Sippicon

Sippicon

by Lois Swann
Sippicon

Sippicon

by Lois Swann

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Overview

SIPPICON closes the mythic circle of a unique Native American and British family divided by the fiery politics of pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts. The woods, the sea, the farm, merchant ships, the church, the university, Venice, London, a Sippicon village, drawing rooms and battlefields are the stomping grounds for iconic characters reaching for independence of soul. The red man and white woman once married now suffering life apart are the catalyst for the action of the novel.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781504917223
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Publication date: 07/14/2015
Pages: 880
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.95(d)

Read an Excerpt

Sippicon


By Lois Swann

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2015 Lois Swann
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5049-1722-3


CHAPTER 1

March 1749


He slipped out of the Massachuseuck hideout. Four days later he stood on the steps of a clapboard house perched above the roaring Atlantic.

He had bled on and off since his dream. His head ached all the time. He quaked in his light clothing, common trapper's clothes, which disguised who and what he was. He knocked. English manners came easily to him since his own more complex ones were the stuff of tribal survival. Grace made him welcome among the foreigners. He spoke their language better than most of them, and read, and, since his marriage to the New-English woman, he had added writing to his skills. As recently as the year before, his finesse and his influence among other tribes and among the traders allowed him the use of Boston's great homes as if they were his club. Right now all he wanted was a corner out of the wind. Wakwa, Silent Fox, as the English said, knocked a second time.

"Renard!" An immense, black-robed Frenchman opened and stuck his face out.

Wakwa dropped to his knees.

The Jesuit looked down the path for signs of companions or pursuers while his hands capped the Indian's head. Then the priest's beefy arms scooped Wakwa inside.

Wakwa gained balance almost smoothly, fighting a ripping of skin. Another man appeared in the hall and the two stood and stared.

The priest talked above their silence. "There was somezing in ze knock. Somezing that move me. And so, I come running like a gatekeeper before ze housemaid. So! Ze Fox is 'ere!"

The native man looked as long as a beam of moonlight and was as quiet. His flesh and bones, face and body, had been drawn by the elegant hand of a different god than the English knew. Wakwa watched the other man who spun down the vestibule at him like slow shot.

"Let me see," came the nasal voice of Dire Locke, agent for the great merchant house of V.T. Kirke, Ltd. He stepped in a semicircle testing the lights in the Indian's eyes. "You're a man still. No one's taken that." Then with pique, "Fledgling sachim still. Clear as a bell. Clear as hell. For a man thirty-five you make a poor fifty. The sap seems frozen in you. I've had only silence from you for over a year. Some rascal robbed your tongue? You've got the look of a fast-stepping foot soldier. Have you been fighting? In what war? And then again, what war could you not win?"

Wakwa swallowed hard.

The spindly, dun-coated man looked the full foot upward to the Indian's face. The shadows made by its structure seemed deep and dark. Locke, quite his senior probed, "Fox?"

The visitor gingerly undid the lacing of his doeskin shirt. He dropped it to the runner of the hall. Against the papered walls, a disfigurement of his torso looked ugly, shocked more than in the woods. "I should have come to you long before this," Wakwa said. "May we talk somewhere?"

Dire Locke's left hand searched for the support of the hallway mantel. The calmness of the Indian's voice and the grossness of his wounds left Locke dumb.

It was the priest who wrapped his shoulder cape around the Massachuseuck with the naturalness of a mother covering her child from the rain. "Venez."

Without knowing the word, Wakwa went after the Jesuit into the heart of Thomas Kirke's Pemaquid house. The room they found was something like the hold of a ship, its greens and blacks darkly gleaming like wet wood, glittering like seaweed or slime or resin under the oil lights. It was the perfect place for confidences or confessions, a place to hatch plots, and Wakwa sat there gratefully.

He looked at Locke. Locke eyed him. The priest padding to and fro, a considerate bear, did quiet service bringing them little cups of black coffee.

Convulsing as his body warmed, Wakwa said, "I have been living in a cave, Dire."

"Whatever for?" Locke, a Welshman and an English Jew with no creed and little use for anybody but his Indians, his French Canadian wife who was now far away, and Thomas Kirke, listened from a hard square chair at perfect point to the room's darkest corner. He recrossed his legs, his bony fingers travelling the chair frame.

"We came to Agiocochook, or, as you would say, the White Mountains, before Nickommo. That was the worst feast time I have had to live through."

"Apparently. Are your stripes the new style in torsos among the Massachuseuck? I don't worry, though. Fashion is fickle. Next year they'll carve marks on you in a downward pattern and you'll have plaid."

"Dire...."

"What the hell are you doing to yourself?!"

"Four days ago I woke from a dream...."

"Should we be glad?"

"It was the pleasantest dream I remember since we came to Agiocochook."

"The White Mountains." Now, Locke knew how to be polite, to perform the verbal calisthenics pertinent to successful discussion with the natives. Yet, the younger man's victimized sincerity made Locke impatient, incautious, inconsiderate, and downright tart. "Don't tell me you were dreaming of a third wife. Looks like two are more than you can handle."

"How can I contemplate a third, wetomp, when I have but one wife left me?"

