Chesapeake

by James A. Michener

  The other story was incredible, much weightier than the tale of the big river, for it contained disturbing implications. He first caught rumor of it from Scar-chin, who said casually, “Maybe when the Great Canoe returns, it will chastise the Susquehannocks.”

  “What Great Canoe?”

  “The one that came many winters ago.”

  “It came where?”

  “Near the island.”

  “How big was it?”

  “I didn’t see it, but Orapak did, and so did Ponasque.”

  He had gone immediately to Ponasque, a very old man now, to ask directly, “Did you see the Great Canoe?”

  “I did,” the old man said as they huddled in the marshes.

  “How big was it?”

  “Twenty canoes, forty, piled one on the other. It rose high in the air.”

  “How many paddlers?”

  “None.”

  This was the most ominous statement Pentaquod had ever heard, a Great Canoe moving without paddles. He contemplated this for some time, then asked the old man, “You saw this thing, yourself, not some great story recited at night?”

  “I saw it, beyond the island.”

  “What did you think of it?”

  The old man’s eyes grew misty as he recalled that stupendous day when his world changed. “We were very afraid. All of us, even Orapak. We could not explain what we had seen, but we had seen it. The fear has never left us, but as the years pass we have managed to forget.” He indicated that he was not happy to have a stranger to the tribe revive those distant fears and he would say no more.

  By prudent questioning, Pentaquod satisfied himself that all members of the tribe believed that the Great Canoe had indeed come to the mouth of the river, that it was huge in size, that it moved without paddles. One old woman added to the story: “It was white on top, brown at the bottom.”

  Pentaquod carried the disquieting news with him as they penetrated deeper into the swamp, and when they reached relatively solid ground on which they could camp, he went to the werowance and asked bluntly, “What did you think, Orapak, when you saw the Great Canoe?”

  The old man sucked in his breath, then sat down beneath an oak. He reflected on what he should reply to this penetrating question, knowing that it cut to the heart of his tribe’s existence, then said slowly, “I cannot come into the marshes again. I find it too exhausting and know that my time for death is at hand. You must be the next werowance.”

  “I did not ask about that, Orapak.”

  “But this is the significant answer to what you did ask.”

  Of this Pentaquod could make no sense, but the old leader continued, “When we gathered on the shore that day to see the Great Canoe as it moved slowly north, all of us saw the same thing. You are probably aware of that from the questions you’ve been asking.”

  Pentaquod nodded. He was convinced that this tribal memory was no mere chant composed by some imaginative ancestor like Scar-chin. Satisfied on this point, the old man went on, “When the others had seen the Canoe, and assured themselves that it was real, they returned home, but my grandfather, the werowance then, took my father and me along the shore, and we were hiding in the forest when the Canoe came close, and we saw that it contained men much like us and yet much different.”

  “How?”

  “Their skins were white. Their bodies were of some different substance, for the sun glistened when it struck.”

  That was all the old man knew, and since none of the others had told him of these startling facts, he realized that this was privileged knowledge, to be possessed only by the succession of werowances. In sharing this sacred knowledge of the glistening bodies, Orapak was passing along to Pentaquod the burden of leadership. He did not need to warn that no mention must be made of what the Great Canoe actually contained, for it was clear that one day it must return, bringing the enigma of men with white skins and bodies that reflected sunlight.

  “They will come back, won’t they?” Pentaquod asked.

  “They will.”

  “When?”

  “Every day of my life I have risen from my bed with one question: Is this the day they will return? Now that burden is yours. You will never place your head upon the sleeping reeds without wondering: Will they come tomorrow?”

  They buried the canny old werowance, a craven who had lost his village a score of times but never a man in battle, deep in the swamps away from the river he had loved. From his tired, worn body they removed the copper disk symbolic of leadership, proffering it to Pentaquod, but he refused, for such disks of authority were not part of the Susquehannock ritual. Instead he planted three tall turkey feathers in his hair, so that he towered even more conspicuously over his little charges, and Scar-chin recited his epic of how the new werowance had once defeated the Nanticokes single-handed. And so this tribe became the next in that strange procession of nations who choose as their leader someone who is not even a member of their tribe.

  The first test of Pentaquod’s leadership came when the Nanticokes marched north on the traditional raid. The women assumed that the tribe would flee north in the accustomed manner, but some of the younger warriors, infected by Scar-chin’s epic, believed they should stand and fight. “With Pentaquod to plan the battle,” they argued, “we could repel the invaders and end our annual shame.”

  The idea was tempting to Pentaquod the man, but in his capacity as werowance, on whom the safety of the tribe depended, he had to think more cautiously. He could not casually sacrifice any men, for his was a trivial group, small and frightened and inconsequential. A sore defeat might demoralize them, leaving no base for continued existence. Furthermore, he had achieved his memorable victory over the four Nanticoke warriors by surprise, and he was not at all sure this could be repeated. He told the young warriors, “Let us scout the Nanticokes to see how they approach this time.”

