During the second month, one of the guards — soft and pockfaced, an ignorant Irish from Verplanck — singled him out and taunted him with all the old sneers: chief, Hiawatha, squaw, dog eater. When Jeremy refused to respond, the Irish went further, dousing him with a pail of slops, spitting through the bars at him, waking him in the dead of night for meaningless inspections. Jeremy might as well have been deaf and mute, carved of stone. He never moved, never spoke, never expressed surprise or alarm. But one morning, early, when the lights had begun to go soft against the gray of dawn, he was there, in the shadows against the wall of his cell, waiting. The Irish was on wakeup, moving along the cellblock with a baton, rapping it on the bars to the sound of curses, groans, the thump and wheeze of men tumbling out of their beds. “Rise and shine!” he called with malicious joy, repeating it over and over as he worked his way toward Jeremy’s cell, “Up and at ’em!” The Indian crouched down, motionless, as intent as if he were stalking deer or bear. And then the Irishman was there, the baton rattling the bars, his voice punishing and sadistic: “Hey, Geronimo. Hey, asshole. Roll out.”
Jeremy got him by the throat, both arms thrust through the bars. They’d been working him in the quarry, and his grip was like the grip of all the Mohonks through all the generations gone down. The guard dropped the baton with a clatter, snatching desperately at the Indian’s wrists. His face was a blister. Swelling. Red and swelling. Inches away. If Jeremy could only hold on long enough he’d burst it once and for all. But there was someone behind him — his cellmate, the tattooed idiot — shouting and tearing at his arms, and now there weretwo, three more guards, their billies raining on his hands, his wrists, the whole cellblock in an uproar. They broke his grip, finally, but he seized on the soft fat hand of one of the others and squeezed till he could feel the bones give. Then they were in the cell, they were all over him and they administered their own kind of justice.
When it was over, he got three months in solitary and two more years tacked onto his sentence.
So it was throughout his career at Sing Sing. He fought them each minute — each second — of each day. When the war came and they released muggers, second-story men and arsonists to fight the Fascists, he wouldn’t yield. “You’re the Fascists,” he told the warden, the recruiter, the guards who stood over him in the warden’s office. “The Revolution will bury you.” It was the first thing anyone could remember him saying in years. The cell door clanked shut behind him.
For all his resolve, though, for all his toughness, prison finally broke him down. He knew prisoners who were executed, saw men who’d spent their entire lives behind bars, their backs stooped, faces sunk in on themselves. He was a young man still. Last of his line. His business in life was to reclaim some of what his tribe had lost, to seek out a woman of constant blood — a Shawangunk, an Oneida, even a Seneca, as his father had done — and keep the race alive. He was meant to roam the woods, to remember the old ways, to honor the sacred places — there was no one else to do it, no one among the pulullating hordes that blighted the earth like locusts. The knowledge of it mellowed him. The war years slipped past, Sing Sing was quiet, underpopulated. He stayed out of trouble. In 1946, five years short of the full term of his sentence, they set him free.
He walked out of the gate at 8:00 A.M. on a chill and windblown December morning, wearing a cheap prison-issue suit and overcoat and with the token recompense for his seventeen years’ labor tucked deep in his breast pocket. By nightfall he was back at Nysen’s Roost, huddled over an open fire with a can of corned beef hash and the knife he’d picked up at a pawn shop in Peterskill, a knife exactly like the one Horace Tantaquidgeon had inserted between his father’s lumbar vertebrae in a time that seemed as distant as the first moment of history.
He lived there a year before anyone discovered him. He’d built himself a timber and tar-paper shack for half of what it had cost Thoreau to build his place a century earlier. Built it beneath the white oak, in the place that spoke to him, precisely where his first shack had stood so briefly twenty years before. What he didn’t have — nails, an axe, plastic to stretch across the windows — he appropriated from the suburbanites who crowded the verges of his domain with their blacktop driveways and brick barbecues. When the prison suit fell away to nothing he made himself a breechclout and jacket from the hide of a doe. For cooking, he had a clay pot, shaped, tooled and fired in the way of the centuries.
The year was 1947, the season fall. Standard Crane, son of Peletiah, a sharp-nosed, round-eyed gawk of a man in his early thirties, was out hunting squirrel one morning when he blundered across the shack. Jeremy, in his stained buckskin and with the flight feathers of the red-tailed hawk braided into his hair, stepped out onto the porch and shot him a corrosive look. Puzzled, Standard dropped the muzzle of his shotgun, shoved back his cap and scratched his head. For a moment he was so disoriented, startled and surprised he could only make a series of throat-clearing noises that the Indian took to be a sort of rudimentary game call. But then, shuffling his feet, he managed to say “Good morning,” and went on from there to inquire as to whether he and Jeremy were acquainted. The Indian, remembering Van Wart, said nothing. After a moment, Standard tipped his hat and wandered off down the trail.
But Standard Crane was no Van Wart. Nor was his father, Peletiah, who despite a head cold, rheumy eyes and a bad knee, hiked all the way out to the shack in twenty-five-degree weather to view this prodigy, this green-eyed Indian who was squatting on his land. Jeremy was waiting for them. On the porch. Ready for anything. But Peletiah merely greeted him with a nod of his head and invited himself to a seat on the rough-hewn step beside him. Standard, who’d served as his father’s guide, hung back and grinned in embarrassment. Producing a tinfoil pouch from the inner pocket of his red-and-black plaid hunting jacket, Peletiah offered the Indian a chew, and then, in the most neighborly way imaginable, explained how he’d acquired the land from the late Rombout Van Wart.
The Indian was a tough audience. He refused the tobacco with a gesture so curt he might have been shooing flies, then made his face into a mask. Though his expression didn’t reflect it, he was secretly pleased to hear that the land had passed from control of the Van Warts and deeply gratified to discover that the son of a bitch who’d put him behind bars was no longer among the living. And so he listened, as mute as the peeled logs of the porch, as the wheezy white man went on about the history of the place and circled around the question of Jeremy’s identity like a mosquito looking for a patch of bare flesh. But when Jeremy cut him off in mid-sentence and began quoting Proudhon, when he insisted that property was theft and that it was his tribal right to live there beneath the hallowed oak and be damned to all thieves and expropriators, Peletiah surprised him.
Not only could this runny-eyed, pointy-nosed, skeletal old white man outquote him, he agreed with him. “On paper, I’m the owner of this land,” Peletiah said, ducking his head to spit and then looking around him with a bemused little smile that barely parted his lips, “but in fact the land belongs to everyone equally, every man that walks the earth. You’ll find no posted signs here.”
Jeremy glanced up at the trees as if to confirm the assertion and found himself staring into the reticent eyes of the squirrel hunter. Standard slouched against a tree at least twenty feet from the cabin, and he was picking his teeth meditatively. At the mention of posted signs, he made a noise deep in his throat that was meant to convey good humor and amusement but that sounded more like the death rattle of a drowning man.