That moment has haunted me all my life. Her sitting on the tailboard of the wagon, going away, the driver rattling the reins and the mules pulling and the wooden members of the wagon rubbing and rattling against one another as the wheels rolled through the mud. Claire bending her head and her hair falling over her face like drawing curtains across a bright window. And me saying nothing. Doing nothing. I was a young man, but I believed my best life was over.
3
I RODE BACK TO WAYAH, THROUGH THE GLOOMY GORGE, WITH THE feeling that the whole world was splitting apart. Bill Axe sought me out immediately upon my arrival. He was a half-blood and lived on the outskirts of our land. He urgently needed to tell me about a visit to his homestead by a little party of pilgrims. We sat by the fire in the trading post, and I listened to his story.
They arrived at Axe’s place before dark, carrying the odors of journey in their clothes and their hair and on their skin—scents of morning dew beading the leaves, the dust of the trail, the droppings of animals, sweat, and woodsmoke. They had come down out of their home on Nantayale Creek and followed the river through its narrow black gorge where the water ran white between great smooth boulders and the walls were so high and close that the sun only shone at midday. They came out the lower end of the gorge into the open valley, where they could see the big mountains standing blue to the north like a wall marking the ultimate limits of the world. Somewhere in their eastward progress, they had crossed the boundary line and had left the Nation and entered America and become fugitives.
There were about a dozen of them, men, women, and children—three generations of Charley’s family. The youngest boy was named Wasseton in honor of the first president, and he led a little small-boned packhorse loaded with a lumpy burden of food and pots and blankets. Equipage for living out in the high mountains for some time to come. A dog loped along with them, and she was of such antique configuration that she might have been a recent convert from the tribe of red wolves hunted nearly to absence by whites who could not abide their existence and also by Indians recently forgetful of the old pledge never to kill them due to the close blood relation between wolf and man. The dog carried her triangular head hanging loose, almost touching the ground, and her nose often pulled her out into the woods on some fascinating scent-path.
Bill Axe’s cabin stood in a clearing of tulip trees above the north bank of the river. A fire of red cedar logs burned on the ground outside the house, and the smoke in the air smelled like incense. The slant light of afternoon fell in broken beams through the yellow leaves and straight trunks. Axe sat asleep in a straight chair by the fire with his hands folded in his lap and his chin on his chest. Everyone but Charley stood off in the trees and waited. Charley went into the clearing, walking effortfully on bowed legs like an old horseman, though he had seldom ridden.
Charley touched Axe on the shoulder with two fingers and then stepped back.
Axe looked at Charley and rubbed his hands down his face to compose himself for wakefulness. Charley was the color of old polished cherrywood. His face was marked with hard wrinkles, running horizontal on his forehead and vertical on his cheeks and neck, and they were deep enough to lose a handful of river pearls in the folds. He was a short man but broad at the shoulders, stout through the barrel of his body, round-headed and big-handed. He wore a red bandana, blue calico shirt, brown linen britches, and greasy deerhide moccasins without beading or other ornament. His hair was going grey and he wore it blunt-cut below his ears where his wife, Nancy, trimmed it monthly by gathering up the excess at the back of his neck in her fist and lopping it off with one swipe of a skinning knife. He was only about sixty, but he looked eighty and was a grandfather several times over.
Axe said, You’re taking the wrong direction. The soldiers are riding up and down the river looking for runners.
—I’m not going, Charley said. I’m abiding by the old lines.
—They’re wiped clean away. No more boundary lines. No more Nation.
—I’m not going.
—A man can’t live in the woods. They’ve emptied out. Everything’s gone. The deer and bear and turkey are on the way to wherever the bison and elk already went. Far away. Where you’re going.
