They drew the house lots on a cold morning near the end of December.
Nineteen households were called up, one at a time, to learn which patch of frozen ground would be theirs to build on.
I watched the whole business from the edge of it, my hands pushed into my armpits against the wind.
“Single men are put in with families, to keep the number of houses down,” Bradford told us, his breath smoking.
“Fewer houses, fewer roofs to raise before the worst of it comes.
We can make finer arrangements when we are not fighting the frost for every nail.”
My own name was called with the Brewster household, which surprised no one, least of all me.
I walked back from the drawing beside Giles Hopkins, both of us picking our way over old snow gone hard and treacherous underfoot.
“My father says the common house goes up first,” Giles said.
“Everything else after, as hands and weather allow.”
“That is the right order,” I said, and meant it.
I did not say the rest.
I had watched too many of us go grey and cough on that ship to believe a common house would be the hardest thing this winter asked of us.
The common house took the better part of three weeks, raised in short bitter spells between storms.
Men’s hands split in the cold.
The framing timber wore a skin of ice more mornings than not.
I hauled what I was fit to haul, water and kindling and the lighter beams, and more than once I found myself working beside Myles Standish, the short, fierce captain who directed the framing as though a badly cut joint were a personal insult to him.
Once I pointed out that a corner post looked to be taking its load at a bad angle, and would work itself loose before spring.
Standish squinted at it, saw that I was right, and had it reset.
“You have an eye for how a beam should sit,” he said, gruff, not quite ready to trust it.
“Where does a servant boy get an eye like that?”
“I have always watched how things stand up, sir,” I said.
I watch what carries the weight, and what only pretends to.”
It was true, and it was answer enough for Standish, who cared a great deal more about the joint than about me.
He grunted and set me to holding the post steady while it was made fast.
By the ninth of January the common house stood roofed and thatched and sealed, and the colony gathered for the first time under a roof that was not the Mayflower’s groaning deck.
It was the first solid thing we had made since the coast first rose out of the sea, a building meant to be standing come summer and not merely to outlast the next storm.
I remember standing inside it and feeling something settle in my chest that was close to hope.
It nearly burned to the ground the following week.
The fire took hold in the thatch a little after midday, while a handful of the sick lay inside near the hearth.
Bradford was among them, still weak with fever, and Carver besides.
I was hauling water up from the stream when the shout went up.
I dropped the buckets and ran with everyone else toward smoke climbing far too fast into the gray sky.
I did not think.
That is the part of it I have kept.
In a whole winter of weighing everything, where every kind word and every clever notion was set down as carefully as a stone in a wall, I did not weigh this at all.
Men were already dragging Bradford out through the low door, the sick man barely able to stand, coughing now from smoke as much as from fever.
I caught Carver’s arm without a single thought in my head and half carried him clear, while behind us men beat at the burning thatch with cloaks and buckets and, by the sound of the cursing, their bare hands.
It was the better part of an hour before we were sure the fire was truly out.
No one died.
No one was even badly burned, though I saw three men nursing blistered palms once the danger had passed.
“There was powder stored in that room,” Bradford said afterward, hoarse, wrapped in a blanket by the ruined roof.
I stood a little apart, my hands still shaking from having moved fast and thought nothing, and I noticed that the careful, watching part of me had simply been gone for those few minutes.
I had not calculated.
I had not measured how it would look, or whom it would help.
I had run at the fire because a man I respected was inside it, the same as every other man who ran.
It was one of the very few things I did that whole winter that cost me nothing to decide and asked nothing of me afterward, beyond the plain fact of having done it.
I lay awake that night, listening to the wind test the burned roof, and I felt cleaner than I had in weeks.
Brewster found me the next morning, studying the blackened thatch with the squint of a man working out repairs.
“You went in after Carver,” he said.
“Someone had to, sir.”
“Several someones did.
You were only one of the quicker ones.” He looked at me a while.
“It is a different thing, running into a fire, than dropping a clever word by the hearth.
You have a gift for the second.
I had wondered about the first.”
“And now, sir?”
Something close to a smile found his tired face.
“Now I have stopped wondering.”
I said nothing, but something loosened in me at that, and it was not the quiet satisfaction of a plan gone well.
It was plainer than that, and harder to hold.
For one clear hour I had been exactly the man I hoped I was underneath all the careful arranging, and it turned out I had wanted to know that about myself more than I had ever let myself see.
Behind us, men were already climbing back onto the scorched roof to begin the repairs.
Further off, past the treeline, the first geese of the season crossed overhead in a long ragged line, heading north with a confidence that owed nothing to any compact or plan the men below them had ever thought to make.