Darkness Rising (The East Salem Trilogy) (16 page)

“We know she was talking about Satan, and we’re pretty sure she was telling us something was, or still is, going on at St. Adrian’s,” Tommy said, turning to Ben. “That’s a local private school. So here’s what we’re left with . . .”

World Religions for a thousand, Alex! Anyone for a little game of dodge ball? Dodge one, dodge all . . .

World Religions for a thousand, Alex! It’s both the question and the answer, Alex. The beginning and the end—what more do you need to know? Potpourri for one hundred, Alex—this common element is something you pass, but that’s asking a lot. Make your way with all haste and look not behind you, ’cause you never know what’s sneaking up on you, Satchel Paige! Baseball for two hundred, Alex—this Sultan of Swat is the boy’s best chance! Native Americans for five hundred, Alex—this Native American sorcerer’s black magic killed the daughters of Hiawatha.

Question #1: How does Abbie know about the school?

Question #2: Dodge ball? What?

Question #3: Beginning/end, question/answer, same thing?

Question #4: What about salt?

Question #5: What does “Don’t look back” mean?

Question #6: Babe Ruth?

Question #7: Who is the Native American sorcerer?

Tommy gave them all time to read the statement and the questions.

“This is better than paper,” Ben said of the Smart Board. “I liked that drawing the children did better, though.”

“It’s saved,” Tommy reassured him. “I think we can probably just think about questions one through six. Ruth said she had some information about number seven?”

“Well,” his aunt said, moving to the computer and resting her hand gently on the mouse. “I have to say, I feel a bit odd talking about Native American history with an expert like Mr. Whitehorse here. Maybe he should be the one telling us about Hiawatha.”

“You go ahead,” Ben said, “and if I have anything to add, I’ll jump in.”

“I can’t say I know how this applies to poor Abbie,” Ruth said, “but I can tell you a little bit about Hiawatha. For starters, let’s throw out anything you knew based on the poem by Longfellow. I don’t know where that man got his information, but I think he made a lot of it up.”

“I think so too,” Ben said.

“My primary sources were a book called
Ancient Society
by Lewis Henry Morgan, published in 1877, and a book that’s more local,
The History of Cortland County, New York
by H. P. Smith, published in 1885.”

Ben suddenly sat up straight.

“Is everything okay?” Ruth said.

“Yes,” Ben said. “I’m sorry. I thought I heard something.”

“What I can’t seem to find out is whether or not Hiawatha was a real person,” Ruth continued. “I have various sources placing him in the tenth century, the twelfth, the fourteenth, and the fifteenth. Neither Morgan nor Smith is able to say for certain whether or not Hiawatha was a legendary human or simply a legend. Ben, would you know?”

“Yes,” he said, smiling. Ruth waited but Ben remained silent.

“At any rate, the historical Hiawatha is credited with uniting the Iroquois Nation in this part of North America, which is something New York children study in fourth grade, so I’m sure Thomas can recall. Thomas? Can you name the five tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy?”

“Oh man,” Tommy said. “If I knew you were going to call on me, I would have sat in the back row.”

“Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca,” Dani said. She offered Tommy a mock
So there!
smile.

“I knew that,” he mumbled.

Ruth clicked on a link to a map of New York State prior to the arrival of Europeans, with an estimation of how far the Iroquois Nation had spread.

“But Hiawatha didn’t do it alone,” Ruth said. “He had help from a man named Deganawida. Did I pronounce that correctly, Ben?”

“The
g
sounds a bit like a
k
in Iroquois,” Ben said.

“Well, this is about all I have,” Ruth said. On the screen they saw an ancient Indian pictograph, the photograph taken in Leatherman’s Cave in a state park called the Ward Pound Ridge Reservation about five miles west of East Salem. The drawing showed, at the bottom, five groups of people in a line from left to right, each paired with some sort of designating totem, and above them two human stick figures holding hands.

