by Alix Hawley
—The boy! The boy himself, the very boy!
I catch a lick of his smell on the boarded walk. Smells do not disappear from memory, as I find. His broad face and the slope of his shoulders remain the same. As do his voice and his iron breath.
My thoughts of the past seem to have conjured him out of old darkness. William Hill. Perhaps he is what has been coming for me. Not Israel. I am somewhat relieved, I will admit. And he is very pleased at any rate and clutches at my hand:
—Always a pleasure and a delight to see an old friend, friendship is a gift! How do, Boone?
—I do all right.
Hill hardly hears me, so glad is he to be pumping my hand up and down in muscular fashion and crying:
—What brings you here?
I do not tell him that I am looking for my dead brother. He is still gripping my hand and talking:
—The companion of my youth! Happy days, happy days. Though you seem to be in search of other happiness this evening, ha!
He eyes one of the larger whores up the street, and I think of him in youth cheerfully singing under the bridge with the rest: Your sister is a whore. Perhaps it was with hope that he used to say it. He puts his arm about my shoulders and presses me forward. Nodding towards the capacious woman, he says:
—We might go in together, have a share. She has plenty to go around, look! Here, let it be my gift. What else is there to do in this city?
He jangles coins about in his palm. He smiles me up and down with his old pointed curiosity mixed with affection. His eyes are clear, his offer is quite sincere. His belief seems to be that we have always been great friends. He makes no mention of the fact that I stole his gun, or that my family was cast out, and I do not wish to bring it up. I suppose it is better to be friends after all. It is better to forget bad times. Hill seems entirely able to do it. And still he has money, which he is used to having, and it seems better than my own money, which at once seems miserable.
He begins to sing “The Green Fields of Home,” opening his arms to the lady and the whole night.
I feel sick as a pig. But interested also. I go with him.
We feel our way up the tilted steps to get to her room. It is at the top of the house, and is dim and smells of cold tallow. She settles herself upon her bed, which creaks as if afraid of what is coming for it. We can hear her hard breathing there, we see her broad outlines. She says that she will save her candle, but Hill cajoles her to light it, saying that he wishes to inspect all of her charms closely, and that he will buy her all the candles she wants. And so she lights it and in the guttering glow I watch her get herself out of her bodice and skirts. She huffs and adjusts her flesh as Hill hums and throws his heavy arm about my shoulder. He tells her we are brothers. I burn with a quick wish to strike him for saying so and I pull back, but the woman says dully:
—Brothers. The singer first? Or keep singing while the other has his go. Pass the time.
The singer first. I watch Hill attach himself to her, singing an old song about jolliness of all sorts. Brothers indeed. Hill is rewriting my life for me. It seems easily done. I watch as Hill carries on, running his fingers up and down and in the woman. He turns to slant a joyful eye at me. What would your father say, Hill? Confess to your Friends here today. So I think. And Hill would do so, he would tell anyone anything.
Through the cracked shutter I can see the street, it is still there, it helps me to feel less strange. I look down at the earth until my eye lights on a woman in the shadow of the building. She steps forward as a cart passes, and I see her copper-coloured hair in the light from the tavern below us. Israel’s wife, her cap off on the cellar floor. My heart fills. The past is with me here. The cart veers on and when the woman turns back she looks up briefly and her eyes flash.
I begin to think that whores are no bad thing.
I go out while Hill is occupied with his face in the woman’s backside, singing on in smothered fashion:
I’ll roar and I’ll groan,
Till I’m bone of your bone,
And asleep in your bed.
Down in the street I offer my hand to the dark-haired woman and I say:
—How do.
As it turns out, she also has red stockings and the most beautiful dimples in the flesh of her thighs. Still I remember her face in the flicker of her own bad candle, as though she were passing in and out of the shade of a tree on a bright day. I remember her pointed chin and her hair curling before her ears. She tells me that her name is Maria and that she lost her virtue at the top of a volcano in Italy. Then she laughs in snapping fashion. But she is kind in spite of my innocence and my hurry. She makes me forget. Thank you, Maria, if that is your name. Are you still in that city, I wonder, or have you vanished like so many.
When I go out the next afternoon I hope to evade Hill, but I go back to that inn to seek her out. It is too early perhaps, she is not there and so I introduce myself to another lady. She is a very long lady and has no dimples but does smile and I will say no more of my trip to Philadelphia.
When I am back in Carolina, that city becomes a loose dream to me, not a real place. It has eaten my money. Miller has kept his share of our hunting proceeds safe. He looks upon me, his face like soap, all clean and disgusted with my dirt.
I had thought myself lucky. But so did Israel. I do not know what I am to do.
The hunting and trapping are poor as the summer comes, and so I earn my keep driving wagons to market in Salisbury. It is dull enough work. I think only of escape, my brains thump with the thought in the day’s heat. All the worse because the Yadkin Valley seemed a good place when we first settled here. But my happiness is gone, and where may I go to now? My legs are heavy as lead. I cannot live this way, rolling about with lead legs in a wagon. A fear creeps along, a fear that I will disappear entire into this life. At times I feel Israel’s breath, his laugh, at the back of my neck. But when I turn he is not there. Never.
