Thirteen Moons (21 page)

I never took cases of murder and rarely of assault or horse theft. Mostly I was a dirt lawyer, my specialty the buying and selling of land and the many complications and disagreements arising therefrom. And my practice was helped considerably by the idiocy of the state law that allowed anyone to file a claim on land, even if it was already occupied and filed on by someone else. Then everyone involved had to go to court to sort out the title. It was a bad law, but good for the lawyer business.

I noted that many successful frontier esquires had vivid personal styles that juries found entertaining and therefore convincing, and I tried to find one for myself. For a while I let my hair grow long in the back and shined it with pomade. I had a fancy waistcoat made of bright red silk and pointy-toed boots polished to a high gloss. I ordered Havana cigars in the largest size and would puff meaningfully at certain moments in my questioning of witnesses, as if I were thinking hard about their answers and could only come to the sad reluctant conclusion that they were lying.

There were days when court was like a knife fight. Debt collection and land ownership and whose hogs broke down somebody’s fence all have surprising power to raise emotions to a high pitch. Nobody likes to lose, no matter what the stakes. Lethal threats were made right in front of judges. You came into the courthouse with your pistol in your pocket and left with it in your hand. Other days, though, court was a jocular affair, and the lawyer that prevailed was the one whose dry wit most often made the audience laugh.

I WROTE SOME
poems during that time of Claire’s absence. Of course I did. What young man of feeling does not? Furthermore, they did not remain forever in a private precious journal. The most romantic of them were published. Not enough to make even a slim volume, the pages sparely dressed with words, barely blackened between wide margins. So, without a collection, my works are scattered and lost to the reading public among old numbers of mostly discontinued periodicals:
The Chesapeake Review, The Congaree Quarterly, The Arcadian, The Allegheny Review,
and a few others of lesser note.

In the third number of the fifth volume of
The Arcadian,
my finest work, “To C——,” was unveiled to the public. It was some poem. Better than a hundred lines long. In it, I promised my lost and presumably dead beloved
down all the ruins of time
that I would give my fortune (then largely nonexistent) and my place on earth (as marginal and remote as you can get) and pretty much everything but my left hand to once again
taste of her garnet lips.
(Why garnet? Because I had recently found a large one in the creek behind the Valley River station and was quite proud of it.) Between those semiprecious curves of flesh, her teeth shone like pearls, her breast as white as moon in June. The poem expresses a great deal of
’tis
and
thither.
Gloom and mystery. I’m afraid I might have used some phrase like
Now, still grave, speak.
That sort of sentiment.

I reckon there was such a shortage of poems back then that the quarterlies would set into type just about any rhymed writing you cared to send them. The price of postage was all that stood in the way of becoming a poet. In summation, you might say that my poems did not breach the citadel of the soul. I’ll just leave it at that. Except to say that, in fact, favorable notice was taken in some discerning quarters. I had a few appreciative readers, and my abandonment of poetry was not welcomed by all.

ONE OF THOSE YEARS,
when dead winter had set in and I had retired with Bear into the winterhouse, I remember walking out one day for a breath of fresh air. I had to break snow knee-deep to reach the creek. It was covered over with grey ice, and through it I could see black water rushing underneath. What a mournful day it was. I took my knife tip and carved Claire’s name in the ice and then wrote down what I thought the date was, though I could have been as high as a week wrong, one way or the other. And thus the year wheeled back around to yet another grim commencement.

1

T
HE FIRE IN THE CENTER OF THE TOWNHOUSE WAS BUILT SMALL,
burned down mostly to coals with blue and yellow flames rising low and sporadic from checkered and nearly consumed logs of hickory and chestnut. The pole benches all around the walls were crowded with people, and the children sat or lay on the packed earth floor. They nearly faded into the darkness, except for vague blurs of faces, the pale movements of hands. Bear stood and walked around the fire and used the light to his advantage—like an actor moving in and out of the yellow glow of footlights—revealing and then retreating.

He began the council with a confession. From his long and somewhat error-prone life, his greatest regret was that long ago he had let old obsolete hatreds mislead him into fighting under Jackson during the Creek War. He regretted fighting against other Indians, even though the Creeks had been enemies of the Cherokee long before the first whiteman erupted into the world. Even more, he wished deep in his heart that he had not squandered the opportunity to kill Jackson back then, for they had stood an arm’s length apart on several occasions, and it was well known that Bear always had a quick hand with a knife. During that time he had witnessed Jackson order a boy soldier shot for insubordination. The offense was failing to obey a command to pick up some chicken bones littering the ground. The boy did not do it immediately but waited until he finished eating his dinner. By necessity, the firing squad killed the boy sitting on a log, for he was too terrified to stand. On the other hand, after the fight at Horseshoe Bend, Jackson’s men cut bridle reins from the back hide of dead Creek warriors and collected their noses to verify the numeration of dead. On those actions, as opposed to a matter of chicken bones, Jackson had no comment one way or the other.

