“You’ll be having your lessons together and such,” Ephraim said. “Easier on everyone if you get along.”
Quent would always remember that moment: his father, the squaw dressed in blindingly white fur pressed up against his back, and her son a white boy with an English name. And the easy way his father said, “And that nigra with him, that’s my slave.” It was the first time he’d ever heard the claim stated aloud.
He’d asked Solomon once how it was that he could be owned like a horse or a book or a bolt of cloth. “’Cause I be bought and paid for.”
“But you’re a person. Like me. Can my father sell me?”
“Ain’t never gonna let that happen. You be white. Ain’t no white people be slaves. Only black nigra people.”
“Why?”
As they talked, Solomon had been shaving the long side of a strip of oak just come from Shadowbrook’s sawmill, straddling his workbench and holding the narrow plank of wood across his knees while he smoothed the adze back and forth, back and forth. When he butted that piece of oak against the next plank of the eventual barrel it would fit smoothly, and after he bound them together with leather hoops and the barrel spent a month submerged in water, that seam and all the other seams would have swollen tight shut.
“Ain’t no why about it,” he said without breaking the rhythm of his long, even strokes. “That’s the way it is. It say in the Bible, ‘Slaves, be subject to your masters.’ Don’t say nothin’ about asking why.”
Quent knew about the Bible.
One of the settlements on the Hale land was called Do Good. Maybe a dozen families lived there, and there was a small church they called a meeting house. It looked pretty much like a barn. Lorene Devrey Hale didn’t hold with the services in Do Good’s church. No preaching, she said. No Bible reading. No music. No flowers, not even in high summer when they were everywhere. Just the folks from Do Good sitting around and mostly not saying anything, and talking funny when they did.
Quent’s mother conducted her own Sunday service in the great hall of the big house. She insisted that all twenty-six of her husband’s slaves come, and of course her two sons. Most weeks the tenants who lived near enough came as well: the Davidsons, who worked the sawmill, and the Frankels, who were in charge of the gristmill and did the distilling at the sugarhouse. Sometimes even Ephraim attended. But whether or not he was present, it was Lorene who read from the Bible.
“Better suited to it,” Ephraim said once when he was asked why his wife led the service. Mostly he didn’t sing either. He was the only one exempt; Lorene made the others sing while she accompanied them on her dulcimer, and before Pohantis and her son Cormac came to Shadowbrook, Lorene smiled at everyone when the service was over. After their arrival there were fewer smiles.
Quent heard his parents talking soon after Pohantis and Cormac arrived, when they didn’t know he was outside the half-opened door to the room where his father did his sums. “I got a fire in me for her, that’s why. It’s convenient having her nearby.”
“You had a fire in you for me once.”
“That’s true, I did.”
“But not since—”
“Lorene, she’s a squaw and a whore. Left her people and ran off with a damn fool Irishman. Only went back to her village after he got himself eaten alive by the Huron. She’s got nothing to do with you, or our life here.”
“How can you say that? You brought her here. She’s living under my roof.”
“I decide who—”
“You’d have lost this land if it weren’t for me! Don’t you turn your face from me, Ephraim Hale! You know that’s true. If it weren’t for my dowry—”
Quent heard a crack of sound. Maybe a drawer being slammed shut. Maybe something else. Then he heard his mama crying. That scared him so he ran away.
Next day Ephraim brought Cormac to join the daily lessons Lorene gave her younger son. He was the only pupil because the two Frankel children—Elsie, eight, and her five-year-old brother, Tim—who sometimes came weren’t there that day. It was the only time he had ever seen his father in the classroom.
Ephraim pushed Pohantis’s boy into the seat beside Quent. “Teach him, too,” Ephraim told his wife. “He speaks a fair bit of English, but he needs to learn more. And how to read and write. A little geography wouldn’t hurt either.”
He had always refused to let her teach the children of the slaves. Now he was bringing her a half-breed. “Why?”
“Because I promised.”
