Thirteen Moons (44 page)

After the kissing went badly, we tried just holding each other. And that was a little better but still awkward, a bumping of the soft and hard parts of the body. I said aloud that at least we were both lean enough that the points of our hips still clashed against each other as they once had done. After all, how often in midlife do you get to repeat any element of the distant past whatsoever? And by the way, we both being in the range of a half century old, any assertion of occupying a midpoint in life was a highly optimistic note to strike.

I became aware that I was talking too much.

—How come I’m still in love with you? I said.

—One of the mysteries.

THREE NIGHTS LATER,
I stood at the far end of the ballroom. Lights dim. The band played all the current waltzes and a few of the popular songs of the day. Dancers moved across the floor in shapes like water, if water were considerably less graceful than it is. I waited and waited. And then through the wide French doors down the two-hundred-thirty-three-foot length of the ballroom, Claire entered. All the heads turned. She wore a shining silk dress of midsummer green, close at the waist, full below. Her hair was drawn up in an approximation of the current fashion but much looser, stray locks falling around her face and shoulders. A thin band of black crepe no wider than my finger around her upper arm. I went to her and gave her my hand, and we danced.

Oddly, hardly anyone was scandalized. After that first waltz, a few muted gloved hands met in applause directed our way. I credit the free and generous spirit of the Springs. Something in the water.

WE WERE CLOSE TOGETHER
all the way from high summer to the equinox. The progression of wildflowers, blooming and fading in the ditches, and the phases of the moons were all the calendar I needed. By day, we spun along the river road and on country lanes in my colorful cart. After dinner we climbed to watch sunsets at the jump-off. Waltzes late into the night. Much wine and other spirits. In the foggy hours after midnight, tangled abed in one room or another.

One evening we waded out into the river to the broad rock with the Rebel flag. Wobbling barefoot over mossy riverbed cobbles, Claire with her skirts held knee-high, me with cuffs rolled over pale shanks and a half bottle of champagne sloshing in my hand. As twilight fell in the gorge, I lit a fire no bigger than the lid to a bucket. Striking a blaze from a nest of sticks and tinder collected in a hollow of the rock and feeding it with driftwood lying about. We watched the fire burn and I told Claire about Granny Squirrel’s potion made from just such a river nest. Me fasting and drinking the tea brewed from it in an effort either to forget her or bring her back.

—Granny Squirrel’s spells rarely failed, she said. So maybe that one just took a long time.

—Maybe. I’ve always tried to maintain the attitude that being happy interferes with our perceptions of the world.

—Did she ever die? Claire said.

—Possibly. During blueberry season one year, she never came home from picking. We looked and looked and all we found was her basket, half full. Nobody knows what happened. She might have just moved on.

—How old would she have been?

—Couple of hundred. Maybe more.

SUMMER WAS SUDDENLY DONE,
wheeled away too quickly. Overnight, abandoned cornfields bloomed with head-high purple ironweed, burning and blinding and visionary. Autumn never the best of times for me.

Letters arrived daily from Conley and others. Debts and responsibilities. Things falling apart. Every morning, carriages rolled away taking summer people back to the lowlands. We had reached the sad time of year when the ballroom was used only on Friday and Saturday nights and the two upper floors of bedrooms were dark and empty. Dogwoods and sumac already burning red and poplars fading to yellow. Time to go.

Claire and I had not talked at all about a future. We never had before. When we were young, we worked under the assumption that all the life there was or would ever be was right in our hands at the moment, so why bother speculating about a future entirely lacking reality? But the future had waited in ambuscade and now pressed down on us with all its weight.

LATE ONE NIGHT,
along about the equinox, I asked her to marry me. We were sunk to our chins in the steaming spring, and a light rain fell around us without even the force to pock the water. I interlocked fingers with her and pulled her to me and said what I had to say about loving her for so long, yearning and despairing. And about the power of second chances. While I talked, Claire’s eyes teared up, which I took as a good sign.

But when I was done she shook her head. Not yet, she said.

—If not now, when?

—I need some time to think about it.

—Time, I said. That’s exactly the problem.

