Peter Loon (3 page)

With that, they parted amicably and no more was said on the subject between them for some months.

In the late summer of the following year, Ezekiel Peter Black was countenanced with less agreeable company in the form of a surveyor working for Henry Knox. Surveyors were not well-liked in those parts; they were considered heralds to the official claims of the proprietors, and since one could not claim what one hadn't measured, they were more than usually driven off. Black discovered this surveyor at the eastern extremity of his own claim. The border between Sheepscott Great Pond and Davistown was in some dispute and the man was laying lines in preparation of an agreement between the two representative patents.

Black was mounted on a big black horse and must have made an impression upon the surveyor. “If you're dividing
my
land from that of Henry Knox,” said Black, “or any other man, you have your stakes too far west.”

“I'm dividing what belongs to Henry Knox from the Plymouth Patent,” said the man.

“Your stakes need be further east,” said Black, “and what lies west of them from here to that hill yonder is mine.” He pointed over a recent deadfall at a green ridge.

“The Patent will soon take it up with you, once matters with England are solved,” said the surveyor, and he did his best to appear careless by returning to his work.

Black replied “And if Henry Knox claims an inch that I consider mine, I will take it up with him,
and
the Patent soon after. So if you would save your
master
large grief for little gain, you'll move those stakes.”

“Are you threatening me?” said the surveyor, bristling suddenly with all the office he imagined he possessed.

“I wouldn't threaten you, but I might climb down from this horse and pound you if I didn't want you to go back and tell Henry Knox and whoever else you serve that any claim to my land will rally my presence at their door.”

“I shouldn't worry they'd be frightened.”

“I shouldn't worry I'd give them a moment to think on it.”

The surveyor was aghast that bald threats could be levied against men such as Henry Knox and the Great Proprietors. “While you're safe in your little house in the woods, men like Henry Knox are fighting the British for your rights!” he declared.

“Men fight the same battle for separate reasons,” said Black, “and I am sure that Henry Knox has had little thought for me in his war. If he is willing to fight the British for this land, I am willing to fight him for it.”

The conversation did not go on much longer, but the end of it was that the surveyor was allowed to gather his gear and leave in peace, if not peace of mind. Black did not dignify the man's work by pulling his stakes. “Any thief can drive a stick in the ground,” he would say.

There was a story people told, years later, that Ezekiel Peter Black paid a visit to Henry Knox, though the truth was that the Plymouth Patent claimed the land Black had settled. The story told better with Knox in it, however–the hero of Dorchester Heights and Washington's Secretary of State.

Knox came into his own parlor one day, it was said, (there in his mansion in Thomaston), and Black was waiting for him, unbidden. Knox's favorite dog was lying at Black's feet like a best friend, and Black offered Knox the view of a pistol, muzzle first, as evidence of his claim. “I just wanted you to know,” Black was to have said, “that you will have less warning of my presence in your home, than I will of your presence within ten miles of mine.” Then Black got up and left, and by the time Knox had shaken himself from his apoplectic state, the settler had made good his escape. Knox, people said, had shot the dog.

But Ezekiel Peter Black was dead before he might have performed such a feat, despite what people said. Several days after his encounter with the surveyor, he collapsed in his own rough parlor and Rosemund was only barely able to drag him into bed. He shivered, as from ague, and sucked in his breath like a drowning man. Rosemund took horse to the nearest neighbor and soon the Black's homestead was scene to a deathwatch.

Silas Loon and Obed Winslow came, of course, and got nearly the last mortal words from Ezekiel Black. “You will marry my daughter, and be honorable,” he said, but there was no clue in his words or his gestures, which one of them he thought he was speaking to. Try as they might, they could not bring the man's mind back to the question of his daughter's hand. Rosemund was called in, and she was left alone with her father, and soon he was dead.

Some said the surveyor had poisoned Black somehow, and there were tales that the conversation between the two had been a deal more friendly and that the surveyor had offered a jar of rum, from which he himself did not drink. But Rosemund had heard the true story of the encounter from her father's lips and she said it wasn't so.

Silas and Obed fretted what to do, and days later, they went to the farm nearest the Black homestead, where Rosemund was staying for a while, and told her that her father wanted her to marry one of them. “We give you to choose,” they told her, “assuring you that you will do nothing to our friendship, however you decide.”

