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I was born in 1892 on the banks of the Mississippi, in that muddied, mongrel part of the world where the East and West are separated only by the coalsmoke-scummed river.1
My mother was a Westerner, an Amerind woman who made her living on the liminal economy of the river, unloading ships at dock and manning short-handed steamers. My father was an Easterner—one of those scruffy, perennially drunk men who float down the river like driftwood. They must have passed a few pleasant August evenings together, because my mother gave me an Irish name in his honor: Oona. I have his hair, too, a dirty red color like Tennessee clay. That’s all I know about him.
Growing up, people hissed that I was born to be a mapmaker, being half of one thing and half the other. In our language, the word for mapmaker is also the word for traitor.
They never said that about my younger brother Ira, product of my mother’s brief affair with some poor Christly white man who crossed the river to bring his tortured god to the red man.2 But no one could have said anything sour about Ira, with that wistful little smile and that slight, red-tinged translucency along his cheekbones.
If my aunts could have thrown me out and kept Ira after my mother died, they would have. They spent their time tending their spite like a well-made fire, my three aunts, hating every trace of the East that leaked across the river. Including me.
But I suppose in the end they were right about me. I signed my contract with the Imperial American River Company in 1909. I took a cramped room on the Eastern bank above the Gateway Barroom, close enough to the river that the tang of oil and engine smoke drifted through my window as I slept.
I was a mapmaker for ten years.
I wrote pages and pages here about the intricate trials of a mapmaker’s labor—the lonely half-lives we lead among the Easterners, the way our own languages grow heavy and strange in our mouths, and especially the terrible stillness we bring to the land, like a kind of dying. But I tore those pages out and sent their ragged-edged bodies floating down some nameless creek.
It’s only the end that matters: September 9, 1919, when I crossed the river with Mr. John Clayton and his surveyors as I had done six days a week, come rain, shine, or the end-times, for nearly a decade.
The morning was hot and greasy, like butter left out of the icebox too long. Clayton’s men hunched together on the flatboat, wearing expressions that said today was likely to be the day the West swallowed them up whole and spat their bones downstream, regardless of their prior experiences.
I have always blamed Marcus Polo and his fancifully deranged The Book of the Marvels of the West for encouraging such fears among Easterners.3 Whether or not Polo was truly the first Easterner to make it past Virginia, and whether he was given buffalo milk in the court of the King of the Great Plains, I don’t know, but I can say with certainty there are no dragons or winged deer or cannibals in the West. At least, not on the half-tamed borders where I grew up.
There’s just the land. The fey, shifting land that twists beneath your feet and runs in mad paths of its own devising, which might lead you away and never let you out again.
I was the expedition’s mapmaker, the men’s safety and sanity, but none of them could bring themselves to trust a half-savage. Except Clayton. Although perhaps trust is the wrong word—when a person ties a noose around your heart and holds the end of the rope in their palm, do they really need to trust you?
Clayton stood braced in the center of the flatboat, eyes fixed on the horizon as though his gaze alone might force the land flat. He turned and smiled his gold-glinting grin at me, indulgent and proud, the way owners smile at their favorite hounds.
I hated him. I have always hated him, and I suppose I will go on hating him until I die, and when my bones are swinging from some great Western pine they will rattle in the wind and whisper their hollow hatred to one another until there is nothing left of him and nothing left of me.
But I kept my hate hot and acid in my belly, because there was nowhere else for it to go.
The Western shore was damp and gravelly that morning, where the day before it had been gray mud and reeds. I couldn’t prevent these tiny rebellions, these ripples in the land, and I didn’t care to; it’s good for Easterners to see there’s still something left alive in the West, no matter how solid the earth feels beneath their boots or how carefully they draw their maps.
Clayton charted us a path north and west that morning, into new territory. It was the first time in several years that our crew had gone out of sight of the shoreline—where the comforting, unchanging outline of Stone Gap waited for us on the Eastern side—and there was mutinous muttering among the ranks.
“The Company feels the shore is sufficiently stable for their needs. It’s land we want now, boys, space to stretch our wings. Ms. Oona here will lead us true.” Clayton’s hand landed on my shoulder. I didn’t flinch.
I closed my eyes and felt the shape of the land around me. I led them true.
They need mapmakers, you see—a few traitors like myself to hold the land still. They need us more than anything in the world, if they ever want to fulfill that destiny so manifestly their own, “to overspread the continent allotted by Providence.”4
Without us, the land won’t lie still. It writhes and twists beneath their compasses, so that a crew of surveyors might make the most meticulous measurements imaginable, plotting out each hill and bluff and bend in the river, and when they return the next day everything is a mirror image of itself. Or the river splits in two and one branch wanders off into hills that shimmer slightly in the dawn, or the bluffs are now far too high to climb and must be gone around. Or the crew simply disappears and returns weeks later looking hungry and haunted.
