They were all there, Lorene noted, everyone who lived on the Patent except for the Quakers up at Do Good, who were too far away and doubtless didn’t yet know what had happened. The whites sat up front and the slaves were crowded into the back of the room the way they were most Sundays when she conducted services. But everyone was watching Ephraim with a look they never turned on her—as if he held the answers to the meaning of the senseless slaughter, the devastation. Not all. Ely Davidson was staring straight ahead. Lorene moved to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “How’s that bandage keeping, Ely?”
He nodded a wordless reply. Lorene lay a finger on the forehead wound; it was cool to her touch. She’d used one of Sally Robin’s unguents meant to ward off pustulating eruptions. Sally was off in a corner speaking urgently to Quent. Lorene considered working her way over toward them, but Ephraim’s voice stopped her.
“Eight horses are missing.” He continued his litany of destruction. “Two were badly burned and had to be put down. The rest, I fear, are gone for good. Seven slaves are dead. That’s a quarter part of the stock. Two were mere children. Lilac and Sugar Willie had a lifetime of labor left.” Lorene heard a choked sob behind her. Ephraim seemed to have forgotten that Runsabout was the mother of the twins. “And then there is the personal loss,” he said, clearly excluding Runsabout and the other slaves from such delicacy of feeling. “The sawyer’s entire family. You have our deepest sympathy, Ely.”
Ephraim paused while Moses Frankel and his kin nodded in the direction of Davidson. They looked embarrassed to have been the lucky ones, Ephraim thought. The sugarhouse and the gristmill were unharmed and every one of the Frankels was alive. They’d lost a few of their best workers; Big Jacob was a particularly terrible loss. Not a black or a white anywhere who knew more about horse-flesh than Big Jacob. That white-haired slave over there pouring an ale for John, that was Deliciousness May as he recalled. Considered herself married to Big Jacob. Ephraim was never quite sure what that meant among the blacks. Still … “How did this happen?” he asked. “How did this abomination come upon us?” They were all waiting for him to answer his own question. Damned fools. If he knew the answer he’d be doing something about it, not just standing here counting the cost. But he couldn’t go on standing. Not even his iron will could supply the strength for that. “You,” he pointed to Little George, “get me a chair.”
John stood up and offered his. In the few moments while Little George took it to the front of the room and helped Ephraim to sit down, his eldest son spoke. “You ask how all this happened, Father. But we know the answer to that. It was Indians. Savages. If we go to the Mohawk village we’ll probably find—”
“It wasn’t Mohawk that attacked us.” Quent’s voice cut him off.
“You can’t know that for su—”
“Yes, I can and I do. I saw them, John. So did Ely. You did not. They were Huron, a band of renegades who have been banished from the longhouses of their birth. The brave leading them is a notorious killer called Lantak.”
Ephraim was startled. Sweet Christ. Huron this far south. The first time they’d come to the Patent they’d intended to take something irreplaceable from the legend they called Uko Nyakwai. And they had. What motive did Huron renegades have to attack Shadowbrook this time? “You recognized this Lantak?” Ephraim asked. He leaned forward and studied his younger son.
“I did.”
“So you got close enough to tell one savage from another,” John said, “but I don’t imagine this Lantak’s dead, or you’d have said so.”
“He got away.” There was a murmur of surprise around the room. No one was supposed to get away when he was in Uko Nyakwai’s sights. Quent ignored the hum of disappointment. “According to what Sally Robin here’s been telling me, it’s worse still. Lantak took Solomon the Barrel Maker with him.”
“Solomon, he be dead.” It was Sampson, speaking up from the back. “Right away when it all started, when we was haying, Mr. Quent. ’Fore I ran away and happened on you. Solomon, he went after that savage with a pitchfork, and the savage he threw a hatchet at him, and Solomon, he fell down. I saw.”
