by Alix Hawley
Hill throws out an arm and cries:
—No frost! Always summer.
Russell puts his arms around his sons’ shoulders and says:
—Eternal summer. Of course. Do you hear that, boys?
The boys grin, Russell and Hill laugh again. I think of my private Heaven. Nobody will set foot on it before I can claim the best part of it, one part to keep safe. And I will find Stewart and make things right with him. All I have ever wanted. I clench my back teeth and try not to crack them.
I begin to hack at the saplings in our way. At the edge of my eye comes a movement, a blur of grey like a quick jet of steam from a kettle in the thick trees. The skin between my shoulder blades pricks as if a finger is just above it. A wolf, perhaps. Looking into the trees, I want to whistle, I want to go after it. I think of my brother Israel shooting wolves for magistrates’ money. But no bounty is offered here. And no ghosts are here. I tell myself again.
So slow are we that we run short of flour and cornmeal, not to mention rum, before we reach the great mountain gap. Then we run out.
We are in Powell’s Valley, with its steep sides and narrow path. There is no way to turn the whole rattling bawling group around now, and no way forward with all of these women and children and trappings. My skin bristles. All of this is wrong but I do not know why.
We stay in our camp for some days as we try to decide what it is that we should do. People seem to plant themselves, as people will do. My gut sinks. Some of the men sit up jawing half the night, and Hannah sets up preaching from a box, as though we have all the time in the world. As though this place is good enough. Rebecca and Martha and Jane make a nest of babies amidst boxes. It has the look of a miniature fort. I am for riding ahead, but how can I?
Russell takes me aside and says quiet:
—You and I might ride back with a couple of the blacks to Virginia and ready supplies to send on. If we have to winter here, it is not a bad place.
I look over the winding line of tents and cooking fires along the valley. All of it puts me in mind of the army train marching to the Monongahela and disaster. The smell of supper rises peacefully and says: Stop thinking of such things. Do not think.
Turning to Russell, I say:
—Can we leave these people?
Russell says:
—There is Hill to keep order.
Even he looks dubious. Hill is washing his head noisily in the creek, taking great gulps of air so that everyone will take notice and share in his joys. See my great head, see my shoulders, see my health. Ned and a few of the other men are playing cards with their backs to him. Old Dick Callaway grunts. He insists on being called Colonel, his Virginia militia title, and likes to walk about with a stick as if inspecting troops. His gangly red-headed nephew Jimmy shows in the set of his neck how purposely he is ignoring Hill. But Hill keeps trying with greater Ahs.
My heart grows with the desire to be moving. I am tempted. I take up my gun and say:
—We would be back in a few days. Five at most. A week at the utmost.
Rebecca, I feel your eyes as though they are hooks. They run along the gun and then look away towards the younger children, who are running about holding sticks to their foreheads like horned beasts. I see Squire cleaning his gun and glancing at me.
—No. No. I had best stay, Russell.
But the thought of remaining caught here for a winter makes me feel quite drowned. I look to the sky, it is grey and unhelpful.
The sound of a small axe breaking the air with precise cuts enters my head, clang clang clang. Jamesie is chopping kindling in a small clearing near us. He works with perfect rhythm, like a little bell calling for order. The Mendinall boys are sulkily chopping with no rhythm at all, but Jamesie continues in his fashion.
—Jamesie.
The boy’s ears redden. Not really a boy—seventeen years of age at this time. His face keeps up its old cautiousness permanently, and it seems to me that fathers can always see through the grown bones down to the young child they knew first. I correct myself:
—James. Would you ride back with a party for more supplies and meet us back here again as quick as you can?
His face lights and is quickly serious again. He says carefully:
—I could.
I walk over to him and take his axe. I say:
—All right. You and these two friends of yours can go. They have complained long enough of being here. Make men of you all.
James half-smiles at the great Mendinall brothers, who keep their surly faces but stand straighter. Russell shouts for his oldest son:
—You will go along, Henry. Take two of the Negroes, Adam and Charles.
