Chaneysville Incident (61 page)

“So you think he found the graves before that, and that’s what changed him?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think he changed at all. I think he went to war for the same reason he married my mother when he came out, for the same reason he did everything else: to get himself ready to find C.K. Washington.”

“But he’d
found
him.”

“No,” I said. “He’d found his grave.”

She didn’t say anything.

“I know,” I said. “It sounds like the same thing. That’s what I thought too; that’s the way historians think. I assumed that if Moses Washington went looking for his grandfather he’d really be looking for signs of his grandfather: records, old campsites, markers, graves, maybe even a skeleton. And he was. So I assumed that he was acting just like a historian, and when he found whatever it was, he’d set up a marker or something, and that would be it. But I forgot that Moses Washington wasn’t a historian, any more than he was a moonshiner or a real estate speculator. If he was anything, he was a hunter. And he did what any good hunter does when he’s going off to trail dangerous game: he left trail markers, so that if somebody wanted to they could follow him, and he more or less made sure somebody would want to….”

“You’re talking about you, aren’t you?” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“All right,” she said. “So he was a hunter, and he left a trail for you to follow. But what was the point of it if he’d already found the grave?”

“He wasn’t looking for a grave,” I said. “He was looking for a man. That’s what he was looking for all along: a man. He knew when he came here that C.K. Washington was dead; if he wasn’t he would have been a hundred years old. So he was looking for his grave or a skeleton or whatever the same way a hunter looks for a hoofprint, or bedding grounds, or signs of feeding or droppings—it was a spoor. And when he found it he did what any good woodsman would do: he put himself into the mind of the game and headed off after it.”

“Wait a minute. You’re saying that because C.K. Washington died there Moses Washington committed suicide there?”

“No,” I said. “Not suicide. I was wrong about that. We were all wrong. Everybody thought it was an accident. The Judge thought it was murder. I thought I had discovered it was suicide. But what it really was was a…a hunting trip. That’s where he said he was going. That’s what he told his wife, and that’s what he told Old Jack: he was going hunting. And that’s what he did.”

“That sounds…crazy,” she said. “You’re talking about a man chasing after ghosts.”

“No,” I said. “Ghost isn’t the right word. Ghost is a word that was invented by people who didn’t believe, like the names the Spaniards gave the Aztec gods. Ancestors is a better term, or—”

“I don’t care what you call it. It’s insane.”

“Maybe,” I said. “I guess maybe that’s what insanity is, somebody believing in something that doesn’t have any kind of reality for you. Napoleon’s dead; anybody who thinks he’s Napoleon is crazy. There are no ghosts; anybody who chases ghosts is crazy. The thing is, if you accept his premises, everything he did was perfectly logical. He wanted to understand dying, to look before he leaped, so he went to war. He was a hero, because he wanted to take chances, get closer to dying. He loved a woman because C.K. had loved a woman, maybe two, and Moses Washington needed to understand that. He had a son because C.K. Washington had had a son….”

“Moses Washington had
two
sons,” she said, “and it’s still crazy.”

“Only if you’re a Christian. Only if you believe in heaven and hell, and all those things. Moses Washington didn’t; the old ladies always said he was a heathen, and he was—he spent all that time in the church and talking to preachers and reading the Bible because he wanted to be sure the Christians were wrong. You don’t throw your whole life away if you’re not sure that the dead really are there, waiting for you.”

“That’s not crazy,” she said. “That’s the Goddamned Twilight Zone.”

I didn’t say anything.

She raised up and looked at me; I could feel her eyes on me. “You don’t think so, do you?” she said.

I didn’t say anything.

“No,” she said. “You don’t. You not only think he did that, you think it was a perfectly sane and sensible thing to do, don’t you?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Don’t you?”

I didn’t say anything.

She lay back down. “Dear God,” she said.

We lay there for a while, listening to the fire, to the first low hummings as the west wind began its song.

“Anyway,” she said, “it’s over now. You know what happened to Moses Washington, and all that—”

“I don’t know anything,” I said. “I don’t know what happened to C.K., and that means I don’t really know anything. I just know what Moses Washington knew when he got this far.”

