The Old American (6 page)

“You turn a man's mind to mush, master. I know nothing of these things,” Nathan says.

“Corn mush for the belly of the savage, and prayer to purge the bowels.”

“Does my master worship Jesus?”

“I argue with all the gods, except the god of rum and brandy, whom I despise with constancy since he has no redeeming virtues. You, Nathan Blake, must make do with your one God. You will need your English Jesus when we arrive in Montreal.” Caucus-Meteor waits for Nathan to ask why, but Nathan remains silent. His restraint pleases Caucus-Meteor. He says, “In Montreal, you will be tested in the gauntlet.”

“If my blood is spilled, I'll make a poor slave,” he says.

“That's true, but the gauntlet is a venerate tradition among the tribes, and there's nothing I can do to protect you. I will give you a bit of advice, though. Don't think about blood; think about behavior.”

T
hat night Caucus-Meteor drifts off into one of his waking dreams. He sees a forest filled with people and trees he can't identify. In the background is a rushing noise. A figure representing himself dangles from the claws of a crow. Below is another figure with folded arms and colorless eyes. The crowd is boisterous though not violent, merely excited in a way Caucus-Meteor cannot determine.

The crow does not injure him; indeed, the crow's claws embrace rather than grasp. The man with the folded arms and the colorless eyes is obviously an adversary, though he makes no threatening gestures. In the dream Caucus-Meteor hails the man, who says nothing but unfolds his arms, producing two small stones from the air and placing them on a large flat rock. The Caucus-Meteor figure, still dangling from the crow, places one stone on the rock. The mob cheers, and half a dozen runners appear. Caucus-Meteor tries to enter more deeply into the dream to study the runners, but he cannot. Usually he has the power to alter his dreams as he wishes, but not this one. The sound of the cheering crowd rises, then subsides, and now Caucus-Meteor can hear the mysterious rushing noise again. The men have stopped running. The crow releases the Caucus-Meteor figure, who picks up the stones. The man with the folded arms walks away. The figure representing himself in the dream mingles with the crowd. The figure seeks out one of the runners to congratulate him on his performance, but the runner has disappeared. The crow scratches marks on the ground that Caucus-Meteor understands as advice telling him that finding the runner is of great importance. Then Caucus-Meteor sees the runner in the shadows. Before he can recognize the man, the old gods return and disrupt the dream.

The feeling of fulfillment that accompanied the dream suggests that it's important he learn what the dream means. Why? Why do I think this? he asks himself. Once he's asked himself the question, the answer is readily apparent. The purpose of the dream is to set him on a course to conclude his stay in this realm. The dream is the beginning of the middle of the great and last adventure of his life. The end of the beginning was his capture of Nathan Blake. A major task that lies ahead of him will be to determine how Nathan Blake fits into his dream.

Next day it's more of the same—paddle paddle paddle, sing sing sing. It's night when the raiders arrive at a village across the great St. Lawrence River from Montreal. Caucus-Meteor lectures Nathan, “Tomorrow you will run the gauntlet. Until that event is finished, you belong less to me than to the spectacle to come. You will be isolated until that time.” He locks Nathan in a gloomy storage shed full of hides, stinking of animal blood, musk, and oil, but he's not bound.

Caucus-Meteor is the guest of Furrowed Brow, the captor of Captain Warren and the owner of young Allen. Furrowed Brow occasionally teases Caucus-Meteor by calling him king. Caucus-Meteor pretends to be amused, for he is the guest. The men talk and smoke outside by a fire, and soon the old chief is exhausted, not only from the journey, but from the strain of holding his tongue, for he finds his Iroquois host overbearing and full of himself. Or perhaps I am merely envious, thinks Caucus-Meteor, for Furrowed Brow has
two
captives, one of them a military officer.

The villagers build up the fire; drums and rattles play. This place is the home of most of the fighters who destroyed the English frontier town, and they're celebrating their victory.

The next morning Caucus-Meteor brings his slave some breakfast, the corn and grain mush that the Iroquois are so fond of, and then takes him outside. Nathan blinks into blasts of hard light. He sees clusters of log huts on the bank by the river, a few more elaborate than his own burned-out log cabin, some more primitive.

