So what Bear accomplished was remarkable. If he did not prevail against America, I think it is at least fair to say he fought to a draw. In his battle, Bear used all the weapons at hand, including me. But the only killing shots any of us fired were against our own. Charley and his boys.
Bear was not one of your mystic Indians. He was only interested in this one momentary world, not some hypothetical other. Bear loved all the tangible manifestations of Creation as fervently as Baptists do King Jesus. It was not the spirits of winds, rivers, mountains, trees that he worshiped, but the living things themselves.
Bear was the possessor of the deepest and sharpest mind to which I have ever been exposed, and I say this as one who has known presidents, though, to be fair, only vicious Jackson and dim Johnson. That’s if you don’t count President Davis, who was plenty smart, but whose mind was thin and brittle as a water cracker. Bear, though, could not read or write, neither English nor the syllabary. Still, he more than held his own. The way I look at it, we have all been illiterate. Only a few of us stay that way, usually for the worst of reasons. Poverty in some cases. Law in others, at least back in the day of slavery. Bear, though, remained illiterate out of personal philosophy. But he loved stories, even the ones written down in books. I remember, when I was a boy, reading him long episodes from the Morte d’Arthur and the Quixote, translating into Cherokee on the fly. Bear would listen for as long as I cared to read, late into cold endless January nights when the whole world contracted within the circle of light from the fire in the center of his winterhouse.
But Bear was not some isolate, living within a little narrow circumference of experience. He had seen a lot of what there was to America back then. As a young man, he had taken a blood grudge against a whiteman and sworn to kill him. He pursued the man for a year and a half, all up through Virginia and Kentucky and Tennessee and down into the wastes of Alabama and Georgia. Traveling rough and light, but happy knowing how hard he was pushing the man ahead of him across the land, like desperate game driven by beaters. When they’d finally made a great circle and come back nearly to home, the man quit running and holed up in a barn to make a final stand. Bear went in with nothing but a hawkbill knife.
—I’d a mind to gut him out, Bear said when he told me the tale.
But instead, after he had cornered the man in the hayloft, Bear just touched him with the crook of the blade and walked away. It was an exquisite point of honor.
In his middle years, Bear saw even more of America when he traveled all through the coastal plantation country chasing after a Cherokee girl of nine or ten who had been stolen by slavers passing through the mountains. The girl, named Blossom, wasn’t even clan kin to Bear, but the whole business angered him. Slaver trash coming onto his land and hauling children off. He set out afoot and was gone for months tracking Blossom from town to town, slave market to slave market. He went down to Hillsborough and Fayetteville and from there to the coast and then south right into the heart of Charleston to the big market and from there out into the countryside to find the people who had ultimately bought the girl.
Back then, years before I first met him, he would have been an even taller man than I remember, unstooped by age, broad-shouldered and full across the forehead, his long nose like a hatchet blade and his black hair long and loose except for the one little plait he liked to wear in the back. I can see him walking up the tree-lined drive of a great Charleston plantation, his linen hunting shirt and deerleather leggings dusty from the road. A look on his face of utter calm and disinterest, but intent on claiming the kidnapped girl. And back then, he probably had a drink or two in him, for he achieved temperance only occasionally, in old age.
He talked with the first whiteman he saw, a stout little music tutor, sitting on a horse watching two men making a wheel hoop in a blacksmith shed. The tutor passed Bear up the chain of command to the foreman and finally to the actual owner and his pale slim wife. They came out from the big house and talked to the dashing and handsome Indian just for the entertainment of it. They disagreed with Bear’s assessment of the situation. And though Bear wanted to take out his knife and kill the man where he stood, he went back to town and found a lawyer. Not an honest lawyer but, better yet for his purposes, a smart mean little bastard with personal and political grudges against the plantation owner and eager to go against him in court.
For a month, Bear slept every night down by the water in a rope hammock strung in a stand of palmettos, and by day he and his lawyer fielded every argument they could muster, including expert microscopic evidence to show that the girl’s hair bore no Negro characteristics. The long and short of it is, they won. Bear came walking back into the village with Blossom by his side and restored her to her home.
