Arundel

by Kenneth Roberts

  My father, wrapped in his red blanket, nodded soberly and signaled to the m’téoulin to speak.

  “Brother,” the m’téoulin said, “the white men came here to enjoy their own religion in their own way. We gave them corn and meat; they gave us poison. They called us brothers. They wanted more land; they wanted our country. We became uneasy; Indians were hired to fight against Indians. Your white chiefs have offered large sums for the scalps of the women and children of our brothers to the east. Your people brought strong liquor that stole away our senses and even killed our friends.

  “Brother, our country was once large and yours was small. You have now become a great people, and we have scarcely a place left to spread our blankets. You have got our country but are not satisfied; you want to force your religion upon us.

  “Brother, continue to listen: you say you are sent to instruct us how to worship the Great Spirit agreeably to his mind, and if we do not embrace the religion which the white people teach we shall be unhappy hereafter. You say you are right and we are lost. How do we know this to be true? We understand your religion is written in a book. If it was intended for us as well as for you, why has not the Great Spirit given it to us? And not only to us, but why did he not give to our forefathers the knowledge of that book, with the means of understanding it rightly? Why has the Great Spirit permitted our forefathers to live wrongly since the olden time? We only know what you tell us about it. How shall we know whom to believe, being so often deceived by the white people?

  “Brother, you say there is but one way to worship and serve the Great Spirit. If there is but one religion, why do you white people differ so much about it? Why not all agree, since all read the book?

  “Brother, we do not understand these things. We are told your religion was given to your forefathers, and has been handed down from father to son. We also have a religion which was given to our forefathers, and has been handed down to us, their children. It teaches us to be thankful for favors we receive: to love each other, and to be united. We never quarrel about religion.

  “Brother, the Great Spirit has made us all; but he has made a great difference between his white and red children. He has given us a different skin and different customs. Since he has made so great a difference between us in other things, why may we not conclude he has reason for giving us a different religion? The Great Spirit does right: he knows what is best for his children. We are satisfied.

  “Brother, if you white men murdered the son of the Great Spirit, we Indians had nothing to do with it. It is none of our affair. If he had come among us we would not have killed him. We would have treated him well. You must make amends for that crime yourselves.

  “Brother, we do not wish to destroy your religion or take it from you. We only want to enjoy our own.

  “Brother, you say you have not come to get our lands or our goods, but to enlighten our minds. We are told you have been preaching to white people along this river. These people are our neighbors: we are acquainted with them. We will wait a little while and see what effect your preaching has upon them. If we find it does them good, makes them honest and less disposed to cheat Indians, we will then consider again what you have said.”

  Seldom have I seen a man so infuriated as Hook when my father had interpreted the last sentence. His rage, for some reason, was directed more against my father and me than against the m’téoulin or the other Abenakis. I think he suspected my father of putting words in the m’téoulin’s mouth. His eyes reddened and his knees trembled; he shot his head forward and croaked, “Blasphemy!”, looking more than ever like a heron about to pounce on a fish.

  My father would have gone from the council house had not Hook gone up close to him, shaking with wrath, and said: “These sons of Belial have blasphemed against our religion and our God. Say to them they cannot speak thus!”

  My father shook his head. “Reverend Hook,” he said, “I’m no minister of the gospel to rebuke these people for their beliefs. I’m a trader and innkeeper, and sometimes, against my will, an interpreter.” Again he made as though to leave the cabin, but Hook stopped him, his lips compressed, and his forehead shiny like the dried bladders my sisters throw about at Christmas.

  “Or,” asked Hook, his voice shrill with rage, “are you yourself a heathen, damned forever with these imps of hell?”

  “Now, now!” my father said soothingly. “I take comfort in the Good Book; and according to my lights I’m what they call a godly man. I think, even, I’m as godly as your Boston saints and deacons who speculate in land and trade in human flesh and specialize in bribery under the protection of a special God.”

  “A special God!” Hook croaked, raising his hands, as though undecided whether to call on heaven for help or to take my father by the throat.

