All True Not a Lie in It

by Alix Hawley

  —You might have brought me some. Cold or no.

  —They will feed you eventually. Perhaps. Did they say they would?

  —Pompey, nobody says much to me now. Thanks to you.

  Pompey cannot seem to keep himself away. His face is close to the chink in the logs. I can hear him breathe in and place his lips to the crack.

  —Your trouble, Sheltowee, is that you do not understand it here.

  A burst of laughter pops from the big house like a bubble of sap in a fire. Pompey laughs too. Then he says:

  —They are sincere. They tell the truth. You think they are lying or dissembling, you think everything has another meaning or is part of a game. But they mean what they say. They believed in your Pekula’s madness because you said he was mad. And when they start over, they start over. It is a good weapon. They told you they would not hurt you, a head man like you. They told you that you might do as you like. They made you their son and they believe you to be their son, but you did not believe it. You said you would stay and then you made to leave. You are not to be trusted.

  —Am I not?

  I am curiously sad at this thought. I stretch my arms behind my head and open my chest to the dark room.

  —No.

  —You were the one who wanted me to leave.

  —You think so.

  I wait to be left alone again in all my badness but Pompey is still breathing there. A curl of tobacco rises. Old Bryan rises too like another spectre, shaking fistfuls of money, his money wasted on me, his debtor for ever. Bryan, are you dead now as well? I have been here for months, and you were so old.

  —You do not trust me alone even in here, I see, Pompey.

  —Would I ever have put my trust in you?

  I hear him spit and strike a flint. He says:

  —White Indian.

  —Black Indian.

  I feel the way a rat must feel when between the teeth of a dog, twisting its spine to squeal and make the dog listen though its rat language cannot be understood. I shift myself closer to the wall where Pompey is. I say:

  —You are a black Indian. If not a very good one. I am not wrong. I can tell the truth also, if pressed. You had no wish to remain with them in the clearing on that evening, making eyes at me and my horse. Do you not remember it? I do.

  A shuffle, a loud puff. He is standing. He says:

  —White Indian is right enough. All you whites think you are born clever enough to see through anything. Can you see through this wall?

  At once he begins to sing one of his Shawnee tunes. Over his voice I call:

  —You belong to them. Or you would like to.

  He cuts off the song:

  —I could say the same to you.

  —Why did you want to go, then? Why did you want to go with me? And afterwards, why did you go telling my father that I was trying to leave him?

  —Were you going to leave, Sheltowee? All alone?

  A heavy silence thumps down. I do not answer. His disappointment in me is like a thick fast fog, I feel it spread through the chinks in the walls. Even the feast sounds have receded. Perhaps everyone there is neck-deep in one of the roast deer or buffalo. Then Pompey says low:

  —There are plans for you.

  —So I can judge. Will you tell me their plans for my fort? If it is still there.

  —Perhaps you will not be in prison for ever. I will not leave you all alone here. We think of your comfort. We are your brothers in this land.

  Even his willow tobacco has an offended smell. I hear the way he is choosing his words. He is knitting himself to them with that we. He is trying to deepen the hole he is caught in here, make it more fast, make it his own. Well Pompey, you and I might have been brigands together, running through Kentucky, taking what we liked, selling our knowledge of the Shawnee to the highest bidder. Then cutting it up, twisting it about, and selling it again. Getting the Indians cleared out, opening up the land, selling it too, like Hill. Richer and richer. Did you see us that way?

  —We will see to it that you wish to stay.

  He speaks in Shawnee now, a tight formal version. Then he is gone, and sounds from the big house come again, and women’s voices make a haze of words that I cannot understand, and it is night again.

  I am not crazed yet. Not at this time.

  The door opens with a scrape. The prison hut has been built in white style like a log cabin and the door is made of logs lashed together upright. The light angles in, I get to my feet.

  Delilah, carrying water and a plate of food. She tilts her face up at me as she bends to place them on the ground.

  —How do. You are not the usual turnkey.

  She gestures towards the food. I say:

  —From last night’s feast? The remains of the twelve deer, the three buffalo?

