The Old American (37 page)

Upon conclusion of the prayers, Nathan rises, holds out a hand to you, and says, “The music of your voice reminds me of my first trip to Conissadawaga when I was on the river and the wind brought the singing of a farmwife working in the fields.”

“And what of your own prayer, husband?” she asks, as you walk hand in hand back to the house, the wood-burning stove, the hard comfort.

“My prayers are worn from too much use brought on by captivity. I ask only for guidance.”

After an uncomfortable pause, you whisper, “Nathan.” And at that modest promontory before house entry that Nathan calls the stoop you fall into his arms. Perhaps he can feel your child pressing against him. Surely, the message from heaven is: Nathan, your place is with this American woman and her—your—child.

Both you and Nathan are uncertain what course he will take, but I know. I cannot write parchment script, but I understand what is written in a man's behavior. Nathan Provider-of-Services in the time he was my slave, especially during that winter we spent on the ice, talked often of his regret for rash acts. In 1736, as a very young man, Nathan was among those who pioneered a village on the New England borders. With the coming of winter, the other proprietors retreated to the established towns to wait out the severe weather, but Nathan on a whim remained in his bark shelter. Eventually, he ran out of food and had to flee, leaving his oxen behind. Two winters later he risked crossing a pond, and his horse fell through thin ice and was drowned. This is the man who abandoned his family in the stockade merely to let his animals out of the barn during an attack. This is the man who walked the gauntlet, who defied a people in renouncing his slave status. How a man behaves during moments of crisis is of great interest to me in this my last epoch. In Nathan's day-to-day life, he is pious, reliable, predictable, controlled, uninteresting. But during moments of inner turmoil he is rash, a subject worthy of inquiry.

He protects himself against fear and tedium with the thought of a “far place.” It was this thought that made a pioneer of him, that killed his horse, that starved his oxen, that drove him out of the stockade that April day in 1746, that created behavior within him that helped push his wife over the edge into madness. It's the thought of the far place that grips him now, and he tells you about it, his language often lapsing into English, for his grasp of Algonkian is insufficient to reproduce in words the emotions of his childhood.

“When I was a boy,” he tells you, “I was often restless. No activity or encounter seemed agreeable enough to me. And then I heard the stories of the west where, it was said, there were paradise lots for the taking. This story has stayed with me as a feeling, as a directive. Times are I think it's the devil that's in every man who gives me this feeling, but when it is upon me as it is now, I do not care if the source is out of Providence or below. I wish only to follow the feeling. Black Dirt, I'm a man no longer English, who can never be a proper savage and who will forever despise the Frenchman. You see how it is with me? I have to break paths to the far place. You must come with me to the great west. With our child we will people the paradise lots; we will build the barns, the houses, the towns—not for France, not for England, not for any native tribe, but for our own nation.”

And so you pack food and stores, and leave by dog team. Conissadawaga lies before you with the helplessness of a deer with a broken leg. Smoke twists up from the chimney of the house Nathan had built, and from perhaps a half dozen wigwams surrounding it; it is a village reduced and it is the saddest day of your life since your children were taken by the distemper. Nathan does not notice. He's in the middle of something. I remember sailors in Quebec telling me about a peculiar feeling. A man will climb the mast to do some chore. High up he will look down. The sway of the ship will make it appear as if the mast is still and the ship moves out from under him. Men under the influence of this effect often fall. The sailors call the feeling “rapture in the rigging.” It's this rapture in the rigging of mind that steers Nathan west. You travel until the dogs need to rest, and then you travel some more. You spend that night in a shelter made by the sled and skins.

The next morning is thick with a cold, malevolent fog. Nathan hadn't reckoned on this. He'd said the north star would guide you in the long night, and the sun would guide you in the day. But this—fog—means you have to work just to stay on the path. By noon the fog has cleared, only to be replaced by dark clouds. A storm is coming.

In an hour you reach the gorge, the place where Haggis and his hunters slaughtered the deer herd, where I told Nathan, teasing him, that the opening to the western lands lay ahead. The fog is lifting.

