When the Pantoscope had spooled to its close with a view of the skyline of New Orleans, my approbation knew no bounds. I leaped to my feet and applauded until my palms were numb.
NEXT MORNING, I
mounted up and rode out. I journeyed west through sand hills and pinewoods and cane creeks and palmetto flats. And then there was wasteland and cypress swamp, flat and watery country where the trees that grew were bearded with grey moss hanging from every twig. It was country that drew up night fears and blue thoughts. On the scant dry ground beneath the trees lay the dim-lit runways of wild horses, wild pigs, and red wolves. The season grew increasingly buggy, and in camp I unsuccessfully tried burning cow dung and bark and noxious vines to keep off the various bloodsuckers. Then I met a black-haired, dusty-skinned family of wandering Melungeons who showed me how to make a dark and fragrant paste of lard and herbs and fish parts, which at least kept the mosquitoes off, and afterward I slept a little better. Though even then, I spent more than one long wakeful night in the swamps, my shotgun across my lap, gators and bears and panthers coughing and grunting and splashing in the night and sometimes their eyes shining bright as stove coals where they circled round the edge of the firelight.
When I came out the other side of the wetlands to where people were again, there stretched before me as far as eye could see great flat fields of cotton and indigo and the occasional bog of rice. Great packs of slaves worked them, all under the watch of mean little white men on horses.
I went westerly through such slave country for some weeks until I passed into a territory of little dusty one-street towns scattered about in clearings among the vast pinewoods. I just rode on through the towns, rarely even stopping to ask their names. In one such place, there was no one about and the only sound was my horse’s hooves, muffled in the dust of the street. A hearse painted with glossy black lacquer came toward me. The harness of the four horses was adorned with faded black ostrich feathers. Though I found myself vaguely embarrassed by such a show being made over something so common as death, I nevertheless pulled my horse to a stop and removed my hat. As the hearse passed, the driver nodded to me, and I could see an open coffin through the glass panels. A glimpse of pale skin, the sharp-nosed profile of a young woman, and then it was gone.
I rode mornings, slept at noon, shot game birds and squirrels for supper, then rode on until just before dark. I kept up an infrequent correspondence with the trusted Tallent. Money and letters pertaining to my businesses were to await me at specified banks in the larger towns.
In the open country, people sometimes put me up for the night, and I slept in every kind of house from plantation mansion to trapper hut, and the inhabitants of the one seemed as ignorant as the other and there were not books to speak of in any of them, only religious tracts printed in the poorest manner on paper hardly more permanent than crepe. The people seemed to get less interesting the farther I went. But during every day of travel I watched with endless fascination the varieties in the way land could shape its contours and what bearing water and weather had on it and what sorts of plants and animals could love it or at least tolerate it enough to grow from it.
As I traveled onward, I noted in my journal the passing road signs stating the next town of destination and the mileage to it. In particular, I began counting and recording the bullet holes in the signs, always wondering if the number signified something about the town designated. Did twelve holes warn of something that three didn’t? Did an unblemished sign portend a city of angels? Did a sign shot to scraps on its post suggest an upcoming hell, a slaughter yard? The farther I traveled, the more I believed myself capable of understanding hidden correlations that might be presenting themselves.
The Southwest seemed a sorry and benighted place, and each small town had its pit of bloody sawdust wherein chicken fights and dog fights and man fights were played out for wagerers. So I angled northwest and cut across a corner of Mississippi, a scrub state, intolerably flat, to which I paid no more heed than it deserved.
By such route I thus came somewhat unawares upon Memphis. I rode into it at night and it was lit up like Judgment Day, full of folk surging all through the streets right down to the river. I found myself somewhat disconcerted by such population. It was not an entirely cheerful thought to find so many people unexpectedly extant out here in the West. There was music of fiddle and banjo and guitar and piano coming from the doorways of saloons and whorehouses, and the first place I walked into for a drink was full of near-bare women, their clothes so skimpy there was not enough cotton among them to wad a rifle load, and they made it clear to any who entered that they were willing to gap their legs for a drink of liquor or any state denomination of paper dollar, even Georgia money. Neither Washington nor Charleston had entirely prepared me for such a place.