  She is turning, but before she is out the door again, I say:

  —Did my father send you specially?

  She points to the plate again and says:

  —It was good food.

  —It was? That does not bode well for me.

  —It was. Last night.

  —But no longer.

  A smile spreads up her face and then drifts off.

  —Try.

  I take up a strip of meat and sniff it and chew a bite. It is cold and tough and sinewy. I mime choking on it but she is not persuaded. Feeling quite a fool, I swallow it down in a lump and I say:

  —Thank you for the provisions.

  —From your father.

  —Is that so. Well, and will my father be visiting me himself?

  She shakes her head and says:

  —He is occupied.

  —Ah. I have heard of his planning. Though not what it tends towards.

  Her quick hand touches the side of my head where my hair is growing back. No longer a warrior, most likely. Her hand is curious and, I think, pitying. It draws away quick. At once I am struck by a wish to tell her about Jamesie, about the feel of his head under my palm when he was new. But I put my hand on my own skull and I say:

  —Always soft-headed, some have said.

  She is going, but from behind the door she says:

  —You are still his son. He will not be cruel.

  I SAVE SOME of the meat and some of the water, for who can tell when I will have more? I find that I am not so ready to die. Or not to starve to death at any rate.

  No further food this day or the next.

  I think of Delilah for a time, I even call to her once, but I hear only the usual coming and going in the town. The light through the walls deepens its colour and so I know that dark is coming on again. I sing a little tune:

  For the want of a nail, the shoe was lost,

  For the want of a gun—

  Will anyone answer? No. But I have always liked to sing when alone. When I was a boy in Pennsylvania, it kept others from me sometimes. If I sang wildly enough in the woods the other boys would snort and lob a rock or two but leave me alone. But if I tried to sing sweet like Neddy and sounded as though I were trying, they would crash out of the bushes and call me an arse and we would fight. Toadmouth. Arseholemouth. Well, Hill, you were with them sometimes, I have not forgotten it.

  I think about what Pompey said, that the Shawnee are straight in their meaning, that it is a good weapon. That the rest of us are the ones making a virtue of deceit, pawing through everything as if it were a great trunk with a false bottom, the real treasure hidden away. Perhaps that is true enough.

  I eat another strip of the cold venison. Chewing it is work. I rummage in my pouch. They have left me a few of Hamilton’s silver trinkets and sweets. A dented ring, a single earbob, a few thin coins. I feel for the King’s profile. Sir! Would you have me back in your army?

  I flip them over my knuckles until they fall and I have to feel about to find them again.

  An odd wish strikes me, a peculiar taste for sugar, perhaps to cover the taste of the old meat. I am not generally one for sweets, but now my teeth ache for it down to the roots as if I
were really a boy again. I find one boiled English candy from Hamilton’s secretary among my few belongings. What became of the rest I do not know. There must be mice about. I must be sleeping hard at night, harder than I believe. This thought unnerves me. I open my eyes until the lids feel pinned back. It is near dark now. I crunch the sweet. Shadows cross the dirt floor and stay there.

  When Hill and Callaway were in this house and went quiet, I thought it was as if they had gone beneath the ground. I was outside then. But now it seems to me that this whole place is a fairyland, the place under the hill where the unwary stay for thousands of years once they stray in. Where people disappear to. Rebecca’s stories, and Ma’s. Hamilton’s too, for all that. A ring of toadstools by the light of a full moon, a little door under a tree root, a drugged drink, and you are gone. Gone. Perhaps the fairies have added meat-packed horses to their list of tricks to get people here.

  To myself I say: They are keeping you alive. You are alive, you must be. You are still here.

