Bear’s face did not shift one way or the other.
—No? I said.
—That kind of thing, you can’t get away with it anymore.
He said it sadly, like the world had been unalterably diminished.
—The colonel asked for our help, I said. He doesn’t dare come within three days’ ride of here under any circumstance. Too rough and dangerous, and none of them know this country in any detail. I’m to be their guide. I made a deal.
—For what?
—Certain considerations in regard to our situation. He gave me his assurance we’d be left alone, our deeds respected and any uncertanties as to citizenship ignored.
THERE WAS HARDLY any autumn that year. At the end of the dry summer, one black storm after another came ripping across the ridges, and by the end of September the trees were nearly stripped of leaves and the rivers were full to the banks with red water. The Nut Moon had hardly made an appearance during its cloudy month. Bright autumn, normally the driest month of the year, was like a new unsatisfactory season interjected into the year’s round, warm and wet and yet the tree limbs stark as shattered glass against the grey sky and the goldenrod and ironweed and joe-pye weed all beat down to brown trash on the ground. Nothing colorful at all except for a few stunted pumpkins still glowing in the fields and a few persistent apples hanging red in the skeletal orchards. The Harvest Moon arrived like it intended to be about the same.
All through that unsettled weather, I rode with Lieutenant Smith and his soldiers, scouring the coves for fugitives. There were ten boys, all from big towns. Not one of them other than Smith had yet passed twenty. None of them had ever fired a weapon except in training or for amusement or in highly amateur attempts at hunting. They were baffled and frightened by these wet dark woods and mountains that went on and on, with more twists and folds and dangers than a Minotaur-infested labyrinth. Besides the Indians, bear and wolves and panthers still roamed all through these forests. The fact that the boys had seen no animal bigger than a groundhog failed to ease their minds. At night when the sky was blanked with clouds and there were voices coming from the creek noise and every odd sound out in the woods could mean death, they slept poorly. Most mornings they arose at dawn, wet and unrested. All day they searched the coves for fugitives, going up and down the many convoluted rivers and branches and creeks with names that were hard to pronounce and so impossibly resistant to spelling that the lieutenant would sit by his candle flame at night writing his reports and cursing loudly each time it became necessary to render one of the Indian watercourses into a phonetic approximation of English.
And for our relentless searching, two weeks of it, all we found was one old man, nearly blind and living alone, who said his name was Hog Meat and that he was nearly a hundred years old. They believed him, for he looked every day of that age, and I vouched for his harmlessness and frailty. He stood in the entryway to his cabin with one hand holding back the greasy deerhide that served as door and the other hand visored over his cloudy eyes, looking out to where we sat our horses in the rain. The lieutenant did not even bother to get down off his horse but said, That old man won’t live out the winter. Perhaps we should let him be and give him some cornmeal. So we sorted through our packs and gave the old man food and then we let Hog Meat be. As we rode away from the house, I was thinking that a man’s in a bad way when fellows younger than your grandchildren get to decide how your life goes from now on out.
Then one morning we rode up unexpectedly on sixteen fugitives camped right out in the open by the river with no apparent thought to concealment. Old men and women and children. They were starving and weaponless but for one rusty shotgun with no loads and a bow with only three arrows and a blowgun with a handful of long darts whittled from buckeye wood and tufted with thistledown. They put up no fight at all. The Irish boy took the bow and arrows from the man who held them, and the fletching of the arrows was rumpled and gapped like the feathers of a wet chicken. The Philadelphia boy broke the blowgun into three pieces and threw them into the fire. After being fed some beans and cold cornbread, the captives told where another dozen runners were hiding near the forks of a river two or three days away. So the lieutenant decided to divide his men, sending part of them back to the fort with the prisoners, and now it was just the five of us to find Charley’s people and bring them in.
