The Old American

Other Novels by Ernest Hebert

The Dogs of March

A Little More than Kin

Whisper My Name

The Passion of Estelle Jordan

Live Free or Die

Mad Boys

The Kinship

Hardscrabble Books—Fiction of New England

Laurie Alberts,
Lost Daughters

Laurie Alberts,
The Price of Land in Shelby

Thomas Bailey Aldrich,
The Story of a Bad Boy

Robert J. Begiebing,
The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton; Or, A Memoir of Startling and Amusing Episodes from Itinerant Life

Anne Bernays,
Professor Romeo

Chris Bohjalian,
Water Witches

Dona Brown, ed.,
A Tourist's New England: Travel Fiction, 1820–1920

Joseph Bruchac,
The Waters Between: A Novel of the Dawn Land

Joseph A. Citro,
Guardian Angels

Joseph A. Citro,
Lake Monsters

Joseph A. Citro,
Shadow Child

Joseph A. Citro,
The Gore

Sean Connolly,
A Great Place to Die

J. E. Fender,
The Private Revolution of Geoffrey Frost

Dorothy Canfield Fisher (Mark J. Madigan, ed.),
Seasoned Timber

Dorothy Canfield Fisher,
Understood Betsy

Joseph Freda,
Suburban Guerrillas

Castle Freeman, Jr.,
Judgment Hill

Frank X. Gaspar,
Leaving Pico

Robert Harnum,
Exile in the Kingdom

Ernest Hebert,
The Dogs of March

Ernest Hebert,
Live Free or Die

Ernest Hebert,
The Old American

Sarah Orne Jewett (Sarah Way Sherman, ed.),
The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories

Lisa MacFarlane, ed.,
This World Is Not Conclusion:

Faith in Nineteenth-Century New England Fiction

G. F. Michelsen,
Hard Bottom

Anne Whitney Pierce,
Rain Line

Kit Reed,
J. Eden

Rowland E. Robinson (David Budbill, ed.),
Danvis Tales: Selected Stories

Roxana Robinson,
Summer Light

Rebecca Rule,
The Best Revenge: Short Stories

Catharine Maria Sedgwick (Maria Karafilis, ed.),
The Linwoods: or, “Sixty Years Since” in America

R. D. Skillings,
How Many Die

R. D. Skillings,
Where the Time Goes

Lynn Stegner,
Pipers at the Gates of Dawn: A Triptych

Theodore Weesner,
Novemberfest

W. D. Wetherell,
The Wisest Man in America

Edith Wharton (Barbara A. White, ed.),
Wharton's New England: Seven Stories and
Ethan Frome

Thomas Williams,
The Hair of Harold Roux

Suzi Wizowaty,
The Round Barn

The old

American

A Novel by

Ernest Hebert

University Press of New England / Hanover & London

DARTMOUTH COLLEGE

Published by University Press of New England

One Court St., Lebanon,
NH
03766

© 2000 by Ernest Hebert

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hebert, Ernest, 1941–

The old American : a novel / by Ernest Hebert

   p. cm.

—(Hardscrabble books)

   
ISBN
1–58465–073–7 (cl: alk. paper);
ISBN
1–58465–213–6 (pa: alk. paper)
ISBN
978–1–61168–360–8 (eBook)

   1. New England—History—Colonial period, ca. 1600–1775—Fiction.

2. Blake, Nathan, 1712–1811—Fiction. 3. Indian captivities—Fiction.

I. Title. II. Series.

PS3555.B425 044 2000

813'.6—dc21

00–008467

This book is dedicated to the old Americans in my life, my father, Elphege Hebert, and my father-in-law, Leo Lavoie.

So many people read parts of the nine drafts of this novel that I don't dare list them for fear of leaving somebody out. My thanks to all, but especially to Nicola Smith and Tom Powers, who were the first to see the promise in an early draft. I also want to thank the librarians at the Baker Library at Dartmouth College and The Historical Society of Cheshire County in Keene.

Contents

Grief

The Gauntlet

The Great River

Conissadawaga

Slave

Pure

Succession

A House like the English Build

A Far Place

Reading Group Guide

APRIL 1746

T
he old American wears a red turban with white feathers sticking out of the last turn at the peak, a strategy designed to conceal a bald head. His habitual pose and features resemble that famous profile to the north that both English and native refer to as the Great Stone Face. Many years ago he named himself Caucus-Meteor, for he'd lost his childhood name. He uses no war paint, but his ear lobes are split and stretched an inch long and from each hangs a French coin. Except for the turban and highly decorated fringed moccasins reaching almost to the knee, he's dressed like a French soldier with brown pants and a blue waistcoat, which hides burn scars on his arms. He carries no musket, sword, or hatchet. A short knife with a bone handle dangles from a neck cord, but it's more a tool than a weapon, for the old American has no use for the excitement of bloodletting; he's too feeble to fight well, and the French hired him as an interpreter, not as a warrior, so he's not expected to engage in combat; even so, for the purposes of continuing instruction in those matters that concern a king, he always immerses himself in battle.

