Thirteen Moons (18 page)

—I’m plenty happy. And I’ve got all the friends I care to have.

—Meaning you care to have—what, three? And one of those is a horse.

—People. They’ll let you down.

EVEN IN OLD AGE,
she recurs. I still dream about Claire at least twice a year. How amazing for a thing as vaporous as desire to survive against all the depredations of time, becoming, at its worst, a sad reminder that life mostly fails us. In some dreams she is just a fragrance. Sometimes lavender and sometimes clove and cinnamon, but also another scent dear to my heart. During those two summers, Claire had the habit of absentmindedly wiping her pen nib on her skirts, most of which were dark blue, so the only trace of her habit was the faint odor of ink around her.

SUMMER BEGAN WILTING
to a close. Goldenrod and ironweed. Brilliant dry afternoons and the sun setting farther and farther south by the day. I had ridden from late afternoon into dark, heading to Cranshaw. That day, as they had done at summer’s end since old times, the people burned brush off the lower slopes of the mountains. It made for better hunting, easier travel. Long into night, wavering lines of fire still climbed slowly toward the black sky. Smoke hung in the air all down Valley River.

It was going on midnight when I arrived, expecting a dark house and Claire waiting on the gallery. But Featherstone still sat out in his yard in a leather club chair, smoking a whole tom turkey over a glowing bed of hickory coals. The big bird was trussed with twine and skewered breast-up on an iron spit. Strips of bacon lay draped across it. Drops of fat stood on the browning skin like beads of sweat. Featherstone had his feet propped up on an empty wine crate, and he used another for a side table, on which sat a bottle of claret and a stemmed glass and a candle lantern and a pistol. He read from a book.

When he heard me approaching, Featherstone set the book winged open across his groin like a dead bird and rested his hand on the crate near the pistol without actually touching it. He looked toward the sound until I showed myself in the firelight.

Featherstone looked me up and down and then pulled out a gold Jurgensen watch as big as a biscuit and held its face to the candle lantern.

—Late to be calling.

—I told Claire I’d be by this afternoon.

—Then you’re the very emblem of timeliness.

—I came from all the way down the valley. I’m thinking of buying another post down there. I went to have a look at it and was delayed.

Featherstone lifted his boots from his ottoman and nudged it toward me.

—Sit, he said.

I moved the crate to a quartering position around the circle of the fire and looked at Featherstone. He bent forward and tossed a dry hickory split onto hot coals, and the split flamed up yellow immediately. A streak of red bristles still highlighted his grey hair.

—I’m done with this book, Featherstone said. You can take it. See what you think. I think it’s not bad.

Featherstone reached the book to me, and I took it and angled it to the fire and looked at the spine and then fingered it open and looked at a few pages of type and then closed it.

—I’ve heard of this poem and been wanting to read it, I said.
Don Juan.
I pronounced it as I understood the Spanish or the Mexicans might possibly do.

—Best I can tell, you say it different, Featherstone said. He rhymes it with
new ’un.

I said the words experimentally. New ’un, Juan.

—It’s about a fellow can’t keep his peter in his pants. And you’ve been all anxious to read him. But I guess he stands for all mankind.

Featherstone reached out a small tin bucket with the handle of a paintbrush standing above its rim.

—Here, swab that bird and give it a turn.

I took the bucket by the bail and held it to my nose. It smelled of vinegar and hot pepper.

I dabbed the wet brush at the turkey with some delicacy until Featherstone said, There’s plenty. Slop it on till it runs.

I did as told, and the dull red liquid sheeted off the slopes of the turkey into the fire and sizzled on the coals.

—Now turn it, Featherstone said.

—The bacon will fall off, I said.

—It’s done its job. Crank away.

The spit was crooked into a handle at the end, and when I grabbed hold to give it half a turn, it seared a deep red stripe across my palm. I might have made some kind of momentary high-pitched acknowledgment.

