The Light in the Forest (7 page)

T
RUE
S
ON
kept his word. That evening he pulled off the tainted clothes of his Cousin Alec and no one could induce him to let them touch his body again. Mornings he put on his Indian dress. When his father forbade him coming downstairs in it, he made a prison of his room. In a few days Peter Wormley, the Derry township tailor, came. He drew a painful face at the rude hunting-frock and leggings. What was he coming to, he complained,
having to leave Captain Rebuck’s fine broadcloth coat to dress a half-naked Indian boy!

Peter Wormley turned out two suits for the boy while he was there, one out of new cloth for Sunday, and one for weekdays from an old suit of his white father.

“Now take care of these!” he charged when he left. “Remember you’re no young Injun running wild in the brush any more!”

Later Andy Goff, the shoemaker, arrived. The tailor’s fitting and fussing had been trial enough, the clothes he made were ugly as Alec’s. But the shoemaker was worse. The boots he pounded out were like half-hollowed logs. They gripped the boy’s feet, wedged his toes, cramped his ankles. He felt that he stood in millstones. How could white men endure such things when they might run light and free in moccasins? Next day True Son went back to his Indian footgear. Then one night when he lay half asleep, Aunt Kate came in and took both pairs of moccasins. She carried off his Indian dress, too, and now if the boy didn’t want to languish in bed, there was nothing for him to do but put on his prisoner garb and clatter about in his hard leather boots.

It was done, he suspected, so he wouldn’t run
away, for no man or boy could hope to get far through the woods in such encumbrances. Already Del Hardy had gone back to his regiment. At first True Son welcomed his going, but once away, he missed him keenly. Of all these white people he had known the guard the longest. He was the only link to Half Arrow and his people along the Tuscarawas. He had no one to speak Lenni Lenape to any more.

And now all the odious and joyless life of the white race, its incomprehensible customs and heavy ways, fell on him like a plague. Every afternoon but the sixth and seventh he must be a prisoner in his mother’s bedroom learning to read, making the tiresome Yengwe marks on a slate. On the seventh morning he must sit, a captive between his father and Aunt Kate in what they called the Great Spirit’s lodge, with the strong scent of the white people and their clothing about him. The whites were very childish to believe that the God of the Whole Universe would stay in such a closed-up and stuffy place. The Indians knew better—that the Great Spirit loved the freedom of woods and streams where the air blew pure, where the birds sang sweet, and nature made an endless bower of praying-spots and worship-places.

Sometimes he felt the Great Spirit had utterly forgotten him in the white man’s land. Then he would remember what Kringas back along the Tuscarawas had told them. Kringas was old and rheumatic, a great-uncle to Half Arrow. True Son could recall most every word.

“Nephews. Never think the Great Spirit forgets you. Some Indians think he favors the white people. They say the white people have their flocks of cattle to kill from when they are hungry. They have their barns filled with grain for their pots when they need it. The Indian has none of these. Nephews. Some think this is bad, but of truth it is good. It shows the Indian he is not supported by storehouses but by the Ruler of Heaven. Nephews. I have been young and now am very old. I have often been in want. It taught me that the Great Spirit suffers us Indians to be so for a purpose. It’s to show us our dependence on Him who is the Father of us all and to let us know that if we do our part he will always supply us at just the right time. If we wait and are worthy, he will deliver the enemy into our hands.”

Today True Son wondered if the Great Spirit had anything to do with his being sent out for a
new bushel basket? Aunt Kate had sent Gordie along to show him where the basketmaker lived, but he suspected that Gordie was really the string to lead him back again. She need have no fear that he would run away on a day like today, for this was still the Month When Cold Makes the Trees Crack. The sun on the treeless white countryside blinded him, and his boots slipped in the snow as moccasins never would.

By and by they came to a little dark patch of woods near a run. In the woods was a log cabin. Blue smoke rose from the chimney. The door opened to their knock and a very old man with a brown wrinkled face stood there welcoming them. For a moment it was almost like being in the village at home. The ancient Negro basketmaker might have been an Indian. The cabin had a dirt floor like cabins along the Tuscarawas. The chinked logs and split white-oak baskets had such a smell of the Ohio woods that the boy was overwhelmed with homesickness.

