I paused to think but then realized that not much thought was required.
—All right, I said. I’ll bring them in.
The colonel took the time to look at his plate and thumb it, sloshing, to the far side of the table. It left a shining trail across the desk like a slug’s passage. He said, I guess next you’ll want cash payment for your services?
I told him that what he was asking might well cost me my life, and that he hadn’t enough Federal money at his disposal to compensate me for its loss. Furthermore, I said that if I was to die I didn’t want to go under the ground as a hireling. It would be as a free agent or nothing at all. And contrary to the devout belief of his Yankee people, money was not the engine that wheeled the stars across the night sky.
The colonel smiled at my foolish lack of skill in negotiating. He said, No money at all?
—None.
—I believe we have reached a deal, he said. You have a month from today. Bring them in and we’re done with each other. And none too soon. One day later, and I’ll wipe all of you away to the Territories.
—Care to memorialize this agreement on paper? I said.
The colonel laughed as if I’d told the joke about Old Blue the coon dog. He motioned me away with flicks of his two hands. I backed directly into Smith. We jostled and regained balance and went to stand together by the door. The colonel and his scrivener huddled together whispering, and then the scrivener sat at the end of the table and dipped his quill and began writing.
BACK IN WAYAH, I told Bear all the details of my recent past. The travel with the soldiers, the capture of Charley, the killings. I concluded by showing him the colonel’s letter and translating it for him, explaining in detail its guarantee that we and any innocent fugitives now on our land would be left alone if we caught Charley and his people within a month. Minus my day of travel from Valley River. Otherwise we might well be wiped away to the Territories.
Bear looked so old, everything about him drawn smaller except his knobby fingers. He sat without a word for a long time and smoked a long-stemmed clay pipe down to ash. He said he believed that you could think about our situation for a month and come to the same conclusion, for our dilemma was simple. What we had before us were two bad choices. But there was nothing unique about that. So often in life, all the option Creation grants us is either shit or go blind. The short of it was, Charley’s people had put us in danger. We hadn’t killed anybody, except in our dreams, but we would be punished just the same by reason of blood identity. That’s why Wild Hemp had died back in the last century at the end of the Revolution. Her red blood. She hadn’t raised a finger against either Americans or English and could not even tell the difference between them and was confused by why they were fighting each other to begin with. They looked much more alike that we did in regard to the Creeks or anybody else you could name. But she was shot down by the Americans nevertheless. And the only reason for her death was that Indians had sided with the English, and the English had lost. Wild Hemp died as a result of forces she didn’t understand or even acknowledge. Dead in the dirt, the most beautiful being ever created. There was no justice in the world anymore. All you could do was try to go on living as a form of vengeance, to keep your memory alive as long as possible. For as soon as Bear died, the memory of Wild Hemp would pass entirely from the world, never to be retrieved again. As if she had never lived.
The end of Bear’s thinking was that Charley had made a choice for all of us, and Bear did not agree with that choice and was not bound by it.
—Let’s bring him in, Bear said.
Hunters had reported to him that people were hiding somewhere up among the highest mountains, starving and cold and sick. Lichen’s bunch. Several dozen fugitives from at least three generations. Bear said, We’ll start tracking Charley from here. You go up and find Lichen and get his people down with us to help. Do it before Charley gets to them.
—So they don’t join up? I said.
—The fewer people we’re hunting the better.
I WENT ALONE through that unsettling autumn weather, on foot through rough and ragged country for many days scouring the coves and creek banks until I tracked Lichen’s band to a cave up under the peaks of the highest mountains. I won’t tell every lone camp and miserable thought that crossed my mind those days except to say I lay awake every night, flat on my back, watching the stars transit through the tree limbs and wondering if Claire had made it to the West and fearing she had not. The word bleak would pretty well describe every element of those footslogging days. I’ll just say that I walked a long way and finally tracked Lichen’s bunch to their cave. Perhaps I should also add that with every upward step I feared that when I found them they would kill me and leave me in the deep woods for the wolves to break apart.
