And they were as stubborn as snapping turtles.
You
wouldn’t stand beside me when I reached for the unreachable.
You
wouldn’t accept a realist’s vision of a real world.
You
wouldn’t tell me the truth when Clara tried to save her part of the island with the will.
You
wouldn’t quit even if it cost you your marriage.
But sometimes the stubbornness faded. Janice knew that he had not been chasing a foolish dream but trying to make things right in a world spinning out of control. Geoff knew that without her pragmatism to balance his dreams, the center would not hold.
The log was hailed, within a few days of its discovery, as the historical, if not literary, equal of William Bradford’s
Of Plymouth Plantation
.
It and the accompanying manuscripts were sold to Old Comers for seven and a half million dollars, which liquidated the note and left a profit for Geoff, Jimmy, and George. Geoff stayed to watch the archaeologists peel away layer upon layer of the palimpsest that was Jack’s Island. Jimmy went back to New York, though he contributed his profits to the Indian museum and considered opening a practice in Mashpee. George gave up on sitcoms and took a place in Provincetown to edit and annotate the log for publication.
“It will sell forever,” John M. Nance said in
People
magazine, “because it’s a story of people surviving—some through faith, some through love, and some through pure cussedness.”
He got that part right. And some of those people had joined together to defeat him. He didn’t mention that.
But of everything that the
Mayflower
log contained, it was the love that drew the most attention. Especially love that led to scandal.
“Murder on the
Mayflower!”
shouted the
People
headline, over a photo of the Tom Hilyard painting. “Dorothy Bradford: Separatist Floozy?” asked the
National Enquirer
. Serious journals also explored the possibility: “A New Suspect in America’s First Murder Mystery?”
In her Boston condo, Janice read the stories and laughed. Who could know the truth of what had happened? Christopher Jones merely speculated on what had gone on, had seen it in shadow from the chartkeeper’s cabin.
The papers were right to say that history had been made on the deck of the
Mayflower
. The history of the world could be written in those passages about Ezra Bigelow and Dorothy Bradford, because no part of history was untouched by the mystery of a woman and a man reaching out to each other in the dark.
Though the truth was unknowable, Janice became obsessed by the story. She read all that she could. She attended lectures. And on a chill November Saturday she went to the
Mayflower II
, so that she could stand in the place where the captain had stood and look toward the rail where her ancestor and Dorothy Bradford had talked.
Part of the experience when you visited the Pilgrim village or went aboard the
Mayflower II
at Plimoth Plantation, was that you met interpreters who dressed, spoke, and thought like the Pilgrims.
Talking to them could be exasperating, but if you made the effort, the effect was magical. They could very quickly make you forget the school kids swarming about the ship, the traffic, and the Frostee-Freeze Ice Cream and Souvenir Shop directly across the road.
It was late when she got there. And a calm November cold was settling down with dusk.
She let the children explore the tween-deck while she climbed to the poop deck and stood in front of the chartkeeper’s cabin. She took a deep breath and looked forward, to the spot where, according to the Tom Hilyard painting, it had happened.
“Good evenin’ to thee, dear lady.”
He was big and bearded, a robust-looking man in a black wool suit with red ribbon points and a sea cape of heavy wool lined with rabbit skin. He had about him the proprietary air of the ship’s master. “Where be thee from, good lady?”
“Boston.”
He frowned a bit. “Thou be a long way, marm.”
“Just an hour,” she said, forgetting the little game.
He laughed. “Thou jest, marm. It took us sixty-six days from Plymouth. There be no wind drive you much faster from Boston.”
She smiled. “Uh, Boston,
Massachusetts
, I mean.”
“Massachusetts? I know not this place.” Then he smiled, as if they should not let such things stand in the way of their friendship. “Now, then, be there anything I can tell thee ’bout me vessel?”
“I’m curious about the things I read in your log.”
“Log? Me sea journal? How couldst thou know of me log?”
“It’s in all papers.”
“Papers? I know not of such things, good lady. And me log, as you call it, me log be in me cabin, where I always keep it.”
