Virgin Earth

April 1643

He had to wait until April, and then he and the Hoberts rowed upriver and saw their adjoining plots. It was good land. The trees reached down to the water’s edge and their thick canopy shaded the banks. Their wide gray roots stretched out into the flooded river. John tied the canoe he had borrowed to an overhanging trunk and stepped ashore on his own new land.

“My Eden,” John said quietly to himself.

The trees were alive with the singing of birds, birds courting and chasing, fighting and nesting. He saw birds that looked like familiar English species but which were bigger, or oddly colored, and he saw others that were wholly new to him in this new and wonderful world, birds like little herons which were white as doves, strange ducks with heads as bright as enameled boxes. The soil was rich, dark and fertile, an earth which had never known the plow but which had made and remade itself with centuries of tumbling leaves and rotting vegetation. Feeling almost foolish, John went down on his hands and knees, took a handful of the rich soil, crumbled it between his hands and raised it to his nose and his lips. It was good dark earth that would grow anything in rich abundance.

The bank sloped steeply up from the river, there would be no flooding on his fields, and there was a little hillock, perhaps half a mile back from the river frontage, where John would build his house. When the trees were cleared he would have a fine river view, and he would be able to look down the hill to his own landing stage where his own tobacco would be loaded to take downstream.

John thought his house would be set square to the river. A modest house, nothing like the grand size of Lambeth: a pioneer’s house of one room downstairs and a ladder leading up to a half floor for storage set in the eaves. A fireplace in one wall, which would heat the whole of the little building, a roof of reeds or maybe even wooden shingles. A floor of nothing more than beaten earth in the first few years, perhaps later John would put down floorboards. Windows which would be bare and open, empty of glass, but with thick wooden shutters to close in winter and bad weather. It would be a house only a little grander than an English pauper might build to squat on common land and think himself lucky. It would be a normal house in this new world, where nothing could be taken for granted and where men and women rarely had anything more than they could build or make for themselves.

Thoughtfully, John reached toward a sprouting vine and pulled away a cutting, tucking it in his pocket. He would grow it around his doorframe. It might be a little hovel in a great wilderness but it would still have a garden.

The house did not take long to build. There were men in Jamestown who would work at a daily rate, and Bertram and John hired them as a gang to work first on the Hobert house and then on John’s smaller version of the same design. The gang specified that they were to have their food and their ale, and that the nails, the most costly part of the house, were to be supplied: counted out each morning, and checked in at nightfall. They told John that when he wanted a new house built elsewhere, he should burn his old house down and then sift through the ashes for the nails. New timber could be had simply by clearing the woods around the foundations, but new nails had to come from England.

“But then you never have houses for sale,” John remarked. “You never have houses for newcomers.”

“They can build their own,” the man said in the rough frankness of the new world. “And if they cannot build their own they can go homeless.”

Sarah Hobert cooked for the men while they built her house, roasting meat over a camp fire on long skewers in a way that the colonists had learned from Indian guides. John thought of Suckahanna squatting beside the little fire with trout skewered on green sticks. Sarah made bread in a heavy dark dough from rye flour; the colonists could not grow wheat in this land. When her own house was finished and the builders moved on to John’s house, she came too and cooked for them there, never complaining that she would have preferred to start digging her own fields or planting her own vegetable patch.

“Thank you,” John said awkwardly as the Hoberts got into their native canoe to travel the little way downriver to their own homestead. “I could not have built it without you.”

“Nor could we have built ours so quick without you,” Bertram said. “I will come over in the next month or two to see how you are faring. We will have to be like brothers if we are to survive in this land, John.”

“It’s funny,” John said. He took the rope and cast it off, throwing it into Sarah’s waiting hands. “I thought this was an easy country to live in, easy to build a shelter, easy to find food. But now it seems to me that we are on the very edge of surviving, all the time.”

They looked at him blankly, their pale faces turned toward him as the current nudged the canoe away from the bank.

“Of course it is a struggle,” Sarah replied, stating the obvious. “The Lord God ordains that we should struggle our way through this difficult world to righteousness.”

“But a new world-” John suggested. “A new world of natural goodness, of natural wealth?”

She shook her head and the canoe bobbed. Bertram took up the paddle. “Men and women are born to struggle.”

“See you soon,” Bertram called over the widening gulf of water. “I’ll come over some time, when we are settled.”

John raised his hand in farewell and stood watching them. Bertram paddled the canoe awkwardly, with none of Suckahanna’s easy grace, and Sarah sat stiffly in the front for all the world like a Thames fishwife in a wherry. The current flowing swiftly downriver took them, so that Bertram need do no more than steer. John watched the flowing water for a long while after they had gone from sight around a bend in the river, then he turned and went slowly up the little track to his new house.

