The Old American (30 page)

“I think you will do just fine, you old fool,” the intendant says. He laughs heartily and clasps Caucus-Meteor's hand.

The old American takes his duties seriously as Great Stone Face, fire tender for the intendant. His natural sense of command allows him to order other native members of the staff to assist him in bringing in wood. All during the winter, the intendant will never have cause to criticize his fire tender. The palace becomes the most comfortable abode in all of Canada.

Rooms on the first floor of the palace are spacious, public, and decorated in the grand style of old France. Rooms on the second and third floors are smaller and more personal but still large, and serve as quarters for the intendant, his mistress, and scores of guests. Rooms on the fourth floor are tiny and cramped; here the servants are housed. Great Stone Face's room barely has space for a bed, a chamber pot, a chair, a wooden chest, and a stove, but he doesn't complain. He removes the door to his stove so he can eat the fire. He replaces the furniture in the room with hides and blankets on the floor. He leans sticks and bark strips against the walls of his room until it smells and looks and feels familiar. He has to admit that this is the best wigwam he's ever lived in, for it stays warm without drafts of cold air or smoke that stings the eyes. At the same time he apprehends that his comfort has come at a price. He's spoilt. He tries to explain his compromised position to Norman Feathers, who comes to visit him every day.

“Caucus-Meteor is dead if not buried,” he says. “Great Stone Face shows no expression to the world; he is more a conjured figure than a man. Too bad no oratory resides within him. The house he lives in is not his house; the more comfortable and content he becomes, the less of him in me I recognize. He will take his bald head to heaven, where Jesus, having sent Bleached Bones to hell, will be wearing his turban to mock him. I am very happy, and suspicious of the feeling, Norman.”

“When you talk like this I do not know what you mean, my king,” says Norman Feathers.

“Forgive me. I like to test my ideas by uttering the arguments against them. How much of what I say do you understand, Norman?”

“I do not choose to understand. Understanding would corrupt my faith; I live by mysteries, not by the pronouncements of supposed solutions.”

“In other words, you don't really listen to me.”

“That's correct. I memorize, but I do not listen to men at all. I listen in concentration only to the lowing of my oxen in the stables. They are my true comfort. All else I do is duty to God, village, and king.” He bows, a bow-legged bow.

“I suppose what's happened to you is what happens to any man who is a bachelor too long. You ought to think about getting married, Norman.”

Norman goes to the village twice a week, and reports back to his king everything he sees and hears. Nathan Provider-of-Services leaves his concubines and moves in with Black Dirt; from their reported behavior Great Stone Face determines that they sleep in the same wigwam for appearances' sake, their relations cordial but unromantic. Norman's observations come without insight or color, which frustrates Great Stone Face in his search for whole understanding. He attempts to conjure the crow in his dream. Come, pick me up, carry me to my village so I can see for myself what's really going on. I'm especially concerned about my daughter. But the crow remains nested in memory. Apparently, he will have to develop the conjuring craft without divine help.

Soon Great Stone Face does see for himself, though not as he would have wished. Black Dirt arrives to pay the intendant his tribute. He sees her from an upstairs window through bars and wavy glass. She's alone, wearing a black mourning ribbon in her hair. It's a different ribbon than she wore to grieve for her destroyed family. It's for him. A moment of horror comes over him. He'd had it in the back of his mind that somewhere along the line he would inter Great Stone Face and rise from the dead as Caucus-Meteor once again, returning in triumph to his village as king of Canada. Now he realizes he can do no such a thing, for it would mean that his daughters would have to mourn him twice. For their sakes, he must remain dead. That night, for the first time since establishing himself as Great Stone Face, Caucus-Meteor cannot prevent emotion from spreading out through his skin and features. Distraught, he hides in his room, burns his arm, the physical pain relieving the torment inside his heart. By dawn the palace has grown cold, but the intendant and his mistress are out of the city, so no harm is done to the reputation of the fire tender.

Time goes by, new fires are made, flare up, die to embers, grow cold, reports come in, Great Stone Face pieces together the life lived by his daughter and her husband … conjures them.