WE WERE CAMPED beside a strong-running creek filled with mossy boulders. Big woods rose black all around. The hobbled horses had finished eating their oats, and they shuffled and whickered nervously off in the dark beyond the firelight. I lounged with the three boys around a small fire that pushed back the dark only to arm’s length. The lieutenant was sitting a little distance away with a candle lantern, writing up his report for the day.
The boys were cooking a supper of potatoes and bacon and cabbage, a grey mess that was just rising to a boil in a pot hanging from an iron tripod. A pile of chestnuts lay roasting in the outer ashes. The boys sprawled in their uniforms and overcoats on ground cloths waterproofed with wax. Their saddles and rolled wool blankets served as backrests. Wet wrinkled boots lay with the open ends to the blaze in hopeless effort to render them dry, if only briefly, so that in the morning the boys might not have to start the day with cold sodden footwear. They sat with their wool-socked feet close to the fire, steam rising from their toes.
—Well, fuck all, the Irish boy said. His name was Perry.
He had reached into his saddlebag and come out with a wooden stem and the shards of a yellowed clay pipe bowl cupped in his palm.
—Busted all to fuck, he said. My last one.
Perry pitched the pipe shards off into the dark and put the stem in his coat pocket until such time as he could buy another bowl or at least come upon a corncob he could core out and fit it to. The other two men were smoking with great concentration and looking at the fire.
—Anybody got a loaner? Perry said.
Neither man spoke.
Perry settled back against his bedroll. The man next to him reached out his pipe and Perry wiped the stem against the back of his wrist and took two draws and passed it back. The man held the bowl and looked at the stem and then made a show of waving it across the flame of the fire to clean it.
—I heard when we’re done here it’s Florida for us, Perry said.
—I heard Canada. The border, leastways, said the Philadelphia boy.
—One or the other, I guess. But I’m pulling for Florida, Perry said. They say it stays warm all winter and there’s plenty of fish to fry.
—Where I’d like to be right now is Charleston, walking down Dock Street, the Charleston boy said. And then the Philadelphia boy said he’d like to be walking down South Street. When it was Perry’s turn he said Galway, walking down Quay Street to the waterfront right at sunset to watch the light fall away from Inishmore across the water. He had not seen Galway Bay since he was nine years old, and he never expected to see it again this side of the grave.
I was reading a Washington Irving book about the western prairies by candlelight reflected.
Smith, finished with his report, came over and said, Perhaps one of you might stir that pot. Smith was barely older than the boys, but he did his best to act confident beyond his years and experience. He had the habit of including the word perhaps in nearly every order he gave. Perhaps, Private Perry, you might build the woodpile a bit higher before dark. It was an affectation he had not picked up at the Military Academy but had acquired all on his own, either in an attempt to be elegant or else to blunt the edge of command and make himself more likable to the boys under him by suggesting that the action he was requesting might be entirely optional. I had noticed that the boys had taken the word into their own vocabularies and used it frequently and not without irony when they were out of earshot of the lieutenant. Perry, perhaps you could try not to burn that bacon to a cinder. Perhaps next time you might walk a little farther away from camp to shit.
Perry dug the spoon into the grey mess and turned up the bu
rnt bottom, black as cinders.
The boys were not cooks. Pretty often, their idea of supper had been to wrap a few strips of bacon around a green stick and hold it over the fire and try to get it brown without lighting it ablaze. I, on the other hand, enjoyed trailside cookery and even traveled with a coffee grinder and green beans, which I roasted in a dry skillet until they were black and sweating a sheen of oil. That night, I told the boys to toss out their charred cabbage. I cooked the best quail any of them had ever tasted. I’d been lucky enough to shoot four that flushed up out of an old weedy cornfield. I put pieces of apple and onion inside the birds and cut bacon in little slivers and shoved them between the skin and the breast. I rubbed a mixture of dried sage and salt and red pepper between my palms and let the dust fall over the plucked skins. Then I cooked the quails slow and patient on spits over a fire burned down to red coals. And I was not content with just the quail. I sliced potatoes in thin rounds and arrayed them pinwheel fashion in an iron skillet and daubed the top with butter and some more bacon slivers and lidded it and let it cook slow over grey coals until it was done. I cut it like pie and flipped the slices upside down on their plates, and the top was crisp and brown, and the inside was soft and had almost melted. I wished I’d been able to shoot a bird apiece, but it came out close enough.
