But that was then. With time, Featherstone mellowed, as men have a tendency to do. At least, that was the widely held opinion. Though mostly I think that any attribution of age-induced softening is more a matter of the generosity of others than a change in ourselves. It’s one of the few sweet deals life offers: the older we get, the more we are forgiven the things we did when we were twenty-seven. Still, in Featherstone’s middle years, when I was there to witness, he ran his holdings with a lighter touch and a certain contemptuous distance. Maybe he was a different man. These were certainly different times. When slaves offended, he disdained even to whip them and only rid himself of them by selling them off to Alabama or Louisiana. Despite all his holdings, he was a lone man. The only one he had left aboveground was Claire, and he loved her with a fierce and largely abstract love. So, looking back at my entry into Valley River, it is no wonder I saw Claire in the tall house as a maiden in a tower and myself as a despairing romantic loner, a Lancelot longing endlessly. And Featherstone, inside the tall plantation house, attractive and frightening. Arthur one day, Merlin the next.
MIDAFTERNOON THAT FIRST day, Featherstone sat at the head of the table. He had seated me between himself and Claire. He began Sunday dinner with the reading of a poem by Robert Burns out of a fat little duodecimo volume with the leather worn away from the feathered corners of its cover boards. He read the one about going no more a-roving, and the tone of his voice left no doubt in my mind that the poem stood equivalent to saying grace.
As we dipped into the platters of roast pork and fried chicken, the bowls of beans and squash and okra, the little china cups of chutneys and relishes, Featherstone began his examination of me.
Some of the questions were easy. Where was I from? Who were my people? How did I happen to be where I was? Where did I plan to go from here, both geographically and in the generality of life?
I told the approximate truth with no emotion whatsoever. You can just wear people out with your personal feelings. I said I was an orphan sold into the wilderness and had lived in Wayah for a long time, my people were Bear’s people and I got where I was by hard work, and I was at the outset of a career as a businessman and a lawyer and I planned to read a lot of good books before I died.
And then Featherstone caught me off-footed and asked, When you pray, Will, what do you pray for?
—What? I said. Sir?
—A pony. More money. A new hat. Those sorts of things.
—I was taught that it is wrong to pray for anything that has to do with your own material well-being.
—So when you address your lord, all you allow yourself to do is ask that mankind improve itself or that it doesn’t rain too hard in China?
—Or for a pure heart and a mind set free from desire.
—So what you pray for is death.
—Sir?
—Since neither of the conditions you mentioned is obtainable on this earth. Or have you not noticed?
Claire, at that moment, pressed a warm palm against my inner thigh under the table. A deep pull in her direction. She must have meant it as comforting, though it did not seem that way at the time. Not at all, in fact.
GOING ON SUNSET, we three sat on the back lawn in low wooden chairs with canted backs under a poplar tree. The chairs were aimed to look down-valley, a long prospect toward the blue west. Featherstone uncorked French claret, the bottle held tight between his knees. One quick expert pull revealed a stained cylinder of cork skewered on the screw. He poured the wine, red as melted garnets, into faceted stemmed glasses. The pale orange and cream blossoms of tulip poplars lay in the new green grass. He talked about the books he had recently read and discussed why he had admired them or not. Claire offered her thoughts on the books, which did not entirely coincide with his. He offered to loan me three of the best, and I soon sat with the little brown stack resting awkwardly in my lap. He asked whether I read The North American Review. I did not, but I resolved to correct that fault as immediately as possible. Featherstone notified me that he did not ordinarily trade at the post, his needs and those of his dependents being mostly met by his land, and otherwise he dealt directly with suppliers in Charleston or Philadelphia. But he wished me well in my endeavors, since the foundations of all nations rest on the stones of commerce.
I rode home late, a wavering inebriate in the saddle, moon and planets and stars layered dimensional and deep in the sky as if arrayed on the inside face of a funnel. Waverley skipped sideways at every tree shadow moving in the roadway. It occurred to me that the only times I had ever taken spirits were in the presence of Featherstone, and both those times to glorious excess.
Nine decades gone down life’s twisty path—despite the depredations of time, the nights of thrashing sleeplessness until the damp sheets twine like kudzu around my ankles—I still remember, in the finest detail, the following blissful and fatally imparadised summers during which I fell irrevocably in love with the Featherstones.
I RODE OUT to Cranshaw every few days with the pretext of returning borrowed books and selecting others. I was fairly drunk on the riches of Featherstone’s library and with the prospect of seeing Claire. In between visits, I read like mad late into the night so I might go back the sooner. And the books had to be read, for Featherstone quizzed me in detail about them. Even if I had been skilled at flimflam and filibuster—which, back then, I was not yet—that would have done me no good for, unlike many rich men, Featherstone had read a majority of the books he owned. In those earliest days, I rode out to Cranshaw along the river in the soft light of spring afternoons, and I rode back to the store under various diminishing phases of the Flower Moon.
