by David Liss
He made his way back to Pittsburgh, where he told his story, and men ran out into the forest armed with guns and hatred of the Indians. The idea that Indians might be human beings with souls, capable of good as well as evil, is disregarded as romantical rubbish. Every evil the white men have done the Indians is forgotten, but every crime against the white men by Indians is branded into their souls. These men hate Indians with a passion hardly to be understood if not felt, and no opportunity for taking an Indian’s life must be neglected. Phineas’s story was the sort of thing that unleashed their most feral passions. They muttered curses, blaming not only the savages but also the men back east who would spare no money for the protection of the West. They had no choice, they said, but to take matters into their own hands.
In the woods, they found nothing, not even the bodies, but their blood was up, and they could not let the incident pass. Instead of killing the fiends who had committed these crimes, they marched back toward town with Phineas in tow, to a small cabin just outside the city full of Christianized Indians—seven in all, including two small children of their own. The Indians did not resist. They had no weapons to fight with, but the men barricaded them inside their home and set it afire. As the flames rose, Phineas could hear their voices rising in song, calling upon the Lord to carry them home.
Phineas told me this story without inflection or emotion. It was as empty and hollow as an old legend, one from a stranger’s childhood, without connection to his own experiences. When he finished, he turned away from me. At first I thought it was shame, but I soon decided it was something far more visceral. The story had been like phlegm that lodges in the lungs. It must be expectorated and, once gone, is thought of no more.
After a long silence I said, “Did you kill those Indians last night?”
He did not look at me. “I ain’t never going to let an Indian live if it’s in my powers to kill it. I aim to be a great Indian killer, like Lou Wetzel. You ever hear of him? He’s killed more Indians than any man in the West.”
“Is that truly what you wish?” I asked, not knowing what else to say.
“Wishing don’t signify. ’Tis what I am. Now you know what I done you won’t be my friend no more, but there’s no helping it. Not now. You’ll see, though. The West changes you. It don’t let you be a Christian. I’m what the West made me, and you’ll be what it makes you.”
It was now near the end of the day’s travel, and soon he was occupied in the business of making camp. I left the poor boy and made my way back to Andrew, who asked nothing of what Phineas had told me, and I told him nothing. I told him nothing because I sat there lamenting the horror that was now our lives. We had traded what little we had in exchange for a passage to Hell, and I could not end the question that repeated itself in my own mind: What have I done? I would not have Andrew asking the question of himself.
As for Phineas, he was never again kind to me. In truth, he grew hostile, even predatory. He had regarded me before as a mother; now he joined with the other men in gazing at my body with hungry interest. He glared at me if I walked too slowly. If I stumbled, he pointed and laughed. I grew fearful of him and kept my distance. The men were fiends and I could hate them, but his youth made Phineas’s hardness far more frightening.
Ten days later, days filled with tension and fear but no further incidents, we arrived in Pittsburgh, though only with the greatest of difficulty. We could not simply stroll into town, the way being made near impassable by great mountains of coal. Instead, for the last few miles, we were piled, beasts and all, upon a great flatboat that made its way down the Monongahela, propelled by burly men, muscled and bearded, mostly shirtless, who thrust great poles into the riverbed to force the lumbering conveyance forward.
The landscape was both rugged and beautiful, certainly sublime in its untamed majesty of undulating hills and thick forest. The city itself was another matter. Even before our flatboat docked, I could see that to call Pittsburgh a town would be like giving the name of feast to a moldy crust and a sliver of hard cheese rind. It was but a muddy clearing with the most uneven and haphazard log cabins, all stained with coal dust. There were no roads to speak of, but mud passageways that were, to the credit of the city founders, arranged with a Quaker regularity. The people looked more savage than civilized. The better sort wore rough homespun in cuts that were a mockery of fashions some five years past, though I looked with relief upon even the most outdated satin petticoat or laced waistcoat. Otherwise it was naught but buckskins and hunting shirts for the men, rough burlap gowns for the women. The men were all bearded and rugged, and a disproportionate number were missing an eye. The women, for their part, were often misshapen and hunched, with faces ravaged by weather, hands clenched and arthritic like demonic claws. It was the rare citizen who possessed even half his teeth, and all the people, like the buildings, were black with coal dust.
