Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [75]
Yet we had things to do on this other holiday. Within the hour, after coffee and a bite of Precious Sally’s best Sunday cake, a wonderful rich mixture of eggs and butter and certain secret spices—“Not giving away my secrets,” she said when I inquired, by way of praising her cooking—cousin Jonathan and I set out on horseback for the woods.
I was seated on Promise. I knew not the name of his steed.
The woods! The woods! Not a place where I was either yearning or prepared to be! Although the sun had scarcely risen above the height of the tall bushes the heat had already become intense, bordering on excessive.
“You must live an exciting life up there in your New York City,” my cousin said as we rode along.
“Yes, yes,” I said, straining to keep my seat upon the fast-moving beast.
“As you have seen, we live our quiet life out here in the country and visit the city now and then, perhaps every other Sabbath. And I can do it only because I know that almost as soon as we arrive we are going to be returning home. While I know I must have shown a certain amount of pride when we took you around the city, I have to confess that I never stop at those places we showed you except when we have a guest such as yourself, which is rare. Most of the time I am here, with now and then a visit to the synagogue. When I was younger I did now and then visit the auction. Now my excursions occur mostly in my reading of history, something Father encouraged in me ever since I was a boy, and my outings to hunt and fish. Such as today’s.”
“There is Rebecca, is there not?”
“Oh, yes, I nearly forgot. She would be furious with me if she knew I had forgotten to mention her.”
He laughed a deep laugh, and it had such dark bass notes to it, that it made me wonder why I had not heard him laugh that way before. The trail narrowed and we slowed our pace so to move single file, and so I gave myself over to the buzzing of the insects and the sound of our horses’ hooves upon the spongy track and the creaking of their bones and muscles, and my own wondering. What if we kept on riding, how far could we go? Past the river, west toward the mountains of Tennessee, whatever those mountains were called, and then keeping on to the west until we reached the Ohio territory ahead, where Indians roamed and men lived freely in the open or under leaning roofs to keep off the rain and snow?
Out of the razzing of the insects and the shushing of the wind in the treetops I might possibly make out the thousand voices of strange tribes, whose ways and mores intrigued me much more than the people among whom I was born or those I met. I could hear their horses, tethered in large numbers outside their huts. I could hear, ever so faintly in the distance, the cries of their hounds. If one passed through these Indian lands, I wondered, what might be the chance of survival? And wasn’t there beyond them a great river that one had to cross, and mountains upon mountains, to reach the shining Pacific? Oh, I was dreaming, dreaming far ahead of myself, as it ultimately transpired! As I hope I have made clear, I saw myself as a Europe-man, ready for my Grand Tour that lay on the other side of the nearby Atlantic. (Not even thoughts about the family’s abode down in Curaçao, which came up now that I had met uncle and cousin, could bend the line I drew in my mind from New York across the Atlantic to points east. Do not distract me, Caribbean, for I am, within a few weeks or a month or two at most, was how I saw it, Europe-bound!)
“This is the place,” my cousin said, disturbing my geographical reverie as we broke out from beneath the trees into a glade filled with sunlight with the river running gaily to the north of it. We dismounted and tied our horses to trees on the edge of the clearing and fetched water for them from