Authors: Shelby Foote
They did not see him for ten years. When his name failed to appear in the testimony at the Burr trial three years later, they believed he was dead. “He must be,” the father said. “Otherwise he’d be involved in it somewhere. It’s too wild for him to have missed.” He could have been at the bottom of some creek or river, with a belly full of gravel; that was the way the Trace bandits, Murrel and the Harps, disposed of bodies. But not long afterwards they heard from a planter just returned from New Orleans that he had seen Isaac sipping claret in a Royal Street cantine with Jean Lafitte and Dominique You. “So thats it,” the father said; “he’s a pirate. We should have thought of that at the outset.”
There followed a five-year period during which they heard nothing. Then one of the brothers met on the street in Natchez a ragged man who had fought alongside the missing son against the Creeks at Burnt Corn. A year later they saw Isaac himself.
He had come home to die, and he looked it. Four men brought him off the steamboat and up from the wharf on a stretcher. He was unconscious. Laid out, he appeared even taller than before, but he was considerably gaunted. His eyes were far back in their sockets and he had grown a wide blond beard that crawled with lice. One leg was wrapped full length
in a rag bandage which was stained with suppuration and stank of gangrene. He had been wounded at the Battle of New Orleans — whether fighting under Jackson or Lafitte they did not know, though they thought it was probably Jackson since Lafitte took better care of his wounded than this. After two weeks in a riverfront hospital he had used a derringer to stand off the surgeon who wanted to amputate.
“Youre being a fool,” the surgeon told him. “That thing has mortified, and now it will spread and kill you.”
Isaac did not lower the derringer.
“Then let it mortify in peace,” he said. “If I die I’ll die with both my legs.”
When the surgeon came back that night, intending to find him asleep, Isaac was gone. He had got someone to help him board the steamboat and was on his way upriver, though by the time the boat reached Natchez he was in delirium and barely managed to direct the stretcher bearers to his father’s house at the top of the bluff.
He woke and instead of pain there was warmth and comfort, smooth sheets, and a pleasant feeling of falling slowly through space. Then he recognized the furniture in his room; the ten years might have been a dream. Remembering his leg, he sat up in bed to look for it, and it was there; the only thing that was missing was the beard. He was a year mending. Then he spent another year trying to make up for lost time. But it did not go right. There were still the cockfights and the grog shops and the women under the hill, but the old life had paled on him. He was thirty-nine, a bachelor, well into middle age, and apparently it had all come to nothing.
Then he found what he had been seeking from the start, though he did not know he was looking for it until some time after he found it. Just before his fortieth birthday — in the spring of 1818; Mississippi had entered the Union in December — he rode into the northern wilderness with two trappers who had come to town on their annual spree. This time he was gone a little over two years. Shortly after the treaty of Doaks
Stand opened five and a half million acres of Choctaw land across the middle of the state, he reappeared at his father’s house. He was in buckskins, his hair shoulder length, and he had the beard again.
Next day he was gone for good, with ten of his father’s Negroes and five thousand dollars in gold in his saddlebags. He had come back to claim his legacy, to take this now instead of his share in the Jameson estate when the old man died. The brothers were willing, since it would mean a larger share for them when the time came. The father considered it a downright bargain; he would have given twice that amount for Isaac’s guarantee to stay away from Natchez with his escapades and his damage to the name. He said, “If you want to play prodigal it’s all right with me. But mind you: when youre swilling with swine and chomping the husks, dont cut your eyes around in my direction. There wont be any lamp in the window, or fatted calf either. This is all.”
It was all Isaac wanted, apparently. Between sunup and nightfall of the following day — a Sunday, early in June — they rolled forty miles along the road connecting hamlets north of Natchez. Sundown of the third day they made camp on the near bank of the Yazoo, facing the Walnut Hills, and Wednesday they entered the delta, a flat land baked gray by the sun wherever it exposed itself, which was rare, from under the intertwined branches of sycamores and water oaks and cottonwoods and elms. Grass grew so thick that even the broad tires of the Conestoga left no mark of passage. Slow, circuitous creeks, covered with dusty scum and steaming in the heat, drained east and south, away from the river, each doubling back on itself in convulsive loops and coils like a snake fighting lice. For four days then, while the Negroes clutched desperately at seats and stanchions in a din of creaking wood and clattering metal (they had been warehouse hands, townspeople, and ones the brothers could easiest spare at that) the wagon lurched through thickets of scrub oak and stunted willow and over fallen trunks and rotted stumps. It had a pitching
roll, like that of a ship riding a heavy swell, which actually did cause most of the Negroes to become seasick four hundred miles from salt water.
They followed no trail, for there was no trail to follow. There was only Isaac, who rode a claybank mare as far out front as visibility allowed, sometimes half a mile, sometimes ten feet, and even in the latter case they sometimes followed not the sight of him but the sound of snapping limbs and Isaac’s cursing. Often they had to dismount with axes and chop through. Just before noon of the eighth day, Sunday again, they struck the southern end of a lake, veered right, then left, and continued northward along its eastern shore. Two hours later Isaac reined in the mare, and when the wagon drew abreast he signaled for a halt. A wind had risen, ruffling the lake; through the screen of cypresses the waves were bright like little hatchets in the sunlight. “All right,” he said. “You can get the gear unloaded. We are home.”
Thus he began the fulfillment of a dream which had come to him the previous month. It was May then, the oaks tasseling; he and the trappers had reached the lake at the close of day. While the sun went down, big and red across the water, they made camp on the grassy strip between the lake and the trees. Isaac lay rolled in his blanket, and all that night, surrounded by lake-country beauty — overhead the far, spangled reaches of sky, eastward the forest murmurs, the whisper of leaves and groan of limbs in the wind, the hoarse night-noises of animals, and westward, close at hand, the lapping of water — he dreamed. He dreamed an army of blacks marching upon the jungle, not halting to chop but walking steadily forward, swinging axes against the retreating green wall. Behind them the level fields lay stumpless and serene in watery sunlight, motionless until in the distance clanking trace chains and clacking singletrees announced the coming of the plowmen. Enormous lop-eared mules drew bulltongue plows across the green, and the long brown furrows of earth unrolled like threads off spools. What had been jungle became cultivated
fields, and now the fields began to be striped with the pale green lines of plants soon burdened with squares, then purple-and-white dotted, then deep red with blooms, then shimmering white in the summer heat. In a long irregular line (they resembled skirmishers except for the singing; their sacks trailed from their shoulders like limp flags) the pickers passed over the fields, leaving them brown and desolate in the rain, and the stalks dissolved, going down into bottomless mud. Then in the dream there was quiet, autumnal death until the spring returned and the plowmen, and the dream began again. This was repeated three times, with a mystical clarity.
“Wake up. Wake up, Ike.”
“Dont,” he said, drawing the edge of the blanket over his eyes.
“Wake up, Ike! It’s time to roll.”
In the faint dawn light the lake and forest had that same quality of unreality as in the dream. He was not certain he was awake until one of the trappers nudged him in the ribs with the toe of his moccasin and spoke again. “Ike! You want to sleep your life away?”
For a while he did not answer; he remained half-in half-out of the dream, which was still with him and which he knew already would always be with him. The trappers stood waiting, but he just lay there, looking out over the lake and at the forest. Then he sat up.
“You two go on,” he told them. “This is where I stop.”
He stayed there for three days, alone. A mile back from the lakeshore he found a deserted Choctaw village. The Indians had burned their shacks and gone; there was nothing left except an occasional shard of pottery in the ashes, and grass was already reclaiming the paths their feet had worn. During the past month he had seen them, or others like them, traveling single file, a people dispossessed, the braves in dirty blankets carrying nothing, the squaws with babies and utensils strapped to their backs, going north to land not yet ceded by the Chiefs.
On the fourth day Isaac rode south to Natchez and claimed
his share of the Jameson estate in cash and Negroes. Within two weeks of the night he and the trappers made camp by the lake he was back again, with the ten slaves and six mules, clearing ground and bounding the claim he had registered at the land office and paid for in gold. That was the beginning. During the next ten years he was joined by others drawn from the south and east to new land available at ninety cents an acre with few questions asked. Near the south end of the lake, four miles below Isaac’s property, a North Carolinian named Ledbetter established a general store and trading post. Soon this was flanked by a blacksmith shop and a roadside tavern and hostelry called the Ithaca Inn by its owner, who claimed to have been Professor of Greek at an eastern university but who never enlarged on the circumstances that had prompted his change of careers. He did not stay long and soon no one remembered so much as the shape of his face. But that was no matter; by then the crossroads had taken the name of the tavern. When Jordan County was formed — this was 1827; men were leaving the land, abandoning their claims because of the collapse of cotton economy two years before — Ithaca was the leading settlement in the southern district, but Bristol, thirty miles upriver, had outgrown the earlier hamlet and was made the county seat, the legal as well as the industrial center.