THE FIRE WAS burning low and a layer of pale smoke thick as meringue settled against the ceiling of rock, unable to find a passage out. A thin brown dog rose stiffly and stretched and circled and then moved a few inches closer to the blaze. The cave held the heat of the wood fire close. People sat far back from the flames and were only dark shapes. I couldn’t see the faces of the people around me and knew them only by their voices, but I had known some of them since I was a boy. The generations surrounding me were as desperate as you can drive people to be. Babies crying in piercing tones, elders coughing with a deep rattle in the lung. They were a band of fugitives living hard and pressed, starving and hopeless, but together in body and purpose. All I had to offer them was five pounds of dried beans and an ugly deal, but necessary and without reasonable option. I didn’t know where to begin arguing with these people. They had survived beyond fright into glazed and fatal blankness.
I started with a rant against the whole sweeping weight of the modern world that was poised to fall on them. After which it would just keep moving forward like a wave on the sea, oblivious to individual pain. I used every tactic of rhetoric I had learned from Bear and from all the smart dead English writers I treasured and from all the days in court, teasing out disputes about land titles and property lines and whose cow broke down somebody’s pasture fence. All those experiences stood me in good stead, at least to the extent that I convinced Lichen and his people not to kill me.
The concluding sentence to the first stage of my argument was this: Come down and help us track the killers and be welcome to join Bear’s people. Have peace. How can you argue against peace?
—Peace, Lichen said. White people wipe their ass on the notion of peace every day. Don’t come all white-faced telling me about peace. You people spit on peace.
—Not all of us do, I said. I don’t spit on it. And furthermore, I said, if he wanted to call me white, that was his privilege. But I took my clan membership to heart. I went by the old rules. If you were a member of a clan, you were an Indian. As to peace, I said, I had spent most of the past few years trying to find a path to it. The entire direction of the new world, though, was against peace. So it was an honorable thing to fight against the world. And I had done my best to be a warrior.
Lichen said I was not the issue. He could not be at peace because soldiers had hunted them like wild deer. A year ago he had a wife and child, a woman he loved and a brave bright-eyed boy. And because they would not become slaves and be told where to live, they were left to starve upon the mountains. He had buried his child, and then shortly thereafter he had buried his wife. And this was his own country. How could that be right? Hunted like animals in your own country. Every man and woman with him had a similar story. So Lichen would agree neither to come down from the mountains nor to join in the hunt for Charley. They had known each other since boyhood. There was no precedent for hunting your own people like game. And so he scorned my proposition.
Bear had guessed at Lichen’s response and had suggested that at some point I might need to tell the tale of U’tlunta. Spearfinger the Monster. I sat by the fire and told the story that everyone already knew. But I fleshed it out and used the best features of the language to ma
ke it live anew. I told how Spearfinger had been one of our people, a respected old woman until she went bad and began shifting shapes and became covered in scales as hard as plates of shale that no knife or arrow could break. She grew a forefinger like a spear point and poked everyone she met to the heart, men and women and children. Then she opened them up and ate their livers. She brought threat and disorder down on the people. They didn’t ask for it, she brought it. She went through the mountains singing a song, and it was pretty if you didn’t listen closely to the words, for they were all about eating people’s livers. Spearfinger forced the people to band together and find a way to kill her. They chased her through the mountains, and then they dug a pit and trapped her in it. A bird told them where to aim their arrows between the scales of rock to strike her heart. Her death was a sad victory for the people, for Spearfinger had once been one of them. But she had left them no choice.
At the end of the story, I paused. Five dramatic heartbeats. I could feel them beating in my wrists and temples. I said that by killing the soldiers, Charley and his people had brought similar threat of annihilation to all our people. And, similarly, we were left with no choice.
