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. That’s 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.
“I left it outside,” he said quietly. “Now I’ll have to get it.”
He went slowly to the door and put his hand on the wooden latch. He paused. Through the cracks between the planks the colder night air breathed against his face like an icy sigh. It was dark beyond the wooden door, dark with a density that John had never seen before in his life, a blackness which was not challenged by firelight nor candlelight nor torchlight for dozens of miles in one direction, and hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions of miles westward. It was a darkness that was so powerful and so completely void of light that John had a foolish, superstitious fear that it he opened the door, the night would rush into the room and extinguish the fire. It was a darkness which was too great for him to challenge.
“But I want my cloak,” he said stubbornly.
Slowly, fearfully, he opened the door a little way. The clouds were thick between him and the stars, the darkness was absolute. With a little whimper John dropped to his hands and knees like a child and crawled over the threshold of his house, his hands before him feeling his way, hoping to touch his cloak.
Something brushed against his outstretched fingers and he recoiled with a sob of fright, but then he realized that it was the soft wool of his cloak. He gathered it up to him as if it was a treasure, one of the king’s most beautiful sacred tapestries. He bundled it to his face and smelled his own strong scent, not with distaste but with a sense of relief at smelling something human in this icy empty darkness.
He did not dare to turn his back on the void. With one arm tucking his cloak to his chest, he backed, still on his hands and knees, into his doorway like a frightened animal retreating into its lair, and then he shut the door.
His eyes, strained wide open against the darkness, blinked blindly when he was back in the fitful flickering light of the cottage. He shook out his cloak. It was wet with dew. John hardly cared. He wrapped himself in it and lay down to sleep. Lying on his back, his eyes still wide open in fear, he could see the steam rising off himself. If he had not been so deep in despair he would have laughed at the sight of a hungry man supping on porridge, a cold man wrapped in damp cloth, a pioneer with one hand. But none of it seemed very funny.
“Dear God, keep me safe through the night and show me what I must do in the morning,” John said as he closed his eyes.
He waited in the darkness for sleep to come, listening to the sounds of the forest outside his door. He had a moment of acute terror when he heard a pack of wolves howling in the distance, and thought that they might smell the food and come and ring the cottage with their bright yellow eyes and their lean, serene faces. But then they fell silent and John fell asleep.
When he woke in the morning it was raining. He put his cloak to one side and put the pot by the fire to heat. He stirred the porridge but when he came to eat it he found he had no appetite. He had gone through hunger into indifference. He knew he must eat; but the gray porridge, dirty with the old ash from the inside of the pot, was tasteless in his mouth. He forced himself to swallow five mouthfuls and then put the pot in the fireplace to stay warm. If there were no fish in the trap, and if he could not shoot something, then it would be porridge for dinner as well.
The stocks of wood beside the fire were low. John went outside. The woodpile was low too and damp from the rain. John took nearly all of it and stacked it inside the house to dry. He went to grasp his ax to go and cut some more but the pain from his burned hand made him cry out. He could not use the ax until the burn was healed. He would have to gather wood, break up what he could by stamping on it, and burn the longer branches from one end to another, pushing them into the heart of the fire as they were consumed.
He went out into the rain, his head bowed, wearing only his homespun coat, leaving his cloak behind to dry. He had seen a fallen tree rather like an oak when he had been out with his gun a few days ago. He trudged toward it. When he got there he saw that some of the branches had split from the main trunk. There was wood that he could use. Using only his left hand, he pulled a branch away from the rest of the tree, and tucked the limb under his arm. It was hard work getting it home. The broad sweep of the branch kept getting caught in the undergrowth, wedged against trees, enwrapped in ground vines. Again and again John had to stop and go back and break it free. The forest of John’s headright was thick, almost impenetrable, it took John all the morning to travel just one mile with his firewood, and then another hour to break it up into manageable logs before bringing it inside the house to dry.
He was soaked through by the rain and by sweat and aching with tiredness. The burn on his hand was oozing some kind of liquid. John looked at it fearfully. If the wound went bad then he would have to go to Jamestown and put himself in the hands of whatever barber surgeon had set up in the town. John was afraid of losing his hand, afraid of the journey to Jamestown, one-handed in a dugout canoe, but equally afraid of staying on his own in the cottage if he became ill. He could taste the sweat on his upper lip and recognized the scent of his own fear.
He turned to the fire, wanting to think of something else. The fire was burning well and the room was warm. John looked out through the open window and through the gaps in the plank walls. The forest outside seemed to have come a little closer, to have advanced through the sheets of rain to press a little nearer to the solitary house.
“Don’t let it destroy me,” John whispered, knowing himself to be absurd. “Don’t let me come all this way and try so hard, to be just grown over as if I were nothing more than the dead body of a dog.”
There was nothing to eat but yesterday’s porridge. John did not bother to heat it. Warm or cold, it was equally unpleasant to him. He took a spoon and made himself eat four spoonfuls and then took a drink of water. He knew that he should go out into the forest with his gun and shoot a wood pigeon, a squirrel, anything he could get, for its meat. But the rain was too forbidding and the darkening sky was threatening thunder. John felt a sense of deep, helpless terror at the thought of being out there amid all that powerful green life, with the rain pouring more life and more energy into the avid earth, and him the only thing in the woods that was cringing and growing weaker every day.
“I’ll sleep while it rains,” he said, trying to comfort himself. “I’ll take the gun out at twilight, that’s always a good time.”
He took off his wet coat and his sodden breeches and spread them out to dry, then he pushed one of the big branches into the heart of the fire, wrapped himself up in his warm cape, and fell asleep.