  I am heavy-headed. My limbs fall about and I sweat. I open my eyes wider until they dry out and pain me. I think again of being a child. Indeed I feel that I am a child, I can see through my old childish eyes. Some girls in the town ate mushrooms in the woods all unknowing that they were deadly. One little girl from Meeting, Lucy was her name, Lucy Black, the sister of Molly, my little first wife. She survived the summer fever but not this. Her coffin was among the others being carried to the burying ground on a hot summer morning. I had been watching pigeons strutting along a fence as if to show what they could do. But the wooden coffin wobbled on the men’s shoulders. I saw it, I must have. I saw a boot dangling from it, I saw the black leather cracked over the toe, a button loose and dangling too. But how can I have seen that?

  Things get into the head somehow.

  Do not sleep. I close my mind to the idea. There is no sleep. Sing again, keep yourself awake, wake everyone else. Take a breath.

  I sing a mumble with no words. It is not Shawnee. It is nothing.

  A low answer arises from outside the door. The surface of my brains is covered in cracks, like dried mud. I try to speak. Slowly I manage to say:

  —Pompey.

  I am filled with relief. But the silence hisses around me. I try again:

  —Taking the air?

  Still no reply. Pompey wishes to frighten me. I say:

  —I would be happy to receive you, had I the power to open the—

  My tongue is too thick and dry to finish. The water is gone. When? I have Hamilton’s silver ring gripped in my fist. I stumble and bang against the door. Now comes a whisper, a single word, but what? I cannot understand it.

  —What? What did you say?

  I am desperate for it now, even for Pompey’s taunting, but there is nothing more. I think on it for hours or days, I do not know which. My mind reaches for it, it stretches itself beyond its powers. I think the word is go. Or gone. Or some other word I cannot reach.

  I eat again. I do not know what it is that I eat, meat or metal or earth. It is still dark, my throat is rough as hot sand. Daddy’s anvil pounds unevenly in my skull, clang clang clang. A little red Daddy banging away. I am very little and my bed is hard and hot. I think of my sister Bets and my little brothers Neddy and Squire. I think we are very sick together.

  A slow thought wraps itself about me. A slow word takes time to spell itself out. My finger is tracing the letters, trying to catch them in the air. My finger is bewildered. I concentrate until my head aches further. I can never finish the word, it never finishes.

  P-O-I-S

  P-O-I-S

  P-O-I-S-O

  This is what it says. It does not finish. I am busy down a deep hole, I am clay. My moving finger is drying clay, it is going stiff. I am dry. I will crack right through. What is inside?

  Straw stuffing.

  There is nothing else here, I am so low in the hole. Nothing to see or hear. But I am listening. My eyes are open in the clay of my face. My tongue hurts all the way along. I keep very still but my bones vibrate and clack, the dark muffles the noise. But there was a word, a word in the dark. My mouth reaches back for it and tries for the sound. It comes up with Guh. Guh. What was it? Gone. Possibly so.

  All moves backward now, there is no forward. A smell of wolf. Wolf’s stomach. This is where I am again, then. I sigh and sink and the stinking wolf stomach cradles me in pieces. And I am so glad.

  But the word will not let me be.

  I flap my baby wings a little, this is the way my arms feel, weak as a new chicken’s wings fresh out of the egg. They hurt to move, they hurt to unbend. I am trying to pull myself up out of the wolf’s gut and its gullet, out of its throat and over its lolling tongue. The smell is sharper here, and the gate of the teeth is sharp.

  I am crawling across the dirt floor looking for water. The sound of my legs dragging is a harsh sound.

  I have kept it off, but I cannot here this night. Now it comes, it screams up: Jamesie. I cannot see him. He is down inside the wolf. He hides his face in the dark with his torn arm. I cannot see him. He will not speak to me, and my heart drains inside me.

  In his place another shrills out of the black, it is Jemima. Daddy, Daddy!—Her face is white inside her curtains of black hair, her eyes burn as she shrieks. I knew you were coming. Her mouth is open, shrieking, black, empty. Seeing her face, I stand stock still and I am afraid. My famous daughter’s face, my poor girl. It retreats suddenly, leaving only a pale print on the dark, as my brother Israel’s did. My ghosts.

