Virgin Earth

  In the two days and three nights while he waited John realised how much of a Powhatan he had become. The forest was no longer fearful to him. He thought how he had once seemed to be a little beetle crawling across a terrifying and infinite world. He now seemed no bigger, the Powhatan never thought of themselves as owners of the forest. He now felt as if this little beetle called John Tradescant, called Eagle, had found his place and his ordained path in this place, and that he need fear nothing since his place led him from the earth to birth and life and death and then to the earth again.

  He knew there were wolves in the forest and soon they would get the scent of the elk, and so he built a rough fence of fallen branches around the carcase, and kept the fire lit. Now that he could eat well from the forest the immense labour of his English life seemed to him absurd. He could hardly remember how he had nearly starved in a wooden house set in a forest teeming with life. But then he remembered the hungry anger in Bertram’s twisted face and he knew that a man could live among plenty and never know that he was rich.

  On the morning of the third day, as John methodically cut steaks of meat from the big animal’s body, he heard a tiny crackle of movement behind him and whirled around with his knife at the ready.

  ‘Eagle, I give you greeting,’ said Attone pleasantly.

  Suckahanna was with him. John held out his arms to her and she came to him, her body as light as a girl in his grasp, her shoulders bird-like and bony.

  ‘I brought your wife and my children, and some others to help cure the meat and to feast. They were hungry at home,’ Attone said. ‘Build up the fire, they will come soon.’

  John wiped Attone’s knife and returned it to him with a word of thanks and then he and Suckahanna piled John’s little brushwood fence on to his fire so that it flared up and crackled. As soon as it had burned down into hot embers Suckahanna brought large boulders from the river and heaped them with ashes to make them hot, then she laid dozens of small steaks of meat on the hot stones where they sizzled and spat. By the time the village had arrived – all those able to walk – there was meat cooked and ready for everyone.

  Everyone ate a little, no-one ate to excess. Everyone sighed at the end of a couple of mouthfuls and said, ‘Good. Good,’ as if they had attended a banquet of forty-four courses in Whitehall. Then they all stretched out in the bright winter sunshine and dozed for a little while.

  When the shadows lengthened, they set to work. The women made a temporary long house by pegging down saplings and weaving bark and leaves through the twigs. The men set up drying poles for the skin of the beast, and enlarged the fire for cooking and smoking the meat. The children were sent out to gather wood for the fires and for another, wider fence, to encircle the smoking meat and the long house. By sunset, when they all went down to the water to pray and to send the smoking leaves of tobacco downriver, glowing in the darkness, they had a little fortified camp: safe against wolves, defensible in case of attack.

  It took another two days for the elk to be butchered thoroughly, smoked and packed ready for carriage back to the village. After the first day a couple of fast-running braves had taken the first consignment back to the village for the elderly and the very young, and those too sick to travel into the forest. The skin was tanned and ready, the meat was smoked. The bones were gathered and tied into a great bundle. Suckahanna poured water over the fires and scuffed the embers with her foot. The women untied the saplings and they sprang back up. It was clear that there had been a house on the site but by spring there would be no mark on the ground; and that was what they wanted. Not only to keep their ways and their paths a secret, but because the forest must be a home to the elk as well as to the Powhatan, and elk will not come near a village nor even a trace of one.

  When all the work was done John hesitated with his burden of meat. ‘I want to visit Bertram Hobert,’ he said to Suckahanna.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I saw him while we were hunting. He is hungry and he is sick. His feet are falling off him. He was my friend. I should like to take him some meat.’

  She looked at him with a long, worried gaze. ‘You cannot go looking like this,’ she said. ‘He will shoot you the moment he sees you.’

  ‘I shall leave a gift of meat on his doorstep,’ John said. ‘That was done for me once, and it saved my life. I should like to do the same.’

  ‘You ate yourself sick,’ she observed. ‘Take care you don’t kill him by accident.’

  John chuckled. ‘He has a wife to care for him,’ he said. ‘Or at least he did have. He is my friend, Suckahanna.’

  The look she turned to him was more powerful than tender. ‘He cannot be your friend now,’ she said. ‘You are a Powhatan.’

  ‘He can,’ John argued. ‘If a Powhatan could not be the friend of a white man then I would have died in the woods and I would never have been called Eagle by one of the finest hunters in the People.’

  ‘That was then,’ she said gently. ‘The river gets wider every day. The distance between one shore and the other is greater all the time. You cannot cross and recross, my husband.’

  He put his hand out to her and barely touched her fingertips. As soon as she felt his touch her eyes flickered closed for just a moment at the pleasure of the warmth of his hand. John knew that he had won.

  ‘Shall I wait for you?’ she asked in quite a different tone, as low as a sleepy honey bee in winter.

  ‘Go with the People,’ he replied. ‘I will catch you up before you reach the village.’

  She nodded and picked up her burden of dried meat, and set off. John watched her rangy, long stride until the trees hid her, then he turned and set off at a hunting jog downriver to Hobert’s plantation.

