Much later, journalists and travel writers would discover these mountaintop clearings and find them irresistibly mysterious. Their summits were among the tallest in the East but not elevated enough to reach a tree line in this temperate rain forest. Some of the balds comprised scores of acres, wide bright meadows of tall grass and wildflowers, forming sudden dramatic openings to sky and distance out of the dark canopy of forest. Bear said all the balds were made by a giant flying serpent, and I’ve never come up with a better explanation of them, though I’ve tried.
Those three days and nights I had the best of both worlds, in that I had Claire and yearned for her at the same time. I looked down through the blue air, onto watersheds and dividing ridges and far ranges, and thought myself to be king of all that summer country.
Decades later in life, deep into aching middle age, I held deeds to most of the land I then saw, all the way to the longest horizon, stacks of papers saying all that summer country was mine. But of course, all the paper in the world was nothing in comparison to those three days.
UP ON THE BALD, young as we were, we sometimes tried to joke about marriage. But mostly the jokes didn’t work. Age was not the impediment. Teenage brides were common. In fact, if a girl was exceptionally desirable, she frequently became bound to an old man of thirty-five or forty or even older who could give her a place in the world. Such marriages were business transactions wherein the bloom of youth was traded while it still had value in exchange for a life’s security.
For us, however, the law was the issue. My state did not much care what mixtures or degrees of dark people wed one another. Among themselves they could go at matrimony however they saw fit. People in gradations of skin from the color of an eggplant to that of a chicken egg were free as the birds in the sky. But the state placed severe restrictions on whom a white person could marry. Minor fractions of darkness undetectable to the human eye were given significance to the extent that a drop of blood in a bucket of milk was sufficient to keep lovers apart.
Claire and I somewhat enjoyed the fact that the state prohibited us from ever joining in wedlock. Just talking about it made us feel like outlaws, which at that age seems a desirable condition. We’d break off kissing, lips all swollen and reddened, and she’d swear that the law suited her fine. She’d take nobody for a husband but a rich old man of vague race with money to burn. Some dusty-colored man with property and a big house with crystal chandeliers and suits of black clothes and hardly more Indian in him than she had. One drop of blood in a bucket of milk. Their children would come out so minutely fractional as to be a living confusion to the law. And when she was done with her fantasies, all I could swear fidelity to was bachelor freedom unto death. A long string of women stretching from here into withered senility.
And then, a minute later, we’d declare undying fealty to each other, and it seemed like bitter fetters to acknowledge the limits of the law.
—Does it address the Chinese? Claire said.
—I seriously doubt it, I said.
—So they wouldn’t deny you a Chinese wife?
—Well, they’ve probably not thought of it yet.
—It’s just a matter of time.
—Who you are is who you think you are, I said.
She leaned and kissed me as if I’d said something sweet and dear. But what young man wants to be sweet and dear rather than moody and mysterious?
She said, No, it’s not that way at all. Most of the time it’s who they think you are that matters.
I said, As long as we’re dreaming, there’s always Georgia. They’ll marry anybody down there.
And it was true. Whatever mix of bloods the bride and groom had between them, they could cross the line and ride Georgia’s pig-track roads to the nearest court town and find a drunk preacher or a sober magistrate willing to marry anybody in exchange for five dollars. That was the kind of place Georgia was. Wide open all the time. And then, of course—even apart from the laxity of Georgia customs—marriage was occasionally a casual thing on the frontier. People sometimes just said to hell with the state and called their own selves married and went on about their business for the rest of their lives.
—Maybe we’ll get up in the morning and just go to Georgia, she said. No one would need to know but us, she said. It would be like a secret promise. We could just come back and go on as if nothing had happened.
—But we’d know, I said.
—Yeah, we’d know.
But we didn’t go to Georgia, not the next day or ever. And I’m not sure how my life would have worked out differently if we had.
WHEN WE LEFT the bald, we came down Deep Creek, and for a while at elevation the laurel was still blooming. We could not allow a wide place in the trail to pass without riding alongside each other and letting our hands touch. At such a moment of conclusion later in life, I would inevitably have felt a sense of failure, an overwhelming gloom in the knowledge that days such as those three were done and gone forever. But back then I simply exulted in the false but glorious knowledge that life would be exactly this way from now on. I wasn’t different from anybody else. I took youth as a special pact with God.
And as proof that endings were not endings, Claire reined up at a wide bend in the creek, a place of deep black water punctuated with green rocks, and went bathing. We both did. And afterward she lay drying in a patch of sun, stretched out long and naked, resting on her elbows, a spill of cream on a bed of green pigeon moss. Morning dew still stood in bright beads on the moss, and the creek water similarly beaded on her skin. Her nipples were drawn tight, stippled and cinnamon. She sat up and twisted the water out of her hair. And though I generally think that human beings are among the least beautiful of God’s creatures—I mean, just look at us, and then look at fox or crow or trout—Claire at that moment was as beautiful as people get to be.
—You ever feel like an apostrophe? she said.
—An apostrophe?
—Just a little faint mark to stand in for something more complete. A place keeper. A convention. Barely more than nothing.
