They called it, afterward, only the sickness, which was a plain name for a thing that cared nothing at all for how plainly it was named.
It began quietly, almost politely.
A cough here, a fever there, easy to blame on the cold or the damp or the weeks still spent crowded aboard the ship while the first rough shelters went up ashore.
By the second week of January it could no longer be blamed on anything but itself.
“Six dead this month already,” Brewster said one evening, not really to me, more to the fire, the way a man will speak a thing aloud just to hear its shape outside his own head.
“And the month scarcely begun.”
I had no comfort to give him that would not have been a lie, so I gave him none.
But I had been turning something over for days, and I said it now.
“May I ask you something, sir?”
“You generally do.”
“Has anyone tried a tea of pine needles for the worst of the sick?
The green tips, boiled a good while, and drunk warm?”
Brewster looked at me.
“And where does a boy come by a notion like that?”
“Nowhere, sir.
I only looked at what we have not eaten since England, and at what grows here that we have not tried.” I kept it plain.
“We have lived on salt meat and hard biscuit for half a year.
A body wants more than that, and goes weak and strange without it.
Sailors say that men who get something green in them, even something bitter, hold up better on a long voyage than men who do not.
And we have nothing green in this whole country in January but the pines.
But it costs us only firewood and an hour to find out.”
Brewster considered it, the fire snapping between us.
“It can do no harm, I suppose.
I will speak to the women who tend the sick.”
It did not save everyone.
I had told myself, the night before I spoke of it, that if it did nothing I would let it go rather than press a second time and make myself strange.
But among those given the tea early, before the wasting took deep hold, more came through than the women had looked for.
Not a miracle.
Not a thing anyone would swear to.
Only a small, stubborn edge, in a season that gave almost none.
It was enough.
Enough that Susanna White, who had buried her own husband that winter on the unmarked slope above the harbor, took my hand one afternoon as I carried water to the sick-house and said, “Whatever you told Master Brewster, boy, I thank you for it.
It bought my sister a few more weeks she might not have had.”
I did not know what to say to that, and was surprised by how much the not-knowing moved me.
“I am glad of it, ma’am,” I managed.
“I wish it could have done more.”
“So do we all,” she said, not unkindly, and went back to her work.
I kept that one differently from how I kept most things that winter.
Just as a thing that had happened, plain, between two people trying to live through the same cold.
By the time the worst of it had passed, near half of everyone who had crossed the ocean lay buried on the slope above the harbor, in graves the living had learned, out of grim necessity, to level flat and hide, so that no one watching from the treeline could read how few of us were left.
Brewster found me there one evening, at the edge of the leveled ground, and stood beside me a while without speaking, the way I had once stood beside Bradford at the ship’s rail.
“You did more good this winter than most men twice your age,” he said at last.
“I do not say it lightly, and I do not say it only for the tea, though I do not discount the tea.
You have a way of seeing what a thing needs before anyone thinks to ask you.
I have watched it in you all these months.”
The old habit rose in me, to turn the praise aside, to hand it off somewhere safer than myself.
I let it rise, and then, for a reason I did not stop to examine, I let it go instead.
“I only wanted to be useful, sir,” I said.
“I lost my own people once.
I had no wish to stand and watch it happen a second time, if there was anything at all I could do about it.”
It was, I understood only after I had said it, nearer the whole truth than anything I had told him in all the months since I woke aboard that ship.
Nearer than I had meant to come.
Brewster nodded slowly, and did not ask me who my people had been, nor how I had lost them.
He only stood beside me in the cold, looking out over ground that held, now, so many faces I had come to know.
Then he said, “Spring is coming, Thomas.
We have paid a hard price to see it.
Let us make it worth the paying.” And we stood there together until the last of the light was gone.