The Tantaquidgeons were remorseful and penitent. Horace extracted a rumpled dollar bill from the hoard of eight he kept buried in a gourd out back of his house, walked the six miles to Frewsburg, and purchased a wheelchair from the widow of a white man who’d been crippled in the Spanish-American War. Then he wheeled it back home, all the long way up the dusty road to the reservation. And Mildred, the fractious wife, was fractious no more. Not only did she dismiss the subject of little Jeremy’s descent (the boy was his father’s son, a Kitchawank, one of two surviving members of the once-mighty Turtle Clan and rightful inheritor of the Kitchawank domain to the south, and that was that), but she devoted the rest of her days to the care of her husband. She prepared stewed opossum and venison, collected berries for him in season, greased his hair and diapered him like a second son. And all this was necessary, and more. For Jeremy Mohonk, son of Mohonks uncountable, last of his race but one, would never walk again.
The boy grew to manhood there on the reservation, where the light was a thing that invested the visible world with its glory, where streams met and bears roamed and the clouds held the setting sun in a grip as gentle as a mother’s hand. He listened to the dew settle on the grass at night, watched the sun pull itself out of the trees in the morning, stalked game, gigged frogs, fished and climbed and swam. He learned to read and write at the agency school, learned about Amerigo Vespucci and Christopher Columbus from a white man who wore a starched collar and whose face was like an overripe plum; at night he sat at the foot of his father’s wheelchair and discovered the history of his race.
His father sat stiff in the chair, holding himself erect with arms that were eternally flexed against the numbness of his belly and bowels. The injury had made him gaunt, and he seemed to grow more attenuated day by day, year by year, as if Horace Tantaquidgeon’s blade had somehow let the spirit escape like air from his body, leaving only the husk behind. Still, he told the old stories in a voice that sang, strong and true, told them with the breath of history. Jeremy was no more than four or five when he heard them the first time; he was a full-grown man of eighteen summers when he heard them the last.
His father told him how Manitou had sent his big woman to earth and how she squatted in the water that covered everything and gave birth to dry land. Undaunted by this mighty feat of parturition, she heaved herself up again and gave birth to trees and plants, and then finally to three animals: the deer, the bear and the wolf. From these, all the men of the earth are descended, and each of them — man, woman and child — has the nature of one of these beasts. There are those who are innocent and timid, like the deer; those who are brave, revengeful and just of hand, like the bear; and those who are false and bloodthirsty, like the wolf.
Wasted, his face drawn and cheeks sucked back to bone, the elder Mohonk sat beneath the stovepipe hat given him by the Tantaquidgeons as partial recompense for his injury and told his son of god and the devil, of the spirits in things, of pukwidjinnies, neebarrawbaigs and the imps that haunt the still and sheltered lagoons of the Hudson. Jeremy was eleven, he was twelve, fourteen. His father was dying, but the stories never stopped. In school he learned that Lincoln had freed the slaves, that the square root of four is two and that everything in the world is composed of atoms. At home he sat before the fire with his father while the spirit of the flames raised her hackles along the length of a sputtering log.
After his father’s death, the last of the Kitchawanks had no reason to linger on the reservation. His mother, ancient enemy of his tribe and betrayer of his father, took another husband before the grass had gone yellow on the grave. Horace Tantaquidgeon, who’d taught him to hunt and fish and fire a clay cookpot, turned his back on him now, as if, with his father’s death, the debt had been paid. And though Jeremy had stayed on to finish school with a white man’s diploma, he found the doors in Jamestown shut to him. Hey, chief, people called to him on the street, where’s your wigwam? Hey, you. Geronimo. No, there was nothing in Jamestown. And so it was the most natural thing in the world to bundle up his possessions — the knife that had cut his father’s legs out from under him, a bearskin sleeping bag, two strips of eel jerky, a dog-eared copy of Ruttenburr’s Indian Tribes of the Hudson’s River and the notochord of a sturgeon his father had worn around his neck to remind him of the perfidy of fishes — and head east, along the Susquehanna and Delaware, then across the Catskills to that gleaming apotheosis of modern technology, the Bear Mountain Bridge, and then over the storied river to the hills of Peterskill itself.
He was almost surprised to see that those hills had houses on them, to see that the streets were paved with brick and cobblestone and lined with automobiles and telegraph poles. Battened on tales, he’d expected something different. If not dewy forests, free-running streams and open campfires, then at least a sleepy Dutch village with dogs drowsing in the streets and a noonday silence that sank into the marrow of the bones. He was sadly deluded. For Peterskill in 1927 was clanking along with the industrial revolution, stirring up dust and turning over the greenback dollar; to an Indian from the reservation it was teeming, dirty, pandemonium itself. On the other hand, it wasn’t a bad place to get lost in. No one noticed an Indian on the street. No one even knew what an Indian was. They recognized Bohunks, Polacks, wops, micks, kikes and even the occasional nigger — but an Indian? Indians wore headdresses and funny underwear and lived in teepees somewhere out west.
Dressed in the work pants and faded flannel shirt he’d worn on the reservation, his hair cropped close with the blade that had stuck his father, Jeremy appeared one morning at 7:00 A.M. outside the gate of the Van Wart Foundry on Water Street, asking for work. Half an hour later he was dodging around vats of molten iron, hammer and file in hand, hacking lumps of fused residue from the castings. The first week he slept in a clump of smartweed near the mouth of Acquasinnick Creek, and he got wet twice; once he’d been paid, he took a room in a boardinghouse on the west end of Van Wart Road. From here, in the shortening evenings, on half-day Saturdays and breezy Sunday mornings, he hiked up into the hills to commune with the spirit of his ancestors.
It was on one of these hikes that he met Sasha Freeman.
Carrying nothing that would identify him to the casual observer as the innocuous footslogger and nature lover he was — no rucksack, no canteen or alpenstock, no sandwiches wrapped in butcher’s paper — Jeremy made his way up Van Wart Creek one warm September afternoon, keeping off the roads and out of the way of cottages and farmhouses. He didn’t want to run into any watchdogs, any fences or posted signs or inquisitive white faces. He saw enough white faces at work. In his element, in the forests that had given birth to his ancestors, he wanted to see where the deer had come down to drink, where quail nested in the grass, he wanted to see the brook trout wagging in the current and test his reflexes against the one that would make his lunch … it was nothing personal, but when he was outside the walls of the foundry, he wanted to see the world as it had been, and white faces were no part of it.
But it was a white face he discovered peering up at him in alarm from a clump of mountain laurel as he rounded a bend in the creek and flung himself over a fallen birch in a single gangling unconscious leap. The face was bearded, bespectacled, small-eyed and suspicious, and it was attached to the stark white body of a naked man with a book in his hand. Jeremy halted in mid-stride, every bit as surprised as the naked man stretched out there in the mountain laurel as if in his own bed, uncertain as to whether he should slink off into the undergrowth or continue on his way as if nothing were amiss. But before he could make a decision either way, the white man was on his feet, simultaneously bobbing into a pair of baggy undershorts, shouting hello and extending his hand in greeting. “Sasha Freeman,” he said, pumping the Indian’s hand as if he’d been expecting him all afternoon.