Thirteen Moons (7 page)

Except for my little sick mother, I’d had no experience with love in my life, neither incoming nor outgoing. Lately, since love had seemed an impossibility, I had steeled myself against it. But I held Claire, and that was that forever. Something was sealed. Desire abides. It is all people have that stands proof against time. Everything else rots.

She turned her head away and looked through the slats to the round moon shining through. She said, Wind Moon.

There was a sound outside. Stealthy steps in the dark. A number of people sneaking.

She said, You better run.

I was not at all ready to run, but she broke away and shoved me toward the gap at the low end of the springhouse where the water flowed out. Someone burst through the door. I scrabbled on hands and knees in the water, tiny gritted stones shifting under my palms as I bent toward the low sill.

A hand seized my collar. I wriggled under the framing, and the grey coat stripped off me like skin from a skeleton. I ran, zagging among dark grabbing figures until I snatched my budget by its straps at full speed like a horseman at a gander pull. Various confused bawls and yaps, the sounds of clamorous pursuit, faded behind me. I more fell than ran down the bluff toward the river, a dirty plummet broken by saplings, shrubbery, weeds, and wildflowers. And when I hit bottom, I ran lovelorn up the river road, my back to the grey dawn.

3

I
WANDERED FOR DAYS THROUGH THE MOUNTAINS, FOLLOWING
whatever paths led west, trying to remember my uncle’s directions. I walked horse trails, footpaths, the runways of deer, and the remnants of buffalo trails nearly as faint as the sign ghosts leave in their passage through the night air. Not knowing exactly where I was going, I suspended expectations on time of arrival.

I bemoaned the loss of the girl, my horse, my coat, and my money. I didn’t sleep well and had taken a cramping stomach ailment that frequently left me squatting in the woods, shitting and admiring the scenery. I was wrung out by the third day, twisted down to almost nothing. I thought I was hopelessly lost, though I kept walking a grown-over scratch through the forest so faint it might have been imaginary. It went climbing up a bold creek filled with green boulders and white water. A severe-looking dog emerged from the woods and crossed the creek and stood staring at me as if it expected something. I guessed it to be an Irish wolfdog or some like breed. Wirehaired and long-legged and colored like smoke. It stood panting in the trail with a ring of old grey hemp rope at its neck showing it had not always run wild. I said, This is a public courseway. You go whichever direction you will.

The dog looked at me as if I hadn’t spoken, and I figured he was probably Indian and was unaware of the English language. When I set out walking, he fell in behind me like we were travel partners.

TWO DAYS LATER,
I didn’t have to ask if I had reached my destination. You couldn’t miss it. The building stood just back from the wagon road. And there was a sign, a grey slab of shingle nailed to a stob pitched at a leisurely angle to plumb, big writing in red faded paint saying
STORE.
Which suggested the existence of customers. There was apparently a community nearby, but you’d never know it by looking. This was just the merest gesture of an outpost, a place marker set down in the wilderness.

The trade post sat on a little level patch of ground with a bold creek running loud to one side and big dark hemlocks growing serene and gloomy all around. It had been out of business since shortly after Christmas, and the board shutters on the windows were closed and an iron padlock big as a beef heart hung rusty from a hasp and loop. The first sprigs of ragweed grew from the packed dirt in front of the three steps to the porch.

Nevertheless, for all the apparent abandonment, two old men sat on the porch in straight chairs as if they expected business to continue any minute. One looked to be a full-blood Cherokee, and he sat with the chair tipped back on its hind legs and its post ends propped against the log wall, and one of his long legs stretched out across the floorboards and the other hooked by its heel to the bottom chair rung. He was looking right at me, and that was the first time I laid eyes on Bear. The other man was white and he was dozing, chin to chest, the slanting afternoon sun shining off his bald pate. He wore a grey wool coat thick as a saddle pad that appeared to be mine. It fell around his chair like a disorganized shadow. The man dreamed doglike, whining and grunting, his eyeballs jigging about under the lids, one foot thumping the floorboards.

Waverley stood off to the side in a disused corral with a pole run-in shed. He had his head down grazing on new grass, and I stood amazed, wondering how he had found his way here before me.