It stood, a plain little box made of green wood, in a square of cleared ground. John had felled no more than the trees he had needed to build it, and their unwanted branches and lesser wood was heaped in wasteful confusion all around. He stopped on his way up the riverbank to admire it. It was a square-built house, little more than a shed or a hovel, but he had felled the wood which had built it, and planed the planks of the door, and set the rough frame for the window and packed the reeds for the thatched roof, and he felt proud of it.

Then he looked a little closer. On one side of the door was the cutting he had picked when he first set foot on his new land. It had struck, he could see the fresh green growth of the trumpet vine which would flower in early summer as golden and as prolific as Turkish nasturtiums. But on the other side of the door, which he had not yet touched, someone had dug the earth, cleared it of stones, and planted another creeper, one he did not recognize, which already was putting out a little shoot to touch the new wall so that soon, perhaps as early as this summer, the door would be wreathed in some other new flower, planted by someone else.

His first thought was that Sarah must have put it in, working in an idle moment, while the rest of the building gang had been up on the roof. But then he realized that Sarah would have thought that such a task was a waste of time, and a vanity – neglecting the real work of the day. None of the builders would have troubled themselves with such a piece of frivolity. Bertram Hobert could not tell one plant from another unless it was tobacco from maize. And there had been no one else near the little house in the woods. John paused for a moment and then turned toward the darkening forest.

“Suckahanna?” he whispered into the green shadows. “Suckahanna? My love?”

She did not come to him, though that night he lay wakeful on the bare floor of his house, and waited for her, certain that she was out in the forest, waiting for him. At dawn he lifted the wooden latch on his new door and stepped out into the forest, already singing its way into morning, and looked around, expecting her to emerge from the trees and come to him. She was not there.

He went down to the river, half expecting to see her surface from the icy water, with a knife in her hand and a handful of freshwater mussels in her little purse; but the water was gray and ruffled only with the morning breeze.

John thought with a pang of cold fear that maybe she was tormenting him, to repay him for the delay, to make him wait for her as she had waited for him.

“I’m sorry,” he said, speaking to the indifferent trees, to the blithely singing birds in the high branches. “As soon as I got home I found my father was dead and there was much for me to do. My children needed me, and I had to work-” He hesitated. Even speaking before nothing but thick woodland, he was conscious of the lie of omission when he did not mention Hester. “I never forgot you,” he said. “Even when I was at war and fighting for my king I thought of you every day and I dreamed of you every night.” That part at least was mostly true.

He waited. From the river behind him came a loud splash. John whirled around. But there was only the spreading ring of water where a salmon had leaped or an otter broken the surface in a dive. She was not there. Not in the river and not in the trees.

John shrugged his coat a little closer around his shoulders and went into his house.

John opened a new sack of cornmeal and put his pot on the embers of the fire. He heated up enough water for a wash, a drink, and to make suppawn porridge for his breakfast.

“I must hunt this evening,” he said to the empty house. “I can’t live on this swill.”

He washed his face but did not trouble to shave. “I shall grow a beard and a mustache like my father,” he said to the empty room. “Who is there to see me after all?” He poured half the hot water into a beaker, threw a spoonful of the cornmeal into what was left and stirred it till it thickened. It was warm and he was hungry. He tried to ignore the fact that it tasted of nothing.

He took his bowl, spoon and pot down to the river and washed them, watching the reeds to his left for movement, in case Suckahanna was hiding there, watching him, and laughing at him having to do woman’s work. Then he filled the pot with fresh water and went back up to his house.

The room was still silent and empty. John took down his ax from the hook above the fireplace and went out to cut wood from the felled timber before the house. The great felling of trees to clear land for planting would have to wait. Firewood was the most important. The fire must not, on any account, go out. Enough people had warned him of the danger in Jamestown, and that was in a town, where you could borrow a couple of glowing embers from the house next door and carry them home on a shovel. Here in the wilderness, a fire was like a spark of life itself. If it went out it might take a couple of hours to get it lit again, even with a good tinderbox and dry wood, and if darkness and cold were coming on, that would seem a very long time. If a pack of wolves had found the courage to come to the door, it would feel like an eternity with neither light nor fire to scare them away, and no means of firing the musket.

John cut and split logs for most of the morning and then piled them on either side of the fireplace to dry. He opened the rough-planed door of his house and looked down to the river. He was aching with fatigue and yet all he had done was get in one, perhaps two, day’s supply of firewood. He had nothing for dinner but more suppawn porridge, and nothing at all for supper. He set the pot on the fire to heat the water and felt, for the first time, a dark sense of foreboding that surviving would be a struggle in this country that no longer seemed rich and easy.

