Hamilton Stark

by Russell Banks

  How, then, to justify the well-known practice of understanding one’s present by going into the past, when the farther into the past one travels, the more trivial seems the present? For if such understanding is available there, its nature at bottom would seem to be that the present is of no special significance. Why stay down there, it (the past) asks you, in that mucky, mosquito-infested, broad delta region where the muddied waters mix turgidly with the green and blue of the sea? Why indeed, when you have seen the flumed waterfalls here inland, the crystalline streambed glittering in noontime sunlight, the exotic beasts and highland orchids where the stream curls farther and farther into the mountains, through the mists to the mossy crags and the lichen-covered high plateaus?

  For just look at where we, reader and writer of this book, stand now. Look at our quandary, our shame, our project. A mere crank, questions of his intentionality, of the quality of our love for him and possibilities of his love for us—that’s what’s got us down! A rube! A citizen of the provinces, a man whose life may well be incapable of offering posterity a single slice of cheese more than his particular sociology! How mere. Especially when to speak of love, or of cruelty, or of “demons” and the possession thereby (as indeed we must and shall), we are in all probability speaking solely from our private and peculiar, narrow versions of our very own lives. Worse, of our lives as children! Brats, puling, polymorphously demanding dependencies, social and genetic accidents dropped into an inappropriate time and place. We are so used to our own whining about how we never asked for our parents, their limitations and friends, that we forget how little our parents and their friends had to do with requesting us. We weren’t exactly what was wanted—unteethed, limp-limbed, blind, bawling, caul-wrapped, hungry and without gratitude. What would any poor people, poor and therefore leisureless, in bad health and nasty-tempered, want with children? Or at least with children such as we were? A poor people, if, as a consequence of the quick and cheap pleasure of copulation with sick and tense bodies, it must produce children, wants them to be born fully grown, strong, intelligent, useful and filled with abiding gratitude. No people is in such dire need of a healthy slave population as a poor people in a poor land. But one of life’s great ironies is that all these people get are children, and more of them than anyone else. If the reader does not yet agree, let him read some population statistics. It’s enough to make a sensitive man weep and think longingly of infanticide.

  But despite the irrelevance and the triviality of the place where we are standing now, it does have historical background. This poor mongrel has a pedigree. Several of them, in fact. We might prefer running with a blooded hound, but we cannot have one; perhaps we’ll accept the run with our own mangy cur, even learn to admire him, if we can know something of his ancestry. For it is true that—though he may seem it and though we sometimes despise him for seeming it—he does not come wholly from nowhere out of nothing.

  He springs from the Valley of the Suncook, so named for the ululating river meandering gently southerly and westerly to the Merrimack, which is, in turn, a larger, coarser stream that poles the region south of the granitic mountains and widens and fills across bumpy flatlands all the way to the sea of Massachusetts, where at last it empties its finely ground contents onto the outflowing tide and adds yet another petulant lip to the North American continental shelf. To speak solely of the Suncook River, however, is to speak, at its head, of a man-stride-wide rill that breaks across boulders thrown in springtime thaws and by snowmelt from the sides of glacial morraines. It is to speak then of a confluence of brooks, streams, creeks—the Webster, the Perry, the Crooked Run—all of them southern outlets of muskegs, ponds, small lakes, with names like Halfmoon and Brindle, Huntress, Upper Suncook and Lower Suncook. Thus, in referring to the Valley of the Suncook, and specifically to its northern terminus, one is referring to the beginning of a system, if he follow nature’s path, and the end of a system, if he follow a manmade map, which inevitably traces the path of white settlement. These two paths, that of nature and that of white human settlement and the particularities thereof, are what determine the affective history of a people springing from that region, or any region, for hundreds of years afterward, long after the paths have been worn smooth and straightened with machinery, widened and bridged, overpassed, clover-leafed and median-stripped.

