There Will Be War Volume VIII, page 31
“Surely, that is Logan, the ‘White Man’s Friend’?”
“Shouldn’t we shoot him? He leads the Shawnee.”
“Not yet, you fool! Let the Captain talk first!”
“Welcome him with whiskey!” comes Greathouse’s voice,
“A welcome with whiskey for the White Man’s friend!”
With childish glee the chieftain takes the cup,
Drinking while he confers with the Captain,
Drowning his wisdom in welcome whiskey.
Nervous wide-eyed women watch, picturing
Their children scalped; their cabins smouldering ash;
Themselves tied screaming to the torture-stake.
Logan drinks, and babbles, and goes home sure
That the Whites are friendly, and there’ll be no war.
Even the nervous, watchful women that winter became
Inured to Indians, as, again and again,
Logan returned; they learned to laugh, saying, “Look,
Back for another bottle!” Before long,
His wife comes with the wise one, wanting whiskey,
Bringing her younger boy beside her, and
Big with child, a baby on her back, Logan’s daughter.
At last a time when Logan cannot come:
To his Shawnee charges the chief has duties:
Without the father, his family goes to the fort.
Hurrying off happily, knowing there’ll be
A welcome with whiskey for the women of Logan.
Even the babe at the breast imbibes the liquor,
His mother’s milk mingled with alcohol.
Dozing, drunk in a ditch, Death comes on them.
Greathouse has taken Lord Dunmore’s bright gold,
And now his men to earn their pay are told.
Women and children lie helpless in mud,
Hatchets and skinning-knives are stained with blood.
Ohio River, flow with tears,
For after years the blow
Has fallen. Who is the foe
Of children? Who knows why their death,
Their failing breath and cry
Should be a thing gold could buy?
While women’s wailing wounded the silence,
Cornstalk called the Cayuga Peacemaker.
He came from his cabin, and questions died on his lips.
All Logan’s loved ones were laid in a row:
Bloodied bodies of babes and women.
Cornstalk cursed Cresap while the Cayuga stared.
The Chieftain’s face changed with his children’s death.
Ohio River flow with blood!
A raging flood to show
What seed fear and greed can sow!
April, seventeen seventy-four.
The beginning of Dunmore’s War.
The flowers that bloomed that
Spring Fed on the blood of Logan’s children:
Fed on the blood of Red and White Men:
Blood of innocence, blood of guilt—
To the flowers it tasted the same.
Who could hold back the howling avengers
When Logan leads them; no longer the White Man’s friend?
Well-loved is Logan along the Ohio:
To Cresap’s camp the crazed Cayuga
Brings torch and torture—and triumph for Dunmore.
With all Virginia’s power riding to war,
This is Lord Dunmore’s hour! Proud and cocksure,
He leads his soldiers through the Western hills,
To the border, where Logan kills and kills,
Mourning in madness his murdered children,
Burying in butchery and blood his grief.
Colonel Cresap’s tired troop finds no relief
On their grim retreat through the tangled wood.
Six Nations meet in Council at Thendara:
Settlers writhe screaming at the torture-stake.
Lord Dunmore swells with pride. This day is his!
Naked savages must face cannon and steel:
(He thinks of the Charter, with its great seal,
And all the wealth he could expect to flow
As soon as the valley of the Ohio Virginian land became—and his domain.)
Sweeping down on the bloodstained savage hordes,
The Virginian followers of Lord Dunmore
Bring sabre and musket and cannon’s roar.
The flowers feasted well.
Rifles and roaring cannon wreak destruction
Among charging Shawnee, and shattered they retreat.
Fallen on the field, the father of Tecumseh
Leaves hate as legacy to a later generation:
The wailing of his widow much woe shall cause.
Between White Man and Red, the Great League stands;
The treaty belts for all the North gathered in their hands.
The Onondaga call the Council at Thendara:
Wild Seneca come from the Western Gate,
With concerned Cayuga, the kin of Logan,
And the Youngest Brother, the Tuscarora.
From their rocky homes the Oneida bring
The hymns that settlers have taught them to sing:
And from the Great League’s eastern wing
Come Anglican Mohawks, loyal to the King.
Messengers now leave the Long House,
Bearing belts of peace over forest trails.
Shattered by the shells, the Shawnee gather
Cheerless while their chieftains choose their path.
Cornstalk comes to the Cayuga peacemaker,
Lonely old Logan, lamenting his children,
Proposing a parley for peace.
“What purpose peace with perfidy?”
The chieftain’s face changed at his children’s death;
Now fiercely flashes fire in his eyes.
“I was not at war with the White Man!
Through thirty years their throne I served
Persuading to peace the peoples of the forest.
Now thirty scalps I’ve seized to soothe my heart’s aching:
But thrice thirty scalps will not thaw out my hatred!