  “Why, yes,” my father said, “a special God; the God of Boston. We’re sick of your Boston God, and we’re sick of your Boston merchants with their special privileges we common people can’t have; with their money bags filled out of wars we little people make; with their yowling and yelping that we who want a voice in the affairs of the colony are thieves and rascals!”

  “A special God!” Hook whispered, with an air of expecting to see my father struck dead.

  “Just so,” my father said: “a God like the God Jonathan Edwards wrote and preached about, without mercy or decency, rejoicing in human misery and suffering, cruel beyond belief to little children, and condemning the greater part of mankind to eternal torment. There’s no place for any such God in my life; for Jonathan Edwards’ God says my son here”—he dropped his hand on my shoulder—“is evil, was born evil, and is doomed to hell fire. Therefore if I believed in Jonathan Edwards’ God my son would be wasting his time in striving to lead a decent, godly life, being damned to begin with. And if I told these red men about the existence of such a God, they’d say he was worse than Malsum, their evil wolf-god. They’d fear to speak his name, lest he come back to earth to do mischief to innocent people.”

  Hook stared from my father to me. I have never seen hatred more bitter, not even on the faces of men with whom I have fought for my life. He moved to the door, peering back at us with hard heroneyes. “The sins of the fathers!” he rasped. “You and your son and your son’s sons shall burn in hell!”

  “I reckon we will,” my father said calmly, “if your say-so can do it!” He snorted a little, seeming to imply that Hook’s influence was not sufficient to cause him distress.

  While Hook stood glaring, the m’téoulin went to him and offered his hand in farewell. Hook said bitterly, “There can be no fellowship between the religion of God and the works of the devil!” He flung out of the cabin and paddled back to Pownalborough in the dark, causing my father to remark that he had his faults, but cowardice, seemingly, was not one of them.

  That night we feasted on venison and beaver tail, comfortable in our newly washed garments and our scoured buckskins; and after the feast the squaws brought all the drums in the camp to play upon for what my father called a Bragging Dance, which is what the Abenakis always have when a sachem from another nation comes to visit.

  When Manatqua rose up to sing his bragging song there was no way of telling his enormous powers of endurance, for his knees were wrinkled and seemingly insecure, and his voice quavery. Yet he grew stronger and stronger, going back many years and fishing up mighty exploits that my father said may have happened to Manatqua, but more likely happened to Noah on the Ark.

  All of us near died with laughter we could not show; for in the heat of his dance his scalp-lock came unstuck and fell off, and he was forever striving to stick it on again, only to have it slip to the ground at once. So to conceal our mirth we whooped and shrieked as though in applause, thus spurring him on to renewed endeavor.

  We went down to the guzzle at slack tide in the morning and climbed into a long canoe, with Manatqua and the m’téoulin and all their skins, and two braves to paddle us.

  When the black topsail schooner came slipping into
sight around the bend Rabomis kissed me. “Come back soon, Stevie,” she said, “and bring your father.” We both looked at him, but he stared stonily ahead and signaled for the canoe to be run out. Hobomok splashed into the marsh beside us and gave me a pouch made from mink skin. The marsh grass hissed as we moved through it. Clouds of ducks and water hens went up around us with a vast whispering of wings, and little short-tailed birds blundered helplessly among the reeds.

  I knew, when I looked back at the silent throng on the beach, that I could live happily at Swan Island if I had no other home, and no mother or sisters, and no Ranger or Eunice to draw me back to Arundel; and if, above all else, I had no Mary Mallinson to drag my thoughts to her from any place at all.

  Arnold gave my father his hand when we came alongside the Black Duck, while Manatqua and the m’téoulin scrambled up and stowed the skins under a tarpaulin. Before we knew we were aboard, almost, the schooner had slipped past the end of the marsh, and our friends were dark specks against the broad expanse of redrimmed river.

  My father and Arnold soon became thick. My father wanted news of Quebec, and Arnold asked what he knew of military matters, whereat my father said he had been at Louisbourg in ’45. At once they united in cursing the stupidity of the English for giving back to the French that which had been won by the colonies with so much labor.

