I’ve heard of men who accepted challenges in their parlors with a bloody mind but then later, on the dueling ground, only discharged their pistols into the air and stood square to their opponent waiting to receive fire, saying afterward—those lucky enough to survive—that they had the courage to die but not to kill. I’ve never understood such men. They are not made for this world. They must either view themselves as saints or the duel as a finer alternative to suicide. For me, every time I saw the scabbed and puckered blankness at Waverley’s groin, I still wanted to kill Featherstone about as bad as I had that day in his stable yard. And not just kill him but live to gloat about it for many years after. I pictured a bright summer day, the grass boot-top high, me a man in middle years with trousers unbuttoned, splashing piss off his headstone.
Of course, such happy visions were entirely different from actually believing I could accomplish his killing. In any other form of combat, Featherstone would have cut me down quicker than I could blink my eyes. But a duel with smooth-bore flintlock pistols at forty yards evens things out considerably. Back then, my aim was true, for I had a steady hand and had spent many a slow afternoon target shooting out behind the store at Wayah. And, too, Featherstone was more noted for his use of the knife than as a marksman, so I figured my odds to be even, or maybe a little better.
I wrote a quick note stating that I appreciated the information on how the Irish did things. It was always enlightening to learn about colorful foreign ways. But I had no inclination to apologize. Nor did I care to take a beating at his hand.
I left it at that and sent Bushyhead on his way.
The next morning he returned bearing the formal letter of challenge, which was phrased in the required exquisite diction. Perhaps it exceeded all requirements. It may have crossed some line into parody. The phrase field of honor figured repeatedly. The subjunctive mood was predominant. One periodic sentence of considerable magnificence, and with more than a whiff of the previous century, went on nearly forever, more than a page, before its grammar finally reached the payoff whereupon, if you were strict in your attention, you could figure out what the subject and the verb had been. But the gist of it was that certain offenses leave one’s honor so fouled that the only solvent strong enough to cleanse it is blood. The letter concluded not with a challenge to a duel but with an invitation for an entrevue.
When I was done reading, Bushyhead asked if I’d say the letter aloud to him, and when I reached the part about an interview, he said, The only part I understood of it was Dear Sir.
I wrote back with the knowledge that though Featherstone might be intent on making a joke of the fight, I could still very well end up dead in a few days. I pressed my clerk, Tallent, into service as my second, and he shut the post at Wayah and came to Valley River immediately. He delivered my acceptance of the challenge.
The next day began a flurry of further correspondence. In one letter, despite the fact that he occupied the position of challenger and was not in a position to dictate choice of weapons, Featherstone demanded that we duel by war hatchet while tied together at our left wrists. He cited as precedent for the odd choice of weapons a famous duel by whaling harpoon at ten paces and suggested that we might as well also make history, or at least become notorious. When I declined to respond, his next letter simply read, Blowguns at dawn! Below that message, a bold flowing signature, written with a nib cut broad.
It was only when I threatened to post his foolishness on every wood fence in the Nation’s capital at New Echota and to advertise it in every paper in the three adjoining states and The Phoenix as well that he settled on the customary matched pistols, of which I happened to own a pair, souvenir of an overly complicated livestock trade.
I showed them to Claire that week. The pistols were beautiful artifacts, all curved polished wood and glowing metal, and a great deal longer than you’d expect. Lying in their open-lidded wooden case, paired one above the other on the blue velvet lining, they looked like lovers coupling in a canopy bed.
I said as much to Claire, and she looked at them for quite some time and then said, Panicky bed.
She walked straight out the door and down the steps to her horse. I followed, trying to make her stay, but she mounted without a word, making an uncustomarily awkward hop and unbalanced swing of leg over the horse’s back. But before she rode away she said, Between you and Featherstone, I am doomed to love asses and idiots.
The next flurry of letters picked at the details of the code, niggling over every detail. One letter expressed concern that our meeting lacked the necessary element of social equivalence to stand the test for a proper duello. Even overlooking the disparity in our respective positions, he wrote, your choice of Second concerns me. Tallent, he felt compelled to point out, was a mere shop clerk and, as such, clearly violated the spirit of equality embodied in the code. However, he reasoned, gone were the days when dueling was reserved for true gentlemen of the plantation-owning class. And sadly so. Now the institution had descended so far that every young would-be lawyer and peddler with social aspirations felt entitled to display an exquisite sense of easily bruised honor and demand to meet his betters on the sacred field. But he conceded that since we were in neither Charleston nor New Orleans, some latitude was called for. And perhaps, nowadays, even those bastions had been breached and concession held sway, for, he concluded, these were deeply degenerate times.
The letter seemed designed to provoke me into bringing to his attention the fact that I was a whiteman and he a sort of Indian, for pure white blood prevailed. I merely sent back, through Tallent, a brief note reiterating the time and place I had already specified.
