by Alix Hawley
—Go back to your face-ache. Spare us the pain.
Dodd says so while digging about with a twig in his ear. As he goes too far with it, he yelps: Shit. Then he says:
—Lying there like a slug. Shame the Indians did not send you to your eternal rest on your travels. Their heavenly hunting grounds will take anyone, clean or not.
Findley gives a cooing laugh and flaps an arm:
—Indeed. The Indians are great friends of mine. We trade, and they have shown me all manner of things.
—And they like your things.
—All my things, certainly. They are fond of silver and gold.
—Well, and are your things silver and gold? The deuce, and mine only flesh. But meaty! Take a look if you dare to come out from under that arse-rag.
Dodd is laughing and reaching for his belt to drop his breeches as he will do at any opportunity, but Findley does not lift the cloth from his peaky face. He goes on with his arm held out:
—What I tell you will appear in your dreams, and they will be the most heavenly dreams you have ever known.
Dodd spits on Findley’s face cloth.
I take a drink and I say:
—Your path to Heaven could be sped for you, Findley.
Now he lifts the cloth dainty as a bride with a bedsheet and looks me up and down with a grin before replacing it. He knows he has me on his hook.
The air tastes of thick dust. It gets all through our mouths and clothes.
We are in Pennsylvania now. Pennsylvania again. The fifes far at the front of the column take on a wheezy flat tone after some days in the dust. The late summer wasps and flies keep with us, I grease up my face and neck to keep them off, but they pay no heed. At the front the infantry are building a log road to get us through a newly cleared boggy patch. I pull up my horses, who are restless. The oxen pulling the open wagon ahead of mine are unperturbed at having to stop so often. I stare at their ridged blank backs. I wonder about the sentiments of oxen. What do they think of? Being gelded, there is not much to think of, as I imagine.
An insect creeps into my ear, and as I turn my head to shake it loose I see my little sick wife, Molly Black, the wife of my childhood. For an instant I see her blindfolded ghost, a small camp-follower at the back of the wagons.
I am sentimental at twenty years of age. So I tell myself.
But now my team butts against the wagon in front and steps back, tangling the traces. One horse rears and sputters. I get down to unsnarl them. I invent fresh curses about vegetables and the crevices of horses. Findley on the wagon behind me laughs and says:
—I could listen to you all the day and night. Do not stop now, go on, go on. You are quite amusing to watch, Boone, did you know it?
For his benefit I turn the vegetable curses to the crevices of the Irish and he laughs the more and slaps his long thin thighs.
When I have untangled the beasts, we lurch on. We bump over the logs and onto the ground again. I could crawl faster than this backwards. The heat oppresses me. I occupy my mind with keeping the horses exactly half a foot from the wagon in front. I think also of the round-armed girl in her under-shift, and the pretty faces and parts of other women I have seen, and my thoughts become less sentimental for a time.
The axes at the front clash with the trees, the fifes pick up their dreary tinny tune, “Roslin Castle” again. Goddamned castle, are there no other tunes? Findley yawns heavily. I call back:
—Headache again? Like to die yet?
He only groans, and I must say that my own head is aching violently when I think of it. We drag on a quarter-mile or so, the sun heightens. The river nearby gives no coolness and no relief from the clanging and whistling and creaking and groaning. Far ahead of us, the line begins to ford the water.
We bump to a dead halt, pinned by a high bank on one side and stands of birches atop a ridge above the river on the other. The river seems an impossible cool dream. There is no way to get the wagons through this to the shallower ford up the path, so the axemen will have to set to work again. We are not permitted to leave the line.
I sit back. My hat falls down my back at this moment and my aching head burns in the sun.
I do not hear the shout, only the echo bouncing back. Then the doubled echo of four shots. Then more, running into one another so they cannot be counted. No human sound at first. I stand and I can see a mounted officer just ahead of the wagons and behind the marchers, stopped with his hand over his mouth and nose, as though a stink had hit him in the face. He turns back and I see his perplexed forehead. I climb up on the box: a half-mile ahead at the front of the train are hundreds of people like the Lilliputians in the story, miniature people appearing out of the trees and descending the bank. Where have they come from?