We trudged through the muddy streets of Pittsburgh, looking at the ramshackle houses in stunned silence, growing more filthy with each step. This, we knew, was going to be our dream from now on. This dirty, muddy grid of rude shacks would come to seem to us, as weeks turned into months and months to years, as a glorious metropolis. How long until this decrepitude came to seem like the glories of New York? How long until we lulled ourselves to sleep with the fanciful notion of what we would do once we arrived in this city of delights?
Duer had arranged for us to lodge separately with different residents of the city for the night. In the morning we were to be led to our plots of land. Andrew and I were given a space on the floor—naught but dirt packed hard and smooth—of a miserable cabin, somewhat larger than most others but cramped and cold and smelling like a tannery. This room, which seemed to me little better than a ranger’s tent, was shared by a couple with three children, and, indeed, a pair of pigs, which wandered in and out of the house at their leisure. It had a single room, though there was a separate bed for adults and offspring. They had rough furniture, made from barrels and shipping crates and hewn logs, and the meal that night was a stew of Indian corn and potatoes, cooked with a sour meat from their freshly slaughtered old milk cow. Only later did I learn that our hosts were one of the most prominent families in town.
The meal was served not with water or wine or tea but with liquor, a kind of western rum, of which I had never yet heard. The husband, the wife—even the children—drank it as though it were sweet nectar, but I could hardly manage a swallow. It tasted to me like poison set afire, but Andrew, perhaps savoring the distraction of something novel and unthreatening, sipped as though it were a prized claret. “How is it made?” he asked. “With what varieties? How is it aged?”
“Aged?” our host had asked.
“Yes,” said Andrew, who had some limited experience making wine in his youth. “Like wine, it is aged, is it not?”
Our host laughed. “’Tis aged from the time we put it into the jug to when we drink it. Don’t last that long. Around here, you see, there ain’t no money. Where would money come from? Ain’t no roads back east, and the damn Spanish won’t let us use the river. You want to buy something, you buy it with whiskey. You want to sell something, you get whiskey for it. This here is our money, friend, and ain’t no one can be bothered to turn money into prettier money. There’s nothing to be gained by doing so.”
But there was something to be gained. Andrew saw it—not yet clearly, but I believe an idea was already forming in his mind. He now knew how the locals did their business, and he already sensed there was opportunity for a man willing to do it a little differently. He had never in his life made his own whiskey, never even considered doing so. He was, nevertheless, already mulling over in his mind the things he would do that would, in the vicinity of the four counties, elevate his name from obscurity.
Ethan Saunders
Evening descended, and Cherry Street was full of middling people in their middling clothes going about their middling business, exchanging with each other their very, very middling sentiments. They steppe
d with manic precision, avoiding mud and filth and mounds of snow, piles of manure, clusters of animals—chickens, cows, goats, pigs—being driven here and there by angry-looking minders waving their sticks. They ignored the looming blackness of chimneys spewing soot. They bustled and bumbled and bumped about, returning home, attending to their evening meals, engaged in conversations so quotidian I could scarcely comprehend. When shall I mend this pillow? What thought you of that piece of ham? No, the other piece. Have you had a moment to speak to Harry about the crate of salt cod?
I do not condemn these creatures for living their own little lives and discussing the things in them, but the smallness of it pained me. Yes, I was brought low, but what of it? Had I not lived fully? Such a full life does not allow for the petty and trivial concerns of domesticity. That was the palliative I applied when I thought of how fate had robbed me of Cynthia all those years ago. Even then I understood that I would never have conversations with her about salt cod and pillows. Men who had lived as I had, with dirt and blood and death, were not made for the comforts of domestic quiet.