For a month you and Nathan hardly say a word except in public. You are overwhelmed by a sense of responsibility for the future of your village. You pay the intendant's man the bribe, and begin to understand in the burdensome way of a chief how tentative our villagers' hold is on our plot of land. You have committed our people to a sedentary way of life, but you don't know how to establish its basis. You are nagged by the realization that you and the rest of the tribe lack experience in and knowledge of the enterprise you are about to embark on. You deal with the problem in your usual way—work work work—but eventually when the crops are in, and before the nut-gathering season, you suddenly find time heavy on your hands. You know you should act. Cannot. The villagers are waiting for you and Nathan to lead. Do not. Your husband is sullen and distracted. He obviously feels tricked into this union, and he demonstrates no love for you. He slinks off to be with his concubines.

Oh, my daughter, my godson, what a terrible thing I have done. If you loved one another, that would be one thing; even if you hated one another, this false union I have contrived would not be so bad because then your hearts would not be so divided. Just when I think I should arrange a divorce, I see a change. In the end, it is not affection, or need, or even what you two are good at—duty—that starts you talking; it is sheer proximity.

You are in the wigwam and have just had a minor disagreement over whether to start a fire in the stove, for the nights are getting cold. Nathan: pro fire. You: pro save wood. Compromise: very small fire. The smoldering is as much in your heads as in the belly of the stove. An hour goes by in which neither of you says anything. Finally, you pose a question. You aren't sure why you ask it, but the issue has been on your mind for months and now it just spills out.

“You think we could farm this land like the English?”

“I imagine so,” says Nathan, but his tone is dismissive, perhaps scornful.

“I think I will buy a cow with Caucus-Meteor's money,” you say. I told you more than once that cow's milk is often offensive to the stomach of the savage, but, daughter, you never listened to me.

Nathan laughs small.

Naturally, you take offense. “A cow in an American town is a big amusement to you?”

“Let me tell you a thing or two, Black Dirt: there's more to a real farm than planting the three sisters.”

“We not only plan corn, beans, and squash; we plant peas, we plant onions …”

He interrupts her. “True. You do well with what you have. But a cow, a cow would change everything.”

“Please explain, then,” you say, with a smile that mocks him.

“All right, I will. A cow must be milked twice a day, every day. It must have pasture. You must plant for the cow as well as for the people. A farm in the English manner needs more than a cow. It needs a horse, or an ox, to pull a plow to break soil. It needs a barn to house the animals.”

“Breaking soil is offensive to me, and I think offensive to the corn,” you say.

“There's some justification in your caution. Fact is I admire your methods of cultivation. The soil remains sweeter for a longer period. Broken soil goes bad quicker. But there is plenty of land. Endless lots for the taking. The way to deal with the problem that broken soil brings is to let the land lie fallow—that and manure. Don't break soil where the rains wash it away. In the end if you plan well, you'll have more yields with broken soil and cow dung than the three sisters in hillocks of burnt-over lands.”

You ask more questions, and Nathan answers, and suddenly he is no longer haughty and you are no longer sarcastic. You are two people pleased by each other's company. Nathan's knowledge of agriculture, long buried, rises up from its grave to haunt and fascinate both speaker and listener. As Nathan Provider-of-Services talks he is rediscovering with admiration Nathan Blake. He spins off stories, descriptions, and explanations regarding the creatures of New England—cows, sheep, chickens, pigs, oxen, foxes, wolves, birds of prey; and also explanations regarding the things of New England—hay fences, manure, wells, tools, plows, surveys, rock walls. You can see that he likes just speaking the words. You respond with comments, laughter, sometimes criticism if he doesn't phrase his thoughts well in Algonkian.

So much of the building language in English is transfigured in common speech. He “hammers” out his ideas; “screws” up his face in concentration. Boring a hole with a brace and bit is a tedious activity. Hence, in Nathan's language, tedium is described as boring.

