“I thought I should settle this with him,” she told me, “because you were not here to ask him yourself.”
I did not rise to this bait. “Thank you,” was all I said, and turned to look away from her.
It was a gray morning with rain-clouds smudging the northern horizon, and the breeze struck coldly as it brought us upriver. For the first few miles the country would be called dull by someone who did not know it, since it was made entirely of marshes and hardly seemed a part of the earth at all. Everywhere I looked I saw only miniature soft cliffs, streaked with slime; shining mud-heaps; a ribcage of decaying timbers, wrapped in a cloak of sea-lavender.
All apparently cheerless; all apparently ugly. Yet to my eyes the greatest beauties in the world, with the most beautiful creatures living among them—the geese that craned up from their grazing to honk as we passed them by, and the godwits and sanderlings that blew away from our shadow and turned the air silver, and the curlews calling the sound of their own sad name over and over.
As we drew onward, and the traffic of other boats increased around us, the land became more solid and fertile. Here, with as much curiosity as I had felt while cruising along the Mississippi, and seeing all manner of novelties for the first time, I found cottages standing among cornfields that had recently been harvested, and hamlets with people leaving their homes for work, or standing in groups talking, or pausing with their hands on their hips to watch us pass. Where I could not see things exactly, because they were too far off, I imagined them. The dusty leaves on the elm trees fringed with soft little teeth. The plum-colored brick-rubble used to fill a hole in the surface of a lane. The knapped flints on a church tower and the clever pattern of their black-and-white facets. The blue caps worn by men in the fields, and their green and yellow waistcoats, and their boots laced with string, and the fringed bonnets on the women, and their clogs, and their long dresses stained with mud along the hems.
As each bend of the river brought us into more populous country, and the ragged shoreline lifted into pasture, and the bare mud-banks into hills covered with trees, such a feeling of tenderness swelled inside me that I struggled for breath. These were my fields, I told myself—or rather felt in the veins of my body. My fields; and my salty inlets winding between them; and my fishermen’s sheds; and my bridges across my streams; and my ponies drinking from my troughs, eating my grass.
Then all that gliding ended. All that gliding, and absorbing, and praising, because Natty left my side to ask the captain for his permission to set me ashore.
I must now change the way of telling my story, for the simple reason that everything previously settled was suddenly uprooted, and everything continuous was broken. I saw the next several minutes in fragments, and could not easily join them together.
A sail was reefed. The Mungo slowed to a walking pace. The rowing-boat strapped at our stern was lowered into the water, with a crew-mate working the oars to keep her steady. I thanked the captain and collected my bundle from our cabin. I found my way back to the daylight. The gray daylight, and the cold air. I walked to the stern. I said goodbye to Natty.
I could not believe it was me speaking, me living and breathing. When I wrapped my arms around her she stood very still, and I felt the bones of her shoulder blades. When I bent to kiss her she turned aside so I only brushed her cheek, which the breeze had made dry and cold. I told myself to keep moving.
What could I think, in such a rush of things happening? I had no wish to think. I had no capacity, because the weight of my heart had dragged everything out of my brain. Out of my body, too, so letting my hands slide away from Natty, turning away from her, climbing over the rail of the Mungo, finding the rope ladder that hung there, reaching the rowing-boat, sitting in the prow with my bundle on my knees, untying the tow-rope, watching my crew-mate heave at his oars, reaching a little tumbledown jetty protruding from the shore, climbing the slippery steps, feeling them heave beneath me after my long time at sea, grasping the dry rail at the top, hearing mates on board the Mungo holler that my oarsman must hurry or else be left behind, seeing him set off and tether the rowing-boat and climb the rope ladder again, then watching the Mungo unfurl her topsail and accelerate away: so all these things were quite separate from me, perfectly foreign and incomprehensible.
Until I saw Natty standing in the stern of the ship. She was too far off already, not herself but a silhouette. And yet from the way she waved one hand above her head, and continued waving until she vanished round the next bend of the river, I told myself I knew well enough what she was feeling. If I had not done this, I could not have withstood the silence that followed, or begun to make my way.
It was an hour’s walk, or perhaps half an hour. I do not remember. I remember instead the prints of gulls’ feet in the mud as I jumped over gullies and creeks. I remember doubling back on myself sometimes. I remember the ground improving, and a towpath made of sandy-colored stones. I remember a church bell tolling, a dark red sound blossoming over the fields. I remember touching the satchel inside my shirt, and my father coming more and more powerfully into my mind.
I saw him accepting the necklace when I held it out to him; I heard the pieces slide together as he bowed his head and put it on, then watched them separate and hang in place against his chest. I watched the animals begin their dance inside the silver, bringing their brightness to the English air.