Mixed in with the sooty air lingered the scent of hearth fires and stews and soups and roasting meats, and I recalled that I had eaten nothing since breakfast. Here, where Cherry intersected with Third Street, near the Hebrew house of worship, was where Lavien had told me he made his home, so it was here I looked for him. I saw a pretty young Jewess and thought that if I were in better form I should surely present my question to her, but now—tattered and filthy and bruised, wearing a poor and stolen hat—I feared I would frighten her. Instead I found an Israelite peddler, pushing his cart of rolls, and asked him if he knew a man named Lavien. He directed me to a house in an alley, half a block away, with a bright red door and said, in heavily accented English, that I might find him within.
I knocked at this narrow two-story house, and a servant at once appeared. She was aged and unappealing, with that distinctive and unpleasant old-person smell, and yet she sat in judgment of me.
“Go on,” she said, with a wave of the hand. “We have nothing for you.”
“How can you know what you have for me when you know not who I am?” I asked.
“Get gone, you with your fancy talk. We have given to beggars enough today.”
All at once a woman appeared behind her, and she was like the sun rising against the black sky. This was a very pretty Hebrew, with a wide round face, large black eyes, and arched eyebrows.
“I beg your pardon, madam,” I said, directing myself to this new and infinitely more pleasurable creature, “but I am an associate of Mr. Lavien, and I must speak with him.”
“He’s a beggar, missus,” the servant said, “and drunk, by his smell.” Here was a woman whom clearly no one had ever married, and I could not blame mankind for not asking for her withered and mean-spirited hand. For shame, old prune, to speak to me so.
The wife, however, demonstrated her superior perception. “He’s no beggar but something else.” Then, to me: “You know my husband?”
“I do, madam, and I apologize for my appearance, but things have gone hard for me this last day, a story with which your husband is familiar in part.”
“Show him in,” she said to the servant. “I’ll fetch Mr. Lavien.”
The house was narrow—as was common, for in Philadelphia, houses are taxed according to their breadth—but it was also quite deep. The crone led me through a well-appointed hallway, with a handsome rug and several fine portraits, and into a sitting room that was very full of books for so modest a home. I sat in a slightly low-backed but well-cushioned chair, and there the woman left me without offering refreshment, which I thought rather uncivil.
Lavien was apparently at hand and had no interest in impressing me by making me wait. I had hardly had time to study the pale green wallpaper, flecked with bits of pink, before the Hebrew attended me and was good enough to present me with a glass of Madeira. I drank deeply from it—very good stuff—and we settled down together.
“You are bleeding from your head,” he told me.
“Prodigiously?”
“No, only a little.”
I shrugged. “Then it is no matter. I shall come to the point, sir. I need you to give me thirty dollars. Perhaps another twenty for comfort. I need you to give me fifty dollars.”
He made little effort to mask his amusement. “I have no such sum to spare. My position pays well enough, but I am hardly a rich man.”
“I thought all you Treasury men were wealthy,” I said.
He snorted. “You have been listening to the lies disseminated by that rascal Jefferson.”
“You are not one of those men so blinded by Hamilton that you are set against Jefferson?” I asked.
Lavien clucked like an old woman. “Jefferson is a liar and scoundrel and, in my opinion, an enemy of the state.”
“I think he is, in fact, Secretary of State,” I suggested. “Common mistake, though.”
His eyes narrowed, and his expression darkened ever so slightly. I suspected he was attempting to measure my sincerity, my level of enthusiasm for Jefferson and his republican followers. Lavien struck me as the sort of man who always measured a man’s opinions, who felt for strengths and weaknesses. He was the sort who could not step into a room without noting the location of every door, which windows he might jump through in a pinch, which tables might be toppled for a shelter from bullets. I knew the sort. I had spent the war as just such a man.
“Hamilton has had cause to lament that Washington puts his faith in that man,” he said. “Soon enough, Washington will regret it. Jefferson has opposed us at every turn. And he will stop at nothing.”
