All God's Children

by Aaron Gwyn

  When twilight came, she left her picksack on the ground, walked off a ways and made water, though she didn’t void her bladder completely. She bore down, pinched off her stream, walked to the tree line to observe the road, then crossed and made water in the woods on the far side. Then she recrossed the road and finished in a third location.

  Doubling back, she slung her picksack, and started out in earnest.

  It was evening of the next day when she heard the barking of hounds. Or thought she heard them. Maybe it was the wind. She tried making water, but her stream wouldn’t come. She just squatted there, trembling.

  She walked down to the road and knelt. She heard the wind in the pines. She heard the birds calling. She went on up the thoroughfare, and she’d made it a quarter mile maybe, when she heard dogs quite clearly. She stopped, and stood there, and tried to think.

  You’re all right, she told herself, using her mother voice, mothering up her courage. You just keep on.

  She went quickly as she could. She was still wearing Haverford’s shirt, but she could only use it once. She wasn’t certain how well it would work, or if it would work at all. The dusk came on, and the road forked, and when she heard the hounds crying, they sounded very close. She believed she was only a few miles from Pennsylvania and that the left-hand road went to Morgantown. The map was shifting in her head; it was hard to picture with the dogs so close.

  There was a stand of spruces just yonder, and she hurried to them, took off Haverford’s shirt, and tied it to the highest limb she could reach, standing on her tiptoes, making a knot of the sleeves. She didn’t think you could see the garment from the road, and she wondered if that mattered.

  Then she climbed down the hill, took the right-hand road, and that night she stepped onto the free soil of Pennsylvania.

  Later, she’d claim she had felt it right away, but maybe that was just a trick of memory. She was sleepy all of a sudden. Comfort washed through her like a wave. Why would the fear leave if it wasn’t Pennsylvania?

  It felt like freedom to her.

  * * *

  She slept in a grove of cedar, and her dreams were cedar dreams. Her mistress’s cedar chest, or gewgaws Anne’s father had carved, lined up on her bureau in rows. There was something in the wood that kept bugs away.

  She woke to daylight slanting in from the east. Men were standing beside her with their dirty boots and britches. She didn’t know how long the men had been there, how long they’d been watching. She had the sense she’d fallen from the sky, and that these men had crawled up from their hovels to see what sort of being had landed.

  One of the men was Mister Haverford. She would not think of him as master, not here in Pennsylvania. She’d outwitted him and his dogs too. However you sliced it, she had mastered him.

  But here he was standing over her, staring hard and cold.

  He toed her with his boot.

  “Get up,” he said.

  She laid there. Her pulse slapped at her temples. She had the notion if she ignored him, maybe he’d go away. It was foolish, but he had no authority up here. There was no slavery in Pennsylvania.

  Then he reached down, grabbed her by the shoulders, and yanked her to her feet.

  His touch woke her all the way. The strength of men always surprised her. Just the unfairness of it made her furious. If you had a rifle, she thought. Or a gun you could hold in your hand. She thought about the knife in her picksack, but it was too late.

  Because now Haverford was dragging her from the cedar grove, down the hill to the road. There were horses standing there. There was a buggy. Two hounds sat staring at her with their beaten, brown eyes.

  Haverford marched her to the buggy and told her to climb up.

  “I will not,” she said, but her voice was weak and wavering. She wasn’t even sure he’d heard.

  All around, men had been speaking to one another. Now they went quiet. She heard a crow begin to squawk. She thought how crows had wings they could use, and that seemed like more unfairness. Who was capturing the crows of Pennsylvania? If anyone needed wings, it was her. She was so frightened it seemed the fear alone would lift her. Terror would suck her into the sky.

  Haverford’s green eyes were staring. His brow crinkled, like he was thinking of how to pose a question.

  But there was no question. He balled his fist and struck her in the stomach. All the air fled her body and she fell forward into his embrace. He caught her by the waist and slung her over his shoulder like a sack of flour, stepping up and depositing her on the buggy’s rear seat.

