The long hunters from Boone’s time, he said, were now old men, those who were not already dead. All they could do was spin winter stories about Kentucky and the big wilderness and the flowing blood of yesteryear. Elk and bison still numerous, and deer so thick in the woods that a single musket ball might kill two at a shot if they happened to be standing bunched together. The stories bore resemblance among them. Many featured a man closing in personal combat with a wounded bear and killing it in a manner like a tavern fight engaged in by a pair of drunks. If the man had a knife, then just as the bear’s long-clawed forepaws drew closed around him to pull him apart like a stewed chicken, he plunged the blade all the way to the handle in the bear’s chest and the animal bled out still embracing him like a lover. If the teller had a pistol, he discharged it into the bear’s howling red mouth, thrusting the barrel past the yellow teeth and pressing the muzzle into the soft palate—the whiteman’s suicide spot—before pulling the trigger. To prove the tale’s bloody truth, the old teller might display raised white toothmark scars on the back of his right hand where it dragged through the clashing teeth on the way out. But that was a lost world of men and animals and freedom and death, and it would never come again.
What I thought was that while it might have been romance to those old hunters, really it was business. Hides and furs and feathers for the markets as far away as New York and London and Paris. And now the woods were as empty as church on Monday morning.
I said those things as best I could in his language, and Bear looked straight at me, all sharp-witted and thinking hard. I was not sure whether I had butchered the grammar or not. And I wondered whether I had found a workable replacement for the concept of romance and whether he knew at all about the existence of London and Paris.
Bear didn’t say anything, only nodded a time or two and had his drinks and went off hunting.
But a week or two later he came down off the mountain, with a pitiful little batch of green hides draped over the horse, and sat on the porch and immediately started talking about how bad it is not to have a place in the world. Without a place where you belong, you have too many choices before you and therefore cannot go in any direction. It is a fine line between too few choices and too many. As he saw it, I had too much freedom.
—Too much freedom? I said. I’m bound with papers here to this one spot for seven long years. Any less freedom, and they might as well throw me in jail and turn the key in the lock. And if I light out and they catch me, they’re liable to do it.
Bear clarified his point. He said he meant that truly living in a place means being tied to it in ways I was not. Having a place means being bound in many directions. To the land, the animals, and the people. By relations and even the names of places. Such ties are both comforting and discomforting. In some ways it is easier to be an exile than to have responsibilities. But also sadder. I had no bonds and was therefore lost in the world.
I said I was not lost. I knew for damn sure where I was. I was orphaned and then exiled from my own kind of people. And, by the way, piss on them if they wanted to send me off to the woods and make money on the deal. I was where I was, and I liked it just fine and could get along without them.
Bear said, Now, you be mad at your people all you want to be. And when you’re done being mad, think about this. I’m offering to stand as your father.
Then he went inside, tallied up for himself what the hides were worth and deducted his five shots and drank them without a word further, and consulted only with the fireplace for an hour. Then he went out the door.
Well, my first thought was naturally that Bear would make a notably poor father, him being a frequent drunk and all. Also prone to disappear into the mountains for long stretches of time. But there wasn’t exactly a line of people waiting to take an interest in me, neither fathers nor mothers. I also knew adoption was not a light thing for him. And it was not just a matter of him taking me on as a son. There was further scope and responsibility to it. The Cherokee were about the same as everybody else; they considered themselves the only people that mattered. The exclusive way to be one of them was to belong to a clan. Skin color or blood degree was not the issue back then. Belonging to a clan was everything. If you were born or adopted into a clan, you were Cherokee. Everybody else was an outsider. So when Bear made his offer it was not only between him and me, it was also a deal with his whole people and thus a matter of identity. For them and for me and for him.
Though for all the gravity behind Bear’s proposal, there was no ceremony to it at all. I don’t know what I expected. Maybe a knife slash across our palms and a bloody handshake that would make us part of each other forever. Father and son.