“Solomon don’t be dead. Least he wasn’t.” Sally Robin closed her eyes when she spoke, as if she were seeing it all again. “That tomahawk just hurt Solomon in his shoulder. He bled mightily, but I was with him and we walked right out of that field what was on fire, to the big road. We couldn’t go fast—Solomon was too weak for that—but we walked a goodly ways.”
“Where were you going?” It was John who asked the question. “And how come the savages didn’t take you as well?”
“I don’t rightly know the answer to either of them questions, Master John. Only that we was going in the opposite way to the fire and the savages, but they caught up with us anyway. They was on horses, and one of ’em, he rode right up to where we was and he dragged Solomon up on his horse and rode away.”
“And left you behind.”
“Yes. I sang my I-ain’t-feared song and them savages heard it and left me be. Only my song don’t be big enough to protect Solomon same as me.” Two big tears were rolling down Sally Robin’s cheeks. Quent wasn’t sure she knew she was crying. She started to hum, very softly.
“I’m going after Lantak,” Quent said.
Ephraim sighed. It was time to find out if things were as they had always been, if Quent were more Indian than white, or if, as Lorene insisted, their youngest boy had changed. “No, you are not,” he said quietly. “We need you here, Quentin. Shadowbrook needs you here.”
“I have to go, Father. If Lantak—”
Ephraim had propped his sticks against the hearth. Now he reached for them and struggled to his feet. “I don’t give a damn about Lantak. I care about the Patent. Bringing the punishment he deserves to this renegade Huron may make you feel considerably better, Quentin. It may serve your sense of honor, and add to your reputation among the savages, and console you for letting him get away in the first place. It will not put one more sack of wheat aboard one more ship. Our survival depends on how clever we are in the next few weeks, and how hard we work. Whatever code you may have learned in all the time you’ve spent with the Indians, it’s useless here among civilized men. We have a living to make and a holding to protect. The Patent comes before anything else.”
“It’s nothing to do with revenge.” At that moment, more than anything else in the world, he wanted his father to understand.
“With what then?”
It was as if father and son were alone, Lorene realized. They were finally saying what they had not said for years. She looked about for Nicole, but couldn’t see her now. If she was correct, Nicole was the tether that would hold Quent on the land. But she had to be present.
Sally Robin was still humming so quietly Quent thought he might be the only one who heard. He knew if he explained about Solomon and Lantak and why he had to go, she would suffer more. But if he did not, his father would never understand. “Lantak won’t just kill Solomon. And he won’t hold him for ransom. He will …” His parents and his brother were all looking at him, waiting. “Lantak will torture Solomon to death. Very slowly, over a very long time.” Sally Robin hummed a little louder, a little faster. Quent couldn’t look at her.
Ephraim took a moment or two to absorb the words. “That’s a filthy business,” he said finally. “I regret that it is so. But it changes nothing.”
“It changes everything. I can’t let Solomon be—”
“He is property, Quentin. We have lost much valuable property this day. As I said, I regret it all.”
“Solomon is a man, damn it! A human being.”
“I bought him. Do you not think that I—”
“You bought his labor. Good God, Father, you cannot—”
“Quentin.” Ephraim stared at his son, at the Patent’s best chance for a future, maybe the only chance. “Until now I have not pointed out that once before, Huron came here and did terrible things. That was all to do with you and yours and no o
ne asked you for any explanation. I am asking for none now. I am only stating an irrefutable fact. You are needed here on the Patent. At Shadowbrook. Are you staying?”
It was the final question, and the only one that mattered. Quent looked for Nicole and couldn’t find her. The pain of leaving without seeing her one more time, without explaining, was a truly physical thing. He could feel it in his heart. No matter, she would be safe here. Whatever Lorene thought of him, however angry she was about his leaving, she would take care of Nicole.
His mother was in fact staring at him as intently as if she were trying to see into his soul. John, too. They had different goals and different expectations, but both realized what was at stake as well as he did. He’d planned to talk to his father again, say he would stay if… . His birthright, the Hale Patent and everything he had loved best almost from the first breath he drew was at risk. Nicole might wait for him; nothing else would. No matter, he had to go. Quent turned and walked away.
