GREEN CORN MOON, the weeks leading up to the summer solstice, had long been one of my favorite stretches of time. But not that year. From the post I would wake up and take my coffee onto the porch and if it wasn’t too foggy or rainy look down across the river to the fort and watch little groups of soldiers sally forth shortly after dawn to search the mountains and collect Indians cabin by cabin. In the afternoon I watched them march families and old folks into the holding pen that the fort had become. Late afternoons I could smell the smoke from their cook fires rising, and then by dusk the young officers began coming up the hill for their drinks and an evening of conversation.
Many of them were contemptible, but I guess no greater portion than the generality of people. A few, though, resembled actual human beings and seemed shaken and saddened by what they were doing. One of these latter officers was a young lieutenant named Smith. He was a slim blond-headed fellow, gangly and not yet in complete control of his big hands and long feet. A few years younger than I was, but when you’re that young two or three years still seems significant. He would talk as deep into the night as I would listen, telling me about his day and every flicker of thought and feeling that had crossed his mind.
I remember one evening in particular, but I’m not sure why, for it was about like all the others. Smith said they had ridden out from the fort shortly after dawn to go round people up and escort them back to the stockade. Smith rode half asleep with his reins loose and his pipestem clamped between his teeth. A column of four soldiers, if just four could be called a column. The young lieutenant and three enlisted men, boys from Ireland and Philadelphia and Charleston. Their job was to work their way upriver and clean the Indians out of the mountains cove by cove. About all Smith had previously been trained to do was salute, and the three enlisted men had been taught the additional skill of sponging out cannon barrels after they had been fired.
The days were all alike, Smith said. Circle their houses and give them half an hour to collect only what they could easily carry and then herd them down the road or trail to the next farmstead and do the same there. By dusk, they’d have thirty or forty people walking ahead of them, carrying bundles of blankets and pots and precious worthless little objects, portable things to remind them of their former lives. The people all walked away from their homes fearing what their new lives held for them. A very few cried and a few made grim humor of their situation, but mostly they went wordless with their faces composed into an expressionless mask, as if they had placed a large wager on whether or not they could conceal any hint of their thoughts or emotions.
Tagrags and offscourings and white trash followed behind the little column with the attentiveness of buzzards circling a kill. The whole bunch of followers smelled of armpits and ramps. Then, as each farmstead was vacated, they would rush in behind the soldiers to collect livestock and possessions left behind. There was nothing to be done about it. Sometimes the rabble fell upon a place so soon after vacancy that the owners could look back and see them trying to straddle a plow mule or struggling to lead away a reluctant hog by a rope around its neck or flailing about in the farmyard chasing old big-breasted and flightless hens that ran squawking with their wings trailing in the dust. Sometimes out of exuberance the followers would set fire to a place after they’d emptied it. And at the few places that had wells rather than springs, some wag among them would drop his trousers around his ankles and take a shit down the hole to spark general hilarity.
That morning, Lieutenant Smith’s party had ridden up a green cove, their first mission of the day to roust out an old woman, a widow living solitary in a cabin with tied bundles of sage hanging stems-up under the eaves of her porch to dry, the cabin hemmed in by fenced garden plots, corn and beans and squash growing in her fields, chickens scratching in the yard, straw skeps humming with bees, carefully pruned apple and peach trees busy putting out fruit. A bold creek cutting through the middle of the farm, running clear over mossy stones. In every direction, mountains hanging like green curtains from the sky.
This particular old Indian woman had her grey hair pulled back into a fist-sized bun, and she wore a greasy apron over a blue skirt that fell in limp folds from her wide hips. When she saw who they were and what they had come for, she went into the cabin and came out very quickly with two blankets and a little black pot. She spread the blankets on the porch floor and folded some of the herbs and the pot into the blankets, and with a quick knot she fashioned a shoulder sling of the bundle. Then she stopped and insisted on feeding her chickens before she was taken away.
Smith wanted to tell her not to bother. The chickens would not live out the morning but would have their necks wrung and be roasting on a spit for someone’s dinner. But he guessed she did not understand a word of English, and perhaps the longevity of the chickens was not her point of concern but just her stewardship, maintaining it until the last moment. So Smith squatted on the ground with the other soldiers and refilled his pipe and smoked. One of the enlisted boys, an Irishman, said that other than for the hue of her skin the old woman looked much like his last sight of his grandmother when he was a boy. He told how he and his family had been set to sail for America, and they had gone from Galway out past Spiddal for a last visit. The Irishman recalled how his grandmother had refused to acknowledge that the journey meant she would never see any of them again in this life. When they got ready to leave, she had said, Be off with you, then. Said it in a tone as if they would be back in a week or two. And then she started feeding her chickens from grain she held basined in her apron.
The rabble that followed the soldiers to loot the farmsteads stood off at the edge of woods and waited.
