They had a little money, and they used some of it to spend their first night on the road at a trading post that had a few extra rooms to rent out to travelers. On they went the next day, early, southward on the road. By afternoon they had almost despaired of finding a place to stay, until they came to a farm whose owner was working hastily to bring in his crop of corn. He was alone and overburdened, so John pulled out his work knife and joined him in the field while Huldah rode Aaron—very nervously, her first time alone with the horse—to the house.
She found the farmer’s wife, very pregnant, trying simultaneously to shell peas, light a cooking fire, and chase twin two-year-old boys. Very soon they too were working together, exchanging life stories, and John and Huldah ended up spending not just that night at this farm but two more days and nights as well. They became fast friends with Adam and Prudence, who had sailed from England only four years ago with more money than some, but much less experience of planting and building. They were struggling but hopeful. Like several nearby friends, they had settled within the outer bounds of Roger Williams’s New Providence.
Reluctantly they all separated on the third day. Prudence held the two-year-olds out of harm’s way, as Adam helped John and then Huldah up on to Aaron’s patient back.
“The road is good, but grows narrower, and in five miles or so you will find it divides,” Adam said. “Both forks meet again eventually—but the last time I was that way, the left was a clearer track.”
When John and Huldah reached this point, however, they found that since Adam was last there a great deal of rain must have fallen. They took the left fork in the road, but very soon their way was barred by a flooded stream, with trees so dense on either side that Aaron could not push through.
They retraced their steps and took the right fork, but soon it too divided, into two tracks that were not much more than paths. They were lost.
“Which way shall we go?” said Huldah. They were both down from the horse now, standing together, baffled.
“I don’t know,” John said.
They both stared at the divided track. Aaron twitched his long tail. The woodland was very quiet, but for the birds singing. Then they heard a very faint rhythmic rustle, like the sound of running feet.
Both their heads went up. John put his finger to his lips.
Round the corner of one path came a young Pokanoket, running in the long-distance lope that I knew so well. He checked in midstride as he saw them, and I could feel his instinctive impulse to melt away into the trees. But his curiosity was greater than his caution. He paused, eyeing them warily.
John called out in our language, “Greetings! Can you show us the way to the coast?”
Huldah gazed at him in amazement. She had no idea what he was saying. She had felt she knew everything about John that there was to know, but he had not told her that he could speak the Indians’ tongue. And certainly not who he learned it from, and how they met.
“Greetings,” said the young man, surprised. He came closer, and then his expression changed. He paused, respectful.
He said, “You are the man from Plymouth, are you not? The Speaker!”
“Well . . . yes, I’m from Plymouth,” John said.
“Who saved little Trouble. The boy with the ball. I was there.”
John grinned. “Is that what they call him—Trouble? They are right!”
“The youngest son of the Massasoit,” said the young man. Massasoit was the formal title of our father Yellow Feather, though all the Englishmen thought it was his name. All except John, who had learned better from me. He stood staring for a moment, thinking back to the distinguished Pokanoket in the Plymouth street.
“That was the Massasoit?” he said, amazed. “That was your great leader Yellow Feather?”
“Of course. Did you not know?”
Huldah said plaintively, “John? What’s happening?”
“I’m sorry,” John said. “He’s a Pokanoket and I think he’s going to help us.” He turned. “This is Huldah Bates, who is going to be my wife.”
The young man inclined his head to Huldah, with courtesy but no real interest. “I am Stardancer,” he said.
“He says his name is Stardancer,” John told Huldah.
“It is a beautiful name,” said Huldah, still baffled.
Stardancer said to John, “Speaker, where are you going?”
“To New Providence,” John said.
“You cannot reach it before night. The house of our father Yellow Feather is not far from here, I know he would wish to offer you hospitality. May I take you?”
John said to Huldah, “We are offered shelter for the night. I promise you it’s safe. May I accept?”
Huldah swallowed nervously, but she trusted him. “Of course,” she said.
I could sense John’s excitement, and of course I shared it.
“Thank you,” he said to the young man. “That would be most kind.”
So Stardancer—a runner who had been sent to carry a message to an English trading post, but who knew this new task would be considered more important—led John, Huldah, and Aaron to the house of our father Yellow Feather. The house to which, years before, Leaping Turtle and I had once been headed, but to which only Leaping Turtle had come.
John and Huldah walked in wonder through the Pokanoket town, whose inhabitants glanced at them with mild interest and sometimes an amiable nod; English visitors were not infrequent here. Stardancer summoned a boy who led Aaron away to be fed and stabled, horses now being familiar to my people. Then they arrived at the house, and he asked John and Huldah to pause while he announced them.
The door flaps were open wide, this summer day. They heard a murmur of voices, and suddenly, there was Yellow Feather: tall, bare-chested, in fringed deerskin pants, his hands out in welcome.
He said to John in Pokanoket, “There is no one to whom I owe more, or whom I would more gladly entertain.”
And seeing the incomprehension in Huldah’s face, he instantly switched to English. “Please enter my home,” he said. “You are most welcome.”
