by Alix Hawley
Israel looks set to kill anything that comes near. His eyes snap. He is in usual clothing, not his hunting outfit, but he stands with his feet apart and easy, as if he were in his leggings and moccasins, as if he were quite at home. His fingers curl at his belt and then retreat. I wish I had my little knife or my bird club. I would need no gun to deal with anyone here.
My boots bite into my heels as I rock my feet back, the bad blood outs and wets my stockings. I am not fond of boots and I feel myself trapped inside a giant one, all stinking and chafing. Even Bets keeps silent but she has her eye on a bony fellow across the room. I give Bets an elbow to the ribs but she is too flabby in spirit to jump. She sits thinking that nobody, bony or not, will marry her now, sprung as she has from this Boone family flower bed.
William Hill’s father calls for Daddy to come forward. His voice is like a bell ringing the same ring all the time, it makes the back teeth ache.
Daddy stands but moves no farther. His mouth is calm but I can smell his black humour. Hill’s father speaks:
—Friend Boone, you know a father’s duty. Correct your son and make your confession before the Friends gathered here.
The leader holds out his white hand. It puts me in mind of a drowned thing dredged up with its legs all splayed and limp. Who would take such a thing? Daddy stares with his brows locked until his bad eye slopes off to a corner. He breathes in as if to speak and then coughs too loud and spends a time seeking a handkerchief to drag across his mouth. Israel is not a good son, he does not listen, he does only as he pleases. But Daddy loves him, he is helpless with it, Israel is his favourite, his first boy. Looking upon him, Daddy sets his arms about his stomach as though he is the one with child.
Everyone is picturing fornication. I see all the pictures rolling and turning in all the heads. The silence grows fat. The snow keeps falling. Ma’s lips are tight, she is squeezing young Hannah who is fortunately not given to shouting. Neddy is slipping his hand into her pocket in search of sweets. Daddy’s front hair grows damp, but even his wandering left eye does not deign to wander in the direction of the boy singing about our blood. Do not give in legs or eye: so I think. And Hill’s father goes on smiling towards Daddy with his drowned hand out. The kindness that cannot be ignored.
Women begin to fan their faces faintly with their hands to show they are aware of the sweaty smell and that it does not come from them. Ma is nailing Israel in place with her smile, though he throws back his head. Hill’s father keeps his hand out and speaks as if he knows everything and owns everything:
—Come. Can you not beg forgiveness, as your own father did, for allowing your child’s fornication to occur?
Looking again at the hand, Daddy appears to conclude something, for his nostrils gape:
—P-nah. I do not choose to do so. Not t-today.
In spite of the stammering, he speaks like a man who can do whatever he likes on any day, like a man who has every choice in the world. I know he is thinking of Granddaddy standing here in the Meeting House he built, saying sorry for everything in his life. I know he is thinking that he will not go to his grave having done the same. Daddy, when I first see a buffalo bluffing a charge, spinning and snorting itself mad, I will think at once of you.
Israel is grinning now. He whistles a few notes: I care for nobody, no not I. Daddy’s legs creak as he stiffens them. Bets has taken her miserable eye from the object of her affections and shoots me a look that says: See Daddy’s bandy legs.
Daddy does not take the hand. He whistles lightly between his teeth also, I hear it. Israel barks out, Ha!
What else can one say at such a time, I suppose. He turns and everyone sets to bustling on the benches. I see Daddy’s rough angry eye looking for a landing place, I see Ma’s pale smile. Again it is done. The bride and bridegroom stalk out into the snow together. No congratulating this time. Although there is again a baby, five months later.
Daddy keeps up his defiance of Meeting though he insists we all continue to attend. He is letting his anger puff up like a toad. He will not condemn his son, he will not beg forgiveness, he will not beg for anything. He is waiting. Like the people in the city of Troy, as Uncle James said. Go on and attack us.
