For much of the way up the river, the passage was only a narrow ledge above the bank, alternately rocky and muddy, impassable to wagons for many months at a time. The walls of the gorge were so narrow and deep that we rode in chill shadows except when the sun shone straight down at midday.
Granny Squirrel lived in splendid isolation somewhere nearby. Up some cove or ridge where the trail climbed like winding stairs. If people wanted her medicine, they had to travel. It was said that she had a piece of clear quartz crystal the size and shape of a quail egg. A drop of your blood dripped from a finger onto one of its faces would tell Granny Squirrel all your life to come, the joy and hardship, victory and death. Some people wanted to know their future, and some didn’t. I, for one, didn’t. Is wolf or bear aware of impending death? No. Would wolf or bear be better for the knowledge? I tend to think not. Be as you are and then go on your way to the Nightland is my belief. But whether you wanted to know your fate or not was all the same to Granny Squirrel. She’d lived for two or three hundred years, had seen generations rise and pass. She took the long view, wherein most of the flurry of life meant nothing to her.
Down in the gorge that day, I passed only one other human being, an old man with skin the color of hemp rope camping in a bend of the river. I smelled his fire smoke hanging over the water for the better part of a mile before I got to his camp. The man was knee-deep in the river, fishing, and came out with his pants dripping and his feet bare and his big toenails pale and luminous as the insides of mussel shells. He fried me a pair of trout dredged in cornmeal, and afterward I made coffee and poured the man a cup, which seemed to be a great novelty for him. And he seemed mildly surprised that I was fluent in the language. He said his name was Walter Grey Fox, and he planned to live by the river all through summer and fish until at least the first snow in the fall, and then he would go to stay the winter with his last living son, five days’ walk to the southwest. It did not bother him a bit to live by himself so long in the depths of the gorge, because the fishing was good and the river was musical, and travelers passed every few days and invariably appreciated a trout or two to break the monotony of the journey. We spent an hour together and parted as great friends so that if we had met twenty years later—which we did not—we would have embraced as kin.
It was far into the afternoon, the light falling at a low angle, when Waverley and I topped out of the gorge at a gap and then descended many miles down a long gentle incline, two thousand vertical feet or more into a broad green valley. That valley was, and still is, the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. It was bounded on three sides by high blue mountains and divided down the middle by a slow river, but it stretched westward on and on without visible limits. As we passed through, the head of the valley was busy with the fields and orchards of homesteads filling the bottomland all the way to the first upslopes of the mountains, and then it was all big timber and coves and ridges sweeping to the sky. People everywhere worked newly planted corn and beans and squash. Little communal clumps of single-pen cabins lay scattered for miles down-valley. Some of the enclosing mountains were bald, topped with broad treeless swaths of long grass, and on one of these, Bear had warned me, a giant lizard was alleged to sun itself on sheets of exposed rocks, and he also warned that great red leeches the size of plow oxen still sometimes roiled the deepest holes of the Valley River.
The sky became deep violet with yellow dashes of light breaking between bands of black clouds hiding the sunset, and by the time we reached the trade post it was almost dark and a thin crease of moon stood partway up the sky. I did not even strike a fire but ate cold biscuits and water and spread my bedroll on the cupped porch boards. The post sat on a hill overlooking the river and valley beyond. I studied the view until night fell entirely.
WAVERLEY AND I came thrashing up a creek bank out of dark laurel with their long leaves in my hair and twisted in Waverley’s mane and tail. Broken brushes of jack pine waved from under the wings of the saddle. We were like a small segment of thicket breaking free with violence from the general mass, to rise and stand alone in a vast bright clearing. I reined to a stop and let the milky sunlight sheet off us, liquid and warm, and pour into the ground. I beat the forest litter off my clothes with my hat and took a notebook out of my pocket and looked for the tenth time at the map I had transcribed from my hand by firelight two years previous. A turning had apparently been missed somewhere along the way. I looked around for a new direction.
Off in the distance across plowed fields stood an entirely unexpected sight, a tall columned plantation house situated in a river bend. Out back, various outbuildings, a slave village, more fields stretching into the distance, Africans moving in groups like shadows on the land. I knew such places existed, but I had never personally witnessed one before.