“Is this Quebec?” Nathan asks.

“You are not in Quebec. You are in the Christian Mohawk village of Kahnawake. You and the other two Englishmen will be taken across the river into Montreal, where you will run the gauntlet. If you survive, you will go on with me to my village of Conissadawaga, which is just north of the place where you thought you are now, Quebec—one hundred sixty English miles more canoeing.”

“I stand corrected,” Nathan says. “You are the sachem of this town of…” Nathan tries and fails to pronounce Conissadawaga.

“I am king of Conissadawaga.”

“Aye,” says Nathan, and bows slightly.

I like his subtle insult to my pride, thinks Caucus-Meteor.

Captain Warren and young Allen appear with their guards. In the next few minutes, scores of men, women, and children empty from the cabins and surround the captives.

“Remember what I told you about the gauntlet—behavior,” Caucus-Meteor says. “I can do nothing for you until after that test.”

The captives are pushed and shoved, moved on down to the shoreline. Caucus-Meteor takes note of the town: log cabins with plank roofs, iron stoves for heat, a few cows and horses, many chickens. He watches a girl lead a couple of dogs pulling a cart on wheels. She's headed for work in the fields that surround the village. Maybe eight hundred to a thousand Mohawks live here. There's even a public building, a long log cabin with a cross on top. The place is more advanced than his own village, and even the English border town they burned. The Iroquois, whether Pagan, Protestant, or Catholic, know how to organize themselves. Caucus-Meteor feels a mixture of envy, resentment, contempt, and admiration.

Half the village's canoes will cross the St. Lawrence to Montreal. The atmosphere is festive, for a gauntlet day is a holiday. The people laugh, exchange witticisms, place bets, pack food and brandy into canoes. Many of the men adorn themselves extravagantly. Furrowed Brow himself is bare-legged and bare-chested in chilly weather to show off white-dot body makeup. Another man halves himself with blue and yellow paint. An old man, a survivor of tortures by a rival tribe, accentuates his burn scars with subtle red and gray makeup. The women wear colorful beads, but no paint. Everyone is carrying an instrument for inflicting harm—a stick, a spear, a hatchet, a whip, a club, a bundle of thorns.

Caucus-Meteor studies the faces of the captives. Nathan's lips move; his slave has detached himself from the situation through prayer and perhaps the consolations of memory. Young Sam Allen walks as if the bones in his legs have been removed. Captain Warren, broken by his interrogation, seems like a man with an unworkable but soothing plan, he's so calm. Ensign St. Blein likewise seems preoccupied with his own thoughts. Once in the canoe, Caucus-Meteor suddenly hears the background rush of the Lachine Rapids, which prevent oceangoing crafts from penetrating any deeper into the continent. Where has he heard that sound before? Why is it taking on importance in his mind?

Montreal is a bustling trade center of three or four thousand people, a town surrounded by wooden palisades; the gauntleteers march their prisoners through a gate manned by soldiers in blue and brown. Inside are paved streets, impressive houses made of wood and stone, along with stone churches, and a huge open market. Furs coming in from the western and northern tribes keep this place humming. Hung in open stalls for viewing by buyers are pelts of beaver, wild cat, lynx, martin, mink, deer, bear, moose, wolf, skunk, and seal; the feathers from scores of different kinds of birds; and porcupine quills arranged by size and sold with dyes for coloring same. With the money they make from animals they hunt and trap, the tribal emissaries shop for kettles and other kitchen ware, beads, brandy, guns, powder, lead, cloth, brandy, brandy, hardware (such as door hinges), knives, scissors, axes, and brandy. The bargaining is conducted in different languages, accompanied by politic hand signals and facial expressions. The raiders display their prisoners to curious onlookers. The word has circulated. Today is going to be a gauntlet day.

