Virgin Earth

Winter 1644, Virginia

Winter clamped down on the coastal plain of Virginia as if it had taken sides in the war and was in savage alliance with the colonists. All the food stores of the Powhatan had been looted or fired, there was not enough to eat and even the skills of the women could not feed the tribe from the fish and crabs on the shoreline or the frozen berries left on the trees. The braves went out hunting every day and came back with duck and geese shot on their migrating journey southward. The meat was shared with strict fairness and then mothers gave their portion privately to their children and the old people pretended that they were not hungry.

When they had started the war they had thought that it would be over in one great rush – as battles generally were. There was a persistent belief that the white people would simply go, back to where they came from, especially since they always spoke of that other place as “home,” and talked of it with longing. Why would a man abandon his own fields, his own woods, his own game, and scratch a life on the edge of a strange river? If things went badly for him why would he not take one of the great ships and go, as easily and as unexpectedly as he had come?

Of all the questions Opechancanough had put to John he had never asked him if the colonists would leave if they were defeated – the question never arose in the chief’s mind. He knew that land which had been won in a battle could be lost in a battle. He knew that a newly arrived people could be easily dislodged. It never occurred to him until this terrible winter that the white people would renege on their promise to move on, on their promise that they wanted only a small patch of land at Jamestown, and then their promise that they would settle a narrow strip by the river and live in peace with their neighbors.

Opechancanough did not expect men to be honest. He himself had promised peace with a smile on his face and twice gone to war. But he did not expect the depth and consistency of duplicity that the white people brought to the virgin earth. He did not expect their determination, and to his death he never understood their greed.

In the little village there was a strong sense that everything had gone wrong. The first attack had been a victory but since then they had been hunted like frightened hares. Hidden now in the swamps in midwinter they were safe enough but there was a growing fear that the swamps might be all that was left for them, that only the arid land, the brackish water, the desolate and barren places would be left for the People who had been proud to walk safe on their footpaths through fertile woods.

John’s share of the food stuck in his throat. He did not go hunting with the braves, he was not invited. He cleared the land around the temporary village with the women and with the old people, keeping his head low and scraping the earth with his hoeing stick, dropping the precious seeds safely into the earth and covering them up. He felt as if he had died on the raid on that little farmhouse and that it was his ghost who worked in the row behind Suckahanna and humbly lay in her little house at night. She did not reject him, she did not invite him. She did not by one gesture or one glance show that she saw him at all. She carried herself with simple dignity as a widow who has lost her man, and John in her shadow found that he was wishing that he had died before seeing that beautiful, loving face look away from him and those dark, veiled eyes go blind.

He thought she might grow kinder to him if he worked without complaint and lay on the floor of her house at night like a dog, like a hunting dog which has been beaten into submission. But she stepped over him when she rose in the morning and went to her prayers in the icy water as if he were a log on the floor. She went past him without disdain, without a glance that might offend him, without a look that might open up a conversation between them, even if it were to be a quarrel. She acted as if he were a dead man, a lost man, a ghost, and as the months went by Tradescant felt that he was lost indeed.

He went to find Attone, who was setting a fish trap by the river and watching the flow of the rising flood water over the markers at the riverbank.

“Can I speak with you?” John asked humbly.

His former friend glanced at him and then away as if the sight of John displeased him. “What?”

“I need advice.”

There was an unhelpful silence.

“Suckahanna turns from me and says not one word to me.”

Attone nodded.

“Is there anything I can do to make it better between us?”

Attone bent down and raised the trap from the water. The delicate withy work was bending in the current; he straightened a twig and then carefully bedded it in with pebbles before he answered. He took his time, the whole process took nearly half an hour.

“Nothing.”

“Will she take me back as a husband if I serve her without complaint? Perhaps in Coltayough? In the warm time?”

Attone thought for a moment, his eyes still on his fish trap, and then shook his head. “I shouldn’t think so.”

“At Nepinough?”

Again the dismissive shake of the head.

“Will she ever forgive me for coming home without blood on my hands?”

Attone turned from the river and looked John squarely in the face. The relief of being seen, of gaining a response, was so great that John wanted to fling his arms around his former friend. Just that one look was an affirmation that he was a man still; that he could be seen and acknowledged.

“Never, I should think,” Attone said.

Tradescant drew breath. “What have I done that is so bad?”

“Don’t you know?”

Dumbly, Tradescant shook his head.

“You’ve shamed her. She stood for you before all the People and said you were a man worthy to be tested. You were tested and you passed and she chose you as her man, before all the People. Now they all look at her and say what a fool that woman is to choose a man who bends like a willow, who is neither white nor brown, who is neither English nor Powhatan, who is neither hunter nor gardener, who is neither Eagle nor John.”

“Will she never forgive me?”

“How can she? Will she ever not feel the shame?”

“If we were to go away-”

Attone laughed a brief bitter laugh. “Where? D’you think she’d live in Jamestown? D’you think they’d not take her out and hang her or worse? D’you think she’d live with you in that house and send tobacco down the river and pack up your plants for you, and be a wife like the other one, the one you left behind in England? Or d’you think to take her to England and watch her die in exile, as Pocahontas did?”

John shook his head, he felt as bewildered as a scolded child. “I’ve been a fool,” he said.

For a moment Attone softened. He dropped his hand on John’s shoulder. “These are foolish times,” he said. “I think at the end of it all, when the Great Hare runs through the world all alone again, we will all seem fools.”

“Can the People survive?” John asked in a low whisper.

Attone shook his head.