Thirteen Moons (16 page)

In our little dim chamber, we listened to the trees drip onto the canvas, and then we kissed a considerable while. At a point, a certain pitch of feeling, Claire leaned back away from me into the rolled leather, the pale stitching showing deep in the black upholstery. She breathed a long breath and then took a rush basket from under the seat, a blue-and-white checkered cloth covering it, and she tugged away the cloth to reveal a yellow cake with yellow icing that had slumped into a puddle around it from the warmth of the day and the jouncing ride up the creek. The body of the cake was fissured and falling into broken pieces. But Claire shaped it back as close to cylindrical as she could with her hands and elevated the icing into place with a thick-bladed knife from the basket, and when she was done it made at least an approximation of a layer cake. We ate in the cabriolet, cutting the mashed and lopsided cake with her knife and eating it from Featherstone’s blue-and-white china with only our fingers for implements, since she had forgotten forks. The light was green under the wet trees, and raindrops still dripped steady off the boughs and fell in faint percussion onto the stretched canvas.

I held a last ragged delicious gob of cake in my hand. My birthday.

I sat a minute and then said, How did you know it was my birthday?

—Granny Squirrel told me.

—How did she know?

Claire made a slight twirling motion with her hands, a ghost move from the Booger Dance. She said, Same way she knows all kinds of things.

—You went all the way to her place? Half a day’s ride to the gorge?

Claire said, This time of year, I like to be out and about.

LATE AUGUST, THE
dogwood and sumac already red down by the creek below the store. On the porch, Claire reached into the neck of her blouse, her hand between her breasts. She brought out a little vial hanging from a rawhide lanyard around her neck. She bent forward and leaned her head down and swept her hair forward with her hand and wrist to pull the lanyard off. The nape of her neck was white, and I stopped her with my hand and leaned to kiss her there. She shook her head and tossed her hair back into place and held the vial up to me.

—You see this? she said.

—Hard not to, with you swinging it in my face.

—This will seal you to me.

—I’m sealed already.

—You’re seventeen. Any pretty girl that smiles at you is the love of your life. At least for a short while.

I did not argue.

She reached to the waistband of her skirt and brought out a folded piece of quarto-sized paper. She opened it and the sun was shining on the face of it and I could see her inelegant jagged handwriting reversed through its back side.

She said, According to Granny Squirrel, I’m to say these words.

She studied the paper and read in a strong voice, as if to an audience of more than one.

Be sleepless.

Sleepless and thinking of me.

Wanting me.

Only me.

Change right now.

Change.

Now I own your thoughts.

I own your breath.

I own your heart.

Claire folded the paper and tucked it back into her waist.

—And furthermore, I’m to do this, she said.

She uncapped the vial and poured a powder dark as coffee grounds into the palm of her hand. About a teaspoonful.

She held out her hand and said, Breathe it up your nose like snuff.

I put my face to her palm and sniffed hard, and the powder went into me. I didn’t feel anything but an itch in the nose, watery eyes, the brief sense of a sneeze coming on.

There was still some left in her hand, dampening in its creases. She looked at it as if somehow I had failed a challenge.

She said, I guess lick it.

The powder had no taste whatsoever, but her palm was salty.

—Now you’re meant to always want me, she said.

I didn’t doubt it, neither then nor now. I don’t know what that powder was. Dried herbs and roots and mushrooms and fungus and bear gall ground in a mortar and pestle. Or something similar. I’ve never put much stock in the powder. But I believe the words entered me and changed me and still work in me. The words eat me and sustain me. And when I’m dead and in a box in the dark dark ground, and all my various souls have died and I am nothing but insensible bones, something in the marrow will still feel yearning, desire persisting beyond flesh.

THE RED SILK
scarves I had ordered finally arrived in early fall. Just in time, for Claire was leaving before long for school in Savannah. I cut the rectangles of silk into wedge shapes and tried to sew them together into a sphere with an opening at the bottom, but I was downhearted when my handiwork turned out lumpish and not particularly globular, closer to a small ruddy flour sack than the taut elegant geometry I had imagined. Judging function over form, however, the awkward thing I made was weightless as cobwebs, and when it was held up to daylight you could read through it. I drew a picture of the kind of candle basket I wanted for it and took the drawing to the best basketmaker in the territory, a squat old woman with a face all scored with age but carrying the name of Rising Fawn. She wove the little basket exactly as I specified from oak splits shaved thin as paper, the warp and weft spaced wide to leave more holes than anything else. The basket would hold aplenty of candle stubs packed together, but you could cup it in your hand and it had no more heft than a good-sized sycamore leaf. I hooked basket to balloon with runs of silk thread and fired it up and held the sack above the flames with the mouth open to catch the rising heat and watched amazed as it belled out and lifted slowly into the air, exactly as it had flown in my imagination. I grabbed it down when it was head high and blew out the stubs and put it away to wait for a dry windless night when the moon was dark.

