But most characteristic of him (so that one might not notice other things—I can’t remember what he wore) was a kind of brightness. He had, one might have said, a beautiful radiance: he was a man who saw things, who saw things and understood them.
One October evening after we were friends he took me out to the Junius swamps. We stood in waist-high waders in the cold murky water amid the water-rotted trees, some still standing, with the faint pink hands of remnant leaves floating on frail elongated stems up to the surface, some gnawed down by beaver into flaking points like palisades. The sky was silver blue with a film of cloud, but we could see the stars come through in the early dark.
We watched the ducks fly up in gathered bursts, and tried to see what they were in the half-light, by the pattern of their wing beats, their patches of white. For some reason we didn’t bother to shoot at anything.
At Christmas that year Bob brought me a wood duck. I had asked him that October night if he had ever seen one.
2
The Tree of Light
THE IROQUOIS SPOKE of a tree of light, on whose branches were blossoming stars, and of a tree that all year long bore flowers of delicious fragrance and fruit of delicious taste—a concentrated vision of the apple tree, whose white blossoms seem to be made of light as they scatter like snow on the ground.
When George Washington sent his general John Sullivan to break the back of the Iroquois confederacy in the summer of 1779, Sullivan went on a scorched earth campaign. His intention was to burn every trace of the militant branch of the Iroquois, the Seneca nation, to the ground in retaliation for the Indian and British massacre of settlers at Wyoming, Pennsylvania—a military action that had been planned and carried out from the Seneca stronghold, Kanadesaga, on the present-day site of Geneva, New York.
Sullivan’s men thought they were going to a wilderness filled with primitive savages, the Northwest Frontier, as the Finger Lakes region was then called. They marched up through the Chemung Valley and north along the east side of Seneca Lake. Their journals are filled with a sense of astonishment at what they found—not a dense and terrifying forest, but open country, with orchards and cultivated fields around the Seneca villages, which they called castles, of bark.
As Arthur Parker, the Seneca who became the first ethnologist at the New York State Museum in Albany, pointed out in his 1913 monograph on corn, the Iroquois were such an agricultural people that the Europeans attacked their fields instead of the Indians themselves. Parker quotes Sullivan’s letter to John Jay, written on September 30, 1779:
Colonel Butler destroyed in the Cayuga country . . . two hundred acres of excellent corn with a number of orchards, one of which had in it 1500 trees . . . the quantity of corn destroyed at a moderate computation, must amount to 160,000 bushels. I flatter myself that the orders with which I was entrusted are fully executed . . . We have not left a single settlement or field in the country . . .
Sullivan’s men called one place “apple town” as they marched north along Seneca Lake, cutting the trees down. The apple trees themselves were like a buffering force, they complained, for the trees were thick-bodied and old, and the hard work of destroying them slowed down the expedition.
The entire ripe harvest was consumed in fire. In less than two weeks Sullivan’s army reduced the Seneca to scavengers, wandering and hungry in the Niagara region, a tentative nomadic people. As Sullivan came north they vanished into the trees, offering no human resistance, though they took with them two of Sullivan’s unwary officers, Parker and Boyd, and slowly hacked them to death. In his report to Congress Sullivan describes the shock of finding their headless mutilated bodies and then their heads—from which everything that could be cut away was cut away.
Sullivan’s men made note of the hidden beauty of the place—a glacial landscape with rich deposits of soil set in long low hills rolling like parallel waves within a row of deep blue lakes. The cool deepness of the water tempered the climate and created the best fruit-growing land that they had ever seen. The name Geneva may have come to mind, but it had long since been coined by the French trappers who camped in shacks on the edge of the malarial swamps at the foot of Seneca Lake. It was part of a long established network of fur-trading outposts in the lake country, the critical gateway to the rich trade in furs across the continent, the American Silk Road.