I had polished my boots to a high black sheen before setting out, but they were now covered in a chartreuse dusting of spring pollen from riding cross-country. I pulled a broken pine branch from under the saddle and whisked the leather clean with the fan of needles and rode on toward the big house, taking care to skirt the new-planted fields, the furrows still fresh turned, the broken dirt lying in pieces like potsherds, and the seeds of something yet indeterminable still germinating in the dark.
I rode to the house, and by the time I had alighted on the pea gravel of the circle drive before the front steps, a groom of twelve or fourteen, the color of an eggplant, had come out to take Waverley. He immediately pulled the reins over Waverley’s ears and began trying to lead him off.
—Where you going? I said.
—Around back, sir.
It was the first time I had ever been called sir, and I was momentarily taken aback. The boy tried to go on leading Waverley away, but Waverley had other ideas and put his head back and went walking sideways and looking white-eyed. The boy held the reins by the ends, and it was like watching someone try to launch a very large kite in a March wind.
—Wait a minute, I said. All I’m wanting is directions.
—To where?
—The Featherstone place. I believe it’s nearby.
The boy tipped his head at the white columns of the big house. Real nearby, he said.
I looked at the house again.
—I’m here to see Claire Featherstone.
—Somebody at the door generally does that. But they out back taking breakfast.
—They?
Waverley had settled some, and the boy renewed his efforts to lead him away.
—I’ll give him water and some hay if that suits you, he said.
—Surely, I said. I’d appreciate it. And a cupful of oats if you’ve got them.
—We got aplenty of oats.
I looked up at the sun where it stood far up in the sky. Breakfast? I thought.
I went to the front door and knocked and waited. No one came. I walked around the side of the house, past boxwoods planted at the foundation, a brick chimney stack. Under a gathering of poplar trees stood a small dining table and chairs, blue-and-white dishes with remnants of bread and butter and preserves, a teapot and half-empty cups sitting in their saucers. I looked about and saw Featherstone and Claire off past a little fenced herb garden near an edge of woods. They were laughing. Featherstone broke off a branch of redbud blossoms and tapped her on the forehead with the flowers, a motion like anointment. They were dressed in the clothes of a plantation owner and his daughter, not as Indian horse thief or Wasp Ghost, and so apparently made easy transit between old and new worlds. Claire had grown up in a great many wonderful ways. She was a slim beauty, about my own height. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, and she wore a simple high-waisted shift that hung vertical but clung, where needed, to all the new curves of her form in heartbreaking lovely arcs. The neck scooped frighteningly low to reveal a creamy cloven expanse that I had to concentrate not to look at too closely. Such was the style then, at least among fashionable young women.
Claire introduced me as a young businessman she had met as a girl wh
en she visited her distant relatives at Wayah. Featherstone did not seem to remember me in the least, and I did not think reminiscing about our card contest would be at all to my advantage. Nor would it be useful to remind either of them, however lightly and with a gentle laugh, of the scope of my winnings back then.
I was offered breakfast, and I said vaguely that I had taken mine already and did not mention that it had been more than four hours earlier.
Featherstone immediately led me into the house and began showing me through it with great pride of ownership, talking without letup about its features as we went. Like Washington and Jefferson, he had drawn the plan himself and had specified the design and material of its construction—all the way from fireplace stone to dining room chandelier, from the handles of the paneled doors to the brass screws with which they were affixed. The columns and glazed windows and the various pieces of mahogany furniture all came with stories of their uniqueness. The marble floors in the foyer coordinated intentionally with the colors of an enormous Turkish rug. The walls were plastered and whitewashed, only a little soot-streaked around the fireplaces. Wall skirting of delft tiles painted mostly in the oxhead style, but some depicting ships and milkmaids and postures of soldiers and unlikely flat landscapes with windmills in the distance, all of which Featherstone had specified, though the overall effect for me was that he had struck a good deal on odd lots and leftovers from the previous century. Some of his things seemed to have been chosen as much for their irony as their innate value. For example, the many fine crystal wineglasses upended on a hunt board had been made at Murano, the selfsame Venetian island from which worthless colored-glass beads had originated for nearly two centuries and were traded with the Indians for things of actual value like hides and pelts and feathers for the European markets. Furthermore, Featherstone’s china came from England; and he found it humorous that the Wedgwood company had dug a particularly fine pale clay from a riverbank one mountain ridge east of where we now stood and hauled it across the Atlantic, dirt shipped way round the world. And then they did whatever they did to shape it and color it and make patterns on it and fire it into service pieces. And then damned if they didn’t ship some of the transformed clay right back where it came from, to him. So much work and so many thousands of miles of transport to and fro. All of which Featherstone seemed to find of amusing worth all by itself.
