Ghost Hawk by Susan Cooper
A woman and two small children came out of the house to greet Goodman Bates, and he helped Huldah down to her new home. Huldah just had time to look up at John for a moment, a silent farewell, before she had to turn and curtsy. The woman had a kind face, John thought hopefully—and then there was the sound of hooves behind him, and a man rode up on a horse and the children shrieked in excitement. It was clearly the father of the family. John was too busy handing down Huldah’s bags to pay him any attention. After that he had to climb out of the back of the cart and get up to sit beside Goodman Bates, who liked company.
It was only as they left, and he looked back and saw the father dismount and hand his horse’s reins to a servant, that John saw the man’s face. He was a small man, but strong; he grabbed one of the children and hoisted him up onto his shoulders.
He was the man who killed me.
“Do you see? Yes, it’s Master Kelly,” said Goodman Bates with pride. “Our Huldah is a lucky girl to be coming to this household.”
John said, “Where are we?”
“They are calling it Duxbury,” Bates said. “Only an hour’s ride from Plymouth. Captain Standish is building here too. The leaders among us deserve to have more land and some peace. Governor Winslow has the same, up beyond where you’re going, in the place they call Marshfield.”
He called to the patient oxen, and they lumbered off again.
I knew this land, but it was changed. If I had been living, I would not have been there. My people were no longer there. For thousands of years, we had hunted and lived and farmed on the land over which John was now passing. Already, after less than one man’s lifetime, these invaders from across the ocean felt that it belonged to them.
Goodman Bates’s cart took John some miles further north, to a house that had been built on flat fertile land in this wide river valley. He gazed at the house, the place where now he would live.
It was a good sturdy building, on land rising above the track, and it smelled like a farmyard. Unlike the Duxbury house, it had a thatched roof. Beside it was another building, about half as big. The track up to them was steep, and the oxen hesitated; Goodman Bates yelled at them and for the first time cracked his whip over their backs. They strained hard, their hoofs churning up the dirt. The cart creaked up toward the smaller building and finally stopped.
Three men came out into the sunshine, and John had his first sight of his new employer, William Medlycott. He was a big broad-shouldered man wearing leather britches and a dirty white shirt, and his beard was flecked with grey; he raised an arm to Goodman Bates and went round at once to the back of the cart. His first interest was clearly the three massive logs wedged in there.
“Ah, very nice, very pretty, Richard,” he said. His voice had a deep burr of an accent; John had never heard anything like it before.
Goodman Bates heaved himself down and they both stood studying the logs. John scrambled off the cart and stood at a respectful distance. One of the oxen, less respectful, let loose a pile of steaming droppings.
“A good straight oak it was,” Bates said. “Fifteen feet or more without a knot, likely. This one came down last fall, and there are more on that island, for when you want them. I thought it worth the carrying.”
“Very well worth,” said Medlycott. “And there’s a shipbuilder up the river will be glad to hear of them. Let those poor beasts of thine loose and Ezra will take them. Then come tell Priscilla all the news from Plymouth.” He looked across at John. “And this is my new apprentice?”
John ducked his head awkwardly. “John Wakeley, sir,” he said.
Medlycott looked him up and down. “Eleven years old, they said?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Th’art small for a cooper,” said Medlycott, frowning. Then his mouth gave a merciful twitch. “But Priscilla will fatten thee up. Go with the boys, now. Come, Dick.”
The younger of the other two was a boy a head taller than John, with a friendly grin, and dark hair so short that he looked as if his head had been shaved. He grabbed one end of John’s bundle and they carried it together.
“I’m Thomas,” he said. “And that’s Ezra Clark, he’s my father’s journeyman.” He jerked his head at the young man helping Goodman Bates unyoke the oxen, who seemed untroubled by the beasts’ size and horns even though they towered over him. Ezra Clark had spiky yellow hair and a wispy beard, and did not smile.
“What’s a journeyman, please?” said John.
“Served his apprenticeship, works as a cooper—tha don’t know that much?”
It was not an unkind question, and John smiled.
“I know nothing,” he said.
“Well, come on, Know-nothing,” said Thomas cheerfully. “Let’s get this to the back—we sleep in the lean-to.”
This also baffled John, but he followed, and they had just dropped the bundle inside a small door at the back of the house when there was a yell from Ezra. It was a surprisingly deep voice.
“Thomas!”
They both ran. Ezra had led the oxen into an enclosed piece of the yard and was pulling a hurdle to shut them in. “Straw from the loft for the animals,” he said. “And pump them some water.”
“This is John, the new apprentice,” Thomas said.
Ezra looked John over, from hooded eyes in a long, lugubrious face. “Well, John,” he said, jerking his head, “over there is the manure pile, and that’s where tha can take the beasts’ leavings. We keep a tidy yard.”
So John fetched the long-handled wooden shovel that was sticking out of the manure pile, and spent the first half hour of his seven-year coopering apprenticeship carrying mounds of fresh ox manure, of which there were now three. He found himself wondering if his life had changed after all.
