The Old American (32 page)

“Nathan rigged a drag for the oxen to carry our new tools to Conissadawaga,” Norman Feathers says. “The village has enough pasture to keep the animals fed through the fall, but once the cold weather comes we will have to depend on cut hay. Nathan returned to Conissadawaga by canoe in less than three hours. It took me a day and a half to walk the beasts from Quebec to the village. The route was not designed by God for beasts of burden.

“The oxen were a novelty and amusement in the village, especially among the children. They'd never seen anything like this before. Some of our dogs dined on the steaming droppings of the great beasts. It did my heart good.”

“And, Black Dirt—what was my daughter's response?”

“Her eyes grew large. ‘Next year,' said she, ‘we'll have chickens and cows and sheep and pigs. There will be no reason to depend on deer and moose for meat and hides.'”

‘“I would go easy on the pigs at first,' Nathan told her. ‘Pigs cause problems between neighbors. In New England, pigs have killed more children than bears and wolves put together.' And then Nathan made a speech. He named me teamster, took a drink of brandy and said in English, ‘I toast thee.'… What does ‘toast' mean?”

“In English usage, toast as an object means burnt bread; as an action, toast calls on the God of Burnt Bread for favors.”

“English is a remarkably silly language. I can't imagine why people would want to converse or think in it.”

“Then what happened?” says Great Stone Face.

“Nathan in mirth commanded that I name the great beasts we had brought to the village. Great Stone Face, I humbly thank you for inspiring me to leave the service of the intendant and return to my village. It's only by your wisdom and the grace of God that I can do the labors in my own realm that brought me so much pleasure in the intendant's stables.”

Great Stone Face forces a smile. He'd freed Norman from the stables in Quebec so that he could return to the village as his own eyes and ears. Now Norman was inadvertently helping destroy his village, then reporting with glee the details. I'm receiving the punishment that Caucus-Meteor deserves, Great Stone Face thinks. “And what did you name your beasts of burden? Jesus and Joseph?”

“Right church, wrong pew—that is a French expression I learned in Quebec. I named my oxen Peter and Paul, after the saints who served Jesus.”

“I believe the Catholics have a saying: may the saints preserve us.”

Nathan works eighteen-hour days, training his Americans in the work, familiarizing them with the tools. Norman reports back: “‘Some day,' Nathan said to me, ‘you'll have a saw mill down below the lake, but for now we will make do with pit saws, which I was able to purchase in Quebec. I tell you, Norman, I enjoy this work, and I understand now what Caucus-Meteor taught me about being a king. A king must be a teacher.'”

Haggis' clan moves out of the summer village to the winter village. Black Dirt's tribe remains behind. The undecideds go back and forth. Instead of tearing down all the old wigwams as in past years, the women in the village insulate them with more layers of sticks, moss, corn stalks, and forest litter. The only time the two bands assemble as one is for the fall hunt.

The leaves drop from the trees, hard frost sinks into the ground, the snows fly. But the work goes on. Winter's a good time for logging—no bugs to torment the wood choppers, no leaves to obstruct their view, no heat to drain their energy. It's easier for the oxen to skid the logs from forest to the pit saw crews on snow than on bare ground. Rain, the friend of the farmer, is the enemy of the logger. The work is very exciting to everyone involved. The woodsmen hardly notice that cedars falling on snow leave scars in the forest.

One cold night in the wigwam in early winter, Nathan has just voiced some minor complaint about Americans and his place among them.

“The American way of life has improved your character, Nathan Provider-of-Services,” you say.

“Maybe,” he says, starts to speak more, then pauses. Usually when you and Nathan verge on personal matters, you both become silent, retreat in the American way of privacy by averting your eyes and moving toward the edge of the wigwam. Not this time. He senses something within you—a warmth. But you don't feel it—not yet.

“A village should have a church, don't you think?” you say.

“I would not deny such an assertion,” Nathan says cautiously.

“Would a church make the crops grow better?” you ask.

“I think so, yes, though there is no surety in such matters. We have a saying: God works his wonders in strange ways.”

“Tell me how I can get Jesus to bless my crops.”

