The Old American (2 page)

The woman is pale as if with fright; her hair is the color of corn silk and eyes like a winter sky on a clear day. She's small and doesn't look very strong, though it's obvious she can bear children. He guesses from her face, fighting itself, that she would make a stubborn captive, especially if her children were killed before her eyes, as they were likely to be, for they are too young to endure the march to Canada as captives. Only their scalps have value.

Caucus-Meteor notices a musket leaning against the inside wall by the door. He knows this kind of gun well. It's almost as ancient as he is, a 1680 New England trade fowler, the kind of weapon his own father carried in his great war. This farmer probably inherited it from someone in his family, and probably has fired it but half a dozen times in his life, if that.

When the corn finishes popping, the woman takes the pot from the hearth, empties the contents in wooden bowls. Another child appears as if by magic, scrambling down the ladder from her loft bed, and takes her place on a bench and drinks from her noggin on a slab-pine table. Caucus-Meteor estimates her age at four.

An Englishman, a Frenchman, or even a Mohawk, might regard the cabin as crude, for it has only one room of unpeeled softwood poles laid on the ground with no foundation, a dirt floor, logs chinked with mosses—a temporary affair until a proper frame house can be built. But for Caucus-Meteor even the cabin is too refined, for he has always lived the nomadic life and structures built to last more than two seasons strike him as unnecessary and subtly corrupting of the spirit; also, prone to insect infestation.

The man shows little emotion, but Caucus-Meteor can read his eyes, for the old American has witnessed this kind of trouble in families before: the man cannot bear the sorrow in the woman, and cannot tell the woman that he cannot bear it. The man turns away from his food, grabs his coat, and starts for the door.

“What's the matter?” the woman says.

“Naught. I'm going to the barn. Breakfast can wait.” He hesitates at the door, looks at the musket, and frowns.

“Nathan?” calls the woman, a touch of harshness in her voice.

The man responds sharply. “A man cannot chop wood and carry a musket, nor can he hoe the ground, pitch hay, scythe grass, plane a board, or even haul a bucket up from a well… carrying a musket.” His outburst stops abruptly, and he is instantly contrite. “I am sorry, Elizabeth. I did not mean to lose my temper.” She gives him a bare nod, and he goes outside. The weapon remains inside, the woman's eyes wild and fearful.

The man needs only to look in the shadows twelve feet away, and he will see the profile of the great stone face in the old American, but he continues on, for he is more in his thoughts than in his environs.

He pauses at the barn, turns his eyes toward his town, gazes at it for the longest time with an expression that is a queer confluence of pity and confusion, or perhaps, thinks the old American, I am only mirroring myself, as I am wont to do when I require company to fend off morbidity. Caucus-Meteor wonders now what was here before the arrival of these invaders—a meadow, swamp maples, and strange gods that have long withdrawn. Caucus-Meteor is aware that the English divide land into measured lots, but the sight—fenced boundaries, cabins and frame houses under construction, and barns, and pigsties, everything lined up in squares—sends surges of revulsion through him. He wants to tell the Englishman, who like himself is still looking out, puzzled, over the town, that Christian hell must be like his village, row upon row of square-made structures. In this near-dawn light all is shapes and shadows, though in the distance Caucus-Meteor can make out the log fort and under construction a kind of church, which the English call a meeting house. It's a good idea to mix religion with statecraft, for the errors of one can be blamed on the other. Before Caucus-Meteor can meditate further on this notion, before the Englishman breaks off his attentive gaze, they're both distracted by the pop of a musket. Then another. The attack has begun.

The woman is already out the door with both children in her arms when she meets the man. In the dawn's first light and in their silence and fear-frozen expressions, they resemble something like statues Caucus-Meteor saw in Europe. The man takes the children from the woman. She hikes her skirt, and the family runs for the fort. Caucus-Meteor is glad they got away.

