We stood in the trail and Bear called out greetings and the old woman came onto the porch and billed a hand at her brow to study her visitors. She motioned us inside with a two-beat gesture of her first and middle fingers.
She was cooking bean bread. The little room was filled with the smell of wood fire and the imminence of food. We sat beside the hearth and watched the light shift in the embers, and for a long time nobody said anything. Granny Squirrel had the manner of many conjurers, all aloof and held within themselves and proud of their particular notion of enchantments.
When the bread was ready and we were busy unwrapping it from damp fodder blades and scalding the palates of our mouths, Bear told her our mission. He knew she could write in Sequoyah’s syllabary and that she kept a little book of her formulas. She had traded for the blank books at the post. Her clients had reported that she sometimes consulted their pages as she worked. He had little interest in the doctoring parts of her knowledge, for he had never been sick a day in his life, and at that time neither had I. So she could keep the ones such as When They Piss Like Milk; When Something Is Causing Something to Eat Them; When a Tooth Comes Out, to Throw It Away With.
But we’d pay whatever price she asked for the love formulas. To Make a Woman Lonely; To Protect Against False Thinkers; When They Flee from You, to Make Them Return. Those sorts of things. We needed help. We were love-struck and in pain always. Endless running pain, perfect and inexhaustible. We were impaired and wanted fixing. Bear was stricken with love for a harsh woman. And as for me, I either needed something to make my distant love come to me or else to release me from my anguish over the loss of her.
—Too costly to do it that way, Granny Squirrel said. I don’t much care for writing, so I charge steep for it. Real steep. But I can work the formulas without you having to buy the book. What’s the names of these women?
I blurted out Claire’s name, and Granny Squirrel started shaking her head immediately.
—I’m the one set the spell on you to begin with, and mine don’t come unstuck easy. I’m not saying you’re a goner, but don’t raise your hopes too high.
When his turn came, Bear didn’t care to call his tormentor’s name. He said, This job will take some doing. Some long trying. And I’m not wanting to journey up here and pay you every week for another go at it. The way I see it, I can either hire a man to plow my cornfield every spring, or I can buy a plow. I’m looking to buy a plow.
He reached into an old bag that had once been a shot pouch and drew out a spray of silver coins and fingered them out into a rainbow array on the tabletop. He elbowed me, and I started digging in my pockets and added a greater pile of specie and a thick fold of notes.
—No paper, Granny Squirrel said. I’ve got no use for it. But she began raking the silver with a hook of hand and wrist to the table edge and down jingling into her lap. She said, You understand this might be no more use than buying a key without its lock? Sometimes it’s more than words.
Bear and I went walking back down the cove, me carrying the rifle and him with the little book in his hand like he was carrying a live coal back to a cold hearth.
Bear’s formulas went on and on for many pages in the little book. One by one, I read them to him, and he repeated the words. Let her be marked out for loneliness. Let her be blue. No one is ever lonely with me. I will never become blue. That sort of thing. Then he did whatever action might be required to go along with them, one of which had something to do with splinters of wood from a lightning-struck hemlock tree. Amazingly, they took effect almost immediately. Sara again veered toward him, and before long she was sexing him down well and frequently. This lasted all through spring and summer and autumn. He never slept in the townhouse, but only rested there during the day to build his strength for the nightly bouts. He spent the afternoons watching the fire and drinking a great deal of ginseng tea, figuring if it worked on a Chinaman’s pizzle it might well do the trick for him. He stuck close to home and was happy and tired all during the entire life span of the tree leaves—pale spring nubs, big wet green fleshy July spreads, sepia withers falling in tight spirals and long glides down a deep-blue autumn sky. And then, when the first snow fell, that was the end of Sara’s desire for him. Things went back chill between them like it had been before. No more feats of love for Bear.
Bear tried taking her little presents. Bundles of pine fatwood split into fragrant kindling. Bead necklaces and silver earbobs. A ham of a deer. Nevertheless, she offered nothing in return.
And when he tried doing Granny Squirrel’s spells again, they failed utterly.
One November afternoon by the fire, he complained at length about being cut off from the pleasures Sara had to offer and reminisced fondly about the stirring, lengthening nights of early autumn.
I said, Indian summer. I meant it funny, but he was not aware of the term, and when I explained it to him he failed to see the relevance. The ironic tone was never one of his greatest strengths.
As for my formulas, during those three seasons after our pilgrimage to Granny Squirrel, my erotic life consisted exclusively of an experiment in projection of thought across distance, a thing Granny Squirrel claimed would occasionally work and sometimes wouldn’t. Sad but true. There was no telling, really. It was like so much of life: nearly hopeless, but you must go ahead and try.
