It had taken all summer to write a poem suitable to the occasion. In all honesty, I’ll have to say that the final draft touched many of the same keys as the bird poem. But mine was briefer and more particular in the details of its imagery to Claire’s specific features and to the exact geography of the valley. I copied my poem in my smallest hand onto a strip of paper and rolled it tight and tied it to depend on a long thread from the basket. And then I waited.
When Claire next came into the store during favorable weather and a dark moon, I said, Be at your window. After midnight.
I HUDDLED IN the dark below the yellow window, striking fire to the several candlewicks. When they were lit, I spread the mouth of the silk balloon and let it catch the heat. It rose like the spirits of the dead, a luminous red plasma ascending into the dark. Claire leaned out, black against the rectangle of her yellow window. She did not touch balloon or basket but reached and pulled the paper toward her and bit the silk thread through with her teeth and let the balloon fly on.
There was a breath of wind, a faint exhalation of the night, not even enough to stir the dry leaves on the ground. But enough to send the balloon drifting away from the house on a descending path. It floated off into the cornfield, only a few feet off the ground, glowing and mysterious, moving against the dark line of autumn trees. And then my balloon fell into a dry stook of fodder and collapsed and the basket upended and lit up like tinder and the fodder blades caught fire. Immediately, the stook was burning like a signal beacon out in the field, the flames standing thirty feet tall in the night and making a loud hissing sound.
I looked back toward Claire’s yellow window and it suddenly went black. I ran and lay down behind a laurel bush. A light was lit downstairs. Featherstone, straight out of bed and backlit and wearing nothing whatsoever, came walking calmly out the door with a shotgun in his hands. He put it to his shoulder and fired both barrels out into the field, two booming reports with long yellow spouts of muzzle flash lighting the ground around him. I think he fired more as a kind of statement of selfhood rather than in hope of hitting something. And then he went back into the house. If I were a painter, I would spend a great deal of effort trying to capture that scene, a dark night sky with broken clouds, a fodderstook burning, a naked man illuminated in a halo of gun light.
7
AS PLANNED, TALLENT AND I SWAPPED POSTS WITH THE ONSET of cold weather and Claire’s departure for Savannah. Back in Wayah, I didn’t see much of Bear until hard weather drove him down from the mountains. In the winterhouse that year, with wind howling outside and woodsmoke lying thick under the ceiling, I listened as Bear told hunting tales from the months of my absence. It had been a series of seasons wherein all his solo jaunts through the woods were desperately boogered just short of fatality. He divided the narrative in three parts, no detail spared, for we had plenty of time. But I will summarize.
In green midsummer he was bit by an enormous snake, much longer than he was tall. The head of it was nearly as big as a dog’s head, fangs the size of his pair of crooked forefingers. He thought snakes like that were long since gone from this world, but he was wrong. The calf of his leg swelled up as big around as the mouth to a bucket, and he couldn’t walk out of the mountains. He lay under a rock ledge for days, taking no food but just drinking from a drip of water coming directly from a seam in the rock. The skin of his calf turned black and then split open from knee to ankle. It was two weeks before he was able to hobble home, thin as a cornstalk.
On the next trip, at the highest pitch of autumn, he had inadvertently shot and killed a grey wolf right at dusk, thinking it was some other animal entirely, a young doe or a long-legged hog. The light was very low, and he had been intemperate. Of course the sin of killing a wolf had invalidated his gun for further use. He tried cleaning it by filling its barrel with seven thin sourwood wands and soaking it in the river overnight, but still it would not hit a target. So he finally gave up his efforts and removed the lock and donated the piece to the children of the village to be used as a toy.
Then, on the very next trip, during a cold grey spell of early winter, he made camp at the lip of a cliff up in the high balsams. All he had for supper was a tea he brewed over his campfire from some frost-withered but nourishing-looking plant matter reminiscent of mushroom or lichen that he found growing in a rock garden nearby. A hard freeze settled in shortly after dark. Inexplicably and without precedent, the stars grew big as pine torches blazing across the sky. The full Snow Moon was a brilliant hole in the darkness through which another world became partially visible. It was a revelation worthy of strict attendance. Bear lay out on the cliff edge, engrossed by the amazing night and the long moon-grey landscape stretching off into a mountainous distance he had never before imagined. His mind being otherwise occupied, he let the fire burn out, and he failed to wrap himself in his bedding. By silvery dawn he could hardly feel his feet. He went to the little spring nearby and soaked them in its cold trickle, but he still lost one blackened toe on his left foot to frostbite.
—What a damn bad set of moons, Bear said. The worst hunting I’ve ever known.
With that, I changed the subject and told my love story from the summer. I went on for a day or two, between meals and sleep, doing the best I could to be entertaining with the material I had—the details of Claire and Featherstone, the beauty of Valley River, lavish Cranshaw, my anguish and desire concerning Claire.
When it became Bear’s turn to talk about love, the first line of his story was this: I should have enjoyed an old age of quiet and respect as head man of my people, a wise voice in council, a strong tale-teller on winter nights. But instead I’m a fool and a subject of gossip and hilarity.