“Oh, great,” she said. “So what does that mean? You’re going to put on your little Dan’l Boone costume and take your little rifle down there and blow your brains out so you can go hunting with the old men, and sit around the campfìre drinking whiskey and telling lies—”

“I’m going to sleep,” I said.

We lay there for a while, not talking, not touching. The song grew louder. I tried not to listen.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” I said.

“Then hold me?” she said. “Please?”

I twisted around to face her, put my arms around her, felt her breath on my face, feeling the chill in it.

“Don’t go away,” she said. “Please.”

“I won’t,” I said.

But I had gone away. When her breathing became slow and even, punctuated by the little catches and hesitations that, in her, meant deepest sleep, I slipped away from her, and went to sit at the table, staring into the darkness, listening to songs the wind sang as it fluted through the hills. I don’t know how long I sat there; a long time. Long enough for the fire to burn low, its substance leeched away by the wailing wind. Long enough for the chill to come and set me shivering. I closed my eyes then, trying to escape the cold, knowing, as I did it, that it would not do any good. And then I heard her moving, getting up and going to the stove. I had opened my eyes and had seen her shadow moving, coming to me, bringing me coffee.

“I don’t want it,” I said.

“Drink it,” she said.

“I don’t want coffee….” I caught the aroma then: strong, sweet, heady. A toddy. She had made me a toddy. I took the cup and sipped at it, once, twice. Then I drank it down, almost in a gulp, feeling the warmth spread through me. I closed my eyes. She came and took the cup from me and filled it again and brought it back, held it out to me. “Why?” I said.

“Faith,” she said.

I didn’t say anything.

“I know,” she said. “You don’t think I understand. You’re right; I don’t understand. But I can believe in you; I do believe in you. If you want to take that gun and blow your head off, I won’t try to stop you; I don’t know that I can help you, but I won’t try to stop you. And I’ll try to understand. And if you say you need something that I can’t give you, something you need a toddy to get, then I’ll make a toddy for you.”

I wished the lamp were going so that I could see her face, but I could not, so I just reached out and took the cup from her hands and drank. She came and stood beside me, her hand on my shoulder, waiting while I finished. When I set the cup down she went to the stove and began to mix another. “You still hate him, don’t you?”

I didn’t say anything.

“That’s what it is, you know,” she said. “You hate him. You’ve hated him all along. You keep saying you made mistakes, or you didn’t understand. That’s true, I guess; I wouldn’t really know. But I do know why you made all those mistakes. You were too busy hating him to really see him. It took you how long to figure out he killed himself? But you should have known. All the facts were there—”

“They covered them up,” I said.

“ ‘I study history because I want to know where the lies are.’ That’s what you told me. So now I’m supposed to believe you swallowed the biggest lie of all.”

“How was I supposed to know?”

“ ‘Why not study atrocities? History itself is atrocious.’ You told me that too.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You know,” she said, “you have to wonder. Here you are, hot-stuff historian, superscholar, able to leap to conclusions in a single bound, and half the people who know you think you’re brilliant and the other half think you’re crazy, but everybody agrees there’s something special about you, even if they don’t understand what the hell it is. You can make a bonfire by rubbing two dry facts together, so long as you’re talking about the Punic Wars and Saint Francis of Assisi, or the Lost Chord and Jesus Christ. But let you come within twenty miles of where you live and it all goes out the window. Because you don’t really want to know, John. You want to win. You want to beat Moses Washington and whatever—”

“No,” I said. “Not now. Not anymore. Now I just want to know the truth.”

“Then what’s stopping you?”

“Facts,” I said. “Don’t you understand? There aren’t any facts. All that about the runaway slaves and Moses Washington, that’s extrapolation. It’s not facts. I’ve used the facts.”

“So get more facts.”

“There
aren’t
any more facts.”

“Then forget the facts,” she said.

“You were right to start with,” I said. “You don’t understand.”

