by Alix Hawley
—You ought to get back.
His face remains shut but his eyes rise to meet mine. I know that this is all he will say on the subject. His opinion has been presented like a small rock striking my head. Squire always had a good aim. I say:
—I know it.
Then I keep quiet, though something is evidently not right. I do not feel the need for more rocks to the head at this time.
We pack our way out through the mountain gap after more luck at trapping, and we travel past the white cliffs, where I stop to look for the letters of our names we carved. They are unchanged. We carry on down the eastern side of the Alleghenies. The Warrior’s Path turns and follows a creek through the narrow valley I remember. Powell’s Valley, I say, and I think of coming through here with Findley. I do not wish our trip to be finished, though I do not know where he is now.
Squire offers his hand to help me through the fast high stream. I say:
—I am not quite an invalid. I am alive yet.
He is still somewhat ill at ease but he laughs and says:
—I respect my elders.
We walk the horses through the water and stop on the far bank, our leggings wet and stiffening. The air is still cool, especially in the shaded places such as this. I sit to dry my feet a little. Squire says:
—We should keep on.
—Your favourite phrase, it seems to me. What is wrong with taking one more night here?
—Feeling your age, old man?
—I feel nothing, nothing at all.
I try to believe this, though I am still half-minded to go back to Kentucky. I find myself almost afraid it will have disappeared without me. I begin to gather kindling, and Squire sighs but sets to helping.
We do not see them until they are in the creek, running their horses straight across, straight for us. We have enough time to reach our guns but not to load. They dismount and stand, dripping and huge, their heads wrapped in coloured scarves. Giants, I think. Here are we in Gulliver’s Brobdingnag.
We stare mutually.
I take my gun in one hand and step forward. I say:
—How do, brothers. Shawnee?
—Cherokee.
The one who replies is very tall with a long face, all bone. His cheekbones look as though they will burst straight through his skin. His headscarf is frayed along the edge, and he tucks it back up with care. His movements are all ease. His five companions go on staring until he lightly puts out his hands for Squire’s rifle. With a glance at me, Squire gives it up. I speak little Cherokee and so I say in English:
—We can see yours?
The big man lifts his chin and hands over his own gun. It is poorly made trade-trash, the stock painted up all gay, and puts me in mind of Findley’s pile of magpie rubbish. I point to my eyes and say:
—You know a white trader with blue eyes? Very white, very blue.
The man snorts and laughs. He says something to the others and they laugh as well, especially after he gives a little flourishing bow. Findley’s gesture. He reaches towards my face, and I keep myself still as his hand goes around to the back of my neck, where Findley’s lavender hair-ribbon is still in my plait. He tries to pull it out but it is well caught. He twists it over his fist instead and says:
—Everyone knows this man.
—Have you seen him?
The man smiles, still fingering the end of the hair ribbon. He says only:
—Maybe so.
—Have you seen another white man, tall and thin, smelling of bear? Or one who goes about singing in a loud voice?
—Maybe so.
His voice is even and tells me nothing.
—Did you kill either of them?
My tone is light also. Again he says:
—Maybe so.
He laughs and takes out a pipe. He offers it to me with a broad smile.
Squire makes the fire when I ask him to. Wariness shows in the line of his back. He says soft to me:
—We should get ready to be gone.
I am drinking from my flask with the tall man. I offer a toast:
—To Blue Eyes. Or—to you. What is your name?
—Jim.
The man says it so easy it is almost a mockery. All of their white-given names sound like small lies. I say:
—The same as my older boy. That the name your mother gave you?
He only laughs. The other men are examining the rifles again, and one looks up and asks something with a smile. Jim says:
—Trade?
He is smiling too, as if it is all one joke. I say:
—Oh, we could not do that.
I join the smiles. My face twitches and throbs and my muscles are warm from the rum. I look at Squire, he raises one shoulder, he is willing me not to get us axed, willing me to stop this. But I cannot stop, I feel reckless all through, and curious about these men. I want to keep them here. I want something to happen. I say:
—You can see we are not traders. Not like Blue Eyes.
Jim stretches out a broad, flat fingertip. He says:
—Your eyes are blue. Little Blue Eyes.
His finger is close to the surface of my eye, as if he is aiming at a target, as if he will gently touch it. I do not move. I say:
—Are mine blue? So I have been told. You will have to tell me what you see.
Jim laughs and takes his finger away. The other Cherokee make a show of considering the guns and pelts and horses with buyers’ care. And so I make a seller’s show, I point out the length of the rifles Squire brought, the quality of the otter pelts especially. Jim strokes one and idly puts his fingers through the eyehole. He touches the fur to his cheek. Bright as I can, I say:
—Squire. Your shaving mirror. Perhaps they would like to see themselves.
But Squire shrugs roughly. He says:
—My shaving mirror is not to hand.
The Cherokee Jim looks at him a moment, then nods to his companions. They load their horses with our furs and rifles, leaving us the poor trade guns. They wave and call as they ride our horses back over the river and up the path on the other side, the pack animals behind.
Well. Everything is gone again.
Squire sits by the fire and takes off his damp moccasins. He rests his nose against his fist for a moment. Then he looks up grimly. Smoke curls in tails about him. He says:
—You are quite a negotiator.