But before long, after washing at the pump in the yard, he was inside the house, at the table that covered the length of one room. Though he was here to work, he found he would eat with the family. It seemed a pattern not very different from his life in Plymouth—and here he was free of Daniel Smith.
There were four other young Medlycotts, all of whom had the same bright eyes and dark hair as Thomas: in descending order they were Joseph, Sarah, William, and Matthew. Mistress Medlycott called William “Willie,” to avoid confusion with his father. She was a buxom, welcoming lady who somehow seemed to give off as much warmth as the enormous hearth on which she cooked. To John’s great astonishment she gave him a hug when they were introduced, and he liked her immediately. Master Medlycott and Goodman Bates teased her over the hug.
“What shall I tell them in Plymouth?” roared Goodman Bates merrily. “Thy wife makes free with the apprentice!”
“To the stocks with her!” said Master Medlycott.
John blushed, and looked at the floor.
“Stop thy nonsense, he’s the size of Matthew,” said Mistress Medlycott. “And missing his mother already, I’ll be bound.” Her deep voice had the same rounded accent as her husband’s. She plunked a large loaf of bread in front of Medlycott, and he attacked it with his knife.
Ezra was not smiling. John wondered if he was as strict as Daniel. But then he forgot everything except the food, which was plentiful at this long table. They had delayed their dinner until the arrival of Goodman Bates, who was an old friend and would stay the night, and the children were all ravenous. Like all the Plymouth children, they ate in silence unless spoken to, standing with Ezra and John at the foot of the table. Thomas stood beside John, and they shared a trencher, the hollowed wooden plate that all these people used.
The talk was all between Bates and the Medlycotts, who were thirsty for gossip about Plymouth, and its relations with the new Puritan colony in Massachusetts Bay. John paid this little attention until a question was directed at his end of the table.
“Ezra,” Master Medlycott boomed, “tha shut the oxen safe inside, I trust?”
“They are indoors,” said Ezra. “And fed and watered.”
“I thank you,” said Goodman Bates. “Is there fear
“Wolves,” said Master Medlycott. “My neighbor saw one on his land last week. But it would take a big pack of wolves to bother an ox, I think.”
“And a big pack of Indians,” said Goodman Bates comfortably.
“No—one arrow would do it.” Master Medlycott shook his head. “Satan gave those savages a deadly aim. And now we are selling them guns, heaven preserve us. There’ll be a bloodbath one of these days.”
“William,” said Mistress Medlycott rapidly, “prithee cut some more meat for Goodman Bates. And the children if they need it.” And she launched into a description and discussion of the sermon preached in the local meetinghouse the previous Sunday, so that there was no more talk of savages.
But when John went to bed that night, on a mattress on the floor of the back room that he was to share with Ezra and Thomas, he took nothing but his nightshirt out of his bundle of possessions. For all the friendliness of this household, he was greatly afraid of what would happen if anyone were to find that his private treasure was an Indian tomahawk.
The next day he watched and waited for a chance to slip away from the house to hide it, and before long he managed to bury it in the ground behind a clump of birch trees edging the yard. There it lay, safely hidden again. Chickens trotted and pecked above it, the roots of wildflowers grew down around it, but nobody knew it was there except John.
The thing he did not yet know was that very close to the Medlycott house, out on the salt marsh, waiting for him, was the place that holds me—the place where my tomahawk was born.
FIVE
Master Medlycott’s workshop was a noisy, bustling place, and he employed three general workmen as well as Ezra, Thomas, and John. On John’s first morning, two of the workmen had unloaded the enormous tree-trunk logs from Goodman Bates’s cart and rolled them to the yard behind the workshop. Other logs from local trees lay here too, waiting to be sawed into chunks and then split lengthwise with axes, first into quarters and then eighths, then thinner still. Lengths of wood like this sat weathering in the yard in tall neat stacks—chestnut, red oak, and pine. They would sit there for months or years, until Master Medlycott felt they were ready to become the staves out of which all barrels were made.
I watched all this with fascination. In the life I had lived, our pots and containers were made from bark and skins and clay; we wove baskets from reeds and wood, but we had no need for these massive containers, nor for the great wheels of the carts that had to carry them, nor the great beasts that pulled the carts. The skills of the cooper belonged to a different life, in which the bark of a tree was often thrown away, and all its wood chopped into these prized flat pieces called staves.
John would learn someday to make staves, but he had a long way to go. It took him weeks even to learn the names of Master Medlycott’s tools, all of which had come over with him from England. To begin, John was put at the grinding wheel, to learn how to sharpen the blades of planes and spokeshaves and axes. There he sat, in a little cloud of sparks, while he watched the others making casks: bending staves into shape while heating them over a small fire, damping them with water, and whacking iron hoops down over them to hold them together.
They were always busy; there was a great demand for barrels and casks, to carry almost everything the people ate or drank. Many more English families were coming in ships, spreading through this open forest land where my people had hunted and grown crops for so long. Instead of hunting and trapping, they raised animals that ate up everything green, and they were cutting down all the trees. Their buildings were made with deep stone-lined cellars and thick sturdy walls, and once a settlement was built, it did not move. It just grew bigger.