Most evenings, Claire went out with me to where Waverley stood in the care of the young groom. I had learned enough to give the boy a coin with one hand as I took the reins from him with the other. After the boy left, Claire and I just touched hands.
—COME OUT TONIGHT, Claire said.
She took the box of writing paper she was buying and tucked it under her arm and started counting coins out of her moneypurse.
—Out? I said.
—Down below my window. But after midnight. Featherstone stays awake reading until then. One or two would be a good time. Come on foot. Don’t make a sound. Be there.
—Be there for what?
—If you need to know, then don’t come.
—Chilly night, I said. Blackberry winter.
—No night’s too cold for a man in love. If that’s what you are.
I put out my hand to take the coins, but she smacked them down on the counter like she held a very strong hand of cards and was placing a wager that could not lose.
IT WAS INDEED cold that night, the last frost of spring, and pitch-dark most of the way down Valley River. The half-lit Planting Moon did not rise until I had nearly reached Cranshaw, and I wondered if Claire had factored the time of its rise into her plans, waiting for days to order me there so I would walk through black forest to a secret moonlit meeting, feeling surreptitious and fraudulent in the night.
From a distance, the house was dark. Featherstone had put away his quarterlies, snuffed his candles, and gone to bed. I waited until the moon had climbed an hour into the sky and cast my shadow on the ground like a stain. And then a light was lit behind a second-floor window. A slim backlit figure threw open the sash, and I could see Claire leaning out into the moonlight. She held a leaf of paper the size of a folio page. She began folding it elaborately. I could see her hands moving very precisely. The flat paper became dimensional. She shaped it like a very simple bird, the head and wings and tail and sharp beak recognizable. And then she cast it out on the air. It glided toward me and passed above me, a pale shape against the stars. I chased it back toward the woods’ edge and retrieved it as it landed in dead weeds. I looked back and the window was closed and dark. I took the paper bird and walked back up Valley River to home.
By the fire I could see that the paper was all written on. I opened it up carefully, taking the bird apart fold
by fold, and found not a personal love letter but a copied-out passage from a then unknown poet. It had to do with childhood, springs and fountains, passion, mountains, autumn, and lightning. As if the writer had tried to compress the significant elements of my current life into a space of fewer than two dozen lines. In a much smaller hand at the bottom of the page, Claire had written a full bibliographic citation. Author, title, and details of publication. I read the poem over and over and then lay awake the rest of the night thinking about it and what it meant.
By the next morning, I had resolved to take up the challenge of her folded gliding bird. As a gesture of love, I had decided, it was not beyond improvement. For example, had it been me, I would have set fire to the paper before launching it into the air. And though I was moved by the poem the deconstructed bird revealed, I’d prefer to make up my own. So those were the elements I needed to work with. Flight, fire, poetry.
In the science section of one of the quarterly journals I had borrowed from Featherstone’s library, I had read about how hot-air balloon flight worked and had seen an illustration of the taut bladder and well-dressed passengers waving from the dangling basket to the amazed crowds below. Astounding, yes. But it seemed a thing susceptible to miniaturization, a matter only of proportion, the lift of heat against the weight of balloon and basket. I pictured a dry leaf caught in the uprise of a campfire, a flake of pale ash rising up a chimney flue. So I ordered eight red silk scarves of the sheerest quality and a spool of fine silk thread from my Charleston supplier and began drawing designs for a withy basket and drafting a poem suitable for the occasion.
ON MY SEVENTEENTH birthday, as during the past several years, I firmed my mind to ignore the occasion. I went about my usual morning business, feeding Waverley and giving him a good brisk brushing until his summer coat glowed like buckeye. By noon only a few customers had stopped by to trade. Ginseng for gingham. Buckskins for plowpoints. The endless tedious round of commerce. Then Claire came driving up into the yard in Featherstone’s cabriolet with the dark articulated top folded down like a stack of bat wings. I was sitting on the porch reading Powell’s Essay upon the Law of Contracts and Agreements.
—I’ve made you a cake, she said. Get in.
I locked the door to the store, scratched a note in English and in the syllabary, and pinned it to the door. Be back soon.
Claire popped the reins and we went spinning off north, across the valley and up the wagon road that climbed along the creek a mile or two and then narrowed into a trail leading to the bald of the big lizard. When we reached the end of the road, a wide spot beside the creek, the daily rain shower gathered over us with drops the size of pearls falling sizzling from the sky. I got out and hurried about raising the top to the cabriolet, but it involved erecting the framework and stretching the waxed canvas over the members and then attaching side curtains, and by the time I was done we were both completely wet and the hard rain had settled into a slow drizzle. The creek ran full and the fat leaves on the trees were glossed and dripping. A drift of fog settled down the watercourse and spread out into the tree trunks. It was a green world beyond any I’ve since known. Having read a number of books about the jungles of the Amazon and Congo, I’d stand amazed if they present a lusher face than that wet cove in July.