“There, there, through the gorge is our beginning,” Nathan says, though he's not looking at land but at heaven.

You turn your thoughts to the baby in your belly, and you think that Nathan's mad love for the far place will kill the three of you. And yet a woman's place is no further than with the father of her children.

“We always traveled by rivers and known paths,” you say. “All I've heard of the land beyond the gorge is stories of swamp, and great rock ledges, little sustenance even for beasts,” Black Dirt says.

“Don't you see? It's the wastelands that discouraged your people. You must persevere.”

You look at the sky.

Nathan says, “If the weather holds …”

“It is winter, it is Canada—how can the weather hold?” you say.

For a moment Nathan doubts his rapture, but the rapture is too strong. It orders his thinking. “Remember the lights we saw the first time we made love …”

“They were in the north …”

“They started from the north, they spread to the west. Don't you understand?” he says. “We start one place, and we spread to another. Our dreams, our hopes, our faith—these give us vigor and purpose. We have provisions for a month. We will find the paradise lots.”

“I've prayed to the Son of Man, and I hope, as so many women do, that the Son of Man is not as crazy as a man. I would go with you, Nathan. But this child in my belly wants to stay where it is safe.”

“At least come through the gorge with me. If it's a wasteland beyond …” He stops, he can't bear to promise her he'll turn back.

Who can say if he would have turned back or if you would have gone on? The old trickster intervenes. You are almost through and in some thick spruces, when five men step from the shadows. One is Nathan's New England friend John Hawks, a stalwart soldier. With him are two dough-faced, well-fed, jolly fellows. These three men have come all this way under a white flag of truce with a fourth man, their prisoner, Pierre Raimbault St. Blein. As Nathan will soon learn, they also carry ransom money that Elizabeth, his English wife, has raised. You take note of the fifth man, the guide who brought the men to this point, a native you've never seen before, an old buzzard with tattoos covering face and head. Since I started this conjuring business, I'm only half myself, hence half my hopes, so I half hope you'll recognize me, but you don't.

You stand aside as the reunion progresses. It is very awkward. The Englishmen rejoice when they see Nathan. Something like love crosses Nathan's face, but it quickly fades into confusion. He looks at you, at his fellow New Englanders, at his own skin, and then buries his face in his hands, and weeps. The bottled emotion of three years or perhaps even a lifetime, pours out of him.

At first the New Englanders think he is happy to see them, and surely he is. But there is something else in him that he is weeping for, a loss behind all the other losses, an ache that seems like gladness in the knowledge that he'll never know in this life whether a wasteland lies before his dreams or paradise. Whereas before, with you, daughter, he had to reach into English to express himself, now that language of his birth deserts him. Finally, he says in Algonkian to John Hawks, “I can never return as the man I was. Nor can I remain as the man I am.”

Hawks doesn't know what he's saying, and perhaps neither does Nathan, for sometimes the lips speak the truth hidden from the mind; the moment slides past him, until he finds some English on his tongue. “My wife, my girls—are they well?”

“Your family is sound. They are staying with your people in Wrentham. Come, let me bring you to them.”

“John, I cannot.”

“Cannot?” Hawks draws back.

“I have a wife here in Canada. I have, I think, a destiny in Canada, an account payable to God.”

Hawks snaps at his countryman, “This being in buckskins is not you speaking, Nathan Blake. It is the demon who lurks in the anguish of your captivity. Come, we will make you whole again in New England.”

How certain in their opinions these English are. They are easy to admire, if difficult to love.

Nathan answers simply, “I will not go.” I think his voice lacks conviction.

Hawks is a soldier, and of course a soldier knows only one way. He points his musket. “Nathan, I'll return your body to your English widow, before I let you remain in Canada with a savage wife.”