It had taken all summer to write a poem suitable to the occasion. In all honesty, I’ll have to say that the final draft touched many of the same keys as the bird poem. But mine was briefer and more particular in the details of its imagery to Claire’s specific features and to the exact geography of the valley. I copied my poem in my smallest hand onto a strip of paper and rolled it tight and tied it to depend on a long thread from the basket. And then I waited.

When Claire next came into the store during favorable weather and a dark moon, I said, Be at your window. After midnight.

I HUDDLED IN
the dark below the yellow window, striking fire to the several candlewicks. When they were lit, I spread the mouth of the silk balloon and let it catch the heat. It rose like the spirits of the dead, a luminous red plasma ascending into the dark. Claire leaned out, black against the rectangle of her yellow window. She did not touch balloon or basket but reached and pulled the paper toward her and bit the silk thread through with her teeth and let the balloon fly on.

There was a breath of wind, a faint exhalation of the night, not even enough to stir the dry leaves on the ground. But enough to send the balloon drifting away from the house on a descending path. It floated off into the cornfield, only a few feet off the ground, glowing and mysterious, moving against the dark line of autumn trees. And then my balloon fell into a dry stook of fodder and collapsed and the basket upended and lit up like tinder and the fodder blades caught fire. Immediately, the stook was burning like a signal beacon out in the field, the flames standing thirty feet tall in the night and making a loud hissing sound.

I looked back toward Claire’s yellow window and it suddenly went black. I ran and lay down behind a laurel bush. A light was lit downstairs. Featherstone, straight out of bed and backlit and wearing nothing whatsoever, came walking calmly out the door with a shotgun in his hands. He put it to his shoulder and fired both barrels out into the field, two booming reports with long yellow spouts of muzzle flash lighting the ground around him. I think he fired more as a kind of statement of selfhood rather than in hope of hitting something. And then he went back into the house. If I were a painter, I would spend a great deal of effort trying to capture that scene, a dark night sky with broken clouds, a fodderstook burning, a naked man illuminated in a halo of gun light.

7

A
S PLANNED, TALLENT AND I SWAPPED POSTS WITH THE ONSET
of cold weather and Claire’s departure for Savannah. Back in Wayah, I didn’t see much of Bear until hard weather drove him down from the mountains. In the winterhouse that year, with wind howling outside and woodsmoke lying thick under the ceiling, I listened as Bear told hunting tales from the months of my absence. It had been a series of seasons wherein all his solo jaunts through the woods were desperately boogered just short of fatality. He divided the narrative in three parts, no detail spared, for we had plenty of time. But I will summarize.

In green midsummer he was bit by an enormous snake, much longer than he was tall. The head of it was nearly as big as a dog’s head, fangs the size of his pair of crooked forefingers. He thought snakes like that were long since gone from this world, but he was wrong. The calf of his leg swelled up as big around as the mouth to a bucket, and he couldn’t walk out of the mountains. He lay under a rock ledge for days, taking no food but just drinking from a drip of water coming directly from a seam in the rock. The skin of his calf turned black and then split open from knee to ankle. It was two weeks before he was able to hobble home, thin as a cornstalk.

On the next trip, at the highest pitch of autumn, he had inadvertently shot and killed a grey wolf right at dusk, thinking it was some other animal entirely, a young doe or a long-legged hog. The light was very low, and he had been intemperate. Of course the sin of killing a wolf had invalidated his gun for further use. He tried cleaning it by filling its barrel with seven thin sourwood wands and soaking it in the river overnight, but still it would not hit a target. So he finally gave up his efforts and removed the lock and donated the piece to the children of the village to be used as a toy.

Then, on the very next trip, during a cold grey spell of early winter, he made camp at the lip of a cliff up in the high balsams. All he had for supper was a tea he brewed over his campfire from some frost-withered but nourishing-looking plant matter reminiscent of mushroom or lichen that he found growing in a rock garden nearby. A hard freeze settled in shortly after dark. Inexplicably and without precedent, the stars grew big as pine torches blazing across the sky. The full Snow Moon was a brilliant hole in the darkness through which another world became partially visible. It was a revelation worthy of strict attendance. Bear lay out on the cliff edge, engrossed by the amazing night and the long moon-grey landscape stretching off into a mountainous distance he had never before imagined. His mind being otherwise occupied, he let the fire burn out, and he failed to wrap himself in his bedding. By silvery dawn he could hardly feel his feet. He went to the little spring nearby and soaked them in its cold trickle, but he still lost one blackened toe on his left foot to frostbite.