He motions to two of the black men who lead the pack horses. I say:
—We had best keep Hill to ourselves. He might work at his book, it will keep him occupied. But send Crabtree with the boys. He knows what he is about in the wilderness.
Crabtree is one of the lone men game to settle. He is grey-haired and past fifty, but a good shot and a storyteller, which the boys will like. He looks up from his horse’s shoe and says:
—I will accept that compliment, Boone, from you.
He tosses his hat to the ground and I toss mine at him. James gives one of his short measured laughs, which always sound as though he has thought them out first. Then he throws his own hat a small way and laughs again.
In the valley bottom, the women are happy enough to rest and unpack a few more of their things, in spite of the lack of bread. Rebecca takes to the rocking chair in the evenings, she has found a grassy spot for it. Her eyes are heavy-lidded and her mouth is small. She is very still, smiling down at the baby. Martha has another new one, born not long ago. I saw her eyes through the gap in the tent as I passed by during her labouring. She gave a cry and willed me to look look look.
We build stone fire rings, they have the look of a bracelet in the dark. Squire works nearby but we say nothing to one another.
Ten days pass, and all the noise of the group settles to a hum. Even the cattle and hogs are quieter, browsing and rooting in the remaining grass and the reeds along the creek. Hill enters one of his damper periods as there is so little excitement here. He does not care to hunt. He writes in cramped hand on his papers. He reads them to one of the slaves, London, who listens with fortitude. Occasionally Hill trots about on his horse, singing. But from a distance away in the hills, one can hardly hear a thing.
I take my boy Israel on an afternoon hunt up the valley. He has dark hair with red in it, which he wears plaited up. He lopes ahead with his bird rifle. He turns back to shout:
—Daddy, you must have more shot for me.
I recall his bright face, his hand turning out his bag, his grin. For a moment he has a look of my dead brother, his namesake. My boy, it makes me uneasy for you. If one could know what was coming, would one want to see it, or would one avert one’s eyes and carry on?
Israel gets a turkey. We find several more, and for sport we take a few songbirds with our clubs as well.
The girls run up and down collecting bright leaves. They have some plan for these. They do not let on what it might be.
The younger boys are restless. They follow the girls, they watch Susy’s legs as she runs. They walk along the trail west of camp to see what is there. They talk of Kentucky often and loop back to where I am from time to time.
One of the lone men is even more restless and turns thief. He takes horses and skins and creeps off before dawn. Later in the morning he is back. Out of the forest he comes, his face greased with sweat, his eyes skipping like small flies.
—They are dead. All murdered.
His voice is loud in the extreme. He shuts his palm over his mouth in what strikes me as a tender motion.
Say nothing more. This is what has been coming for me all along. Here: a black bloom of nightmare opening its face every night, every minute. Let yourself think of any other thing and there it is, showing its red throat.
HOW YOU SCALP someone
is like this. Cut a small round down to the bone beneath the hair on top of the head near the front. Put your foot on the back of the person to be scalped, pull the hair at the edge of the round. The whole comes free easy enough, easier than skinning a deer.
Jamesie, you once asked me how, and I refused to tell you, but I do not see why I should keep it from you any longer. If you are listening. But perhaps you cannot hear me, perhaps you do not wish to.
In my mind I write it: James Boone, son of Daniel and Rebecca Boone, was killed October 1773. But I do not know the day you died, I cannot write it properly in Granddaddy’s Bible record, and my heart breaks and breaks for it. Every minute my heart is dying but it does not stop though I tell it to. I do not know how it can go on.
I have wondered too about the sound of the skin surrendering itself up and how the head left behind must feel. I have seen the hair dangling from the dried scalps stretched on hoops in Indian villages. And black Indian hair turned in by English scalpers for Governor’s money. I could do it if I had to. I would do it hour after hour and day after day if I had the opportunity. When we find Russell’s slave Adam hiding in the woods, he gibbers all the terrible things he heard as he hid behind a log at the boys’ camp, despite having stuffed his fingers down his ears. I do the same at night for months.
