Please God! John breathed.
The little flame flickered yellow again and caught. The twist of bark crisped, burned, and was consumed. John laid a couple of twigs across it and was rewarded by them catching alight at once. Immediately he fed the fire with bigger and bigger twigs until it was burning brightly and John was safe from the coming darkness and cold once more.
He realized then that he was hungry. In his cooking pot was porridge from last night, or if he wished to give himself the labor he could clean out the pot and set some water to boil and try to shoot a bird for meat. There was nothing else to eat.
He put the cooking pot a little closer to the flames so that the porridge would not be stone cold, and went to the door.
The evening was drawing in. The sun had gone behind the trees and the sky above the little house was veiled with strips of thinnest cloud, like the shawl the queen used to wear over her hair when she was on her way to Mass. Mantilla clouds, John said, looking up at them. The sky was pale, the color of dead lavender heads in winter, the color of heather in summer, violet and pink with all the brightness drained away.
John shivered. His momentary admiration of the sky had suddenly changed. At once it looked again too vast, too indifferent, it was impossible that a man as small as him could survive under the great dome of it. From the mantilla clouds looking down, Johns home would be nothing more than a little speck, John peeping out would be smaller than a flea. The country was too big for him, the forest too wide, the river too rich and cold and fast-flowing and deep. John had a sense that all his new life was nothing more than an arduous crawling like a little ant from one place to another and that his survival was of no interest to the sky, any more than the life of an ant was of interest to him.
God is with me, John said, summoning Janes faith.
There was a silence. There was no sign that God was with him. There was no sign that there was any God. John remembered Suckahanna casting smoking tobacco on the river at sunrise and sunset, and thought for a blasphemous moment that perhaps this land had strange gods, different gods, from England; and that if John could somehow creep under the protection of the gods of the new world then he would be safe from the indifferent gaze of the swelling sky.
I should be praying, John said quietly. He did not observe Sundays here in the wilderness. He did not even pray before his meals nor before he lay down to sleep at night. I dont even know when Sunday is! John exclaimed.
He could feel panic rising up in him at the thought that he had slept during this day; but he did not know how long he had slept. He did not know how far the town was downriver, how long it would take him to get there, that he did not even know what day it was.
I cannot go into town dressed like this and stinking like an animal! John said. But then he stopped. How was he to get clean if not in town? He could hardly wash and dry the clothes he needed unless he was prepared to run as naked as a savage in the forest. And how could he pay for all his laundry to be done in the town like some fine gentleman? All his money should be spent on hiring laborers to clear his land, buying seed corn, buying tobacco seeds, new axes, more spades.
John thought of the wealth of the house at Lambeth. He thought of the servants who did the work for him: the cook who prepared the meals, the maid who waited in the house, the garden and the gardeners, his wife Hester who ordered it all done; and how he had wildly, madly decided that none of it was for him any longer, and that his life belonged somewhere else, with another woman. Now he looked ready to die in that somewhere else. And the other woman was lost to him.
That is all this place is to me, he said softly. Somewhere else. I am living in somewhere else and I am going to die in somewhere else unless I can get myself home again.
A sharp, acrid scent reminded him abruptly of his dinner. He turned with a cry of distress. The cooking pot was spewing a dark smoke into the room, it had overheated and the porridge had stuck to the bottom of the pot and was burned.
John lunged to pull it away from the fire and then recoiled as the hot metal handle scorched into his hand. He dropped the pot and cursed, his hand burning with pain. He had a little water left in his cup and he poured it over the burn. The skin puckered up and turned white. John felt the sweat break out on his face at the pain and he cried out again.
He turned from the room and ran out of the door, down to the river. At the little beach before the house he knelt down to the water and plunged his hand in. The cold water felt like a blow from a whip against the damaged skin, but slowly the pain eased. Ah God, my God, John heard himself saying. What a fool! What a fool I am!
When the pain had eased a little he took his hand from the water and looked at it fearfully. The handle of the cooking pot had left a white stripe along his palm. The skin was dead-looking, swelling fast. John tried to flex his fingers; at once a sharp pain ran like a blade across his hand.