What I was to do was train my mind to throw its force westward, thinking toward Claire these brief expressions: Come to me. Come to me. Can’t you hear me? Can’t you hear me? Thinking the words over and over through all my daily rounds until they said themselves, whether I was waking or sleeping, like a constant drone or a chiming in the ears, calling across the incomprehensible and ghost-ridden distance between us. Come to me.
Despite all my efforts, Claire failed to come. At one point I became so desperate I went back to Granny Squirrel. She prescribed various courses of herbs and going to water and scratching the skin of my chest and arms with trimmed turkey quills until I bled. I performed all her cures one after another and then all together, and still Claire had not come to me. And neither was I free of desire for her. As a last effort, late in the fall, Granny Squirrel suggested finding a hollow among rocks along the banks of a river bend, a place all full of little sticks and shredded leaves and dead insect husks formed by high water into a shape like a bird nest. Then boiling the entire nest in a pot to make tea and drinking it for four days while otherwise fasting. I did as she directed, and the only result was that I emptied myself in painful wrenching spasms from both ends. After all that failure, she said perhaps my only hope was to become a conjurer myself, a sorcerer’s apprentice, and work nonstop in my own behalf. But when she held two beads between her thumb and fingers and let them move themselves around, what the twiddling told was that I lacked the aptitude and qualifications to become a conjurer. She would not state what those attributes were, but there was no doubt I didn’t have them. She suggested that I brace myself against failure.
Two days later, the stage came sloshing into town, a freezing rain just beginning to glaze the canvas of the lowered side curtains. The narrow tall wheels sank so deep into the mud that the spokes were stained red halfway to the hubs. I came out of my office into the street, and the driver handed me down a letter from Claire, soiled from months of travel. Even his gauntlets were wet and muddy, and the places where he held the letter pinched between thumb and forefinger came away dark and wet. I broke the seal standing in the rain. It was dated near the equinox and arrived on the day of winter solstice. I scanned down it with the rain falling on its face. It was about like the few others I had received since the Removal, written as if to a mere acquaintance.
How are you? I am fine.
The new Nation was a little hillier than she expected. The new plantation house was nearly finished to the exact plan of the first, and Featherstone insisted on calling it Cranshaw. And so forth. Not one blissful memory or hint of yearning for me.
The letters had begun at the rate of about one a month and then dwindled gradually to one per season of the year. Each one becoming slightly more distant in tone. I began to dread their arrival and had suggested in my last letter that if she was so intent on receding from me, she should write each succeeding letter in a smaller and smaller hand until at some point, even with the aid of a magnifying glass, I could no longer make out the words, and then she would be gone.
2
T
HE FIRST OF MANY JOURNALISTS FELL UPON US THAT NEXT SUMMER
. He was a skinny, tallish Yankee with a big head of curly dark hair, and his black suit was worn to a green shine at his elbows and cuffs and the seat of his pants, and he did not even carry letters of introduction. He was writing a travel piece about the southern mountains for a magazine I had never heard of. I can’t remember whether it was a monthly or a quarterly. All we were to him was just a day’s rest on the trail and a brace of paragraphs in his article. Which was lucky for us, because we—and by we, I mean Bear and I—were unprepared to answer his questions about Charley and exactly how he came to be dead and we came to still be living in our homeland instead of displaced to the West.
I told him how the wealthy white Indians on the Nation had referred to Bear and his people as animals with names. But by a set of legalities and treaties and circumstances too convoluted and ironic to be easily explained, Bear’s people—who were the most pure-blooded and traditional in their habits of all the survivors of the original clans, people for whom the concept of private property held no meaning and who offered a great challenge to every sect of invading missionaries, whether Baptist or Quaker, because they did not even have words in their language to correspond with the concepts of sin, repentance, grace, heaven and hell, damnation and salvation—had come to live outside the boundaries of the Nation on private property to which they held legal deeds. Bear had set up a world of his own on his little parcel of land. And it backed up onto a vast and beautiful range of mountains so wild as to be unowned. On the Nation, no one held deeds to property because all the land was, by their customs and laws, held in common. But Bear had papers. And except for the singular fact that white people put great stock in them, he held them in so little regard that otherwise he would have balled them up and used them to light a fire or to wipe his ass. I talked on and on and hoped to muddy the issue about Charley in particular, for his manner of death troubled me a great deal and had darkened Bear’s mind as well. I used the difficulty of translation with Bear to deflect questions aimed directly at him.
