My surrender was a show, and the whole town turned out to watch. I came strolling down from the mountains accompanied by Tallent and my personal guards, the tallest Indians among us, all well better than six foot, even before you got to their hats and turbans. I had changed from my normal dress clothes into breechcloth, greasy buckskin leggings, and moccasins laced with woven strands of horsetail dyed red and blue and strung through eyelets cut from the quill ends of bird feathers. From the waist up, I went naked, nothing but beads and feathers tied in my hair, a leather thong around my neck with one curved black bear claw as pendant. And I had not been barbered for some time. We had been living rough. So my hair was longish and I had a growth of grey beard. I’d painted myself up all striped with ochre and lampblack in the old manner. A long rifle slung over my shoulder on a lanyard of plaited leather. After four years of woods living, I was lank; all the bones in my chest showed through the skin. Me—an attorney, a colonel, a chief, and a senator. An acquaintance of presidents. Coming into town like some icon of the olden days erupting into the baffled present.
And then, when we began negotiating surrender, the lawyer in me came blooming forth. I became quite rational despite my wild attire. I said that the Indians left with me were none of them soldiers but men in my private employ—bodyguards, as it were. And I insisted that as such, they were exempt from having to lay down their guns as Lee’s ill-conceived surrender agreement required.
I think even I was surprised to prevail with that shabby argument. The Yankees scribbled on the paper to amend their surrender contract with a little marginal addendum, and I insisted that we all initial the change. Much dipping of nibs and blotting. But then when it came time for me to sign on the bottom line, I don’t know what came over me. I became agitated and claimed again that there were hundreds more Indians on the ridges, cavalry too, and I was their chief and colonel. At my sign they would descend and scalp every man of them, and nothing but my whim kept it from being so. True, I said, men have survived scalping. But it’s not an attractive way to end up. Your whole head heals to a red puckered scar. Ladies—at least the great majority of them—dislike the look of it quite a bit.
The Yankee colonel looked confused. He was smoking a little stub of cheroot that stunk like rabbit tobacco, and he examined the glowing tip of it for a long time, and then he cut his eyes to Major Tallent. Tallent gave one little vibratory head shake to the Yankee and then touched me very gently on my bare painted shoulder, dipped the steel pen nib in the inkpot, put the shaft between my fingers, and thumbed the dire paper an inch my way. I signed in the most formal and florid of my several styles of handwriting.
And then I looked at the Yankee colonel and said, If not for these Indians, I wouldn’t have had a thing to do with this goddamn war.
Then, accompanied by my guard and trusty Tallent, I walked out without another word. All of us fully armed. Noble old Lee could have used a better lawyer.
DESPITE MY SMALL
victory against the Yankees, Pyrrhic indeed, I now believe that leading the Indians into the War was the greatest of my failures, or at least prominent among many. The War was no business of the Indians. They ought to have stayed home. For that matter, we all should have stayed home. And this belated realization was darkly underlined when, within a matter of days, we were hit with a smallpox epidemic. It was widely believed that two of our returning warriors brought the disease into the community after a Yankee officer took them apart from the others and showed them a little glass bowl in which a strange red fish with sad bulging eyes swam slow circles in water cloudy from its own shit. Its entire remaining life was held within a circumference you could almost have compassed with your fingers and thumbs. A nasty world of unimaginable limitations. Find therein what symbolism you will. For me, bowl and fish represented the Yankee vision of life.
Immediately upon returning home, the two men who’d been exposed to the Yankees and doomed to witness the red fish fell desperately sick and broke out in blisters and died. And soon they were joined by more than a tenth of our people.
It was a dark time, the worst in my memory. The sickness came in waves, half a moon apart. The heralds were mouth sores, headaches, and vomiting, in that order. Then the eruptions. Pale skin of forearms rising up like plowed ground. Faces so swollen in welts people couldn’t see out from under their eyelids. In the worst cases, the rash spread from head to toe, pustules overlapping one another in plates all down the body.
There wasn’t anything to do about it. Nothing in the way of doctoring was available other than herbs. Some took a decoction made from milkweed. The leaves or roots, I forget which. It tasted terrible and was thought to be helpful only on the slim logic that the milk of the mature plant resembles pus. Some others swore by poke root on even shakier grounds. In the outer world, there had been various forms of inoculation against the disease, at least as far back as when old insane Cotton Mather was taught the trick by his slave Onesimus. But none of us had done it, there being a substantial risk of death in the process. Looking back, maybe I should have insisted upon it. But then, neither had Lincoln been inoculated, for he had come down with a mild case just the year before.
