South Henge
W
ith Tes Qua on the mend, Tyoga trekked the fifteen minutes south to his family home, South Henge, nestled in a sunny glade about one hundred yards from the banks of Tonkin’s Run. With winter coming, he needed to help with harvest chores and prepare the root cellar to store perishable foods over the long winter months.
Tyoga’s grandmother, Rebecca, fell in love with the land the moment she had set eyes upon it in the summer of 1623. The son of the Ani-Unwiya elder, Kicking Bear, had shown it to her and her husband, Joshia.
When they stepped to the top of the earthen embankment, or henge, that marked the southern boundary, they stopped dead in their tracks. A lush grassy meadow, knee high with bulbous oat grass, bellflower and coriander spread out before their eyes. The northern border of the property was a riverstone jetty that interrupted the rapidly flowing shallows of Harley’s Run like a giant thumb pressing its will upon the river’s course. The half-mile arch was thick with cutthroat and brown trout struggling to steady themselves against the pummeling of the fussy flume. The west boundary of the meadow melted into a stand of pine and cedar trees. To the east, the deciduous woodlands of Appalachia flowed up and over a formidable crest before disappearing into an unnamed hollow. The echoes of a never-seen waterfall rose from the blackness of the cavernous gorge.
Tyoga’s grandpa, Joshia, had built the one-room log cabin in the glade about four months after the Powhatans had saved the Weathersby family from massacre by secretly guiding them from their homestead along the James River to the safety of the Ani-Unwiya village. When Tyoga’s father, Thomas, was about twelve years old, the single room was expanded to three when a kitchen with a giant stone hearth was added to the north side. In 1631, when Thomas married Emma, the original loft was converted to a complete second story to make the Weathersby home one of the largest in the Appalachian frontier.
While Tyoga loved the freedom of the Cherokee way of life, and the warmth of his Indian brother’s lodge, South Henge was his home. The knotty pine walls oozed with the scent of holiday pies, Bay Rum, and lye soap. Grandpa Jos’ bentwood rocker rested in its nook by the hearth, above which the deer hoof gun rack held the old Weathersby matchlock.
Sitting on an oversized oak stump that had rested alongside the family forge since before he was born, Tyoga was mending the mules’ plow harnesss. The Ani-Unwiya were fine tanners and he had picked up the art of leather working by watching the tribe elders make sheaths for their knives and quivers for the arrows of the younger braves.
Tyoga’s mother Emma was in the garden digging a crop of potatoes and picking broadleaf chard. The first hard freeze was only weeks away and this would be the final crop for the season.
Tyoga looked up from the harness to see her stretch her back, pick up her basket of harvested vegetables, and walk toward him. He waited until she was by his side.
“Mama, tell me about Davey,” Tyoga continued mending the harness he was working on.
Taken aback at his question, Emma hesitated before answering.
More than most, she had noticed the changes in Tyoga since his battle with the Runion wolfpack. She had not said anything because the changes had been so subtle that only a mother would know. She sensed, more than observed, the difference. This uncharacteristic question was more evidence of the change. Tyoga’s younger brother, David, had beendead for three years, and never before had he wanted to discuss the circumstances of his untimely death.
“Why, Tyoga,” she replied while stretching out her back again. “Why are you asking me about what happened to your brother? You found him lying on the floor with that hideous reptile curled in the crook of his arm.”
“You’re right about that, Mama,” he said in a soft voice, “but I want … I need to know more.”
“All right.” Rather than recount the entire story, she waited for him to ask his questions.
Placing the harness on the ground by his feet, he looked up at his mother standing by his side. “Why did you let him keep the snake, Mama?”
