Thirteen Moons (39 page)

Now, I hold my hands up to the electric bulb and think those same things. The bright new light, unknown to all past history, is not flattering. Not flattering at all. It glares grim. The pupils of one’s eyes clench in the face of it. The future will not favor the old. We need shadows. Candlelight, moonbeams, embers.

Oddly, in the days after Bear’s death, the hard-hearted women of Sara’s family mourned him as a great man and beloved husband. They all wept bitterly and with no irony whatsoever. Even old Grandmother Maw said over and over, tears running down the deep channels of her face, that Bear was about the best man she had ever known in her entire long life. Excepting, of course, the incomparable Hanging Maw, who had lived in a different world before white men had become so overwhelmingly dominant, and in that younger world it might have been somewhat easier to achieve eminence. All the women of the several generations cried and cried, and I believe to this day that every tear was genuine.

It has been stated more than once in print that Bear’s body was buried in a secret location. Not true. The grave simply no longer exists. Bear had chosen a shelf of land down by the river as his gravesite. I helped stack smooth stones over the blanket-wrapped body. The grave stood for only a few years, and then spring floods broke it apart and scoured the shelf of land bare. The stones were all scattered and his bones washed away. So now he is gone entirely from the physical world he loved so powerfully.

I’ll go no further with this topic. Grief is not a thing that can be convincingly shared with an audience. Our worst pain is confined within our own skin. I’ll only say this in conclusion. A time of earth died with Bear, and I hope he found peace and Wild Hemp in the Nightland.

NOT LONG AFTER
Bear died, the U.S. Government became suddenly urgent and imperative in its ongoing attempts to convince our remnant of the Cherokee to remove west and join their brethren on the bleak Indian Territories and be done with us for good, and the time seemed opportune. I was not at all sure things could be held together without Bear, but I determined to give it a go, for I was all the chief we had now.

A representative named Hindman was sent down to travel from community to community, any place with a townhouse, and hold meetings to convince the people to sell out and leave. Hindman, of course, couldn’t understand yea or nay in the language, nor did he trust me one inch to translate, so he required a neutral linkster. I don’t even pretend to remember how I arranged it or what foolishness I committed to make it so, but the Government was persuaded to hire Tallent as adjudicator of languages between Hindman and the people and myself. Never mind that Tallent had been an employee and friend for many years, and that despite his long residence among the Indians, several among their many verb tenses remained an impenetrable mystery to him. To be fair, the language divides time into confusingly fine fractions and conditions and qualifications. In the official paperwork, Tallent was listed as a prominent mixed-blood freeholder, though every drop of blood in him, to my knowledge, was Scot, and he even knew what plaid his clan had worn into battle.

To begin our journey with Hindman, we met after morning coffee on the main street of the raw new town to the west of Valley River. It was the first day of a bitter December, and us setting out to slog crusty trails all day and some nights pitching camp in blowing snow or freezing rain. I shook hands with Hindman from horseback, neither of us wanting to be the first to dismount in honor of the other. He was a Philadelphia lawyer, and he looked it, and that’s all I need to say by way of description. We made mild observations about the conditions of the roads and the weather. The hooves of our mounts sucked in and out of the mud as they shifted around. Hindman made a great show of laying down his orders to Tallent not to add or take away anything in his translations, one way or the other. And Tallent swore that he wouldn’t. He put his hand to his heart.

I’m afraid I might have muttered some phrase along the lines of
Great God
or
Shit fire
in a somewhat louder voice than intended.

So right from the start of the trip, things did not go well, nor had I expected them to. Long before we first caught sight of each other and traveled together and made offers in the wilderness to kill each other, Hindman and I had nurtured a blood hate just from our correspondence. We had been dueling with lawyer letters for better than a year. Of course that was a major part of the trouble, our being two lawyers. Lawyers have got to fight somebody. It’s their nature. And I claim no personal exemption.

