An Embarrassment of Riches (37 page)

“Starboard swivel—”

“Aye, sirrah!”

“Take goodly aim upon that Spanish churl and blast his head into the rigging!”

“With pleasure, my lord. Adieu thy lights, thou scum!”

He touched off the small cannon. Its charge of nails raked the enemy's ranks and cut to ribbons several of them, including the captain, who dropped his speaking cone and reached for his face as though he had merely been stung by wasps. But it had been reduced to a pulp, like a squashed pomegranate, and he slumped over his own rail an instant later, as dead as my dear Lovelace. The Spanish crew fell into disarray at his loss, yowling and caterwauling, firing at random. Three others of my men lay sprawled upon our deck, dying or already dead, but the rest held to their posts, good sailors and better soldiers. Suddenly our sloop lurched. A deep groan shivered its timbers, and I realized our keel was scraping the top of that previously sighted shoal. The mast shuddered. My men glanced anxiously at one another. For a moment we hung suspended on the bar, listing badly to port. Several more powder kegs broke loose and tumbled overboard. Then a gust of wind welled behind us and the mast creaked as the big sail ballooned out and lifted us off the shoal. Another volley of vicious Spanish gunfire scoured our deck. My poor, loyal Karoo took a terrible wound to his jaw and spun around the deck like a rag doll dashed to the floor by an angry child. Water, Bugbear, and Hammerhead likewise fell. Our ranks were being decimated.

Suddenly the pinnace struck the selfsame shoal we had just sailed free of. Her masts groaned and rigging shook. A thunderous crack resounded amidst the screams of her crew as her mainmast crashed to the deck, crushing several sailors. A cannon broke loose from its carriage, rolled across the deck, and crashed through a bulwark into the river. What with their deeper draft than ours, our enemy was hopelessly aground. We hove away from her, from the screams and imprecations of her stranded crew, and a shout of victory went up among my valiant men. It was only the second time in two centuries that they had beaten their arch-foe—but at what a cost I tremble to relate: five dead, including my ensign and first mate, and seven wounded, some horribly. What sort of victory, thought I, would this be for the Wejun wives?

The stranded pinnace soon disappeared from view. The euphoria amongst our crew was short-lived, however, for the roaring gale soon turned into a howling maelstrom. The sky grew as green as bilgewater. The trees along the banks bowed against the wind like mere reeds. Storm-blown leaves and branches littered the river, while along the shore many shallow-rooted giants toppled like tenpins. We raced forward, mainsail half-reefed to keep our mast from breaking, and jibs furled. The wounded we comforted as best we could, which is to say, not very well. For we had nothing aboard to avail their relief save assurances that they would recover from their wounds and live, even when it was an arrant lie. Then, at last, we sighted Paradise—the Wejun isle, that is, not the place where the God of Love doth dwell.

We lost our mast in the attempt to jibe at the sheltered cove below the village proper. Our boom swung 'round and down she came, just like that, killing poor Touchstone as it fell.

“Drop anchor, men! Get the wounded off her first!”

I was yet up to my chest in the lagoon when one of the villagers staggered out of the path through the woods, wobbled in place for a moment, and shouted above the wind, “Hell is empty! And all the devils are here!”

Following this pronouncement, he fell face forward in the sand, disclosing an Indian war axe buried in the center of his back.

We glanced dumbly at each other—after the terror of our chase it seemed a sort of ghoulish prank. Moreover, the victim in question, one Jack-a-merry by name, had a reputation as a joker. But it did not take us long to apprehend that he was quite authentically dead.

“Stinkards!” wailed the men in despair and struggled for shore.

“Fuzees! Fuzees!” the crew shouted desperately at others yet aboard the dismasted sloop. These now grabbed as many muskets as they could seize, jumped ship, and slugged through the murky water toward the beach.

“Hold 'em high!” I admonished them. “You'll wet the flashpans!”

The muskets were passed all 'round. Cries, shrieks, and screams were audible from the village amid the howling blasts of the storm—the pathetic outcry of their wives, children, loved ones. These appeals shattered whatever military discipline they had lately learned, and all broke ranks for the village, some trying to load their weapons on the run, others brandishing them aloft by the barrels like clubs, and emitting the yelps of savages.

“Stop, men! I implore you! Form ranks!” I shouted after them, but it was no use. I charged a pistol and a musket and followed close behind.

