Major Ridge, who had been given his rank by Jackson back in the Creek War, had his boys with him, both approximately my age. Young Ridge was the only son, and the other was a nephew, Elias Boudinot, who had been born Buck Watie but had decided to take a name that better suited him. Boudinot and young Ridge featured themselves to be darkly Byronic figures, an image countless young men—myself included—held of themselves.
Looking back upon my first meeting with them in the social room of the Queen, it seems like we should have gotten along. For some now unaccountable reason specific to young men, we didn’t. I knew all about them, though, for they were somewhat famous. Major Ridge had sent them to Connecticut for their educations, and when they could read Latin and write fluently in every verse form common to the English language, they came back to the Nation dressed to the teeth in the latest fashion, riding in matched cabriolets drawn by matching teams, and married to matching white wives, all four of them unimaginably young and burning to make progressive reforms in every department of life you could name. Education, child-rearing, government, literature, journalism, cuisine. Upon arrival in the Nation, the two young Yankee brides were reported to look pale and stunned but game for the new lives they’d chosen with their brilliant and exotic new husbands.
The people of the North are very open-minded and so much more advanced than we are. All they did to one of the girls when it became known that she intended to marry an Indian was burn her in effigy on the main street and chime all the church bells of the town hourly throughout the night. She was sixteen or seventeen, somewhere in there. The next morning, which was a Sunday, she got up and dressed in her best clothes and walked alone straight through town, past the grey and still-smoking ashes of her pyre and into the church, where she sat on the front pew with her face set and let the congregation all glare hatred at the back of her head for an hour. She left that afternoon to meet Boudinot nearby and be surreptitiously married by a sympathetic preacher, and afterward they set out south with young Ridge and his equally stunned bride.
It took them the better part of two months to make the journey back to the Nation, because they paused on the way in New York City to watch a few plays and in Washington City to go to parties attended by members of both houses of Congress.
I don’t know what the girls were expecting when they reached the young gentlemen’s ancestral home. Wigwams and feather headdresses, maybe. What they found on arrival was the plantation house of Ridge’s family, hundreds of acres with slaves working vast fields of cotton and tobacco, moving down the rows like the shadow of storm clouds settling over the land. And inside the big house, white tablecloths and silver and china in the dining room. Presided over by a stout big-haired patriarch who went by the title of major and wore ruffled shirts and waistcoats and anything else white men were wearing in America.
All of which is to say that for the Government, Chief Ross and the Ridges were unsatisfactory Indians and hard to deal with. Silver trinkets and talk of the Great White Father got nowhere with them.
Though Ross and Ridge shared the same goal, the survival of the Nation, they hated each other more than Calhoun and Jackson did. Somewhere deep in their minds, they both imagined a future in which the Nation would become a state, a new star on the striped banner. Governor Ross or Governor Ridge living in a new executive mansion.
When their delegations arrived, I half expected Featherstone to be among them, but he was not. Lobbying must have seemed a little too much like real work, though I could have set him straight on that fear.
Both Ross and Ridge viewed me with a great deal of wariness, since I represented Indians living outside the Nation, and when I tried to suggest we join ranks in our efforts, each man let me know I was on my own and warned me not to muddy their waters with my little problems. Nevertheless, Ridge and I drank together some nights in the Queen and got along just fine when we were not talking business. But I made Ross nervous because I spoke Cherokee with a degree of polish, while Ross could barely comment on the weather, and even that topic was limited to the current moment, since the chief ’s understanding of his people’s language was limited to the present tense.
I MET CROCKETT through the agency of Calhoun. Crockett was then at the height of his fame, at least pre-posthumously. When I knew him, he was a figure of folklore; it took the Alamo to elevate him all the way to myth.
It was considerably more difficult to arrange a meeting with Crockett than with the president. In preparation, I bought Sketches and Eccentricities of Col. David Crockett and went to a coffeehouse and settled in to read. Well, the story just got the more unbelievable the farther I proceeded. And then I reached this line: Here roamed the red men of the forest, free as the breezes which fanned their raven locks. I put the book down and tried not to let it color my view of the man, for Crockett had no say in its production. Writers can tell any lie that leaps into their heads.
I had at least gotten far enough to learn that Crockett and I held in common the experience of being bound boys, though in Crockett’s case he had violated the pact his father made by running away from his new master, a hog drover, on their first journey together. Boy Crockett had dared either man—master or father—to try enforcing the contract. He backed them down. At least that’s the story the book told. And for me, it was as Romantic as all of Byron’s poetry put together.
Our first meeting was in his office in the Capitol and we got along like equals, even though Crockett was old enough to be my natural daddy. He soon began coming around the Indian Queen late afternoons for a drink and a visit. He was going through a spell of malaria about then. His color was like wood ash, and his eyes were dark and swollen below the underlids, and he was sheened with sweat even in the cool of evening. Like anybody else of good sense, when he stayed up all night drinking, he favored Scotch whisky of the highest quality, as long as somebody else was buying. He was a hard man to keep up with for more than a day or two, but I liked him and hated to miss good and useful entertainment. So I did my best, which meant showing up to listen night after night and providing a bottle of Macallan’s no more than once a week, for to do so more often would look needy and also wreak entire havoc on my wallet. One useful thing I learned from Crockett on those nights was to alternate my Scotch with glasses of chilled mineral water, preferably from the mountains of Virginia.