Rosemund was overwhelmed, and could say nothing, and her courting fell out in this way: Silas and Obed gave thought to what chore they were pretty equal at, and took themselves out to the woods and felled a straight pine. Then, with a belt, they measured the trunk in two places, and at two points where the tree equaled itself in girth they commenced to drive their axes. Obed, it happened, fell upon a knot, where an old broken branch had healed over years before, but Silas's portion was clean as threshed hay. So Silas won and, half in delight and half in sorrow, he took Rosemund to wife when she was yet sixteen years of age, and Obed, who found circumstance harder to bear than he could have imagined, said goodbye to Silas with a shake of the hand and a tear in his eye, and left Sheepscott Great Pond.

In later days, many in the settlement were sure that, had Rosemund found courage to speak, she would have married Obed. It may be that some decisions in life should not be left to chance, or a strong arm.

ROSEMUND WAS ONLY JUST SEVENTEEN WHEN HER AND SILAS'S FIRST
child was born. It was a difficult confinement, and the neighborwives attending thought she might die. One of them wetnursed the child, who was named Peter, while Rosemund hovered in and out of the grave for three days. She did recover, but seemed more puzzled than pleased with the baby.

Silas Loon, despite pride in his own claim of land, had never been able to ask his wife to leave the Black homestead, and so had sold his own place for livestock and feed and commenced married life on his wife's property. Despite his presence, and his improvements, Silas's new home was always known as the Black place. Obed Winslow's cleared land and cabin were squatted by a new family soon after Obed left Sheepscott Great Pond.

It seemed as if Obed had never left, his continued presence at the Black homestead was so real to Silas. It might have been as real to Rosemund, but she never spoke of it; she never spoke Obed's name once he was gone, and rarely spoke Silas's name as long as they were married.

The husband was ever conscious that Rosemund might have had Obed for a husband, but for chance or the Grace of God, and mindful that she might have been better off. Consequendy, there was nothing denied her, and gifts were given and favors performed that she had never asked for or imagined. Her father had treated her as an equal as long as she could remember; and others, daunted by her beauty, had deferred almost reverendy to her. Now her spouse treated her as more than equal, and suspected himself less than equal to the honor of being her husband.

Rosemund was not so much unkind as she was simply unaware; and eventually folks decided that she was
touched
. Such beauty came with a price, it was said, and no wonder she could look at her reflection in the pond and be a little mad. People did not think poorly of her, exactly. Once, a year or so after Peter was born, she was out walking in the forest, which was her wont, and she was attacked by a man who thought she was a wood nymph, she was so beautiful. She managed to brain him with a rock before he much had his way, and folks said she had grit, but she remained unaffected by the encounter. The man was thrown into a makeshift jail and died there soon after.

Other children came. Some survived birth and some of those survived infancy. Rosemund did as she pleased, which sometimes included fierce hard work in the gardens and fields, but as often took in a walk along the stream below the house or a visit to the hill her father had pointed out to the surveyor. She met Indians sometimes, and could speak more of their tongue than most settlers thereabouts. She wandered off with some Indian women once and Silas and his neighbors had to go looking for her. She never showed more than a passing sort of interest in her children. She was
touched
, folks were sure, and signs of her queerness only seemed plainer as the years passed. She had strange humors about her; she kept her children from church, disdained talk about land, and would sometimes laugh at jests that no one else understood.

The Loon children never heard of Obed Winslow. Peter and his brothers and sisters grew up in the presence of a pipe dream, it seemed. Some mothers, they knew, could be hard where life was so hard, but Rosemund Loon was like a ghost in the house. She might pick up a crying child and dust him off, but there was always the sense that she was merely quieting him for her own sake, for the sake of the dreamlife she lived, beyond the experience of those around her. Some thought that her first born, Peter, shared some of his mother's othermindedness.

A new century was born. When he was seventeen, Peter wasted no time cleaving from his family, but went north of his father's interrupted homestead of years before, where a new family had recently taken up living, and began to clear his own acres. His father came to help him after the harvest, and one bright October day a twisted hackmatack swung to the wrong quarter as it fell and it crushed Silas. Peter got his father home, carrying him the entire way, and Rosemund tended the man until he died the next morning.

To his brothers and sisters, Peter seemed more like his mother than ever as he stood out on the porch after their mother broke the news to them. He seemed confused, unable to decide between falling down or fleeing. His father had always been good to his children when he had the opportunity to deal with them at all. He had been the steady influence in their lives and it was difficult to make sense of their fate, now that he was gone.

The next night, long before sunrise, Peter woke to find his mother standing by his cot, looking down at him. There was a lantern in her hand, the light of which must have wakened him; it lit her face from below so that she seemed almost sinister. Peter wondered if she knew he was awake and tried to pretend otherwise, but she spoke in a near whisper.