“The Leatherman was an early nineteenth-century hermit,” Tommy explained to Ben. “Nobody knows much about him, other than that he dressed in hides and lived in a cave. They don’t even know his real name. He was a white man. I’ve done a trail run past his cave.”

“At first they thought he’d done the drawings in the cave,” Ruth said, “but they brought in some experts who established that the pictograph was definitely pre-Columbian. They can’t say for certain, but they think it was done somewhere from 1000 to 1200 AD.”

“Every year they have a 10K race in the park called the Leatherman’s Loop,” Dani told Ben, “where you run through mud and across freezing streams and up rocky trails. You have to be completely insane to run it.”

“Tommy ran it three times,” Carl said. “He won it twice.”

“You don’t have to be
completely
insane, but it helps,” Tommy said. “You were saying, Ruth?”

“Deganawida was also called the Great Peacemaker or the Man of the North,” she said. “Deganawida means ‘Two River Currents Flowing Together.’”

“Sken-nen-RA-ha-wi in Mohawk,” Ben said.

“Thank you. Apparently he came from somewhere north of the Great Lakes. Hiawatha and Deganawida are credited with forging an alliance among the five tribes that lasted for hundreds of years. It had a stable agricultural economic base, shared defense, and limited representational government—rather advanced for pre-Columbian North America.”

“What’s the reference Abbie Gardener made to the ‘black sorcerer who killed Hiawatha’s daughters’?” Carl said. “Isn’t that what she was trying to warn us about?”

“Well, again,” Ruth said, “I’m not going to be able to separate fact from fiction, but according to the legend, the black sorcerer who killed Hiawatha’s daughter was a fellow named Thadodaho. His name translates as ‘entangled.’ He was an Onondaga chief, apparently, said to be deformed, with gnarled arms and legs and snakes in his hair. Like Medusa, I suppose. He led his people into cannibalism and self-destruction. But I think maybe Mr. Whitehorse would know more about him than I do. Ben?”

Ben studied the picture for a moment, then took his hat off, smoothed his hair back with one hand, and replaced the hat.

“I can tell you the real story,” he said. “What you’ve been able to learn is very good, Ruth Gunderson. I’m impressed. Tommy, I think your aunt is the answer to question number six. She’s the Ruth the old woman was directing you to. The knowledge contained in a library is the boy’s best chance. And I think you’re the boy.”

“I can go with that,” Tommy said.

“Most of what the books say is true, as far as it goes. How do you think it could be possible for a man to have snakes for hair?”

“I assumed that was figurative,” Ruth said.

“Why did you assume that?”

“Well . . .”

“You’re right, of course, that it’s not possible for a man to have snakes for hair, but if I heard a story about a man with snakes for hair, I would assume that he was not a man.”

“Thadodaho wasn’t a man?” Tommy said.

“I think he may have been a man at some point, but then he chose not to be a man,” Ben said. “If he let the Wendigo into his heart, he would have been driven by something that wasn’t human.”

“What do you mean?” Dani said.

“I’ve heard it said that he was Onondaga originally,” Ben said. “But the people he led were not the Onondaga that we think of today. They were cannibals. They decorated their lodges with the heads of their victims. For hundreds of years they ruled that part of the world because of their violence and their brutality and hatred. Other people fled to be as far away from them as they could get. They had no idea of goodness until Hiawatha showed it to them after he defeated Thadodaho.”

“Hiawatha and Deganawida,” Carl added.

“Yes,” Ben said. “And it was Deganawida who taught Hiawatha the ways of peace. Then Hiawatha taught the others.”

“He was a Huron?” Dani said. “Why did they call him the Man of the North?”

“That was where he was from, but he wasn’t Huron,” Ben said. “He was from farther north.”

“He was an Eskimo?” Tommy said.

“Not that far,” Ben said, “but you’re getting warmer. I think you probably know a name for other men who came from the north. Some of them may be your relatives.”

“Norsemen?” Ruth said. “Do you mean Vikings?”

Ben nodded.

