by David Liss
In New York or Philadelphia, he might have, with different clothes, passed for a poor scholar. In the wilderness, he looked to me nothing but a cunning low creature, cruel and heartless, and more foul-smelling than any other species of man. Like the majority of the tribe of the West, he either did not approve, or had not yet been made aware, of the functions of the razor, but his miserly face yielded only a scraggly outcropping of pale whiskers here and there. Clearly visible under this sparse growth was a most lamentable skin condition, cursing him with a reddened and scabby appearance. It must have caused him considerable discomfort, for he scratched at himself almost incessantly, sometimes with absent interest, other times with the repetitive fury of a cat with an itchy ear.
The third of their number, Phineas, was but a boy, or what should have been called a boy in more civilized climes-fifteen or sixteen, by my reckoning, with fair hair and sunburned skin and a narrow blade-shaped face. He dressed in frontier clothes, but his gaunt frame left him aswim in his hunting shirt, which came down so low on him as to be almost a gown.
Phineas took to me at once. Perhaps he saw me as a kind of mother, or perhaps he merely noted that I looked at him with compassion. He would often ride alongside me a portion of each day, and if he did not speak, he took some pleasure in the companionable silence. At mealtimes he made certain that I enjoyed a superior portion, and he often reserved the softest and most secure spot for me. He looked at Andrew with indifference but not hostility. For Phineas, it was as though Andrew did not exist.
Of the settlers, eleven were Americans, the rest were French. Andrew had learned serviceable French during the war and so was able to discover that these people had sailed all the way from Paris, lured by agents of William Duer into settling the lands of western Pennsylvania. These French pilgrims gave us our first true cause to wonder about Mr. Reynolds’s veracity. He had told us that all the inhabitants of Libertytown were veterans. Who then were these Frenchmen? He had told us that crops they grew on their fertile lands had made them comfortable, but whence came the money? If there were no roads that could support cart or wagon, how were the crops brought to market? They could not be sent east without spoiling; they could not be sent west, for the Spanish did not permit American traffic upon the Mississippi.
For the first few days of our journey, Reynolds listened to our questions, though he would not answer but only grunt or shrug or shake his head. When we were a week or more out, he began to exhibit signs that this reticence was, for him, the height of patience and manners. When I asked him about the means of transporting goods, he looked at Andrew and spat. “Does that bitch ever shut up?”
Andrew, who had been walking alongside me, only a few feet from Reynolds’s horse, rose to his full height. “Sir, step down and say that to my face.”
The boy, Phineas, turned away, but Hendry let out a shrill laugh, shockingly like a tiny dog’s bark.
“You ain’t challenging me, Maycott,” Reynolds said. “You live and die as I please, so keep your mouth shut, and that goes twice for that woman of yours. She’s pretty enough, but, by God, does she ever stop talking?”
“Sir!” called out my husband in his most commanding voice. I had no doubt that, during the war, such a tone would have made even the highest-ranked officer stop in his tracks, but here it meant nothing. As he called out, Hendry rode astride and kicked Andrew hard in the back, just below his neck. He lurched forward and fell into the dirt.
Hendry let out another burst of shrill laughter, and a horse whinnied, and then all fell silent. The horses had stopped, the mules held still, the settlers milled in place. I knelt by Andrew, making certain he was unharmed, and heard nothing about me but the endless singing of birds. Once I had found it melodic, but suddenly it became cacophonous, the unnerving music of chaos, the orchestra of Hell. Andrew looked up at me. His cheek bled from a cut of some three inches below his left eye, but it was not deep and would heal well enough. The wound to his pride was another thing. I met his gaze and shook my head. Honor demanded that he not let this pass, but I demanded he did. He could not hope to defeat these men, and even if he did, then what? We were at their mercy for another month or more of hard travel. The luxuries of pride and reputation were no longer for us.
“Listen to me,” cried Reynolds. He held up his rifle by the barrel, pointed to the sky, like a brutal general rallying his barbarian troops. In his rage, the scar across his eye had turned as pink as the inside flesh of a strawberry. “This ain’t the East. You’ve left the lands of manners and justice. There ain’t no law here but force, and while you’re in this traveling party, that law is mine. If I choose to call your woman a whore, then a whore she is until I say otherwise.”
