Cape Cod (31 page)
The defeat was swift, the gavel final. The town did not want Jack’s Island.
Rake grabbed the handles of the wheelchair and rolled his sister toward the door. No one else stood. No talk drowned out the squeak of the wheelchair wheels. It was as if the Hilyards were allowed to leave with their pride intact. Rake stood as straight as a dock piling, and Geoff almost cheered him.
“Didn’t expect to win,” said Rake when Geoff caught up to him in the lobby after the meeting. “But ain’t finished yet.”
Now Bill Rains came through the crowd. He was sweating in his flannel shirt. “Well, Rake, you and Clara better think about giving the property to the town, and I’ll get ready to give them hell when we inspect the island.”
Rake looked around until he spied Doug Bigelow, who was chatting with Blue and the Humpster by the trophy case. “Do that, Bill, and I might do it, too. Just might give away my land after all.”
Doug Bigelow looked up as though someone had called him a communist.
Rains crouched down and asked Clara, “What do you think about—Hey, is she supposed to have one eye closed and one open like that?”
“Huh?” Rake looked at his sister.
Geoff touched the old woman’s wrist. “Clara!”
Even before she saw her mother’s face, Emily was shouting, “Give her air! Give her air!”
So naturally, everybody surged forward to see who it was that needed air. The Humpster was pushed into Doug Bigelow, who was pushed into Emily, who hit Rake, who nearly fell over the wheelchair, which rolled over Bill Rains’s toes and right out the door.
“For chrissakes,” cried Emily, “get her before she rolls all the way to the beach!”
Geoff and Janice caught her before she made it to handicapped parking. It was clear, even in the eerie orange light, that air was something she no longer needed.
“The poor woman,” said Janice. “They never gave her the chance to change…”
“Change what?”
“Never mind.”
When the ambulance light flashed off into the summer night, no siren was needed.
In a pool of orange a small group talked to reporters for the Brewster
Oracle
and the Cape Cod
Times
, and the mosquitoes took it all as great sport.
“This is now in the hands of the Conservation Commission, and we’ll be inspecting the property next Tuesday, the seventeenth,” said Bill Rains. “And I know we’ll have some strong objections to construction there.”
“This is no time to be discussing business,” responded Doug Bigelow. “I’ll only say that my company will comply with every regulation. The law gives us certain rights.”
On a bench in the shadows, Rake sat with Geoff and Janice. He seemed too shocked to leave. “Never knew she was dead. Just held up her hand, thought she was tired.”
“She
was,
” said Janice gently, “so she went to sleep.”
Sometimes Geoff knew exactly why he loved her.
“Got no choice now,” said Rake.
“Don’t think about selling now,” said Geoff.
“Ain’t thinkin’ about sellin’. Gotta find it.”
“What?”
“The log of the
Mayflower.
It’s out there.”
“Sure it is,” said Janice.
Maybe it
is
, thought Geoff.
In the shadows, someone chewed a fresh stick of gum and wrote down what he had just heard.
Now Ma Little came over and sat down beside Rake. “Too damn much talkin’, Rake, that’s what done her in. Too damn much talkin’. Too damn many talkers.”
“Let’s go, Ma,” said Jimmy. “You saw what I said you’d see. The town was against this. And it killed poor Clara.”
In his blazer and business face, Jimmy looked about as sympathetic to Geoff as Doug Bigelow did. “Like I told Geoff, times are changin’.”
Ma took Rake’s hand in hers. “You’re right, Rake. The town’s wrong. That’s all there is to it. So stand your ground.”
Rake patted her hand.
“And if them bulldozers ever come, you call me, and we’ll meet ’em right on the causeway, with shotguns.”
“We’re too old for bloodlettin’, Ma,” said Rake.
“Maybe so.” Ma pulled her cap over her eyes. “But it wouldn’t be a bad way to die.”
March 1676
Though the bright sun promised spring, the wind still stung of winter as Jonathan Hilyard led his family across the cornfield to Clarkes’ garrison house. There he embraced them all and promised that he would return straight after meeting.
“Pray hard for the end of this thing,” said Jonathan’s wife, Rebecca. “I wish to take my family to worship again.”