On my way back from market when the daylight is low, I stop at Lowrance’s tavern some miles out of town. After a drink I go outdoors to relieve myself, and round the side of the house I see a bundle of hay set on sticks with a slap of red paint at its centre. It has the look of a square pig without its head. Headless it stares at me.
A sign.
I do not relieve myself. I join the queue before the target though I am fatigued and arse-sore from sitting. The evening is windy. It is only a small shooting contest, hardly a contest at all. But I know that I will win it. The wind nips at my eyes but I know. I get out Hill’s old gun and I shoot the dead centre of the red paint, the eye of the straw pig. My prize is a tomahawk prised from the death grip of a fallen Iroquois, as old Lowrance says grandly, which makes a group of Catawba Indians who have stopped to watch hoot with laughter.
—White Indian, ha ha ha ha.
They laugh on into the wind. Their eyes glint. One of them is drunk and laughs so hard he falls sideways to the ground.
For a time I carry the tomahawk about. I take it to more competitions in hope of gaining some new luck from it, though its weight swinging from my belt makes me feel a fool. A white Indian indeed. But I win. I win. The winning is stupid and easy but I do it as if I had been born for it. Some of the prizes are poor enough things, kettles or badly tanned skins, but some are bottles of whiskey, and some are money. And people begin to know me, they talk of me as if I were not there. As if I were a tale. I ready my powder measure, and I hear a woman say I shot three men straight through, the holes lined up like shirt buttons. Another says I cleaved someone else’s brains dead in half one Sunday afternoon. Families sit and eat on the ground watching, children chew their bread with their mouths open and call out: Shoot.
Another shooter, a sharp-faced man with ratty teeth, jabs me with a long musket and says:
—Now get one arm behind your back.
I take his musket and I do so, though the gun is near as long as I am tall and my arm holding it shakes. People go on talking of what I will do. Some place be
ts. I feel eyes pinned on me.
I can shoot this way, one-armed. I go cold all through with knowing that it can be done. My arm quiets, my chest empties out, I am able to hold myself still and shoot clean. Israel, look. The words come into my mind but are soon covered by the gun’s crack. The ratty-faced man claps slow. The crack is what I love, and the burned smell and the bits of straw spinning from the target and slowing in the air.
Again I begin to feel alive. I get two new guns, my own long gun and another short-rifle, and in autumn I go on hunts with Squire and Neddy. Squire is very silent, a good tracker for his age. He keeps his thoughts to himself. Ned teases him for the way he checks the hour by the sun, as though time were of great importance out here. Ned likes to hum, or to stop us and say: Let’s sit a while. Then he likes to go home. But though we know the whole of the Yadkin Valley well by now, there is no pleasure in it. The game is poorer and poorer.
We get back to the cabin one evening to find Hill sitting outside it singing. I say:
—What are you doing here?
He smiles. He is holding a new long gun, rubbing the barrel. He says:
—Inspecting Carolina’s possibilities.
—Here?
—Even the whores of Philadelphia talk of coming out here. Even they have heard of your shooting. Some of them remember it personally, I should say.
This he says with his heavy reminding clap on the back as he stands. He presses the gun into my hands and says it is a gift. He has presents for the young ones and Ma also. As we go inside, he talks with Neddy about old times, he says he has always felt himself quite at home in our family. Ma gives him coffee and he sits at our table and talks on. He takes out papers with land advertisements in which the words green and sweat appear without fail. He has written them, he says, for the newspapers in Pennsylvania. I believe he means sweet but my spelling is uncertain and I do not wish to penetrate the mind of Hill. He is buying up land cheap, any land he thinks he can sell at a profit. When Daddy comes in, Hill stands and calls him sir. Daddy’s face goes hard as a rod, but Hill offers him fifty good acres upriver for nothing, which slowly placates him for the memory of being cast out of Exeter Meeting. Wealth does this, as I can see, it smoothes things like a hand over a fur.
Soon it seems Hill’s fault that people are everywhere and that houses and cabins pop up like weeds. Most of these have no interest for me, though one day I see a girl washing her linen in a creek, and she is a pretty girl, which is interesting, especially as she is wearing only her undershift and I can see her round arms. Neddy and Squire and I stare, but when she notices us she crawls into the rough low sty on the bank and does not heed our calls.
We have to go still farther to find deer and bear, and our traplines are often empty.
Tales crawl in with the new people like a dark blanket being tugged over the country. Everybody seems to know them at once, they infect the air. There is no peace. Cherokees and Shawnees and Iroquois slaughtering everyone at any little settlement, old women and all. And Virginians killing Indians, even old peaceful Catawbas long settled there, for anything, for stealing an egg, and turning in the scalps to collect the Governor’s bounty. Hill loves to talk of all of it. He will sit by our fireside and throw his hands behind his head and go over and over these tales, as women will talk of a mortal sickness, the vomit and the soiled bedclothes and the final words and the precise minute that Death arrives. I do not want to hear it.
—Some of the children whose parents the red-boys murdered got away into the woods, all bloody wounds. Poor little creatures. Who can say where they have got to?