Lorene’s blue eyes narrowed and she nodded her head in bitter understanding. “Not her. You’d pay no mind to what you promised her. You promised the village chief, didn’t you? In order to get her.”
“Clever,” Ephraim said softly. “Too clever for a woman. See he learns.”
Cormac did learn, and quickly. And he had things to teach as well.
A few days after Cormac started coming to the classroom both boys were in the woods on a hill above the big house where they’d been sent to gather kindling. Quent spotted a rabbit standing perfectly still with his ears perked straight up and his nose twitching, seeking the danger smells in the biting winter twilight before setting out to feed. But the rabbit was sniffing in the wrong direction. He didn’t pick up the human scent.
Two years before, a Scot who looked like a barrel on legs and spoke in an accent so strange Quent could barely understand him had come to visit his father. The men spent two weeks riding and rowing all over Shadowbrook. Before he left to return to what he called the “auld country” the Scot gave Quent a dirk; he’d been practicing with it ever since. Now the small dagger flew through the air in a perfect arc almost too swift to be seen. The thin, pointed blade landed in the rabbit’s neck and the creature died instantly. “Tkap iwkshe,” Cormac murmured. Well done. It was the first time he’d spoken to Quent in the Potawatomi’s Algonkian language. Quent didn’t understand the words, but he could tell from the tone that they were complimentary.
Quent gathered his kill so he could bring it home to Kitchen Hannah to skin and clean and cook. She was called that to distinguish her from Corn Broom Hannah, who cleaned the big house. Quent knew names were important, that they told you things about people. “What’s your Indian name?” he asked when he had bled the rabbit and tucked it into the leather bag he’d been filling with kindling.
“Don’t have one.”
“Why not?”
“I was named by my father. For a great warrior among his people.”
“I thought the clan mothers decided the child’s name.”
“That’s how it is with the Irinakhoiw, the snakes. Not with us. Potawatomi men are strong. They aren’t ruled by women.”
“The Kahniankehaka aren’t snakes. And they’re plenty strong.” Quent jerked his head toward the distant hills and the land of the Mohawk. “The other Haudenosaunee call them the Guardians of the Eastern Door.” He’d been listening to visitors to Shadowbrook tell Indian stories for as long as he could remember.
“Not as strong as we are,” Cormac insisted. “The Potawatomi are the People of the Place of the Fire. Nothing’s stronger than fire.”
“Kahniankehaka means the people of the flint. Flint doesn’t burn.”
“Fire is over everything. The strongest thing of all. You wait, you’ll see.”
Eventually he did. But in that winter when Pohantis and Cormac came and changed his world, Quent first discovered a number of other truths. Among them, how mean his older brother John could be.
John was seventeen. Six other children had been born in the eight years between the brothers, but none lived more than a few months. Once Quent heard Kitchen Hannah say that what John liked least about his baby brother was that he lived. “That John Hale, he got himself accustomed to being mostly prized in this house simply for surviving. Not having to do nothing else to be special. Then little Quentin came along and he survived too, and John Hale, he didn’t like that.”
Quent guessed that was true, but he didn’t worry too muc
h about it. Mostly John ignored him. The younger boy was something to be put up with, like the flies of spring and the mosquitoes of summer and the mice that came indoors when it got cold. Quent tried to ignore John in his turn, but it wasn’t always possible.
Do Good was on the northern rim of Shadowbrook’s land, a couple of hours upriver from the big house. The people who lived there called themselves Friends; everyone else called them Quakers, because, it was said, they quaked before the Lord. That was maybe why they were known to be the most straight-dealing people in the colonies. Once the Quakers said it would be so—they refused to take an oath because it implied they were not always telling the truth—it was so.
Ephraim Hale allowed the Quakers to settle on his land for precisely that reason. They ran his trading post and did all Shadowbrook’s business with the local Indians. The Kahniankehaka brought furs to Do Good to exchange for metal tools, woven cloth, and of course ale and spirits. Periodically the Quakers took the pelts of beaver, otter, bear, and seal to New York City and sold them. Ephraim had no part in the business side of the Do Good trading post, but he never for a moment doubted that he was getting the two-fifths part of the proceeds to which he was entitled in their agreement.
