The Mayflower sailed for England on the fifth of April, and not one soul aboard chose to sail with her.
I stood on the hill above the harbor and watched her sails take the wind and grow smaller against the same gray Atlantic that had nearly killed us all coming the other way.
It struck me harder than I expected.
There went the last easy road home, the last simple way back to the only world any of these people had ever known, and every one of them stood on that hill and let it leave without them.
I understood it, watching.
It was not really a thing about courage.
It was simply what people do once a place has taken enough from them that leaving would mean the losses had bought nothing.
Half of them had buried a wife, a husband, a child on that slope above the water.
To sail home now would be to say those graves had been dug for no reason at all.
So they stayed, and watched the ship go, and turned their faces back to the work.
I had done the same, in my own way.
My own road home had closed a long time before theirs, and there had never been any question of turning back down it.
I watched the sail shrink to a smudge, and then to nothing, and then I went back down the hill to help with the planting.
Squanto put us to planting within the week.
“Four seeds to a mound,” he said, showing us with an ease that made every English effort around him look clumsy, “and a fish beneath each one, split open, to feed the ground as the corn grows.
Your soil here is thin and sandy.
It wants more feeding than the ground you came from.”
“How did your people come to learn that?” Giles asked, honestly curious, elbow-deep in the same sandy soil.
Squanto’s face did not change much, but something in his voice did.
“The way people learn anything that keeps them alive,” he said.
“By trying it, and burying the ones who guessed wrong, until only the right way is left standing.”
No one had an answer for that, and the planting went on in a quiet that felt more like respect than anything else.
I worked the fish into the mounds myself that morning, my hands slick and stinking by midday, and I thought how strange it was that everything I meant one day to build began here: a boy on his knees in poor sandy dirt, burying a dead fish under four kernels of corn, trusting a slow and ordinary thing to a season no cleverness of mine could hurry.
All the knowing in the world is worth nothing, I thought, if you cannot also do the plain, unlovely work in front of you.
I have learned that lesson in a new shape almost every year since, and I expect I will go on learning it until they put me in the ground myself.
The houses went up in earnest that season, now that the ship’s leaving had made the settlement’s permanence somehow official.
The frames went up first, oak timbers cut square with axes and pegged at the joints rather than nailed, since nails were too dear to waste on a wall that would stand without them.
Between the timbers the men wove a lattice of thin split branches, wattle, Standish called it, with the flat patience of a man explaining a thing to someone who ought already to know it.
Then we packed the lattice thick with daub, a strong-smelling paste of clay and mud and chopped straw and whatever animal hair could be spared, smeared on by hand until the walls stood solid enough to keep out the wind, if not always the damp.
The roofs we thatched with reed cut from the marsh, laid thick and tied tight and steep enough to shed rain and snow both.
Windows, where a house had them at all, were narrow slits covered with oiled paper instead of glass, and they let in a weak, milky light that I found, more than once, I was almost fond of.
Dim, and imperfect, and honestly earned.
“Mind the chimney,” Brewster told me dryly the day we raised the clay-and-timber stack for our own small house, “given what the last one nearly cost us.”
I laughed, but I took the warning to heart, and packed the clay thick around the timber with more care than the work strictly needed.
I had learned, that January, exactly how fast a well-meant fire can turn on the people who lit it.
By the time our own house stood daubed and roofed, a crooked, low, single-roomed thing with a dirt floor and a loft barely tall enough to sit up in, I found I had something like real pride in it.
It was the first roof I could point to and say, plainly, that I had helped raise it with my own two hands, and that it would still be standing come winter.
I caught my own reflection properly for the first time that same week, kneeling at the edge of the pond to wash the day’s daub from my hands and arms, the water gone still enough in the fading light to hold a true image instead of the broken, rippling one I had grown used to in buckets and rain barrels.
I had gone out of my way not to look too closely, I realized, for longer than made any sense.
Some part of me had not yet agreed to accept this borrowed, sixteen-year-old face as anything more solid than a coat I was wearing for a while.
The face that looked back was leaner than I remembered a boy’s face being allowed to look, the cheekbones sharpened by a hard winter, the dark hair grown longer and rougher than any barber would have permitted.
It had lost the last softness of childhood somewhere between the storm and the sickness.
The eyes were the strangest part.
They were a boy’s eyes, and yet they held something I knew too well to be at ease with, a watchfulness that did not belong to sixteen years of ordinary living.
This is who I am now, I thought, studying it.
Not a disguise.
Not a thing I am wearing until my own face comes back to me.
This is the face my children will carry some version of.
I had better learn to live behind it.
It was, I decided, a face I could live inside.
I was not yet certain it was one I could learn to be.
I found Elizabeth at the far edge of the pond that same evening, come down on her own to fetch water, her hair fair, almost flaxen where the last of the light caught it, escaping in loose strands from under her cap in a way she seemed only half aware of and not at all troubled by.
It was the first plainly vivid thing I had let myself notice about anyone in a long time.
“You have daub in your hair,” she said, not looking up from her bucket, in the flat, amused tone she had apparently decided was the correct way to speak to me now. This chapter was copied from NovelPing without permission.
“I have daub in a great many places,” I said, and dropped onto the bank near her, tired in the good and honest way of a day spent building a thing rather than only planning it.
“Your house is going up well, from what I have seen.”
“Our house,” I said, before I quite meant to, and then, hearing it, did not take it back.
“Brewster’s, and mine, for as long as he will have me under his roof.”
She looked at me properly then, something considering in her face.
“You say that like a question you have not finished asking yourself.”
I looked out at the darkening water rather than at her, and turned it over honestly before I answered.
“I suppose I still wonder, some days, what exactly I am to this family.
A ward.
A servant.
Something in between that has no proper English word.
I did not wonder it so plainly before this winter.
I think I was too busy staying alive to ask.”
“And now?”
“Now I have the leisure to be uncertain about smaller things,” I said, with a small honest laugh, “since the large matter of staying alive has, for the moment, mostly settled itself.”
She thought about that, and set her filled bucket down carefully in the grass.
“For what it is worth,” she said, “you seem to me exactly like a son.
Whatever word anyone else puts to it.”
It landed somewhere quieter and less guarded than most things people said to me then, and I found I had no clever answer ready at all, only a plain, unpracticed warmth that surprised me by how easily I let it sit there, unmanaged, between us.
“Thank you,” I said, and meant all of it.
We walked back up toward the houses together as the light finally went, our buckets heavy, the daub still drying somewhere in my hair, and I thought, not for the first time and certainly not the last, that whatever I built in the years to come, I wanted to remember evenings like this one as the true foundation of it.
Not the treaty.
Not the corn.
Not even the careful trust I had spent all winter gathering.
Just this.
A pond going dark, a girl with flaxen hair troubled by neither daub nor grief, and a boy learning, slowly and unevenly, how to live inside his own borrowed life without managing every moment of it.