Poison in the Colony, page 4
Samuel tips his head back, letting the sun shine on his face. He begins to recite the prophecy:
“In the time of the first planting of corn, there will come a tribe from the bay of the Chesapeake.”
“That was you, the first three ships,” I say. “You and Captain Smith and my father and all the rest. You landed in April, and you were that tribe, because you sailed up the Chesapeake Bay.”
Samuel nods. We have recited this together many times, ever since I was small.
I fill in the rest of my part: “And Chief Powhatan had the Chesapeake tribe all killed or captured because he thought they were the tribe in the prophecy.”
Samuel continues, “This tribe will build their longhouses on the land of the Powhatan. They will hunt and fish and plant on the land of the Powhatan.”
“That was your settlement, when you built the first cottages in James Town,” I say. “Then there were the battles. . . .”
“Yes,” says Samuel. “Three times the Powhatan will rise up against this tribe. The first battle will end and the Powhatan will be victorious.”
“The first battle ended when Captain Smith and Chief Powhatan became countrymen,” I say. “Then there was peace.” Captain Smith is a hero to me and to many. Samuel says he was very brave and fair.
Samuel goes on, “But the tribe will grow strong again. The Powhatan will rise up. The second battle will end and the Powhatan will be victorious.”
“That battle started when Captain Smith went back to England and the leaders here went on a rampage against the Indians,” I say. “But it’s over now. We are at peace.”
Samuel swats at a fly. “Yes. The Peace of Pocahontas.”
My stomach twists. I hear Samuel’s voice in my head, speaking to my father two years ago when Pocahontas died: How long do you think the peace will last with her gone?
“We are still at peace, even with Rebecca gone,” I say hopefully.
Samuel goes back to reciting. “But the tribe will grow strong once more. The third battle will be long and filled with bloodshed. By the end of this battle, the Powhatan kingdom will be no more.”
We are silent for a time. This last part has always seemed impossible to me. How could the Powhatan kingdom ever “be no more”? There are so many more of them than there are of us—thousands more. And this is their land, their country. Chief Powhatan, up until he died last April, said he wanted to live at peace with us. And now the new leaders, his brothers, have vowed to keep that peace. Though each individual tribe and town has its own chief, Chief Opechancanough and Chief Opitchapam rule over all the tribes together. If they want peace, then all of the tribes must listen to them.
“Do you think the last part is true?” I ask Samuel. “Maybe the Indian priests made a mistake when they gave the prophecy.”
He shrugs. “Maybe they did.” He senses my discomfort. “And maybe it will be many years from now before it happens.”
I pound the pestle into the grain, letting the rhythm calm me. “I hope we stay at peace for a long time,” I say. “Forever.”
“We all do,” he says.
Alice decides she wants to climb into his lap, and he winces but he lets her.
“Alice, be careful,” I say. “No kicking.”
“I don’t kick Samuel,” she says solemnly.
My mother returns home with the yoke across her shoulders and two full buckets of water hanging from the ends. She is carrying a basket with four eggs in it. I help her unload the water buckets.
“I don’t suppose we’ll have to beg you to eat with us, Samuel,” Mum says. She sounds a bit annoyed. It is the third day in a row, and Samuel’s rations go to him now instead of to my father, the way they used to when Samuel still lived with us.
“Ginny, go to my cot in the barracks and reach under my mattress. You’ll find a piece of salt pork wrapped in a rag,” Samuel says. “I’ve been keeping it for a special occasion, and that must be today.”
“Under your mattress?” Mum asks. “I’m surprised the dogs didn’t find it.” She breezes into the cottage to lay the table.
I leave them with Alice still bouncing on Samuel’s knee, to retrieve the hidden treasure. When I return, my father has already come in from the fields for our midday meal. He picks Alice up and she giggles.
I go to check on Samuel’s leg to see how the fresh air has been helping it to heal. I take one look and scream. The wound is filled with pale, wriggling maggots.
My mother comes running from inside the cottage. By now, Alice is crying, my father is laughing, Samuel is staring at his leg as if it might jump up and bite him, and I have one hand over my mouth to keep from vomiting. Mum takes Alice to calm her and examines Samuel’s very lively wound.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, come and let’s eat,” Mum says, trying hard not to join my father in his laughter.
Samuel and I both look at her. “Eat?” I say in a weak voice.
“Yes, I’ll pick them out later,” she says. “In the meantime, let them do their work.”
“Work?” Samuel asks. His face is ashen. He and I have both been reduced to one-word sentences.
“They will eat the dead tissue,” Mum says. “It’s the best thing to clean out infection.”
I am too hungry to refuse dinner, and so is Samuel. While we eat, I make Samuel keep his leg under the table where I can’t see it and I try not to think about those wriggly, squirmy maggots.
Ten
I HAVE A dream of ships.
It has the feel of the knowing, but it cannot be, dead as that is within me. Still, I wake shaking as if the ships were real.
