I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History
Page 22
'Good news,' said Gerry, picking idly at the huge scab on that bald and weather-beaten pate. 'Just seen an eight-foot black king snake back there, so I don't think we'll be bothered by much else.' This apparently took into account the thumb-sized ants I could see scuttling about on the nearby tarpaulin that would be my bed for the next four nights, if not the ground-hornet nest Gerry now located a few paces behind my haversack pillow. 'Watch for that if you need to visit the woods in the night,' he said, though I'd long since vowed to preclude any such excursion by the simple expedient of wetting myself. Then he squinted up at a now potent sun, assessed the hour by counting the hand-widths that separated it from the horizon, and suggested 'a little walk with the boys'.
Some years ago, while traversing Spain in the sole company of the donkey previously alluded to, my expansive ignorance of farmyard-class hoofed animals evolved into deep respect. Mutual understanding, interdependence, companionship – just some of the factors that ought to have underpinned this respect, which was in depressing reality dominated by a base fear of having my genitals pulped by an incoming Buckeroo number. As Gerry and I walked towards his browsing behemoths, one by one they raised their huge horned heads from the grass to survey our approach with curiosity, hatred, dread, affection, whatever it was that went on behind that bland, impenetrable gaze. How sad that I was already defining my relationship with these magnificent animals, each four-square and flourishing as a period livestock portrait, by their ability to injure me. Totting up the hooves and horns on display, all I saw were twenty-four new ways of meeting a ridiculous end.
Hailing George, William, Charles and James ('four of my least favourite kings') by name, Gerry brought his herd to attention and then swiftly to heel. With a series of gentle calls and grunts, and just the merest tug on a nose-ring, he somehow persuaded the rear oxen to reverse back over the various bits of tackle attached to the wagon's towing pole; another gesture and they bowed their heads, allowing Gerry to affix the pair to a mighty neck yoke burnished with age and use. In a moment more he had manoeuvred and attached the front two, then with a modest chorus of hups, a cacophony of trundling creaks and clanks and a wave to Jacob and Butch, the six of us and our wagon eased off, past the awkward intrusion of our pickup truck, and away up the deserted earthen trail into another age.
By 1775, almost a million British colonists – religious refugees, economic migrants and convicts – had settled in North America, and it's estimated that of the four million Americans counted in the first US census in 1790, some 80 per cent were of British descent. In curious consequence, as Gerry had already reassured me, my period American accent was more authentic than his; imagining myself as a recent arrival in the colonies, I was struck by the distorted familiarities that characterised this new world. The rolling swathes of oak and birch had provided a reassuringly English backdrop as we'd driven by them at twenty-first-century speed, but close up, at ox pace, there was an odd, almost psychedelic twist to our surroundings: the blades of grass were too broad, the leaves on the trees too green, the butterflies and dragonflies too plentiful, too colourful and far, far too large. Our rattling, rumbling progress would send birds chirruping away through the treetops; I'd look up expecting to see dun-hued anonymities making their escape, and instead catch lurid flashes of scarlet.
I'd imagined the life of an ox wagoner as one long and leisurely, straw-chewing stroll through the countryside, letting the ox-train take the strain. I quickly found it was not. Our outing, an unladen two-mile jog up the trail and back, was no more than a brisk recce for the full-scale expeditions to come, yet even this modest journey proved fraught with alarums. When Gerry yelped out a warning to mind where I trod, he wasn't alerting me to the latest wet sack of crap flopping out on the trail, but my proximity to the cartwheels: he had once thus bisected a dog. On even modest descents, we had to swiftly attach a chain-brake to a rear wheel to forestall a destructive runaway; on the uphill sections, any delay in cracking the whip (a skill Gerry performed with forest-echoing proficiency) and the loss of momentum would have his boys locked in strenuous combat with gravity. Though unmetalled, our trail was certainly broader and better than whatever Daniel Boone and his boys could have hacked out, yet even so Gerry had to monitor every inch of our progress with a keen eye: on one steeply pitched curve we almost dropped a wheel off the edge, a scenario which, I was assured, would very likely have ended in a Magnum-sponsored mercy killing or four.
