Death in the Pines Read Online Free PDF

rug. After another ten seconds or so, he said evenly, “You got something against Native Americans?”
    â€œAbsolutely nothing at all,” I said.
    â€œWhat if some bureaucrat for the state said that the Abenaki or some others had a claim to your land, that you’d have to pay them or give it up? What’d you think then?”
    I glanced around the room at the exposed rough wood, the junk-shop furnishings, and said, “I think I could walk away from this without too many pained memories. Is that a rhetorical question?”
    â€œI’m just curious,” he said. “You learn a lot about a man when he’s faced with a tough decision. So what would you do, if you discovered this wasn’t really your land?”
    What a peculiar evening this was turning out to be. I’d started a topic that Smith seemed unable to leave. What the hell. The cabin wasn’t something I had invested much money in, or even all that much time. I knew a man once who lived on a houseboat and who always said he could watch it sink andthen go on and live somewhere else. And old Thoreau again, railing against possessing land, houses, furnishings:
Things are in the saddle, and they ride mankind
.
    But what would I do if someone tried to take what I had? There is a powerful instinct to defend the cave, to fight against the intruder. And then, for no clear reason, I thought about the woman on the rock. “Smith, why are you focusing on this? Do you know something I don’t?”
    â€œI’m sure they’s a hell of a lot I know that you don’t. I don’t know nothing about your land, though.”
    â€œOK,” I said slowly, thinking my way through the answer, “if the Native Americans who once lived here wanted my land back, I’d work something out with them. I’d like to keep some of it, particularly the cabin, and I wouldn’t want them building a casino next door to me, but I’d work out an agreement.”
    â€œBe easier to just kill them, though, wouldn’t it?” he said with a sudden savage vehemence.
    I stared at him in the light of the kerosene lantern. “And where the hell did that come from?”
    He rocked for a moment, then said, “Well, that’s the way you’ve been handling ’em for the past three hundred years, you white folks.”
    â€œLike me and Joseph Smith?”
    Jeremiah nodded. “He is an ancestor of mine, that’s the truth. And I’m white, probably Irish and Scotch stock. But my wife, Rebecca, was Abenaki, or at least mostly so.”
    I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t think of anything to say.
    â€œShe’s been dead twenty years now,” he said. “One hell of a good woman.” He sipped his wine.
    â€œAll right,” I said. “But tell me about what brought you out here to begin with. Tell me about your grandson.”
    Smith had his face turned toward me, but I had the sense he wasn’t looking at me, just looking back into the past. “He was raised by Susan, our only child. See, a friend of Susan’s got pregnant and there wasn’t any question of an abortion. The girl left the baby over at Susan’s place, that was when she was at Vermont College in Montpelier, and just vanished. Boy was two weeks old. They never did find the mother, and couldn’t even find her family. She was one of those kids, just passing through, you know? The state was full of ’em back then. So Susan got adoption papers, named him Jerry, after me, and raised him. We all thought of him as ours.”
    â€œDoes he know he was adopted?” I said.
    â€œI expect. I’ve never discussed it with him, but probably Susan did.”
    â€œAnd where’s she?”
    â€œShe died of breast cancer two years ago,” he said, his voice blurred. “Seems they’s an epidemic of it in this state. I think it’s got something to do with those injections they give the