My first thought at that moment was to take notebook and ink flask from my satchel and a trimmed quill from my coat pocket and record the event on paper. All the details and my impressions of them. My delight and discomfort. The broad caricatures of the wood and gourd masks. The blurry frightfulness of the Wasp Ghost. The color of the firelight falling on the walls.
But all of a sudden I imagined my uncle and the other white men I had known in my childhood behaving in the crude manner depicted by the Boogers, farting and humping and grasping at everything their hands could hold and a whole lot more. And I thought about all the white men in the territory with little unacknowledged part-Indian babies running around, and nevertheless the profound superiority they felt over the Indians by blood entitlement.
I began laughing like everybody else, laughing so hard that I pitched backward on the bench and fell until I was caught by the wattle-and-daub of the townhouse wall behind me.
The drums and rattles reached a crescendo. The Boogers roared their final roar and rushed out the door into the night. The whole townhouse seemed to take a deep breath and pause.
Glad to be shut of them, Bear broke out a demijohn of popskull liquor and led the final bout of drinking, this being long before his later frequent vows of temperance.
Other dances followed, but they all seemed diminished by the departed Boogers. Beaver Dance and Bear Dance and Circle Dances where everybody joined in, even those as poorly skilled as myself. I was of the age where one feels overly conscious of failings at physical grace, and I tried to just sit and observe, but one of the older women yanked me up and shoved me into the crowd. I did the best I could, which, oddly enough, and entirely due to their generosity, proved to be sufficient.
When grey light was not more than an hour or two from showing through the smoke hole, it was time to do the Buffalo Dance and then go home. They danced the dance even though the last buffalo had been killed thirty years ago and its broad chalky skull with polished brown horns, fitted like molars in their sockets, was hanging from an old widow’s barn up Hanging Dog Creek and the dusty hide covered Bear’s bedstead.
Even before the Buffalo Dance was done, Bear wrapped himself in a blanket and fell asleep on a bench. The party broke up. It was a cold clear night, and when we all stepped outside, hot from the dancing, and stood about saying our good-nights, steam rose from us, all as one, and we were haloed in the moonlight. I put my wool coat on, and the hem no longer swept the ground but fell just below my knee.
Everyone set out walking down the creek toward the village, and I turned up the two-track wagon road that led home. The full moon was riding low to the west, and black shadows of trees stretched long across the pale dirt of the road. I had not gone much beyond the first bend when the ghost in the wasp mask stepped out from a stand of poplar trees, their trunks pale columns in the moonlight. The bulb-shaped face looked at me without expression, black eyes and wasp paper like the skin of a dead man.
Before I could catch myself I must have flared backward a step or two, a skitter just short of wheeling and taking to my heels.
The ghost laughed, and it was the sweet and unrestrained laugh of a girl.
—That was a pretty step, she said. I guess you’ve not had enough of dancing yet.
—Who are you and what do you want? I said.
I was halfway between scared and mad, and I had not at all intended to repeat Bear’s formulaic questions to the Boogers. But they held within them the essential things you want to know from beings that erupt into your world and frighten you.
She laughed again and then said, We come for fucking and fighting.
She bent forward and took off the mask and set it on the ground. Her long hair fell forward over her face until she stood up and swept it back with a forearm.
The girl with the silver bracelets.
Of course I was stunned, but the world was a less populated place back then. You ran into people. Lots of land, few folks. The opposite of what prevails now. I wanted to say all kinds of things at the same time, but the last thing I wanted to say was, I won you in a card game.
—Do you remember me? I said. We’ve met.
—Don’t get all inquisitive in a rush. Let’s kind of sidle into this.
—There was a card game, I said. A game of Blind-and-Straddle.
—Hush, she said.
—I held good hands.
—Not another word on that topic. I mean it.
—Then what’s your name? I said.
—It’s Claire.
—Where have you been?
—Home in the summer. School in the winter.
—School where?
—Savannah this last year. Charleston before that. There was a little problem in Charleston.
I had all kinds of questions lined up, waiting to be asked. But she said, I’ve got to go. They’ll be worried.
—They who?
—Relatives I’m visiting. I’ve got to go.
She bent to pick up the mask.
—How will I find you? I said.
—I’m going home tomorrow. It’s far.
—Where?
She reached to the breast pocket of my coat and pulled out one of the turkey quills and flexed its point against her finger.
—Ink? she said.
I fumbled in my shoulder satchel and took out the little travel flask and was still feeling for the notebook when she stopped me.
She did not take the flask from me, but unscrewed the cap and dipped the quill into the narrow neck. She took my hand in hers and held it firm by the fingers while she drew a map to her home on the back of it, the split nib scratching and tickling.
—That’s the way through the woods, she said, when she was done.
