Cape Cod (36 page)
May 1716
The boy who had survived through prayer the massacre at Clarkes’ garrison house grew with a straight spine and a firm faith and married a woman more devout than himself. He took her to the Eastham farm his father had bequeathed to him, and there they brought six children into the world, of whom two survived infancy. The boy they named Solemnity, and he grew so strong in the faith that they sent him to Harvard to study the Word of God. The girl they called Serenity, more in hope than in fulfillment.
In the spring of 1716, there came to Cape Cod a handsome giant of a man whose beard was so black that it gave him his name. Black Bellamy he was called, and he wooed the young woman whose great-grandfather had come on the
Mayflower
, and he promised he would return a spring hence to marry her. Then he sailed for the Caribbean, while the belly of Serenity Hilyard grew large.
There was talk of punishing her for unlawful carnal knowledge. Two days in the stocks was the proper sentence, one for the evidence beneath her apron, a second for refusing to identify the father. But Justice Doane said such punishment was too severe for a woman with child, and Serenity was too stubborn to give up the father’s name.
Besides, everyone thought it was Sam Bellamy did the begetting. If he came back, he would be punished. If not, his absence would be punishment enough for Serenity. No scarlet letter would brand her. No elder would bar her or her child from meeting. There was mercy in Eastham, after all. And her stubbornness was seen by most as a virtue—not so lustrous as purity, perhaps, but enough to gain her the respect of those who damned her sin.
Respect did not ease her father’s mortification, however. To let his daughter’s bastard be born beneath his roof was almost too much to bear. Yet how much worse would it be to put her out? asked his wife, Arbella. What kind of parents would they be then? What kind of Christians?
Serenity felt the first pains on a raw morning in February 1717. The wind had swung ’round to the northeast, and snow clouds were blowing in. Arbella wrung her hands, then sent her husband to fetch the midwife, Goody Doane. But Goody Doane was off to tend another young woman, and this one had a
husband
.
Jeremiah had learned to brook those insults he could not rebut, and with the first flakes fluttering down, he pulled his cloak around his neck and headed down the King’s Road to Goody Snow’s. There the news was the same, though more gently offered. Goody Snow had gone to the aid of Mrs. Bangs, near Sunken Meadow Pond, and could offer no help until Mrs. Bangs had been delivered.
So Jeremiah took to the road once more. He was forty-nine, as strong and stubborn as the pin oak that rooted in the sand and dared the wind to blow it down, with a face that might have been cut from the hard oak wood itself. What he had survived in youth had prepared him for God’s arbitrary ways, and neither birth nor death disconcerted him. But the sight of Sarah Daggett coming through the snow nearly caused him to cry out in shock.
“I guess thou be needin’ a midwife.” She was stooped and wrinkled and had only three teeth, and it was said that she always wore her bonnet because she had more hair on her chin than on her head. It was also whispered about that she was a witch.
“How could you know our need?”
She touched a finger aside of her nose. “I smelled it.”
Yes, he thought, a witch. Why else would she have left her distant sandspit and traveled by shallop and on foot to meet him here on the road? But what would be more fitting than a witch to birth a bastard?
ii.
Serenity was eighteen, with wild black hair and eyes that could change from green to blue as quickly as the sea on a bright windy day.
She had resolved that she would present Sam Bellamy with a healthy child, no matter that the midwives of Eastham might shun her, no matter the truth of the tales now reaching Cape Cod, tales of plunder and murder and great flaming hulks left for dead upon the sea. Her Sam, they said, had become a pirate. She would not believe it until he told her himself.
When her labor began, she slid a box from under her bed and put it beside her. In it she had packed an hourglass to time the pains, clean swaddling, a sharp knife to cut the cord, thread to tie it, and a leather strap to bite on, so that her parents would not hear her scream. After all, her mother was no match for anyone’s pain, and she would give her father no satisfaction for the suffering brought on by her fornication.
She was biting hard on the strap when Goody Daggett shook the snow from her shawl.
“Another biter, eh?”
The pain was rising to its peak. Serenity drove her teeth into the leather.