In 1787 a beautiful woman from New England sent scouts to the Northwest Frontier with the intention of setting up a colony in the wilderness. Jemima Wilkinson was near death in a fever when a vision came to her of angels descending from the sky saying “Room, room, room. There is yet room, and all may drink from the water of life, which is free to all without price.” Wilkinson said that a spirit of light had come upon her and scorched the human life away, leaving her neither male nor female, but merely the vessel in which the luminous spirit dwelt.
Wilkinson embodied the Quaker principle stated by Pythagoras: that friendship is true equality. In the landscape of the Revolutionary War she became the Publick Universal Friend. Wilkinson’s contemporaries, the founding fathers of the United States, saw themselves as equals, with the common goals and qualities of male landowners of European descent, with everyone else subordinate to them. But Wilkinson received all people. Among her many disciples were men and women, rich and poor, black and white, colonists and British soldiers alike. She is described as having had healing powers that bordered on the miraculous, and traveled widely in New England to use them, visiting the wounded and dying on both sides of the battle lines. She referred to death simply, without fear, as “leaving time.”
Wilkinson’s enemies said that she had the audacity to present herself as the second manifestation of Christ, in the body of a woman. She was stoned by an angry mob in the urban northeast. People wrote of her long black hair flowing eccentrically, undressed, down her back, of the eerie contrast of her lovely face and strange male voice, of her eyes, which were startling and intense. Some compared her to Scylla, a monstrous female trap for trusting innocents.
At the age of forty-four, Wilkinson, on a black horse with a blue velvet saddle, rode up the east side of Seneca Lake to found a New Jerusalem in the American wilderness. She followed the route Sullivan’s army had taken ten years before, traveling north from the swamps of Elmira, where she and her followers were knee deep in March snow and mud, past the spectacular waterfalls along the lake’s southern shore. One night they heard the roar of the falls from the Keuka Creek across the water, and rode around the lake toward the sound, past the sad remains of Kanadesaga, and down the west side to Kashong, where the French trappers there told them stories of the richness of the place and showed them remnants of the apple trees that Sullivan’s army had failed to destroy, the hacked stumps sprouting thin green clusters of twigs sealed with tight March buds.
…
I could think of the town of Geneva, New York, where I was born, as a landscape with figures drifting over it like ghosts: Sullivan’s men making their way north along Castle Creek to Kanadesaga, or myself walking up the huge slabs of tilted blue slate that made up the sidewalks on Castle Street where the ruins of Kanadesaga had long since become the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station. I might be fourteen or fifteen, in the freshwater light of the late winter thaw, the sound of the swollen creek rushing below, on my way to Anne and Terry’s house above the creek with something I had proudly learned to bake, butter pastry or a thick perfect round of Scotch shortbread wrapped up in wax paper and string, on the day they gave me a book of woodland watercolors with the inscription, “May your life be filled with the dances of bees . . .”
I could think of the place as a kind of archaeological layering, the top layer a mix of local elements with the homogeneous overlay of contemporary American life—the concrete blocks of malls on the high terraced land above the lake where Hamilton Street becomes Route 5 and 20, where the inn named after Lafayette, who once spent the night there, burned down and became Wal-Mart or Kmart or one of the interchangeable chain
s that sell fried beef or dough or fish; or the sand-colored mountain of landfill on Route 414 where white gulls swirl above slow-moving diesel trucks that hour after hour, under clouds of black exhaust, haul truckloads of trash up from New York three hundred miles away. Yet through the layers would drift a distinctive quality like a flavor or a smell signaling something indelible, a native atmosphere.
The essence of the atmosphere, like its weather, lay in the presence of water. One could paint it with water words— otter, water, winter, wet—the root core echoing throughout like the cries of geese that marked the swing of the seasons. When we used to hear them, even in the house, in spring and fall, my mother and I would drive down to the lake where the shoreline was rimmed with storm-battered willows, to watch the trails of geese dissolve in thick black flakes falling all across the sky.