—No, I said. Maybe a dash or a hyphen sometimes. Now and then a set of apostrophes.
—I was not exactly joking, Claire said.
She slipped off the moss bank into the water and sank to her chin. She slicked her wet hair back from her brow and her face was pale and bare.
—You are not very happy, are you? she said.
—What?
—Alone. An orphan. Few friends. Only prospects. Which are rarely more lasting than yellow butterflies in September.
—I’m plenty happy. And I’ve got all the friends I care to have.
—Meaning you care to have—what, three? And one of those is a horse.
—People. They’ll let you down.
EVEN IN OLD AGE, she recurs. I still dream about Claire at least twice a year. How amazing for a thing as vaporous as desire to survive against all the depredations of time, becoming, at its worst, a sad reminder that life mostly fails us. In some dreams she is just a fragrance. Sometimes lavender and sometimes clove and cinnamon, but also another scent dear to my heart. During those two summers, Claire had the habit of absentmindedly wiping her pen nib on her skirts, most of which were dark blue, so the only trace of her habit was the faint odor of ink around her.
SUMMER BEGAN WILTING to a close. Goldenrod and ironweed. Brilliant dry afternoons and the sun setting farther and farther south by the day. I had ridden from late afternoon into dark, heading to Cranshaw. That day, as they had done at summer’s end since old times, the people burned brush off the lower slopes of the mountains. It made for better hunting, easier travel. Long into night, wavering lines of fire still climbed slowly toward the black sky. Smoke hung in the air all down Valley River.
It was going on midnight when I arrived, expecting a dark house and Claire waiting on the gallery. But Featherstone still sat out in his yard in a leather club chair, smoking a whole tom turkey over a glowing bed of hickory coals. The big bird was trussed with tw
ine and skewered breast-up on an iron spit. Strips of bacon lay draped across it. Drops of fat stood on the browning skin like beads of sweat. Featherstone had his feet propped up on an empty wine crate, and he used another for a side table, on which sat a bottle of claret and a stemmed glass and a candle lantern and a pistol. He read from a book.
When he heard me approaching, Featherstone set the book winged open across his groin like a dead bird and rested his hand on the crate near the pistol without actually touching it. He looked toward the sound until I showed myself in the firelight.
Featherstone looked me up and down and then pulled out a gold Jurgensen watch as big as a biscuit and held its face to the candle lantern.
—Late to be calling.
—I told Claire I’d be by this afternoon.
—Then you’re the very emblem of timeliness.
—I came from all the way down the valley. I’m thinking of buying another post down there. I went to have a look at it and was delayed.
Featherstone lifted his boots from his ottoman and nudged it toward me.
—Sit, he said.
I moved the crate to a quartering position around the circle of the fire and looked at Featherstone. He bent forward and tossed a dry hickory split onto hot coals, and the split flamed up yellow immediately. A streak of red bristles still highlighted his grey hair.
—I’m done with this book, Featherstone said. You can take it. See what you think. I think it’s not bad.
Featherstone reached the book to me, and I took it and angled it to the fire and looked at the spine and then fingered it open and looked at a few pages of type and then closed it.
—I’ve heard of this poem and been wanting to read it, I said. Don Juan. I pronounced it as I understood the Spanish or the Mexicans might possibly do.
—Best I can tell, you say it different, Featherstone said. He rhymes it with new ’un.
I said the words experimentally. New ’un, Juan.
—It’s about a fellow can’t keep his peter in his pants. And you’ve been all anxious to read him. But I guess he stands for all mankind.
Featherstone reached out a small tin bucket with the handle of a paintbrush standing above its rim.
—Here, swab that bird and give it a turn.
I took the bucket by the bail and held it to my nose. It smelled of vinegar and hot pepper.
I dabbed the wet brush at the turkey with some delicacy until Featherstone said, There’s plenty. Slop it on till it runs.
I did as told, and the dull red liquid sheeted off the slopes of the turkey into the fire and sizzled on the coals.
—Now turn it, Featherstone said.
—The bacon will fall off, I said.
—It’s done its job. Crank away.
The spit was crooked into a handle at the end, and when I grabbed hold to give it half a turn, it seared a deep red stripe across my palm. I might have made some kind of momentary high-pitched acknowledgment.
—Shit fire, Featherstone said. I thought you had sense to use your hat or your coatsleeve or something to cover your hand.
I went to the black river and held my hand in the water but could not entirely drown the fire out of it.
When the turkey was done, we ate slices drizzled with more of the vinegar and peppers between thick cuts of wheat bread. And then we drank more wine and watched the coals of the fire. My seared hand burned on, and every so often I turned my palm to the fire and looked at the diagonal brand.
—Here, Featherstone said. A gift. Or rather, another gift consonant with the book. I’m all charity tonight.
He reached me a little red velvet pouch tied closed at the top with a pink grosgrain ribbon in the simplest bowknot. It weighed nothing.
I pulled one of the ribbon ends and fingered open the pleated top of the pouch and shook the contents out into my burnt palm. Three identical items. I knew what they were, but barely. Awful husks like shed snakeskins.
—Useful to stop the pox, Featherstone said. But also good to keep from getting babies. You soak them in water before use. And you’re meant to wash them with some considerable particularity afterward.