He sat on the earth floor on a mat plaited from shavings, watching the wrinkled brown hands split the splints and weave them into a bushel basket.

“You’re the Butler boy took by the Injuns?”
the basketmaker said. “I heerd about you. I was took myself when I was a little tyke. The Wyandottes got me down in Virginny. Before I was twenty a Pennsylvany captain got me out, and I been working for him ever since.”

“You’re a slave, ’Bejance,” little Gordie said.

“I reckon I am, child,” he agreed equably. “And so are you and your brother, though you don’t know it yet. Now I know it too well. For nigh onto sixty years I been wantin’ to go fishin’ in the spring and summer, and huntin’ fall and winter. But every spring and summer I had to work in the fields and every fall and winter in the woods. Now when I kain’t work in the woods and fields no more, I kain’t go out huntin’ or fishin’ neither. All I’m good for is sit on my bench and braid up hampers for the white folks.”

“You’re not free like us,” Gordie declared.

“No. I’m never free from white folks,” the Negro assented. “And neither are you and your brother. Every day they drop another fine strap around you. Little by little they buckle you up so you don’t feel it too much at one time. Sooner or later they have you all hitched up, but you’ve got so used to it by that time you hardly know it. You eat with a fork and spoon. You sleep in a bed. You
own a house and a piece of land and pays taxes. You hoe all day in the cornfield and toil and sweat a diggin’ up stumps. Piece by piece you get broke in to livin’ in a stall by night, and by day pullin’ burdens that mean nothin’ to the soul inside of you.”

True Son felt a constriction in his chest.

“I’ll never be a slave to the white people,” he declared.

“Oh, you don’t aim to, boy. Neither did I. I reckoned I was gettin’ out of the woods. I was a goin’ back home to fine folks and good livin’. I was gettin’ back to good houses and barns and tools and wheat and barley fields, to clocks that told the time, and preachers that preached out of books and prayed your soul to heaven. Now I’m eighty-four years old near as I can make out, and the best I remember of my time is when I was a boy in the woods. I kin look back and see my whole life stretchin’ like a cordstring behind me. And the brightest piece was when I ran free in the woods. It had a glory I ain’t seen since.”

True Son looked at him hungrily.

“Can you talk Lenape?”

“When I was young I could. Not Lenape but Wyandotte. I could rattle it off like I was born to
it. But the Wyandottes and Lenni Lenape can’t understand each other. Now the Shawanose and the Lenape kin.”

“Not too good but they can make each other out,” True Son said.

“That’s what I say. The Shawanose and the Lenape kin make each other out. Once I could talk a little Lenape. All I recollect now is:
nitschu
, friend, and
auween kachev
, who are you, and
kella
, yes, and
matty
, no. I kain’t even recollect much Wyandotte any more. Once when I was workin’ up the river for Mr. McKee, a Wyandotte came through. I could understand everything he said to me, but it shamed me that I couldn’t talk it back to him.”

“I was hoping you could talk Lenape with me.” True Son was disappointed.

“No, they’s only one left around here who can talk Lenape, or Delaware as they call it around here. That’s old Corn Blade up on the Third Mountain, and I reckon he’s a hundred years old.”

“Where’s the Third Mountain?”

“You know the Kittaniny Mountain? You kin see it from all over Paxton township. Well, that’s what some call the First Mountain. The Second Mountain lays just beyond. Still farther north is
a short mountain they sometimes call the Stony Mountain. It don’t run out to the river. That’s the Third Mountain. On top the Almighty left a pile of rocks like a church and on top of that a pulpit. Up in those rocks is where Corn Blade lives. How he keeps alive, nobody knows because he never comes down. He’s afeard the Paxton Boys’ll scalp him.”

All the boy could think of when he got back to the house was the old Indian on the Third Mountain who could talk Lenape. Most of January, the Month when the Ground Squirrels Begin to Run, he stood at the window looking north through the small panes. He couldn’t see the Third but he could see the First Mountain. It rose from the fields dark brown and furry like the back of an immense beast. After a fresh snowfall the paths of the mountainside stood out clear. The deer paths were short. The wolves’ paths were longer, crossing the mountain at dips in the ridges. Near the foot of the mountain a broad path ran level to the westward. It must be an Indian path, the boy told himself. In his mind he could see it running on and on, fording the Saosquahanaunk, crossing the mountains and rivers beyond till it reached the Tuscarawas where blue smoke rose from the dark
weathered cabins, and quiet and peace lay over all.