  Then they were moving. There was the clop of horses’ hooves and the jingle of tack. She was still trying to inhale. Motes swam before her watering eyes, and her lungs were burning.

  She thought how they were always taking away her breath. You needed breath for words, but they didn’t want to hear her words. Not in Pennsylvania. They only wanted to hear a song they’d taught her, some poem they’d had her memorize.

  You start saying your own words, they closed you up like a box.

  DUNCAN LAMMONS

  —TEXAS, 1828–1835—

  We set out from DeWitt’s Colony and started up the river. It was rough country, but it beat the beard off living with slavers.

  The next few months we went from settlement to settlement. In addition to knowing the farrier’s trade, Noah had acquired considerable skill as a gunsmith. There were plenty of old rifles that needed work, but we were hard pressed to find tools, and no one had money to pay us for the labor. We ended up establishing a blacksmith’s shop at Bell’s Landing where we did a fair business for the budding town of Columbia. For an entire year, we shoed horses, mended tack, and attended every wedding we could find. Such ceremonies were special in those days, where, after the bride and groom had said their vows, the chairs would be cleared away for dancing. Your frontier folk purely loved to dance. We rapped the puncheon floor of many a house and made the splinters fly. A number of us still wore moccasins, and as you couldn’t make a satisfactory commotion in such slippers, you’d have to swap shoes with someone and take turns. We didn’t mind a bit. We wired, and shuffled, and cut the pigeon’s wing, didn’t consider the occasion a success unless we’d kicked the floor down to bare dirt by morning.

  This was before the land was lousy with Baptists who’d no sooner landed on Texas shores than they went about convincing people that dancing was little better than lying in rut with your neighbor’s wife. I can remember the first of these self-proclaimed prophets coming to Bell’s Landing to spread libel against our beloved form of recreation. Thomas Pilgrim was his name. Noah heard him missionate one Sunday and asked me about it. His family back in Tennessee had not been as religious as my own, and all this talk about the evils of the dance struck him as rather strange. He reckoned Baptists must be awfully virtuous if they’d pruned their conduct all the way down to dancing.

  “Well,” I told him, “I’m pretty well acquainted with Baptist virtue. My pap had a saying about them: ‘Invite two Baptists over and they won’t drink a drop of your whiskey. Invite one, he’ll drink all of it.’”

  * * *

  It seemed the farther I got from Pap, the more I thought about him. He was a hard man in many respects, but he was no hypocrite. He took his approach to everything from King David: whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might.

  He certainly didn’t laze about. He worked in his tanning shop and was deacon in his church. In his spare time, he preached the Gospel.

  I think he and Mama had wanted a big family, but all they got was me. For a long time, that seemed to be enough.

  Then, round my eighteenth birthday, me and Dan Yarborough went on this hunting trip. We were only supposed to be out three days.

  We shot a young doe our first morning, and the next, got ourselves a turkey. The game seemed to run right into our barrels. Three days turned into a week, and th
at week into several more. We hunted and fished and built a little dugout in the side of this cliff. Dan and I shared everything. He was a couple of years older than me, soft-featured and somewhat feminine. We’d been raised together and had always been thick. The longer we lived out there, the thicker we got. It is difficult to explain, but it seemed quite natural to us; I never stopped to ruminate on how it might look from outside. Didn’t feel like there was an outside. The wider world seemed to drift away. I lost track of how much time had passed or if time was passing at all. St. Paul says that it is a shame for one man to lie with another, but out there in our wilderness, we felt no shame at all.

  When Pap managed to track us down, two months had slipped by. I woke one morning and heard a horse crunching through the leaves, and knew it was my father before I even stepped foot outside. I combed my hands through my hair and hurried to meet him, leaving Dan sleeping in the dirt.

  I couldn’t see Pap or his horse just yet, though I could hear it crisp and clear. I straightened myself up and tried to count back through the days to when Dan and I had left.

