All True Not a Lie in It (10 page)

O
NCE WE GET
out of Carolina there are no true roads west, only narrow trails, which the scouts lose entirely from time to time. I hope to see something marvellous but there is little so far. The French have no interest in showing themselves. We will boot them back to Quebec when we find them, all this land and its furs for England and King George! So the officers keep announcing. General Braddock places his proper British regiments at the front in their proper scarlet coats. Some of us colonial militiamen at the back have jackets the wives or mothers tried to dye red, but we are a sorrier looking lot. The army creaks and groans and whistles along. We force our slow way through bogs and underbrush and woods. We hack everything down. Every blade of grass. We stop for every bump. For every anthill.

—Ought to have kept one to show my Ma. Or to turn in for the money.

I hear one of the scouts saying this to another as they pass our fire on their way to their tent. The other runs his finger over his lip as he says:

—No money in those, they have hung out there for months. Not even the flies are interested. Use it as a wig for your prick, your Ma would like that.

Scalps they are talking of, nailed to the trees where we last camped. In the Allegheny Mountains now, it is rough going. We are tired out and sore and want only to drink in private without catching Hell from the officers. No wagoner is fond of the scouts and their airs, and perhaps it is a mercy there are so few of them, though there ought to be more. Indian ones would likely do better, but who can tell which side they are on? I do know I could do better myself. Signs are everywhere if you look. And I do look.

As the scouts walk on I hear them arguing about the name of a town they both believe they know. No no yes yes, on and on.

—If they do not like the scenery they should paint themselves another scene. Such is the privilege of you boys of America.

This comes from Findley, the wagoner fondest of talking. He is the worse for drink now, that is to say worse than the rest of us. He is an odd fellow, all bones and small bright blue eyes. In his usual life he is a trader and so he is able to supply us with the drink we are not meant to have. But in exchange we are forced to listen to him. Rum makes him affable at least, and we all watch out for the officers together. He lies with a cloth over his face for his toothache and spins yarn about his travels. He has been south to Florida to trade among the Seminoles. He says he tried to shoot a dragon there, properly called an alligator, but he was baffled by its weird eyes with their black pupils like narrow doors. The heat also baffled him, it was so damp and gasping. And deep in the green swamps he came upon an Englishman living with twelve women and his old mother. The Englishman called it an Ideal Society, where work was done according to inclination.

I am the only one who really listens. I would like to know about all he has seen, not least these women. I say:

—And what was these ladies’ inclination? What do they wear in the swamps of Florida?

From beneath his face cloth Findley laughs in muffled faraway fashion and says:

—Perhaps I will tell you. Perhaps.

I sit up and say:

—How long did it take you to get there, Findley? What was the hunting like?

But he seems to have fallen asleep. Dodd, another driver, says:

—Christ.

He throws a spoon at Findley, who stirs and reaches for it. His voice rises again gamely:

—For that, I will tell you something. There is another place I have been to with no one in it, no women, no French and no need of roads at all, so perfect is it. Some Indians perhaps, not many, and perfect nonetheless. No need of roads, no need of names. Beautiful. And clean. I dream of it, you boys, I dream of its cleanness. You too would dream of it if you only knew what cleanness was, if God in his mercy chose to reveal it to you as well—

I am listening. I know that Findley feels me listening. His voice seems directed straight at me. I am about to say: Where is this place then. But another among us groans like an ox and says:

—Oh Christ, no goddamned Irish sermonizing here, Findley. O
Jaysus
.

—Go back to your face-ache. Spare us the pain.

Dodd says so while digging about with a twig in his ear. As he goes too far with it, he yelps: Shit. Then he says:

—Lying there like a slug. Shame the Indians did not send you to your eternal rest on your travels. Their heavenly hunting grounds will take anyone, clean or not.

Findley gives a cooing laugh and flaps an arm:

—Indeed. The Indians are great friends of mine. We trade, and they have shown me all manner of things.

—And they like your things.

—All my things, certainly. They are fond of silver and gold.

—Well, and are your things silver and gold? The deuce, and mine only flesh. But meaty! Take a look if you dare to come out from under that arse-rag.

Dodd is laughing and reaching for his belt to drop his breeches as he will do at any opportunity, but Findley does not lift the cloth from his peaky face. He goes on with his arm held out:

—What I tell you will appear in your dreams, and they will be the most heavenly dreams you have ever known.

Dodd spits on Findley’s face cloth.

I take a drink and I say:

—Your path to Heaven could be sped for you, Findley.

Now he lifts the cloth dainty as a bride with a bedsheet and looks me up and down with a grin before replacing it. He knows he has me on his hook.

The air tastes of thick dust. It gets all through our mouths and clothes.

We are in Pennsylvania now. Pennsylvania again. The fifes far at the front of the column take on a wheezy flat tone after some days in the dust. The late summer wasps and flies keep with us, I grease up my face and neck to keep them off, but they pay no heed. At the front the infantry are building a log road to get us through a newly cleared boggy patch. I pull up my horses, who are restless. The oxen pulling the open wagon ahead of mine are unperturbed at having to stop so often. I stare at their ridged blank backs. I wonder about the sentiments of oxen. What do they think of? Being gelded, there is not much to think of, as I imagine.

An insect creeps into my ear, and as I turn my head to shake it loose I see my little sick wife, Molly Black, the wife of my childhood.
For an instant I see her blindfolded ghost, a small camp-follower at the back of the wagons.

I am sentimental at twenty years of age. So I tell myself.

