Wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa! Wa-wa-wa!
A belly full of smoke
Turns to stone.
Ribs try to cut it
But keep on breaking off.
Wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa! Wa-wa-wa!
I’d chew my hands off
If I knew how to grab and hold them.
I’d eat my dog and baby boy
If they weren’t so scabbed and thin.
Wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa! Wa-wa-wa!
(repeat)
The entire corpus of the Abenooki chants and song poems were transcribed phonetically by a pair of Jesuit missionaries, Fathers Michel LaFamme and Bruce Brôlet, who traveled in the region in the late seventeenth century, investigating reports then circulating among the Canadian Algonquin residing along the Saint Lawrence River that there were in the forests to the south of them small bands of “angry people who know nothing of a life.” From the name, the Jesuit fathers had speculated that these might possibly be remnants from the voyages of the Irish monks, meditative men who supposedly had sailed across “the northern mists” in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Naturally, when they discovered only the scattered tribes of the Abenooki scratching a living from these valleys, the fathers were disappointed, for they had hoped to locate a native brethren in Christ. Nevertheless, the two priests lived for a winter among the Abenooki in the Valley of the Suncook, studying their customs and manners, such as they were, learning their language, such as it was, and taking down, as well as they could, the Abenooki literature. This was made difficult because Abenooki, although an Algonquin dialect, is a wholly uninflected language spoken in a low, nasal monotone. There is no sound for R and none for W or L—so that, for instance, the phrase “drifting over the waters in a sloop” would come out: “difftingovathatazinna-soup” (which is one of the reasons that so few Abenookis ever learned English, French or Latin). It is, of course, not a written language in any sense of the word. To complicate matters further, there are no obvious rules of syntax, and though a sharp distinction between nouns and verbs is held, none is held between adjectives and adverbs, nor are verbs declined beyond the present tense. But since verbal communication between the Abenookis surely took place, one must assume that there are whole phonemes that simply are not heard by the non-Abenooki auditor.
Against such formidable obstacles as these, LaFamme and Brôlet nevertheless were able to notate and eventually translate into Latin seventy-three entire songs, plus one hundred and forty staves from what appears to be a half-forgotten epic of creation, certain elements of which suggest a linear kinship from ancient times with the Indians of the Labrador flatlands, the so-called Graelings of the early-arriving Norsemen. A few typical selections from that long poem (called by the Abenooki “Stone-People-Long-Song”) might be of interest:
Stave 12
Seal mother, take from me the sharp-toothed cold!
Take from me the deep-chest cough!
Take from me the ice-toed feet that bleed!
Take from me the banging-hard fingertips!
Let me lie here in the snowfield and die warm!
Stave 37
Ninnomakee chews on the ear of Gan the Wolf,
And Gan cries out, “Let go, Tooth-faced One!
My father is your father’s only son!”
But Ninnomakee does not stop his biting mouth
Because of his far-sung thunder-like rage,
Which covers his eyes like a bloody hide,
Which stops up his ears like a lump of mar row,
Which fills his throat like a gob of seal-fat.
And when he has chewed off the ear of Gan the Wolf,
Ninnomakee of the Terrible Teeth bites Gan’s face twelve times.
Stave 114
Ninnomakee’s fat wife gives him the bear-coat and the grease,
And he slaps her twice and smiles the big love-smile.
“You are twice the wife the thin girl-woman makes,”
He tells her, “I slap her one time and she breaks!”
Stave 122
The time for drinking the honey has arrived again!
Ho-h-ho-h-ho-h-ho-h-hee-hee-hee!
We cook it and wait, full of jokes and wrestling.
Then we open our big mouths and pour it down,
And for five nights and days we are crazy.
Ninnomakee breaks more big trees than anyone else.
That is why the women love him and are so afraid again.
As mentioned earlier, the Abenooki, because they were the first group of humans to make a more or less permanent settlement in the Valley of the Suncook, are of interest here. One should not make too much of it, but nevertheless it does seem that, as a society, they were preeminently well adapted to the harsh and selfish environment, its parsimony and the cruelty with which it protected itself against human exploitation. It would be a long wait before a second group of human beings would appear who were so well adapted. And as the reader has doubtless guessed by now, foremost among this second group of humans (anthropologically speaking) would be the pipefitter A., or Hamilton Stark. As a matter of fact, one might properly think of him as the single most evolved instance of a type or class of human beings which, as type or class, had made an astoundingly successful adaptation to an environment that had successfully been turning other groups away for well over a thousand years.
