The Autobiography of a Traitor and a Half-Savage: A Tor.com Original

by Alix E. Harrow

  “Don’t let her spook you, boys,” advised Clayton. His voice boomed and was swallowed in the black leaves above him.

  The patterns of unpacking and measuring and clearing rustled around me. The volume rose as the men took heart from Clayton’s booted footsteps, his too-loud voice. Men like Clayton were born to settle new lands, I think, to render them rigid through the sheer force of their wills.17 But he had lost his power over me; the noose around my heart hung slack and empty.

  I stooped beneath my mother’s gnarled tree. Her bleached jaw smiled at me.

  “She’ll take care of you, little brother,” I promised. I tucked the lock of hair into the deep loam around the tree’s roots. I even said a prayer, some limping hybrid of my aunts’ old chants and the exaltations of the Baptist minister in Stone Gap. It would have outraged both parties, but I wasn’t praying to either of their gods. I was praying to the trees, that they might find Ira’s bones abandoned across the river and let them hang here in the twilight with our mother.

  I stood up. I closed my eyes. A tiny corner of me jabbered in fear, wished I’d just slunk away into the night and never taken Clayton and his men out here again. But the rest of me was too emptied-out to fear anything at all.

  I let go of the land, felt invisible reins slide from my fingertips.

  Every bone in the trees shuddered in unison. The path disappeared. Tables and tools were swept away by purple vines writhing snakelike across the ground. The gentle loam was replaced by poison-colored flowers and thorny shrubs crouching in the shadows. Instead of dense black branches above us it was open sky, glowing a dull orange as if some distant city were aflame. The earth writhed beneath our feet like the hide of a monstrous horse, resettling itself in a different shape none of us had ever seen.

  Tobacco-scented breath crawled across the back of my neck. “I’d have thought you’d learned.” Clayton’s voice was affable, drawling. “Ira deserves better than you, Oona.”

  I turned to face him, tear tracks burning down my cheeks like comet trails and my hair blowing wild in the sudden wind. Clayton took a half-step back.

  “Yes,” I answered, feeling my lips contorting into something like a smile. I stepped closer to him. “But Ira is dead.”

  In that moment, having yanked his noose and found it hanging slack between us, I knew Clayton was afraid. The ruggedness of his features seemed to soften and slough away. I had the impression that he had never been at someone else’s mercy, never felt the fearful fragility of his life beneath some crushing force.

  There was no pity in me. I looked out at the shifting land and thought to it, Run wild, my love.

  And the world came unsewn.

  Imagine the earth you walk along is just a vast and detailed map rolled out on some surveyor’s table. Now imagine that map is torn away, whisked from beneath your feet, or perhaps all the ink simply runs together in a sudden liquid chaos of rivers and mountains and neatly labeled regions. And your eyes ache just to see it, because you believed all your life that the labels on the map were the truth, and now you see they were just thin ropes stretched over the land and easily shaken off.

  I suppose this is why the men screamed so terribly. Clayton fell to his knees with his tanned hands clutching his face. I laughed.

  When the world reformed, the trees were ten times as tall as any tree ought to have been, with trunks like stone towers. The grass in the meadow now waved in purple-edged stalks taller than grown men, rippling in the new, chill wind from the north. The orange sky burned darker.

  I found I was looking down at them from a great height. The ground I had been standing on had shot straight into the air and become a high, chalky cliff. The wind that tore so cruelly at the men below was a soft caress on my skin.

  Clayton had staggered upright again, spinning and panting in the tangled grass. He saw me standing still and tall on the cliff above him. “You bitch—”

  An ominous thundering sound, as if of hooves or impossibly large paws, drifted from the trees. Black shapes seemed to be moving among them. The men were scattering, panicking, every story they’d ever heard about the West made horribly real.

  “Come down here, girl. Fix this—where else can you go? A traitor and a half-savage?” Clayton was wheedling now, almost begging, hoping his voice could reach like hands into the queer twilight and wrap itself around my throat.

  Behind him a surveyor made wild, hacking sweeps at the undergrowth with his knife, heading in the direction he must have assumed was East. He was wrong. Another man attempted to climb one of the vast trees, but the trunk made a grinding, splintering sound and he was gone.

  Some of the men would survive, I thought, if they set down their compasses and knives and snaked through the land like ships through a dangerous harbor.

  But Clayton would never see the Eastern shore again. His body would rot unseen, untouched by the bone trees, swallowed up by the ravenous border.

  “West,” I told him. Clayton bared his teeth like a cornered animal and drew his silver pistol with shaking hands. I left him.

  * * *

  I told Ira I wouldn’t write down a word of what I saw out West, so I could never guide anyone to the heart of this dark, strange land. I want my own fleeting footprints to disappear like dew behind me.

  I have paper and pen, though, and I cannot help but write—a symptom of the Easterner in me, I suppose. I write about the vast mauve-shadowed canyons that appear only at dusk, about the nameless animals that leave behind golden scales and silver feathers, about the stars that shift their pearled patterns every night. Those pages I burn in the evenings, translating them into the cryptic language of ash and char.

  But some pages—these pages—I fold and tuck into my pack. So that one day they can be found and read. So that someone else might know what it is to be born between two vast continents crashing together, and to become a traitor three times over, never certain precisely what you are betraying or why.

  And, in the end, to be granted a lonely grace. To be freed, and know the cost of it.18

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Begin Reading

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2016 by Alix E. Harrow

  Art copyright © 2016 by Ashley Mackenzie

  1 My childhood obsession with travelogues and adventure novels—piles of Eastern nonsense, my aunts felt, indicative of my half-blooded impurities—tells me this is the way to begin an autobiography. For example: Bernard del Castillo, The True History of the Conquest of the Old West, trans. Maurice Keating (London: John Murray and Sons, 1800); Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Down the Mississippi (Boston: J. J. Little, 1903).

