IT WAS ONLY
natural at some point that I would stand for election. My first office was the state senate. It just meant a couple of months out of life every two years to travel down to the capital and have a brief convivial drunken time of lawmaking. The state’s needs were fairly limited back then. From my first term, I mainly remember that the rotunda of the capitol was a space that sweetened every voice. Under its dome, a crow would have sounded musical. Most Monday nights during the session, between dinner and the drinking hours, some of the members of the house and senate gathered there to sing the old sentimental songs. One night, a young house member, a rich dandy from down at the coast with a splendid affected voice, sang one of the sad songs from the
Winterreise.
Then later, over pints at the Sir Walter Tavern, he translated that particular song and summarized the others to me. The songs were chapters in a story about a wanderer grieving for his failure at love, and in one song he writes the name of his beloved on the ice of a frozen creek. I was proud to announce to the table that I had performed the same futile gesture years ago and had agonized for much of a year over thoughts of the creek melting, the water that had shaped the six letters flowing away from me, passing from one watercourse to another all the way to the Mississippi and then down to the salt Gulf to mix with the oceans of the world. That’s the way you think when you’re that age. At least some do.
5
I
T OCCURS TO ME THAT I MIGHT BE GIVING THE IMPRESSION THAT
those years of my life after Claire were lived monkish. That I still waited for her, celibate as some pining heroine in a novel. That path never entered my mind, partly because I believed it futile, Featherstone being capable of living as long as Granny Squirrel. Year after year, I did not know whether Claire loved or hated me or, worse, did not think of me at all. Had Claire been fully mine since I won her as a boy, I would have lived a life of utter fidelity. No doubt in my mind whatsoever. Even the way it turned out, it is fair to say that I was, in a way, forever faithful to her. First point in evidence, I never married. And, two, I have never had a woman for very long. Neither point entirely of my own choice. Nor have I ever denied a woman. So I’ll pause here to make a few brief comments in regard to love’s ravaging histories during my middle years.
For many years I entertained the belief that I would meet someone, a woman who would be my woman in a deeper way even than Claire. A true wife.
The
woman. And I was not content to wait for fate to throw such a woman in my path. I would fling myself in hers. In Washington, I discovered again how the steep inclines of the galleries to the Senate chamber provided opportunities for meeting ladies of a certain kind. Which is to say, high-minded and of a desirable class and nevertheless somewhat desperate for male companionship; otherwise, why would they inflict Senate speeches on themselves? And if I happened to be in a position to ask them to join me at an embassy party or a reception at the White House, all the better. None of them made a perfect fit, but many were good company for a while. I remember one fairly plain woman, twentyish, sitting with me on the lawn of the White House for an Independence Day picnic, her pale summer dress falling all around her like cake icing in the remnants of light from a long summer day. Fireworks spewed across the sky and lit her upturned face and she was suddenly beautiful. The spectators made spontaneous sounds of
ooh
and
ahh.
Toward the end of the show, balls of fire the size of moons fell to earth and killed two or three of the spectators, and we were both appalled and drawn closer to each other. The brevity of life, and so on. We were somewhat intimate on the ride back to her hotel in the shelter of my carriage. I remember her string of pearls broke, pearls spilling onto the seat and rolling across the carriage floor.
And there were certain other women scattered all along my usual routes of travel. One lovely woman lived in a little two-store town shoved right up against the base of a great humped mountain a day’s ride north of the nearest railhead from Wayah. I loved her dearly. For several years, I made the long detour to see her on the way to and from political business in the Nation and Washington City. She was a schoolteacher and a spinster, and much taller than men commonly like their women to have grown. All she ever told me of her age was that she was on the down side of thirty. She had beautiful soft hair the color of a dove’s breast and green eyes and creamy long legs that turned under into unfortunately long narrow feet, but she had a behind with curves to break your heart. At least, they broke mine. There were times I would ride a hundred miles out of the way for a night with her. She had spent the previous ten years tending her father, who had been blinded when she was a girl by the kick of a horse he was blanketing out in a paddock in an ice storm. So when I visited, it was fairly easy for us to carry on however we liked as long as we kept it real quiet. For a while, it was a close call whether she was the one woman or not. And I still don’t know. I never had the chance to finish finding out. Her father died suddenly of a stroke, and soon afterward she began dying of consumption, and it was a lingering death with all the translucent beauty of the disease. And at the last all the brilliant blood.