Jackson had long since announced his intention to remove all Indians to the West. A date certain had been set, and though it was many seasons away, it was rushing toward them. Some of the Scottish Indians on the Nation paid little heed to it. They believed in their ability to make a deal. But Bear had seen Jackson at work. The Old Possum was implacable, and he meant to put an end to Indians.

—End-times are tricky things to deal with, Bear said.

He moved out of the light, gliding toward a dark corner where his voice would be deepened by the intersecting walls and project sourceless into the vaulted and dramatic space. He reminded the people of the great comet years ago, before the memories of many in his audience. Its tail stretched across half the sky, and it had fallen through the night for weeks. Then over and over for more than two months, the old and dying earth shook until one wall of the townhouse had fallen away and the roof collapsed. Holes opened in the ground and filled with bad water. Hens were shaken from their roosts onto the dirt, and treetops swayed though there was no wind whatsoever.

Shortly thereafter, an old man reported that one afternoon he was sitting by a fire in his cabin yard when a tall man came out of the woods. All his clothes were made of green leaves, big sycamore and poplar leaves fashioned so that they lapped one another like snake scales, and he had his head covered with a broad hat of waxy laurel leaves. He carried a child in the crook of one arm, and he claimed the child was God and God was fixing to destroy earth soon unless the people returned to the old ways and gave up clothes of woven cloth and guns and plows and nearly all metal whatsoever, and quit growing yellow corn and went back to real corn—the old mottled ears—and stopped grinding their kernels between the stones of water mills and went back to pounding it into meal by hand in log mortars, and resettled the old towns and rebuilt the townhouses on top of the mounds and recommenced observing all the old sacred festivals and dances in the squaregrounds at the foot of the mounds. The Green Man laid down all these conditions, and God offered no additional opinions on his own but just kicked his bare feet against the air and pulled at the leaves of the man’s tunic and looked around as if seeing everything he had made for the first time, and his attitude was one of surprise and delight.

Soon a prophet named Dull Hoe weighed in with his vision. Dull Hoe was a man who did not just visit the spirit world but resided there nearly full-time and only experienced this world as a vague troubling dream. On a lonesome journey into the mountains, he had seen black riders come across the sky on their mounts and light to rest on a high peak, Tusquitte Bald to be exact. Their leader was beating a drum, and the whole world vibrated to its urgent rhythm. When he quit beating, he started talking, and his words matched up with the story of the Green Man and God. Stop following white ways, don’t break the bones of corn in hideous and violent machines, forswear all metal, wear hides not cloth, be wary of the wheel in all its forms, see the plow as an enemy, dance the old dances. Die otherwise. For a great storm was coming soon, with hailstones as big as hominy blocks falling from a black sky, killing all the whites and anyone else who did not go to refuge in the highest mountains. The world would be wiped clean. Afterward, the disappeared deer and elk and buffalo would return from wherever they had gone, and the people could go back to living like they used to, all the beauty and blood of the old ways restored to them.

Soon, belief in these visions and revelations became widespread, and trails from the foothills up to the mountains began filling with pilgrims. They went to the high balds and camped in the long grass and waited. There was not a date as exact for that apocalypse as Jackson had given for this one.
Soon
was all the Green Man and God and the Black Rider had said.

When the people had been up on the mountaintops so long that by anyone’s reckoning
soon
had long since passed without any sign of a cleansing storm gathering on the horizon, they journeyed back down to the same hopeless world they had fled.

Bear, who then as now lived in the mountains and kept mostly by the old ways already, had not followed the pilgrims but watched all of it with despair. What he believed then was that Green Man and God were not going to save him or his people. And he believed the same now. There would be no regaining what was lost. A world once gone was gone for good.

And neither would war save them. The Creeks had fought with Jackson and lost half their people. Choctaws had been cut down likewise. So fighting was out.

How to survive? How to save the broken fragments of the world? Those were the pressing questions. On the Nation, some of the people had decided that becoming as much like the whites as possible was the way. Washington and Jefferson had told them that to survive, those were the only terms. And the white Indians of the Nation had gone at it to the best of their understanding. They now had their own laws and head chief and bicameral legislature housed in a big townhouse, and a supreme court and even a national academy and a museum displaying the long culture of the people. Also a newspaper,
The Phoenix,
printed in the syllabary. All situated in the capital city of New Echota, which was platted out and in progress of construction. And that was all fine for those people out on the Nation, but it hadn’t changed the Possum’s mind a bit.