Let us fight on forever, until fear of us
Wakes in the White Man such wailing and terror
That they board their boats, and back over the ocean go.
There is no peace with perfidy. Let us paint for war.”
Cornstalk confronts the Cayuga’s raving eyes.
“What, Wise One, would you have us do?
The big knife is before us.
It can kill us all.
Shall we all kill
Our women and children,
And fight on till we fall?
No.
I shall go make peace.”
Ohio River, flow with tears
For all the years that no
Child of Logan’s line may know.
Now messengers from the Long House come running,
With White Men, agents of the English King.
White wampum belts of peace are in their hands.
Between White Man and Red the Great League stands.
The royal envoys seek out Lord Dunmore
To bid him cease his cruel and bloody war.
The League looks now to Logan peace to bring:
Along the blazing border war must cease
Because the League has treaties with the King.
All his life long Logan has served that peace.
White Men have come to bring the “White Man’s Friend”
To Council, so their king may deal with these
Troubles, and bring all warfare to an end.
To treat with Lord Dunmore is Logan’s task—
Such is the message that the Sachems send:
Terms of peace he must at the parley ask.
While White Men wait, the weary chief replies:
Like moaning wind they hear his voice arise.
“I ask if ever any White Man
Hungry came to the cabin of Logan,
And found not food,
Or who came naked and cold, and clothing was denied him?
For the length of the last long and bloody war,
Logan calmly stayed in his cabin, calling for peace.
So loyal was Logan’s love for the whites
That my people pointed as they passed,
Saying, ‘See, there is the friend of the White Men.’
I had thought to have lived in friendship forever,
But for the cruel deed of one man. Colonel Cresap
This last spring, in cold blood and unprovoked,
Murdered all of the family of Logan;
Not even sparing my women and little children.
There runs not a drop of my blood
In the veins of any living creature.
This called on me for revenge.
I have sought it. I have killed many:
I have thoroughly glutted my thirst for vengeance.
For my people, I rejoice at the promise of peace:
But do not think my joy the joy of fear.
Logan never felt fear.
He will not turn on his heel
To save his life.
Who is there to mourn for Logan?
Not one!”
Some say
That Patrick Henry wept:
And that Thomas Jefferson dabbed at his eyes
Where he sat taking notes in a corner.
To have killed the Cayuga a kindness had been:
But lonely old Logan must live six more years.
But the deed went on.
Surly Shawnee gather,
Refusing belts of peace
When the Onandaga call the Council at Thendara:
Demanding with red belts
A hatchet to strike the English.
Angrily the Sachems
Hurl back their belts,
And bid them till the soil.
But the Shawnee defy the League;
To seek white scalps by the side of the river.
But now the White Man’s war is blooming:
The settlers rise against the King in war.
Virginian rebels drive out Lord Dunmore,
Who leaves, as he flees from the rioting bands,
All his gold invested in Ohio lands—
And thus fade into nothing all his plots.
Lexington farmers fire their famous shots.
Between English settler and English King
The war-belt lies, to fill the land with pain;
Partisan cries across the land loud ring.
The Onandaga call for peace in vain.
The almost-English Canienga bring
The red belt of war sent them by the King.
Cayuga and Seneca stalk coldly from the Council,
Vowing vengeance for Logan.
Rebel preachers have taught the Oneida well:
Who stands for the King takes the road to Hell.
He who desires to become a saint
Must fight for the Congress in his warpaint.
Thus, torn apart by the partisan calls,
Drawn into a White Man’s war;
The League is split, the Long House falls:
The Council shall meet at Thendara no more.
A new Deganoweda and Hayenwatha,
Franklin and Jefferson,
Unite the Thirteen Tribes,
To build a second Great League,
In imitation of the first…
But listen, ye who established the Great League!
Now it has grown old.
Now it is nothing but wilderness.
Ye are in your graves,
Ye who established it!
We are met upon the gravesite
Of a million murdered children.
Unknown, unnamed, unnumbered,
Their bones make up our soil.
It is their flesh that fills our gardens,
We drink the tears shed for them:
The air we breathe—their laughter!
But who can mourn an abstract?
Truly sorrow for the nameless?
All statistics of destruction
Are as empty as the sorrow
That is given by convention.
A multitude is faceless,
One cannot mourn a cipher, yet—
Who are we that mourn for Logan?
The World Next Door, by Brad Ferguson
Editor’s Introduction
The total destruction of the human race by nuclear war or by any other means is too horrible for any sane person to truly contemplate. Even in Lucifer’s Hammer and Footfall, we only touched upon the disasters that threatened mankind’s continued survival. The science fiction writer who’s probably come closest to touching the heart of this tragedy is Greg Bear in his novel Psyclone, where the residual “souls” of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki dead collectively pass over the Pacific Ocean to seed their revenge upon the victors of World War II.
