Free Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks Page A

Did he not abandon these people to Satan all these many ages past? We must not want a convert more than God wants him. It must not be that we, in our pride, attempt to make a convert of one who is not among the elect. We are instruments, but if there is not an influence from God, the work will not be done, nor should it be.”
    “But what of the satanic rites that they persist in? Is there no way to disrupt them?”
    Father looked grave. “It is my chiefest concern,” he said. “The devil drives on their worship so pleasantly—as he does many false worships. The gift-giving at gatherings, the feasting and the dancing—these ceremonies are, I must own it, much beloved of the people. They do not like to hear me preach against these things.”
    “I was thinking particularly of the trial by ordeal that I have heard their youth are subject to … surely those rites are not so pleasant?”
    “Who has told you of such things?” he said sharply. I made my face a blank mask of indifference, as though it was a small matter, and shrugged. I felt mother’s eyes on me. “I do not rightly know. It is just something I overheard.”
    Makepeace interjected, looking up over his book. “They force the strongest and ablest of their male children to swill down poison—the white hellebore is one plant they use—and when they cast it up, they must drink it down again, and again, until what they cast is merely blood. Then, when they can barely stand, they are beaten with sticks, and thrust out into the icy night to run naked through cat briar till the devil catches them and makes covenant with them in their fainting fit.”
    “But why do they subject their youth to this? Surely there is danger in drinking such poison?”
    “Oh, they know how to decoct so as to bring on the visions they seek to have, short of a killing dose. They do it to get power, sister. Diabolic power. Some of them learn thus to call on the force of Satan to summon the fogs and whip up the seas.”
    I felt the hot blood creeping up my neck. Mother placed her hand protectively on the arc of her belly. Although it had not been spoken of, we all of us knew her condition. “Enough!” she interjected. “This is not fit talk for a Christian hearth. I beg you, hold your peace.” She feared to miscarry, as she had, just a year since, on a terrible afternoon of blood-soaked rags, whispers, groans, and then silence, for the lost babe, if mourned by mother, was never spoken of. Worse, perhaps, she feared that such talk of Satan might embolden that emissary of darkness to enter her womb and make a monstrous birth of that which grew there. I repented my question, and pressed no more. Although Solace was born unblemished five months later, there is no doubt: that ill-judged conversation and all that followed from it caused my mother’s blighted childbed, and her death.
    But I did not see that danger then. My mind was brimming with corrupt fancies. That night, I lay upon my shakedown, and though it was a night crisped by the chill of early fall, I tossed in my own heat, consumed by what Makepeace had said. I thought of that familiar chestnut-brown body, pared by ordeal, naked in the darkness. And of Satan, in his serpent form, twining about those bruised thighs, hissing out his tempting promises of potency.

VIII
     
    W ho are we, really? Are our souls shaped, our fates written in full by God, before we draw our first breath? Do we make ourselves, by the choices we our selves make? Or are we clay merely, that is molded and pushed into the shape that our betters propose for us?
    In the days following Caleb’s leavetaking, I turned fifteen, and my narrow world became ever more straitened. I began to feel more and more like clay, squeezed flat under the boots of other people. I went to meeting on the Lord’s Day, raised my eyes and hands to God, joined in the hymns and let the words of scripture pour into my ears. But my mind was elsewhere. What choice had I ever made that