Entered in the Ledger at Plymouth, autumn 1621. Told by Mrs. Whiskers III. Written down by Obedience Tibbs, who would like it known that this episode is about him.
THE RAT
Ink.
Candle smoke.
Wet wool and old wine.
Forty-one men in a cabin built for six.
And under the table, a rat and a boy.
It was the morning of the eleventh of November, 1620, and the Mayflower was riding at anchor inside the hook of Cape Cod, in a harbor so wide and calm after sixty-six days at sea that nobody quite trusted it.
The night before, the Strangers had said it out loud. You heard me tell it. The patent was for Virginia. This wasn’t Virginia. So the patent didn’t count, and the Company’s rules didn’t count, and when they got ashore, nobody had the right to tell anybody else what to do.
The Saints had lain awake all night over that.
Not because they disagreed. They agreed. That was the trouble. The Strangers were right. There was no law here. There were a hundred and two people, a ship that was going home in the spring, a coast full of somebody else’s smoke, and winter coming in off the water.
You can’t build anything with a hundred and two people who don’t have to listen to each other.
So in the morning the elders called all the men to the great cabin, at the back of the ship, to write a new piece of paper.
The great cabin was where the master of the ship lived, and it was great only in comparison with everything else aboard. It had a table, bolted to the floor. It had a bench along the stern windows, and a lantern, and a shelf for the master’s charts. On a normal day it held Master Jones and perhaps two officers if they all breathed in turn.
That morning it held forty-one men.
They came in stooping, shoulder to shoulder, wet coats steaming, hats in their hands, and they packed the walls and the bench and the doorway and stood two deep along the windows, and the ones in back stood on tiptoe to see the ones in front.
Obedience had been told to stay below with his mother.
So naturally he was under the table.
He’d gone in an hour early, before anybody came, and wedged himself in the corner between two of the table’s great oak legs with his knees up under his chin. I found him there because I’d had the same idea. The great cabin was where the master kept his good biscuit.
He looked at me. I looked at him.
He put a finger to his lips.
That was fair. So did I, in my way.
They started by arguing.
The Strangers stood together near the door, and the Saints stood together near the windows, and the space in the middle got smaller and hotter by the minute. From under the table I could see nothing but boots, forty-one pairs of them, in every condition you can imagine after two months at sea, and I could tell who was angry by the way the boots moved.
A pair of big square-toed boots by the door, cracked across the toes, planted wide. A carpenter’s boots.
“There’s no patent for this place.”
A pair of good black shoes by the window, tied with laces, the leather gone white with salt. Those were John Carver’s.
“Nobody denies it.”
“Then nobody here’s got the right to give orders. Not you, not the elders, not the Company. We came over to work the Company’s land in Virginia. This isn’t the Company’s land.”
“Whose is it, then?”
The square toes shifted. That was a better question than either of them knew, and neither of them answered it.