—Shit fire, Featherstone said. I thought you had sense to use your hat or your coatsleeve or something to cover your hand.

I went to the black river and held my hand in the water but could not entirely drown the fire out of it.

When the turkey was done, we ate slices drizzled with more of the vinegar and peppers between thick cuts of wheat bread. And then we drank more wine and watched the coals of the fire. My seared hand burned on, and every so often I turned my palm to the fire and looked at the diagonal brand.

—Here, Featherstone said. A gift. Or rather, another gift consonant with the book. I’m all charity tonight.

He reached me a little red velvet pouch tied closed at the top with a pink grosgrain ribbon in the simplest bowknot. It weighed nothing.

I pulled one of the ribbon ends and fingered open the pleated top of the pouch and shook the contents out into my burnt palm. Three identical items. I knew what they were, but barely. Awful husks like shed snakeskins.

—Useful to stop the pox, Featherstone said. But also good to keep from getting babies. You soak them in water before use. And you’re meant to wash them with some considerable particularity afterward.

I tucked the items back into the pouch and reached them back to him.

I said, No thank you, sir.

Featherstone grabbed my wrist in a fierce grip, first painful and then numbing. He was looking hard at me, a raptor eyeing a rabbit.

He said, Gentlemen keep them in an inside pocket.

He released my hand.

I tucked the pouch into my waistcoat, feeling mastered.

We sat a long time without speaking, and then Featherstone poured for both of us again. He said, I believe this past issue of
The Chesapeake Review
is their best yet. And I agreed.

But the more I studied the fire the more this seemed like one of the moments in life which, immediately afterward and for the rest of your life, you wish you could revise to your credit. It gnaws at you when you’ve failed yourself and can’t go back and do anything about it. I could make a very long personal list of regretful moments. But this one would not be on it. I pulled the pouch out of my pocket and pitched the whole mess into the fire. The velvet smoldered a few seconds and then the guts flamed up quick and bright as pine shavings and died away.

VALLEY RIVER WAS
busy with talk of the ball at Cranshaw. The party of the year. I awaited my invitation for days. No mail. Then Claire came by.

—He takes notions. Pay no attention.

—So then, I’m not to come?

—Ignore it. It’s a few hours and then it’s done. Let it go.

FEATHERSTONE’S SLAVES MUST
have been making candles all week. Every window of the house blazed yellow. Men stood on the dark gallery talking. I could not see them other than when their black forms crossed in front of a window, but I could see the ends of their cigars stoke up when they puffed them, blinking here and there along the gallery like fireflies. And I could hear a mumble of voices, women suddenly laughing, and the sound of a poorly tuned spinet plinking some antique dance tune. A faint shuffle of feet. No fiddles and banjos for Mr. Featherstone’s dance. Dancing room would have been made for the party, furniture cleared out, rugs rolled up. I supposed Claire was dancing now, someone’s hand resting at the narrow of her waist or maybe a bit lower, at her hip bone or the soft place just below where her hip began arcing.

I felt just exactly as I had expected to feel when I set out from home. Exiled, bleak, an outsider lurking in the dark. And yet I had come anyway. It was a public road. Who could say no? And besides, I had been in a tragic mood for days, waiting for the invitation that did not arrive.

A majority portion of moon stood high and blue overhead, and I remained a long time burning in the road. A sad tune ran in my head like a circle.

Suddenly Claire was descending the steps, running across the lawn. Her fancy gown was green as the forest and scooped somewhat daringly at the breast. She was running right to me.

—Help me up.

I took a foot out of the stirrup and reached down a hand. She gathered the dress to mount, and as she leaped to the stirrup, her raised leg was all angles and curves above the black ankle boots. And then a glimpse of white chest and a darker depth, a scoop of shadow between her breasts as she rose toward me and swung on behind and her arms circled my waist. We were at such point of slim youth that we both fit in the curve of a saddle if we pressed hips tight together, which we did.

