John Billington loved mornings. He loved waking before his wife and sons, before the human world woke. If he stirred before them, he thought it already a day blessed by God. When the boys were young—for seven years at least—there had not been a morning like this. Now, his eldest, John the younger, was two years dead, in a grave behind his house. His youngest, Francis, was in bed with his mother.
John Billington heard the ee-oh-lay of thrush. He imagined what trees the birds were on, what fences. Ten, then twenty, the numbers swelling, growing louder, until there seemed to be a symphony. He smiled large enough to reveal his rotting front tooth. His wife and son slept through the noise. Astonishing it was, to hear the low hum in the background of your life brought forth to a crescendo. At fifty years of age, he knew the world was painful, but also beautiful.
Behind the sound of birds, he heard his goat, Mary, opening herself up for her infant. Two weeks earlier she bore three babies. The runt, a male, was the only to survive. He suckled greedily at the teat.
The birds were startling in their shrill calls to one another. Though perhaps this was not a happy sound at all, but instead rivalry. The birdsong came to a halt. He did not hear their wings flapping in the wind. It was as if they saw something and, in fear, kept quiet. He could no longer hear the goats, either. Had sound itself ceased?
John Billington tiptoed from his bed to the door, opened it only enough to slip out. He was a slender man, often preferring drink to food, and the door made little sound.
Outside, nothing was amiss. His house was still directly across from Governor Bradford’s. He was still at the crossroads betwixt the wide road that ran east–west, from the ocean to the meetinghouse, and the road that ran north–south. He was still in the last place he wished to be: at the center of it all, so the puritan hypocrites could place their watchful eyes upon him. These puritans kept their enemies close.
Why were they hypocrites? The reasons were numerous, but on this morning John Billington was most concerned thus: that they forbid commoners such as himself from trading with the Wampanoag Indians while they did so freely. As if the Indians were murderers, when in fact the only ones near Plymouth who had murdered were Captain Standish and his militia, the proof of which—Wituwamat’s head on a stake—was erected atop the roof of the meetinghouse. In pamphlets the puritans called the Indians idle, unable to help themselves, poor farmers who left the land desolate and therefore ready for the English. But it was Squanto who had shown them how to fertilize the sandy, shallow soil with fish; it was the Wampanoag Indians who gave them seeds to grow squash, corn, and beans. It was the knowledge of the Wampanoag women, planting in their own fields, that they had, in the beginning, relied upon. All things Governor Bradford would never put in writing. A disgrace that the hypocrites called themselves godly men and lied thus to get what it was they wanted: profit. John Billington had every right to trade with them.
The birds were gone. Who or what had provoked them? Had Billington had too much ale last evening? No, two pints only, though he had hoped for more.
A lone colonist walked up the hill toward the meetinghouse. A man whose face and gait he did not recognize. Beyond him, on the water, at a distance Billington could barely see, was a ship full of passengers, passengers sold on lies about what awaited them. His own experience on the Mayflower, though ten years past, was palpable. He had been the tenth person to step off the ship. He should be considered an elder. But the leaders of Plymouth would never recognize him as such. Those like him—the former and current indentured servants, the commoners—treated him with deference. There were three hundred people in Plymouth now. Some were unfamiliar to him. But he’d been here long enough to have many familiars whom he wished were strangers.
As if Billington had conjured him with his thoughts, Governor Bradford stepped out of his house. Billington looked away, but was not quick enough. Governor Bradford tipped his hat.
The elders would never be his friends.
Ten years before, when the hypocrites’ ship, the Speedwell, had sprung a leak—twice—they demanded a place on the already-crowded Mayflower. Bradford, who was then just a man with self-righteousness and an inheritance, asked John Billington to move his family’s place from the center of the ship to the side, where, during a storm, the water might run.
You’d have me sleep with the gunpowder? Billington had said.
Rather than turn back to Holland, whence they came, the puritans had persisted in adding themselves to the Mayflower. Billington knew they were a people who believed in God’s back parts—that God was ever present even when not visible. They believed in signs, as he did, so he spoke to them thus.
Perhaps the leaking Speedwell is a sign, Master Bradford?
William Bradford turned.
A sign you should go back to Holland. Perhaps God does not wish you to see the New World.
Profane, Bradford said, rather loudly, to his first wife, Dorothy—rest her soul—which was not for Dorothy at all, but for Billington. That was the first of many conflicts betwixt them.
Billington wondered what allies and what foes might be aboard this approaching ship.
It was not he, John Billington, nor his kind, who supported Bradford as governor. Billington had arrived as an indentured servant and as such was not even permitted to vote. Had the servants had a vote, Billington’s people would have been in the majority and Billington’s kind would have led. But no, he knew, they never would. They never did.
John Billington had not been brought up with an inheritance, as Bradford, Brewster, and Carver were, as many of these hypocrites were, though they complained that Holland did not offer them enough. Being poor did not make him, John Billington, profane. Profanity was a man who preached God’s way and acted against it. Profanity was forbidding baptism and the celebration of Christmas, as these puritans did.
Plymouth was the England that John Billington had tried to escape, just under a different name. Instead of King James, there was Governor Bradford and his hired soldier, Myles Standish.
Billington let the chickens out of their coop. They rushed toward him, eager for scraps, but he had left the carrots and corn in the house. He lunged. Shoo.
Dear God, he thought. Those birds. What sign could this be? A voice came to him, as it did on occasion. The voice may have been his own, or may have been his ancestors, or may have been God. But whenever it spoke, he listened. Today all will appear the same, but something will not be.