He unlocked the catch upon his rifle’s flintlock and pointed it at Andrew. Then he swiveled around and pointed it at one of the French settlers. “I don’t care who among you lives or dies,” he said. “It ain’t my trouble to care. I’ll kill one of these Frenchers to make my point unless you”-here he glanced at Andrew-“get on your feet and start walking and keep from looking at me for the next few days. Maybe until we get to Pittsburgh. So up with ye and keep your tongue still.”
How can a man be made to endure such a humiliation? I did not think Andrew could have been made to bury his pride and his rage to save himself, but he did it to save the stranger. He pushed himself to his feet, and, keeping his eyes straight ahead, he began to walk. In so doing, the entire procession began to move. I put my arm about Andrew, but he did not respond. I do not know that he could have made himself speak.
Reynolds returned the catch on his rifle and lowered it. Hendry rode alongside us and laughed softly, as though he recalled a joke from a long time past. Then he scratched at the rash under his beard. “Next time you forget yourself, Maycott, you’ll be sorry for it. Reynolds might like to kill Frenchers, but I think I’ll fuck your wife instead.”
He did not wait for an answer but rode ahead, leaving us to our silence and to watch Phineas glower at Hendry for the rest of the day.
T he weather, at least, was fair. We made our trek in the first full bloom of spring, and the sun, wreathed with unthreatening wisps of cottony clouds, was warm but not hot. At night, the cool was refreshing rather than uncomfortable, and mosquitoes were not out in full abundance. At times it rained, but a little wetness did us no harm, and it did not persist long enough to make the roads, such as they were, unbearably muddy.
Far more distressing was the tense disposition of our guides, who clutched their rifles perpetually, keeping them taut and ready like the muscles of a crouching beast. Ceaselessly they scanned the tree line for signs of danger, though they never spoke of what form it might take-bears, panthers, Indians? One of the Frenchmen attempted to inquire of Hendry, but he only told him to shut his Frencher mouth.
One day followed another with blunting drudgery, and though the memory of Andrew’s conflict with the guides lingered, the wound grew less hot. Reynolds or Hendry would, from time to time, make some trivial comment to Andrew, perhaps to make him feel that all had been forgotten.
Three weeks in, we had begun to make camp for the night in a grassy clearing. We sat huddled by a small fire that danced in a strong breeze and ate what the guides had hunted during the day-a medley of rabbit, squirrel, and pigeon-and a porridge made of cornmeal. We rarely spoke to the other settlers, and Andrew and I, who had so often passed countless days and night in easy conversation, now spoke to each other with increasing infrequency.
While we ate I looked up and observed emerging from the trees an Indian woman and a little girl. The guides raised their weapons, and I believe Hendry would have shot them as they approached, but Reynolds stayed his hand. He bared his teeth like an animal. “Don’t be an idiot,” he said, and Hendry lowered his weapon, grinned a largely toothless grin, and spat tobacco onto the dirt, near a Frenchman, his wife, and their little boy.
The Indians approached tentatively. The woman walked with a limp. She wore a ruined dress of animal skins, pe
rhaps once quite pretty but now soiled and torn and, as we found when she approached, rank to the nose. The girl, not above ten or eleven, wore a cotton shift, formerly white, now the color of all things unclean. She had been the victim of a burn; her face was scorched, and she was missing her entire right eyebrow, there being only a horrific red welt.
The woman might once have been a regal squaw, but circumstances had brought her low. Her face was filthy, smeared with mud and hardened, I had no doubt, by much violence, for her lower lip was split, as if by a fist. It took little imagination to see that these poor wanderers had walked through chaos and might yet trail it behind them. Andrew must have felt it too, because he took my hand and held it in a firm grip.
Once the Indians were no more than ten feet from our little camp, the woman moved her hand to her mouth, making signs of eating. She had, I observed, lost several fingernails, and a fresh cut on her thumb bled freely.
