The Eden Hunter (16 page)

The soldiers muttered cautious greetings and though Garçon offered rum he declined, just sat watching as a curled rack of ribs cracked and cooked. After a while he looked down and saw a slight wriggling in the ground between his feet. A small beetle emerged from the hot dirt, then began crawling away from the fire.

T
HE SKIN UNDER his arms had been rubbed raw by the crutches and so he stayed off his feet and inside his hot tent—though on occasion he would move his chair to the entrance to catch whatever breeze, sit and watch as the same few soldiers came and went, all the while waiting for his ankle to heal.

Often Beah would pull a chair next to his own, and on these visits she would talk and talk and talk until finally one morning he ran her off with his silence. “You always in a spider’s mood,” she said in leaving.

He realized that part of him was sorry to see the fat nurse go, but he did not try to stop her. He was certain that this strange fort was not where his journey was meant to end, and though his ankle was still hurting him he wondered whether it might be best if he struck out again.

Garçon had left the fort two days earlier. Beah had said he rode north and was headed for the border. Around the fire that night Kau had sat off to the side, listening to the soldiers from Georgia and the Mississippi Territory—Tennessee, even—speculate on Garçon and his purpose. Americans had collected along the upriver headwaters. The General was off to figure their intentions. Them Americans had better stay right where they is, don they come marchin into Florida.

Now, remembering those boastings, Kau thought of Little Horn and his running war, of the lesson that had been taught to the redsticks at Horseshoe Bend. And then he thought further back, to his own ruined life in Africa. He closed his eyes and saw it—this negro fort afire, all of those brave men dead or captured.

 

HE WAS STILL sitting alone in front of his tent when he saw the soldier Xavier exit the barracks and begin walking toward him. Kau watched as he approached. The young man was barely twenty and had a smooth, rolling walk, a way about him that suggested a thin fish swimming slow, a bass easing along with a current. Xavier squatted down next to him in the dry dirt, then rocked back on his boot heels as he introduced himself.

“I ain’t forgot.”

“And your name is Kau?”

“Yes.”

Xavier began to draw circles in the dust with his long field knife—a small circle swallowed by a larger circle and so on and so forth. Like the other soldiers he wore a British redcoat and pale
cotton trousers, a black round-hat fashioned from glossed felt. Sweat dripped from the tip of his nose and landed inside the smallest of the stabbed circles. He looked up. “I think I have heard of you before,” he said.

“How you mean?”

“Pensacola. Do you know it?”

“They had me there once.”

Xavier nodded. “And I lived in Pensacola. Back before I ran myself.”

“So?”

“So I remember some talk. They said a ship once came into the docks carrying a tiny man with teeth like fangs.” Xavier slid the blade of his knife between his fingers, cleaning it. “That could have been you, no?”

Kau shrugged but said yes, he supposed that it could have been, more than likely was.

Xavier sheathed his knife and stood. He pointed at the ground with both hands. “Will you be staying?”

Kau looked up and the rising sun forced him to squint. Xavier existed now only as a tall and dark blurring. “No,” he said to him. “No.”

 

LATER THAT SAME day Beah came rushing into his tent, her rough dress twirling. She told him he had to get up and stretch his foot. “Scowl all you want,” she said. “But you comin.”

She stood watching him, her big arms akimbo. He started to argue but then decided she was right. The sooner he got around to
walking the sooner he could be on his way. Beah handed him his crutches and led him outside. His ankle felt sore but better. One more day, he figured. Two at most.

He stepped out from the dark and into the light. The heat of the sun seemed almost to push against him as he followed Beah toward the river and the slack British jack. At the base of the flagstaff stood a weather-beaten shack no bigger than the outhouse at Yellowhammer. She pointed at it. “Know what that be?”

“No.”

“Come on then.”

She took him closer and he saw that narrow windows, barred with thin rods of metal, had been cut into the sides of the shack. Beah opened a leather-hinged door and peered inside. “Lookie,” she said. “The British left them behind.”