Whether you lived in Wayah or New York City, once you got it you either died or you scabbed over and got well. The survivors felt lucky to be scarred deep for life. White pockmarks sprayed across their faces, down breasts and backs. Scars more extensive than Bear’s or Cudjo’s silver claw marks, though considerably less interesting to tell about in old age.
I went from cabin to cabin visiting the sick, more useless than a preacher or an herb doctor. Dying people retching and insensible, sometimes two or three to a cabin. Young and old alike. All prostrate and pustuled and unable even to hobble into the river and immerse themselves in the cool brown water of late spring in hopes of life. Not life everlasting, but just a little bit more of it. And me with nothing to offer whatsoever on either the physical or spiritual front.
The healthy among us lived every day in numb fear of the first little blister rising on the roof of the mouth. During the waking hours, we went about constantly rubbing our tongues against our palates.
After three waves of sickness, the disease tapered off. Among the very last to go, Tallent.
He lay sick in his house. Fevered. His bedding damp and soured with sweat all the way through the sheets into the ticking. The rash red on his cheeks and arms. Sores overlapping and leaking. A vomit bucket handy. He came in and out of sense.
I sat in a chair by the bed and held his hand and wiped his face with a cool cloth. The sweaty hair at his temples was nearly as grey as mine. I said, Little brother, you’re not doing a bit well, are you? Very poor indeed. Bad, bad.
I buried Tallent on a rise near a grove of chestnut trees. A good view down to the river. Those days, there were a lot of burials. We got to where there were no words left for the eulogies. We just shoveled dirt and walked home, thinking whatever we felt toward the dead inside ourselves. I won’t go into it any further, other than to say that year by year the world darkens down and things are always going away.
7
A
FTER THE WAR, NOTHING WAS EVER THE SAME. ALL OF THE SOUTH
was a mess. The flow of money dried up. No money anywhere. Yankees trying to run everything and determined to beat us down in the peace at least as bad as in the fighting. No place left in politics for those of us who had been the big men less than a decade earlier, mainly because our conquerors had banned many of us from holding office at any level. I can’t even imagine what songs Yankee carpetbaggers and scalawags sang under the sweetening dome of our old capitol. Not Schubert, I’d bet.
On the national level, the Government was corrupt right up to and including the old gutless white heads on the Supreme Court. But it was fair enough for the victors to take over entirely. We former big men should have been a lot better. We had failed utterly as leaders and deserved whatever beating we were required to take. And neither was the South the only target of the Yankees. Just look at what they did out west. Immediately after they finished with us, they aimed their armies toward the setting sun and fought Sioux and Cheyenne and Apache—too many peoples to list. For the next few decades, Yankees won and everybody else lost. It’s hard to hold politicians with big armies back from fighting somebody.
But not all was devastation. The countryside was still beautiful, no matter what moon of the year it was. As soon as the vines overtook them, Sherman’s many burnt-out white-columned plantation houses became as picturesque as Wordsworth’s ruined abbey. So during that period of my life, the road offered a great comfort, for it was still open and free. Fine to be out roaming on a good horse, observing the change of seasons, the progressive bloom and wilt of flowers, and the phases of the moon all through the pale spring and aching deep green summer and into the melancholy yellow fall. Watching the seasons seemed particularly pressing now that the stack behind me rose higher than the ones ahead, even at my most optimistic reckoning of life span. Where better to be than on the road to test day by day the assertion that the hardest thing in life is to remain constantly attendant, especially since it gets harder to do the farther along you go?
For all those reasons—or excuses—I did not wish to be home much. Aside from cultivating what my friends ironically referred to as my rich inner life, part of my reasoning for living mostly in transit was that if I kept moving I was a more difficult target to hit by those looking to collect debts or serve papers or ask favors.
Needless to say, for long stretches of time, I did not take care of my duties with great mindfulness. I left the majority of work to my current generation of young clerks, under the direction of Conley, one of the legion’s lieutenants. Conley, though, was no Tallent. The business that he and the boys could not handle without my presence was immense. When I returned home, the accumulated paperwork waiting for me was stacked waist-deep around my desk, shoulder-high against the walls. When I opened a desk drawer, the stuffed papers rose up to meet me. They spilled from chair seats like white water over river rocks and filled a vast number of old wooden claret crates until there was only a winding trail for passage from the doorway into the depths of my study. But I’m not blaming my boys for everything. Or even for anything. Right here I should digress to say that many of them went on to distinguished careers in law and business, and several served terms in the state legislature and the Congress, and that’s as close to a father’s pride as I’m allowed.