The land has bucked them like a half-tamed horse for more than two centuries.5 But above any other vice or virtue, the Easterners embrace persistence. And slowly, acre by hard-fought acre, they are succeeding.
By the 1830s they’d settled as far as Virginia, and Captains Lewis and Clark had discovered the great utility of employing native guides.6 By 1890 they had reached the edges of the Mississippi. The river put up a respectable resistance, but soon the steamships puttered up and down it without fear of finding themselves suddenly on some strange waterway with black water and blue-gold hills on either side. Now new companies form every day, each of them clawing westward with hungry hands. Each of them relying on the moment when someone like me might close her eyes and hold an image of the land still in her mind, feeling its endless permutations but soothing it like a fractious horse, settling on only one place.
I walked north
down a path the others could barely see. It wound first beneath pines so dense they made a queer, needled twilight, then opened onto a shaded glade filled with red columbines blooming carelessly out of season.
I knew those columbines. I stopped dead, stunned by the sudden weight of old hurt. “Mr. Clayton.” He appeared at my shoulder, oozing the moneyed smells of tobacco and pomade. “Are you certain this is the direction the Company requires?”
“Is there some kind of problem?” His voice had that dangerous drawl to it, the deceptive laze of a predator.
“No,” I lied. “It’s just this is going to be a real difficult path. I can tell.”
There was a brief, sharp-edged moment of silence. Then he said, “Oona, sweet, I’m not interested in that. Not a bit. Don’t make it harder on yourself than you’ve got to.”
I closed my eyes again, feeling the land sliding again into the place I wanted to go least in the world. There is no reasoning with it, no forcing it. Mapmakers don’t make the land; we only hold fast to whichever shape it gives us. I walked forward.
The trees grew taller, darker, more twisted. The men’s voices descended to whispers.
The path ended in the center of the wood. Bones hung from the black branches like skeletal chimes, clacking their welcome to me. I wanted to run, or to weep.
Easterners might call that place a “graveyard,” but the name would be a typical Eastern fallacy, associating specific places with specific purposes as though they might remain permanently fixed. We call it by a dozen different names.7 My aunts call it the bone trees or, in their more dramatic moments, the trees that take up the dead to sing for seven generations. It’s the place that comes for the dying, the mourning, and the dead. It’s the place waiting outside the cabin door when your mother is rasping those terrible last breaths beneath her pile of quilts. When she falls quiet, and you and your brother wrap her tight and haul her gently outside, it’s the place looming dark and knotted around you, limned in red columbines.
Funerals in the West are fleeting things, like black hounds padding past you in the night. Ira and I laid our mother down beneath a gnarl-boughed old queen of a tree, kissed her red cheeks, and turned away.
That day with Mr. Clayton was the first time in almost ten years I’d seen my mother’s bones, fresh and white as laundered linen, hanging from the tree in a pattern like a smile.
“Jesus, Oona, what is this?” Clayton flung his arm toward the skeletons hanging around us like macabre Christmas decorations.
“It’s a kind of—graveyard,” I offered. A strange feeling, a shaking and burning, seemed to be crawling down my spine.
Clayton spat. “Well. They don’t seem to be very buried, do they?”
I did not attempt to explain that no sane Amerind would have their body locked in an oaken casket to rot. When we die each of us is granted this one strange and hurting miracle, to be lifted up into the bone trees by the unseen hands of the land.
At least, I hoped that was the miracle waiting for me. Some of the nastier children used to tell me stories about half-bloods left lying on the ground to decay, unrecognized by the bone trees. My aunts never said one way or the other when I asked.
“Damned uncanny savages.” Clayton gave a brazen laugh, to communicate precisely how little he cared about such primitive rituals. “To work.”
The surveyors began unpacking their instruments in the muted rhythms we all knew well. Tripods were erected, camp tables were balanced on the uneven ground, and pale green undergrowth was hacked out of the way. Our artist set up his easel and began to paint the scene in deep indigo and gray-white. The Company had found it profitable to employ artists to record the landscape in a particular size and shape; it seemed to help hold the land more true to itself.8
My work required no tools or instruments. I merely stood in the center and settled the ripples as they rose out of the earth. But I was still shaky, distracted. I found myself looking up at the bones, around at the men tromping carelessly between the trees, at Clayton standing beneath my mother’s rattling ribs, fingering his silver pistol.
There was a sudden swooping feeling, as if we’d all missed the last step on the stairs. Men swore. The shadows of the trees seemed to slide eerily over the ground. The bone trees were still around us, but now there were eight paths leading away, and the mid-morning sun seemed to be slanting the wrong way through the trees.
Clayton cursed. “Hold it, woman,” he hissed.
I tried. I want you to know I tried, that it was no noble act of rebellion but just sentimental failure. I knelt down and closed my eyes and bent my will earthward, grasping for that certainty, the sureness that was required.
