Shadowbrook (5 page)

“Your father’s dying. He’s only got a few more months. That’s why Miss Lorene asked me to find you. She said I was to tell you that afterward you could do as you liked with her blessing, but if you let your father die with the last words between you spoken in rage, she’ll never forgive you. And you’ll never forgive yourself.”

Cormac felt better for saying it. He squatted and began attending to his own rifle, examining the severed carrying strap. Quent walked away and stood at the edge of the clearing, staring into the trees. Every once in a while Cormac lifted his head and examined the other man’s rigid back.

The shade was thicker where Quent stood and the forest floor was a mass of nodding bluebells. There were no bluebells at Shadowbrook; it was too far north. There were plenty of other flowers, though. No place on earth was more beautiful. At least none he’d seen. But for him the land of the lakes would always be haunted by Shoshanaya’s ghost. In the Ohio Country he was free of that, free to be his own man. And in the Ohio Country he wasn’t a slave owner.

“This land be your pa’s land, but it don’t rightly belong to no human being,” Solomon the Barrel Maker told Quentin Hale in 1732 when the boy was nine years old. Solomon had been born to a slave bought by Quentin’s grandfather. He had always been Hale property, and he understood the difference between possession and ownership. “This land belong to God Almighty. It got a lot to teach you. No way you can have learned it all. Not yet.”

The land known as the Hale Patent had been given to Quent’s grandfather back in 1696 by King William and Queen Mary. It comprised a great swathe of upper New York wilderness that had been presented to a minor court functionary originally from the Kentish town of Lewes not because he was a noble or had any particular claim on the crown, but because he was judged foolhardy enough to take his young wife and go live there.

To the south were the Dutch families, people with names like VanSlyke and de Vlackte and Schuyler, who had settled the far reaches of Nieuw Netherland before the English took it from the Dutch in 1664. The fierce Kahniankehaka, who were part of the Iroquois Confederacy and whom the Europeans called the Mohawk lived to the west. North were the hated French. It suited the British to plant on some hundred thousand acres of the wilderness between them a colonist firmly tied to the English crown, and the English tongue, and the English way of doing and being.

By the time Ephraim Hale—born on the Patent his father had named Shadowbrook—came into his inheritance, the land had changed them all. They were English, yes, and certainly loyal to King George II. But by nature and nurture and instinct they were what the land of their birth had made them: Americans, accustomed to living beside people who were different from themselves, and to following their own rules in a place where they need want for nothing.

The Patent was a land of incredible riches, folded between the Adirondack Mountains to the west and Hudson’s River to the east. It was dotted with countless lakes, most small, but a few wide enough so a man needed a day to row from side to side and a week to paddle the full length. There was more hardwood than could be cut for warmth or shelter in a dozen lifetimes. The brooks and streams teemed with fish, and there was every imaginable kind of game in the forests. The
presence of the lakes and the river gentled Shadowbrook’s harsh northern climate. Between them was the rich black earth of the rolling lowlands and broad alluvial flats where summer wheat grew tall and thick with seed and barley and rye and corn thrived, as did the tender hops necessary for ale.

At one of its many corners the Hale Patent rolled up to the big lake English-speaking people called Bright Fish Water, a translation of the name given it by the People of the Great River, the Mahicans, who had been scattered by the Kahniankehaka many years before. The French who lived at the distant other end of the lake knew it as the Lac du St. Sacrement. At another place the Patent folded itself around a long, curved sweep of watercourse fed by the rushing brooks and streams of the mountains. It emptied into Hudson’s River which flowed south from Albany to the harbor of New York City.

By the time he was nine the land of Shadowbrook had entered Quent’s blood. Then, on the frozen-in-white December day when he stood with Solomon the Barrel Maker near Tenant Mountain, near the crevasse they called Swallows Chil dren, he saw the first thing in his young life that he neither expected nor understood.