"Not Qunneke! Not in childbirth?"

"Dire, each woman is in fine health."

Locke twitched and sweated slightly. He wanted to wallop the man for letting himself get into some desperate condition.

"Dire, I woke from a dream so pleasant that I knew it was a day to draw blood."

"Obviously."

"This may seem strange to you."

"Not at all." Locke waved a bird claw of a hand in nonchalance. "Four open and bloody gashes across each of your sides look very smart."

"I woke from my dream. It was cold. I was shivering but between the rocks red flowers were blowing."

"On Agiocochook?" Locke broke in, giving the Indian some of his own medicine.

But Wakwa's honey voice proved unequal to some reminiscence. The brass clock ticked a minute away. Then - "I made a light for myself and went back into the cave to find my knife."

"The old obsidian?"

"None other!"

They savored it until Locke concluded, "One thing constant, praise Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."

"I beheld a narrow thing slide across my foot."

"Eh?"

"I stepped backward and a muscle, one outside myself, free of any body, rose up the back of my leg."

"What?"

Wakwa's tiny cup rattled in its saucer. "I must have lain next to them the whole night. In the belly of the mountain. The cave had been clean in winter but spring had come without my seeing it, I am so distracted, and eggs must have been all about. I had been dreaming such pleasant dreams, all the while making warmth for nests of snakes' eggs. Caressed, perhaps, by the mother snake. Caressing her curling babies. Mayhap I broke open the shells as I slept."

"Stop! This is horrible! I will not watch you in this condition!"

"All night I had been feeling ... she was there."

"She?"

"I stood among the snakes in the early morning watching them weave in an out, and I wondered why it is my life has become one of bursting open beds of serpents."

"Has it?"

"Dire! I let them take her."

"What are you talking about?"

"I gave her away. Gave her back."

"Back? Back! You gave back ...? You don't mean the land heiress? Dowland's daughter? I can't believe it! What for? This was ideal love, I'd heard."

"I deserve everything you say to me."

"I say good riddance to her! I told you when it began it were no good for you. Never work. So much for the power of Eros. You are well shed, should be dancing in the streets not habitating caves!"

"Dire! I am a fugitive. An outlaw."

"No. No." Dire's nervous hands baffled the air in front of his face. "I won't hear it. I won't have it!"

"Dire!" The priest came out of the dark and claimed those hands. "Listen to him! He is telling you!"

Wakwa leaned toward them. "My journey from Sweetwood to the tribes near here two winters past, fourteen moons ago, but a year and two months before today, was laid bare before the court at Boston."

"No!" Dire and the Jesuit rejected it together.

"Every man who walked with me to talk to the northern tribes is as good as dead. All their families are listed as enemies of King George."

The priest took to the walls.

Locke said, "You didn't do a damned thing but chit chat. Where's Beckett, your famous solicitor?"

"Dire, "chit chat" with any Indians about the state of things is not allowed in the Treaty of Submission. You know that."

"You knew it too!"

"Then what could Michaelbeckett do?"

"How much is he paid? For the last couple of years, Sachim, you have been hell-bent on being a hero."

"I was a man then."

"And now the Crown has got you by the loin cloth. No protection due from His Most Canny, Most Thrifty Highness now that you've passed the time of day with some northern cousins over a French and English fence. There's the Treaty. Very neat."

"I shall change all this."

"I find you a flawed character much to my surprise. Integrity seeping right out of the stripes on your sides. What reason or right had you to be a Messiah with a beauty like Qunneke to vanquish all your life!"

St. Aubin, the priest, lashed out at Locke. "Merchant! Moron! Shithead!"

"Pipe down, Your Excellency." Dire was at no loss. "Of anybody I know on this bloodthirsty coastline you have the most to gain from spilling Fox's bowl of beans. You and your puppety, Popish Indians. Watch your tongue, for I'm watching your turf."

They were unlikely housemates. The Jesuit headed the local French fur trade; Locke dealt with the trappers on the English side. More than an anomaly in the political tide of 1749, sharing Kirke's house was a complicity that could have gotten Claude de St. Aubin and Dire Locke hanged. But who was around to see to it? The unruly times helped their breach to go practically unnoticed and certainly unattended. In Claude's and Dire's way of thinking, a man had to have some basic rights. And it was clearly better to keep Kirke's house in full use than not, to indulge harmlessly their mutual appetite for intrigue, to supply each other with a competent whist opponent when and for as long as they were in the same vicinity. Locke picked up a little pocket money besides on courtesies having to do with the Trade, packing, portages, and the like. Moreover, as Wakwa proved, they had friends in common.

"Do not quarrel, Pereclaude and Dire. I know who gave the names."

"Then let's go get him!" Dire howled.

"Too late!"

Dire Locke watched Silent Fox with a certain distaste. He did not like to consider that this Wakwa, Wakwa Manunnappu, literally, Black Fox Who-waits, son of Pequawus, the Gray Fox, the wisest man Locke had ever known, nephew of Waban, the Wind, the eagle-souled strongman of the Massachuseuck, was mortal, subject to error, weakness, or naïveté, and not to be relied on absolutely. Locke traced the tip of his thin nose, his lips, his chin with his forefinger. "Why did you not contact me?" And then he had all he could do to hide his pleasure in the Indian's answer.