Claire went along during the tour, an absent expression on her face, not really listening. She touched door handles and dinner plates with dismissive glancing brushes of her fingertips. She would not meet my eyes.
Featherstone said that aside from imported goods, he was a world unto himself. His enormous holding provided everything he truly needed and most of what he wanted. All the wood for his house and outbuildings had been cut and milled on the place. And the land produced the entirety of food for its population, excepting a few of Featherstone’s favorite novelties like crystallized ginger and orange marmalade. He had beeves and hogs and every kind of domestic fowl in great quantity, and a fish pond from which big arm-long bass could be pulled at a moment’s notice if that’s what he craved for his dinner. Extensive vegetable and herb gardens grew in raised beds arranged in geometric patterns. He made all his own beer and some of his liquor, though he had given up trying to produce either rum or wine. In the latter case, all his efforts had proved entirely undrinkable and of a heretofore unknown color, both the reds and the whites. Every vintage a gritty and dreadful end to good grapes. And so now, to his disappointment, all his wine had to come from France in pretty little wooden boxes. It also upset him that the earth would not yield the right elements from which he could grind the pigments to paint his barn and outbuildings the particular shades of white he preferred. Nor did indigo grow well in this climate, and he resented having to pay ignorant low-country South Carolinians to dye the clothes of his slaves the color blue he thought looked especially fetching against a yellow field of ripe wheat. But to offset that failure, he pressed and baked brick from his own clay to special dimensions he found more aesthetically pleasing than any he could have bought elsewhere. He even forged his own nails, for God’s sake.
Claire eventually drifted away down a hall as we went from one room to the next. It was all I could do to listen politely and not go following after her. Featherstone went on talking, gesturing toward objects of particular interest, the flats of his hands thick as puncheons and terminated with stout blunt fingers and opaque nails. He had forsaken his ear jewelry and shaven hair-do from back at the card game and now tried to fashion his greying hair after the high sweeping roach of Andrew Jackson, but it frizzed and crinkled as if singed. The pupils to his eyes were dark as pokeberries, a reminder that Featherstone was part Cherokee, though his hide was a slightly paler hue of white than mine. He wore the fashion of clothes current in Charleston and mentioned that, as a somewhat younger man, his conversion from breeches to trousers had been among the first, not just within the Nation but in the three-state surrounding area. On particularly Indian occasions, though, as a statement of identity, he topped his costume with a turban, as had become the fashion among Indians of several peoples, from Seminoles to Hurons. He subscribed to The North American Review and The Allegheny Quarterly, and every few weeks packages of books arrived from Boston. He reread his favorite book, The Anatomy of Melancholy, annually.
He was particularly proud of his study, and he saved it for last on the tour. It was all brown books and brown dead animals. The art of taxidermy, he said, occupied much of his leisure time. I stood admiring his work, and the gallery walls stared back with many reflective glass eyes in the mounted heads and bodies of everything that had thrived in the valley and its mountains. Buck, bear, and wolf. A whole panther, black phase, standing stuffed in the attitude of a scream. Owls and eagles and herons. Even a vole no bigger than a man’s thumb. One corner of the room was filled with an entire section of hickory trunk, and a gravity-defying flying squirrel was mounted on a limb so that just the toe of one hind foot remained attached as it leaped into the air with the webs of skin between the legs stretched like wings for gliding and the bright chips of black glass set in its head for eyes looking toward the fireplace as if it had had enough of life and was ready to blaze away into the next world. Given pride of place above the brick hearth and heart-pine mantel was the enormous dusty head of a bull bison. It erupted blockish out of the plaster wall as if from another time, a lone straggler from a retreating bison army lost in enemy territory. Its old pelt was broken and peeling back at its neck to reveal a pale underlayment of unidentifiable composition. When Featherstone wasn’t looking, I reached up and touched the broken place and could not decide whether it felt more like chalk or sawdust. And then I palmed the black nose, big as my spread hand, its texture like sand. On Featherstone’s desk, an amber-tinted jar of glass eyes stared in jumbled sizes and colors, like a schoolboy’s collection of prized marbles, frightening taws. More to my taste, stacked among the four walls of heads stretched shelves and shelves of brown books.