“Perhaps Hamilton wants opposing,” I said.
“You cannot defend Jefferson. In his wretched newspaper he even insults Washington, calling him old and feeble of mind.”
I knew it, and I hated that Jefferson did not have the sense to leave Washington’s reputation alone. “That ought not to be,” I admitted.
“But despite all that, you are against Hamilton’s great achievements, Captain Saunders? You were against the Assumption Bill? You, an old soldier, opposed paying out the debts the states incurred during the war? And the Bank Bill? You think it a mistake for a nation to have a bank upon which to draw funds in times of crisis?”
The Bank Bill. The act of Congress that had established Hamilton’s pet project, the Bank of the United States. Cynthia’s note said that her husband’s disappearance, the danger to herself and her children, had something to do with the new bank. Best to take this slowly, I thought. I would not show too much interest. I would listen.
He spoke very calmly, but each syllable landed like a hammer blow. The entire world knew that Jefferson hated Hamilton and his Federalist policies, but Hamilton and his supporters were generally much quieter. I suppose they had the advantage of success, since Washington so often sided with Hamilton, and the Congress, though it grumbled, had voted his policies into law. Hamilton and his followers did not need to spit venom in the press the way the Jeffersonians did, for they were instead making laws and shaping policy. But if Lavien was any measure, it seemed the Hamiltonians were filled with just as much resentment as the Jeffersonians.
“I opposed the Bank Bill in my own way,” I said. Indeed, I distinctly remember sitting in a tavern and cursing it very colorfully.
Lavien shook his head. “I am sorry to hear that, but it hardly seems the time to discuss policy. What has happened to you, Captain Saunders?”
“My landlady has very suddenly cast me out,” I told him, providing a description of events from the previous night, and hinting that perhaps my expulsion was linked to his inquiry.
He pointed to my head. “That new injury of yours. Is that related?”
“Very likely,” I answered, not quite ready to tell him about the Irishman. When he shared what he knew, I would consider dispensing my little store of knowledge.
“It is as I told you last night,” he said, perhaps noting my skepticism. “Pe
arson has been missing a few days, perhaps a week. I would like to find him. And, lest you ask, I cannot tell you why. I am not to share information regarding my inquiry with anyone uninvolved. You would need to speak to Colonel Hamilton.”
“Do you hold everything you do in such secrecy, or just this?”
“I can’t tell you that either,” he said, without irony.
“You must know I don’t want state secrets. My questions are about Pearson. If you won’t tell me why you seek him, tell me at least if you believe his family to be in danger.”
“In danger?” he repeated. “No, I don’t think so.”
“But you cannot say for certain?”
He shook his head. “There is so little of which one can be certain.”
I made an effort to hide my frustration by refilling my glass. Though he was a small, swarthy, bearded man, I liked Lavien, and while he certainly was possessed of some rather significant abilities, he did not strike me as a gifted spy. He was alert, and no doubt was possessed of a kind of cunning, but did he have the sort of expansive intelligence, the curiosity and openness, that is required of the best of those in the trade? I doubted it.
“I wonder if there are things of which you might be more certain,” I said, “if you went about your affairs in a different way or had the benefit of more experience.”
At once it all became clear to me, like a vision: Lavien and I working side by side, his curious physical prowess and my abilities as a spy. I’d had too much to drink, I suppose, and had been confronted by the past too unexpectedly. I had not thought of being in service for some time now—years, perhaps—but suddenly it seemed close enough to touch. Were I to find myself a coequal with Lavien, would that not erase the tarnish that had been placed upon my name all those years ago? Could I not appear in better circles without the whispering and pointing and awkward conversation? The encounter with this remarkable man, in service to Hamilton, and my contact with Cynthia Pearson, who made all things seem bright and wonderful, left me with the unexpected notion that I could rejoin the brotherhood of respectable men, that I could be useful once more. The thought of it was every bit as intoxicating as the wine.