He ducked his head under her outstretched arm and winced at the acid smell of hot birdshit. The shack was full of cooing pigeons. Dozens of the pepper birds sat along a staggered trio of roosts. He looked at Beah. “For what?” he asked. “To eat?”

Beah laughed. “No, no, no. Don you let the General go hearin you say that. Good Lord.” She reached inside the open door and grabbed quick hold of the closest resting pigeon. The bird began to flap and struggle, but then she cupped the crying creature in her meaty hands and it calmed. “Close that door,” she ordered.

He did as he was told and then turned back to her. The pigeon was enveloped save its delicate neck and tiny head. Beah held it out in front of her like an offering. “Now you watch.” She lifted her arms and then spread them wide, releasing the bird high toward the
noontime sun. The pigeon rose up nine, ten feet, then started to fall back to earth before it flapped its wings and climbed again. “Keep watchin,” said Beah.

The pigeon flew west, crossing the river, and was outlined against a cotton-white cloud forming in the distance. Kau had begun to lose sight of that dark dot on the horizon when it banked left and to the south, then began a slow and lazy arch of a return. The pigeon drifted east over the fields and turned again, flew north and then back west, crossed the river a second time and then commenced another circle in the sky—but closer though this time—on and on, ten times or more, until it was simply skimming along above the pine-wall perimeters of the fort, teasing the soldiers who manned the bastions.

“Here he come,” said Beah.

The tiring pigeon dropped lower and then arrived on a bending swoop of a glide. Kau wobbled on his crutches as it shot past. The pigeon slammed down onto a flat ledge that ran beneath one of the windows of the shack, then cocked its head and looked at them. Beah waved her hand, and the shooed bird pushed itself against the metal rods that fell down across the window. The thin bobs swung inward, then fell back into place once the pigeon had disappeared into the shack. Beah slapped her hands together as if she meant to clean them. “You see they can come,” she said, “but they can’t go. At leas not on they own.”

Kau looked at her. “What he got them for?”

Beah laughed. “They is the General’s eyes.” She pointed to the south. “He keeps them on an island out in the mouth of the river
and has a man tie messages to they legs. They come reportin ships and storms and such.”

This was too much for him to believe. “And they make they way back here?”

Beah shook her head. “I wonder the same thing you wonderin,” she said. “How do they know, right?”

“So?”

“I ain’t got the answer to that.” She told him all she knew was that once every month or so Garçon would cage all of the birds up and send them with Xavier downriver. And it had to be young Xavier. The General didn’t trust too many people to look after his pigeons. She shrugged. “I spose we all got our favorites,” she said.

 

AS THEY WALKED back to his tent Kau asked Beah to tell him more about the man downriver, and she explained that the so-called pigeonkeeper was named Israel. A man who, years back as a slave, some rogue Georgia preacher had taught to read and write. Israel now lived alone on a delta island and watched for ships entering the bay. Every day at the initial slight colorings of sunset he would send a message to Garçon, regardless of true news. The pigeon would fly north to its home beneath the flag of the fort, and before Garçon took supper he would check on his birds, untie and read whatever words Israel had committed to him that day. “If they is anythin in this life that truly pleases the General,” Beah told him, “you’ll be findin it in that pigeonhouse.”

 

WHEN THE DAY finally began to cool he sought out Xavier. The soldier was climbing down from atop one of the bastions when Kau surprised him. “Beah showed me the pigeons,” he said.

“
Sí
,” said Xavier. “I saw.” He slid a finger across his throat. “She needs to learn to leave them alone.”

“He back yet?”

“Yes.”

Kau laid his crutches down in the dust and rubbed at his arm-pits. “When you leavin to see this man Israel?” he asked.

Xavier shrugged. “He will need more pigeons soon, I think. The General will tell me when it is time.”

“Can I come?”

“For what?”

