Katu Read online

I am provoked.

  At his behest, I walked from here to Hades, that is to say Philadelphia, and back in a morning for the hemp twine he could not do without. My temper is as frayed as that net of his. I could have been recognized as my Father’s son and captured by the British as a spy or impressed and made the newest thing in cannon fodder. Grand as those dangers are, they speak nothing of the threat of Mother catching me. So I say it is a response—any response—I await and with what I wager must appear an irksome stare.

  And I wait.

  I begin to think: Have I not made good time? Does one not with death at their heels? I had lingered for as long as was possible at the spinner’s shop, peeking from his rippled, cloudy window into the street and not wanting to try my hand at that game ever again. But with business concluded and all pleasantries exhausted, it had been time to take my leave. The spinner’s wife handed me a loaf, then, like every mum’s fare-thee-well, she rustled my hair as I drew a deep breath and stepped back into Chestnut Street. I turned at Third and followed it to High Street, where I was met with the most pitiful sight of prisoners begging bread from three stories up.

  “Lo, there, boy, spare a crust for your countrymen who’ve done no more than take up the cause,” one man hollered down to me while lowering a basket.

  I paused for a moment, longer than their bellies likely pleased, pondering the odds of Father ever falling to such a state of incarcerated beggary as reprimand for his beliefs. So I relented, broke my loaf in half, and placed it in the basket.

  Voices of the men crowding the window competed in a symphony of discord, but I refused to look up at any one of their faces for fear of whom I might see. There were so many of them, and all I’d given was a bird’s peck of bread to satisfy them all. Ashamed, I hurriedly took flight when presumably the man whose hands reached the bread first called his thanks to me.

  His voice still resounded at my back as I made my way to the duck puddle at Fourth. I resisted my urge to rest there as was normally my want when the rains occasioned, as they had this season. Instead, I settled on skipping stones at the birds as I passed, snickering a bit as they scattered, delighted I could no longer hear the patriot calling to me. And at that, my already brisk pace was ever more quickened when an overstuffed hag of a meddler decided to take up a few stones against me. Thereafter, I stopped only once and that was to relieve myself. So here I am, all in good time and haughty with the accomplishment of having escaped the city with my life as well as his confounded twine. Oh, how I wish to holler in his least fickle ear: Are you pleased with me now?

  But I resist such insolence and resolve to uphold my campaign of restless footwork.

  Still, he works away at that blasted net like a man alone on his own island.

  Indeed, I’ve angered him. I’ve taken too long. Yes, so now I am to wait. ’Tis the game.

  After a few more infernal moments, Grandfather reluctantly inspects my offering with little interest and nods what is to pass for his approval.

  “Nunshetu,” he says. “Come sit.”

  In the Unami dialect of his people—our people—he corrects me thus, Nunshetu means a young nursing deer. Grandfather never liked my Christian name of Joshua. He said it means nothing in the language of his people, so therefore it means nothing to him. Such a name fails to befit a boy carrying his blood, the blood of the Turtle Clan.

  Though named and christened in English fashion, it is true I’m not wholly an English boy. All I have to do is peer into the looking glass to see the eyes and cheeks of the first people staring back at me. As the fine down of manhood collects on my top lip, and my face grows boxy and blotched, browning another shade darker with each summer, I no longer resemble the child I once was. I appear the amalgam of two peoples, two worlds, the Lenni-Lenape and the English.

  Perhaps in other lands I might begin to feel this squeeze of difference, that the evidence of my heredity might affect the depth and breadth of my dreams. But as a creature of this unusual time and place, I feel no such discomfort. Father says all I am required to submit to society is the evidence of my character and ambitions, such declares one’s true identity now, for the age of equity and reason has dawned.

  Why it is Grandfather seems blind to such light? Oh, this I suppose I need not question at any great length. No one does. It’s taken as a given that he’s of another age, another way of approach, and he exempts himself of all that changes around him. And bloody good riches to him for it, I say, but why does he also blind himself to me? Pray this war be over, in two years’ time I will go to university and thereafter assume my place alongside Father as a gentleman. Can Grandfather not see that I’m no longer a boy? I am a man—well, as much of a man as fifteen years can buy—but to call me Nunshetu, why, it is like calling a stallion a foal. To say I am named after the great spy and conqueror who led the Israelites to freedom means nothing to Grandfather. But Nunshetu, Nunshetu means something—it means me.

