World's End (28 page)

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.

Jeremy gaped down at him in bewilderment. The stranger was at
least a foot shorter than he, round-shouldered and slight, with the musculature of an adolescent girl and a berserk growth of coiled black hair that sprang up like a pelt on his limbs, his back, even his hands and feet. The only place he lacked hair, it seemed, was on the crown of his head, where it was thinning, though he couldn't have been more than twenty or so. “You're a fresh-air fiend too, I take it,” the stranger said, squinting up into the trees.

“Sure,” Jeremy mumbled, numbly shaking the proferred hand. “Fresh-air fiend. That's right.” He was embarrassed, impatient, angry at this stranger for intruding on his solitude, and he was anxious to get on up the stream and explore the tributary that branched off to the left and ascended the ridge to the crown of the forest. But Sasha Freeman, with his mad toothy smile and dancing little feet, already had him by the arm, offering him a sandwich, a drink, a seat on his blanket, and for some reason—out of a desire to please, out of loneliness—Jeremy joined him.

“So what did you say your name was?” Sasha Freeman handed him half an egg salad sandwich and a tin cup of fruit punch.

“Mohonk,” Jeremy said, looking away. “Jeremy Mohonk.”

“Mohonk,” the stranger echoed in a ruminative tone, “I don't believe I've heard that one before. Is it shortened from something?”

As a matter of fact, it was.

“From Mohewoneck,” Jeremy said, staring down at his feet. “He was a great sachem of my tribe.”

“Your
tribe?”
Behind the wire-rimmed spectacles that gave him the look of a startled scholar, Sasha Freeman's eyes blinked in amazement. “Then, you're … you're—?”

“That's right,” Jeremy said, and he could feel the power growing in him as if he were a tree rooted to the earth, as if all the strength of the ancestral soil beneath him were suddenly his. He'd never spoken the words before, but he spoke them now. “I'm the last of the Kitchawanks.”

It was the beginning of a friendship.

For the next two years—until the Depression descended on them and Sasha was forced to move back with his parents on the Lower East Side, until the foundry foundered and Jeremy lost his job and left the boardinghouse to reclaim his birthright from Rombout Van
Wart—they met nearly every weekend. Neither of them had a car, so Sasha would bicycle down from his grandparents' place in Kitchawank Colony, and from there they'd hike out along the river to fish the inlets or climb one of the peaks of the Highlands and camp overnight in the old way, in a wickiup made of bent and interwoven saplings. Or they'd take the train into New York for the latest Pickford, Chaplin or Fairbanks, for lectures on the people's revolution in Russia or meetings of the I.W.W.

For his part, Sasha Freeman, city kid and future novelist, who in that fall of 1927 was three months out of N.Y.U. and teaching for a gratuity at the Colony free school, felt that in Jeremy he'd found a link to an older, deeper way of knowledge. It was as if the earth had opened up and the stones begun to speak. Jeremy didn't merely teach him how to listen for the footfall of fox and deer or how to gather and boil herbs against poison ivy, impetigo and the croup, didn't merely give him the means to walk out into the woods with nothing more than the clothes on his back and survive—no, he gave him more, much more: he gave him stories. Legends. History. Leaning into a campfire on Anthony's Nose or Breakneck Ridge, snow sifting down out of the sky, Sasha Freeman learned the story of Jeremy's people, a people dispersed like his own, crowded onto reservations that were like the shtetls of Cracow, Prague, Budapest. He heard the story of Manitou's big woman, of Horace Tantaquidgeon's treachery, heard about the reservation school and the delusions of the plum-faced preceptor in the starched collar. Smoke ascended to heaven. It was spring, summer, fall again. The Indian forced up every legend, every memory, giving up his history as if it were a last testament.

Eight years later Sasha Freeman published his first book, a polemic called
Marx Among the Mohicans.
It took the redoubtable father of communism back in history, to the time of the American primitives, and allowed him to score points against the slave state of modern industrial society as contrasted with the simple communal fraternity of the Indians. So what if it sold fifty-seven copies, half of them at a meeting of the Young People's Socialist League attended by six of his cousins from Pearl Street? So what if it was printed in a basement and had a paper cover that fell to pieces if you looked at it twice? It was a beginning.

And what did Jeremy get in return? Companionship, for one thing—Sasha Freeman was the first white friend he'd ever had, and the only friend he made in Peterskill. But it went deeper than that. Jeremy too was awakened to a new way of thinking, a new way of perceiving the world that had chewed up his people as if they were lambs of the field: he became radicalized. Sasha took him to unadvertised meetings of the I.W.W., gave him
Ten Days That Shook the World
and
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,
gave him Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Proudhon, Fourier. Jeremy learned that property is theft, that destruction is a kind of creation, that the insurrectionary deed is the most efficacious means of propaganda. He was beaten by hired goons outside a shoe factory in Paramus, New Jersey, hit with truncheons, billy clubs, brass knuckles and two-by-fours in the streets of Brooklyn, Queens and lower Manhattan, and it hardened him all the more. His people had never owned the land beneath their feet, but had lived on it, with it, a part of it. They hadn't bought and sold and expropriated the means of production—they'd lived in their clans, cooperating, planting and harvesting together, sharing game, manufacturing their clothes and tools from nature. Sure. And the white men—the capitalists, with their greed for pelts and timber and real estate—they changed all that forever, strangled a great and giving society, a communist society. Sasha Freeman wrote a book. Jeremy Mohonk climbed the hill to Nysen's Roost, an ancient place that spoke to him like no other, and swatted down Rombout Van Wart—the very type and symbol of the expropriator—swatted him down like a fly.

In prison he was recalcitrant, as hard and unyielding as the stones they'd stacked atop one another to build the place. Prison regulations, the guard told him the day they ushered him through the admitting gate and down the long gray corridor to the barber's chair. He'd let his hair grow out till it trailed down his back in a coil as thick as his arm, and he wore the notochord cinched around his forehead like a strip of gut. And if he'd been thin and gangling when he first met Sasha Freeman, now he was forty pounds heavier—and still growing. It took four men to hold him down while they shaved his head. They tore the notochord from his brow and swept it up with the refuse. To improve his attitude, he was given three weeks in solitary.