Spring came to Plymouth the way relief usually comes, quietly and unevenly, with no ceremony to mark the hour it arrived.
The ground softened first, mud taking the place of the iron frost that had made even a grave such brutal work all winter.
Then the daylight stretched a little longer each day, until Mary Brewster stopped rationing the candle stubs so tightly of an evening.
Then, almost as an afterthought, the sickness itself began to loosen its hold.
Not all at once.
Just a week in which no new grave was needed, and then another.
I did not trust the quiet at first.
Some part of me, the part that had spent a winter watching people I cared for go one at a time into the ground, kept waiting for the next blow, the way a man flinches at a sound long after the thing that taught him to flinch is gone.
“You will wear a hole in that plank, pacing it so,” Brewster told me one morning, not unkindly, watching me cross the same stretch of packed earth for the third time.
“Sit, boy.
The sickness has had its due this year.
Let it be.”
“Yes, sir.” I sat, though it took more out of me than I expected.
“You have done more than your share of grieving, for one so young,” he added, quieter.
“I do not forget it, whatever else this winter asked of you.”
I turned a bit of kindling over in my hands.
“I keep thinking of the ones we did not save.”
“As do I.
As does every soul left standing, I would wager, whether they say so or not.
It is no sin to grieve what you could not mend, Thomas.
It would only be a sin to stop mending what is still in front of you.”
I found Elizabeth Tilley at the water’s edge two mornings later, alone, scrubbing linens with a hard, mechanical care that had nothing to do with the linens needing it.
Both her parents dead that winter, within weeks of each other, leaving her to an aunt and uncle who had troubles enough of their own.
She was thirteen, and quiet in the particular way of someone who has learned, all at once and far too young, that the world can come apart without warning.
“You will rub that cloth to threads,” I said, settling nearby, not too close, and picking up a second piece of linen without being asked.
“It gives my hands something to do besides shake,” she said, without looking up.
It was a startlingly honest thing for a girl her age to say to a boy she barely knew, and instead of reaching for some easy comfort I found myself matching it.
“Mine did the same, most of January,” I said.
“I split more kindling than the whole colony could burn.”
That won the ghost of a smile, small and quick, gone almost before it came.
“My father used to say idle hands were the Devil’s workshop.
I do not think he meant this.
Grief with somewhere to put itself, instead of nowhere at all.”
“Perhaps it comes to the same thing,” I said.
“Better a devil kept busy scrubbing linen than one left loose to think too long.”
She looked at me properly then, for the first time, something older than thirteen behind her eyes.
“You are the Brewster boy.
The one they say found the cure for the wasting sickness.”
“I only asked a question about pine tea,” I said, and I meant it plainly, not as a move.
“The women who nursed the sick did the curing, such as there was any of it.”
“Humble,” she said.
“Or clever enough to seem so.
I have not decided which.”
I laughed, surprised out of myself, and the sound startled us both a little, out of place against the gray morning and the grim work of scrubbing dead people’s linen clean.
“Perhaps a little of both,” I said.
“And why is that?”
“Because the quick answer is rarely the true one.
About most things worth knowing.”
She studied me a moment longer, then went back to her scrubbing, though something in her shoulders had eased.
We worked the rest of that morning in an easy quiet, and I found, without quite deciding to, that I would remember that plain gray morning long after the winter’s sharper griefs had softened.
Not because anything remarkable happened.
Because nothing needed to.
That night, by the light of a nearly spent candle, I did a thing I had been turning over since the second week of the crossing and had kept putting off.
I begged a few scraps of paper from Brewster’s careful store, and a stub of pencil-lead I had traded a morning’s labor for weeks before, and I began, in a small cramped hand and a private shorthand of my own making, to write.
Not everything.
Not the whole of what I carried, which I did not yet trust to any page another hand might one day find.
Only fragments, plainly set down, meant for no one but myself in some later year.
Or perhaps, if I lived long enough and kept careful enough, for a child of my own, grown old enough one day to be trusted with a part of what I knew.
I wrote that we had taken corn from people who would have had every right to kill us for it and had not, and that we had begun our life in this country already in their debt, and that a debt of that kind is not paid by letting yourself forget it.
I wrote that Brewster was the whole church this colony had, whatever became of the minister still waiting in Holland, and that when I had sons of my own, they should know the old man’s name before they knew mine.
I wrote that there was a girl at the water’s edge who scrubbed linen to keep her hands from shaking, and that I did not yet know what she might come to be to me, if anything at all, but that I meant to remember the morning all the same.
Then I folded the paper small, and worked it into the lining of an old coat too worn for anyone to think worth stealing, and blew out the candle before the careful voice in me could talk me out of having written anything down at all.
Someday, I thought, lying in the dark and listening to a household finally sleeping without fear for one night, someone who comes after me will want to know how it truly began.
Not the tidy story that gets told once the hard part is over.
The real one, in cold rooms like this, between people who were only ever trying to live to the next spring.
Outside, the tide moved against the shore the way it had moved longer than any name I carried, old or new, and would go on moving long after every soul asleep in the small cold houses around me was only a name in someone’s careful record.
I meant to see that mine was a name worth keeping.