  Arnold told my father he had gone as a soldier to Lake George four years before, when he was sixteen, but had sickened of inaction under the overambitious Shirley, and so had deserted and returned home.

  Together they damned the English officers who had been sent to fight the war against the French, and it was plain to see that either of them would prefer to take a rattlesnake to bed with him than to trust himself in our forests with an English general, barring always James Wolfe and young Lord Howe.

  By the time the schooner had dropped down Merrymeeting Bay and passed through the narrow water-churn we call the Chops into the broad lower reaches of the river, they seemed like old friends; and Arnold had told my father how he had sailed up to Quebec, arriving just before it fell, with a load of medicines from his employers, the Lathrops, of Norwich, who imported drugs from Europe, and sold much of them to the English army.

  “Drugs, eh? So that’s why you went up to see Sylvester Gardiner!”

  “Aye,” Arnold said. “Private business! If I can make a trade with Gardiner in Boston I can get him a market for his drugs at a round price and be the gainer myself, with nobody the worse for it.” He winked at my father, placed his hands on the hips of his white blanket coat, stuck his right leg straight out in front of him and squatted suddenly, so that he was sitting on his left heel. Then, as easily as I get off a bench, he raised himself again on one leg and looked inquiringly at me.

  “Can you do that?”

  I tried it, but fell over on my side; and I was months learning to do it as easily as he did. He was forever performing such tricks: reaching up, when talking, to the rung of a ladder or the edge of a doorway and chinning himself with one hand; or holding his left foot with his right hand and hopping through the circle thus formed, all so easily and gracefully, that I was lost in admiration of him.

  “How’s trade in Quebec?” my father asked.

  Arnold’s eyes rounded until they looked like snowballs stuck with bits of blue glass.

  “Why,” he said, “the city was stove to pieces by Wolfe’s artillery, and the people of the town robbed and cheated for years by two of the greatest thieves unjailed, Vaudreuil and Bigot. They need everything; and any price in reason looks cheap after those they’ve had to pay.” He drew himself up a rope, as we had seen him do the day before, and dropped lightly back again. “Everybody in Quebec is either a gentleman, a thief, or a dolt. It’s the easiest place to make money I ever saw! If I had the capital I’d trade nowhere else; and almost before you could spit I’d have a fortune.”

  My father nodded. “Did you ever hear the name Guerlac or De Sabrevois in Quebec? Henri Guerlac de Sabrevois, captain in the regiment of Béarn?”

  My heart pounded as I waited for his answer.

  “I know that name,” Arnold said. “He has a seigneurie on the Island of Orleans. He bought one of the bomb-proof houses in the upper town. He’s a stinker, pale and haughty; a devil with the women.”

  “Not so pale,” my father said quickly, “since I scarred his cheek and ear with a hunting arrow!”

  Try as I would, I couldn’t keep the tears from my eyes. Seeing this, Arnold sat beside me on the deck house, clapping his hand on my shoulder and looking inquiringly at my father.

  “He came through Arundel a month ago,” my father said. “Out of cussedness he stole a little girl who lived near us; and his damned French-led Indians killed her father. We’ve been after him, but we lost him. Now we hear he’s sailed back to France.”

  Arnold patted me on the shoulder and rounded his eyes at my father again. I find it hard to describe this quick, fixed stare of his, gone almost as soon as it appeared; but it was a little like the hunting glare of an animal, or the fixed look in the eyes of our cat when she peers up into the corners of our kitchen at night for things we cannot see.

  “What was the name of this little girl?”

  “Mary Mallinson.”

  Arnold repeated the name, then picked me up by the upper arms and jounced me down on my heels so that my teeth jarred together. “Now, now!” he said. “Everything’ll be all right! I’ll keep my eye on your Frenchman myself, and save him for you. When you get bigger you can shoot off his other ear. Some day we’ll walk right into his house and throw him through his bomb-proof roof. Listen!” He tapped my chest. “Your girl won’t like Frenchmen any more than you would!” He paused impressively. “They eat frogs’ legs!”