That February Ephraim sent his eldest son to Do Good to collect what Shadowbrook was owed. “Take the young ones with you.”
John had yet to say Cormac Shea’s name aloud. “Both of them?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I said so.”
John looked quickly upstairs toward the adjoining bedrooms occupied by his mother and his father, then in the direction of the little room near the kitchen where the Potawatomi whore spent most of her time. “Maybe Mother would care for an outing,” he said, looking straight at his father. “Shall I ask her?”
Ephraim didn’t flinch from his eldest son’s glance. “Your mother is staying here. And if you want to be allowed to do the same, you’d best do as I say.”
John took Quent and Cormac with him to Do Good.
The trading post was built of split logs; it was the biggest building in the settlement and the first built. The houses and the pair of barns at either end of the single village road were made of planked wood from Shadowbrook’s sawmill. The barn at the opposite end from the trading post was the Friends’ meeting house and had been given a coat of whitewash. That made it the fanciest thing in the place, except maybe for the sign that said DO GOOD TRADING POST in black letters on a white board.
Inside the trading post Esther Snowberry stood at a long wooden counter. Behind her the wall was lined with shelves containing bolts of homespun, rows of tin mugs and crockery bowls, and heavy metal frying pans called spiders with three short legs so they could stand beside the hearth. One entire shelf held brown crockery jugs filled with the rum Moses Frankel distilled from the boat-loads of Caribbean sugar that arrived at Shadowbrook’s downriver wharf. After the sugar was offloaded the ships took on the plantation’s grain and vegetables and barrels of salted pork and venison. Without those foodstuffs the Barbadian planters and their slaves would starve, since every inch of their soil was given over to cane, the king of all cash crops.
On the counter beside Esther was a pile of furs, a mix of thick brown beaver pelts and a few gray-black sealskins. She had obviously been inspecting them, but she looked up from the task the moment the Hale brothers and Cormac Shea arrived. “Welcome, John Hale. I hope all is well with thee and thine at the big house.”
“Well enough. I’ve come for our share.”
“Of course. It’s put by for thee. But first thee must take a seat by the fire and have a warm drink and some food. And thy two young companions as well.”
There was a large fireplace at the other side of the room, flanked by two long pine settles with high backs to keep off the drafts and broad seats that offered a place to rest and take comfort in the warmth of the hearth. The only other people in the trading post were an Indian studying a display of hunting knives at the far end of Esther’s counter, and a small girl dressed exactly like Esther, in a gray dress with no trim, not even buttons or collar, and a pristine white mobcap without a ruffle.
The girl was seated beside the fire busily stitching and pretending to take no notice of the visitors. “Judith, take thyself at once to fetch thy father and Edward Taylor. Thee is to tell them John Hale is come to collect his father’s portion. And tell Prudence to bring johnnycakes and hot cider.”
Quent paid the little girl no mind. He was peering into the shadows at the brave who was bent over the knives. The blue tattoos on his cheeks proclaimed him Kahniankehaka. His hair was long and black and fell free to his shoulders. Quent knew that if the brave were on the warpath he would have shaved his head, leaving only a scalp lock that challenged his enemies to take it. He’d heard plenty of stories about fierce Kahniankehaka warriors who had fought beside the English against the French back before he was born, in what his father called Queen Ann’s War, but everyone said the Kahniankehaka who lived around Shadowbrook were peaceful. Be that as it may, Quent wasn’t sure what would happen if this brave knew Cormac was half Potawatomi. Corm had already told him the Potawatomi were the sworn enemies of all the Irinakhoiw.
John was apparently wondering the same thing. “You know my little brother Quentin, Esther. This other one’s a métis, a half-Potawatomi brat. The story goes that the Huron cut out his father’s heart and ate it, but they must have been too full to bother with this little something extra.”
