Nathaniel learned to walk in the winter of his second year, and I, who had spent a whole life believing I understood a great many things, discovered that not one of them had taught me the smallest useful thing about a son.
“He will fall,” I said.
“He will,” Elizabeth agreed, not looking up from her mending.
“The hearth.”
“Is exactly where it was this morning, and yesterday, and every day of his life.” She bit off her thread.
“Sit down, Thomas.
Children fall.
It is how they learn where the ground is.”
Nathaniel took four steps, sat down hard on the packed earth floor, and looked deeply offended by it.
Then he looked up at me to see how offended he ought to be.
I kept my face grave.
“That was the floor, Nathaniel.
It does that.”
The boy considered this.
Decided against crying.
Got up.
“You see,” Elizabeth said.
“I see that between the two of you I am outnumbered in my own house.”
“You were outnumbered the day he was born.
You are only just noticing.”
Nathaniel’s first clear word was not mother, to Elizabeth’s lasting and loudly stated sense of injustice.
It was not father either.
It was book.
I owned three by then.
A Bible, a battered book of psalms, and a herbal I had bought off a sailor from the last ship for more corn than the thing was strictly worth.
Three books, in a colony where most houses held one or none, and Nathaniel had decided, with a small tyrant’s certainty, that the evenings his father opened one of them belonged to him.
“Book,” he commanded, from the middle of the floor.
“It is Scripture, Nathaniel.
Not a story about dogs.”
“Book.”
“He has your stubbornness,” Elizabeth observed.
“He has my excellent judgment.” I lifted the boy onto my knee and opened the herbal, because the herbal had pictures.
“Very well.
This one is called sage.
Your mother grows it in the dry corner, away from the mint, because the mint…”
“Will choke out everything near it,” Elizabeth finished from her stool.
“He is two, Thomas.
“He will have both.
It is cheaper than a tutor.”
Nathaniel put one fat finger on the woodcut of the sage plant, looked up at me, and said, with immense satisfaction, “Book.”
“Close enough,” I said, and something in my chest turned over, quietly, the way it did a dozen times a day now and had never once done before this life.
“Close enough for today.”
The fever came in his third winter.
It came the way the sickness always came, fast and for no reason anyone could name.
Nathaniel was chasing the Brewster children between the houses at midday.
By dark he was flat on his pallet, burning, his breath coming with a small catch at the end of it that put ice straight through me.
“It is the winter fever,” Mary Brewster said, her hand on the boy’s brow.
“It passes through the children most years.
Most of them shake it off.”
“Most,” I said.
Mary looked at me, and did not soften it, because we had all buried too many children together for her to insult me with softness.
“Most,” she said.
“Keep him warm.
Keep water in him.
Willow bark tea if he will take it.
And pray.”
The night that followed was the longest of my life.
I had waited out storms at sea.
I had waited out the dying time itself, hauling water past open graves.
None of it had readied me for the particular, grinding helplessness of sitting on the floor beside a child’s pallet, counting his breaths.
Elizabeth held the boy while he fussed.
I fed the fire, and brewed the bark, and when Nathaniel finally took a little water near midnight the two of us looked at each other over his head like soldiers sharing out a watch.
“Tell me something,” Elizabeth said quietly, somewhere in the black hours.
“Anything.
I do not care what.
I only need your voice in the room to keep me awake.”
So I talked.
I told her about orchards.
About how our apple whips would look in thirty years, rows of them, white with blossom every spring, and Nathaniel’s own children stealing the windfalls.
I told her about a town, someday, somewhere up the coast, with a school in it, and a street wide enough for two carts to pass, and our name over more than one door.
I talked for hours, low, building the future out loud in the firelight the way other men hummed psalms.
I never once said how I knew the shape of what was coming.
She never once asked.
But somewhere toward dawn, with Nathaniel’s breathing gone longer and easier against her shoulder, Elizabeth said, into the quiet, “You tell it like a man describing a place he has already stood in.”
My hands went still on the fire iron.
“It is a fault of mine,” I said at last.
“Mm.” She was watching the fire, not me.
“That is what I told myself, the first year.
It is a good explanation.
It fits almost everything.” She shifted the sleeping boy gently.
“Almost.”
The fever broke that morning.
By the third day Nathaniel was commanding book from the middle of the floor again, thinner and crosser and entirely himself, and I went out behind the house, alone, and stood among the bare apple whips a while with my eyes shut, and made no record of the hour in any cipher.
Some pages I was learning to leave unwritten.
It was the spring after, Nathaniel three and a half and into everything, a climber of fences and an opener of chests, that the thing I had been careless about for nine years finally happened.
I came in from the field at midday and knew, before a word was said, that the room had changed.
Elizabeth sat at the table.
Very straight.
In front of her lay my old coat, the worn one, the one too shabby for anyone to bother stealing, the one that had crossed with me from the Brewster house to this one and had hung on its peg through nine years and two houses because I could never quite explain, even to myself, why it must never be given away.
The lining was open along the seam.
Small fingers had done it.
The ragged edge said so, and so did Nathaniel, sitting on the floor in a drift of pulled thread, deeply pleased with himself.
And spread on the table, smoothed flat under Elizabeth’s hand, lay the pages.
Years of them.
Small cramped lines in a cipher no living soul could read.
The corn and Squanto, Brewster’s name, a girl scrubbing linen at the water’s edge, a town, a school, every plan I had never dared speak aloud and every future I had never dared explain, safe all these years behind a wall of code.
Except that the wall of code was itself the problem, and I saw that in her face before she said a word.
Innocent notes do not need a cipher.
Sermon thoughts do not get sewn into a coat lining.
She could not read one line of it, and that was exactly why her hands lay flat on the table and her back was straight and her eyes, when they came up to mine, held nine years of almost.
“Papa,” Nathaniel announced from the floor, holding up a torn scrap in triumph.
“Book.”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said.
Her voice was very quiet, and very level, and left me nowhere at all to stand.
“Your father’s book.
The one he has kept from me since before we married.”
She turned the top page around to face me.
“Nine years, Thomas.
I have given you nine years of not asking.
I find I have come to the end of them all at once.” Her finger rested on the cramped, unreadable lines.
“So you will sit down now, husband.
And you will tell me what it is I married.”