The scene that greeted me was truly the end of the world, the end of the Wejun's sweet little portion of time and place called Paradise. Every cottage stood aflame, roaring in the wind. Bodies lay everywhere, men and women, young and old alike, little boys and girls shot with so many arrows they looked like porcupines, many with limbs cut off, some yet groaning in their death throes. By the time we arrived upon the scene, the enemy had eloped out the other end of the village. Now, only a few sporadic gunshots sounded over the taunting yells of the retreating savages in the far distance.

Uncle I located amid a patch of pink hollyhocks in what had formerly been the garden of the Duke of Owls. He lay in a heap, his head in a pool of bright and viscous blood. I thought him dead for certain, and the tears streamed down my cheeks 'till I saw his leg twitch. At once I dropped beside him and rolled him up upon my lap.

“O, Uncle!”

His face was a purplish mass where some savage had struck him four-square with a club. His nose was clearly broken and askew, his front teeth cracked in half, lips bruised like berries. I placed my hand behind his head, trying to hold it up, but recoiled as I felt a warm, sticky wound. His head lolled to one side. The brutes had scalped that side of his head, peeling off the skin from above the ear to the bald margin near the top of his head. His eyes opened; he tried to speak but couldn't.

“Sssshhh. Don't move. Be still,” I said, and searched the rest of his person for wounds, but there were no others. He must have been struck down in the first wave of the invasion, deprived of the scalp, and been left bleeding and forgotten in the chest-high flowers.

The noble Duke of Owls was not so lucky. Robin lay beside his wife and little boy in the dusty footpath beyond his garden, the three in loving last embrace, their mingled lifebloods oozing into the porous earth. The wind moaned in the surrounding forest like the dead of the ages. I cried and vomicked all at once, and then the rain came.

It fell as if the brooding skies themselves were sickened with remorse, great lashing sheets of water that sent plumes of steam from the burning cottages and washed clean the blood-streaked corpses of the dead.

I lay Uncle back amidst the flowers and commenced my search for Tansy. I had turned over several bodies when the remnant of my valiant crew emerged from the woods with a prisoner in tow, a topknotted, copper-skinned savage bedizened from ankle to crown in an elaborate scheme of swirled tattoos. I hastened toward them in the stinging rain. Two of the men, Tom and Basilisco, were sharpening stakes, very businesslike.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

They did not reply, but merely glowered at me. Soon, the stakes were ready. Monger flung the captive to the muddy ground. Three more Wejuns fell upon him, holding down his arms with their knees. The prisoner behaved with the utmost stoicism until they commenced driving the long stakes through his wrists and feet, and then he screamed and writhed like any poor wight.

“Stop that! Stop it, I say!” I shouted, but they would no longer obey. I had the eerie feeling for an instant that I myself were dead and didn't know it, for that is how they responded to my commands. When the prisoner was fully immobilized upon the ground, the men all drew their knives and fell upon him like a pack of ghouls, cutting pieces out of his living flesh and eating them before his eyes. I railed at them to cease, to no avail. Rather, they glared up at me, blood dripping from their mouths as if relishing my horror of their evil act as much as they enjoyed the vengeful abomination in and of itself. They consumed the poor wretch methodically, from the limbs inward, and concluded by slitting through his breastbone, removing the still-beating heart, and passing it 'round for bites, like schoolboys sharing an apple. They had only just finished when Merkin limped forth in the torrential rain. He carried Tansy in his arms, her body naked, the broken arrows yet protruding from her ribs, and he lay her at my feet.

“Go,” he said in his brittle voice, the cold rain dripping off his beaked nose, the wings of his feathered helmet broken and askew. “Go, thou bringer of death.”

“I … I cannot leave you now—”

“Go!” he shouted, seizing a rapier from one of the others and holding the tip before my face. “Iambics fail me now. Go!” he shouted, “Go! Away at once!”

“But my Uncle … he—”

“Toads, beetles, bats light on you! Go, I say!”

“But what will you do. Where will you go—?”

“Live. Wander. Elsewhere. Further. Go! Else thy heart become my supper, go! In England's name: get thee gone and go!”

I backed away from them. What a terrible portrait they made, the dozen survivors huddled in the lashing wind and rain, a mutilated savage at their feet, a murdered angel of a maiden before him, and the broken old King surrounded by everything he had ruled and loved, turned to a wilderness of death and ashes. I returned to Uncle in the hollyhocks.

“Come, dear fellow,” I said, kneeling beside him.

