Virgin Earth

  John marked out with his eye a line which would run parallel with the front of his house and stop before the doorway. It would be a vegetable bed with young tobacco plants interspersed with eating plants. Salad vegetables would be quick to grow, and he had seed potatoes, turnip, carrot, leek and pea seeds as well. Other planters up and down the river, with labourers to work for them, some of them enslaved, some of them free, had taken the risk of planting nothing but tobacco, assuming that they could buy everything else they wanted, all their food, all their building materials, all their clothes, from the profits of one cash crop. Men like that had died in the early years, or begged from the Indians and called it trade, or gone barefoot into town and pleaded for charity. But when the tobacco grew, and the price of tobacco started to rise, the gamble for some of them had paid off. John thought of the little cottage gardens that his mother had told him about, in the village of Meopham, where every house, however small, had a patch of ground behind it which grew food to keep the worst of the winter hunger away. John realised that he was reduced to a level that his parents had congratulated themselves on leaving behind; but then he thought more cheerfully that perhaps this was his starting place, as Meopham had been theirs.

  He hefted the pick and swung it into the ground. At once it jarred on a root and he felt the sudden pain as the new skin on the palm of his hand split open and drained a dripping water. He caught his hand up and looked fearfully at it. The skin which had looked so dead and white had peeled off the wound and was pouring, not blood, but a clear liquor. The pain was so sharp that John’s head rang with it for long moments. Then he slowly bent, took the axe and the spade, tucked them under his arm, and brought them back to the house. He could not dig one-handed. His garden would have to wait.

  Inside the house he took a strip of linen which had once been destined to be a white stock if he were invited to somewhere fine, and wound it around his hand, tying it tight to staunch the flow. It stung painfully as he wrapped it, and he felt the cloth stick into the wound.

  ‘The thing is,’ he said quietly to the empty room, ‘is that I don’t rightly know what to do for the best.’

  John thought he should wait till his shirt and breeches were dry and then walk, though it would be a long walk, to the Hobert plantation and see what Sarah Hobert could do for a grievous burn. ‘She may have a salve,’ John said. ‘And I could stay the night with them, and talk. And they’ll have bread.’

  The high spirits of the morning were draining out of him. He felt his shirt, anxious now to leave. The shirt was dry and sweet-smelling but the breeches, made of thick homespun, were still wet. John was thinking of wearing them wet when a sudden pain gripped him deep in his belly.

  It was the food, shovelled down into his shrunken stomach, too rich for a system which had been living at starvation level. ‘Ah God!’ John exclaimed. The pang of it was like a sword thrust into his heart.

  He doubled up and ran, bent double, for the door. He had scarcely cleared the house when he voided himself and felt his strength burst and then trickle from him. He clung to the doorframe with the pain of it and then felt his hands and even his fingertips grow weaker as the pain seized him in the belly and shook him, like a monster’s jaws.

  ‘What a fool I am, what a fool …’ he gasped between spasms. He thought he should have known that his body could not take the richness of such food after weeks of hunger. ‘What a fool … what a fool.’

  The attack subsided and John half-stumbled and half-crawled back indoors. The stink was very bad but he could not get down to the river again to wash. He wrapped himself in his cloak and lay down before his fire. He realised that he would not be well enough to walk to the Hoberts’. He could not paddle his canoe one-handed. He could not dig his garden until his hand healed, and until this dreadful flux passed he would be fit for nothing. He would be hard-pressed to get down to the river and then he would be unable to walk up the hill again. He lay in the warmth of the fire, thanking God that he had thought to make it big this morning, and then closed his eyes. Everytime the pain in his belly woke him with a spasm of hurt he turned his eye towards the door. If Suckahanna did not come again with food, with water, and with herbs to heal his burned hand, John thought he would probably die there, lying before a dying fire, bare-arsed, sick as a dog, and with one worthless and perhaps poisoned hand, and nothing fit to eat.

  She did not come. When dusk fell John crawled to the door and pushed it shut, fearful of the night creatures. If the wolves came closer tonight it would be only the closed door that would keep them from him, and they could break that down with one spring. John himself did not have the strength to load his gun. He felt himself sweating into his cloak and then a wet sensation and a terrible stench which meant that he had emptied his bowels again. He could do nothing but lie in his own filth. Some time in the night he was sick on the floor, the vomit spreading in a pool around him, and then the smell of it made him sick again but he brought up only burning bile from his empty belly. He hauled himself up on one elbow and put more wood on the fire. Then he slept.

  He woke in the morning, aching all over and shivering as if he had an ague. His hand was throbbing and the fingers were turning black. The house stank like a kennel and his cloak was stuck to his back by a dried pelt of excrement. He crawled to the door and opened it, kicking the cloak off his back as he went. His skin was raw and sore and his sight kept coming and going, the open door a wavering oblong of gold and green light.

  There was a black earthenware pot of clean water on the doorstep, and another pot beside it of warm corn porridge. John heard his sore throat give a little sob of gratitude. He drew the pot of water towards him and sipped it cautiously. His stomach rumbled but the dreadful spasms of pain had passed. He pulled himself round to sit on the doorstep and lifted the pot of porridge to his lips. It was not porridge as he made it, in his dirty scorched cooking pot. It was light, faintly scented with herbs, as yellow as blanchemange, flavoured with something like saffron. John took a cautious sip and, despite a growl of hunger from his belly, made himself wait, sip water, pause. Then he took another.