When Bear was next in the post, about a week later, to trade some marten skins stretched on hoops for an axehead, he didn’t bring up his offer. He traded and drank and told about his hunting trip, which had been inconsequential except that a mountain lion had followed him for three days and at night he had to wake every hour and build up the fire to keep the lion backed off in the dark, for otherwise it was hard to sleep with the yellow eyes staring at him. Finally, I interrupted and told him I’d be honored to call him father.
Bear just nodded and said, We’re dancing at my place tonight. You come too.
5
I HAD NEVER BEEN TO ONE OF THEIR DANCES. HAD NEVER BEEN INVITED. But on still nights I had often heard the faint sound of drums rising up the mountain and continuing almost until dawn. Those had been lonely nights when Smollett’s rendition of the Quixote was particularly welcome company, and the doings of the characters kept my mind from turning around and around until dawn, on aching thoughts of love and loss about my little dead mother and the girl with the silver bracelets or equally painful hatred for my aunt and uncle.
My first dance was held in the townhouse, so everybody understood it was Bear’s party. Some of the women brought smoked duck meat and roasted venison and little rough cylinders of bean bread steamed in cornhusks with palm prints from their shaping still on the soggy dough when you tore open the wrapping. The drummers upended their various-sized drums and poured water into them to wet the skin heads. The fire in the middle of the floor was built high and bright, and it shot sparks to the ceiling and up into the starry night sky beyond the fire hole like a migration of fireflies. It threw amber light and cast shadows of the dancers against the walls.
I had expected that maybe Bear would make an announcement of our arrangement, but he didn’t. Everybody seemed to know already and had made some adjustment in their thinking toward me.
I should pause here and say something about the townhouse itself. I have toured Europe and been to Chartres, Mont-Saint-Michel, Notre-Dame, and other such places. In other words, I’ve seen my share of architecture meant to scribe lines around a space on earth and a vault in air and declare it holy. Those constructions all succeed in their attempts at creating awe, at least to the farthest extent of human ability, however limited that might be. So it may seem ridiculous to add a ragged dirt-floored mountain townhouse of poles and wattle-and-daub capped with a low-hanging deep-eaved roof of cupped grey bark slabs to that list. But there it is, a space undeniably charged with spirit.
In the old days, a townhouse sat on top of a truncated grassy pyramid of earth, and it would have been a little more obviously magnificent. The peaked roofs of the townhouses stretched the lines of geometry to completion. But the people had long since lost the ability or the will to make new pyramids, and the remnants of the past were rapidly losing their angles. Wind and water had muted them into low round mounds.
Nevertheless, Bear’s moundless townhouse was an interesting feat of architecture. The entryway was so low under the eaves that you had to walk bowed to enter—an enforced obeisance, a curtsy—through a kind of brief sunken vestibule, a baffled hallway. There were no windows. You emerged into a room of uncertain dimension, dark except for what illumination came from the fire and the small smoke hole in the tented roof. In daylight, a beam like a Jac
ob’s ladder fell in a solid cylinder through the fire smoke and moved around the room as the sun arced across the sky. The air was thick with the incense of hickory, oak, chestnut, cedar, hemlock, fir. As your eyes adjusted, they revealed an expansion of vaulted space, aiming your thoughts upward. Of course, if you entered at night, there was just the fire, the yellow light waxing and waning, reaching out and falling back, touching the mud-plastered walls and the lowest radius of each converging roof pole. There was a power to the place. The earth floor, the circle of fire, the square of the walls oriented to the four cardinal directions of the world, the movement of light and dark, the four pitches of the bark roof as it climbed in its diminishing angles to the little round spy hole on the endless sky. At any rate, it worked on me as effectively as did, later, the stairway of the Medici Chapel or the dome of the Pantheon. A reaction of spirit as involuntary as a doctor striking beneath your knee with a rubber mallet. Or maybe it is only that we are so habitually inattentive that when some rare but simple geometry grabs us by the shoulders and shakes us into consciousness, we call our response sacred.