My eye lights on a tiny man in a tiny French blue jacket separating himself from the pack. Quickly he knocks down one of our soldiers with his gun-butt and then kneels on him and knifes his head and peels off his scalp. I see the whole of this scene, the small arm waving the detached hair in the air and the tiny body on the ground. I seem to be peering into a strange world underground, perhaps in an anthill. I want to shut my eyes but I cannot. I am still standing upon the box. A dog cries with a desperate sound. More bodies on the ground ahead are scattered like fallen red birds. The officer now cries out: Unfair! I believe this is what he says. He orders the rear guard and the wagons onward, slashing his sword across the air. Urging their animals ahead, the first wagoners crash into the infantrymen and some of the mounted soldiers who have turned back to flee. I turn to try to see Findley, but when I look back I see only the moving line of blue jackets and painted skin making its way along our confused column. They chop as if scything through brush, as if we were thousands of thin trees in their way.
Five wagons ahead they are already tearing into the white covering, slitting it like a belly and looking inside. I hear some words in French and then some of the Indians beginning to confer and to pull things out. They know where everything is. They have been following us for days, perhaps for weeks.
Dodd, the driver of that wagon, goes down with a sigh as the breath is torn out of him. I see him roll down the bank towards the water. By now the river is stuffed to the jaws with us, some face down, some splashing in feeble strokes, some standing up to their hips and holding their guns out, waiting for direction.
It strikes me that people do not always run in the face of such danger, they do not believe in it when it opens its maw at them. They wait to see what will happen. I am not the only one. I think of it later in my life when I am standing in the snowy woods, not running.
The French and the Indians sweep along the line, pushing between the trees. They want the horses, the oxen, the supplies. The scalps too. The French king buys them. I picture the French king in a suit woven of people’s hair, stroking his long sleeves.
This is no fight, it is only killing, and killing is nothing after all, it is nothing, it is only dull and horrible. I want no more to do with it. Officers in their red sashes fall from their horses screaming. I turn again and see Findley is sitting on his box with his cloth over his forehead. My body is coiled tight. My gun is beside me. I do not know how loud I am or whether I speak aloud at all:
—We had best be gone, I am going.
I slash at the traces with my knife and one of the horses tries to bolt, one falls. I crawl onto the back of the one rearing, I cut him free and we run crashing down the bank into the Monongahela River up to his withers, where I throw myself into the water. I keep my head down and my eyes cracked open just enough to see. With my gun in both hands I push my way through the water to the other side, I hear muffled wet shouts and calls as I keep on, I feel terrible things that I do not think of.
Others are with me on the far side. Not many. One man’s trousers are in shreds, he stumbles ahead, his backside ribboned with blood.
I can still feel the bodies in the water like logs, with the same sodden weight, the way I have to push them from me and stand on
them. Israel, I keep thinking of your body, though I did not see it. I will not look at any of these dead in case I see you. I tell myself I have seen many murders at once here, but I have killed nobody and I have saved myself and so—V is for victory. But chewing it over is like another piece of army salt beef, likely to give you a sore mouth. I want only to not think of it.
I face west. I stand still with the sun burning my eyes out. I think of running past all of this, past everything, and finding the place Findley talked of. Paradise. It is not so far, surely.
My breath struggles in my tight chest. But Ma, I see you with your worried face white as an onion, your hair gone all white too. I see your terrible face after Israel died in the wagon. Ma and Daddy.
I leave the possibility of Heaven behind and make my way back towards Carolina. But after all I do not escape Death, I do not escape killing. There is no escape.
I walk on with my heart swollen and sore. I sing to the trees, I count them to occupy my mind. I list the names of horses we have had. Fatsy, Charming, Helen, Houynhym, Swifty, Sausages. Then I turn to hogs, Jub and Plum, good hogs and clever ones, who dug their way out of their pen at slaughter time. I think of Ma in the dusk of the summer pastures calling in the cows: Here with you, you Ham. Oh Ma, I think of you now.
