T. Boyle - World's End

“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.

When the three weeks were up, he was assigned a cell on the prison block. His cellmate was a white man, a housebreaker, skin the color of raw dough and blemished all over with tattoos like grape stains. Jeremy wouldn’t talk to him. Wouldn’t talk to anyone — not his fellow prisoners, not the guards or trustees or the sorry fat-assed preacher who poked his head in the cell door every month or so. He hated them all as one, the race that had polluted his blood, stolen his land and locked him away, the race of money grubbers and capitalists. He was twenty years old, and for every year he’d lived he had a year to serve: twenty years, the judge had intoned, his words as harsh as the thump of his gavel. Twenty years.

During the second month, one of the guards — soft and pockfaced, an ignorant Irish from Verplanck — singled him out and taunted him with all the old sneers: chief, Hiawatha, squaw, dog eater. When Jeremy refused to respond, the Irish went further, dousing him with a pail of slops, spitting through the bars at him, waking him in the dead of night for meaningless inspections. Jeremy might as well have been deaf and mute, carved of stone. He never moved, never spoke, never expressed surprise or alarm. But one morning, early, when the lights had begun to go soft against the gray of dawn, he was there, in the shadows against the wall of his cell, waiting. The Irish was on wakeup, moving along the cellblock with a baton, rapping it on the bars to the sound of curses, groans, the thump and wheeze of men tumbling out of their beds. “Rise and shine!” he called with malicious joy, repeating it over and over as he worked his way toward Jeremy’s cell, “Up and at ’em!” The Indian crouched down, motionless, as intent as if he were stalking deer or bear. And then the Irishman was there, the baton rattling the bars, his voice punishing and sadistic: “Hey, Geronimo. Hey, asshole. Roll out.”

Jeremy got him by the throat, both arms thrust through the bars. They’d been working him in the quarry, and his grip was like the grip of all the Mohonks through all the generations gone down. The guard dropped the baton with a clatter, snatching desperately at the Indian’s wrists. His face was a blister. Swelling. Red and swelling. Inches away. If Jeremy could only hold on long enough he’d burst it once and for all. But there was someone behind him — his cellmate, the tattooed idiot — shouting and tearing at his arms, and now there weretwo, three more guards, their billies raining on his hands, his wrists, the whole cellblock in an uproar. They broke his grip, finally, but he seized on the soft fat hand of one of the others and squeezed till he could feel the bones give. Then they were in the cell, they were all over him and they administered their own kind of justice.