They are frightful, fantastical, and strange. They come one after another, crowding the wharf at James Town. They unload their cargo: people. So many people. But not just ordinary groups of settlers. That is what is so odd. There are ships with only children, ships with all young women dressed in white dresses, and a ship carrying people with dark brown skin, dressed in colorful robes.
The people themselves are not frightful, but rather the sheer mass of them. They fill James Town to overflowing and spread up the river on both sides. Too many people to feed. Too many people to govern. Too many people spreading out into Indian lands, angering the Powhatan leaders.
I sit up in bed and shake my head to chase away the dream. My nightclothes are wet, partly from my own sweat and partly because Alice has wet our bed again.
Alice opens her eyes.
“No more drinks of water at night for you,” I tell her.
Gray dawn fills the cottage. My parents are two lumps in the bed next to ours.
I pull off my wet nightgown, and dress for the day in shift, petticoat, frock, and apron. Then I pull Alice’s wet nightgown off her and dress her.
I use the bellows to fan the fire. The orange glow lights up the wooden table and chairs and the iron cook pot full of porridge. I use the ladle to break the crust that has formed on the porridge overnight and add some wood to the fire to get it going.
We are still only a few hundred settlers, I think, trying to wash away the dream. I hear my father yawn and use the chamber pot. He pulls on his clothes and boots. He’ll need to get an early start. It’s tobacco transplanting time. Though my father and Samuel are both skilled carpenters, ever since tobacco has become so important to the colony, they have been assigned to the tobacco fields during the planting, growing, and harvesting seasons. The carpenters work in the fields, and servants sleep in tents or out in the open for lack of good cottages.
“What have you got for me for breakfast today?” he asks as he sits at the table and runs his hands through his hair. “Roast pheasant?”
I laugh and ladle warm porridge into his bowl. “Roast pheasant is tomorrow,” I say. “Today is porridge.”
“Good. I like porridge, too,” he says.
Mum was the first unmarried woman to ever come to James Town, and I can see why she chose my father over all the other men who tried to court her. He is tall, with lively eyes and a quick smile, and most important, he is kind through and through.
My father eats quickly and leaves for the fields. As my mother begins to stir, I have Alice help me carry our corn-husk mattress outside. We hang it on the laundry line, along with our nightclothes and linens, to dry.
“You’re Mum’s big girl now,” I tell her. “When our new little sister comes, Mum will have enough diapers to wash and dry without our bed being wet every other night.”
“I’ll be her big sister?” Alice asks.
“That’s right,” I say.
My mother peeks her head out the cottage door. She is tying her apron over her big belly. “I heard that,” she says. She is looking at me crossly.
I take Alice’s hand and lead her back inside. “Heard what?” I ask innocently. I don’t understand why she is angry with me.
“It’s a girl?” she asks bluntly.
I feel the color rise to my cheeks. I look down. “I’m sorry, Mum,” I say. Sorry that it’s a girl, and sorry that I know.
Mum frowns. “Your father will get over it, and we’ll try again,” she says. “But you, you worry me, Virginia.” She is mixing flour, water, salt, and yeast for our bread. I sit Alice at the table with her morning porridge.
“I’m trying, Mum,” I say. “Sometimes it’s just . . . there.”
“That’s what she said, too,” my mother says softly.
A chill runs down my back. “My grandmother?” I ask.
She nods.
Alice pretends to feed porridge to her rag doll.
“It is a gift and a curse,” my mother says. “A gift from God, because I know your grandmother’s heart was pure, and I know yours is, too, so where else could it come from?” She dumps the bread dough out onto a floured board and begins to knead it. “But it is a curse to have this gift and live among men who fear it.” She stops her work and looks up at me. “Pray, Virginia. I know I told you to kill it in yourself, but that has not worked. You must ask God to take back this gift He has given you. Ask Him to take it from you so that your life may be spared.”
“I will, Mum,” I say earnestly. “I will pray.”
* * *
. . .
I am on my way to fetch water, the yoke hanging from my shoulders. He steps into my path, blocking my way.
“No more rocks,” he says.
I search Charles’s face. There is not a hint of niceness in it, only spite and determination. Could he really be calling a truce?
“When I was a boy, I threw rocks at you. I didn’t know any other way. Now I am almost a man,” he continues. He is not asking for a response from me. I try to move around him, but he easily blocks me and my yoke.
“Now all I have to do is watch you, until the time is right,” he says. He narrows his eyes. “I know what you are. I know what your mother is.” He straightens himself up. “The governor will listen to me when I make a report of witches among us.”
I feel faint. I stumble forward but catch myself.
“You see?” Charles says, smiling with satisfaction. “Your guilt is all over your face.”
I somehow gather myself enough to speak. “I am guilty of nothing,” I say. “And neither is my mother. She tried to help your family, and your father, rest his soul, caused us nothing but grief.” I shake my head. “Governor Yeardley will not listen to lies from a boy.” I spit out the word “boy” and I see I have angered him. He picks up a stone and cocks his arm back, ready to throw it.