THOSE DAYS, it was hard to be noted as a character in Washington, what with Crockett strutting and flashing about town being the wild frontiersman. I liked him a great deal but I had no desire to become Davy Crockett’s understudy, his sidekick, his young buddy. However, I was around him enough to think that being Crockett in those days would have been pretty fine. Crockett had the attention of everyone. When he entered a room, it felt like the candles would all flicker out from the breeze created when every head suddenly turned his way. Even in a great pressing party crowd, everyone knew exactly where Crockett was at all times. If he went outside to piss, word of it spread from one end of a ballroom to the other before he could button up and get back indoors. What made me truly like Crockett was noting, in moments of a public nature, a sad discontinuity between the upcurve of his smiling mouth and the bleak deadness of his eyes. And also that Crockett knew it to be a flaw in his public image but could do nothing to correct it other than, when outdoors, to cock his hat so that it rode low on his brow, its brim casting deep shade to the bridge of his nose.
One day, drinking in the lounge of the Queen, Crockett noted that there had been a withering attack on him in one of the morning papers. I asked if that sort of thing bothered him, for back then it would have bothered me a great deal. Crockett said, Oh, I’m a big target and easy to hit, so there’s no honor in it. Every newspaper jackass with a pen and half an hour of unclaimed time gets to take a shot.
I SOON LEARNED that the public galleries of the Senate chamber were an excellent place to meet ladies, both young and youngish. What I desired was Claire, but the gallery ladies were better than lone bachelorhood. In the streets most
days, I could not help staring hard at passing strangers in case one of them might be Claire, visiting the capital with Featherstone.
I met the famous actress Mrs. Chapman at a small party in the house of a senator from one of the upper states, a squat dark little man with almost no hair and only a dense chin beard for compensation. She had grown up in Charleston, had succeeded Fanny Kemble as the principal female lead of High, Low, Jack…Game, and was the talk of the town. Wherever she went during the day, all traffic, both pedestrian and vehicular, came to a halt to watch her pass. She was tall and angular and beautiful, and a soft warm light seemed to shine down on her, following wherever she moved. But, constantly and a little awkwardly, she tried to step just out of its beam, and thus she went about with a dodging motion, as if always apologizing for herself. All men and most women found her sidling manner charming in the extreme.
While the party went on in an adjoining room, she and I circled awkwardly around a long dark mahogany table burdened with china platters filled with various delicate foods. Our orbits were duplicated in a great rippling framed mirror on the wall. Both of us eyed the little special doughballs filled with meat, the dense rum cakes and dark mincemeats. My attention was drawn to a dish of fig pastries, each no bigger around than a gold dollar. Mrs. Chapman claimed to have handmade them herself. I ate one and offered the bland opinion that it was especially good.
She had been told I published poetry, though regrettably she had read none of it. She mentioned that she knew a vastly famous old Boston writer, who had told her he could not get through a day in any peace unless he had written a specific quantity of lines. Otherwise, despair.
She paused and then mentioned the exact melancholy number. It seemed unimaginably large.
I pictured the old grey man sitting at his desk scribbling as frantic as a farmer beating out a wheat-field fire with a wet tow sack, shedding strands of white hair in a momentous backlit explosion from his nimbus of beard and coiffure, tossing the dense blackened pages over his shoulder into a pile of paper as great and conical as a haystack. It seemed to me that onanists must feel the same way. Not happy if they are unable to practice their special art daily.
But aloud I said, With me it’s the other way around.
She nodded politely and composed her face as if my comment were something worth serious consideration and not just a piece of smart-assery, for which generosity I found her even more lovely.
I met Mrs. Chapman at other parties and was initially only polite to her, given the Mrs. attached to her name. But I soon got the distinct impression that Mr. Chapman, whoever he had been, had long since passed to another world, or at least to an unimaginably distant state like Ohio or Illinois. And also, stunningly, that Mrs. Chapman was twenty-two. My age exactly.
When I discovered this fact, I brought it up at a dinner. We’re the same age.
I regretted the comment as soon as it fell from my mouth.
She said, Many are. But let’s agree to make a special pact of it.