At the opposite end of some scale to which I do not entirely subscribe were all the heart-gladdening whores at Welch’s place. I lump them into one capacious category along with the Senate ladies. I would not have discriminated against them and would have taken any of them as a wife if my heart had told me to. But in its mysterious way, it didn’t. One pretty aging whore among them, though, has stayed in my memory all the way to now because the first time I was with her she grabbed my ready member in her fist and said, Wherever I go after I die, I hope I never see another one of these bastards again for all eternity. That didn’t portend well for the remainder of the evening. But she went to work and rode me as if her passion knew no bounds. Four times that night, according to my old ledger.
At one point well after the onset of middle age, I courted the very pretty young daughter of a fine family from the county seat. Her grandfather had been one of the town’s founders just after the Revolution. When a treaty moved the boundary line between America and the old Nation a notch westward, he rushed in to grab the best newly available land and had thus become important. The pretty girl was half my age and fairly stern-tempered, but she was attracted to the romanticism of the Indians and the good she thought she might do among them. She and a grievous widow aunt came visiting Wayah to tour the area and see all my enterprises—the post, the smithy, the mill, the craft shops, the school and the church, the farm with its slaves and paid Indian workers, the wagon roads we had built. The day had about it the air of talking to bankers about taking out a loan of considerable scope. We rode three-across in the second seat of my best carriage, the grievous aunt sitting blackly in between. The aunt was about my age, give or take a few years, and I found that fact gloomy.
Everywhere we went, people came to the carriage and asked favors, complained about their neighbors, detailed conflicts entirely unrelated to me. They all expected me to adjudicate. The pretty girl said hardly anything. She looked off into the distance. About three in the afternoon after a long day of touring, the aunt said, So, Will, you’re king here? I said, No, ma’am. No kings here. Not these days.
That pretty girl and I went far enough in the direction of apparent matrimony that the principal newspaper in the capital ran a piece of gossip stating that the rumored nuptials of the senator, a man of fairly full years, and the beautiful young Miss Amor should give hope to old bachelors everywhere.
Then, very suddenly, she married a young army lieutenant. In considerable haste, I should add. The timing such that later the arrival of their first child might fall within an agreed-upon span—a sort of social grace period—wherein the birth would have to be accepted as at least possibly horribly premature. All I got out of it was a tearstained letter.
And all along the way were brief mountain resort passions. Summer flings. Over the years the women I attracted were transformed from bored nearly grown daughters still accompanying their parents into youngish spinster aunts. And then into faded widows and pale unhappy wives and the occasional desperate nanny.
In the last category I was once forced by overwhelming desire to make my way, long past midnight, onto the servants’ floor up under the eaves of the Warm Springs Hotel for an assignation with the beautiful, sad-eyed keeper of three miserable outsized blank-faced children, the get of a plantation owner from near Cheraw. I was powerfully drawn to her for the loveliness of her thin mouth and because, when I first saw her on the lawn near the river, she was carrying a copy of
Werther
even though she had no opportunity to read it, her attention being occupied with keeping the idiotic and bovine children from falling into the water and being carried away into Tennessee.
I flirted outrageously.
Then two nights later, thinking about how love will draw you to strange places, I paced cautiously down the narrow hallway under the eaves. It was black but for the brief globe of light my outheld candle threw onto the oiled floorboards and up the yellow walls. Door by door, I traced the diminishing painted numbers. At twenty-three, I pecked a knuckle, and she opened her door into a room scarcely as long as the bed and only wide enough to allow three feet of open floor for dressing. The bed was a two-tiered bunk like a railway berth with dingy linen curtains ringed to slide on rods.
There was a roommate. When I climbed onto the top bunk and flopped onto the thin mattress beside my nanny, a giggle rose from below.
—I don’t think I can do this, I whispered. Come down to my room.
But she would not. No matter how I pled.
It was a declaration of identity. If I wanted her, I had to accept her for who she was, with all the lack of privacy her world afforded. I buckled down and did the best I could, as silently as I could. She gripped me hard in her arms and legs like I was all the life left offered to her, gripped me with more strength than I could have imagined in those slender limbs. The next day, my torso ached. At the breakfast table, I secretly probed my rib cage but found no positive evidence of fissures.