THE NEXT DAY,
Claire put back on her mourning. All the dismal black layers. Green summer was passed and gone. Time again for heart grief. She came to my room dark and weighted down. I held her in the doorway, the Woman in Black. Hugging a bleak stiff figure. I looked her in the eye and argued all the muddled and desperate wisdom of my middle years against her gloom. We are not made strong enough to stand up against endless grief. And yet pain is the constant drone of life. So if we are to have any happiness at all, it is only in the passing instant. This past season together had been an exception to the general miserable conditions of existence. As had those two summers back in the old world. Surely it is a sin to reject the few gifts we are given. Be happy in the flash of time granted to us or hurt forever. Those are the harsh and contradictory rules Creation has laid down for the game we’re forced to play.

CLAIRE ABOVE ME,
white bedcovers crisp and bunched in folds at her hips. Through the window, a thin final curvature of End of Fruit Moon falls down a milky sky to the black jittery ridge. The upcoming new moon will mark the beginning of the new year. An odd time to start, with the dying of summer, the fall of leaves. Claire moves in private abstraction. I am not absolutely necessary to whatever pleasure she’s finding. Her veil on, and nothing else. On the floor a dark pool of mourning clothes. The netting a blank scrim over her face. Only when she leans a certain way to the left and turns her head and catches the backlight from the candle stub burning over her shoulder on the washstand do I see any features at all beneath. A fierce determined silhouette. The only signet of passion her full and slightly parted lips.

I raise a hand to lift the veil where it swags below her chin, but she stops me, presses the hand back down to the one place where we connect. Moth wings hiss in the candle flame. She finishes, pressing down hard, and only then lifts the veil with a sweep of wrist and forearm, a motion I remember from our youth. She falls onto me.

I doze off with her in my arms and awake to the sound of ankle boots being buttoned. I reach to her where she sits on the edge of the bed and try to make her stay, but she will not. She stands and studies her grim attire in the mirror, bends and smooths a hand over rumpled crepe.

—I have to go tomorrow.

—Go?

She draws the veil back down, leans, and kisses the corner of my mouth, the veil between our lips grainy and resistive.

—Go where?

No answer.

—Where? I said.

—Away.

—This will break us both, I said.

OVER HER PROTESTS,
I insisted on taking her to the railhead. No dawdling allowed for enjoying the brilliant autumn weather. And little conversation. We did the four-day journey in two. Spinning along the river road from dawn into dark, skipping the usual pleasant night at the inn in Alexander and driving on to the Eagle Hotel long after dinner with the horse exhausted and steaming in the cool night. I hired another for the next day’s travel, which began before dawn. We fell out of the mountains like a dropped stone and reached the railhead at midnight. An eastbound train waited at the station. Its lamps were lit and steam huffed rhythmically from the engine. Ready to roll. Porters transferred bags in a hurry. Claire kissed me a sort of smeared glancing blow and was gone up the two steps into her car. I sat on the carriage seat with the reins loose in my hands and watched the taillight until it disappeared around the first bend in the rails. All the autumn stars were sprayed across the sky, and the dew was rising in the grass.

FOUR DAYS LATER,
autumn sun already set, I walked out to the gallery of the Springs with a glass of whiskey. There sat the razor man, smoking a cheroot and rocking very slightly in a rocker. The exact black suit of clothes from summer. I looked around for the stout boy, but he was nowhere to be seen.

—Have a seat, the razor man said. He palmed the arm of the chair next to him and set it bobbing. I sat one chair down from it and took the Remington out of my vest pocket. It was not much of a weapon. If you stuck out your forefinger and cocked up your thumb to imitate a pistol, the Remington would be considerably smaller. But at six feet of range, it could put a little precise hole through your head from one ear to the other. I set it in my lap and sipped my drink.

—Pretty little gun, the man said. You ought to have bought it in chrome. Then it would look like a piece of jewelry. A brooch.

I was too old to start finding deep personal symbolism in the pistol I carried.

—It’s been my experience in all departments of life that the pretty ones will kill a man faster than the others, I said.

—How’s your thigh? he said.

—Thigh?

He drew on his cheroot and looked upward and puffed out an irritable plosive cloud of smoke.

He said, So I take it that thanks for my generosity is still forthcoming. Oh, well, they say charity is its own reward.

—We could do this all night long, I said. What do you want?

—Me? Not a damn thing. As far as I’m concerned, you can do what you want. You’re of no interest to me whatsoever.

