Remember the Morning (47 page)

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Authors: Thomas Fleming

BOOK: Remember the Morning
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“Think of you? I think you're still a rather attractive woman. Perhaps it comes down to what you might be willing to do to persuade me to extend this debit.”
“Get out of here.”
He sauntered to the door. “I'm staying at the Fighting Cock on the Broadway. You know where it is, I'm sure.”
“I'll get a lawyer. No judge will turn me out.”
He laughed at this idea. “Jonathan Belcher, the new royal governor of New Jersey, is an old friend of my father's. He's here to repair a damaged fortune, I might add. It would be cheaper to pay me than bribe him.”
He mounted his horse and rode off. Should I give myself to him? It was more than mere desire. He wanted to savor the triumph of forcing me to submit—to do anything and everything to please him for money. Having loved and abandoned me for money, he was eager to flaunt me around New York as his whore, proving him right about my character from the start.
In the morning, Bertha appeared with little Paul. She had become tremendously fond of the child. “He wants his momma. No one else will do,” she said, and lifted the boy into the bed, where he surprised me by curling up with a contented sigh and falling asleep. It was the first time he had exhibited an iota of affection for me.
The sight of his innocent face recalled my sense of loving purpose, the reason why I was in New Jersey. I would not turn my back on that memory now, no matter what Robert Nicolls threatened to do. I climbed into my buggy and returned to Hackensack for another conference with Harman Bogardus. When I told him about Robert's threat, his Dutch blood virtually simmered with indignation.
“Come next week to a meeting of the Board of Elders,” he said. “I'll
have them ready to consider your plight as their Christian duty—not to mention their honor as Dutchmen!”
A week later I was back in Hackensack in Bogardus's dining room, which was so full of tobacco smoke I could barely breathe. Dutch farmers never went anywhere without their pipes. Around the big mahogany table sat the half dozen elders of the Dutch Reformed Church, listening to Bogardus tell them to open their purses and persuade their friends to do likewise to help this good woman in distress.
The fattest of them, Arent Schuyler, who owned the largest farm in Bergen County, looked enough like Cornelius Van Vorst to be a younger brother. “We live in New Jersey,” Schuyler said. “Why should we worry about a judgment for debt from New York courts? Everything depends on the attitude of our royal governor. I understand he's badly in need of money—and the assembly has declined to raise his salary. In my grandfather's day, when a governor found himself in such a fix, he solicited donations from the citizens. We had something called ‘the blind tax' which wise men paid—because it guaranteed them the governor's friendship. I suggest a new blind tax on behalf of Mrs. Stapteton—which I'll take to Perth Amboy for a little talk with the governor.”
Each of the elders promptly subscribed ten pounds to the blind tax and recommended that all the members of the church be exhorted to contribute at least a pound. In two weeks, Bogardus reported they had collected four hundred pounds. The spirit of Dutch independence was alive and well in Bergen County! Once more I felt the sheltering presence of Cornelius Van Vorst's spirit.
Arent Schuyler, puffing cheerfully on his pipe, soon appeared at Great Rock Farm to report on his trip to Perth Amboy. “His Excellency greatly appreciated the concern of the citizens of Bergen County for his welfare,” he said with a straight face—though the glint in his blue eyes left no doubt that he appreciated his own wry humor. “After much talk about crops and the late war, I mentioned your problems as of great concern to us. He assured me he would speak to the chief justice of the province about the matter and that henceforth you should not have the slightest concern about losing your land. Now you can get to work on your store in Hackensack.”
“I haven't a cent to buy goods. No one will honor my credit, with Nicolls's judgment against me.”
“You go to New York and buy whatever you need and draw the bill on me,” Schuyler said. “Once, many years ago, when I was a very young farmer, my wheat crop rotted. I didn't have enough money to pay for new seeds. I had just married and my wife had expensive tastes. I had many bills to pay. I went to New York and a merchant named Cornelius Van Vorst, a fat old fellow like I am today, loaned me two hundred
pounds on my good name. He didn't even ask me to sign for it. He said he knew an honest Dutchman when he saw one.”
“I fear I'll run up a good deal more than two hundred pounds—”
“I know, I know. But I bet you'll make it back before the snow flies. The
vrouws
of Bergen County know how to spend their husbands' money, believe me.”
I rushed to New York and spent a thousand pounds to launch another Universal Store, with the emphasis on quality. I bought nothing but the finest silks, lustring, satins, and velvets and persuaded one of New York's best seamstresses to move to Hackensack to make dresses and negligees and nightgowns on the spot—guaranteeing a perfect fit. I bargained furiously to get the goods at close to wholesale prices—not difficult because the end of the war with France and Spain had created a worldwide slack in business.