As the day approached, I felt a kind of hysterical clarity. One moment I was tossing out witty comments to anyone who would listen and the next I was bent over, throwing up a grey spume of tea and biscuits into a patch of jewelweed by the back steps. Claire wanted to attend the duel, but Featherstone told her she was strictly prohibited both by her sex and by the rules concerning degrees of consanguinity allowed for spectators.
As I’ve said, accounts of the duel have accumulated over the years. They vary widely and are, each and all, in some regards suspect. Only three details appear without fail. The first detail is simply that Featherstone took a wound in the leg. The next, oddly enough, is that, to mark firing positions, my second scribed a line in the ground with the brass ferrule of his cane while Featherstone’s drove a little wooden stob, hammering it down with the butt of his pistol. In none of the accounts is either duelist said to have objected to the lack of consistency, nor does it play any further role in the events. So why then, I wonder, did that particular detail—one which I do not remember and can neither verify nor deny—fix itself in people’s minds as a necessary component of history? Third and finally, all accounts agree that the event happened during the first new moon in autumn, Nut Moon, with the apples all dead ripe on the trees, and hickory nuts and walnuts and chestnuts falling, and the leaves coloring. The month of the year when the world was created and time began ticking. Thus the first month of the new year is not in grey winter or green spring. Everything starts with the grace of approaching death.
As for the duel itself, I might fairly group the variant narratives into three categories.
The simplest and therefore most credible story is merely that the two men and their seconds met in a clearing beside the river at the first peep of dawn with the fog still settled in the valley and the light so low they must have been just dark shapes moving about making mysterious gestures at one another. Vague horses barely had shape at all where they stood across the road tied to trees. The customary wagon was present to haul home the dead or wounded. When the fog and the light had risen a little, the men began the excruciatingly slow and solemn rituals of loading the pistols and pacing off distances and marking the ground and taking positions. And, finally, the call to fire. One shot cracked, muffled by the fog. Hardly louder than an axe splitting a stick of kindling. Morning would still have been dim e
nough for yellow flame to have flashed from the muzzle, but the cloud of jetting grey smoke would have merged quickly with the river fog. And then, after a slight pause, a second shot. The result of the engagement in this telling was that Featherstone missed his target entirely, after which Will, at more leisure to take aim, struck him a light creasing wound on the inside of his upper thigh, akin only to a burn, a sort of branding, a red stripe that barely drew blood and did not even knock Featherstone to the ground but only staggered him a step and irreparably damaged a new pair of fine dove-grey breeches. At that point both men walked forward, shook hands, and declared the matter entirely settled with honor preserved all around. A frequent addition to this version of the duel is that Davy Crockett was among the spectators, having shown up unexpectedly the day before on a journey back to Tennessee. Crockett is credited with saying, at the conclusion of the events, that it never did make shit sense to him to tangle up the bloody business of killing with so much good manners. I will only say that I am nearly positive that I did not meet Crockett until at least a year later.
A second account, widely though more discreetly reported, was that the duel did not take place at dawn but rather at sunset, because word of the meeting had become widespread and a great many Indians, eager to witness this novelty of civilization, had camped at the specified ground by the river and cooked and danced through the night. When the duelists arrived in the fog of first light, they found a crowd already assembled, some of whom were drunk and many of whom had already begun laying bets as they would do at a ball game. Not wanting an affair of honor to become a carnival show, the parties discussed the problem among themselves and then announced that the duel was off and a reconciliation reached. The crowd, of course, was not pleased that the blood had suddenly drained out of the air. Amid the grumbling, the combatants departed and then reconvened at sunset after the crowd had gone home. During the preparations by the seconds, it is said, Featherstone went to Will and handed him a great lead ball, sized to fit a buffalo musket. Big as a crab apple is the most common simile. Featherstone said, Bite on this; it is meant to steady the nerves. Will was pale as death or the color of a cut peach, one or the other. But he had the presence of mind to roll the ball in his palm and hand it back to Featherstone, saying, Thank you, sir, but perhaps you should keep it as a spare in case you swallow your own. Meanwhile, the seconds were furiously thumbing through their copies of the code and found, as they suspected, that the principals are forbidden to address each other directly. They cautioned the two men that further communication would not be allowed. Will’s second shouted, We insist that you both forbear to altercate further. He held up his copy of the code and jabbed a forefinger at the article in question. Featherstone’s second, Bushyhead, simply said, No talking. None a-tall. Then, when the duelists took their positions and were given the call to fire, Featherstone stood his ground and let Will have the first shot, hoping it would be rushed and inaccurate, which it was. The bullet hit the ground at Featherstone’s feet, throwing a spray of red mud up onto his dove-colored breeches and white shirtfront. Seeing the damage to his attire, Featherstone became enraged and rushed toward Will, either to fire at closer range or to strike him with his pistol or his fists. The moment Featherstone crossed his mark on the ground, however, Will’s second, the clerk Tallent, acting in full accord with the chosen code duello, raised his own pistol and shot Featherstone in the thigh, dropping him like a poleaxed steer. Featherstone’s second then thumbed through the code again and spoke the words therein suggested: I have been deceived and have come to these grounds in company with a coward. Featherstone was taken home in the bed of a wagon.