—What a damn bad set of moons, Bear said. The worst hunting I’ve ever known.

With that, I changed the subject and told my love story from the summer. I went on for a day or two, between meals and sleep, doing the best I could to be entertaining with the material I had—the details of Claire and Featherstone, the beauty of Valley River, lavish Cranshaw, my anguish and desire concerning Claire.

When it became Bear’s turn to talk about love, the first line of his story was this: I should have enjoyed an old age of quiet and respect as head man of my people, a wise voice in council, a strong tale-teller on winter nights. But instead I’m a fool and a subject of gossip and hilarity.

At that point I figured I was probably whipped in the contest of storytelling, and all I could do was listen.

Bear said he had fallen deeply and badly in love with a beautiful young widow largely on the basis of her pitiless and insatiable lovemaking. She was named Dogwood Leaf and also Sara. He could not get enough of her. And so when she insisted that, to continue, he had to marry her and her two sisters as well, he went right along and did it, for he still held with the old ways, even though the mixed-bloods and the white Scots Indians out on the Nation had declared that the old ways were swept aside and marriage ought henceforth to involve just two people, a restriction which had not prevailed before.

I should say here that Bear had been married quite a few times and was disinclined or unable to put a specific number to it. But to say he had numerous wives gives a possibly inaccurate impression. A pasha ruling over a harem or a cock treading a flock of hens in the farmyard. Some of the women he had left, and some had left him. It was about even. He held no bitterness toward any of them. And he still missed his first wife, Wild Hemp, with a bitter ache nearly fifty years after her death. When he thought of her, he was as forever young as she, for she would always be seventeen, and a great deal of love in him stayed back there.

Sara, though, was sensible enough not to be jealous of the dead, or else she didn’t much care in what direction Bear’s true feelings took flight. He married the three sisters all at one time, and they brought with them several widowed and spinster cousins, and a violent-tempered mother, and an old great-grandmother who claimed to have lived several decades past a hundred. So Bear was vastly outnumbered and much beleaguered by his many new women, who would gang up on him and overrule him in most decisions except in the traditional male areas of war and hunting, of which the former was entirely gone and the latter but a shade of the past and largely just an excuse for men to get away to the quiet woods.

Bear’s women at least agreed with him in following the old ways, which dictated that the fields were the concern of women and thus fell under their ownership and were not his at all. And also the cabin and granary and of course the menstrual hut, which after years of abandonment suddenly began doing a brisk business near the full of the moon. If Bear ever ventured into the fields just to strike up a conversation with the women—for he had no interest in hoeing—they would run him out. The oldest woman, called Grandmother Maw because her husband had been the great Hanging Maw, was built low to the ground to begin with, and age had bent her practically double with rheumatism, so she was only about waist-high to Bear. Nevertheless, she went after him one day with an old flint hoe, hollering, No men in my corn. No bloody men.

Bear slept most nights in the townhouse, and when he couldn’t stand it anymore, he went creeping by moonlight to visit Sara in the cabin on the off chance that she would agree to bed with him. And if Bear had little desire for the other new wives, they had none at all for him. One seemed not to be able to tolerate the sight of him and made angry biting comments about his every word or act, and the other treated him as a clown that God had created for her especial amusement. All three of the wives had lovers who came and went. These young men ate from the stewpot and disappeared into the sleeping houses at moonrise and were gone by dawn. All of the wives used the medicine formulas that armored them against falling in love, so their hearts remained free and clear. But they also worked the formulas that made men fall in love with them, so they had awful power. Bear was at a great disadvantage against them.

Soon, the lovemaking with Sara, which before the marriage had been frenzied and diurnal, suddenly slowed until it seemed to him that eclipses of the moon happened more frequently. And when she did take him on, he became the butt of jokes for days afterward, for the cabin where the women slept was small, like all the houses were at Wayah, and any sense of amatory privacy in such confined spaces was purely an illusion constructed from the decorum and reticence of the other inhabitants. But Sara’s people—her mother and sisters and especially her grandmother—had neither. They’d talk about Bear’s love sounds over breakfast soup and would contest with one another to see which among them could most closely mimic his groans. They made the sounds of boar hogs rooting in the ground, of groundhog whistles, buck snorts, crow calls. Bear would end up rushing from the house, either to sit all day sulled by the fire of his townhouse or to wander up and down the river no matter the weather in search of company and sympathy, in which case he would end up at the trade post, drinking and damning love in all its forms and wishing I were there to listen to him talk, for Tallent was a poor audience and didn’t care a thing for stories, only writing figures in our ledgers.