Thirteen Moons (27 page)

I stood and waited, and in a minute the colonel lost his place in his own thoughts and fell silent. He looked as if he needed a nap or a drink. He picked up the coffee cup and rotated the contents and set it back down. The scribe used the pause to correct an error in his transcription near the top of the page. He scraped at the words with his penknife and then shook pounce on the bad spot and rubbed it with agate and rewrote the colonel’s sentiments accurately. In the meantime, the colonel had lost interest in the letter and had begun lighting a pipe.

He looked up at me from his puffing and said, You’re the lawyer?

—At times.

—Well, whether this is one of those times or not, I’d like you to listen to something and then hear what say you in response.

He shuffled among the scattered papers and came up with a sheet that he studied to himself a moment and then handed to the scribe.

—Summarize the relevant sections, please.

The scribe read the several pages of the letter through in silence. He looked out the window for a minute of deep contemplation and then, all at one fast swoop, said, During the period of detention, this Cooper sold the Indians popskull liquor at prices that would buy a whiteman bonded Tennessee whiskey. His young clerks traded right by the stockade, where they were penned until the cart they sold from was ordered to be confiscated. After that, they sold liquor from their persons, in coat pockets and satchels. He is said to be a man of such make that he could preach temperance out of his mouth while at the same time digging in his pocket to make change for a bottle and not see any conflict between the two actions. These Indians were about as low as you can get to be. Nevertheless, he sold them liquor in any quantity they desired and could afford, from the demijohn to the noggin. And under his influence they became drunk as lords and about half of them spent their days laughing and the other half sitting with their backs against the stockade palings and their blankets over their heads, either passed out or crying. He was ordered again to quit selling, and he not only continued to do so but raised Cain about our authority to set conditions on him. He was banned from entering the stockade until the primary departure. Unfortunately, this Cooper is also a sharp lawyer and has long been under the spell of an old chief in these parts, and they have overmastered their fraction of Indians for quite some time. And whenever he is not here going buck wild, full Indian in language and customs all the way down to playing their deadly violent ball game, he’s in Washington City dancing at fancy balls and bootlicking every wheelhorse and crony in the Government, which is why his bunch of Indians get to stay in their homes unmolested while all the rest are hunted up out of the woods like hogs in the fall. He has written a great raft of lawyer letters to his Washington City friends complaining that we had no right to deny his legitimate business and furthermore claiming he is owed a substantial reimbursement for vaguely specified expenses, some related to food and other supplies he says he gave the Indians after we failed to meet their basic needs. In conclusion, what are we to do with him?

When the scribe fell silent, the colonel drew on his pipe and puffed smoke. He took the letter from the scribe and tossed it back among the clutter.

—Any speculation as to the correspondent? the colonel said.

—Apparently not one of my well-wishers, I said. Perhaps some green young lieutenant unacquainted with the facts.

—Major Cotton, he said. He picked the letter up again and studied the signature and said again, Major Cotton.

—I’m shocked that a man of such rank is so misinformed, I said.

The colonel waited awhile, entranced by the smoke rising from his pipe. His timing was impeccable. Finally he said that he did not intend to altercate. And under no circumstances would he consent to my outrageous claims for reimbursement of expenses. But he had a counteroffer. A deal for services as guide and translator that only I was in a position to render.

—We intend for you to help us bring in the runners, the colonel said.

NEXT MORNING,
I watched from up the hill as the fort emptied out in a sad parade. Soldiers on horseback, wagons loaded with provisions under their canvas coverlids, Indians and their slaves following afoot behind, children walking and babies being carried. Everything was a shade of brown, the people and their clothes, horses and wagons, and even the muddy road itself.

And this was not a singularity. There were other such forts scattered about the old Nation, each host to its own drab procession heading out to the West. A whole country shed of its people in the course of a summer.

TWO DAYS LATER,
back in Wayah, I sat in the dim midday townhouse with Bear.

—You talked with that colonel? Bear said.

—Haden’s a detestable old sow. His nose was so far up Jackson’s ass for so long he couldn’t smell honeysuckle, even if you presented him with an armload of blossoms. He needs to be gutted, and I had about half a mind to do it. Right through to the backbone with a Bowie knife, which I had on my hip.

