Thirteen Moons (32 page)

IT WAS A
bad time of year to be a fugitive living off the land. Charley overturned creek rocks to find crawfish, and one by one as he found them, he pinched their whiskered heads and snapping foreclaws off between thumb and forefinger and ate the tails and whatever hind legs remained while they still pulsed in a last attempt at flight. He made no effort to separate meat from shell, but crunched them together between his back teeth and swallowed them down. He dug roots and brushed the dirt off and ate them raw as apples. There were still a few wormy chestnuts and hickory nuts on the ground under leafless trees. One day he caught a trout by spearing it with a sharp hickory stick and ventured to light a fire no bigger than he could have cupped in his hand to sear it over. When he was done with the body, he held the head in his mouth and sucked until it held no more flavor than his own spit. His bowels suffered greatly from such diet. He squatted under the canopy of rhododendron and felt that his insides were being twisted like a dirty dishrag.

He wished he had a great double-barreled gun as long as he was tall with which to kill whoever he could until they overwhelmed him.

ICED STREAM BANKS,
frost-burnt pigeon moss, a cold sun setting down a metal-colored sky. Heavy-timbered steep land. No scrap of it horizontal enough for a short man to sleep on except where a damp gravel bed rose a handbreadth above a creek shoal. The sky was overcast with such thick low clouds that the sun did not even make a bright spot through them, and there was no way to gauge the progress of the day.

Charley put his back to a big chestnut tree and slept sitting up, forehead to knees, cowled in his blanket. The next morning after he awoke, he sat motionless a long while trueing up his mind. Then, suddenly, the sound of runners coming close. He had no time to hide and just squatted with his back against the trunk of the tree and became utterly still. He fixed his eyes on the ground between his feet, for it is the meeting of eyes that most identifies prey to predator. Hunters bloomed out of the fog and ran past him without letup. He could have reached out and hit them with a stick. Then they were gone, and he rose and fled upward.

The white sky was entirely free of birds. Charley looked down the long view south, grey mountains lapped and stacked to the end of the world. He stood at the edge of the vast laurel hell, feeling the hard cold that spilled down the slopes so gently it did not even stir the leathery leaves that overlay one another dense as a wall in front of him. But the cold seeped through the weave of his clothing and chilled him deep in his joints. The laurel could feel the cold too, for they were beginning to curl their leaves into themselves in long rolls that looked no more alive than strips of deer jerky. Under the canopy, as dense as a canvas tent, there would be nothing to eat whatsoever other than two lumpy pocketfuls of chestnuts and hickory nuts he had picked up the day before. Charley pinched the last little bit of fat at his belly and judged he could live only a short while longer on water and nuts. He shook his big stoppered gourd to check if it was still full from the most recent creek. He parted laurel boughs and they rattled against him as he passed through their gates at a stoop.

It was as if he had entered a cave mouth. The day immediately dimmed to twilight, but stained green, and he moved through it as if crawling across the bottom of a slow deep river. Dry dead laurel leaves under his hands and knees and feet were thick as nutshells. They clattered against one another like potsherds when he moved.

He went on and on, walking stooped when he could, but mostly crawling where the tangled trunks and limbs left no choice. After dark, he ventured to strike a little fire no bigger around than the mouth to a bucket. The runners would have to be on top of him to see it through the brush. He wondered where Nancy was tonight, and all the children. At best, they were captives beyond his power to redeem. He leaned over the fire as close as smoking meat, trying to get warmth.

When he woke up in the night, the fire was dead. He waved his hand in front of his face and could not see a thing.

He heard them coming, following his trail, which must have lain behind him in the dead leaves plain as if he were dragging a plowpoint.

It was a chase suited for an old man, very slow and mostly on hands and knees. Charley moved jittery as a crawfish. He crawled over dirt like powdered ashes, trunks and branches spreading all around bare as old bones, broken-down skeletons.

When he paused, he could hear them coming. And he guessed they could hear him too.

So he tried just sitting, looking with unfocused eyes at the various parts of the laurel in its dim green light.

There was a long silence, and then the hunters spread out and moved forward and began circling around him. Many of them. They made no effort now to move silently, and the sounds of the men crawling in the ground litter and of the laurel boughs brushing and sometimes breaking against their bodies came from all sides. It sounded as if the thicket itself were closing around him, the limbs tightening and reforming from wild tangle into something much simpler, a harsh-spoked wheel with him at the hub.

The first man to reach him was only a few years older than Wasseton, and he came crawling forward out of the half-light with a knife between his teeth and an awkward long musket on a strap over his shoulder banging against every limb and trunk.

Charley still sat, breathing deep. He looked at the boy and said, Hey. And then he looked more closely and said, You favor a man I once knew. He went by the name of Dull Hoe and sometimes John.