I turn my yoke sideways and push past him. As I walk away, I do not expect to feel the sting of a rock on the back of my head. Charles is too proud to help me prove my point.
* * *
. . .
“Ship ashore!”
We are in the garden when we hear the shouts coming from the wharf. Alice’s eyes brighten. “I want to go see!” she says. Even the smallest colonists know the excitement of landing ships.
I look to Mum for permission to leave our work.
“You girls go on,” she says. “I’ll finish up here.”
Alice and I make a game of it, “racing” each other to see who can get to the wharf first. Of course, I take baby steps and let her win.
Others come to greet the ship as well, especially the gentlemen, who have servants to do their work for them and have nothing much to do except smoke their pipes, talk to one another, and occasionally go hunting. I hold Alice’s hand and we listen to the conversations of the men around us as the ship sails closer.
“I hope they’ve sent the hogs Governor Yeardley requested. We’ll need more than what we’ve got to stay well fed.”
“I promised my wife I’d get her a coconut if they’ve any left over from their stop in the islands.”
“Forget the coconuts, forget the hogs, I want a wife! I hope they’ve sent some unmarried women.”
Lately, ships have been arriving in two and threes, but today there is only one ship for all these hopes to be pinned upon. She comes gliding in, her sails filled with the warm breeze. As she approaches the wharf, the sailors luff her sails. They toss lines to the men waiting onshore, and the ship is reeled in to dock. Her bow is painted in bright patterns of red, white, yellow, and blue. Her flags wave, stretched out flat and proud. British, the flags say with their white, red, and blue, I am a British ship.
It is odd, but there are no passengers on deck taking their first look at the shores of their new home. I think maybe the sailors are fed up with them always trying to come on deck, and they’re making them stay down below in the ’tween deck until the last moment. I’ve heard many stories from Samuel about how hard it is to get a breath of fresh air on the journey to the New World.
Once the ship is close enough, the sailors lower the ramp. They begin rolling barrels and shoving crates down the ramp and onto shore. I have often complained, along with everyone else, that a new ship brings new mouths to feed—the mouths of people who know nothing about how hard they will have to work to survive here. But the thought of a ship without passengers is eerily strange. Where are all the people?
Alice has lost interest and is running toward two mastiffs who are sitting at the feet of their gentleman master. I don’t know these dogs—they are new, and they are twice Alice’s size—so I run after her. I scoop her up before she can reach them. She squawks her frustration. “I want to pet the dogs!” she cries.
Just then I hear a gasp and a murmur of voices. Someone says, “Oh dear, what has the Company done now?”
I turn to see what everyone else has already seen: there are, indeed, passengers, and they are finally being allowed to leave the ship. They come slowly down the wooden gangplank. Some are holding each other’s hands. Some have faces set in scowls. Many are crying. Others simply have wide, fearful eyes. Their smell wafts to me on the breeze, of unwashed bodies and vomit. Their clothes are no more than rags.
They are children. Some are as small as six or seven years old, but there are no mothers or fathers with them. There are at least a hundred of them. And not a single one looks as though they have made this trip of their own free will.
Eleven
THESE CHILDREN ARE rough and wily and prone to fist fighting. They’ve been gathered off the streets of London and sent as free labor. They are orphans, runaways, children whose parents are too poor to feed them and who thought they could eat better living on the streets.
They begin to die almost immediately. They are sent to sleep in moldy tents or out in the open, some without even a blanket. Many are sent to the plantations upriver. All of them are put to work, from morning till night. And there is no one to take care of them, to make sure they get their rations.
One of the boys is different from the rest. He is nine or ten, and so quiet I realize after a couple of weeks that I have never heard him speak. When they first landed, I heard the pleadings of an older girl: “He wasn’t even living on the street like the rest of us. He lived near the docks with his mum and da. His mum sent him to buy a sack of flour, and they grabbed him and shoved him onto the boat. He needs to be sent back home to his mum and da.” But no one listened, and the ship set sail back to England without the boy.
He is sent to work in the tobacco fields each morning, and I see him return in the evening, his face dirty and sullen. I sneak, following him outside the fort one evening at dusk, and see him curl up with a torn old blanket, alone, staring at nothing and rocking his body to and fro. There is no food that I can see in his makeshift camp. Is he even bothering to get his rations?
This is what life has given you, I want to tell him. You still have sunny days and the taste of food when you’re hungry, and if you’d talk, you’d even have a few friends. You can’t go back to England, but you can choose to be happy here.
But I say nothing, and creep away silently, back to my own cottage, with my noisy family and lit candles and freshly baked bread with boiled turnips for supper.
Two weeks later, in the early morning, the boy is found cold and stiff in his blanket. Bermuda is sent to help dig the grave. When he returns to the fort, I meet him at the gates.
“We should have been his friends,” I blurt out. I am surprised to hear anger in my own voice, as if I am blaming this on Bermuda.
“No, we couldn’t,” he says. “He wouldn’t talk.”
I kick at the dirt. “I wish I had at least tried to talk to him,” I say.