Bear’s face did not shift one way or the other.

—No? I said.

—That kind of thing, you can’t get away with it anymore.

He said it sadly, like the world had been unalterably diminished.

—The colonel asked for our help, I said. He doesn’t dare come within three days’ ride of here under any circumstance. Too rough and dangerous, and none of them know this country in any detail. I’m to be their guide. I made a deal.

—For what?

—Certain considerations in regard to our situation. He gave me his assurance we’d be left alone, our deeds respected and any uncertanties as to citizenship ignored.

THERE WAS HARDLY
any autumn that year. At the end of the dry summer, one black storm after another came ripping across the ridges, and by the end of September the trees were nearly stripped of leaves and the rivers were full to the banks with red water. The Nut Moon had hardly made an appearance during its cloudy month. Bright autumn, normally the driest month of the year, was like a new unsatisfactory season interjected into the year’s round, warm and wet and yet the tree limbs stark as shattered glass against the grey sky and the goldenrod and ironweed and joe-pye weed all beat down to brown trash on the ground. Nothing colorful at all except for a few stunted pumpkins still glowing in the fields and a few persistent apples hanging red in the skeletal orchards. The Harvest Moon arrived like it intended to be about the same.

All through that unsettled weather, I rode with Lieutenant Smith and his soldiers, scouring the coves for fugitives. There were ten boys, all from big towns. Not one of them other than Smith had yet passed twenty. None of them had ever fired a weapon except in training or for amusement or in highly amateur attempts at hunting. They were baffled and frightened by these wet dark woods and mountains that went on and on, with more twists and folds and dangers than a Minotaur-infested labyrinth. Besides the Indians, bear and wolves and panthers still roamed all through these forests. The fact that the boys had seen no animal bigger than a groundhog failed to ease their minds. At night when the sky was blanked with clouds and there were voices coming from the creek noise and every odd sound out in the woods could mean death, they slept poorly. Most mornings they arose at dawn, wet and unrested. All day they searched the coves for fugitives, going up and down the many convoluted rivers and branches and creeks with names that were hard to pronounce and so impossibly resistant to spelling that the lieutenant would sit by his candle flame at night writing his reports and cursing loudly each time it became necessary to render one of the Indian watercourses into a phonetic approximation of English.

And for our relentless searching, two weeks of it, all we found was one old man, nearly blind and living alone, who said his name was Hog Meat and that he was nearly a hundred years old. They believed him, for he looked every day of that age, and I vouched for his harmlessness and frailty. He stood in the entryway to his cabin with one hand holding back the greasy deerhide that served as door and the other hand visored over his cloudy eyes, looking out to where we sat our horses in the rain. The lieutenant did not even bother to get down off his horse but said, That old man won’t live out the winter. Perhaps we should let him be and give him some cornmeal. So we sorted through our packs and gave the old man food and then we let Hog Meat be. As we rode away from the house, I was thinking that a man’s in a bad way when fellows younger than your grandchildren get to decide how your life goes from now on out.

Then one morning we rode up unexpectedly on sixteen fugitives camped right out in the open by the river with no apparent thought to concealment. Old men and women and children. They were starving and weaponless but for one rusty shotgun with no loads and a bow with only three arrows and a blowgun with a handful of long darts whittled from buckeye wood and tufted with thistledown. They put up no fight at all. The Irish boy took the bow and arrows from the man who held them, and the fletching of the arrows was rumpled and gapped like the feathers of a wet chicken. The Philadelphia boy broke the blowgun into three pieces and threw them into the fire. After being fed some beans and cold cornbread, the captives told where another dozen runners were hiding near the forks of a river two or three days away. So the lieutenant decided to divide his men, sending part of them back to the fort with the prisoners, and now it was just the five of us to find Charley’s people and bring them in.

WE WERE CAMPED
beside a strong-running creek filled with mossy boulders. Big woods rose black all around. The hobbled horses had finished eating their oats, and they shuffled and whickered nervously off in the dark beyond the firelight. I lounged with the three boys around a small fire that pushed back the dark only to arm’s length. The lieutenant was sitting a little distance away with a candle lantern, writing up his report for the day.