'Wagoning was a hard, filthy and dangerous job,' said Gerry, having heaved the perpetually errant Charles back on to the straight and narrow by his nose-ring. 'Plus you'd be away from home most of the year, so keeping a family was tricky.' Because of this, and because ox wagons were the only supply line to the pioneers and settlers who pushed this new nation ever further westwards, men like Gerry were richly rewarded: twelve shillings a day, his research suggested, equivalent in terms of relative average earnings to perhaps £400 now.
'Woah there, baby boys.'
Gerry brought us to a halt before a fresh dog turd on the sun-dappled path; my surge of relief at this comforting evidence of fellow humanity died away when he knelt down and ascribed it to a bear. 'Only a small guy, maybe 150lb,' he mumbled, squinting closely at the claw-tipped footprints clustered around it, but that was 150lb too much for me. Afterwards I seemed to find myself walking rather closer to Gerry's side, almost treading on his heels when he strode off into the trees to harvest sticky red sumac buds or sassafras roots, for beverage use.
Another foraging mission ended with Gerry pulling down a thick wad of broad, flat leaves that he described as the woodsman's toilet paper; I nodded distractedly, my shoulder inclined against his, my eyes darting around the treetrunks for a telltale snatch of dark fur in motion. I was still nodding when Gerry coughed gently and explained that he was rather hoping to make use of these leaves; my trudge back to the ox cart, and my vigil beside it, was long and very lonely.
A squadron of enormous, languid horseflies gathered around the boys' flanks and my face, and as I swatted away blindly with my hat, I recognised just how hard won were those twelve shillings a day. And I hadn't yet accounted for the bandit ambushes that obliged most travellers to gather in convoys – rarely an option for a wagoner, who couldn't afford to hang around waiting for company. I'd left the Age of Collective Joy and entered that of Solitary Hell.
The sky was bruising ominously when we rumbled back into the firing-range car park, now home to a huge bulldozer, and the tree it had recently felled. The three-man crew turned as one to survey our tumultuous approach with disbelief, then very vocal yee-hah-model enthusiasm. They rolled up to us, those large faces reddened by hot toil and excitement, slapping linen backs and ox flanks in a manner that betrayed a life-long familiarity with draught animals and men dressed as cowboy scarecrows.
Reluctant to confuse – and thus enrage – these substantial, uncomplicated fellows, I kept my milksop Limey twitterings to myself as their tree-necked foreman addressed us. Never has my mother tongue sounded more alien: all I took away from his speech was a worrisome pledge that tomorrow we would all have a taste of his cousin's Y-lining. As we watched them drive off in their pick-up truck, Gerry explained that in Kentucky, moonshine was known as 'white lightning'.
The supper that Butch had prepared in our absence was a parody of male-pattern culinary ineptitude: a viciously carbonised blend of rice, apple, sweet potatoes and – how? – sand, made tolerable only by the tart and invigorating sumac tea we sluiced it down with. Gerry opened a grubby chest and from it withdrew a period bottle of homebrew ale; conditioned to expect unlimited fireside alcohol as my inalienable historic right, I watched with something beyond disappointment as he poured out an espresso-sized measure into my tin mug and his own – Butch, I now learned, had long ago forsworn all liquor. (The following morning Gerry poured a carton of apple juice into an earthenware flagon; sixty hours later, having regulated the fermentation process by briefly loosening the cork once a day, we accompanied our last
hours in the forest with a palatable and acceptably potent cider.)
Jacob was dispatched to wash up in the nearby river, which as a later yomp around the pasture would prove wasn't at all nearby. Taking unkind advantage of Jacob by virtue of his age and status was our sole concession to eighteenth-century interpersonal authenticity. The hierarchy was never ruthlessly imposed – tongue in cheek rather than ruler on hand – but Jacob's mother, a keen re-enactor herself, had apparently insisted that her son enjoy nothing less than an unvarnished character-building experience.
'Hey – rotten kid!'
Throughout the first day I chuckled uncertainly while Butch chivvied the wagoner's boy with jocular period relish, as if we were doling out the workhouse gruel and he'd just asked for more. But by the last, I found myself building Jacob's character through such endeavours as fetching my canteen from the wagon, or checking my hat for spiders, or getting some proper wood, not this twiggy rubbish, and being quick about it.