He affects sensitivity and love of children. He sets his hands on the shoulders of my youngest sister Hannah. Hill feels all of this truly when he talks of it, his body quakes with his feeling, I cannot bear his swimming eyes. But he is richer than ever. He has turned his Quaker father’s money into land speculations and bets, and he is winning everything.
I think of money, I think of fresh land. All I would like to have. I go to market with my skins on a grey day. There is no escape from the bad talk. At the stall I am told of a farmer tomahawked through the back of the neck who had to drag himself four days to safety with his head lolling, unable to eat or drink but knowing that he must somehow get away, for any prisoners the Indians take are burned alive at the stake. The woman who tells me this runs her eyes eagerly all over my face. Like rats they run. She says:
—The Shawnee are the best burners. Chief Black Fish is the one. He paints the captives black so they know just how they will look afterwards. Black as your hair.
She has a newspaper with a drawing of such a burning in it, which she thrusts at me. She then shades her eyes with her hand and calls for her husband to look at my skins. Ma, I think of your tales of women burned for witches in England and the north, little ashy heaps of them left everywhere. I drive the wagon home and have no wish to speak to anyone for some time.
I am in want of money, I am in want of everything, I am in want of a scratching. I itch in Carolina head to foot. I have no quarrel with the Indians, I never have, and not much with the French. But I am young.
Come on boys. Come on. We will get the FROGS out of this land for good and some of their Redskin friends too.
The appeal is poor enough. But I tell Ma the King’s shilling is as good as any. She says war is no life for me, but to myself I say: You do not know what life is for me. It is not here.
I kiss her sad face both sides, and I go to drive a wagon in the army baggage train. I am young and I believe that I know what I ought to do, I believe that I can get free and make my own way. Though it is only Death opening its clothes to me and saying: Look close.
ONCE WE GET out of Carolina there are no true roads west, only narrow trails, which the scouts lose entirely from time to time. I hope to see something marvellous but there is little so far. The French have no interest in showing themselves. We will boot them back to Quebec when we find them, all this land and its furs for England and King George! So the officers keep announcing. General Braddock places his proper British regiments at the front in their proper scarlet coats. Some of us colonial militiamen at the back have jackets the wives or mothers tried to dye red, but we are a sorrier looking lot. The army creaks and groans and whistles along. We force our slow way through bogs and underbrush and woods. We hack everything down. Every blade of grass. We stop for every bump. For every anthill.
—Ought to have kept one to show my Ma. Or to turn in for the money.
I hear one of the scouts saying this to another as they pass our fire on their way to their tent. The other runs his finger over his lip as he says:
—No money in those, they have hung out there for months. Not even the flies are interested. Use it as a wig for your prick, your Ma would like that.
Scalps they are talking of, nailed to the trees where we last camped. In the Allegheny Mountains now, it is rough going. We are tired out and sore and want only to drink in private without catching Hell from the officers. No wagoner is fond of the scouts and their airs, and perhaps it is a mercy there are so few of them, though there ought to be more. Indian ones would likely do better, but who can tell which side they are on? I do know I could do better myself. Signs are everywhere if you look. And I do look.
As the scouts walk on I hear them arguing about the name of a town they both believe they know. No no yes yes, on and on.
—If they do not like the scenery they should paint themselves another scene. Such is the privilege of you boys of America.
This comes from Findley, the wagoner fondest of talking. He is the worse for drink now, that is to say worse than the rest of us. He is an odd fellow, all bones and small bright blue eyes. In his usual life he is a trader and so he is able to supply us with the drink we are not meant to have. But in exchange we are forced to listen to him. Rum makes him affable at least, and we all watch out for the officers together. He lies with a cloth over his face for his toothache and spins yarn about his travels. He has been
south to Florida to trade among the Seminoles. He says he tried to shoot a dragon there, properly called an alligator, but he was baffled by its weird eyes with their black pupils like narrow doors. The heat also baffled him, it was so damp and gasping. And deep in the green swamps he came upon an Englishman living with twelve women and his old mother. The Englishman called it an Ideal Society, where work was done according to inclination.
I am the only one who really listens. I would like to know about all he has seen, not least these women. I say:
—And what was these ladies’ inclination? What do they wear in the swamps of Florida?
From beneath his face cloth Findley laughs in muffled faraway fashion and says:
—Perhaps I will tell you. Perhaps.
I sit up and say:
—How long did it take you to get there, Findley? What was the hunting like?
But he seems to have fallen asleep. Dodd, another driver, says:
—Christ.
He throws a spoon at Findley, who stirs and reaches for it. His voice rises again gamely:
—For that, I will tell you something. There is another place I have been to with no one in it, no women, no French and no need of roads at all, so perfect is it. Some Indians perhaps, not many, and perfect nonetheless. No need of roads, no need of names. Beautiful. And clean. I dream of it, you boys, I dream of its cleanness. You too would dream of it if you only knew what cleanness was, if God in his mercy chose to reveal it to you as well—
I am listening. I know that Findley feels me listening. His voice seems directed straight at me. I am about to say: Where is this place then. But another among us groans like an ox and says:
—Oh Christ, no goddamned Irish sermonizing here, Findley. O Jaysus.