One additional peculiarity of the Abenooki. They were the only people to have resided in the several hinterland valleys north of the coastal plain of Massachusetts, west of the coastal plain of Maine, south of the great barrier range of mountains that crosses from Vermont through New Hampshire well into Maine and terminates at Mount Katahdin, who were willing to defend their valleys against incursion. They defended them against the remnants of the southern tribes when these tribes began to be pushed northward by the English; they defended them against the Algonquins who, in the employ of the French, ranged southward and attempted to set up bases from which they could harass English settlements farther south; and they defended them against English and later Irish Protestant colonists who came tramping northward looking for cheap land to speculate with and sometimes even to farm. No one else, before or after, bothered to defend these lands against newcomers. It’s almost as if the Abenooki knew that, because of the subtlety and the peculiar extremity of their adaptation, they were unable to live at anything approaching their present low state anywhere else. They were like duck-billed platypuses, or giraffes, or strange top-eyed fish able to survive only in extremely cold waters at great depths with very high atmospheric pressures against their bodies. Remove them from what had become a “natural” state and they would gasp for air, their eyes would bulge, their skin would dry and crack open, fissures and large warts would appear, and flopping pathetically in the mud of a truly foreign shore, they would slowly, painfully, die.
Their violence, then, their pugnaciousness and witless recalcitrance, when, for example, they were offered the alternative of removing themselves to the rich forestlands of Nova Scotia, seem to have been deeply instinctual responses to their real situation, responses prompted by a sense of themselves more subtle and perhaps more profound than any native history, oral or otherwise, would have permitted expression. They were called “irrational,” “savage,” “suicidal,” even, by the chroniclers attached to the military forces sent out from the large coastal settlements to pacify and, if possible, remove them from their valleys—lands which, according to royal grants, charters, contracts and deeds, now belonged to companies of white Englishmen. One studies the response of the Abenooki to this particular stimulus, hoping to learn from it, and one more or less successfully draws several generalizations from that response. The difficulty is in knowing what those generalizations should be applied to. To Hamilton Stark? His family, friends, neighbors?
Perhaps, perhaps—but if so, one must also remember that there is more to explaining a single human being than the ancient history of his region allows.
Ergo: Some observations less anthropolog
ical, less geographic, less distant from the true object of our study than the foregoing; by the same token, however, observations, now following, which are as wholly from outside the conscious life of the true object of our study as have been all foregoing observations.
2
Moving northward now, from the third, fourth, and fifth generations of families of Europeans who had settled in Boston, Newburyport, Salem, Gloucester, Charlestown, Cambridge, Belmont, Concord, and on and on—the small, yet crowded, cities and villages clustered close to the coast, bays and estuaries—all those seventeenth-century business communities with theological interests and connections, whose interests and connections, of a business as well as of a theological nature, had begun to jam harshly against one another by the end of the century. Second sons often went unemployed, and third sons came up landless, too. And there seemed to be an excess of ministers and schoolmasters. What to do? What to do? One of the nicest things about being an American in that century (or in the two centuries that followed, for that matter) was the liberal plenitude of land not yet populated by white people. This, of course, is an old story, well known. The second sons and their younger brothers pack up wife, ax, gun and bag of seed, and they head out for the back country, the far outback, the territory, the hinterland, the boonies.
Lemuel Stark, aet. twenty-four, out of Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1703, with his wife, Eliza, and son, Josiah, in a company of thirteen men and twelve women and seventeen children of various ages, went forth from Newburyport on 22 April to clear and establish residence upon certain lands near the headwaters of the Suncook River which had been properly surveyed and marked the previous year by a party of engineers sent out for the Newburyport Northern Regional Development Association.
There they met the resident Abenookis, who, innocently, the previous summer had traded forty freshly speared salmon and twelve maple-cured cougar skins for a knife and hand mirror offered by members of the surveying party. The leader of the Indians in 1703 was a tall (for an Abenooki), muscular man named Horse. His name had been given him by a wandering Cree from the far northwest, a man who enjoyed the luxury of having actually seen horses and so knew what they looked like, which of course the Abenooki did not. It was rumored among the Abenooki that sometimes the white people stood upon and even had sex with enormous, long-tailed, big-nosed beasts, but the Abenooki word for the animal was Kiyoosee-hi-yi-ho-yo (“enormous, long-tailed, big-nosed beast that gets screwed by the white man”). When the wandering Cree had told them, first, that the animal was called by his people a “horse,” and second, that the white people were in many ways dependent upon the “horse’s” good nature and great strength, and third, that the tall (for an Abenooki), muscular, big-nosed boy before him looked something like a horse, the boy’s family immediately changed his name from Water Lily to Horse. When later, after having passed many trials of strength and courage, he became the leader of the Abenookis residing in the Valley of the Suncook, Horse was very proud of his name, for among the Abenooki, while there were many who were named Water Lily, there was but one named Horse.