James asking for help. For Daddy. For death.
I can hear it, his poor voice thickened and without words at the last. The echo of it spreading out across the night country, shivering like wind over water or over the grasses of Kentucky. For ever. The father, which is to say me, only two miles away, did not hear.
Squire goes to bury them. They were so close to getting back to our camp with the supplies we sent them for. He tells me the bodies were left in ruins. Hurt everywhere. But not scalped. They do not take white scalps in peacetime. This is all Squire will say. He shakes his head when I ask him to say more.
I force my breath into a rough laugh. I chop at a tree. Pale chips fly back at me. Let them blind and choke me. I am not alive. I try to see the murderer’s face. I ask him in my mind what point there is in killing boys for sport, without a fair fight. What point there is in killing a boy you know to speak to, but a boy you know nothing of otherwise. Aside from the fact that he did not like to smoke. And that he was my boy.
I let bears get too near before I shoot. I let deer get too far away.
If I were really to see his face, what might I do? I think of every burning and ripping and carving up there can be. There is nothing else. I can think of nothing. I can think of him no more. And Jamesie is hidden under the earth, I cannot see him. I did not see him dead. I did not go back for him with the burying party.
I will not think of the murderer’s name. I will carve it out from my brains. And I will not think of you, Jamesie, I cannot allow myself to speak to you now. You are gone and the fault is mine and I am not alive, but not with you. I do not know where you are.
I chop in my boy’s straight rhythm, clang clang clang. I cover his crying voice, I try to make my hands into his. It comes to me in my sister Hannah’s soft words that he is like Christ, exalted by the suffering, sent straight to Heaven like a shot from a gun. So far away that I cannot hear him now, and he has no need to hear me.
But this is little comfort. There is none. I believe in the human agony on the cross. I have seen what people will do to one another. And I believe in the story of God being unable to help his son and therefore not being much of a God at all.
I will say that after the attack, I want to go on. Russell turns back straight away, his face fallen in and his neck shrunk into his shoulders. His boy Henry was murdered too. The Mendinalls go with him, having lost their two boys also. So do half of the others. I scream at the rest of the group that we are carrying on, as though Kentucky will blot out everything and rewrite it all beautifully. Terrified and half-starved people will go anywhere, looking for someone to follow. We walk for some time. Then I dare to look Rebecca in the face. It is a terrible face, a painted wall holding itself up. She has not looked at me once since she handed me a linen sheet for Squire and the others to bury Jamesie in. Nobody speaks.
When the burying party rejoins us, I agree to turn back for Carolina. We leave the bedsteads and furnishings on the trail. I stand Granddaddy’s black cabinet up in the trees with its doors gaping open. Martha and Jane huddle the children together, telling them to keep silent, and cover the babies’ mouths with rags. Squire leads. Ned and my boy Israel walk the cattle and hogs with their guns ready. Snow begins.
And when we are back, I am dead. I work the fields again, dead. I dye all my clothes with black walnut. I try to dye my hair blacker with it. I lie on the ground. When a new land company agent comes asking me to lead a road-building party into the wilderness, into Kentucky, I say I will do it, but first I wait for the birth of our next child. The child is stillborn into a hot June full of flies. A boy. I do not wish to see him before he is buried.
I leave for a treaty-making where the land company buys a piece of Kentucky from the Cherokee for silver and guns and shirts, but I do not see the murderer there. I look among the young Indian men sitting along the riverbank. Some of them do not like the bargain. They sit skipping pebbles across the shallows and muttering that the country is still theirs. The heavy son of a chief, watching his father making his mark on the treaty paper, shouts:
—All writing is lies!
Hearing this, I leave and make trail for the company axemen.
