Thirteen Moons (26 page)

—Something along those lines, Smith said.

—Go home, Lieutenant, I said. Or at least back to your tent. I’m done with commerce for this evening.

I FLURRIED ABOUT,
always a-saddle. Letting constant motion stand in place of actual achievement, everything done half-assed, both tending to business and to the heart. Back and forth on the daylong ride between Valley River and Wayah. The roads were filled with uniformed Federal soldiers and heavily armed Tennessee mercenaries dressed like bandits and hired just for the summer by the Government to roust out Indians. The bandits’ cook pots hung behind their saddles, clashing like unpleasant bells as they coursed along the roadways. They were all draped about their chests and shoulders with powder horns and shot pouches.

I rushed to Cranshaw, after I heard Featherstone was gone, and found Claire bitter amid the wreckage of packing crates, slaves milling about directionless, fields untended, ragweed knee-deep among the cornstalks, suckers overwhelming the tomatoes, squash and pumpkins and melons growing tiny and pale as babies’ fists in the shade of rampant chickweed. What to say to her other than Love me, love me. Don’t go. Stay with me.

She would not even accept an embrace in the dooryard but stood all rigid and looking off toward the river with her hands clasped tight behind her back.

At the fort, the growing population of prisoners, many of whom I had known since boyhood, sat in the dirt of the stockade drinking liquor bought from a cart one of my clerks tended just inside the gate. People drank deep to achieve immediate stupor. And why not? Who was I to deny them comfort? Denial was what the Army was for. If you can’t get drunk when your entire world comes crashing down around your feet, why did God make alcohol to begin with?

And then back outside the Nation in Wayah, I found Bear awake long nights in his townhouse, plotting out the organization of a new miniature world in the pattern of the vast old one. Divisions of governance no bigger than cove bottoms but assigned the names of lost clans. And not even all of them, only Long Hair, Paint, Wolf, and Deer. Also, Bear was pensive and mournful over the state of his troublesome marriage to Sara and her grievous sisters, and the two endeavors, politics and love, were part of each other, both necessary in his attempt to rebalance a world gone wrong, to try to get back his time again.

I WENT BACK
to Cranshaw, feeling hopeless and foolish at my desperation to make one more try to reach her. Expecting nothing. But Claire ran to me. I had hardly looped Waverley’s reins around the hitching post when she came rushing down the front steps and fell into my arms. I didn’t spend a second wondering what it meant or how I felt about it. I just held her tight and let myself be happy and hopeless and free of further desire, in case that moment was all we would ever have.

I stayed at Cranshaw three days that were like a compression of our two summers back in green youth, except that Featherstone was absent and the place was being taken apart. Packing crates stood in stacks in the emptied rooms, their walls bare of paintings.

I started out trying to be discreet in front of the help, but Claire did not care what tales the servants might carry to the West. The first evening at dinner, she straddled me in my chair, her dress in a bunch around us. A woman came in bearing a tray of pork loin and roasted new potatoes and little lettuces killed with bacon grease. Claire did not even lift her face from where it was pressed in the space between my neck and shoulder. After that, I quit worrying and let desire rule.

We sprawled on the broad river rocks at noon, and the sun scalded our buttocks as in days of yesteryear. We drank too much of Featherstone’s best wine. We drove the carriage at high speed along the valley roads at any hour that suited us from dawn to midnight. Claire was beautiful, beautiful. Every single part of her.

One night we built a fire in the yard in the old black circle. I recited to her from memory my old poem “To C——,” taking care to note that it had actually been published in
The Arcadian.
All the way through, line by line, we laughed like idiots, especially at the conclusion about lips of garnet. We both traced the outline of her lips and said the word
garnet,
as if it were the most ridiculous word in the entire English lexicon.

On the third night, we fell asleep fully clothed, exhausted. I awoke in the dark. Claire was gone. Nothing but a dent in the pillow, flapped-back sheets. I went looking for her. Traversing the long dark upstairs halls, keeping my bearings by brushing fingertips against the plaster walls. Then down wide steps to the parlor. Partway there I saw her moving across the dark room without a candle. Gliding silently, keeping her bare feet close to the oak floorboards so not to stumble. Her hands out at waist level, palms forward, to touch doorframes, table corners, chair arms, crates of packed china, trunks of clothing. Everything displaced, unfamiliar.

The mullioned parlor windows were grey. A thick slice of the Ripe Corn Moon stood framed above the western horizon. Enough light to shape the ridges against the sky, enough light to know that though the mountains are not permanent, they are persistent. Claire reached the front door, crossed the porch, walked down the lawn to the riverbank. The slow water moved almost without sound.

I stood in the doorway and watched as she undressed in the moonlight.