Nathan responds in English, “Ye must pray.”

“Then I will pray,” you say in English, then return to our native language. “Tell me, and this is something I have always wondered, how is the Papist Jesus different from the English Jesus?”

Nathan bursts into laughter, a joyful, refreshing laugh, a laugh that touches a woman's heart; tears come to his eyes. You want him to reach for you, touch you. But when he does, you draw away, shy; you and Nathan retreat to your separate beds.

Two nights later you are awakened by a loud, cracking sound. It is nothing to be upset about, just the lake making ice. Still, you cannot go back to sleep.

“I'm full of energy,” Nathan says. “I feel something. I think it's the power of the ice. I'm going outside onto the lake.”

“Good. I will go with you.”

You dress in the dark, French wool coats under deerskin wind-breakers, mink-fur mittens, mink-fur-lined moccasin boots that reached to the knee, and you go out into the winter. It is one of those windless, blister-cold Canadian nights. You both put on snowshoes, trudge through the village, to the lake. Even on a night like this with no moon, the snow cover reflects enough starlight so you can see your own figures in blue silhouettes, the glittering snow in wave-pattern drifts, the dark hills beyond, the blacker sky above, the tiny lights of the stars.

In the middle of the lake is an area swept clean of snow by the wind. You kick off the snowshoes and prance on the ice like children.

“I wish I had …” Nathan searches for a word in Algonkian, cannot come up with one, and says in English, “skates.”

“Skates?”

“Yes, skates—moccasins with metal blades on the soles for gliding on ice.”

“Feet toboggans,” you say in our language.

“That's right. You can go like the wind.”

“If you can acquire the proper metal, I could make some feet toboggans.”

A second later the ice vibrates. The loud, cracking noise, thunder under foot, sends a pleasant shiver of excitement through you both. You fall into an embrace. You part, embarrassed. In the sky, something happens … the sky speaks. Think of me now as the sky. At first I am only an exaggeration and merging of starlight, and then I am a big green silent explosion of lights bursting from the northern quadrant of the heavens. Seconds later I am a crescent of red, followed by a pulsing halo of blue. Soon I am entire as a dance of light, with shapes in red, green, blue, my silent oratory giving homage to all the gods.

You and Nathan bask in the lights for a few minutes, and then return to the wigwam. Nathan grabs his stick bed and brings it beside yours. I turn away from my conjuring, and stare at the flames in my fire.

Later, his arm around your shoulder, he talks to you. “When I was with women after racing I was all carnality and haste. With you it is different.”

“You go about love-making the way you go about your work, with care and deliberation,” you say to your husband.

Dear daughter, you have been without touch for so long that now the experience seems novel. You please Nathan by displaying curiosity about his hands, thick and calloused. You tell him it's the part of him you like the best. You take one of his hands into your own, and hold it against your face. You say, “It was like a conjuring. In this love I search for a future.”

“Let us test it a second time,” Nathan says.

And you do, and I, in deference to the sanctity of your act, leave.

Nathan's daily routine includes moving back and forth between the logging site and the pit saw mill near the house foundation, and the wigwam is conveniently placed in between for midday liaisons. Meanwhile, the work continues on schedule—despite disruptions. An ice storm halts the loggers for three days. Kokadjo breaks a leg when a tree falls on him, and several men chop their own flesh instead of wood, but we in this land accept it as a given that men will be injured or killed in work accidents, hunting expeditions, war, and sporting; and women will be swept away in childbirth; and children will die in droves from disease; and the aged will be exhausted into death by the cold; and all will starve when game cannot be found or pestilence attacks the humors or untimely weather withers the crops.

Nathan tells you that this winter is the most blissful he has ever spent, and he's sad to see it come to an end.

“The blessing and the curse of a season coincide: with a turn in weather, things are never the same as before,” you say.

“Another Algonkian saying?”

“Just something my father would say.”

The woods work stalls in the muddy time before true spring, and it's too early to start actual house construction, so Nathan decides to go on the salmon run this year. You join him, because lovers should not be separated, which is an idea that you received from your mother.