“That’s . . .” Dani couldn’t think of the word. She needed one that combined
ridiculous
and
obvious
, so she said, “That’s interesting.”

“You can look all this up,” Ben said. “The Vikings sailed to America in the year 1002.”

“Leif Erikson, right?” Carl said. “They found some archaeological proof of a Viking settlement in North America. They called it Vinland.”

“
Leifsbudir
,” Ben said. “That was the village they created. He was an outlaw, but when he went back to Norway for a visit, he became a Christian. He made all the men on his ship become Christians too. By the end of the first millennium, Christianity had spread to Norway. Before they became Christians, the Vikings were not very nice people. No offense.”

“None taken,” Tommy said.

“Christianity was the end of the Vikings,” Ben explained. “Leif Erikson was still a Viking and an explorer, and he wanted to see the country to the west. So he set sail from Greenland with thirty-five men and explored America, including the St. Lawrence River and Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. But when he got back to Iceland, he only had thirty-four men with him. It’s in the records.”

“One died?” Dani guessed.

“Nobody died,” Ben said. “They kept very good records. They had paper to write on. I was telling Tommy what a great thing paper is. Erikson left one man behind.”

“Deganawida,” Carl said.

“That’s what the people who already lived here called him. He stayed behind to spread the Word of God and to bring the salvation of Christ to the people he met and to tell them the stories. The Man of the North was the first missionary to the New World, centuries ahead of the others who came later.”

“Two River Currents Flowing Together,” Tommy said.

“And the man he met who helped him was Hiawatha,” Dani said. You’re saying the Iroquois Confederacy was a Christian movement?”

Ben Whitehorse stood and walked to the Smart Board, which was still showing the pictograph.

“He converted Hiawatha to Christianity. You can see in this pictograph
the five tribes,” Ben said. “This box with the sun on the left is the Seneca. They were the Keepers of the Western Door. This turtle represents the Cayuga, the People of the Swamp. These flames are the Onondaga, the Keepers of the Fire. This stone is the Oneida, the People of the Standing Stone. And this box with the sun on the right stands for the Mohawk, the Keepers of the Eastern Door.”

Ben stepped back for a moment to let his lesson sink in.

“Thadodaho sought to destroy the alliance to protect his power. There was a great battle, but in the end, Thadodaho was driven away. Before he left, though, he summoned the Wendigo to kill Hiawatha’s daughter.”

Tommy saw Carl grimace at the idea of a man losing his daughter.

“‘Suddenly, with a mighty swoop,’” Ruth read from a book she held open, “‘a huge bird, with long and distended wings and a pointed beak, came down and crushed the beautiful child to the earth. Despairing and desolate, Hiawatha remained for three days prostrate upon his face on the ground. Everyone present shared the old man’s grief.’ That’s from H. P. Smith’s
The History of Cortland County, New York
.”

She stopped and they all looked up when they heard a noise, a scurrying and scraping of nails or claws above them.

“Oh my,” Ruth said. “I think we’ve got squirrels in the attic again. I don’t mean that as a euphemism. This time of year, as soon as it gets cold out, they start looking for a warm place to spend the winter. Mice too.”

“What happened to Hiawatha and Deganawida?” Carl said. “I guess what I’m asking is, what happened to the Word they were preaching?”

“Thadodaho gave them a disease before he was driven away,” Ben said. “I think it might have been smallpox. They knew that if they didn’t quarantine themselves, they’d give all the people the disease, so the two of them went away.”

“What happened to Thadodaho?” Tommy asked. “And the Wendigo?”

“Demons don’t die,” Ben said. “You can damage the corporeal forms they take but not the spirit that animates them. Only angels can do that. I’m sure that when the body Thadodaho was possessing died, he found
another one to occupy. He went into hiding after he was driven away and didn’t come out again until he thought it was safe.”

Dani looked uncomfortable. “I have to ask,” she said, “are these just stories, mythologies that tell a fiction, or are you saying they’re true? Is what you’ve said one out of several possible explanations?”