Thirteen Moons (24 page)

I SOON LEARNED
that the public galleries of the Senate chamber were an excellent place to meet ladies, both young and youngish. What I desired was Claire, but the gallery ladies were better than lone bachelorhood. In the streets most days, I could not help staring hard at passing strangers in case one of them might be Claire, visiting the capital with Featherstone.

I met the famous actress Mrs. Chapman at a small party in the house of a senator from one of the upper states, a squat dark little man with almost no hair and only a dense chin beard for compensation. She had grown up in Charleston, had succeeded Fanny Kemble as the principal female lead of
High, Low, Jack…Game,
and was the talk of the town. Wherever she went during the day, all traffic, both pedestrian and vehicular, came to a halt to watch her pass. She was tall and angular and beautiful, and a soft warm light seemed to shine down on her, following wherever she moved. But, constantly and a little awkwardly, she tried to step just out of its beam, and thus she went about with a dodging motion, as if always apologizing for herself. All men and most women found her sidling manner charming in the extreme.

While the party went on in an adjoining room, she and I circled awkwardly around a long dark mahogany table burdened with china platters filled with various delicate foods. Our orbits were duplicated in a great rippling framed mirror on the wall. Both of us eyed the little special doughballs filled with meat, the dense rum cakes and dark mincemeats. My attention was drawn to a dish of fig pastries, each no bigger around than a gold dollar. Mrs. Chapman claimed to have handmade them herself. I ate one and offered the bland opinion that it was especially good.

She had been told I published poetry, though regrettably she had read none of it. She mentioned that she knew a vastly famous old Boston writer, who had told her he could not get through a day in any peace unless he had written a specific quantity of lines. Otherwise, despair.

She paused and then mentioned the exact melancholy number. It seemed unimaginably large.

I pictured the old grey man sitting at his desk scribbling as frantic as a farmer beating out a wheat-field fire with a wet tow sack, shedding strands of white hair in a momentous backlit explosion from his nimbus of beard and coiffure, tossing the dense blackened pages over his shoulder into a pile of paper as great and conical as a haystack. It seemed to me that onanists must feel the same way. Not happy if they are unable to practice their special art daily.

But aloud I said, With me it’s the other way around.

She nodded politely and composed her face as if my comment were something worth serious consideration and not just a piece of smart-assery, for which generosity I found her even more lovely.

I met Mrs. Chapman at other parties and was initially only polite to her, given the Mrs. attached to her name. But I soon got the distinct impression that Mr. Chapman, whoever he had been, had long since passed to another world, or at least to an unimaginably distant state like Ohio or Illinois. And also, stunningly, that Mrs. Chapman was twenty-two. My age exactly.

When I discovered this fact, I brought it up at a dinner. We’re the same age.

I regretted the comment as soon as it fell from my mouth.

She said, Many are. But let’s agree to make a special pact of it.

In short order, Mrs. Chapman and I began seeing a great deal of each other. On Sundays we often went riding, usually to view the stone locks on the towpath of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. Or to the George Town heights to look across the river in the direction of Alexandria and on back to the Capitol across the thin scattering of homes and government buildings. I took her to see the portraits of significant Indians from the various peoples displayed in a chamber of the Department of War. We met at the sorts of parties where the music and dancing went on until past midnight, and then supper was served. At one party held at the house of a noted art collector, Mrs. Chapman and I danced not a step but spent time going from canvas to canvas. We decided to bypass landscape, my usual favorite, and also still life, for she did not find bowls of grapes and apples very interesting. We chose to examine only portraits that evening. Most of the faces gleamed up from brown darkness, bathed in a flattering buttery light, eyes liquid and searching. We studied them one by one and guessed in which of the two basic categories the persons belonged, preachers or drunks. At another party, we created a minor scandal by dancing every dance exclusively together. It was a fancy ball where only the eldest senators were excused for arriving
en habit de ville
—a phrase I overheard Calhoun use in begging the pardon of the hostess for his failure to find a suitable costume. That year, getups of Asian flavor were predominant for both men and women, though there were also the usual scatterings of pirates and gauchos and Indian maidens and chiefs, so I found an unexpected use for my purple turban and tall moccasins. Mrs. Chapman was living alone in a townhouse with only two or three servants, and when the party broke up deep in the night, I accompanied her home in her carriage. I walked back to the Indian Queen shortly before dawn with only the late-night packs of half-wild dogs roaming the streets for company, the Corn Tassel Moon almost full.