“Bite down, darlin’, bite down.” The old woman winked at Arbella, who stood on the other side of the bed, her arms folded tight across her deflated breasts. “Just like all the rest, bitin’ and fightin’.”
“I bit the strap through six births,” said Arbella. “What other way is there?”
Serenity felt the pain receding now. Her body relaxed and settled back onto the bed. She closed her eyes and tried not to think. Then she felt the strap slipped from between her lips. A warm wet cloth was passed over her forehead. Outside, the wind whipped the snow against the house, but Serenity was aware only of the old woman’s touch.
“You came far,” said Serenity.
“I smelled the air this mornin’ and said there’d be babies by nightfall.”
“Just by
smellin
’?” Arbella unconsciously took a step back from the bed.
“Smelled a storm, I did. Nobody sees it, but babies is always born when there’s storms. And I knew there’d be one lass who might go beggin’ for a midwife.”
“But all the way from Billingsgate Island?”
The old woman smiled, as if to say that the journey was not so bad if you had a broomstick to ride on. “Serenity’s as good a girl as any, I’d say.”
“She’d be better if she had a father for that child,” said Jeremiah from the doorway.
“The child’s got a father,” snapped the old woman. “How in holy heaven does thou think it got in there? Just be thankful it’s got a strong mother.”
“The father will come,” Serenity said softly.
Jeremiah looked out at the snow. “Not this night.”
Goody Daggett ordered him out, then took the girl’s hand. “Now let me show thee why they sometimes calls me a witch.”
Serenity fixed her eyes on the old woman’s face. Arbella’s lips moved in a psalm; then she leaned close to hear the witchcraft.
“To ease your pain, we’re going to use… the air.”
“Spirits?” said Serenity.
Arbella looked around the narrow birthing room.
“Just the air.”
“The air? What foolishness is this?” demanded Arbella, perhaps disappointed at such simplicity when she expected spells and newt’s-tongue stew.
“God put air on this earth so’s birthin’ women could ease their pain.” And she told Serenity simply to breathe when she felt her womb tightening. Breathe fast and shallow, she said, in-out-in-out-in-out, and faster as the pain reached its peak.
“What about the strap?”
“The strap means thou’s fightin’, and there’s nothin’ finer than a woman with some fight in her.” Goody Daggett rubbed her smooth old palm over Serenity’s belly. “But that little beauty in there don’t want thee fightin’. He wants thee acceptin’, givin’ thanks. So do the most natural thing there is.
Breathe
. God’ll take care of the rest.”
And he did. Blizzard and birth pains kept up the night through, but Serenity breathed hard and harder, and only at the end, when it came time to push, did she cry out. And the name she cried was Sam, again and again. Sam. I’ll birth you a son, and we’ll all three live happy. Sam. Come home. Black Sam. Black Sam Bellamy.
And whatever warmth her father had felt for her went cold. Until that moment Jeremiah had prayed that it might have been a Cape Cod lad who had done his daughter, someone dishonorable and cowardly, for certain, but not the one they said was a pirate. When the baby’s cry rose above the wind, Jeremiah did not run into the room, as he had done at the births of his own children. Instead he pulled down the Bible and sought out the psalms.
It was left for Serenity to summon him, and however reluctantly, he went. She looked radiant, joyous, and, for one of the few times in her life, serene. “His name will be Jeremiah Edward, Father.”
Goody Daggett had said there was no better way to soften a man than to give his name to a child.
“Jeremiah Edward
what?”
he asked coldly.
Serenity’s smile faded. “He shall bear the last name that I bear… whatever it might be.”
“That name’ll be Hilyard, for no decent man’ll have you now.”
“Jeremiah Edward Hilyard, then.” She looked down at the black hair nestled against her breast. “But we’ll call him Ned.”
The snow fell for two days more. When the sun appeared at last, three and a half feet covered the open fields, six-foot drifts rose against houses and hillsides, and Jeremiah was like to go mad with the chattering of the women and the squalling of the babe who now bore his name. So he put on snowshoes and went among his cattle. All but one had survived. He butchered that one and put out marsh hay for the rest, then began the seven-mile walk to his property in the north parish of Harwich.