Book 2
The World That Came from the Belly of the Fish 1754-1756
Chapter Twelve
THE TELLING OF THE GREAT HEAT MOON THE VILLAGE OF SINGING SNOW
“HAYA, HAYA … At that time we Potawatomi and the Ojibwe and the Ottawa were one people, one Fire Nation.” Ixtu the Teller chanted the words in the same tone as had every Teller in the long line that preceded him.
“Haya, haya, jayek,” the listeners chanted in response. So, so, all of us together.
It was evening, and the hard, dry earth gave back the relentless heat it had absorbed during the day. Sweat ran down the faces of the people of the village of Singing Snow. Their bodies glistened with it, old men and braves and squaws and children. “Haya, haya, jayek.” So, so, all of us together. In the Circle of Telling.
“At that time,” Ixtu told, “each morning when the sun returned, we were the first Anishinabeg he saw. Then the sun grew tired of looking at us and he came less and less often, and the world grew cold and our braves could find no game and our squaws could find no fish and no berries, and there was only grass to eat. Then we and our brothers the Ojibwe and the Ottawa said, ‘When the sun comes next, let us follow it.’ And so we did. The Fire Nation followed the sun.”
“Haya, haya, jayek.”
The rhythm of the response, like the rhythm of the Telling, had become part of Cormac. Some days before, he had exchanged his buckskins for a breechclout made of deerskin and decorated with the porcupine symbols that identified him as a Potawatomi warrior. His body was tanned a dark bronze. He wore beaded bracelets on his wrists and ankles, and three eagle feathers in hair that hung free, not tied behind the way he wore it when he was in the white world. “Haya, haya, jayek.” His blood pulsed to the rhythm of the chant and the Telling, matching the blood rhythms of the others. “Haya, haya, jayek.” So, so, all of us together.
Ixtu had begun his story at sundown. Before that he had picked up an ember from the Sacred Fire that came from the First Fire, and carried the smoldering piece of wood in his bare hand to the place he’d chosen for this Telling. Then he built the New Moon Fire from the old, and the people of Singing Snow gathered around it and listened to the history of the world.
As always the Teller began with how Shkotensi, the Great Spirit, created fire in the belly of Abigigos, the first fish, and how Abigigos swam until he came to the end of the ocean and fell to the earth. There he opened his mouth and the fire came out, and after it the People of the Fire. Now the new moon was high overhead and Ixtu had come to the part of the story that told what happened when the Fire Nation left their traditional homeland near the Great Salt Water and began their migration west, or in the story words, in the sun-going direction.
Ixtu paused to gather his thoughts. He always paused at just this place.
“Haya, haya, jayek,” the listeners chanted. So, so, all of us together.
Now a kind of humming was added to the affirmation and the people in the circle began to sway side to side, everyone keeping to the same rhythm. Cormac gave himself entirely to the music and the movement and the story that was told at every New Moon. He had heard it many times before, spoken in exactly the same way, using exactly the same words, but that did not matter. It was always the first time. He had no thoughts in his head that were not also the thoughts of the others humming and swaying either side of him, and no questions Ixtu could not answer.
A woman began beating a small storytelling drum. When he heard the drum Ixtu began to speak again. He told how the Potawatomi separated themselves from the Ottawa and the Ojibwe, and how the Fire Nation became three brother nations. He told how the Potawatomi, who were called the People of the Place of the Fire, learned to put seeds in the earth and make things grow so they would not starve even when there was no meat and no fish and no berries. He told how the Cmokmanuk, the whites, came, and how at first the Potawatomi hid themselves and did not look at them, but eventually they did. And when the Cmokmanuk asked for beaver skins and offered to trade for them, the Potawatomi, like the other tribes, used their great hunting prowess to get beaver skins, and how they came to cherish the Cmokmanuk things they got in exchange. But the Cmokmanuk never had enough. They demanded more and more skins. And the Anishinabeg too, wanted more and more trade, until almost no beaver could be found and the Real People made war on each other over what was left.