Quent’s father appeared out of the dark shadow of the snow-laden conifers that rimmed the crevasse, a treacherous wedge-shaped split in the earth, seductively narrow at the top edge with a rushing underground river below. Ephraim Hale rode a big brown gelding and a squaw sat behind him. Her arms were wrapped around his waist, and before the riders became aware of Quent and Solomon watching them, her cheek was pressed to his spine.

Ephraim saw his son and reined in his horse. He murmured something to the woman and she straightened. A small gray horse behind them stopped as well. Quent paid it no attention; he was busy examining the squaw. She didn’t look to be either Kahniankehaka or Mahican. She wore leggings made of pure white skins laced tight with white thongs. The skirt of her overdress was white as well, and the thick jacket that covered the top half of her was fashioned of a sleek white fur and had a hood rimmed in long-haired white fur that might be fox, except that Quent had never seen a white fox.

“This here’s my youngest boy, Quentin,” Ephraim Hale said. “Goes by Quent. And that nigra with him, that’s my slave. Goes by Solomon the Barrel Maker.”

The squaw threw back her white fur hood and her black braid fell over her shoulder and shone in the midday sun. Her features were delicate and her black eyes enormous. She said nothing but she smiled at Quent; her teeth gleamed white against her honey-colored skin.

“This is Pohantis,” Ephraim continued. “She’s from Singing Snow, a Potawatomi village a ways north and west of here. She’s come to stay with us for a time.” He half-turned and gestured to the small figure on the gray. “That’s her
boy, Cormac Shea. A year younger than you. He’ll be staying with us as well. Never been in these parts before. You can show him the lay of the land.”

Quent looked at the other boy. He wore ordinary fawn-colored buckskins the same as Quent’s. The fur of his jacket—dark brown like the boy’s hair and his eyes—was probably beaver. The surprise was his skin. It was white, the same as his name. Quent felt his father’s eyes watching him. Solomon’s large hand exerted pressure against his back. Quent nodded in the direction of the strange boy. Cormac turned his head away and stared at his mother and Ephraim Hale.

“You’ll be having your lessons together and such,” Ephraim said. “Easier on everyone if you get along.”

Quent would always remember that moment: his father, the squaw dressed in blindingly white fur pressed up against his back, and her son a white boy with an English name. And the easy way his father said, “And that nigra with him, that’s my slave.” It was the first time he’d ever heard the claim stated aloud.

He’d asked Solomon once how it was that he could be owned like a horse or a book or a bolt of cloth. “’Cause I be bought and paid for.”

“But you’re a person. Like me. Can my father sell me?”

“Ain’t never gonna let that happen. You be white. Ain’t no white people be slaves. Only black nigra people.”

“Why?”

As they talked, Solomon had been shaving the long side of a strip of oak just come from Shadowbrook’s sawmill, straddling his workbench and holding the narrow plank of wood across his knees while he smoothed the adze back and forth, back and forth. When he butted that piece of oak against the next plank of the eventual barrel it would fit smoothly, and after he bound them together with leather hoops and the barrel spent a month submerged in water, that seam and all the other seams would have swollen tight shut.

“Ain’t no why about it,” he said without breaking the rhythm of his long, even strokes. “That’s the way it is. It say in the Bible, ‘Slaves, be subject to your masters.’ Don’t say nothin’ about asking why.”

Quent knew about the Bible.

One of the settlements on the Hale land was called Do Good. Maybe a dozen families lived there, and there was a small church they called a meeting house. It looked pretty much like a barn. Lorene Devrey Hale didn’t hold with the services in Do Good’s church. No preaching, she said. No Bible reading. No music. No flowers, not even in high summer when they were everywhere. Just the folks from Do Good sitting around and mostly not saying anything, and talking funny when they did.