In Wayah, Bear didn’t think he and his people could turn white no matter how hard they tried. But he didn’t much want to try at all. He wondered if you could be said to have survived if at the end you didn’t even recognize yourself or your new life or your homeland. Do you dissipate like a drop of blood in a bucket of milk, or do you persist, a small stone tossed into a rushing river?

One choice that lay before them was to go west as Jackson had commanded them to do. But if the western territories were as fine as they were made out to be, the white people would soon come and take that land away from them too, for it was the nature of white people that they could never be satisfied.

As Bear saw it, his people had only a pair of things in their favor. The first was their land. It was so difficult and beautiful that nobody wanted it but them. Most of it lay inconveniently vertical. It was hard to farm. You couldn’t cut a wagon road through even the easiest parts without the greatest difficulty. It had no gold. It was wet and foggy and rainy a great deal of the year. But nevertheless it was theirs, both by heritage and by deed, nearly a thousand acres of it anyway, which Bear conceded was not really much land at all. But it had the advantage of belonging neither to the Nation nor to any whiteman. It was on paper under his name. His view was that they needed a great deal more such land.

Then he told another story, of his journey to Charleston and his discovery of the workings of the law and how he found a way to use it in his favor, like an axe, by keeping its sharp edge turned away from himself and his desires. Blossom, the girl he had redeemed from slavery, was among the people in the townhouse. She was now a stout woman of middle age with a half dozen children, most of them grown. Her hair was parted in a strict line down the top of her head and was threaded with white. She spoke up and told how splendid and terrifying the court was and how, nevertheless, Bear and his lawyer had swept all before them and set her free.

Bear looked at the crowd and waited in silence long enough for them to grow uncomfortable. Then he said, And now the second thing we have is our own lawyer, who is one of us. Me and Will can save us.

Everyone looked at me.

I wanted to run far away from the kind of fight Bear was proposing. But what I did was stand up beside Bear in the firelight and say that at least I’d give it a try. Go to Washington City and see what I could do in our behalf.

DAYS ON HORSEBACK
east to the nearest town with stage service. Days on the stage to the railhead. Then flying along on the train for two days at dizzying speeds occasionally approaching twenty miles an hour to the state capital. And after some business there, on to navigable water. And then lazy days floating in a riverboat to the coastal port, followed by a sailing ship up the Atlantic and past Cape Henry into the Chesapeake, and then another riverboat for the final stretch up the Potomac.

On that first trip, I was so excited about train travel that for the first fifty miles after the railhead, I sat up front in the locomotive conversing with the engineer and the fireman and helping feed wood into the firebox. And in turn they shared their dinner with me, fat yeasty bread rolls and thin beefsteaks seasoned with a great deal of crushed black and red pepper and seared fast in a dry long-handled iron skillet heated nearly red-hot over the fire.

I was delighted by the variety of towns along the way, whether I stopped for the night or just for an hour of rest and food. I remember overnighting at a tavern in the hill country, where homesick Irish fiddlers and pipers and drummers played their music until almost sunrise. There were towns noted for pig cookery, where they dug pits in the ground and built fires in them and let the wood burn down to red coals and then put in the pig and buried fire and carcass together in red clay. When the pig was disinterred the next day, it would be chopped or hand-pulled to shreds and dressed with vinegar and hot peppers and served with salty dollops of cornmeal fried in lard. Cookery in each town was somewhat different from the next. One place, full of little stout Dutchmen, had the finest sausages I had ever eaten, cooked over hickory coals and served with sauerkraut and brown ale drawn from brown glazed crocks cooled in the creek. Another town had a tavern where they alleged the T-bone beefsteak had been invented, though I did not see how that claim could possibly be true since beeves had surely gone around with that part of their insides for quite some time.

Down along the coast, everything smelled of fish and salt water. I spent a night in a town where the wild hogs came down onto exposed mudflats at low tide and ate little pale crabs, crunching them like chitlins. More pleasantly, in Wilmington I found a waterside place that took pride in their cool grey oysters pulled fresh from the sea and arrayed still quivering in their opened shells and eaten alongside glasses of straw-colored wine from France. The first time I dined on oysters, my enthusiasm embarrassed my tablemates. I slurped down two dozen in quick succession, and even after I could eat no more, I kept now and again between swallows of wine lifting an empty half shell to my nose and sniffing the pearly cup to remind myself of the existence of this marvelous and completely unexpected food.

I was raw to that flat country of piedmont and coastal plain. So when I boarded the first riverboat of my life—a sort of broken-backed stern-wheeler in bad need of scraping and painting, a watercraft disappointingly far removed from my imaginings of the grand floating palaces of the Mississippi—I wanted to be taken for a young man of substance, traveling with a certain style.

I was met on deck by a little lean purser even younger than myself.

—I’d like your best cabin, I said.

—Best how? the purser said.

—Largest, finest, cleanest, brightest. Those sorts of things. Your best.

—They’re all of a kind.