Eleanor, had threaded her right arm through the crook of her husband’s left.
Now she leaned closer, smiling seraphically.
“Put your hat back on, darling.”
Chapter 11
Leppe Island, Montgomery County, New York
Tsiokwaris had almost lost contact with his roots as a young man; going to work in the mills of Buffalo to send money home. His father had died in a bar room fight at the hands of a European several years before the restoration of the tribal lands yet in those years without hope he had sworn to live without the hate and remorse which had consumed the souls of so many of his childhood friends. Revenge would not feed his mother or his sisters; revenge was what got the angry young men of the Iroquois Nation buried in the ground before their time and their families condemned to live in the squalid, stinking shanties on the edges of the White Man’s towns.
Revenge and alcohol were still the twin curses of his peoples.
Thirty years ago, ‘separate development’, or Getrennte Entwicklung, had begun to give his Nation back small parcels of its ancestral lands below the Canadian border; already, some among the White Man wanted that territory back, planting illegal ‘settlements’ around the fringes of Indian ground and then slowly, seeking to insidiously expand into the Nation’s lands, stealing, piecemeal what they were afraid to seize face to face, warrior to warrior in war. It was hardly surprising that some of the young bloods chaffed at the caution of their elders.
‘This,’ they claimed, thinking as young people always do that they have the gift of perfect understanding over all things from time immemorial, ‘is the way it began in olden times. First, they come as friends, then they rob us blind and move us off our hunting grounds. After that it becomes submit to our will or starve!”
It was not that simple of course, there was no Colonial guiding hand in the illegal encroachment upon Iroquois lands; it was mostly the work of a few Christian sects and rogue businessmen and if the ‘big men’ in Government House in Albany were involved at all it was most likely only by association with a few corrupt, bad apples in their secretariats. In a funny sort of way, the men at the top in New England had as little time, and equal contempt for the mainly Puritan extremists and greedy opportunists scratching away at the otherwise – from its point of view – successful separate development policies of the last three decades.
Nothing that had happened in those years had undermined Tsiokwaris’s belief that the way forward was through dialogue with the white majority. The entire surviving Indian Nation from the Atlantic to the Pacific comprised perhaps some twelve or thirteen million people, of whom less than a third still lived traditional lives. There were over a hundred million whites in the twenty-nine constituent colonies, protectorates and territories of New England, and south of the Rawlings-McMahan Line – which ran from Wilmington in the east to Port Oxford on the Pacific west coast for well over two thousand six hundred miles – was home to at least fifteen or sixteen million of the estimated eighteen million descendants of African slaves still living in the colonies. Hotheads talked of ‘uniting with the black men’ but that was never going to work; geography and arithmetic were too heavily weighted in favour of the White Man.
And besides, his old friend Isaac Fielding and his wife Rachel had taught him that not all white men – or women – were his enemies, and that good fellowship and reason could be, even if they often were not, the determining virtues of peaceful coexistence. Notwithstanding that the majority of whites were bigoted, ignorant of his Nation and its customs very few among them were bad people, it was just that they could not respect what they did not understand and they brought up their children to look down upon, and to despise ‘natives’.
Tsiokwaris and his two nephews, both of whom had attained that adolescent age when his brother realised his first mistake had not been drowning them at birth, had waited in the trees until the three aircraft had stopped buzzing Leppe Island and performing acrobatics up and down the adjoining mile or so of the Mohawk River before dragging their canoes into plain sight and rowing over to the island.
His nephews had pulled faces when he told them that if they wanted to accompany him ‘down river’ they were going to have to dress ‘Indian style’ and travel light. But even modern teenagers could be persuaded to conform to a tribal old fart’s wishes when it meant they could get escape from their parents for a couple of days.
‘No transistor radios!’ Tsiokwaris had mandated.
The last thing he wanted was for his peaceful weekend to be ruined by the loud ‘English music’ – if one could call so much ‘raucous noise’ music – polluting the senses of the tribe’s children. Already facing at least two days without sight of a TV set, panic had briefly creased the youngsters’ faces.
The old man’s daughter had told him where she and her husband planned to camp, tonight he and the boys would set up far enough away to ensure the young lovers’ privacy was respected. Nonetheless, that afternoon he was looking forward to renewing acquaintance with his unlikely son-in-law.
Abe reminded him of his father, Isaac, when he first met him. Isaac would have been five or six years older at the time but the son had the same sparse, yet to fill out frame and optimistic grey-blue eyes and a mind always open to new ideas. That said, Abe was by far the more practical man. Isaac was a dreamer, a dilettante and Tsiokwaris suspected, a little lost in the world these days without his beloved Rachel.
The old man’s daughter emerged from the trees as he hauled his canoe out of the water, from habit dragging it over stones not mud so as to leave no trace of his arrival in the mud to alert strangers to their presence on the island. His nephews followed his example and soon the canoes were hidden from anybody on the river.
Abe Fielding approached his second father with a broad smile and the two men embraced.
“I might have guessed you two would turn up!” he chuckled at his teenage cousins, both boys grinned and hands were slapped in the colonial way as if Abe was just another teenage confederate of the two youthful miscreants.
“You were right,” Kate told her father as the group moved up the shallow slope deeper into the trees which covered well over ninety percent of Leppe Island. “The snakes must have killed all the rats.”
Colonials killed snakes as vermin and wondered why rats and other rodents infested their towns and cities!
Truly the ways of the White Man were a mystery to the Mohawks.
“You guys watch where you are putting your feet,” Abe told the youngsters. Every Mohawk used to know that unless you trod on a rattler it was going to go out of its way to keep out of your way. Likewise, you never put your hand down a hole unless you knew exactly what was living in it.
“You talk to your Pa lately, Abe?” Tsiokwaris inquired.
“A few weeks back,” the young man replied with a shrug. He changed the subject. “I reckon that was Alex up there in one of those planes,” he went on, chuckling. “He threatened to come up this way. He’s going down to Jamaica Bay tonight. He says he’ll make more in a day from flying photographers over the Fleet than he usually makes in three months at the flying club in Albany!”
“It must be quite a sight down there?”
Abe shook his head, his smile rueful.
“Some of the big ships are bigger than this whole island!”
Tsiokwaris had had his fill of big cities working in Buffalo all those years ago. He had visited Newark once but never Manhattan. One colonial city looked very much like any other; they all had a similar grid of broad streets at their heart and confusion and incoherence the farther one walked from the centre until at last one reached the sanity of the surrounding countryside.