Bear looked at me without changing his posture or any other manifestation of his thoughts, as if twenty lost boys a day passed by this porch and one more was not worth even a quizzical expression. Bear wore his hair long and cut blunt at his shoulders, and it was about half grey, back then, but full to the temples. He had on hunting clothes. Long linen shirt, deerleather leggings. His moccasins were laced with horsehair, eyelet holes in-wrought with quills of feathers. Beaded bracelets, large rings in his ears. And a rifle, shot pouch, and powder horn arrayed at the porch rail.

The dog went straight to the porch and flopped down beside Bear’s chair. He just touched the dog briefly between the ears, and it began wagging its hard tail against the floor like beating a drumhead with a stick. The other man came awake and threw back his head and ranted awhile in Gaelic, yelling out what sounded like curses and threats until spittle drops hung in his yellow chin whiskers. I’d heard the old language all my life, for our county was full of displaced Scots who still spoke it and a few who even thought in it. Such a great number of people got letters from across the sea that one of the qualifications for postmaster was to be able to read at least a little Gaelic in order to deliver the mail.

I thought it impolite to interrupt such a fervent tirade, so I just nodded a greeting to the big Cherokee and then sat on the middle porch step and figured to keep close counsel and listen first before I declared myself.

The Scotsman switched his language to English and began talking about Culloden, a story I had heard all my life in various forms. His voice fell into a solemn minor-key tone, as if the tale he told was a myth of origin, an explanation of how he came to be where he was, as I later heard the Cherokee tell of how Waterbeetle daubed up mud from the bottom of the ocean to make earth and how Thunder first made fire in the hollow of a sycamore tree. The man counted out in great detail the clans all arrayed on the field of Culloden and the colors they wore, noting the particular plaiding of the first line of Highlanders, the Camerons and Stuarts and Frasers. He squealed and wheezed to represent the bray of bagpipes, and he named the tunes they had played that day and described the brave men, greatly outnumbered but wild to fight, howling their battle cry. Then he told of how they scrugged their bonnets down low on their brows and made a headlong rush at the Angles and Saxons, saying it was exactly as Celts had done against the Romans at Telamon two thousand years before. And with like result. Heroes numberless killed down by cowardly and alien swords and, at the end of the day, their heads on pikes. And in the years following, the culture in disarray, the people forced into greater pilgrimages than even Moses and his Israelites made. The man spoke haltingly, almost bogging down at the end. As if the enemy language resisted him, like fording a river and trying to hold a line against the push of water.

Bear sat looking off into the distance, a long view through a cut between layers of mountains unfolding down a narrow blue valley. He nodded as if approving of the tale of struggle and loss, but he didn’t say a word. The Scotsman rubbed his face with both his hands, and then he fell asleep again.

I said, Just so nobody gets the wrong idea, that colt is mine. And that coat too.

It was one of the few times I ever remember hearing Bear speak English, and he later claimed I must have been confused. But I remember clear as day him saying, Well, this dog’s mine.

I said, Fine with me.

I dug through my budget and found the key with the heart-shaped butt. I put the business end in the keyhole and turned it. There was a simple rasping mechanical click and the lock sprang open like something alive. I swung the hasp and opened the door.

With the shutters closed, the place was lit only by the rectangular fall of light through the entryway. The room ahead was dim as the dens thieves are said to frequent in romance tales. The dusty floorboards gapped wide enough for snakes to rise through without impediment. I stood blinking a minute. Then I shuffled ahead, a hand held palm forward at hip level to keep from tripping over something. The smells of wood ash, cured meat, clabbered milk, pickle vinegar, old cheese, hemp rope, moldy harness leather, badly cured hides beginning to rot. Altogether, I thought, it smelled like death. Even before my eyes had opened up to the dark, I was appalled at where I found myself. This was not a store, it was some confabulation of smokehouse and henhouse and springhouse. Shithouse too, going by the smell.

Bear came in with an armload of firewood and got a yellow blaze going in the cold black fireplace.

He disappeared into the darkness, and I could hear him rattling about in the stock. He came back into the light carrying a bottle of dark amber Tennessee whiskey and a shot glass. He dug into a pouch at his waist and turned up a palmful of gunspalls and various coinage, including a George II farthing and a copper elephant halfpenny from the days of the Carolina proprietors. He set a coin on the counter and held up his whole hand of spread fingers to signify the number five. Then he poured out an amber shot full to the brim and held it to the firelight to admire its color a moment before drinking it down. When he had done that four more times, he sat by the yellow fire and began looking into it as if a scene from an engrossing play were unfolding inside. And not a comedy, from the look on his face.

