All True Not a Lie in It (8 page)

The brother grabs at his parts and thrusts out his hips. Ned laughs again as he dismounts. He turns towards the barn at the side of the big double house, where there is dancing. People in pairs spin past the open doors in the gold torchlight. Miller keeps himself well back, hoping nobody will notice him and tell Daddy later. I get down too and watch. But just to the left of the door my eye catches a face against the wall, turned just slightly, as if it were a painting on the wall, a painting of a face only. Her hair and dress both black and hidden. She is not moving even her toe to the music, not moving at all. She will not look at me, though I continue to look at her.

I raise my rifle at a black movement far across the field, and I shoot it clean. A whoop goes up with the flash of my gun. Another Bryan gives my back a violent slap. The girl does not move.

A young boy runs back with the dead animal limp over his arm, a grey owl. He hoots: Tu whit tu whoo! He spreads the owl’s wings wide, clicking the joints, the feathers fanning against one another and the head lolling back. Some of the others hoot back. Ned takes the bird and holds it out to the girl. Wordless, she turns and walks
into the warm noisy depth of the barn. Another girl spins out and stops in the loop of light from the door, just before Ned. She looks similar to the other girl, likely a sister. Someone in the barn shouts for Neddy to come in and sing, and he hands the owl to this girl. She is confused, but she takes it and holds it to her breast. I whoop also, I am too happy.

Miller vanishes at some time, I do not know when, and I lose sight of Ned in the dancing. When I find Ned, it is getting on for dawn, and I say:

—We had best get home.

We mount Jezebel and set off. I have the reins. I ought to have seen it, but I am half-dreaming of girls dancing, and one girl standing still. I gallop Jezebel and she keeps her head down against the boughs and twigs across the path. Ned gives a shout and I feel him stab his heels into Jezebel’s sides,
jump
, but she is going down already, the ground is flying up to meet us as she falls hard onto her knees and over onto her back. A shape in the path looms up out of the dark.

My heart seems to stop. No sound. Then a wet snap of bone, a rickety crack like a child’s leg breaking. I roll clear.

—Ned.

I am against heat and mossy breath. I listen, but there is nothing to hear. My hand scrabbles for anything, my gun or my knife.

—Ned. Neddy.

—What? I am here, I am all right.

Ned is kneeling at the side of the path. It is Jezebel’s neck twisted and broken, like a fish leaping back on itself. I find myself standing over her, my arm slashing stupid at the dark. White patches begin to move against the night.

Only when it heaves itself up onto its legs does it make a noise and then I know it is a cow, a living one. It walks off. Who would have guessed that a cow could fell a mare so handily? Without trying. Ned laughs all helpless until he empties his drunken stomach
all over the path. I laugh madly too until rain begins to tap at my face. I sit down then against the dead horse feeling sorry.

But Jezebel is not dead, not yet. No. She is breathing, her side moving up and down. I crawl up towards her face and I peer close. The lashes feather my cheek, I see a slight shine as the eye rolls towards me. It disappears behind a slow blink but then comes back. I find her nose, I touch her lips with the flat of my hand and put my ear to them. She does not snap at me, perhaps she could not do so even if she wished to, but she was always a gentle girl. I listen to her gentle breath, my throat clenched. I cannot see enough to load a shot, and at any rate my horn has spilled in the fall. I whisper:

—Ned. Ned. Have you any powder?

But he has none, he dropped his gun somewhere and is dizzy and sick with drink. And so I have to find the centre of Jezebel’s throat with my knife. It is not difficult, her throat is bent back. She seems to be offering it up. She is patient. I feel for the place where her neck meets her chest, and I find the notch between. The knife slips in without hitting bone. I hold it there. She shudders twice. I move back to keep her blood from my good shirt, but I bend to keep my ear near her mouth. Jezebel, I hear your last breath.

I thought I heard it. I smelled it, hay-scented. I stand, and out of the night, for a burning instant, I see Israel’s face, his sharp smile and eyes, his mouth opening, before all of it is wiped out.

