by Alix Hawley
* * *
The morning comes clear. It is a warm day. No clouds.
VOICES BREAK the quiet first, blurred by splashing. In one of the back bastions, guns catch and lock, the men aim. Now comes more calling, clearer. And laughing.
When I get out the rear gate and across to the riverbank, I see Squire’s boys with the four horses they have taken out to water. They have mounted two and are in the river up to the animals’ shins. Little Isaiah is prodding his horse with his knob-knees, leaning over its neck and pointing to the ridge ahead. I shout:
—Moses! Isaiah!
I run towards them. One of my sore feet tears open, but I stagger up and run on. Moses hears me, I see him turn. He pulls up his horse and calls back in his grave fashion:
—The Virginia soldiers, Uncle Daniel. Red coats, see!
Red coats. He is not wrong. Red coats, bright as flags, moving out of the line of trees and behind the ridge. A stream of them. Then another stream, bare-skinned and paint-skinned, a long file of horses and Indians, making a great loop in our direction. Hundreds.
—Boys! Get back here now!
My voice rips from my throat, it tears my eyes away from the moving army downriver. Moses pulls up his horse and reaches for Isaiah’s bridle, his face is quizzical.
—Now!
I run into the water as best I can, Squire overtakes me. He leaps up behind Isaiah and pounds the horse’s sides with his heels. Moses follows quick. I snatch the bridles of the other two animals drinking at the river’s edge and turn them back.
—Do not shoot! Do nothing!
This I shout to the guards in the bastions and on the walls. Do nothing, nothing! My eye lands on Old Dick still aiming. Dick, if you shoot now I will rip out your goddamned eyes that think they see all there is. Two of our scouts come riding hard, one on each side of the river, they see we know already what has come. What is here.
We smash the back gate shut behind us. Jemima freezes in her doorway. The fort seems a tiny world made of twigs, a bird’s nest. My breath comes tight through my nose, the horses’ breathing the same after their run. I tell the women to get the children inside the cabins, and they spin off at a run. I tell Moses to take Isaiah and go look after his ma and he runs also. Isaiah’s small face turns for one look back at me before his brother hauls him away. Dick has not dropped his gun by an inch and his thick finger is jerking back and forth about the trigger. The others in the bastions are frozen with their weapons ready also. I shin up to the parapet between the two front bastions, keeping my head low. Near me young Johnny Gass’s freckled hands shake as he looks out. He is fourteen years of age, I have near forgotten how close to being boys some of the men are.
Between the spikes of the logs I see the first of the long line of Indians reach the patchy meadow beyond the farthest of our corn. Shawnee paint and silver jewellery flare in the light. A lesser number are Cherokee. His name flies into my brains: Cherokee Jim, the murderer.
Murder.
The great tail of them coils into the meadow like a snake eating itself for lazy enjoyment. My guts clench. My girl is beside me, her tough small hand on my back. I tell her:
—Get down for God’s sake, get indoors. They are here.
—I want to see them.
—Christ, Jemima.
Johnny Gass is hissing behind my head:
—Sir, they are cutting our trees.
I look. He is right. Some of the Indians have gone to the orchard of young peach trees at the edge of the field.
—What are they doing?
Jemima says it, her breath warms my shoulder, and we see them stack the feathery tops of the thin boughs they have cut and begin to cut more. These men are Shawnee, their eyes are painted up black and red, two are wearing hunting shirts with tiny bells sewn on. Four of them go back towards the woods, we hear their axes clang. Then they each return with a fair-sized pine, they limb these and drive them as posts into the ground some sixty yards from our front gate. The rest make a roof with the peach boughs. It is quite an arbour.
Old Dick is muttering: Do nothing. He turns my words to spit and poison. He is not the only one speaking, everyone is turning about asking what this is, what they mean to do. I call:
—They are beyond our range, you know it and they do. And we are beyond theirs. Do not waste your shot. Wait.
Jemima breathes:
—Daddy, are they coming in?
—No.