Back in New Jersey, Arent Schuyler invited me to his spacious house on the Hackensack River above the town and from there we rode out each day to visit farmhouses throughout Bergen County. Again and again, he introduced me as Catalyntie
Van Vorst
Stapleton, leaning on my Dutch name so hard the English name was barely pronounced. He told everyone about my new store and allowed me to do the rest of the talking about my goods. The old man closed the conversation by remarking that Mrs. Schuyler expected to buy all her clothes at this remarkable new emporium.
Customers flowed through my doors. My English competitor soon closed his second-rate shop in disgust, leaving all the business in the county to me. In three months, I was able to repay half of Schuyler's loan. But the effort this took was virtually all-consuming. I barely saw little Paul at Great Rock Farm. Many nights I slept on a cot in the rear of the store. When I went back to the farm, I seldom arrived before dark and left the next day at dawn. I saw as little of Hugh at school in Hackensack.
One Sunday I arrived at the farm in midafternoon. “Paul. Where are you, Paulie?” I called as soon as I came in the door. I had a wooden gunboat I had bought on a shopping trip to New York.
There was no response to my call. Finally his brother Hugh said: “He's in his room. He's angry at you.”
“Why in the world?”
“He says his tummy hurt all night and you didn't come when he cried.”
In his room, I found Paul sitting on the floor with a red crayon in his hand, drawing great broad strokes on a piece of paper. “Look at the boat I brought for you, Paul,” I said.
“No like boats.”
“Aren't you going to give me a kiss?”
He shook his head. “No like you. Bad!”
Bertha confirmed his stomachache. “He's the strangest child. I think he understands more than most his age,” she said. “He cried and cried for you. When I told him you weren't here, he suddenly stopped crying, even though his stomach still hurt. He rubbed it and rubbed it but he wouldn't shed another tear.”
I wooed Paul for the rest of the day but he barely relented his condemnation of me. At supper, when I made an exasperated remark about his stubborness, Bertha could no longer restrain her disapproval of my child rearing. “The poor little boy has no father—and now no mother. Can you blame him for being troubled?”
But I can't take any time from the store now, with the business on the brink of doubling in size.
I was about to hurl this rationalization at Bertha when Paul leaped up and ran to her, crying: “I love
you,
Bertha!” I forced myself to face the vacuum at the center of my life. My sons had no father—and I had no husband. The new store was a sorry substitute for a living, loving man in my house.
Where was Malcolm? What was he doing? Did he have any desire to return to me? Or had he become Clara's lover again, as Robert Nicolls nastily assumed? Could the bribe to New Jersey's governor be extended to include both the safety of our land and the safety of my husband? Could he return here without fear of prosecution from New York? It was time to find out.
F
OUR HUNDRED MILES AWAY, ON THE shore of Lake Ontario, Clara stood in the doorway of the longhouse of the Bear Clan, watching Malcolm Stapleton stain his white flesh dark brown with berry juice. Next, he painted streaks of bright blue and yellow and red down his face. He wore only a warrior's breechclout that displayed his massive thighs and huge torso. Against the wall rested his oiled, gleaming rifle. From his waist belt dangled a hatchet and a scalping knife. Clara's heart swelled with instinctive pride as she gazed at him—but her soul was afflicted with doubt. Malcolm had become a Seneca chief in an undeclared war Clara feared and opposed.
She remembered their arrival in the village two years ago, the excitement they had stirred, as Malcolm told their story to the assembled sachems
and chiefs and the matrons of the clans, asking them for refuge in Clara's name. Clara had translated his words and added her own witness to the fate she had narrowly escaped in New York. Her father, Hanging Belt, had died, but her mother was now the matron of the Bear Clan. She embraced her daughter and urged the acceptance of both fugitives. No one spoke against her. Malcolm's daring rescue of Clara aroused everyone's admiration. Many stories in the Seneca past celebrated famous warriors abducting women they loved from hostile clans or villages.
Shining Creek's sachems voted unanimously to grant refuge to both fugitives. But some people wondered if a white man could live happily in an Indian village. Wouldn't he yearn for his lost luxuries? Wouldn't the warriors regard him with contempt, as he hoed corn with the women?
When Clara translated this, Malcolm had pointed to the sky, where a full moon was shining, and replied: “If I don't prove myself a warrior worthy of adoption by the Seneca before the next moon—I'll return to New York and the hangman's noose.”
The next day, he was invited to join some warriors in a hunting party. They came back three days later laden with game, most of which Malcolm had killed at amazing distances with his rifled gun. Next a round of lacrosse was suggested. Malcolm was given the long stick with the basket at the end and the rules were explained to him. The young warriors did not bother to mention the battering they planned to give him as they raced up and down the village street. They swiftly discovered that Malcolm shrugged off their most ferocious blows and returned them with devastating whacks that sent more than one brave reeling out of the game. Malcolm's team won, five to nothing, with Malcolm scoring three of the goals. In challenge games with nearby villages, they were soon winning valuable prizes—bear robes, wampum belts, English muskets—thanks to his prowess.