He opened his eyes and blinked in the deluge.

“Mmmpphh—”

“Don't try to speak. Here. Can you put your arm about my neck? That's a good fellow. See if you can stand now.”

I helped him up, placed his arm about my waist, and helped him hobble forward. In the meantime, the Wejuns advanced as a group. They formed a kind of cordon behind us and drove us back down the path to the lagoon where we had left the sloop. It too was now destroyed. The wind had driven it from the cove and stranded it on a shoal downstream, its broken mast stuck crazily in the submerged sand bar like an old fence post, the hull awrap with riggings, and the patchwork mainsail draped over the stern like a beggar's shroud. The Wejuns, led now by Monger, prodded us with their swords to the water's edge. The storm had whipped the lagoon to a froth. The air was filled with flying leaves and twigs. Tree limbs crashed in the verdure around us.

“I'm afraid we must depart Paradise without delay,” I explained to Uncle. He nodded his head to indicate that he understood, and we hobbled into the water. “Hold fast to my shirt,” I said. We waded into the river.

My mind next went blank of all concerns save one:
make the opposite shore
. Not storm, not crocodile, not weariness of limb or weariness of living's ceaseless horrors might oppose that necessity. And by the all-perceiving, all-indifferent God of nature—or possibly despite him—we crawled upon that reeking opposite shore, and lived!

Have circumstances ever required you to live like a marsh rat? For three days and nights we huddled 'neath the shelter of a topped swamp oak
(Quercus shumardii)
while the hurricane raged above us, battering the riparian world and all its denizens. I emerged from our watery den only to procure the freshwater clams that were our sole nutriment in this dire interval. (And just as well for Uncle, whose battered mouth and broken teeth could not have endured a sodden biscuit.) The Ocmulgee oyster, as this mollusk has since been named, compares to a Long Island cherrystone as an horse apple compares to an October pippin. Odd to relate, though, they were full of perfect little blue-black pearls, for which in our present circumstances we had about as much use as a marsh rat has for a vermeil snuffbox.

Uncle's scalp wound, while very painful and ugly, proved superficial. And when at last the hurricane ran its course, and flocks of winging cranes beat westward against the pumpkin-colored sun, and the alligators roared anew along the river's timeless, teeming bank, we left our marsh rat's lair for good, bid silent, sad farewell to the tragical isle across the storm-swollen stream, and limped off northeast toward home.

Sometimes, in cases of extreme adversity, the body keeps going long after the mind has snuffed its lamps. And so, forward we lurched, Uncle and I, arm in arm, away from the reeking swamps of Spanish Florida back toward the closest reaches of the United States, viz., the half-wild state of Georgia.

For a word-portrait of its deep forests, grassy vales, sweetwater brooks, verdant uplands, stolid, rocky mounts—I recommend Bartram.
¹
For ours was anything but a leisurely scientific tour. Rather, it was a furtive, skulking flight across a territory filled with some of the most pugnacious of all the southeastern tribes of savages, those “Stinkards” of Wejun lore, whom we Americans call the Creeks. That they did not catch us and visit some ingenious and abominable cruelties upon our persons seems more a matter of luck than deft evasion. For we spied roving bands of them everywhere, war parties bedizened in their campaigning colors, often passing in fearsome file bare inches before our noses, as we hid ourselves 'neath a hollow log or a clump of hydrangea
(H. quercifolia)
.

Once, whilst waiting out the perilous daylight hours upon a recessed shelf of granite high above a peaceful, grassy meadow, we observed a most heinous slaughter of a fugitive tribe of Calusa by these same Creeks. The former, a ragged little band of no more than fifty individuals, having been driven from their native haunts by the Spanish, and doomed to wander north into the lands of their enemies, had just arrived beside the little stream that watered the meadow, had just thrown up their flimsy shelters and charged their supper fires—the children playing at the brook's reedy verge—when down from the pending rocky hill opposite our perch swooped an hundred Creeks, warriors at the peak of fractious manhood, shrieking like fiends and lusting for carnage. And when they departed that little vale an half hour later, not a live Calusa soul remained. Not babbling babe, nor doddering grayhead, nor female of any sort did they spare. In years hence, these same bellicose Creeks would visit equal havoc on the white intruder, but at this time they were happy to exterminate their redskin cousins, for warfare was to them not a political tool of the last resort—it was the very essence, the animating principle, of life itself.