Words seem to hiss in the rain. They hang in the air a moment but are quickly gone. I do not know what the words are. My ears strain for them. The hairs are standing on my neck. Neddy is still crouched, laughing and coughing. He has not seen, I know it without asking him. He has not heard. Part of me wishes to see our dead brother’s face again, to ask him what he is telling me, but I am afraid.

—Ned. Come on.

Neddy and I creep home without speaking in the wet dark and crawl back into the house. As I slide into bed, Squire remarks with his usual precision:

—You are damp and you smell of wet horse.

He puts his feet on mine to warm them but they cannot be warmed. I think of the horse and I think of Israel. My face is wet with tears I cannot stop. I turn it from Squire.

In the morning Daddy goes out and finds his best horse missing. He rides the pony out through the woods until he comes upon her body. He comes home asking:

—How did she get out? How did she break her own neck? How—how did she cut her throat?

I say:

—I cannot think how.

I remain calm as Ned is, eating his bread. I lie and I am not struck by lightning. Untruth is no calamity. Keeping quiet is no calamity. As I think at this time.

I go back to the forest to try to see Israel again or hear some echo of what he said. Israel, if I had listened harder, I might have known what was coming. But there is nothing. At this time I do not know how many dead followers I will have.

I
DO NOT
sleep well for weeks after I see Israel’s face. It does not come back. I sleep outside the new cabin and stare back at the stars. Israel, I am full of confusion. I am afraid of seeing you, and I am afraid you are gone.

It is Miller’s idea to go to Philadelphia. He pleads with me to go along for two nights and not to tell Daddy. Squatting on his heels, he says we can make more money selling a pack of skins here and enjoy ourselves spending some of it. I say:

—All right.

Another city, somewhere Israel never went, seems a reasonable thought.

The tavern’s bedsheets are innocent though grimy enough. The first night, we have to share the room with a travelling Frenchman who tells us of a woman he had seen in Paris, kept in a glass box quite nude. He stretches out the word in sleepy tones: newwwd. He is half asleep, his eyes are slits. I ask him to say more, but he looks at Miller with a snaky smile and says:

—Have you not dipped your wick yet, ah, poor young man?

He reaches out to touch Miller, who goes pale and turns his back and leaves for home in the early morning. The Frenchman leaves too and I get the bed to myself, though I do think on the
quite nude woman. I picture her gratefully loosed from her glass box into this bed.

In the wet evening, I go north some streets into Hell Town, closer to the river and all its slapping noise. I keep myself to myself but I keep my eyes open also. There is plenty of trade here, plenty of people coming and going in boats and along the alleys. Always the smell of fish and the sad little moons of their old scales all over the walk. My skin pricks up here. I like being in a new city, not knowing what is coming. I like feeling my knife.

I stand looking at the river. I am looking for Israel’s face again, in spite of myself. This is what I am doing in Pennsylvania. I look at every face to see if one is his. He is not dead, or not fully dead, I am sure. I am watching the shifting of the water and thinking so when a man runs at me, his arm hanging like a dragging wing, I cannot see his face in the shadows of the buildings. He puffs a rough, unshapen word, it is not
help
, though it is something like it. He stumbles and reaches out as if he would take my arm in trade for his broken one. I step back but he falls and clutches my knees. Now I see his upturned face, his eyes are full of tears, pale blue with starry lashes all round. Not Israel’s eyes. The man kneels panting before me. I get out my knife. I see his unshaven throat, the bobbling lump at the front of it, and I am full of quick anger that he is not my brother. I raise the blade. I believe by this time that I could kill someone if I had to. Perhaps I believe I could fight Death itself, now that it has been close to me. Most young men believe so perhaps. I grip the handle and keep the blade above him. I stare into his face, I am ready, but he straggles back up and runs on, no longer looking at me. He is calling for mermaids. Show yourselves: so he cries in the direction of the stale water.