I asked him one time how he knew to use the law in his favor. He said that the law is an axe. It cuts whatever it falls on. The man that wins knows how to aim the sharp edge away from himself.
He didn’t much care to talk about the court business, but as an old man he still remembered with great favor the enormous and tasty fish he caught from the sand beach at his campsite. The water, though, was the worst he had ever put in his mouth. When I asked him how he managed to conduct all this business not speaking the English language, he said maybe back then he knew a word or two but not anymore.
TO BE EVENHANDED, I should also tell a representative story about Featherstone, for he was fatherlike to me as well. But more the kind of father you want to kill. Or one who wants to kill you. When I think back on the single instance when we actually exchanged pistol fire, I sometimes still wish I had taken him down. Also I still miss him, and the world seems poorer for his absence. To be entirely fair, when I was a boy and young man, Featherstone provided another pattern of manhood entirely different from Bear’s. I’m sure it is one of my greatest failures in life that, of my two flawed fathers, I more closely mirror Featherstone’s example. I heard this account from a number of older men back when I was a boy, for if it was only on Featherstone’s word, I wouldn’t dignify the tale with repetition.
Until some years after the Revolution, the Cherokee system of justice remained very direct and without interference of judge and jury and lawyer. The penalty for murder was that the clan of the victim became entitled to kill the murderer. I think we could all accede to the fairness of that. But various complications sometimes arose, and as a boy Featherstone was caught up in one of them. His maternal uncle, Slow Water, a man of some considerable property and power within the community, happened to kill a man of the Wild Potato Clan as a result of bad whiskey and high feelings after losing a momentous wager at a ball game. Slow Water had bet several horses, many skipples of shell corn, a house. When the game ended with its final brutal skirmishes leading to a pair of goals scored in quick succession by the opposing team to win the match, the Wild Potato Clan fellow looked at Slow Water and smirked. He didn’t say a word, but just that look, the twist of mouth, was enough. Come winter, he’d be eating Slow Water’s cornbread in Slow Water’s house.
Slow Water reached to his waist and pulled a long skinning knife from under his coat and ran it through the man’s neck until the point came out the other side. And then he watched the man bleed out right on the bruised grass of the ball field.
Justice should have played along as normal, with Slow Water hunted down and killed by the men of Wild Potato Clan, and then life would be balanced and ordered again and could go on harmoniously. That was the way it ordinarily was. At worst, there might be one or two further bouts of justice before matters finally settled down. But Slow Water’s clan, the Long Hairs, met and reckoned unanimously that Slow Water was too valuable to forfeit. They agreed to offer Featherstone in Slow Water’s place, and even his mother would not break with the consensus of the clan. Featherstone was then a fatherless redheaded freckled Indian boy of sixteen. His natural daddy had been a Border Scot trader, and his mother’s father was Highland Scot. But in those days identity still went through the women, and if your mother bel
onged to a clan, you did too. Blood degree didn’t factor.
Featherstone had not even been in attendance at the ball game. He had been on a pony-club outing, and they had run a string of stolen horses from the piedmont of North Carolina across the Cherokee Nation and sold them outside of Nashville. All in all, it had been a jaunty and satisfactory month of desperate scrapes and high spirits. Hilarious rum camps and long ass-blistering days a-saddle. None of the six-member party was more than eighteen, and they returned to Valley River splendidly mounted, leather pistol buckets hanging paired before their saddles. All of them rode cocky with cash money in their pocketbooks, fine new suits of clothes on their backs, and well-constructed stories to tell.
Slow Water met Featherstone as he came into town, and the uncle’s face was grim. They stepped aside and Slow Water laid it out. He detailed the sacrifice Featherstone was called to make for his clan. Featherstone was undoubtedly slightly drunk. He said, Well, shit on you. And fuck them Wild Potato boys. Maybe they better watch out I don’t kill them first. And then maybe come looking for you when I’m done.