As I say it I see the four Shawnee retreat to the meadow where the great army has looped itself. Someone else is walking out slow and holding a great truce flag that flaps very white before his face. All our guards take aim. I hold up my hand. He has no gun, we cannot shoot a man asking for peace.
Is it peace?
My ribs go soft in me, I move my ankles about in their crouch. Peace. The thought of it washes all through my chest. Before I can pull her back, Jemima raises her head above the wall to get a clearer view. She says loud:
—It is a black. Do they have slaves?
I kneel, I lift my head also. I know it, the slow rolling walk, the princely indolence. The man carries on with the flag before his face, but I know his face without seeing it. He climbs the cornfield fence until he stands on the top of it some hundred yards from our wall. When his voice comes, I know it also, the cool singing tone of it. He says:
—I am here to speak with your man Boone.
I stand. I shout:
—I am here, Pompey.
In my ear Jemima says loud:
—You know him, Daddy?
He drops the flag. His skin shines dark in the noon, his teeth shine as he smiles. I want to grin back at him though my heart is banging at me like a set of fists. Yes I do know him, and he knows everything of me. The first Shawnee words he taught me rock about in my brains, waking themselves: Neppa. Neppoa. Sleeping. Dead.
He is with the Shawnee yet. He has never escaped, has he tried to do it without me? I could not help you get free, Pompey, and here you are with the knowing of it spread over your face. I can see the bright blue of your headscarf. A trade thing. You would have made a fine trader in another life, if you were magicked white. But no such magic here, or not for you. You wanted a new life and here I am in mine. Though it is all old in truth, all of it.
He stands on the fence-top staring in my direction, smiling and smiling. A sudden breeze runs over the corn before him, which ruffles like the back of an angry dog. He stands silent and looking all along the fort wall, with all the guns bristling from it. He stretches the fingers of one hand at his side, he rubs at his leggings. After a time he calls in his lazy fashion:
—Boone, your father Chief Black Fish has come to accept your surrender, as you promised it to us.
Your father. Us. I hear him weight these words as if he had a stone stored up in his cheek for each one.
Hancock has heard it where he is crouched at a gunslit below the ramparts. He cries out:
—You hear? Boone promised!
The men along the parapet keep their guns on Pompey but swivel their eyes to me. Johnny Gass goes tense as a cat beside us, Jemima’s hand goes flat on my shoulder. Surrender is scratched hard on each eye and into my girl’s palm. I shout:
—Is that so!
It is all I can think to say. Hancock is speaking very urgent to someone below but I cannot listen, I will not. Pompey reaches into his shirt. He pulls out a paper and opens it but does not look at it, he goes on looking at me. He could say anything at all, he has always been one for storing things up and then telling them. What is he going to tell them of me? My heart gallops harder. He calls:
—I have in my hand a letter from Governor Hamilton guaranteeing your people’s safety if you will all go with us to Detroit. This is another promise you made.
In his bastion Dick yells big-throated with his cheek pressed tight to his gun:
—Give us the letter! Leave it on the ground and get back.
Some of the other men take up his shout. Billy Smith comes caref
ul along the rampart to me:
—Captain, Colonel Callaway is right. We ought to read it, if it has come with them from Detroit.
Billy’s pale eyes say nothing, but he does not call me Dan now. He stands with his back to the spiked wall and says only:
—They use a black as their interpreter?
Pompey calls:
—Governor Hamilton has sent his king’s men all the way from Quebec to help you.
—I know this black well. He is bad trouble.
This from Hancock below, bobbing his head like a wise old man, his upturned face grinning at me. I think to tell him he does not know Pompey in the least, but this is no help here. Squire and Ned stand behind him looking up also, their puzzlement as clear as anyone else’s. Billy begins to speak but as he does so Pompey’s voice carries to us again:
—Boone, is this your famous daughter with you?
His voice is dark and amused. Your daughter is a whore. He does not say it but I know the line well enough. And then it comes through the air. All the Shawnee know it, for some it is their only English. Whore whore whore.
Jemima pushes round me and leans out with her hands on two log points. She is scarlet-faced and bawls from the bottoms of her lungs:
—Yes I am his daughter!
A short hooting comes from the Indian army, faint as a tired owl. The chiefs have sat themselves in the peach arbour, their thin laughing carries to us also. Jemima, I did not want you ever to know what they say of you, but how can you not know. Everyone here has said such things of you too. I pull her back, she is set to yell something more poisonous, but before she can do it I stop. We all stop.
A man is walking from the arbour towards Pompey. A Shawnee, with the warrior’s lock and chief’s paint and silver brooches over the bright red blanket wrapped round him. He takes his time to climb the fence, he stands at Pompey’s side. He is not a tall man. He circles his mouth with his hands. His call is clearer than Pompey’s, not so singsong. Urgent and sorrowful at once, like a horn in the earliest morning.
—Sheltowee. Sheltowee.
My father is calling me. Sheltowee is the name they gave me, it goes straight through me, it is my name.
* * *
I am down from the parapet and at the front gate before my heart can give another beat. I pull up the bar and am out before any of the guards has time to shut his wide-open mouth and stop me. The gate bangs closed at my back. There is talk from inside the walls but I walk out across the flat. I am all pain again.
No one on the fence now, I cannot see them. I carry on walking slow. When I am close to the corn I stop, I hear a rustling, I close my eyes a moment and I listen to the low hum in the air.
They are here. They are coming round the side of the cornfield. Pompey and Black Fish and another chief, an old and important one in a wine-coloured jacket with a fringe of lace round its collar. He is one I know from our long walk to Detroit with the Shawnee. I do not know the jacket, he must have taken it somewhere, perhaps at another of the settlements. But I know the bones of his face and his eyes, which do not change when he sees me. My own face has the feel of an anthill about to break open.
Smooth your expression you goddamned ape.
Pompey has a greyish blanket folded over the shoulder of his shirt and cinched in by his belt in Shawnee fashion. As he moves closer his smell strikes me, cloves and heat. Perhaps he means to wrap me up and take me to be reborn a Shawnee here in the Kentucky River.
They will wash the whiteness from me again, they will shave my hair that has grown in, they will take me back and it will be my home. The walls of my throat close and I cough up a sour taste. Pompey folds his arms and says:
—Sheltowee. Chief Black Fish and Chief Moluntha.
He talks as though we do not know each other at all. Well perhaps we do not.
I am afraid to look Black Fish full in the face. I am looking at where his hands are folded beneath the blanket when he speaks. He says:
—My son.
His voice catches and I look, I look in his eyes and they are black as ever, they are shining with tears. His face is tired but the same, he is hardly older than I am, this man who took me as his own son after we killed his. He is speaking in English, he is speaking straight to me. His hand comes out from the red blanket, its palm up and its fingers curled like a beggar’s cup. He steps towards me and says in Shawnee:
—What made you run away from me, my son?
—Father.
The word cuts its way from my mouth as if it is a blade. His face is wet now with his silent weeping. I take his open hand, the skin is dry. I feel Pompey and Moluntha watching us, I feel the fort watching us. I pull in a hard breath before I am able to say:
—I wanted—I wanted to see my wife and children so badly that I could not stay any longer.
The Shawnee words are strange shapes in my mouth. In my mind Rebecca and the children are brittle as frost, they will melt away. I weep too, my father and I are weeping as the sun blazes on our heads. My father holds hard to my hand, he touches the side of my head where my hair has grown. Now he takes the other hand also and he says very gentle:
—You have a wife and a daughter. I gave you these, Sheltowee.
—I know it.
Where are they, are they here? Methoataske and Eliza, my girls. But I cannot ask it, I cannot or I will break. I drop my head and feel the long bones of my father’s hands beneath his skin. In the same soft fashion he says:
—If you had asked me I would have let you come.
