The Old American (36 page)

Then Norman says he has been talking to his confessor about a sin. Now that he has a wife this secret he carries, that his king is still alive, has become a sin of omission. He must renounce his king, for there is not sufficient fidelity for God, family, king, and secret. Trembling, Norman asks his king for release. He kneels in front of him, and Great Stone Face puts his hand on his shoulder and mumbles ancient Algonkian incantations well mixed with as much pretend Latin as he can muster, and then Norman leaves him forever to be with his wife, his oxen, his own life.

The old king no longer can wield power or even influence. With Norman lost to him, he calls upon other sources—the reports of visiting natives, voyageurs, priests, soldiers, and his own conjuring gift, which grows more powerful as his worldly faculties decline.

B
y speaking with my mind's voice in oratorical tones directly to you, I speak to all the women in my life—to you, Black Dirt, to my adopted daughter, Caterina, to my wife, Keeps-the-Flame, and to my dear mother, whose name I will not voice out of respect for the old superstitions. These words within my conjuring, these are my embraces—words have always been my embraces. I am beginning to see how it should be between you and Nathan. An old Algonkian saying tells us a heart mended after heartbreak makes for the strongest heart.

For two months, Father Spike instructs the villagers in the requirements of the faith until one day, speaking in the three main languages of the villages—Algonkian, French, and Iroquois—he says, “Now you are ready to receive Jesus.” The priest baptizes everybody in the village and gives communion to all except one. The demands of the priest remind Nathan that while he might in good conscience love a pagan woman, he's hard put to love a papist one. He says to you, “I'm too much an Englishman to offer my soul to a priest.” While I fear that his intransigence will be the ruin of you both, I cannot help but admire him very much. Dear daughter, you are not sure what to think, what to feel. You gave yourself over to this man for reasons mysterious and perhaps (you are thinking now) temporary. These Frenchmen and

Englishmen, they presume to court Jesus, but they quarrel over how to love Him, and in the end the quarrel supplants the love. How can a poor savage woman determine a correct course weaving between these and those?

The house that Nathan built serves variously as a meeting hall, a Catholic church, and a residence for the builder and his wife. But, Black Dirt, a house like the English built is not a wigwam! It is not like the den of the wolf or the nest of the bird or the burrow of the mouse, abodes in the village of the earth. A house is apart from the earth; it separates you from the very dirt that you love. Nor is a house heaven. Don't you understand what I am saying? A house is a place to grow lonely, and the lonely grow ambitious for comforts. What is happening in Conissadawaga supports my proposition. The villagers treat the house as if it belongs to them, and after a fashion it certainly does, for they have put their labor into it and their king paid for its necessities. But Nathan behaves as if it belongs to him and you alone. He snaps at the villagers, as a squire snaps at his servants. You draw back in sullen criticism of his actions, but you do little to dissuade him because secretly you, too, want the house for your own. The house has made the villagers envious, you and Nathan jealous. The ancient idea of sharing fades into the yaw of want.

Religion, too, is making the people lonely. When they were pagans they always had good company, for a pagan can feel like a brother to a stone or a tree; a pagan can laugh with the foolish voices in a brook. Now that the people have been baptized, they feel, as the priests told them, removed from the garden; they start to leave Conissadawaga. A great orator might yet hold them together, but neither you nor your husband are orators; you are only hard-working and good people. Over the course of the months where summer flows into fall and abruptly drops off into winter, the tribe grows smaller and smaller.

Omer and Hungry Heart and Freeway move permanently to Montreal. After Wytopitlock changes her name to Anne and marries Norman Feathers, they set out in search of great teams of oxen which require great teamsters, who have great wives to make them happy so they can impart happiness to their beasts. Others leave for Quebec to live as Frenchmen. Most have either left or are planning to go to réfugié villages where relatives reside, for now that they are in the faith they will be accepted. A few go North searching for Haggis. Ossipee wanders off and falls from the river bluffs on the rocks below. Passaconway stops eating, and he too dies.

Haggis was right. Once the village turned to the papist Jesus, the tribe broke apart. You see how it is? Do you? No you don't. You still hope to remain a member of a people in this place. What is it that holds you? The land? The past? The folk? The future? I think it is the dirt. I know how it is with these réfugiés, for I am one myself. As a boy I was a true savage, but I lost myself in slavery. Because of that experience I cannot just be. I must become. I am a conscious act, I am a decision, I am a labor. With all my effort, I can never be entirely the savage that Haggis is. Part of me will always be a slave with a European way of thinking and feeling.

You bring up the subject of loss and dissolution with the priest. Father Spike tells you that Jesus takes away our dream for a life on this earth in return for eternal life with Him. I admit his is an unbeatable answer to the question.

You draw closer and closer to the church, and by the tenets of that proximity a distance between you and Nathan lengthens. You have been searching for something that neither family nor village can provide; now you have found it in the papist Jesus and the difficult order he brings. Perhaps it is the very difficulty that makes submission possible. Or perhaps it all a ruse with you, and you are more conniving than myself or your mother. I cannot tell. Oh, this feeling of wonder and suspicion makes me happy to be alive.

As one by one the people depart, Nathan attempts to console you. “I know how difficult is for you when even one of the villagers leaves.”

“And now they are all going or gone. The few who remain have voted to divide up our fields and hunting grounds into … I forget the word in English?”

“Lots.”

“Yes—lots. My people are becoming like the French and English: paradise is in their own lots, their own houses, their own farms. I plead with them but my oratory fails, and the votes go against me. I cannot blame them.” You say no more. You are thinking that the English house that Nathan Provider-of-Services built is a lonely place; even so, something in you wants to remain there.