And then with little warning the play’s run was over and Mrs. Chapman was off to another city, and I moped about the riverbank for days on end and neglected my correspondence to various departments of government and back home to Tallent. I wrote a poem rather more about my moping than about Mrs. Chapman, and it was published in
The Chesapeake Review.

After the pain subsided, though, I became more assured in the presence of congressmen and lobbyists from Boston and New York City, who seemed particularly polished in mixed company. I took pleasure in noting that few if any of them had run up against Charleston women. And also, my invitations to parties increased. I was out to dinners and dances at least five nights a week. That year, the fashionable younger women—and a few of the older—wore their breasts cinched down low with vast creamy expanses of skin exposed by the low scoops of their necklines. It allowed a fine appreciation of their breathing. Crockett was philosophical on the matter. Things change, he said. There’s nothing you can count on. Come back in a couple of years and they’ll be wearing them high, hove up nearly to their chins.

A lobbyist for rice growers, a wealthy plump middle-aged lawyer from Savannah, was said to live a complicated life. I did not know what that might mean other than a girl proving to be married when you thought she was not. But then I spent some time around the man and noted that his black body servant rarely left his side and spoke in a rarefied English kind of accent he had learned in Bermuda. There was a way about their eyes meeting, a way their hands touched in the passing of a teacup, tones of voice in speaking to each other. Complicated.

THE CITY WAS
ripe with brothels. When the Congress was in session, the houses were full from dusk until dawn. Those who could afford it went out whoring, drunk and lustful, at least a night or two a week. The old senators, most of them fat as beeves, rolled up in their carriages just as soon as the sun went down, and then in very short order they rolled home to bed. After that, right through until dawn, the younger representatives came and went. And also all the scavengers and predators, the diplomats and agents and lobbyists like me, drawn to the scent of blood and money and power the city throws out.

One night, I played the old Washington hand, giving a walking tour to the clerk of a new senator just arrived from some little hard-shell Baptist-ridden town in Alabama. The clerk was enormously delighted to be staying, to his complete astonishment, at the famous Indian Queen Hotel, and he could not stop talking about it as we walked. The air carried the smell of the river and the mudflats. Every brothel we passed was tinkling with piano music and breathing out its own particular fragrance of perfume and sweat into the evening. I looked over, and the clerk had tears of joy in his eyes and a look of rapture beaming on his face.

—Perhaps we might choose one to enter? the clerk said.

—Perhaps we might, I said. But farther along.

A few blocks later, it was my pleasure to introduce the clerk to an entire roomful of exquisites, both young and not. Of course, that was back when men joked about the pox as if it were a runny nose.

IMMEDIATELY UPON MY
return to Wayah, I engaged in a three-hour-long ball game in which my nose was broken by a blow from a racquet. Truth be told, it was my own racquet. I made a desperate stooping dig at a grounded ball, and somehow the long webbed stick rebounded from the earth. The haft of it struck me hard, square across the bridge of my nose. A veil of blood streamed down my lower face. I went to the creek and stanched it with cold water and went on playing. I understood the injury as justice. Punishment for my time among the Washingtonians.

Bear was a spectator that day. He sat on a big downed log with a raucous group of old men drinking from a shared bottle. When the game was over and my team had come out on the bottom, Bear asked me whether I had won or lost in the bigger game against the Government. All I could say was that the ball remained in play.