It was like all the sturdy winter houses of our people, but bigger and more handsome, its walls bright with beaded hangings and soft deerskins. It was, after all, the house of a man whom the first English settlers described as a king. There were two smoke holes in its lofty roof, two fireplaces beneath them, though only the farther fire was alight, for cooking. Sleeping platforms mounded with rugs and pillows surrounded the walls, and there were even a couple of English-style chairs.
Three women and a girl of about eleven were busy preparing a meal; one of them was the young mother of the boy John rescued from the wheels of the cart. She too came forward to greet them, smiling.
“Welcome to our house,” she said to Huldah in faltering English. Then to John, in Pokanoket, “Speaker, I am so glad to be able to offer you some small gratitude for your saving our son.”
She pointed: the boy was asleep in a corner of the house, curled up on a pillow, taking a nap.
“There is Trouble,” said John, smiling.
Yellow Feather laughed. “His other name is Metacom,” he said.
It was a warm, companionable evening of a kind I had never seen in my lifetime between my people and the English. But our father Yellow Feather had been enabling such meetings ever since he took a large group to feast with the first white arrivals in Plymouth, at a thankful celebration of harvest and survival. His friendship toward them had increased after one of their leaders, Edward Winslow, came to help him recover from an attack of a fever that could kill.
And I saw now that his tolerance had not grown less. When the strict Puritans of Massachusetts Bay had banished Roger Williams, it was Yellow Feather who had first given him shelter, and the chance to buy land to found a settlement of his own. For twenty years or more, by shrewdness and diplomacy, Yellow Feather had been juggling relationships between the whites and the other tribes to maintain a state of peace within this land.
Gradual
ly the house filled with people eager for a sight of the white man who had saved Yellow Feather’s son. They all called John “Speaker” because word had spread that he could speak their language better even than Master Williams.
There was much eating and drinking before the evening was done, with children far more in evidence than John and Huldah were accustomed to. Small Metacom even seated himself for a few moments on John’s knee before he wriggled off to some other distraction. Most of the talk was in Pokanoket, but Yellow Feather and any others who spoke any English were careful not to make Huldah feel an outsider.
At length the house began to empty, though Yellow Feather, his eldest son Wamsutta, and two of his advisers were still deep in conversation with John. At the request of Yellow Feather’s wife, Huldah went with her to spend the night in the women’s house, where they might be of help in the impending birth of a baby.
“I’ve done it three times before,” she said cheerfully to John, “so perhaps I can be useful—though I’m quite sure they don’t need me. I hear tell that Indian women have far fewer problems than we do.”
“Good night, my dear,” John said. “It seems likely that neither one of us will find much sleep.”
And he was right. He had been discussing Roger Williams’s banishment with Yellow Feather, who regarded Williams as a close friend, and he had begun to feel that the mind of his host was like a limitless sponge. Like all careful negotiators, Yellow Feather was an insatiable collector of reports and opinions.
“Roger Williams has taught the colony that they may not take our land without paying a price,” he said, “and it seems to me that his disagreements now with them—and yours too—deal only with your own laws.”
“That’s true,” John said, and he began describing the Puritan insistence on government imposing the rules of how a man might worship. But Yellow Feather held up his hand.
“Conflicts within a people are for their own argument,” he said. “The need is for peace between peoples. Your people have things that we find useful”—he touched the knife at his belt, and pointed to an iron pot beside the fire—“and we have the land you want. So we trade. If we trust our exchange, there is no conflict, and no war.”
Shadows flickered round the house; it was lit now only by the fire. Wamsutta was the last one left with them. He was a handsome young man of about eighteen, like a younger copy of his father, but more distant, more wary; John was not sure what to make of him. He was frowning into the fire.
“I think you are more trusting than I am, my father,” he said.
“I do what is necessary,” Yellow Feather said. “Our ties to the colony keep us safe. Without their balance we would be wholly subject to the Narragansetts.”
“The white men will support you only as long as you sell them land,” Wamsutta said.
Yellow Feather laughed softly. “There is much land,” he said. He leaned forward and tapped his son on the knee, one tap for each word. “I want peace for my people. I will do what I must, for that. And if some of John’s people distrust what I do, and some of my own people question what I do, still there is a broad way in the middle that we can all tread. In prosperity, and safety, and in peace.”
Wamsutta sighed. Then he got up abruptly and turned to the door. “It is late.”
“Sleep here.” His father waved at the platforms further up the house, where several bodies lay peacefully asleep.
Wamsutta shook his head. “I salute you both.” He bowed his head, and he was gone.
John yawned, covering his face apologetically. But Yellow Feather had not finished with him yet.
“Speaker,” he said. “John Wakeley. I wish to know who taught you to speak our language so remarkably well.”
“A good friend,” John said.
“So you said before. What friend?”
John looked at the strong, confident face under the greased scalp lock, a leader like none he had ever met before, and I could feel the sudden leap of trust in his mind.