I took a room in a hotel, and during the days following I found that in a town like Memphis the people act like every day is court day. They just milled about in great numbers and drank and whored and listened to music. At night, the big riverboats blazed with lamplight, and their bright tiers of decks jittered in long reflections across the black expanse of the river.
Money that should have been banked for me had not arrived. I waited for it day after day. In the afternoons I would walk down by the river to a sort of bar, a dirt-floored, thatch-roofed lean-to, and sit at a table and read my old boyhood copy of
Werther
and drink warm beer and watch the white riverboats churning slowly against the current toward St. Louis or booming downstream to New Orleans. Black smoke from their stacks so thick as to make shadows on the water. It was my belief that beyond the Mississippi little existed but empty landscape and Claire.
Little brown frogs lived in the mud of the riverbank, and pink-headed buzzards fell in drunkard angles from the sky and stepped through the mud to eat them, and sometimes the commerce between the two parties went on right at the legs of my table. I would stay until the light on the river’s dull red face fell toward evening and my book became unreadable. Besides, I had read it so many times over the years that the brown leather was dark from my hands and the gold lettering on the narrow spine was entirely worn away and I about knew the words by heart. The margins were scribbled with penciled thoughts of yesteryear, nearly all of which I now disavowed and judged to be juvenile.
The great river parted the country like a gash in meat. The immense space lying beyond its western bank felt like a frightening vacancy drawing things toward it, and the contrary part of me wanted to turn away and ride back home. Another part of me wanted to cross the river by whatever means available and just keep on moving across the wild land and see what it offered or threatened day by day until I died or fetched up against the Pacific in California Territory.
One day, fairly drunk, I put a thin leaf from a river cane in
Werther
to mark my place and went to the water’s edge and stripped to my linens and set out swimming. I suffered under no romantic idea that I was swimming to Claire. How pathetic that would be. Travel a significant arc of the continent out of mere longing and then possibly find yourself unwelcome at journey’s end.
I just wanted a Byronic Hellespont swim to the far bank. A thing to brag about fifty years down the line, though not likely to mark me as deeply and permanent as Bear’s claw stripes. Things went fine until halfway across, and then the river took hold and carried me downstream. I’ve never been the best of swimmers. I fought west, but the river pulled me its way, southward. By the time I struggled to shore, I was far below the town and had washed up again on the eastern bank. I slogged out of the water and had to flounder along muddy flats and ledges back to the thatch bar. The tender drew me a warm cloudy beer, and I sat and drank it and dried off in the sun until the mud cracked in geometric shapes on my forearms and shins and could be shucked off with a scrub of palms.
The next day, money arrived. The great facilitator.
TWO WEEKS LATER
I rode down the main street of the raw capital town of the new Nation, Tahlequah. In hopes of finding Claire immediately, I stared at every woman walking or riding. I passed a mercantile, and a young man coming out the door stopped and looked at me long and hard. I kept going and noted out of the corner of my eye that he was sloping along the storefronts in my wake. He had a pistol holstered at his hip like a gunfighter, and he bore watching.
When I got to the hotel he was still coming. I positioned my horse so that when I dismounted, she was between him and me. When I had both feet on the ground, I put a hand on the grip of the pistol at my waist.
The man walked right up across the mare from me so that we were eye to eye across the bow of the saddle.
He said, I know you.
Well, I didn’t know him. He was a short full-blood, his skin burned by the prairie wind to the color of oiled leather, wearing a dusty overlong black suit coat over jean pants and a white shirt all rusty around the collarless neck. Big brown clodhopper work boots. He looked like a farmer dressed up to come to town.
I said, You have the advantage of me, sir.
