Free Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks Page B

was fully my own? From birth, others had ordained my life’s every detail. That I should be a colonist and an islander, a dweller on these wild shores, all this was the product of choices my grandfather had made before I was even thought of. That I might be literate but not learned was the choice of my father; the lot of a girlchild. It was around that time that I heard father and grandfather speaking together of Noah Merry, the second son of the miller who lived south of us on the island’s swiftest brook, saying that he was a godly boy, a stout worker, and in time a likely husband for me. So even this choice, it seemed, would be made by others. There was a little ember of anger inside me when I thought this: a hard black coal that could be fanned into a hot flame if I chose to let my thoughts give it air. Most of the time, I did not do so. I went on, dutiful, trying to keep in mind what father preached, that all of this was God’s plan, not his, not his father’s, nor any man’s. A small part of a grand design that we could not fathom. “Consider your mother’s needlework,” he said once, taking a piece from her hands. “The design is plain to us, when we examine the front, but the back of the piece does not reveal it.” He turned it. “Here, you see the knots and the dangling threads. There is an outline of the pattern, but if we guess—is it a bird? Is it a flower? We might easily be mistaken. So it is with this life—we see the knots, we guess at the whole. But only God truly sees the beauty of his design.”
    So then, what of Caleb, or Cheeshahteaumauk, shivering out there alone, night following night? Was it part of God’s beautiful design to leave him there in the winter darkness, waiting for the devil to snatch away his soul? Or did God make no designs for the heathen? If so, what was father about, in his ministry to them? Perhaps it was pride, merely, to seek these souls that God had chosen to abandon. Perhaps it was in itself a sin…. But no. Surely my wise father could not err so. And why had God brought Caleb into my path if I was not meant to save him? Why had he set us down here at all? I could no longer even guess at the whole, no longer even glimpse an outline amid so many dangling threads.
    I was sorely troubled by these things, and did not eat or sleep well, and could give no convincing account of what distressed me. I told myself that I wanted father to go and find Caleb, wherever he was in the wild woods, and deliver him from evil. Yet where he slept that night, in all those heaths and thickets, that only God—or Satan—knew.

IX
     
    A s it happened, father did propose a journey, around that time, although not the one I longed for him to make. Grandfather was interested in acquiring a share in the Merrys’ grist mill and, as ever, he looked to father to be his negotiator.
    “I thought to take Bethia with me, if she cares to go,” father said to mother, quite suddenly, at our breakfast board. “She is looking rather wan of late and I think a long ride in the fresh air might be good for her.” He spoke lightly, but I saw the meaning glance exchanged as mother handed him a hot corn cake. “You will like to see the Merrys’ farm, Bethia; I hear it has a pleasant prospect with the brook running through, which he has dammed up for a millpond, and he has built his house well, I’m told. They say, who have seen it, that he has a number of glass windows, and has installed a wainscot.” Makepeace looked up at that, and made a disapproving snort. “Sumptuary affectations and an affront to plainness,” he said. Me, I thought it none of my brother’s affair. If a man wished to glaze his windows or line his walls, then he might face fewer drafts when the icy air of winter probed through every chink and crevice. And what harm if he have the skill to make it look well?
    The appointed morning was cold, but fine and crisp. Mother touched my face before I set out, and looked at me kindly, but