The other day she and I stood in Jerusalem Township on a bluff above Keuka Lake where Jemima Wilkinson’s house still stands, “When there was suddenly a rushing noise,” as Warren Smith wrote of standing in the same place in October 1959, “and, before we realized what had happened, a whole flock of wild Canada geese had passed directly over us, flying low, to land on a nearby field. If a visitation of angels from on high had come to bless us, Margaret couldn’t have been happier.”
Margaret Hutchins and Warren Smith often came to this place to paint, and I thought, as I stood with my mother there, how extraordinary the light was—a kind of watercolor light that seemed to rise in thick diaphanous columns from the lake itself. This must have been why Jemima Wilkinson had chosen to build her house here, I thought, in this peculiar atmosphere of otherworldly light.
I never saw the house where Margaret Hutchins lived near the lake below. It was torn down after she died of cancer in the early 1960s, but I often used to visit her grandfather’s clock above the boat pond in Central Park in New York. I did not know at the time that it was a clock, or that it was a monument to her grandfather, Waldo Hutchins, one of the founders of Central Park and the Park’s first commissioner. I was drawn to it by the words carved in large letters on what seemed to be the back of a long curving stone bench. The bench was gray and dirty then, soaked with urine smells, and not a place where many people would want to sit, though sometimes a muttering homeless man was there. I never minded dirt much and went over to the bench whenever I walked by to try to figure out the letters, which were in Latin, and so (to me as to most of the other people in the park) essentially in code: ALTERI VIVAS OPORTET SI VIS TIBI VIVERE, If you can live for yourself you should live for others.
The bench was on a discolored stone dais that was oddly etched with curving lines. It was years before I realized that it was the large circular back of a human-sized sundial, and that the lines incised below marked the precise progression of the bench’s shadow on the vernal and on the autumnal equinox. A complex circular gadget rose from the center of its back. The gadget held the blackened bronze statue of a tiny woman in a wind-blown gown. Behind her were words, so small I almost did not notice them, NE DIRVATUR FUGA TEMPORUM, May it not be destroyed by the flight of time. As a teenager I was surprised to see the name Waldo Hutchins carved on the bench. I knew Waldo Hutchins in Geneva as Margaret’s brother.
…
There I had learned time as a reliable circling of snow and thaw and low gray skies. In summer we cooked things that belonged to a precise progression of weeks—black bass caught casting in our bay, corn from the roadside stands in August, asparagus that appeared in the local market late in June, peeled a bright lime green to eat with Hollandaise spun white in the blender.
There was a week when the town of Geneva was washed with purple, when the lilacs were out. The color seemed to come on rapidly after the late March thaw. One such week years ago I stood in the doorway of the old Italianate red brick mansion that stood back away from Castle Street behind a dark screen of large unusual shade trees, one of the old houses that rose like an outcropping of odd rock from the rest of the town that had settled in streets and blocks around it. Warren Smith, who was spindly and old then and bent almost double, stood beside me in the doorway with an odd formality, even courtliness, a threadbare fineness that was present in his long thin face, his fine gray wisps of hair. A tree beside the door blossomed purple in a ghostly film over long slender branches of silvery gray. I had never seen such a beautiful tree, and I asked him what it was. His voice was high and cracked like a scratchy old musical instrument as he broke into a small sweet grin. “Now that is an American tree,” he said, and he told me about the redbud, how it came to be called the Judas tree, how its radiant blossoms, shining as they would once have done through the American forest in one of the loveliest colors in all the world, could have been seen as the blood of Judas, the blood of betrayal.
We had met that afternoon to have tea, and we went for a walk in his garden, following a circular path hidden by cut-leaf beech with their odd translucent tiers of light green, sharp, serrated leaves. The tower of the house, steep fish-scale slate rimmed with trellised iron, rose up darkly behind us. Warren Smith spent much of his life as a scholar in residence at Yale, where he edited the Walpole papers. But in Geneva he wrote small lovely books about his old Geneva friends, which he illustrated himself and had printed at the local Humphrey Press on Pultney Street. He was a very good watercolorist and filled the books with pictures and etchings. The characteristic Genevan, he wrote, was a spinster, an aged childless person like Margaret Hutchins or himself, around whom a house had formed as a living presence made of old things, the family relics—paintings, teacups, carpets, books—all priceless, private, and crumbling.
