The New World

by Andrew Motion

The Mississippi.

  The almighty Mississippi.

  But first the cane-brake, growing twenty foot high, where the leaves flashed as bright and sharp as knife-blades. They made it look impossible to breach, but once we pushed inside we found so many animals had already decided it was their home and created trails for us to follow, we moved quite easily, with birds on every side telling one another about our progress. One was a fellow the size of a sparrow, with a yellow-and-green tail twice the length of his body, who owned a completely circular nest of leaves and a front door as round as an eye; I saw him flutter inside as I came close, then study us with his own much smaller eyes as we trampled past.

  Then the next obstacle. This was the belt of mangrove trees that began where the cane-brake ended, all growing so close together, in such tangled falls and clumps, I thought we must have stumbled into a second Thicket. And as these branches forced us to move more and more slowly, I lost my sense of what might happen when the river did finally appear. Would we stand on the bank and hail a boat as she passed? I had imagined something like this ever since Hoopoe first gave us our plan; now I could see it was a ridiculous idea. No boat could stop in such a wilderness—the banks were too overgrown, and too snarled with fallen logs and other obstacles.

  But the river. The almighty river. When I say I saw it at last I am putting everything the wrong way round. I did not see the river. The river saw me—shining through the mangrove trunks, and so vast that even to my eyes, which from childhood had stared at the wide Thames from my bedroom window, it seemed not to be water at all but a stretch of the yellowing sky. Gigantic clouds were buffeting one another; calmer patches opened and stilled; the whole panorama surged and buckled under strange tensions.

  I stopped beside Natty and the Rider, standing on a slippery platform of roots, and now that I could see more clearly I changed my mind. The river was not like the sky. It was like the sea, with the opposite bank more than two hundred yards away, and as distant-seeming as another country. A sea that began hundreds of miles to the north, and ended hundreds of miles to the south. A sea that obviously felt disgusted with the idea of stretching between two such distant points, and therefore bunched itself into countless coils and curves and doublings-back. To describe it as a gigantic snake is an absurd kind of understatement. When I looked to either side of me I saw only a few dozen yards of open water, before the current curved out of sight and was hidden by a bulge of green land.

  “Look,” said the Rider, pointing off to our right beyond the tops of the trees.

  “What?” I was still dreamy.

  “Can you not see?”

  Natty was looking as well and eventually she nodded, saying “Yes”—but only slowly, which made me think she was lying to please the Rider.

  I blinked and focused again—and made out a faint column of smoke.

  “We will go there,” said the Rider.

  “Where is it, though?” I said; I could not decide if the smoke was on our side of the river or on the opposite bank; the twists and turns made it hard to tell.

  The Rider smiled, a rarity for him, and muttered something I did not catch, which I thought might have been “For the last time.” Natty could not have heard him either for she said nothing, but put her head down and began stumbling forward once more, over the tangled roots.

  For the next two or three hours we kept close to trees—so we could have the river in sight and hail a boat if one happened to pass—but sometimes veered into the corn-brake if the way ahead was too difficult. On both courses we made slow headway, and by mid-afternoon had become a melancholy crew, tramping in single file with our hands covered in scratches and our faces swollen by insect-bites. Our ponies seemed equally unhappy, with swamp-stains up to their knees and flies fizzing around their eyes.

  In such a depleted state it was easy to feel that all the effort of the previous weeks was about to prove pointless. “Hoopoe was wrong”: that was the phrase I found myself repeating over and over, and still had in my head like a kind of pulse when our ponies stopped dead.

  We had come to the edge of a clearing where trees had not only been cut down, but stumps pulled from the ground, and a ditch dug for drainage, and a jetty built into the river—a surprisingly strong-looking jetty, made of mangrove trunks with the branches lopped off. Beside this jetty stood a cabin, just as surprising and just as well built. A cabin with a pitched roof and shutters bolted tight, and a chimney at one end made of mud-bricks, and smoke—sweet-smelling woodsmoke—rising straight up to heaven.