  John slowed as he recognised the features of Hobert’s boundaries, a pine tree where they had slashed a crude ‘H’, a magnificent oak, bending over the path and shading it with its spreading branches, and then he saw the shingled roof of the Hobert house and a thin spiral of smoke coming from the chimney. John stepped back into the shade of the trees and hunkered down on his heels to watch.

  He saw a man bent low under a burden of wood come out of the trees and fling down the cord by the door and straighten up with a sigh. A black man: Francis the Negro slave. He saw the door open and it was Mrs Hobert, speaking sharply and then going indoors. He waited a little longer as it grew cold and the light started to drain from the sky. Bertram must be out late with his gun. John did not move even though the hairs on his arms and his chest stood up, and his skin prickled with goosebumps against the cold. Only when it was nearly dark did he decide that Bertram must already be indoors. He rose to his feet and went silently down the hill to the little house nestling on a piece of flat ground before the river.

  He hesitated at the door and then put his eye to the crack to peer into the firelit interior. It was a sparsely furnished room. A table before the fire; two stools and a hewed tree stump served as chairs. A box bed built into the wall was occupied by a man, his shoulder hunched against the room, his head tucked down. A ladder at the back of the room led to a sleeping platform, a string and a piece of sacking serving as a curtain between the two. John thought of the spick and span London house that the Hoberts had left for this venture and felt his heart ache for them, and surprisingly for himself too: another exile in this strange and remote land.

  He tapped on the door and called out at the same time: ‘A friend, John Tradescant.’ His own name was awkward in his mouth.

  Despite the reassurance he heard a little scream from Mrs Hobert and heard a stool overturn as Francis leaped to his feet.

  ‘Who?’ she demanded.

  ‘John Tradescant, your shipmate and neighbour,’ he repeated.

  ‘We thought you were dead!’ The door opened cautiously and Mrs Hobert’s white face peered out.

  John kept back in the shadows. ‘I was with the Powhatan,’ he said.

  ‘Savages?’

  He bit back a retort. ‘Yes. So I look strange …’

/>   She stepped a little further out, female curiosity driving her onwards. ‘Like a savage?’

  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ John said and came towards the light.

  She clapped her hand over her mouth at the sight of him but her eyes widened with terror. ‘Is it really you?’

  ‘I swear it,’ John said. ‘Just dressed as a Powhatan.’

  ‘Your poor, poor man,’ she said and took hold of his hand and drew him indoors. ‘Good God preserve us all from such a fate. How did you get away from them?’

  ‘I was not captured,’ John said. He nodded at Francis, who stood frozen in horror at the sight of him.

  ‘It is me,’ John repeated.

  Francis nodded, gave a little bow in reply and restored a woodchopping axe to its place behind the door.

  ‘Sit down, sit down,’ Sarah begged him. ‘Your hair! and – dear God – they have even stained your skin to their colour!’

  ‘That’s bear grease,’ John said. ‘It keeps off insects in summer and keeps out the cold in winter.’

  ‘God preserve us! How did you get away?’ Then her constant terror of the savage men struck her and she shot a frightened look at the thin wooden door. ‘Are they after you?’

  ‘No, no,’ John reassured her. ‘They let me go freely.’

  ‘Are you hungry?’ The anxious glance she threw at the cookpot suggested that there was not much to be had, even if he was.

  ‘I have eaten,’ John said steadily. ‘But I brought you some meat. We killed an elk.’

  ‘Meat?’ She choked as the saliva rushed into her throat. ‘You have meat?’

  John reached for the bundle strapped into the small of his back. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘It’s smoked; but you could seethe it in a little water.’

  She fell upon it and tossed it into the cookpot as it stood by the hearthside. John, remembering his sickness from food heated and reheated in the same pot, winced a little. But she was already stirring in water from a pitcher, and greedily tasting. ‘Bertram, Bertram!’

  The shoulder in the bed shrugged still higher, and then the man rolled over on his back and glared into the room.

  ‘We have meat!’ she said triumphantly. ‘Can you sit up while I spoon you some broth?’

  ‘Meat?’ Hobert’s voice was a rough croak.

  ‘Neighbour Tradescant has brought us some steaks from an elk,’ she said. ‘He has been living with the savages but has got away from them now, praise God.’

  Hobert heaved himself up to one arm. His face was marked with pain. In the little room John could smell the flesh of his snow-rotted feet and the stench of unwashed blankets.

  ‘John Tradescant?’ he asked wonderingly. ‘Is that really you?’

  John went to the bedside and took the man’s hand. ‘I have been living with the Powhatan and I dress like them and hunt with them,’ he said. ‘They treat me as a friend. I saw you in the woods the other day, and I thought you might be in need. I have brought you some meat and I can bring you more. They have medicines as well which would make you well. I would have come sooner if I had known you were in need, Bertram.’

  The man’s red-rimmed eyes wandered over John’s face. ‘A savage,’ he said, bewildered.

  ‘I am indeed John Tradescant,’ John said. ‘But I could not live alone in the forest. Thank God I fell among the Powhatan and they have treated me kindly.’

  Sarah Hobert came to her husband’s bedside with a delicate pot filled with gravy. John recognised at once the work of the People: the perfectly smooth walls of one of their dainty black pots.