WHEN I NEXT
visited Valley River to check on the post there, I was told immediately upon arrival that Claire and Featherstone had returned during my long absence. An hour later I stood on the gallery, Waverley with reins looped over a rail behind me. A round brown woman of indeterminate race opened the door. I reached into a breast pocket and took out one of my cards, printed at excessive expense at the same Washington stationers that now made my journals. Please present this to Mrs. Featherstone, I said. The woman looked at the face of the card and ran a finger over the raised lettering, and then she turned it over and looked at the blank back with equal interest.

—Who? she said.

—Mrs. Featherstone. Claire.

—Oh. She don’t need your little pasteboard, but I’ll tell her you’re calling.

She handed back the card and shut the door in my face. There were chairs farther along the gallery, but I went to the steps and sat down with my back to the door. It was a still day, and I could hear voices inside. The woman came back to the door and said Claire was not receiving visitors. I asked when might be a more convenient time to return, and she said, There’s not likely to be one.

2

I
N THE SOUTHERN MOUNTAINS, A
HELL
IS A BAD STRETCH OF LAND,
a hard place to get through, a laurel thicket so vast and dense that men go in and can’t find their way out and die there. In other parts of the country, it’s the section of town with all the bars and whorehouses and gunfighters and knife fighters. Not the Hell. A hell.

That’s what the immediate future looked like it was shaping up to be. And no clear way through, at least none that I could see. No way to come out the other side feeling noble or even whole anymore. And plenty of ways to come out ashamed and disappointed in yourself for the remainder of life, with stories you wouldn’t even care to tell drunk. But there was no direction to go other than forward. Bear had set his mind and heart on staying in his mountains, and nothing could change his mind, certainly not government decrees or new lines drawn on maps or old lines erased. Mountains were home, and that was that. Bear said that every time he had been to the flatlands, he felt like he might slide off the end of the world, for there was nothing upright to stop him from the void. He said being in a place without mountains was like riding in the bed of a careening wagon without side rails.

I loved the old man and would do anything for him, and also I believed that Bear’s people had as much right to decide where they cared to live as anybody else. Maybe I should have packed up and gone to Washington for good, used my friends there to find a position. Put that Wayah Town behind me. There are many who can make new selves at a moment’s notice. Slough a skin, dismiss memory, move on. But that is not a skill I ever acquired.

If the soldiers came marching into the mountains and began collecting everyone on the Nation together and taking them off to the West, I had little faith our sheaf of inconclusive letters and vague legal papers would stop them from coming on up to Wayah and emptying our coves too, deeds or no deeds. But I kept working, tirelessly and without hope. I made the long journey to Washington and back three times during those years, each time with a stronger presentiment that all my efforts would be futile. No argument had helped the Nation. Chief Ross and the Ridges had constructed years and years’ worth of arguments, and nothing they did or said changed a thing. Sympathetic lawmakers ranted righteous opposition to Jackson and then moved on to more pressing matters. The Supreme Court rendered a decision siding with the Indians, and Jackson said, Now let them enforce it. The Court, a toothless and ultimately corrupt bunch of old men, backed down.

The Ridges and their followers stalled as long as they could, but before the axe fell they made a desperate and almost actuarial calculation to determine their best chances of personal and financial survival. Helping them in their decision was the old major’s very concrete experience, all the way back into the previous century, of fighting both for and against white men. Before white men, war of Indians against Indians was very bloody and sometimes cruel to the limits of human imagination, but it was a near relative to the ball game, a form of sport. These new white people took all the fun out of war and just won and kept winning, as if that was all that mattered. Major Ridge had seen firsthand what wonders of domination can be accomplished by the overwhelming and single-minded application of force, and finally he and his bunch of supporters conceded defeat.

One winter night in New Echota, a small roomful of wealthy Ridge men, Featherstone among them, huddled about a white paper centered on a candlelit table and autographed a secret nighttime treaty, selling all of the Nation to America under the most favorable terms they believed they could get and agreeing for all their people, without consultation, to remove to the new Indian Territories. When the group had finished putting their names to paper, one of them expressed the opinion that they had just signed their own execution warrants. And of course he was right.

