The Old American (39 page)

By the dawn's light, the fire has gone out, the rain has stopped, and Caucus-Meteor can feel warm moist air pouring in from the south. As Nathan sleeps, Caucus-Meteor blesses him again, and whispers, “Go home, reclaim thy family.”

Caucus-Meteor, walking alone south, stops frequently to drink water, but he takes no food. He thinks: I'll never again have need for food, which is one of the conveniences of dying. I am very grateful. He walks all day, following childhood memories. It's only toward the end of his journey, when he sees the ocean bay through the trees, that he falters. He breaks from the path and walks through the woods to the shore. From the rocks he can see little hills across the water, small English sailing vessels, and circling sea birds. He cannot remember what the birds are called. This sudden failure of memory troubles him. He returns to the path, feeling old and weak and sick. Soon a man on horseback appears on the trail headed toward him. He hails the man, and asks, “Is this Mount Hope Bay?” His pronunciation, like that of the men of Old England, throws the rider off his mental course if not off his horse. “What in helldom are you, an antique statue cast from the rum barrel?” he says.

Caucus-Meteor repeats his own question.

“Aye, this is Mount Hope Bay,” says the man. “Would you be a savage old whaler from Nantucket?”

“Nay, I am the king's son,” says Caucus-Meteor.

Puzzled, the horseman rides away.

It's the smell of the sea that finally relaxes Caucus-Meteor. He breathes it in and goes on. The air temperature has warmed, and he sheds his clothes until he is naked.

Caucus-Meteor comes to a fork in the path. The low road leads into a swamp where his people hid from the English. He slogs through it for the experience, then climbs a gentle bank to the pasture of an English farmer. He walks the edge of the pasture to a stand of oaks with no path, no obvious signposts, but he knows where he's going. He's finding his way by reading rock shapes. A field, a swamp, a river will change with the seasons, and over a human lifetime might vanish all together, but a rock takes a century or two to change even its color. He walks maybe a mile on gradually rising land when he comes to a place that floods him with the sweet longing of home. At a spring where his mother often took him as a child he drinks deeply.

The path narrows, winding through oaks and maples, their leafless branches in multiplying embraces.

It's afternoon when Caucus-Meteor reaches his destination, the rock formation that local people call King Philip's Seat, a half-crown-shaped ledge surrounded by oaks and maples. With the ledge at his back, his father would step into the circle and deliver long and eloquent speeches.

Close by is a downed maple. Caucus-Meteor pauses at the maple for a minute, then returns to the rock face. He climbs along a split in the ledge, puts his hand in a crack, and feels around until he finds what he's looking for: a human skull.

Caucus-Meteor is at the end of the reuniting ceremony he contrived many years ago in the despair of his slavery. He's thinking back to his boyhood in Europe now. He's in a great hall of art, but instead of images of Jesus and the saints, he sees himself in the statues and picture frames: Caucus-Meteor as a young slave, unctuous and articulate; Caucus-Meteor running in the woods, fleeing dogs and men with guns; Caucus-Meteor exhausted, about to die of exposure, found by a Seneca war party that surprises his pursuers with a hail of arrows. His thoughts return to the hall of art in Europe. The sun sets through the arched windows of the great stone castle, and soon it is dark, and now he is remembering in words only—Algonkian, Iroquois, English, French. He calls out, “My name, please—my name.”

The Seneca took him prisoner, put him through tests, and decided he'd make a good American. Caucus-Meteor never belonged to any particular tribe, never excelled as a hunter or warrior, but because of his skills as an interpreter and orator he gained respect and prestige. Even after his escape from slavery, he was subject to unaccountable sorrows and terrible loneliness. All that kept his mind sound was the personal mission he had envisioned to tolerate his slavery.