He’d said it loud enough so the brave had to hear, but the Indian didn’t look up until he’d selected one of the knives. He came toward them carrying it. Cormac stared straight at him and took a couple of steps forward, so he was in front of both Quent and John. Quent’s eyes darted back and forth between the Mohawk brave and Cormac Shea, whose head didn’t quite come up to his shoulder. Quent moved just enough so he was closer to Corm. In case. Behind them John chuckled.
The brave ignored both children. “This knife,” he said, showing his choice to Esther Snowberry. “And the cloth you have measured. And two jugs.”
Esther frowned slightly, but she reached behind her and put two jugs of rum on the counter beside the cloth and the knife. The Quakers were abstemious in the matter of drink, but one of the conditions of their settlement on Ephraim Hale’s land had been an agreement that their trading post would deal in Shadowbrook’s rum. Few Indians would come to trade otherwise. “Thee is then fully and fairly paid for thy skins,” Esther said, nodding toward the pile of pelts on the counter. “Dost thou agree?”
The Indian nodded and collected his goods. On the way out, never once having looked directly at the little boys standing shoulder-to-shoulder, he said quietly, “The hearts of those who hide behind squaws and children would not be worthy of eating. The Kahniankehaka would throw them to the dogs.”
No sooner had the door closed behind the brave than it opened again. Esther’s husband had arrived, bringing two other men with him. “Thee is welcome, John Hale,” Martin Snowberry said. “Thee knows Edward Taylor.” Martin indicated his Do Good neighbor with a nod, then turned to the third man. “This is another visitor, Daniel Willis, who comes to us from Rhode Island.”
The men took seats beside the fire. Prudence arrived carrying a basket filled with still warm corncakes and a jug of sweet apple cider that steamed when she poured it into small crockery drinking bowls. The black woman served the men first, then Quent and Cormac, and finally Judith. Esther refused the refreshments and tied the skins into a neat bundle.
Edward Taylor had been summoned in his capacity as the keeper of Do Good’s purse. He leaned forward and passed a soft deerskin pouch to John. “Thy father’s share of the last trip to New York City is here. Seventeen pounds and eleven shillings. All good coin. Louis d’or and daalders and Portuguese cruzados and the like. Thee need not hesitate to count them if thee wishes.”
John hefted the pouch in his hand and the coins inside jingled softly. He loose
ned the drawstring but made no further move to count the money. “What brings you to Shadowbrook, Mr. Willis?”
“There is no need to call me mister, John Hale. I’m told thee does not share our beliefs, but thee should know I seek no title of any kind.”
“Very well—-Daniel, then. What brings you to Shadowbrook from Rhode Island in the dead of winter? It can’t have been an easy journey.”
“Easy enough since it ended safely. I come on the urging of the Light Within, John Hale. To bring a message.”
“Oh? What message is that?”
“It is time we stop buying and selling our fellow creatures.”
John looked over at the bundle of pelts that lay on the counter. “You worried about the seals and the beaver, Daniel? We’d be overrun with the things if we didn’t trap ‘em.”
“I speak not of animals but of people, John Hale. Negro people like Prudence here.”
Quent shot a look at the black woman. She stood absolutely still and stared straight ahead, as if she did not hear what was being said. “What do you say to that, Prudence?” John asked. “You think you’ve been treated right?”
Prudence didn’t answer.
“Thee may reply if thee wishes,” Martin Snowberry said quietly. “I confess, I would hear thy answer.”
“Ain’t nobody in this place be’s mean to me.” Prudence didn’t look at them and began packing the basket with the remains of the food.
“But thee is not paid for thy labor,” Daniel Willis said. “Thee gets no reward for thy toil. In the Bible it says the workman is worthy of his hire.”
Esther was looking from Prudence to Daniel Willis with some consternation. “In his letter to the Colossians Paul says to be fair and just in the way thee treatest slaves. Would he say that if the owning of them were contrary to God’s law?”
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