All True Not a Lie in It (9 page)

—Brothers. The singer first? Or keep singing while the other has his go. Pass the time.

The singer first. I watch Hill attach himself to her, singing an old song about jolliness of all sorts. Brothers indeed. Hill is rewriting my life for me. It seems easily done. I watch as Hill carries on, running his fingers up and down and in the woman. He turns to slant a joyful eye at me. What would your father say, Hill?
Confess to your Friends here today
. So I think. And Hill would do so, he would tell anyone anything.

Through the cracked shutter I can see the street, it is still there, it helps me to feel less strange. I look down at the earth until my eye lights on a woman in the shadow of the building. She steps forward as a cart passes, and I see her copper-coloured hair in the light from the tavern below us. Israel’s wife, her cap off on the cellar floor. My heart fills. The past is with me here. The cart veers on and when the woman turns back she looks up briefly and her eyes flash.

I begin to think that whores are no bad thing.

I go out while Hill is occupied with his face in the woman’s backside, singing on in smothered fashion:

I’ll roar and I’ll groan
,

Till I’m bone of your bone
,

And asleep in your bed
.

Down in the street I offer my hand to the dark-haired woman and I say:

—How do.

As it turns out, she also has red stockings and the most beautiful dimples in the flesh of her thighs. Still I remember her face in the flicker of her own bad candle, as though she were passing in and out of the shade of a tree on a bright day. I remember her pointed chin and her hair curling before her ears. She tells me that her name is Maria and that she lost her virtue at the top of a volcano in Italy. Then she laughs in snapping fashion. But she is kind in spite of my innocence and my hurry. She makes me forget. Thank you, Maria, if that is your name. Are you still in that city, I wonder, or have you vanished like so many.

When I go out the next afternoon I hope to evade Hill, but I go back to that inn to seek her out. It is too early perhaps, she is not there and so I introduce myself to another lady. She is a very long lady and has no dimples but does smile and I will say no more of my trip to Philadelphia.

When I am back in Carolina, that city becomes a loose dream to me, not a real place. It has eaten my money. Miller has kept his share of our hunting proceeds safe. He looks upon me, his face like soap, all clean and disgusted with my dirt.

I had thought myself lucky. But so did Israel. I do not know what I am to do.

The hunting and trapping are poor as the summer comes, and so I earn my keep driving wagons to market in Salisbury. It is dull enough work. I think only of escape, my brains thump with the thought in the day’s heat. All the worse because the Yadkin Valley
seemed a good place when we first settled here. But my happiness is gone, and where may I go to now? My legs are heavy as lead. I cannot live this way, rolling about with lead legs in a wagon. A fear creeps along, a fear that I will disappear entire into this life. At times I feel Israel’s breath, his laugh, at the back of my neck. But when I turn he is not there. Never.

On my way back from market when the daylight is low, I stop at Lowrance’s tavern some miles out of town. After a drink I go outdoors to relieve myself, and round the side of the house I see a bundle of hay set on sticks with a slap of red paint at its centre. It has the look of a square pig without its head. Headless it stares at me.

A sign.

I do not relieve myself. I join the queue before the target though I am fatigued and arse-sore from sitting. The evening is windy. It is only a small shooting contest, hardly a contest at all. But I know that I will win it. The wind nips at my eyes but I know. I get out Hill’s old gun and I shoot the dead centre of the red paint, the eye of the straw pig. My prize is a tomahawk prised from the death grip of a fallen Iroquois, as old Lowrance says grandly, which makes a group of Catawba Indians who have stopped to watch hoot with laughter.

—White Indian, ha ha ha ha.

They laugh on into the wind. Their eyes glint. One of them is drunk and laughs so hard he falls sideways to the ground.

For a time I carry the tomahawk about. I take it to more competitions in hope of gaining some new luck from it, though its weight swinging from my belt makes me feel a fool. A white Indian indeed. But I win. I win. The winning is stupid and easy but I do it as if I had been born for it. Some of the prizes are poor enough things, kettles or badly tanned skins, but some are bottles of whiskey, and some are money. And people begin to know me, they talk of me as if I were not there. As if I were a tale. I ready my powder
measure, and I hear a woman say I shot three men straight through, the holes lined up like shirt buttons. Another says I cleaved someone else’s brains dead in half one Sunday afternoon. Families sit and eat on the ground watching, children chew their bread with their mouths open and call out: Shoot.

Another shooter, a sharp-faced man with ratty teeth, jabs me with a long musket and says:

—Now get one arm behind your back.

I take his musket and I do so, though the gun is near as long as I am tall and my arm holding it shakes. People go on talking of what I will do. Some place bets. I feel eyes pinned on me.