The boy sat up and took the knife out of his mouth and wiped the spit against his britches. He said, My grandfather.

The boy took two strips of deer jerky from a pouch and reached them to Charley.

—They’ll be wanting your blades.

Charley handed him his hatchet.

The boy said, We caught the others some time ago.

Then he made a sort of bow to Charley, at least to the extent possible given that they were both sitting. An acknowledgment of Charley’s will to live.

LIGHT SNOW CAPPED
the highest balsam ridges, a bright band between the grey slopes and the dark sky, and it did not melt away until nearly midday. In the bend of the river, there was a grassy piece of flat ground with just a scattering of old grey birches and a few big rocks. The river was high and thick and red with the clay it was carrying. I stood on a hill above the bank and saw it all from some distance, so that all the men were remote and small, actors on a distant stage beyond earshot. I had not slept in more than a day.

Across the river I could see the fire circle where Charley and I had sat up talking all night.

Guards stood over the prisoners, who sat under a birch tree with their bound hands between their thighs and did not talk, even to one another. The younger men—Lowan and George, Jake, and the boy Wasseton—wore brown felt hats, and old Charley had on a white headcloth tied in a band around his forehead. They all wore moccasins and britches and shirts of linen and faded red calico. The women and little children stood together, off to the side, guarded by a pair of young soldiers.

Lieutenant Smith and another officer huddled together and there was a long period of talk between them, and then they seemed to argue. Smith made broad encompassing motions using the whole of both arms, as if to implicate the wide landscape in the coming actions. The other made little jerky emphatic gestures with just his fisted right hand and kept his left in his coat pocket. Among the hunters from Lichen’s bunch, disagreements appeared to run in many different directions. Voices were raised and lowered and raised again, though I could not make out a word of what passed down below me. Two Indians shouted at each other and then locked up and fought on the ground until soldiers waded in and grabbed them by their arms and snatched them apart. Two other Indians went and propped their muskets against a rock and walked into the forest and did not return. No one tried to stop them.

Several of Lichen’s hunters began working at the loads to their muskets, fooling with shot pouches and powder horns, checking the pans and priming. Smith watched them and then took a rundlet from his saddlebag and drank a long pull and stoppered it back and put it away in the bag. Then he took it out and pulled again at it and just kept it in his hand.

Soldiers stood Charley and the boys up and walked them out near the riverbank and left them standing there in some confusion. The Indian hunters, including Lichen, went and stood near Charley and the boys. I could see them talking. Then just Charley talked and tried to make gestures with his bound hands. The hunters backed away and raised their muskets. There were two shooters for each of the tied men, and it was arranged so that one would aim for the head and the other for the heart. Smith walked over and pulled Wasseton from the group and led him away toward the women.

I saw the flash of powder in the pans, the leap of grey smoke against the background of dark trees. A great bloom of red blossomed on the white forehead band of Charley’s turban. Then—only after the four men began falling, knee joints gone limp—the reports of gunfire arrived across the river where I stood watching. The sound had crossed the water and climbed up the ridge like a rushing wind, but still in arrears of what sight had already told. When the brittle crackle of shots reached me, not appreciably louder than eight dry sticks breaking, it seemed allied with the brevity of life, with time, the sound we make as we fall through its abyss into darkness.

1

A
FTER THE NATION HAD BEEN WIPED AWAY, THE EMPTY LAND WAS
not even left for a moment to draw breath. State surveyors had plotted and platted it in preparation for a mighty land auction in the spring. Down at the capital, someone had drawn the street plan for a county seat to erupt near where the empty fort stood, the ground still beaten smooth where the people were collected and held before transportation to the West. Squatters and claim jumpers began streaming into the white space on the map even before the auction. And of course there I was, my string of trading stations already in place, ready to sell them everything they needed and a lot they didn’t at elevated prices justified by the distance goods had to be transported and by the lack of competition. I expanded all the posts and began calling them mercantiles and brought in a wider range of stock, for I knew the trade would not just be hides and ginseng for gingham and axeheads. And too, I was already buying land like God wasn’t making any more of it—which He wasn’t, for otherwise we wouldn’t have had to shove someone else off to make a place for ourselves.

THE WINTER AFTER
the Removal was a hard one with a great deal of snow. It often piled halfway up the door of the winterhouse and the wind howling blue out of the north. Bear and I would be inside warm as loaves baking in a clay oven. Nearly all we talked about that winter was loss and land and love. Maybe if we’d known there wouldn’t be many more Cold Moons together by the fire, we’d have talked about something else. The meaning of life or the nature of God. Maybe not. We were in pain, and that has a way of focusing one’s attention. We still could hardly talk about what had happened to Charley and the boys, and the part we had played. I was all broken by Claire’s absence, and Bear yearned desperately for Sara, who was holed up not a quarter mile away in the cabin with the other women. I argued that her proximity made me the winner in degree of anguish, but Bear declared physical distance irrelevant. The obstacles of time and space were as nothing compared to a heart hardened against you. Also to be tallied in his column of despair was the fact that Sara had recently produced a baby, which was clearly not Bear’s, for it had reddish hair and pale skin. Very quickly it grew four sharp front teeth from its pink gums and would bite like a snapping turtle onto any extremity that presented itself, though unlike the implacable turtle it would let go if you just popped it lightly on the top of its head rather than having to wait for a clap of thunder.

