“The gentleman says nine. Do I hear nine five?”
There was a slight pause before the man at the back raised his hand.
“And ten?”
For a moment the words hung in the air. The bidding had slowed. Perhaps ten would take it. Geoff looked at George, then at Janice. She squeezed harder.
“I’ll make the decision,” he whispered and began to peel her hand away.
Then the woman in the front called, “Ten.” And before Geoff could get his hand up, the bid bounced to ten-five, then eleven.
Geoff’s hand relaxed, as though it had gone beyond him. Janice said, “Thank God for her.”
“Are we out of it?” George whispered.
Janice squeezed Geoff’s arm again.
“Lighten up,” Geoff said to his wife. “I think so,” he whispered to his friend.
Quickly the bidding ran to fifteen thousand, and the murmur grew as steady as the breeze off Pleasant Bay.
“Fifteen five.”
“Sixteen.”
Those in the back watched the man. The rest stretched their necks for a look at the young woman, who seemed to most of them no more than a pile of strawberry blond hair and the padded shoulders of a tan business suit. George shook his head in amazement. Geoff squinted at the painting. Janice folded her arms and gazed over Barleyneck to Pleasant Bay.
Finally, at eighteen thousand dollars, the woman became the owner of a Thomas Hilyard. When the gavel fell, the applause burst, as if everyone knew they had seen the best duel of the season. The woman stood now and gave a small, gracious bow to the gentleman in the back.
“Good taste in paintings. Pretty, too,” said George.
iii.
Geoff agreed. He agreed so completely that he followed the young woman, her two male companions, and the painting out to the road. George followed Geoff, while Janice stopped to chat with a friend.
The young woman was nearly six feet tall and as brusque as bleach. When she saw Geoff, she gave him the mildly annoyed and momentary glance that every woman perfects to ward off unwelcome males. But when he introduced himself, his name got her undivided attention.
“You’re related to Rake Hilyard, then?”
“You know him?”
“Everyone who knows Cape history knows him.”
“A student of Cape history?” George squinted in the sun. “Is that why you bought the painting?”
She gave George the kind of neutral smile that said she gave away nothing she didn’t have to. “One buys a work of art for many reasons. This has been purchased for the Old Corners Plantation. I’m the director of collections.”
George looked her up and down. “You must have a pretty good… er… endowment. To spend eighteen grand on a painting, I mean.”
“We have an excellent genealogy collection as well, although
your
family may not be represented.”
George smiled. He admired a good insult, even at his own expense. “Hilyard thinks somebody pushed Dorothy Bradford?”
“A lot of people have thought that for the last three centuries or so. Tom Hilyard is just one more. My real interest is as much in his technique as his narrative.”
“Why the interest in my uncle?” asked Geoff.
The larger of her two companions, who were apparently bodyguards, reminded her of their schedule.
She kept her eyes on Geoff, tuning out everything else. “Not only has your uncle seen the whole century here, but he also knew Tom Hilyard. That makes him doubly interesting. I did an oral history with him.”
“Rake can talk a cat off a fish wagon,” said Geoff. “As owner of three Hilyard paintings, he’ll be glad to know someone’s just paid the highest price ever for one.”
“Do you own any?”
“Two. I was hoping for three.”
“I’d love to see them sometime.” She took a business card from her jacket pocket and handed it to Geoff: Carolyn Hallissey, Old Corners Plantation, Orleans, Massachusetts. “You should do an oral history with us, too. The Cape’s changed more in your lifetime than in the previous three centuries.”
George was still laughing when her car went down Barley neck.
“What’s so funny?”
“When a woman asks you to do something oral, you’re supposed to say, “ ‘When and where?’ ”
“I was going to show her mine if she’d showed me hers.”
“Her what?”
“Her Hilyard Pilgrim painting.”
“Which one do you have?”
“The Gravediggers.”
February 1621
Christopher Jones wrapped a blanket around his shoulders and opened his log. He looked forward to his writing. It had become a way to drive off the winter phlegm and make springtime come sooner.