  “Take this,” he says as he hands me his knife. “Cut away the rot. All of it.”

  I proceed in fumbling along the bank, trying ever so nimbly not to latch the toes of my shoes into the mesh and fall. Patches of black speckle the net like the markings of some fantastical jungle cat’s coat. I inch to a particularly fetid section of the thing, and with great resignation I take my place as it is today, alongside Grandfather, and commence excising the blemishes from Grandfather’s prize net.

  “Only the trees remember,” Grandfather says. “Your grandmother and I were first together at a place called Great Eagle Hill.”

  All air deflates from my head, and it droops as my eyes shift at the mere threat of his words, that is to say that there might be more to come.

  “Back then, man and woman went there to be alone, with each other. Eh, your grandmother and I wanted to go too. We were children together. I knew no one better, but as we walked from our village, I knew not what to say to her. Suddenly, things were different, we were not children anymore. So we kept walking toward Great Eagle Hill. Eh, you will know the strangeness one day when you feel it too. Love, Nunshetu, it makes you crazy in the head. Mmm, when we got to where we was going, your grandmother walked on ahead to the clearing, so fast she lef me in the trees. I say’d to myself: Where is she going to?”

  Grandfather laughs. “She turned to me. Her black hair shone like sun-dance on the water, and her face was full of mischief. Butter-flowers, violets, and clover swayed at her feet, and the bluest sky and green wavy mountains were at her back, and at that moment it all looked to me like the Great Spirit had created her first, then everything else around her. I was drunk on her. And she knew it! It is the way of woman, they always know what you think they do not, and it verily amuses them. There I was addled and in need of great mercy, and do you know what she did?”

  I briefly but vigorously shake my head like a dog drying its coat.

  “She called me an old woman and took off running, laughing, laughing how she did. She had the advantage only for my eyes stared too long, but I caught up to her. It was then I saw my chance and pretended to trip, took her down to the ground with me, and we both rolled laughing down Great Eagle Hill.”

  “Who won?” I ask with a most shameful degree of contrived naïveté I pray steers him to more digestible recollections.

  “Me, I won! Maybe she say her too.” He continues mirthfully, “Eh, we laid in the meadow, warming our skin, laughing and smelling of spring.” With a peculiar look in his eyes, the corners of his lips curl, lingering in a satisfied smile. “Your mother came along just after the harvest.”

  “Oh,” I say, averting my eyes. I don’t care to know the illicit details of how my mother came to be, which I fear is to follow, but as if God Himself has fixed to shelter my ears from the salacious telling, I am rescued from my embarrassment by an incredible sound approaching up the road above us. Where they’ve come from, I can’t say for certain. This mob of ill-tempered men presently appear as if born of the woods. They are trickling out from the trees and onto t
he road like some slow-rolling brawl. Quite a thing!

  We stop our work but a moment and watch their traffic through the clearing up the road from over our shoulders. All clothed the way they are, I can’t be certain if they’re from the battle yesterday at Germantown or just townsmen transiting their desperate lives. Both appear the same since the War for Independence began.

  Booms of artillery fire and the ensuing mad scramble of distant unseen men being driven through with bayonets came with yesterday’s dawn and rang through the woods on the other side of the creek, carried far and wide as if the fog had put a lid over the land and somehow concentrated the horror. We had stayed behind doors yesterday, as the shots were too near. But Mr. Evans brought word this morning that the battle had come to an end. General Washington’s army hadn’t fared well, and now as these men lope by, we daren’t ask who they be. It’s best.

  James, the Negro from Carlton’s farm, and his woman, Louise, have met the men up the creek apiece from my parents’ property. Louise is offering the men drinks from brown glass jugs she is passing from one of Carlton’s disused, rickety carts. James is handing the men some form of repast wrapped in what looks to be leaves of an old Gazette.

  Grandfather nods from where he sits,