The next year, on my dead legs, I drag the family out again with all the rest of my dead followers. I tell Rebecca we are going, we will not be stopped, we will not give in. I tell her Jamesie would wish it. The words have a sour taste.
She says:
—How can you use him for what you want? How—
She does not speak to me again through the journey. But I have no wish to speak.
Others come, some of the first party who sold up and have nothing left here, or who think the adventure of it worth the while. Richard Henderson, a long-nosed hawkish man with grey hair, whose land company it is, says he will give me two thousand acres and pay some of my debts. He keeps just behind me as I lead. I use my old prize tomahawk to hack at the fresh brush and saplings that have begun to grow up again. We all hack, a great broad wagon road we build, the Wilderness Road. We let the rest of the world in. My country is already a ruin, and so why not? My paradise. Of my making.
When we reach Kentucky, we find the bones tucked in the empty gut of a dead tree. An arm-bone is broken and the gun is gone. The powder horn is there still, pushed behind the hips. I know the initials carved in it, the back-bent shapes of the letters J and S. It is his. Stewart’s. So is the skull. I stare it down, I put flesh back on the cheeks and jaw and eyes back in the raw sockets.
What happened to you, John? Did the Shawnee find you and kill you?
Or did you want them to find you? Were you waiting for your chance when you broke your arm and hid in the tree for shelter? Did you try to find your way back to them?
I had thought there were no ghosts here, but Kentucky is all salt. The salt is old blood seeped out into the ground, the beautiful grass all growing out of blood and bones. John, I wish I had never seen yours.
We hack on. I find the place for a fort near the Kentucky River. A great spreading elm in the centre of a meadow. This will be it, I say. This, here.
No one questions me. Henderson falls to his knees weeping for joy and cuts out a piece of sod he says he will keep always. He christens the place Boonesborough. We set about building. Hill appears again on a new horse. He has taken it upon himself to write to the newspapers in Virginia about our murdered boys. It is known everywhere, he says, and he is breathless with tales of some there who have taken it upon themselves to avenge us. A Mingo woman, sister of a chief, axed through the belly, her unborn child dragged out and left planted upon a stake. The rest of the group killed too and strewn about in pieces. Some Cherokees murdered also, any Cherokees the Virginians could f
ind. Hill sets his grey eyes on me like guard dogs. He had hoped to find a certain one to kill himself, he says gently. He touches my arm and gives me a newspaper to keep. It is thin and soft in my hands, worn like a skin. I cannot read. I cannot think. I do not wish to.
We bang together fort walls with cabins attached in lines, taller blockhouses at the corners. We begin the stockade of pointed logs, but no one has much interest in seeing it through. The men are mainly interested in hunting and claiming land for themselves or to sell. Rebecca dreams one of her dreams, a house made of salt, where she can lick the walls and window frames and floors. The first time she tells me one of her dreams since she fell into deep silence. For so long we have lain in the same bed not touching, and moved about the small cabin not touching. Now at the table, she smiles for a moment, before her face is veiled with shame to have shown a smile, a part of her old self no longer in existence. She bends her head to her work, mending a linen sheet like the one she sent back to wrap Jamesie’s poor body in. Wedding linens from her granddaddy, packed all the way to this place.
Rebecca. This terrible way my Fate has evened things between us. Taking away your other first child. Our first child.
Your hand moves quick, your stitches twist. You were always an impatient seamstress. Mending irritates you, the rips and wear should never have happened in the first place in your eyes. I watch your hands and my first stupid thought is of our wedding night, when we were so young. The next stupid thought is that I might get that buried sheet back for you, Rebecca. There is nothing else I can get back.
We sit still as the stumps that serve as chairs in that poor cabin. I have bought glass for the windows from Henderson’s store, and I dragged Granddaddy’s cabinet here out of the forest, but the floor is still dirt. In the end I speak. I say her dream has the sound of one of her old Welsh tales. After a time, she says:
—It is. A princess tells her daddy the king that she loves him as meat loves salt. Then he exiles her.