Thirteen Moons (37 page)

Later—in the second and last year of the presidency of my vague kinsman Zachary Taylor—Mullay returned south, still miraculously holding his job. He came down to put a touch-up on our census, which had evoked the adjectives
mythic
and
vaporous
in two different newspapers.

Mullay had sadly declined in health. This trip, he could not ride as we went about our travels, and I sat with him on the carriage seat. His face was blue as skim milk in the shadow of the canvas top. On the few occasions when he tried to walk, he depended on a pair of canes. And all the time we were together, the roll of names got longer. The day he headed back to Washington, he stuck out his hand to shake in farewell, but I grabbed him around the shoulders and hugged him, for I knew we would never meet again in this world.

Upon Mullay’s return, a figure was settled upon—many multiples of $
53.33
at six percent—which meant that those on the roll were owed, collectively, a staggering figure. A check was drawn in my name for disbursement. But even that was not the end to it, for the annual interest on all those $
53.33
shares would continue to build with never an end in sight as long as we or our heirs kept refusing to move to the Territories.

Mullay died shortly thereafter. News of his passing sent me into a state of gloom that lasted longer than I could strictly justify.

I WOULD LIKE
to avoid the topic entirely, but here it is. I held upward of four dozen Negroes at the height of my enterprises. If I’m being more than a little bit honest, I’d have to say that it is awfully easy, when you get so old you can’t do anything else, to look back on some of the actions of your full manhood and feel a distant and nearly painless regret. As an emotion, it has about the color of dust in the wind. Now that it’s too late to do anything about it, you suddenly entertain the notion that you might have been slightly and altogether inadvertently in the wrong. It is a sweet and melancholy feeling, and an easy path toward self-forgiveness, but false. Maybe it is an inevitable part of becoming old, like arthritis and weak eyesight. We all get it, if we live long enough.

Bear was not exempt from self-congratulatory regret. In his last years, he often thought back on his vast killing of animals. He said he didn’t regret one animal he killed out of hunger, but it was the hunting for trade he wished he hadn’t done. In the young days of the world, there had been prayers to the animals, the dwellers in the wilderness, begging their pardon for the necessity of killing them for food and spilling their blood, bear and deer especially. They hold a great deal of blood, an embarrassment of it, like killing a man. It spills out all over the place. So there were rules for dealing with it. You fed the river with the blood of bear and deer that pooled in the fallen leaves. When you spilled it, you prayed and fed the river, and you were square with the world. But that was back when the women farmed and the men hunted, and together they made a living that neither could accomplish alone, a fact acknowledged in the very marriage ceremony, which included an element of trade, an equal exchange between woman and man of corn for meat skins. But then, not long ago, all of a sudden there was money to be made from killing, to the extent that deerskin was currency and the buck a more common denomination than a dollar and of equal value. You’d see men leading long strings of packhorses with twenty badly cured skins stacked high and stiff across the back of each one. Lots of bucks.

In the face of so much money, men did as they always do; they lost their manners. The prayers went away, and then before long the bear and deer went away too. And Bear always said it like that: the deer went away. Or the deer left. He never said the exact truth, which was that people killed every valuable animal they could hunt down for cash money or in trade for tin pots or gingham cloth at the post, and never acknowledged that the elk and bison didn’t just wander off somewhere else and disappear from this world entirely but were every one hunted down. In a note of unintended irony, the place where the last one in each section of country was killed usually became memorialized in the name of a creek or a cove or a ridge. Or at least with a rotting patchy hide tacked to a barn wall.

Bear described walking up to a badly wounded buck sprawled on the ground too weak to move, one hind leg broken by a ball and twisted beneath it and another ball in its belly, blood blackening the leaves around it. An entire branch of antler sheared off near the skull by another missed ball. Bear remembered the look in the buck’s eye as it watched him coming to cut its throat and sell its skin for a dollar.

—There’s not a prayer for that, he would say.

Bear was always in a wistful mood telling that story. I heard it a dozen times. But back in the trade-hunting days he would not have been wistful. He would have wanted that dollar, would have wanted a great high stack of them.

As for me, I didn’t want to plow my own fields or split my own rails or milk my own cows, so I ended up owning men and women and their children. And if there are any prayers for that, I wish somebody would teach them to me.

Bear was as honest a man as I ever knew, with others and with himself. And still he indulged that self-exonerating version of the past. So it is one of the things I list among his lessons that I’m not now much inclined to ask anyone’s sympathy or understanding, nor am I inclined to ask forgiveness from anyone, including myself.

IN FAIRNESS, I
should mention that Bear was also a slaveholder. It was a short and singular experience. In one of those years between the Removal and his death, Bear came into possession of a man named Cudjo, his exact match in age and infirmity, a genuine old African brought over on one of the last of the ships. I never understood how the deal worked, except that it was a notably poor trade involving some old debt concerning ginseng and three or four horses and also carried some element of personal grudge with his trading adversary.

Though Bear understood slavery perfectly, he found the institution remarkably uninteresting, at least on his end of it. Immediately upon taking possession, he told Cudjo he was welcome to hang around if he cared to, but he was not to call Bear his master and he was not to expect much of anything from Bear other than what anyone in the community could expect—which was that if there was food in the pot you were welcome to eat a bowlful. A single bowlful, by the way. Those were the local rules of etiquette. And if that didn’t suit Cudjo, he’d better move on.

