All was quiet when he opened his eyes again, and he thought for a moment he was back in his cot listening to the crickets tick off the seconds till dawn. There were no shouts. No tires squealed, no engines roared, there were no cries of grief and rage. But he wasn’t in his cot. He was laid out on his back in a ditch beside the road and his body was possessed by the demons of pain. He’d been clubbed, kicked, stabbed; his left arm was broken in two places. Lying there in the ditch, gazing up at the stars through the interstices of the trees, he listened for a moment to the chant of the crickets and let his mind touch each of his wounds. He thought of his ancestors, warriors who’d used their pain as a tool, mocking their torturers even as the blade bared the nerve. After a while, he pushed himself up and started down the road for Peletiah’s place.
Jeremy Mohonk left the hills of Van Wartville six months later. The despair that had eaten at him in prison, the sense of decay and futility, drove him from his shack beneath the white oak as no man could ever have done. He returned to the reservation outside of Jamestown, looking for the mother of his twenty sons. His own mother was dead. Ten years earlier, while he was languishing beneath the stones of Sing Sing, she succumbed to a mysterious wasting disease that stole her appetite and left her looking like a corpse mummified over the centuries. Her brother, he of the perfidious knife, was hardier. Jeremy found him in a cluttered little house on the bank of the river. Snaggle-toothed and wizened, with his white hair bound in a topknot and his suit of burial clothes draped over a chair in the corner, he stared at his nephew with eyes that could barely place him. As for Jeremy’s coevals, the clean-limbed boys and efflorescent girls of his school days, they’d either sunk into fat so pervasive their eyes were barely visible or vanished into the world of the expropriators. Jeremy found himself a picking job — grapes at that season, apples to follow — and within the month had married a Cayuga named Alice One Bird.
She was a big woman, One Bird, with calves that swelled under the fullness of her and a broad open face that spoke of her good nature and optimism. Her two sons by a previous marriage were grown men, and though she claimed to be thirty-four, she was closer to forty. To Jeremy, her age didn’t matter, so long as she was capable of bearing children, and her sons — both of them razor-eyed and tall — gave proof of that. He picked grapes, he picked apples. In the fall, he hunted. When the snow lay over the ground like a fungus and the larder was empty, he got a job as a stock boy in a supermarket in Jamestown.
A year passed. Two, three. Nothing happened. One Bird grew heavier, though she wasn’t carrying a child. Jeremy was forty-three years old. He consulted a Shawangunk medicine man who’d known his father, and the old man asked him for a lock of One Bird’s hair. Jeremy snipped the hair while she slept and brought it to him. With trembling fingers, the medicine man selected a hank of Jeremy’s hair, clipped it close, and then rolled the two locks vigorously between his palms, as if he were trying to start a fire. After a moment he separated the strands, dropping them one by one on a sheet of newspaper. For a long while he studied their configuration in silence. “It’s not you,” he said finally, “it’s her.”
Jeremy left the next morning for Van Wartville and the tumbledown shack he’d deserted three years earlier. Save for the structure itself, there wasn’t much left. The elements had taken their toll on the place, birds and rodents had used it as a dormitory and midden both, and vandals had smashed everything they couldn’t carry. No matter. The Indian lived in the old way, silent and secretive, snaring rabbit and opossum, liberating what he lacked from the homes and garages and toolsheds of the wage slaves who pressed in on the property from all sides. Over the course of the ensuing years, he drifted back and forth between Peterskill and Jamestown, drawn on the one hand to his ancestral soil, and on the other to his people. One Bird always welcomed him, no matter how long he’d been gone, and he was grateful to her. Driven by natural urges, he even came to her bed now and again, but it was an exercise without hope or meaning.
The last of the Kitchawanks grew older, and as he did so, he grew increasingly embittered. The world seemed a bleak place, dominion of the people of the wolf, the bosses ascendant, the workers crushed. He was doomed. His people were doomed. Nothing mattered — not the sun in the sky, not the great Blue Rock on the verge of the Hudson or the mystic hill above Acquasinnick Creek. A decade came and went. He was in his mid-fifties — still vigorous, still powerful, still young — and he wanted to die.
Yes. And then he met Joanna Van Wart.
The Wailing Woman
The first of the Jeremy Mohonks, son of Mohonk son of Sachoes, distant ancestor of that sad radicalized jailbird whose tribe seemed destined to die with him some three centuries later, was two and a half years old and uttering his first halting words of Dutch when the shadow of Wolf Nysen fell over his world like a month of starless nights. It was October 1666, late in the afternoon of a dark graceless day that promised a premature sunset and heavy frost. Jeremy was under the kitchen table playing with sticks and dirt clods and rehearsing the words he liked best—suycker and pannekoeken—while his mother stoked the fire and stirred things into the soup. He was also watching his mother’s feet as she stood at the table chopping cabbage or crossed the room to poke the fire and adjust the blackened cauldron on its armature. When he saw those feet slip into their clogs and head out the door in the direction of the woodshed, he crawled out from under the table. In the next moment he was on the stoep, and in the moment after that, he was gazing up at the great swirling columns of smoke that blotted the sky at the far end of the cornfield. Though he couldn’t yet put it into words, he had an intuitive grasp of the situation: Uncle Jeremias was burning stumps.
Jeremy was two and a half years old, and he knew several things. He knew, for instance, that until recently his name had been Squagganeek and that he’d lived in a smoky wet hut in a smoky wet Indian village. He knew too that the wood brooding over him was home to wolves, giants, imps, ogres and witches and that he was never to leave the immediate vicinity of the house except in the company of his mother or uncle. And he knew the penalty for transgression. (No suycker. No pannekoeken. Three clean swats across the bottom and bed without supper.) Still, the shapes those columns of smoke made against the sky as they fanned out — there a butterfly, here the face of a cow — were not to be denied. Before he could think twice, he was gone. Down the steps, across the yard and out into the field with its weathered furrows and sheaves bound up like corpses.
He ran like a shorebird, stiff-kneed and quick-legged, tottering from one furrow to the next, splashing through puddles, falling flat on his face and as quickly scrambling to his feet again. When he reached the nether end of the field, he saw the stumps, a whole army of them like decapitated little men spouting smoke from their headless trunks. His uncle was nowhere to be seen. But there before him was a family of scuttling grouse, and to these he gave chase with a shout of joy. Round and round he chased them, through a funnel of smoke and a half-cleared thicket, right on up to the verge of the wood. And then he stopped. There was Jeremias, right in front of him. And another man too. A big man. A giant.
“You know who I am?” the giant roared.
His uncle knew, but he spoke so softly the boy could barely hear him. “Wolf,” he said, and that was when Jeremy called out his name.