All I am able to do is shake my head. Pompey gives a great bow and says we ought to go to the arbour now to talk. I look to the fort, where hot sun flashes from all the guns. Again I shake my head and I say:
—I cannot go so far.
Pompey gives a short call, Skillawethetha, boys, and in a moment two come with some of the peach boughs and begin to fan us as Pompey pulls his blanket from his shoulder and belt and lays it on the ground with a great flourish and a smile. These boys do not look at me and I do not think I know them.
Black Fish takes his hands from mine and gestures to Chief Moluntha to sit first. The old man sits straight. His scalp lock is long and sleek with a streak of white in it, it slips halfway down the back of his velvet jacket. I wipe my face on my shirt and sit between him and Black Fish, I keep myself a distance from both of them. Pompey walks about along the edge of the corn, he looks over the fields as though he were a lord.
All at once Moluntha barks to him, and he ambles over with his hands behind his back and his face amiable. The chief holds out his hand, Pompey bows and gives him the paper he has kept tucked into his shirt. In Shawnee Moluntha says:
—Here is a letter from the white chief, he reminds you what you have promised.
He hands the letter back to Pompey, who holds it out to me on his palm as if it were a tray. He is swallowing a grin. I take the paper and I look. It is all looping hand and great inked capital letters.
Surrender. Promises. Your people. A long signature, Henry Hamilton His Majesty The KING’S Governor at Fort Detroit and et cetera.
Moluntha looks at me now with his heavy lined brow lifted. He says:
—You know already what it says. I will tell you what he told me with his own mouth. If your people insist on trying to stay in this place, he cannot protect you. He will not be responsible for what becomes of you, women and children and all. Will you be responsible for it?
Pompey begins to interpret in English but I put up my hand. I know what has been said. I am responsible for everything, I have always known it. My insides burn and the top of my head is burning through. The swish of the boughs above us has the feel of a lazy swarm.
Black Fish nods and again Pompey reaches into his shirt. He brings out a pouch of soft beaten leather, sewn all over with tiny patterns in thin white gut. I have seen my Shawnee mother doing such fancy work in firelight. The small breeze shifts the cornstalks one by one and I see women’s hands moving, the same soft quick moving in air. M
y own old ma in Carolina, in your grave a year. I have not seen it, though I can picture your hands still, very easy. And if you were here, what would you think of it?
My Shawnee father takes the pouch and draws it open very careful. Out comes a thick long belt strung with tiny shells of different colours, red and white and black. It is fancier work yet, a subtle thing. Black Fish lifts it by both ends so it is strung between his hands, I can see its weight and its strength. He holds up his left hand first and he says:
—Detroit.
Now he raises the other end and he says:
—This place.
The tears have dried on his cheeks, his eyes have shrunk back to the black rock I know. It seems to me now that they can breach my skin. I rub my shirt sleeve over my own damp face and in Shawnee I say:
—These colours?
Pompey crouches beside Black Fish and points to the belt. He says in loud English:
—Red is the road of war. White is the road we can walk together. Black is death. You see?
He speaks as if I am an idiot child, as if I am little Andy Johnson playing the fool at Chillicothe. Pompey is playing the servant with Black Fish more than ever, and more than that, he is showing me his closeness to my father. How truly he understands him. What a poor rotten son I am in comparison.
Moluntha sits unmoving, I can see his pulse slow in his neck. In Shawnee I speak direct to Black Fish:
—Which am I to choose?
My Shawnee father’s eyes crack again for a single instant. A horsefly gets too close and is brained by the sweep of the fanning boughs. His face turns to follow it over the ground.
—Father.
But he says nothing, and Moluntha says nothing, they could sit there for all eternity saying nothing as I know. To the boys Pompey says:
—Fan this good man a little faster, the day is warm.
I wish to say, No need to act the slave with me, Pompey, I do not own you. But I do not say it. I see his eyes blaze up again, I see the corners of his lips rise, I know he is turning over some private knowledge in his mind. I do not yet wish to know what it is. Again I look at the bright shells sewn into the belt, again I put my sleeve to my face.