He said, “His name is Little Hawk.”
Yellow Feather paused, expressionless. He said after a moment, “When did he teach you?”
“Often, these past years,” John said.
Another pause. Yellow Feather said, “My people have been much diminished by plague, and again by the smallpox. There are few clan names I do not know. Our only grown warrior named Little Hawk was secretly murdered by an Englishman a long time ago.”
“Yes,” John said. “I was there. I was ten years old. I shall never forget.”
“His friend said that there was a boy,” Yellow Feather said softly. “A desperate boy who screamed for help. And Little Hawk went to give it.”
John said, “It was because I called his name that Little Hawk tried to help me. And they killed him, because they thought his help was an attack. I had met him once before, when I was the age of your little Trouble.”
“A name is very powerful,” Yellow Feather said. “And telling your name is a gift, freely given.”
John hesitated. He said, “I . . . see him.”
He was waiting for disbelief, but Yellow Feather was listening, untroubled, expectant, so the words came tumbling out. “I have seen him often, often, these past years, and we are true friends. Perhaps I shall see him no longer, because it was always in one place. An island, in a salt marsh. We must have spoken in our minds at first, because somehow we each understood what the other said.”
Yellow Feather said, “You are a fortunate man.”
“Then I asked him to teach me to speak your language. And he did.”
“He knew you would use it well,” Yellow Feather said.
John said in English, suddenly hoarse, “God rest his soul.”
If I had still been alive, I might have wept.
“Ah,” Yellow Feather said. “He will have rest when it is time.” He sat quietly for a moment. “Tomorrow my people will take you to Roger Williams,” he said. “I hope you will come back and talk to me again.”
“I will,” John said. “I will indeed.”
Yellow Feather stood up, and touched him on the shoulder. “Let us sleep now.”
So they fell onto sleeping platforms on either side of the room, and slept till sunrise. And the next day Stardancer and three others mounted horses and escorted John and Huldah to the place where Roger Williams lived. As they left, Yellow Feather and his council stood ceremonially in the central square of the Pokanoket town to wish them a safe journey. I could feel John’s excitement as he rode. Huldah rode behind him, her arms about his waist, and she too was excited, though full of uncertainty.
And among the families watching them ride by, I saw some who had once lived in my village, but had now moved here. Two of them were my friend Leaping Turtle and my sister Quickbird.
They were older, but they were the same. I saw that they were husband and wife now; they had two children, a girl holding Quickbird’s hand, and a smaller boy in Leaping Turtle’s arms. His father was holding him up high so that he might see John, the Speaker of their language, the white man who had saved the life of the little boy’s friend Metacom.
Leaping Turtle had no idea that he had seen John before. But in a wonderful instant, I found that the years had not made him forget me.
“Do you see the Speaker?” said Leaping Turtle to his son. “Do you see him, Running Hawk?”
PART THREE
* * *
BURNING MOON
ONE
Jedediah and John rolled the last of six barrels down to John’s jetty, where Roger Williams was waiting in his biggest canoe. Williams scrambled out to help them angle it to the edge, and into the arms of the three Narrangansett Indians who would help him paddle the load to his trading post at Wickford.
“You are ready?” said one of the Indians. They were sturdy men; over the years since John and Huldah had come here, I had seen many of their tribe working with, and for, the independent-minded people of this settlement.
Roger Williams said in the N
arragansett dialect, “Almost ready. I must bid farewell to the children.”
I felt John’s mind storing away the words; he was still endlessly fascinated by the connections between the Pokanoket he had learned from me and the tongues of other tribes. He had heard several of those by now. This was his fourteenth year in Providence Plantation, and of course Huldah’s, and it was their three children to whom Roger Williams wanted to say farewell.
The three Englishmen walked back up the hill. In the field above them, one of John’s two new cows lowed, a deep, mournful sound.
Williams glanced up at the field. He said, “Resolved Scott lost a calf to wolves three days since.”
“So I heard,” John said. “These two are shut in the barn every night.”
“That’s the third attack this year, and it won’t be the last,” said Jedediah. “Have you penned your sheep, Roger?”
“I have, for now. We have a mind to ship them over to the island where we keep the goats. Soon, before the ewes get closer to lambing.”
“Wolves can swim,” Jedediah said.
“Not that far,” said John. “The Lord is on Roger’s side. He gave wolves legs, not fins.”
They headed over the rough grass to the workshop, the piles of cut staves, then the house. Jedediah Watkins was John’s partner, a burly, amiable man who had been called in to witness John and Huldah’s wedding in Roger Williams’s living room the day after they had arrived. Williams often claimed cheerfully that he had given John two marriages that day.
John and Jedediah were the master coopers of New Providence, and they divided their time between two workshops: Jedediah’s, in the center of the fast-growing settlement, and John’s, here on the other side of the river. John had wanted to be able to supply people by boat, in this watery countryside. He and Huldah had also wanted more land; as he grew older, he found that he loved farming and fishing as much as making barrels.