I held the back of my hand up to the moonlight. It was a mess of lines bleeding into the smooth topography of young skin.
—Is there not an address, I said, the name of the road or street? I’m not free to travel far, but perhaps we might write.
She dipped the pen again and capped the flask and took it from me and tucked it back into my satchel. On my other hand she wrote only four words—I could feel the pauses and the skipped spaces on my skin. When she was done, she tucked the quill back in my pocket and bent to the ghost mask at her feet and settled it over her head.
—Have you fallen in love with me yet? she said.
—I’m deciding.
—It’s not a thing you decide.
There was a long silence and then she said, I didn’t know if you’d made it out alive.
—I’m alive, I said, as you can see. But I don’t know about out.
—I’ve got to go.
She turned and ran away down the road.
WHEN I REACHED the post, I built up the fire and transcribed the markings from my handbacks into my notebook, first the map and then the address, which read, in order of composition from wrist to knuckles:
CLAIRE
FEATHERSTONE
VALLEY
RIVER
I knew even then that she was something fatal piercing my life.
I WROTE TO Claire at least bimonthly for a while. Or, to be more precise, for an interminable stretch of slightly more than two years. And my voluminous letters must have been foolish beyond belief, an outpour of young feelings. My pride is not in the least bruised that Claire disposed of them. In fact, I am quite happy that they have long since ceased to exist. I imagine them balled up loosely in her fist and lit to ignite pine kindling for a February hearth fire. I, of course, kept all six of her single-sheet responses and have them to this day in a box. She answered me only quarterly, and her letters were highly impersonal, barely more than brief descriptions of the recent weather and the colors of the autumn leaves or the depth of snow or how cool the evenings had been for July. She was hardly present in them, and I was not mentioned at all except for an occasional perfunctory closing line hoping that my health had been sound.
I was not sure how I would ever happen to see her again
. She did not seem particularly impressed that I wanted her, a fact I attempted to conceal in my letters but could not. It had been my understanding, both from reading novels and from some consonant feeling in my own heart, that women put a great deal of stock in the desire of men. And yet my desire had apparently been declared of suspect value. Not even the basis for a line of credit.
6
ALL OF A SUDDEN, WHEN I WAS SIXTEEN, EVERYTHING CHANGED. As I’ve previously said, successful old men like to look back at their ascension in the world and see it as an endorsing imprint on their brows, a mark from the thumb of God. But really, sometimes success just falls on you. Or you step in it.
The antique gentleman with the knee breeches who owned the trade post died. His son, named Junius, quickly ran the business into the ground so that none of the suppliers in either Philadelphia or Charleston would send us new goods. I hadn’t been paid my little stipend in months. Junius came riding up one morning in a big boat-shaped Conestoga wagon heaped above the gunwales with all his possessions, at least the portable ones he could neither sell for cash nor trade against his debt with his many creditors. He was fevered with the notion of going out west to escape his failures and begin life anew. His destination was the farthest reaches of Mississippi. He could have taken a different route in his flight and left me high and dry, but he was not at all dishonest, just run-of-the-mill incompetent. He pulled up into the store yard sitting hunched on the seat board with long dark reins drooping across the backs of a matched pair of yellow oxen and with a fairly good ash-colored riding horse following at the end of a lead rope off the back. The canvas coverlid bulged out between the hoops in various geometric shapes, the points and angles and curves of his boxed and bundled things. A young black servant dressed in better clothes than his master rode with his legs dangling off the tailboard.
Junius stepped down and greeted me in considerable embarrassment, with only a brief limp handshake and a glancing look from his eyes. Then he drew me to the back of the wagon and shooed the boy off the tailboard and said, Pilfer about and see what you’ll take for your wages that I owe you.
I climbed up and dug around in the dim internals of the wagon, and there was not much of interest in his clutter except for several boxes of lawbooks. I’d have been happier if they had been novels and poetry and plays. Nevertheless, they were books.
—I’ll take these, I said.
—Good choice, Junius said.
I loaded the boxes off the wagon and onto the porch.
He sat doing sums in a ledger, his pen scratching fast against the paper.
—So we’re settled on back pay and all? he said.
—Square and plumb, I said.
I was wondering what next for me, but I was just waiting.
—How much cash money have you got? he said.
—Not much.
—How much?
—A very little.
He made a sort of impatient forward rolling motion with one hand.
—About a hundred, I said.
—About?
—Maybe a little more. Hundred and twenty.
—Good God, he said, you’ve lived thrifty.
I shrugged. I had indeed lived thrifty, and I’d had a few little enterprises of my own. It was not part of my master’s mission to deal in livestock, so I figured that making a little money buying and selling beeves and hogs with drovers passing on the way to the Charleston stock markets mattered little. None of my master’s business.