  The thought strikes me as it must. I have been trying to run from it but here it is in my face: Jemima, dead like Jamesie and like Israel, having joined the dim ranks that I can only try to reach. Is she? Are you? Jemima. Is the fort gone? I have sometimes wished it to be. Everyone gone with it. All burned, all turned to ash and air, floated away in all directions. Everything gone.

  Rebecca, are you living, and my girls and my boys? I cannot read you, I cannot read. Now I see Israel standing with his arm out and covered in sitting birds, which give me directions, but their language is sly nonsense, their eyes are beady lies. The face of Israel’s lovely dead wife flashes at me and is gone. These signs mean nothing to me. When she was teaching me to read and write better, I felt like this, like being blind and cursing my state every minute of my life.

  And at once I do see it, all the signs snapping and locking into sense, all thick black lettering: Everything is gone. They are all gone, all dead together. Their faces drifting off. My heart aches and aches, it is stripped clean and robbed. For a moment I believe that now I will catch my boy among these dead, I will see him, see a brilliant picture of his face, even for an instant.

  I drag myself along, only myself.

  At the door is a shadow deeper than the others. I know it is Death. It has a shape, a face, a mouth. A long face, a smiling mouth. It opens the mouth, it can talk. Death has his face, of course. His hollow eye sockets and cheeks and smile. I gasp the name: Cherokee Jim.

  I want to weep. I have kept it away for so long, though it has always been with me. The long sad face. I stare at it and I say: Why? Why did you kill him that way? You could have adopted him as Black Fish did with me. He was a good son, he was better than I am. You did not have to use him as a sign to the rest of us, you did not have to make such a poor piece of writing paper of him. Keep Off.

  I expect to be dead in a moment, if I am not already. The short hairs on the sides of my head are up on end, my whole skin is screaming. I am alive. The pain smashes me. I stagger to my screaming feet and with all my breath I say: Cherokee Jim. Big Jim. I know Jamesie said it also. It is the wrong name, it is a false name, but what else is there to say?

  The face can talk but it chooses not to. It has the same old easy manner it always did, the ease of ownership and certainty, like Hill’s and Russell’s. Stupidly I hold out the silver ring to it, the dented trinket. I feel it wanting to laugh. I know that I will get no answer. Answers do not come when you wish for them. T
hey come later in curious forms you do not recognize.

  Now I only want him to be gone. I raise my arm, I will chop him down like a tree. I cannot look at him, I am sobbing, I have no breath. But he will not go. He puts a hand on my arm and presses me back to the ground. He crouches beside me where I lie, he touches my head. It is a gentle enough touch. He says: I told you to stay where you were. You did not listen. You kill me, I kill you. We make our trades.

  Or perhaps he does not say any of it, perhaps this is what I imagine he would say. I do hear other words, they tunnel down into my bristling head:

  —What is your dream?

  A BLADE is moving above my face.

  I am awake and not dead. When I shift myself, I expect my body to ache as it would after a fight, but it does not. My head is clear and still attached. The ring is still in my hand. I rub my jaw and it is oddly smooth.

  Delilah draws the knife over my cheekbone towards my eye. It catches and rasps and I feel a small cut opening. Then up and over my skull it goes. I can feel the short hairs lifting and being cut away. For some time I listen, I turn my head with her hand when she pushes it. The knife scrapes gently over and over.

  —Did you poison me?

  She is dipping the knife, it clanks dully against the wooden bowl of water.

  —Did you come and ask what I was dreaming? It is not your affair.

  The knife rolls. Still she says nothing.

  —Ha. I will tell you in any case. I saw Death, if that was your intention.

  My head lightens further. I am exhausted and cleaned out. I have seen Death’s face at last. I saw what Jamesie saw. This is what I have wanted. I have seen the very worst thing. I have seen that the rest must be gone. Rebecca, Jemima, all of you boys, all of you. My bones have turned into birds’ bones, all hollow and light. I have a curious feeling of having been rescued, though I am still in the prison house. It is very curious.

  —Delilah. Did my father order it? If he is still my father, that is to say. Or Pompey?

  Her arms are still for a moment. I have the sense that it was all her doing. She says: