Tallent and the boys came to me as a group to discuss what to do. I insisted on talking to the journalist myself, being the only one among us with relevant experience dealing with their kind. The writer was a little plump-faced man in a baggy brown suit. Bulging coat pockets, ink-stained fingertips. It took all of a minute for me to realize he was too sharp to mislead for long. All I remember saying to him was, Here’s your lead: Yankees scalped! They had it coming.
Because of those instances and a dozen more, my behavior did not sit well with the powerful in Richmond. I was eventually thought unsound of mind by most of those above me. I was court-martialed a time or two on charges of little merit, which came to nothing more than a great deal of correspondence and residual bitterness.
Needless to say, beset all around as I was, I valued any loyalty and affection I could get. So I took great joy at the eventual outcome after five of the Cherokee were captured in a skirmish and taken out of the state and held prisoner for weeks. The Yankee officers offered them a deal of great ridiculousness that displayed nothing but contempt for them and their native ignorance. They were told they would be set free and given an impossible five thousand gold dollars if they returned with the scalp of their murderous scalping colonel. The captive men made a show of conferring and talking among themselves very solemnly and deliberatively in their language. And then they took the deal, promising to return with my raw scalp by the Ripe Corn Moon. They crossed the high peaks at a jog trot, laughing all the way. And five days later we were sitting around my campfire in a hilarious mood due to the deep gullibility of the northerners, who thought money was the world’s only driving wheel. I remember our celebration involved a certain amount of whiskey and tale-telling and me cooking a boar loin over hickory coals with juniper berries and a Tuscan wine for flavoring. It was, all in all, a rather fine night of warfare.
We had our last engagement with the Yankees several weeks past Appomattox, and the majority of historians certify we took the last fatality of the War, which is why I say my early wild pronouncements about the final battles being fought in our mountains were, in a greatly diminished way, absolutely true.
The Yankees had come over the ridge from Tennessee and occupied a little town set down in a river valley amid high mountains. It was the town where many of my earliest courtroom battles as a green lawyer took place, so it meant something to me to come back leading what was left of my legion.
We got onto the ridges above town where we could watch the Yankees through a glass, and I’m afraid I grew more and more agitated and intemperate as the day went on. I swore to kill them all or be killed by them rather than let them swagger about our town. But I didn’t have much force to back my anger. By various powers of attrition, we were drawn down to a group that would hardly have made a regiment, much less a legion—but nevertheless notorious and feared, mainly due to that colorful scalping incident. About all we had left for strategy was to pick at the Yankees with little fights along their flanks. We lost one man, and several others took wounds. After a few days of that sort of thing, I scattered the Indians along the ridges and told them to light fires after dark all across the mountains surrounding the town. They were to whoop and sing and dance so as to appear numerous. Some of them had skin drums, and a couple of Scots Highlanders had pipes and fiddles. Come nightfall, they poured war music into the valley all the way to first light.
I waited until about dinnertime, and then I sent a tall hook-beaked Indian, one of the last full-bloods, into town. I coached him to deliver a curt phonetic message: Now! Colonel Will says this. We are all around you. Surrender, please. Or else die with your bloody scalps decorating our pommels.
Sadly, the Yankees did not surrender. They informed us instead, in a lengthy written message, of Lee’s agreement at Appomattox Courthouse a month earlier. I had not heard of Lee’s surrender, but I studied on the way things were for no more than a few seconds and then said to my officers, Well, gentlemen, if Lee’s gone on home, I reckon we’re done too. Four fucking years down a hole.
I first sent some men, Indians and Highlanders both, riding hard west toward Wayah with nearly all our horses, which the Federals surely would have taken for their own use, horses having become scarce since nearly as many had been killed in battle as men.
My surrender was a show, and the whole town turned out to watch. I came strolling down from the mountains accompanied by Tallent and my personal guards, the tallest Indians among us, all well better than six foot, even before you got to their hats and turbans. I had changed from my normal dress clothes into breechcloth, greasy buckskin leggings, and moccasins laced with woven strands of horsetail dyed red and blue and strung through eyelets cut from the quill ends of bird feathers. From the waist up, I went naked, nothing but beads and feathers tied in my hair, a leather thong around my neck with one curved black bear claw as pendant. And I had not been barbered for some time. We had been living rough. So my hair was longish and I had a growth of grey beard. I’d painted myself up all striped with ochre and lampblack in the old manner. A long rifle slung over my shoulder on a lanyard of plaited leather. After four years of woods living, I was lank; all the bones in my chest showed through the skin. Me—an attorney, a colonel, a chief, and a senator. An acquaintance of presidents. Coming into town like some icon of the olden days erupting into the baffled present.
And then, when we began negotiating surrender, the lawyer in me came blooming forth. I became quite rational despite my wild attire. I said that the Indians left with me were none of them soldiers but men in my private employ—bodyguards, as it were. And I insisted that as such, they were exempt from having to lay down their guns as Lee’s ill-conceived surrender agreement required.
