Thirteen Moons (36 page)

Claire came sweeping in. She had changed some, become a full woman.

—Why are you here? she said. Said it pretty much in midstride, barely through the door.

I had ridden a thousand miles and had been fool enough to expect our first meeting to be a rush together, teeth clashing in a urgent first kiss as in olden days.

I shook my head, turned my palms up. Gestures of confusion and defeat.

—I wanted to see you again, I said.

—You might have written saying you were coming.

—It was a sort of spur-of-the-moment trip.

—How long have you been on the road?

—I left Charleston in the spring.

She summed the intervening months in her head and said, You could have written. But she said it softer.

—I wasn’t sure I’d make it. I came the long way.

We sat. Tea was called for. We had a moment. Reminiscences, et cetera. The glories of youth. Time’s winged chariot. All very polite. No sunburned buttocks or late-night river couplings allowed.

Then another black woman, younger and darker than the one who’d answered the door, came into the parlor carrying a wailing baby bundled in little white blankets. All you could see was a face like a barn owl’s, just as round and flat and pale and fierce. Like all babies. If they had the physical means, they’d kill you without conscience to fulfill their slightest immediate desire. Same as house cats, which if they weighed two hundred pounds would not accede to our existence for a single day.

The woman presented the baby to Claire. She took it in her arms and turned halfway from me and made an adjustment in the upper portions of her clothing.

How could one have the courage to take a thing so predatory to one’s breast? God knew something fundamental about the nature of his own creation when he failed to give babies teeth and claws.

Claire turned back over her shoulder to me and said, Featherstone is out riding. He rides for hours every day in every weather. He won’t be back until dark. He will be sad to have missed you.

—Well, tell him I’m sad to have missed him too. My aim has never been quite as true as I wish it to be.

We were polite to the point of disgust. I began saying the things you say in preparation to leave. Claire leaned and kissed me on the cheek. The barn owl rested fiercely in a crooked arm between us. I gave a little head nod of a bow and left without another word, for I wanted to think I still had some pride left. I didn’t say, Write me, or anything of the kind. I figured that chaste kiss was my last communication with Claire.

I went out to the yard and Featherstone came riding up. He was slimmer than previous, not quite an old man but getting there. And just as vain in regard to dress. He wore the latest style of riding attire and a little round pair of smoked glasses. No hat. His hair was still full to the temples, though cut short and entirely silver as new-honed steel. He didn’t seem the least surprised to see me standing in his front yard. He dismounted and dropped his reins and walked straight to me.

I put out a hand to shake, but he reached with wide arms and grabbed me in a bear hug.

—I’ve missed the hell out of you, he said after he let me go.

He insisted we take a walk. He had something he wanted to tell me. He did not think I would believe it.

We walked silently a long way toward the bleak western horizon. Nothing worth describing. The sort of place they have plenty of out there.

I finally pulled up and said, Tell me what you have to say, and we’ll see whether I believe it or not.

His story was this: He was currently living a second life after dying a death that did not meet his approval. It happened a few years before, during the bad times after the Removal. On the same night, young Ridge and Boudinot had been gutted by Ross men in their front yards, with their wives and children watching from the upper windows. Old Major Ridge was shot dead by an ambush party while taking one of his boy slaves into town to be doctored. For months afterward, the survivors among the Ridge bunch fought the Ross bunch in a bloody feud. Featherstone sometimes rode out at night, fighting on the side of the Ridges. It was like a return to the glorious days of his youth—pony clubs, pistol flash, and hoofbeat. Risk and blood. Moonlight and magic. But on a chill drizzly night when he felt he was about to take a cold, he decided to stay home. He felt every year of his advancing age in the aching joints of his traitorous body. After a dinner of roasted hen and baked sweet potatoes and collard greens, he went to his study and began reading, once again, some witty lines from
Don Juan.
An amber inch of smoky Islay whisky quivered in a heavy glass on a side table. He slouched in his wing chair with his tall-booted feet on a stool and the fire logs burning low, their split faces checked and grey, beginning to hiss instead of crackle. And then he had a strange pain in one side of his head. The Byron fluttered into his lap. He fell asleep, and in his sleep he died the death of a saint, not even waking briefly enough to mark his own passing. The kind of death God awards to a bare few of his most beloved. Painless and unforeknowledged.