The salmon run is always an exciting event. Winter is over. If we've been lucky (and this has been a lucky winter), we have avoided death by starvation, freezing, and diseases, and can now look forward to months of plenty before the next hard winter, so all the people are in a playful mood upon arrival at the salmon stream. This year adds poignancy to joy because this is the last great task that this réfugié tribe embarks on in common before it will divide into two bands. The sight of cold water thrashing rocks, spray like busy fog, colorful fish slippery in the hands, sharp cuts of sunlight, stir the blood.

Does Nathan Provider-of-Services understand that the nomadic life, though more prone to disasters than the farm life, is also more ecstatic, and the salmon run is one of those ecstatic moments? This life that you are throwing away, will you miss it, Black Dirt?

Several tribes along with the Conissadawaga Americans come to this place. Each group by tradition and custom and, in another time, by force of arms, stakes a particular claim along the river to fish. Years ago I negotiated with some Montagnais for the village's fishing rights. Intruding into another tribe's space can lead to some nasty disputes, though in our epoch hostilities rarely break out because there's plenty of war to the south for those possessed by the spirit of combat.

This kind of fishing is for the nimble and the strong. It takes strength to set up the weirs in the fast water to slow the fish so they can be stabbed. It takes good balance to perch on a ledge of slippery granite while at the same time stabbing at jumping fish in frothing water. It takes agility to climb to the best spearing stations, and it takes timing and dexterity to actually spear the fish. Nathan's flaws as a fisherman are tied to his character, for as those more experienced can see he is not at heart a fisherman, and he frequently loses concentration on the river while he occupies his mind with other matters. Tell my godson that one cannot spear a fish unless one can see a fish, and one cannot see a fish unless one looks. I know, Black Dirt, I know, you are all sick of my sayings.

The men enjoy the fishing, though they don't take it as seriously as they do hunting, for they depend on their women to do the real work. By the end of the day when all have come down to the camp and drying racks, Nathan boasts that he's not only the village's best runner, he is its best fisher.

Katahdin, who is in charge of smoking the fish, says, “No. Black Dirt caught two more fish.”

All the women and some of the men laugh. Nathan Provider-of-Services has been out-fished by his woman.

“Tomorrow I will catch more fish than anyone else in the village,” Nathan is half-joking, half-serious.

“Want to bet?” challenges Haggis.

The good humor has spilled over into a contest. Nathan bets a comb, Haggis a walrus tusk pendant. You don't wager. Like your mother, you do not approve of wagering. But you are thinking like a bettor: I'll not let either of these men best me.

By midmorning of the following day, you, Nathan, Haggis, and the others are fishing with mad joy. Everybody wants to be the top fisher. The older women smoking the salmon have gotten into the spirit of the competition. They meet in secret and conspire to determine a method so that they, the women, shall decide the winners.

On the river, the competitors take added risks, leaning closer to the cold, roiling waters. Meanwhile, the fish, driven by lust, just keep flailing and flailing upstream for one final, exhausting, and fatal orgy. You are wet with spray, but you don't care.

At the end of the day, Nathan and Haggis are both certain they have caught more fish than any of the women, and that the only dispute will be among themselves and the other men. You know what is going to happen next, and you smile. Katahdin, who has been counting fish all day names the top fishers. All are women. It's not until the older women laugh as one that the men understand what has transpired. The men have been tricked into working harder than usual. It's all part of the mad joy of the occasion, and everyone partakes of it, even Nathan and Haggis and you, my serious-minded daughter.

The tribe is readying to leave when a group of Algonkian traders from the south happens by. Parmachnenee recognizes a cousin she has not seen since she was a child. He tells her that her clan has reassembled and returned to its ancient village on a lake of the Magalloway river in the mountains of English territory. Parmachnenee leaves with her cousin. In my conjuring I can see now that she triumphs. She will marry and lead her clan. Her name will be remembered in the waters, Lake Parmachnenee. But my people, who will be all but forgotten, the salmon fishing ends with a touch of sadness, for the tribe has lost yet another member. You, who once despised Wytopitlock for taking your man, now console her for the loss of her friend. Before, she was a woman without a man; now she is a woman without anyone.