So I’m bartender here too, I thought.

Bear started talking, and it sounded like he was telling a story, but of course I could not understand a word. After he finished, he stood and made some vague gesture of farewell and went to the porch and roused the Scotsman and peeled the coat off him and handed it to me. He gathered his weaponry, and the pilgrim Scotsman shouldered his pack. The dog yawned and stretched. The three of them went off down the trail, the dog running out ahead as if hunting, some brilliant thread of scent spooling ahead of him. I shook the coat, and the pockets made one faint jingle, a pair of coins representing the remainder of my winnings. I stuck my hand in the pocket and found a folded paper, a note in a big flowing hand.
We’re even. Featherstone.

IT DID NOT
take me long to survey the stock. The store was hardly bigger than the parlor room of my aunt’s house. What I found was mainly confusing, for I was accustomed to town stores at least partially full of manufactured goods, the shelves and cabinets stacked with tins and glass bottles and waxed-paper packages, a few of them from as far away as England and France. Bright printed labels telling what the things they contained were called and who had produced them, and remarks on their superiority to all other like goods, and little badges and devices, each unique, so that even the unlettered might know them when they saw them. Paper wrappers of soaps and candies, claiming that they were the sort enjoyed by the royal family.

Here, though, I found woefully little such stock from the outer world, and almost all of it was simple. Bolts of gingham and calico, plowpoints, bottles of ink, fiddle strings and fishhooks, packets of steel needles, gunpowder and flints, bar lead and bullet molds, axeheads, blank books and wool blankets, laudanum and coffee beans, pistols and palm-leaf hats and horse fleams. Of particular interest were the apparent anomalies for such a wilderness post, the sad commercial miscalculations of some previous shopkeep. A fine china tea service and several tins of rich-smelling black tea. A tarnished brass trumpet from which I could produce only a prolonged farting sound. Inexplicably, a full case of claret from Château Latour dating back almost to the previous century, which I remember only because later in life that is the red wine I most favored. And, most welcome, a little shelf of books that had apparently been unsuccessfully offered up to the buying public for some time, their brown leather bindings having blossomed with grey spots of mildew in the damp air.

The most part of the post’s contents lacked any hope of name or emblem. Things were what they were, and you knew it or didn’t. Rush baskets of muddy eggs all gone bad. Dried pinto beans. Dank earthen crocks of cloudy vinegar wherein shelled eggs half floated. Wheels of cheese grey with fuzz. Lard or tallow or some other fragrant grease packed in paired hog bladders and hanging from rafters. Baskets heaped with the forked roots of the magic ginseng. In one corner a tall pile of cured deerhides lay one atop another like a deck of cards swollen from being left out in the rain. Everything was some shade of grey or brown, and nearly everything smelled. I felt some other old world intersecting suddenly with the familiar.

I searched until I found a sack of oats and went out to grain and water Waverley. Whatever adventures he’d had in the past days, he looked none the worse for wear. I took the armload of books out onto the porch and wiped them clean with a rag and rubbed beeswax into the leather until the books looked better than new, dark as mahogany, the gold lettering of their titles shining like fire coals.

Morte d’Arthur. Tristan and Isolde. A Midsummer Night’s Dream
and
The Tempest
in individual volumes, and another thick close-printed volume containing all the tragedies.
Gulliver’s Travels. Don Quixote
as reduced into English by Mr. Smollett. And Dr. Johnson’s
Shorter Dictionary,
which included as an appendix an alphabetical account of the heathen deities.

When the books were clean, I lined them back on their shelf and figured they were about all the companionship I would have for a while.

I pared the mold from a big cheese and ate the inner slices with withered nubs of sweet dried fruit, the origin of which I could not identify though I guessed they might once have been plums or very old peaches. Long before it grew dark, I went and looked at the little sleeping room in the back. A full-grown man could have stood in the center and touched each wall with his fingertips. The narrow rope bedstead had a sour-smelling and brown-stained ticking stuffed with something that exhaled a deep animal must when I pressed my hand into it. I judged that I would not sleep a wink in this terrifying hole. I took blankets and a pillow out to the front room and made me down a lonesome pallet on the floor in front of the fire. Candles of tallow or beeswax being inordinately expensive and the woodpile being high, I supposed I would have only the hearth to read by.