  Tell him you been hunting, I thought. Show him all the pelts.

  Then there he was, winding through the tall oaks on his gelding, Young Roger. He took one look at me and it was like my skin was made of glass.

  “Duncan,” he said, and his voice sounded like he was trying to wake himself from a dream.

  All of a sudden, the world came rushing back; I felt filthy and wrong.

  Pap’s eyes were a clean shade of blue. I could see myself reflected in them. It’d never struck me that he was especially proud of who I was, but seeing his cheeks go red with embarrassment—it felt like someone had kicked the wind out of me. How could he know what had transpired ’tween me and Dan? Was I just imagining it?

  “Duncan,” he said again, and his voice was already different. He started climbing down from Young Roger. I glanced over and saw that Dan had crawled from the dugout to stand there beside me.

  “Mister Lammons,” he said, nodding. You could tell he was trying to hold his voice steady. For half a second, it was calm enough to convince me everything would be all right.

  Pap just stared at him.

  He can’t know what you’ve been up to, I decided. It is just your scruples coming awake.

  Then, quick as that, he knocked Dan to the ground, seized his throat in both hands, and commenced to throttle him. I’d never seen Pap lose control of himself. I thought he’d kill Dan, sure enough.

  If I hadn’t pulled him off, he very well might’ve. Pap and I wrestled around a few moments, and then I felt the heart go out of him. The three of us just sat there, trying to get our wind.

  Directly, Pap started to cry.

  * * *

  That was a very hard time. It never occurred to me I could lose my father’s respect, so I had no notion what the loss of it might mean. After a while, he let things lie, and it seemed life might balance back out. I never heard anymore from Dan; it was said he moved out to Virginia.

  But it happened again the next year—William Ross, was the man’s name—and then it happened a third time with Peter Briggs. Peter was a known nancy, and I’d started to acquire a reputation myself.

  Pap could no longer make excuses for me. When I told him I’d asked God’s forgiveness, he said, “That’s fine, Duncan. That is very fine. But there are things folks won’t forgive you for. I pray someday the Lord draws you to Heaven, but the men of this county are liable to elevate you on a rope.”

  Providence had made me as honest a lad as you could ask for—I was shaped to be truthful in both word and deed. I didn’t view matters of right and wrong as goods to be balanced on the scales of men’s ambition.

  Why then had God seen fit to hollow out this defect at my core that forced me to adopt stealth and secrecy? Feeding this unnatural hunger required me to become a regular Freemason, a citizen of signs and signals, fearing all the while they’d be read by the wrong man—and one wrong man was all that it took.

  I hated this thing inside me, resenting the hold it had. How many times had I prayed for God to remove it, this soft, flawed place in my flesh that throbbed and hurt and threatened my being, dividing my attentions and allegiances. I knew if the Lord would only extract this tumor, I would be whole in the eyes of the world. And in my father’s eyes.

  So, when I attended that talk in Morgantown and heard Sterling Robertson speak about Texas, I thought that maybe I could leave this thing behind. Maybe my heart would be different on the frontier, and those old feelings wouldn’t follow me there.

  At Bell’s Landing, I’d done tolerably well. Noah Smithwick had become a brother to me—I was never afflicted with untoward longings for him—and I felt that I’d begun to make myself anew.

  But young Noah began to contemplate schemes for acquiring wealth. He fell in with three recent arrivals to the country—John Webber, Joe McCoy, Jack Cryor—and they pooled their funds, bought 1,000 pounds of leaf tobacco, and decided they’d smuggle it into Mexico and make themselves a killing. I watched the four of them set out one morning with a crew of mules. I warned Noah not to venture south of the Nueces, but yonder he went.

  Before departing, he sold me his share of the blacksmith shop, and I made a go of it for a while. But it was not the same without his company, and Bell’s Landing seemed drearier by the day. Finally, I unloaded the whole shebang on a man named Furnash and headed for San Felipe on the Brazos.

