All True Not a Lie in It (49 page)

The dance is serious and ancient but a current of happiness ripples through it. Everyone is dressed up, painted up, very fine. Even the children are in the big house. Everyone eats and talks and goes back to pick again at the meat and bread and bones, and then more food comes in on platters. A warrior vomits quietly at the side of the room and I think briefly of poison, but it is only too much eating. He is a famous eater, as Pompey tells me.

The drummers started long ago, their bodies are coated in sweat. The rhythm drags and then bounces back up. Bodies mill and shuffle round them. Pompey stands about, refusing to be pulled in, looking as though he has to be persuaded, which he likes. At last he lets himself be pressed to the centre of the room beside the drums. He raises his arms to shoulder-height and looks distant before he begins a high song, another familiar tune that was once English, perhaps. Many of his words are unfamiliar. I understand some: people, time, war, sing. It is something about the past, old times, I think.
Sechcommika
. It sounds as though he is making it up. It goes on and on.

Black Fish is smiling a little, tilting his head, then he catches himself and sits up straight. Pim sits upon his knee and pulls his earring. The men make a circle to one side of the room, women make one on the other. All turn and turn, no one looking at anyone else. The concentration is great. The bodies seem walled off from one another. Only the feet move on and on together with the drumming.

The women melt away, their silver brightens into gold in the firelight and then vanishes. The children go too, some crying with fatigue. My wife turns to me with Eliza in her arms before they disappear.

Alone the men carry on faster, twisting their upper bodies within the circle. I am jostled in, Pompey pauses in his singing to grin at me, his face glistening. I shuffle my feet about, I was never a dancer. But this is not difficult. I turn, I feel the mass of the turning, a great shivering wheel. I feel the drums in my ribs and my back and the top of my head.

When the circle breaks into pieces, the drums roll back down into a low steady pulse. We all stop and breathe and stand about, a little foolish. Some stretch their arms and necks. The smell of us pervades the great room and I am glad for the smoke hole, though not much cool air comes down. Several old women, their eyes down, drag in a huge salt kettle. One of those they took from us at the salt spring, most likely. Perhaps the one I toted here. So long ago, back down a thin tunnel in a rock.

The women struggle to set it down, they puff and back away when they have done it.

Black Fish has vermillion on his raised palm, which he pulls across his eyes. Red streaks his forehead and eyelids, his finger-lines show in it. He dips a cup into the pot, he holds it in both hands. The air is heavy and liquid and over-breathed. My head wheels, I pull my eyes back to my father. He is drinking. His throat swallows, down and down.

We all form a tail. We all drink. Black Drink, they call it. War drink. When my turn comes, I take the cup from my father. Bitter, brackish, strong. It moves into my blood. His eyes glitter at me in their red, they are full of love. He dips his chin.

And Eliza’s face. It catches me. She has crept back in, she is crouched in a corner, she fans herself with the crow’s wing.

—You ought to take your mother’s old name. You are like a young crow.

Eliza feels heavier on my shoulders this morning. The paint horse walks beside us, its head nodding. I am tired, I have not slept. The Black Drink did its work on me but now I am emptied out, though I must hunt with the others. I must go with the men to the graves beyond the trees. She, however, is wide awake, banging her heels.

—Why?

—Because—you make such a noise. And your eyes do not shut.

I talk stupidly, I talk to stop my mind from darting about. I tease Eliza and I tickle her legs. Others are out already on their way, laden with food and pots and clothing and other offerings. We are late rising. Methoataske is coming along as far as the fields. Women are at work there with their white sons, they are crossing their arms and leaning on their hoes and sticks, turning their faces to the sun. Methoataske stops to speak with them, she bends to pull up a string of weed. Her hair is plaited up again. I have an urge to touch it and to make her look at me.

We are to dig up the dead warriors and rebury them with better things in hope that their old strength and luck are still about and will settle on us. We do not like them to be alone. They will be with us when we march on Boonesborough. We will go there and I will see the people there again. There will be more deaths, more burying, and whose? This I do not know. I watch my feet.

I go on with the girl. I walk slowly, I try to sharpen my brains. I hold onto her sharp knees. We are close to the trees at the edge of the woods. Here I set Eliza down on a greying trunk.

—Your place for this morning. All right?

She flaps her fan at me. I remember the waft of air on my face. Eliza.

Four or five others are drifting into the woods, spreading themselves out. No one is moving quick today. They are walking
towards the painted grave-markers, the sticks weathering in the trees. I cannot see them yet. Black Fish is first. His head is bowed slightly. He is thinking of his real son. They brought his body back here to bury it. He will see him.

I walk the horse forward, the shade cools my sore tired eyes.

Across the sun it comes, a burst of black and bright red, a flight. We have not seen turkey for months. So many of them fly out that they are crashing into one another, knocking heads and wings, crying garbled sounds no one can understand. They are like the bright flying souls of the dead, they are absurdly close to us, within our reach. They are alive and flapping and fighting and callling. The men laugh, hardly able to get out their guns and load and aim. This abundance is a shock. It is like seeing Kentucky for the first time, full of turkey and full of everything.

My chest goes hollow. Surely this is some sign. All my life I have been looking for signs. And the turkeys seem to be looking on me with their peaceable ringed painted eyes like spirits. So beautiful is it here, and so strange. But nothing can stay so beautiful and so strange.

You might run
.

Go
.

Be gone you ape
.

The old voices in my head. Human voices, but so far away.

I rein the horse in, I turn her head, her hooves twist, her ankle near rolls. The day is bright and sharp-edged above the forest. The figures dip and sway in the fields. Clutching at the horse’s mane I drop the rifle, the stock cracks and splits as it strikes the ground. No gun, no knife. Here again am I. I have not moved an inch since they first caught me in the snow.