So now I have only one good hand, he said grimly, and burned dinner. He looked again at the sky. And night coming on.
He turned and walked slowly back up to the little house, his head full of thoughts and fears. The fire was still lit, which was one good thing. He pushed the overturned cooking pot with his booted foot. It rolled on the earth floor. It was cool, he had been down by the river for perhaps an hour. He had not known that the time was passing. He set it on its little feet and peered inside. There was nothing that he could eat. The porridge was blackened and charred almost to ashes.
John took the pot and went down to the river once more, picking his way in the twilight, which was coming on in a rush like a dark cloak thrown over the forest. He left the pot to soak in the water while he looked at his fish trap. It was empty. John went back to his pot and arduously, with his good left hand, tried to scrape out the charred remains, swill it and rinse it clean.
He filled the pot with water and, carrying it in his left hand, went back up the beach and up the little hill to his house. Where the trees had been felled before the house the forest was already regaining the land. Small vines and little weeds and ground-covering plants were invading the space. If John did not get out and dig soon the forest would crowd back in and his house would be all but forgotten, marked only on a map in the governors office as a headright, once claimed but then neglected, ready for another fool to take the challenge and try to make a life in the wilderness.
In the house John poured his drinking water into his cup, spilling some on the floor in his one-handed clumsiness, then he put a scoop of powdered corn flour into the water and set it to heat. This time he did not take his eyes from it, but stood over it, stirring as it thickened and came to the boil, and then set it to one side to cool before serving it into his trencher. He had made enough for breakfast tomorrow so he could eat when he woke in the morning. His stomach rumbled. He could not remember the last time he had eaten fruit or something green. He could not remember when he had last eaten meat that was not wood pigeon. He thought, absurdly and suddenly, of English plums and the sharp sweetness of their flesh. In his fathers garden there were thirty-three different varieties of plum tree, from the rare white diapered plum of Malta, which the Tradescants alone grew in all of England, to the common dark-skinned plum of every cottage garden.
In the house John poured his drinking water into his cup, spilling some on the floor in his one-handed clumsiness, then he put a scoop of powdered corn flour into the water and set it to heat. This time he did not take his eyes from it, but stood over it, stirring as it thickened and came to the boil, and then set it to one side to cool before serving it into his trencher. He had made enough for breakfast tomorrow so he could eat when he woke in the morning. His stomach rumbled. He could not remember the last time he had eaten fruit or something green. He could not remember when he had last eaten meat that was not wood pigeon. He thought, absurdly and suddenly, of English plums and the sharp sweetness of their flesh. In his fathers garden there were thirty-three different varieties of plum tree, from the rare white diapered plum of Malta, which the Tradescants alone grew in all of England, to the common dark-skinned plum of every cottage garden.
He shook his head. There was no point thinking about home and the wealth his father had left him. There was no point thinking about the richness of his inheritance, the flowers, the vegetables, the herbs, the fruit. There was no point thinking about any food which he could not catch or grow in this unhelpful land. All there was for dinner tonight, and breakfast the next day, was an unappetizing mess of corn porridge. And unless he could find a way to fish and shoot with only one hand, that would be all there was for a day or so, for a week or two, until his hand healed.
With his belly full of porridge John drank water and took off his boots, ready to sleep. His cloak was missing. He looked around for it, cursing his own laziness in not hanging it up every morning. It was nowhere to be seen. John felt a disproportionate alarm. His cloak was missing, the cloak Hester had given him, the cloak he always slept in. He could feel an absurd panic rising up in him and threatening to choke him. He strode to the corner of the room where his goods were piled and turned them over, tumbling them to the ground in his haste. His cloak was not there.
Think! he commanded himself. Think, you fool!
He steadied himself and his breathing, which had become hoarse and anxious, settled down. I must stay calm, John said to himself, his voice quavery against the darkness. I have left it somewhere. Thats all.
He went through his movements. He had slept in his cloak in the afternoon and then he had run outside when the fire had burned out. He remembered then. His cloak had been tangled around his feet and he had kicked it away in his haste to get some dry wood to relight the fire.