But after the Yankee journalist had departed, Bear and I agreed that blather and indirection would not always work, particularly after Bear had passed to the Nightland and I was left on my own. And given Bear’s advanced age, his passage was not an unforeseeable event. So Bear and I spent a long night figuring out how best to tell Charley to the future. Not his history, his story. For that is what it would become, a narrative, with our help or without it. I’d learned something in that regard from my time with Crockett—the way he became a barely recognizable character in print, either for the better or the worse. Similarly, somebody would give Charley’s final days a created shape and meaning rather than leave things the way life actually overtakes us, which most of the time is just one damn thing happening after another, all adding up to confusion. So Bear and I figured that if the story was going to be told by somebody, we might as well go ahead and do it ourselves. Bear had learned enough about the way written history works from my readings and summarizings of Herodotus and Thucydides and Caesar, and by his firsthand encounters with the Old Possum, to know that it’s generally the victors who get to make up the stories and furthermore that they have a great deal of leeway in regard to adherence to facts and especially interpretation and opinions, not to mention outright lies.
We sat around the townhouse fire deep into the night, me drinking a little and Bear not at all, for this was during one of his temperance periods. We told Charley stories different ways to each other, trying alternate versions for how they might play. My tendency was to make up too much, to lay the plot on too heavy. Politics and machinations in excess. As a narrator, I had an overconcern with the
why
of people’s actions, when really the
what
is largely all that matters. So of course it was Bear who came up with the idea of leaving everything exactly as it was, telling the story straight through just the way it happened, but flipping it with the underside up. It would be Charley who sacrificed himself for the good of his people, not the other way around. Nothing else needed to change. Charley chose to give himself up in return for the promise that the rest of us could remain. It made a better story and was certainly better for Charley.
—He’ll be like your Jesus, Bear said.
Coming on toward dawn, Bear told his version of Charley complete from start to finish in great detail, touching up the dignity and tragedy, giving it a high degree of shine. And it was so good that about all I could think to add was a little
Et tu, Brutus?
touch at the moment before execution. It was not much of a creative contribution, but I’m proud of it nevertheless. And later, the journalists ate it up. My part goes like this: Charley looks at Lichen, the head of the firing squad, and says, We have been like brothers, and yet you are to do this to me? Lichen just nods his head. Then the blindfolding and the shooting play out pretty much without further writerly intervention. The End.
We tried the story out on Lichen the next time we saw him, and he liked it so much he nearly convinced himself that it had happened just that way. Like brothers we were, he said.
All during that time, we were busy seven days a week re-creating the world on our expanding boundary of land. The old clans were gone except vestigially, which is to say that most people could remember which one they would belong to if clans still meant anything. So they took enthusiastically to Bear’s plan of organizing his territory by laying out various townships with the names of the old clans. Each would have a small townhouse wherein local business would be conducted by consensus rather than the majority rule that I favored. The old townhouse at Bear’s place would be enlarged and reserved for issues of wider scope.
Bear believed that if we make the world around us a better place to live, our inner selves can’t help but come along for the ride and we’ll get better too. Sometime in the far bright future, we would all live in a world of saints. And who’s to say he was wrong? Certainly not me, at least not vociferously. So I arranged the building of the new townhouse and suggested that a school and a church wouldn’t hurt, in regard to our relations with the outer world. The latter two whitewashed buildings were identical, except that the church was capped with a little gesture of steeple at the door end of its gable. Of course, I immediately hired a teacher and a preacher, nearly indistinguishable young men from Baltimore with no better prospects in life other than come to what must have seemed the ass end of creation for a rate of pay that amounted to little above room and board, and forced them to live together in a one-pen log cabin so small they shared a rope-and-tick bedstead. The two were so much of a size they could share each other’s clothes, three black suits identifiable only by degree of fade to grey.
Bear and I also established a volunteer firefighting corps in the village, calamitous grease fires being a constant fact of life. But he drew the line at police, saying that he thought more highly of his people than to believe law enforcement was needed. And it was my idea entirely to designate a shelf of books in the post as the beginnings of a library, the books loaned out gratis until the time of the next full moon. Because we needed money to fulfill Bear’s vision, we started business enterprises as well, a gristmill, a blacksmith, a saddlery, a shop for constructing wagon wheels and barrels, et cetera, et cetera, all the way down to a gunsmith and a shop wherein women made fine handcrafts, baskets and woven materials and the like. In little more than a year, we had built an entire town based on an abstract idea of the minimum requirements, a few little log and clapboard buildings standing on either side of a road I called Main Street.
It all worked as planned. There were meetings and dances in the townhouses. Children learned to read and to cipher, and some of the people listened to sermons and sang the Methodist hymns with considerable enthusiasm, though many did it phonetically. More money came into the community from the new businesses, and that is nearly always good. Everybody got a piece, including me. And things did get better in very tiny increments.