—And yet you’re here.

That got a smile out of him.

—It’s the same old business, he said. Money. That’s all there is. The driving wheel of everything.

—Who? I said. Williams?

—Not just Williams now. I’m representative for a sort of consortium.

—They’ve ganged up against me?

—Yes indeed. A gang wanting their money that you owe them. And failing cash repayment, they want your land. All of it.

—All my land? That’s complicated to define. There’s my land in my name. And the people’s land in their names. And their land still in my name from back when they couldn’t own property, and that’s a lot.

—This is not the least bit complicated. They want everything with your name on it.

I did rough calculations. Not enough room left over for people to live on. Cornfields overlapping one another, cabins standing cheek to jowl, fishermen jostling each other on the riverbanks, and the dead woods thick with frustrated hunters.

—The inhabitants? I said. The people. What of them?

—That’s what the Indian Territory is for. The West.

—No, I said.

—No? the razor man said. No is what you have the freedom to say when you’re in charge. You’re not exactly calling the shots here.

—So what do we do? Duel or what?

He laughed and turned aside and spit a fleck of tobacco from his tongue.

—Duel? he said. I don’t do that ancient shit. I kill people if they need killing.

—If they don’t kill you first.

He took off his hat and showed his balding pate and turned his bagged and wrinkled eyes toward me.

—Kill me first? he said. Good God. I’m a thousand years old. Get in line if you want to take your turn with your tiny pistol. If my job was to kill you, you’d have been dead three months ago.

He sucked a lungful of smoke and I took a drink. We both looked off toward the river. Neither of us said another word, and it seemed a competition not to be the first to speak.

I finally scored the point.

—Here’s the only thing pertaining, he finally said. In the spirit of your old friendship, Williams just sends a word of advice. You need to go home and attend to business and not let love rule your life.

—That’s it?

—Go home, he said. All kinds of shit’s waiting to fall on you when you get there.

10

W
HAT FOLLOWED WAS A PERIOD OF LIFE SO EMPTY THERE WASN’T
even anything to dream about. All that I had was gone.

Someone should write a sad ballad with that line as title. In a minor key. Fiddles droning, old women keening grim lyrics containing the words
broke, ruined, busted,
and
failed.

As Bear had said, I was a man with payments. I did not want to default. I was no willing welsher. At the heart of the problem was the flow of money backing up my cascades of paper. After the War, government checks were not reliably forthcoming. Neither the long-delayed final payout nor even the annual interest on the $
53.33.
Nor could my many debtors pay me back what they owed. All kinds of loans remained outstanding. Everything from pure objective business deals to a handshake loan I’d made with an old friend to pay for his twin boys to go to Harvard. Now he wouldn’t even talk to me. A few of my other debtors at least wrote back with excuses. This was the Reconstruction, they all pointed out, one of the most ironically named government policies ever, since its goal seemed to be plowing us all into the ground rather than building anything back up. Money was tight, et cetera, et cetera. As if that was news to me. I’d sit at my desk and read the letters and wonder what rates the razor man charged and if he might offer a volume discount.

There might have been some angle to work, a three-bumper shot I might have made in my youth. But I could not even imagine it now. Some days the weight pressed so hard I lay in bed until sunset, sipping claret and reading novels from before the War:
Carwin, Pym,
and the like.

Before long, lawsuits began flying. Court dates loomed. All kinds of opportunities for loss presented themselves.

Money, though, was not at the head of the list for me. The worst loss was to see the land go. Our holdings were not one big square country. We had our core territory, which was fairly regular in its borders. But nearly half the total was scattered about in pieces, some of them two days’ ride away. Bear’s vision had been far-flung, and some of our original purchases at the land auction had defined the outer boundary of his imaginary homeland. It was left to me to fill in the empty spaces of our map as time went on. But for all kinds of reasons, that hadn’t happened.

So those broken tracts were the first to go. And it hurt me awfully deep when I signed the papers on the river land that included the Drowning Place where Bear had fought his namesake battle. A man wanted the land to grow corn on the flats by the river and to log the steep mountainsides of oak and chestnut, and he was willing to pay cash money.