"And dirty you and Thomas Kirke with my troubles after all the years you and he have fed my tribe?"

To be considered more important to a man's way of life than his wife was the supreme flattery. It was also correct in a factor's way of thinking. Locke did not preen. He saw Wakwa examining his own words.

Pain crossed Wakwa's face and he confessed, "These sides of mine show where she held me as she was ripped from my arms." He bent to look and he touched the open flesh and shuddered.

"She ... she...."

"You are all about the bush! Why can't you come out and say a thing anymore?"

"I must not."

"What!"

"I am never to pronounce her name again."

"What horse shit is that?"

"The holyman forbids her and her name to me."

"You are suddenly religious."

"I walk through the camp and the people whisper after me."

"I don't wonder."

"They see her hand on me because I keep these wounds open where she held me when they pulled her away. They know I am in pain and I continue in their service. Her name I do not say burns in me like a salt. The longer I am silent with it the better the tribe holds together."

Locke shot out of his chair and faced the wall.

The priest lumbered over. "Renard! Do you blame the little English lady for your debacle? And do they?"

"Priest, I have killed two men over all this since last we met. And so has her uncle, Gilbert Worth."

"Zheelbert!" Claude rocked back.

Locke twisted around from the waist. "Who are the dead men?"

With a satin voice Wakwa answered, "Gilbert's two were Indians who were on my trail.

Mine were an Indian and Annanias Hudson."

Turning away again, Locke said, "Wasn't that the Sweetwood preacher? The man she was to marry before she ran across you? You had her. What did you bother with him for?"

"Friend, it was he gave our names away to the English."

"Ahhh! Then you did all right."

"I did not kill him for that!" Wakwa came to his feet. "My heart may be turned into a swamp but of this I never lose sight - I ended him not because he betrayed me and mine, not for what he did to my life with her!"

"What the hell else could he have done?"

"What is the worst thing a man can do to a woman?"

Locke had handy a barrelful of glib retorts but he did not dare to ridicule this friend. He gave it a minute. Turning, he said, "Stick her for his proving ground?"

"Most brutally."

"How did he get to her?"

"After I gave her up."

"Oh, ho." Locke did not even blink. "Did you make a good show of him?"

"I did."

They linked arms.

"I promised her father that life among us would never injure her. My promise was forfeit with that Information to the court. The truth is, I have ceased to be. I am barely alive. I watch out for my children's sakes. I live in them. I do not see her family. I must never see ... again."

Claude softly separated Silent Fox from Dire. "Shhh. You and I must talk! You have all zeese matters mixed up together. What is past is past. You cannot deny so pure a love as you 'ave. Be 'appy! The future belongs to the constant heart."


* * *

Evening came to the Maine coast wrapped in fog. The cold, bright air gently turned gray and was company for the fishermen closed off from the world until dawn. The near-night bestowed grace through silence, its silver shoulders pressed close up to everything.

The three men in Thomas Kirke's house did not notice the change outside, yet they lowered their voices. Violent emotion slipped. Their wit sparked from nearness to one another like the kindling in the grate.

Wakwa sat in a big chair taking small bites of the dinner Locke had arranged. The agent drank wine poker-faced. St. Aubin watched his creamed cod and chewed his Vespers over.

Locke matched fingertip to fingertip. "Fox, why did you say you should have come to me much sooner?"

The Indian put down his dish and said, "We are friends. You help me to think."

"Claude, are you getting through there?" Locke looked uneasy.

"I 'ave 'ad enough!" Claude snapped his Breviary shut.

"You are a bad priest." The imp in Dire said.

With sour solemnity, the Frenchman took up the black book again.

Dire lifted the brush of conversation and began to paint Indian-style. "You cut me to the quick, Sachim."

"How is that, old friend?" Wakwa's newfound serenity was sullied.

"You may think it selfish in me, but the fact is, Silent Fox, you are a supplier of mine. I represent you and your labors to V.T. Kirke Company, Ltd., ergo you merit my attention, time, and advice for the amount and quality of the furs you bring to trade, or, as in our last agreement, the ginseng you carry to Wareham. On the basis of some trade or other one amasses experiences, which if friendly, constitute friendship. Take Claude and me. For a terrifying sum of money I provide him with certain of his requirements - a decent house, wonderful food, if only he would eat instead of pray, my own packers for his peltry, not to mention my occasional and sparkling company. As for me, I receive the money, yes, but also his amicable abuse, he chasing me up and down the halls with a chastity belt, for one example, and in general being laudably obnoxious within the realm of his Frenchness. Thus we relate to one another in trust and understanding.

"You, my Silent Fox, I have not seen in a year. From you I have received no communication. There has not been a shred of fur or a measly man root presented to me by you personally, or through any henchman of yours. I have been left holding the bag, empty, as it were, of fur as it is of friendship. What have we got between us anymore?"


(Continues...)

Excerpted from Sippicon by Lois Swann. Copyright © 2015 Lois Swann. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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