Because of his staves, Master Medlycott had respect for the trees. He would gaze up in admiration at a tall straight white oak and feel that the casks he made from its wood should be worthy of the splendid tree. But even he treated the tree not as a living creature but as a thing. This was how they thought of our mother the earth, these white men: as a place full of things, put here by their God for them to use.
“Is it not wonderful,” Master Medlycott said at dinner one summer day, “the bounty of this land that gives us unlimited timber? My old father would scarce have believed it. He was always scouting about for new wood.”
“He’d not believe our stacks of firewood, either,” said Mistress Medlycott. “For all the harsh winters, this house is warmer than the last, praise the Lord.”
Ezra speared a piece of meat with his knife. “My granddad held it was the shipyards ate up the timber. The Queen’s ships kept out the Spaniards, he used to say, but every one of ’em used up twenty-five hundred trees.”
“And all of oak,” Master Medlycott said. “Small wonder it was hard in England to find trees like the one Richard Bates brought us this year. He carries another soon, I believe—we need all we can get, for the tight work.” He looked down the table at John, who was sitting dutifully mute with the children, chewing. “Ask me for a sheet of paper and a pen tomorrow, John Wakeley, and tha canst send a letter to thy mother by Goodman Bates.”
John stared at him in happy disbelief, and Mistress Medlycott smiled. And the next day, Medlycott set John to cutting staves of white pine to make a simple bucket, so he would be able to write to his mother that he was indeed becoming a cooper.
Sundays, for John, were just as they had been at home: everyone went to the meetinghouse for worship, all day. The minister read from the Bible and preached a long sermon in the morning, and Ezra kicked John if he saw his eyelids droop. Then all the families of the community gathered in another room and ate heartily together, from dishes brought by all the women, and went back to the meetinghouse in the afternoon for the sermon to begin all over again. By this time Ezra’s eyes too were in danger of drooping, and John had to resist the temptation to give him even the smallest nudge with a foot.
The meetinghouse and gathering room were much smaller than those in Plymouth, and in summer the air was hot. But it was the only time of the week for people to exchange news and gossip, and often John caught sight of Huldah sitting obediently with the Kelly family. He tried not to look at Master Kelly, though the man was hard to avoid because he was clearly a pillar of the community. Quite often he and Captain Standish were called on to stand up and read from the minister’s big Bible.
One summer Sunday, after the meal, John came across Huldah sitting on a boulder at the edge of the common, beside the meetinghouse. She was in charge of two small Kelly children, who were intently watching a row of ants carrying seeds to their nest, and she was wearing a neat dark dress and a little white cap on her head. She looked up and smiled at him.
“Has t’a learned to be a cooper yet?” she said.
John said solemnly, “I have made a bucket of pine, that you can carry vegetables in.” He grinned. “But it leaks. I can’t do tight coopering yet—that’s barrels and such, to hold water.”
Huldah said, “Are you happy?”
John blinked. He was not used to direct questions.
“They are good people,” he said. “And you?”
Huldah wrinkled her nose.
A man’s voice called sharply, “Huldah?”
John looked round and saw Master Kelly striding out of the gathering room onto the grass, looking around him, and he caught Huldah’s eye again just for a second before he ducked out of the way and was gone.
He thought of her often, and tried not to imagine the reasons why she was not happy. Perhaps, he hoped, she simply missed her family.
One afternoon in the autumn, before the leaves began to fall, before the Hunter’s Moon, Mistress Medlycott asked her husband’s permission to send John out into the fields gathering sassafras root for her. The English knew something of using herbs and plants as medicine, especially the women, and those of them who talked to my people were learning more. And Mistress Medlycott had already discovered that her husband’s new apprentice was good at gardening; sometimes he even aske
So John set off, carrying a Pokanoket basket that had come to the family as part of a trade, and he headed in a direction he had never taken before. It was a beautiful calm fall day; the sky was blue and the sun was halfway down the sky.
I watched him.
He threaded his way through the trees behind the house and found himself going downhill, down through the woodland to a small pond. The water was very still, filled with red and gold reflections from the blazing colors of the maples and oaks and ash trees all around it.
John found a stand of small sassafras trees beside the pond, and dug out some roots with his knife. When he had filled the basket, he straightened his back, stretched, and looked around. He had not been here before.
But I had. I had lived here, alone, one winter when I was younger than he was now.
John looked across at the opposite side of the pond—the steep, rocky place where in unthinking rage I had killed a wolf whose only crime was trying to stay alive. I hoped he would not go there. After a moment he turned away, and headed instead to the land beyond the pond, where he could hear a sound like a long, distant sighing. He passed a stand of oak trees—scrubby red oak, not of interest to his master for its timber, but filled with acorns that would attract squirrels and deer.
The trees grew sparse as he went on. Then ahead, suddenly, he saw a great green stretch of salt marsh, broken by three island hummocks of trees. Way out across the marsh, on the horizon, he could see the sea.
High in the sky above him, coasting out from the trees, he saw a red-tailed hawk lying on the wind. He heard its harsh thin cry, and it headed for the nearest of the three islands.