An army surges at my back and it is an army of ghosts, all of my dead. My neck pricks and cringes, so bare is it. They do not touch me. They are watching, they are all eyes, what will I do this time?

I argue with them: We need to go along. We have been going along here.

A turkey gobbles and gibbers like a dead aunt offering advice from the next world. It is no advice. It is no help. The dead blow cold nothing on my neck. Israel is smiling. More of them are waiting, quiet in their graves in the woods. I wheel, I try to see but again there is nothing. Still your face is not there.

I want to see you. I want to see you again. Then perhaps I would understand.

The want strikes me like a blow, my heart is a great hole full of want. I had not thought want could go so far into a body. I hear Eliza calling after me, insistent as the turkey:
Daddy, Daddy
—

Out of her words shapes grow. Jemima, Rebecca, my boy Israel, and Susy and the rest. Perhaps alive at the fort. Not safe, but there at least. But Jamesie, your missing face rips a hole through me. I think of you calling me in the same way as Eliza does. I turn again to try to catch you but you are not there.

Here is the bargain I offer Death: Take others if you must. Let me see my son.

We make our trades.

I see what I want, what I must do. I dig my heels into the guilty horse, I push her so she runs and we are ahead, we are in the trees. I narrow my eyes against the branches, and the day dims. And as I race on I see myself running on through black woods and mountains, for days and days, all the long way to Powell’s Valley. I see myself in a light spinning snow at the grave Squire went back to make, where it is higher and colder, where the wolves have been first, trying to scratch a way in.

I see that I will dig down to the two bodies wrapped together in Rebecca’s linen sheet. One has dark hair and one is fair. The fair plait is yours. It is stiff and unpliable, like frozen straw.

The face is yours but covered in a film of salt. The eyes are still
there beneath the half-closed lids but they have withdrawn entirely. You have become strange. The waxy flesh is dull, still torn. I had thought it might have healed itself up in some way, I suppose. I take up the forearms, the poor hands, the nails all gone, pulled out one by one. The stabbed palms. The black bites from knives look like small gills, as if you had been trying to suck at air with your whole body, trying to get free of the terrible net.

I hold your hand. A dart-arrow is broken off in your side, I touch it gently beneath your torn shirt. Your shirt makes me want to weep. You are still seventeen years of age, but strange.

The dark boy is Russell’s son Henry. His body is in much the same state and is worse to look at, it makes my shoulders heave, I cannot touch it. I can only touch you. I cannot let you go. I am the only living thing here, a black mark in a field of snow. I put my face to your chest. It is cold and hard, no sound comes from it. If I do not move, wolves will eat my body. They have not eaten yours but they have been close. They will eat us together and we will be mingled inside them then, we find out where wolves go.

The thief who returned to camp said they were dead, all the boys, and Crabtree and the Negroes gone. Their camp was only two miles back from ours, they would have reached us the next day. This thief found Russell’s slave Adam in the woods babbling and shaking and clutching his hair as if it would all fall out if he let go of it. When the attack came in the night, Adam had hidden himself under a pile of driftwood near the creek. Twenty Indians or more, Cherokee, Delaware, Shawnee. He watched everything. He heard everything, the wolf calls and the false wolf calls.

He said Boone’s boy called one of the attackers by name, asking for his life and then begging. Big Jim, Jamesie said. It is me, he said. Already on the ground shot through both hips. Jamesie never could speak a name without a hesitation and a flush, as though he were making too free. But he said it, he looked up and asked
through his hovering hands: Did you kill my Mama and my sisters and brothers?

Jamesie. Your poor voice and hands. What were you thinking of? Mama and your family waiting you in the next life, but your Daddy missing?

He did not speak of me then. He did not think I could ever be dead, he thought I would come. In the end he did call me.
Daddy, Daddy, Dada
.

I see what I will do now. I will count your fingers and toes as I did the night you were born. I will count them again. I will dig and I will rebuild the grave deeper, I will put you in it, I will heap rocks and logs on top.

I will hear wolves yip somewhere in the light snow. A gun firing, not far. The wind stirring and sighing. I will get to my feet.

My thanks to my excellent agent, Denise Bukowski, and my excellent editor, Anne Collins. Thank you also to Amanda Lewis and Michelle Roper at Knopf Canada, and to Alexis Alchorn, Tilman Lewis, and Robin Studniberg for their careful copy-editing and proofreading. I’m grateful to the Canada Council for the Arts, the Banff Centre for the Arts,
The Walrus
magazine, and the Faculty of Arts at Okanagan College, especially Jeremy Beaulne, Jim Hamilton, Rob Huxtable, and Craig McLuckie. For reading and discussing, many thanks to Damien Barton, Corinna Chong, Francie Greenslade, Sean Johnston, Terry Jordan, John Lent, Clare McManus, Melanie Murray, Andrea Sazwan, Matthew Skelton, and Rebecca Upton. A particular thank you to Mary Ellen Holland for her untiring thoughtfulness and support. My family has lost me to the frontier for some time: Mike, Theo, and Kate Hawley; Jocelyn, Peter, Jon, Marcela, Laura, and Sarah Bunyan; Carolyn and Dan Hilton; José Burtch. Thank you all for letting me go, and for taking me back.

A
LIX
H
AWLEY
studied English literature and creative writing at Oxford University, the University of East Anglia, and the University of British Columbia. She published a story collection,
The Old Familiar
, with Thistledown Press in 2008. She won the 2014 Canada Writes Bloodlines competition, judged by Lawrence Hill, and was runner-up for the CBC Literary Award for short stories in 2012 and 2014. She teaches at Okanagan College in Kelowna, BC, where she lives with her family.