We rode out of town, following the river up the valley, heading for the first council meeting at the Long Hair community. Riding past fallow fields with nothing but dull green clumps of cresses growing in old furrows to offer any color besides the brown and grey of dirt and fodderstooks. The trees on the mountains to either side were stripped down to the bones of their trunks and limbs. Valley River, needless to say, was a landscape fraught with memory for me, and I was both rhapsodic and morose.

I rode sort of sulking, saying nothing, spaced to the rear of our little column. Hindman chattered on, talking to Tallent about the remoteness of the place and the backwardness of its thinly scattered people until he made it clear that he feared he had fetched up at the world’s nethermost quarter. When we were about halfway to the Valley River settlement and had not yet crossed into my land, Cranshaw came into sight through the trees, not a ruin but in steep decline, as if it were beginning to strike the eye as a blur—all the edges of the bricks, the white paint of window sashes fading away.

Hindman paused in his nattering and turned and raised his voice to the grating pitch of most Yankees and asked me if I was sad that I didn’t own all the land within our sight in addition to the boundary we would cross a few hours hence in our journey.

I didn’t say a word back to him. I sat inside myself and waited.

He suspected I was a larcenist, and land was at the heart of his suspicion. He’d gotten a few people in Washington believing the same. It was clear he would like nothing better than to come up with charges against me that would stick. Me behind bars was his most arousing dream. Poor man, to lack more stirring imagination. But if I was poaching on the Indians, he certainly couldn’t figure how, and it frustrated him. So why let him interrupt my memories? Out in the river, breaking its black flow, I could see a big flat rock where Claire and I had once waded waist-deep and sat face-to-face cross-legged in the humid aftermath of a July thunderstorm eating red pepper jelly on water crackers with a good white Italian wine from Featherstone’s cellar. The wine’s maker I fail to recollect, though if I quit chasing after it maybe it will come back to me. But I do remember that we touched each other fairly personally and discussed the weaknesses of Byron’s rhyming in certain stanzas of
Don Juan.

But Hindman had little patience for my silence. A few slogs of horse hoof in road mud, and he couldn’t help but start yapping again. He said, I understand that people in this part of the world have gotten used to talking about your holdings in square miles instead of acres. And even so, the total number is staggering.

—It’s all the same, whether you measure in miles or acres or by the square rod. Arpents would be my preference.

—Arpents? he said.

I rode on and waited. I sang an old song inside my head.

In a minute he said once again, Arpents?

—It’s a unit of measure, I said. French in origin.

—French, he said. There was a critical tone to his voice.

—Is it just the amount you object to? I said. The fact that I own a certain broad swath of country?

—It’s the methods used to obtain it.

—Paid for out of my own pocket, most of it. And the rest owned by Bear’s people.

—That old troublemaker, he said. You and your chief have kept yourselves busy for years obstructing the good of the country and accumulating vast tracts of this mountainous land. And building your little empire atop a flimsy web of debt. It’s my understanding a great many people hold paper against you.

—No law forbidding that. I respect it enormously. Any country would fall to scobs and flinders without paper. That’s all a nation is. Paper. Otherwise it’s all just land in general left to its own devices.

We went on arguing at each other that way for several miles. And things became more personal the farther we went along.

At some point, loud enough that he couldn’t help but make it out, I might have responded to one of Hindman’s opinions by saying that he could kiss my ass.

Hindman pulled up crossways in the road. He said, I understand you may think you have cause to resent my presence here, but if we are to travel together through this backward wilderness we might at least be civil to each other.

I looked around. Took my time about it. In the near distance, I saw cultivated fields, cabins with smoke rising from mud-and-stick chimneys. Cows and sheep and goats. A man walking by the river with a broadaxe balanced on his shoulder. It seemed like settled farmland to me. Green and plotted and platted. But the view from Philadelphia somehow made it into a raw wilderness as screaming as any Smith or Winthrop encountered in the early days of Virginia or Massachusetts.

—Wilderness? I said.

—In that it is little but a nursery of savage habits and operates retrograde to civilization, which is much impeded by your holding such immense tracts of it.