The treaty, as drafted, contained a provision to allow the richest Indians to stay, keep all their holdings—land and houses and slaves—and become American citizens. Unfair, yes. But I was all for it, since it meant that Claire and Featherstone could remain at Cranshaw, and just her proximity offered hope, for time back then seemed long enough for anything to happen, even the softening of a heart inexplicably hardened against you.

When the treaty reached the White House, however, Jackson ranted against any exemptions whatsoever. He wanted all Indians gone, no matter how rich or how white, and the provision was stricken from the final document.

The Old Possum finished out his eight years and began rusticating outside Nashville, a hermit in his Hermitage but still savoring the sweep of his hand across the land even in absentia. Van Buren followed him and his Indian policies like a swimmer caught in a riptide.

In the year before the Army arrived, the members of the Ridge bunch began leaving the plantations they had built, the mills and ferries and stores and printing presses, and pulled out to the West, taking a few of their house slaves with them but leaving most to follow later. Some of the paler among the rich Indians might have been tempted to cross out of the Nation and melt into the surrounding white populations, but the bordering states, Georgia in particular, were vigilant in arresting fugitives of whatever blood degree and deporting them to the West under conditions suitable only for convicts.

Major Ridge and his wife chose to travel out to the new Nation by riverboat, quickly and uneventfully. Boudinot and young Ridge and their Yankee wives made a happy jaunt of it. They trotted to the new Nation in fine carriages drawn by strong healthy horses. Even under such leisurely conditions, their trip took a mere month, the young couples enjoying the fine dry weather of a southern October and the spectacular change of colors and fall of leaves as they crossed Tennessee and rolled through the Ozarks. It being fashionable among gentlemen at the time to be naturalists, Boudinot and young Ridge noted in their journals the passing varieties of wildlife and plant life. They even took time from their journey to visit the Old Possum at his Hermitage, which, when I heard about the visit, struck me as being not entirely required by the etiquette of the situation. And the more I thought about it and imagined their conversation, the more disturbed I became. But the Possum always had something about him that moved many folks his way, like the wind pushed them or gravity pulled them in his direction.

Back on the Nation, Chief Ross fumed and litigated on against America and, of course, denied the legitimacy of the Ridge agreement, rightfully pointing out that the Ridges had no authority to sell even an acre of Nation land to a non-Indian and had in fact committed a capital crime in doing so. When Ross’s efforts all continued to come to nothing, he soon began striking deals of his own to have America pay him, by the head, to move all the people to the West by overland routes. Vast caravans of Indians and slaves, accompanied by soldiers and missionaries, emptying the old Nation and filling the new one. America took Ross’s low bid and got what they paid for. The trail where they cried.

LIKE MAJOR RIDGE,
Featherstone chose—in his words—to eschew the toilsome overland route to the new Nation in favor of the more comfortable water passage, where one might eat dinner at a cloth-covered table and take a morning shit through a buttock-shaped hole in a sternward outhouse overhanging the passing brown river face all a-churn from the turning paddle wheel. Contrary to his wishes, Claire remained behind to pack their belongings. Clattering silver service, footed trays and platters, tiny salt bowls, and endless flatware. Wedgwood dinnerware and Murano crystal cocooned in yellow straw. Many shelves of books and bureaus of folded clothes laid rectangle by rectangle in wooden crates. Her goal was to be done and gone before the soldiers came.

The night before his departure, Featherstone built a midnight blaze of his collected works of taxidermy, a nightmare bonfire on the lawn. Generations of dusty animals large and small combusting quick as fat-pine kindling, their blank faces looking out of the fire, scenting the spring air with an autumnal odor like burning the bristles off a butchered hog. The next morning Featherstone set out for the West on a sort of middling-quality horse which he planned to sell at the river before embarking. His only baggage was a pair of bulging saddlebags filled with dress clothing, all the way down to gloves scented with frangipani for the riverboat salons and a great deal of cash with which he planned to begin life anew. When the poor Indians arrived, he’d be there waiting to profit like most of the other rich Indians.