Though we could have spared enough for a meal, charity would no more occur to Reynolds than would sprouting wings and taking to flight. He waved his weapon at the poor creatures. “Git on,” he said.
“We cannot let them run off those unfortunates,” Andrew said.
I felt my stomach lurch. Andrew was anxious to restore his honor, if only in his own eyes, and I knew he could not remain still while these refugees were sent away. Yet I knew full well that he could not challenge our guides on this matter. There was nothing he might say to persuade them, and he would only make them more determined to be cruel.
“They know their business,” I said, hoping for the best. “We know nothing of Indians.”
He would not be moved. “We know of human beings, and these are in want.”
He began to rise, but before he could do so, I pushed hard upon his shoulder, forcing him down and rising myself. Andrew had no time to object before I was several paces away and had begun talking to Reynolds. “Perhaps we can be charitable and spare some food.”
Hendry laughed his unpleasant laugh. The veins in his neck began to bulge.
I did not let my attention waver from Reynolds. “It is the Christian thing.”
“They ain’t Christians,” said Reynolds. “They’ll repay your kindness with blood.”
The boy Phineas nodded his young head, showed his teeth, and made a trigger-pulling gesture with his finger. His stringy hair fell into his eyes, and he did nothing to brush it aside.
“Even that burnt girl’ll kill us if she gets a chance,” Reynolds said, “’Tis what they do.”
“How can you be certain they are not Christianized?” I said.
Both men laughed the way adults laugh at the whimsical wonderings of children. Phineas looked down, as though the notion somehow embarrassed him.
The woman pointed at her neck, and then made the eating gesture once more. I saw now that she wore a necklace, an elaborate and filigreed carving of bones in the shape of a beautiful starburst. She said something, which sounded not to me like the language of savages. I realized only once Andrew had cocked his head that she was speaking in a kind of broken French, yet I required no translation to understand.
“She will trade her jewelry for food,” I said. “I doubt she has anything else of value.”
“I think she’s got sommit else,” Hendry said. “Sommit I’d trade for.”
“Shut up,” said Phineas, surprising everyone.
“What, you don’t want that nice jewelry?” he said to the boy.
“Shut up,” said Phineas. “Just shoot ’em. That’s all.”
“I’d rather wait till they do something I don’t care for and then shoot ’em,” said Hendry. “But I might take that pretty thing she’s got round her neck.”
“Surely,” I said, “you are not so base as to let her give up the only thing she has in the world for a few morsels-not when we can spare the food.”
“Maycott!” Reynolds shouted. “Sit your woman down. She’s come off her leash again.”
I would not give Andrew a chance to respond, for any response would almost certainly be incendiary. “They may be savages but we are Christians. We shall feed them, and if you don’t like it, you may certainly shoot us.”
Andrew blanched, and I knew what he feared: that he would be humiliated once more and then be given no recourse to preserve his honor. Yet Reynolds seemed untroubled by my speech. He picked up a rabbit bone and stripped it of its boiled meat. Then, after due consideration, this Solon of the West nodded his head, his ruminations complete. “Green idiots,” he pronounced. “Let ’em stay, then, but ’tis on yer head.”
I gestured for the two to sit. We understood they were not to be given their own food and that Andrew and I would have to give of our own portions. Some of the others did as well, but many of the settlers steered clear, not wanting to stand with us against Reynolds. The Indians sat by our fire, hunched over the food we’d given them, eyes darting about like wary animals. They ate with their hands, smearing dirt and blood on their food. The woman was missing two fingers on her left hand, and the wound looked recent and raw.
I had thought Phineas a sensitive boy, but he watched the two Indians from the outskirts of camp, hands on his gun, never taking his eyes off them, waiting for some menace that never manifested itself.
Andrew tried to make conversation with them, but the woman said nothing more and the child, if she could speak-our language or her own-never showed a sign of it. They ate their pigeon-it was what he liked best, so of course it was what Andrew had volunteered to first give-and corn pudding, and when they were done they moved some fifty feet from the rest of us, curled up upon the ground, and went to sleep without delay. Andrew said nothing to me of what I had done for the Indians-and for him-but when we went to sleep he wrapped his arms about me, I about him, and we slept together as lovers in a way we had not since leaving for the West.
