With which group should I live? What was a group, now, on the Genesee?

I consider my experience; almost every day, as my death approaches, I consider the stories of Corn-planter and of Dr. Knight.

IN HER later years she buried three sons. If she had thought to stay in one place for the sake of her children, some of them took no thought about remaining for her. They left her there, in that place. These were the sons.

The daughters—wise Jane with her seven children, bold Betsey with seven, and lighthearted Polly with just three young ones and no signs of more—lived peacefully within eighty rods of her.

So that sometimes I thought of writing, if I could have written, these words: “I hope that you will all have some daughters. Have at least one daughter.”

VIOLENCE—the hatchet and the knife—and the drinking of ardent spirits marked her sons’ deaths, a violence that seemed senseless, that pointed nowhere. Mary often imagined the deaths as silent set-pieces, since she had not herself been present when her boys received the blows that dispatched them.

Thomas and Jesse died in separate incidents, both at the hand of their brother, John. Two Squawky Hill Indians later killed John. All three of them had become heavy drinkers and drunken fighters. Her flesh and blood, the spirits she had cared for over many years, left her.

I had been touched by, I had recoiled from many acts of violence in my life, but until the deaths of my sons I had not known what violence was. Just before our capture, an older friend had told me, out of my parents’ hearing, that to “know” in the Bible meant to “sleep with.”

To have one’s sons kill each other?

How could I have stopped it? Until now I had in some way or another managed almost everything.

Now, in my old age, have I slept with violence.

SHE SAW in detail the eager faces the boys had shown her as babies. Those curious, small faces where one expression seemed to dawn and then break up and give way to another, those faces floated now always before her eyes.

IN THE first of the tableaux, Thomas comes to pay his mother a visit. He is approaching her house, where he will find not Mary but his brother John. The first thing she imagines is his walk, which is the walk of the proud and intoxicated person who likes to think of himself as in all ways competent. Thomas has drawn himself up as if he is holding his breath, his chest is stuck out, and his hips sway just a bit, for they must absorb the shock, their locomotion must make up for the rigidities he has imposed on his body.

He mouths words to John, who has some renown for curing ills with herbs and whom Thomas both envies and dislikes and has called a “witch” and an “evil spirit.” John mouths words back. Thomas speaks again. Then John picks up his tomahawk, grasps Thomas by the long hair he has always and openly scorned, drags him out the door, and twists the hair so that Thomas must face him.