Yet enormously disappointing. All his life he had wanted to die riding against enemies at a gallop with pistols flashing and a plume of back-flung gunsmoke marking his passage out of the world.

I didn’t approve of an easy death for him either, and I said so. Especially not a death of inexplicable mercy when he deserved at least a fair share of the worst that could be laid on him by God or man. There wasn’t even a slight degree of justice in the death he described. For the rest of us, the punishment begins somewhat previous to passing, in the pain and suffering and fear that comes before. And in the hope for living too, for that is also a part of the punishment. Why should Featherstone, especially, get off clean?

—My feelings exactly, he said. Which is why I believe I was brought back. So that next time I can go harder. I arose the next morning at dawn with a blinding headache and a slight lack of firm grip in my right hand and a discernible droop to the eyelid on that side. All famous tokens of death. But I also arose with a great determination to set some things right during my second life. And the first thing I turned my attention to was Claire. I’d not previously treated her entirely as I should have. As a wife, so to say.

—Great God, I said.

—And I want to square things with you too, he said.

—If you keeled over right now, the single shred of justice would be the fact that the only two significant scars your hide would carry into the grave are from Bite’s teeth and my pistol ball.

—Now, see, that’s where you’re wrong, Featherstone said. You’re making a young man’s mistake. You need to let your anger fall away. It won’t get you where you want to be. It’s poison. But it will rise from you like smoke from a fire if you let it go. And anger is not a becoming feature as you grow older.

He reached out to me and touched me on the shoulder. He said again, Let it go. Stay here with us awhile.

All I could do was shrug off his hand and say, A little too much marital bliss for a bachelor to stand. I mounted up and rode away.

I RODE WEST.
The way to the Nightland. But also, in the mythology of my mother’s people, the direction of new beginnings, where when you’ve fouled your life past all understanding, there’s still hope. The direction of last-chance salvation. When the sunset was in my face I made camp.

I slept on the open ground and watched the enormous sky off and on between brief bouts of sleep. It was a dark night, without any moon at all and utterly cloudless. The air was dry and the stars were sharp points in the dark and there seemed to be a great many more of them than I ever remembered seeing before. And then it came to my attention that it was a night of meteor showers. Spouts and shoots of light, both thin and broad, arced overhead. So I got my scope from its leather case and stretched out its articulations and lay on my back in my sleeping robe peering into the universe. For hours I looked through the eyepiece, as if down into a well. And the longer I looked, the deeper down I thought I saw. The shape of Creation appeared like a funnel, a maelstrom, a maw. Vertiginous. Made to swallow us down its narrowing throat.

Then I heard a slight rustle in the long grass, and a young grey wolf went walking by on slender legs just past the end of my ground cloth, and it gave me one glance down its long snout as it passed, a moment’s locking of eyes, and then it was gone without ever changing its gait or in any other way passing judgment or even opinion concerning my unexpected presence.

When I awoke just before dawn, heavy dew had risen all around me, and the outermost layer of my sleeping robe was wet. When the sun had just risen in its dimmest form, I crawled out and stood and shook my sleeping robe, snapping it sharply. Drops of water globed around me, rainbow colors in the morning light. I mounted up and headed east. I rode back into America and across Tennessee to home.

When I rested at the last mountain gap, it was autumn, drizzle and fog so thick I could hardly see past my horse’s ears. Otherwise it would have been a long view down a familiar broken landscape. I could have traced the drainages of numerous creeks, all of them twining together to make the river by Wayah. The cool damp air smelled of wet growing leaves and rotted dead leaves. A redtail hawk sat in a Fraser fir. It stared my way and shook water out of its feathers. It spread its wings and its tail, and it bowed toward me—or lunged, perhaps. I thought there was recognition in the look it gave me, and I put up an arm straight into the air as a salute, for I guessed the hawk to be a representative of the mountains themselves, an ambassador charged with greeting me upon my return.

