Ghost Hawk

by Susan Cooper

  John and Benjamin were halfway through putting the head on a large cask. They dropped their tools and ran to hitch the horses to their two carts, which already waited near the house. In a flurry of packing and loading, the family seized clothes, food, supplies, anything of value that could be moved, and piled boxes and bundles onto the carts. Samuel saddled the riding horses. Roger drove his mother’s best chickens, all indignantly squawking, into a carrying coop.

  “And the cows?” he shouted to John. “They’re in the far field!”

  “Leave them.”

  “The Indians will kill them!”

  “Sooner the cows than us!”

  So the Wakeleys, like all their neighbors, fled from their home toward the town.

  * * *

  The war dance went on, for days and days.

  Perhaps Philip promised his army of impatient young men that they might raid unoccupied houses, with no killing except of animals, in order to enrage the English and force an attack. Perhaps. I saw only that there came a point, on a Sunday when the English were all at worship in their meetinghouses, when finally a group of Pokanokets erupted northward from Mount Hope.

  They ran swiftly across their own territory toward the English farmlands, near a garrison where a force of English soldiers had been gathering. The families from the nearby farms had already taken refuge inside the garrison, just as the Wakeleys had gone to Providence.

  Philip’s angry young warriors looted the farms, and slaughtered the cattle and pigs that for years had been trampling the corn in neighboring Pokanoket fields. Because now they had muskets as well as their bows and arrows, this was not hard. They killed no people, only the animals, which they cooked and ate that night with noisy pleasure.

  These attacks on English property went on at intervals: a provocation, though never a threat to any human life. Not until one morning when two Englishmen, a farmer and his son, came out from the garrison to check their own farm and found Indians looting it. The son had a musket.

  “Stop them!” shouted the father, furious. “Shoot!”

  So the son aimed at an Indian and fired. The man fell, but stumbled up again and fled with the others. The farmer and his son rescued as many belongings as they could carry, and went back triumphant to the garrison.

  The next morning, a trio of Pokanokets who spoke some English went openly to the garrison and asked to speak to the commander. One of them was Running Hawk.

  “We have killed nobody,” he said, “yet this boy shot one of our people. We wish to know why.”

  “Is your fellow dead?” said the commander.

  “Yes,” Running Hawk said. “He is dead.”

  The commander looked at the boy, a loutish fifteen-year-old who had been bragging endlessly about his shot.

  The boy shrugged. “What of it?” he said. “He was a thieving Indian. It was no matter.”

  “Fool,” said the commander. He turned to look at Running Hawk’s icy face, and he said in apology, “This is the word of an idle lad.”

  “It gives us our answer,” Running Hawk said.

  He swung round abruptly, and the three men walked away.

  * * *

  Early the next morning, before news of this had reached Providence, Huldah was helping Mary Williams prepare breakfast when Benjamin came clattering through the kitchen, pulling on his coat.

  “Where are you going?” she said in astonishment.

  “To the house, very quickly, with Father. He says he is going mad without his tools, he wants to fetch them.”

  “Jedediah has tools, for goodness’ sake!” said Huldah. Jedediah’s cooperage was near the Williams’s house, and they were all working there now.

  Benjamin kissed her on the cheek and made for the door. “It’s not the same—I know what he means. I’d like to get mine too.”

  Huldah followed him. John was outside with the horses.

  “Don’t worry,” he said to her, “we shall be there and back very fast. The Indians are stealing cows now and then, they say, but not up here, and there’s been no violence yet.”

  “Please be careful,” Huldah said.

  “Of course.” He swung himself onto his horse. “Is there anything you want us to bring?”

  “My cloak from the press, perhaps. Just come back as quick as you can. God bless you both.”

  John blew her a kiss as they rode away. “All will be well!” he called.

  * * *

  But the Pokanokets were fanning further out over the countryside that morning, seeking more farms, seizing more cattle, angry over the death of their fellow the day before. Running Hawk and two others, riding in search of plunder, came upon the Wakeley farm.

  They saw two horses tethered outside the workshop. Horses were as valuable a prize as guns.

  Benjamin was in the house, pulling out the cloak Huldah had asked for. John was in the workshop, collecting his tools. He looked out the window, and he caught his breath as he saw the three Pokanokets riding up. He knew he had to get to them as fast as he could, to tell them who he was, to reason with them.

  Running Hawk reined in his horse at the gate, and kept guard as the other two dismounted to take the white man’s horses. He cocked his gun and held it to his shoulder, tense, watchful, in case of an angry shot from anyone inside.

  John came running out of the workshop, still with a cooper’s tool in his hand. It was his best drawknife, in a long canvas case.

  But to Running Hawk it looked like a musket.

  Instantly he swung his gun toward John and he shot him. In the moment between the pressure of his finger on the trigger and the sound of the explosion, he heard John shout in Pokanoket, “Stop!”

  It was too late to stop.

  John dropped to the ground. The horses reared at the noise of the shot; the Pokanokets tried to calm them. Running Hawk jumped down and ran to John.

  He was lying on his back, a great stain on his chest, with blood coming out. He looked up, and he said in Pokanoket, “I beg you not to harm my son.”

  He had no idea who it was that he was talking to.

  He thought for an instant of me, as the years dissolved, as he went out of time, and he said, “I am the friend of Little Hawk.”

  Then he died, the blue eyes still open.

  “Come!” shouted one of the others urgently to Running Hawk. They were mounted again, leading the horses away. Running Hawk looked down once more at John, amazed and bewildered, and then he turned and ran back to his own horse, and followed them.

  From a window of the house, Benjamin shot at him. But his musket misfired and there was only a small clicking sound, that nobody else heard.

  Except me.

  FOUR

  King Philip’s War, a terrible, bloody business with much brutality on both sides, blazed through what is now called New England for more than a year. Many English settlements, including Providence, were burned to the ground, and more than six hundred English were killed—though not Roger and Mary Williams, nor Huldah and her family.

  Running Hawk died, and all his family. So did more than three thousand of my people, and those who survived the war retained only tiny amounts of land. Philip’s head was cut off by the English and stuck up on a pole above the fort in Plymouth, where their Captain Miles Standish had put the head of Wituwamet half a century before. Hundreds of “Praying Indians” from our villages that had embraced Christianity died after being shipped to an internment camp on Deer Island, in Boston Harbor, and almost a thousand of my people were shipped by the English to Europe or the West Indies as slaves, including Philip’s wife and son.

  I watched all this, as I have watched the fate of my tribe and all the others in the long years since.

  My people still live in some parts of this New England, a few thousand of them, on tribal reservation lands. They keep alive our traditions and our spirit; they struggle to revive language in places where it has faded away; they fight for the rights of the tribes under the nation’s law. They are the soul of
the land to which we belong, where once we roamed free. But now they share that freedom with others, in the new nation to which they too belong. They are Americans.

  I have been watching it all so long, like a bird trapped in this house of sky and sea and land. Here I have stayed, on the salt marsh island where my tomahawk was born, and where it has rested for so long in the memory hole that John made for me. I have told my story, but even now I am not released. Somewhere, beyond our knowledge, is the long home to which we are all freed to go, in the end.

  I want to go home.

  I want to go home.

  PART FOUR

  * * *

  RIPENING MOON

  There is a dog on my island now, where in all the centuries there has never been a dog before. He looks like a wolf. His name is Pan.

  It is high summer; the salt marsh is green, the sea deep blue. As time went by, the English farmers began to harvest hay for their animals from the marsh, and they dug drainage ditches among the creeks where my people had come in canoes to hunt and to fish. But after two centuries or so, in 1898 a great hurricane broke through the coast and gave the river a new estuary, out through the marsh, so that salt water now came flooding round the islands at high tides. This is the way of things.

  The only grass that will grow in a marsh that is salt has no value for haying, so the farmers went away. The islands bear the names of their forefathers. Today, on the first island only the wild creatures live; but on the second there are a dozen or so houses, some occupied all the year, some only in summer.

  On the third salt marsh island, where John and I talked so often, there has been for a hundred years or so a small house occupied only in summer. In winter, nobody has been there but the birds, the animals, and the trees, many of them overgrown with huge thickets of the vine called poison ivy, the plant we were careful to avoid. It is high summer now, and in places the poison ivy’s leaves are turning the brilliant red that overtakes them in the fall.

  A little while ago the summer home began to fall down, and now a new person has come and replaced it with a sturdier house. It is a woman, in her middle years. She has dark eyes and hair, and her name is Rachel. She is a painter. She appears to live alone.

  I watch her, and think sometimes that she looks as my grandmother Suncatcher may have looked at that age. She is tall and lean, and works often on the land, planting only the trees and bushes that belong here. “Natives,” she calls them. The dog who looks like a wolf lives here with her.

  It is August, the time of the Green Corn Moon. Rachel is digging, pulling out a network of greenbrier roots. She keeps well clear of the poison ivy, but she has a helper, a big sunburned man called Gabe, who must be one of those who are not poisoned by it—he has spent much of this day hacking down its twining trunks and hauling up its roots. The sun is low in the sky now, but he is still pulling poison ivy out of the cherry trees, compulsive, unharmed.

  “The tide’s coming in, Gabe,” Rachel says. “Better go home, or you’ll be stuck here for hours.”

  “I’m going,” he says. “But look, here are the trees I brought from the nursery. On sale—and all native.”

  He leads Rachel to his truck, and the group of little trees he has unloaded from it, all in pots. The wolflike dog, who has been lying in the shade, gets to its feet and pads after them.

  “Two crab apples,” Gabe says, “two more junipers, a river birch, another arrowwood. And a little orphan guy, there’s not much demand for them—a bitternut hickory.”

  “Great,” Rachel says.

  “Oh, and there’s this,” Gabe says.

  He reaches in through the front window of his truck. “My guys found it this afternoon when they were edging the driveway, just where your land starts. They thought you should have it.”

  And he hands her the head of my tomahawk.