I made that dark and blissful pilgrimage many times throughout a wet stormy August. And then without warning she and her employers were gone on the long journey back down into the hotlands. I stood on the gallery and watched them roll away in a carriage, followed by a wagon heaped with their trunks and bags. She would not look my way. The children roiled mindlessly about her on the rear seat.
For all the months of autumn and on into winter, I wrote her fervid letters and imagined rescuing her from her life and marrying her. Even now, I do not doubt that with the least encouragement I would have done it. Committed marriage.
I sent her packages of books, perfume, silk scarves, silver bracelets. Shameless expressions of desire. By Christmas, however, when she had failed to write back even once, I finally conceded defeat.
I kept a wooden box of mementos, my museum of failed love. A pearl from a broken strand. A handkerchief spotted with blood. A dollar bill of antique currency. A letter, its blue ink smeared in three places across cream paper. An octavo edition of
Werther.
I NEEDED HELP.
My life was in disarray. I had been trying to do everything, run everything. Keep all the books for the tannery and wagonwright and shoemaking shop, the smithy and all the stores scattered across four counties. On top of my political duties in the senate.
And, I admit, certain elements of the business had been left unattended. For example, my ledgers often served double duty as personal journals. And sometimes attention to the latter superseded the former. I loved those blank books. Their physical characteristics. The texture of their paper, the regularity of the black parallel lines across their pages. I had been buying those elegant leather-bound volumes from a bookmaker in Washington for many years. They were sized perfectly to fit my saddlebags, since I mostly lived mounted and moving. I was a fairly meticulous record keeper, though indiscriminate. On any specimen page you might find a great variety of mismatched entries, any kind of thing that had struck my mind on the day in question. A hand-drawn table of debts owed and debts collected. Amounts taken in and paid out in various of the businesses. Land sales and purchases. Lists of creditors and debtors. And then all mixed in would be observations on the appearance of the moon or the way fog had risen from a cove of the mountains, or wry observations concerning the behavior or the attire of other lawyers in court. And then, in code, a notation on what woman I had briefly fallen in love with at some roadhouse.
Tallent studied page after page. I could see in his face he thought it all a mess.
He said, If you want to expand my duties even further, I can fix this, but some things have to change.
—How so? I said.
—This sort of thing, he said, flipping to a page and studying it and then reading aloud:
My birthday. 40 years old. Celebrated without a cake. Total eclipse of the Ripe Corn Moon. Rode 18 m. to Welch’s, partially in the dark. F-k-d H.D. 2 t.
—Yes? I said. A problem?
—I mean, who do you think would find that last notation impenetrable? Or at all useful?
So I gave Tallent a free hand to put things in order.
He said, Thank you, and expressed the heartfelt opinion that a proper accounting of business dealings should mainly concern itself largely with money and expressly not include a record of moon phases and poontang.
—That would be a fair enough start, I said. So I take it that I should keep two journals rather than just the one.
BEAR DIED IN
the Planting Moon, during the waxing of it. Nothing dramatic precipitated his passing. No clash with Nature or sudden revelatory conflict against his fellowman. He was just old and worn out. We piled quilts and pelts around him in the townhouse and kept the fire built high, for he was chilled the entire time.
Bear had always been very good with people about to die. He held their hands, looked them in the face, and did not lie to them. He’d say, You’re in bad shape. Awful bad shape. Not doing a bit good, are you? And it comforted them. They looked at him like he was the only one who knew even a little what they were going through. I, on the other hand, was useless at those times. I stood with my hands in my pockets and had almost nothing to say for fear that I would make some faint acknowledgment of the shadow of death glooming the room. Like we all might otherwise be exempt from it if none of us said any one of its horrible names.
During those final days, Bear didn’t say much, but he often held his hands up to the firelight and studied them, their fronts and their backs, turning them, spreading the fingers and clenching knotty fists. At the time, I wondered what he was thinking. Did he wish to grab something? A knife handle or rifle grip or a soft breast? Maybe a gesture expressing one last wish of possession. Something to hold.
I don’t wonder at all these days. I know he was looking at the swollen knuckle joints, the veins thick as night crawlers under the creped skin of his handbacks, fingernails broad and luminous as the insides of mussel shells, the polished skin of his palms marked deep with intersecting lines like the rivers and roads and boundaries of a map to an unknown territory. Bear was thinking that, taken all together, his hands looked exactly like the hands of his father.