  2 We don’t know where he went once my mother was through with him. He left his black leather Bible behind him and walked farther into the West. Perhaps the land let him live.

  3 Sir Polo’s work is much debated in the scholarly community. There are some rather vocal flocks of historians who believe he wrote the entire thing on hearsay and imagination. I personally feel that if he was not mad when he began his journey he was quite mad upon its completion, and only God and the Amerinds of the far West know the truth. Sir Marcus Polo, The Book of the Marvels of the West; Being an Honest Account of the New World and Its Inhabitants, 6th ed. (London: Thomas Cook Ltd., 1754).

  4 John L. O’Sullivan, “Annexation,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review 17, (July-August 1845):, 5–11.

  5 This is not universally true. Plenty of lone wanderers—explorers, trappers, eccentric poets, hermits—have gone into the West without undue suffering. There are even a few families that have settled over here. If they keep to themselves
and walk lightly down the paths, and don’t worry overmuch about precisely how far away things are or the shapes of trees, they make decent lives for themselves. But when the Easterners march in those rigid lines, armed with compasses and gunpowder and bow saws, they fail.

  6 Even with the helpful Miss Sakakawea, only Meriwether came limping back home, claiming they’d seen the Pacific Ocean but also making a lot of other less plausible claims and muttering about betrayal, savagery, and madness. Captain Lewis, History of the Expedition Under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark: Into the West and Thence to the Pacific Ocean (Philadelphia: Bradford and Inskeep, 1838).

  7 There used to be more names for the trees—thousands, even. Recent scholarship suggests Amerinds used to speak thousands of separate languages and called themselves a thousand different names. Over the years the lines between us—the things that made us Shawnee and Quapaw and Osage and Chickasaw—have blurred. We are like rocks under the pressure and heat of the earth, losing our edges and merging to form some new thing.

  8 There are competing theories about this subject. The most popular is Cosgrove’s assertion that the entire process of mapmaking is about civilizing the land, and teaching it to recognize its truest form. But I disagree; I’ve always felt mapmaking is about believing in the solidity of a place, and the paintings help Easterners drive out their doubts. Edmund Cosgrove, Order and Progress: Essays on the Symbolic Representation and Civilization of Western Lands (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1909).

  9 If you think I shouldn’t have done it, that I should have scrabbled along in the shifting mud of the West forever rather than sell my land to the Easterners, then I suppose you’re right. And I suppose you’ve never been hungry, never been a half-blooded outcast with a sick brother to look after.

  10 It is strange to suppose that the end result of this frontier obsession will be to eradicate it. What will they do then, I wonder, when every square mile lies placid beneath their plows? Jackson Turner, “The Frontier in Eastern History” (paper presented to the Eastern Historical Association, Louisville, Kentucky, 1893.

  11 The Eastern States technically claimed sovereignty over half the continent, although they could only move freely east of the Mississippi. It was an aspirational legal fiction, which meant they could exercise sporadic, unwelcome authority on small settlements very close to the river.

  12 It’s an old oath, the kind they only say in overwrought Western romances written by Easterners. It refers to the bones of the land, and to the bones of our families swinging in the trees.

  13 My investigations into non-Western travelogues tell me this is unlikely to be true. Every stretch of land is too different, too unique, too secretive to be all lumped together. Dr. Livingstone’s famous essay informed the world that the headwaters of the Nile were actually a vast inland ocean occupied by sea-faring gods. Meanwhile, the occupation of Ireland is plagued by mists and islands that are only present at certain times of day, and strange earthen mounds which are to be avoided at all costs. Empires are terribly fractious, slow enterprises. David Livingstone, “Essay on the Shocking Properties of Victoria Sea, Being an Honest Record of my Time There,” (paper presented to the Royal Geographical Society, Edinburgh, Scotland, 1854).

  14 Sticks and Bones is an old Amerind game our aunts taught us, involving the systematic tossing of sticks and delicate bird bones on the table, and the competitive reading of different patterns therein. I’ve tried to teach more than one Easterner, but there is something about the process of seeing multiple meanings within the same pattern that eludes them. “This,” declared one of my first lovers, “is a bit like reading one of Mr. Hawthorne’s dreadful novels, where everything is a symbol for something else.”

  15 It is my suspicion that travel writings from those few brave souls who wander into unsettled territory are the first steps toward conquest. Their words create an image in our minds of a still, singular place. Although, I confess, Conrad’s dark and twisted descriptions of the Mississippi as “resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land” probably did more to discourage settlement than assist it. Joe Conrad, The Heart of Darkness (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1884); Charlie Darwin, The Voyage of the Spaniel (London: Thomas Cook and Sons Ltd., 1839).

  16 Sir Marcus Polo, The Book of the Marvels of the West; Being an Honest Account of the New World and Its Inhabitants, 6th ed. (London: Thomas Cook Ltd., 1754).

  17 While you will not find such suppositions in works of reference, I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that some mapmaking crews are far more effective than others, and it comes down to the men who lead them. Clayton was one of the most efficient men south of St. Louis, possessed of a steel-edged certainty that settled acres faster than three average crews stuck together.

  18 Editor’s note: These collected papers were published originally in 1929 by a now-defunct press in Chicago. (Oona Sawgrass, The Autobiography of a Traitor and a Half-Savage (Chicago: Wayfaring Press, 1929).They were mailed to the acquiring editor in a brown paper package bearing the inscription: For Ira. I will meet you someday in the bone trees.