“Plymouth be three miles away. ’Tis a dangerous walk,” answered Jonathan. “God will understand why we keep our women to home.”
“Pray for the Injun’s head.” Eight-year-old Jeremiah slipped his words through the space where recently he had lost his milk teeth.
“We never pray for such things,” chided Elizabeth, the eldest daughter.
Jonathan tousled his son’s hair. “ ’Tis the head of a devil we pray for. God will hear us.”
“Oh, la,” said fifteen-year-old Katherine, “sometimes methinks ’tis God visits these things upon us for our sins.”
“You listen too much to Goody Clarke,” said Rebecca.
“The Lord does not punish us, Katherine. He
tests
us.” Jonathan Hilyard strapped on his bandolier and shouldered his musket, like a practiced captain of militia. “He sends this Injun to warn us ’gainst growin’ weak or complacent.”
“Give me a hatchet and I’ll chop off his head myself.” Jeremiah hacked the air with his hand.
“Just see that the women bolt the garrison door, son. Worry for thine own head afore the Injun’s.”
The Injun was Metacomet, or King Philip, and his head had become the most valued trophy in the colonies.
Jonathan’s father had beheaded an Indian called Witawawmut, and for fifty-five years, there had been peace. Witawawmut’s skull had become the symbol of English strength, while Christ’s Cross had become the sign of English decency. But there were many among the Wampanoags who saw English decency as nothing more than a way to conserve English strength. Whether by the dealings of the General Court or the threat of the musket, the English were populating the land with their white children and filling the air with the three white spirits they called one God.
When Metacomet’s father, Massasoit, had signed his treaty, he had seen the First Corners as allies against the Narragansett but as no threat to him. There had been only fifty of them, after all. Now there were thirty thousand. The Massachusetts Bay Colony had grown westward toward the Connecticut River. The colony at New Haven had spread north. The religious rebels of Rhode Island had settled round Narragansett Bay. And Plymouth Colony, though hemmed in on three sides by the sea, filled steadily with families, and each family wanted a hundred acres, and each son of each family would one day want a hundred acres more.
To make room, the whites had united to rub the Pequots from the face of the earth. Through land purchase and Praying Towns, Plymouth had rendered the tribes of Cape Cod guests in their own land. And yet, until Massasoit died in 1661, peace was ensured. The old sachem was a man of his word, and perhaps he could not admit that his fair dealings with a few whites had been the undoing of his people.
When his son assumed the throne at Mount Hope on Narragansett Bay, however, he heard the warlike counsel that his father had rejected. He heard it from the young men who feared the loss of their world. He heard it from the old men whose world was already gone.
The war began in the summer of 1675. Historians would chronicle the stream of events that flowed from Massasoit’s death to the opening shots. But like water running downhill, war was simply inevitable.
Whites and Indians first skirmished in the town of Swansea, on Narragansett Bay. The Indians won the fight, so the English raised a fine army to chastise them but could not find them. The Indians then struck at Dartmouth, east of Swansea. They burned the town and captured those Quakers too slow or trusting to reach the safety of the garrison house.
Each Quaker was hanged by his wrists and sliced neatly around the waist. Then his skin was peeled up and off like a shirt. To the Indians, skinned Quakers were little different from the beheaded Witawawmut. Torture and terror were fair weapons in war. And this they saw as the final conflict. One side would survive, the other disappear forever.
Not all Indians joined the fight, however. On Cape Cod, there was tense quiet in the Praying Towns and tribal villages. Ministers like Richard Bourne, Samuel Treat, and Simeon Bigelow labored to keep the peace and spread the Word of Christ among the Indians. But as the raids crept closer to Plymouth, the General Court decided that even Praying Indians could not be trusted. In hope that isolation would succeed where word of Christ might fail, they prohibited any Indian from crossing the Scusset River.
Still, in much of the Plymouth Colony, isolation was more common to the white settler than to the Indian. For all his efforts, the white man had far to go before he wore away the wilderness. His settlements and cornfields were like brightening Christian stars in the firmament of heathen forest or, to Indian eyes, like white pockmarks on the face of a virgin.