The woman moved about the dooryard casting crumbled bits of dry leftover cornbread onto the ground with a rattling motion of her hand and wrist, like shaking and throwing dice. The brown chickens gathered and so did wild mourning doves. The birds mingled together and scratched the ground with their tripartite toes and ate the crumbs of bread, and then the chickens scattered across the bare ground and the doves flew away, their wings beating with a sound of mittened children clapping hands. The woman struck her palms against each other twice, with a hard brushing smack.
It turned out she did speak English, for she said in a loud clear voice, I spit on my past. Let’s go.
And then she shouldered her bedroll and walked off into exile.
Her house was afire and black smoke rose to meet the low clouds before she made the second turning in the trail. But it was all the same to her, for she didn’t look back.
At the end of such days, Smith said he went to sleep with a bitter taste like ash from a coal fire in his mouth.
But at some point, he said, it was just a job. And as with any job, you can become accustomed to it. Six days a week, get up before dawn and go out and beat the bushes for people and dispossess them of everything they have and march them away to the holding pens. Neither Smith nor the boys from Ireland and Philadelphia and Charleston were ever cruel. They marched nobody away with a bayonet point to their buttocks. And what did it matter about burned houses and slaughtered animals? Smith asked. Everything of value was noted down in his ledger. You could do the accounting with your eyes shut, for every place was materially the same. One cabin with puncheon floors and stick-and-clay chimney, one hewed-log corncrib, a bed or two, one table, a few rush-bottomed straight chairs. Various house clutter, basins, spoons, and dippers. A weeding hoe, a shovel plow, a short-handled axe. Hasp and staple, collar and hames. The American Government would pay them for what they lost after they reached the West.
By that point in the night, all the other officers had wandered back down the hill. Lieutenant Smith was left sitting with a flat inch of Moët’s in his flute. He needed something from me, and I was afraid it might have been absolution. But I was no preacher. I’ve always numbered myself among the drunks. Absolution was outside my range of talents or responsibilities.
I said, So the gist of your story is that you worry how many times d
uring your rounds you can note knife cuts in wooden doorframes to memorialize the heights of children at various moments of infancy and still find it poignant?
—Something along those lines, Smith said.
—Go home, Lieutenant, I said. Or at least back to your tent. I’m done with commerce for this evening.
I FLURRIED ABOUT, always a-saddle. Letting constant motion stand in place of actual achievement, everything done half-assed, both tending to business and to the heart. Back and forth on the daylong ride between Valley River and Wayah. The roads were filled with uniformed Federal soldiers and heavily armed Tennessee mercenaries dressed like bandits and hired just for the summer by the Government to roust out Indians. The bandits’ cook pots hung behind their saddles, clashing like unpleasant bells as they coursed along the roadways. They were all draped about their chests and shoulders with powder horns and shot pouches.
I rushed to Cranshaw, after I heard Featherstone was gone, and found Claire bitter amid the wreckage of packing crates, slaves milling about directionless, fields untended, ragweed knee-deep among the cornstalks, suckers overwhelming the tomatoes, squash and pumpkins and melons growing tiny and pale as babies’ fists in the shade of rampant chickweed. What to say to her other than Love me, love me. Don’t go. Stay with me.
She would not even accept an embrace in the dooryard but stood all rigid and looking off toward the river with her hands clasped tight behind her back.
At the fort, the growing population of prisoners, many of whom I had known since boyhood, sat in the dirt of the stockade drinking liquor bought from a cart one of my clerks tended just inside the gate. People drank deep to achieve immediate stupor. And why not? Who was I to deny them comfort? Denial was what the Army was for. If you can’t get drunk when your entire world comes crashing down around your feet, why did God make alcohol to begin with?
And then back outside the Nation in Wayah, I found Bear awake long nights in his townhouse, plotting out the organization of a new miniature world in the pattern of the vast old one. Divisions of governance no bigger than cove bottoms but assigned the names of lost clans. And not even all of them, only Long Hair, Paint, Wolf, and Deer. Also, Bear was pensive and mournful over the state of his troublesome marriage to Sara and her grievous sisters, and the two endeavors, politics and love, were part of each other, both necessary in his attempt to rebalance a world gone wrong, to try to get back his time again.
I WENT BACK to Cranshaw, feeling hopeless and foolish at my desperation to make one more try to reach her. Expecting nothing. But Claire ran to me. I had hardly looped Waverley’s reins around the hitching post when she came rushing down the front steps and fell into my arms. I didn’t spend a second wondering what it meant or how I felt about it. I just held her tight and let myself be happy and hopeless and free of further desire, in case that moment was all we would ever have.
I stayed at Cranshaw three days that were like a compression of our two summers back in green youth, except that Featherstone was absent and the place was being taken apart. Packing crates stood in stacks in the emptied rooms, their walls bare of paintings.
I started out trying to be discreet in front of the help, but Claire did not care what tales the servants might carry to the West. The first evening at dinner, she straddled me in my chair, her dress in a bunch around us. A woman came in bearing a tray of pork loin and roasted new potatoes and little lettuces killed with bacon grease. Claire did not even lift her face from where it was pressed in the space between my neck and shoulder. After that, I quit worrying and let desire rule.
