love, was what made him run from that pitiless Indian chief, that Beast of the Forest, the one they call Horse — the ugly one you have seen in the village, the same who now claims he is Christian, yes, but who cannot be, or he would confess publicly what he did to my husband, your father, and be hanged for it or thrown in a pit and slowly pressed by stones until he is crushed beneath them, forgive me, Father, for the force of my anger, I know that revenge is Thine, yet I cannot bear that the savage who slew my husband, the father of my son, I cannot endure that the murderer is allowed to walk easily about the village and forest like any Christian and loyal subject of the king, and if I cannot have revenge, and I know, Lord, that to continue lusting after it would only lead me sinfully to envy what power is rightfully Thine, but if I cannot have revenge, if I cannot see that savage pressed to death by stones, cannot throw the final, crushing, bone-snapping stone upon him myself, then I shall at least make sure that you, my son, know the truth, that you know your father loved you and was no coward, that you know he was not afraid, no, and that you know he now resides in the bosom of the Lord and is looking down on us, surely, and weeping at our plight and the way his good name has been smeared with mud and filth by that savage, the one called Horse, yes, my son, he would weep to see us now, his good wife and baby boy living alone on the land below the very mountain where he was cruelly slain, here on the plot of land he purchased with his honest toil the year before you were even born and a full year and a half before I myself even saw this place, this bleak and ungiving plot of earth, this scab, this mountain-shaded rockpile where the winds come all year long and bring us disease, chills, agues, where we must wake every gray morning and look out onto the mountain where your father ended his all too brief life in courageous defense of your life and my honor, for that is how it truly happened, my son, not as the savage, the heathen, Horse, would have it, no, and not as those in the village would have it, those who wish to believe that the heathen is converted so they can gain credit for it in Heaven, we both know who they are, my son, and why they choose to believe the Animal instead of the knowledge that God Himself has placed into their darkened hearts. They choose Satan, and God will surely loose His rage upon them for it, my son, just as surely as He will protect and comfort thee and me in our distress and despair, here in this tiny cabin where every morning we must wake to shade, winter and summer, shade cast by the heathen as much as by that mountain. You must not cry, Josiah, for the Lord is our shepherd, He will comfort us, the Lord and His truth, and the truth of your father’s love for us, his bravery, and the treachery that followed, what we should expect from Savages but not what we should have expected from our 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 and the 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 light change 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 certain things about him that no one else may ever know, and oh, Josiah, oh, my son, I would have known if your father, that early morning when he stepped into the bushes at the edge of the clearing by the river, were deserting us, were leaving us here to choose between scratching pitifully in desolate and deprived isolation on this land or enslaving ourselves to the charity of a village that would sooner believe an Indian’s version of a tale than a man’s own true wife’s version, and I saw his face as he left my side, Josiah, I saw his face, remember that, for that’s how I know the true story of what actually happened once his square-shouldered form had disappeared into the tangle of bushes at the edge of the clearing, I know what happened then, I know that he was set upon in cunning silence by Horse and a band of blood-thirsty Abenooki, and I know that your father, instantly deciding that the Indians would be able to overcome and slay the party of sleeping Christians, chose to run instead of fight, chose to lead that pack of savages as far as he could from the place where his friends, his young wife, and most important, his baby son, lay sleeping, and so, indeed, he ran, a strong young man who, you may enjoy knowing, was a well-known runner, once said to be the best long-distance runner in the entire colony of Massachusetts, a man who could run all day long, from Hopkinton Green all the way to Boston Common once in only a little over two hours, thought by some to be a miracle, thus when your father decided to run from those savages, he was not behaving in a cowardly manner, oh, no, he was instead choosing to employ against them the strongest weapon he owned, his ability as a runner, which he was to use so effectively that no one would ever know of his decision, of his great bravery and love, so that the very people he saved from death, and worse, were later to deride your father’s memory and to pity me, pity, pity a woman and child they should honor instead, as the wife and son of a hero, the only hero this village has so far produced and probably the only one it ever will produce, unless it be a son of Lemuel Stark or a son destined to spring from that seed in some future time, a hero who will know the truth of Lemuel Stark’s life and death and therefore will not believe the fiction, who will know instead that Lemuel Stark courageously led the ravening pack of Abenookis along the river and away from the camp all the way to Blue Job Mountain, where, tireless, he ran ahead of the savages, who, like hounds with one replacing the other as the lead hound grew tired, pursued screaming behind with axes and knives and other murderous devices brandished above their heads, led that pack up the side of the mountain that towered above the very plot of land he had chosen for a homesite, led them up the tortuously brambled and tangled path to the craggy top, where no trees grew, where the cold winds scraped every living thing away, scourging it, leaving only boulders, crags, and the sky above — and there, at last, he turned and faced his pursuers, for there was nowhere farther to run unless he could leap into the sky, and to accomplish that, he needed his murderers’ aid, which they eagerly provided, first the brutal, sly Horse, then each of his followers, like Brutus and the vicious Romans, one after the other sinking his dagger into your father’s body, a dozen, a hundred blows, each of them mortal, so that after the first blow your father’s soul had flown away to Heaven, releasing him from his torn and bleeding body, leaving behind, atop the mountain, a pack of satanic savages tearing at a mere chunk of flesh, while far below, by the river, a gathering of Christians were beginning to wonder where their friend had gone, and a wife was beginning to worry that something terrible had happened to him, and an infant son was beginning to wake hungrily from his peaceful-sleep…”