Read Online Cape Cod by William Martin - Free Book Online Page A

stayed behind as well, having dug into enough graves that he claimed to need a respite from the face of death.
    Jack was glad to leave Bigelow at the rail beside Dorothy Bradford. Jack and Bigelow had become natural adversaries, like the sperm whale and the giant squid, and he could not understand the trust that others put in Bigelow. Even William Bradford treated him like a brother.
    Jack thought that, in most things, Bradford molded brains to his courage and good sense to his faith. But Jack would never have sailed off and left his wife at Ezra Bigelow’s side. Had Kate been as frail as Dorothy Bradford, Jack would never have left England at all. That was the difference ‘twixt a man of the world and a man of faith. The one never forgot his good sense. The other believed that the same God who warmed his English hearth would care for him in the wilderness.
    Jack did not think that with all the things God had to do, he was watching this miserable corner of the earth, so Jack would do it for him. While the others kept their heads out of the wind, Jack watched for creeks and inlets and, most of all, for whales, which they found, along with a handful of Indians, on a small bay some ten miles south of Cornhill.
    The Indians were cutting up a dead drifter and ran at sight of the explorers. This seemed a bad portent. Still, Jack said they were fools if they did not settle on a bay that drew drift whales and was a full five fathoms deep. But they were most of them farmers before seamen, and deep anchorage meant less than a spit’s-depth of black earth. So they named the bay Grampus for the abandoned whale, rejected it for the thin topsoil, and continued south.
    They stopped for the night just north of where the armlike Cape bent its elbow. There, they built a barricado of logs and boughs and gathered at the fire to give a prayer of thanks. For what, Jack did not know, as they lacked the good sense to settle on Grampus Bay, and how many more chances would God give them? While they prayed, he borrowed the mate’s spying glass and went down to the beach to continue God’s work.
    The tide had ebbed from this corner of the bay as though flowing from a shallow bowl. Flats now stretched for miles, a bleak muddy plain dotted with freezing pools and flocks of gulls gabbling busily about, gossiping and laughing like old women on market day. Jack wondered if they laughed at the fire glimmering feebly in the dusk… or at the praying around it.
    Through the glass, Jack scanned the southern coast. There was an inlet near the elbow, and west of that, two creeks. Between them stretched a beach, beds of eelgrass, and a collection of shadows that looked, in the fading light, like boulders, all of the same size and shape. He steadied the glass on the gunwale of the shallop to better see.
    “ ’Tisn’t appreciated when one of our number will not pray with us.” Simeon Bigelow’s voice, even in rebuke, was gentler than his brother’s, as if the voices and features reflected the men. Simeon was near as tall as Ezra, but fleshy and rumpled where his brother was hard and precise. Even his beard, a rough black tangle, contrasted with Ezra Bigelow’s pointed chin whiskers.
    “More whales.” Jack handed the glass to Bigelow and pointed toward the land between the creeks. “Enough oil to pay off all the debts of this group in one motion.”
    “They look like boulders.” Simeon lowered the glass. “Come mornin’, thou may seest more clearly.”
    “Come mornin’, we must go there.”
    “I be not the man to ask.” Simeon began to dig for something in the shallop.
    Jack grabbed him by the elbow. “Thou be the man to ask for me.”
    “Why shouldst I ask for thee?”
    “Thou be a man of good sense and broader mind than most.”
    Bigelow straightened himself and removed Jack’s fingers, one by one, from his elbow. “I hold the same beliefs as my brethren.”
    “But thou got charity in thee. Thou knows that, for all me rough words, I wish