In short order, Mrs. Chapman and I began seeing a great deal of each other. On Sundays we often went riding, usually to view the stone locks on the towpath of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. Or to the George Town heights to look across the river in the direction of Alexandria and on back to the Capitol across the thin scattering of homes and government buildings. I took her to see the portraits of significant Indians from the various peoples displayed in a chamber of the Department of War. We met at the sorts of parties where the music and dancing went on until past midnight, and then supper was served. At one party held at the house of a noted art collector, Mrs. Chapman and I danced not a step but spent time going from canvas to canvas. We decided to bypass landscape, my usual favorite, and also still life, for she did not find bowls of grapes and apples very interesting. We chose to examine only portraits that evening. Most of the faces gleamed up from brown darkness, bathed in a flattering buttery light, eyes liquid and searching. We studied them one by one and guessed in which of the two basic categories the persons belonged, preachers or drunks. At another party, we created a minor scandal by dancing every dance exclusively together. It was a fancy ball where only the eldest senators were excused for arriving en habit de ville—a phrase I overheard Calhoun use in begging the pardon of the hostess for his failure to find a suitable costume. That year, getups of Asian flavor were predominant for both men and women, though there were also the usual scatterings of pirates and gauchos and Indian maidens and chiefs, so I found an unexpected use for my purple turban and tall moccasins. Mrs. Chapman was living alone in a townhouse with only two or three servants, and when the party broke up deep in the night, I accompanied her home in her carriage. I walked back to the Indian Queen shortly before dawn with only the late-night packs of half-wild dogs roaming the streets for company, the Corn Tassel Moon almost full.
And then with little warning the play’s run was over and Mrs. Chapman was off to another city, and I moped about the riverbank for days on end and neglected my correspondence to various departments of government and back home to Tallent. I wrote a poem rather more about my moping than about Mrs. Chapman, and it was published in The Chesapeake Review.
After the pain subsided, though, I became more assured in the presence of congressmen and lobbyists from Boston and New York City, who seemed particularly polished in mixed company. I took pleasure in noting that few if any of them had run up against Charleston women. And also, my invitations to parties increased. I was out to dinners and dances at least five nights a week. That year, the fashionable younger women—and a few of the older—wore their breasts cinched down low with vast creamy expanses of skin exposed by the low scoops of their necklines. It allowed a fine appreciation of their breathing. Crockett was philosophical on the matter. Things change, he said. There’s nothing you can count on. Come back in a couple of years and they’ll be wearing them high, hove up nearly to their chins.
A lobbyist for rice growers, a wealthy plump middle-aged lawyer from Savannah, was said to live a complicated life. I did not know what that might mean other than a girl proving to be married when you thought she was not. But then I spent some time around the man and noted that his black body servant rarely left his side and spoke in a rarefied English kind of accent he had learned in Bermuda. There was a way about their eyes meeting, a way their hands touched in the passing of a teacup, tones of voice in speaking to each other. Complicated.
THE CITY WAS ripe with brothels. When the Congress was in session, the houses were full from dusk until dawn. Those who could afford it went out whoring, drunk and lustful, at least a night or two a week. The old senators, most of them fat as beeves, rolled up in their carriages just as soon as the sun went down, and then in very short order they rolled home to bed. After that, right through until dawn, the younger representatives came and went. And also all the scavengers and predators, the diplomats and agents and lobbyists like me, drawn to the scent of blood and money and power the city throws out.
One night, I played the old Washington hand, giving a walking tour to the clerk of a new senator just arrived from some little hard-shell Baptist-ridden town in Alabama. The clerk was enormously delighted to be staying, to his complete astonishment, at the famous Indian Queen Hotel, and he could not stop talking about it as we walked. The air carried the smell of the river and the mudflats. Every brothel we passed was tinkling with piano music and breathing out its own particular fragrance of perfume and sweat into the evening. I looked over, and the clerk had tears of joy in his eyes and a look of rapture beaming on his face.
—Perhaps we might choose one to enter? the clerk said.
—Perhaps we might, I said. But farther along.
A few blocks later, it was my pleasure to introduce the clerk to an entire roomful of exquisites, both young and not. Of course, that was back when men joked about the pox as if it were a runny nose.
IMMEDIATELY UPON MY return to Wayah, I engaged in a three-hour-long ball game in which my nose was broken by a blow
from a racquet. Truth be told, it was my own racquet. I made a desperate stooping dig at a grounded ball, and somehow the long webbed stick rebounded from the earth. The haft of it struck me hard, square across the bridge of my nose. A veil of blood streamed down my lower face. I went to the creek and stanched it with cold water and went on playing. I understood the injury as justice. Punishment for my time among the Washingtonians.
Bear was a spectator that day. He sat on a big downed log with a raucous group of old men drinking from a shared bottle. When the game was over and my team had come out on the bottom, Bear asked me whether I had won or lost in the bigger game against the Government. All I could say was that the ball remained in play.
WHEN I NEXT visited Valley River to check on the post there, I was told immediately upon arrival that Claire and Featherstone had returned during my long absence. An hour later I stood on the gallery, Waverley with reins looped over a rail behind me. A round brown woman of indeterminate race opened the door. I reached into a breast pocket and took out one of my cards, printed at excessive expense at the same Washington stationers that now made my journals. Please present this to Mrs. Featherstone, I said. The woman looked at the face of the card and ran a finger over the raised lettering, and then she turned it over and looked at the blank back with equal interest.
—Who? she said.
—Mrs. Featherstone. Claire.
—Oh. She don’t need your little pasteboard, but I’ll tell her you’re calling.
She handed back the card and shut the door in my face. There were chairs farther along the gallery, but I went to the steps and sat down with my back to the door. It was a still day, and I could hear voices inside. The woman came back to the door and said Claire was not receiving visitors. I asked when might be a more convenient time to return, and she said, There’s not likely to be one.