to take the whale. He was going about from house to house, rousing enthusiasm for this venture, and had met with some success by the time he got to us. Father had gone some days earlier with Peter Folger to our sister isle, Nantucket, to transact some business there on grandfather’s behalf, and mother was with Aunt Hannah, who was ill, tending to her and her babes both. I am sure father would have counseled against Nortown’s plan. But Makepeace saw no flaw in it, and readily agreed to go with the other men. “Bethia, you shall come also, and do a share at the try pots, and make my meal for me,” he said. All my life I had been schooled that it was not my place to argue with him, but as I hastily packed what we would need to spend a night on the open beach, and later, as our boat beat up the coast amid that small fleet of thieves, I felt a great heaviness, as one does, when one knows oneself engaged in an act of greed and sneakery.
By the time we reached the cliffs, the whale had indeed beached herself. She was huge, glistening, luminous, a pregnant shape that the surf pulled this way and that, as if she still had vigor and was not already doomed. There were many rounded rocks scattered across the shore there. As each wave receded, these stones beat against each other in a rattling tattoo. I have read that one hears such a thing at an execution.
We moored the boats in the lee of the cliff, where they could not be sighted from Nomin’s island, and commenced to unload them. The cauldrons and tripods were heavy enough as I helped to drag them up the beach, but the heaviness of my mood seemed to add to their weight so that my arms ached under the strain. I helped to set them, then we rolled the butts that would receive the oil up the beach and carried the long-handled dippers that would skim it off the boiling blubber. As soon as that was done, I went off to help in the search for driftwood to feed the fires, which would not be set until nightfall, so that the Indians on Nomin’s island would not descry the smoke. I was glad to leave the beach as I did not want to be witness to the cutting. As I walked away, I heard the men’s voices shouting in coarse merriment even as they hewed at the whale’s living flesh. I thought of the shining bass in my friend’s hands, the raised rock, and his gentle words of thanks to the creature. This no longer seemed outlandish to me, but fitting and somehow decent. The idea that this heathen youth should show more refinement than we in such a matter only added to my leaden mood.
The dunes up island are very much higher than those closer by Great Harbor, and on the far side of them is a vast expanse of low, wind-sculpted moor, wrapping around damp swales and shimmering ponds filled with every kind of waterbird. There was a Wampanoag pathway leading through thickets of stunted oak, shadbush and bay-berry. I followed it, until I was far enough from the beach not to hear the raucous voices of the men.
At first, I stopped from time to time to add a good-sized piece of wood to my sling, but soon I neglected this. The scent of the beach plum flowers hung in the humid air, and the drone of bees thrummed all around me. I felt heavy in limb, heavy in spirit. My head began to ache and throb. The very air seemed to push upon me. I have no idea how far I had walked, but suddenly I was aware of a deeper throbbing, a louder hum. The honey fragrance of the plants gave way to the sharp tang of woodsmoke. The path curved suddenly, and dropped away into a bowl of open grassland. I found myself on the lip of a great depression running down to a broad notch in the whitest clay cliff I had ever seen. Below me, Wampanoag were dancing in a wide circle, shaking corn-filled gourds and beating rhythmically on small skin drums.
My first thought was to drop my burden of wood and run back to the beach, to warn the others that the Wampanoag were not on distant Nomin’s island, but nearby, and in numbers large enough to threaten us if they caught us red to the elbows with the blood of a whale that was rightfully their own.
But then a voice rose, high and fierce, in notes that I had not known a human throat could produce. The sounds went through to the very core of me. I could not turn away. Indeed, I felt drawn towards the maker of those sounds. I told myself that I needed to give an exact count of the band, and the number of them who might be armed. I left the path, which led down into the clearing and would have put me in plain sight, and pushed my way through the dense heath plants that gave me cover should anyone look upward. Soon, I was close enough to understand some few words of the song. The pawaaw was calling upon his gods, praising, thanking, beseeching. The drums beat in tempo to the rhythm of my heart, which seemed to be swelling at the sound. I felt my soul hum and vibrate in sympathy with his prayers. There was power here; spiritual power. It moved me in some profound way. I had striven for this feeling, week following week, as the dutiful minister’s daughter at Lord’s Day meeting. But our austere worship had never stirred my soul as did this heathen’s song.
Thou shalt not have strange gods before me. So I had been instructed all my life. Still, it was to those strange gods that I wanted to cry out with the same abandon as the pawaaw. Time stopped its relentless forward march as I crouched in the scrub, rocking in tempo to the drums. Finally, I threw back my head and let the breath from my body speak for me, in a sigh of surrender to some unknown thing of power and beauty, adding my breath to the prayers filling the wide sky. When it was done, I felt the day’s heaviness go off me like a lifted weight.
After the pawaaw’s prayer finished, I meant to leave. But songs followed, and dances, and I stayed there, to watch and to listen. For a time, the young men danced in wild leaps, brandishing polished war-clubs in a manner that seemed to mimic battle. Then came the women, old and young together, their woven blankets pulled across their shoulders. They stood for a time, their hands raised up before them so that their blanket covered them entire. They looked like a flock of roosting birds. Then, as if to some invisible signal, they all began to move with the music. All my life I had been taught that dance was the devil’s business. Only whores, the daughters of Salome, danced, or so I had been instructed. But there was nothing lewd or wanton here. The women’s movements were stately, dignified, entirely graceful.
Much later, when I crept back to the beach, grazed, with runs in my hose and rips in my bodice and bits of bracken clinging to my hair, Makepeace’s face was thunderous with worry and rage. I concocted some lie about falling into a thicket and hitting my head.
The other women were solicitous, and bade me lie down upon the sand as dark fell and they lit the fires to try out the oil. But hours later, when the oil had been ladeled into the butts and everyone had settled wearily, I lay awake. My thoughts veered wildly. I turned on the sand, unable to find a comfortable position. I felt disgust at the behavior of those all about me, our low willingness to steal and deceive even as we preened and boasted of our godly superiority. Subdue the earth. So the Bible said, and so we did. But I could not believe that God meant us to be so heedless of his creation, so wanton and so cruel to those creatures over which he had given us dominion.
I knew I would not sleep. When the men’s snores competed with the beating of the surf and the rattle of the stones, I got up, standing still for a moment, to make sure no one stirred, and made my way across the dunes. As soon as I was away from the camp, I turned back to the path that led to the circle cliffs, and followed it by a moon so bright it threw my shadow clear before me on the sandy ground.
Their fires had blazed up against the night sky and the music had grown wilder. The animal self inside me responded to it. Now, remembering that night, I cannot say how, or why, I felt as I did. I only know that the beat of the drumming touched me in some deep, inner, unsounded place. There, in the dark, without even knowing my own purpose, I commenced to unlace my sleeves. The warm air caressed my arms. I let fall my hose and stood, bare armed and bare legged like the Wampanoag women in their short skin shifts. My toes dug down into the sandy, cooling earth, as my heartbeat matched itself to the drumming. The soul within me, schooled in what was godly, seemed to exit my body in great gasping exhalations as I began to move to the beat. Slowly at first, my limbs found the rhythm. Thought ceased, and an animal sense drove me until, in the end, I danced with abandon. If Satan had me in his hand that night, then I confess it: I welcomed his touch.
At dawn, they had to shake me awake. For a few moments I could not recall how I had made my way back to the campsite, and a hot dread seized me lest I remained unclad. But somehow in my ecstatic trance I had found my shed garments and put them back on. I got up and made myself busy with the others to cover the signs of our theft, dragging the remains of the butchered carcass into the surf, dousing the bloodied and fire blackened sands with buckets of sea water,