Under the moon one night he went to the gates of Plymouth, Massachusetts. Here his grandfather, the sachem Massasoit, not only befriended the English, he saved them with gifts of food when they were starving. Here too was what remained of Massasoit's son, Metacomet, derisively called King Philip. After Philip was betrayed and assassinated, his body was drawn and quartered, the limbs and torso strewn in the forest for the animals to eat, the head impaled on a stake at the entry of Plymouth for all to see. Cotton Mather, only a boy of twelve himself at the time, defiled the body further by ripping the jaw from the skull to silence Philip forever. Caucus-Meteor's mission was to rescue his father's remains. The head had been on that stake for twenty years when Philip's son climbed the pole, removed what was left, just a skull without a jaw. He had held the skull up to the moonlight, and he had said, “I will be your jaw; I will speak for you.”

Caucus-Meteor returned the skull to Mount Hope, wedging it into a crack in the ledges. Now the skull begins to crumble in his hands. This is good, he thinks, this is as it should be.

He takes a place in front of the ledge, imagines himself in the circle where the Wampanoags gathered. “You've heard all my speeches,” he says. “I hope they have entertained you. I am too tired to deliver my own eulogy, and anyway such vanity is beyond even my scope. I am happy to be here. I will not say, ‘Goodbye,' but ‘Hello.' I search the gathering for my mother, Woostonekanuske. I see her now. I will come to you mother.” He's forgotten now what else he wanted to say. It's better when you don't finish the speech, because filling the omissions gives the audience something to do.

He walks slowly down the path holding the skull in one hand by his side, carrying it the way the priests in Europe carried their holy books. Still in sight of King Philip's seat, he comes to the large, mossy, downed maple tree. He remembers the day it fell, struck by lightning during a violent storm. It was during the war, and his father said to him. “If the English soldiers should come, run away from me and hide in the hollow of this maple.” The soldiers did come, but the young son of Philip never had a chance to escape. Now he kneels beside the tree; now he will hide himself, as any child does, to await rescue. He crawls into the hollow of the tree and lies on his back, the skull resting on his chest in his hands. At any other time in his life, the soggy rot would feel cold and clammy, but now it feels warm, the wet like the velvet on the Intendant's couch.

Caucus-Meteor breaks the skull into little pieces, scoops them up and sprinkles them on his head, the only crown this king will ever wear. Muscles in his body twitch involuntarily. His face and body contort into a knot. The hours go by. Gradually, his muscles loosen and he arrives at a state of partial consciousness. For a moment he thinks he will recover from this illness and rule over Mount Hope Bay. And then a bright flash of light, and he is blind, his left arm suddenly useless. Only his voice remains strong. He says aloud, “Speak, speak … speak my name.” The great silence of a lifetime continues.

A minute later the old man's body shudders briefly, a gargling sound comes from his throat, then he's still. One more miracle—he can see again. He can see as well as any man has ever seen. A crow flies by, circles, alights on a branch, watches. Caucus-Meteor finds himself greatly entertained by the crow, its black-purple sheen, its ironic eye. “Keeps-the-Flame?” he says. Now his understanding of the dream three years ago is complete. Now he can die as he must. “I will take you to the place where the names are spoken,” the crow says. She unfolds her wings, and the ghost grabs hold and they fly away.

JULY
1804

Elizabeth Blake has shut her eyes. Her husband puts his hand on her forehead. It is cool to his touch, her breathing rapid and faint. “If you can hear me, Elizabeth, give me a sign.”There is no change in his wife.

Nathan Blake stands from his chair by the bed. His back is still straight and his mind sound, but he moves slowly; after all, he is ninety-one years old.

He looks out the second-story window of what everyone in town calls Blake House. Not the biggest or the best house in Keene, New Hampshire, but a fine timber-frame structure that he'd built with his sons and for that reason house enough for a Blake. From the bedroom window he can see the wide Main Street and the road to Marlborough, other fine houses, barns, stores, the streets full of carriages. A town measures its pride by its traffic, he believes. It's a fine town in a fine, if brand new, nation. He wonders what that old pagan, Caucus-Meteor, would think today of the village, then called Upper Ashuelot, that he burned to the ground so long ago.