Horse, as noted above, was a physically gifted man, but he was also known to be shrewd and inventive, and among his people he was regarded as a driver of hard bargains. For instance, to their endless wonder and admiration, it was he who had succeeded in convincing the surveying party to give up the mirror and knife for a bunch of fish and furs. This is leading up to the moment, probably anticipated by now, when it can be announced that Horse was a proper match for the similarly gifted, shrewd, inventive and careful man Lemuel Stark. A classic confrontation.
It was atop Blue Job Mountain, supposedly, that the two finally met, at the end of a long chase, a foot race with a bloody dying for the loser that had begun at sunrise on the mist-blanketed bank of the Suncook. Lemuel had left the safety of the camp for an early morning leak in the bushes, and Horse, with three comrades, had surprised him at it. Lemuel ran, stuffing himself frantically back into his trousers. Horse gave chase. The others, as Abenooki are wont to do, melted back into the forest to await the outcome of the chase. If Horse lost and were slain by the white man, one of his three comrades would be able to take his place as leader of the Suncook Valley Abenooki. If, on the other hand, Horse either captured or killed the white man, all Abenookis would benefit alike, although obviously Horse would benefit the most. Even so, the Indians reasoned, it wasn’t a bad idea to melt into the forest and meet back at camp and sit around all day beneath the balsams, drinking fermented honey and waiting for the race results to come in.
Lemuel ran armed with his unloaded musket. Horse was armed with the knife and mirror he had obtained the previous summer by smart swapping. Lemuel had the advantage of height and probably good speed. Horse had the advantage of knowing the country, especially the Indian paths that followed the meandering shore of the river. Both men were in excellent physical condition. The race was a toss-up.
They ran along the river, following the narrow pathway through what is now called Center Barnstead. Here Lemuel stumbled and fell, skinning his knee. Horse, not believing his good luck, hesitated, just long enough for Lemuel to scramble to his feet and speed away southward, running slightly down-hill, to what’s now called Barnstead Parade. Lemuel was beginning to enjoy the race, was gaining slightly on his pursuer, and was probably reaching that point of exhaustion where lightheadedness and exhilaration replace fatigue and anxiety. Horse, on the other hand, having finally realized that he was alone in his pursuit of the white man, was beginning to understand the political implications of the chase. He had to catch the white man now. If he did not, he would be humiliated in front of his people and would lose his position of leadership, probably to someone named Water Lily. Horse had a fairly well developed sense of irony.
What the author would like to do here, but because of his respect for historical truth cannot, is to describe the awful death of Lemuel Stark, suggesting, through metaphor, symbol, and literal utterance, the effect of that death on Lemuel’s son, Josiah, who, under the understandably careful care of his mother, Eliza Stark, grew up (1) to hate “Injuns” (and all other non-Caucasian racial groups, whether minorities or not), (2) to resolve personal conflicts by the use of personal violence, and (3) to adore his mother, mainly because it was through her that he received first-person testimony as to the heroic stature of his lost and long-grieved-for father. Thus her testimony:
“Your father, my son, loved you. He loved you perhaps too well, and as it turned out, not wisely enough, thought that, of course, is not for me to judge, Heaven forgive me for presuming, I was not presuming, Father, it was a figure of speech, and it’s just that you, Josiah, and I, my son and I, Father, it’s just that we both have lived here so long, except for Thee and Thy everlasting comfort, that sometimes in our frailty we wonder and ask, Where has he gone, my husband and my son’s father, why did he not come back to us, why did he leave in the first place?… when of course, Father, we know all the answers to those questions, don’t we, Josiah? it’s not easy for us, the weak and fragile vessels of Thy everlasting love, to keep ourselves from crying out in the long night of our solitude, is it, Josiah, my son, my dear sweet boy, my beloved boy, you do so resemble your father, Josiah, his black hair, and his eyes, eyes the color of Irish peat, the clear white skin, the smile, the teeth, the tiny ears … thank Heaven I have you, my son, else my grief for your lost father would surely break me, I fear it, I’m ashamed for it, but I am a weak woman, my son, your mother is weak, son, but you shall be strong, I know it, as your father was strong, a tall, muscular, energetic man, who loved you, my son, oh, yes, he surely loved you, and if I say he did not love you wisely but too well, I say it only because his love for you, his love, was what made him run from that pitiless Indian chief, that Beast of the Forest, the one they call Horse—the ugly one you have seen in the village, the same who now claims he is Christian, yes, but who cannot be, or he would confess publicly what he did to my husband, your father, and be hanged for it or thrown