Now she made a conscious effort to force her mind backward, to see him not as an actor but as the master of the ship. She had done this before, with the children, and it always helped the experience. “Could you tell me, sir, a little about the death of… of my friend Dorothy Bradford?”
“Friend? What be thy name?”
“Bigelow.”
In the surprised little rise of the eyebrows, he came out of character for just a moment. But he dropped back quickly. “Be thou related to Ezra?”
“At some distance.”
He warmed now to his part. He spoke delicately, as though not wishing to offend her, but took her forward to the place on the deck where Tom Hilyard said it had happened.
“Why did he do it?” Janice asked.
“Who can tell for certain if he did? And if he did, who can tell why?”
“I’m glad to hear you say that.”
She looked out along the coast, at the lights of cars and houses, and the red flashes beyond the next hill, on the towers of the Pilgrim nuclear plant. And she closed her eyes. People talked about genetic memory, about things that nature had imprinted on us to help us survive, like fight, flight… and love.
But Janice sometimes thought there might be more to it than that. Maybe, if a person concentrated, in the right place, at the right moment, she could think herself back along her own genes, back through the memories of her parents and their parents before them. Back… back…
The lights of the nuclear plant stopped flashing. The cars disappeared. The night grew darker. And in her mind’s eye, she became Ezra Bigelow….
“Good Master Ezra, thou dost trouble me,” said Dorothy.
“I must speak with thee,” he whispered.
Dorothy Bradford pulled her heavy wool cape around her shoulders. “ ’Tis cold, good master. Miserable cold.”
“Aye, too miserable for words, good lady.” He leaned against her, and she pulled away. “Fear not, Dorothy. I seek only the touch of shoulders through our cloaks.”
“ ’Tis unseemly, Master Ezra, ’specially with my husband out there, wanderin’ the wilderness.”
“ ’Tis merely a touch.” He raised his voice slightly and looked about. The forward watch was nowhere to be seen. At the stern, the lights of the great cabin were out, the elders asleep. In the chartkeeper’s cabin above, the taper burned. The master wrote.
Ezra turned back to Dorothy. “I have admired thee for many years, dear lady.”
“Thou mustn’t.”
“I know how bitter this must be for thee, left to contemplate the wilderness while thy husband wanders this spit of sand. But think thee on his misery, helpin’ shoulder the burdens of our community.”
“Methinks too much on misery, Master Ezra. I see no future but death.”
“Nor do I.”
“Then why hast thou brought us here?”
Ezra looked out into the blackness and touched the wood of the rail, as if to feel something real, something solid. “God wills it. Men must do what God wills, else they are not men.”
“Men must quest for God,” she said bitterly, “whilst women are left to wash the bloody linens.”
“ ’Tis the way of the world.” He leaned against her once more.
She pulled away and turned to him, her eyes wide, her face a strange wax color in the starlight. “We have known each other for many years. I have long admired thee for thy constancy and felicitous preachments.”
At this, he felt a small leap of joy in his heart, but she was the wife of a friend, and he had placed himself already in temptation enough.
“Thou must promise me,” she went on, “that thou wilt speak nothing of the words I now say.”
“So I do promise.”
She took a deep breath and said, “God wills nothing. He hath forsaken us.”
“Yes.” It was as if he could not keep the word from rushing out of him.
Her eyes widened in shock. “Thou sayest such things also?”
It was blasphemous agreement to a blasphemous premise. Ezra felt a cowl of sin droop down over his face. He shook his head, as if to shake it off. But he could not drive from his eyes the image that had haunted him for days, nor could he keep from speaking of it.
“I would have gone with thy husband this time, but I could not. When I looked into the canvas sack on Corn Hill and saw the grim eyes of the corpse, I felt something wither in my heart. Then I did see the boy-corpse and
lost
heart. I saw us all dead afore our time, deserted by God.” The steam from his mouth disappeared into the blackness, like his spirit rising into nothingness. “I read my Bible to drive the eyes of the corpse away. I remember that even Our Lord knew this terror in the Garden.”
“Then he died.” She looked out, along the arm of sand that for weeks had lain bleak before them. “They have been gone many days. I fear they may not come back.”
“ ’Tis my fear as well.”
