The season was summer, and the purpose was a journey from a farm on the banks of the Sudbury River to a college on the banks of the Charles.
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.
A father and mother stood in the cool dark of their house, preparing for a parent’s small death in their son’s departure, while a son saddled the horses and prepared to be born into manhood. The journey would cover some twenty miles, the plucking up to be done in the morning, the planting to be completed before dark.
“I shall miss him sorely,” said Rebecca Watson Wedge, her eyes steady on the square of light pouring through the front door. “Would that the Lord had seen fit to send us another child to ease this pain.”
“Thank the Lord for what He give,” said Isaac as he filled a sack with books. “One son be gift enough when he’s a son like John.”
“And those books,” she asked, “be they gift enough for John?”
“A man will be known by his books,” answered Isaac.
“So you say . . . Reason enough to keep no book of plays in your house.”
Isaac cast his eyes at the floorboards beneath which
Love’s Labours Won
was hidden in a wax-sealed lead box.
“Isaac, you promised you’d take the play to the college when you took our son.”
“’Twas my hope that ministers and magistrates would have grown more liberal in their thinking by now,” he answered, “but still I mistrust ’em.”
“I be but a plain minister’s daughter and true minister’s wife—”
“You’re no minister’s wife anymore. Raisin’ corn and cuttin’ marsh hay satisfy me more than preachin’.”
“Be that as it may, keepin’ a play under our roof be blasphemy.”
“Breakin’ an oath to a friend be blasphemy, too,” answered Isaac. “’Tis my duty to keep the play safe till changes in England make their way here—”
“What greater change do you need?” she asked. “The king is restored. The Anglicans are in the ascendance, the Puritans in retreat—”
“There may again be Christmas masses in London churches and new plays in London theaters,” he answered, “but our colony and its college keep to harder standards.”
“Do you not mean
higher
standards?” she asked.
To that he gave no answer. He had never doubted that he should have stolen the play from Eaton, who had stolen it only to sell it when the price was right. But should he not have returned it more openly? Should he not have forced the magistrates to confront their prejudice in public?
But in Massachusetts, prejudice remained powerful. And in Rebecca’s correspondence with Cousin Katharine, it still echoed. Isaac could not change it, any more than the Reformation had stopped Catholic peasants from placing offerings before the tombs of saints. A play might reveal for man his vanities, his passions, and his appetites, but not in Massachusetts. So it had fallen to Isaac to protect a small shard of knowledge, to keep the play safe until such time as his Puritan brethren were ready for it.
Still, it pained him that he could not keep his word to Rebecca. It pained him whenever he disappointed her, because, quite simply, he loved her. He loved her as he had from the moment he met her in the college library.
She had been beautiful then, slender and smiling and filled with simple faith. And she had offered him that faith and her love through all the years that he served in her father’s ministry. And when the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel had asked him to teach at the Indian College in Harvard Yard, she had gone with him willingly. But the Indians had hardly gone at all. And Isaac had soon concluded that they no more wished to know the white man’s God than the white man’s books. So he had brought his family to this farm on the banks of the Sudbury, and here had they stayed some ten years.
Rebecca was heavier now and smiled less, but her faith was still simple and strong, and she said, “Plays be the devil’s work, Isaac. There be imps in that box you’ve hid ’neath the floorboards.”
“They’re called characters, dear. Dramatis personae.”
“Don’t play the educated fool with me. They be
imps.
Some nights, I come awake, and I can hear ’em scuttlin’ about the great room.”
“Do they perch on the mantel?” he asked. “Or the table?”
“They be spectral things. As spectral as the devil himself, walkin’ the dark woods, enlistin’ the Indians to do his work.”
Isaac did not dispute that. Puritans believed in Satan, especially in his presence among the unconverted Indians. Having preached to the Indians, Isaac saw them simply as human beings in whom ignorance rather than evil resided, little different from the benighted Papists of Padua worshiping the remains of their saint.
“Isaac,” she demanded, “what will you do with the play?”