I gave a touch of heel and pulled right to make a show-off spin in the road, just cavalierly holding the reins one-handed. Waverley gathered himself under us and turned, pivoting in such a tight spin it felt as if his four feet would have fit on a stove lid. Then I gave a great deal of leg, and Waverley drove forward into flight.

We went hard down the road, riding double on a fine horse, the river road unspooling flat and sinuous and the wind blowing back Waverley’s mane. I looked around and Claire had loosed her hair from its binding, and it too was whipping long behind, and her dress skirt was blowing back, flaring like a comet’s tail, as if that sweep of hair and skirt was all the effect the resistance of the world could have on us as we streaked through the night in a moment that I could not then know was unrepeatable.

As far as I knew, we would go on endless. Youth and night and wild freedom and not one real worry yet intruding on our thoughts. Riding with the certainty that life could be a stream of such moments, a dream forever. I thought we could ride beyond the endurance or even the mortality of horses. Beyond the mortality of ourselves. All by virtue of velocity.

Waverley flew right through the ford in the river without letup, and the black water rose white around us as it parted and then fell behind. Claire leaned forward and put her lips to my right ear and said, Don’t ever stop.

Remember, please, that back then there was nothing on the face of the earth faster than a fine horse at full gallop. Not one brute machine could outstrip it. In the places where they had railways, it could take four hours to go forty-five miles, at least so said Featherstone on the basis of a recent trip to Georgia. We were going multiples of that mechanic speed, ripping the night right down the middle in what now seems to me a last glorious expression of a dying world. We tore west down the valley through tunnels of close woods. And then we burst into open ground, fields overlain by infinite starred skies. The high ridges of the mountains flowed along to right and left in the moonlight. Waverley’s stride was so long and elevated that we were only in contact with earth occasionally.

I could go on and on. But of course, eventually, we did have to break the spell and stop and let Waverley blow before his heart burst in his chest. And I had no doubt in my mind that if I had asked, he would have driven himself beyond the physically possible into death. His big willing chest went like a bellows between our legs, and I could feel Claire pressing against me, from her forehead at my hairline to the cusp of her at my hips. The moon was sloping west. Sad to say, we turned and started east. But slowly now, at a walk.

Claire said, Let me up in front.

She sort of pivoted some way that caused a powerful rustle and flounce of dress skirt but did not feel the least bit awkward. And then she was between my arms, leaned back against me, her hands gripping my thighs just above the knee for balance. I smelled her hair, fresh washed and scented with lavender. And I could feel a suggestion of the sides of her breasts through the dress where my forearms passed around her and pressed against her to hold the reins. I could feel her relax, a sort of deep softening breath against me. But I kept adjusting my seat in the saddle so that it would not be so apparent how rousing I found that current arrangement.

We went back toward Cranshaw, traveling retrograde to what I believed were our desires, about as slowly as Waverley could walk without coming to a full stop. But still, we eventually returned to the plantation house. Fiddles and banjos had been brought out after all, and there was a drunken buck-and-wing going to the extent that the whole place drummed with the stomp of boot heels.

There’s not much left to tell about that night except that we dismounted and kissed a great long while. Her lips were chapped and she had rubbed lanolin on them and they were slightly rough and sticky. Close up, she had a faint odor of wool. And then the party began breaking up. Groups went away in the dark, heading up and down the river, in carriages and a-saddle and afoot. And before one of the groups had reached the first turn in the road, someone fired a celebratory shotgun blast straight up into the air. A yellow spew of fire gleamed fountainous up the black sky. Featherstone stood alone on the porch, a silhouette against the bright windows, and he tipped one finger to his brow in salute to me. Claire kissed me one more long goodbye and went back across the yard toward the house. I rode home. Or at least to the Valley River post, one of the places I called home. I kept Waverley at a walk all the way. I untacked him and rubbed him down with tow sacking and gave him extra grain and two little green apples and a big carrot, which he ate in one long suction from tip to feathery greens. I did not fall asleep until dawn.