In the end, Lichen’s people came on down to Wayah with me. Along the way, we collected a few more fugitive stragglers. After eating from the community stewpots nonstop for two or three days, Lichen’s men joined us in searching for Charley. We scoured the rivers and creeks and streams like hounds after foxes. Charley and his family fled before us like driven deer or quail flushed to the guns by beaters.
5
I WOULD LIKE TO MAKE THE CONCLUDING ACT OF CHARLEY’S STORY an epic and tragic tale. But almost nothing in life is epic or tragic at the moment of its enactment. History in the making, at least on the personal level, is almost exclusively pathetic. People suffer and die in ignorance and delusion.
Late in the fall, during the final diminishing parings of the Hunting Moon, I pieced together the rest of Charley’s story from what Nancy and Lowan and George and Jake told me. And from another long night by a campfire with Charley. It seemed important to me to let them all bear witness. I heard five separate stories that did not entirely correspond, but I believe I understand something fairly close to what actually happened, at least a few fragments, and that is better than most of what we know of history.
THERE HAD NOT been a plan to the killings. When Lieutenant Smith had failed to uncover the hatchets in his search of the shelters, the men figured they were not responsible for calling attention to them. The next morning, as the soldiers prepared to drive them away, the men hid the hatchets under their clothes with no notion other than that edged implements might become useful. No deadly plotting took place among them. They just figured it was better to be armed than disarmed. They also reasoned that a hatchet, like a knife, is both weapon and tool, and for all they knew, the Army allowed its prisoners to keep their knives and hatchets.
The only point of unanimity in their stories was that during the day’s march, when Nancy grew tired and dropped back, one of the boy soldiers prodded her forward with either the blunt end of his rifle barrel or the sharp end of a bayonet fixed beneath it. At which point the men righteously objected and drew their hidden hatchets.
After the killings, the horses bolted off into the woods and then stopped and came back and milled about in confusion, stepping awkwardly on their fallen reins and whickering among themselves. Charley’s people consulted, and decided that the horses would be an impediment up among the trackless peaks, and so they left them standing nervous and confused with the dead boys.
The women gathered the few items that would help them in their escape. Weapons, leather goods, saddlebags, tin pots, and dirty linens. Then they went running upward into the mountains. Even at that desperate moment, they knew no altitude was high enough to offer sanctuary or refuge.
AT SOME POINT in their flight, Charley stood drawing breath, watching old Nancy and the nursing mothers and the little children and the younger men struggle up ahead of him toward the ridgetop. Thrashing through newly fallen leaves that lay knee-deep on the legs of the younger fugitives. Babies cried, though all they had to undergo in regard to suffering was to be carried jostling across broken ground in their mothers’ arms, pressed against soft breasts that had ceased to give milk. Far behind them, trackers rose up the slopes of the coves and drew nearer by the day.
There is romance in the lone fugitive. But when babies are involved and exhausted young mothers and grey-haired elders with swollen finger joints, being a fugitive is just terrifying and hopeless. Not flight but slog. A desperate passage through a landscape rising against you, the beautiful world you love suddenly risky and dangerous.
Charley opened his mouth wide and cocked his head, listening for the sounds of the manhunt, but his own people made such a racket that he couldn’t tell how far away the runners might be. The numbers of the hunters had grown by the day.
To flee or hide or surrender? Those had been the decisions someone needed to call. And it had fallen on Charley to make the call for all of them. It was a weight shifted onto him by reason of age alone, for he knew he had no particular wisdom left in him. And also because he was stout enough to bear the unwilling responsibility toward all these people climbing ahead of him, none of whom would be gathered here starving and in flight but for some urge he once had on Nancy’s body.
We are all mad when we are twenty. And because of it we cause pain farther on down the road. And then, if we are not weaklings, we have to take possession of our old madness and try to soothe its issue.
Charley’s littlest ambulatory grandchildren, the shortest boys and girls—each bearing some reference to his particular hands or hair or nose or slant of eyes—churned lattermost against the gravity of the mountain. He heard them wheeze in their effort. Dead leaves and black humus and pale pipe plants broke apart under their struggling feet. They wanted to live and so they climbed.
Charley wondered why his people possessed such unreasonable desire. To live is to suffer. And they were doing plenty of both right that moment. If he could have swiped his hand across the world and made every one of them not ever have been at all, he would have done so.
But being goes on regardless.
Charley placed both hands in leverage against the place where his knee joined his thighbone. He lifted one foot in front of the other. His whole body disagreed against the downpull of the mountain. With considerable effort he came shepherding behind them all.
THERE WAS A great deal more to Charley’s story. He talked and we drank most of the night. You can tell all kinds of stories in the space between dark and dawn. I’ll skip forward to a point that I remember very clearly. Charley said the blanket bundle in his arms was airy as if it had been stuffed with cornhusks. Death seemed to have diminished the boy. The wind howled out of the northwest and carried the winter’s first pellets of snow. Charley went alone, climbing through hardwoods, their leaves cupped and holding the little bit of grainy snow that had fallen to the ground like salt in a hand. He climbed up into a stand of gloomy balsam fir to a ragged rock face streaked with dark ribbons of seepage and hung with long icicles and encrusted with scabbed patches of bright orange lichen. Jaggy stones of all sizes lay scattered on the ground, sloughed off the rock face. The passway across the ridge crest bent around the face and went on forever into the north, a thin wavering line that had carried trade and war as long as there had been people to walk it.
Charley squatted, and his knees made a crackling sound like dropping an armload of firewood. He opened the blankets and lifted the weightless boy in his hands and laid him on the frozen ground. The boy had been dead less than a day, but the skin was grey as wood ash and his long black hair seemed unaccountably full of pale dust. He was naked and already arranged by the women into fetal compactness. Naked because other children needed the clothes. The soles of his feet were a color of white that Charley had never seen before, even on a whiteman. The boy’s arms and legs were bone thin, and the el
bow and knee joints looked enormous. Charley circled the calf of the boy’s leg with just his thumb and index finger and there was room to spare. Charley’s grandson had lived five years.
There were no digging tools to be had, so the burial would be in the fashion of a stone barrow. Charley stood up, and his knees made the firewood sound again. He began carrying rocks and stacking them over the boy, working first with the largest ones he could heft, making an effort to think only about their shapes and how their angles best fit together and not about their weight. The stones were cold as blocks of ice, and his hands were soon numb and his fingertips were bleeding from small cuts. He worked until he had sweated through his clothes and something in the small of his back had given out and prevented him from standing up straight. He carried and stacked stones without stopping until he had built a tight mound to chest height, sufficient to keep out wolf and maybe bear, and imposing enough to invite every passerby to add a stone to the top of the pile.
When Charley was done, the snow was falling again in little grains, rattling in the tree branches. He went to the rock face and broke off the end of an icicle and put it in his mouth to melt. It tasted of the minerals in the rock it had passed through. He wrapped the blankets from his grandson’s bundle around his shoulders and began walking back down the trail.
EVERYTHING HAD GONE WRONG, but how could it not have?
After days of chase—down creeks, over ridges, up coves—the hunters were right behind them in the grey open woods. They had spread themselves up each slope of the cove and came on relentlessly, driving Charley’s people forward. Charley was aiming his family toward a laurel hell that went on and on, close and convoluted like a vast cavern. But it was a long way there.
The younger women and the children and Nancy sat down in the leaves and could go no farther. The children no longer wept. They were all silent except for their hard breathing. The runners in the distance made a sound like a rising wind below them. Nancy told the men to go on, Charley and Lowan and George and Jake. But not Wasseton. She would keep him with her. The Indian trackers would certainly not kill women and children, and perhaps the soldiers would spare them as well. The men stood a better chance of escape on their own.