A FEW NIGHTS LATER,
Claire came to me just past sunset. It was raining and she was soaked. After her horse was settled in the corral, I built the fire higher and made a pallet of quilts and blankets on the floor in front of the fireplace. An autumn thunderstorm drove across the ridges to the west. The sky flashed outside the windows, casting brief light across the floor in blue trapezoids partitioned by the black shadows of muntins. Rain drummed on the shakes. We went at each other with incandescent yearning, all the bleak hopefulness of youth manifested in our grasping and clashing.
Afterward, Claire lay on her stomach with her forehead on her crossed forearms. I could have looked at her in the yellow light and smoothed my hand over the swell of her rump forever. But she soon sat up cross-legged with a quilt loose-draped around her shoulders shadowing everything but the foremost curves of her breasts lit by the fire. She sang in its entirety a recent song she had learned, “Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms.” When she was done, she pointed out lines of lyric that she found especially rich in poetry, particular configurations of words that carried a freight of emotion for her. And also lines of risible sentimentality. And then when she was done, she sang “The Cavalier,” a recent lesser song which I found marked by tedious excessive plot. A young man goes at night beneath a young beloved lady’s window. He finds a rope ladder and thinks it is meant for him. But she has used the ladder to elope with someone else, though the mechanism by which he discovers this is left unexplained. On his way home he composes a song within the song. The refrain of his composition expresses the opinion that, as far as he is concerned, such ladies as his former beloved may go to Hell or to Hong Kong.
When we were done with criticism, we had a second go at each other. And then she reckoned she might spend the night with me.
—And as to your father? I said.
—Father?
—Featherstone.
—He’s not my father.
—He’s not? What is he then?
—I’m married to him, she said.
I could have died right on the spot.
—Married?
—It’s complicated.
—Nobody ever said.
—Nobody ever said not. And I don’t recall you asking.
I sat thinking a long time. I had made certain false assumptions.
I said, Have you ever slept with him?
—Yes.
—Well, that about covers it, then.
I rose to go. An awkward moment of poking feet into trouser legs, feeding arms into shirtsleeves. I was not sure where to go, since we were at my place. Nightwalking. Roaming out fearless into the malevolent universe. Running full speed into the dark until I slammed into something hard and jagged enough to open my head up. Spilling my pink brains, which apparently would be insufficient to tan my own hide.
—But he’s never fucked me, if that’s the question you meant to ask, she said.
She reached and took my hand and pulled me back down onto the warm quilts and told a story.
SHE HAD COME
to Featherstone as part of a marriage arrangement, a deal under the old ways in which she was thrown in as an unwanted bonus. Featherstone had come riding along the road in front of their house near sunset one day. He was half drunk from a bottle of black Barbados rum that he had been nipping at all afternoon to ease the boredom of the journey between his plantation at Valley River and the new capital of the Nation—which was still mostly an empty field and hopeful marks on a plat map. A previous wife had recently died, and he had blood in his eye to take another. As he passed their farm, Claire’s older sister, Angeline, was sitting on the bottom step of the porch, twisting the water out of her newly washed hair. It was a beautiful sight, and Featherstone said to himself, at that moment, I’ll have to marry that girl.
There was no courtship to speak of, only negotiation. The mother was a widow and such a minor fraction Indian that she had blue eyes. She was thirty-five years old, still somewhat pretty, and eager to see if life had anything left to offer her. She set terms and stuck to them against all of Featherstone’s counteroffers and bluffs, during which he threatened to walk away from the table. Finally, he agreed to her deal, the only one she had ever offered. Aside from a substantial cash payment, the mother insisted that to get Angeline, he had to take Claire, then a skinny girl of eleven. During that entire period, all the notice Featherstone took of Claire was that he once gave her a linty stick of striped candy from his coat pocket.
Featherstone did not come for them himself, nor did he send a carriage. An old African—with stiff arthritic hands, clawed and big-knuckled, holding the reins—pulled up in front of their house in an ox wagon. The canvas cover swagged in loose articulated arcs over metal hoops, the fabric grey and stained with use. It was the sort of conveyance in which you would haul dusty sacks of milled corn.
The man’s sunken lids drooped over yellow-whited eyes. He spoke only fragments of English, and those few with a heavy West African accent, but he made it known that he was to fetch them to Featherstone. Angeline was disinclined to clamber over the tailboard of the miserable wagon and ride like produce to market. As far as she was concerned, the deal was off. This was not what she had been led to expect. Her new life was meant to be otherwise than this. But the mother would not hear of it. She argued that perhaps all of Featherstone’s several carriages were in use that day. He had much important business to transact. They should all wish to accommodate, to show an attractive willingness.
