I flirted outrageously.
Then two nights later, thinking about how love will draw you to strange places, I paced cautiously down the narrow hallway under the eaves. It was black but for the brief globe of light my outheld candle threw onto the oiled floorboards and up the yellow walls. Door by door, I traced the diminishing painted numbers. At twenty-three, I pecked a knuckle, and she opened her door into a room scarcely as long as the bed and only wide enough to allow three feet of open floor for dressing. The bed was a two-tiered bunk like a railway berth with dingy linen curtains ringed to slide on rods.
There was a roommate. When I climbed onto the top bunk and flopped onto the thin mattress beside my nanny, a giggle rose from below.
—I don’t think I can do this, I whispered. Come down to my room.
But she would not. No matter how I pled.
It was a declaration of identity. If I wanted her, I had to accept her for who she was, with all the lack of privacy her world afforded. I buckled down and did the best I could, as silently as I could. She gripped me hard in her arms and legs like I was all the life left offered to her, gripped me with more strength than I could have imagined in those slender limbs. The next day, my torso ached. At the breakfast table, I secretly probed my rib cage but found no positive evidence of fissures.
I made that dark and blissful pilgrimage many times throughout a wet stormy August. And then without warning she and her employers were gone on the long journey back down into the hotlands. I stood on the gallery and watched them roll away in a carriage, followed by a wagon heaped with their trunks and bags. She would not look my way. The children roiled mindlessly about her on the rear seat.
For all the months of autumn and on into winter, I wrote her fervid letters and imagined rescuing her from her life and marrying her. Even now, I do not doubt that with the least encouragement I would have done it. Committed marriage.
I sent her packages of books, perfume, silk scarves, silver bracelets. Shameless expressions of desire. By Christmas, however, when she had failed to write back even once, I finally conceded defeat.
I kept a wooden box of mementos, my museum of failed love. A pearl from a broken strand. A handkerchief spotted with blood. A dollar bill of antique currency. A letter, its blue ink smeared in three places across cream paper. An octavo edition of Werther.
I NEEDED HELP. My life was in disarray. I had been trying to do everything, run everything. Keep all the books for the tannery and wagonwright and shoemaking shop, the smithy and all the stores scattered across four counties. On top of my political duties in the senate.
And, I admit, certain elements of the business had been left unattended. For example, my ledgers often served double duty as personal journals. And sometimes attention to the latter superseded the former. I loved those blank books. Their physical characteristics. The texture of their paper, the regularity of the black parallel lines across their pages. I had been buying those elegant leather-bound volumes from a bookmaker in Washington for many years. They were sized perfectly to fit my saddlebags, since I mostly lived mounted and moving. I was a fairly meticulous record keeper, though indiscriminate. On any specimen page you might find a great variety of mismatched entries, any kind of thing that had struck my mind on the day in question. A hand-drawn table of debts owed and debts collected. Amounts taken in and paid out in various of the businesses. Land sales and purchases. Lists of creditors and debtors. And then all mixed in would be observations on the appearance of the moon or the way fog had risen from a cove of the mountains, or wry observations concerning the behavior or the attire of other lawyers in court. And then, in code, a notation on what woman I had briefly fallen in love with at some roadhouse.
Tallent studied page after page. I could see in his face he thought it all a mess.
He said, If you want to expand my duties even further, I can fix this, but some things have to change.
—How so? I said.
—This sort of thing, he said, flipping to a page and studying it and then reading aloud:
My birthday. 40 years old. Celebrated without a cake. Total eclipse of the Ripe Corn Moon. Rode 18 m. to Welch’s, partially in the dark. F-k-d H.D. 2 t.
—Yes? I said. A problem?
—I mean, who do you think would find that last notation impenetrable? Or at all useful?
So I gave Tallent a free hand to put things in order.
He said, Thank you, and expressed the heartfelt opinion that a proper accounting of business dealings should mainly concern itself largely with money and expressly not include a record of moon phases and poontang.
—That would be a fair enough start, I said. So I take it that I should keep two journals rather than just the one.
BEAR DIED IN the Planting Moon, during the waxing of it. Nothing dramatic precipitated his passing. No clash with Nature or sudden revelatory conflict against his fellowman. He was just old and worn out. We piled quilts and pelts around him in the townhouse and kept the fire built high, for he was chilled the entire time.
Bear had always been very good with people about to die. He held their hands, looked them in the face, and did not lie to them. He’d say, You’re in bad shape. Awful bad shape. Not doing a bit good, are you? And it comforted them. They looked at him like he was the only one who knew even a little what they were going through. I, on the other hand, was useless at those times. I stood with my hands in my pockets and had almost nothing to say for fear that I would make some faint acknowledgment of the shadow of death glooming the room. Like we all might otherwise be exempt from it if none of us said any one of its horrible names.
During those final days, Bear didn’t say much, but he often held his hands up to the firelight and studied them, their fronts and their backs, turning them, spreading the fingers and clenching knotty fists. At the time, I wondered what he was thinking. Did he wish to grab something? A knife handle or rifle grip or a soft breast? Maybe a gesture expressing one last wish of possession. Something to hold.