February 7, 1621
. Bitter cold, steady NW wind, sky as clear and thoughtless as a dead man’s eye… and of those have I seen too many. There is death on the ship and death on the land. Of the ship’s company, I have lost eight, and more are laid low. Were I of a mind to challenge the winter sea, I would have but ten able bodies to man the rigging. And whilst the passengers do labor to build their houses, their chief activity is burying their dead.
To the six dead of December and the eight of January have been added five more this month. Some lie sick in the tween-decks, on the same foul pallets they have used since we sailed. More lie in the common house, which has in truth become a charnel house. Most have congestion of the lungs. Some show also the bleeding gums and swole joints of the scurvy.
Samuel Fuller, their chirurgeon, has bled many to drain the ill humours, so that the sweet smell of congealing clots sickens the air. Giles Heale, ship’s doctor, has physicked them in hope of cleansing the illness through the bowels, but many are so weakened that they cannot move and must lie in their own filth till tended by the few who are healthy.
William Brewster and Myles Standish have not faltered, though Standish has lost his wife. Kate Hilyard washes vile linens in the brook. Simeon Bigelow aids her in the dressing and feeding of the sick. Ezra Bigelow tends to sick spirits, going from pallet to pallet, asking for favorite Bible passages, which then he does read. In this does he show a constancy that makes me question my earlier suspicions.
And at dusk, when they have finished work on their own house, Jack Hilyard and his son go to the common house to learn how many have died that day. Then they climb the hill to a place by the ordnance platform, hack through the crust, and dig what graves are needed. Then the bodies are brought up. The procession is small, for there are few who can walk, and quiet, for the Indians must not know how many have died. The dead are put into the ground without ceremony, as is their custom, the graves then being covered with pine boughs and brush to hide them.
Only one was buried last night. Simeon Bigelow turned the first shovelful of sand onto the body of his own wife Anne. “She is with God now,” he said. “She has finished her work. We yet have much to do.” In the Indian fight, it is said that Simeon showed great fear afore saving the day. No man who has looked so bravely into the mouth of the grave could ever be called coward.
Surely God guides these people, else they could not endure. As my sailors die, their friends desert them, steal their victuals, take their blankets. As the passengers die, their friends show love and faith that surpass anything in my knowledge. They show it even to the dying sailors who mocked them for their piety and prayers. This is charity. This is Christianity.
ii.
Jack Hilyard was not a prayerful man, but each night he bowed his head and said his amens, because prayer was all they had, prayer and the slow lengthening of the days. No man could warm the winter. No man could stop the snow. And no man could avoid the sickness, unless protected by God or in a place far away.
When he lay by Kate’s side in the night, he begged her to leave the dying and go with him to the land between the creeks. But she said no. They had signed the agreement. They could not survive without the community, nor the community without them.
And so the Hilyards did what they could, until a miserable sleeting afternoon in late February when Jack came to the common house. He stood at the door until his eyes made friends with the gloom. He held his breath, for the smell of death was as bad as the sight of it. Then he stepped over bodies and beds and looked about for his wife. She should have been at the chimney, bent over the stockpot.
“She’ll be on the pallet in the corner.” Simeon Bigelow put a hand on Jack’s shoulder, and Jack felt the chill travel from the hand down the length of his spine.
She had been coughing more of late, her clothes hung looser around her frame, and at night, the heat from her body was enough to warm him without blankets.
“Coughin’ blood, she is, Jack,” said Simeon, “but she’s hardy, like thee and the lad.”
Jack knelt beside her and took her hand. Her skin was flushed from fever and the heat of the fire, so that she looked to be filling with life rather than losing it.
“See what thou’s done to thyself,” he whispered.
She gripped his hand, and her breasts shook with the coughing that raised a foam of red spittle to her lips.
What a bitter place he had brought them to, thought Jack. What hell he had put them through. What foolish dreams he had dreamed.
William Mullins, who lay in the next bed, was suddenly seized by a spasm that sat him up and doubled him over and left him weak and wheezing when it was finished. Jack knew that before long, he would be dumping sand onto the waxen face of Master Mullins, and he resolved that his wife would see no more death.