In short order, though, the two old men grew enormously fond of each other. Cudjo was a genius of language, and even the daunting proliferating verb tenses of Cherokee took him no time to learn. As soon as they could talk to each other, they found consonance in their boyhoods. Cudjo told a youthful story involving himself and a lion that made a great impression on Bear. Blood and honor and courage and weaponry. They showed off old scars, claw marks from a better time. And they quickly reached an agreement recognizing each other as equal hunters and warriors, representatives of an antique style never to come round again in this world.

Very soon they began making a little joke between themselves at the expense of others. In front of some ignorant third party—particularly if the party was white—Cudjo would refer to Bear as Master. Bear would look at the ground and shake his head and then waggle one bulbous-jointed forefinger and say that being Cudjo’s master was a job you couldn’t pay him a pile of silver money to take on. Nor gold money neither. A man can make the mistake of becoming slave to his own possessions. Cudjo was too much responsibility to shoulder. And so, therefore, no thank you to masterhood.

Then Cudjo would say, Nevertheless, old Bear’s my master now. He holds paper on me.

Then they’d both laugh like a pair of jays.

Bear would threaten to sell Cudjo straight to some brutal bullwhip cotton farm in Mississippi—except, sadly, Cudjo was so old as to be totally worthless. So why bother trying? And then Bear would walk away.

In more serious moods, or drunk, they proclaimed that they were brothers and would lift their shirts together and turn their backs in unison to show their old claw scars, shining in five parabolic silver lines against the darker skin.

For the short time of their relationship, they lived together as equals in the townhouse, and on cool nights of that year’s spring and fall they slept on the same narrow platform closest to the fire, though they both set a boundary at sharing a quilt and so kept separate bedclothes.

Cudjo died shortly before Christmas. He just fell out one frosty morn, walking down the road. Bear saw to it that Cudjo was buried in the same manner as if he had been born in the mountains and had been a member of a clan. Bear took on the job of heaping stones atop the grave himself, though as an old man from the previous distant century, he had every right to beg off from the job.

Bear didn’t deliver much of a eulogy after the stones were heaped up. He just said, You never know when somebody will pull you to them. And then we all walked back down the creek to home.

Those were the years when I was full of industry. No more pining for Claire, at least not much. She was just gone. I had the several mercantiles, all scattered through what had been the Nation’s eastern boundary and about a day’s ride from one another. And there was also the law practice, requiring my frequent attendance at the court days of a half dozen different counties all the way down into the foothills. And the businesses in Wayah. In other words, I spent a great portion of my life a-saddle.

Nothing got by me back then. I had feelers out in every direction. At one point, the legislature came up with some freakish bit of minor lawmaking designed to encourage silk production. Our state, after all, has aplenty of mulberry trees, and its leaves are all a silkworm will deign to eat. The bill offered all kinds of subsidies and legal benefits such as easy incorporation, which was then neither common nor much encouraged by state law. Elsewhere, in the lowland counties, the silk incentives went largely ignored. But I took one look at the state’s offer and saw immediately what an easy cow it would be to milk. And the way I found to work the new law to our advantage didn’t have an awful lot to do with visioning the Indians picking apart cocoons and winding silk thread onto bobbins and selling it at market in Charleston or Philadelphia.

For appearance’s sake, I did go so far as to put in an order for a package of silkworm eggs and applied for a government check to pay for them. And then I set about incorporating the Indians. Turned them all into shareholders in the Cherokee Company. And their business was not just silk but encompassed all their joint interests, or at least the ones I found interesting. Most particularly, the corporation interested itself in the ownership of all that enormous boundary of land Bear and I had been buying and buying for years and holding together with spit and promises and, now and then, kited checks. We set the corporation up with limits so that each shareholder could own property individually but could not sell to anyone but another shareholder. However they thought of themselves—as a people, a community, or a tribe—was their business. As far as the state was concerned, they were now a legal corporation.

Before I’d even finished drawing up all the paperwork, the little black worm eggs had hatched into black threadlike worms and then they fattened on mulberry leaves and shed their skins and turned pale. But then, before a single one of them had spun even an inch of thread for a cocoon, they all curled up and died. And that was the end of the mountain silk trade, which was fine with me. Bear said any enterprise that depended for its success on little wiggling grubs was bad for the soul. The one exception being, of course, the making of yellow-jacket soup.

The worms died. But the Cherokee Company lived on.

Some of my detractors claimed my whole purpose in such dealings as the silk trade was just self-interest, to make it easier to sell the Indians all my cheap, steep mountain land. Others said I was following old Bear’s wish to re-create a homeland for them and undo all the Federal Government’s efforts to move them out and make way for progress. They said Bear was an upsurger, perhaps a revolutionary, and had long ago sworn never to make peace with the white men and had cast a spell on me and set me on my present misled course, and thus together we had accomplished what Tecumseh and Osceola and many others could not—to fight for a homeland and hold out against the Government. Others among my critics said I was making a wilderness kingdom for myself to lord over like some biblical patriarch, and in darkened voices they said that whether my rule would be benign or despotic was still to be determined.