THAT NIGHT BEGAN with the social dances, the fire built high and bright. Old men got up and did the Gizzard Dance, circling the fire and swinging their bony asses to the music of drums and rattles made of gourds and tortoise shells. People sat on the benches lining the walls and ate between the dances. Later, some of the women did the Wood Gathering Dance, and toward the end of it a few men got up and went outside.
The fire had been left to die down and the room had become dark and shadowy. The people, by custom, let on like they did not know what was happening.
Some of the women began shaking rattles, and the drummers beat a fast ragged figure. Then a troupe of costumed Boogers erupted through the entryway. Ghosts and monsters. They were robed and masked to represent a caricature of outlanders of various skin tones, brown and white and black. The Booger Dance gave shape to the fear and loss the people had undergone since the arrival of such dangerous newcomers. The Boogers were figures of threat and carriers of despair, but the dance made them ridiculous. They rushed about randomly and violently, circling the fire and shouting in a made-up dissonant gabble meant to sound like various languages of Europe. But mostly they maundered as if seized by a fit of tongues, a dither of mostly vowels.
I was deeply aware, despite my new adoption, of my blood membership in the tribe of Boogers. One of them depicted an Englishman, and his mask was made of buckeye wood, painted chalky grey with a bright red nose and red cheeks, orange hog bristles for eyebrows and mustache, and a strip of boomer fur at the hairline. The eyeholes were cut with a suggestion of puzzlement to their slant, and the mouth was full of big blunt crooked teeth. A gourd-masked German talked like he was trying to rid his lungs of a rattling obstruction. An elderly Negro mask dark with charcoal had beard and hair made from tufts of thistledown. The Spaniard wore one of Bear’s prized possessions, a rusty shallow-brimmed metal helmet with a crest standing like a cock’s comb across the crown. The Spaniard’s headpiece was usually on display atop a post in the corner. Bear claimed it had come down from an earlier time and was, in fact, the hat of the man who was the namesake for the deep hole a few miles up the creek, a place called Where We Drowned the Spaniard.
Bear’s people had been rubbing up against other people for quite some time, starting with de Soto and Pardo and other such killers. As further memento of the Spanish entrada, Bear also had a small doll—a figure bearing only about as much likeness to the human form as a forked ginseng root and of nearly the same dirty color—which he said had been made from scraps of the drowned Spaniard’s woolen underclothing, a great novelty back then in a place where sheep had not even been imagined. Though, truth be told, their own fabric woven from mulberry bark and hemp was much finer, and the mulberry had the added advantage that you could paint pictures on it. When Bear had first shown me his artifacts from the drowned Spaniard, I worked the dates in my head and said that the killing must have happened more than two hundred years ago. Bear said that exact calendars had not been kept back then, but indeed the Spaniard died in the creek a moderately long time in the past, though Granny Squirrel claimed to have been present at the killing and to remember it as clearly as yesterday, and she knew where the drowned man had been buried and whose pair of hands had held him underwater until he quit bubbling. But she’d never tell the killer’s name, because she feared the white people might yet find a way to avenge the centuries-old death, righteous though it had been, for the Spaniard’s behavior was atrocious.
The Boogers whirled and roared, and in their wake was a slight figure, draped in white sheeting cloth in the style of a ghost. It wore a mask over its head made from a great hollowed-out wasp’s nest, leaving just the outer few layers of pale grey paper. The mask maker had stobbed a pair of forked twigs like antlers into the nest above the forehead. Deep black eyeholes had been slit in the bulb end, and the little hole at the funneled bottom where the wasps used to come and go was left to stand for a mouth. The mask was face-shaped and yet not a face. All it did was make glancing reference to faces, human and animal both. The pale wasp paper lay in wrinkles, dry and withered like the skin of the ancient dead. All in all, it was a frightening and strange vizard, blank and unreadable and vague. It struck the eye blurred, as if seen through water.