“Davey loved animals, Tyoga. Not just some animals, but every creature that walked, hopped, slithered, or crawled.” She wiped her hands on her apron, and placed them on her hips. “Davey wasn’t like you, Tyoga. He didn’t know what you know. He didn’t understand the way that you understand. When he came walking in that very door,” she said while pointing to the front door of the cabin, “holding that half-frozen water moccasin against his chest to keep it warm, there was no turnin’ him around.” Tears filling her eyes, she gazed off into the blackness of the forest as a smiled creased her lips. “He stayed up all night with that snake. Moving it closer to the fire when he though it was getting cold, and pulling it back when the coals got too hot. He was determined that that snake was going to survive.” She choked when the tears began to flow more readily. “I knew better. I should have thrown that snake into the fire and killed it myself. But I didn’t. Now I have to live the rest of my life knowing that I could have done something to save …” She stopped speaking and dried her eyes with her apron.
Tyoga picked the harness up off of the ground. Silently, he began working the awl through one of the leather side stays.
Emma picked up her basket, and turned to go into the house.
Before she could take a step, he reached out and gently grabbed her wrist. “Mama, it wasn’t your fault, you know.”
“Tyoga, water moccasins are dangerous snakes,” she replied with a hint of annoyance in her tone. “He was just a child. It’s a parent’s job to protect and defend their children. I knew better. He didn’t. If I had only … My baby boy—your brother—would be alive and with us today.”
Tyoga placed the harness at his feet again, and stood up. He stepped in front of his mother so that she was looking into his eyes.
“Ma, there isn’t anything that you could have done to change the course of events. I saw you get out grandma’s doctorin’ tools and watched you cut the X’s over the fang marks, and try to suck out the poison even though you knew that it was too late. I even watched you open his arm with the razor when his skin began to split because of the swelling. There wasn’t anything more you could have done. Ma, the real point is that water moccasins aren’t dangerous. Snakes don’t take into account good will or bad intent. They react not by design, but in the only way that they can.”
“Ty, Davey never hurt the snake, he took care of it and protected it.”
“But, Mama, he did hurt the snake. He harmed it in the worst possible way. He put it in that hog’s head, and placed it on the shelf.”
When she didn’t understand, he continued, “You can’t lock nature in a crate or a box, Mama. You can’t place it in a barn or behind a fence. You see all of this?” He waved his arm to indicate the acreage that he and his father had plowed and manicured. “This isn’t real. This isn’t what matters. It doesn’t belong to us any more than the trees and the dirt and the rain. In time, it will all be gone—consumed by what really matters.”
While she was a bright, educated, inquisitive woman, Emma was a Weathersby by marriage. She couldn’t hope to be awakened. She would never know the promise.
Tyoga turned away from his mother and faced the west. It was mid-afternoon, but already the warmth of the sun had been blocked by the peak of Polish’d Mountain. He closed his eyes and opened his heart to the whisper of the promise.
Standing behind her son, Emma noticed, perhaps for the first time, his broad shoulders and well-defined waist. Mature beyond his years, and wise in ways that hadn’t been apparent before his encounter with the Runion wolves, he was growing into a fine young man.
She watched as her son’s breathing slowed and deepened. She stepped away when she noticed the swelling in his upper arms, and the back-panel of his leather vest tighten across his shoulders. When he turned to face her once again, she raised her right hand to her lips, stepped back and gasped nearly inaudibly.
The gentle hazel swirl of his eyes that she was so used to seeing was gone. The emerald hue that pacified his gaze had been stripped away. In spite of that, she recognized her son beyond the amber hues that had taken the place of his eyes.
“Ma, the truths that you cannot see are hidden from you for a reason. They are concealed from most men, because to know them is to change what was meant to be. Nature is cruel, but not calculating. While we are rarely given second chances, we are constantly given choices. Once the choice is made, there are only two outcomes. We see before us fire and water, the earth that we stand on and the air that we breathe. We place judgements on all of these things, and pretend to understand right from wrong. The reality is that there is nothing in nature that is good nor anything that is evil. It wasn’t the choice to care for the snake that cost Davey his life. It was his notion that he should care for it—and that it was the right thing to do. There was no choice to be made. The snake was meant to die, not our Davey. He should have let it be.”
Emma took a step toward her son and gently placed her hand upon his shoulder. “Tyoga,” she said barely above a whisper, “how do you know these things to be true?”
He did not answer.
“You speak as if there is no right or wrong, and that animals—” She hesitated before continuing her thought. “And even people are meant to live or die. How is it that these are choices? Who would choose to die? Who would choose to take a life?”