The problem was me. I failed to keep up with correspondence. Many checks went unwritten, and a few went uncashed, lost in the piles that accumulated around me. All those pale stacks of paper loomed like malignant spirits, grown taller and more powerful every time I drew up courage to go home and address myself to them. They haunted my place—the increasingly olden Jeffersonian octagon—so fiercely that I wanted to strike a match to it all and ride away with a pretty yellow light spewing upward at my back. Every day that I was in residence, I had to face a string of people expecting things from me—money and decisions, neither of which I enjoyed doling out.
During this time, I made a pointless trip up through the Cumberland Gap and beyond. I returned road-weary midafternoon on a beautiful late-summer day, intending to make a quick turnaround and go back out jaunting until at least the onset of November, maybe follow the New River up into Virginia. The grass in the front yard stood knee-deep, and the grey-painted porch boards were speckled with black mildew. Inside, the furniture was shrouded in white sheets. The facets of the cut-glass chandeliers hung dull with dust from their armatures by their little twists of corroded wire. Everything smelled of damp and must and old bitter ashes spilling from the fireplace.
Conley came hustling around, all concerned.
—Will, he said. We didn’t know you were coming.
—Evidently.
—You mostly send word. We’d have had the furniture uncovered and the grass cut.
—I intended it to be cut regularly whether I’m away or not.
—Grows so fast, the help can’t hardly keep on top of it.
—It’s two shitting feet high.
—Been a real wet summer. Rain, rain, rain.
There was a sound of footsteps overhead in my bedroom. A door closed, and then the descending squeak of step treads. I walked into the foyer and looked down the hall. A nut-colored pretty girl came slipping downstairs, all sleepy-headed and rumpled. She smiled sort of ruefully our way and went on down the hall and out the back door.
Conley said, Excuse me for a minute.
He went running after her. I stood where I was and waited with unexpected patience.
When Conley returned, I said, How’d that come out for you?
He said, Sorry.
I said, Some of you need to scythe the yard and pull the covers off the furniture and sweep the floors and open the windows. And for God’s sake, get somebody to change the sheets on my bed.
While everybody got busy, I took a bottle of claret and a book from the shelves and went up to the bench under the dogwood tree by Waverley and read until nearly dark.
The next morning, Conley awaited me when I came downstairs. He sat at the dining table with a notebook. Before I could even pour coffee, he began going down his list of things I needed to attend to. All my affairs fallen into indescribable disarray.
First, there was a fistful of notes long overdue for payment. Lawsuits pending. A pressing matter. The Beaver Creek land, the slopes on both sides up to the ridge, would cover the debt. A buyer had made an offer.
—Hold or sell? Conley asked.
—Hold.
Second, there was an epistolary feud needing to be calmed, for it had heated up nearly to the point of gunplay. The story was this: Since learning to write in English, Big Dirt and Dreadful Water had been engaged in an epic poison-pen tournament based on the reopening of an old grievance concerning the parsing of an elk carcass on a hunting trip back almost into the last century, when they were both young. The issue was whose musket ball struck the killing blow. Honor was at stake. They had traded many letters full of insults and allegations, even though their wives were great friends and relatives, both being members of the Bird Clan.
—Talk to the wives, I said.
But Conley already had. The little round women were no help whatsoever in calming the dispute, for they viewed the two men as irrelevant for all purposes beyond providing a sure source of amusement. Conley handed me the full sheaf of back-and-forth correspondence. I riffled through the pages, reading a phrase here and there. Literacy, a blessing or a curse? In the end, I pitched the letters into the fire and said, Tell Big Dirt and Dreadful Water that every path through the world but peace leads to eight kinds of loneliness.
—That’s it?
—Yes. It’s excellent advice. I wish I’d always followed it. Present it to them with conviction.
Number three. The church and school, having been built more than twenty-five years previous and virtually identical in design and materials except for the steeple, were falling apart at exactly the same rate. Should the failing shake roofs be replaced or just patched?
Answer: Patched.
And also, Conley said, the paint on the clapboards was peeling off both buildings in flakes as big as a man’s hand. Repaint or let go au naturel?
Answer: The latter.
Four. I had been in charge of building and maintaining roads in that section of country for decades. Which one should the crew work on next?
—The worst one.
—That would be the wagon road north, Conley said. It keeps washing out in hard rains. Two different times recently, wagons with their oxen and drivers had tumbled into the ravine. It would be a very big job. Did I want to direct the road crew in the needed repairs or should he?