“Haya, haya, jayek.” So, so, all of us together.
Next Ixtu told how those not killed by their traditional enemies were killed by the Cmokmanuk sicknesses. By then there were three drums, all beating to the rhythm of the group’s collective heart.
From the moment when the Telling began, Ixtu had sat cross-legged on the ground, his voice doing all the moving, his body still. Now he staggered to his feet. His old legs trembled with the pain of standing after such a long time in one position, but they held him. “At that time, Insigison the wise chief took a band of the Potawatomi away from the fighting and the sickness. They traveled in the sun-coming direction until they returned to the land they had left long before. So Insigison brought the fire and the People of the Place of the Fire to this place.”
“Haya, haya, jayek. Haya, haya, jayek.”
The drums beat faster. Cormac’s heart kept pace with them and he could feel the heartbeats of the others doing the same. “At that time, when Insigison and the braves and the squaws who had followed him arrived here, it was during the Long Night Moon. The ground was covered with snow and Insigison could not see if this was a place where the seeds would grow to make food that would prevent famine, or if the hunting would be good, or if there were fish swimming in streams or bushes with berries. None of them could see anything but snow and Insigison was not sure he was in the right place. At that time, the father of my father’s father’s father, Axtu, was the Teller. And he said, ‘This is the place we are meant to be. There is no doubt.’ And Insigison questioned the wisdom of old Axtu. ‘How do you know that?’ he asked. ‘I know it,’ Axtu said, ‘because I can hear the snow singing.’ So even though they were many, many sun’s journey from any others of the Fire Nation, Insigison and his people let the fire they had brought with them burn in this place. And it was our fifth fire, the fifth home-place of the journey that began when the three peoples were one. And in honor of Axtu they named the place Singing Snow.”
The hours passed and Ixtu continued the Telling, reciting the happy stories of many successful hunts that set out from this village, and many bountiful crops, and of times of weeping when many braves were killed on the hunt or in raids made by their enemies or raids they made, and when there was drought and the crops did not grow and the people, all but the strongest of them, starved, the youngest children, of course, dying first. Until finally when it seemed he must be too exhausted to speak another word and it was almost morning, he told the tale of Thunder Moon, the moon before this Great Heat Moon. “At that time the squaw Sohantes gave birth to three children, all at the same time and all sons.”
“Haya, haya, jayek.” So, so,
all of us together. “Haya, haya, jayek.”
Sohantes sat across the circle from the Teller, her three infants strapped to her back in a carrier specially made for her because nothing like this had ever happened in the village before, and chanted with the rest.
All of us together, she thought, but this is my part of the story. Forever.
“And Sohantes was the wife of the chief Kekomoson,” Ixtu intoned. “And he had no other wife but her, and he had promised not to take her sister as another wife as long as Sohantes lived. When the other women told him what had happened in the birthing house, Kekomoson went out and found a fat buck standing alone on the top of a hill, and Kekomoson killed it with one arrow so perfectly shot it went directly to the killing spot between the buck’s eyes. Then Kekomoson gave a great feast to celebrate this thing that no one remembered seeing before, three sons all born together.”
“Haya, haya, jayek. Haya, haya, jayek.”
Kekomoson sat beside the Teller, in the place of honor because he was the chief. He did not let his face show how pleased he was to have found a place in the Telling.
“Haya, haya, jayek.”
Ixtu was coming to the end. He looked once at the sky. Still gray, but lighter than before. Soon he would know if he had correctly performed the Teller’s most important duty. If he had failed he would walk away into the wilderness, taking nothing with him and eating nothing and drinking nothing, and when he could walk no more he would sit down and wait to die. Great Spirit, grant that I may die beside the fire with my brothers, not alone, parched and starving in a far place.
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