by Alix Hawley
—I will have to remember that this is the way to treat unruly children.
—He is sorry for it in the end. She was right.
—About salt.
—About love.
—Aha. You know all about that, oh queen.
I am joking, but she looks stung suddenly, and I think of the shock of the strange baby who became Jemima. We both bristle. I sit a moment, then I reach out to stop her hand as it stitches. I say:
—Rebecca. Our boy is better where he is.
She stares at me with her eyes black and surprised and the needle bright in her fingers. She says:
—No, he is not. He is not.
Staring, we show the ugly angry raw meat just beneath our skins. I want to tear mine out and dump it at her feet like the deer I once dragged to her house. I go out to bang at the stockade with its missing side and its gaps. All the world’s cracks gaping.
The salt runs when autumn comes again, and the game begins to run out too, fleeing from those here so starry with the ease of Kentucky hunting that they shoot everything they see.
I hear some of the smaller children talking in bed. Our little Jesse says:
—The food is all bloody here. I can taste the blood all the time.
The others talk of the bad smells, making a list. We all smell of old meat from every pore. Old Dick Callaway bawls with rage when someone shoots a steer of his within the walls, and his red-headed nephew Jimmy cannot stop himself from shooting an old bull buffalo that wanders up towards one of the blockhouses. He has the ideal logical shot, just behind the eye and straight out the same place on other side. He says so. Well. The shot does bring it down fast enough, but how can we use all that meat?
No salt.
The carcass rots and stinks and hums with flies and birds just beyond the wall. It bloats and turns green. Colonel Dick and Jimmy ignore it. The women run past it on their way to the spring, their aprons up over their faces. They always run all the way to the spring at any rate, but now they run the faster. The well inside the fort is still unfinished.
The dead buffalo’s stink is no worse than ours, trapped with livestock and their dung, and ours, and drying skins and smoke and rotting clothes. Susy’s shift slides down her shoulders, the sleeves shredded. Soon she is going about in not much more than her bodice and a petticoat. One evening she comes to me with Will Hays and says they want to be married. She cannot wait any longer, not another day. She tells me so with her mouth firm, holding up her pretty face and shoulders as if saying: Look at what I have to live with. A bird swoops behind her in the twilight as she argues:
—I know how to cook and do everything already. Everything.
Her hands are over her belly. She is not sixteen.
I am voted magistrate, to Colonel Dick’s disgust, and so I perform the wedding. Susy, it is all I can do for you. I have tears in my eyes, as Daddy did when he married Rebecca and me. After the ceremony I tug at Jemima’s ripped skirt and remark that soon we will be like Adam and Eve in their innocence, without clothes at all. Holding the cat Tibby to her cheek, she fixes her stare on me and says suddenly:
—I wonder where Adam and Eve were buried, Daddy, do you know?
Jemima, no longer a child, always listening. And Jemima, you near are buried. They take you too.
SHE COMES into the cabin, bunching her hair up under her torn cap and hopping on one bare foot. She says she stabbed the other on a broken cane. She holds it in the air so I can see the blue bruise circling the small bloody mark. Rebecca offers to bind it up, but she says:
—No, Ma.
Then you hop out again into the afternoon, and nobody stops you, Jemima. You disappear.
In my mind I see: down at the river, she unties the fort’s only canoe, thinking to dangle her sore foot in the cool water. She calls to Colonel Dick’s two girls to go with her. The air is warm, insects skitter over the river surface. A fish jumps and leaves hardly a ripple. The girls all lie together in the canoe bottom, waiting for the clouds to make shapes of themselves. A tower, a bunch of grapes. The current tugs the boat gently, and their talk drifts away, and birds begin calling. Jemima sits up to look. They are almost at the far bank. The bushes are thick and dark and faces are in them.
The Indians have them ashore and bundled off before anyone at the fort sees. Young Fred Gas on the watch hears only the cry and call from the opposite bank. He looks out from the blockhouse and they are gone, the air already still and the canoe riding high in the water, empty.