Because Caucus-Meteor knew he couldn't keep up with the troop, he had left the camp an hour early under moonlight to time his arrival with the outbreak of hostilities. He likes to wander among the carnage, the exercise making him feel like a living ghost, which he reckons is another of those emotions unique to a king. And, too, there's something else in him, a wish; as his old mirror, adversary, and sometimes intimate, Bleached Bones, was fond of saying: “Call sudden death the best of luck.” In an attempt to see into his future, Caucus-Meteor tries the conjuring trick of the ancients. But it doesn't work. He's too hale for release from the responsibilities of mortality.

He's surprised that he's arrived before the fighters. Something must have delayed them. He knows that this village is one of the newer settlements on the borderlands of New Hampshire, but he does not know its name and he wishes he did. To destroy a place without bothering to learn its name strikes him as disrespectful. It will be dawn soon, and he should stay in the woods until his comrades launch their attack, but he'll walk boldly into the town, for he enjoys the shiver along the spine when one is close to one's enemies without their knowledge.

He sees perhaps half a hundred homesteads, log huts, and timber-frame houses under construction. Most of these structures are strung along a muddy path. Beyond is a stockade with wooden pickets and turrets for sharpshooters at the four corners. But Caucus-Meteor has little interest in military matters. He's drawn to a light, a warm glow from a single pane of glass in a log cabin. He peers through the wavy distortion. The sources of light are a whale oil lamp and a blaze in a stone fireplace. Caucus-Meteor sees a man sitting on the edge of the bed putting on leather shoes held together with gut laces, a woman poking the fire with an iron. A two-year-old lies in a cradle only a few feet from the old American. He could break the pane and snatch the child, but he only watches its blue eyes suddenly widening, blinking, mouth opening, crying out, fists doubled. Caucus-Meteor guesses that it's a girl. The mother comes to tend to her offspring. Caucus-Meteor makes no attempt to conceal himself. Since his wife died, he never lets practical matters, such as possible threats to his life, stand in the way of satisfying his curiosity, and for the moment he's engaged by this English family behind the glass. The mother sweeps up the child, carries her to the hearth, and sits her down on a low stool.

The woman spoons white bacon fat in a pot and hangs it from one of the irons over the hearth. Through the cracks around the glass, the old American catches the aroma.

The husband has finished putting on his shoes, and now takes notice of his wife at her cooking pot. The two begin to talk. Caucus-Meteor presses his ear against the glass. He enjoys listening to English. It's an unmusical language, weak in ability to convey feeling but full of expressions for things and actions. He catches only a few words through the glass, but he surmises from the woman's tone and the pained expression on her face that she brims with sorrow.

“You peer so deeply, Elizabeth, even into the bottom of a pot,” the man says.

“I have half a notion that God made the world and all the creatures in it merely for the pleasure of His viewing.” The woman's eyes are wild, disturbed.

“Merely?”

“It's a mere world. Or perhaps only meager. But does God …” She halts in the middle of her thought, in order to hold the man immobile, keep him from breathing for a moment. It's the way of some women even in their lovemaking, thinks Caucus-Meteor, admiring the woman's trick. Finally she speaks. “But does God ‘smell' his works as well? And touch? What of God and touch?”

The conversation goes on, and Caucus-Meteor begins to understand that there's a strain between these two that they're both pretending is not there.

The woman reaches into a plain ceramic pot for a handful of dried corn. She scatters the kernels into the sizzling bacon fat, and places the lid on the pot. Then she pours cow's milk into wooden noggins.

Caucus-Meteor realizes now how much like the woman he feels: tired, hungry, and full of despair.

Inside, the man notices what Caucus-Meteor has already seen, a tightness in the sinews of his wife's face. The man makes as if to speak, then falls silent, as if he understands her sorrow but has no means to deal with it. Caucus-Meteor bends his ear to the window.

The woman says, “If a cook could slow time to watch corn burst open, she might feel a little closer to heaven, do you think?”

“Aye,” says the man, puzzled and disconcerted by his wife's strange question.

A few tears make her eyes glisten. She wipes them away angrily, and makes herself smile falsely. The man mumbles to himself. These people are like us, Caucus-Meteor thinks; it is only their learning that is disgusting. The man on the other side of the wavy glass is perhaps thirty or thirty-five years old, or maybe forty. It's hard to tell the age of white people; even those that live long lives often show time-wear early on. The man's movements, nimble and fluid, are unlike most Englishmen's. His face, sharp as rocks split by frost, seems to be a frame to display a long pointed nose and eyes the dark brooding gray of ledge. The hair, tangled and the same fusty brown as last autumn's fallen leaves under Caucus-Meteor's feet, is offensive to the old American. Don't these Englishmen know how to use a comb? The man wears a trade shirt, dark gray trousers, and white stockings under the laced boots. Lying on the bed is a buff-colored waistcoat and a tricornered hat. Caucus-Meteor concludes that an Englishman with no belly fat, no wig, and no buckle shoes cannot be very important in his world. Still, even an ordinary man has value as a captive, either for trade or enslavement. Not that the old American wants a slave. Slaves are trouble; he himself was once a slave and he was trouble for his owner. Still, it would be nice to have a captive for others to admire.