  So he and two of the most excitable young fighters crept into the woods, went far upstream and swam across the river onto alien land. There they hid until the noisy Nanticokes came into sight, and as Pentaquod had suspected, this time they did not move without sentinels and forerunners. There would be no surprising this expedition, for it was prepared.

  The enthusiasm of the young warriors dampened. In some consternation they scurried back to inform the others, “They are marching as a well-prepared army. We had better go to the rivers.” And with a very willing Pentaquod in the lead, they fled.

  When they returned to their village, it was Pentaquod who surveyed the damage; it was not great but it was humiliating, and he vowed: They will not do this again.

  That summer he did not allow his people to abandon their land because of the mosquitoes. “We will stay here and fortify it. We will lay subtle traps along the approaches, and all men will learn some skill at arms. Anyone who complains of the mosquitoes will get no crab meat.”

  It was a trying summer. The mosquitoes were terrible; at dusk hundreds would land on any exposed arm or face, and people stayed close to smudge pots when the sun went down. They smeared themselves with bear grease, slept with blankets about their heads and rose weary from the sticky heat which had kept them sweating through the darkness. But they were inspired by the vision held before them by their tall young werowance: “When the Nanticokes come this year, what a surprise they will get at this tree!” By testing his young men repeatedly, he satisfied himself that they would stand firm and execute their surprise.

  He used every military idea developed by the Susquehannocks and invented others appropriate to the situation, and when the mosquitoes disappeared in early autumn they left behind a village prepared to defend itself.

  The young men actually hungered for the Nanticokes to arrive, but some untoward event in the south delayed the customary expedition, and the fledgling warriors chafed. Pentaquod, knowing that he must keep their enthusiasm high, divided his tribe into portions, one marching against the other, and thus they perfected their strategies. And then one cool day at the start of
winter, when geese lined the river, scouts ran in with the long-awaited news: “The Nanticokes are coming.”

  The southerners came with their accustomed noise and self-assurance, with only casual scouts in the forefront; following Pentaquod’s surprising assault on them, they had been attentive to details, but now they were, as he had predicted to his troops, careless once more. They came through the woods like revelers; they forded the river like people swimming for pleasure; they straggled down the right bank of the river as if attending a celebration.

  And then they came to Pentaquod’s carefully disposed troops. From behind trees arrows were launched, and men appeared with spears, while ahead the ground gave way, projecting the forward troops into pits, and strange sounds echoed through the forest, and even women appeared, beating sticks. Confusion and pain captured the Nanticokes, and in the end all they could do was flee, leaving behind more than twenty prisoners. Never had they known such a debacle.

  The little villagers, finding themselves with an unprecedented victory and also a score of captives, did not know what to do with either. Unaccustomed to war other than the retreats it caused, they had no concept of what one did with prisoners, and when Pentaquod explained that in the north his Susquehannocks followed three courses of action, they listened attentively. “The wounded we kill. The strong we turn into slaves. The swift we send back to their people with insulting messages.”

  The villagers nodded approval of these suggestions, completely unaware of what they entailed, but their werowance continued, “However, we wounded no one, so there are none to kill.” Most of them saw the common sense of this judgment, and indeed applauded it because they had no taste for killing. “We do not need slaves, because there is no work for them to do, and if we made work, we would also have to make meals for them.” This, too, was irrefutable. “And I do not think we ought to send insulting messages to the Nanticokes. We want them for our friends, not our enemies.”

  To some, this was a surprising verdict. Many, especially those who had not participated in the battle, desired to humiliate their enemy and had devised clever ways for doing so; they were disgusted that Pentaquod should preach conciliation, but he received support from a strange quarter.

  Two young warriors who had stood behind the first tree where the traps were sprung confessed that they had been terrified, and that if even one thing had gone wrong, they would have been surrounded and killed. “It is much better for the Nanticokes to come as friends,” they reasoned. “Let us feast the prisoners and talk with them and send them south with our respect.”

  As soon as the words were spoken Pentaquod cried, “Let us do just that!” and his counsel prevailed, and the feast was held with goose and deer and yams and baked fish and pumpkin sweetened with the juice of cornstalks, and tobacco was smoked in long pipes which passed from hand to hand. One of the Nanticokes of good family said at the conclusion, “We will inform our people that we are no longer enemies,” and the sun rose before the new friends parted.

  This dramatic change of affairs created a feeling of profound excitement in the village, and talk became heady. “Never again will we desert our village to the Nanticokes. We have proved that we can fight better than those fools. One of these days we’ll march south to their villages, and they’ll see what a change has occurred.”

  Pentaquod took no notice of this bombast; he recognized it as the boastfulness which Susquehannock warriors had engaged in when he was a boy, but when he heard his people tell one another that the entire system of the world was altered by their victory, he became worried. And when they boasted that next time the Susquehannocks marched down from the north there would be war, he called a halt.