JUST AS BEAR
and I had suspected, the writers kept coming. We were too exotic a story to let be. They wrote about the last vestiges of the old ways. Our land accumulating at a frightening rate. Old Indian chief and young white son carrying out a plan to hold their place on earth against the forces of progress and the wishes of the Government. The first few writers were mostly a novelty and a welcome diversion. But each one was a little less charming than the last, and pretty soon they were just a nuisance. By about the fifth or sixth, I quit taking most of them seriously and just made up answers to their questions as suited my mood. And Bear acted like a house cat that disappears when strangers come visiting and pops back out when they’re gone. I told one of the writers that our fields were so nearly vertical we planted our corn with a shotgun and had to breed a race of mules with legs shorter on one side than the other for plowing. And when he asked how we transported the corn down off the mountain, I said, In a jug. He appeared to believe me, so I was encouraged to go on and tell him that every church in that corner of the state, except for our Indian congregation, either conducted services speaking entirely in tongues or else took up serpents as recommended by Jesus. Both the writer and I had taken a few rounds of Scotch at the time. The story appeared as fact in a well-known national periodical, along with the obligatory descriptions of the beauty and ruggedness and unmatched remoteness and mystery of our mountains.
Of course, several of the preachers from the better churches in the nearest county seat were particularly angry with me, and the Episcopalian lit into me directly from the sanctity of his pulpit. Also, a newspaper editor took me to task in his paper, addressing to me an Open Letter expressing his outrage at the shame I had heaped on the region in much the same terms as the preachers. Moral outrage was apparently the order of the day. But I didn’t pay too much attention to any of them on the grounds that some preachers live to be angry, and the newspaper was of the other political party from mine. As to the Episcopalian in particular, I had always believed prayer ought to be conducted on our feet rather than on our knees, since God seems in all other departments of life to require us to stand upright and account for ourselves. I immediately dashed off a letter to the paper in question, saying it was a sorrowful but true fact that some people, mainly newcomers to the region, fail to appreciate the subtleties of frontier humor; however, such lack of taste was not sufficient grounds to evoke an apology from me.
Just to show I had not been cowed, I told the very next writer passing through that Hog Bite—humped over poking a stick in the dirt to plant squash seeds as we passed his garden plot—was performing a very powerful conjuration believed to affect weather worldwide. Every mark he scratched and hole he poked had enormous significance. If there were typhoons in Calcutta and drought in Italy, blame Hog Bite. That story too was immortalized within the covers of one of our higher-class monthly periodicals and was later cribbed by yet another writer in a quarterly of nearly the same water. So for a time Hog Bite was famous, at least among our better-read visitors, and he began charging as high as twenty cents to re-create the sacred weather ritual.
OF COURSE I
took some of the writers seriously, the ones who might be useful and the ones too sharp to be trifled with. I will let one example stand for many. His name was Langham, and as a writer he specialized in mountains. His descriptions of a walking trip through Europe, titled
Views Afoot; or, The Alps and Pyrenees Seen with Knapsack and Staff,
had been well received, and I may even have read it. But several years had passed since his last book, so he had been forced to set out on another journey, though he lacked enthusiasm for hard travel. He had ridden up from Charleston, intent on following the mountains north as far as he could stand to travel, going it alone without guides but with a thick sheaf of letters of introduction, including one from Calhoun.
So the next morning I saddled Waverley for a brief ride to tour Langham around. This was a few years after the Removal, and Waverley had become an old gentleman horse, nearly deaf, with silver around his muzzle and threaded in his black mane. His hip joints rose angular beneath the skin, but he remained bright-eyed and eager to be lunging forward, so much so that I had to rein him back to a walk as we set out. We started at the old trade post, childhood source and root of all our fortunes, and then rode into Wayah, where I displayed the new enterprises to Langham: Indians shaping barrel staves and riving shakes and tanning hides and even, a couple of them, forging plowshares and the complicated mechanisms of muskets, the locks and other such parts. Blacksmiths beat musical rhythms on red metal as we visited their shed. The silversmith shop turned out passable earbobs and necklace pendants and the like, and a weaving shop produced good stout cloth from wool sheared from our little mountain sheep, spun into thread on drop spindles, and woven to broad goods on handlooms. And there were nimble-fingered women shaping oak splits into closely worked baskets of all shapes and sizes. Markets for all these goods had been found in both Charleston and Philadelphia as well as in the nearby towns, and thus the village was, as I pointed out to Langham, the state’s largest center of manufacturing and commerce west of the foothills, a distinction perhaps only of local interest, since every time I traveled, no matter where I went, I was told that a certain mercantile or tavern or hotel was the largest between Washington and New Orleans. Of course, I showed Langham the schoolhouse and the church. And I mentioned the temperance society conceived by Bear when he began to fear that the drinking of ardent spirits sank any people of whatever color into a state of degradation and violence.