  It is tempting to make much of the observation that the essential movements of nature here have been from north to south, while those of white neo-European society have been from south to north. Regard the prevailing wind and water systems, the tendency of erosion to flow inevitably to the sea. What are now called the White Mountains were then ten-thousand-foot-high upthrust blocks of granite, stocky mountains in the prime of life, the craggy head of the robust Appalachian chain. In the blond valleys and sun-warmed plains below the peaks, herds of gigantic bison with horns like barrel hoops grazed peacefully, while lions the size of modern horses loped lazily along behind, keeping to the shadows of the briars and the low nut trees, waiting hungrily for a straggler or a fat calf to wander from the herd’s protection. So far as is now known, this was a region without bipeds, human beings.

  Then the first signs of the glaciers—lingering winter snows, each summer shorter than the one before, streams and lakes that fail one spring to boom and break from ice to water and thus they complete a full year icebound, and winds, high, relentlessly cold winds, carting across the mountain barrier moisture-laden clouds from the snow blanket of the farther north, blotting out the sun for month after month, then year after year. The herds shift the loci of their grazing circles farther south, on to the Carolinas, and even through the gaps and west into the Valley of the Mississippi. Until there comes a time when the hard icy tongue of the glacier has carved a notch in the mountain wall and has extruded enough of its body through that notch into the soft valleys beyond to drag with it a never-melting pelt, finally covering even the very peaks with a mantle of ice, accelerating its march now by making its own weather unimpededly. And as the glacier, conjoined with several separate glacial forays from the two far sides of the mountains, crunches its way across those upthrust blocks of granite and the bumpy flats beyond, great wads of earth are scraped away, huge chunks of stone are ripped free of the mountain wall, deep trenches are gouged through the effluvial plain, and all the matter, stone, till, boulders, billions of tons of black earth, all of it, is plowed ahead or is eaten by the ice and as if being digested is passed along and ground finer and finer as the head moves southward and is at last spat out at the sides or lodged deeply beneath the grinding white belly. What escapes being eaten by the glacier gets shoved ahead of it, all the way to the sea, where great blocks of ice laden with soil and rock torn from the continent hundreds of miles away crack and break of their own weight and fall tremendously into the storm-tossed sea, where as icebergs they bob and float southerly, gradually diminishing in size, eventually melting, crumbling apart like saturated lumps of sugar somewhere off Hatteras.