4

B
ACK AT THE FARM,
I
FOUND THAT IN MY LONG ABSENCE THE HOUSE
had been conquered by my increased tribe of long-headed, blue-speckled bird dogs. I climbed the front steps, and two of them sleeping in a wedge of sunlight on the porch growled at me without bothering to lift their heads. The feathering of fur growing from their forelegs and from the leathers of their ears had twisted into knots and collected burrs and beggar lice. Inside, another pair of dogs occupied the brown leather sofa in the parlor, and it was scarred to the pale quick from their razorous toenails, as were the dark-stained heart-pine floorboards. Silver-blue dog hair drifted in airy mouse-sized clumps across the floors and congregated in corners and wreathed the legs of furniture, settling in a pale haze over tabletops and lamp globes and Turkish rugs. Upstairs, more dogs lolled on the bedsteads. All through the house, the lower panes of the windows were opaque with overlapping nose prints.

The dogs were of the mind that someone has to be in charge, and if no one else was willing to step up with conviction and claim the job, they’d jump right in and be the boss themselves. The help had become scared of the pack and avoided conflict with its members. Mothers refrained from letting their babies roam free after dusk. They had taken to leaving the front door standing open at all hours and in all weathers, and the dogs became accustomed to going and coming as suited their moods. The bird dogs had gradually forgotten every bit of English they ever knew, and when it was spoken to them they ignored it, as if it meant no more than the sound of the river flowing. They had long since ceased to fetch. The word
down
meant nothing to them. Previously, at its softest utterance, they would dive for the floor with their chins between their paws and their tails thumping in anticipation of the next request. Now they glared a blank rebellious glare toward all the world of man.

I reinstituted the old regime. I went to the woodpile and took up a stick of pine kindling, and with it in one hand and a pistol in the other, I routed the dogs from the house. They milled about in the yard and finally retreated under the porch. I announced to all the farm’s inhabitants that I would bivouac by the river for the night and would light a fire and cook my own supper and breakfast from the food in my saddlebags. But by dinnertime of the next day, I expected the house to be cleaned and biscuits to be baking in the oven.

In the following days, I reintroduced the bird dogs to human language. When they failed to heed—or, worse, growled at me—I grabbed them two-handed by the loose skin at the scruffs of their necks and shook them hard like their mamas had done when they were pups. One young male dared to wheel and bite me on the forearm, and I bit back hard. When the dogs conceded I was sovereign over them, I rewarded them with quail livers and sections of hog bowel. I walked about the newly reclaimed house and wondered how it would be occupied in some unimaginable future when the blue dogs and I would all be underground.

I REOCCUPIED MY
house and grounds, claimed my place in the world. Though with a great paralyzing sadness, for I now believed Claire was truly gone and Waverley had died in my absence. All I could do about any of it was put a bench under the dogwood tree by Waverley’s grave and go there in the afternoons to read. That’s the way it is at some point in life. An inevitable consequence of living. A lot of things begin falling away.

I believe that was the last year Bear and I used the winterhouse, and only for a few nostalgic days during the most blue and howling blizzards. Bear was becoming fragile as a champagne flute, and his chestnut color had faded gradually to sepia. But he had not lost a hair on his head and there were still quite a few threads of black mixed in with the silver, and he still gathered some of it into a queue in the back and let the rest fall to his shoulders. He talked a great deal about several new opinions he had developed in my absence, one of which was that we come to value the fall of the year more and more as we age and decline. It is easy in youth to become emotional at the overwhelming symbolic autumnalness of withered peaches and reddened honey-locust pods. Later in life, though, the season becomes more actual to us, not sentimental, just sadly true. Therefore, autumn was now Bear’s favorite season by far, replacing early summer in his affections. He ached with newfound pleasure all through autumn’s many stages, the slow day-by-day coloring of fragile dogwood and sumac and redbud in late summer, then maple and poplar, and the sudden netherward jolt of the first frost and the overnight withering of the weeds, and finally the heroic fortitude of oak, its most persistent dead leaves gripping the branches all through the bitterest winter until finally cast to earth by the push of new growth in spring. And above all, the waxing and waning of the several moons—End of Fruit, Nut, Harvest, Hunting—commanded Bear’s deepest interest. The different ways they rise and fall in the sky and change from one to the next, from milky and enormous in late summer to tiny as a fingertip and etched hard as burning phosphorus against the wee stars in cold early winter.

