The Light in the Forest (5 page)

Thank the Lord, he told himself, when they came to the home river. It would take his mind off the boy for a spell. The great stream flowed south from the mountains, a noble tide a mile wide. Just to let his eye roam over it gave him peace and wonder. The ferry pushing off from the far shore was a mark of civilization and the white race. To the north a squadron of islands swam like ships pointing down stream, and still farther northward were the majestic gaps of the Blue Mountains, one after the other, where the great river poured through.

It was to Del the greatest sight in his world. The narrower if deeper Ohio couldn’t compare to it. And yet when he looked at the boy, he found him sitting his saddle unnoticing and unmoved. Not till they were on the ferry did he wake up to it. That was when his father called the river Susquehanna. Quickly, as if he had heard that name before, the boy lifted his head. His eyes took in the great stretch of water with the fields and houses on its far shore. Then he poured out bitter words in Delaware.

“What’s he saying?” his father asked.

Del made a face.

“He says the Susquehanna and all the water flowing into it belongs to his Indian people. He says his Indian father lived on its banks to the north. The graves of his ancestors are beside it. He says he often heard his father tell how the river and graves were stolen from them by the white people.”

Mr. Butler looked weary.

“Tell him we’ll talk about that some other time. Tell him he’s getting close to home now. If he’ll look up at those hills across the river, he’ll see Paxton township where he was born.”

Even before he translated it, Del was sure the boy had understood. He gazed at the far bank with a sudden look of terror.

“Place of Peshtank white men?” he asked in thick, Indian English.

His father looked pleased. He put an affectionate hand on the boy’s shoulder.

“That’s right, son. Peshtank or Paxton. It’s the same thing. We call them the Paxton boys. Many of them, I’m proud to say, are your own kin.”

The boy looked as if a whiplash had hit him. He stared wildly up at the facing hills. The ferryman pushed by with his pole. The water curled around the flat bow of the scow. On the eastern bank, the sycamores and maples grew steadily nearer. Suddenly, before the boat touched shore, the boy kicked his moccasin heels into the sides of his horse and plunged with him into the shallow water. At once he was urging the gray with sharp Indian yells up the high steep bank. By the time Del and Mr. Butler reached the shore level, all they got was a glimpse of horse and boy vanishing into the northern forest.

“They’ll stop him at Fort Hunter,” the boy’s father said.

But before reaching the fort, they came on the
boy’s horse standing riderless in the trail. Del jumped from the saddle and bent over the ground. In the thawed earth he could make out where the gray had shied at a white rag tied to a bush at a fork in the trail. In the ground were marks where the boy had landed. His tracks on foot were harder to follow, but Del ran down a path that led to the river. In a tangle of alders and sweetbrier he stopped and soon pulled out the kicking and biting boy. Mr. Butler had to help drag him back to his horse and lift him on the saddle. Then, with the gray firmly tethered between the two men, they rode back down the river trail.

They passed a mill, open fields, log and stone buildings. Their road climbed the rising hills. Now they could see rich, cleared farms with solid-looking houses and barns. The boy’s father turned in to a lane lined with young walnuts. Ahead of them a barn with stone ends had the greatest space between them that Del Hardy thought he had ever seen in a building. Nearby was a limestone tenant house and, beyond the spring, a stone mansion house with a wide front door. As the riders approached, a boy and servant girl came out on the porch with a determined-looking woman beside them.

Del glanced at Mr. Butler. His face was uneasy. Likely he had looked forward to a time when his son would come back to him. But hardly had he counted on a homecoming like this. It would be an ordeal they would all have to go through.

The two men swung to the ground in front of the house, but the boy had to be ordered from the saddle. Del took him by the arm and led him to the porch steps.

“Your brother is home,” the father said uncomfortably to the small boy standing there, then to True Son, “You never saw Gordie. He was born while you were away. But you ought to recollect your Aunt Kate.”

The older boy stood silent in his Indian dress, ignoring all. The servant girl had started toward him. Now she stopped painfully, while Aunt Kate stared in frank disapproval and disbelief. Only the small boy seemed to see nothing unusual in the scene, gazing at his brother with open delight and admiration.

“Well, let’s go in,” the father said, clearing his throat, and they moved into the wide hall.

“Harry!” a lady’s voice called eagerly from upstairs.

Mr. Butler and Aunt Kate exchanged glances.

“Harry!” the voice called again. “Aren’t you bringing him up?”

The father gave a look as if there was no help for it.

“You better come along,” he told the soldier significantly, then with the small boy running ahead and the aunt coming after, they urged True Son toward the stairs.

It wasn’t easy to get him up. Plenty of times, Del knew, this boy must have shinned up cliffs and trees higher than this. But he eyed the stairs and bannister rail as an invention of the devil. For a while the guard figured this short distance from floor to floor might be the hardest part of their journey. Then Gordie, running ahead, turned the tide. He bounced up those steps so easy, looking around as he ran, that his brother shook off the hands that tried to help him. For a moment his eyes measured this white man’s ladder, wide enough for two or three men abreast, the oaken treads shaven smooth as an axe handle and polished with a kind of beeswax. Then half crouching and taking two steps at a time, he climbed to the second-floor hall. It ran from one end of the house to the other, with doors branching off on both sides.

“This way, son,” Mr. Butler said, and took him
toward an open doorway where his small brother stood waiting.