Even in full summer, the complete attire of a fashionable young woman constituted such an elaborate layered array of pleated and ruched and lapped fabrics that it was like taking something small and precious, an art object, from a series of beautiful protective cases and pouches. A thing of wonder, but only to be admired briefly and then shut carefully away again. Claire finally descended through the layers to a doeskin summer corset, light as a second layer of flesh, the color of chamois and trimmed in green satin. She shed it onto the frothy hummock of pale silk and bombazine and linen and stood pale and slim in the moonlight. She walked into the river. Going to water.

Ankle-deep, she stopped, wavering. The surface of the river before her was black, bottomless. But when you reach the point that you no longer trust the world, you live in never-ending fear. She walked on, wobbling and uncertain, the arches of her feet shaping to the round stones of the river bottom. When she got shoulder-deep she looked up into the strip of sky the river cut through the trees, a mirror of the river’s shape. Stars overlapped stars down a vertiginous well. She bent her knees and sank below the water.

THE LOADED WAGONS
stood lined in a train outside Cranshaw, ready for the journey west. Claire sat for a long time on the tailboard of the last wagon, leaning forward with her hair covering her face. Her blue skirt draped in her lap to outline her thighs, a shadowed valley between them. Polished ankle boots dangled in space. She gripped the edge of the tailboard so hard her knuckles went white. I reached out and ran my finger across the four knobs of bone. I wanted to kiss them, but when I tried to pull her hand to me, she pulled it away.

Claire leaned back and shifted the mass of hair from her face with a raking motion of wrist and forearm. She stared at me hard, lips parted. She touched my face and said, I want to remember how you look, at least for a while.

—Send some thoughts this way to fill this empty place. I put my palm on my chest.

—What a silly thing to say. Just get in.

—I can’t. I’m needed here right now. I’ve worked so long for Bear, for our people. Things are at such a state they could fall apart in a moment. I have responsibilities.

Claire turned her palms up, held her hands out.

—What about Featherstone? I said.

—We can deal with that when we get there. He might not be exactly what you think he is.

I hesitated. I’m not proud to report it. It was my Lancelot moment. Hesitate to get in the cart, and you are lost. Maybe every life has one moment where everything could have been different if you’d climbed on the cart.

Claire looked around at Cranshaw and said, I would have burnt all this down at a word from you.

The driver looked back at her. She tipped her head in the direction of forward. West. He whistled a sharp note down the line of wagons, and the whole train lurched forward. He popped the reins on the mules’ backs, and they pulled. The rig creaked into motion, the narrow wheels broke free of the mud with a sucking sound.

Claire rode away as the condemned ride the final cart to the gallows. But I was the one condemned.

I thought then that if she would look up and say one more word, I would turn my back on the life and the place I had made, on the people who had taken me in as an exiled bound boy when no one else in the world wanted me, and I would follow her anywhere. But she lowered her head and her hair covered her face, and that was the end. The driver began whistling “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” They turned the bend in the road, and all I had left to look at were the parallel tracks in the mud leading off into a future that had sideswiped us all.

Now I think, What more could she have said? And for so long I have hated my nature for failing to say what I felt. And most of all for not acting on it. You live with such choices until you die. They eat at you like heartworm, coring you out until you are just a skin enclosing nothing. A balloon filled with hot breath.

That moment has haunted me all my life. Her sitting on the tailboard of the wagon, going away, the driver rattling the reins and the mules pulling and the wooden members of the wagon rubbing and rattling against one another as the wheels rolled through the mud. Claire bending her head and her hair falling over her face like drawing curtains across a bright window. And me saying nothing. Doing nothing. I was a young man, but I believed my best life was over.

3

I
RODE BACK TO WAYAH, THROUGH THE GLOOMY GORGE, WITH THE
feeling that the whole world was splitting apart. Bill Axe sought me out immediately upon my arrival. He was a half-blood and lived on the outskirts of our land. He urgently needed to tell me about a visit to his homestead by a little party of pilgrims. We sat by the fire in the trading post, and I listened to his story.

They arrived at Axe’s place before dark, carrying the odors of journey in their clothes and their hair and on their skin—scents of morning dew beading the leaves, the dust of the trail, the droppings of animals, sweat, and woodsmoke. They had come down out of their home on Nantayale Creek and followed the river through its narrow black gorge where the water ran white between great smooth boulders and the walls were so high and close that the sun only shone at midday. They came out the lower end of the gorge into the open valley, where they could see the big mountains standing blue to the north like a wall marking the ultimate limits of the world. Somewhere in their eastward progress, they had crossed the boundary line and had left the Nation and entered America and become fugitives.

There were about a dozen of them, men, women, and children—three generations of Charley’s family. The youngest boy was named Wasseton in honor of the first president, and he led a little small-boned packhorse loaded with a lumpy burden of food and pots and blankets. Equipage for living out in the high mountains for some time to come. A dog loped along with them, and she was of such antique configuration that she might have been a recent convert from the tribe of red wolves hunted nearly to absence by whites who could not abide their existence and also by Indians recently forgetful of the old pledge never to kill them due to the close blood relation between wolf and man. The dog carried her triangular head hanging loose, almost touching the ground, and her nose often pulled her out into the woods on some fascinating scent-path.