Easterners often suppose the process of mapmaking involves some arcane Amerind magic. They like to talk about the connection between Nature and Her Native Sons, and the ancestral, spiritual connection to the land that supposedly runs in our blood.
But if mapmaking is magic, it’s only the magic of knowing—knowing the land and its hundred faces so well you carry the shape of them in your marrow. It’s the kind of heart-deep familiarity that lets you recognize your brother from the tiniest half-glimpse of the top of his head in a crowd of people. If an Easterner were born and raised in the West, spent their childhood running through secret, strange woods and meadows that were sometimes mountains, drunk on the shifting shapes of the horizon, I imagine they could be mapmakers, too.
I tried, but I felt myself failing. The shadows continued their creeping dances through the roots. The trees seemed to twist darkly down around our heads like a thorned crown. The hollow hooting of some unrecognizable bird echoed around us. The men had abandoned their instruments and backed toward the center.
Clayton said my name. He was still standing tall and straight beneath the bones, unafraid. I hated him for that, too, because he should have been afraid, trapped in an Amerind graveyard with his mapmaker failing him.
“If some … superstition is going to compromise your work, Oona, then I suggest you take us back home.” Casually, as if he were clearing cobwebs from the ceiling, he yanked my mother’s femur down from the dry vines that held it.
He stepped forward, touched the grained knob of the bone to my cheek. “Take us home, Oona.”
I teetered on the edge of some great red chasm, looking down into its molten center and longing for the sweet heat of it. I wanted to let go entirely of this acre and let the land swallow them all up, lose them in labyrinthine caverns forever, leave them stranded along craggy cliffs with no one but the vultures. To hell with the Company, with my contract.
If it had not been for Ira, I suppose I would have done it. Clayton knew it. The gold in his smile winked down at me like a malevolent star.
I led them out of the woods that day and back to the edge of the Mississippi, where the boat bobbed patiently in the current. No one spoke during the crossing except to whisper a few impotent prayers.
Clayton told us all to take a rest day tomorrow, after a fright like that, and to return the following Wednesday. His voice was still that drawling, unhurried purr, but his eyes made me think of the gray hunks of ice that flowed downriver in the deepest weeks of winter.
I fled to the Gateway Barroom with sweat sliding like hands down my back.
* * *
By six o’clock I was slumped against the back wall of the bar, suspended in a golden haze of whiskey and tobacco smoke like an insect preserved eternally in a lump of amber. I had failed to maintain the delicate balance between no-longer-tormented and able-to-walk-upstairs, and only the arms of my chair impeded my inevitable tilt toward the floor.
Most mapmakers drink, I’m told. The Easterners are scientifically certain it’s our primitive urges reasserting themselves, and they form charity groups to Save the Red Man from His Natural Enemy, but really it’s because of the work. Mapmaking is like tackling your dearest childhood friend and pinning her to the ground while men in linen suits draw red-and-black lines across her flesh. It is the basest treachery.
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br /> But it pays. I was so tired of grubbing on the frayed edges of my little village in the West, begging from my aunts’ lean larders and feeding Ira catfish that tasted of trash and oil. I thought the money—real Eastern dollars with presidential portraits in smeary green ink—would soothe the sting. It did. At first.9
After six years I was cold and heartsick. I tried to break my contract. I didn’t understand, I suppose, the depth of the Easterners’ obsession with their Westward march, the way it had come to infect every soul, their belief that “the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of Eastern settlement” are what defines “the exceptional Eastern character.”10
I didn’t understand that the Imperial American River Company would never, ever let me go.
I showed up to the pier one morning weaving and disheveled, smelling like I’d spent the previous evening fermenting slowly in a whiskey barrel. I told Clayton I wasn’t going to be a mapmaker anymore, that I regretfully had to break my contract. Everyone had a moment to appreciate my composure and bravery before I vomited several gallons into the river.
Clayton didn’t seem especially concerned by either event. He smiled crookedly at me and said, “Oh, Oona.” Then he ordered the crew to unload and head back to town. I was left covered in acrid sick, my head connected only distantly and unpleasantly to my shoulders, with something riotous happening in my chest.
I looked across the river at the slow spirals of greasy smoke, at the clouds running in their dawn circus of rose and gold, and thought for a time that I was free.
I went home to Ira and my aunts as soon as I was sober enough to hitch a ride on a flatboat. Ira’s face seemed too fragile to hold a twelve-year-old’s unfettered glee, as if his huge smile might crack him in half. My aunts were less enthused, sitting hunchbacked around their fire with lines running down their faces like tears. I wondering uncharitably if they were more bitter about my Eastern impurities or the absence of the sizable payment I sent them each month.
The Autobiography of a Traitor and a Half-Savage: A Tor.com Original Page 1