From round the door at the forge, I see Daddy’s arm banging at something small. A cowbell. He often makes little things, not very useful things. He is not much of a blacksmith. He is worse since Israel’s marriage. His trade has declined. Some Delawares from the little settlements and some travelling Catawbas come for horseshoes, but no Friends come. The crops are worse, the earth is being used up. Daddy is no magistrate. And he has near given up weaving, as if the good suits of Hill and his father haunt the looms and mock him. He looks up and catches me.
—What do you want? Come in here.
This seems an opportunity. And so I do go in, though I never like the smell of hot weeping from the metal and I have no wish to run the bellows. He once beat my backside with a stick when I refused to help here, I ran off singing to the woods with my breeches still down, and looked back once to see him all angry and helpless. He has had to take an apprentice, none of his sons is any good for this work. But he is happy having someone tied to him, who will take his orders. The skinny apprentice, Miller, scowls at me from where he is pumping away with his long arms. He is one of the boys who shouts after me sometimes still: Whores. I have fought him before and he is no fighter.
To Daddy I say:
—Well, I want a new ramrod. Can I have one?
He puts down his hammer. I feel myself surveyed like a field. He is set to lecture me, I know, and so improve his temper. He comes round the table to take me by the arm. He says:
—You come along, Dan. Miller, keep it hot.
I do not ask him where we are going when he takes off his apron and gets his hat. We walk quietly down the lanes. The leaves overhead are like dark stars against the sky.
Though it is forbidden, it turns out we are going to see Israel’s baby. He is a big baby and appears to fancy brawling, which seems to me a good quality in Exeter. He waves his red fists at me and, not knowing what else to say, I say:
—How do.
Israel’s new house is full of the sharp smell of new wood. Daddy sits down with a thump at the table, he bumps it and jigs his joints about like an old man, darting his eyes in all directions. Jig jig jig goes his foot on the knee of his opposite leg. He makes an irritated remark:
—This time of year is fickle. The air is not what it might be. That is what disappoints, that it is not what it might be. N-nah-no. Like all of this place.
He laughs without mirth and goes on jigging. Israel stares at him as though he is too tired even to move his eyes elsewhere. I want to ask him what is wrong but I do not.
Israel’s wife is calm by contrast and offers us tea and flatbread and jam. The jam is very good and I say so. She smiles at me. She is thin as a stick now though her bosom is round. Her eyes are circled by purple shadows, but the eyes themselves are very bright. She piles more jam on my bread, as women do when you praise their cooking, until the baby sets up howling. Israel does not move. Though I am still hungry, I get up to rock the cradle but I knock the table worse than Daddy did, and I spill some tea. The baby howls all the more for my efforts, and so his mother is forced to take him up the stairs to tend to him. I hear her voice, it is husky and pleasant. She has him at her bosom, I know. She says Goodboy, Goodboy. I am uncertain of the ways of Indians in naming children and so I ask Israel:
—Is Goodboy the boy’s name?
—No. It is Jesse.
Israel adds that the child is indeed a good boy, however. A very good boy. It might as well be his name! He says so boomingly as if I might not believe him. The baby bawls on upstairs.
I look around. There is a cut of new sacking stiff across the entry in place of a door. Daddy keeps up the jigging of his foot until he takes himself off to the privy.
I look at the jam pot and have to stop myself from taking more when there is so little here
. I hear Israel’s wife coughing above. I think further about her bosom. She is lovely, she gave me plenty of jam. I say to Israel:
—You off hunting again soon?
He rubs at his chin and laughs, all helpless. A poor pile of deerskins is lumped beneath the table. He has got no furs worth having this year. He says:
—My luck is going.
I say:
—Maybe you need to go farther south. Or west. You could settle anywhere you like.
He looks hard at me. His cheeks are thin, his bones show. He says:
—Is that so?
His voice is hard also. I shift about in the chair and I say:
—Well. I would like to have a wife and a house like yours.
He picks up a gun barrel he has been making a new stock for, then he throws out his hands and drops it. His wife coughs harder upstairs, the baby lets out a bawl. He laughs again and says:
—Do as you like, Dan. That is all I can tell you.