The boys were cooking a supper of potatoes and bacon and cabbage, a grey mess that was just rising to a boil in a pot hanging from an iron tripod. A pile of chestnuts lay roasting in the outer ashes. The boys sprawled in their uniforms and overcoats on ground cloths waterproofed with wax. Their saddles and rolled wool blankets served as backrests. Wet wrinkled boots lay with the open ends to the blaze in hopeless effort to render them dry, if only briefly, so that in the morning the boys might not have to start the day with cold sodden footwear. They sat with their wool-socked feet close to the fire, steam rising from their toes.

—Well, fuck all, the Irish boy said. His name was Perry.

He had reached into his saddlebag and come out with a wooden stem and the shards of a yellowed clay pipe bowl cupped in his palm.

—Busted all to fuck, he said. My last one.

Perry pitched the pipe shards off into the dark and put the stem in his coat pocket until such time as he could buy another bowl or at least come upon a corncob he could core out and fit it to. The other two men were smoking with great concentration and looking at the fire.

—Anybody got a loaner? Perry said.

Neither man spoke.

Perry settled back against his bedroll. The man next to him reached out his pipe and Perry wiped the stem against the back of his wrist and took two draws and passed it back. The man held the bowl and looked at the stem and then made a show of waving it across the flame of the fire to clean it.

—I heard when we’re done here it’s Florida for us, Perry said.

—I heard Canada. The border, leastways, said the Philadelphia boy.

—One or the other, I guess. But I’m pulling for Florida, Perry said. They say it stays warm all winter and there’s plenty of fish to fry.

—Where I’d like to be right now is Charleston, walking down Dock Street, the Charleston boy said. And then the Philadelphia boy said he’d like to be walking down South Street. When it was Perry’s turn he said Galway, walking down Quay Street to the waterfront right at sunset to watch the light fall away from Inishmore across the water. He had not seen Galway Bay since he was nine years old, and he never expected to see it again this side of the grave.

I was reading a Washington Irving book about the western prairies by candlelight reflected.

Smith, finished with his report, came over and said, Perhaps one of you might stir that pot. Smith was barely older than the boys, but he did his best to act confident beyond his years and experience. He had the habit of including the word
perhaps
in nearly every order he gave. Perhaps, Private Perry, you might build the woodpile a bit higher before dark. It was an affectation he had not picked up at the Military Academy but had acquired all on his own, either in an attempt to be elegant or else to blunt the edge of command and make himself more likable to the boys under him by suggesting that the action he was requesting might be entirely optional. I had noticed that the boys had taken the word into their own vocabularies and used it frequently and not without irony when they were out of earshot of the lieutenant. Perry, perhaps you could try not to burn that bacon to a cinder. Perhaps next time you might walk a little farther away from camp to shit.

Perry dug the spoon into the grey mess and turned up the burnt bottom, black as cinders.

The boys were not cooks. Pretty often, their idea of supper had been to wrap a few strips of bacon around a green stick and hold it over the fire and try to get it brown without lighting it ablaze. I, on the other hand, enjoyed trailside cookery and even traveled with a coffee grinder and green beans, which I roasted in a dry skillet until they were black and sweating a sheen of oil. That night, I told the boys to toss out their charred cabbage. I cooked the best quail any of them had ever tasted. I’d been lucky enough to shoot four that flushed up out of an old weedy cornfield. I put pieces of apple and onion inside the birds and cut bacon in little slivers and shoved them between the skin and the breast. I rubbed a mixture of dried sage and salt and red pepper between my palms and let the dust fall over the plucked skins. Then I cooked the quails slow and patient on spits over a fire burned down to red coals. And I was not content with just the quail. I sliced potatoes in thin rounds and arrayed them pinwheel fashion in an iron skillet and daubed the top with butter and some more bacon slivers and lidded it and let it cook slow over grey coals until it was done. I cut it like pie and flipped the slices upside down on their plates, and the top was crisp and brown, and the inside was soft and had almost melted. I wished I’d been able to shoot a bird apiece, but it came out close enough.