And at the same time I remember my mind stalling, because I had no idea what I might say to my father, how I might begin to explain what we had done.
Not even now, after so long to get ready.
Not even when I saw the Hispaniola on the horizon, with its roof sloping down to the ground on the landward side, and the outbuildings where we kept our puncheons.
And still not when I drew close enough to notice the smudges of green on the clapboard walls, and the brick chimneys where the mortar was almost rotted away, and the windows turning their blind eyes.
And still not again when I reached the front of the house and found the rose-bushes my father had planted there all smothered in weeds, and a part of the towpath fallen into the water, and the window of my own room, the window I had looked through to see Natty for the first time, cloudy with dust.
I took a breath and settled myself; I stepped off the towpath and onto the weeds around the front door.
Locked.
Then round the back, to the other door. Broken glass on the step. Green glass and brown glass. Gin bottles and beer bottles.
This door locked as well.
I stood still for a moment, staring back across the marshes in the direction I had just traveled, and felt the weariness in my legs, in my whole body, so I had to sit down and rest against the house, which took my weight without a sound.
This was the worst possible homecoming, then; the worst. It was not Mr. Silver who had died. It was my father. Died and left the house deserted. I could never tell him what I had seen, or show him the treasure I had brought, or ask for his forgiveness. The worst.
I looked up and a face was staring at me. A thin face above a thin neck, with his coat blowing about his ankles. Not a face I knew. One of my father’s customers, perhaps.
“You won’t find a way in there,” he said, and laughed to show he thought I was a fool for trying.
“What?” I asked, squinting up at him.
The man opened and closed his mouth; he was old, and did not have any teeth. He might have been a scarecrow, standing stark against the enormous sky, deluged with its gray light.
“Do you hear those bells?” he asked, as if this was an answer to my question.
I did hear them, still tolling faintly in the distance, as I had heard them when I first came ashore.
“What of it? I asked.
“A famous victory,” he said, and smacked his lips. “We have conquered the Frenchies.”
I began to think he was witless. “A victory?” I said.
“A famous victory with Admiral Nelson,” he went on. “The news
has just come. That’s why they’re ringing the bells. For Trafalgar.”
None of this meant anything to me. I scowled, and banged on the wall of my home with a clenched fist.
“Why is it locked?” I asked, dragging him back to here and now. But he would not easily follow.
“Locked and gone away,” he said.
“Who’s gone away?”
“Mr. Hawkins, of course,” he said, suddenly reproachful, as if I was talking nonsense. “Mr. Hawkins is gone away. Or been led away, rather.”
“Led away? Led away how?”
“Led away by a stranger and months ago. Led away by a stranger and not seen since.”
I cannot say how—I have no memory of standing up—but next thing I was on my feet and floating toward him.
“Tell me!” I ordered.
He cringed and lifted one hand to protect himself. “Tell you what?”
“Tell me everything you know.”
He flinched again, and I saw myself as he saw me, my face salted by the cold Atlantic, with the fire of the wilderness still burning inside me.
“What’s it to you?” he asked, his voice shaking.
“I am his son,” I told him. “I am Jim Hawkins come home. I am his son.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’m very grateful to my wife, Kyeong-Soo Kim, and my friends Tim Dee and Alan Hollinghurst for the help they gave me while I was writing this book. I’m also indebted to the following:
American Indian Portraits: George Catlin, ed. Stephanie Pratt and Joan Carpenter Troccoli (2013)
American Places, Wallace Stegner and Page Stegner (1981)
Changing National Identities at the Frontier, Andrez Resendez (2005)
Chronicle of the Narvaez Expedition, Alvar Nunez Cabeza De Vaca (1555)
Ecological Imperialism, Alfred W. Crosby (1986)
Empire of the Summer Moon, S. C. Gwynne (2010)
The Essential Lewis and Clark, ed. Landon Y. Jones (2000)
The Eternal Frontier, Tim Flannery (2001)
The Fall of Natural Man, Anthony Pagden (1982)
Ghost Riders, Richard Grant (2003)
Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond (1997)
The Indians of Texas, W. W. Newcomb (1961)
La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West, Francis Parkman (1869)
Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain (1883)
The Magic World, ed. William Brandon (1971)
The Mammoth Book of Native Americans, ed. Jon E. Lewis (2004)
Native American Voices, ed. Steven Mintzl (1995)
Native Americans and Anglo-American Culture 1750–1850, ed. Tim Fulford and Kevin Hutchings (2009)
North American Indians, George Catlin (1989)
The Red Man’s Bones, Benita Eisler (2013)
Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Steel, Mark Cocker (1998)
Travels of William Bartram, William Bartram (1791)
Wildlife and Man in Texas, Robin W. Doughty (1983)
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