Everyone in town knew how the matter stood, and they had come out of their houses to loiter around the squareground and watch Featherstone’s progress. He rode past them, his back straight as if a fire poker had been driven up the circle of his spine. He spurred his mare and reined in at the same time so that she went compressed, with her neck arched and her legs bunched under her, trotting nearly sideways in response to Featherstone’s contradictory suggestions.
Featherstone rode to his mother’s house. She but confirmed Slow Water’s report and offered no advice other than that maybe he ought to leave the Nation for good, maybe slope for Texas. She gave him several little bean-bread tamales, wrapped in their scalded fodder blades, and said that was about all she could do for him.
Featherstone went outside and stood with his head on his mare’s damp shoulder and breathed in her sweet scent and thought awhile. He took out one of several pints of black Barbados rum from his saddlebag and drank and then looked to his weaponry, of which he had aplenty. The matched pair of pistols. A shotgun with an oiled walnut stock and a pair of great dark bores that seemed even larger because of the extreme shortness of the barrels, the paired hammers sporting big pointed thumbpieces so that when they were at full cock they were reminiscent of a horse with its ears pinned. At that time it was a fresh concept in firearms. Also a fighting hatchet with a bright honed edge to its head and blue-jay feathers dressing its hickory handle. And several knives, one of fine Damascus steel with a blade as wide as his hand and an ugly upcurve to the blade like a stubbed scimitar, a style of knife that would later be dubbed Bowie.
He mounted and rode back through town, and all the people were still there as audience. He announced in English and Cherokee, for all to hear, that anyone who came after him would have to die. Sad to say, but there was no way around it. Give me but a long willow switch, he shouted, and my pursuers will be no more than a wet heap of shreds when I’m done. Soup meat.
And he told them where to find him. A place where three roads met down by the river. Tomorrow morning. But after breakfast. I ain’t missing a meal for you shit.
He went straight to the place he had named and waited through the night just inside a laurel thicket uphill from the specified field of combat. He expected to be set upon and killed at any moment. He sat fireless in the dark and drank from a succession of pint bottles, and when he had reached the small hours of morning, with dew beading on the glossy laurel leaves, he was inspired by the black rum to wish enthusiastically that his killers would hurry up and come on.
And they did come, at daybreak, with the fog still heavy along the river. Three boys his age and two grown men riding out of the fog into the crossroads, thinking they had arrived early enough to set an ambush. They were dressed in their greatest finery as for a special occasion. The men were full-bloods and wore traditional long hunting shirts, vests, blue and red turbans, deerskin leggings with silk garters. The boys were all mixed-bloods and wore such assortment of white and Indian clothing as to suggest divided allegiances. They sat in the road discussing how to array themselves for ambush and arguing over who had the right to strike the first blow and who had first claim to the kill.
Before they reached agreement, Featherstone erupted out of the laurels in a rain of flung dew and rode down among them with his hatchet in one hand, the great Damascus knife in the other, and the reins in his teeth like some berserk battleground Celt, which he more than three quarters was. He went into them slashing two-handed at anything that moved. His mare wheeled in the road two times and he cut a swath around him as she turned, and then she collected her hindquarters under her and burst off down the road at a gallop.
In that one instant, before they could even think toward defense, the ambushers had all taken wounds, some rather dire. One of the men was cut down to the white joint of his shoulder. Blood ran down his arm and dripped from his four fingers and painted the neck of his horse in red stripes. The other man had lost a divot of muscle from his upper thigh, and he looked at the raw gape as if it held a revelation. Both wounds were from the hatchet. The boys grabbed at themselves in various places and howled as high-pitched as coon dogs, and the blood welled out between their fingers from knife cuts in their arms and deep rakings along their ribs.
Featherstone was by then only a diminishing muffled sound of hooves beating on dirt, long lost in the river fog.