In his book about his friendship with Margaret Hutchins and their decades of painting expeditions, in which they often went about in canoes to paint the lakes, their cliffs and odd light effects, Warren Smith told how Dick Manzelman, our minister at the North Presbyterian Church, suggested in the 1960s that the town organize an exhibit of paintings by Arthur Dove, the first American abstract painter. Doves father was a stonemason and had built the North Presbyterian Church. In my life his elderly brother still lived in the old Dove house on the street above the north end of the lake. Arthur Dove kept a studio in Geneva during the Depression. Warren Smith quotes the New York critics describing Dove’s distant home, not as Smith saw it himself, as a rare landscape of remarkable old trees and extraordinary light, but as a decaying backwater with rotting wharves and grass growing up through the broken sidewalks.
What the town was like without its grid of sidewalks we did not even attempt to imagine, though in 1877 the Luminist painter Worthington Whittredge painted a fair representation of the house that stood outside my childhood window with its high-columned porch and triangular pediment white against the sharp blue sky. It was his wife’s family home. Whittredge grew up hunting and trapping on the Ohio River. He went to Europe to study painting for a decade, but was restless and dissatisfied with the formulaic academic and religious subjects he found there. He left abruptly one morning in August 1859 and made his way back to America, where, as he later wrote, tears came to his eyes when he saw a study of rotting logs in the dappled green light of a forest, a painting by Asher Durand. Whittredge realized that he had been searching for a teacher he already knew, nature.
In 1867 Whittredge traveled to Geneva to marry a woman he knew primarily through her letters to him. He painted that year a branch of the streaked and golden fruit of an apple tree.
…
Western New York used to be called the burned-over district, where the fires of the spirit, like forest fires, so burned people that they became harsh: wary and cynical. The remoteness of the region made it a draw for religious eccentrics like Wilkinson, and the moral reformers and con artists who came after her. Yet the burning-over created a sort of radiant ground for the clarification of key ideas and experiments in the development of American life, a hectic mix of authenticity and fraud.
The ground itself was thought to contain some kind of secret buried history. This began
with what was known. The first settlers to farm the land around Kanadesaga agreed not to disturb the burial mound of raw earth, five feet high and forty feet around, that stood in an open field where a Mrs. Campbell, a captive from the massacre at Cherry Valley who was still alive among them, had witnessed one of the last of the Seneca tribal rituals: the sacrifice of a white dog at the end of winter.
Every year as leaves began to fall small groups of Seneca drifted in and sat silently beside the piled earth that contained the bones of their ancestors. As the shell of human life crumbled into the soil, and (as the Seneca elders said) passed into the roots of trees, their visits dwindled away, and after fifty years the ground around Kanadesaga became ordinary farmland.
At the White Springs Farm a mile to the east of Kanadesaga, the grading of a field unearthed a cache of unusually large human skeletons, suggesting a race of giants. The bodies were buried in the Indian way—in sitting posture, so that first the rounded surface of innumerable skulls appeared like pale melons emerging from the raw earth. So many bodies were uncovered that they were hauled away in carts, as though an entire village had died and been buried at once. The workmen were afraid to touch the bones with their hands, for they feared that the bones were infected with smallpox.
A cigar maker from New York named George Hull later hired a stonemason to create a crude giant representation of himself. He rubbed the statue with acid, gouged it with nails, and buried it on a friend’s farm in Cardiff, east of Syracuse. When a crew of well diggers were hired to put in a well on the land, people from miles around paid to see the human fossil they unearthed, a testament to the holy words: There were giants in the earth in those days.
Wolves & Honey Page 2