Daddy and I continue to visit, let Meeting say what it might, and I go on my own also. I hold baby Jesse, and soon I am helping him stand and walk and run about after a leather ball I make. Then there is another boy, and a little girl quick enough. Their mother is tired always, but at her table she teaches me some proper spelling and ciphering and some of the Delaware language, which has a musical sound. She used to have a little dame-school for the Indian children in a little settlement somewhere outside town. She tells me some Delaware stories about odd creatures and reads to me from Gulliver’s Travels, which has plenty of odd creatures also. When I am better at reading, I read it to her. Yahoos and Lilliputians. The half-circles under her eyes grow darker and her body grows thinner. She coughs and sometimes she cannot stop the coughing. Israel goes on hunts but never comes back with much. I take the little family a deer joint or some bear meat when I get any. I am fifteen years of age, I feel life springing and surging all through me and I see her smile to look at me.
But she is sick. After the last child, she lives for a time, thin as a whip and big-eyed in bed, but then she is dead. Daddy thinks to try to bury her in the Friends’ ground but he will not go quite so far, and we put her in a grave at the edge of our place. Israel brings the children to live with us at Ma and Daddy’s house. The poor little girl’s breathing is troubled like their mother’s. Israel is thin too and he is weak. He tries to help Daddy at one of the looms in the barn but his heart has flown out of him and his hands are not quick. Everything is always coming undone, he says, and he laughs and coughs as the loom beam thumps down on his fingers.
I hunt to feed everyone at home. I have no trouble getting deer or anything else.
Some of the women Friends come to Ma. They say the children must attend Meeting for their own sake, if Daddy and Israel will only confess and beg forgiveness as they have been asked again and again. They say it reasonably and then they say it with damp eyes. Ma drops her head and reaches for Israel’s little daughter. Daddy hears and says:
—Get off my land, you pack of crows and buzzards. Off!
In my mind I still see Israel’s wife’s hand spelling the words on the slate for me to puzzle out, and I hear her soft voice reading to me. I see the dark freckles in a V down her neck. I have a liking for freckles still and for the letter V, which she showed me how to write with little wings at the top. V is for victory! I do not forget her laugh when I spelled out friend as f-i-e-n-d. At that time I was astonished that it is possible to spell out untrue things.
But I know now it is possible to spell out anything you wish. I return from a hunt with a doe and find Daddy standing in the door of the house with Israel behind him. I see William Hill in our yard holding out a notice between his hands. His father is a few paces away looking more scrubbed than ever. He does not hold out his hand to Daddy now. Ma at the window has her own hand to her throat, and her face is dreadful.
Here is Exeter Meeting’s last judgement on us: Against the Order and Discipline of Friends in General. 26 March 1750. I remember all of this trumpeting across the page in great letters, and I remember laughing as Daddy stood repeating it. Israel coughed and spat a bloody bubble in Hill’s direction and Ma tugged him indoors. I hear her soft fretful question: Where? Where? Daddy rips off coat buttons and sends them skittering over the floor, saying there is no answer to such a stupid word, why talk, why not go anywhere other! The buttons bouncing off to all corners and Israel coughing and coughing and falling to his knees sick and laughing.
Outside, Hill shouts:
—Dan, I wanted to tell you first. I will not forget you.
A hot flint seems to be striking against my breastbone, trying to kindle all my bones. Hill, it is true. Hill, I am sorry. What is this but the true desire to murder you, the first time it is sparked in my own body. I shout back through the window:
—Use that paper for your arse.
Hill’s father beside him shakes his head and walks on all solemn in his good grey cloth, but Hill turns back to see me. He stops and fumbles in his pocket and sets a little stack of coins down on the ground. He points to them and to me, and he nods. Then he stands staring in dull sorrow at our all being cast out this time. I see what he is thinking: What will you do now?