I laugh and quiet my heart and I walk on up a street away from the river. The cobbles have a wet sheen, the air is damp. It is quite dark here but for the lights in some of the windows, and not many
people are about. And no ghosts. This is what you are now, Israel, I know. And what do you want of me?

I walk slow. Under the splintery red face on the sign for The Indian Queen tavern, a man pukes neatly and then deposits a backgammon piece in the puddle. A horse nips my hair and its drunken rider brushes my neck with dry fingers. I slide my own finger up my knife again and it seems a lonely flat thing.

I close my eyes to the streets. A sniff of green wood burning, a sniff of pickle, a sniff of deep armpit. I sit inside the doorway of a shut bakery, which has a cindery smell and gives me a sad thought of hunting, my campfire sinking to ash and the owls going about their night business. I pull myself up, I feel the cool of the step under my backside and my feet. I force my eyes open to watch the people come and go. People like this life. People like this city, they live in it all the time. But the bells here have a tired sound.

I begin the walk southward back to my inn. Two lights in another tavern burn upon parts of women as they move past the door, lighting their faces when they pause against the wall. One of the women yawns hugely, showing her wide throat. A pair stands blowing smoke into the air and another drags her gown about. When they look at men their faces turn to wood, with carved wooden smiles. Whores. I think of the story of Gulliver, the best story. Israel’s wife did not read all of it aloud, not about the whores, but I read it myself. O Gulliver, you did not know what to do with them either.

—The boy! The boy himself, the very boy!

I catch a lick of his smell on the boarded walk. Smells do not disappear from memory, as I find. His broad face and the slope of his shoulders remain the same. As do his voice and his iron breath.

My thoughts of the past seem to have conjured him out of old darkness. William Hill. Perhaps he is what has been coming for me. Not Israel. I am somewhat relieved, I will admit. And he is very pleased at any rate and clutches at my hand:

—Always a pleasure and a delight to see an old friend, friendship is a gift! How do, Boone?

—I do all right.

Hill hardly hears me, so glad is he to be pumping my hand up and down in muscular fashion and crying:

—What brings you here?

I do not tell him that I am looking for my dead brother. He is still gripping my hand and talking:

—The companion of my youth! Happy days, happy days. Though you seem to be in search of other happiness this evening, ha!

He eyes one of the larger whores up the street, and I think of him in youth cheerfully singing under the bridge with the rest:
Your sister is a whore
. Perhaps it was with hope that he used to say it. He puts his arm about my shoulders and presses me forward. Nodding towards the capacious woman, he says:

—We might go in together, have a share. She has plenty to go around, look! Here, let it be my gift. What else is there to do in this city?

He jangles coins about in his palm. He smiles me up and down with his old pointed curiosity mixed with affection. His eyes are clear, his offer is quite sincere. His belief seems to be that we have always been great friends. He makes no mention of the fact that I stole his gun, or that my family was cast out, and I do not wish to bring it up. I suppose it is better to be friends after all. It is better to forget bad times. Hill seems entirely able to do it. And still he has money, which he is used to having, and it seems better than my own money, which at once seems miserable.

He begins to sing “The Green Fields of Home,” opening his arms to the lady and the whole night.

I feel sick as a pig. But interested also. I go with him.

We feel our way up the tilted steps to get to her room. It is at the top of the house, and is dim and smells of cold tallow. She settles
herself upon her bed, which creaks as if afraid of what is coming for it. We can hear her hard breathing there, we see her broad outlines. She says that she will save her candle, but Hill cajoles her to light it, saying that he wishes to inspect all of her charms closely, and that he will buy her all the candles she wants. And so she lights it and in the guttering glow I watch her get herself out of her bodice and skirts. She huffs and adjusts her flesh as Hill hums and throws his heavy arm about my shoulder. He tells her we are brothers. I burn with a quick wish to strike him for saying so and I pull back, but the woman says dully: