Hamilton Stark by Russell Banks

neighbors, our friends,
Christians
, men and women who knew your father from his childhood and who chose to believe a heathen Indian chief, an Animal, a Dusky Beast of the Forest, one of Satan’s own henchmen, before they would believe the Lord Himself, before they would believe even the wife of the slain man, for I told them, Josiah, just as I am telling you, have told you, will go on telling you, for I must strengthen you against the burden you will have to bear in this village as you grow into your boyhood and young manhood, strengthen you with the truth, so that someday when you are grown you will be able to redeem your poor father’s stained memory and return his name to its rightful place of respect and honor among Christians, and though the people of this village choose not to believe me, I know that you will believe me, and thereby will come to know the truth of your father’s life and the grandeur of his death, for I am the only one who saw it, I andthe Beast who slew him, we two are the only ones who know what happened that morning, yet people have chosen to believe him because they wish to believe him converted, they wish to obtain credit for his conversion, when in fact it’s
he
who has converted
them
, and they know it, they must, they cannot truly believe your father would leave his wife and son, his infant son, alone in the wilderness, just disappear into the woods, like a fox, the Indian said, that’s how he said it when they asked him, What happened to Lemuel Stark? they asked when the Heathen had learned to speak a few words of English in that
awful
way of theirs, enough to pretend he had converted to Christ, and he told them, Like a fox, into the woods, we talk and him go like fox into woods, gone, big smile on face, smile like fox, Horse told them, and they all looked at each other and nodded, yes, how true, how sad for his wife and son, to desert them at their hour of greatest need and dependency, but they
forgot, they forgot that I saw your father leave
, Josiah, that morning, the dawning of our second day in this wilderness, for we were all camped out on the shore of the river, near where Dame Edna now lives, very early in the morning, just at sunrise, and the mist was floating low over the dark, nearly still water, and I opened my eyes and saw your father rise from his pallet beside me, and before he left my side, he whispered that he wanted to look at the mist and the still water and watch the light change as the sun rose, for your father was a tender man, not a coward, a deeply tender and God-fearing man, though he was not a man who talked easily of his Love of God, not like these others who now surround us, he was a
true
Christian, a quiet man tender enough to wish to see the sunrise his second day in the wilderness, in the valley where he had chosen to build his home and live out a peaceful God-fearing life in the comfort and love of his family, and so eager was he to watch the lightchange as the sun rose over the river that he walked away from the camp alone, carrying only his musket, doubtless in the event that he saw some game, a deer or rabbit, that he could bring back to share in camp with the company of people he thought were his friends, all of them people from the town he had been born and raised in, people he had known all his life and with whom he had joined in this venture into the wilderness, and I lay there next to his pallet with you at my breast, and I smiled up into his broad face, and surely, as surely as God is in His Heaven, as surely as anything on this earth exists, I would have known if that man was going to leave us, was going to walk off and disappear into the forests, leaving behind his wife and baby, alone, without money or possessions, with nothing but a seven-hundred-acre plot of rock- and tree-covered land in the wilderness, I would have known that, such things cannot be hidden, they are too horrible, too inhuman, for me not to have known that, a man’s wife knows