  ‘That’s Powhatan-made,’ he said.

  She gave him a swift disapproving glance. ‘We used to trade with them, but they became too demanding and dishonest,’ she said. ‘Now my husband will not have them near his land.’ She turned to the wreck of the man in the bed. ‘Will you taste, Bertram?’

  Eagerly he sat up and reached for the pot, eagerly he sucked at it and gulped until the pot was empty.

  ‘Rest now,’ John said, remembering his horrors of illness after he had eaten too richly on a starved belly. ‘You can have more later, and I will bring you other food, corn and berries and nuts.’

  Sarah reached out and caught his hand. ‘Praise God for bringing you back to us,’ she said. ‘For that which was lost is found.’

  John hesitated. ‘I must be a visitor only,’ he said.

  Her face was shining with relief and happiness, deaf to his reluctance. ‘Praise God for returning you to your true people,’ she said.

  It was out of the question for John to leave that night, or even the next day. He slept in the attic on the same side of the makeshift screen as the Negro Francis. In the morning Hobert was in a fever, groaning and counting aloud, counting the sums of money he must save to buy headrights in the new land, counting the percentage of profit he might hope to make, counting the wages he must pay to get his land cleared and tobacco planted.

  ‘Is he mad?’ John asked Sarah.

  She shook her head. ‘It’s the fever again,’ she said. ‘When it comes on him he acts like a madman but then the fever breaks and he is cool-headed again. Francis has to tie him up sometimes.’

  ‘This is impossible,’ John said. ‘You will have to go back to Jamestown. You cannot stay here with only a sick man and a slave.’

  She looked up, her face shining with new hope. ‘That’s what I had feared,’ she said. ‘But now you are come, sent by God to help me. You will help me plant the fields, won’t you, John? Help me until Bertram is well again? He will be well now that you can bring him food, and when the summer comes he will be well and strong again. He is a man of much strength. This is only the dreadful seasoning of Virginia. They all say that. A man must be seasoned to work under the hot sun. Bertram is burning up now, no sun will ever be too hot for him again.’

  ‘I cannot stay,’ John said awkwardly.

  ‘Where else could you go?’ she asked. ‘Your own headright is overgrown and the savages will have stripped your house of everything you ever owned.’

  John felt completely incapable of telling her that he had a new house in the Indian village, and a wife and children waiting for him.

  ‘A cup of ale, for the love of God!’ Bertram called loudly from his bed.

  Sarah turned and poured him a little pot of water from the pitcher.

  ‘I’ll get you some more,’ John muttered, and took the pitcher and went outside.

  He walked slowly down to the river, filled the pitcher, and strolled back, taking the chance to think. If he left Sarah to fend for herself he was signing her death warrant as clearly as if he were the king in Whitehall condemning some poor soul in the Tower. She and Bertram and Francis would die in the forest and the trees would grow through their earthen floor and the trumpet vine strangle their chimney. There was no chance at all that they would survive in this fruitful, overwhelming land without help. In contrast, Suckahanna and the children would be guarded by Attone, and fed and protected by the village. The land was no danger to Suckahanna, she fed from it as easily as a deer nibbling green shoots in the woods.

  John squared his shoulders, picked up the pitcher and went back to the house.

  Francis was outside, stacking firewood. ‘Go in and guard your master,’ John said. ‘I must take Mrs Hobert out into the wood and teach her how to gather fruits and roots and berries. You have been starving in the midst of plenty here. Why did you not tell her?’

  ‘Me? How should I know?’

  ‘You must have eaten nuts and berries in your own country,’ John said irritably. ‘Gathered them in the forests?’

  The man raised one eyebrow. ‘My own country is not like this one,’ he said. ‘So we don’t have the same fruits. And in any case, I had my meals served to me by my wife or by my slave. I didn’t go out clambering in trees for cashew nuts like a monkey.’

  ‘You’re a savage!’ John exclaimed. ‘What d’you mean, slaves, and being served?’

  The black man looked from the remnants of his ow
n breeches and shirt to John’s embroidered buckskin loincloth and his stained and tattooed skin.

  ‘I see only one savage here,’ he remarked.

  John swore under his breath and pushed open the door. ‘Mrs Hobert!’ he said. ‘Come out and let me show you how to find nuts and roots for your dinner.’

  She brought a basket, Indian-made, John observed, and she was quick to learn how to identify roots which could be cooked and eaten, and roots which could be sliced and eaten raw. John showed her nut-bearing trees and pointed to the wild plum and the wild cherry trees which would blossom and bear fruit later in the year. They came home with a basket full of good things and she sliced the roots to supplement the remainder of the elk in the cookpot for their dinner.

  Hobert had lapsed into a deep sleep, the sweat thick and cold on his forehead.

  ‘We won’t wake him,’ his wife decided. ‘The fever may be breaking and he will need his rest.’

  ‘The Powhatan have physic,’ John said. ‘For fevers and also for frostbite. I could ask the werowance, or one of the physicians, to come and see Bertram. Or there’s a wise woman very gifted with herbs, she made me well. She might come.’