—We passed some time together. Up Deep Creek.
—Deep Creek?
—You cooked good porridge.
—Oats?
—Also, we were together down by the river. A flat place. Killing ground.
—Wasseton, I said.
He stepped around the mare’s head and faced me top to bottom. He had his right coattail pulled back behind his holster. Wasseton was all grown up.
What do you do in such a case? I put out a hand to shake.
He looked at it and then, for lack of better idea, he shook back. Taking his calloused hand was like gripping a cow horn.
After you shake with a man ready to draw his pistol on you, what do you say?
Wasseton looked downward.
—You could have saved him, he said.
—It wasn’t up to me, I said. You might recollect that there was an army of soldiers and Tennessee mercenaries calling the shots that summer and fall.
—You could have done something.
—We saved all we could save.
Wasseton looked off down the street, thinking. But I knew enough about gunplay not to look where he was looking or even at his face. I watched his pistol fist.
He said, I been wanting to kill you a long time.
If I was him, I’d have wanted to kill me too. So there weren’t any hard feelings on my part.
—Factor this into your judgment, I said. None of us, not me nor Bear nor any of us, chopped up any soldiers. Your people put us all in danger. We made the only deal we had left. You’d put us in a corner.
—It wasn’t right, what you did.
—What would you have had us do different?
—What you did wasn’t right.
He was still looking away.
—Look at me, I said.
And he did. Eye to eye.
—I’ll agree with you, I said. What happened was wrong. It was all wrong from the start. But what else was there? I’m not saying that as an excuse. I’m wanting to see if there was an option that escaped us.
—I don’t know.
—Me neither. And not from lack of thinking about it.
Wasseton looked off down the street again, deciding what to do.
I said, If there’s a bar in this town, why don’t you close your coattail over your pistol and we’ll go sit and have a drink together and not kill each other today.
He was a sensible young man, always had been. He took me up on my offer and told me to call him Washington. Times had changed.
I was the one buying, so of course we drank the best they had, which was at least from Tennessee, second only to Scotland, and not by coincidence but by direct lineage. We talked for three or four drinks about our mountain homeland, how it had been and how it had changed since Washington last saw it. And then, at a certain point of whiskey camaraderie, we contested to name all the colors the mountains and their foliage are able to take on. Any tinge there is between white and black. We competed to find exceptions but could not score points against each other. We didn’t even bother talking about green. Without question, every shade of it would be accounted for by our homeland. We went straight to red, but found that all degrees from the faintest pink to old blood were expressed by the leaves or flowers of some plant or another or by the autumn sunset sky. We went on down the colors, even all the purples, including puce. And the yellows including cadmium, which I had to describe to Washington, and he immediately named both a flower and an autumn leaf as examples of it. Blues were a little harder, but we managed to cover all the shades from robin’s egg to the indigo of ironweed to the unnameable color of the tallest peaks just before full dark in late summer. We drank another whiskey to celebrate our stalemate.
Washington said he had never gotten used to this edge of the prairie and found the great flat emptiness to the west like a suckhole in a river, like the Leech Place, pulling you toward destruction, whereas the uprisen and folded mountains of his youth held you protected down in them like being cupped in the Savior’s hands.
—So they’ve saved you? I said.
—A little bit. Most of the time. You’re enough to make a man backslide.
—Come on home, I said. Sometime before long, just throw a leg over a horse and ride on back. We’ll make a place for you.
Out on the street, we shook hands and began to part. And then I said, I’m out here looking for Claire Featherstone.
—On out of town a ways. Big brick house. Hard to miss.
And it was hard to miss. Its shape was etched in my memory. Cranshaw. A massive plug of brick and a row of white columns across the gallery.
I knocked at the door. Presented a card to the same woman, now a little greyer and stouter, who had passed my card back to me several years before. She showed me into a parlor, where I sat for a long while listening to the pendulum of a big clock knock down the passage of time at each end of its arc.