They went ashore in small parties, armed men only, while the rest of us waited on the ship in a cold that had moved into the timbers and meant to stay.
I was not among them.
I was sixteen, unarmed, and no one aboard had any reason to put a musket in my hands over Standish or John Tilley.
It galled the older, restless part of me and quietly relieved the younger part that still flinched at loud noises.
So I waited with the women and the children and the men too old or too valued to risk, and I had the story secondhand, the way news had always reached me, in another life and now in this one.
“They found corn,” Giles Hopkins told me, breathless, the evening the first party came back.
Giles was near my own age, Stephen Hopkins’s son, and had gone ashore with the men over his father’s grumbling.
“Buried in baskets, under mounds the natives had raised.
Whole baskets of it, yellow and red both.
Master Bradford says it is enough seed to plant in the spring, if we are careful with it.”
“Did they leave anything for it?” I asked.
Giles looked a little sheepish.
“A promise.
Master Bradford means to pay the owners back double, once we know who they are and have something worth paying with.
It did not sit easy with some of the men, taking it.
But we had little food, and less time to be careful about it.”
I said nothing for a moment.
Something in me turned over at the thought of it.
A whole winter’s careful work, another family’s harvest, lifted out of the ground by strangers who called it Providence and meant, in their rough way, to be honest about the debt.
But it was the promise I held onto, not the taking.
I was glad Bradford had made it, and gladder that he had said double.
I had already begun to see, that early, what most of the hungry men on that beach could not.
We had not come to an empty country.
We had come to someone’s, and every basket we took and every grave we opened was an entry in a ledger the people of this land were keeping as carefully as any merchant in London kept his.
A colony that began by robbing its neighbors and calling it grace would answer for it, if not this winter then in ten winters, or in twenty.
If we lived here at all, we would live here on their sufferance for years before we lived here by our own strength.
The men who understood that would build something that lasted.
The men who did not would leave their bones in the fields they had stolen.
I said none of this to Giles.
He was a good lad and it was not his to mend.
I only asked him to tell me the rest.
The second party left within the week, and came back changed.
I had it from Brewster this time, in the low, careful voice of a man giving news he would rather have kept.
“There was an attack,” he said.
“At dawn, while our men slept by their fire.
Natives, Master Hopkins thinks Nausets, loosed arrows at them out of the dark.
No man of ours was struck, thank God.
They answered with their muskets, and the attackers went back into the trees.”
“Is anyone hurt?”
“Shaken.
Not hurt.” He was quiet a moment.
“Though I take less comfort from it than I ought.
We are guests in this country, Thomas, whatever grand names we give ourselves.
And guests who come taking corn out of another man’s stores are seldom welcomed with open arms after.”
It was one of the more honest things anyone had said since the coast first rose out of the sea, and it struck me how much of Brewster’s quiet weight came from exactly that.
He said the plain thing where other men said the comfortable one.
I was learning more from him than he knew, and not the lessons he thought he was teaching.
“What will Master Bradford do?” I asked.
“Look further.
There is a harbor a captain charted years ago and named for himself.
Plymouth, he called it, with more pride than modesty, though I doubt anyone will trouble to rename it now.
Deep water, a stream of sweet water running down, open ground already cleared, from some village long since gone.
Master Bradford thinks it may suit us.”
Plymouth.
The name settled into me quietly, and meant more to me than I let show, and I let it pass without a word.
The trip that finally settled things nearly ended in disaster before it was done.
A storm broke their small boat’s rudder and drove them, half frozen, onto an island in the harbor, where they waited out the Sabbath before they finished the search.
They came back on the eleventh of December with the answer we had all been waiting on.
Plymouth would do.
Water deep enough for the ship, fields already cleared for the spring, a hill fit for a fort and a watch, sweet water close at hand.
It should have been the best news we had heard in months.
In its way it was.
But I learned it in the same breath as something else, the kind of news that moves through a ship in hushed voices, faster than any man could carry it on purpose.
Dorothy Bradford had drowned.
She had gone over the side into the freezing water of the harbor while her husband was away with the very party that had just found us a home.
I heard three different tellings of how it happened inside a single hour, and no two of them agreed, and I understood that this was simply how it would stay.
A woman gone.
A man coming back from the discovery of his life to grief instead of joy.
And no one left who could say for certain what those last minutes on the water had held.
I found him two days later, alone at the rail, looking out at the shore his wife would never see made into a town.
For once there was no plan in me at all.
I simply went and stood beside him, and said nothing.
“You need not stay, Thomas,” he said after a while, not unkindly.
“I know, sir.”
He did not ask me again.
We stood there together a long time, the wind off the water cold enough to burn, until at last he spoke once more, quietly, almost to himself.
“We came all this way,” he said.
“And the sea took her three days from land.
There is no reason in grief.
No sense to be made of it, however hard a man tries to make it.”
“No, sir,” I said.
“I do not think there is.”
It was one of the truest things I had said since I woke into that life, and there was nothing clever in it and nothing aimed.
It was only a boy standing beside a broken man because there was nothing else worth doing.
I kept that hour apart from everything else I was gathering in those days.
It had nothing to do with any plan of mine, or with anything I meant one day to build.
I found, a little to my own surprise, that I wanted it kept exactly as it was, untouched, and so I kept it.
Behind us the ship’s carpenter had already begun laying out his tools for the work ahead.
A colony to raise, on a hill above a harbor named by a proud captain for a city half of them had never seen, with the winter closing harder by the day, and half our number, though not one of them yet knew it, never to see the spring.