Claire held her arms by their elbows, crossed and clenched beneath the narrow ribbed space of chest where her breasts would be. She looked off in the direction of a haystook by the pole barn where a pair of grey striped kittens played at hunting. They stalked and pounced on whatever small things moved in the loose hay.
The argument continued until, eventually, Angeline wore down. She fell silent. The mother said, Well, get on. The girls clambered awkwardly into the high wagon, and the driver poked the oxen with a stick. The pale blurred shapes of their similar faces and identical sharp grey eyes looked out from under the dark shadow of the wagon lid as they rode away.
After the wedding, such as it was, Featherstone, to his credit, had loved the older sister without reservation and taken her as his true wife, and Claire became a mere dependent, a daughter of sorts. Then after two years, Angeline died of yellow fever. Featherstone grieved her passing and had never, even after several years, come creeping to Claire’s bedroom late at night.
—So why have you slept with him? I said.
—It is a complicated relationship, Claire said.
—Complicated?
—Yes.
—To me, this is complicated.
—What?
I gestured with both hands toward her, still sitting naked with the blanket around her shoulders.
She didn’t say anything back in actual response but only asked what time it was. I went and looked at my watch, not yet a gold Jurgensen, and when I told her she said, They damn. She yanked her clothes on and went and would not allow me to ride even partway home with her.
9
T
HREE MORNINGS LATER, WAVERLEY WAS GONE. THE CORRAL STOOD
empty and breached. The four peeled poles that slid into augured holes in posts to make a gate lay tumbled on the ground.
Not much was left from the old pony-club days, but some of the young men still ran stolen horses across the Nation to sell in neighboring states. And whenever some of the youngsters went horse stealing, they knew Featherstone would give them a place to overnight their string, and if they were in a real scrape they knew that, out of his stable of blooded horses, he’d provide the mounts for them to escape on. He saw it as a civic duty worth the risk to himself for the improvements pony-club outings effected in the character of the young men. So if you were missing a horse in Valley River, Cranshaw was the logical place to start looking.
THE GROOM WAS
nowhere to be seen, and all the other slaves must have been busy. I could see a few of them building a run-in shed off at the back of one of the pastures and some others working in the apple and peach orchards on the far hillside. So when I walked into the stable yard, Featherstone was alone, tacking a mare. He wore his whiteman riding clothes. A dark coat, tall black boots, pale breeches, and a wide-brimmed Panama hat. At his waist a wide belt with a sheathed Bowie knife hanging from it.
Featherstone looked at me and said, Be with you momentarily.
He kept on about his business, working slowly with a great deal of fussiness in regard to settling the bit, a harsh twist of bright metal with long shanks, in the mare’s mouth. He buckled the throat latch underneath her jaw, got the saddle all adjusted and the girth tightened and the stirrup leathers lengthened one hole on each side—and then, upon reconsideration, put back to their original positions. Finally, after some process of decision that—judging from the changing expressions on his face—could have gone either way, he added a martingale.
I stood and waited.
When Featherstone had mounted without the aid of a block and was about to ride off without another word, I said, I’m looking for that Waverley stallion of mine. He’s gone missing.
—Haven’t we already done this? Featherstone said. It was a long time ago. You were looking for a horse at my hunting place. Years ago.
—People’s horses find their way into your corrals pretty regularly. It’s why I came here first. Maybe you recollect mine. A bay stallion. You’ve seen him standing hitched in your stable yard about a hundred times.
—A lot of horses come and go. I don’t pay much attention. But there isn’t anything here that answers to your description right now. Not stallions, anyway. There’s a horse over there in that third corral looks something like what you’re talking about. He’s a gelding, though.
I walked out to the corral and saw Waverley sorted in with a half-dozen little speckled horses of indeterminate breed. He still bled down the insides of his hind legs.
I stood there a minute and then started patting my pockets like I might find a pistol if I kept looking. And if I’d found one, I’d not have been able to hold back from shooting Featherstone out of the saddle where he sat. All I remember thinking was that I’d sooner die than let this pass. I declared it to myself as a vow.
I walked back to where Featherstone sat waiting, the mare bobbing her head impatiently and trying to back away from the bit.
—You care to climb down off that horse, I said.
—Great God, are you going to try to claim that gelding? I reckon there’s hardly any horses between here and the Mississippi that’s safe from being declared yours.
—That one’s all I’m claiming, I said. Just about everybody between here and Wayah will bear me out.
—Oh, shit, am I ever in a pickle now. Up against a man with Indian witnesses scattered all through the big dark woods. That’s just grand. I guess there’s nothing for it but that I’ll have to get me a few witnesses of my own. An even dozen shouldn’t be hard.
He reached up and felt his forehead with the back of his hand like checking a child for fever.
—There, he said. I feel better already.
—Difference is, I wouldn’t have to pay mine to back up a lie, I said.
Featherstone dismounted, and when he was good and off, standing with the reins in one hand and looking all bright and interested in where this might lead, I walked up to him and hit him square in the mouth with all I had. Still, I did not knock him down but just stepped him back two or three paces until he caught his balance. He dropped the reins and the mare went walking off unalarmed toward the other horses in the corral. His hat lay on the ground.
Featherstone put his hand to his mouth and bled between his fingers. He took his hand down and looked at the blood on it and then felt his lips and probed around his teeth with his bloody fingers. Then, so quick I hardly realized he’d moved, he’d yanked the broad upcurved blade of the Bowie from its scabbard. For a pair of heartbeats, it sang like a tuning fork as he held it to the light.
I wanted to take to my heels, but I stood inside myself and waited. I was unarmed and at least thought fast enough to say so.
He first looked like that fact didn’t have a bit of bearing on his next act, but then he thought on it and said, I’ll get around to killing you for this later.
He put the knife away and spit a red gob onto the ground. He pulled up a wad of grass and wiped his hands. It took him an undignified minute to pick up his hat and chase down his mare. He adjusted his hat on his head and mounted and rode away without looking at me again. The knuckles of my fist were already swelling, and the first two had split open like the skin of an overripe tomato.
DUELING IS A
kind of courtship, codified and fraught with etiquette, but with the ultimate ceremony designed to effect the irrevocable parting of two lives rather than their wedding. The consummation serves to channel rage as marriage does the practice of sex, and with the same goal—to confine damage to just the two principals.
Now dueling is a thing of the past, and welcome so. But back then it was all the fashion, like an inexplicably popular new idea about the shape of hat crowns or the cut of lapels. Men of the dueling class, which is to say anyone who was a gentleman or wished to be considered one, often entered into affrays for the slightest reasons. Andrew Jackson, when a young backwoods lawyer across the mountains in Jonesboro, fought one of his several duels when his opponent expressed a poor opinion of Jackson’s favorite lawbook. And that fight was not a singularity in regard to silliness. Men fought because one gave the other a look passing in the street. And they also fought because one
failed
to look at the other while passing in the street. Men held their honor like a wild bird’s egg cupped in their hands, a beautiful little thin-shelled brittle thing, ready to break at the slightest breath of insult. But, of course, nearly every custom, no matter how risible, has its good points. So I’ll say this for dueling, it worked a remarkable improvement on public manners, since knowing that any number of men you might encounter were willing to use pistols to address the slightest affront, and a small minority of them could snuff a candle at twenty paces, tended to moderate one’s behavior considerably.
In the past four decades, the number of people claiming to have seen our duel firsthand has swelled to the point that one imagines a vast crowd requiring draft-beer vendors and women boiling peanuts and frying chitlins in black iron pots for their accommodation, as at the public hanging of a prominent murderer. And many of those claimants have told their stories of the day in great detail, some in print. The accounts vary considerably, and I have collected them over the years in my journals and in my memory. I, however, have never spoken or written about the
rencontre,
and neither did Featherstone or either of the two seconds before their deaths. And I don’t intend to say very much here to set history straight, other than to make a few random observations, mainly about the preliminaries.
Featherstone waited several days, a week at least, before sending his initial letter by way of his second, a lesser plantation owner named Bushyhead. The lag in time was, no doubt, to educate himself on the etiquette of an affair of honor, the rules of which were many and widely published. Young men in Camden and Charleston kept copies of the French code in their pistol cases. After all, it was difficult to remember all the eighty-four rules off the top of your head at a time of some understandable nervousness.