He gestured to the floorboards. “Keep it safe, where ’tis.”
“And leave it for our son? Force him to wrestle with Satan after us?”
“Wrestle with Satan?” In the doorway appeared a gangling boy with a few tendrils of black hair covering the blemishes on his chin. “When do I wrestle him?”
“We all wrestle with him, John,” said Isaac. “Every day. But today, you begin to gain such learning that Satan will never take the field against you.”
“I hope only that I’m worthy, if he does,” said John Wedge.
And those humble words, uttered with such sincerity, brought from Rebecca a cry of love and loss familiar to every son who has taken leave of his mother. She threw her arms around his neck, and both parents forgot the business of the play, for there were other matters at hand.
First, Isaac presented John with a blank book of a hundred leaves. “A commonplace book,” he said, “to be filled with your favorite passages, with lines of verse that strike you as well phrased, and with your ruminations upon them.”
Then Rebecca gave him a sack containing a dozen cornmeal muffins and a clay pot of blackberry preserves sealed with wax. “To nourish you in your ruminations.”
Finally, Isaac loaded his old blunderbuss and placed it by the door. “You’ll not need this,” he said to Rebecca, “but ’twill make you feel more secure.”
“Our Indians be docile, Mother,” said John.
“Your mother fears ’em yet,” said Isaac. “‘Satan’s minions,’ she calls them.”
“Which they be,” answered John, “the unconverted ones, leastways.”
Indeed, thought Isaac, the mother had taught the son well. His faith was as simple and strong as hers.
“If Satan’s minions come to the door,” Isaac told her, “point the gun and fire. The shot will splatter wide. What it doesn’t strike will be frightened off by the roar.”
“I’ll need no gun, Isaac,” she said. “I’ll simply pray, as I pray for our Johnny.”
They left Rebecca in the yard, shielding her eyes from the August sun, and took the road along the edge of the marsh. After a quarter mile, they came to Deacon Haynes’s garrison house, built to defend the settlers should ever there come an Indian attack, and Isaac offered a silent prayer that the garrison would never be needed for its purpose. Then they turned east, crossed the rough-hewn bridge over the Sudbury River, and made for Cambridge.
It was a brightening world that they went through, as by now the forests had fallen for some twenty miles in a wide semicircle around Boston. The Lord’s people were an industrious lot, thought Isaac, and fruitful, too. Settlements had appeared along the roads, congregations were coming together in the Lord, and there were many opportunities for a young man who wished to preach the Word.
Isaac, however, would not commit his son to any goal beyond the gaining of knowledge. The boy could be a minister, if that was his choice, or a merchant, or a doctor educated at some European university. After Harvard, he might even choose to attend the University of Padua, though Isaac would not encourage him to follow the path of one who had gone there long ago, one rumored recently to have died in a London debtors’ prison, one Nathaniel Eaton by name.
Isaac tried to push thoughts of Eaton from his mind, and yet, to look upon his son, riding solemnly at his side, was to remind him of his own emotions on a similar journey, made on the day that he first met Eaton, a journey made in company with the man after whom the colony had named the college and Isaac had named his son.
John Harvard would have been pleased to know that the college survived, though it could hardly be said to thrive. There were only five students in the class of 1678, twenty-three in all. Towns that once had sent the College Corn now spent their money on other things. Contributions promised were quite often deferred. And while students might pay in hard coin, they were as likely to offer “country pay”—grain, livestock, cords of wood. The only regular income derived from the Boston-to-Charlestown ferry revenue, a tradition at Oxford and Cambridge that produced a pittance at Harvard. And not only was the college a poor place. It was a contentious one, too, rife with disputes and intrigues among a new president, certain overseers, the tutors, and the rebellious students.
It may not have been the best place for a young man to earn his
Ars Bacheloris,
then, but in English North America, it was the only place.
Isaac and John arrived in the late afternoon. They came into the Yard by old Peyntree House, into a scene that would never be immortalized in a book of engravings depicting the world’s great seats of learning.