Tyoga sat down on the oak stump.
She walked around so that she was facing him, knelt down in front of him, and placed her hand on his knee. She saw that her son’s eyes were returning to their hazel swirl. She realized that she had witnessed something that would set Tyoga apart from everyone else. What it meant she could not say.
After a while, Tyoga looked down into his mother’s loving eyes and said,. “No, Ma, it’s more than that. Sometimes the choice isn’t to live or die. It is to kill or be killed.”
Together, they watched the shadows grow until darkeness filled the glade, and South Henge was consumed by the blackness of a moonless night.
Chapter 11
Of Fearless Stock
W
hen the sun had finally set behind the mountain, Tyoga’s mother patted him on his back and walked slowly back to the cabin.
She knew that this was Tyoga’s favorite time of the day. The growing shadows draping across the mountains quieted the clamor of the day. A placid calm enveloped the natural world and prepared its creatures ending their day for rest.
But the growing darkness likewise ignited baser instincts for those that would spend the blackest hours in predation.
Tyoga felt the lure of both prey and predator.
It was the hour of the day for reflection.
If Tyoga was not watching the sunset from the outcropping at Carter’s Rock, he would be perched in the old bentwood rocker his Grandpa Joshia had made for his wife to sit in while she knitted, crocheted, or spun wool into yarn.
Staring into the flames in the hearth, Tyoga rocked the evening away while lost in his own thoughts. More often than not, he would read by the light of the fire until well after midnight. Including tomes by Shakespeare, Herodatus, Marlowe and Middleton, their home library was substantial by frontier standards. Tyoga had inherited his mother’s love of reading and education. He had never attended a formal school, but his mother served as an excellent teacher.
Emma was the daughter of Kenneth Longsworth, an educated man with a successful law practice in Albermarle County, Virginia. A bright girl, she began reading at an early age. Noticing his daughter’s acumen with the written word, her father spared no expense on the finest tutors in Virginia and Maryland. Her education became his passion.
In colonial America, young girls were not afforded the same educational opportunities as boys. After all, young men had to earn a living to support a family. However, Mr. Longsworth was so devoted to advancing his daughter’s education that he was able to persuade Reverend John Todd, Senior, to accept young Emma as his first female student.
Her command of foreign languages was bettered by no young man in his charge. Her mastery of advanced mathematics was unmatched, and came as a complete surprise to the cognoscente who agreed in the complete inability of the gender to comprehend the abstract as a matter of principle.
Emma’s decision to marry Thomas Weathersby not only sent a floodtide of consternation roaring through Virginia’s societe` aristocratique, but wounded her father so deeply that they were never to speak again. Though well educated himself, Thomas Weathersby was considered “that backwoodsman” due to his birth and devotion to the frontier.
A strong willed woman, Emma used her strength to fortify her determination to share her love of learning with her children. Like his mother, Tyoga could read at an early age. Proper grammar and erudite employ of the spoken word were valued in the Weathersby home. Sometimes, his father, Thomas, would walk in the front room to join his son in the quiet before the stone fireplace and they wouldn’t speak at all.
Other times Tyoga’s father would regale him for hours with tales of his youth and the adventures of his own father, Joshia, during his struggle to settle in the New World.
Thomas Weathersby was a gifted storyteller, which was revered and rewarded in the Indian culture. He was always a welcome visitor in Tuckareegee. Fluent in Tsalagie, his Native American brothers loved to listen to him tell a story of daring-do.
That evening, when he heard his father enter the front room, Tyoga turned to ask him, “Papa, will you tell me the story of Grandpa Jo and the Powhatan?”
“Son,” his father replied, “you know that story by heart by now. I bet that you could tell me about Grandpa’s run in with Openchanecanough better than I can tell it myself.”
“I reckon you’re right, papa,” Tyoga replied. “But I’d like to hear it again just the same.”
It would be the first time that he heard the story since doing battle with the Runion wolves. He was certain that the story would have a new and more important meaning to him since the encounter and exchange.