“Without William, I shall be alone… completely.”
He was overwhelmed by the need to touch her. He took her shoulders and drew her toward him. “Good lady, I
am
alone. I sailed without woman, without love. God guides my hand, but if I have not a woman to hold to my breast, I cannot know God’s heart.”
She looked at him, neither inviting more intimacy nor rejecting it, and in that moment he came as close to adultery as ever he would come. He wet his lips, as if to press them to hers. He brought his face so close to hers that he could feel the warmth of her breath. But the Lord had not forsaken him. The Lord gave him strength. He stopped and whispered, “If thy husband does not come back, I shall offer thee my love.”
She looked at him with eyes that seemed as lifeless as two wooden pegs. “Where God has forsaken us, no love is sufficient.”
“Do not
say
that!” he cried, then lowered his voice. “Do not say that. We must always believe the other. We must hope that love will come one day.” He looked into her eyes for some sign of acceptance, of understanding, and he saw none. He released his grip on her shoulders. He could do nothing against this misery, though he would try. “The Lord is my shepherd. I… I… I will leave thee to thy thoughts. My nightly reading beckons.”
He went to the great cabin and rummaged in the dark for his Bible. Then he heard something splash into the water, and a terrible thought froze his heart. He ran on deck and saw that her shadow was no longer there. He ran forward, but she was gone….
And no one would ever know the truth of what passed between that man and woman. Not Janice Bigelow for all her effort, not the historians, not Christopher Jones himself.
And it developed, as the months wore on, that no one would know the truth about the Vikings and Jack’s Island.
Geoff had been watching the dig. He had even learned how to plot a grid and excavate a small area himself. They had found many artifacts, from Rake Hilyard to Jack, from broken Carling bottles to clay pipestems. There were stone arrowheads and Indian jewelry buried in the shell midden. But the artifact they all dreamed of—a Norse coin that the midden might have protected—was not there.
The axe, which should have proved everything, caused only controversy. It did not take long before the world divided once more into anti-Vikings and pro-Vikings.
Yes, the axe looked Norse. Yes, it had the same strange markings found on the Bourne Stone. And yes, the log said this axe had been found in the marsh mud. But how could such an axe have survived a millennium? And what could have buried it?
What about the Bog People? the pro-Vikings cried.
The conditions were different, the anti-Vikings answered.
What about the letters on the axe? the pro-Vikings cried.
As meaningless as the letters on the Bourne Stone, the anti-Vikings answered. The axe was left by fishermen, they insisted, who had come the winter before the Pilgrims and had chosen to live on Jack’s Island.
Do you have evidence? the pro-Vikings demanded.
Do you? the anti-Vikings responded.
In the seemly tradition of scientific discourse, New England towns that had always claimed Viking visitations aligned with the pro-Vikings and sold bumper stickers. Those who had laughed at Viking theories for decades laughed all the louder and said that Leif Ericson and his brother Thorwald had come no farther south than Nova Scotia.
One of the ballast stones was subjected to lithic thin sectioning and compared with similar kinds of rock from Scandinavia and Europe. The tests were inconclusive but suggested that the stones might have come as easily from France as from a Norse country, from French fishermen wintering over, with nothing to do but dig a foundation. But what about the axe? And the writing?
In the long run. Nothing was answered. Nothing more was found.
But Geoff read the sagas and studied the sea each day. It was always there, like a tangible god, giving the land mood and identity, giving the people a sense of limitless possibilities… or overwhelming odds.
And he imagined a Viking
knorr
, riding the godlike sea into the bay. Would there have been women aboard? he wondered. Why would men, exploring a new and unknown world, have constructed a dwelling with a root cellar and a doorstep, unless they were planning to bring their women? What men settled without women? Without women, what future was there?
On the cold Wednesday morning before Thanksgiving, he went to the back of Rake’s barn and stood at the place where the doorstep had been. The archaeologists were gone. It was quiet. He closed his eyes and tried to see what the world might have looked like to someone perched on that doorstep. He had read somewhere about Einstein’s theory of time, that it was like a river, and if one could somehow swim backward, if he could go back a few decades…