  Cheered by this knowledge, I sat with Manatqua and the m’téoulin and only half heard Arnold tell my father how Wolfe had found a path up an impassable precipice at Anse du Foulon, and taken his entire army up it in the dead of night; how Montcalm, fearful of being cut off from all supplies, had come out from behind the impregnable walls of the upper town and fought Wolfe in the open fields; how Vaudreuil, the lying, timorous, braggart governor, had failed to go to Montcalm’s support, so that the French were routed; how they had fled through the town and thirty miles beyond in an insane panic; and how both Montcalm and Wolfe had been killed.

  They spoke of warfare, too, and my father told how the Abenakis begin to train their children in the art of war when they are twelve years old—the art of war being the art of ambushing and surprising an enemy.

  “You seem to think,” said Arnold, “that if they were properly disciplined they’d fight better than the English.”

  “They’re already disciplined,” my father said. “They’re under good command, and punctual. They cheerfully execute orders, and march abreast, without disorder or confusion, in a line a mile long, with a space of twenty feet or more separating each man from the other. It’s their discipline to annoy the enemy to the greatest degree, while saving their own men and their equipment. That’s against all the rules of the white man, who regards war as an excuse to follow unwise counsel, and to waste as much money as possible to no effect, just as the English think it’s discipline to have their men slaughtered in the woods, and to no result.

  “Look,” my father said, “at the defeat of General Braddock when he tried to take Fort Duquesne four years ago from the French and Indians. He had nine hundred men killed, while the six hundred Indians who defeated him lost seven! That battle was planned and executed by Abenakis from St. Francis. I’ve heard from Virginians who fought in it that when they took trees to protect themselves in the Indian manner, Braddock beat them back into line with his sword, to be shot down like cattle. Discipline! That’s no discipline! That’s organized murder!”

  “Then you’d discipline our people in the Indian manner?” Arnold asked. “Encourage them to run like dogs when they lose a few men?”

  “Oh, no!” my father said, “I’d train th
em in both the Indian and the English manner, so they’d always protect themselves as much as possible, behind trees in the woods and in holes in the open plain, but arrive somehow at their objective, if worth having, despite all losses. There’s no other sensible form of warfare, if any sort of war is sensible. If we could teach our militia to fight that way, I think they could whip the finest armies of all Europe, though we’d be called a cowardly rabble by the foreign officers who were being whipped.”

  At a later day, when we picked Burgoyne’s army to pieces at Saratoga, under Arnold in reality, I thought often of those words, and of the wide hunting stare of that swarthy-faced young man; but on this autumn morning I cared little for world affairs or the fate of armies. We passed the low shores of Arrowsic, Georgetown Island and Phippsburg, and rounded out past Popham Beach into the long swells of the open sea. The broken hills of Casco Bay lay on our right, and the high sun glittered on the little waves. Straight ahead was home—a thought that set me to shivering under my blanket with excitement, and made time flap by on leaden wings, as it never fails to do when I am returning from far places.

  We raised the sandy spit of Winter Harbor and the rock ledges beyond; then the pine-clad islands of Cape Porpus. When we rounded the cape, Wells Bay opened out before us, the breakers creamy on the reefs, and the soft blue bulge of Agamenticus rising from the distant shore.

  Standing in around the rocks of Cape Arundel, we saw the garrison house behind the dunes where I had sat with Mary. A little figure of a man stood by the skiff at the ferry landing, staring; and though we bawled and waved at him, he stood doltishly watching us, unmoving.

  Around the corner of the stockade came Ranger, looking at us, his head high. We shouted again, and Ranger moved closer to the water. The anchor went down, and a third time we shouted. Ranger ran back and forth at the river’s edge. I knew he was whining to get to me.

  The doltish figure, Ivory Fish’s brother Jethro, came to life, flapping his arms, and hurried to the house, while Ranger plunged in and swam toward us.