  “The Susquehannocks are not Nanticokes,” he warned. “Not one of our tricks would fool them, because they are Susquehannock tricks, and they use them against their enemies.” He harangued them for an extended period, and then a happy metaphor came to him. Lowering his voice and leaning forward to face his enthusiastic warriors, he told them, “Among the Susquehannocks, I was a small man.” His height was so great as he said this, his torso so much broader than theirs, that they could only gasp.

  “What shall we do when they come again?” they asked, subdued.

  “We shall cross the river, hide our canoes and go into the swamps,” he said, and into the swamps he led them.

  In the decade that followed—1586-1595 by western calendar—Pentaquod became the best werowance his people had ever known. He was a tall, courageous, kindly man serving among a small, frightened people. When his tribe went east to the Great Waters, he led the way and carried his share of the burdens, and on the rare occasions when they had to flee into the southern marshes, his ability to absorb such ignominy without losing good spirits inspired them.

  They no longer had to hide in the northern rivers, because he had arranged lasting peace with the Nanticokes, and the two tribes now traded instead of fighting: dried deer meat to the Nanticokes, bright shells for roanoke to the villagers. There were even exchanges of visits, which were salutary, for the returning villagers boasted with perverse pride, “Our mosquitoes are twice as fierce as theirs.”

  Pentaquod and Navitan had a son to inherit the title, and then another, and all things prospered. He led his people east to the supreme river and watched as its salty waves came higher than his head to thunder upon the shore in shattering power. As he stood transfixed one day an illumination came to him: If the Great Canoe we await is able to move across this river of such tremendous power, it must be of vast size and the men who steer it must be even greater than the Susquehannocks. And he looked upon the ocean with dismay and wonderment.

  There were other mysteries. At far-spread intervals on some starless night a child would cry, “The light is there!” and in the forest across the river would come a single glimmer, and move about as if controlled by demons, and come to rest, glowing ominously through the dark passage of night. In the village parents hushed their children, and no one spoke of it. Through the long darkness the little people remained at water’s edge, staring obsessively, wondering who or what could be moving on the southern shore, but there was never a satisfactory explanation, merely that flickering light emanating from some unknown source. Toward dawn it would vanish and not reappear for many years.

  A greater mystery concerned the bay. It lay only a short distance to the west, but rarely did a villager see it and never did they venture upon it. In all their generations of living beside water, they had not discovered the sail, nor the fact that men could move across rivers and bays without paddling; to them the bay was alien. Its abundance of fish and crabs and oysters was proscribed, and all they knew of this great river of rivers was that it was the route by which the fierce Potomacs attacked. They were content to leave this splendid body of water to their enemies, and never did they know the grandeur of sunset on broad waters or the rising of a sudden storm.

  It was believed by the villagers that on those nights when portentous affairs impended, Fishing-long-legs would come to the river as the stars were beginning to fade, uttering mournful kraannks to warn of imminent wonders. Then the people would huddle in the darkness, listening with terror to the sounds that echoed from the trees bending over the water.

  On one such night in 1596, when distant nations were preparing to invade the bay, blue herons flew in great numbers from the swamps, scattering over the landscape before dawn to search the estuaries for swift-moving fish. Their cried filled the night, but if they distressed those men and women of evil conscience and with something to fear, they caused no apprehension in Pentaquod, because he knew that they had flocked to signal the birth of his third child, and before sunrise he heard the reassuring cry.

  “A girl!” the midwife reported as she ran from the birthing hut.

  “I am content,” Pentaquod replied gravely, but he was far more than that. He had always wanted a daughter who would comfort him when he retired from war, and at last he had one. As soon as it was respectable for him to v
isit the birthing hut, he stooped low, passed beneath the pine boughs and chains of acorns to take the hands of his wife. “I am content,” he said and he was permitted to see the new child, so small that it was hard to believe she was his offspring. Holding his two forefingers apart, he indicated to his happy wife how really minute this child was, not at all like her two brothers at that age. He laughed, then lifted the tiny thing and held it against his cheek.

  “Her name shall be Tciblento,” he said, and she became the most precious thing in his life, the joy of his later years. He taught her the lore of the river: where the geese clustered, and how to watch beavers at work, and the right striplings to cut for a wigwam, and how to burn out the heart of a tree in order to make a canoe. She learned to dive for oysters and fish for crabs, and with his urging she became an excellent cook.

  But it was the grace of her movements that delighted him; she was as deft in dodging among trees as a fawn. The soft color of her skin was like a deer’s, too, and she was never more beautiful than when she appeared suddenly from behind some tree as they were working in the forest—unexpected, bright of eye, quick of gesture.

  Once as he worked among the trees, seeking pines from which canoes could be burned, he found her sleeping on a bed of needles, her hair thrown carelessly across her breast. Tears came into his eyes and he whispered, “Tciblento, Tciblento, why were you born into the days of change?” He could foresee that in her lifetime the Great Canoe would return, imposing fearful difficulties as she endeavored to adjust to the new world it would bring. As he watched, a blue heron landed, uttering its mournful kraannk, and without waking she twisted an end of hair. Herons did not cry at random; they sent warnings. And he remembered that on the night of her birth the Choptanks had been warned.