ABOUT THIS TIME,
I began to lack the strength of spirit to manipulate visiting journalists to my ends. But they kept coming nevertheless. So I delegated Conley. A poor choice, it turned out. His first and only adversary among the tribe of journalists was a writer from
Lippincott’s Magazine,
and Conley failed utterly in the contest. Needless to say, the main thing about failing against journalists is that your defeat fetches up in cold print for all to read unto eternity, same as the Celts against the Romans at Telamon.

Conley spent two days giving the usual tour of the community. The grey and off-plumb schoolhouse and church. Various oddities among our citizens to represent local color. A weary ball game with neither bloodshed nor gambling. A few remnant basket weavers and potters doing their work under a drooping shed roof.

And then, after some months, Conley was sent a fresh copy of
Lippincott’s
in which the article appeared. As if he might be proud of his contribution.

He didn’t even try to hide the story from me. I still read widely, and he realized he couldn’t get a lot past me. He came to the house and handed me the issue in question all fearfully, as if he expected me to fall into a rage as I read.

The story started out pleasantly enough, pretty much like they had for decades. The southern mountains are a land of forgetting. Railroads and telegraphs, work and hurry, are left behind at the first pass. An entire paragraph on the beauteous landscape largely untouched by man.

So far, so nice.

But then the article turned to a catalog of varied local rumor and misinformed shit-ass opinion in regard to me. I was portrayed as a deep mystery, existing only to be solved by the writer. Local folks had been scrounged up to say all kinds of things about me, and since the tales had been collected at considerable effort on the writer’s part, they were thus presented reverently as entirely possible facts. And the various possibilities were arranged in descending order.

Number one. The Indians living in the colonel’s vast boundary of land were a Christian people existing in peace and prosperity for many decades. He had been their benevolent sachem, their white chief, who had accumulated for their benefit a territory nearly as large as some minor European countries. Specific examples of such tiny nations were not forthcoming, though perhaps a little embittered borderland principality fitted into a seam between France and one of her several neighbors was intended. But sadly, our vast and hard-won homeland was shrinking day by day under the current unfavorable economic conditions of the South. Leaving us all in jeopardy.

Number two. For decades, the Indians had been little more than slaves, abused and bled white by the melancholy colonel, who ruled over them and a vast lawless wilderness as autocratically as a pharaoh, claiming for his personal property every penny of congressional appropriation since the Removal, which amounted to a squandered fortune. And now the whole kingdom was falling apart due to a combination of poor stewardship and outright malfeasance.

Three. The Indians were godless heathens, living in a state of primitive licentiousness and unbridled passion, and the colonel had not only condoned such a retrograde state but immersed himself in their manner of free love and pagan rites with great enthusiasm for such a long time that a great many half-breed children and full-grown adults milled about his grand estate with noses embarrassingly like his own. He herded the people toward Christian ways only to the extent that it looked favorable to outlanders. As long as his people kissed the Bible and said something convictional about Jesus loving them when visitors came calling, the colonel was happy. Otherwise, it was fine with him if they went right on praying to the souls of animals to beg forgiveness for killing them or believed whatever they wanted about witches and herb doctors and spirit healers. An unidentified white woman in the area was quoted as saying that the colonel hadn’t moved the people further toward Christian conduct because it might cut down on all the relations he had with their women. Another unidentified source said, There’s enough of them running around saying he’s their daddy that just the boys of them would make a pair of baseball teams.

Finally, the Indians were nothing but a sad remainder of primitive humanity, debased and starving, living in total isolation and disarray, and the colonel was a madman chained to the floor of his own house.

And that was but the first couple of pages. Illustrated with a fine etching of high jagged peaks and deep jagged gorges and tiny human figures dressed in the current fashion standing by a boiling river and looking upward toward impossible summits in rapt attention. From that point on, it just got worse and worse.

When I finished reading, I sat in my chair by the fire and closed the magazine and set it on the side table. Conley was already trying to figure what other kind of job he might do henceforth. Plowman, scrivener. You could look in his face and see that he believed his future sent back miserable tidings.

I said, Everybody with an inkpot and steel pen and an hour to kill gets to take a shot. About all you can do in defense is present them a moving target.

I made a little faking motion with my head and shoulders, an old ballplayer’s move.

—Yes sir, Conley said.

Then I riffled the magazine back to the starting page of the story and studied it further, looking particularly at the author’s credit.