Bill Axe’s cabin stood in a clearing of tulip trees above the north bank of the river. A fire of red cedar logs burned on the ground outside the house, and the smoke in the air smelled like incense. The slant light of afternoon fell in broken beams through the yellow leaves and straight trunks. Axe sat asleep in a straight chair by the fire with his hands folded in his lap and his chin on his chest. Everyone but Charley stood off in the trees and waited. Charley went into the clearing, walking effortfully on bowed legs like an old horseman, though he had seldom ridden.

Charley touched Axe on the shoulder with two fingers and then stepped back.

Axe looked at Charley and rubbed his hands down his face to compose himself for wakefulness. Charley was the color of old polished cherrywood. His face was marked with hard wrinkles, running horizontal on his forehead and vertical on his cheeks and neck, and they were deep enough to lose a handful of river pearls in the folds. He was a short man but broad at the shoulders, stout through the barrel of his body, round-headed and big-handed. He wore a red bandana, blue calico shirt, brown linen britches, and greasy deerhide moccasins without beading or other ornament. His hair was going grey and he wore it blunt-cut below his ears where his wife, Nancy, trimmed it monthly by gathering up the excess at the back of his neck in her fist and lopping it off with one swipe of a skinning knife. He was only about sixty, but he looked eighty and was a grandfather several times over.

Axe said, You’re taking the wrong direction. The soldiers are riding up and down the river looking for runners.

—I’m not going, Charley said. I’m abiding by the old lines.

—They’re wiped clean away. No more boundary lines. No more Nation.

—I’m not going.

—A man can’t live in the woods. They’ve emptied out. Everything’s gone. The deer and bear and turkey are on the way to wherever the bison and elk already went. Far away. Where you’re going.

Axe argued that the whole slab of mountain range, all the southern slopes, the cuts where the creeks drain down to the rivers, the dry ridges leading up like ribs to the long crest of the chine, are indeed a vast and convoluted piece of terrain. But not endless. And a man cannot crawl under a rock and disappear. Much less a family, three generations extending from Charley down to members not yet weaned and still wavery on their feet. Nor can such a group turn themselves into bush fighters and bandits.

Charley said again, I’m not going.

During the day’s walk, the boy Wasseton had shot several squirrels from chestnut trees with darts from a cane blowgun taller than he was. The boy said he could smell squirrels, especially on damp days. At a distance of ten paces, Wasseton had driven long shaved hickory darts through their skulls with a single plosive breath.

Some of the women skinned and gutted the squirrels as handy as shucking an ear of corn and ran them through from ass to mouth with sharp birch skewers and set them to roasting over the fire coals. Nancy mashed pinto beans and mixed them with cornmeal and wood-ash lye and rolled the mixture between her palms into little loaves and wrapped them in scalded fodder blades and held the packages together with thin strips shredded from fodder blades and tied in neat knots. She simmered them in a black iron pot. Axe’s wife brought out some chunks of yellow squash and cooked them at the edge of the fire until they softened up.

When the cooking was done, the squirrels looked awfully little with the hair and skin off, but they were sizzling brown and shining with grease. Their grimacing mouths shone full of long yellow teeth.

Charley’s people sat by the fire with Axe and his wife and ate the meal off wood trays with cane-stalk implements. Charley had a pattern to eating a squirrel. He kept it on its skewer and worked back to front, eating the little hams first, each by each, and then he went at the body meat, eating it off the ribs as if it lay in rows like corn kernels. When he finally got to the head, he broke it off and put it in his mouth and worked it around for quite some time like he was gumming tobacco. And then when he was done, he reached in a finger and pulled out a bare little skull and showed it cupped in his palm like it was a fine achievement, his own creation worthy of favorable comment.

Nobody said much of anything during the meal. But later, when Charley’s people had made camp in the clearing and fallen asleep, Axe and his wife lay in bed and talked quietly in the dark about how they might gracefully rid themselves of these dangerous guests.

And after Axe was finished telling his tale, I too wondered what varieties of woe Charley might bring upon us when the Army came searching. I had known Charley a little since boyhood and felt disoriented in a world where a subsistence farmer and his family could become transformed into dangerous fugitives.

THROUGH VARIOUS CHANNELS,
bits of copied correspondence continued to fall my way.

Lieutenant H. C. Smith to Colonel Haden

Your favor of the 24
^th
instant of August including your orders to find and “put into motion” toward the Indian Territories the fugitives said still to inhabit this region was duly received, and I have done my all to carry your wishes forward. But I am afraid my efforts have produced little gain.

