It was such a day in a national forest just south of the city. An old man stood in the threshold of his curious abode, a treehouse battered and precarious as a secret boys’ club. He did not know how long he had lived there, and he wondered why he no longer fouled the shack with excrement, but he didn’t wonder very hard. He sniffed the fragrant western breeze, and he inspected a few pine needles, blackened at their points as if winter had been a brush fire. The young perfume in the air produced no nostalgic hefts in the heart beneath his filthy matted beard. The vaguest mist of pain like lemon squeezed from a distant table caused him to squint his eyes: he scraped his memory for an incident out of his past with which to mythologize the change of season, some honeymoon, or walk, or triumph, that he could let the spring renew, and his pain was finding none. His memory represented no incident, it was all one incident, and it flowed too fast, like the contents of a spittoon in recess jokes. And it seemed only a moment ago that the twenty-below wind had swept through the snow-laden branches of the second-growth fir trees, wind of a thousand whisk brooms raising tiny white hurricanes between the dark of the branches. Beneath him there were still islands of melting snow, like the bellies of beached and corrupted bloated fish. It was a beautiful day as usual.
– Soon it will get warm, he said out loud. Soon I’ll begin to stink again, and my thick trousers which are now merely stiff will become sticky, probably. I don’t mind.
The obvious problems of the winter he hadn’t minded either. It hadn’t always been that way, of course. Years (?) back, when some fruitless search or escape had chased him up the trunk, he had hated the cold. The cold seized his shack like a bus stop, and froze him with a fury that was positively personal and petty. The cold chose him, like a bullet inscribed with a paraplegic’s name. Night after night he cried out in pain during the freezing appliance. But this last winter the cold had only passed through him in its general travels, and he was merely freezing to death. Dream after dream had torn shrieks from his saliva, imploring the name of someone who might have saved him. Morning after morning he rose from soiled leaves and papers which comprised his mattress, frozen snot and tears in his eyebrows. Long ago, the animals fled each time he broke the air with his suffering, but that was when he screamed for something. Now that he merely screamed, the rabbits and weasels did not frighten. He presumed that they now accepted his scream as his ordinary bark. And whenever this fine mist of pain made him squint, as it did on this spring day, he stretched open his mouth, torturing the knots of hair on his face, and established his scream throughout the national forest.
– Aaaaaaarrrrrrrgggggghhhhhhhh! Oh, hello!
The scream switched into a salutation as the old man recognized a boy of seven running toward his tree, taking great care to wade through every drift. The child was out of breath as he waved. He was the youngest son of the keeper of a nearby tourist hotel.
– Hi! Hi! Uncle!
The child was not a relative of the old man. He used the word in a charming combination of respect for the ancientry and a rubbing of the forefingers in Naughty, Naughty, for he knew the fellow was shameless, and half out of his head.
– Hello, darling boy!
– Hello, Uncle. How is the concussion?
– Climb up! I’ve missed you. We can get undressed today.
– I can’t today, Uncle.
– Please.
– I haven’t got time today. Tell me a story, Uncle.
– If you haven’t got time to climb up you haven’t got time to listen to a story. It’s warm enough to get undressed.
– Aw, tell me one of those Indian stories that you often swear you’re going to turn into a book one day, as if I cared whether or not you were successful.
– Don’t pity me, boy.
– Shut up, you filthy creep!
– Climb up, oh, c’mon. It’s a short tree. I’ll tell you a story.
– Tell it from up there, if you don’t mind, if it’s all the same to your itchy fingers, if it’s half a dozen and six, I’ll squat right where I am.
– Squat here! I’ll clear a space.
– Don’t make me sick, Uncle. Now let’s hear it.
– Be careful! Look at the way you’re squatting! You’re ruining your little body like that. Keep the thigh muscles engaged. Get the small buttocks away from the heels, keep a healthy space or your buttock muscles will overdevelop.
– They asked me if you ever talk dirty when the children come across you in the woods.
– Who asked you?
– Nobody. Mind if I pee?
– I knew you were a good boy. Watch your leggings. Write your name.
– Story, Uncle! And maybe later I’ll say maybe.
– All right. Listen carefully. This is an exciting story:
IROQUOIS
ENGLISH
FRENCH
Ganeagaono
Mohawk
Agnier
Onayotekaono
Oneida
Onneyut
Onundagaono
Onondaga
Onnontagué
Gweugwehono
Cayuga
Goyogouin
Nundawaono
Seneca
Tsonnontouan
The Iroquois ending ono (onon in French) merely means people.
– Thank you, Uncle. Good-by.
– Do I have to get down on my knees?
– I told you not to say bad words. This morning, I don’t know why, but I informed the Provincial Police about us.
– Did you tell them details?
– I had to.
– Such as?
– Such as your cold freakish hand on my little wrinkled scrotum.
– What did they say?
– They said