The eighteen hundred acres of Isaac’s original claim were increased to thirty-two hundred in 1826 when his neighbors north and south went broke in the crash. Two years later, though he had named his ten-square-mile plantation Solitaire in confirmation of his bachelor intentions, he got married. It happened almost accidentally. She was the youngest of four daughters; the other three were already married, and she herself was more or less engaged at the time to the blacksmith’s assistant, two doors down the street. Her father, who came from Kentucky, had bought the Ithaca Inn from the wayward professor, and from time to time she took her turn at the tap. Isaac found her tending bar one warm spring evening when
he rode down for a drink. He had seen her before, of course, though he had not really noticed. Now he did. He particularly admired her arms, which were bared to the elbows, and her thick yellow hair, worn shoulder length. That night he had trouble getting to sleep. At last he dropped off, however. He did not dream, but when he woke he thought immediately of her. Whats this? he asked himself. He returned to the Inn that evening, and the next. By then he had decided. He spoke to the father first. “I’m willing if Katy is,” the innkeeper said. The daughter made only one condition. She would not marry a man with a beard, no matter what size the plantation he owned might be. So Isaac was clean shaven at the wedding. It was held at the Inn and the blacksmith’s young assistant was there, bulging his biceps, drunk for the first time in his life. He got into three fights that day, though not with Isaac.
Isaac was just past fifty; the bride was five years less than half his age. Along with the plump arms and tawny hair, she brought to Solitaire the bustling, cheerful, apparently thoughtless efficiency he had admired in the Ithaca taproom. The house, which they moved into on the wedding night, was little different from what it had been seven years ago when Isaac and the slaves first put it up. A cedar shingle roof covered three rooms grouped to form a truncated L and indistinguishable one from another except for the casual presence of a stove to identify the kitchen and a four-poster the bedroom, the whole resembling a combination gunroom, kennel, office, and hunting lodge. It was musty of bachelorhood and cluttered with the incidentals of plantation living, old cotton samples and turkey-wing fans, split-bottom chairs and a Duncan Phyfe highboy, gnawed bones and in one corner half a dozen rusty plowpoints strung on a length of baling wire.
First Mrs Jameson drove the dogs out. There were eight of them, mostly hounds with long sad faces, scrabbling and yelping beneath her upraised broom. Then, commandeering three of the fieldhands, she had the rooms emptied of their
conglomerate litter and scrubbed with lye water, floors and walls and ceiling, until the cypress timbers paled and wore a nap as soft as velvet to the touch. For nearly a week the house was damp and clean, empty of furnishings except for the bed and a box of clothes. She and Isaac left at last for Memphis on their wedding trip. After a single outing, when a clerk in a Main Street store referred to Katy as his daughter, he would not go shopping with her; he was afraid it might happen again. He stayed at the Gayoso bar while she made the rounds of the shops. “Just get whatever you think we’ll need,” he said. “Tell them to send the bill down home.”
They returned to Solitaire five days later, living again in the almost empty house while Katy waited for her purchases to arrive. When the steamboat blew for a landing she was there with four wagons to supervise the unloading. Four wagons, Isaac thought; why four? Then he found out. He watched with amazement her transformation from girl-bride into mule skinner and section boss (all that was missing was the cursing) while the crates off the steamboat were being transported from the landing, along the twelve miles of road that led around the head of the lake to the house on its eastern shore. They were unloaded in the yard, uncrated there and carried in, carpets and draperies, a dining room table, lyre-back chairs and a grandfather clock, kitchen utensils of every imaginable size and shape and even a bathtub, the first Isaac had seen outside a hotel since he left Natchez. He watched with no less amazement, when the work was done and the house was to her liking, his wife’s retransformation back to the girl-bride she had been before the steamboat blew for the landing. He had been in much the same position as a man watching what he thought was a spring breeze develop into a tornado, then back into a breeze again as soon as the holocaust was done. Standing among the new chairs and sofas and hangings and table lamps, she asked demurely: “How do you like it, Mr Jameson?”