Answer: Change the designation from wagon road to bridle path. Alert the press.
On and on.
Conley reached the second dozen on his list, or somewhere thereabouts. The season having come round to the end of another summer, in anticipation of cold weather, our new preacher wanted to know how deep snow had to lie before he could call off services. And the schoolteacher wanted to know the same.
—We’ve not even reached the equinox.
Conley shrugged. They’ve been asking, he said.
I paid both men’s salaries and provided room and board entirely out of my own pocket. My answer was, Two shitting feet high at the very least.
DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES.
I’d sit at my desk for hours drinking coffee and trying to reduce the stooks of paper that needed attending. Work all day until my buttocks clenched in spasms from inactivity. Look up from the desktop and refocus my eyes out into the room, and the piles had not diminished in the least. And when I went out among the people, some of them called me Will and some called me Colonel or Senator, and a few called me Chief, but only with a certain tilt of irony to their voices.
When they needed me, though, people still considered me the ultimate arbiter. I was the law. The high sheriff. Squire over white and Indian alike on my vast diminishing holdings and the adjoining remote unowned mountain land far from the nearest county seat. So people knocked on my door at all hours of the night to report crimes, and in those disrupted first years following the War there were a great many more than before, especially murders.
For example: come late spring, a bedraggled little circus had stopped in a nearby settlement of ten or fifteen families, a few brown cabins hunkered beside a stout stream. A patched tent was erected atop the ball field. And then that evening, a spectacular lamplit one-night show with a juggler and a slack-rope walker and a daringly clad girl who swung upside down on a trapeze with her hair hanging long in a point toward the ground. The main attraction was an old dim-eyed elephant with not too many years left in her but enough strength to sit on her hind legs on a big three-legged stool and use her trunk to hoist her trainer up to ride astraddle her neck and march two laps around the ring and sit back down and blow. On command, while making a sound like tooting a bugle, she could squirt water from her trunk out into the crowd and flap her big veined ears, stained and tattered along the edges as a blacksmith’s leather apron. It was an evening of wonders the show folk put on.
The morning after they cleared out, it was discovered that one of the musicians—a banjo picker and Ethiopian delineator, an artist of the burnt cork—had been killed, his head knocked open. He had been thrown into the millrace and his body had lodged face up against a board that was slid partway down into a slot in the race to regulate the flow of water to the wheel. All the blacking was washed away from his face, and underwater it looked up at you hopefully and strangely pale, the whitest thing in all the visible landscape. The top of his head was broken open in a bloodless mess the color and texture of caul fat.
No one would move him until I could come to investigate. And so for the better part of a day, all of the boys and most of the men had made the same precarious journey that I did upon arrival—walking spraddle-legged along the cross braces of the race to stare down through the rushing water onto the upturned countenance. The dark suit of fancy clothes and the longish black hair and even the cheeks of his face fluttered with the flowing water as if driven by a high wind.
When I acted like a lawman and asked questions, everybody talked about the amazing show, happy to tell me all about its many unexpected delights, especially that elephant. But nobody knew anything at all about the killing other than to repeat vague mutterings concerning somebody’s wife, though whose wife they could not or would not specify. And furthermore, who knew what old grudges and passions had prevailed among the departed animal trainers and painted clowns and contortionists and jugglers?
I had the dead man pulled out of the water and buried in the churchyard. I paid out of my own pocket for a simple stone marker and wrote an epitaph myself, which read:
SHOWMAN
D. 1867
I CAME FROM FAR AWAY EXPECTING PROFIT, BUT INSTEAD SUFFERED A GREAT LOSS.
At least we got a new addition to our word hoard out of the death. Previously, of course, there had been no reason to have a term for elephant. But long after her departure, the people kept marveling at her many features. It was all the talk. Those amazing ears. The people settled eventually on a name for her:
kamama utana.
Big butterfly.
UPON MY RETURN HOME,
I found that against my best advice Big Dirt and Dreadful Water had continued their poison correspondence. And finally, when words became insufficient, Dreadful Water had cut Big Dirt a long slashing wound down his chest, bone-deep. Big Dirt was home trying to heal. And when I went to see Dreadful Water, he was more morose than remorseful.
—Me and Big Dirt were such friends back in the old times, he said. Damn him.
These were old grey-headed men fighting about something they could hardly remember. And the little stout wives had suddenly sided devoutly with their husbands and were now enemies too.