But now my team butts against the wagon in front and steps back, tangling the traces. One horse rears and sputters. I get down to unsnarl them. I invent fresh curses about vegetables and the crevices of horses. Findley on the wagon behind me laughs and says:

—I could listen to you all the day and night. Do not stop now, go on, go on. You are quite amusing to watch, Boone, did you know it?

For his benefit I turn the vegetable curses to the crevices of the Irish and he laughs the more and slaps his long thin thighs.

When I have untangled the beasts, we lurch on. We bump over the logs and onto the ground again. I could crawl faster than this backwards. The heat oppresses me. I occupy my mind with keeping the horses exactly half a foot from the wagon in front. I think also of the round-armed girl in her under-shift, and the pretty faces and parts of other women I have seen, and my thoughts become less sentimental for a time.

The axes at the front clash with the trees, the fifes pick up their dreary tinny tune, “Roslin Castle” again. Goddamned castle, are there no other tunes? Findley yawns heavily. I call back:

—Headache again? Like to die yet?

He only groans, and I must say that my own head is aching violently when I think of it. We drag on a quarter-mile or so, the sun heightens. The river nearby gives no coolness and no relief from the clanging and whistling and creaking and groaning. Far ahead of us, the line begins to ford the water.

We bump to a dead halt, pinned by a high bank on one side and stands of birches atop a ridge above the river on the other. The river seems an impossible cool dream. There is no way to get the wagons through this to the shallower ford up the path, so the axemen will have to set to work again. We are not permitted to leave the line.

I sit back. My hat falls down my back at this moment and my aching head burns in the sun.

I do not hear the shout, only the echo bouncing back. Then the doubled echo of four shots. Then more, running into one another so they cannot be counted. No human sound at first. I stand and I can see a mounted officer just ahead of the wagons and behind the marchers, stopped with his hand over his mouth and nose, as though a stink had hit him in the face. He turns back and I see his perplexed forehead. I climb up on the box: a half-mile ahead at the front of the train are hundreds of people like the Lilliputians in the story, miniature people appearing out of the trees and descending the bank. Where have they come from?

My eye lights on a tiny man in a tiny French blue jacket separating himself from the pack. Quickly he knocks down one of our soldiers with his gun-butt and then kneels on him and knifes his head and peels off his scalp. I see the whole of this scene, the small arm waving the detached hair in the air and the tiny body on the ground. I seem to be peering into a strange world underground, perhaps in an anthill. I want to shut my eyes but I cannot. I am still standing upon the box. A dog cries with a desperate sound. More bodies on the ground ahead are scattered like fallen red birds. The officer now cries out: Unfair! I believe this is what he says. He orders the rear guard and the wagons onward, slashing his sword across the air. Urging their animals ahead, the first wagoners crash into the infantrymen and some of the mounted soldiers who have turned back to flee. I turn to try to see Findley, but when I look back I see only the moving line of blue jackets and painted skin making its way along our confused column. They chop as if scything through brush, as if we were thousands of thin trees in their way.

Five wagons ahead they are already tearing into the white covering, slitting it like a belly and looking inside. I hear some words in French and then some of the Indians beginning to confer and to
pull things out. They know where everything is. They have been following us for days, perhaps for weeks.

Dodd, the driver of that wagon, goes down with a sigh as the breath is torn out of him. I see him roll down the bank towards the water. By now the river is stuffed to the jaws with us, some face down, some splashing in feeble strokes, some standing up to their hips and holding their guns out, waiting for direction.

It strikes me that people do not always run in the face of such danger, they do not believe in it when it opens its maw at them. They wait to see what will happen. I am not the only one. I think of it later in my life when I am standing in the snowy woods, not running.

The French and the Indians sweep along the line, pushing between the trees. They want the horses, the oxen, the supplies. The scalps too. The French king buys them. I picture the French king in a suit woven of people’s hair, stroking his long sleeves.

This is no fight, it is only killing, and killing is nothing after all, it is nothing, it is only dull and horrible. I want no more to do with it. Officers in their red sashes fall from their horses screaming. I turn again and see Findley is sitting on his box with his cloth over his forehead. My body is coiled tight. My gun is beside me. I do not know how loud I am or whether I speak aloud at all:

—We had best be gone, I am going.

I slash at the traces with my knife and one of the horses tries to bolt, one falls. I crawl onto the back of the one rearing, I cut him free and we run crashing down the bank into the Monongahela River up to his withers, where I throw myself into the water. I keep my head down and my eyes cracked open just enough to see. With my gun in both hands I push my way through the water to the other side, I hear muffled wet shouts and calls as I keep on, I feel terrible things that I do not think of.

Others are with me on the far side. Not many. One man’s trousers are in shreds, he stumbles ahead, his backside ribboned with blood.

I can still feel the bodies in the water like logs, with the same sodden weight, the way I have to push them from me and stand on them. Israel, I keep thinking of your body, though I did not see it. I will not look at any of these dead in case I see you. I tell myself I have seen many murders at once here, but I have killed nobody and I have saved myself and so
—V is for victory
. But chewing it over is like another piece of army salt beef, likely to give you a sore mouth. I want only to not think of it.

I face west. I stand still with the sun burning my eyes out. I think of running past all of this, past everything, and finding the place Findley talked of. Paradise. It is not so far, surely.

My breath struggles in my tight chest. But Ma, I see you with your worried face white as an onion, your hair gone all white too. I see your terrible face after Israel died in the wagon. Ma and Daddy.

I leave the possibility of Heaven behind and make my way back towards Carolina. But after all I do not escape Death, I do not escape killing. There is no escape.