“I must think,” John said into the silence of the house. “Suckahanna and I ate like princes, every day, and she was not chopping trees all morning. I must try to live like her, and not like an Englishman.” He scraped the last of the porridge from his wooden bowl and put it to one side. “I’ll put down a fish trap,” he resolved. “And at dusk when the birds are coming back to the trees to roost I’ll shoot a couple of pigeons.”

He felt the juices rush into his mouth at the thought of roast pigeon. “I can do that,” he promised himself. “I can learn to live here, I am a young man still. And later, when Bertram and Sarah come over, Sarah can teach me how to make bread.”

He set his bowl and spoon to one side and went to his pile of belongings, to find a length of twine. “Now a fish trap,” he said.

John had seen a fish trap in Jamestown, and had watched Suckahanna weave one out of the tendrils of vines and a couple of sticks. She had spent two evenings on it, and on the third evening they had eaten roasted carp. John had bought the withy hoops and the string in Jamestown, all he had to do was knot a net that would keep a fish inside. He took the string and the hoops outside, sat on a tree stump in the afternoon sunshine and started to work. First he made a row of knots around the large entrance hoop. The fish was to swim in, and then through a series of hoops, each one smaller, until it was trapped in a little space at the end of the maze, and could not find its way out. John knotted his first row and then set to work on the second. It was intricate, difficult work, but John was a patient man, and determined. He bent over the task, twisting the string, knotting, moving on to the next row. He did not notice the sun was falling behind the trees until the shadow had chilled his back. Then he straightened and sighed.

“By God, this is weary work,” he said. He took string and hoops inside the house and put them down at the fireside. The fire was burning low. He put on another couple of logs and took his musket down. He loaded it, tipping the powder and then the ball down the muzzle, and then sprinkled a pinch of powder at the top of the powder pan, ready for lighting. He bent over the fire to light the long coil of oiled string which served as the fuse. When it was glowing brightly he held it between first and second finger, well away from the powder pan, and went quietly out of his house.

The trees were so near that John could hunker down on his doorstep, his two vines on either side, and watch the open sky above him for the wood pigeons coming home to roost. A great whirling flock of them came in all at once, and John waited for them to settle in the trees. One plump, confident bird landed on an extended branch that dipped under its weight. John waited for the branch to stop swaying and then took careful aim, touching the glowing string to the powder.

He was lucky. The sound of the shot was like a cannon blast going off in that innocent land and the flock of pigeons exploded out of the trees in a flurry of whirling wings. But John’s target bird could not fly up, it spiraled downward, one wing broken, bleeding from the breast. John dropped his musket and taper and ran across the cleared ground, crossing it in five giant strides. The bird was scrabbling to get away, one wing trailing. John snatched it up and wrung its neck quickly and mercifully. He felt the little heart pound and then stop. He went back to the doorstep, put the bird inside, near the fireplace with the unfinished fish trap, and reloaded the gun.

The light was going fast and it was getting cold and dark. The pigeons, recovering from their fright, circled the little clearing and landed in the trees again. John took aim and fired and the birds dashed skyward again, but this time nothing fell to earth.

“Just the one,” John said. “Well, that will do for my supper at least.”

He plucked the bird carefully, saving the feathers in a fold of linen. “That’ll make me a pillow some day,” he said with assumed cheerfulness to the shadowy room. He gutted and beheaded the bird, tossing the entrails into the water in his cooking pot which he set on the fire for soup. Then he split the pigeon into four, and skewered the pieces carefully on a sharp green stick and set it before the fire with the pot beneath it to catch the dripping juices.

It was a long while for a hungry man to wait but John did not allow himself to hurry, nor to be distracted from the task of turning and turning the fowl while its stubbly skin grew golden, and then brown, and then finally crisp and black. “Pray God it’s cooked through,” John said fervently, his stomach rumbling with hunger.

He took the skewer, and with his knife pushed the pieces off the charred wood on to his trencher. The meat was speckled with burned wood. John flicked the splinters away and then took up a little leg joint. It was wonderful: hot, tasty, and strong. John burned his lips against the hot skin but nothing could have stopped him biting into the flesh. He ate every scrap of meat and then dropped the bare bones reverently into his cooking pot. For the first time in his little house he looked around with something like confidence.

“That was good,” he said quietly. He gave a quiet, satisfied belch. “That was excellent. I shall hunt again tomorrow. And I shall have the soup for my breakfast. A man cannot work on the land with only porridge in his belly.”

He picked a scrap of meat from his teeth. “By God, that was good.”

He kicked off his boots and drew his satchel and spare jacket toward him, folded them under his head for a pillow, and then pulled his traveling cloak and a rug over him. He opened one eye to see that the fire was banked in, and his fish trap was safe, and then he was asleep in moments.