I awoke in the night to the sound of two gun reports in rapid succession. It was distant, but I knew the sound. I sat and looked about me. The fire burned and no one was disturbed. I convinced myself that I had dreamed it, but in the morning I knew better. The Indian woman and child were gone when I opened my eyes. Reynolds and Hendry acted as though nothing had happened and offered no comment, but Hendry, I saw, wore the elaborate bone ornament around his own neck.
He leered at me, evil delight in his narrow eyes. “The boy done it. Woke ’em up, dragged ’em off, and done it. Like Reynolds told yer, ’tis on yer head.” He walked away, laughing as though it were the greatest joke in the world.
A ndrew and I chose not to speak of the incident. Instead, I rode by Phineas. The suggestion that he might have shot those Indians in cold blood terrified me, but it fascinated me too. What, I wondered, would drive a boy to so unspeakable a crime?
“They say you hurt the visitors,” I said, after a period of quiet. I had already observed that, in the West, conversations often began with a respectful period of silence.
“I ain’t going to speak of it.”
“You may speak of it to me,” I said, hoping my face showed warmth I did not feel.
Phineas said nothing for some time, and I thought better than to repeat my inquiries. Yet he surprised me by finally breaking his silence, perhaps an hour after I had first raised the subject. In a flat and lifeless tone, like an oracle whose mouth is but the instrument of a remote spirit, he told me he had lived, since the age of seven or eight, in a settlement some twenty miles from Pittsburgh, the great metropolis of western Pennsylvania as Mr. Duer described it. “Hain’t no Philadelphia,” Phineas told me, “but ’tis big. Biggest place I ever saw afore I come east. Maybe a full thousand people there.” He and his father traveled to Pittsburgh five or six times a year, and Phineas had grown up knowing how to read the ground, the leaves, the sky. He was a tracker, as I saw every day we were on the road with him. He tasted the earth and sniffed the air, as much beast as human being, as much Indian as white man.
One day he traveled the road not only with his father but with his mother, little brot
her, and older sister as well. Both his mother and little brother were ill-feverish and vomiting-and were in need of a physician. The only one in hundreds of miles was to be found in Pittsburgh, or so they thought, but when they came to town, they discovered that he had been killed three weeks earlier in an argument over the best way to dress a roast duck.
They had no money to remain in town, not even for a single night, and so with an ailing woman and child, they returned to the woods to make their way back to their cabin. They were not a mile and a half outside of Pittsburgh, however, when they were set upon by a trio of Indian braves. It was late autumn, but it had grown warm in what is called Indian summer, for it is the season when Indians go on the warpath one last time before spring. Accordingly, these men were near naked, their heads shorn and shaved into savage designs, their faces and bodies covered with demonic symbols that made them seem creatures of Hell. Indeed they must have been, for they paused hardly a moment before one slit Phineas’s father’s throat. That atrocity was hardly complete before a brave held Phineas’s mother so she would be made to watch, then another picked up her younger son by his foot, twirled the toddler about over his head, and dashed his skull into a tree. Only then did they do her the mercy of slitting her throat.
One brave grabbed Phineas, the other took hold of his sister, each man clamping a hand over the mouth of his prisoner. At this time Phineas was but nine years of age, his sister eleven. They had witnessed the death of their parents and of their sibling, and they were not permitted to cry out in grief and terror. While one of the Indians held his sister, the other began to cut off her clothes with a fierce knife, long and twisting and gleaming in the flicker of sunlight. The one that held Phineas, entranced by this orgy of violence, let slacken his grip upon his prey, and Phineas managed to stomp hard upon the brave’s moccasined foot. It was too futile a blow to do serious damage to so strong a creature, but it was sufficient to loosen his grip. Phineas was free, and he fled into the woods, leaving behind the bodies of his parents and his brother, and consigning his sister into the hands of monsters, where she most likely remains today, presuming she was not burned alive, as is sometimes the custom.