I think even I was surprised to prevail with that shabby argument. The Yankees scribbled on the paper to amend their surrender contract with a little marginal addendum, and I insisted that we all initial the change. Much dipping of nibs and blotting. But then when it came time for me to sign on the bottom line, I don’t know what came over me. I became agitated and claimed again that there were hundreds more Indians on the ridges, cavalry too, and I was their chief and colonel. At my sign they would descend and scalp every man of them, and nothing but my whim kept it from being so. True, I said, men have survived scalping. But it’s not an attractive way to end up. Your whole head heals to a red puckered scar. Ladies—at least the great majority of them—dislike the look of it quite a bit.
The Yankee colonel looked confused. He was smoking a little stub of cheroot that stunk like rabbit tobacco, and he examined the glowing tip of it for a long time, and then he cut his eyes to Major Tallent. Tallent gave one little vibratory head shake to the Yankee and then touched me very gently on my bare painted shoulder, dipped the steel pen nib in the inkpot, put the shaft between my fingers, and thumbed the dire paper an inch my way. I signed in the most formal and florid of my several styles of handwriting.
And then I looked at the Yankee colonel and said, If not for these Indians, I wouldn’t have had a thing to do with this goddamn war.
Then, accompanied by my guard and trusty Tallent, I walked out without another word. All of us fully armed. Noble old Lee could have used a better lawyer.
DESPITE MY SMALL victory against the Yankees, Pyrrhic indeed, I now believe that leading the Indians into the War was the greatest of my failures, or at least prominent among many. The War was no business of the Indians. They ought to have stayed home. For that matter, we all should have stayed home. And this belated realization was darkly underlined when, within a matter of days, we were hit with a smallpox epidemic. It was widely believed that two of our returning warriors brought the disease into the community after a Yankee officer took them apart from the others and showed them a little glass bowl in which a strange red fish with sad bulging eyes swam slow circles in water cloudy from its own shit. Its entire remaining life was held within a circumference you could almost have compassed with your fingers and thumbs. A nasty world of unimaginable limit
ations. Find therein what symbolism you will. For me, bowl and fish represented the Yankee vision of life.
Immediately upon returning home, the two men who’d been exposed to the Yankees and doomed to witness the red fish fell desperately sick and broke out in blisters and died. And soon they were joined by more than a tenth of our people.
It was a dark time, the worst in my memory. The sickness came in waves, half a moon apart. The heralds were mouth sores, headaches, and vomiting, in that order. Then the eruptions. Pale skin of forearms rising up like plowed ground. Faces so swollen in welts people couldn’t see out from under their eyelids. In the worst cases, the rash spread from head to toe, pustules overlapping one another in plates all down the body.
There wasn’t anything to do about it. Nothing in the way of doctoring was available other than herbs. Some took a decoction made from milkweed. The leaves or roots, I forget which. It tasted terrible and was thought to be helpful only on the slim logic that the milk of the mature plant resembles pus. Some others swore by poke root on even shakier grounds. In the outer world, there had been various forms of inoculation against the disease, at least as far back as when old insane Cotton Mather was taught the trick by his slave Onesimus. But none of us had done it, there being a substantial risk of death in the process. Looking back, maybe I should have insisted upon it. But then, neither had Lincoln been inoculated, for he had come down with a mild case just the year before.
Whether you lived in Wayah or New York City, once you got it you either died or you scabbed over and got well. The survivors felt lucky to be scarred deep for life. White pockmarks sprayed across their faces, down breasts and backs. Scars more extensive than Bear’s or Cudjo’s silver claw marks, though considerably less interesting to tell about in old age.
I went from cabin to cabin visiting the sick, more useless than a preacher or an herb doctor. Dying people retching and insensible, sometimes two or three to a cabin. Young and old alike. All prostrate and pustuled and unable even to hobble into the river and immerse themselves in the cool brown water of late spring in hopes of life. Not life everlasting, but just a little bit more of it. And me with nothing to offer whatsoever on either the physical or spiritual front.
The healthy among us lived every day in numb fear of the first little blister rising on the roof of the mouth. During the waking hours, we went about constantly rubbing our tongues against our palates.
After three waves of sickness, the disease tapered off. Among the very last to go, Tallent.
He lay sick in his house. Fevered. His bedding damp and soured with sweat all the way through the sheets into the ticking. The rash red on his cheeks and arms. Sores overlapping and leaking. A vomit bucket handy. He came in and out of sense.
I sat in a chair by the bed and held his hand and wiped his face with a cool cloth. The sweaty hair at his temples was nearly as grey as mine. I said, Little brother, you’re not doing a bit well, are you? Very poor indeed. Bad, bad.
I buried Tallent on a rise near a grove of chestnut trees. A good view down to the river. Those days, there were a lot of burials. We got to where there were no words left for the eulogies. We just shoveled dirt and walked home, thinking whatever we felt toward the dead inside ourselves. I won’t go into it any further, other than to say that year by year the world darkens down and things are always going away.