Featherstone’s letter, which I read while Bushyhead sat drinking coffee by the fireplace of the store, stated the obvious. There are offenses of such galling nature that one would rather die than let them pass unanswered. And he wrote that since I put so much stock in the ways of Charleston and suchlike places, he wanted to deal with me as a gentleman would do rather than just gut me out by the roadside as I clearly deserved. He said he would abide by any published code duello I cared to name. But after studying the matter, he wanted to recommend that we adopt the Irish rules, including the Galway addendum. He had discovered that according to those rules, it is well established that blows cannot be answered with words. So just an apology was out of the question. But the sensible and peaceful Irish suggest a way to avoid a fight to the death. In their view, the offending party in a case where a blow has been struck should not only make an apology on bended knee, like a suitor, but should then hand his own cane to the offended party. A beating of varying brutality ensues, entirely dependent on the character and mood of the offended. So you see, Featherstone concluded, we could easily resolve this business in a matter of ten or fifteen minutes without recourse to the field of honor and equality. He would await word from me specifying the time and place where he might beat me senseless with my own stick, after which our prior warm relation—nearly that of father and son, he wrote—might continue unabated. And in the role of elder and adviser, he suggested that in the future I not take the gelding of horses to be so personally symbolic. Then, a big showy signature. At the bottom of the page, he had added a postscript in a looser and perhaps later hand. It read,
What do you say we do as friends do and go have a drink together and not kill each other? A horse is a horse, even on its best day.
I’ve heard of men who accepted challenges in their parlors with a bloody mind but then later, on the dueling ground, only discharged their pistols into the air and stood square to their opponent waiting to receive fire, saying afterward—those lucky enough to survive—that they had the courage to die but not to kill. I’ve never understood such men. They are not made for this world. They must either view themselves as saints or the duel as a finer alternative to suicide. For me, every time I saw the scabbed and puckered blankness at Waverley’s groin, I still wanted to kill Featherstone about as bad as I had that day in his stable yard. And not just kill him but live to gloat about it for many years after. I pictured a bright summer day, the grass boot-top high, me a man in middle years with trousers unbuttoned, splashing piss off his headstone.
Of course, such happy visions were entirely different from actually believing I could accomplish his killing. In any other form of combat, Featherstone would have cut me down quicker than I could blink my eyes. But a duel with smooth-bore flintlock pistols at forty yards evens things out considerably. Back then, my aim was true, for I had a steady hand and had spent many a slow afternoon target shooting out behind the store at Wayah. And, too, Featherstone was more noted for his use of the knife than as a marksman, so I figured my odds to be even, or maybe a little better.
I wrote a quick note stating that I appreciated the information on how the Irish did things. It was always enlightening to learn about colorful foreign ways. But I had no inclination to apologize. Nor did I care to take a beating at his hand.
I left it at that and sent Bushyhead on his way.
The next morning he returned bearing the formal letter of challenge, which was phrased in the required exquisite diction. Perhaps it exceeded all requirements. It may have crossed some line into parody. The phrase
field of honor
figured repeatedly. The subjunctive mood was predominant. One periodic sentence of considerable magnificence, and with more than a whiff of the previous century, went on nearly forever, more than a page, before its grammar finally reached the payoff whereupon, if you were strict in your attention, you could figure out what the subject and the verb had been. But the gist of it was that certain offenses leave one’s honor so fouled that the only solvent strong enough to cleanse it is blood. The letter concluded not with a challenge to a duel but with an invitation for an
entrevue.
When I was done reading, Bushyhead asked if I’d say the letter aloud to him, and when I reached the part about an interview, he said, The only part I understood of it was Dear Sir.
I wrote back with the knowledge that though Featherstone might be intent on making a joke of the fight, I could still very well end up dead in a few days. I pressed my clerk, Tallent, into service as my second, and he shut the post at Wayah and came to Valley River immediately. He delivered my acceptance of the challenge.
The next day began a flurry of further correspondence. In one letter, despite the fact that he occupied the position of challenger and was not in a position to dictate choice of weapons, Featherstone demanded that we duel by war hatchet while tied together at our left wrists. He cited as precedent for the odd choice of weapons a famous duel by whaling harpoon at ten paces and suggested that we might as well also make history, or at least become notorious. When I declined to respond, his next letter simply read,
Blowguns at dawn!
Below that message, a bold flowing signature, written with a nib cut broad.
It was only when I threatened to post his foolishness on every wood fence in the Nation’s capital at New Echota and to advertise it in every paper in the three adjoining states and
The Phoenix
as well that he settled on the customary matched pistols, of which I happened to own a pair, souvenir of an overly complicated livestock trade.