The soldiers ate in total silence until their plates were empty but for a scattering of fine clean bones and a few little grey shotgun pellets, and then Perry wiped his mouth on his sleeve and said, Great God. And the rest of them agreed entirely.
Perry said, Every single time I try to cook chickens they end up with the feet burnt to charcoal and the thighs bleeding raw, and hardly any of it what you’d properly call done.
I said, You ought to see what I can do with a beef tenderloin.
THE NEXT AFTERNOON we made camp in the rain.
—Wet day, Smith said.
It had rained since dawn, rain falling white against the trees.
—We’re famous for our moisture, I said.
Smith and the boys were miserable. I, though, had spent enough years in these wet woods to know how to do. I kept a set of clean dry clothes in an oilcloth bag. At the end of a day’s travel, I’d strip out of my wet clothes and wash in the creek and then dress in my dry evening attire. Come morning, I’d put the traveling clothes back on, wet and cold until they warmed up to body temperature, but that was better than being miserable all the time. Another thing I did that people chose to interpret as an eccentricity was to take an umbrella into the woods for especially wet days. If I was afoot, I would wedge the handle between my knapsack and back, leaving my hands free, and I guess it did look a little strange to meet up with me on the trail.
Perry had taken off all his wet clothes and was naked under his grey wool blanket, which he wore cowled over his head and drooping to his white shins. He went and addressed himself to the fire, standing close, his back to the other men. He opened the blanket and baked for a while.
—I’d take it as a favor if you’d lap that blanket shut before you turn around, the Charleston boy said.
It might have seemed strange to me that these hapless boys should form the sharp edge of national policy, had I not moved among the men who made that policy.
I went to check on Smith, who had built his own fire. He sat in his underwear cross-legged on a blanket with his coat draped over his shoulders like a cape and his boots unlaced and flapped open on his feet. He finished his smoke and knocked out his pipe bowl against his boot heel. His wet clothes hung limp on a tripod of sticks near the fire. His hat was off and his blond hair stood in points, and every once in a while he would rake his fingers through it as if to smooth it down. His little mustache, faint even in brightest daylight, was invisible by the fire. He looked forlorn out there in the woods in the dark. I had brought along a bottle of good Scotch whisky, and in the spirit of conviviality I offered to share it.
—Strong stuff, Smith said after throwing back a shot.
—Smoky and strange. A taste of peat, which as I understand is a sort of swampy mossy kind of plant that the Scots and Irish collect and dry and make fires from, as settlers on the prairie burn buffalo dung. A cord of dry split hickory must be a thing of absolute wonder to such people. But to return to the point, the whisky is extremely passable.
Smith reached to his canteen to cut it, but I would not hear of it. It was necessary to draw the line somewhere.
—Either drink it or don’t, I said. If you’re going to water it down, you might as well be drinking the piss Welch sells at the tavern.
Smith deferred to my judgment and drank the whisky slow and careful. Something about its brown and musty taste carried a tinge of retrospection, and after two pours, Smith began recounting his life—at least his boyhood and youth, for that is all he had to tell. His father an old veteran of 1812, his mother somewhat younger but now dead. A bout of drear military school. And then, after four pours, he told that every day in these impenetrable woods and mountains left him terrified. He didn’t know a thing about them and did not ever care to know. He wanted to go home. His greatest wish was to operate a store selling clothing, men’s and women’s, of the most recent fashion.
—Then go, I said. And do.
—I’m to make this my life and advance in it, he said. A career.
—Made by whom?
