The Light in the Forest (4 page)

“You Injun-crazy young fool!” the red-haired guard panted as he got up. “I wasn’t trying to shoot him—just to save his hair.”

As they tied his arms again True Son still struggled. Half Arrow stood by, grave and impassive.

“Once long ago my cousin had white blood,” he apologized to the guard. “Now you can rest your mind. I will stay on this side like you say. But first
I would like to give True Son a message from his father before we are separated by the waters.”

“You can give him a message,” the guard said sharply. “But don’t try to give him a knife. If you do, you’ll get a bullet between your ribs.”

At the order to march Half Arrow moved beside True Son. Through the trees ahead they could see the river.

“I talk now for your father, True Son,” he began. “He said I should tell you this. On no account must I forget. These are his words: ‘True Son. Remember what happens to the white prisoner the Indian takes. If the white prisoner bears his hardship with patience and cheerfulness, his Indian master likes him. He knows he will make a good Indian. So he treats him well and adopts him. True Son. If the white prisoner fights him or hangs back or tries to escape or if he complains all the time, the Indian knows he will never make one like himself. Then there is nothing to do but scalp him. True Son. If you fight and hang back, maybe the white man will scalp you. True Son. It is better to wait for your cause to be ripe like a persimmon on the snow before you fight back. True Son. It is wiser to be willing and be alive than be defiant
and be dead so your father and mother and sisters have to mourn you.’ ”

True Son bowed his head. The words were so like his father’s, he could hear the sound of his father’s voice in his mind. Half Arrow went on.

“Your father said more. He said, True Son. Remember the time we hunted on the White Woman’s River. We came on a bear and the shot broke its backbone. The bear fell down and started to cry like Long Tail, the panther. Your father went up and struck it with his ramrod across the nose. He said, ‘Listen, bear. You are a coward and not the warrior you pretend to be. You know our tribes are at war. Had you conquered me, I would have borne it with courage and died like a warrior. But you, bear, sit and whimper like an old woman. You disgrace your tribe with your behavior.’ True Son. Do you remember?”

“I remember,” the boy groaned. “Tell my father so. Tell him I will bear my disgrace like an Indian and will wait to strike till the time is in my favor.”

The two marched on in silence. When they came to the river’s edge, Half Arrow stepped aside and True Son waded in alone. The water grew steadily higher till it reached above his waist. He shivered,
but he did not turn around. Not till he was out and dripping on the other side and following the trail on the bank with the column did he look back. Far across the water he could make out two figures. They were Half Arrow and Little Crane, standing at the water’s edge. Their eyes, he knew, strained after him. He wished he could hold up his hand in farewell but his arms were tied. Then he passed with his companions into the forest.

F
ROM
now forward he was on his own, the boy told himself. He would have to think his own Indian thoughts and follow his own Indian counsel. He gave no sign of the constriction in his throat or the loathing in his breast when they entered the white man’s stronghold of Fort Pitt; the gloomy stone, the dark passageways, the drunken soldiers, all the swaggering of the white-skinned legion and
among them a few turncoat Indians looking pitiful and slavish among their enemies.

But it was when they had left Fort Pitt and crossed the eastern mountains that the full weight of his exile fell on him. Never along the Tuscarawas had he seen such tremendous mounds of earth and rock heaped to the sky and running farther than the eye could see. Once behind him, they were like unscalable stockades separating him from his people. And now he saw he had reached a point he had often heard about, the sad, incredible region where the Indian forest had been cut down by the white destroyers and no place left for the Indian game to live. Here the desolate face of the earth had been exposed to dead brown weeds and stubble, lorded over by the lodges of the white people and the fat storehouses of their riches. Fort Pitt had been ugly, but it had still been Indian country. This now, he knew, was the barbarous homeland of his white enemies.

He could feel them all around him. His moccasins tramped no longer soft mossy forest trails but a hard-rutted roadway. Curious wooden barriers ran alongside in a regular crooked fashion with spreading wooden horns at each angle. He was told they were meant to keep the white man’s
cattle from running free. The cattle stood tame and stolid as the soldiers passed, but the white people came running from their lodges to line the road. From the noise they made you might have thought the white army came from a great battle with loot and scalps instead of only children captives and without a shot having been fired.

Every hour the forest receded and the lodges of the whites grew more numerous. Late that afternoon they encamped near a white man’s village. How could human beings, he wondered, live in such confinement! Here the whites had shut themselves up in prisons of gray stone and of red stone called brick, while the larger log houses had been covered over with smooth painted boards to give them the glittering ostentation and falseness so dear to the whites. Evidently their coming had been expected, for many people awaited them. Herds of saddled horses stood around. Men and women must have come a long way. Small crowds tried to storm the captives as soon as they arrived, but the soldiers held them off.

That evening the red-headed guard spoke to True Son in Delaware.

“Well, thank the Almighty I won’t have to wetnurse
you much more. Your father’s taking you over in the morning.”

The boy gave no answer but the realization of who these people were swept over him. They were the captives’ future masters, who would claim them and drag them off to a life of subjection in their own lodges. Among this company staring at him now was likely the one who pretended to be his own father.