We dreamed powerful and vivid dreams during that blizzard and we told them to each other in great detail. In my dreams, Claire never made an actual appearance. She was a force akin to gravity or magnetism drawing me toward her through various landscapes and through the corridors of buildings that were somewhat like the Indian Queen Hotel and the Capitol in Washington City. I searched and never found. Bear’s dreams, though, all ended in full consummation. He bragged shamelessly of night emissions as profound as those of a fourteen-year-old boy.

It was Bear’s contention that if you want to know who is dreaming of you, just look at who peoples your own night world, for there’s a confluence to the flow of dreams. I could only hope that Bear was right and that out in the unimaginable West, Claire woke up every few mornings with her pillow in a wad and her bedclothes damp and twisted, and that she went about with a haunted empty feeling that bruised the day blue until well past the dinner hour.

When we became exhausted with the subject of hopeless love, we turned to land. Bear had begun studying on the matter as soon as the great auction of the Nation was announced. In the winterhouse, I tried to show him my paper map of the territory printed by the state. The rivers were drawn crooked as life, but everything else was cut up into perfect squares and rectangles that bore no resemblance to the ragged and often vertical terrain. Bear looked at my map a minute but then rolled it back up into its cylinder and began to draw his own in the dirt of the floor. He squatted on his heels and swept his palms in broad strokes to smooth the dirt, and then he sharpened a stick with his knife and sat a long session scribing interlocking rivers and creeks and ridges, working from physical memory of walking them over a lifetime. He progressed from the large to the small. Rivers to creeks to branches to streams, going uphill all the way back to their sources. Thin lines and thick, continuous and truncated. Real places and speculative places. The Great Leech Place, the Great Lizard Bald. When he was done he had covered most of the floor with topography. He studied his work for a long time and then eased carefully to the fire so as not to step on anything important. He made tea and built the fire brighter and studied his map some more. And then he began talking, cataloging all the land he wanted to acquire.

—Make sure to get that Beaver Creek land, he said, jabbing at the marks on the ground. That’s some good land. And Snowbird, all that rough land up in there. Elk Creek, from the river up to the source on both sides, all the way to the ridges. All that sidehill land around Hanging Dog. That whole Buffalo drainage.

On and on. When he was done, he had laid out a place to make a stand, a homeland in the image of the world of his youth, where we all, in our heads, most truly reside. A little bit of river-bottom farmland, good water, and a large proportion of mountain hunting land considered very nearly worthless by whites. Coves and creeks and ridges, all steep and jungled. The kind of place most people say has no value except to hold the rest of the world together. Bear’s plan was to undo all he could of the past and draw his people together again into townships. The bad years after the Revolution had scattered them into the mountains, where they lived isolated up coves, an unnatural way of doing, at least for the Indians, though the immigrant Scots seemed to like it fine. His new world would, of course, be on a smaller scale than the old, a plan enforced by our inability to buy three or four million acres of land. As is the case with all of us in life, what Bear would settle for was not as encompassing as what he wanted, but it was a great deal better than nothing at all. His dirt map was a claim of ownership on a space of earth. Not his claim alone, but his people’s.

As he saw it, the imagining of a homeland was the hardest work. The buying of it he took as a small matter delegated to me. Like he could just think it so and I would make it be.

THE AUCTIONEER WAS
a hen of a man with a big prow-shaped barrel to his body and a little head with tiny close-set emotionless eyes peering out at the world from atop his long sharp nose. He chanted numbers in a rapid rhythm like song, if chickens sang. We bidders made minute gestures with fingers and chins and eyelids and elbows. My sign was a double tap of forefinger to cheekbone. The signals were of such great but ambivalent significance that when the parcel in question—eight hundred acres of steep woodland—was finally knocked down with a sharp rap of wooden mallet on tabletop, half the drunks in attendance snapped into wakefulness and hadn’t a clue whether they had bought land or not. The whole crowd let out a cheer, for it was the last parcel up for bid. I went to the table and signed the papers on that final parcel and left the courthouse.