  I did not expect this. For a moment I am lost in a sound like the sigh of the wind, the breath of the sea.

  Beside Rachel, the wolflike dog barks suddenly, loudly.

  “Shut up, Pan,” Rachel says.

  “Looks like an Indian axe head,” Gabe says. “Should go to their museum, I guess, if it’s some sort of sacred object.”

  “You’re right,” Rachel says. “Thank you.”

  She holds the axe head as he drives away, running her fingers over it. The dog watches her warily.

  Rachel goes back to the place where she was digging and sits down on a log, looking out at the salt marsh as the water is driven across it by the rising tide. The outer island is already surrounded by water, out there. Every tree along its edge stands out, in the clear light of the dying day. The dog lies down at Rachel’s feet and goes to sleep.

  With the axe head in her hand, she sits there for a long time, thinking. She does this often, in this same place. Sometimes I think she is talking to the land in her mind.

  Behind her the sun goes down. The water darkens, but for a little while the last rays of the sun linger on the outer island, and its trees are golden. Then the color dies and the sun has truly set.

  As she turns back toward the west, she sees me, a figure through whom she can also see the trees and the sunset sky. She catches her breath, and is still.

  It is only for a moment. My instinct at first is to hide myself. I am gone again.

  Rachel blinks, breathes again, peers at the place where I was. There is nothing.

  The sleeping dog beside her gives a great sigh.

  “All right, Pan,” she says, and they get up and head for the house. Rachel puts the glimpse of me out of her mind as a trick of the light, and she walks to the house. But she looks back once more before she goes in.

  The bottom half of the house is full of canvasses and paints, with two easels, and some of the pictures that Rachel has painted, here and elsewhere. They show the salt marsh in every mood and weather. Some include birds, and other creatures, though very few of them include people. She is a good painter.

  She does not sleep well that night. Dreams flicker in and out of her mind, dreams of snow and summer, of a bow and a tomahawk, of deer and of a wolf like her dog Pan; dreams of a frozen pond and a slithering eel, a swaying cart and a crowded unpaved street.

  She dreams of blood, and severed heads. Twice she wakes abruptly, her heart racing, certain that there is the sound of a gunshot in her ears—but each time Pan is sleeping peacefully on the floor beside her bed.

  I am not giving her these dreams, but I can sense them, and I am sorry.

  After the second waking, she lies there restless, and at length gets out of bed. It is early morning but still dark. There are no curtains at the windows of this house, and she looks out of the window at the stars.

  Suddenly she sees a shooting star streak across the northern sky. Then another. Rachel knows the stars, and now she remembers the summer meteor shower.

  “The Perseids,” she says to herself.

  The dog gets to his feet, stretches, and makes an enquiring noise.

  “All right, Pan,” she says, and she pulls on some clothes and goes downstairs and outdoors, with the dog following. As she passes the table beside her door, she picks up the axe head that has been lying there all night.

  There is a wooden picnic table on the grass between the house and the trees. Rachel hoists herself onto this table and lies there on her back, looking up. She sees the dark sky flicker with shooting stars, one after the other, darting across the sky like sparks blown out of a fire by the wind.

  “Look,” my father said, that first time, holding me in his arms and pointing upward. “They are your ancestors, Little Hawk. Every year at this time they leap, they dance. It is Manitou. They are saying to us, ‘Look, we are still here. We are watching over you. We dance for you, in our beautiful home.’ ”

  Rachel watches the meteors for a long time. Sometimes she sees one only from the corner of her eye, but still she sees. The axe head is still in her hands, warm from her skin.

  She watches until the sky begins to brighten with the
beginnings of dawn, and the meteors can no longer be seen, and then she sits up and swings her legs over the side of the table.

  And she sees me standing there, looking at her.

  She sees a bare-chested American Indian, in deerskin pants and moccasins, his hair greased up into a scalp lock—but the body has no substance, and through it the trees are still faintly visible.

  The dog Pan sees me too. He gives a whimper that is like the start of a howl, a sound Rachel has never heard him make before, and he creeps under the table and lies there on his belly.

  Rachel is afraid—I can feel her fear—but she doesn’t run, she doesn’t move. She sits there gazing back at me with the axe head in her hands, for a long time. Her knuckles are white, she is gripping the axe so hard.

  But very gradually the hands relax, the fear loses its hold.

  Then she takes a deep breath and lets it slowly out again, and she says, “Who are you?”

  “I am Little Hawk. Of the Pokanoket tribe, of the Wampanoag Nation.”

  “The People of the First Light,” Rachel says. “Of course.”

  Since she can understand me, it does not occur to her that I am not speaking her own language, nor she mine. She is talking to a ghost, without fear now and without question; she is astonishing.

  She says, half to herself, “I knew—I knew there was something. . . .”

  Then she says to me, “You should be out there with the shooting stars, Little Hawk.”

  “I wish I were.”

  “What holds you?” she says.

  She is a wise woman, even though she is not old. Before I can say anything, the memory of her dreams puts a shadow into her mind, and she shakes her head, as if to shake it away.