Earlier in the day his wife, who was eighty-three years old and had been ill for several weeks, called him to her bed and told him that she meant to put her affairs in order and die. She asked him to remember back into the middle of the last century, and to tell her what really happened to him while he was with the savages. She guessed that his mysterious yearly visits south were somehow connected with his experiences in the north. And, too, she carried her own burden from those years, and he should know her story. He turns to look at her now. Her eyes, those blue blue eyes that he has marveled over for a lifetime, open.

“You're awake,” he says.

“I was resting.”

“Ready to go dancing?” he teases, with the same words he often used to suggest they make love.

“I might dance in heaven with you one day, but for now sit with me and go on with your tale.”

Nathan returns to the straight-back chair by the bed. It's a chair that young Nathan made, cutting the red oak tree, splitting out the rungs and slats with a froe, smoothing them with a draw-knife, doing the boring work with brace and bit.

“Wife, what do you want to know all this for?”

“I think, husband, you are wiser in an understanding of an answer to your question than you let on.” She'd grown plump in her middle years, providing his hands with entirely different sensations than in their earlier years. During odd moments, often when working alone with his oxen, it would pass through his mind that in Elizabeth he'd had by touch what it had taken two women in Canada, Wytopitlock and Parmachnenee, to provide.

“Why bring it to the fore in these your final hours?” he asks.

“I think perhaps in tales told truthfully heaven remembers to forgive.”

“I daresay heaven is absentminded.”

“You were always rueful, Nathan.”

“It's my way. Started being rueful upon my return from captivity to find that my wife had been restored in spirit and sensibility during my absence and without any help from myself.”

“You made the most of your adventure, and I made the most of mine.”

“Aye.” He's thinking about St. Blein, that damn Frenchman.

“I think I lack the conclusion to your story,” Elizabeth says. “I wish to learn here on earth, not in heaven, why my husband visits Mount Hope Bay every year.”

“All right, then. Twenty-five years after my return, a young stranger passed through Keene. He found me in the barn. I recognized him immediately, for he greatly resembled me, enough to be able to pass for white. It was my son by Black Dirt. His mother had taught him English. He told me that as Marie Metivier she had married Robert de Repentigny. They operated a saw mill at the falls by the lake, and lived their lives as French Canadians in the house I built. This boy of mine went by the name of Philip Provide. He informed me that he planned to leave Canada for good and establish his residence in Mount Hope Bay, Rhode Island.”

“And that is why you go there every year.”

“Yes, he has a family, and he works the housewright trade. But I think you wanted less to hear my story than to tell me your own.”

“That's true, for my tale is equal to yours in amazement. Listen …”

After Elizabeth Blake finishes her story, she says, “Go now, gather our children and grandchildren, and bring them to my bedside, for I am ready to pass on.” Nathan takes her pale, white hand in both of his. He kisses her brow, and leaves the house to perform this last errand for her. First he will fetch her son. He'd known all along about the boy's paternity, born only six months after his return. Nathan the younger had been a good son and Nathan the elder had been as good a father as he was capable of.

He walks with a cane through the streets of Keene; he needs the cane not for navigation, but for balance. Despite his age, the old man dresses carefully every morning, always makes sure his thin hair is combed, his boots shined. Local people hail him, bow before him, treat him like royalty. He has a number of nicknames about town: Old Nathan, the Old Pine King (because he is known to have defied the crown by cutting the king's pines in colonial days), the Old Speech Maker (from his sometimes long-winded oratories at town meeting), the Old Selectman (because he served for many years on the town's board of selectmen), the Old Pioneer (because he built the first log cabin in the town that would become Keene); but because he was a strong supporter of the revolution in 1776 and reflects the values of the new nation, they also call him the Old American.

1. In his author's note, Hebert explains that
The Old American
was inspired by a true incident, the captivity of Nathan Blake. What expectations do you bring to a story about captivity? What expectations do you bring to novels that are based on historical incidents? In what ways were those expectations fulfilled or frustrated by this novel?

2. The story is set during the French and Indian Wars of the colonial era. How did your previous knowledge of colonial New England and Canada shape your response to the book? What do you make of the author's comment, “while the histories tell us much of what people did they tell us little of who in their hearts they were”?