—Rebecca? I said. That’s a fetching name.

Conley shrugged.

—Pretty? I said.

—I didn’t take note, Conley said.

I just looked critically at him.

—She was pretty, he said.

—Awfully, awfully pretty, I said, and smart as can be? Snapping grey eyes and little curls of pale hair escaping around her temples from underneath the brim of whatever kind of stylish yet unusual hat she was wearing?

—Something like that.

—And about all you said while she was here, no matter what question she asked, was Yes, ma’am?

—If she’d requested me to deny my Savior, that’s the answer I’d have given.

—And that business about me chained to the floor?

—I just acknowledged that it is a current rumor.

—That’s what they’re saying?

—You’ve not been seen out in the world much these days. People get to talking.

Conley paused a long time, and then he said, But damn, she was plenty pretty.

—Well, I said. That’s all right. Pour us a drink and we’ll commiserate about women and their hard hearts.

THE WORST PART
was the walk up to the precipice. But after I had been pushed off the lip of the cliff and was falling in midair, everything relaxed.

The Government sent down a man. F. A. Dony, Special Agent, Bureau of Indian Affairs. He escorted me to the nearest court town. Just the two of us on a three-day jaunt.

The final night of the journey, we camped by a river. Had a fire going and dinner done. Lounging on our blankets, yellow light flickering halfway up the tree trunks, woodsmoke, all that sort of thing. Dony had been sitting a long while writing in a tight hand on big loose correspondence sheets.

—Read me the opening of what you just wrote, I said.

—It’s private correspondence back to my supervisor at the Indian Office. Government business. A sort of report.

—Last time I paid attention, the Government dealt with Indians through the War Department, and what they wanted was to send all of us west.

—Times change.

—Read me just the first two lines of what you’ve written. We’re men out traveling together in the wilderness. Show some collegiality.

—You may not like it.

—Name me something I do like these days.

—All right. The opening lines are these:

I have just completed a journey through the wilderness to the nearest court, including a memorable bivouac atop the Soco Mountain, with no other company than the notorious Colonel Cooper. Contrary to expectation, he has been a charming companion and a trusted guide, so long as one is willing to bide one’s time and patiently indulge his idiosyncrasies.

—As is necessary with every person I’ve ever known, I said. Every damn one of them. So, all in all, a very good and fair beginning, ignoring the fact that we are still on our journey rather than at its end. Not out of the woods yet. But let’s call it poetic license and go on. Your writing fascinates me.

—Second paragraph.

I arrived here expecting to find a thief, an enemy. I found instead a man embattled, beset on all sides. He is being sued by everyone he knows and also by a good number of strangers. Creditors from a dozen counties in four states are trying to seize the land he owns to settle their claims. And the Indians occupying the land in question, the people he has lived among for nearly half a century, are also suing him, their former White Chief, on the grounds that a significant portion of the land had been bought on their behalf. But much of the paperwork memorializing that intent has never been legally filed. So they have been left with little choice. If they do not get in on the suing, they may be left out entirely. But there are few hard feelings in either direction.

In fact, coincident with their lawsuit, the Indians have issued a proclamation making all his descendants members of the tribe for all time. Though from what I can tell, that is an empty symbolic gesture since he never married and has no legitimate heirs.

Against all prudence, the Senator seems intent on testifying against himself in court. Yesterday while riding tack and tack up a rugged mountain trail, I asked him why he insisted on following this self-destructive course. He answered that when he was a boy, cast out by his own people, these Indians took him in and had ever since been his only family and this land his only home. And if a man lacks something to fight for, he is truly bankrupt.

None of which negates the fact that these people are in a precarious situation, liable to be evicted if the Senator’s enemies prevail in court. At issue is a vast territory. But deeds have gone unrecorded for decades, loans in many directions have been defaulted on and then covered by three-party checks and old promissory notes reassigned so many times that the paper is limp and greasy and feather-edged from handling and the signatures are unreadable palimpsests. Collateral
sometimes involves mules and futures on shell corn and next year’s peach crop. By such manner of business, the ownership of a wide swath of mountain topography has become all tangled in the courts. The Senator’s many opponents are trying to seize his land and evict the Indians from it and then parcel it off and sell it.