Junius said, For a hundred and twenty, and that horse there in your paddock, you can just have this store and the one out on the Nation at Valley River to boot. There’s not hardly any stock left in them, and I can’t take the time to put them up for sale. I’ve got to get in motion.
—Nope, I said. I’m not trading my horse.
He looked back east up the wagon road as if any minute dark riders might round the curve in pursuit.
—Just the hundred and twenty then.
—For the stores and the time left on my papers.
—Sure. That too.
I went inside and collected all my savings—hard money and scrip both—from their various hiding places. I didn’t even count it. I knew exactly how much it was. I carried it out in the bowl of my two hands. It was a little heap that in a fractional way represented the past four years of my life. All the way back to a gold twenty-dollar piece saved from my scrape gambling with Featherstone.
Junius didn’t count it either. He spilled it down into a long leather moneypurse, and there was not much in its depths for my coins to jingle against.
He said, I would not have felt right leaving you unaccounted for.
I appreciated his fine ethics. But I was not a fool.
—Would you care to memorialize this transaction on paper? I said.
He wrote a fast contract, and we concluded it with signatures so big and looped and flourished that we might have been vying for a medal in penmanship.
He mounted to the driver’s bench and whipped up the oxen, and the boy made a quick leap to the tailboard. The slack rope pulled taut against the good riding horse, and they were gone.
I stood in the yard looking at the contract, two dozen words and two signatures. All of a sudden the world felt a great deal more expansive now that I was no longer owned but an owner. No longer bound, at least not by paper.
THAT NIGHT I flipped through the lawbooks, reading here and there from several of the many volumes, and found that despite their mighty efforts toward incoherence, they were ultimately penetrable, at least after frequent consultations with Dr. Johnson’s Shorter Dictionary. About all it took to be a lawyer back then was to have read the books and understood a little bit of them. And also to own a black suit of clothes and a white shirt of moderate cleanliness. For anyone even remotely sharp-witted, frontier lawyering was said to be a fine profession. The future suddenly rose up before me, bright as a red sunrise, like Jack meeting the old beggar with the magic tablecloth that produced feast after endless feast. As for the business, I knew something about how credit worked in such a fluid and uncertain economy. It was nothing more than paper stacked on paper, varieties of hope and speculation, handshakes and promises, moonbeams and horse shit, trust and risk layered one atop the other in thin strata like cards in a deck. And not much different from betting all you had on a shuffle and a deal.
Soon the post was stocked again and I was the proprietor, an independent businessman. And I now had an employee, a smart boy by the name of Tallent, just a year older than I had been when I first went into the mountains. But Tallent was not bound. I paid him for his work, though not much and most of it in the form of goods from the store and notes receivable held by me on men of reliable character.
It did not take me long to learn that money was not much interesting in itself. But it was plenty interesting in a secondary way, for what it could do on your behalf. It could, for a start, set you free and make a place for you in the world. In that new country, it began to be my understanding that getting what you wanted was largely a matter of claiming what you wanted.
IN THAT SPIRIT I soon left Tallent in charge and went riding toward Valley River. My intent was to get my new post there back in business and also to follow my map to Claire. By noon I was passing through a deep gorge in early spring with the leaves just squirrel-ear big on the trees and the river running hard and full, breaking white over black rocks. Somewhere along the way, I crossed the boundary between America and the Nation, but there wasn’t a signpost or a rock cairn or even a stob in the ground to commemorate the frontier.
Waverley and I cut a stunning figure that day. I had sent measurements to a tailor in Charleston and had a good suit of black clothes made, including a fancy waistcoat in the hunting plaid of the Scots grandfather on my mother’s side, its dim greens and dark greys and muted blues being more to my tastes than the clan’s garish red dress plaid. And further contributing to our considerable flair, Waverley had matured into a stallion of beauty and spirit
, with flawless carriage and movement. He was a bay almost to black, so that the only time you saw a difference between his mane and his coat was in direct sunlight. He shone like dark metal. His muscles lay in skeins and plates, reshaping themselves constantly all down the slopes of his body. And Waverley was not only handsome, he had impulsion. A horse either has it or not. Many horses suck back a little with every stride, and then before long you’re bogged down, and you spend a great deal of time and effort kicking their asses in order to go. Waverley, all on his own without regard to the opinion of his rider, had a compelling desire to go, often at an alarming rate of speed. He had become worth quite a lot of money on the open market. People built houses for less money than he was worth. Of course, for at least two reasons, I would rather have cut off my left hand and sold it by the pound like pig trotters or stew bones than considered selling him. For one, it was awfully fine to ride around atop a horse of such head-turning quality. And for two, I loved him and believed he loved me. Together, we looked so fine that day I wished I could sit on a porch and watch us ride by.