You refer to assistance reportedly given to the fugitives by the few
bad white men scattered among the mountains, but I have yet found no evidence of such assistance. At every white settlement of five dogtrot log cabins and a frame church, the inhabitants congregate to tell us of great masses of Indians hiding high in the mountains. They fear them and fervently wish us to rout them out. But we cannot verify their tales, and tales are all I believe them to be.

We have searched both sides of the Little Tennessee and about ten miles up the Tuckasegee, marching long days, though of little mileage, tracing every rumor and tiding mongered hereabouts. The land is unimaginably rough, and in the laurel thickets five hundred men could hide from a thousand in an area of exceedingly small scope and we have found nothing. We went up the Nantahala and from there we searched Snowbird, Buffalo, Hanging Dog, and Beaver-dam, days and days of travel in terrain whereupon our horses could not find secure footing and we often had to walk them, and all with the result that we found but some old thatched hunting camps and one Indian man so blind he could not travel, and during the whole time of which heavy rain was falling from a dark sky and the autumn leaves yellow and red in the trees and slick on the ground. There is a great deal of mast, mostly chestnut, but little or no game to be seen as it has all been hunted out to near barrenness, buffalo and elk thirty years gone and deer failing fast, and many nights we have had to make do with our dry provisions. I do not see how this place could support a lone man in the wild, much less a large population of fugitives.

The men have been in ill temper and poor health. They cough and their clothes and bedding are wet constantly and in camp they hang them on stick frames to scorch by the fire, but the dews and mists and rains of morning wet them again. On the trail the men frighten themselves with phantom dangers that they imagine lurk in the forest. They cannot see ten feet beyond the passway, and they invent ambush from every fall of limb or call of bird and I have had to threaten to severely penalize any man who fires indiscriminately.

Frankly, sir, I cannot understand our continuing concern with this land and its inhabitants either white or red. The Indians are ignorant
beyond all reckoning and the whites too, mostly the dregs of Scotland and Ireland fled here for lack of alternative. The country is no better than a jungle of unpracticable mountains cut through with narrow coves and deep gorges, being generally precipitous cliffs falling directly to unnavigable rocky rivers. Beyond the river vallies the little flat ground is filled with thickets of azalea and laurel almost impenetrable to anything but a deer or an Indian and them crawling on their knees. Its only value to the white settlers is as a range for cattle and swine and the country must become much more thickly inhabited before it will be used for that, and if in the meantime the small number of fugitive Indians who presumably now occupy it are left undisturbed the worst injury which can arise from their continuing presence will be the loss of a few hogs and a little corn to the whites in the vicinity, who I should point out purchased all they have of both from these very Indians.

THE YARD OF THE
stockade was packed with people, internees. Too many people in too little space. Families had staked out futile claims to a place on earth by spreading blankets on the ground. People sat in small groups talking. Some lay curled up, knees to chest, trying to sleep. Children wandered about, aimless and blank. Personal goods and clothing lay scattered about. It looked like the aftermath of a train wreck. The smell from the toilet pits brought tears to my eyes. Up against one palisade, a minister sat with his ass upon a crate that had held wine bottles. The stunned look on his face suggested that his imprisonment had come as a surprise to him. He was like a lot of them down on the Nation; he thought becoming as white as he could would protect him. Look white, dress white, act white, be white. He had his black slaves and a few Christian Indians fanned around him, listening to some of the pronouncements of God on the subject of how people ought to act. The Commandments were, as always, especially favorable to the rulers. The minister’s skin was as white as the thin pages of the Bible open on his lap. He had on a dusty black frock coat and a white shirt, and he was locally celebrated for holding a degree in divinity from Princeton College. About all the Indian he could have had in him was a half-blood grandmother, but that was enough. If he were Negro that would make him an octoroon. The words for blood fractions went even smaller than that, down to the thirty-second part of dark blood that in some states still disqualified one from the many entitlements of being white. But primarily, the preacher was a citizen of the Nation and not America, so he had to go.

As I wove my way through the yard, overhearing a thin slice of the sermon, I reckoned the slaves must be doubly stunned, seeing how their Indian masters were suddenly powerless and stripped of nearly every item of private property except for themselves.

The day was bright and blue, but at the far end of the stockade I was shown into a room with the shutters pulled, a square of space dim as evening. Colonel Haden was a big hog of a man, with biscuit crumbs in his whiskers and gravy stains down his shirtfront. Though it was going on noon, he sat behind a table littered with breakfast dishes. White plates with smears of dark yellow where the yolks of soft-fried eggs had run and congealed. Cold coffee and cream skinned over in a cup. A decimated round of warm butter slumping on its dish. In a rambling sort of way, the colonel was talking out a letter to a young scribe, who sat at a corner of the table and scratched fiercely at a sheet of paper, trying to keep up with the rapid flow of words.