At that point I figured I was probably whipped in the contest of storytelling, and all I could do was listen.
Bear said he had fallen deeply and badly in love with a beautiful young widow largely on the basis of her pitiless and insatiable lovemaking. She was named Dogwood Leaf and also Sara. He could not get enough of her. And so when she insisted that, to continue, he had to marry her and her two sisters as well, he went right along and did it, for he still held with the old ways, even though the mixed-bloods and the white Scots Indians out on the Nation had declared that the old ways were swept aside and marriage ought henceforth to involve just two people, a restriction which had not prevailed before.
I should say here that Bear had been married quite a few times and was disinclined or unable to put a specific number to it. But to say he had numerous wives gives a possibly inaccurate impression. A pasha ruling over a harem or a cock treading a flock of hens in the farmyard. Some of the women he had left, and some had left him. It was about even. He held no bitterness toward any of them. And he still missed his first wife, Wild Hemp, with a bitter ache nearly fifty years after her death. When he thought of her, he was as forever young as she, for she would always be seventeen, and a great deal of love in him stayed back there.
Sara, though, was sensible enough not to be jealous of the dead, or else she didn’t much care in what direction Bear’s true feelings took flight. He married the three sisters all at one time, and they brought with them several widowed and spinster cousins, and a violent-tempered mother, and an old great-grandmother who claimed to have lived several decades past a hundred. So Bear was vastly outnumbered and much beleaguered by his many new women, who would gang up on him and overrule him in most decisions except in the traditional male areas of war and hunting, of which the former was entirely gone and the latter but a shade of the past and largely just an excuse for men to get away to the quiet woods.
Bear’s women at least agreed with him in following the old ways, which dictated that the fields were the concern of women and thus fell under their ownership and were not his at all. And also the cabin and granary and of course the menstrual hut, which after years of abandonment suddenly began doing a brisk business near the full of the moon. If Bear ever ventured into the fields just to strike up a conversation with the women
—for he had no interest in hoeing—they would run him out. The oldest woman, called Grandmother Maw because her husband had been the great Hanging Maw, was built low to the ground to begin with, and age had bent her practically double with rheumatism, so she was only about waist-high to Bear. Nevertheless, she went after him one day with an old flint hoe, hollering, No men in my corn. No bloody men.
Bear slept most nights in the townhouse, and when he couldn’t stand it anymore, he went creeping by moonlight to visit Sara in the cabin on the off chance that she would agree to bed with him. And if Bear had little desire for the other new wives, they had none at all for him. One seemed not to be able to tolerate the sight of him and made angry biting comments about his every word or act, and the other treated him as a clown that God had created for her especial amusement. All three of the wives had lovers who came and went. These young men ate from the stewpot and disappeared into the sleeping houses at moonrise and were gone by dawn. All of the wives used the medicine formulas that armored them against falling in love, so their hearts remained free and clear. But they also worked the formulas that made men fall in love with them, so they had awful power. Bear was at a great disadvantage against them.
Soon, the lovemaking with Sara, which before the marriage had been frenzied and diurnal, suddenly slowed until it seemed to him that eclipses of the moon happened more frequently. And when she did take him on, he became the butt of jokes for days afterward, for the cabin where the women slept was small, like all the houses were at Wayah, and any sense of amatory privacy in such confined spaces was purely an illusion constructed from the decorum and reticence of the other inhabitants. But Sara’s people—her mother and sisters and especially her grandmother—had neither. They’d talk about Bear’s love sounds over breakfast soup and would contest with one another to see which among them could most closely mimic his groans. They made the sounds of boar hogs rooting in the ground, of groundhog whistles, buck snorts, crow calls. Bear would end up rushing from the house, either to sit all day sulled by the fire of his townhouse or to wander up and down the river no matter the weather in search of company and sympathy, in which case he would end up at the trade post, drinking and damning love in all its forms and wishing I were there to listen to him talk, for Tallent was a poor audience and didn’t care a thing for stories, only writing figures in our ledgers.
8
THAT NEXT SUMMER IN VALLEY RIVER, I WAS NOT MUCH OF A BUSINESSMAN. Nor did I crack a lawbook. Mostly I concerned myself with the slight weight of Claire’s breast in my hand, the echo of a new poem from The Congaree Quarterly or The North American Review in my head, the mute colors of long sunsets, late suppers at Cranshaw lit with a great many spermaceti candles. Later, the spin of stars across the night sky as I rode home, for I never overnighted at the plantation.
Featherstone poured wine in great profusion that summer, and I knew enough of the trade by then to judge each bottle’s considerable value on the open market. He bought only the best. Champagne in the afternoon and claret in the evening. He poured French wine like it was worth no more than the pure heavy springwater that rose cold and free from the ground. His library was also free, and I read from it with equal intoxication. Poe’s Tamerlane, Byron and Blake, Brockden Brown’s vivid ridiculous novels. Sidney’s Arcadia seemed particularly to the point. Nothing made Featherstone happier than to see Claire and me reading, whether slumped in the lawn chairs on fair days or with a low fire going in the parlor when it rained.