Kau said nothing. That morning there had been a strong south wind and he had smelled salt air. How to say it? How to say that he somehow needed to see open waters? How to say that after so many failed weeks of searching pine forests and lowlands for someplace like Africa he needed to know that there was some end to this ugly other world, be reminded that this land had shores and boundaries same as all lands? That just as a body could be stolen from one life and dropped into another, so could he one day live free again?

He walked away and left Xavier standing at the base of the bastion. The sun was now setting, and he was limping along on his crutches, headed for his tent, when he saw a played-out pigeon come fluttering down alongside the flagstaff—so marking, he realized, another day for the horizon-watching Israel.

 

HE LAY ON his camp bed, sweating and still thinking of this man who lived alone on an island, a man sending everyday messages to a fort he could not see—yet all the time trusting that what he did mattered, that his island-dwelling life had real purpose and real meaning. Kau closed his eyes and when he next opened them he found himself staring into the dark face of an Indian.

The Indian spoke to him in clipped English. “Do you remember me?” he asked.

Kau sat up and the Indian moved to the center of the tent. A tallow candle sat flickering on the table and sent bent shadows dancing along the white canvas of the tent. The Indian was not a Creek but a Choctaw, had the long hair and flattened forehead that Kau had come to recognize among the members of that tribe who would sometimes call upon Yellowhammer. Benjamin once told him that Choctaws worshipped the sun.

“No,” said Kau finally. “I don remember you at all.”

The Choctaw wore a long bright shirt made of striped trade-cloth, deerskin moccasins and leg wrappings. “I heard a soldier speaking of you by the fire tonight,” he said. “You were in Pensacola once.”

“How you know me?”

“I never forgot you.”

“You was one of them?”

The Choctaw turned and left the tent.

“Jus wait now.” Kau took up his crutches and hurried outside. It was late but between the bright sliver of moon and the dying cook-fires he was able to make his way. He heard movement along
the south wall of the fort and went toward it, arriving in time to see the shadowy form of a man slither out through a porthole the soldiers had cut that day, a window through the pine pickets meant to accommodate a cannon. There came the sound of something splashing across the moat and then all was quiet again.

It was only later, after he had returned to his tent, that he realized the Choctaw had stolen his bone club.

 

THE NEXT MORNING, through Xavier, he would confirm that not all Indians had fled the vicinity of the fort. There were thirty or more Choctaw warriors camped somewhere across the river—men who had broken with their own people when Pushmataha sided with the Americans during the war; men who had pledged their allegiance to Garçon after they had all been abandoned by the British; men who, like the negro farmers, promised to come when called. Kau asked the reason for that loyalty and Xavier shrugged, said only that among Indians a renegade Choctaw was a curious thing. A man who would never again see his home in the Mississippi Territory or Louisiana yet was too proud to throw in with the Redstick or the Seminoles and fall back into the swamplands. “They will fight beside us,” said Xavier, “because they feel that they have no other real choice.”

“But what would he want with my club?”

“I do not know,” said Xavier. “What did you ever want with it?”

 

HE ALLOWED HIMSELF to believe that his Choctaw visitor truly had been there at the beginning, that he had been one of those faceless
and nameless and cruel Indians on that trek from Pensacola to Yellowhammer. He tried to place that man among them but could not. In truth it amazed him to think that any of that party—the smuggler, the Indians, the other slaves—still could be living somewhere.

But of course they were alive, most of them at least.

That smuggler was today living somewhere just as those Indians likely were now living somewhere. And then there were the slaves themselves. By now each had a story like he had a story, and after five years in this second world he had more in common with that miserable collection of stolen Africans that very moment somewhere dragging picking sacks through Georgia cotton fields than he did with whatever Ota cousins of his might still be residing in a faraway forest. It was as if here among the white men a new tribe had been born, a lost tribe, a tribe with nothing more in common than fading memories of Africa and their own tragic pasts.

 

HE SPENT ALL of the day resting and then Beah came calling again. It was late in the afternoon when she announced herself at the entrance to his tent. “Be very sorry to wake you, Marse,” she said. “But the General’s requestin the pleasure of dinin with you.”