With Clara's help, he learned the Seneca's language and spent long hours with one of their oldest sachems, listening to tales of their valor in wars against the Hurons and other tribes. He went into the woods with some of the youngest warriors and spent three days without food purifying his body and soul, chanting prayers to the Master of Life. He submitted to a ritual baptism in the frigid waters of Lake Ontario. Finally, he allowed Clara and her mother to pluck out the hairs of his head until he had nothing left but a Seneca scalp lock.
As the moon began rising with ever brighter, more golden light, the sachems declared Malcolm was ready to receive his name and become a member of the Senecas. Clara was told to choose the name. She spent a day and night fasting and praying to the Master of Life before she let the words speak in her mind. Great Heart would be his family name. Standing Bear would be his warrior name.
As the sachems and Clara's mother, now the matron of the Bear Clan, were about to give their approval, an angry voice shouted from the door of the longhouse: “How dare you allow filthy white blood to soil the purity of the Senecas?”
It was Grey Owl—once Clara's lover, when his name was Bold Antelope. Someone in the village had sent for him. He had followers in almost all the villages of the Six Nations. Year after year he traveled throughout the Iroquois country, preaching his hatred of the white man, urging the Great Council that met each year at Onondaga to drive out white traders and force white farmers to leave the Mohawk country and other places where they had purchased land on the borders of the Six Nations.
Grey Owl strode to the center of the longhouse and delivered a tirade against white men in general and Malcolm Stapleton in particular. He was a criminal, wanted for attempting to burn New York—there was a price on his head. Why not deliver him to the white men and collect the reward of two hundred pounds? They could buy many guns with the money. He had seen Malcolm at Oswego, cheating Indians out of their furs. An even bigger cheat was his wife, the Moon Woman, whom the Senecas had raised from infancy and cherished as a daughter. This was how she repaid their generosity.
The sachems and even Clara's mother had been stunned and intimidated by Grey Owl. He had won enough followers to make him formidable. Were they bringing dissension into their village by adopting this white man? Clara saw no one else could answer Grey Owl's slanders. She rose to her feet and confronted her former lover.
“You claim to be inspired by the Master of Life,” she said. “But when I look into your eyes, Grey Owl, I see nothing but the low cunning of the Evil Brother! I was there at Oswego when the man we have just named Standing Bear and the Seneca daughter we call She-Is-Alert traded for furs. I was their partner and friend! I shared in their profits! We dealt honestly with every warrior, even when other white men got them drunk! Do you dare to accuse me, a daughter of the Bear Clan, of cheating my brothers? Do you wish me to return to New York and die at the stake? That will be my fate, because where this man goes, I must go too. I have loved him all my life. The Evil Brother prevented us from becoming man and wife. But that hard fate has never altered my love.”
Grey Owl was struck dumb by this torrent of words. Everyone present recognized in their force the terrific power of Clara's
orenda.
“Speak, Grey Owl,” Clara's mother said. “Do you have any response to this testimony of Nothing-But-Flowers?”
“Only this,” Grey Owl said. “She—and all of you—will live to see the folly of trusting white men.”
For a terrible moment, Clara saw in Grey Owl's eyes the pain of Bold
Antelope's humiliation on that April morning long ago. A moment later, his face turned into Caesar's African features—and his hair blazed in the dim light of the longhouse's candles. She sensed a horrendous truth at the center of those words. Yet they did not alter the love she had just declared for Malcolm Stapleton.
“What matters, Grey Owl, is not the color of a man's skin,” Clara said. “It is the strength and purity of his soul that a Seneca judges as worthy or unworthy. I have brown skin. But my mother considers me a daughter and I regard her as my mother with all the love and loyalty we would owe each other if I came from her body. To say all white men are bad is as foolish as it is to say all Indians are good or all Africans are bad. The Senecas—and the Great Council of the Six Nations to which they belong—do not judge whole peoples in that way. Even when we make war on them, we adopt their captives into our tribe. We make peace with them and exchange promises of good behavior.”
“You speak with a tongue that is twisted, Nothing-But-Flowers. Twisted by the desire you feel for this man,” Grey Owl said, pointing at Malcolm. “We shall see which of us speaks with the wisdom of one who has seen the future! The Manitou has opened my eyes to the Indians' fate. Whether my words come from the Master of Life or the Evil Brother does not matter. They are true!”
Grey Owl retreated into the night. The sachems declared that Malcolm was worthy of adoption into the Senecas and would henceforth be known as Standing Bear. After a feast and a dance of welcome around the fires outside the longhouses, Clara led Malcolm into the cool darkness of the September woods.
“Did you understand what I said to Grey Owl?”