Axe argued that the whole slab of mountain range, all the southern slopes, the cuts where the creeks drain down to the rivers, the dry ridges leading up like ribs to the long crest of the chine, are indeed a vast and convoluted piece of terrain. But not endless. And a man cannot crawl under a rock and disappear. Much less a family, three generations extending from Charley down to members not yet weaned and still wavery on their feet. Nor can such a group turn themselves into bush fighters and bandits.
Charley said again, I’m not going.
During the day’s walk, the boy Wasseton had shot several squirrels from chestnut trees with darts from a cane blowgun taller than he was. The boy said he could smell squirrels, especially on damp days. At a distance of ten paces, Wasseton had driven long shaved hickory darts through their skulls with a single plosive breath.
Some of the women skinned and gutted the squirrels as handy as shucking an ear of corn and ran them through from ass to mouth with sharp birch skewers and set them to roasting over the fire coals. Nancy mashed pinto beans and mixed them with cornmeal and wood-ash lye and rolled the mixture between her palms into little loaves and wrapped them in scalded fodder blades and held the packages together with thin strips shredded from fodder blades and tied in neat knots. She simmered them in a black iron pot. Axe’s wife brought out some chunks of yellow squash and cooked them at the edge of the fire until they softened up.
When the cooking was done, the squirrels looked awfully little with the hair and skin off, but they were sizzling brown and shining with grease. Their grimacing mouths shone full of long yellow teeth.
Charley’s people sat by the fire with Axe and his wife and ate the meal off wood trays with cane-stalk implements. Charley had a pattern to eating a squirrel. He kept it on its skewer and worked back to front, eating the little hams first, each by each, and then he went at the body meat, eating it off the ribs as if it lay in rows like corn kernels. When he finally got to the head, he broke it off and put it in his mouth and worked it around for quite some time like he was gumming tobacco. And then when he was done, he reached in a finger and pulled out a bare little skull and showed it cupped in his palm like it was a fine achievement, his own creation worthy of favorable comment.
Nobody said much of anything during the meal. But later, when Charley’s people had made camp in the clearing and fallen asleep, Axe and his wife lay in bed and talked quietly in the dark about how they might gracefully rid themselves of these dangerous guests.
And after Axe was finished telling his tale, I too wondered what varieties of woe Charley might bring upon us when the Army came searching. I had known Charley a little since boyhood and felt disoriented in a world where a subsistence farmer and his family could become transformed into dangerous fugitives.
THROUGH VARIOUS CHANNELS, bits of copied correspondence continued to fall my way.
Lieutenant H. C. Smith to Colonel Haden
Your favor of the 24th instant of August including your orders to find and “put into motion” toward the Indian Territories the fugitives said still to inhabit this region was duly received, and I have done my all to carry your wishes forward. But I am afraid my efforts have produced little gain.
You refer to assistance reportedly given to the fugitives by the few bad white men scattered among the mountains, but I have yet found no evidence of such assistance. At every white settlement of five dogtrot log cabins and a frame church, the inhabitants congregate to tell us of great masses of Indians hiding high in the mountains. They fear them and fervently wish us to rout them out. But we cannot verify their tales, and tales are all I believe them to be.
We have searched both sides of the Little Tennessee and about ten miles up the Tuckasegee, marching long days, though of little mileage, tracing every rumor an
d tiding mongered hereabouts. The land is unimaginably rough, and in the laurel thickets five hundred men could hide from a thousand in an area of exceedingly small scope and we have found nothing. We went up the Nantahala and from there we searched Snowbird, Buffalo, Hanging Dog, and Beaver-dam, days and days of travel in terrain whereupon our horses could not find secure footing and we often had to walk them, and all with the result that we found but some old thatched hunting camps and one Indian man so blind he could not travel, and during the whole time of which heavy rain was falling from a dark sky and the autumn leaves yellow and red in the trees and slick on the ground. There is a great deal of mast, mostly chestnut, but little or no game to be seen as it has all been hunted out to near barrenness, buffalo and elk thirty years gone and deer failing fast, and many nights we have had to make do with our dry provisions. I do not see how this place could support a lone man in the wild, much less a large population of fugitives.