  None of us spoke for a moment; we just stared, watching the smoke rise and the light fall, and the mosquitoes dancing in their cloud-formations, and the huge brown river swirling beyond the jetty.

  “Are we safe?” This was Natty, breaking the hush at last.

  The Rider slid to the ground, handed her the reins of his pony, and walked forward without making any reply.

  Someone heard him nevertheless, someone I thought must be a bear when he appeared round the side of the cabin some thirty yards off, because he was completely enveloped in fur—hat, jacket, trousers, even his shoes. But he was a bear carrying a rifle, an ancient flintlock that he held like a pikestaff, and pointed at the Rider’s chest.

  I found his face among the skins—a white man, so far as I could tell, but speaking in a rumbling language I did not immediately recognize as English.

  “Stop right there!” he called, but kept marching forward himself until he was only a yard away from the Rider. Here he halted, and spat out a shining jet of tobacco juice; some of it landed on the Rider’s moccasins.

  The Rider grimaced, raising both hands as a sign that he came in peace.

  “Stop right there!” the bear-man repeated, although the Rider showed no signs of moving. “Stop right there so I can have a good look at you. You too.” Here he waved the point of his musket toward me and Natty, ordering us to let go of our ponies.

  “A goooood look,” the stranger said, now taking one hand off his gun to push back his hat, revealing a larger part of his face. I thought he must be fifty years old, but so weathered he might have been eighty.

  “Indians,” he said, sneering at our costumes and hoisting his gun to indicate that he thought we were nothing more than vermin. But just as his finger tightened around the trigger his companion wandered into the clearing and distracted him.

  This was not a second wild man or even a wild woman but a goose—portly and white with clean orange feet—who apparently had more sense of occasion than her owner, for she ambled forward like a princess about to address an assembly of courtiers. At this stately appearance, we all stood straight and still.

  The goose acknowledged this with a hiss, then waddled up to the Rider and pecked at the dark tobacco-stains on his moccasins; this seemed to reassure the stranger, because he now lowered his gun and spoke more kindly.

  “She likes you,” he said.

  When the Rider said he thought so as well, the stranger lowered his gun still further and gaped in amazement; his teeth, I noticed, were all made of wood.

  “Speak English, do you?”

  When the Rider said he did, the stranger’s puzzlement turned into a smile. A reluctant smile, but a smile none the less. “I ain’t expected that,” he said, and clicked his fingers to bring his goose to heel as though she were a dog.

  “See how obedient she is?” he went on, more amiable still. “Best friend a man could have, a goose. Necessary in these parts, too. In these parts you find all sorts roaming around—so me, I’m always ready, thanks to her. Gives me all the warning I need. New arrivals, you name it. It’s on account of her I saw you coming.”

  As the Rider listened to this he turned to me and Natty and gave a little shrug; it was the first time I had seen him at a loss.

  “Is it just you living here?” I asked—but the stranger ignored my question.

  “English again!” he exclaimed. “And better English, if I ain’t mistook.”

  “Both of us,” Natty chippe
d in.

  The stranger rested the butt of his gun on the ground and leaned forward, narrowing his eyes. “I had you for Indians,” he said at last, when he had scrutinised us from head to foot. “You’re wearing their clothes.”

  “We’re not Indians,” I told him, my voice sounding very formal and strained.

  “What do you reckon you are, then?”

  Natty chuckled. “I can tell you what we were,” she said. “What we are is more difficult to explain.”

  The stranger was too astonished even to smile. “You a girl?” he whispered.

  “I am,” Natty told him without flinching.

  “My, my.” The stranger backed away again and rubbed his chin. “My, my. A girl. I ain’t seen…not in the wilds, anyhow…” He raised an eyebrow at me, then peered at Natty harder than ever.

  “A Negro girl,” he said, under his breath. “A Negro!”