I don’t wonder at all these days. I know he was looking at the swollen knuckle joints, the veins thick as night crawlers under the creped skin of his handbacks, fingernails broad and luminous as the insides of mussel shells, the polished skin of his palms marked deep with intersecting lines like the rivers and roads and boundaries of a map to an unknown territory. Bear was thinking that, taken all together, his hands looked exactly like the hands of his father.
Now, I hold my hands up to the electric bulb and think those same things. The bright new light, unknown to all past history, is not flattering. Not flattering at all. It glares grim. The pupils of one’s eyes clench in the face of it. The future will not favor the old. We need shadows. Candlelight, moonbeams, embers.
Oddly, in the days after Bear’s death, the hard-hearted women of Sara’s family mourned him as a great man and beloved husband. They all wept bitterly and with no irony whatsoever. Even old Grandmother Maw said over and over, tears running down the deep channels of her face, that Bear was about the best man she had ever known in her entire long life. Excepting, of course, the incomparable Hanging Maw, who had lived in a different world before white men had become so overwhelmingly dominant, and in that younger world it might have been somewhat easier to achieve eminence. All the women of the several generations cried and cried, and I believe to this day that every tear was genuine.
It has been stated more than once in print that Bear’s body was buried in a secret location. Not true. The grave simply no longer exists. Bear had chosen a shelf of land down by the river as his gravesite. I helped stack smooth stones over the blanket-wrapped body. The grave stood for only a few years, and then spring floods broke it apart and scoured the shelf of land bare. The stones were all scattered and his bones washed away. So now he is gone entirely from the physical world he loved so powerfully.
I’ll go no further with this topic. Grief is not a thing that can be convincingly shared with an audience. Our worst pain is confined within our own skin. I’ll only
say this in conclusion. A time of earth died with Bear, and I hope he found peace and Wild Hemp in the Nightland.
NOT LONG AFTER Bear died, the U.S. Government became suddenly urgent and imperative in its ongoing attempts to convince our remnant of the Cherokee to remove west and join their brethren on the bleak Indian Territories and be done with us for good, and the time seemed opportune. I was not at all sure things could be held together without Bear, but I determined to give it a go, for I was all the chief we had now.
A representative named Hindman was sent down to travel from community to community, any place with a townhouse, and hold meetings to convince the people to sell out and leave. Hindman, of course, couldn’t understand yea or nay in the language, nor did he trust me one inch to translate, so he required a neutral linkster. I don’t even pretend to remember how I arranged it or what foolishness I committed to make it so, but the Government was persuaded to hire Tallent as adjudicator of languages between Hindman and the people and myself. Never mind that Tallent had been an employee and friend for many years, and that despite his long residence among the Indians, several among their many verb tenses remained an impenetrable mystery to him. To be fair, the language divides time into confusingly fine fractions and conditions and qualifications. In the official paperwork, Tallent was listed as a prominent mixed-blood freeholder, though every drop of blood in him, to my knowledge, was Scot, and he even knew what plaid his clan had worn into battle.
To begin our journey with Hindman, we met after morning coffee on the main street of the raw new town to the west of Valley River. It was the first day of a bitter December, and us setting out to slog crusty trails all day and some nights pitching camp in blowing snow or freezing rain. I shook hands with Hindman from horseback, neither of us wanting to be the first to dismount in honor of the other. He was a Philadelphia lawyer, and he looked it, and that’s all I need to say by way of description. We made mild observations about the conditions of the roads and the weather. The hooves of our mounts sucked in and out of the mud as they shifted around. Hindman made a great show of laying down his orders to Tallent not to add or take away anything in his translations, one way or the other. And Tallent swore that he wouldn’t. He put his hand to his heart.
I’m afraid I might have muttered some phrase along the lines of Great God or Shit fire in a somewhat louder voice than intended.
So right from the start of the trip, things did not go well, nor had I expected them to. Long before we first caught sight of each other and traveled together and made offers in the wilderness to kill each other, Hindman and I had nurtured a blood hate just from our correspondence. We had been dueling with lawyer letters for better than a year. Of course that was a major part of the trouble, our being two lawyers. Lawyers have got to fight somebody. It’s their nature. And I claim no personal exemption.
We rode out of town, following the river up the valley, heading for the first council meeting at the Long Hair community. Riding past fallow fields with nothing but dull green clumps of cresses growing in old furrows to offer any color besides the brown and grey of dirt and fodderstooks. The trees on the mountains to either side were stripped down to the bones of their trunks and limbs. Valley River, needless to say, was a landscape fraught with memory for me, and I was both rhapsodic and morose.