In the middle of the argument, you creep away. You have decided that your fate is not with this man. Nathan doesn't notice you until he hears your sharp command to the dogs, and they bolt forward. “Black Dirt—Marie!” he calls out. But you never give Nathan a backward glance; he stands watching you until he can just make out the sled's shape on the horizon. You are thinking that the far place is too far. And with your departure, dear daughter, I feel the conjuring powers leaving me. Once again, I am nothing more than an old man. I know only that my place now is with Nathan.

He starts south as he had gone north three years earlier, a captive again. He isn't bound, but he's closely watched. The old American thinks that one day Nathan will understand that Black Dirt taught him about woman's grief, about his New England wife's grief, and about his own grief, how all along he had been fleeing from it, but for now he is merely in the stupor of the first stage of captivity, as he was the day Caucus-Meteor captured him.

Great Stone Face stays clear of Nathan, makes his wishes known through Hawks in grunts, sign language, and the corrupted phrases of traders and soldiers. As the men start back for Quebec on snowshoes, Nathan walks with head bowed between the two New England underlings. Nathan will be in this state all day, thinks Great Stone Face. He'll not eat, for the stomach rebels against insult as well as injury. Hawks and St. Blein walk with their guide at the front. It's an effort for Great Stone Face to pretend that all this walking is not tiring him out. He muses that though he has taken on a different appearance, his body is as frail as Caucus-Meteor's. His predicament reminds him of an old Algonkian saying: a disguise is full of nerves but has no muscle.

Hawks talks with St. Blein in English, believing that this old savage cannot understand him.

“How could our guide know that Nathan would flee and that he would go west to this forlorn gorge?” Hawks asks.

“Some of the savages enjoy strange powers,” says St. Blein. “I'm surprised that he even exists. I thought I knew every wise tracker, guide, and interpreter in these northern lands, but this fellow is as much a mystery to me as he is to you.”

“He says he's from the south, if I understand him. He speaks in such a crude way.” Hawks looks back at Nathan, head down, in a daze. “I fear for my countryman, that he's lost himself in Canada.”

“That may be,” says St. Blein. “I will take you to my father's house in Quebec. We will celebrate this prisoner exchange with drink, food, and carousing. Then you can start south. Perhaps your man will have his wits about him then.”

Two days later when the men reach Quebec, Nathan's torpor gives way to sullen unappreciation of his predicament. Nathan, thinks Great Stone Face, you are a man between worlds—see them both, be grateful. But, no, he's the kind of man to do a duty without asking for thanks, or offering thanks for a duty received. Great Stone Face is thinking that Nathan, as he did upon his capture in New England, is scheming to escape. It's a thought that has struck the New Englanders too. They are suspicious of all Canada. They've grown to respect St. Blein, but they don't trust him any more than they trust any Frenchman or savage. After the formal prisoner exchange, the party will be vulnerable in Canada. The Englishmen fear that Nathan's savage friends or maybe even French soldiers will pursue them.

The guide takes the men's fears as an omen that suits his own purposes. He assures them he knows a route that will be safe. It's a route he has been thinking about for months. It's the wrong route, he knows, but he must take it, for it's his last chance to plead to the old gods for a father's succor. In this matter, he knows he is destined for failure. Good! The old feeling of the gambler, all anticipation, is in him again. Bleached Bones, I miss you, he thinks.

At the celebration at the St. Blein house the New Englanders get roaring drunk. That is their phrase—“roaring” drunk. One roars when one is the grips of the liquor. Great Stone Face is offered wine, but he refuses with a phrase that disconcerts his hosts. “Where I come from we have a saying. ‘Under the influence, the savage does not roar like the bear—he howls like the wolf.'” The New Englanders know this is their last safe night in Canada. The rich merchant's family, ecstatic to see the soldier son back home, offers them hospitality and sanctuary, but after they leave they will be enemies once more.

Great Stone Face mingles with the crowd, where he's admired for his strangeness. Soon, he's recognized as a member of the intendant's household. That leads to the big joke of the evening among the Canadians. It seems as if the intendant's palace has grown cold, and the intendant is furious. It's only the Canadian cold that can bring heat to the Frenchman, thinks Great Stone Face.