Three days they are gone, and we behind them, always behind, snatching up the strips of skirt and the strands of hair they tore off to make a trail. I follow the trail, I see nothing else. The first night, when we stop to sleep a few hours, I see white shreds of cloth against the dark behind my eyelids. I want to murder Colonel Dick every minute, always bellowing: No, not that way. He takes some of the men and rides off in his own direction. I plunge my group through the woods, seeing no sign, hoping only that we might head off the Indians and catch them higher up the river. It is only thanks to a snake, its head crushed by a club, that I know we are on their track.
I will be first. I will beat Dick. So I tell myself. My jaws and fists ache with clenching. We run on, I keep us running. And when we are on them at last on the third evening, I see Jemima’s eyes instantly catch me as I raise my head from the ridge, where I lie like a snake myself behind the trees. In the hollow below, the Indians are making their fire and cleaning their guns. The girls are against a tree, tied to each other miserably, their fingers twined in each other’s hair. Then Jemima’s face lifts at once, her eyes wide, her belief like a torch. Her triumphant, insisting yell: That is Daddy!
We find them. They are saved. We kill some of the captors before they run. I shoot one, he falls into the fire, I do not know whether he is dead. This is the truth, the end of it. Hill writes the story, of course, and sends it off to the newspapers: We will draw a veil over the scene of happy reunion. But so many holes in the happy end. He does not know that when we first set off after them, I waste an hour going back to the fort to change my damned Sunday shoes for moccasins I can run in. I lose the trail twice. I lose it entirely, I have no idea where to go next, my head is empty. It is a miracle that we catch them up. Or pure luck, a worse thought. And Hill does not know what Jemima tells me later, that one of the Indians asked her to pick lice from his head at night, and she did so. Jemima, I have to say my first thought was to seek his face, not yours. The long, hollow murderer’s face. But he was not there.
I ask her was it him, Cherokee Jim, in case he had magicked himself there and hidden himself from me in the rout. In case he was following me, trailing me like my dead, and had come back for her too. She says his name was Scolacutta. I ask her how she knew it, I ask her did he make her say it, did they—
She stares and says they only asked her to take down her hair, and they coiled it back up tidy in her comb for her after they had looked at it. That was all. They did not hurt her. She says:
—Daddy, they had heard of you. They asked me if I was your girl.
I curse Hill for his stories, for making me a famous man, when I have done no good. Jemima rubs her head and says she wants to be married, like Susy. Beside her, all awkward and young, stands Colonel Dick’s nephew Flanders, who helped track her. She laughs and sobs and says it is all she wants in the world, to leave the kidnap behind her and have a happy life, her own life. And to live in the cabin next to Daddy.
It is not like her to sob. She is so young, but how can I say no to her wish? She sits with Flanders and holds her wounded foot in my face, and tells me how she moaned about it every step of the way to slow them further. Her eyes are ferocious with her victory. See what I did, Daddy?
Again and again, she says she knew I would come for her. Her belief makes me afraid. I am afraid for her all the time. Susy has a little daughter by now, she had a bad time with the birth. My girls, it is not the life I wanted for you.
I beg young Flanders Callaway not t
o take Jemima to wife yet, not fully. Though the thought strikes me that if she dies in childbed, we could at least bury her within the walls, and we would know where she was and could be near her. There is no possibility of going out planting, let alone grave-digging. Nobody wishes to go too far from the fort, crude and shabby as it is, and we all hope the stink will prove a defence. But nobody can get used to it either. Martha touches my neck or my arm whenever she passes. And I do not know what to do. All I do is hope the earth will swallow all of us and this place.
A few young men arrive with plans to find adventure. They have all heard of me and of Jemima’s kidnapping. Hill greets them gladly and talks and talks. One of them, Sam Brooks, has bright eyes and a wild air. He brings me a commission from the British army, making me a captain. But he is not pleased with how he finds us. Looking at the poor fort, he says:
—Is this all there is here?
He and his brother Will sit about a fire making bullets and talking of how they will shoot Indians. The Brooks boys have come out from Fort Randolph in Virginia, where a Shawnee chief was murdered by the militiamen he had gone to make peace with. Cornstalk, the chief’s name was. An old fellow. Chief Black Fish is now bent on destroying any settlements in revenge.