I rode sort of sulking, saying nothing, spaced to the rear of our little column. Hindman chattered on, talking to Tallent about the remoteness of the place and the backwardness of its thinly scattered people until he made it clear that he feared he had fetched up at the world’s nethermost quarter. When we were about halfway to the Valley River settlement and had not yet crossed into my land, Cranshaw came into sight through the trees, not a ruin but in steep decline, as if it were beginning to strike the eye as a blur—all the edges of the bricks, the white paint of window sashes fading away.
Hindman paused in his nattering and turned and raised his voice to the grating pitch of most Yankees and asked me if I was sad that I didn’t own all the land within our sight in addition to the boundary we would cross a few hours hence in our journey.
I didn’t say a word back to him. I sat inside myself and waited.
He suspected I was a larcenist, and land was at the heart of his suspicion. He’d gotten a few people in Washington believing the same. It was clear he would like nothing better than to come up with charges against me that would stick. Me behind bars was his most arousing dream. Poor man, to lack more stirring imagination. But if I was poaching on the Indians, he certainly couldn’t figure how, and it frustrated him. So why let him interrupt my memories? Out in the river, breaking its black flow, I could see a big flat rock where Claire and I had once waded waist-deep and sat face-to-face cross-legged in the humid aftermath of a July thunderstorm eating red pepper jelly on water crackers with a good white Italian wine from Featherstone’s cellar. The wine’s maker I fail to recollect, though if I quit chasing after it maybe it will come back to me. But I do remember that we touched each other fairly personally and discussed the weaknesses of Byron’s rhyming in certain stanzas of Don Juan.
But Hindman had little patience for my silence. A few slogs of horse hoof in road mud, and he couldn’t help but start yapping again. He said, I understand that people in this part of the world have gotten used to talking about your holdings in square miles instead of acres. And even so, the total number is staggering.
—It’s all the same, whether you measure in miles or acres or by the square rod. Arpents would be my preference.
—Arpents? he said.
I rode on and waited. I sang an old song inside my head.
In a minute he said once again, Arpents?
—It’s a unit of measure, I said. French in origin.
—French, he said. There was a critical tone to his voice.
—Is it just the amount you object to? I said. The fact that I own a certain broad swath of country?
—It’s the methods used to obtain it.
—Paid for out of my own pocket, most of it. And the rest owned by Bear’s people.
—That old troublemaker, he said. You and your chief have kept yourselves busy for years obstructing the good of the country and accumulating vast tracts of this mountainous land. And building your little empire atop a flimsy web of debt. It’s my understanding a great many people hold paper against you.
—No law forbidding that. I respect it enormously. Any country would fall to scobs and flinders without paper. That’s all a nation is. Paper. Otherwise it’s all just land in general left to its own devices.
We went on arguing at each other that way for several miles. And things became more personal the farther we went along.
At some point, loud enough that he couldn’t help but make it out, I might have responded to one of Hindman’s opinions by saying that he could kiss my ass.
Hindman pulled up crossways in the road. He said, I understand you may think you have cause to resent my presence here, but if we are to travel together through this backward wilderness we might at least be civil to each other.
I looked around. Took my time about it. In the near distance, I saw cultivated fields, cabins with smoke rising from mud-and-stick chimneys. Cows and sheep and goats. A man walking by the river with a broadaxe balanced on his shoulder. It seemed like settled farmland to me. Green and plotted and platted. But the view from Philadelphia somehow made it into a raw wilderness as screaming as any Smith or Winthrop encountered in the early days of Virginia or Massachusetts.
—Wilderness? I said.
—In that it is little but a nursery of savage habits and operates retrograde to civilization, which is much impeded by your holding such immense tracts of it.
I’d had all I could take and could no longer sit within myself. A flaw of character without doubt. I said that I guessed he must like things much better up in the civilized parts of the country, where they can take their mudsill factory workers—some of them still salty from the boat ride over and jabbering a language of no u
se here whatsoever, people as ignorant as if they had just emerged stunned and blinking from the twelfth century—and proceed to work them to death in factories as dim and violent as the mines of Bolivia. And the children too, almost down to the cradle. As soon as they can walk and take orders, they’re put to the wheel. And that’s the mighty and benevolent and praiseworthy force of free labor and capital, which is about all civilization boils down to for people like him. And opinions such as his are not even paper but just words falling from his mouth like horse manure. And with less value, for you can’t even fertilize your garden with them.
Hindman said, I’ll not suffer to be told what this country is or is not by little more than a thief.
I rode slowly right up to Hindman, keeping on coming way past any normal talking distance, closing until I was so near to him that our stirrup irons clashed against each other and the cook kettle hanging behind my saddle rubbed soot on the near haunch of his pale grey gelding.
We locked eyes with each other. Neither of us would give way, and the horses were confused and danced where they stood and snorted smoke from their nostrils into the cold air. There was a great deal of sawing at the reins on both our parts to try to keep them in place and not give way. The horses slowly wheeled together in the road, flank to flank, as if spoked to some hub only horses recognize and grant allegiance.
The whole time, Hindman and I did not let up glaring. He was all red-faced and smirking. It was the sort of situation that so often turns to gunplay.