iyannough’s Cummaquids, and a white boy who had been found wandering between the Scusset and Manomet rivers. The Manomets had brought him to Iyannough, who now sent him to Aspinet.
Sweat poured from the boy’s face. The sun had reddened him so that he looked like a cooked fish belly beside the healthy-skinned Wampanoags. He had tied his heavy moccasins around his neck so that he could run barefoot across the flats, and he wore also a string of shells.
“We gave him a necklace because he ran well,” said one of the Manomets, “all day, without complaint.”
Autumnsquam asked the boy his name. The boy did not understand. The Nauset thumped his chest and said, “Autumnsquam.” Then he pointed at the boy, who jumped back like a dog ducking the hand of a stranger.