  Cautiously, eating so slowly, that his breakfast took most of the morning, John ate the porridge from the pot and drank most of the water. An hour later, he found he could stand without fainting. Warily, he pulled himself up the doorframe and bundled his stinking cloak out of the house. A row of cleared and dug earth extended along the front of the house, from the point where John had thrown one blow of the pickaxe to where it ended, neatly squared, before the door. John looked at it and then rubbed his eyes as if it were a dream, a dream from fever and from his sickness.

  No. It was real. She had come in the night and cleared a row of earth for him to plant his seeds. She had come and seen his sickness and realised that he had eaten too fast and put himself at the very door of death through his own greed and stupidity, and she had left him, not a little feast, but a thin meal of gruel and water, so that he would get well again. She was keeping him as if he were a child, choosing his food for him, doing his work for him. John felt ready to weep for gratitude that she was prepared to give him food, fetch his water, do his work. But he knew also a sharp, contrasting discomfort that she should see him so unmanned, that she had seen he could do nothing in this new land, not even survive.

  ‘Suckahanna?’ he whispered.

  Still there was no reply, just the calling of birds, and the quacking of ducks in the river.

  John gathered his foul cloak and hobbled down to the river to soak it in his washing place, and lowered himself into the cold water to try to get clean. Again he laboured up the slight slope to his house, lugging the wet cloth, his feet tender on the stones of his field. His hand was sore, his head thudding, his stomach quiveringly tender. ‘I cannot survive here,’ John said as he reached his door after a long, arduous struggle up the little hill. ‘I must find a way to get downriver to Bertram, I will die here.’

  He wondered for a moment if he should wait for her, if he
were to lie before the fire whether she might come and live with him, as they had planned. But he was warned by the cautious way she had approached him. He could not count on her to rescue him. He must help himself. ‘I shall go downriver to Bertram,’ he said. ‘If she wants to come to me she will know how to find me there.’

  His breeches and his shirt at least were clean and dry. It took him a long time to pull them on. His boots went on with a struggle which left him panting for breath, and he bent over to ease the swimming of his head. He did not take his gun for he could not load it nor keep the fuse lit in the canoe. There was nothing else that he could carry. This new country which he had been certain would make him rich had made him poorer than a pauper. All he could carry were the clothes that he stood up in, all he could manage to do was to stagger like a drunkard down the hill to where the canoe was pulled up, out of reach of the tide.

  He thought for a little while that he would never get it down the small beach and into the deep water. He pushed for a while and it moved no more than an inch. Then he had to rest, and then he had to push again. It was a process that took most of his strength and courage. When the canoe finally rocked in the water he could hardly find the energy to climb in. He thought that his weight had grounded it, but when he took the paddle in his one good hand he managed to lift the weight a little and the canoe slid into the middle of the river into the deeper water.

  The tide was on the ebb and the current of the river was flowing seaward. The canoe picked up speed. John tried to use the paddle to steer it closer to the bank but with one hand he could not control it. He thrust the paddle into the water and the canoe spun around it; in a second he would be swamped and the canoe would sink. He made one desperate shove, pointed it downriver, and then clung to the side as it bucked and weaved in the fast current, shaking as it tumbled in the white water. John looked at the bank which seemed to be tearing past him. Nothing seemed familiar though he and Bertram had watched carefully, pointing out landmarks, so that he would be able to make this journey, so Bertram would know when he was nearing John’s headright. He thought he recognised a tall single pine with its roots extending deep into the water, and he dug the paddle in again, trying to turn the canoe towards the shore. The current snatched the paddle, John lunged to grab it back, and then the paddle was flicked like kindling from his hand and the canoe was turning and turning in the dizzying flood and John could neither steer it nor control it, nor do anything but duck down on the wet floor of the canoe and give himself up for lost.

  John opened his eyes. Above him was a high, rounded roof made of lashed branches, and thatched with broad leaves. He was lying on some sort of bedstead made of branches spread with mats. He turned his head, half-expecting to see the familiar face of Bertram Hobert or Sarah’s restrained smile. The place was empty.

  It was not a house built by a normal Englishman, that at least was clear. It was a domed-ceilinged square hut, roofed and walled with leaves, floored with woven mats and deerskins spread on the earth. In the centre of the hut was a small fire with a tiny heart of red which kept the hut warm and filled it with light, acrid smoke. On the walls were hung the skins of animals, and a basket half-woven, and other baskets bulging with goods. The only light filtered in through the hole in the roof above the fire, and flickered at the skins which curtained the door. John swung his feet down to the floor and took two cautious steps to go out.

  At once a brown-skinned child popped his head inside the room, took one look at John standing, and, without moving, without taking his eyes from the Englishman, opened his mouth and let out a yell. John froze to the spot, heard running footsteps and then a woman stood behind the child, her hand on his shoulder, and another woman behind her, poised with a bow raised and an arrow on the string.

