Free Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks

in my eyes.
    “Why do you cry?” he demanded curtly.
    “I do not cry,” I lied. His people consider tears a sign of lappity character.
    He took my chin in his hand and tilted my face upward. His fingers were rough as tar paper. He had grown in the two and a half years that I had known him, and was a full head and shoulders taller than I. A big tear spilled down my cheek and on to the back of his hand. He let go of my face and brought his hand to his mouth, tasting the salt upon it and considering me gravely. I looked away, ashamed.
    “This is no matter for tears,” he said. “It is my time to become a man.”
    “Why should that mean you cannot walk with me?”
    “I cannot walk with you because from tomorrow my steps will choose me, not I my steps. Tomorrow will be new hunter moon. Tequamuck will take me to the deep woods, far from this place. There I will pass the long nights moon, the snow moon and the hunger moon alone.” His task was to survive and endure through the harsh winter months, winnowing his soul until it could cross to the spirit world. There, he would undertake the search for his guide, a god embodied in some kind of beast or bird, who would protect him throughout his life. His spirit guide would enlighten his mind and guide his steps in myriad ways, until the end of his life. In those cold woods, he would learn his destiny. He said that if the spirit guide came to him in the form of a snake, then he would gain his heart’s desire, and become pawaaw.
    I thought of the quarantine of Jesus, a similar harsh and lonely trial of character and purpose. But that vigil passed in searing desert, not snowy wood. And when, at the end, the devil came with his visions of cities and offers of power, Jesus shunned him. Caleb desired to bid him welcome.
    And have no fellowship with the unfruitful ways of darkness . So said the scripture. I had no choice. This marked the end of our friendship. I had to take leave of him. But before I did, I looked down at the catechism he had returned to me. No matter that he lived in a bark hut, his hands ever soiled from bloody hunts and greasy common pots, he somehow had kept the book in the exact condition I had given it him. I pressed it back into those rough hands. “Do not close your heart to Christ, Caleb,” I whispered. “Perhaps he is the one awaiting you out there in the dark.”
    I turned away then because I knew I was about to cry in earnest, and I would not have him see me so. I mounted Speckle and threaded a careful way through the trees, but the world was a blur. I felt sick at heart. I told myself it was wounded pride, merely. I had falsely hoped to turn him from the path he was born to follow, and had failed. I told myself it was natural to regret that this pagan ceremony, whatever its nature, would set him at even greater remove from the gospel.
    But this, also: I burned to know what he would know when he entered that spirit world. I recalled, too well, the alien power I had felt that long ago day and night on the cliffs. I have said that I would write only the truth here, and the truth is this: I, Bethia Mayfield, envied this salvage his idolatrous adventure.
     
     
    That night, as I sat with mother at our mending, I had to use every shred of my will to keep my hands at their task. Generally, I could mend or needlepoint or embroider without the least difficulty, my fingers finding their own way over the cloth. But that night the task seemed so friggling to me that I had to concentrate on every stitch. I noticed mother glance at me from time to time as I sighed and fidgeted and tried to hide my cackhanded work. Somehow, she always sensed when something was amiss with me.
    Finally, I did something most unlike myself. I asked father a question.
    “Does it trouble you, father, that the people of this place are so slow to embrace the gospel?”
    Father put aside his bible. “I do not see it so, Bethia. We must not be willful in this matter, but patient, as God is.