On fair nights, Featherstone burned sparking head-high fires in the yard and sat at the edge of the light and drank the last of the wine and talked about astronomy and quizzed us on our current reading matter. When he eventually wandered inside to sleep, Claire and I went to the river and stripped to the skin and made squeaky love neck-deep in the cool water, with the morning fog already settling around us onto the black face of the river, my feet wedged deep between round stones and her legs tight about my hips.
Afternoons, Claire and I roamed the valley countryside in Featherstone’s cabriolet and stopped when it suited us to grasp and fumble into each other on the tucked and rolled leather seats and also on mossy stream banks and out in the middle of the river on boulders with white water rushing on either side and rain falling at a slant from the sky and hissing around us or else the sun beating down hard and the river smelling like all of the valley—earth and stones and plants—had been steeped into a tea from the rainwater that ran down the slopes to make the river. We made love so often under the open sky that Claire became brown all down her breasts and belly and also her arced ass and faintly downed thighbacks. Previously, in May, all those parts had been luminous white, the ridiculous clothing of a young lady having been designed to ensure that under normal circumstances the only parts of her person the sun ever touched were the backs of her hands, on the occasions when she ventured to remove her gloves, and her face, when she tipped it out of the shadow of her bonnet’s brim. I suppose I must have been equally brown, though all I remember is one uncomfortable night with my ass so sunburned I had to sleep on my stomach and the next morning surreptitiously rubbing myself with the juice of green tomatoes, which is a well-known palliative in such cases.
THE MORNING BEFORE summer solstice. I worked my hands down into the oak-split basket of dusty forked roots and stirred them around and judged them all to be sound. Poured them into the hopper of the scale and finger-tapped the weights from side to side until I achieved balance. Noted the weight and current value in the ledger beside the man’s name. Flying Squirrel.
I said, You want credit or cash?
He stood looking down at the floor, uncertain. As if we hadn’t done this about a dozen times recently.
—Credit, he finally said.
I wrote down fifty cents in the book and handed him his basket. He walked out and I followed him onto the porch. Claire was sitting in the store yard astraddle a horse I didn’t recognize, bulging panniers behind her saddle.
—We’re going to the bald and we’re going to sleep up there three nights of the full moon.
—We are? I said.
She talked English, and though Flying Squirrel claimed not to understand a word of it, he looked at me funny and then went on out to the road and looked back again and walked away.
Claire said, Shut this place up. Get Waverley tacked and let’s go. Come on.
—Featherstone? I said.
—Gone a-roving, not to return for a week at the inside. As much as a month at the outside.
I packed a pair of saddlebags and threaded the stock lock through the staple on the post door and clicked it fast and left a note. Be back shortly. Time was measured differently back then.
We set out on horseback up the trail to the Lizard Bald. Claire led. And all the way, I watched her hair fall against her back and admired the way it caught the light and shifted with the movements of her horse over the raggedness of the trail. The passway was full of rocks and went tacking up the mountain and we crossed the creek a dozen times. The leaves on the trees hung heavy and dark on the limbs from all the moisture. The whole world smelled like pulling a mossy smooth stone up from a creekbed and inhaling its fragrance. Toward midday the sky was like blue cloth faded nearly white from many washings, not a cloud in sight from horizon to horizon. By afternoon it rained out of black clouds like pouring piss from a boot, a common simile the tenor of which I have never understood. And afterward it was so foggy in the woods that you could hardly see your horse’s ears ahead of you. Then the sun began setting, casting yellow and red beams through breaking clouds. Twilight went on for such a great while that you began to suspect night might not fall at all. If there was a time of year to be young and roaming the mountains, this was it.
We reached the bald at moonrise and built a small fire. We had decided not to cook and ate only water crackers with soft cheese and hot-pepper jelly I had brought. And four new peaches that Claire contributed, which we ate out of our hands like apples, fuzzy skin and yellow flesh both. A
nd then we lay in a nest of quilts in the long grass and watched the Green Corn Moon ride slowly across the luminous arc of sky, looking so much bigger and softer than any of the winter moons that you could hardly believe it was the same orb. The horses grazed in the distance with the dew dark on their backs. I remember, sometime before dawn, Claire shrugging from the blankets all naked, her bare shoulders and tapered back blue in the moonlight, the tall grass silver and fallen over in long heavy skeins like a woman’s hair. She wandered out to take in the view and came back under the blankets shivering, dew-wet all down her legs. We lay talking all night together until the first color of morning, and then we slept an hour or two, and when we awoke, everything below was a white ocean of fog. We boiled coffee atop one of only a few sunlit islands. And then the fog lifted out of the valleys and the folded world revealed itself and went on as far as the limits of sight permitted.
We spent three such nights sleeping out on the bald, living like angels, high above the corrugated world, bathed in various hues of light from dawn to dawn, privileged to be young at the highest pitch of green summer. We had taken little food and a single pot and a few blankets, but many books. Had it been rainy, we would have been miserable. The days, though, were blue. And the nights silver, lit by the briefest full moon of the year, arcing so bright across the sky that we read by it, both of us mad with words in whatever form, poems or tales. Sometimes we read to ourselves and sometimes to each other.