Full of conflict, you visit your sister in the convent. She tells you to look for a sign from Jesus. You think maybe that sign comes later in the month.

You meet with your confessor, Father Spike. His tiny hands, hands soft as a girl's, embrace your own. You wonder if Jesus had hands like his priest. Jesus, like Nathan, was a builder, so perhaps he had big rough hands. But Jesus is never seen building; he builds with the heart, and uses his hands only for blessings. So perhaps the hands of the Son of Man were tiny and soft like the ones belonging to Father Spike.

“I have something troubling to tell you,” you say.

“I know what the trouble is in your heart, and I've been meaning to talk to you about it,” the priest says. “Your marriage is not sanctified by the church. In the eyes of God, you are not man and wife.” Sorry, priest, wrong trouble, but you don't correct him.

“My husband wishes to worship his Protestant Jesus,” you say.

“Marie, I cannot marry you to a Protestant. You are risking the pains of hell for this illicit love.”

“I will test it,” you tell the priest.

A week goes by, and you do not test it. You have something very important to tell Nathan, but you cannot because of the pronouncement of the priest. You are afraid. You feel events moving toward something you can't quite fathom. On Sunday Father Spike returns to the village with the omen. He asks to meet privately with you and Nathan.

“Three Englishman have arrived in Quebec under a white flag of truce,” he says. “With them is their prisoner, a French military officer, one Ensign Pierre Raimbault St. Blein. He was captured on the English frontier after being wounded in a raid last fall. Shot accidentally by one of his own men. The Englishmen are negotiating with the governor-general to exchange the ensign for their countryman, known in New England as Nathan Blake. What is your wish, Nathan?” says the priest.

“I wish to remain with my wife,” he says haltingly. Even a fool can see that he's not sure what wife he means to be loyal to.

“Your face is full of doubt,” says Father Spike.

“I am surprised by this news, yea, stunned. Let me think on it some,” Nathan says.

“To guide your thinking I have instructions from Bishop Goulet,” says the priest. “If you choose to return to New England, so be it. If you elect to stay in Canada and convert to the Catholic faith, the church will give you sanctuary. If you keep your Protestant faith, the church will step aside.”

“What does this mean?” you ask.

“It means the determination for Nathan will be made between the governor-general and the English,” the priest says. “It's likely soldiers will take him back to the land of his birth.”

You see how it is, daughter? When the priests say they want your soul for Jesus, they mean they want your soul for Jesus.

Nathan is silent, betwixt and between words as well as worlds.

In your secret heart you've thought about this moment since you married Nathan Provider-of-Services. Now that it is here, you are oddly calm. No amount of work or worry can save you now. The ancients say it is better to keep the wind to your back. The priest tells you that Jesus constantly tests one's faith. You know only that it is your wish for your fate to be determined in Conissadawaga, on your grounds, in your house; this is your land, your home, your dirt.

“I must tell you,” says Father Spike, “that the Englishmen have been informed of your whereabouts. I expect they will arrive here on the morrow. You will have to render them a decision.”

“Time is what I have been passing in Canada,” Nathan says. “Give me some time.”

You send the priest away, and tell your husband that you wish to build a fire outside the house, as in olden times, and you wish also that he join you. And so you build a fire. Once it is going well, you say to your husband with a shy smile, “My mother and father both made small fires like this when they did not know how to conduct their lives, and from the fire they gained comfort and guidance, as well as warmth.” You pause, and both of you stare for a moment at the fire. You continue, “I lost a husband. I lost two daughters. I lost a mother. All I had remaining was a sister and a father, and the sister left me and the father went to heaven. The village was my family. It wasn't until you became a father to my village, teaching them the house-building sorcery, teaching me the farm-life sorcery, that I felt like a woman again. I will always admire you, Nathan Provider-of-Services. But now there is something else. I was able to become a woman because I had a mother and a father. A child needs a mother and a father.”

“Who would deny such an obvious assertion?” Nathan says. He's annoyed. Your way, indirect, is not his way. Already, he is parting from you.

“Nathan Provider-of-Services, I am carrying your baby.”

You can tell by the look on his face that he didn't expect this. Perhaps he had it in the back of his mind that while creatures of different kind can copulate, they cannot produce offspring. “I do not know what to think,” he says. “Nor what to feel or do.” You can tell that he wants to hold you by the way he retreats from you, for he is one of those men who often draw away when they feel great things.

“Perhaps we should pray,” you say. “Stay here. I will return.” You go into the house and come back with rosary beads. “They were a gift from my sister, Caterina. Will you pray with me?”

He points at the rosary beads. “I cannot pray with those things.” They are made of the same trade beads that decorate the moccasins he is wearing. Perhaps he notices that the cross is carved wood, cherry, if the burnished red color is evidence.

“I half hoped,” you say, “that you would come to the Catholic faith.”

“We must pray in our own fashion,” he says cautiously, for they are in the familiar territory of marital discord.

You and Nathan kneel in the snow, hold hands, and pray all the way through the completion of the rosary. Meanwhile, the fire dies to smoky ashes. Nathan listens while you repeat the papist Hail Marys and Our Fathers in French. His jaw drops open during prayers, but his lips do not move. Probably I am unkind, but seeing two such people so desperate and wedded in the snow amuses me. Forget all you know and follow your hearts, lovers, and pretend you are the same in kind; your child will be one, not two.