in a pit and slowly pressed by stones until he is crushed beneath them, forgive me, Father, for the force of my anger, I know that revenge is Thine, yet I cannot bear that the savage who slew my husband, the father of my son, I cannot endure that the murderer is allowed to walk easily about the village and forest like any Christian and loyal subject of the king, and if I cannot have revenge, and I know, Lord, that to continue lusting after it would only lead me sinfully to envy what power is rightfully Thine, but if I cannot have revenge, if I cannot see that savage pressed to death by stones, cannot throw the final, crushing, bone-snapping stone upon him myself, then I shall at least make sure that you, my son, know the truth, that you know your father loved you and was no coward, that you know he was not afraid, no, and that you know he now resides in the bosom of the Lord and is looking down on us, surely, and weeping at our plight and the way his good name has been smeared with mud and filth by that savage, the one called Horse, yes, my son, he would weep to see us now, his good wife and baby boy living alone on the land below the very mountain where he was cruelly slain, here on the plot of land he purchased with his honest toil the year before you were even born and a full year and a half before I myself even saw this place, this bleak and ungiving plot of earth, this scab, this mountain-shaded rockpile where the winds come all year long and bring us disease, chills, agues, where we must wake every gray morning and look out onto the mountain where your father ended his all too brief life in courageous defense of your life and my honor, for that is how it truly happened, my son, not as the savage, the heathen, Horse, would have it, no, and not as those in the village would have it, those who wish to believe that the heathen is converted so they can gain credit for it in Heaven, we both know who they are, my son, and why they choose to believe the Animal instead of the knowledge that God Himself has placed into their darkened hearts. They choose Satan, and God will surely loose His rage upon them for it, my son, just as surely as He will protect and comfort thee and me in our distress and despair, here in this tiny cabin where every morning we must wake to shade, winter and summer, shade cast by the heathen as much as by that mountain. You must not cry, Josiah, for the Lord is our shepherd, He will comfort us, the Lord and His truth, and the truth of your father’s love for us, his bravery, and the treachery that followed, what we should expect from Savages but not what we should have expected from our neighbors, our friends, Christians, men and women who knew your father from his childhood and who chose to believe a heathen Indian chief, an Animal, a Dusky Beast of the Forest, one of Satan’s own henchmen, before they would believe the Lord Himself, before they would believe even the wife of the slain man, for I told them, Josiah, just as I am telling you, have told you, will go on telling you, for I must strengthen you against the burden you will have to bear in this village as you grow into your boyhood and young manhood, strengthen you with the truth, so that someday when you are grown you will be able to redeem your poor father’s stained memory and return his name to its rightful place of respect and honor among Christians, and though the people of this village choose not to believe me, I know that you will believe me, and thereby will come to know the truth of your father’s life and the grandeur of his death, for I am the only one who saw it, I and the Beast who slew him, we two are the only ones who know what happened that morning, yet people have chosen to believe him because they wish to believe him converted, they wish to obtain credit for his conversion, when in fact it’s he who has converted them, and they know it, they must, they cannot truly believe your father would leave his wife and son, his infant son, alone in the wilderness, just disappear into the woods, like a fox, the Indian said, that’s how he said it when they asked him, What happened to Lemuel Stark? they asked when the Heathen had learned to speak a few words of English in that awful way of theirs, enough to pretend he had converted to Christ, and he told them, Like a fox, into the woods, we talk and him go like fox into woods, gone, big smile on face, smile like fox, Horse told them, and they all looked at each other and nodded, yes, how true, how sad for his wife and son, to desert them at their hour of greatest need and dependency, but they forgot, they forgot that I saw your father leave, Josiah, that morning, the dawning of our second day in this wilderness, for we were all camped out on the shore of the river, near where Dame Edna now lives, very early in the morning, just at sunrise, and the mist was floating low over the dark, nearly still water, and I opened my eyes and saw your father rise from his pallet beside me, and before he left my side, he whispered that he wanted to look at the mist and the still water and watch the light change as the sun rose, for your father was a tender man, not a coward, a deeply tender and God-fearing man, though he was not a man who talked easily of