I can shoot this way, one-armed. I go cold all through with knowing that it can be done. My arm quiets, my chest empties out, I am able to hold myself still and shoot clean.
Israel, look
. The words come into my mind but are soon covered by the gun’s crack. The ratty-faced man claps slow. The crack is what I love, and the burned smell and the bits of straw spinning from the target and slowing in the air.

Again I begin to feel alive. I get two new guns, my own long gun and another short-rifle, and in autumn I go on hunts with Squire and Neddy. Squire is very silent, a good tracker for his age. He keeps his thoughts to himself. Ned teases him for the way he checks the hour by the sun, as though time were of great importance out here. Ned likes to hum, or to stop us and say: Let’s sit a while. Then he likes to go home. But though we know the whole of the Yadkin Valley well by now, there is no pleasure in it. The game is poorer and poorer.

We get back to the cabin one evening to find Hill sitting outside it singing. I say:

—What are you doing here?

He smiles. He is holding a new long gun, rubbing the barrel. He says:

—Inspecting Carolina’s possibilities.

—Here?

—Even the whores of Philadelphia talk of coming out here. Even they have heard of your shooting. Some of them remember it personally, I should say.

This he says with his heavy reminding clap on the back as he stands. He presses the gun into my hands and says it is a gift. He has presents for the young ones and Ma also. As we go inside, he talks with Neddy about old times, he says he has always felt himself quite at home in our family. Ma gives him coffee and he sits at our table and talks on. He takes out papers with land advertisements in which the words
green
and
sweat
appear without fail. He has written them, he says, for the newspapers in Pennsylvania. I believe he means
sweet
but my spelling is uncertain and I do not wish to penetrate the mind of Hill. He is buying up land cheap, any land he thinks he can sell at a profit. When Daddy comes in, Hill stands and calls him sir. Daddy’s face goes hard as a rod, but Hill offers him fifty good acres upriver for nothing, which slowly placates him for the memory of being cast out of Exeter Meeting. Wealth does this, as I can see, it smoothes things like a hand over a fur.

Soon it seems Hill’s fault that people are everywhere and that houses and cabins pop up like weeds. Most of these have no interest for me, though one day I see a girl washing her linen in a creek, and she is a pretty girl, which is interesting, especially as she is wearing only her undershift and I can see her round arms. Neddy and Squire and I stare, but when she notices us she crawls into the rough low sty on the bank and does not heed our calls.

We have to go still farther to find deer and bear, and our traplines are often empty.

Tales crawl in with the new people like a dark blanket being tugged over the country. Everybody seems to know them at once, they infect the air. There is no peace. Cherokees and Shawnees and
Iroquois slaughtering everyone at any little settlement, old women and all. And Virginians killing Indians, even old peaceful Catawbas long settled there, for anything, for stealing an egg, and turning in the scalps to collect the Governor’s bounty. Hill loves to talk of all of it. He will sit by our fireside and throw his hands behind his head and go over and over these tales, as women will talk of a mortal sickness, the vomit and the soiled bedclothes and the final words and the precise minute that Death arrives. I do not want to hear it.

—Some of the children whose parents the red-boys murdered got away into the woods, all bloody wounds. Poor little creatures. Who can say where they have got to?

He affects sensitivity and love of children. He sets his hands on the shoulders of my youngest sister Hannah. Hill feels all of this truly when he talks of it, his body quakes with his feeling, I cannot bear his swimming eyes. But he is richer than ever. He has turned his Quaker father’s money into land speculations and bets, and he is winning everything.

I think of money, I think of fresh land. All I would like to have. I go to market with my skins on a grey day. There is no escape from the bad talk. At the stall I am told of a farmer tomahawked through the back of the neck who had to drag himself four days to safety with his head lolling, unable to eat or drink but knowing that he must somehow get away, for any prisoners the Indians take are burned alive at the stake. The woman who tells me this runs her eyes eagerly all over my face. Like rats they run. She says:

—The Shawnee are the best burners. Chief Black Fish is the one. He paints the captives black so they know just how they will look afterwards. Black as your hair.

She has a newspaper with a drawing of such a burning in it, which she thrusts at me. She then shades her eyes with her hand and calls for her husband to look at my skins. Ma, I think of your tales of women burned for witches in England and the north, little
ashy heaps of them left everywhere. I drive the wagon home and have no wish to speak to anyone for some time.

I am in want of money, I am in want of everything, I am in want of a scratching. I itch in Carolina head to foot. I have no quarrel with the Indians, I never have, and not much with the French. But I am young.

Come on boys. Come on. We will get the FROGS out of this land for good and some of their Redskin friends too
.

The appeal is poor enough. But I tell Ma the King’s shilling is as good as any. She says war is no life for me, but to myself I say: You do not know what life is for me. It is not here.

I kiss her sad face both sides, and I go to drive a wagon in the army baggage train. I am young and I believe that I know what I ought to do, I believe that I can get free and make my own way. Though it is only Death opening its clothes to me and saying:
Look close
.