  The glaciers are not driven back from the south. No, under the influences of forces centered deeply behind them in the arctic thermal systems, they retreat. This is not the nice distinction employed by military strategists trying to save face with an angry and hurt civilian population from which future infantries must be drawn, but rather, in the case of glacial movement, “retreat” is a scientifically descriptive term. For, truly, what could stop a glacier’s scourging march across a whole continent if it did not entirely of itself slow its march, hold, and then begin to withdraw? So, too, with the glaciers that covered what is now known as New England. Simply, they began to retreat, and as they did so the skies began to clear, for weeks, then whole months at a time, while below, dark patches of wet ground showed, and then whole soggy regions, vast swamps near the coast, huge deltas, and above the deltas, gradually rising fields stuffed and swollen with smoothly ground boulders, stones, streams of gravel and sand. In the low places, there were deep cold lakes filling rapidly with fresh icemelt, spilling over the
till deposited like dams at the ends, making streams that gushed with clear waters toward the plains and the sea. And as the sullen glacier moved still farther back, beyond Massachusetts, deep furrows and mile-high moraines were revealed, here and there an isolated monadnock, dripping wetly in the sunlight as if just disgorged, too tough to chew and too bulky to swallow whole. Until, finally, the White Mountains themselves stood revealed, humbler now, lower, scraped clean and smoothed, gouged with new deep valleys and notches, yet still obdurate, still planted deeply below the earth’s crust, altered, yes, but not moved. While beyond the mountains, its noise daily diminishing, the glacier still retreats, leaving behind long lakes, swamps, rivers, a tough-skinned corrugation of hills and low mountains, a topsoil of gravelly land and a subsoil of boulders, clay, sand and shale. The winds die down, and for the first time in ten thousand years there are low and warm winds for a full half-year. And then the grasses appear, the low berry bushes, the fruit and nut trees, and the taller, straighter conifers. Come the forests, come the birds and beasts of the forests, for now there is plenty again—the fruits and the sorrels, the produce of the yamboo, the blooms of the yulan, all the bear-loved blood-gutted berries and wrinkled cresses, whole heavy branches of juice-slimed sloes and ferns, whortles and plums, the speckled eggs of daws, the roe of the dee, the milk of the dameen. Thickly mottled with dark shapes are the skies, for now have arrived the crested cormorant, the heron, the melancholic loon, the sharp-eyed hawk and the eagle, the sun-blotting geese, the grackle, the starling, the lowly wren, the jay, and the chickadee. Churning silver are the waters of the lakes and the streams, for now spawn the salmon, the blood-flecked pike, the turgid bass, the muscular trout. Great-bodied shad surge upstream from the low warm waters near the sea, followed by waves of alewives, bream and pout. Flushed are the dark new forests with the footfall, bark and cough of the brawny bear, the roar of the urinating cougar of the claws and fangs that rend, the pad and nighttime howl of the timber wolf, the scowl of the badger, the sneak of the lynx. Add to these the fox who deceitfully reasons and stays forever hungry, the dutiful beaver, the martin, otter, muskrat and mouse—all the wee new beasties of the wood. Add to these the white-tailed deer, the rabbit, the moose with gobs of saturated moss dripping from its great jaws. Add to these the names of the hundreds not named, and fill the air with the buzz of bees, hornets, deer-flies, blackflies, butterflies, the nighttime moths, dragonflies, and below, all the newts, toads, grackles, salamanders, snakes and centipedes that populate the ground beneath the great trees and the grasses, stones, logs and sweetly moldering leaves.

  Now, curl a pair of great, god-sized arms and lift these names of creatures great and small, finny and fur-warmed, feathered and scaled; hold and heft all the names of the mast-high pines and spruce, the straight and the gnarled sword-hard woods, the fruit-laden, the briary, even unto the lacy ferns and maplike lichens; and cart in the god-arms all the names to the ovoid valley bisected by the stream later to be named the Suncook, barred on the south by the morain later to be named the Blue Hills, on the north the Belknap; and here, scattering them as if sowing seeds, set the names upon the ground. Now, standing back a few leagues, see what you have made.

  This is what it is: a good place for creatures capable of hunting game year-round. And a good place for creatures that are at least capable, if they cannot hunt year-round, of gathering nuts and berries and fruits and storing them against the barren winter. Creatures that must graze on long or even short grasses cannot live here, nor can creatures unable to endure long cold winters. Hummocky, rock-laden, tree-covered land bound by steep hills and potted with small shallow lakes and narrow, rapidly coursing streams, with a thin, swiftly eroded topsoil and a subsoil of sand, clay and yellow shale—this place is good only for tough, heavy-coated, pugnacious, stubborn animals, and also for birds that travel south in winter, and too, all hibernating creatures. No others can prosper and multiply under such harsh conditions. They might try it for a few generations, but sensing the approach of species-wide depletion, they inevitably drift to the south and west.

  This is the pattern followed by the first bipeds, the first human beings, to appear in the region. They were, of course, Indians, coming, like the glaciers, from the north, walking down from what is now called Quebec and New Brunswick, first in small foraging bands following deer herds and moose, then in larger groups, families, groups of families, and finally whole tribes. They were from the Algonquin nation of Indians, these first arrivals—Penacooks, Pemaquids, Sasquatches, Deemolays, Awtuckits, Ogunquits, Kanvasbaks, Katshermits, Merrimacks, and so forth, one band after another, passing into the Suncook Valley from the north, usually following the valleys southward from the large lakes in the north, the Winnepesaukee, the Squam, the Ossipee, along the banks of the rivers that drain them.

  But all these people, one following upon the moccasined heel of the other, after entering the Suncook Valley, soon departed for the broader, more bountiful valleys to the south, saving this region up north where the streams narrow for when, late each summer, the alewives run or a week in spring when the salmon spawn and can be easily snared in wicker weirs set into the shallow cold waters or even speared from the shore by boys. For the rest of the year, these tribes, the Narragansett, the Penacook, the Pemaquid, and so forth, lived in relative peace and ease, cultivating corn and tobacco, fishing from the rocks along the bays and estuaries, hunting deer and other sweet-tasting game like turkey and rabbit, along the coast of what later came to be known to the English as Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

  The only tribe that made do with life year-round in the small northern valleys like the Suncook was the Abenooki, late arrivals from New Brunswick, a short, slightly bent, flat-nosed people who spoke an Algonquin dialect. They, unlike their neighbors to the south, were strictly hunters and gatherers. They did not make any attempt to cultivate the soil, which is just as well, given the poor quality of the soil and their lack of modern farm implements.

  The Abenooki, because they were the first group of human beings to make a more or less permanent settlement in the Valley of the Suncook, are of interest here. As their economy was essentially that of hunting and gathering, with no trade for leaven, their existence was what has been called “marginal.” They lived in huts constructed from birchbark, moss, leaves, and muddied grasses tied with thongs to a frame of saplings which they had broken and beaten down with stones. Their clothing was not woven but rather made from the tanned hides of animals, deer mostly, laced loosely together with tendons and ligaments torn from the animals. They were not potters nor even weavers in any sense, nor did they possess the skills one usually associates with eastern woodland Indians, such as canoe-making, weir-weaving, tobacco-growing (though they seem to have participated in the custom of smoking tobacco, apparently acquiring the substance by stealing it in the summer from wandering members of the more agrarian tribes to the south and west of them), body decoration, and organized warfare. Their religious life seems to have been an extremely simple one, based on a belief in the Great Spirit as the Creator and first principle of both the visible and invisible worlds (between which worlds they made awkwardly few distinctions). Additionally, they believed in the existence of numberless woodland gnomes and minor good spirits, evidently guardians of places thought to be especially beautiful and, therefore, lucky. Similarly, places thought to be especially ugly and, therefore, unlucky were watched over by “devils,” minor evil spirits. Except for these devils, there does not seem to be any larger dark spirit, or negative principle, to oppose and thus define their belief in a Creator, their so-called Great Spirit (elsewhere named Mannitoo). It does not seem that any rites were associated with the minor deities, whether to propitiate, charm, or merely to honor them, nor, surprisingly, were there even any rites associated with their belief in the Creator. Therefore, though they certainly believed in the existence and power of these several deities, the Abenooki cannot be said to have worshiped them. And while it can be said that they had numerous cu
stoms associated with religious life, because of the absence of ritual they cannot be said to have had a religious life as such.

  Their social structure was extremely loose, based as it was on a male-dominated family unit and sexual promiscuity. Although incest was a taboo, it was nevertheless practiced extensively, especially in winter. There seems to have been no established rite for selecting leaders, no council of elders, no father-to-son descent of authority. Simply, the largest and strongest male was usually accepted as leader until such time as he was replaced, in hand-to-hand combat or through manipulation and deceit or by simple assassination, by a younger male. The old, when they became ill or infirm, were allowed to freeze to death, usually by the others’ refusal to allow them to come into the huts when the weather turned cold in mid-October. With a like tough-mindedness, sickly infants or badly injured children were drowned by their own parents. Cross-eyed children, especially females, were highly prized for their beauty, and female obesity, when limited to the lower trunk and legs, was regarded as sexually provocative. Large breasts were also praised.

  Most of this information, incidentally, comes to us by way of a small body of chants or song poems, for the Abenooki, as much as they loved hunting and torture, also loved singing. Consequently, we have (from the first white explorers in the area) a number of songs, and while most are concerned exclusively with hunting and torture, a few reveal homely details of the day-to-day existence of the Abenooki. For instance, a “Hunger Chant”: