8
T
HAT NEXT SUMMER IN VALLEY RIVER, I WAS NOT MUCH OF A BUSINESSMAN
. Nor did I crack a lawbook. Mostly I concerned myself with the slight weight of Claire’s breast in my hand, the echo of a new poem from
The Congaree Quarterly
or
The North American Review
in my head, the mute colors of long sunsets, late suppers at Cranshaw lit with a great many spermaceti candles. Later, the spin of stars across the night sky as I rode home, for I never overnighted at the plantation.
Featherstone poured wine in great profusion that summer, and I knew enough of the trade by then to judge each bottle’s considerable value on the open market. He bought only the best. Champagne in the afternoon and claret in the evening. He poured French wine like it was worth no more than the pure heavy springwater that rose cold and free from the ground. His library was also free, and I read from it with equal intoxication. Poe’s
Tamerlane,
Byron and Blake, Brockden Brown’s vivid ridiculous novels. Sidney’s
Arcadia
seemed particularly to the point. Nothing made Featherstone happier than to see Claire and me reading, whether slumped in the lawn chairs on fair days or with a low fire going in the parlor when it rained.
On fair nights, Featherstone burned sparking head-high fires in the yard and sat at the edge of the light and drank the last of the wine and talked about astronomy and quizzed us on our current reading matter. When he eventually wandered inside to sleep, Claire and I went to the river and stripped to the skin and made squeaky love neck-deep in the cool water, with the morning fog already settling around us onto the black face of the river, my feet wedged deep between round stones and her legs tight about my hips.
Afternoons, Claire and I roamed the valley countryside in Featherstone’s cabriolet and stopped when it suited us to grasp and fumble into each other on the tucked and rolled leather seats and also on mossy stream banks and out in the middle of the river on boulders with white water rushing on either side and rain falling at a slant from the sky and hissing around us or else the sun beating down hard and the river smelling like all of the valley—earth and stones and plants—had been steeped into a tea from the rainwater that ran down the slopes to make the river. We made love so often under the open sky that Claire became brown all down her breasts and belly and also her arced ass and faintly downed thighbacks. Previously, in May, all those parts had been luminous white, the ridiculous clothing of a young lady having been designed to ensure that under normal circumstances the only parts of her person the sun ever touched were the backs of her hands, on the occasions when she ventured to remove her gloves, and her face, when she tipped it out of the shadow of her bonnet’s brim. I suppose I must have been equally brown, though all I remember is one uncomfortable night with my ass so sunburned I had to sleep on my stomach and the next morning surreptitiously rubbing myself with the juice of green tomatoes, which is a well-known palliative in such cases.
THE MORNING BEFORE
summer solstice. I worked my hands down into the oak-split basket of dusty forked roots and stirred them around and judged them all to be sound. Poured them into the hopper of the scale and finger-tapped the weights from side to side until I achieved balance. Noted the weight and current value in the ledger beside the man’s name. Flying Squirrel.
I said, You want credit or cash?
He stood looking down at the floor, uncertain. As if we hadn’t done this about a dozen times recently.
—Credit, he finally said.
I wrote down fifty cents in the book and handed him his basket. He walked out and I followed him onto the porch. Claire was sitting in the store yard astraddle a horse I didn’t recognize, bulging panniers behind her saddle.
—We’re going to the bald and we’re going to sleep up there three nights of the full moon.
—We are? I said.
She talked English, and though Flying Squirrel claimed not to understand a word of it, he looked at me funny and then went on out to the road and looked back again and walked away.
Claire said, Shut this place up. Get Waverley tacked and let’s go. Come on.
—Featherstone? I said.
—Gone a-roving, not to return for a week at the inside. As much as a month at the outside.
I packed a pair of saddlebags and threaded the stock lock through the staple on the post door and clicked it fast and left a note.
Be back shortly.
Time was measured differently back then.