7
AFTER THE WAR, NOTHING WAS EVER THE SAME. ALL OF THE SOUTH was a mess. The flow of money dried up. No money anywhere. Yankees trying to run everything and determined to beat us down in the peace at least as bad as in the fighting. No place left in politics for those of us who had been the big men less than a decade earlier, mainly because our conquerors had banned many of us from holding office at any level. I can’t even imagine what songs Yankee carpetbaggers and scalawags sang under the sweetening dome of our old capitol. Not Schubert, I’d bet.
On the national level, the Government was corrupt right up to and including the old gutless white heads on the Supreme Court. But it was fair enough for the victors to take over entirely. We former big men should have been a lot better. We had failed utterly as leaders and deserved whatever beating we were required to take. And neither was the South the only target of the Yankees. Just look at what they did out west. Immediately after they finished with us, they aimed their armies toward the setting sun and fought Sioux and Cheyenne and Apache—too many peoples to list. For the next few decades, Yankees won and everybody else lost. It’s hard to hold politicians with big armies back from fighting somebody.
But not all was devastation. The countryside was still beautiful, no matter what moon of the year it was. As soon as the vines overtook them, Sherman’s many burnt-out white-columned plantation houses became as picturesque as Wordsworth’s ruined abbey. So during that period of my life, the road offered a great comfort, for it was still open and free. Fine to be out roaming on a good horse, observing the change of seasons, the progressive bloom and wilt of flowers, and the phases of the moon all through the pale spring and aching deep green summer and into the melancholy yellow fall. Watching the seasons seemed particularly pressing now that the stack behind me rose higher than the ones ahead, even at my most optimistic reckoning of life span. Where better to be than on the road to test day by day the assertion that the hardest thing in life is to remain constantly attendant, especially since it gets harder to do the farther along you go?
For all those reasons—or excuses—I did not wish to be home much. Aside from cultivating what my friends ironically referred to as my rich inner life, part of my reasoning for living mostly in transit was that if I kept moving I was a more difficult target to hit by those looking to collect debts or serve papers or ask favors.
Needless to say, for long stretches of time, I did not take care of my duties with great mindfulness. I left the majority of work to my current generation of young clerks, under the direction of Conley, one of the legion’s lieutenants. Conley, though, was no Tallent. The business that he and the boys could not handle without my presence was immense. When I returned home, the accumulated paperwork waiting for me was stacked waist-deep around my desk, shoulder-high against the walls. When I opened a desk drawer, the stuffed papers rose up to meet me. They spilled from chair seats like white water over river rocks and filled a vast number of old wooden claret crates until there was only a winding trail for passage from the doorway into the depths of my study. But I’m not blaming my boys for everything. Or even for anything. Right here I should digress to say that many of them went on to distinguished careers in law and business, and several served terms in the state legislature and the Congress, and that’s as close to a father’s pride as I’m allowed.
The problem was me. I failed to keep up with correspondence. Many checks went unwritten, and a few went uncashed, lost in the piles that accumulated around me. All those pale stacks of paper loomed like malignant spirits, grown taller and more powerful every time I drew up courage to go home and address myself to them. They haunted my place—the increasingly olden Jeffersonian octagon—so fiercely that I wanted to strike a match to it all and ride away with a pretty yellow light spewing upward at my back. Every day that I was in residence, I had to face a string of people expecting things from me—money and decisions, neither of which I enjoyed doling out.
During this time, I made a pointless trip up through the Cumberland Gap and beyond. I returned road-weary midafternoon on a beautiful late-summer day, intending to make a quick turnaround and go back out jaunting until at least the onset of November, maybe follow the New River up into Virginia. The grass in the front yard stood knee-deep, and the grey-painted porch boards were speckled with black mildew. Inside, the furniture was shrouded in white sheets. The facets of the cut-glass chandeliers hung dull with dust from their armatures by their little twists of corroded wire. Everything smelled of damp and must and old bitter ashes spilling from the fireplace.
Conley came hustling around, all concerned.
—Will, he said. We
didn’t know you were coming.
—Evidently.
—You mostly send word. We’d have had the furniture uncovered and the grass cut.
—I intended it to be cut regularly whether I’m away or not.
—Grows so fast, the help can’t hardly keep on top of it.
—It’s two shitting feet high.
—Been a real wet summer. Rain, rain, rain.
There was a sound of footsteps overhead in my bedroom. A door closed, and then the descending squeak of step treads. I walked into the foyer and looked down the hall. A nut-colored pretty girl came slipping downstairs, all sleepy-headed and rumpled. She smiled sort of ruefully our way and went on down the hall and out the back door.
Conley said, Excuse me for a minute.
He went running after her. I stood where I was and waited with unexpected patience.
When Conley returned, I said, How’d that come out for you?
He said, Sorry.
I said, Some of you need to scythe the yard and pull the covers off the furniture and sweep the floors and open the windows. And for God’s sake, get somebody to change the sheets on my bed.