Then it was February, the Month When the First Frog Croaks. One day the cold went and the rains came. Almost overnight the paths vanished, and the mountain turned from white to something dark, shaggy, and comfortingly wild. Just to look at it did something to the boy. He thought he could smell the forest as it smelled along the Tuscarawas after a rain, with the trees soaked black as ebony, and mosses on the bark and ground, green as splashes of paint. The ragged bark-flags of the river birches would be flying redder than ever. The buck’s tail would lift white and unconstrained as he sprang. The boy’s heart filled with wild longing. He could almost hear the sharp, fierce shout of his Indian father’s gun along the river and taste the aroma of Kaak, the northern goose, roasting on the coals along with his favorite cakes baked from Indian corn and bean meal.

What he hungered for most was the sight of an Indian face again—his father’s, deep red, shaped like a hawk’s, used to riding the wind, always above the earth, letting nothing small or of the village disturb him—his mother’s, fresh and brown yet indented with great arching cheek wrinkles born of laughing and smiling, framing the mouth,
and across the forehead, horizontal lines like the Indian sign of lightning, not from laughing but from war and talk of war, from family cares and the strain of labor—and his sisters’ smooth young moon faces, not pale and sickly like the faces of white girls, but the rich blooming brown of the earth, their lively black eyes looking out from under the blackest and heaviest of hair, always with touches of some bright red cloth that set them off and made them handsome. Even the ancient face of Corn Blade, which must be no more than a wrinkled brown mask, would do him good, the boy felt, just to see it.

The Pawpawing Days passed. The Month of the Shad came. The roots of grasses scented the thawing earth and air. He could hardly wait. One day he took a loaf of bread and piece of cold beef from the wooden safe hanging in the cellar. Like a half-grown panther playing at stalking its own den, he made his stealthy way to the barn. Dock, the gray horse he had ridden from Carlisle, stood long-haired in his stall. Bridle and saddle hung from oaken pins. It did not take the boy long to ready him, stowing meat and bread in the saddlebags. Then keeping the barn between him and the house, he led the horse toward freedom.

“True Son! Where are you going? Take me along!” Gordie called, running after.

He lifted the boy to the front of the saddle and climbed up behind. Once out of sight of the house, he turned Dock through the half-down bars to the open road. In time they passed a two-and-a-half-story house with a cooperage near by.

“That’s Uncle Wilse’s!” Gordie said. “And there’s Cousin Alec. He’s running in the shop to tell Uncle Wilse that we went by.”

True Son didn’t care. The earth was wide. The sky was the spread wings of a giant bluebird overhead. The sun shone warm. Dock splashed through runs that flowed full and wild. Down a long hill the road entered a dark green woods of pine and hemlock. Mysterious paths led through. A savage creek foamed in the hollow and delicious untamed scents rose from the ground and thicket.

He stopped the horse for a long time.

“True Son, what do you see? Do you hear something?” Gordie kept asking, but how could the older boy tell even his brother what he saw and heard! He let Dock stand in the woods cropping at twigs and buds. Why did the white race imprison itself in houses and barns when the life-giving forest stood all around? Kringas had
spoken true. Perhaps the Ruler of Heaven and Earth had imprisoned him to make him value freedom when he got out. Never even along the Tuscarawas had he tasted such savor in the open trail, the sweet air, the green forest. Ahead lay the wide riches of the Saosquahanaunk, the shadowy water-gaps, the unseen valleys and streams, and then the Short Mountain with Corn Blade calling in good Lenape from the rocks on its summit.

They were coming in sight of the Narrows when the sound of hooves rose from behind them. Here in this deep, holy place where the river broke through the Kittaniny Mountain, True Son wished he could have been alone. He steeled himself against the strange men on horseback overtaking him. Then looking up with surprise he saw his father, Uncle Wilse and Neal, the farmer.

“So you were running away!” his father accused him.

“We were going to see Corn Blade,” the boy said.

“Don’t lie to your father!” Uncle Wilse threatened and True Son braced himself to be struck.