It had been entirely dark for some time when Jacob blundered back to camp behind a teetering stack of crockery and utensils, just ahead of the long-threatened rain. Soon fat drops were clattering down through the oak branches above, but no one else seemed to care – not even Butch, who had come without a hat. Only when the fire began to lose its battle with the downpour did Gerry appear to notice it was raining, and by then I had already turned my shirt back to front to dry its sodden rear before the surviving red flickers. When droves of small frogs began hopping out of the storm in search of refuge, Butch reluctantly conceded the severity of the conditions: 'Like a cow pissing on a flat rock,' he drawled, his large face a delta of rivulets.
Just before our fire was reduced to a smoking hiss, Gerry swiftly brewed up eighteenth-century chocolate – hunks of sugary cocoa-cake dropped into a billycan of water. 'A nightcap for you,' he smiled, producing from another chest a lozenge-sided brown bottle whose dimensions recalled the high-end perfume industry. With the deliberation of an apothecary, he transferred perhaps half a cubic centilitre of distilled spirit from this modest vessel into my mug of ale-tainted chocolate: a gesture I did my best to accept in the companionable manner in which it was offered. A more taxing variant of this challenge followed when Gerry saw me off to bed with a sweating nugget of sausagemeat. One of the most important lessons he'd learned in Vietnam, he said, raising his voice above the thundering rain, was that a diet heavy in fatty food helped prevent trench-foot. 'Eat meat and you get greasy. Waterproofing yourself from the inside out. The Goretex diet.'
A wet while later, I hunkered under a tarpaulin awning, and though it was anything but cool pulled the heaviest nearby blanket up to my bristled, rain-repellent chin. Butch and Jacob's sleeping quarters were of identical design – a sheet of canvas pegged to the ground at one end, and propped up at the other atop two Gerry-fashioned wooden stakes – but for our leader, half a tent was worse than none: he'd laid his bedroll out under the wagon. Not that he'd spend much time on it, though. That night and every other, whenever I looked over Gerry would invariably be standing silhouetted in the frail, damp moonlight, hands on hips, just gazing at the sky, his boys, the hand-built conveyance they hauled ('I just love the look of a covered wagon!' he blurted one afternoon, like a wide-eyed kid at an airshow).
The awning sufficed only to cover my top half – ideal camouflage for that nocturnal toilet scheme, at least – and I had to share its shelter with equipment that coped badly with damp, which meant being prodded in the armpit or eye-socket by a musket barrel every time I moved. Raindrops shot-blasted the tarpaulin; my sodden shins steamed; something with a lot of small legs darted across my face. Could I be any more awake? The rain subsided, and a thousand quacking, honking frogs provided the answer.
The difficulties endured the previous night, I now recognised, were strongly connected to the absence of brewed depressants in my system: in ignoble reality, it was the first time I had taken to my historical bed entirely sober. In a period spanning over a millennium and a half, I had been lulled to sleep every single night by at least a lot of beer or cider, and most often far too much. What would I give now for a deep, deep draught from a redneck's Y-lining? And so began many long hours of restless fear: exhausting, but never quite exhausting enough.
The twitches and scratches and flailing slaps didn't allow for much contemplation, and what there was proved stubbornly devoted to imagining how my sorry situation might get sorrier. Yet somewhere in between choking to death on an errant amphibian and haplessly blunderbussing my face off, I exprienced an epiphany of sorts.
By attracting only willing volunteers, those eager to embrace the pains and perils of an earlier age, re-enactment was hopelessly compromised as a socio-historical tool. For every twenty-first-century Gerry, might there not have been an eighteenth-century me, someone born out of time in the other direction, who resented the damp and discomfort, who was scared of spiders and darkness, who passionately yearned for a cleaner, brighter, scuttle-free future? Or failing that, a skinful of booze to blot out the horrors of the present?
Dawn was tinging the edges of a huge green world when I finally lost consciousness, and very soon after a wet slap in the face brought me round. The awning had collapsed; I effortfully pulled it off and found myself memorably presented with the back end of a hairy orange Routemaster. A croaked yelp sent this clumping heavily away, and as I groped about in the sodden turf for the stake it had uprooted, the sights and sounds of human activity assailed me. Jacob was again dashing barefoot through the wet grass, smiling brilliantly, as if on a cover shoot for Wagoner's Lad. Over by the rekindled fire, and rather less winsomely, Gerry was rubbing embrocation into the folds and flaps of poor Butch's hugely distended calves and ankles. Dropsy had an authentic period ring, but it was difficult to greet its symptoms with nostalgia.