I walked down the main street. In the afternoon light the clapboard buildings and the muddy street and muddy board sidewalks looked antique. The little mountain town, though, was so recently settled that the cemetery held only an unlucky few markers rising off-plumb from long grass, like death was an idea that had failed to catch on. The main street sloped off to a river and afforded a vista of an old townhouse mound. Rain and time had begun smoothing its pyramidal angles and its entry ramp into a general round pile. The Indian village that once spread all along the river had been gone since the Army burned it down during the Revolution. A cornfield stood in its place, the new crop only a green haze along the furrows. The townhouse too was gone, though it had stood and been occupied by an old firekeeper when I had first ridden through this valley years earlier. I remember sitting by the fire drinking herb tea with him and eating peaches from the new crop, and we spat the peach pits into a hole in the dirt floor where one of the posts supporting the roof had rotted away.

When I reached the hotel, the bar was filled with men celebrating the end of the long auction. It had taken almost two months to sell off our state’s portion of the Nation, and I had bought all of it I could afford and a great deal that I could not.

I ordered a cup of coffee and a shot of Scotch whisky at the bar and carried them to a big round table crowded with buyers. They were all listing their acquisitions and detailing their victories and defeats in a swirling conversation, voices overlapping one another around the table. Drinks came in a steady stream from the bar. Stabs of light angled through the seams in the closed shutters and made Jacob’s ladders in the thick smoke of pipes and cigars. I was tired from the long bout of commerce and only half listened. When the men were done bragging on themselves, one of them said, We’ve not heard from Will, and he bought more than all of us.

—More in quantity, another man said. But mostly what nobody else wanted.

—Some of it’s wasteland so steep a red hog couldn’t traverse it, someone said.

—How much did you buy?

—I don’t exactly know, I said. I bought what I needed to buy.

—But how much?

—In acres? I said.

—What else measure would you use for land? They don’t sell it in quarts.

—He’s awfully cultured and drinks French wine and reads their books. He probably keeps track of his holdings in arpents. Or else he’s bought so much he goes by the square mile.

—I don’t know for sure how much, I said. I haven’t added it up yet.

—Man’s bought so much land it’s not worth his time to bother counting.

—It was a right smart of land he bought. In old Europe, they’ve made countries out of less territory.

—Dukedoms at least.

—Principalities.

One man raised me an ironic toast, To the Prince of the Goddamn Indians.

Someone else said, The Duke of the Wasteland.

Glasses clinked together.

Everybody drank except for one man who declined. He said, Andy Jackson spent his whole life trying to get shut of Indians and the goddamn Nation, and Will’s trying to put it back together. I’m not drinking to that.

The table had reached a high pitch of drunkenness one degree short of pistol-pulling time. They were at the point where men need a clear direction pointed out to them or else they become dangerous.

I raised my glass and offered a toast, not to the old Nation or the new but to the sanctity of private property. It was a popular concept and received the approbation of all in attendance.

When I reached my room, late into the evening, I sat amid my piles of papers and tallied my recent purchases and added them to my previous holdings and was somewhat stunned to find that the sum could fairly be spoken of not in thousands of acres, or even tens of thousands, but in hundreds of thousands.

It was every kind of land. Not everything Bear wanted but a lot of it. I had bought whole chains of mountains, long ridges, and the entire runs of several bold creeks along with the slopes that drained into them. Every penny I had made from business and law was gone. And still, only a minority of the transactions were straight sales. The majority involved promissory notes, loans supported by other loans, kited checks, and lines of credit cosigned by figmentary personages. None of it tallied. I had constructed deals of such complex usury that I didn’t even understand some of them. But the next morning when I rode out of that town, my saddlebags bulged with contracts and deeds and notes. I had transformed Bear’s imaginary dirt map into a great convolution of interlocked promises memorialized by a cascade of paper into a vast tract of actual mountain land.

THREE DAYS AFTER
the auction closed, Bear and I went walking up the cove to Granny Squirrel’s cabin. The bold creek ran white over green rocks and the trail was muddy from spring rain. Bear was dressed in his best old-time fringed buckskin shirt worked with beading of red and white. And contrary to the law of things that says old folks, no matter what height they once attained, will end up squat and humped and hobbled, Bear stood tall and lean and straight, and he walked with a long loping stride that left me puffing trying to keep up. He had pulled just a part of his long hair into a plait terminated with a large amber bead, and the rest was let to swing free about his shoulders. He carried a long rifle drooped across his left forearm, but it was more as a fashion accessory than as a weapon, a defining implement that made him feel young. And it was important for him to feel young, for we were on a mission of love.

Granny Squirrel’s cabin was about the size of a pony stall, and the roof shakes were as mossy as the creek rocks, and it was pressed down into the head of the cove as tight as a tick in the intricate folds of a hound’s ear. Speckled chickens moved in a body across the dooryard. Red peppers hung in lapped strands from the porch rafters to dry, for she liked her food with a great deal of pepper and sage to the point that no one else would eat it, and that was the only secret of her longevity that she would share with others.