Chapter One

Mansfield, Ohio, December 1834
JOHN’S STORY

 

For half the year, the hills and the farms are easy. The two fingers of the Mohican River were touched by God with fertility, as surely and whole hog as the rambunctious Adam and Eve. The town that grew there was just as fecund, producing farms and businesses and population with rapidity that at first intrigued the local red men, then perplexed and alarmed them.

I got there in 1832. I was in my fifties, then, and a little less patient than I had been in my youth. No, maybe that’s not the word. I was patient to watch things grow. I was unforgiving—that’s a better word—unforgiving for things that grew bad. I could nurse blight or bugs from my plants but that was a natural, God-created competition. What people do is rarely that.

Where I lived before, in Warren, Pennsylvania, was showing signs of smoky, noisy blight. Too many forges, too many mills, too much hammering, too many people hollering to be heard, too many horses complaining, too many cartwheels turning, too many youngsters shouting and crying and getting yelled at.

Too much civilization.

I worked on a sheep and goat farm nigh the Allegheny River and wasn’t attached to a thing but the earth. I would always stay out until sunset and took that moment to look west and admire what remained of the uncorrupted work of God. I would go to my shack, then, and read the Good Book by the failing light before joining my employers, the elderly Brandons, for supper in the main house. It was over apple pie one night that I announced my intention to leave. I hadn’t planned to say that, hadn’t even planned to go; it just, suddenly, felt right. I waited till a replacement could be found and set out on a spring morning, at dawn, with just a rifle, my Bible, and a grain sack generously filled with produce I had grown.

It took me about six months to arrive at where I didn’t even know I was headed. I was meandering west and Mansfield got in the way. I planted myself there for two reasons. First: the soil was so rich I wept when I touched it. I swear, if there were seeds, those tears would have grown them. It was like God had sent me a vision instructing me to work this land. Second: that good earth was the only sign of God in the region. Oh, people had dutifully built two churches, but few parishioners passed through their doors and the parsons lacked enthusiasm. One of them told me he had agreed to this sinecure just to be close to Pittsburgh for when some aged clergyman there hung up his frock.

“I want to be in a real city,” he told me, “with real sin.”

I was not sure how the padre meant that, but I decided to trust the calling and not the man.

With more faith than planning, I elected to use what money I’d saved to buy a small plot, plant my own fruits and vegetables, and use the unsteady old barn for Bible meetings.

I did not grow up prayerful. I was born and raised on a small farm in Massachusetts before, during, and after the War for Independence. We were the people who constantly broke the king’s peace, and we suffered the first and enduring wrath of the Redcoats. Floggings, hangings, deprivation of goods and services. I learned to shoot at a young age—at game, since my pa was off fighting. I learned to work the land. When the war ended and pa didn’t come back, me and my younger brother Nathaniel stayed on till my ma went too. From sadness, I believe. She was the one who had turned to the Holy Book and found solace in its lessons. I often sat by her as she read, more for her comfort than mine. She taught me reading and soon I was reading to her—right up till the end.

Nathaniel apprenticed with a granite-carver—he had the stocky build and arms for it—but I did not want to stay. The spirit of freedom smelled too much like blood. It still does, only then—well, then I was younger and thought a new place would clean it from my nostrils. I picked and hunted my way through New York and into Pennsylvania. I read verse by the light of many a campfire. I felt the presence of God Himself under the million eyes of night—the stars above and the lesser ones lurking in the shadows, “all kinds of living creatures” that were created amidst the innocent coming of the world. I stopped in Warren, partly to share my faith but also to put my hands in soil again, to make things grow. When the choke of man became too great, I departed.

You know of my reaching Mansfield, about me growing food outside the barn and over the next two years, one by one, then two by two, and eventually in groups of ten or twelve growing souls inside the barn. They grew me too, a community of loving souls as surely my God had intended. Eventually, I fell hard in love with a member of the flock: Mrs. Astoria Laveau, a New Orleans–born widow who used her inheritance to found and run a library.

I knew how to read, but it was there, from her, that I learned how to read. How to understand what was in the mind of the writer, why words were chosen just so, why some writers described everything in detail and while others did not. Why some stories were told by narrators and others were not. A world opened for me, and with it, my heart opened, too.

Everyone, if they’re lucky, has love. She was deeply mine. She was spiritual. She had all those many books—not a day went by that I did not learn from her. She was worldly and desirable, yet we did not cross into sin. Not that I did not desire it. I went to kiss her, one time after a springtime walk, but she bowed her forehead to me. It was love-made-chaste . . . at least, for me. Alas, when I finally summoned the gumption to propose an official courtship, I was spurned. Astoria said she loved me as a preacher, as a friend, as that accursed word “brother,” but not as a man. I learned that at the same time I was considering betrothal she had feelings for another man, a blacksmith. It was just gossip, whispers, until they came to a dance together and I saw how affectionate she could be within the bounds of public decency. My heart stopped beating for anything but getting away.

I left carrying what I had left Massachusetts with. It was nearly winter, last winter, and at my age and lack of girth, it meant the only direction I could plausibly head was south.