COMPARED TO WAYAH, it was another world at Cranshaw. But Featherstone was not unique. Inside the Nation’s frontiers, land could not be owned. It was free for all. You claimed what you needed. Previously, back to the beginning of time, need had been defined as a little place for a cabin, small fields for beans and corn and squash, an orchard. Everybody the same size. Those were the rules Bear and his people still followed.
The white Indians, though, suffered under vast personal desire. In the years after the Revolution, Featherstone and a few others of his kind had arrived at the same new idea independently in various parts of their country. It was simple: claim all the land you want, not just what you need. They understood the changing times and the nature of property differently from their distant Indian kin, and they did not mourn the passing of the old ways, which were colorful but rather too strictly encompassing. In their view, everybody was not the same size. Nor was that a desirable way to live. The white Indians embraced the new ways like a fresh l
over, and Featherstone was representative of his small class. He laid claim to several thousand acres of the best farmland in Valley River, along with sweeping stretches of wooded mountain slope to the north and south. He named his place Cranshaw, which he understood to be a Scots name for something or other. He began farming on a large scale, not just for his own needs but for sales to distant markets. And he began running a toll ferry across the river, and also a gristmill and a smithy. As the money from his enterprises came in, he bought slaves out of South Carolina and Georgia and Alabama—at first just two or three and then dozens at a time. He set about building the kind of plantation house that white men so desperately desired. And, like his peers, he soon developed a reputation for ruling his holdings like a feudal lord in the beloved Middle Ages, which is to say with extreme violence and self-righteousness and absence of restraint toward any of his passing moods, especially pertaining to the under-people, which included nearly everybody.
There was a story about Featherstone, widely told up and down the valley. I heard it many times in following years, but I repeat it with the caution that I’ve had enough false tales told about me in print to discount every form of narrative by at least twenty-five percent. A sort of bunkum factor that must be accounted for in one’s emotional ledger in the same way as spoilage or petty theft. Neither history nor journalism nor sausage-making is a pretty business. But here’s the story, and take it as you will.
Years ago, immediately after the establishment of Cranshaw but before the death of his wife, while Featherstone was away traveling on pony-club business and his wife was off visiting relatives, his brother-in-law stole money from him. The man was a fool and a drunk, and he went into Featherstone’s very bedroom and rooted around and turned up one of his money boxes under the bed. It had a fair quantity of gold and silver coin in it. Some have set the figure as high as four thousand dollars, which may or may not have bearing on how you judge Featherstone’s reaction. When Featherstone got home and discovered his loss, nobody around the house owned up to knowing anything about stolen money. He raged around and burnt a house slave’s hands in the cook fire to get the name of the thief. After the woman healed, she had scalloped patches of pink scars all over the backs of her hands. What she told Featherstone was that his wife’s brother had been in the house while he was away and had given her five dollars not to tell and had also promised to cut her throat if she did. Featherstone gave the woman a round of butter to spread on her burns and said, I wouldn’t worry about that threat for a minute, for he’ll not live to carry it out. He went directly to the man’s house and found the unspent remainders of his money. Then he dragged the man out onto the porch and beat him to death with his fists because, as he bragged later, he wanted the killing intimate, skin to skin, without an implement in the way, not even a buck-horn knife handle standing between him and that thieving bastard of a brother-in-law. And factor this in: Featherstone loved his wife with a consuming passion. That must not be forgotten. The first time I heard the story, I remember thinking that the wife was all the relation he had left in the world except Claire, who would have been only a baby at the time. And yet he killed the brother-in-law out of some sense of raw justice.