I stumbled towards them across the pasture. It was hot, it was moist, and that reheated overnight batch of ox pies was doing its olfactory worst. 'It's looking a little better,' murmured Gerry, working another gobbet of cream into those sagging, waxy bollards of flesh. Butch let out a high-pitched snort of derision, the first of his generous daily allowance. 'You said that after the Indian Wars.'
For us, breakfast was charcoal stew leftovers mixed with ground maize; for the boys, as Gerry noted just too late, it was the leather hubcaps off his wagon. 'Charles! I'm gonna cut your ugly head off and beat you to death with it!' The half-smile with which he delivered this alarming reproach was that of a soft-hearted man who had never lost it with an animal; Gerry later confessed that he'd moved on from many decades of horsemanship hoping – forlornly – that he might find it easier to bear the death of a bovine companion. As we yoked his boys up, he outlined his disgust for those who advocated a punishment-based training regime: his own self-evidently successful technique was centred on 'letting them walk towards a wall then shouting, "Woah!"' Sometimes he heard himself telling school parties to haw and hup.
Today's walk was to be conducted under authentic conditions, which meant Jacob and me filling our wagon with the period payload calculated by Gerry's research and currently stacked up under a tarp in a corner of the livestock trailer: fifteen-odd sacks of flour (or, in fact, rice chaff) with a combined weight of 1,100lb, bringing the total of wagon and load to a round ton. The boys barely seemed to notice the difference, trudging doughtily out of the car park to a cheery reception from the road crew, who had announced their recent arrival by setting fire to a truck tyre and covering it with upended vegetation.
Plainly relieved that his experiment was at last up and running, Gerry embarked on a laidback run-through of his goals as a re-enactor. 'Commonality' was the ideal: he liked to imagine walking into a local tavern in 1775, and being swiftly appraised and even more swiftly dismissed by the resident drinkers with a grunt of, 'Pah, wagoner.' You could sense he'd pictured this scene more than once, only without the bit where they peeked in his haversack and found the anthologies of Aristotle and Rousseau therein, then threw him down the well.
Gerry's fundamentalist approach ruled out wearing, eating or doing anything 'inconsistent with the character' – taken to its appalling extreme, this had once obliged him to extract one of his own teeth, without anaesthetic. Living history, he said, required reprogramming the modern mindset. Sitting around doing nothing, for instance, was right out – park your eighteenth-century arse by the fire and you'd need some undarned socks or a dirty rifle to keep your hands busy. 'Behaviour modification' he called it, a process that had the ominous ring of electro-aversion therapy – performed Benjamin Franklin-style, with Gerry's kite flying high in a thunderstorm, and the string knotted round my testicles.
If Gerry's academic erudition compromised his bid for workaday banality, then so too did the professional perfectionism that had defined his long military career. This had become clear when Jacob watched him covering the wagon's flour sacks with a canvas sheet back in camp, and reminded Gerry that his own research suggested that wagoners hardly ever 'tarped their loads'. 'Well, they might not have,' Gerry had muttered, 'but they should have.' He set out to become a typical wagoner, but despite himself he couldn't stop striving to be the best damn wagoner you ever did see.
On we rolled, creaking up the inclines, then rattling madly down the other side, five tons of beef, wood and rice chaff on the hoof. Every so often, Gerry would tilt his head at some innocuous spoor or scratch mark and announce the recent presence of a coyote, or – stoop, sniff – that a mule had been this way three days ago. His terrifying powers of observation meant it was almost pointless trying any covert chicanery, though I did anyway. A gentle crinkling of foil, even at 100 yards, had been enough to alert Gerry to a torso-scrubbing session with an airline-issue refreshing towel round the back of the livestock trailer; no reproach on my return, just a friendly reminder that body oil was an asset to be cultivated. When he now wordlessly disappeared into the towering pines and oaks, I took the chance to inoculate myself against those relentless horseflies with an illicit blast of bovine repellent in the chest and back. At once a voice called out from deep in the woods: 'Everything OK back there?'