Jeremiah Hilyard watched his father and the Clarke men cross the cornfield and turn north on the Plymouth Road. Their leaving left him the oldest male at the garrison house. It did not matter, however, for they would not allow him a gun or even a hatchet. If he had a hatchet, he would cut off the head of any Indian who dared…
He sat on the stump that the Clarkes used for a chopping block and kicked at the dried bark. The sun was warming quickly and felt good on the side of his face. Off in the woods, the crows were squawking at something, and above him the gulls circled and cried like lost children.
He hated Sundays. Bad enough to listen to the minister at Plymouth. At least the meetinghouse had light and air. Here he would have to lock himself into the garrison house, with its tiny windows and three-foot-thick walls, and listen to that old crone Sarah Clarke read from the Bible.
“Jeremiah!” called his sister Elizabeth. “The reading begins. Come quick so that I may bolt—”
She said not another word, and Jeremiah later prayed that she had not another thought. At the strange sound she made, he turned and saw her stagger against the doorjamb. She touched the side of her head, where her hair had been matted into a deep groove. Then the tomahawk struck a second time, and she collapsed into a pile of bloody green wool.
“Beth!” screamed Jeremiah. “Ma! Injuns! Injuns!”
His sister Katherine’s pink dress appeared in the dark doorway, and the tomahawk opened her fair face from hairline to chin.
Jeremiah had heard of Satan and his minions. They were everywhere, said the minister, even in the godly town of Plymouth, but the entrance to Clarkes’ blockhouse had suddenly become the entrance to their hell. As Satan gave a war cry and rushed inside, his devils burst from the distant woods, swarmed around the house, and flew toward the door in frenzy. Jeremiah heard the women scream and the devils bellow, and then he heard tomahawks striking skulls like stones striking pumpkins in the field.
The urine ran down his leg. He tried to run himself, to run for his father, but his legs turned to pudding. He tried to cry out, but his throat closed up and his father was surely too far away to hear him.
Then Elizabeth Clarke’s suckling infant came hurtling out the door, its head stove in at the soft spot that mothers told children never to touch.
And Jeremiah felt the words in his own mouth: “The Lord is my shepherd….”
Elizabeth Clarke rushed after her babe. Her nursing breast, covered with blood, flopped above her bodice.
“I shall not want….”
An Indian lunged out the door after her. As she fell upon her babe, he fell upon her, driving his knee into her spine and pulling her head back with a jerk.
“He maketh me to lie down in green pastures….”
The Indian’s knife flashed. A line of red appeared at Elizabeth’s forehead; then her yellow hair came off all in a piece, like an animal pelt.
“He leadeth me beside the still waters….”
Elizabeth Clarke picked up her dead child and staggered to her feet. She looked like an old man with a bloody bald pate and fringe of yellow around her ears. She took three steps toward Jeremiah and collapsed.
“He restoreth my soul….”
Jeremiah was praying out loud now, and the Indian holding the bloody scalp was coming toward him. He turned to run, but another caught him and lifted him off his feet. Now he screamed and, from within, heard his mother cry his name. He kicked at the Indian and broke free, but a tomahawk glanced off the side of his head and sent him staggering through the garrison door… into hell.
He saw his sister Katherine, faceless and hairless on the floor, and the Clarke children, like dolls thrown heedlessly by the fireplace. He heard screams of horror and hatred. And where he had always smelled the warmth of women, musky yet sweet, he smelled man-sweat and bear grease, deerskin and blood.
“He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake….”
Lights burst before him as a tomahawk sent him hurtling toward the fireplace. He struck the mantel and fell to the floor. His senses began to close out the horrors. Then his hair was pulled back and a knife came to his forehead.
“Nooo! Not his hair!” His mother’s scream was followed by a thunderous explosion that blew the Indian off Jeremiah’s back. The room fell to silence, the momentary and deafening sound that came after a gunshot in a small space.
Then his mother’s body was on top of him, her fingers twining into his hair. “You’ve killed all my babies! but you can’t take their beautiful hair. Their—”
Her fingers closed so tight around a curl that he thought she might pull the hair out by its roots. Then he felt her blood running down the side of his face, and her fingers were no longer moving.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
…. He kept the words inside his head now, because if the Indians heard him, he would die for certain.