I’d had all I could take and could no longer sit within myself. A flaw of character without doubt. I said that I guessed he must like things much better up in the civilized parts of the country, where they can take their mudsill factory workers—some of them still salty from the boat ride over and jabbering a language of no use here whatsoever, people as ignorant as if they had just emerged stunned and blinking from the twelfth century—and proceed to work them to death in factories as dim and violent as the mines of Bolivia. And the children too, almost down to the cradle. As soon as they can walk and take orders, they’re put to the wheel. And that’s the mighty and benevolent and praiseworthy force of free labor and capital, which is about all civilization boils down to for people like him. And opinions such as his are not even paper but just words falling from his mouth like horse manure. And with less value, for you can’t even fertilize your garden with them.

Hindman said, I’ll not suffer to be told what this country is or is not by little more than a thief.

I rode slowly right up to Hindman, keeping on coming way past any normal talking distance, closing until I was so near to him that our stirrup irons clashed against each other and the cook kettle hanging behind my saddle rubbed soot on the near haunch of his pale grey gelding.

We locked eyes with each other. Neither of us would give way, and the horses were confused and danced where they stood and snorted smoke from their nostrils into the cold air. There was a great deal of sawing at the reins on both our parts to try to keep them in place and not give way. The horses slowly wheeled together in the road, flank to flank, as if spoked to some hub only horses recognize and grant allegiance.

The whole time, Hindman and I did not let up glaring. He was all red-faced and smirking. It was the sort of situation that so often turns to gunplay.

Tallent had been hanging back but suddenly came riding closer. He said, How about us all just slowing down here.

But even as Tallent was talking, I was reaching under my coat with my right hand to draw something out, a quick motion. And Hindman was already flinching to take a bullet.

But what I pulled out was a leather cigar case and I offered it out to Hindman and said, Smoke? My voice all mild and companionable.

Hindman took a moment’s pause during which he remembered to breathe.

He said, Hardly, you son of a bitch.

Duelists have paced off their brief distances and leveled pistols at each other’s hearts for a great deal less outrage to honor than Hindman’s comment.

But as a former duelist, one who knows the gravity of bloodshed, I shouldered the responsibility of circumspection. I looked around to Tallent and said, There’s civility for you. That’s the way they do up where he’s from. But you can’t hold it against them. They’re bred to it and don’t know any better. I wouldn’t walk across the road to piss on such a man if he was lit afire.

I reined my horse aside and just barely touched him with the spurs. With little transition he leaped forward and went from a dead stop to a gallop. Hindman sat fuming and watching me disappear up the road at a high rate of speed, clots of mud flying back from the hooves of my mount.

Tallent figured his job charged him with staying alongside Hindman, so he did. And all the way over the ridge to the settlement, Hindman pumped him for useful information against me. They rode at the slow rate of conspirators. By the time they crossed the ridge to the townhouse it was coming on dark, and I had been there for more than two hours. And I had not been idle for any of that time.

The people had become all agitated. The Long Hairs were a stubborn and contrary bunch all on their own without my help. Not even hard-shell Welsh Baptist missionaries had been able to civilize them very much. Their head man was named John Owl, and he was all dressed out in turban and whiteman britches and coat, and it must have been clear from Owl’s very posture that we were thick as thieves. So Hindman didn’t have a chance from the start.

When the meeting began, the townhouse was full of people and all hot and smoky with a great fire built up high with hickory logs, and it was all the light there was, but that was aplenty. The place smelled like bear grease and woodsmoke. Hindman got up and stood near the fire and talked, circling about so that he could look at the people ringing the room on the wall benches. He talked slowly, in a careful booming courtroom voice, pausing at artful intervals to let Tallent catch up with him. And Tallent did his best to link Hindman’s words into Cherokee. It was a meticulously accurate job of translation, with no slant or opinion added in my favor, so I worried that Tallent might be taking his silly hand-to-heart oath seriously.