“Simeon, I’m takin’ her to her own house,” he said.
“Jack, thine own house… thou hast not finished the roof. Think of the night wind blowin’ through the thatch.”
“We’ll keep a fire, day and night.”
“I’ll stay here,” said Kate. “Be about the business of buildin’ houses, or there’ll none of us survive.”
But Jack would hear no argument. With the help of the Bigelows, he carried her across the path they had hacked in the sand, and named Leyden Street, to one of the half-dozen dirt-floored houses that formed the settlement.
He knew she would live. She was as solid as others who had survived. And what’s more, he was praying for her, on his knees, with his head bowed and his hands folded. God would not desert them.
It did not bother Jack that people who had prayed harder than he every day of their lives were dropping like geese in flight above a starving village. That simply affirmed his belief that God favored most those who bothered him least.
Day and night, Jack mopped Kate’s brow, held her, prayed for her. Christopher piled wood to keep the fire high. Simeon Bigelow brought goose broth from the common house. And on the third day, Jack went out to hunt.
Though this would later be called the Starving Time, there was game in the woods and marshlands, but seldom enough healthy men to hunt. There were fish in the waters, but they had not brought hooks of the proper size to catch them. Wild blueberry and blackberry formed the underbrush, but birds and winter winds stripped them bare before the settlers. And the red fruit that the Indians called crane berry, which grew wild in the sandy lowlands and might have saved those who died of scurvy, went unpicked for its bitterness.
That night Jack brought back three ducks. Two he gave to the common house and one he roasted for his family. As he turned the duck on the spit and the fat sizzled in the fire, he spoke of spring.
“Never mind spring. Just care for the boy,” said Kate.
Jack went to her pallet. “We’ll both care for the boy. God’ll see to that.”
She gripped his hand and pulled herself up to a sitting position. Her face and neck reddened with the effort, and her eyes opened wide, as though she were seeing beyond them, into a future she would never know. “God have his own plans—”
“I’m prayin’, darlin’.”
“Do right by the boy.”
Jack tried to make a joke. “It’s him what has to do right by us. Don’t thee, lad?”
On a stool in the corner, Christopher eyed the duck. He was scrawny like his father, tall like his mother, and a greasy shock of black hair scraggled down his neck. “ ’Tis what you say, Pa.”
“There,” said Jack. “He knows.”
“He
trusts
, but I
know
. I know what thou’s plannin’… to go off alone and look for drift whales. But thou signed…” The cough was starting again. She clutched at Jack’s forearm. “ ’Tain’t time…. Thou needs help.”
“I’ve thee to help.”
She struggled to keep the cough down. “There’s good men here, good teachers for the boy. Help ’em start their future, and they’ll help you build—” The cough exploded like a shot from a minion.
Jack drew her to him and told her she would be fine. And he told her again, and again and again, while the little room filled with smoke and the smell of sizzling fat.
Finally Christopher said, “The duck, Pa. ’Tis burnin’.”
But Jack held his wife until the coughing stopped. He could feel her bones now, poking through in places he had never felt them before. He shut his eyes tight, but tears began to trickle down his cheeks, into his beard.
And Kate whispered, “The duck, Jack. ’Tis burnin’.”
iii.
“ ‘Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I fear no evil. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me….’ ”
They had buried so many here that they no longer missed lanterns, especially on nights when the full moon spilled its freezing light onto the snow. Three bodies went into the graves that Jack Hilyard insisted he dig, although Myles Standish and William Brewster had offered to do it for him. Degory Priest and Alice Mullins were placed in their holes. Then the body of Kate Hilyard, wrapped in her best cloak, was lowered into the ground.
Ezra Bigelow recited the psalm. Though the Saints did not believe in elaborate remonstrations over the dead, Ezra knew the comfort the Twenty-third Psalm could bring, and in these terrible days, all needed comfort. He had tried to quote the psalm to Dorothy Bradford on that awful night, but she would not listen. He had offered it to her husband, and it had soothed him. Even a Stranger like Jack Hilyard could feel its power and promise.