I walk on. But I seem to feel breath at my elbow.
In the deepest backwoods it is horse’s breath I feel, though the horse is not here. Jezebel. She has been dead for what seems a thousand years. This is the first time I feel it, the gentle hay-smelling breath. I have not wished to think of it. But Israel has done it. I feel him again as well, his presence behind me. He has called her up from the dead with some wordless sounds. I quicken to a run though the brush is thick and catches at my face and arms. The sun is setting at my back, everything is rusting red.
I know it now. My dead are following me. I say no but they say yes, yes. Little Molly Black’s teeth chatter lightly. I feel Israel narrow his eyes and grin. I close my own. I say low:
—What is it? What do you want?
My voice is rough and hard. No reply. The horse’s breath is cold but it comes and goes and does not stop. Now it seems to say to me, You cannot forget.
I will not think of it. All night I charge on through the brush, branches tearing at my face. I do not stop. The way back is very long. I believe I hear wolves, but my own heart is so loud I cannot tell what I hear.
When day comes, I am still walking, I drag my feet as if I am asleep, I am scratched with thin bleeding lines everywhere, the tip of my ear is torn open, but I go on until I feel nothing and think nothing. Until I stop at the edge of a river. Someone is there.
He is an Indian man sitting fishing on a log bridge over the water far below. All he is doing is fishing. His leg swings light, back and forth, one moccasin dangles from his toes and I see his bare round heel.
The way is very narrow here, my only path straight past him. I see the knobs of his spine curled over his fishing line, his rifle balanced easy beside him.
If I move he will see me. I am trapped, my ribs squeeze my heart, my heart is so loud that I want to rip it out and step upon it.
He goes on sitting and fishing and not going away.
Enough of war, it is not for me. Enough of killing. I say this reasonably to myself. I say to myself, I will frighten him off and go on home. Go on.
Israel, I know you are with me. I close my eyes a moment. Then I ready my shot, and as my finger squeezes the trigger, the man’s head turns, his eyes catch on mine. I am startled that he can move and that his eyes can move, that they are real eyes.
The gun shifts and drops as I fire. His eyes change. He falls without a sound, there is no sound for what seems a long time until his clean splash into the slothful water. He does not come up. The ripples smooth themselves away into green.
As I stand looking it strikes me like water on hot metal. I am a murderer. This is what Israel wished to tell me. I think it is, I think this is what he was saying: You cannot forget what you are. Poor Jezebel has been sent to say it again. I have been a murderer all along. I think of shooting the deer after the fire-hunt with you, Israel. I killed it unfairly, too easy, and I killed the horse, and now a man, and perhaps I helped to kill you by taking away your luck.
I walk on. More than ever, I think of getting away to another place. But I drag back to Carolina. I drown any thoughts of the death I have caused, I sink them as the Indian man sank beneath the slow current. I never tell of it. I try never to think on it again. The way the mind can rub out such things is a wonder. But only for a time. They do come back. You cannot forget, no. More than once as I walk I feel the horse’s breath on my cheek, all innocent.
More than once too I wonder whether I would have killed Neddy that night had he been the one to break his neck and look up at me with sad eyes.
THE REST OF the long walk home from war, I catch at it and I hold it in my mind to keep the ghosts from me, before I know who she is. Her profile, white against old Bryan’s dark barn, only her face showing in the frame of black hair like a painting of a face, still as still. Rebecca.
She is a Bryan herself of course, with that whole band behind her. She does not forget it.
—Do I know who you are?
This is one of the things she says, always, in my mind. It comes with a slight lift of her brows as I watch her sweeping. Her eyes are black like birds’ eyes, all pupil. She turns away and says:
—I am tired of looking at you. There are better views to the south.
Her voice is deadly and I kiss her cool grimy hand and she gives me the twisted smile. Every time I see it my heart near stops. My wife.