—They did not kill us.
My body still roars with energy, I do not know what to do with myself. I feel myself a player in an unsatisfactory performance. I want to do it again. I stand and walk about the fire in a circle and throw sticks into it. I say:
—Everything between us and the Indians feels false. Like theatrics. Or like a long joke. Do you not think so?
Squire is looking down again. He breathes out and grudgingly says:
—Then why play along?
—We all play along. It is a game. Or a tale, we all like a tale. A happy end.
—Happy for who?
—I do not know. For everyone.
I take off my moccasins as well and stretch my toes closer to the heat. Squire says:
—For us? This is happiness?
—Why not? At least we can start again. We can go back and hunt farther. It is another chance.
This thought cheers me, as it always has. Squire is holding his moccasins on a stick over the fire, and the air begins to smell of toasting skin. He says in his dry way:
—Not everyone gets another chance. Go home, Dan.
He swings his moccasins straight down into the fire, where they perish in smoke.
—YOU AGAIN.
She is standing in the cabin doorway holding a spoon. Something is dripping from it. Her mouth is curled tight at the corner, as I knew it would be.
I know you saw me at the dance that was going on at your grandfather’s house when I arrived. I stood with my back to the wall and you looked through me as you spun by, some of your hair falling loose in a loop on your back. I saw your black eye
s moving on and not stopping. I watched you do it. I felt myself disappear.
I left Squire at his house, and I slept outside that night. Now I have walked home across the fields to stand outside our own cabin, and she does know who I am after all. Rebecca looks worn, with a dull sheen to her skin. She is beautiful, it invades me, I breathe in hard. This is my wife. She is my wife. I say:
—Fancy seeing you in this place.
I push back my hat to see her in full. My voice is frogged and odd. My smile hurts my jaws. I need to hear her speak again. She does:
—The same to you, I was going to say, Mr. Boone.
—I suppose we would have to meet one another sometime in a crowded vicinity like this one. Only logical.
—I suppose so.
She stands with the spoon going drip drip drip. Her face is containing itself in its old way, the way it did when I first saw it against the barn. She is the same, she has been here all along. My eyes burn and I have to lower my face:
—I wish I had brought you more, little girl. So much was taken. Stewart is gone.
—Gone where?
—I do not know. Gone.
At once the loss of all our gains crushes me. It no longer feels part of a game or a play. My shoulders fall. I go on standing outside the house with its lit window and its weathering walls. It looks small and tight and fortified. You outsider. You ape.
Her eyes travel over me slow and reluctant. I see myself as she must see me: tired hunting shirt, dirty flapping moccasins patched together from scraps, hungry body. White Indian. Ha. I pull at my long beard and hold out the end to show her.
She smiles gentle, one side of her mouth. No laugh. She says:
—You got something for your pains, I see.
—I did.
She looks out past the kitchen garden to the rye and wheat and flax and corn. Her eyes seem to run over every plant in turn, as if she knows each one. She likely planted many herself, making holes in the dirt with her long fingers. Jesse and Jonathan are bent over the plough outside the stable, trying to mend it, and they look up but do not come over. It strikes me that life has been difficult enough here. Looking at Rebecca, I want to kiss her hard on her face and throat, I want to taste her clean skin, but I do not move. This is her place.
She looks at me. She only looks.
At last she says:
—Will you not come in, wandering sir.
I say:
—I will, lady. If you say so.
—I say so.
She turns with decision in her bones. I follow her in through the low doorway, I ought to have made it higher when I built the place. The children are near the fire, snatching a wood doll from each other and beating its head upon the walls. They are so big and so healthy and so much themselves that I begin to laugh. Rebecca says:
—Here is your Dada.
Jamesie turns. He is so tall now. He is pleased but unsure, his feet apart as if he is stopping himself from running. Israel, always ready to show off for strangers and their beards, turns the spit all crazy to show me what he can do. And Susannah is a little girl already, her fine dark hair a tangle at the back of her head. She lets out a squeal and scrambles for the doll in the corner. She takes it over to the cradle and hops it up and down in the air before depositing it there.
An answering wail comes from within at a thinner and higher pitch.
My hand is about to reach Rebecca’s waist, but it stops in the air. I move to look.
A tiny baby with a fuzz of black hair, like hers. Like mine. It stares up with its eyes fixed on my face long enough to send out a challenge. It opens its wet mouth. It keeps its night-blue eyes open also.
Two Christmases and more. Near two years I have been gone.
I pick up the baby and return the stare. It bleats and fights its swaddling bands. I say:
—Wants out.
I sit and unwrap it and let the bands fall in a pile on the floor. I want to see all of it. The baby hurls out its limbs, making itself star-shaped. It is very young and it is a girl.
Rebecca watches, still holding the spoon. The children try to get it, pulling at her arm and skirts. The naked baby gasps and lets out a clear yell, a single note, and Rebecca cannot help but step towards it. But she halts herself and keeps still. Her eyes shift between the baby and me.
I say to the children:
—Leave your mother be.