The third variant claims that in violation of all the various rules of dueling, the outcome had been arranged ahead of time by Claire Featherstone. She was seen every day that week, riding back and forth between Featherstone and Will, exhausting her horse in round after round of diplomacy. It was assumed she presented every argument she could construct to reconcile the matter without bullets flying. When she failed in her attempts to convince the two men to let sense prevail, she threatened the utter withdrawal of any affection she might still hold for either of them, slight as it was at the time due to their shared idiocy. Her love would be replaced by black hatred for the survivor should either be killed. That strategy eventually worked, and in the end both men agreed to let love for her take precedence over their hatred for each other and to discharge their pistols into the sky and call the matter quits. But at the moment when fire was called, Featherstone, in an exaggerated and silly preparatory flourish with his pistol, managed to miss the broad sky and instead, tripping the hair trigger prematurely, managed to shoot himself in the leg. The ball missed bone and went clear through the meat. The flow of blood was stanched with moss compresses, and Featherstone made a show of laughing and calling for a drink of rum all around during his treatment. He then mounted under his own power and rode home, but not before lavishly, and a-saddle, complimenting the courage of his young opponent in a tone of such carefully calibrated sarcasm as to come within a hairbreadth of inciting another round of dueling. One teller of this version adds that during the final preparations for the fight, Featherstone complained that Will was thin as a rake, girlish in figure, and offered little target, while he himself was strong and wide across the chest as a bull thus easy to hit. Will supposedly suggested that his own outline be chalked upon the front of Featherstone’s black clothes and any shot of his that struck outside the lines be specified to count as naught.
I will only add that by my lights, dim as they may now be, none of the accounts summarized above is accurate and none is entirely lacking in fact. So readers may feel free to choose the story of their liking and consider it true history. After all, the exact nature of the incident is now unknowable. Everyone is dead but me. And my age precludes considering any account I might give as definitive. Something happened. Beyond that, nothing is knowable.
I SAW CLAIRE only once in the weeks after the duel, and that unexpectedly. Cold weather came early that year, and I was out for a morose morning ride in the novelty of snow with the bright leaves still on the trees. She was doing the same, and we met on a narrow byroad. Without much prelude other than a touch of hands and some sense of consonance between our moods and the falling snow, we fell together. When we arose, rearranging our clothes and brushing the snow away, the shapes of our bodies were printed in the snow like the angels children make by lying on their backs and flinging their limbs about. Big new flakes fell hard into our outline, filling it as we watched. But Claire angrily kicked away our sign as if a passerby might read it like a bear tracker and know every detail of our encounter. We stood close and I held her and she pressed her forehead hard beneath my chin. She smelled like woodsmoke, as if the night before, the first cold night of autumn, she had thrown cedar boughs on the fire and scented her dark wool cloak in the incense. It accorded well with her clove and cinnamon.
I reminded her that she had once chewed juniper berries as an experiment, though a failed one. Now kiss me, she had said. And when I did, the taste of her tongue made me jerk back in reflex. Which set her to laughing, and also to imagining other bitter combinations. Acorns and dried peppers. Crab apples and rosemary. Sumac berries and sage.
—That will be my goal for the future, she said. A mouth as sharp as a bee sting.
THEN, WITHIN DAYS, October was back to itself again, dry and sunny, and both Claire and Featherstone were suddenly gone, and no one at Valley River knew or would say where or for how long. The house was shuttered, but the business of the place—the fields and orchards and livestock—went on as usual under a nervous foreman who ran it as if Featherstone himself were hiding in the woods, waiting to pounce on any slight mistake. Some among the help said Claire was back in school, a new one in Virginia or Pennsylvania, and that Featherstone was off gambling and carousing for a few months in New Orleans and wheeling up and down the Mississippi on palatial white riverboats blazing all night with oil lamps. Others be
lieved the two of them had gone off together, with plans to travel for a year or more in England and France and Italy. The only report I took as truth was that they had left with a great number of trunks sufficient to stay away forever.
I waited but received no correspondence from Claire. My inquiries to the various girls’ schools up and down the seaboard all the way from Georgia to Maine bore no fruit. Which is an overly polite way of saying that the great majority of my letters went unanswered, and the few responses I received were rather too smugly pleased to inform me that if a young lady named Claire Featherstone were enrolled at their school, an exquisite sense of institutional discretion would prohibit them from revealing that fact to anyone inquiring by post or in person.