I KICK THE money into the dirt but I keep Hill’s gun. All the long journey away from Exeter I walk with it before the fat flock of wagons. Ma and Daddy and Bets are in them, and Ned and Squire and Hannah, and Israel and his children, and my sister Sallie and her small outcast family. Granddaddy’s black cabinet creaks and takes up half the room in the last wagon. I walk the horses across the shallow ford up the Schuylkill as we leave the valley. My young brother Squire and I swim the animals across the broad Susquehanna in Virginia. Though he is not yet nine years of age, he is a good swimmer, pulling the horses into the water one by one and making sure the wagons keep upright. His little dark head bobs in and out of the river, dipping under a wagon and showing up on the other side. I say:
—There you are.
He nods and walks with me as I make our trail until we get to the old Indian road southwest, which is quite a high road now, scattered with travellers. We are not the only ones in search of a better place.
I watch for anything to shoot. Anything. I watch for signs, for tracks, for moving shadows, for twitches in the trees and grass, for William Hill-shaped things, though I am glad enough to think we are going to a new place without Hill and without Friends, with any luck.
I get turkey and deer and my first bull elk. It noses out into the bright Virginia morning and I shoot it clean through the brain. Squire watches. I give him half the liver and we jerk the meat together. Elk liver is very fine. I could eat fifty. I know I will get more.
At times I am visited by thoughts of Israel’s wife in the spring cellar with her bodice open in the dark and the sound of the cold water trickling. She is in the ground now, truly gone. But above this current of thoughts my eyes and ears keep sharp. Out in the air I feel my skin drying and blowing off like a snake’s. This is what I have wanted all my life.
At first I imagine that I have my brother Israel’s hunting eyes, but soon enough they are my own eyes. Israel is lying in one of the wagons. He coughs roughly into the night, he does not stop. I sit awake at the campfire and listen for his raggedy breath. Ma asks a passing Moravian priest for medicine, for any help, but he has nothing to offer but a spittly prayer in German.
I do not go to look at Israel. He does not come out. I can feel him thinning and vanishing, I can hardly bear to think of it. I hear Ma’s weeping and Daddy’s silence, it is full of disbelief.
I will get game, I will be a better hunter than Israel is, and he will live to see! So I say to myself. The thought charges through my blood. I cannot sit still. I ask Ma for Israel’s hunting shirt with the Indian beads, and I put it on and tie up my hair in a plait like his. His little boys, Jesse and Jonathan, peer at me out of the flap of their wagon. They let it drop when I catch them looking. I go off on a three days’ hunt.
I do not f
orget you, Israel, though when I return you are dead in the wagon, your body gone cold and hard, as I imagine, and your eyes finished, just as the eyes of birds go. I do not go in to see you before Ma wraps you up. Thinking of seeing you this way makes me feel sick. I do not wish to see Death sitting at your shoulder, breathing cold on what is left of you. I do not wish it to get near me. At this time I do not know how close Death can come.
Ma and Daddy remain in the wagon with the body of their first-born son for some time. When Ma stumbles out at last, a cry rips out of her:
—It came from her, from her. It was never in our family. It never was!
Even sweet Ma is marked by Death’s cruelty. She means the consumption came from Israel’s wife. Ma cannot look at Israel’s little girl, who is dark like her mother, and very sick now also. The girl is called Sarah Sallie, after our aunt and our sister. Soon she too is gone.
Again I remember the mother. She was a kinder teacher than most. I am sorry to this day that I cannot recall her right name, though I can picture her hair and other parts of her. Israel called her Little Girl. In the Delaware language he would sometimes say it, Quetit. I know it now.
Israel, Ma tells me through her tears that you wished me to have your guns, and your quarter-breed boys to raise once I have my own house. You leave me your life, or perhaps I took it from you in wishing for it.
But for the time I am emptied out without you alive. I hunt in the hills a few days more before we move on. There is nothing to me now but the smell of powder, the loose shake of it in the horn, the dust caught on my fingers when I tip it into the measure and out into the pan. The cool of the lead in my hand and then in the barrel. The hesitation before the catch, the hot spark and crack, the speed of the shot. And the resistance of flesh when the knife goes in and the skin peeling itself back when the cut line is made.