And, big or small, whatever the season, the moons had begun to streak across the graphite bowl of sky at a harder pace in the later years. Alarming, really, how all the wheels of the world—the days and nights, the thirteen moons, the four seasons, and the great singular round of the year itself—begin spinning faster and faster the closer we get to the Nightland. We’re called to it and it pulls us. And the weaker we become, the harder and faster it pulls.

As proof of the acceleration of time, Bear told how when he was a boy he had a pet heron that settled in to village life and ate shell corn out of his hand and would not even fly away south for winter but walked about in the snow by the riverbank, leaving forked prints where it stepped, and its color looking in accord with the blue light of a cloudy snow day. It stood nearly as tall as a man and so towered over Bear and followed him about his daily rounds, and when Bear fished with his bow and arrow the heron fished with his stabbing grey beak. The point of the story was, time back then was different. Days went on and on and did not flash by as now.

I told endless doomed travel tales. The lay of the western land, strange animals and people, bad weather, the big Mississippi, and Claire. Bear, though, didn’t have a lot to say about love that winter, except that he had pretty much forsaken carnal desire. He just loved Sara without expectation. As a result, everything was better between them. Sara developed a degree of respect for him, even some affection. She treated him something like a just-met father newly returned home after a long life in a distant land. Bear said they had shaped a new ground on which they might stand together in a new light. The biting red-headed baby had grown into a boy, and Bear treated him as a grandchild. Bear said that everything was amicable with Sara so long as he was able to forget the many blissful nights they had lain together.

However, Sara’s new attitude did not in any way influence the other women of her clan. They all still held Bear in jolly contempt. The eldest of them, the humped and increasingly tiny widow of Hanging Maw, a centenarian at the very least, still lived on, though she diminished visibly every year and had come more and more to resemble a rough-barked oak stump, sawn off about waist-high. Grandmother Maw still hoed weeds from corn rows in high summer, but she kept having to cut her hoe handle shorter and shorter each year as she settled closer to the ground. Bear said she hardly acknowledged him as they passed in the course of their daily rounds, other than to growl a phlegmy warning at him: Back off.

MY BUSINESS WITH
the Government—and, in particular, the War Department—went on and on, becoming more and more ridiculous. After several years of argument, they finally sort of surrendered to one of my more outrageous assaults and sent down a deputy or a secretary or some such officer to conduct a census of Cherokee to qualify us for possible payment of money related to transportation and sustenance for removal to the new Nation, which, of course, we hadn’t done. They didn’t intend to pay the whole amount I claimed we were owed, but just the six percent annual interest on the magically persistent number of $
53.33
each. Funny how something as insubstantial as four numerals and a decimal point can take on a life of its own. It doesn’t sound like much, but it went back quite a few years and promised to go on many more years into the future, given the pace of business in Washington and the fact that we had no intention of ever removing to the new Nation. Of course, since the payout was calculated per capita, the magnitude of any reckoning depended on how many times you summed that $
53.33
before applying the six percent. So it’s fair to say that we all had an intense interest in running our census of Indians as high as we could make it go—consistent with accuracy, of course.

Identity, though, is a difficult matter to tease out, especially in a time of flux. How to tell a spaniel from a retriever when all dogs have become middle-sized and brown? Should we go by some arbitrary blood quantum wherein half makes an Indian and forty-nine percent makes something else? Certainly forty-nine percent does not a whiteman make, at least not by the laws then prevailing in our state and most others. Or do we go by the old ways, the clans and the mothers, blood degree be damned? Or by what language someone dreams in or prays in or curses in? Or whether they cook bean bread and still tell the tales of Spearfinger and Uktena by the winter fire and go to water when they’re sick? And what if they did all those things but were blond and square-headed as Norsemen? Or do we just hold a dry oak leaf to their cheeks and cull by whether they are darker or lighter?