I tucked the items back into the pouch and reached them back to him.
I said, No thank you, sir.
Featherstone grabbed my wrist in a fierce grip, first painful and then numbing. He was looking hard at me, a raptor eyeing a rabbit.
He said, Gentlemen keep them in an inside pocket.
He released my hand.
I tucked the pouch into my waistcoat, feeling mastered.
We sat a long time without speaking, and then Featherstone poured for both of us again. He said, I believe this past issue of The Chesapeake Review is their best yet. And I agreed.
But the more I studied the fire the more this seemed like one of the moments in life which, immediately afterward and for the rest of your life, you wish you could revise to your credit. It gnaws at you when you’ve failed yourself and can’t go back and do anything about it. I could make a very long personal list of regretful moments. But this one would not be on it. I pulled the pouch out of my pocket and pitched the whole mess into the fire. The velvet smoldered a few seconds and then the guts flamed up quick and bright as pine shavings and died away.
VALLEY RIVER WAS busy with talk of the ball at Cranshaw. The party of the year. I awaited my invitation for days. No mail. Then Claire came by.
—He takes notions. Pay no attention.
—So then, I’m not to come?
—Ignore it. It’s a few hours and then it’s done. Let it go.
FEATHERSTONE’S SLAVES MUST have been making candles all week. Every window of the house blazed yellow. Men stood on the dark gallery talking. I could not see them other than when their black forms crossed in front of a window, but I could see the ends of their cigars stoke up when they puffed them, blinking here and there along the gallery like fireflies. And I could hear a mumble of voices, women suddenly laughing, and the sound of a poorly tuned spinet plinking some antique dance tune. A faint shuffle of feet. No fiddles and banjos for Mr. Featherstone’s dance. Dancing room would have been made for the party, furniture cleared out, rugs rolled up. I supposed Claire was dancing now, someone’s hand resting at the narrow of her waist or maybe a bit lower, at her hip bone or the soft place just below where her hip began arcing.
I felt just exactly as I had expected to feel when I set out from home. Exiled, bleak, an outsider lurking in the dark. And yet I had come anyway. It was a public road. Who could say no? And besides, I had been in a tragic mood for days, waiting for the invitation that did not arrive.
A majority portion of moon stood high and blue overhead, and I remained a long time burning in the road. A sad tune ran in my head like a circle.
Suddenly Claire was descending the steps, running across the lawn. Her fancy gown was green as the forest and scooped somewhat daringly at the breast. She was running right to me.
—Help me up.
I took a foot out of the stirrup and reached down a hand. She gathered the dress to mount, and as she leaped to the stirrup, her raised leg was all angles and curves above the black ankle boots. And then a glimpse of white chest and a darker depth, a scoop of shadow between her breasts as she rose toward me and swung on behind and her arms circled my waist. We were at such point of slim youth that we both fit in the curve of a saddle if we pressed hips tight together, which we did.
I gave a touch of heel and pulled right to make a show-off spin in the road, just cavalierly holding the reins one-handed. Waverley gathered himself under us and turned, pivoting in such a tight spin it felt as if his four feet would have fit on a stove lid. Then I gave a great deal of leg, and Waverley drove forward into flight.
We went hard down the road, riding double on a fine horse, the river road unspooling flat and sinuous and the wind blowing back Waverley’s mane. I looked around and Claire had loosed her hair from its binding, and it too was whipping long behind, and her dress skirt was blowing back, flaring like
a comet’s tail, as if that sweep of hair and skirt was all the effect the resistance of the world could have on us as we streaked through the night in a moment that I could not then know was unrepeatable.
As far as I knew, we would go on endless. Youth and night and wild freedom and not one real worry yet intruding on our thoughts. Riding with the certainty that life could be a stream of such moments, a dream forever. I thought we could ride beyond the endurance or even the mortality of horses. Beyond the mortality of ourselves. All by virtue of velocity.
Waverley flew right through the ford in the river without letup, and the black water rose white around us as it parted and then fell behind. Claire leaned forward and put her lips to my right ear and said, Don’t ever stop.
Remember, please, that back then there was nothing on the face of the earth faster than a fine horse at full gallop. Not one brute machine could outstrip it. In the places where they had railways, it could take four hours to go forty-five miles, at least so said Featherstone on the basis of a recent trip to Georgia. We were going multiples of that mechanic speed, ripping the night right down the middle in what now seems to me a last glorious expression of a dying world. We tore west down the valley through tunnels of close woods. And then we burst into open ground, fields overlain by infinite starred skies. The high ridges of the mountains flowed along to right and left in the moonlight. Waverley’s stride was so long and elevated that we were only in contact with earth occasionally.
I could go on and on. But of course, eventually, we did have to break the spell and stop and let Waverley blow before his heart burst in his chest. And I had no doubt in my mind that if I had asked, he would have driven himself beyond the physically possible into death. His big willing chest went like a bellows between our legs, and I could feel Claire pressing against me, from her forehead at my hairline to the cusp of her at my hips. The moon was sloping west. Sad to say, we turned and started east. But slowly now, at a walk.