  “That’s right,” said Natty quickly, as though to head off whatever else he might say on this subject. “Or a girl with a Negro mother at any rate. That’ll do for me. And here we have an Indian” (she held out her hand to the Rider), “and here we have an Englishman” (she held out her other hand to me). “We are a whole universe in miniature.” She let her hand drop. “And you,” she went on. “I suppose you’re an American?”

  The stranger was so surprised he forgot to answer. After scratching his chin for a minute he stepped backward, rubbed his hat to and fro, chomped his jaws, found he had no more tobacco in his mouth, ground his face to a halt, and sighed a long sigh.

  “Mr. Williams,” he said eventually, and stretched a leathery hand toward us. “Mr. Achilles Williams. But you can call me Achilles. Most folks do.”

  With this we all returned his greeting and told him our own names—but I could not help wondering about the other folks he had just mentioned. So far as I could tell no one else lived hereabouts, just the goose and a few chickens strutting in the dirt, and a goat tethered to a stake near some outhouses on the farther side of the cabin, where our ponies had drifted away to graze.

  Achilles did not notice me staring around like this; now he had decided we were friends, he only wanted to know more about us. “Where you from then?” he asked, still leaning on his gun like a walking stick.

  “London,” I told him. “In England.” In the corner of my eye, I saw the Rider take a step away, gently shaking his head.

  “London,” Achilles repeated wonderingly. “London, England. You sure? Big old place, I heard. London.”

  “Very big,” I said.

  Achilles needed to think about this for a while longer; he dipped his free hand into a furry pocket attached to his furry coat, took out a plug of tobacco, bit off a corner, half-offered us the remains, returned them to his pocket when we declined, and began chewing.

  “Well,” he said at last. “I’ve seen all sorts coming through here, but never from London. That sure is the most marvelous journey.”

  Natty and I agreed with him; it was a marvelous journey.

  “So—why?” Achilles asked. “What brings you here?” As I knew I must, I then told him how we had been shipwrecked, and wandered inland, and how we now wanted to travel south as soon as a boat came to rescue us; as I did so, I noticed the Rider staring off into the trees, peering into the shadows and frowning.

  Achilles listened without interruption, quietly nodding and chewing. Indeed he became so placid as I continued, I began to think we would stay in his clearing for the rest of the afternoon, perfectly easy and relaxed. But as I came near the end of our story, and was passing quickly over the miracle we had seen with Talks to the Wind, our host interrupted me by banging the stock of his rifle on the ground.

  “I know who you are now,” he said; and although he sounded relieved I felt a prickle of fear.

  “You do?” I said.

  “Your friends told me,” he said. “They were here asking for you—I clean forgot. Said there’d be two of you, though, not three. That’s what threw me.”

  Natty moved to my side but we kept quiet; we did not want to alarm Achilles and set him against us; we did not want to alarm ourselves.

  “Well,” he carried on regardless. “They called themselves friends anyhow, but friends come in all shapes and sizes, I guess. These two were a big Indian fellow and another littler one. A strange one, this little one, I’ll grant you. All covered in paint like a fire-cracker. Said they were looking for you. I didn’t—”

  “When were they here?” I interrupted.

  The stranger pulled his hat down over his forehead, then pushed it back again. “Hard to say. Two days back. Three maybe.”

  “And where are they now?” This was Natty with the Rider crouching beside her, one hand touching the knife in his belt, his eyes still on the trees.

  “Gone,” said Achilles, who had not noticed any of this.

  “Where?” I asked.

  “Who knows. Just gone.”

  “What did you say to them?

  Achilles laughed. “What should I say? Hadn’t seen you then, had I? Hadn’t had the pleasure.”

  “Did they say they’d be back?”

  “Not that I heard,” said Achilles, but speaking more slowly now, peering more narrowly, because at last he had noticed the change in us.

  “You’re not in any kind of trouble, are you?” he asked.

  “You could say that,” I told him.

  “Killed someone?”

  I shook my head.

  “Taken something then?”

  “Maybe.”