The baby flails again and I hold it up in the air, where it tries to lift its head to scream at the ceiling. Its neck lolls, it pisses a wet stream down my chest.
My first thought is of the Catawbas laughing at me with my stupidly won tomahawk at the shooting contest. Like them, I stare unbelieving and I laugh. I say:
—Yours?
Rebecca nods once.
—Well. She is half on the right side of the sheets, then.
The laugh catches in my dry throat. Rebecca says, her face held tight:
—She looks like you.
—That is fine for her, or for you. Whose is she?
She says nothing. I say:
—Perhaps I ought to ask the midwife then, you surely screamed the father’s name in your labour. Is that not what they say in such sad cases? Who delivered you? Martha?
Her eyes are on me for an instant. She says fiercely:
—She is nobody’s. Nobody’s.
She is quietly furious, guarded as a gate. She stalks the six steps across the room. There is not space enough for her fury. To the wall she says:
—You were gone so long. You were just gone. For a long while I thought you were dead. Daniel, I believed you were dead, what else was I to think?
I think of Squire’s locked-up face, and I say:
—Was that your reasoning—that I was dead? That it was time for a replacement? Well here I am from beyond the grave to prove you wrong.
I get up and step forward, she whirls to face me:
—It was twice—twice.
—More than enough, then.
She spins again, shaking Susannah from her skirt. The boys are staring. I am still holding up the squirming stranger baby. I say:
—Name?
She lifts her chin and says:
—Jemima.
This is new, nobody’s name, not her mother’s, not mine. I say:
—Did he name it, this travelling Nobody?
She bends at the fire to viciously stir a pot with her spoon, I cannot see her face. Her voice is trying to steady itself:
—A priest came. One of the Moravians.
—Oho, a priest now. Have you developed a taste for religion? Or did it develop a taste for you, is that your tale? Ja ja ja, gut gut—
Her voice rises:
—A very old man, a good man. An old priest with a grey beard to his waist and a smell of damp. Is that what you want to hear? He wanted a meal on his way back to their colony. He sat and watched all of us as he ate, and he said to me, You are in a lonely position. He saw what it is like here. I told him that I am afraid all the time. All the time.
—You had the boys here to help you, Jesse and Jonathan—
—Boys, they are boys! I am tied hand and foot here, I was alone with all of this—
—You had the children here. Mine.
The baby works up to a serious cry, ongoing and rising.
Rebecca whips about to face me again, clutching the spoon as though she will shovel out my brains for me. She is about to strike my face with it, I feel the sting of her wish to, I feel my arm tighten as hers does. Susannah knocks over a pot of beans soaking on the hearth and begins to howl. The boys stand very still as the water creeps towards their feet. The baby wails. Rebecca stares at me and says:
—Hold her. Not like that.
She hurls the spoon to the floor where it cracks into pieces. She bends to the mess. And I do hold the baby, who grows more angry and burrows her face into my chest, looking for milk or comfort or something else that I am supposed to have but do not have.
I go again. I vanish. I pl
unge into the woods across the Yadkin, I shoot pheasants and sparrows and squirrels and anything else that I see moving. I think of things I might take an axe to. Houses, heads, pricks. I sit by my campfire into the night with my eyes wide, and I wake cramped up as a claw. How can you uncramp yourself from such a state?
I think of going up to Squire’s place to see how he has fared with his wife, or of going to Hannah’s to tell her Stewart is lost. But I do not. I sit. And after some days I return to the cabin. I sit outside the doorway for a time, where I can see Rebecca passing back and forth inside the house. I say nothing. I will stare her out. But she refuses to acknowledge my presence. I watch her moving about, I see her face ease as she lets her eyes settle on the cradle. This baby is another first child to her. This dumbstruck look that mothers get with their newborn babies, as if a new planet has been made before their eyes. She has spent many nights away helping at births and come home sleepless, coated with awe as if she had been dipped in gold.
I see this life here without myself. I look at the dark fields with their accusing crops that say: You were not here.
I go back to when Jamesie was born and Rebecca was bright golden all through. I was waiting outdoors then also, smoothing a piece of wood with a sharp-edged stone. It made the shape of a leaf, a thing still living when it falls from the tree. I was afraid that Rebecca would not live and I wanted to make her live. Or to see her out of this world with some gift. I took out my knife to nick the edges. A stupid gift. I did not wish to think.
—You have a son.
A woman stood in the shadow of the doorway with bright eyes, watching for my reaction as her due. Women do this, as I know.
—He is all right?
—Yes, very well. Rebecca too. The boy is eating already.
—I cannot say I blame him.
It was pleasing to say this new he and him, I was proud as a prince. I laughed at myself. At once I was hungry enough to eat a cow whole. Another woman stepped outdoors and said:
—Come on. I will feed you, as you are so poorly off without your wife. We can spare you a cake and some beer, lucky man.
—No, no, keep those for yourselves. I want to see my son.
When I went into the hot room, I was full of aching delight. I had never felt so unnecessary and so full of my stupid part in the thing. Rebecca looked at me, sparkling, her cloudy hair brushed out against the pillow. She was surrounded by women coming and going. The baby was wrapped up on her chest. She had her hand round the back of his head. She said: