Читать книгу Rivers Parting - Shirley Barker - Страница 7

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They went down to London, Southampton, Plymouth, any port a ship could put west out of. Some were heavy-hearted and cursing because the fields they used to plow had been closed to them, or their looms had gone suddenly idle in the cloth towns and England no longer gave them an honest living. Some gathered in little groups on deck for prayer—“Oh follow me no farther than ye have seen me follow Jesus Christ!”—and talked of the kingdom of saints they meant to set up on earth; honest, too, and not knowing they carried the devil with them. And there were merry lads, adventurers from the west country, and prentices from Cheapside, rioting and abandoned, thumbing their noses as the shore dimmed out and shouting the old ballads.

“And when will you come home again,

Oh my son, Geordie Wan?”

“Oh the sun and moon will dance on the green

On the night that I come home.”

There were family men from the drowned meadows beside the Wash, with mended coats and anxious faces and children around them; a weaver from Bury St. Edmunds; a younger son of county stock in the Severn valley. Country squires from Essex and Suffolk, whose linen still smelled of lavender, who would dole out burnt wine when the seasickness came on. Devon farmers ruddy as beeves, smugglers wanted on Romney Marsh, and soldiers of fortune with sewn velvet sacks to bring home the precious stones they planned to discover.

Every one of them went for his own reasons, but all of them went because of a wind that blew. Because the spirit of God was moving on the face of the waters again, to make a new man for a new country, and what of the old He wanted, that He took. He stirred the harbors of the gentled English rivers, the river currents of ocean, and the black, brooding streams that drained down through the western forests, and caused them to be all alive with sails that spread for the crossing. And He troubled those deeper rivers that flow in a man’s mortal person; the rivers of blood He caused to leap and quicken, and the flow of thoughts across the mind to course where it never had before. He did not explain His ways—any more than He has before or since. He spoke in wind on the water—but He had His will.

For ten years the breath of God blew on England, wafting men out of it, and it was a good land for a man to be up and gone from in that time. For a foolish King kept taking away straw and asking the people for more and more bricks, and in the end he lost, by the people’s axe, the head that was of so little use to him—but that was later, after the wars, when the wind had stopped blowing. There was a shadow rode with Charles, and sometimes it wore a Tudor ruff, and sometimes a Norman corselet; it was the shadow of old time, and like Charles, it rode to its fall.

And the men who were blown out of England drove west over the great water, some to the Summer Islands, and some to Virginia, red Connecticut and stony Massachusetts, and up the wide rivers between. Some, who wanted their way in a fuller measure than most, set up in the snowy swamps of Narragansett, and others thought to found a cathedral city on a sluggish tide-wash in Maine. They took England with them, but England never arrived there. Kettles came, a carved chair, a leather book. A gallon of sack and a flitch of bacon could make the journey, but not England.

The branching waters of Piscataqua lay spread out like God’s hand upon the countryside: Great Bay for the palm, with four streams run back from it like fingers, and the river itself, a broad thumb pointing down to the sea, and cut seventy feet deep below the rocky, green shores. Around its edges lay a country scourged often with northeast storms of snow, where the frost took hold in November, and at winter’s end the cattle were stripped and lean as the wild deer, but stocked with lobsters, fish, beaver, foxes, deer, eagles, grapes, crows, geese, ducks, pumpkins, squashes, corn, marsh grass—and always the trees. Strangers, coming, called it the “home shire” and were homesick to death in it, but their sons saw it a different way, and kept the name.

Four towns grew up there in the years of the great crossings: Exeter, that was for rebels out of Massachusetts; Hampton and Dover for the godly; and Strawberry Bank for men who would love God and honor the King, but first maintain themselves and their own as well as they might. Sometimes they were down to half a barrel of corn and a piece of beef, and once they had only two kegs of beer in twenty-two months. No wonder they wrote home for malt, as well as for children’s coats and “maids which are soon gone in this country.” They wrote inventories, too, cramped lists of their possessions—so many chamber pots, leather stockings, barrels of pitch, brass ladles, cleaving-wedges, herring nets, blankets, and frying pans. They did not write of the kindnesses of neighbor unto neighbor, at night sometimes, and over freezing water, nor of the courage that made them keep on swinging the axe when the hands were blistered, and go home from the grave of the child buried under snow and deep pine roots, to beget another child who might live to bury them—if he were lucky.

But in guilt they recorded each wickedness. Ruth Gooch stood up in a white sheet before the congregation for adultering with the preacher ... two nameless sodomists were caught conducting their unholy business in meeting time ... the devil came in a blast of fire and carried off a man who sat down on a keg of powder and lit his pipe and called on the devil’s name ... two more were drowned rowing to fetch sack on the Lord’s Day ... one was fined for living slothful like swine ... Dover men split into two armies and marched against each other, carrying a Bible on a halberd for ensign. These were the things they wrote down.

How much they wrote down of the border war they lost to Massachusetts will not be known again, for the books they kept in the year of the taking-over have vanished strangely, but not the word-of-mouth story, not the wry, rebellious echo in every history and memoir. A strong country, burning with a fanatic purpose to make men over, moved in on a small country that had no purpose save the casual good of man. Too common a thing, perhaps—in their time or ours—to need to be written down.

It was a time when the fabulous hopes went glimmering and were given up, for the cleared land took the shape of small farms, not of manors, the gems in the Chrystal Hills turned out to be fit only for penny trinkets, and no one was ever able to find the Laconia Country, with its great sleek beaver—but a time when cornfields, and frame houses, and lusty children came on apace. A time when the country stood by itself, little and alone; a hard time, but a good one. And then the great wind died down. And though men kept on crossing the sea, it was not the same again as it was in those devoted years when they came with the breath of God behind them. England, at home, went on to the wars of ruin, but New Hampshire was well about the business of shaping the new man for the new country.