Young Will, who has a sweet boyish face and curly hair, said he would have shot Cornstalk himself if he had been close enough and would shoot Black Fish if he ever saw him. Then he burns his fingers on hot lead and jumps up with a screech. I go to the outer wall and listen for answering sounds, but there is nothing.
We hear nothing for some time. The women relax a little and go back to walking on their way to the spring. Monk, one of the slaves, plays his fiddle now and then and sings to his little son Jerry, the first boy born in the fort. I do not like to see him, he makes me think too much of my own boy when he was a baby. Jamesie, I will not think of you.
I venture outside one morning thinking to clear stumps. I hear a crack from the sycamore hollow to the west of us. Before I turn, the shot smashes my ankle, and I am on the bare ground. The earth beneath my head shakes with the footsteps of the Indians running at me. I close my eyes and I think: Jemima, they had you. Now they have me. A poor trade.
A bang, a roar. I lift my head an inch. One of the new young men tears out of the fort gate and swings me over his great shoulders as if I were a child. We bump along, bullets singing past us. Ned and Squire come at a run and fire back at the trees until the Indians withdraw, after setting fire to our few rows of corn and pumpkins. The Brooks boys whoop and holler:
—Come back and we will give you some more!
Hill laughs and whoops also. I know his voice. I know the scratch of his pen.
Simon Butler carries me to my bed. I had thought him one of the speculators who cared for nothing but getting land to sell on again. He is enormously tall with a big jaw. But his eyes shine tender at me as he gets his breath back, and Jemima bustles about finding tongs to get the bullet. She tugs it out, mashed flat as a silver skin against my ankle bone. Butler says:
—You are all right now, Captain.
I say:
—Well, Butler, you are a fine fellow. Your name suits you. We could do with you in Kentucky.
He looks down at his knuckles and says:
—My real name is Kenton. I killed a man in a fight at a tavern in Virginia. I ran off and changed it to Butler.
I laugh. Saved by a murderer with no name. I should have let the Indians carry me off. The smoke from the poor burning crop drifts in. Rebecca closes her eyes.
Laid up in the cabin for weeks, I look again and again at the official army paper, and cannot help laughing the more. Captain Boone. Hill visits and laughs because I laugh. Colonel Dick does not like it at all. Border trash, he says as he walks past the window, and I salute.
I stay in the cabin for weeks, listening all the time. Martha visits in her brief nervous fashion, her fingers always plucking at me. I hear Neddy outside on watch, singing an old song in his clear simple fashion:
Waste lie those walls that were so good,
And corn now grows where Troy town stood.
Troy. An old war in an ancient city. Impossible to think of it, how ruined it is, how it is all gone. I think of Uncle James telling the story when I was a boy, the war of the Greeks and the Trojans over the stolen unfaithful wife. And a new war here, now. A great wheel seems to roll over me. When a Virginia newspaper makes it to us with another new settler, we find a revolution has begun back in the eastern colonies, that independence has been declared already. We are Americans, this is our country now, we will turn against the British and fight them all off it. We have a bonfire, and the girls dance in their torn dresses, though some of the Bryan boys do not like it and say they will love the King until they die.
Corn now grows where Troy town stood. But no corn in Boonesborough. By winter, the cribs are very low and almost no wheat is left for flour. I set a guard over the remaining supplies. Some people go mad and want to eat everything at once so it is gone and can torment them no more. Perhaps we all stay at the fort for the same mad reason, thinking that torment can be all eaten up and put away. Hunger comes in all varieties, as I have found.
Snow falls and deepens on the ground. We need food for the coming months, and a means of preserving meat. My ankle is not yet right, and the cold makes it ache the more, but I gather a party to go and make salt at a good spring some days north. We leave a few of the young men and some of the old behind to look after the women and children. We wrap ourselves in what skins and furs we have, and we say goodbye. Jemima comes out of the gate to wave her apron. Rebecca does not.