Though the college hall remained the largest building in the colony, its roof now sagged toward the east like a leaking sack of grain. Little remained of Eaton’s orchard, and most of the fencing had been taken down, as the cows now grazed in farther fields. But chickens went scuttling and squabbling ahead of Isaac’s horse, and three piglets rooted about in the grass, which was crisscrossed with dirt paths leading to outhouse, brewhouse, pigpen, henhouse, and a brick building erected in high expectation as the Indian College but now occupied by a printing press and a few students.
With the college hall collapsing under the weight of termites and rainwater leaking through the roof, the overseers had solicited contributions for a grander structure, to be built of brick on a stone foundation, roofed with slate, called Harvard Hall. Its timbered skeleton rose at the west edge of the Yard. And Isaac chose to make it the center of his son’s attention, rather than the squalor surrounding it.
“See that framework, John,” he said. “New wood, pegged tight to proclaim the Lord’s favor. He would not allow such an edifice at a school that had no future. And He would not allow a student who had no future to attend such a school.”
“But, Father”—the boy reined his horse—“I fear that my Latin and Greek are—”
“More than sufficient. I taught you myself.”
“But some who study here studied first at the Boston Latin School.”
Isaac looked hard at his son. “What have I always told you?”
John drew his upper teeth across his lower lip—an expression that reminded Isaac of his little boy, not of this young man. “About what, Father?”
Isaac slapped the sack hanging from his saddle. “About books?”
“That a . . . that a man will be known by his books?”
“Aye. And you’ve had my books to study. By them will you be known.”
“But, Father, there will be others here who know much more.”
“And others who know much less. As long as you keep to your tasks and read your Scripture, you’ll do well. I believe that as sure as I believe in the Lord.”
“Father,” said the boy solemnly, “that remark approach blasphemy.”
Isaac took off his hat and wiped perspiration from his forehead. It was a stark but simple truth that raising a son could make a man sweat. “You worry too much, John.”
“I worry because I’ve heard your thoughts on such truths as predestination.”
“I’ve seen men turn from good to evil and from evil to good. If the Lord permits men to change, He must hold hope for salvation to all.”
“But the Lord has already chosen the elect. They reveal themselves by their good conduct and understanding of Scripture.” John Wedge was a most argumentative boy . . . never rebellious, but always prepared to contend over issues of faith or politics.
And Isaac realized how deeply he would miss their clash of wits. He had taught the boy to argue for the things he believed, even as he had taught him to respect the authority of those who interpreted the Word. He sometimes wished that he had better taught the boy to think for himself, no matter the interpretations of others, because in their debates, Isaac always found himself defending the unorthodox idea, which was not the natural order of things.
Isaac sometimes wondered where he had found his own questioning spirit. Perhaps it had come in Italy, where he had seen the soaring beauties and monumental superstitions of Romanism. But more likely he had begun to question the wisdom of Puritanism when he studied under a man who pretended to all appropriate pieties in public but showed a face of rank brutality in private.
“Remember, son,” he said, putting on his hat, “we are also taught that some who demonstrate strong faith will not be saved.”
“And some who do not
will
be.”
“’Tis a conundrum, then. Simply do as I’ve told you: treat others as you expect to be treated, act as Holy Scripture tells you to act, and live honestly. Now come along.”
They dismounted before the Old College, and John said he would rather go from there on his own. Isaac understood, but he had brought the sack of books as a gift for Samuel Sewall, tutor and keeper of the library, knowing that such a gift would stand young John in good stead. So father and son went into the hall together.
As they entered the library, a boy looked up from his reading. His hair was cut short, his complexion was reddish, as if heightened by the simple exertion of turning pages, and his features had yet to mold themselves into any form that would suggest the character beneath.
“Good afternoon,” said Isaac.
The boy gave a grudging nod of the head, as if he disapproved of those who broke the silence of the library.
Then Isaac introduced his son. “And what is your name?”
“C-C-C-Cotton M-M-M-Mather.” The young man had a powerful stammer.