All True Not a Lie in It

by Alix Hawley

  The thief who returned to camp said they were dead, all the boys, and Crabtree and the Negroes gone. Their camp was only two miles back from ours, they would have reached us the next day. This thief found Russell’s slave Adam in the woods babbling and shaking and clutching his hair as if it would all fall out if he let go of it. When the attack came in the night, Adam had hidden himself under a pile of driftwood near the creek. Twenty Indians or more, Cherokee, Delaware, Shawnee. He watched everything. He heard everything, the wolf calls and the false wolf calls.

  He said Boone’s boy called one of the attackers by name, asking for his life and then begging. Big Jim, Jamesie said. It is me, he said. Already on the ground shot through both hips. Jamesie never could speak a name without a hesitation and a flush, as though he were making too free. But he said it, he looked up and asked through his hovering hands: Did you kill my Mama and my sisters and brothers?

  Jamesie. Your poor voice and hands. What were you thinking of? Mama and your family waiting you in the next life, but your Daddy missing?

  He did not speak of me then. He did not think I could ever be dead, he thought I would come. In the end he did call me. Daddy, Daddy, Dada.

  I see what I will do now. I will count your fingers and toes as I did the night you were born. I will count them again. I will dig and I will rebuild the grave deeper, I will put you in it, I will heap rocks and logs on top.

  I will hear wolves yip somewhere in the light snow. A gun firing, not far. The wind stirring and sighing. I will get to my feet.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My thanks to my excellent agent, Denise Bukowski, and my excellent editor, Anne Collins. Thank you also to Amanda Lewis and Michelle Roper at Knopf Canada, and to Alexis Alchorn, Tilman Lewis, and Robin Studniberg for their careful copy-editing and proofreading. I’m grateful to the Canada Council for the Arts, the Banff Centre for the Arts, The Walrus magazine, and the Faculty of Arts at Okanagan College, especially Jeremy Beaulne, Jim Hamilton, Rob Huxtable, and Craig McLuckie. For reading and discussing, many thanks to Damien Barton, Corinna Chong, Francie Greenslade, Sean Johnston, Terry Jordan, John Lent, Clare McManus, Melanie Murray, Andrea Sazwan, Matthew Skelton, and Rebecca Upton. A particular thank you to Mary Ellen Holland for her untiring thoughtfulness and support. My family has lost me to the frontier for some time: Mike, Theo, and Kate Hawley; Jocelyn, Peter, Jon, Marcela, Laura, and Sarah Bunyan; Carolyn and Dan Hilton; José Burtch. Thank you all for letting me go, and for taking me back.

  ALIX HAWLEY studied English literature and creative writing at Oxford University, the University of East Anglia, and the University of British Columbia. She published a story collection, The Old Familiar, with Thistledown Press in 2008. She won the 2014 Canada Writes Bloodlines competition, judged by Lawrence Hill, and was runner-up for the CBC Literary Award for short stories in 2012 and 2014. She teaches at Okanagan College in Kelowna, BC, where she lives with her family.