by Alix Hawley
The black interpreter draws in a breath and speaks. At once shouts rip loose from the Shawnee. We sit amidst the roaring as if in a windstorm, trying to look stoical. Johnson, small and thin as a child, looks as if he were at a picnic lunch, turning his head about to see the various views. Hill turns his own head about as if it will spin off.
The interpreter appears triumphant. Now he walks the line of us, surveying our upturned faces. He bends and speaks into my ear:
—Fifty-nine.
A solemn slow voice but with an undertone of mischief.
I say:
—Fifty-nine what? Wives apiece for us?
—You can keep them.
This from young Ben Kelly a finger thrust into the air. A few of the men laugh. The black man does not smile. He cocks an eyebrow at me and says:
—Fifty-nine say die.
He walks back up the line, he looks at each of us in turn with his lips set. Then with his back to us and his hands clasped behind him, he ambles off towards the fire.
Hill shouts in disbelief:
—What? How many say live?
The man is walking away. He does not answer. Others begin to shout with Hill: How many? How many? Their voices have the sound of alarmed birds. From up the slope the black man says:
—Is that your concern? You whites. There is never enough for you. Never satisfied. That is your greatest trouble, you ought to know it.
He walks on a few steps and then tosses back:
—Sixty-one.
Hill cries:
—What did he say?
The man is gone. Hill says:
—What did he say, Boone? What is it?
I say:
—Live.
The men roar and gibber and then fall silent, all thinking Fifty-nine, sixty-one. To this day I hear those numbers in that slow amused voice. I look but I cannot see the interpreter, he seems to have disappeared into the dark, and I find myself fearful, not knowing where he has gone.
They are feeding us from our stores when the black man comes back. He stands before me with his arms behind him yet, as if he plans to continue on his idle wander. Black Fish is watching his men packing up our things and cracking pine boughs from the trees. I do not know why they are doing this. The sounds are worse than shots, so hard does the wood crack in the cold. To Black Fish I say:
—Food, but no peace, then.
—We agreed to be peaceful towards your men. Did we say anything of you?
I see the black man’s slow smile, and a bright flicker of amusement across Black Fish’s face before it falls. What he says is true enough. I see the Shawnee sweeping the snow with the broken boughs, raising powdery clouds. Now I know what is coming. I say:
—For me only? Then I will take my pleasure straight away.
—As white men do.
The black man keeps up his smile, the Shawnee laugh. I laugh also, a great braying laugh. As white men do.
The dark comes quick. The interpreter walks me to a long alley made by two lines of Indians running some hundred yards. They have swept the ground in the middle, the bare earth looks black. My men sit tied to one another in the snow at the end of the lane far away. The pitch torches burn like bright blowing tents against the dark. The eyes are all flashes when they move, the teeth show in laughing crescents.
I am near bare. My skin shines and flickers orange. They have let me keep my leggings and moccasins. The cold air stings my chest, gooseflesh crawls up my body. I breathe hard, my mouth and nostrils open. One of the warriors I recognize calls in English:
—Run pony, run.
He claps. I do not run yet. They are all watching to see what I will do. I know this feeling well enough. Clubs, gun-butts, sticks, a few furtive knives, to judge from the metal glints here and there. All waiting.
My muscles whisper and tighten, almost a happiness. But no. There is no happiness now. I do not know what it is, I feel old and young at once, as if I were being reborn out of bones and ashes in the snowy dark. Confusion cramps me. I do not wish to be alive.
They will kill me. I think this and it is a relief. It propels me gasping forward.
I run hard from the start. They all let out their own coiled force, lashing with their weapons and their feet and fists. This is no game, there is no easy go for me here. Black Fish’s still face flashes by behind the line on the left, but I am past him quickly, I dodge skull-crackers and an axe all coming down in flying arcs. I see each movement and each planned movement, each flare of a weapon turning and falling in the light. My eyes are everywhere, dried out and raw with cold. My shoulder is snapped hard and pulled back as I go, but it seems to belong to someone else and so does my heart, it is leaping like a caged bird in another chest.
Jamesie. No. Do not use him as fuel, do not waste him here, you goddamned ape.
My mouth burns dry and sour. My skin is hot, the snow falling is like thousands of wings brushing me. I cut and feint, I dance along the alley of weapons, a fist, another ball club, a yell, an open palm, a closed one, a gun-butt raised to smash in my forehead, a short blade slashing low. A club bangs my rib with a crack but it disappears behind me with everything else. I am living still and running. I am inviting Death to a fight. I do not know what I am about. My skin is inches thick, made of pounded metal. An old knight crashing forward in a joust, O Sir Dan! And no real armour and no horse, only a poor ghost of something that was, but I am winning. If I run fast enough I will reach you, Jamesie.
The last man. Direct in my path, big-shouldered. His hands out low, his arms tense and ruddy in the torchlight, a strip of paint across his eyes. He is not Cherokee Jim but he is framed like him, or close enough. Yes.
I lower my iron head and drive it straight at the waiting chest, ploughing through the suddenly soft body, no breath left in it or me.
This is the end. I keep running, I cannot stop. I might run on into the forest and I do not think that they could stop me now. All the way home I might go. Or elsewhere. Some clean snowy place I have never been and that nothing has ruined.
The sound reaches me, my men applauding and Hill bawling out, Haha!, and one of his ridiculous whoring songs for joy:
So I’ll roar and I’ll groan,
Till I’m bone of your bone,
And asleep in your bed!
My heart bangs. I think of Daddy’s hammer, bang bang bang on the dull orange iron. I turn back, I drag air into my lungs roughly. A rope of spittle hangs from my jaw. I raise a hand and Hill shoots his own upward, dragging Callaway too, who is tied to him and clapping on his thigh with grim relief. A thin victory, but a victory all the same.
The last Shawnee man is on the ground, vomiting upon the snow he has rolled flat. He is thinner than I thought, he is nothing like Cherokee Jim. The other Indians are shouting. They are applauding also.
My rib hurts, my neck and shoulder hurt, but I am breathing. My hands hurt from being balled up. My ears hurt from the roaring. I am still here. Well. Life wants me for the time.
The Shawnee come up to slap my back and hold out their weapons for me to see closely. They say the English words they know: Brother. Soldier. Good man.
Two of them inspect my ears. One has a clasp knife open, ready to cut them off. No. He shows me, delicately he fingers the edge of my left ear with his nail and points to his own. He will slit the rims like theirs. He begins to shave off the fine hairs growing along the top. The black man marches up and argues with surprising life until they back down. He walks off without looking at me.
Here I am, I have won. The snow keeps falling as my blood cools.
THROUGHOUT THE long march to the Shawnee town, Death runs alongside. I think only of walking and snow, both endless. But I cannot ignore the presence. Who else can it be but Death, flapping its jaws and its rags?
For a moment very early one morning, I believe it is Martha. By this time we are so starved that we are seeing false things. My legs are used up, they bow out like Daddy’s with every step in the snow, which has gone he
avy and wet. I stand for a moment with the huge iron salt kettle on my back crushing me, risking a stop for breath. Hill, who is tied to me, groans for food again, and something seems to swish past, brushing my face. For a breath I think: Israel. But the thought fills me with cold anger. I will never think of my dead brother again, he is no help, and he is not the ghost I want. And I will not allow myself to think of my boy, now dead through my fault.
Martha. The feel on my face is like her cobwebby hair, similar to Rebecca’s but with no shine, like black smoke. I try instead to think of home, which is meant to be a comfort to the desolate.
Home. Ah Martha, now I see what you meant when you spoke of home as nothing but a tale. Home now is a makeshift, half-built, lazy fort. It bears my name: Boonesborough, Kentucky. Thinking of it twists my gut. The raw splintery stockade unfinished, the place wide open. The well no deeper than a leg, step into it and break your own. Someone called it the ha-ha, and the poor joke has stuck, just as the well is stuck at that shallow depth. The fort is a heartless place, half-enclosing the huge beautiful elm, and for nothing. It makes me sick. Perhaps they have fixed things by now, but likely not. Who is there to fix it? Squire. Perhaps he is fixing everything for me, my wife and all. I think of Martha’s big swallowing eyes. I think of being above her nervous pale body at the edge of a new small field outside the fort wall. Her skirts up, her face open, trying to bare itself down to bone, hoping for something out of me. Corn all round again, just starting. I gave in to her in the end, for she was trying to offer comfort and nothing mattered, as it seemed to me.
Perhaps it is the thought of food that conjures her up. Both food and Martha seem very distant, fairy stories that turn out slippery and do not end the way you think they will.
Hill looks up dully, as if he has felt something brush his skin also. Nothing to see but naked trees and banks of snow and the Shawnee some distance ahead. Death has passed me by, but for how long I do not know. Starvation is its easiest choice, though sickness is likely enough also. Some of the Indians and my men are already squatting in a great hurry wherever they can along the path. Hancock is the most troubled, he sinks down to open his bowels yet again ten minutes after the last time. Well, perhaps Johnson is the most troubled, being tied to him. He is a small, sly, boyish fellow. He lifts his eyes to the heavy clouds at every stop as if he were in a church, but he cannot help hearing the bodily noises from his captive partner. And nobody can avoid the puddles of stink.
Never have I been so cold, my eyelashes freeze and stick together, I can hardly see to walk. The kettle freezes to my shirt over my back. The cold pierces down to the core of everything and wraps itself hard there like a root. End-of-the-world cold. But the world does not end. We keep moving, though moving is no longer any help. The cold has camped inside our bones. The sky is like the palm of a great iced hand coming down at us. Hill mutters and complains now and then, but not so much as at first. A silence is opening like a cave in me. I will never speak again.
The evening fires are sad affairs, all the sadder for the lack of anything to cook. Not for the first time, Hill says:
—Where has the game got to? Why do they not shoot anything?
Callaway says in his impatient smart manner:
—There is certainly something edible here. Boone promised us the best hunting grounds imaginable. Ducks so fat they cannot fly, they just swoon over the Ohio falls for the catching. Remember that, Mr. Boone? Most likely these Indians are all poor shots.
Hill shouts a laugh and the Shawnee look over from their own fire, but they are too tired to threaten. They have withdrawn from us on the whole. Hill says:
—Maybe these ones do not eat. They live on air instead.
Callaway shakes his head and sets his mouth, and Hill roars louder:
—I know the truth! We have marched all the way to Hell.
Callaway pulls his knees to his chest. He thinks on this and at last arrives at an answer:
—If this is Hell, it is Indian Hell. Even their Hell is backward. You can see how cold it is.
He brushes his hands together after this pronouncement. No one speaks for a time. Then the talk rolls back to the endless complaint about the lack of game and the lack of food.
Too cold for game, you asses, everything is hiding and waiting it out. Nothing will move in this. I want to shout this and shut their mouths. But I do not, and at any rate they seem to enjoy their thoughts of Indian Hell and how we have ended up there. It gives them something to chew.
—Sounded like deer, I think. Sounded like deer. Did you hear it?
Will Brooks speaks insistently, with the soft hopeful face of one whose ma loves him too much. It is stricken at the thought that he might have conjured up the sounds out of the bottom of his dizzy hunger. Shots and brief animal cries. We are all sitting up, we have all heard something in the night. It is the sixth night. Nobody can answer.
The men’s faces are like children’s, all straining to see.
The guards are standing about us, making a fence, but through their legs we watch the flints strike and strike. They are cold too, they take a long time about it. The fire at last flares up the creek bank. We do not move our heads, we are still as wooden men.