At Christopher’s death, Jeremiah had inherited Jack’s Island. He preferred Eastham, but he could never sell such a fine piece of salt marsh and upland. So he let a group of Praying Indians live there in exchange for half the money earned from cattle, hay, corn, and drift whales. This he set aside for the education of his son, Solemnity.
And Solemnity was much on his mind as he came upon a funeral procession digging through the snow. A thousand Praying Indians bore to his rest the body of Samuel Treat, Eastham’s minister and righteous voice for the Indians of Cape Cod. Jeremiah had prayed that one day his son would replace Treat on the Eastham pulpit, when he had done with Harvard and prepared himself for the call. But Treat had died too soon. Now Solemnity would have to wait.
Because of Serenity’s sin, he might have to wait forever.
iii.
Springtime came slowly to Cape Cod. On even the clearest day, a cold east wind kicked up after noon and kept coming until dark. With clouds to feed it, the wind turned wet as well, bringing fog and mist and rainy gloom that sat for days, as heavy upon the soul as upon the sand itself. And in the spring of 1717, not even the smile of an eight-week infant could brighten the gloom at Jeremiah Hilyard’s cottage.
Serenity said she would leave when summer came. If Sam Bellamy returned, she would go with him, because pirate or no, it would mean that he loved her. Otherwise, she would simply leave and never think on him again. She did not know where she would go, but she could not sit by the fire and nurse her child for many nights more, while her mother clicked knitting needles and told her how well she took to motherhood—for a
husbandless
woman—and her father read aloud from the Bible, as if to drive her sin from his house.
She felt the sucking at her breast grow gentler. She knew the babe was close to sleep. She had come to know, from merely his touch, what he wanted and what he liked. When Sam Bellamy’s beard first scratched her breast, she had cried out in shock and pleasure at the intimacy. But here was an intimacy that no lover could equal. Here she gave life to life. As she gently removed his mouth from her breast, she thanked God for the child, however he had come.
“This is the night.” Jeremiah looked up from the Bible.
“What?” Arbella sat in a Bradford chair beside the fireplace, her hands working steadily at her knitting.
“This is the night that the Lord will send Black Bellamy to Cape Cod.”
“ ’Tis foul weather for sailin’,” said Arbella.
The wind had backed out of the northeast earlier in the day, and the rain had begun just after nightfall. The second great storm of Anno Domini 1717 had begun. Now the little house on the Nauset Plain shivered in the gale.
“Does this prophecy appear in your Bible?” asked Serenity.
“A just God sent a great blizzard to take a great man like Reverend Sam Treat. He sends a foul no’theaster to drown a foul fornicatin’ pirate like Sam Bellamy.”
She looked at her baby. “The God who makes this child fatherless is not just.”
“The
father
made him fatherless. And considerin’ the father, the child’s the better for it.”
Serenity stalked up the stairs and put the baby into his cradle. When she came back to the great room, she was wearing her cape.
“Where are you goin’?” demanded her father.
“To show a just God my face. Let him see that some don’t cower.”
“You defy God?”
She took a lantern from the shelf and filled it with whale oil. “I defy the darkness.”
But it was more than mere darkness. It was a wild, howling blackness of a storm that shook the trees and drove the rain like shot against her face, that sent the clouds scudding across the sky and produced, beneath the wail of the wind, a deep and steady roar that seemed the sound of creation itself.
She followed the sound, and it led her to the edge of the earth. Even through the blackness, she could see the boiling surge a hundred feet below, hear the awesome thunder of it, and feel the ground quiver each time it tore into the bluff.
But Serenity was not awed. She had come to shout defiance, to show God the face of one who would not fear him, of one who would never cease to ask him why, and who would start by asking why she had been born in this miserable corner of the earth, to a psalm-singing father, a devoutly superstitious mother, and a brother upon whom all the love and hope of the family rained down.
What wonder that she was nothing like her name? These simple Protestants called their children after things they admired, Faith, Hope, Solemnity, even Wrestling and Increase, for the sons they hoped would wrestle the devil and increase the faith. But never would they name one Defiance.