WE MAKE CAMP at the Blue Licks. The water in the bubbling salt spring is weak, but we do our best to boil up as much as possible. After a week, when we have a few bushels of pure salt, we send young Flanders back to Boonesborough with them. The rest of us stay to make more, but we do not get much.
I know the ground here is a favourite animal lick, but the game is poor now. It is very cold some days, snowing in sideways blasts. Some of the men are lying about under the trees at the edge of the flats, having given up on salt-boiling. Hill and Dick Callaway’s nephew Jimmy are slowly filling one of the great kettles we brought, stopping to warm their hands at the fire below it. I say:
—I am going to find some meat.
Hill stands and says:
—I will go with you.
—No. You stay. Keep a watch over the rest.
He nods, all serious, with a salute:
—Yes, Captain.
I am gone with my horse and my gun before he can say anything more.
I know what is coming. I must have known it when I left the salt-boiling camp. I am hours from there, and days from the fort. There is almost no light left to see by and what there is looks dirty. The shade of drained flesh is what it puts me in mind of, but perhaps I am romantic by nature.
I walk the horse along, she is packed with the meat of the buffalo I killed. A tree is dead across the path, its roots seem the many dead legs of a monster, all helpless in the air.
The back of my neck pricks.
I stop. I can see nothing moving. Nothing. The buffalo blood on the snow is near black.
Cut the straps.
I feel for the knife though I know it to be wet with grease and blood. I left it that way. You goddamned fool, you ass, you ape, you charley, you son of a—. Jammed wet into the sheath the knife is frozen there now, dull as a dead fish. It would not cut the creaking green hide tugs wrapped round the meat. It would not cut a gillyflower. At this moment I seem to hear Uncle James, who would have said such a thing himself, being fond of poetry. And Daddy’s face drags itself out of the twilight, his left eye slides off as though fatigued with looking straight on at life. Looking perhaps instead for gillyflowers. I had thought there were no ghosts in Kentucky, but there are. And they are no help. They do not speak when you wish them to.
Daddy lies back down in his grave and I am alone.
In my mind I call
to my dead brother. Israel, face me here, help me or kill me. The tugs bite at my fingers, all greasy and useless. The rest of the buffalo carcass is back up the trail, fallen partly out of the cane, its ribs poking out sharp and whiter than the snow. An easy sign. I curse the dead buffalo and all its bones and its meat. My horse stiffens beside me, she can see my breath. They can see it. She cranks her neck upward, trying to see over the fallen tree. Her eye and her teeth show yellow in the falling dark. I pull the reins across her neck and put my face against her side. She is a beauty. She knows she smells of slaughter. She knows her smell sings out Catch me.
Catch me. Here am I.
The horse snorts. I whisper against her tight neck: All right, my love. I cover her nose with my cold hand, she tosses her head again and rolls her eye towards me, waiting for me to do something.
I am entirely still against the horse for two minutes. Three.
She cannot keep it up. Her legs twitch beneath her load and a ripple sets up in her flank, creeping forward as if flies were crawling all over her. The meat packed on the horse quivers too, as though it were planning to come back to life and dash off. The horse shoves her head forward and brays. I clutch at her mane. Hush. The snow is coming heavy now.
They know where I am. They are in the snow, they are silent and invisible. The snow is on their side and everything is on their side.
Now I say it to myself: Cut the straps, drop the load, shoot and mount and go, you ape. But the knife might as well be sodden paper. The rifle might as well be a stick. My heart dips and hovers like a bird deciding on its direction. I might as well be dead. Perhaps I am. I breathe out as the horse does. Our breaths mingle like smoke and then vanish.
No not dead, not all dead. My tired arm pulls back and gives her flank a hard slap. She rears and nearly overturns with the weight on her back, but she stumbles forward, trying to bolt over the fallen tree. Even with the huge load, she knows to run. She catches her foreleg on a root, her spine sways, but she keeps upright. Over the tree she staggers, through the canebrake towards the creek, where she cracks the ice and squeals, doubles back and bolts for the woods. The sounds of her gasping and crashing carry. She might be enough for them, with all the meat tied to her. What else is there?