THE OLD AMERICAN
By Ernest Hebert
University Press of New England, 287 pages, $24.95
New Hampshire writer Ernest Hebert, whose devotion to the novel has heretofore been confined to painstaking realism about modern working-class New England life, makes a wonderful leap back in time in this new book–and a good leap forward in terms of craft and accomplishment.
Hebert leads us deep into the 18th Century, when the French and Indian Wars raged across the forests, rivers, lakes and settlements that made up the territory between old New York and the Canadian border. In the center of this vast stage stands an aging Algonquian leader, son of King Philip, whose defeat in battle against the Massachusetts settlers marked a new era in the European conquest of the New World.
Hebert refers to this man by the respectful and affectionate epithet of the Old American. His name was actually Caucus-Meteor–though that was not the name he was born with, but rather a title confered on him by a French master during a period of forced servitude after his father’s defeat. Caucus, for speaking together, Meteor, for a bright body flying across the night sky. With his head covered with a red turban to hide his baldness and his profile a likeness of that famous New England rock formation called the Great Stone Face, Caucus-Meteor seems an anomalous creation, as much a character out of Henry James as James Fenimore Cooper. He’s a wily political genius whose knowledge of languages and the wisdom he has acquired over the years have won him the leadership of a rag-tag group of refugees from various New England tribes. When we first meet him, he’s grieving for his wife (lost in a recent epidemic) while serving as translator for a French-led military expedition against a British settlement in what is now Keene, N.H.
It’s spring 1746, and Caucus-Meteor stands poised to take a captive in the raid. The man he captures and keeps for a slave is named Nathan Blake. Blake was a real person, an English settler whose account of his three years of captivity serves as the kernel of this deeply appealing novel, a book that is, among other things, a painstakingly researched and beautifully developed reconstruction of a village on the New England-Canadian frontier:
“The dwellings consist of poles covered with bark in a roughly conical shape and woven mats for doors, wigwams of the type used before the arrival of Europeans. Caucus-Meteor dreams of wigwams as big as European castles. The only animals his people keep are dogs for pulling loads. On stick racks hang hundreds of fish, mainly salmon. He sees drying racks for skins, one stretching a moose hide. A tri-stand holds a recently killed porcupine. The quills will be dyed and used to decorate moccasins.”
Vivid scenes of work and sports and hunting and trading among the Indian encampments read like living tableaux. But it’s Caucus-Meteor, the Old American Indian king and wise man, who remains the focus of the novel. Hebert manages to capture the strangeness and the universality of the old king’s mind and heart, and in the immediate story of the touching master-slave relations between the Algonquian and Blake, the novelist has found a perfect foundation on which to rebuild a world long since lost to all of us newer Americans.
” `Time,’ ” says Caucus-Meteor, repeating a traditional Algonquian saying, ” `is like a milkweed pod, bursting open, flying in the wind, starting anew in neighboring soil.’ ” Hebert qualifies this by commenting that he’s not sure if the Old American believes it or even knows “exactly what it means, but it seems like the right thing to say.” Writing this wonderful novel was certainly the right thing to do. Reading it is just as right.