The French merchants wear trimmed beards, bright baggy pants, shirts in colors that don't match the pants, and floppy caps. They tip those ridiculous hats to everyone who approaches them. Their outfits are also influenced by fashions from the tribes, including feathers, beaded belts, and earrings. French matrons at the markets wear neat jackets buttoned prim and proper at the throat, but dark blue skirts that reach only to a dimple between thigh and knee to accentuate shapely calves. Women from the tribes wear colorful tops but skirts identical to ones worn by the Frenchwomen. The facial makeup of the tribal women is spare, and their hair is long and straight. The men cut their hair according to their own whim. They spends hours with body and facial paint. Some have tattoos of wild animals and designs whose meaning is known only to them. They wear earrings, nose rings, neck beads, bright sashes, beaded belts, and feathers sticking out of every body nook, hook, crook, and crack. Adornments feature crucifixes, pendants, holy medals, coins, bones, beads, and hair tufts from reluctant donors.

Others in the marketplace include priests and nuns wearing black. Caucus-Meteor recognizes the old Ursuline Nun, Esther

Wheelwright, captured in a raid in New England in 1703 and converted by the French to their side. Others include seamen in woolens, a few escaped black slaves from the southern English plantations; even the enemies of Canada, the English and the Dutch, are represented, for a few traders from Albany have won the right to peddle their goods in the French market through the tried and true persuasion of bribery. The priests and nuns, grave but confident in bearing, and the seaman, curious and severe, seem to be comfortable in plain dress. The rest of these folks, myself included, thinks Caucus-Meteor, if you judge us by our outward appearance, are struggling to find ourselves through display and decoration.

A handful of voyageurs stand out from the rest. One can tell these small, bearded Frenchman from the merchants, seamen, farmers, and tradesmen by their deep tans, leathery skins, buckskin apparel, and knotty muscles. One of them comes over to Caucus-Meteor. The two men exchange greetings, and the voyageur joins Caucus-Meteor in the processional walk with the prisoners. They converse easily, partly in French, partly in Algonkian.

“I haven't seen you for a couple years, Row-bear, where have you been?” Caucus-Meteor asks.

“Out west, up north, all over. You look good, old king,” says the voyageur.

“You lie.”

The voyageur laughs. “How are your people? How's Black Dirt and that interpreter you persuaded her to marry?” The voyageur is Robert de Repentigny, a trapper, trader, curious explorer of western lands, and an old friend of Caucus-Meteor and his family. Like most voyageurs, he's short, wiry, and very strong, perfectly sized to paddle a canoe for hours.

“She is a widow, Robert. And I am a widower. Black Dirt's two daughters were also taken by the sickness.”

“I am sorry. I heard about the plagues. I didn't realize they had harmed your village.”

Caucus-Meteor shrugs. “Are you going to join the gauntlet?”

“The novelty has worn off for me.”

“The rite of the gauntlet is more profundity than novelty.”

“I am sorry if I offended you.”

“No offense.” The two men shake hands, and de Repentigny leaves.

In the background, music plays. Like the garb of the folk, the music is all mixed, the sounds not exactly comfortable in each other's company, thinks the old American. He can hear the drums, rattles, and cedar lutes that move him so; Catholic hymns sung by French nuns in Latin, a language nobody understands but the clerics and the lawyers, but which sounds impressive; even some kind of a fiddle screeching, maybe Scottish, that Caucus-Meteor heard as a boy in New England and that now suggests to him another hidden reason he came out of retirement: somewhere in the back of his mind was the dim hope that the raiders would continue south to that place his parents had called home.

The captives are paraded through the market. Nathan and Sam, hands bound in front, half walk, half stumble; Captain Warren appears to be growing more detached, devoid of emotion. This one may already be dead, thinks Caucus-Meteor, a man at the gates of his own personal Hades. They reach an expanse of pasture grass, muddy and drab with patches of old snow, waiting for the green of May, the field extending almost to a little mountain, the “mont” of Montreal. A few soldiers practice marching and gunnery, but most of the field is used for athletic contests—foot races, wrestling matches, lacrosse games. On the edges are crude stick booths where men can buy liquor or food, and adornments, including tattoos. Some day, in my old age, he thinks, I will tattoo my skin until I cannot recognize myself. Perhaps in that action I will find release from ambition. His attention is drawn to the gambling arbors where men shoot dice, play other games of chance, and wager on the athletes. Drunks of varying races, tribes, nations, and persuasions slither through the crowd.