We shrank from these scenes of infamy with the speechless, stupefied disgust of soldiers too long in the field who had witnessed every conceivable insult of the flesh, and who had become finally interested only in their own preservation.

We traveled at night, following the stars, into cooler, more rugged country; for it was getting to be late in the month of October—the precise date we had left far behind us, along with all the other accoutrements of civilized men. Sans rifles, pistols, knives, blankets, shoes, that is to say, the rudiments of survival, we somehow managed to survive.

Uncle rebounded amazingly from his bashing and scalping—though the scar was quite awful—and brought to bear upon our situation all the hard-won skill of a lifetime spent rambling the wilds. Snares he built of vine and springy wood to capture hares and 'coons. Not a root, nor stem, nor shoot, nor fruit that could furnish nourishment escaped his hungry eye. And from an hundred signs, as the stars or mossy trunks of trees, to the nuance of a winging insect's flight, or the direction of the clouds, he unerringly charted our homeward course true. We lived, in short, like migrating animals, wending northward toward home. And it was a brilliant autumn morning when I chanced to see, at last, the object of our quest, or thought I did.

Dawn had filled the yellowing woods with somber light as we searched for a secure place of shelter after our night's long and arduous journey. It was a limestone ledge some ten feet up a south-facing cliff. It was our practice to sleep in the sun whenever possible, for our clothing amounted to mere rags. We had just breakfasted on a few handfuls of hickory nuts. I remember musing that it might be my birthday—which is October the 19th—meaning that I had attained to the age of twenty and thus true numerical manhood. The idea pleased me so much that I stayed awake to dote upon it whilst Uncle lay his head upon his limestone pillow. It was then that my eye caught the blur of movement amid the sunny dappling of the forest below. Suddenly, and with surprising delicacy of locomotion for a creature its size, there stepped into view what I took at first to be a bear of an unusually striking russet color, being quite as handsomely reddish as Papa's long-gone hunting setter, Dorcas.

My reaction—strange!—was that the beast reminded me of something very familiar. But it was a lapse of several moments more 'til I realized that the
thing familiar
was none other than my repeated sketches of megatherium—indeed by now a portrait graven on my brain. And it was upon this instant of recognition that the huge animal strode out from behind a clump of magnolia
(M. acuminata)
and stood revealed in all its improbable glory.

I would estimate my distance from the beast as less than an hundred feet. By later ascertaining the height of trees in the neighborhood through which it passed, I would guess its size as eight feet at the shoulder and about fifteen in length from rump to snout. Its gait was bearlike, yet more rolling, due, I think, to the cumbrous forefeet with their claws like scimitars, which the beast held inward. Thus, its forefeet met the ground only on their outer soles, so that it swayed like a clubfooted man. Its rusty fur was very long and shaggy, hanging almost to the ground like a robe. Most unbearlike of all was the creature's muzzle: its nose and lips curled down to form a quivering, hairless, mottled, pink and gray prehensile snout.

This entire observation I made in a span of time not exceeding five seconds. It paused before a Judas tree
(Cercis canadensis)
, lifted its massive forebody, reached up with scimitar claws, and prepared to browse. I turned and gently shook Uncle's leg. He woke with a start, sending a little shower of loose rock off our ledge. By the time Uncle lifted his head, the beast had lumbered away.

“Did you see it?”

“Did I see what?”

My heart sank. I clambered down from our ledge and crept quickly to the place where it had appeared. The springy forest floor had not taken a single footprint, for it was the driest season, but one could see where the great claws had left a peculiar raking sort of trail across the dead leaves. I stole deeper into the glade, coming shortly upon a heap of dung twice, no,
four
times the size of the average cowflop. It was still steaming.

“Uncle!” I called out heedlessly, breaking one of our cardinal rules. Half a minute later, he arrived on the spot.

“Well…?” he asked.

“Look!” I pointed to the magnificent specimen.

He glanced down.

“'Tis a pile of shit, Sammy.”

“'Tis indeed, sir. Do you know what made it?”

“An elk?”

“Not at all.”

“A woods bison?”

“Megatherium. A giant russet sloth.”

“Really?”

“I saw it myself. Just moments ago. With my own eyes.”

Uncle looked at me askance, then back down at the huge droppings, then off into the dappled woods, and finally back at me.

“Art terribly fatigued, nephew? Come, rest, my boy—”

“I saw it, I tell you. Just like the sketch it was! As big as a coach! With a long, flesh snout—where are you going?”

