Russell Banks - Hamilton Stark

If they weren’t so scabbed and thin .

Wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa! Wa-wa-wa!

(repeat)

The entire corpus of the Abenooki chants and song poems were transcribed phonetically by a pair of Jesuit missionaries, Fathers Michel LaFamme and Bruce Brôlet, who traveled in the region in the late seventeenth century, investigating reports then circulating among the Canadian Algonquin residing along the Saint Lawrence River that there were in the forests to the south of them small bands of “angry people who know nothing of a life.” From the name, the Jesuit fathers had speculated that these might possibly be remnants from the voyages of the Irish monks, meditative men who supposedly had sailed across “the northern mists” in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Naturally, when they discovered only the scattered tribes of the Abenooki scratching a living from these valleys, the fathers were disappointed, for they had hoped to locate a native brethren in Christ. Nevertheless, the two priests lived for a winter among the Abenooki in the Valley of the Suncook, studying their customs and manners, such as they were, learning their language, such as it was, and taking down, as well as they could, the Abenooki literature. This was made difficult because Abenooki, although an Algonquin dialect, is a wholly uninflected language spoken in a low, nasal monotone. There is no sound for R and none for W or L —so that, for instance, the phrase “drifting over the waters in a sloop” would come out: “difftingovathatazinna-soup” (which is one of the reasons that so few Abenookis ever learned English, French or Latin). It is, of course, not a written language in any sense of the word. To complicate matters further, there are no obvious rules of syntax, and though a sharp distinction between nouns and verbs is held, none is held between adjectives and adverbs, nor are verbs declined beyond the present tense. But since verbal communication between the Abenookis surely took place, one must assume that there are whole phonemes that simply are not heard by the non-Abenooki auditor.

Against such formidable obstacles as these, LaFamme and Brôlet nevertheless were able to notate and eventually translate into Latin seventy-three entire songs, plus one hundred and forty staves from what appears to be a half-forgotten epic of creation, certain elements of which suggest a linear kinship from ancient times with the Indians of the Labrador flatlands, the so-called Graelings of the early-arriving Norsemen. A few typical selections from that long poem (called by the Abenooki “Stone-People-Long-Song”) might be of interest:

Stave 12

Seal mother, take from me the sharp-toothed cold!

Take from me the deep-chest cough!

Take from me the ice-toed feet that bleed!

Take from me the banging-hard fingertips!

Let me lie here in the snowfield and die warm!

Stave 37

Ninnomakee chews on the ear of Gan the Wolf,

And Gan cries out, “Let go, Tooth-faced One!

My father is your father’s only son!”

But Ninnomakee does not stop his biting mouth

Because of his far-sung thunder-like rage,

Which covers his eyes like a bloody hide,

Which stops up his ears like a lump of mar row,

Which fills his throat like a gob of seal-fat.

And when he has chewed off the ear of Gan the Wolf,

Ninnomakee of the Terrible Teeth bites Gan’s face twelve times.

Stave 114

Ninnomakee’s fat wife gives him the bear-coat and the grease,

And he slaps her twice and smiles the big love-smile .

“You are twice the wife the thin girl-woman makes,”

He tells her, “I slap her one time and she breaks!”

Stave 122

The time for drinking the honey has arrived again!

Ho-h-ho-h-ho-h-ho-h-hee-hee-hee!

We cook it and wait, full of jokes and wrestling.

Then we open our big mouths and pour it down,

And for five nights and days we are crazy.

Ninnomakee breaks more big trees than anyone else.

That is why the women love him and are so afraid again.

As mentioned earlier, the Abenooki, because they were the first group of humans to make a more or less permanent settlement in the Valley of the Suncook, are of interest here. One should not make too much of it, but nevertheless it does seem that, as a society, they were preeminently well adapted to the harsh and selfish environment, its parsimony and the cruelty with which it protected itself against human exploitation. It would be a long wait before a second group of human beings would appear who were so well adapted. And as the reader has doubtless guessed by now, foremost among this second group of humans (anthropologically speaking) would be the pipefitter A., or Hamilton Stark. As a matter of fact, one might properly think of him as the single most evolved instance of a type or class of human beings which, as type or class, had made an astoundingly successful adaptation to an environment that had successfully been turning other groups away for well over a thousand years.

One additional peculiarity of the Abenooki. They were the only people to have resided in the several hinterland valleys north of the coastal plain of Massachusetts, west of the coastal plain of Maine, south of the great barrier range of mountains that crosses from Vermont through New Hampshire well into Maine and terminates at Mount Katahdin, who were willing to defend their valleys against incursion. They defended them against the remnants of the southern tribes when these tribes began to be pushed northward by the English; they defended them against the Algonquins who, in the employ of the French, ranged southward and attempted to set up bases from which they could harass English settlements farther south; and they defended them against English and later Irish Protestant colonists who came tramping northward looking for cheap land to speculate with and sometimes even to farm. No one else, before or after, bothered to defend these lands against newcomers. It’s almost as if the Abenooki knew that, because of the subtlety and the peculiar extremity of their adaptation, they were unable to live at anything approaching their present low state anywhere else. They were like duck-billed platypuses, or giraffes, or strange top-eyed fish able to survive only in extremely cold waters at great depths with very high atmospheric pressures against their bodies. Remove them from what had become a “natural” state and they would gasp for air, their eyes would bulge, their skin would dry and crack open, fissures and large warts would appear, and flopping pathetically in the mud of a truly foreign shore, they would slowly, painfully, die.

Their violence, then, their pugnaciousness and witless recalcitrance, when, for example, they were offered the alternative of removing themselves to the rich forestlands of Nova Scotia, seem to have been deeply instinctual responses to their real situation, responses prompted by a sense of themselves more subtle and perhaps more profound than any native history, oral or otherwise, would have permitted expression. They were called “irrational,” “savage,” “suicidal,” even, by the chroniclers attached to the military forces sent out from the large coastal settlements to pacify and, if possible, remove them from their valleys — lands which, according to royal grants, charters, contracts and deeds, now belonged to companies of white Englishmen. One studies the response of the Abenooki to this particular stimulus, hoping to learn from it, and one more or less successfully draws several generalizations from that response. The difficulty is in knowing what those generalizations should be applied to. To Hamilton Stark? His family, friends, neighbors?