When the smell hits us, it seems a golden wreath over the bleak dawn camp. A couple of the men near me are blinking hard, and I will say that I am close to weeping myself, stupid with want and angry for it. Brooks is looking up the creek with tears pouring out of his eyes and freezing below them. The guards eventually go off towards the smell of the cooking meat with a backward look at us. They can see that we are weak, they can see just how weak. Hill says:
—Damn all of it, I am going too.
I pull him down and shake my head. Even he is too feeble to protest any. We all sit on, some still trying to contain their tears.
One of the guards comes back after a time. He is chewing meat. He is carrying more on a long strip of bark. He holds out pieces to us between his fingers and it is like a vision, a trick. Before anyone can take any, Callaway points a finger and says quietly:
—What is it?
The guard tilts his nose at the sky and gives a short howl. I have to pinch my eyes shut. Callaway says:
—Wolf.
The guard hangs out his tongue and pants. Hill interrupts:
—We are not your dogs—
He is ready to plunge into a fight if he can only be fed afterwards. He has always been fond of fighting and eating. But Callaway clips off Hill’s speech:
—They have killed their own dogs. I am not eating dog meat. Lice, maggots—
He touches the sore place on the side of his mouth where his tooth is rotted. He goes on:
—Let me advise you boys, do not eat that filth. Do not take it.
Hill says:
—Well, and why are they feeding us at all? It could be poisoned.
Callaway is flatly patient:
—Where would they get poison out here? Do they travel with vats of it?
—Jimson weed. If they could find any under the snow. Or other things we do not even know about. They know things.
Hill nods, though he does not look certain, his right cheek quivering. His eyes remain on the meat. Callaway is abrupt now:
—They know enough. They know living prisoners are worth more than scalps to their British friends in Detroit.
—But they do not mind sickening us with dog meat?
Hill’s face has dropped. He gives up his argument and lies back down like a sluggard. The guard shrugs and turns to take the food back to the Shawnee. I speak for the first time in some days:
—Best eat it.
My voice is hollow and unconvincing. But the guard returns, he holds out the curled strips and most of the men begin to eat, though they keep their eyes away from what they are putting in their mouths. Hill takes a bite with a little cry first. Young Ben Kelly barks, but nobody is amused. I swallow quick. It is not dreadful meat. Dogs are friendly animals. I tell this to my starved insides,
but they protest at the work and I pause.
Callaway is not eating. He is watching me and trying to control his expression. His high clever forehead creases and his light eyes narrow as though he is trying to work out an irritating puzzle.
Two more days’ marching. Then more.
The one brief meal makes the returning hunger all the more terrible.
The soles of my feet ache and burn, the skin is coming off and the new raw flesh shrinks from the cold. My lungs suck in the icy air, it stabs at my sore rib and my old broken ankle bone. Little Johnson behind me says he has dreamed of dogs and can see them everywhere, hiding in tree roots and treetops. He says loud:
—That was the best dog I ever ate. The very best, by quite some distance. I will have another, thank you, yes.
Nobody questions what other dogs he has eaten in his day. Nobody speaks much now.
The iron kettle on my back shoves me towards the earth. I have to turn my eyes up to avoid its invitation. Callaway has set down his own pot and is standing still. He says:
—I will tote this kettle no farther.
His face is clear. He holds out his arms, his hands palms-up, they say: What will you do? Aloud he says:
—Go on, scalp me. Take the whole head.
He tosses his head back and his hat falls off, showing his red hair. The Shawnee smirk at it but do not deign to take up his offer. One pushes him onward and two others carry the kettle between them for a time before they abandon it in the path with its great empty mouth showing.
At night we lie on the snow that has frozen again to hardness, and try to cover ourselves with branches. I keep curled within myself, I try to believe that I am warm, or gone. I think of elk liver, buffalo tongue. I have to stop these thoughts or I will weep. My stomach is again too empty to complain and I know the others are in the same way. A couple of the younger men are retching.
Captain Will appears out of the growing dark with pieces of bark and a pot of mashed paste. He says:
—Eat this. Then this. Or—