In our little dim chamber, we listened to the trees drip onto the canvas, and then we kissed a considerable while. At a point, a certain pitch of feeling, Claire leaned back away from me into the rolled leather, the pale stitching showing deep in the black upholstery. She breathed a long breath and then took a rush basket from under the seat, a blue-and-white checkered cloth covering it, and she tugged away the cloth to reveal a yellow cake with yellow icing that had slumped into a puddle around it from the warmth of the day and the jouncing ride up the creek. The body of the cake was fissured and falling into broken pieces. But Claire shaped it back as close to cylindrical as she could with her hands and elevated the icing into place with a thick-bladed knife from the basket, and when she was done it made at least an approximation of a layer cake. We ate in the cabriolet, cutting the mashed and lopsided cake with her knife and eating it from Featherstone’s blue-and-white china with only our fingers for implements, since she had forgotten forks. The light was green under the wet trees, and raindrops still dripped steady off the boughs and fell in faint percussion onto the stretched canvas.
I held a last ragged delicious gob of cake in my hand. My birthday.
I sat a minute and then said, How did you know it was my birthday?
—Granny Squirrel told me.
—How did she know?
Claire made a slight twirling motion with her hands, a ghost move from the Booger Dance. She said, Same way she knows all kinds of things.
—You went all the way to her place? Half a day’s ride to the gorge?
Claire said, This time of year, I like to be out and about.
LATE AUGUST, THE dogwood and sumac already red down by the creek below the store. On the porch, Claire reached into the neck of her blouse, her hand between her breasts. She brought out a little vial hanging from a rawhide lanyard around her neck. She bent forward and leaned her head down and swept her hair forward with her hand and wrist to pull the lanyard off. The nape of her neck was white, and I stopped her with my hand and leaned to kiss her there. She shook her head and tossed her hair back into place and held the vial up to me.
—You see this? she said.
—Hard not to, with you swinging it in my face.
—This will seal you to me.
—I’m sealed already.
—You’re seventeen. Any pretty girl that smiles at you is the love of your life. At least for a short while.
I did not argue.
She reached to the waistband of her skirt and brought out a folded piece of quarto-sized paper. She opened it and the sun was shining on the face of it and I could see her inelegant jagged handwriting reversed through its back side.
She said, According to Granny Squirrel, I’m to say these words.
She studied the paper and read in a strong voice, as if to an audience of more than one.
Be sleepless.
Sleepless and thinking of me.
Wanting me.
Only me.
Change right now.
Change.
Now I own your thoughts.
I own your breath.
I own your heart.
Claire folded the paper and tucked it back into her waist.
—And furthermore, I’m to do this, she said.
She uncapped the vial and poured a powder dark as coffee grounds into the palm of her hand. About a teaspoonful.
She held out her hand and said, Breathe it up your nose like snuff.
I put my face to her palm and sniffed hard, and the powder went into me. I didn’t feel anything but an itch in the nose, watery eyes, the brief sense of a sneeze coming on.
There was still some left in her hand, dampening in its creases. She looked at it as if somehow I had failed a challenge.
She said, I guess lick it.
The powder had no taste whatsoever, but her palm was salty.
—Now you’re meant to always want me, she said.
I didn’t doubt it, neither then nor now. I don’t know what that powder was. Dried herbs and roots and mushrooms and fungus and bear gall ground in a mortar and pestle. Or something similar. I’ve never put much stock in the powder. But I believe the words entered me and changed me and still work in me. The words eat me and sustain me. And when I’m dead and in a box in the dark dark ground, and all my various souls have died and I am nothing but insensible bones, something in the marrow will still feel yearning, desire persisting beyond flesh.
THE RED SILK scarves I had ordered finally arrived in early fall. Just in time, for Claire was leaving before long for school in Savannah. I cut the rectangles of silk into wedge shapes and tried to sew them together into a sphere with an opening at the bottom, but I was downhearted when my handiwork tur
ned out lumpish and not particularly globular, closer to a small ruddy flour sack than the taut elegant geometry I had imagined. Judging function over form, however, the awkward thing I made was weightless as cobwebs, and when it was held up to daylight you could read through it. I drew a picture of the kind of candle basket I wanted for it and took the drawing to the best basketmaker in the territory, a squat old woman with a face all scored with age but carrying the name of Rising Fawn. She wove the little basket exactly as I specified from oak splits shaved thin as paper, the warp and weft spaced wide to leave more holes than anything else. The basket would hold aplenty of candle stubs packed together, but you could cup it in your hand and it had no more heft than a good-sized sycamore leaf. I hooked basket to balloon with runs of silk thread and fired it up and held the sack above the flames with the mouth open to catch the rising heat and watched amazed as it belled out and lifted slowly into the air, exactly as it had flown in my imagination. I grabbed it down when it was head high and blew out the stubs and put it away to wait for a dry windless night when the moon was dark.