  I saw that Noah and I had gone wrong in settling at Bell’s Landing, in ever settling down at all. I suppose another man in my circumstances might have gone courting to find himself a bride, but I was not another man, and having been exiled from the family I’d been born into, I wasn’t keen to find another: I did not want to merely remake the thing that had scorned me. I’d started to suspect that the very notion of family was part of our country’s problem, yet another way men forfeited their freedom and assumed the yoke of servitude.

  I’d developed a rather elaborate philosophy on such matters. What were men meant for? To follow behind a horse and plow and break their backs in the fields? Surely, the Southern masters did not think so, and in their unwillingness to stoop to such labor, enslaved others to do this work in their stead. This was a great evil, but wasn’t agriculture itself a wicked practice? And with the tilling of God’s soil to produce wheat and corn for the storehouse, other ills followed: the city, for instance, where men lived atop each other and spread all manner of contagion, for, without grain, there could be no city of any size, no throng of folks piled together to suffer.

  I did not think it was the Creator’s intention for men to be tied to one place. Life was motion and I regarded the owning of land and the responsibilities it entailed as a kind of death—and not a quick, clean one either.

  It was in the nature of man to hunt and roam. The thrill I received from stalking game and eating meat I’d killed myself was suggestive of the great joy that awaited anyone willing to untether himself from farms or cities. The promise of Texas was the promise of movement—wild meat enabled such a life—an unsettled land that barely knew the blade of a plow or the curse of an urban boulevard. Out here, a man could ride and hunt at his leisure, and if you could assemble a band of other like-minded folks and establish a tribe for yourself—well, this was the only family that interested me, and one of your own making: not handed down like a poor-fitting shirt.

  * * *

  I wouldn’t see Noah for another five years. In the interim, I moved from place to place, made money and lost it, made friends and lost them, made a few enemies which I’ve kept to this day. Men are fickle in their affections, but once a man extends his hatred, he seldom takes it back.

  By the fall of 1835, the country was in an uproar of revolution against the Mexicans and that old tyrant Santa Anna. I threw in with those calling for independence and ended up mustering into the ragtag army assembling at Gonzales wher
e the Texians had won their first victory. I rode up through the rows of makeshift tents and made my way down the mud street. When I passed a pinewood shop and heard the clank of a steel, I glanced over and who should be bent over an anvil hammering at a bayonet but Noah Smithwick himself.

  He looked up and saw me, and we commenced to laughing. The loneliness in my heart vanished like smoke.

  “Well, well,” I called. “Has the millionaire decided to cast his lot with us poor Texas rabble?”

  “Millionaire, my eye!” he said, and once I’d dismounted and secured my horse to the snubbing post, he told me how his entrepreneurial adventure had quickly gone awry, how his thousand pounds of contraband tobacco had been confiscated by Mexican authorities, how he’d taken sick with an ague and would have perished had it not been for the kindness of women.

  We spent the next several days watching men file into camp. There was no agreement as to uniform; in truth, there was no uniform. The stragglers were clad in buckskin breeches or homespun pantaloons. They wore the old tri-corner hat, or caps of animal fur. Here and there, a sombrero. Their outfits were filthy, and if we had a common color to our dress, it was the black of grime.

  When we weren’t examining the slovenly men we were to fight beside in the coming battles, we busied ourselves making flags, molding bullets and balls, bushing cannon. The best thing these would-be warriors had going for them was the flintlock rifles they carried—good Kentucky long-rifles that put the Mexicans’ smoothbores to shame.

  Evenings, we all sat around the campfire. Noah had been elected lieutenant, so I made sure to salute him every chance I got. Most of us had yet to see a moment’s combat, and the camp had an almost celebratory air. Noah once remarked to me that there was no common cause in those early days: some men were for independence, some for the Constitution of ’24, and some for just about anything so long as it ended in a fight.