Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks Read Free Book Online Page A

Satan’s voice, I am sure of it now, whispering to me that I already knew Keesakand, that I had already worshipped him many times as I bathed in the radiance of a sunrise, or paused to witness the glory of his sunset. And did not Nanpawshat have power over me, governing the swelling, salty tides of my own body, which, not so very long since, had begun to ebb and flow with the moon. It was good, the voice whispered. It was right and well to know these powers, to live in a world aswirl with spirits, everywhere ablaze with divinity.

VI
     
    N ot long after, Caleb came upon me reading, before I had a chance to put the book by. He had the habit of appearing suddenly, springing up out of dune or thicket. He could move on feet silent as a stalking cat’s, and walk so lightly in his thin, deer-hide shoes that he barely left a footprint in sand or leaf litter to mark where he had trod. With his instruction, and with practice, I was learning to do the same, walking softly on my heel so as to touch less of the earth. At home, I would entertain myself by stalking Makepeace, finding him resting, indolent, in the fields when he should have been about his chores. This vexed him, but he could hardly complain of it without revealing himself. I took a vast amusement from this.
    On this particular day, I had made off with a new tract of my father’s, New England’s Prospect, by one William Wood, who had traveled on the mainland in 1633 and described for English readers what he had found there. I held it out and Caleb took it. This was the first book he had held in his hands. He made me smile, opening it upside down and back to front, but he touched the pages with the utmost care, as if gentling some fragile-boned wild thing. The godliest among us did not touch the Bible with such reverence as he showed to that small book. He ran a brown finger across a line of type.
    “These snowshoe tracks,” he said. “They speak to you?” I smiled. I could see how, to his unschooled eyes, the page might resemble a snowy field hatched by the crisscross of snowshoe sinews when the low winter sun lights up their edges. I said that they did, and pointed out to him the word for “deer,” at which he scoffed, and said it looked nothing like a deer, but more like a snail. That in turn made me laugh, for he was right, and I could see that snail, its pronged head raised in the letter d, its shell curved in the double e that followed it. I explained to him that the letters were a kind of code, like the patterns worked into the wampum belts the sonquems wore, that told some kind of abbreviated history of his tribe. But unlike the belts, which were rare and each unique, there were many hundreds of copies of this book, each just the same.
    “Manitoo!” he exclaimed. “So those Coatmen across the sea, they can know of the plants and animals here, so many months’ journey from them?”
    Yes, I said, exactly so. And men might know each other’s minds, who had never met one another. “Even those who lived many, many years ago may leave behind their learning for us.” I told him how we knew of great cities, such as Rome and Athens; how we read of their warriors and the wars they had fought, and how their wise men had argued with each other about how to live a goodly life. “And now, though their cities are fallen into ruins and the warriors are dust, yet they live for us still in their books.”
    I was enjoying this. For the most part, it was he who taught me. For once, I was able to play the instructor. I held out my hand for the Wood volume. “Would you care to hear some of what he has to say of your people?” He nodded, frowning slightly.
    “So, you can make it out—all of it—from those tracks?” Indeed, I said. “Perhaps, from time to time, I might come upon an unfamiliar word, whose meaning is strange to me. But generally one can make it out from the other words about it….” I was searching for the place as I spoke, and when I found the