The room they entered was large and sunny, with green-figured white walls. The broad flooring held much furniture, a red cherry bureau and washstand, a high polished chest of drawers, two or three small tables and twice as many chairs, a large bed with impressive posts, and by the window a couch on which a lady in a blue dressing-gown half sat and half lay. You could tell by the black hair and eyes and by the eager loving look she gave the boy that she was his mother. Just the same his father had to push him to the couch, and for all the notice he took of her, she might not have been there. Only when she pulled down his head and kissed him did he acknowledge her presence, stiffening painfully.

“Why, you look like an Indian, John!” she exclaimed. “You even walk like one. You’ve had a hard fate, but thank God your life was spared and you’re home with us again. Are you happy?”

True Son had wrapped himself again in aloofness like a blanket. His mother turned with quick compassion.

“Doesn’t he remember any English?”

“He understands a good deal, we think,” his father
said. “But not everything. We don’t know how much he can talk it. So far he’s only said a few words in English. Del has to talk to him in Indian.”

“I’m sure he understands me,” his mother declared. “I can tell by his eyes when I speak. You do understand me, don’t you, John?”

The boy gave no response. She went on quickly, sympathetically.

“You’ve been away a long time, John. Your education has been arrested. You’ve had to live in heathen darkness and ignorance. Now you must make up for lost time. You’re almost a young man. The first and most important thing to know is your native English tongue. We’ll start right now. I am your mother, Myra Butler. This is your father, Harry Butler. Your brother is Gordon Butler. And you are John C. Butler. Now repeat it after me, John Cameron Butler.”

The boy said nothing, only stood there impassively. Aunt Kate turned from the room as if she could stand no more.

“He don’t know his own name. He don’t even know when it’s Sunday,” Del heard her tell the servant girl on the stairs.

But back in her bedroom Mrs. Butler had far
from given up. She might be an invalid, but you could tell she was the mistress of this house.

“I want you to repeat your name after me. Say John, John!” She seized his arm and shook it, then turned helplessly.

“Maybe he’s deaf and dumb, Mamma!” little Gordie said.

That broke the strain for a moment and all smiled, all except the boy in Indian dress. Gradually his insistent, somber silence overtook the others. You could see Mrs. Butler come to a decision.

“Very well, John,” she said, tightening her lips. “I see you are willful and stubborn as your Uncle Wilse. We will have to act accordingly. Your family and friends are coming to see you tomorrow and I won’t have you standing up crude and ignorant as a savage in front of them. You’ll have to stay in this room till you speak your own name.”

You could see that the boy understood. Resentment crept into his dark face. He spoke rapidly in Delaware. Del had to translate it.

“He says his name is Lenni Quis. In English you’d call it Original Son or True Son.”

Mrs. Butler heard him.

“But he’s not with the Delawares any more. He’s
at home under our roof, and here he’ll have to recognize his real name.”

The boy regarded her with burning dark eyes so like her own.

“True Son my real name,” he said in thick English, having trouble with the letter r. “My father and mother give me this name.”

“He means his Indian father and mother,” Del explained.

Mrs. Butler had flushed.

“Well, I think that will be enough today,” she said. “He has spoken a few words in English at any rate.”

She took from beside her on the couch some clothing she had been mending. A feeling of constriction crept over the boy when he saw they were a pair of light gray Yengwe pantaloons and a youth’s yellow jacket. She went on. “When I heard you were coming home, I borrowed these from your cousin Alec. Now I’d like you to put them on and see how they fit you.”

The boy made no effort to take them.

“Do you understand, John?” she repeated earnestly. “You’re to put these on so we can see what you look like in civilized dress.”

The boy stared with loathing at the pants and
jacket. They were symbols of all the lies, thefts, and murders by the white man. Now he was asked to wear them. You might as well ask a deer to dress itself in the hide of its enemy, the wolf.

“Do you hear your mother?” Del said sharply and repeated the request in Delaware.

The boy still held back. How could he touch these things? Had there been small wood by the fireplace, he might have picked up the clothes with the end of a stick and carried them out, holding them as far from his body as possible. But there was no stick. Then Gordie took them for him.

“When you put these on, will you give me your Indian clothes, True Son?” he asked eagerly as they went from the room. “Then I can be an Indian.”

The older boy did not say anything, nor did he take off his Indian dress when they reached the room where Gordie took him, but for a moment a look of mutual respect and understanding passed between the two brothers.

T
HAT
night the boy lay in the alien place provided him and Del. Walls and ceiling had been closed up with some kind of thick white mud. To make it airtight, his white people had covered the dried mud with paper. The only holes in the walls had been blocked off by wooden doors and glass squares.

He felt sealed up as in the grave. He knew now why the English looked so pale. They shut themselves off from the living air. They were like green grass bleached white under a stone or the pallid
ghost pipes that grow in the dark woods where no sun reaches. The heart of the whites must be different from the Indian as sheep from the deer. The Indian and deer would wither and die in such confinement, but the white man flourished in the stale sickly air of his house like fleas in his wall and borers in the cabin logs. He could rise refreshed from a suffocating bed of feathers high as a turkey roost off his mother, the Earth. He could even survive that instrument of torture called a bolster, which bent white people from the straightness of the Indian, curving their necks forward like a crane’s.

But what kept the boy most wakeful this first night was the feel of his enemies around him. He could still hear in his mind the “Peshtank story” that had swept through his village and the other Indian towns like a pestilence. He could see the dark Indian faces of the teller and his listeners.

“It was the month that the white men claim their good, kind Lord and master was born in,” his father had told them. “Our Conestogo cousins had taken the white man’s religion. They were only a handful, living at peace among the white men. Then the white savages from Peshtank came. They came on horseback with guns and hatchets. The Conestogo were true to their religion. They made
no resistance. Only those away from the village escaped.”