Every night thereafter, you talk as a married couple talk, mainly about farming. Eventually, the conversation branches off into … popped corn. Nathan raises the subject casually, and soon you are pouring rendered bear fat into a pan making popped corn over the stove. You sit on your heels like good Americans, munching the popped corn from a common wooden bowl.

“Caucus-Meteor used to demand that Keeps-the-Flame make popped corn every night,” you say.

“He couldn't make his own?”

“He would always burn it. He stopped eating it when Keeps-the-Flame died.”

“Back in New England in my cabin I used to eat popped corn for breakfast with cow's cream on it and maple sugar. I never thought I would have the pleasure in American land.”

“We Americans invented popped corn. We were eating it before the Europeans ever heard of corn. I hope you'll give us credit.”

Nathan speaks now in his native language. “Of course. We English are a fair people.”

You, who know some English from your father's teachings, translate “fair” to mean a people with a white skin. You both nod in the belief that you are talking about the same thing.

Nathan returns to Algonkian and launches into a detailed explanation of how he built the first log cabin in Upper Ashuelot. “When it went up in flames, I could still see in my mind's eye my bowl of uneaten popped corn on the dining table.”

I have to chuckle, for I had eaten Nathan's breakfast before I set fire to his home. You see how it is, daughter: wishing always degrades memory.

“This cabin where you ate your popped corn, it was like one of the houses in Wendake?” asked Black Dirt.

“No, it was more primitive, just logs laid square on a dirt floor, a temporary hovel.”

“So not much different from a wigwam.”

“That's correct. It suited me. I was a young bachelor when I built it.”

“And this English wife you went and got, what were her thoughts about this English wigwam?”

“I think she was charmed by it until the children came.” His voice dies to a whisper.

“Tell me her name in English.”

Nathan speaks the name.

You mentally translate from the English, then say in Algonkian, “Lizard Breath. That is a good name. Usually, the English names make no sense. Like Nay Than. What does Nay Than mean? Two separate words that together as one mean nothing. American names always mean something. Tell me some more about this Lizard Breath woman.”

And tell her he does. Maybe too much. Once his mouth is in motion, it cannot stop. He tells you about his courtship of Elizabeth Graves, how he'd used an old-fashioned courting tube to speak words of love to her, their remove to the cabin, Elizabeth's dreams for a timber-frame house with white-painted clapboards and glass windows and a parlor, her rages, the births of their children, the terrible distemper epidemic that took away their son, Elizabeth's sorrow and her peculiarity that followed, his own peculiar elation when he was taken from his homestead in the raid, her continual harangues that something … something … something was not right. You see, Black Dirt, daughter so dear, you and this English wife shared a common discontent.

“The glories of racing in the trade fairs removed thoughts about wife and children. I think less and less about them.”

“We are teaching you how to forget.”

“Aye,” Nathan says in English, then switches back to Algonkian. “All that remains of my fidelity is the house she asked me to build, and which I kept putting off, partly out of laziness and self-satisfaction and partly because of outside factors, for you see the king marked my pines for his ships.”

“The English king walks in your forest with a hatchet to gouge the bark?”

“That was a manner of speaking. I mean that the admiralty marked my pines for its ship masts. Such trees are called king's pines.”

“But no English king has walked in an American forest—a pity. This house you would build for your wife, it is like your cabin? A big wigwam? Perhaps a long house, like the Iroquois build?”

“It's nothing. No house at all. It's a notion, a feeling, a dream, an idea.”

“From idea and feeling springs the made thing, no? Like a moccasin,” you say, deep into an idea and a feeling of your own. I cannot conjure exactly what it is, perhaps because it is in the mists. But the feeling is clear enough: craven want. Something you want.

Night after night Nathan rambles on to his Conissadawaga wife about the house that he promised his Upper Ashuelot wife he would build and did not, and how to keep himself whole in Canada he'd built it in a place of mind, and now as he talks through the ideas, he adds details and solves nagging problems of craft and design. You can see that the talk reawakens Nathan to his old life. Perhaps he feels pangs for his “king's” pines, his home-raised oxen, his English wife.