And, on a personal level, do adoptees count?

So it really boiled down to these essential questions: Who is an Indian and who is not? And how do you get the former category to number as high as possible?

In regard to both questions, I found an ally in the deputy secretary who came down from Washington. He was named John Mullay, and he fetched up at Wayah highly tubercular and downward bound. The long journey had not helped his health. His eyes lay black in his head and his skin was colorless as side meat and dewed with death sweat. His other problem was that he belonged to the Democratic Party. In Washington, it was looking like the Whigs had them a sure winner in Zachary Taylor, and come November they were going to put out the Democrats. Mullay held his job purely by patronage, and if the presidency changed parties, his job would go to a Whig right after the inauguration, no doubt about it. The seam I found to work was this: I had met Zachary Taylor on one of my early trips to Washington, when he was young and I was younger, and we had discovered ourselves to be possibly related through our fathers’ families. One of those kinds of relations where everybody studies on it and kind of agrees to be third cousins by way of somebody’s granny’s second husband. But nevertheless, we had acknowledged each other as kin, which is all that mattered. I didn’t make any specific promises to Mullay, but I also didn’t keep it a secret that if the election went as expected, I would soon be in a position to help him keep his job. Under circumstances and for considerations I did not need to specify.

But I don’t want to make this seem all bloodless and mercenary. I grew to like Mullay quite a bit and was drawn to him in a sort of protective way. He had come down south hoping that the elevation and mountain air might work some healing miracle on his bad lungs, for he was already at the stage of despair where you spit furtively in your handkerchief and try to fold it real fast to hide the red smear from your companions and yourself. And I believed I might do some good against his disease. Jollity seemed called for. And fresh air and the open road. Nothing like a trip through the mountains in autumn.

To conduct our census, I insisted, we must beat the bushes ourselves. Anything less would be a dereliction. We rode great distances together. According to the expense accounts, three hundred and sixty-five miles. Just the two of us a-saddle, riding everything from carriage paths to pig tracks. I showed him a grand time, and the weather abetted me. The Harvest Moon waxed and waned as we made our journey. That particular autumn was dry and brilliant as you could ever hope for. Day after day of blue skies and yellow poplars and red maples. We went from cove to cove looking for Indians to count, and at night we stayed at the various inns and drank the best of their French wine and went to our rooms early and read novels by candle flame. During the next day’s ride, we recounted the salient plot points from our reading in great detail. We rolled into farmsteads, both of us half lit from the flask of Scotch we passed back and forth, and when people came out onto the porch I’d say, Hey. They’d wave and say, Hey, Will. Then they’d go back inside. And then I’d say to Mullay, Those are Indians, no doubt about it. And Mullay would record them in his ledger without alighting from his saddle.

The final two days of our journey were marked by a plague of green and yellow and orange parrots, clouds of them. They were big as ravens, and they arrived in a great racket of conversation among themselves and began tearing apart the last of the apples to get at the seeds. In three days, they had stripped the trees bare of fruit and then they flew on elsewhere. Mullay was as amazed and delighted as a child by our jungle full of parrots.

When we were finished traveling, we had turned up a sight more qualified Cherokee than anybody would have guessed possible. A staggering number, actually. This despite the fact that not one of the contentious members of the Long Hair community would even talk to Mullay, much less give him their names and particulars, for they suspected that he was really collecting information in preparation for a second Removal.

All in all, it was a first-class job of highly ardent and imaginative census taking, and when Mullay went back to Washington—a much healthier-looking man, I should add, ruddy-cheeked and plumped up and with a newfound grin on his face—I kept adding to the roll by mail, turning up qualified Indians left and right. And though some have claimed that our census was conducted much in the way that small towns will sometimes vote half the graveyard in a tight election, we had our standards, which were strict but comprehensive. We agreed to acknowledge that identity is both who you say you are and who the world says you are, a topic Mullay and I discussed daily on the trail. By the definition we arrived at, I, for example, was marked down as a member. Some called foul. But I would stand pistol in hand on the field of honor to defend my place on the roll.