The old American listens for the sounds of war. In times gone by, Americans believed that devils could be frightened by loud noises, so warriors whooped and hollered in battle. These days Americans have largely discarded these beliefs, but they still whoop and holler. The old American pulls back his mind so that the gunshots, yells of alarm and terror, war whoops, threats, curse words grow dim. He thinks only of his hunger and fatigue. The door to the cabin is ajar, and Caucus-Meteor enters. He takes note of a sagging mattress of straw and feathers, a spinning wheel, tools on wooden hooks. He picks up one of the whimsy-doodle toys that the English father carved for his children, inspects it, and puts it down gently. Englishmen beat their children, and yet they make toys for them. How can such brutality and kindness be reconciled? He walks over to the stone fireplace hearth, tosses on some fatwood kindling, and a couple of hardwood sticks.

Familiar images from a thousand brooding moments float through his mind: a house of poles, birch bark, tied grass-bunch for insulation, a tiny fire in the middle on the earthen floor. The wigwam fades, replaced by a stick castle complete with moat, stained-glass windows, mannequins in armor with feathers sticking out of the helmets, a king's throne of lashed-together sticks upon which sits a younger version of the old American himself; people of all races appear in adoration at the foot of the king of America.

The vision fades, and Caucus-Meteor turns his attention to the food on the pine table. He sits on the bench, a disagreeable and unfamiliar position. Caucus-Meteor thinks in various languages, favoring none, no more than the wind favors a particular leaf that falls from a tree. Now, in an Englishman's cabin, he thinks in English: How can people sit like this? He picks up a bowl of popped corn and the child's deserted noggin of milk, brings them by the fire, and puts them on the floor. He drops to both knees, sits on his heels, and starts eating popped corn, one kernel at a time. He used to lecture his children and later his grandchildren, “No two popped corn kernels are exactly alike, nor is the circumstance of eating them. So, to obtain the full benefit, don't stuff your mouth.” The old American takes a long drink of the creamy milk. It satisfies, though later it will probably upset his stomach.

After he's finished eating, he walks to the bed, tears open the mattress with his knife. Feathers and straw spill out. He unstops the cork from the Englishman's ceramic rum jug. The stink fills the old American with anger and loathing. He pours rum on the straw and feathers and the log walls. He grabs the fireplace poker and pulls the fire out of the hearth onto the earthen floor. Flames catch the rum-soaked straw and flare up into a wave of orange and black.

He's about to leave when he glances through the window-pane. The cabin owner, the man named Nathan, has returned to his home. Caucus-Meteor watches him pause at the barn and go in. The pine siding and split-cedar roofing are eggshell brown, softly iridescent. No sag in the roof, no rot in the boards at ground level. It strikes Caucus-Meteor now that the Englishman built the dwelling place of his animals to last beyond his own years. Moments later two oxen lumber out, then a cow, a pair of sheep, chickens, pigs, geese. Apparently, the man left the safety of the fort to free his animals from the barn. An odd but endearing vanity, thinks Caucus-Meteor.

The smoke from the burning cabin now obscures the old American's vision. He grabs the musket and goes out the door. A score of raiders, mainly Iroquois, run toward the front of the barn. These men may be his brothers in battle, but they are also his competitors, for under the rules of engagement established between the French and their native allies, captives belong to those who capture. Caucus-Meteor goes around the rear of the barn. Coming out a back door is the man Nathan. He's holding a lamb in his arms. The man Nathan sees him, drops the lamb, and the animal scampers off.

Caucus-Meteor cocks the musket, and muses that he hasn't fired one of these things in years.

Seconds later warriors pour out of the back door of the barn, while others appear from around the sides. The Englishman is now surrounded. He extends both hands palms upward, turns a half circle to show he is unarmed. The man's demeanor, apparent mild amusement and the kind of radiance found only in saints and the insane, elicits admiration in Caucus-Meteor.

“You've come too early. I've not had a chance to eat,” the man Nathan says. Caucus-Meteor understands the technique: in the face of disaster, act casually defiant.

Caucus-Meteor translates the man's words first in Iroquois, then in Algonkian, and finally in French. The warriors laugh at the captive's joke. Then Caucus-Meteor utters his own response in the three languages. More laughter. Finally, the old American speaks in English, “It must be a poor Englishman who cannot go to Canada without his breakfast.”

The man Nathan appears shocked that his captor has responded to him in his own language.