She brought the cup to me then, and I took it from her and drank it down, almost angrily. Drank it too fast. Because I realized suddenly that I had had too many toddies, that I was drunk. I set the cup down and closed my eyes, fighting off a wave of dizziness. I reached out and held tightly to the table feeling it solid beneath my fingers, knowing it was not moving, but feeling the room swirl around me just the same.

And suddenly I heard his voice, calling to me through the darkness, above the wind. No. Not calling, like a ghost. Just…talking. And I recognized the words, knew where they came from. For once upon a time we had stood on a hill, looking down at the river shining in the setting sun, running red like blood away to the south. We hadn’t said anything; there was nothing to say. In the morning, just a little after dawn, I had laid for my buck and I had missed him. Or so I had thought, because he had gone bounding away through the forest, white flag hoisted in alarm. But I had followed up a ways, because that is what you do, and after fifty yards of trailing I had found the blood spoor. Not much. Just a spot. But enough. I had wounded; I would have to kill. I had trailed through the morning and into the afternoon, never seeming to gain on him, but always seeing the spoor, faint, almost nonexistent. In the afternoon Old Jack had found me—I will never know how—had seen me tracking grimly, and had fallen in behind me, saying nothing; asking no questions, because he had known what I was doing and why, giving no advice, because he had known I knew what I was doing and why, simply following, simply being there behind me, as we covered the miles, following a trail that would not grow and would not fade away. We had tracked until the sun was going, until the shadows were the same as blood, and then we had stopped on the hill, looking at the river. Then, for the first time, he had spoken. “You got him in a bad place,” he had said. “Some place where it ain’t bad enough to slow him, but where movin’ keeps the wound open. You could say he wasn’t wounded….”

“Hell,” I had said.

“All right,” he had said. “But it’s near dark. You can’t trail him no more anyways.”

I hadn’t said anything.

“ ’Sides, like I say, it probly ain’t too bad. If you was to leave him be, a day or two, he’d probly be good as new. Scarred some on his belly or someplace, but none the worse for it. If you leave him be.”

“I don’t give a damn about him,” I had said. “I want to know where the hell he’s going.”

He had nodded. “All right, then. We’ll find him. But we’ll have to wait for light….”

“I’ll do without light,” I had said.

“How you gonna see the track?”

“I’ll do without seeing it.”

“How?”

“I’ll figure it out.” And so I had thought, estimating how much blood he had lost, gauging the wind, the lay of the land, taking into account all the things I had learned about him from laying for him and tracking him, and then I had moved off, extrapolating his line from all I knew, moving through the deepening dusk, going confidently at first, even though my mind was tired and my legs were tired. But assumption had piled atop assumption, and I had slowed, and slowed, coming, eventually, to a stop. It had been full dark then, and when he had spoken, his voice had come disembodied out of the darkness behind me.

“What’s wrong?” he had said.

“I lost him,” I had said. “I figured something wrong, or forgot something. We can go back now.”

“Not yet,” he had said.

“I lost him,” I had said. “I don’t know enough to—”

“You know you lost him,” he had said. “You know that much.”

I hadn’t said anything.

“You figure too much, Johnny,” he had said. “You ain’t lost him. You jest lost your feel for him. He’s still there. Quit tryin’ to figure where he’s at an’ jest follow him.”

“You want a story, do you?” I said.

“What?” she said. “I don’t understand.”

“Fetch the candle,” I said. I kept my eyes closed, but I did not need to watch her; I could hear her hesitate, hear her move. I wanted to look then, to see if she would trip, or fumble. I didn’t look, but I heard, and she did not. She came back with the candle, and the can of matches. I opened my eyes and reached out and took the can and opened it and took out a match and struck it, the flame springing suddenly out of the darkness, blinding me. But I touched it to the candle somehow, and the flame grew bright. I blew the match out. I held the candle sideways, letting the wax drip. When the pool had formed, when the candle was in it, sitting upright, burning, she took the can and put it back. And then she came and sat down.

Then it was as it had always been: the wind slipping through the chinks in the walls, stealing through the cabin, making the candle flicker, making the shadows dance; the air rattling and roaring in the flue. I didn’t say anything. I listened: to the wood crackling in the stove, to the heat chimney, to the west wind singing to the hills.