No argument had worked for the Indians on the Nation, not even the white ones, and I didn’t expect anything to work for Bear’s brown people either. But Bear had put his hope in a fistful of deeds, and his faith never wavered. At that time we had Bear’s thousand acres, which he owned outright, and my more extensive land, which I controlled mainly through a series of notes and IOUs as interlocked and tangled and messy as an old weathered osprey nest. I held one of my tracts by such convoluted means that a second mortgage on a prime field hand figured prominently in the deal. I lived in fear that if one twig was pulled from it, the whole nest would collapse and fall to the ground. But it held and grew.

Bear kept close watch over all the dealings, and at one point he asked if I knew what the difference between us was.

—No, I said.

—Seems to be, there’s two kinds of men in this new world the white people are making. Ones with payments and ones without. You’re a man with payments.

The year before the Removal, Bear and I between us could fairly accurately claim control over about ten thousand acres. It was a fraction of what our holdings would become a decade later, but enough to form a confusing principality, existing outside the Nation and inside the state. With inhabitants of unclear citizenship and all possible degrees of blood, but so remote from the state capital that nobody in government much cared who we were or what we did way out in our doleful coves.

Just to see what might happen, I sent a carefully worded claim of state citizenship for all of Bear’s people to the appropriate department down in the capital. The response was worded in such exquisite bureaucratic cant that it took me three readings to decipher its meaning. The best I could tell, my claim was not accepted, but neither was it rejected.

Though Bear and I had sat up late nights for years planning the future—hoping and despairing over it, resolving to fight against it all we could—most of the people didn’t at all understand what immediate threat of losing their homeland they now lived under. The doings of the larger world, even Jackson’s will to put an end to Indians east of the Mississippi, seemed as distant and uninteresting as wars conducted by the King of Siam. A lot of our people had never been farther from their own farms than the top of the most distant ridge they could see. They were like everyone else; all they truly knew was locked in the body. The diameter of their world was tightly drawn, just as it was for most of their white neighbors, and its topography was confined to the coves and ridges and watercourses they had seen with their eyes and walked with their legs. Whatever larger geography they held in mind was theoretical. So the distance to the West was entirely abstract, as was the length of time it might take to traverse such unimagined space and the danger that might wait along the way.

DURING THE MONTHS
leading up to the Removal, letters and reports flew back and forth between Washington and the earliest representatives of the Army. And on both ends of the transaction, I had ways to get hold of scrivener’s copies. A case in point:

Memoir Relative to the Cherokee Nation within the Limits of N. Carolina and its Immediate Vicinity, by W. G. Williams, Capt, U.S. F. Grs. Febry
1838.

Preparatory to a Report based upon the data procured by Instrumental Survey, it occurs to me that you may be pleased to be made acquainted with a few particulars in regard to the country in which we are operating; and which have come to me, in the form of memoranda, through the notes of the assistants under me and from my own observation. In a country like this and at a season the most unpropitious for surveying operations, it is natural to suppose many difficulties have been encountered.

In pursuance of my instructions, I will advert to such circumstances as may pertain to an estimate of the resources of the Indians of this district, in the hypothesis of an attempt on their part to evade the stipulations of the Treaty in reference to removal. Previously to entering upon this as a question of numbers, physical strength, interest in the country they inhabit, their means of subsistence & ca. I will remark briefly what has occurred to me as to the moral disposition of the Indians in relation to this subject.

Poor, ignorant of economy of time, or money, cultivating the soil for a base subsistence, they prefer the chase of the deer or deer idleness to more useful employment. It is but natural to suppose that the love of home is a paramount sentiment with the Indian whose range of ideas is too limited to stimulate him to enterprize beyond his immediate vicinity and who is moreover attached to the grave of his ancestors by feelings of superstitous veneration. This natural sympathy is kept alive by the appeals of those interested in their opposition to a removal and by the representation made to them of any thing but advantage in such an arrangement. Influential Chiefs and some white residents among them, stimulated by sordid views and either feeling or pretending to feel for their situation encourage every proposition adverse to their own true interest and the wishes of the U.S. Government.