—My father. All the people of the town.
A bound boy, I thought. And then, damned if I didn’t pop right out and say it aloud.
Smith started to get his back up and then thought better of it. He said, I’m meant to come home someday with honors. But they’re not going to be gained here. It would make one’s feelings about this go down easier if they had put up a fight. As it was, they wept. In the camps, some of the women killed themselves. There’s no honor here.
—They already had all the fight beat out of them some time ago.
—Were they any good at it?
—Fighting?
—Yes.
—Now and again, they were. They were once a fierce people, but they’re long since worn down from losing.
—Could you go tell that to the boys? Smith said. He was tired, and the whisky had hit him fast.
I went over and said, Boys, this is not your country, and I guess you feel uneasy in it. But it is my country. Colonel Haden is fond of referring to the people hiding in these mountains as fugitive warriors. But Charley’s no warrior. I know him. He’s a dirt farmer. An old man. Tomorrow will go fine. Nothing to keep you awake fretting. Sleep hard and dream of your sweethearts.
The next morning by the fire, with coffee boiling and side meat frying, Smith got all proper and priggish and said, I fault myself for an excess of frankness last night.
What I wanted to do was slap him down a bit with wit and words. Grammar and vocabulary as a weapon. But what kind of world would it be if we all took every opportunity presented to us to assault the weak? I said, It was the spirit of the evening and the Scotch whisky. Think no more of it.
And at least Smith had sense to say, I thank you.
WE LEFT THE horses tied a half mile down the river and moved up as quietly as we could through the thick ground layer of frosted leaves. Smith lay behind a blown-down hickory trunk glassing the camp. The other three boys were farther back in the woods, sitting with their muskets beside them. Two of them started loading pipes, tamping tobacco with their thumbs like filling a posthole. I looked at the final few leaves on the trees to see the way the wind moved, and then I looked at Smith, who kept his scope to his eye and made no attempt to keep the boys from lighting up, so I motioned back to them with both hands like pushing something down to the ground and they stopped.
Charley and his people had camped on a piece of land where two rivers joined together. It was a configuration of terrain that had an old appeal to the Cherokee and to the people before them. In the old days, they had usually built their mounds and villages in such places, both for practical reasons of defense and agriculture and flat g
round for dances and ball games, and also because watercourses held spiritual import for them. I always thought it a sign of their generosity that they found water spiritual even in a land so wet that water is more often a nuisance than anything else.
An old hemlock grew on the highest part of this piece of land. Its stout trunk was still six feet through at head height, and the ground underneath would be soft, hundreds of years deep with a bed of its needles and the loose black earth into which the needles decay. Charley’s people had built insubstantial shelters under the tree, a tentative-looking pole shed and an arbor, both lashed together with vines and roofed with brush and leaves and pine boughs. Provisional structures that would fall apart and melt into the ground in a few seasons. A dying fire sent up white smoke from its bed of ashes, and Smith said he could see muskets propped against the hemlock trunk nearby. Everyone in camp still seemed to lie abed, though the sun had been up for nearly an hour.
That worried Smith. He thought it was a ruse, and he began whispering about ambush and his plans to avoid it, all of which were unnecessarily complicated and impractical and based on the assumption that these baffled and powerless people—whose country had, as if by conjuration, dissolved beneath them and been reconstituted far off on some blank western territory—would put up a fight. I rose from behind the hickory trunk and started walking into camp, and as I went Smith was saying something to me in a hissing whisper inflected like he thought he was issuing orders. I looked back, and a vigorous plume of vapor puffed from Smith’s mouth.
I went on and walked into camp and got between the people and their guns. I collected the two muskets, old worn trade pieces, where they lay propped against the hemlock trunk. They were loaded and cocked. I took out the caps and put the hammers down. I went and sat by one of the fires with the muskets on the ground beside me. There was a woodpile, and I stoked the fire and motioned for Smith and the boys to come on in.