I don’t read many horror stories, but I do not remember another as chilling as Psyclone; yet, it only touched upon the fringe of nuclear annihilation. In “The World Next Door” Brad Ferguson takes a different tack; he shows how the death of an entire civilization might well move through time as well as space…
The World Next Door
Brad Ferguson
September 15
Jess told me today his sugar beet crop seems to be doing pretty well. Time was when nobody could get anything at all to grow, much less something as tricky as sugar beets, so Jess deserves a lot of credit… and it’ll be awful nice to have real table sugar again, the white, grainy stuff you could buy at the store. (What was it called? Dominoes? Something like that.) We’re all sick of maple sugar, and the women say you can’t cook with it, except for ham—and we don’t have any pigs around here anymore. It surprised me a little last spring, when the town decided it wanted real sugar so bad, it allowed Jess to turn two acres over to it. Jess raises some of the best corn in the county, and we need all we can get—the eating kind and the drinking kind, both. But sugar is calories, too.
More dreams last night, the crazy kind a lot of people around here have been having. Didn’t sleep all that well myself. Doc says it’s more wish-fulfillment stuff than anything else, like right after the war. I don’t know; these seem different. I remember them better, for one thing. I hardly ever remember dreams at all; now I can remember whole bits of them—colors and smells, too. In fact, in last night’s dream I was watching color television, but I forget what was on.
September 18
A singer named Wanderin’ Jake came through today; he’s from the Albany area. I wrote his news on the chalkboard at Town Hall, and the mayor’s wife fed him well. The news: There were floods in Glens Falls last month, eleven people dead; there’s a new provisional state government in Rensselaer (that makes four that I know of, if that preacher in Buffalo hasn’t been assassinated yet); the governor in Rensselaer wants to send a state delegation to next year’s American Jubilee at Mount Thunder; and there’s been no word from an expedition that set out six months ago from Schenectady, bound for the atomic power plant at Indian Point to see if it can be made useful again. The party is presumed dead.
Wanderin’ Jake led a sing-along in the square just after sunset tonight, and we had a good time, even though there wasn’t much on hand to picnic with and won’t be until we get the crops in. With this climate, we can’t harvest until maybe late October, and only then if we’re lucky and there’s been no rain from the south.
Today I remembered that it was Domino sugar, singular. There was a jingle about how grandmothers and mothers know the best sugar is Domino, which is how I remembered it. It’s strange how those jingles come back to haunt you. Twenty-one great tobaccos make twenty wonderful Kings. Let Hertz put you in the driver’s seat. I like Dee, you like Ike, everybody likes Ike. And you get a lot to like with a Marlboro.
September 25
The town got together tonight to discuss what, if anything, we’re going to do about the American Jubilee. No decision, of course—we’ve only talked it over once—but the thrust of tonight’s meeting was, the hell with Rensselaer and the governor there, just like we said the hell with the governors in Buffalo, Syracuse, and Watertown. What if Rensselaer decides to tax us? We don’t have the crops to spare for taxes, and our town has been doing a good job of hiding away nice and quiet in these mountains.
I also asked if we were going to be doing something about getting me a new typewriter ribbon. The mayor says he wants typed minutes—he says they mean we’re still civilized and a going concern, and he’s not wrong about that—but I’ve been reinking this same damn ribbon for more than ten years, and it’s got big holes in it, especially at the ends where the keys hammer away before the typewriter catches its breath and reverses the ribbon. I’m also running out of ink. I said I’d be willing to go with some people into a big town like Tupper Lake to see if there’s a few ribbons left in the stores there, but the mayor said he can’t spare the people; there’s bandits all over the place and it would be dangerous to go into a big, empty town like Tupper. He said maybe somebody could make a new ribbon for me. I said fine, but where are you going to get a long piece of cotton that’s not falling apart? If I’m going to be town scribe, I told him, I have got to have something to scribe with.
At least we don’t have to try and make paper, which I think would be impossible. The old school’s still got a lot of paper in it. The Hygiene Committee’s been doing a good job of keeping the building free of vermin, so the paper should last. If I don’t have a newspaper anymore, at least I have this journal and the Town Hall chalkboard, so I’m still a newspaperman.
September 30
Another meeting on that Jubilee. Half the town now seems to want to do something—send a representative, hold a picnic, whatever. Maybe they think Camelot’s going to come back. The other half agrees (with me) that the Jubilee is just an excuse to blow the President’s horn for him, and that if it hadn’t been for the war, the President would have been out of office in ’68, maybe even ’64. Giving him a toot for still being in office is an unnecessary reminder of the war, and maybe even a reward for having half-caused it.
I wonder who the ass-kisser was that came up with the idea for the Jubilee? Some general in charge of public relations? At least we know it wasn’t a congressman. If we’ve lost a lot, we at least got rid of the goddamn congressmen.