his Love of God, not like these others who now surround us, he was a true Christian, a quiet man tender enough to wish to see the sunrise his second day in the wilderness, in the valley where he had chosen to build his home and live out a peaceful God-fearing life in the comfort and love of his family, and so eager was he to watch the light change as the sun rose over the river that he walked away from the camp alone, carrying only his musket, doubtless in the event that he saw some game, a deer or rabbit, that he could bring back to share in camp with the company of people he thought were his friends, all of them people from the town he had been born and raised in, people he had known all his life and with whom he had joined in this venture into the wilderness, and I lay there next to his pallet with you at my breast, and I smiled up into his broad face, and surely, as surely as God is in His Heaven, as surely as anything on this earth exists, I would have known if that man was going to leave us, was going to walk off and disappear into the forests, leaving behind his wife and baby, alone, without money or possessions, with nothing but a seven-hundred-acre plot of rock- and tree-covered land in the wilderness, I would have known that, such things cannot be hidden, they are too horrible, too inhuman, for me not to have known that, a man’s wife knows certain things about him that no one else may ever know, and oh, Josiah, oh, my son, I would have known if your father, that early morning when he stepped into the bushes at the edge of the clearing by the river, were deserting us, were leaving us here to choose between scratching pitifully in desolate and deprived isolation on this land or enslaving ourselves to the charity of a village that would sooner believe an Indian’s version of a tale than a man’s own true wife’s version, and I saw his face as he left my side, Josiah, I saw his face, remember that, for that’s how I know the true story of what actually happened once his square-shouldered form had disappeared into the tangle of bushes at the edge of the clearing, I know what happened then, I know that he was set upon in cunning silence by Horse and a band of blood-thirsty Abenooki, and I know that your father, instantly deciding that the Indians would be able to overcome and slay the party of sleeping Christians, chose to run instead of fight, chose to lead that pack of savages as far as he could from the place where his friends, his young wife, and most important, his baby son, lay sleeping, and so, indeed, he ran, a strong young man who, you may enjoy knowing, was a well-known runner, once said to be the best long-distance runner in the entire colony of Massachusetts, a man who could run all day long, from Hopkinton Green all the way to Boston Common once in only a little over two hours, thought by some to be a miracle, thus when your father decided to run from those savages, he was not behaving in a cowardly manner, oh, no, he was instead choosing to employ against them the strongest weapon he owned, his ability as a runner, which he was to use so effectively that no one would ever know of his decision, of his great bravery and love, so that the very people he saved from death, and worse, were later to deride your father’s memory and to pity me, pity, pity a woman and child they should honor instead, as the wife and son of a hero, the only hero this village has so far produced and probably the only one it ever will produce, unless it be a son of Lemuel Stark or a son destined to spring from that seed in some future time, a hero who will know the truth of Lemuel Stark’s life and death and therefore will not believe the fiction, who wi
ll know instead that Lemuel Stark courageously led the ravening pack of Abenookis along the river and away from the camp all the way to Blue Job Mountain, where, tireless, he ran ahead of the savages, who, like hounds with one replacing the other as the lead hound grew tired, pursued screaming behind with axes and knives and other murderous devices brandished above their heads, led that pack up the side of the mountain that towered above the very plot of land he had chosen for a homesite, led them up the tortuously brambled and tangled path to the craggy top, where no trees grew, where the cold winds scraped every living thing away, scourging it, leaving only boulders, crags, and the sky above—and there, at last, he turned and faced his pursuers, for there was nowhere farther to run unless he could leap into the sky, and to accomplish that, he needed his murderers’ aid, which they eagerly provided, first the brutal, sly Horse, then each of his followers, like Brutus and the vicious Romans, one after the other sinking his dagger into your father’s body, a dozen, a hundred blows, each of them mortal, so that after the first blow your father’s soul had flown away to Heaven, releasing him from his torn and bleeding body, leaving behind, atop the mountain, a pack of satanic savages tearing at a mere chunk of flesh, while far below, by the river, a gathering of Christians were beginning to wonder where their friend had gone, and a wife was beginning to worry that something terrible had happened to him, and an infant son was beginning to wake hungrily from his peaceful-sleep…”
Hamilton Stark Page 4