Months after I return to the Yadkin, I see her real face again when Hill decides to take Ned and Squire and me to watch girls cherry-picking in someone’s orchard. It will be cheering, he says. There is no cheering me, I know. But I go along. Much of the way, Hill offers his opinions of the accomplishments of the whores of Philadelphia and elsewhere. Ned asks questions and Squire walks along listening. I will admit that my memories of Maria the volcano whore have worn clear through, though they remain fond enough.
I drop back behind Squire and pick up a root, I look up for birds to club it with. Hill is untiring on other subjects also. Some soldiers carried mutilated bodies from the Monongahela River battle all the way to Philadelphia and dumped them in a square to show that peace is impossible. He has heard of this. He now shouts back at me:
—Did you see many men barbecued in the war?
His face is cheerful. Somewhere he has heard that I killed several Indians as well as a few French on the battlefield. I do not know where he has heard this, it makes my flesh crawl. Other people have been giving me fond thankful looks and one old woman in Salisbury asked to touch the bold hand of a young one who blasted the filth from our land.
Well I felt sick and ugly but I told her she was a poetess, and she rolled her eyes to Heaven before clutching at my hand and saying yes, she has written a poem. Indeed, more than one poem. She began to hurt my bones with her clutching. Her neck was all lollops of fat.
Now Hill asks again:
—See many scalped?
—No.
I am sick of his questions, I have no wish to think of the army or of anything I have done. The defeat is already infamous. Hill is writing a song about it, the General’s battlefield death, bleeding all over his red sash, and all the rest:
The sad death of Braddock in fifty-five,
Soon there was nobody left alive.
Such is Hill’s songwriting. He says he will have to make all of it up if I tell him no more. He is starved for interest in life, he moans. I say:
—I told you, no.
And so he begins to sing again: Poor Britons, poor Britons, poor Britons remember. His singing is insistent. I am not fond of this song and I am not fond of Hill singing it. And I am sick of this life and this walk. It is a long walk, a whole morning.
Hill has hopes of seeing cherry-picking girls caugh
t out and having to relieve themselves somewhere in the trees.
—I will feed them all cherries with this very hand until they can no longer resist nature.
When we arrive out of the forest, he plants his feet and stands shielding his eyes from the high sun. Neddy laughs, and Squire says in his dry fashion:
—There are boys already up in the trees getting cherries, your admiralship, and a few girls getting their own. Best hurry before they take them all.
Hill marches forth, followed by Neddy. Squire looks to me, but I wave him on and stay where I am. The cherry trees are thin and young for the most part, all full of upward effort. Only one row is old enough to make any shade. Here two girls sit, the shadows making a net over them. They are sharing black cherries from their basket and looking straight at me. One is the face, the girl from Bryan’s frolic. Rebecca.
They are very still as they sit eating. Rebecca moves her hand slowly to the basket, and I see what an effort there is in her stillness. She is full of trapped life. Her heart beats and beats beneath her clothing. She will keep me alive. She is another chance. My own flat heart swells and struggles in its pit.
I watch for a time, hardly breathing, then I force my legs to move. I walk over and sit directly beside her. Her mouth is full of dark fruit, she does not trouble herself to try to speak. I watch her jaw move and the stain spreading out onto her untroubled lip. She slips two more cherries in.
The other girl stares at me with her big deer-eyes. She is the sister who came out of the barn and took the dead owl from Ned. I say:
—How do.
The sister blinks and says:
—How do you do.
She has a stopped-up way of talking, with her hand hovering about her chin. She also has black hair and eyes but a paler, thinner face. I say:
—You are sisters.
She twitches herself about. I smirk at my stupid pronouncement. Rebecca plucks more cherries from the basket. The sister ventures a remark about the heat and peeps at me a while longer. Then she gets up and wanders over to where Neddy and Squire have sat in the sun with several of the girls who are minding children. Hill is hovering. I see him lick his palm and shine his latest gun with it and walk up to show it to them: See this.