Page 62 of Dark Tides
“These are the clothes of my other world,” he said. “And now my name is John Sassamon.”
Ned rose to his feet. “Come in, whatever your name,” he said, taking the loop of twine off the little gate.
“I won’t interrupt your work.”
“I’ll go on with it. Sit here. I’ll be finished in a moment.”
Ned pinched the garden soil into a low wall of mud around the willow whip and puddled the water to its bare stalk. “Every beast from the forest thinks it can overrun my garden and eat my crops,” he complained. “I wish I could build a wall against them! Or carve a moat from the river.”
The man laughed. “Why not move the forest back?”
“The Dutch, in their country, hold back the sea,” Ned told him.
“So I heard. Does the sea not push back? Do the rivers not mind?”
“Actually, the sea does push back,” Ned conceded. “And perhaps the river does mind. I’ve never thought of what they might feel—the rivers and the seas—when we master them.”
“Of course they mind—are we not the same being as them? The blood in my veins, the water in the river? We all flow. We all move with the moon.”
Ned sat back on his heels. “When I was a lad I thought that it was the tide that pulled up the moon and turned my days into nights.” He finished the watering in silence, his finger over the top of the stoneware bottle regulating the flow that dripped from the hole in the bottom. “My sister believes that women’s moods and courses come and go with the moon, and with the tides.”
“Of course they do,” John said simply. “You’ve missed that one.” He pointed to a willow whip. “And this is squaws’ work. You should marry a woman to do this work for you.”
“You think it’s beneath a man to hoe and weed?”
John laughed. “No! No! Beyond us! It’s a skill that we men lack.Only the women have the skills to feed everyone. They learn from their mothers, and their mothers from the grandmothers, backwards and backwards to the day when Mother Earth taught women. All we men grow is tobacco. A white man like you’ll never feed a family from your planting. You can’t care for the earth like a woman can.”
“I could take a plow to it,” Ned pointed out. “A pair of ox and a man. Then you’d see a crop of wheat that no squaw could grow.”
“It’d be a desert in four seasons. And the dust would blow around you like snow. This is no land for plowing, it has to rest; but you English will never let anything rest. You enslave everything.”
“I don’t,” Ned objected. “I feed the land as Quiet Squirrel told me. Why—I’m half a Norwottuck already,” he claimed, making the man laugh. “The people in Hadley accuse me of turning Indian. They say that I don’t know what I am.”
“Between two worlds, and unsteady in both,” John suggested.
Ned looked up at the dark broad-planed face under the ugly English hat.
“Unsteady.” Ned repeated the word, and shifted his feet in his uncomfortable shoes. “Anyway, no woman would live with me out here. She would say it’s too far out of town, and too close to the forest.”
“What about the one that you walk with?” John suggested. “Mrs. Rose? You carried her basket.”
“You saw me? Where were you? I didn’t see you?”
John shrugged. “I wasn’t in my hat,” he said, as if native dress made him invisible.
Ned was strangely disturbed. “I didn’t know you were watching me.”
“We watch all of you.”
The two men moved to the rough bench that Ned had at the back of the house, facing the river. They could see the posts of the pier, the raft rocking at the side, the ropes looped to the opposite bank dipping and rising in the water with the flow.
“Because you don’t trust us anymore?” Ned said gloomily.
John chuckled, distracted by the river. “You caught my cousin in your ferry rope the other night. He did not see the rope across the river and he forgot it was there. Nearly overturned him in his dugout. He was cursing you and your water-walker.”
“I thought you all just ducked under the ropes, or paddled over them?”
“It was dark, he forgot.”