We set out on horseback up the trail to the Lizard Bald. Claire led. And all the way, I watched her hair fall against her back and admired the way it caught the light and shifted with the movements of her horse over the raggedness of the trail. The passway was full of rocks and went tacking up the mountain and we crossed the creek a dozen times. The leaves on the trees hung heavy and dark on the limbs from all the moisture. The whole world smelled like pulling a mossy smooth stone up from a creekbed and inhaling its fragrance. Toward midday the sky was like blue cloth faded nearly white from many washings, not a cloud in sight from horizon to horizon. By afternoon it rained out of black clouds like pouring piss from a boot, a common simile the tenor of which I have never understood. And afterward it was so foggy in the woods that you could hardly see your horse’s ears ahead of you. Then the sun began setting, casting yellow and red beams through breaking clouds. Twilight went on for such a great while that you began to suspect night might not fall at all. If there was a time of year to be young and roaming the mountains, this was it.
We reached the bald at moonrise and built a small fire. We had decided not to cook and ate only water crackers with soft cheese and hot-pepper jelly I had brought. And four new peaches that Claire contributed, which we ate out of our hands like apples, fuzzy skin and yellow flesh both. And then we lay in a nest of quilts in the long grass and watched the Green Corn Moon ride slowly across the luminous arc of sky, looking so much bigger and softer than any of the winter moons that you could hardly believe it was the same orb. The horses grazed in the distance with the dew dark on their backs. I remember, sometime before dawn, Claire shrugging from the blankets all naked, her bare shoulders and tapered back blue in the moonlight, the tall grass silver and fallen over in long heavy skeins like a woman’s hair. She wandered out to take in the view and came back under the blankets shivering, dew-wet all down her legs. We lay talking all night together until the first color of morning, and then we slept an hour or two, and when we awoke, everything below was a white ocean of fog. We boiled coffee atop one of only a few sunlit islands. And then the fog lifted out of the valleys and the folded world revealed itself and went on as far as the limits of sight permitted.
We spent three such nights sleeping out on the bald, living like angels, high above the corrugated world, bathed in various hues of light from dawn to dawn, privileged to be young at the highest pitch of green summer. We had taken little food and a single pot and a few blankets, but many books. Had it been rainy, we would have been miserable. The days, though, were blue. And the nights silver, lit by the briefest full moon of the year, arcing so bright across the sky that we read by it, both of us mad with words in whatever form, poems or tales. Sometimes we read to ourselves and sometimes to each other.
Much later, journalists and travel writers would discover these mountaintop clearings and find them irresistibly mysterious. Their summits were among the tallest in the East but not elevated enough to reach a tree line in this temperate rain forest. Some of the balds comprised scores of acres, wide bright meadows of tall grass and wildflowers, forming sudden dramatic openings to sky and distance out of the dark canopy of forest. Bear said all the balds were made by a giant flying serpent, and I’ve never come up with a better explanation of them, though I’ve tried.
Those three days and nights I had the best of both worlds, in that I had Claire and yearned for her at the same time. I looked down through the blue air, onto watersheds and dividing ridges and far ranges, and thought myself to be king of all that summer country.
Decades later in life, deep into aching middle age, I held deeds to most of the land I then saw, all the way to the longest horizon, stacks of papers saying all that summer country was mine. But of course, all the paper in the world was nothing in comparison to those three days.
UP ON THE BALD,
young as we were, we sometimes tried to joke about marriage. But mostly the jokes didn’t work. Age was not the impediment. Teenage brides were common. In fact, if a girl was exceptionally desirable, she frequently became bound to an old man of thirty-five or forty or even older who could give her a place in the world. Such marriages were business transactions wherein the bloom of youth was traded while it still had value in exchange for a life’s security.
For us, however, the law was the issue. My state did not much care what mixtures or degrees of dark people wed one another. Among themselves they could go at matrimony however they saw fit. People in gradations of skin from the color of an eggplant to that of a chicken egg were free as the birds in the sky. But the state placed severe restrictions on whom a white person could marry. Minor fractions of darkness undetectable to the human eye were given significance to the extent that a drop of blood in a bucket of milk was sufficient to keep lovers apart.
Claire and I somewhat enjoyed the fact that the state prohibited us from ever joining in wedlock. Just talking about it made us feel like outlaws, which at that age seems a desirable condition. We’d break off kissing, lips all swollen and reddened, and she’d swear that the law suited her fine. She’d take nobody for a husband but a rich old man of vague race with money to burn. Some dusty-colored man with property and a big house with crystal chandeliers and suits of black clothes and hardly more Indian in him than she had. One drop of blood in a bucket of milk. Their children would come out so minutely fractional as to be a living confusion to the law. And when she was done with her fantasies, all I could swear fidelity to was bachelor freedom unto death. A long string of women stretching from here into withered senility.
And then, a minute later, we’d declare undying fealty to each other, and it seemed like bitter fetters to acknowledge the limits of the law.
—Does it address the Chinese? Claire said.
—I seriously doubt it, I said.
—So they wouldn’t deny you a Chinese wife?
—Well, they’ve probably not thought of it yet.
—It’s just a matter of time.
—Who you are is who
you
think you are, I said.
She leaned and kissed me as if I’d said something sweet and dear. But what young man wants to be sweet and dear rather than moody and mysterious?
She said, No, it’s not that way at all. Most of the time it’s who
they
think you are that matters.
I said, As long as we’re dreaming, there’s always Georgia. They’ll marry anybody down there.
And it was true. Whatever mix of bloods the bride and groom had between them, they could cross the line and ride Georgia’s pig-track roads to the nearest court town and find a drunk preacher or a sober magistrate willing to marry anybody in exchange for five dollars. That was the kind of place Georgia was. Wide open all the time. And then, of course—even apart from the laxity of Georgia customs—marriage was occasionally a casual thing on the frontier. People sometimes just said to hell with the state and called their own selves married and went on about their business for the rest of their lives.
—Maybe we’ll get up in the morning and just go to Georgia, she said. No one would need to know but us, she said. It would be like a secret promise. We could just come back and go on as if nothing had happened.
—But we’d know, I said.
—Yeah, we’d know.
But we didn’t go to Georgia, not the next day or ever. And I’m not sure how my life would have worked out differently if we had.
WHEN WE LEFT
the bald, we came down Deep Creek, and for a while at elevation the laurel was still blooming. We could not allow a wide place in the trail to pass without riding alongside each other and letting our hands touch. At such a moment of conclusion later in life, I would inevitably have felt a sense of failure, an overwhelming gloom in the knowledge that days such as those three were done and gone forever. But back then I simply exulted in the false but glorious knowledge that life would be exactly this way from now on. I wasn’t different from anybody else. I took youth as a special pact with God.
And as proof that endings were not endings, Claire reined up at a wide bend in the creek, a place of deep black water punctuated with green rocks, and went bathing. We both did. And afterward she lay drying in a patch of sun, stretched out long and naked, resting on her elbows, a spill of cream on a bed of green pigeon moss. Morning dew still stood in bright beads on the moss, and the creek water similarly beaded on her skin. Her nipples were drawn tight, stippled and cinnamon. She sat up and twisted the water out of her hair. And though I generally think that human beings are among the least beautiful of God’s creatures—I mean, just look at us, and then look at fox or crow or trout—Claire at that moment was as beautiful as people get to be.
—You ever feel like an apostrophe? she said.
—An apostrophe?
—Just a little faint mark to stand in for something more complete. A place keeper. A convention. Barely more than nothing.
—No, I said. Maybe a dash or a hyphen sometimes. Now and then a set of apostrophes.
—I was not exactly joking, Claire said.
She slipped off the moss bank into the water and sank to her chin. She slicked her wet hair back from her brow and her face was pale and bare.
—You are not very happy, are you? she said.
—What?
—Alone. An orphan. Few friends. Only prospects. Which are rarely more lasting than yellow butterflies in September.