The sun rose red and cold next morning. Through a frosty mist they were herded to the middle of the town where for a blocklike space no houses had been built, for what reason the boy did not know. It was early, but already the white people had gathered around fires trying to keep warm. Hardly had the captives arrived before they were stormed, taken by the hand, their faces sharply looked into, their scanty dress lifted apart for birthmarks, all the while their ears bombarded with questions that True Son could only in part understand. Then the Colonel and his staff put an end to it. They showed they had learned at least one thing from the Indians. They announced there would be no more confusion. All would be conducted according to rule and order.

Nothing of the scene that followed was missed by True Son—the swarming whites in cloaks and greatcoats, their heads scarved and hatted, and in their midst the sacrificial cluster of captives, mostly young, bareheaded, in simple Indian dress, with parts of their bodies exposed to the early winter wind. One unwilling young captive after another was brought forward, what was known about him or her announced, then a hearing given those who claimed relationship. Several times the crowd gave way to emotion, wiping eyes and blowing noses with a great fluttering of red, blue, white and other colored cloths. Even many of the white soldiers showed their feelings. Only the captives took it dry-eyed and restrained. True Son thought their Indian fathers and mothers would be proud of them.

At the end a very few were left unclaimed, including himself and two girls of twelve or fourteen years. The boy felt relief and hope creep over him. His white father didn’t want him after all. He couldn’t believe his good fortune. Now perhaps they would let him go back to his far off home along the Tuscarawas.

But presently above the murmurs of the departing crowd he heard the hoofbeat of horses in the
strange town. Soon afterward a rider approached and the boy saw a small man on a sweated bay horse leading a saddled but riderless gray. In front of the Colonel and his staff, the rider dismounted. The Colonel shook hands with him and, smiling, led him over to where True Son and the unclaimed girls stood awaiting their fate. A chill ran up the boy’s backbone. Surely he had nothing in common with this insignificant man with black boots, a face colorless as clay and a silly hat on his head. He came up anxiously and his very light blue eyes misted into the boy’s face while the ashen hand he held out visibly trembled.

True Son stood rigid and unmoving.

“Put out your hand and shake his,” Del Hardy ordered in Delaware.

Reluctantly the boy gave his hand. The man spoke a stammer of strange-sounding words.

“Your father welcomes you back,” Del translated. “He thanks God you’re safe and sound.” When the boy’s lips compressed, “Can’t you say you’re glad after all these years to see your own father?”

True Son’s heart felt like a stone. How could this fantastic and inferior figure in a long fawn-colored garment like a woman be possibly anything
to him—this pallid creature who revealed his feelings in front of all! In the boy’s mind came the picture of his Indian father. How differently he would have looked and acted. With what dignity and restraint he could conduct himself in any situation, in peace or war, in council or the hunt, with pipe or tomahawk, rifle or scalping knife. This weak and pale-skinned man was nothing beside him.

“He’s not my father,” he said.

Del Hardy made a face. When he repeated it to the white man, the latter seemed to recoil. The Colonel had been standing by following intently with his foreign eyes. Now he began to talk. The boy couldn’t understand much of his mixed-up Yengwe tongue, but it looked and sounded like the Colonel was giving an order.

When they finished, the red-haired guard turned to the boy with a scowl.

“I thought I was rid of you,” he spoke in Delaware, “Now I’ve got to go along and translate you to your own family.”

The boy said nothing. His eyes gave a hard unwelcome. He knew instinctively that translating wasn’t the chief reason for Del’s going. No, the armed soldier was being sent along mostly to
guard him, perhaps also to protect this slight presumptuous white man who claimed to be his father. Bitter disappointment came over the boy. Now he wouldn’t be able to carry out his plan as soon as he had expected.

W
HEN
Del Hardy saw Fort Pitt through the trees, he threw his cap in the air. For weeks he had lived among savages in the wilderness. Now, thank God, he was laying eyes on a white man’s settlement again. Sight of chimneys, of the certain slant of roofs with the British flag flying over them, stirred him deeply inside. These walls of mortared stone bespoke his own people. English or French, they had built to stay. This might be their farthest
outpost now, but it wouldn’t be long. He had heard a dozen soldiers say they were coming back to clear and settle the rich black land they had found along Yellow Creek beyond the Ohio.

His feet felt light as deer hooves climbing the mountains and jogging down the eastern slopes. He reckoned one of the pleasantest feelings a white man could have was, after tramping days in the everlasting forest, to come out on cleared land and look across open fields. Same way with a road. He had marched nigh onto three hundred miles on savage trails and traces, stumbling over roots and logs, slopping through runs and bogs. Now the hard firm ground of a cartway under foot lifted him up. His eye ran warmly over the good ruts, and the familiar zigzag of rail fences. Tame cattle in the fields stood quiet and decent as they passed. Here neither man nor beast had to be afraid of his shadow. The log barns and sheds on the land had an air of white man’s industry and their houses of peace. From all of them young folk and old came to the road to rejoice as the army and its delivered captives passed.

That had been a day or two ago. Yesterday at Carlisle the freed white captives had been given back to the bosom of their families. You’d reckon
by this time they’d learned to appreciate it. Yet, look at this Butler boy on ahead riding with his father, sullen as a young spider, making as though he didn’t understand a word his father said. To watch him and listen to his Indian talk, you’d reckon English a bastard tongue and Delaware the only language fit to put in your mouth. You could see he still reckoned himself a savage and all those were blackguards and slavers who had anything to do with fetching him back to his own people. But then Indians were a strange lot. Del himself had lived neighbors to them as a boy. He knew their ways but never could he make them out.