“Back to sleep.”

“But it was
he
. Quick, help me catch it!”

But Uncle was already trudging back to our ledge.

“I implore you, sir!”

He turned, placed his forefinger across his lips, and said, “Ssshhh.”

I trotted to him. “'Tis the reason we are here, and you propose to let him get away?”

“Yes,” he stated unequivocally.

“But—”

“Tell me, nephew, did he look content?”

“Content…?”

“Yes. Did he seem happy about his business?”

“As any brute, I suppose.”

“Then 'tis sufficient. Let him ramble on where he will. Leave him in his simple brute's contentment.

Thus transpired our encounter with the sole object of our mission. I never did determine whether Uncle believed that I had seen the beast or imagined it in some rapture of exhaustion, cold, or starvation. In truth, I was never quite sure myself. What remained was simply that heap of dung, as impressive and formidable a heap as anyone might hope to find. I thought for a while about somehow preserving it, of wrapping up the heap in a bag of skins and bringing it back for the world to marvel at. But the idea seemed, at least, impractical, and, at worst, odious. So, I left it where it lay and returned to join Uncle in a furtive slumber.

Another week we trudged and trekked without notable event, passing through moonstruck bottoms, gloomy hills, misty vales, dangerous defiles, suspicious meadows, and always, as ever, wilderness, daunting, terrible, clothed with infinite dark woods resounding with the hollow air of perpetual sadness.

One dawning day, our breath white huffs in the chill air, we were undertaking to cross a branch of the Oconee when, to our dismay, appeared on the far side a caravan of mounted Indians. Yet they were Indians of a very handsome and noble mien, dressed in flowing shirts of woven cloth, their heads wrapped in colorful cloth turbans, their earlobes hung with hoops of silver, faces free of devilish paint, and good rifles lodged in the crooks of their arms. They looked, in short, more like a band of Thessalonian freedom fighters than a tribe of American aborigines—whilst Uncle and I, in our stinking rags, with bearded, filthy faces, and sharpened sticks our only weapons, must have appeared to them as backward as a pair of apes.

The fearless chieftain of this company seemed to grasp at once our plight; while we likewise discerned at once his beneficent character. He dismounted from his horse, a tall, handsome, clean-featured man of about forty years, and bid us step out of the freezing brook. We did. He clapped his fist upon his breast, repeating the word
“Wuh-kul-tee-pah,”
which we understood to be his name. Uncle, employing some sort of Indian
lingua franca
, successfully conveyed our identities and our predicament. These Cherokees were well acquainted with white society, and on fair terms with the traders who plied the paths of their mountain stronghold. Without further ado, we were hoisted aboard their healthy chestnut mounts and conducted after an hour's easy march to their town, Ekowee.

It comprised an hundred-odd dwellings, well-made log houses, with chinks plastered inside and out with clay, and round roofs of chestnut bark. And here were Uncle and I fed, bathed, rested, and restored to vigor by these cheerful, well-intentioned people in our autumn of travail.

It was our honor to become acquainted with Wuh-kul-tee-pah, or the Scholar, who, influenced by his contact with us whites, and convinced of the salutary effects of education, endeavored to devise an alphabet in his people's language. He had a son two years my junior, a most melancholy youth, who rebelled from his father's high-minded philosophy and wandered the craggy hilltops composing poems about the slaughter of the whites. Though he was a far more unhappy soul than the Scholar, I admired this sullen prince's intelligence and realism, and the Blackbird, as he was called, turned out to be as resolute a warmaker in his mature years as his father had been a virtuous pedagogue in his.

We sojourned among these laudable people only so long as necessary to recoup our strength, for we were anxious to continue on our journey home. According to the Scholar, the Savannah River lay ninety miles due east, and there upon it, the city of Augusta, where he had visited thrice, a place of limitless marvels, to hear him speak of it; and from Augusta by this same Savannah River, a route direct to the coastal city of that river's name, at whose spacious harbor were ships as big as his town's meeting house, a'bristling with masts and sails like clouds; ships that plied the Great Salt Sea to the yet more wondrous cities of the whites (said he), whence all the boons of mankind came.

Thus, on a bright November morning Uncle and I bid farewell to the upright citizens of Ekowee, dressed in fine cloth Cherokee tunics and trousers, goodly moccasins, our bellies filled and brains revived to happy thoughts of home.