The drummers began a fast beat, the transient edges of the sound popping and decaying. The Boogers ran about the room gabbling their languages and flapping their robes. They lunged aggressively at people as if to slam and butt them, though at the last minute they always veered off on weird vectors, staggering one minute and prancing the next. The drums and rattles banged a hard rhythm. The Wasp Ghost spun in place with its arms extended, hands twirling and draped cloth streaming. Then it broke free and went about the benches peering into the faces of the spectators as if judging or searching. When it came to me, it looked long and hard and then went spinning off with its sheets flowing behind it to the far side of the fire.
Bear, as host, shouted at them: Who are you? What are you doing here? What do you want?
Dreadful Water, the man costumed as a Spaniard, was noted for his ability to break wind at will, and to each of Bear’s questions he let loose a barking response that the women and children on the benches found hilarious. The Englishman kept opening his robe to reveal a great proud phallus made from the arching neck of a gourd, the head of it painted red with pokeberry juice. Every time he showed it, thrusting his hips and wagging it, the women shrieked in terror and then made humorous evaluative comments.
After a long while of chaos, the Boogers began settling down, like stirred liquid coming to rest. At the end of their swirling, they went and sat huddled together on a bench.
Bear went to them and made his inquiries again.
He spoke loudly in a stage voice to the room at large: Who are you? What do you visitors want here?
Now suddenly, after all their shouting, the Boogers would speak only in mutters and hums. They put their heads together and whispered unintelligibly among themselves, and then the Englishman, apparently their leader, gestured grandly for Bear to approach. Bear went and leaned to the mask, and all of us in the room were quiet, but all we could hear was a murmur.
When the mask stopped speaking in his ear, Bear stood and shouted in mock alarm, They say they come for fucking and fighting!
The women and girls squealed on cue. The younger men rose to their feet in fighting posture.
Bear made a patting motion with his two hands as if to calm them down.
He said to the Boogers at large, What are your names?
There was a murmur from the group and then the Spaniard, seated way at the end of the bench, muttered something. Bear went to him and listened again and very solemnly announced, He says his name is Enormous Prick.
The women laughed and some snorted in disbelief and one of the older women said, Weasel Prick, more like. Bear, unfazed, went down the row of the Boogers asking names. They were all to do w
ith the nether parts, each filthier than the last, and not at all limited as to gender. Two words, a noun and a modifier, so make up your own. The permutations are not endless.
But when Bear got to the Wasp Ghost, he held his ear to the grey and frightening visage and then stood up and said a pair of sibilant words that I could not translate and neither could anyone else. They all looked puzzled and whispered among themselves and made it clear by their resistance to laughter that the name was a failure as an act of imagination. The last man, the Englishman, saved the day by delivering a name of such amazing genital filth that I do not dare to call it even in this cruder time. He brought the house down.
The drummers and rattlers started a quick fluttering rhythm, and the singers came hollering in with a lyric prominently featuring the English Booger’s name in nearly every line. All the Boogers rose and began another dance, bending awkwardly and shuffling out of time with the music in the manner of ignorant outlanders poorly mimicking an actual dance. Everything was awkward—their footwork, the angles of their arms, the cock of their heads. Everybody laughed and I laughed too. But all I could think was that if I were called upon to take the floor, my dance wouldn’t be any better than the foolish Boogers’, a risible emulation.
As soon as the laughter tapered to a close, the drums struck up a tempo like a heartbeat at its limits of velocity and the Boogers all broke into a run around the fire, and then they went at the women sitting on the benches and on the floor, thrusting their hips and grabbing at the women’s breasts and asses and humping away like boars in rut but in a mocking way. The Wasp Ghost, though, moved as if to a different music, slower. It peered into people’s faces and made signals with its small hands that might have been meaningful to another race of people entirely. Meanwhile, the Englishman had come up with a great innovation for his red gourd penis. It had a hog’s bladder inside, and he could squeeze it and water would shoot from a hole in the stem end of the gourd and squirt at the women, though mainly he hit the walls and the ceiling. The women howled and laughed, and one of them forgot for a minute that she was not supposed to know who was behind the mask and remarked loudly that Red Squirrel’s real gourd neck, though much smaller, squirted only water too, and that was the reason he couldn’t get no babies.