“Yes.”
“Watching you over these months has been like being reborn. The love I felt for you that first time has returned in a new wonderful way. But how can I act on it? How can I betray Catalyntie?”
He was silent. “Only if we see it as something that must end—that will end when you return to her,” Clara said.
He was still silent. “Do you understand?” she said.
“I feel the guilt of it too,” he said. “Maybe it will end—too soon. But—”
Her mouth sealed his lips. The years fell away and they were back in the New Jersey woods beside their secret lake. The sweetness was redoubled by their mutual confession of guilt and inevitable separation. Never had Malcolm seemed more desirable. Gratitude was part of Clara's passion as well as pride. She had created the soul of this magnificent warrior who had sacrificed his white future for her. The Seneca and the African side of her nature fused in a tremendous burst of joy.
A few days later, a hunting party was attacked by Ottawas from Fort Niagara—a not infrequent occurrence because the boundaries between the hunting grounds of the Seneca and these French-allied Indians were vague. Often these encounters, in which shots were exchanged and men wounded or killed, were more or less ignored. This time, a young Seneca warrior named Red Hawk was badly wounded. When he died the following day, Malcolm took the lead in urging instant retaliation. He stripped to the skin, painted himself in red and yellow war colors and appeared before the village's sachems with a hatchet in his hand. He told them that their honor as Senecas depended on avenging the insult by pursuing the Ottawas—and killing as many of them as possible. It was time to teach them and the French respect for the Senecas—respect rooted in fear.
Clara was filled with dismay. Her mother was even more dismayed and exerted all her influence inside the Bear Clan to prevent the expedition. She persuaded the sachems to propose a compromise. Malcolm and Clara and the parents of Red Hawk would journey to Fort Niagara and demand compensation for his death. Malcolm argued that only a war party would impress the French but he accepted the decision of the village council.
It was not a happy trip. Red Hawk was an only son and both his parents were haggard with grief over his loss. His father, Little Beaver, wept and cursed the Evil Brother every night with a violence that chilled Clara. She saw no point in antagonizing this powerful being. His wife was equally disconsolate but more silent. On the third evening of their journey, she suddenly cried: “Grey Owl is right. This white man has brought a curse on our village. They're all in the service of the Evil Brother.”
Clara assured her this was not true. But it was another ominous sign of Grey Owl's influence on many people. At last they reached the sprawling stone fort at the junction of the Niagara River and Lake Ontario. A white giant dressed as a Seneca brave in deerskin leggings and moccasins virtually guaranteed a sensation. Malcolm had no difficulty locating a Frenchman who spoke passable English and they were soon introduced to the commander of the fort, an affable young French captain named Armand Pouchot.
Malcolm made a vigorous speech, describing Red Hawk's death and his parents' grief. Instead of demanding compensation, however, he threatened the Frenchman with retaliation. The Senecas, he said, were prepared to take a French scalp because they knew the Ottawas were armed by France and sent out to assert the French claim to this side of the lake. Fort Niagara, he coolly declared, was a violation of the territory of the province of New York and if the French wanted to avoid a war, they should abandon it immediately.
Captain Pouchot was more than a little astonished by this aggressive
stance. Although New Yorkers had protested Fort Niagara when it was built, no one had challenged it for two decades. More important, Malcolm was the first Englishman he had seen wearing Indian dress, claiming the right to speak for a tribe. The French had made a habit of sending men to live with their Indians in Canada and they prided themselves on the loyalty this policy had created. If the English were about to launch a similar policy, it could easily affect the delicate balance of power in North America.
Captain Pouchot invited Malcolm to stay at Fort Niagara while he consulted his superiors in Montreal about how to reply to his challenge. This gave Malcolm and Clara time to spend a day going down the Niagara River to see the great falls. It was a stupendous spectacle—but for Clara it recalled the chilling memory of her dream of oblivion.
“Remember when we talked of coming to see this wonder?” Malcolm asked.
She remembered all too well—and it reminded her of how temporary their life together was now. How hopeless, really. But they spent the night within earshot of the falls, wrapped in each other's arms, pretending to regain that long-ago rapture. Were they both pretending, Clara wondered, as Malcolm filled her with sweetness that her soul both welcomed and denied?
Back at Fort Niagara, they waited impatiently for several more days before Captain Pouchot summoned them to his quarters again. “We've made inquiries about you, my friend,” the Frenchman said. “We've discovered you're a fellow with nerves of brass. You're wanted for murder and kidnapping in New York—and there are other stories that connect you to a vicious attack on one of our ships on this lake.”
Red Hawk's mother had obviously talked freely. During his initiation into the Senecas, Clara had urged Malcolm to tell vivid stories in the Indian style to bolster his claim to the status of a warrior. He had described the Battle of the Bracken and the encounter with the French sloop and made a great impression.

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