Caucus-Meteor ties the man's arms to a stake shoved cross ways against his back. The captive's brazen front falls away as he watches white smoke pouring from his barn. “Can you smell your hay burn?” Caucus-Meteor says. “Your cabin, Nathan—that is your name, is it not?”

“Nathan, Nathan Blake,” the man says in a whisper.

“Nathan, your cabin, it burns with the sound of a winter wind, does it not?” taunts Caucus-Meteor.

The captive's body shivers along the spine where the strain of the stake is. He is no longer able to pretend contempt for self-concern. Other than the experience of false cold, he'll be an empty vessel of feeling for a while, thinks Caucus-Meteor. Which is what a master desires from his slave in the early stages of captivity.

Minutes later the attack is over. The raiders leave as swiftly as they arrived. They cross a meandering stream on a single-log footbridge, felled precisely to drop on the further shore, one side hewed flat. Caucus-Meteor finds the cleverness behind the idea as well as the skill used in carrying it out suspicious and oddly disheartening. It's strange but interesting to be old, he thinks. The troop moves swiftly west in single file and in silence. The old American strains on three counts, to keep up with the younger men, to pretend he is not close to exhaustion, and to keep an eye on his prisoner.

An hour away from the battle site, the troop slows briefly. Caucus-Meteor blindfolds his prisoner, ties a rope around his neck, and half drags him as he starts for the head of the column, winding his way through the men. Some are the sons of the northern Algonkian tribes whose territory is now inhabited by the English—Penacooks and Squakheags and Abenaki—who have banded together in the French missionary towns, but most are Christian Mohawks from Kahnawake across the river from Montreal. Only Caucus-Meteor represents the mixed-tribes' village of Conissadawaga.

At the front of the column he's met by the commander, Ensign Pierre Raimbault St. Blein. The ensign is very young, with flowing locks of dark brown hair, blue and silver eyes. He has a pretty face, little nose, almost like a girl's, and like a girl sometimes he pouts; nonetheless he is already a veteran of many campaigns and his men respect him, for he never shows fear. Before a battle he trims his thin mustache and hair patch under his lower lip and parades before his men. “I defy the Englishman to take this scalp,” he'll say, pulling on his hair. “Come, my savage brothers, let us fight together.” Then he'll laugh, a laugh that inspires confidence.

With the ensign is Furrowed Brow, a middle-aged Mohawk with a deeply lined face, features permanently fixed in gravity so extreme he inspires in Caucus-Meteor the opposite emotion of giddiness. Furrowed Brow is holding a tether to which is tied a big white man whose wrists are crossed behind him, his mouth gagged, his eyes covered.

“Now I know why you were late to the battlefield,” Caucus-Meteor says in Iroquois.

“We surprised this fellow and three others in their camp while they slept,” Furrowed Brow says, and he makes a motion with his hand to his temple, which tells Caucus-Meteor that the other men were tomahawked.

“Is he a soldier?” Caucus-Meteor addresses his question in French to St. Blein.

“From his papers, an English naval officer,” says St. Blein.

“I did not know the English could bring the sea so far into the mountains,” says Caucus-Meteor.

St. Blein laughs; Caucus-Meteor laughs; Furrowed Brow's permanent frown deepens. The old American is aware that he and the French officer share a sense of humor that unsettles others, especially humorless men like Furrowed Brow.

“More likely the Englishman lost his ocean,” says St. Blein. “We will discover why when we interrogate him and your own prisoner at our camp by the great river.”

In the tongue of the destroyed tribe that gave him life, Caucus-Meteor speaks the name of that river—Kehteihtukqut—and feels a pang, a longing, for his parents.

The old interpreter and the young commander start talking in the friendly dueling way of French intimates until they are interrupted by Furrowed Brow. “The two of you speak too fast and too cunningly in a language where I am slow and seek certainty.”

“Our apologies,” says the ensign in French.

“You have a worthy captive—you're a credit to your kind,” says Caucus-Meteor in Iroquois. The old American is annoyed that the Mohawk has a more important captive than he does.

Furrowed Brow is not sure whether he's being insulted, teased, or complimented. In frustration, he tugs on the tether of his captive.

Minutes later, the march resumes. The men walk until late in the afternoon, when they reach the river.