  Achilles sucked his teeth. “Indians,” he said contemptuously, as if the Rider could not possibly understand him. As if the Rider did not even exist. “Always thieving things. Gypsies, all of them—thieves and scoundrels.”

  I was about to object to this but lost my chance, because now that Achilles had decided we were not as simple as we seemed, he suddenly quickened his pace. He would not admit to thinking we should take cover, exactly, but he wanted us indoors all the same, even the Rider.

  “Standing out here won’t do us no good,” he said, tucking his rifle under his arm. “Standing out here with me forgetting my manners. So come right along in. Come right along and get out of this damn daylight.”

  He turned on his heel and began marching briskly across the clearing. “Though I tell you something,” he called over his shoulder. “They’ll not be around tonight, those friends of yours. Not tonight and not for a day or two yet. They went north. Seemed to think they might find you there.”

  “You’re sure?” I asked, as we strode behind him.

  “Certain.” He laughed again. “Took off at a great lick—they had ponies too, like you. ’Cept theirs were painted, or the little one’s was, at any rate. Smeared all over with red, like him.” Achilles slowed down again as he said this, and brought us round the side of his cabin where the goat threw us a blethering cry.

  “Surprised they didn’t meet you,” he added as an afterthought. “Reckon they must’ve passed you on the way.”

  “Very likely,” I said, and thought of the thousands of shakings and rustlings we had heard in the cane-brake. Any one of them might have been Black Cloud; we might have passed within inches of him and not known it.

  “No harm though,” Achilles went on, before I had time to think any more about this, or feel the heat of our near-miss. “The hand of the Lord is a powerful hand. Now…here…tie up your animals here.”

  He pointed toward the outhouse, and without any more to-do we collected our ponies, found a place for them among all manner of old sticks and wheels and timbers, fed them oats from a sack, encouraged them to begin a snorting sort of conversation with Achilles’s goat and his goose, then left them and stepped inside the cabin.

  The cabin. In truth, it felt more like a box, with three windows shuttered and only the fourth one open, giving a view of the river. This was done for safety, I thought, and would have made the place very dark if Achilles had not devised an ingenious solution, which was to buy, or
borrow, or barter, or steal a large number of mirrors and hang them on every wall, or lean them against pieces of furniture, or dangle them from the ceiling where they might catch such slivers of sunshine as bounced off the surface of the water and came though the river-window. As a result, the whole interior of his home was continually flickering and shifting.

  This made what I saw next seem all the more disconcerting. While Achilles had assembled a good number of ordinary objects such as a bed and a table and two chairs, his prize possessions were a prodigious number of dead creatures preserved as if still alive, and pinned or nailed or glued onto wooden boards. Small creatures like mice and rats that had been dried in the sun. Opossums and otters. The heads and feet and hooves and skulls of larger animals, including the head of a wolf. Also fish swimming in little dry boxes, and bugs and beetles, and butterflies, and moths, and sea birds and land birds—among them, a brother of the same fellow that had recently looked out at me from his round nest of leaves in the cane-brake.

  Achilles had taken great care with his preparations, and was very proud of the displays he had made, and made a special point of noticing how inoffensive they smelled. Natty and the Rider did not seem entirely convinced by this, and detached themselves to stand near the window and admire the view; but I allowed him to take me on a tour, and so became acquainted with many dozens of bear paws, snake skins, fox masks, turkey wings, and rabbits’ feet, listening to the story of their lives and especially of their deaths, with the goose (who had now followed us indoors) pottering alongside and enjoying the talk as if it had no implications for herself.

  I prefer not to describe in great detail the other kinds of treasure I saw during this diversion, which confirmed my sense that the cabin was as much a museum of loneliness as it was of nature: the scarred workbench where corpses were pegged out ready for dissection; the wooden bowl containing dozens of white knuckle bones; the collection of sticks marked with notches at regular intervals to show the passage of—I did not know what; boats that had stopped at the jetty below the window, perhaps. Or days that Achilles had lived by himself in the wilderness. Or years.