In the following weeks, men and boys from the Wild Potato Clan rode out like Percival and Gawain. They pursued Featherstone day and night, horseback and afoot. They used all the woodcraft and tracking skills they knew in order to find and kill him, and yet over and over they failed.
Featherstone rode days, letting mileage serve for security. Nights, he squatted sleepless in drizzly dark. The Wild Potato Clan pursued him through the Lower Towns, Middle Towns, Upper Towns. Across land planted in corn with bean vines growing up the cornstalks and pumpkins glowing orange on the ground beneath. They drove him deep into wilderness marked only by the passways of departed bison flowing along the hillsides like ancient watercourses gone dry. He hid from them, fled from them, fought them with deadly intent when he had to fight. Wild Potato Clan boys sat by wilderness fires using porcupine quills to dig out lead shot from where it lay like a spray of welted blue boils under the skin of their backs and chests and faces. They dressed knife wounds with poultices of yarrow. One man lay for days under the fever of an infected wound from a pistol ball until Sixkiller took the man to water and conjured out the heat from the wound and so enabled him to live.
In one encounter, a running battle that covered many miles of valley floor and ridgetop, Featherstone bloodied higher than a dozen men and boys, mostly with the shotgun. He reloaded as he rode and fired at the gallop with considerable accuracy, and they fell one by one behind him until he rode alone into dark. He bivouacked that night fireless. He ate cold potato and hated all men and wished to wipe them away with the swipe of a blade. He lived in fear, and as a result swore to spread blood in his wake, leave a trail of dead to mark his brief passage through the world.
The conclusion of the matter was somewhat anticlimactic, both for Featherstone and for those of the community needing a fatal showdown to satisfy their sense of an ending. What Featherstone did was to take his pony-club money and go down from the mountains into cotton country and buy a skinny mulatto girl of fourteen who had been brought recently from Jamaica and spoke an indecipherable brand of English. She was the only person he could afford, even driving the thriftiest bargain he could. He rode her behind him on the mare five days’ journey back to Valley River with her thin arms circling his waist tightly the whole way, for she was terrified of horses, with their redrimmed eyes and yellow teeth and flaring nostrils. They reminded her of the violent mounted foremen in the cane fields.
Featherstone offered her to the Wild Potato Clan as replacement for the man Slow Water had killed. A life for a life. She didn’t look lik
e much, but rather than continue to battle with Featherstone, the clan agreed that she would do. They took her unreservedly as one of them, and she became a member of the Wild Potato Clan. They renamed her Martha, though she already had the perfectly serviceable name of Dolly. But all her life, they mostly called her Bite because when she and Featherstone arrived in Valley River, he had the red crescent marks of her teeth, uppers and lowers both, scabbing on the sides of his neck just above the collar line. The clan speculated at length on the possible range of circumstances under which the wounds had been made, but mainly they honored her as the only member of Wild Potato Clan who had been able to draw blood from Featherstone.
And as far as I know, the only whiteman to do so was me.
3
I CANNOT DECIDE WHETHER IT IS AN ILLNESS OR A SIN, THE NEED TO write things down and fix the flowing world in one rigid form. Bear believed writing dulled the spirit, stilled some holy breath. Smothered it. Words, when they’ve been captured and imprisoned on paper, become a barrier against the world, one best left unerected. Everything that happens is fluid, changeable. After they’ve passed, events are only as your memory makes them, and they shift shapes over time. Writing a thing down fixes it in place as surely as a rattlesnake skin stripped from the meat and stretched and tacked to a barn wall. Every bit as stationary, and every bit as false to the original thing. Flat and still and harmless. Bear recognized that all writing memorializes a momentary line of thought as if it were final.
But I was always word-smitten. Always reading in a book or writing in a journal. When I was fifteen, Bear’s people called me Turkey Wing because of the quills usually fanned in the breast pocket of my coat or tucked behind my ear, for turkey was the source of my favorite writing feather. And me being right-handed, the curve of quills from the right wing fit my hand best, so on hunts they knew to save those in particular.