  John dropped to sit on the bed, spread his hands, tried to smile.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. He nodded, trying to look reassuring, peaceable. ‘Hello.’

  The two women nodded in reply, saying nothing. Remembering the weeks of silence from Suckahanna, John did not make the assumption that they could not understand him, although their eyes remained blank and black.

  ‘Thank you for bringing me here. The canoe was too strong for me. I was trying to get to my friend’s house – Bertram Hobert – but the current swept me away.’

  Again they nodded, saying nothing.

  ‘Is Jamestown anywhere near here?’ John asked. He wondered if he had been swept far below the town, down to the edge of the sea perhaps. ‘Jamestown? Anywhere near? Jamestown?’

  The woman with the arrow on the string smiled briefly. ‘Nowhere near,’ she said. She spoke with a strange Welsh lilt to her voice.

  ‘You speak English!’ John exclaimed.

  She did not nod or smile, nor did she release the tension on the bowstring.

  ‘I am a peaceful man,’ John said. ‘I was trying to farm outside my house, on my land beside the river. I went hungry, and I burned my hand. I was going to find my friend to get help. I am a peaceful man. I am looking for an Indian girl, an Indian woman. Suckahanna.’

  Neither of the women responded to the name.

  ‘I want to make her my wife,’ John said, plunging in. ‘If she will have me. I have come back to Virginia –’ He broke off. It occurred to him that perhaps in their ignorance they did not know the name of their country. ‘I have come back here, from my home, to be with her.’

  ‘Suckahanna is married to my brother,’ the woman with the bow on the string said precisely. ‘He went with her when she took her gifts of food to you. We did not realise that you would eat it all at once – like a pig with acorns. We did not mean to make you sick.’

  John felt embarrassment burn under the skin of his face. ‘I was foolish,’ he said. ‘I was very hungry.’ The thought of these people discussing his greed, and perhaps watching him void himself and retch, made him want to close his eyes and be anywhere else, even back in his own little house facing death, rather than here with the woman looking at him in mild curiosity.

  ‘Why did Suckahanna not show herself?’ he asked. ‘I would be her friend now she has a husband.’ He looked at the arrow on the string again. ‘I never wronged her,’ he said hastily. ‘I wanted to marry her when I thought she was a maid.’

  The woman’s face did not soften. John thought in sudden, rapid terror that perhaps they had saved him for some dreadful execution. There were stories in Jamestown of men having their bellies cut open and their guts dragged out before their eyes. ‘I meant her no harm,’ John said. ‘I meant none of you any harm.’

  ‘Your house is where we hunt,’ the other woman observed. ‘You have frightened away the game birds and the deer are making other paths in the woods to get away from your burned field and the smell of you.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ John said again. He thought of the governor’s map and the empty spaces of forest unmarked by any names. ‘I thought the forest was empty.’

  They looked at him as if his words were simply incomprehensible. ‘Empty?’

  ‘Empty of people,’ John corrected himself. ‘I knew there were animals living there. But I did not think it was your land.’

  ‘The animals do not own the land,’ the woman with the arrow pointed at his body said slowly, as if she were trying to understand some alien logic.

  ‘No,’ John agreed.

  ‘But you know they are there, they pass through the forest.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We pass through the forest too, we follow them when we hunt them, we clear land for a season to grow our food. How can land be empty?’

  John swallowed on a dry throat, his head thudded sharply. ‘It is how we white men speak,’ he said helplessly.

  The woman with the bow nodded, the arrow still pointing at his belly. ‘You people said you would come here for just a little while, look for precious metal and then go,’ she observed. ‘Now you tell us that the land is empty and you build your houses on the game trails and fell the trees of the forests and never let them
grow again.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ John said. ‘We did not know that you were living here. If you would help me to get to Jamestown I could tell the governor …’

  He trailed off. Suddenly she turned the arrow away from him as if she had lost interest in the whole conversation. ‘We will decide what is to be done with you when the men come home,’ she said abruptly. ‘Stay here till then.’

  John spread his hands, trying to indicate his obedience and harmlessness.

  ‘The child will bring you something to eat,’ the other woman said. ‘Do not shit in here. You must go to the forest for that.’

  John felt his face burn scarlet and cursed himself for a fool to be so ashamed for having diarrhoea when he could be facing disembowelling.

  ‘Of course not,’ he said, clinging to his dignity.

  The woman looked at him. ‘We all saw you,’ she said. ‘But we are clean. We are the People, the Powhatan. You must do your dirt in the forest while you are with us, and cover it up after.’

  ‘I will,’ John said. ‘I am thirsty.’

  ‘The child will bring you food and drink,’ the other woman said. She slid her arrow into a quiver strapped to her side. ‘Don’t gorge yourself.’

  ‘And Suckahanna? Is she here?’ John tried to ask the question with a calm, neutral voice but his head hammered again at the thought of her.

  They looked at him indifferently, and then they turned and went out.

  The child brought a pot filled with icy cold water. John sipped at it carefully. The pot was coal-black, as smooth as marble in his hands. He could not think how it had been made, it was as elegant as a funerary urn in the king’s collection.