We sprawled on the broad river rocks at noon, and the sun scalded our buttocks as in days of yesteryear. We drank too much of Featherstone’s best wine. We drove the carriage at high speed along the valley roads at any hour that suited us from dawn to midnight. Claire was beautiful, beautiful. Every single part of her.
One night we built a fire in the yard in the old black circle. I recited to her from memory my old poem “To C——,” taking care to note that it had actually been published in The Arcadian. All the way through, line by line, we laughed like idiots, especially at the conclusion about lips of garnet. We both traced the outline of her lips and said the word garnet, as if it were the most ridiculous word in the entire English lexicon.
On the third night, we fell asleep fully clothed, exhausted. I awoke in the dark. Claire was gone. Nothing but a dent in the pillow, flapped-back sheets. I went looking for her. Traversing the long dark upstairs halls, keeping my bearings by brushing fingertips against the plaster walls. Then down wide steps to the parlor. Partway there I saw her moving across the dark room without a candle. Gliding silently, keeping her bare feet close to the oak floorboards so not to stumble. Her hands out at waist level, palms forward, to touch doorframes, table corners, chair arms, crates of packed china, trunks of clothing. Everything displaced, unfamiliar.
The mullioned parlor windows were grey. A thick slice of the Ripe Corn Moon stood framed above the western horizon. Enough light to shape the ridges against the sky, enough light to know that though the mountains are not permanent, they are persistent. Claire reached the front door, crossed the porch, walked down the lawn to the riverbank. The slow water moved almost without sound.
I stood in the doorway and watched as she undressed in the moonlight.
Even in full summer, the complete attire of a fashionable young woman constituted such an elaborate layered array of pleated and ruched and lapped fabrics that it was like taking something small and precious, an art object, from a series of beautiful protective cases and pouches. A thing of wonder, but only to be admired briefly and then shut carefully away again. Claire finally descended through the layers to a doeskin summer corset, light as a second layer of flesh, the color of chamois and trimmed in green satin. She shed it onto the frothy hummock of pale silk and bombazine and linen and stood pale and slim in the moonlight. She walked into the river. Going to water.
Ankle-deep, she stopped, wavering. The surface of the river before her was black, bottomless. But when you reach the point that you no longer trust the world, you live in never-ending fear. She walked on, wobbling and uncertain, the arches of her feet shaping to the round stones of the river bottom. When she got shoulder-deep she looked up into the strip of sky the river cut through the trees, a mirror of the river’s shape. Stars overlapped stars down a vertiginous well. She bent her knees and sank below the water.
THE LOADED WAGONS stood lined in a train outside Cranshaw, ready for the journey west. Claire sat for a long time on the tailboard of the last wagon, leaning forward with her hair covering her face. Her blue skirt draped in her lap to outline her thighs, a shadowed valley between them. Polished ankle boots dangled in space. She gripped the edge of the tailboard so hard her knuckles went white. I reached out and ran my finger across the four knobs of bone. I wanted to kiss them, but when I tried to pull her hand to me, she pulled it away.
Claire leaned back and shifted the mass of hair from her face with a raking motion of wrist and forearm. She stared at me hard, lips parted. She touched my face and said, I want to remember how you look, at least for a while.
—Send some thoughts this way to fill this empty place. I put my palm on my chest.
—What a silly thing to say. Just get in.
—I can’t. I’m needed here right now. I’ve worked so long for Bear, for our people. Things are at such a state they could fall apart in a moment. I have responsibilities.
Claire turned her palms up, held her hands out.
—What about Featherstone? I said.
—We can deal with that when we get there. He might not be exactly what you think he is.
I hesitated. I’m not proud to report it. It was my Lancelot moment. Hesitate to get in the cart, and you are lost. Maybe every life has one moment where everything could have been different if you’d climbed on the cart.
Claire looked around at Cranshaw and said, I would have burnt all this down at a word from you.
The driver looked back at her. She tipped her head in the direction of forward. West. He whistled a sharp note down the line of wagons, and the whole train lurched forward. He popped the reins on the mules’ backs, and they pulled. The rig creaked into motion, the narrow wheels broke free of the mud with a sucking sound.
Claire rode away as the condemned ride the final cart to the gallows. But I was the one condemned.
I thought then that if she would look up and say one more word, I would turn my back on the life and the place I had made, on the people who had taken me in as an exiled bound boy when no one else in the world wanted me, and I would follow her anywhere. But she lowered her head and her hair covered her face, and that was the end. The driver began whistling “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” They turned the bend in the road, and all I had left to look at were the parallel tracks in the mud leading off into a future that had sideswiped us all.
Now I think, What more could she have said? And for so long I have hated my nature for failing to say what I felt. And most of all for not acting on it. You live with such choices until you die. They eat at you like heartworm, coring you out until you are just a skin enclosing nothing. A balloon filled with hot breath.