Quent’s mother conducted her own Sunday service in the great hall of the big house. She insisted that all twenty-six of her husband’s slaves come, and of course
her two sons. Most weeks the tenants who lived near enough came as well: the Davidsons, who worked the sawmill, and the Frankels, who were in charge of the gristmill and did the distilling at the sugarhouse. Sometimes even Ephraim attended. But whether or not he was present, it was Lorene who read from the Bible.

“Better suited to it,” Ephraim said once when he was asked why his wife led the service. Mostly he didn’t sing either. He was the only one exempt; Lorene made the others sing while she accompanied them on her dulcimer, and before Pohantis and her son Cormac came to Shadowbrook, Lorene smiled at everyone when the service was over. After their arrival there were fewer smiles.

Quent heard his parents talking soon after Pohantis and Cormac arrived, when they didn’t know he was outside the half-opened door to the room where his father did his sums. “I got a fire in me for her, that’s why. It’s convenient having her nearby.”

“You had a fire in you for me once.”

“That’s true, I did.”

“But not since—”

“Lorene, she’s a squaw and a whore. Left her people and ran off with a damn fool Irishman. Only went back to her village after he got himself eaten alive by the Huron. She’s got nothing to do with you, or our life here.”

“How can you say that? You brought her here. She’s living under my roof.”

“I decide who—”

“You’d have lost this land if it weren’t for me! Don’t you turn your face from me, Ephraim Hale! You know that’s true. If it weren’t for my dowry—”

Quent heard a crack of sound. Maybe a drawer being slammed shut. Maybe something else. Then he heard his mama crying. That scared him so he ran away.

Next day Ephraim brought Cormac to join the daily lessons Lorene gave her younger son. He was the only pupil because the two Frankel children—Elsie, eight, and her five-year-old brother, Tim—who sometimes came weren’t there that day. It was the only time he had ever seen his father in the classroom.

Ephraim pushed Pohantis’s boy into the seat beside Quent. “Teach him, too,” Ephraim told his wife. “He speaks a fair bit of English, but he needs to learn more. And how to read and write. A little geography wouldn’t hurt either.”

He had always refused to let her teach the children of the slaves. Now he was bringing her a half-breed. “Why?”

“Because I promised.”

Lorene’s blue eyes narrowed and she nodded her head in bitter understanding. “Not her. You’d pay no mind to what you promised her. You promised the village chief, didn’t you? In order to get her.”

“Clever,” Ephraim said softly. “Too clever for a woman. See he learns.”

Cormac did learn, and quickly. And he had things to teach as well.

A few days after Cormac started coming to the classroom both boys were in the woods on a hill above the big house where they’d been sent to gather kindling. Quent spotted a rabbit standing perfectly still with his ears perked straight up and his nose twitching, seeking the danger smells in the biting winter twilight before setting out to feed. But the rabbit was sniffing in the wrong direction. He didn’t pick up the human scent.

Two years before, a Scot who looked like a barrel on legs and spoke in an accent so strange Quent could barely understand him had come to visit his father. The men spent two weeks riding and rowing all over Shadowbrook. Before he left to return to what he called the “auld country” the Scot gave Quent a dirk; he’d been practicing with it ever since. Now the small dagger flew through the air in a perfect arc almost too swift to be seen. The thin, pointed blade landed in the rabbit’s neck and the creature died instantly.
“Tkap iwkshe,”
Cormac murmured. Well done. It was the first time he’d spoken to Quent in the Potawatomi’s Algonkian language. Quent didn’t understand the words, but he could tell from the tone that they were complimentary.

Quent gathered his kill so he could bring it home to Kitchen Hannah to skin and clean and cook. She was called that to distinguish her from Corn Broom Hannah, who cleaned the big house. Quent knew names were important, that they told you things about people. “What’s your Indian name?” he asked when he had bled the rabbit and tucked it into the leather bag he’d been filling with kindling.

“Don’t have one.”

“Why not?”

“I was named by my father. For a great warrior among his people.”

“I thought the clan mothers decided the child’s name.”