The men have been in ill temper and poor health. They cough and their clothes and bedding are wet constantly and in camp they hang them on stick frames to scorch by the fire, but the dews and mists and rains of morning wet them again. On the trail the men frighten themselves with phantom dangers that they imagine lurk in the forest. They cannot see ten feet beyond the passway, and they invent ambush from every fall of limb or call of bird and I have had to threaten to severely penalize any man who fires indiscriminately.
Frankly, sir, I cannot understand our continuing concern with this land and its inhabitants either white or red. The Indians are ignorant beyond all reckoning and the whites too, mostly the dregs of Scotland and Ireland fled here for lack of alternative. The country is no better than a jungle of unpracticable mountains cut through with narrow coves and deep gorges, being generally precipitous cliffs falling directly to unnavigable rocky rivers. Beyond the river vallies the little flat ground is filled with thickets of azalea and laurel almost impenetrable to anything but a deer or an Indian and them crawling on their knees. Its only value to the white settlers is as a range for cattle and swine and the country must become much more thickly inhabited before it will be used for that, and if in the meantime the small number of fugitive Indians who presumably now occupy it are left undisturbed the worst injury which can arise from their continuing presence will be the loss of a few hogs and a little corn to the whites in the vicinity, who I should point out purchased all they have of both from these very Indians.
THE YARD OF THE stockade was packed with people, internees. Too many people in too little space. Families had staked out futile claims to a place on earth by spreading blankets on the ground. People sat in small groups talking. Some lay curled up, knees to chest, trying to sleep. Children wandered about, aimless and blank. Personal goods and clothing lay scattered about. It looked like the aftermath of a train wreck. The smell from the toilet pits brought tears to my eyes. Up against one palisade, a minister sat with his ass upon a crate that had held wine bottles. The stunned look on his face suggested that his imprisonment had come as a surprise to him. He was like a lot of them down on the Nation; he thought becoming as white as he could would protect him. Look white, dress white, act white, be white. He had his black slaves and a few Christian Indians fanned around him, listening to some of the pronouncements of God on the subject of how people ought to act. The Commandments were, as always, especially favorable to the rulers. The minister’s skin was as white as the thin pages of the Bible open on his lap. He had on a dusty black frock coat and a white shirt, and he was locally celebrated for holding a degree in divinity from Princeton College. About all the Indian he could have had in him was a half-blood grandmother, but that was enough. If he were Negro that would make him an octoroon. The words for blood fractions went even smaller than that, down to the thirty-second part of dark blood that in some states still disqualified one from the many entitlements of being white. But primarily, the preacher was a citizen of the Nation and not America, so he had to go.
As I wove my way through the yard, overhearing a thin slice of the sermon, I reckoned the slaves must be doubly stunned, seeing how their Indian masters were suddenly powerless and stripped of nearly every item of private property except for themselves.
The day was bright and blue, but at the far end of the stockade I was shown into a room with the shutters pulled, a square of space dim as evening. Colonel Haden was a big hog of a man, with biscuit crumbs in his whiskers and gravy stains down his shirtfront. Though it was going on noon, he sat behind a table littered with breakfast dishes. White plates with smears of dark yellow where the yolks of soft-fried eggs had run and congealed. Cold coffee and cream skinned over in a cup. A decimated round of warm butter slumping on its dish. In a rambling sort of way, the colonel was talking out a letter to a young scribe, who sat at a corner of the table and scratched fiercely at a sheet of paper, trying to keep up with the rapid flow of words.
I stood and waited, and in a minute the colonel lost his place in his own thoughts and fell silent. He looked as if he needed a nap or a drink. He picked up the coffee cup and rotated the contents and set it back down. The scribe used the pause to correct an error in his transcription near the top of the page. He scraped at the words with his penknife and then shook pounce on the bad spot and rubbed it with agate and rewrote the colonel’s sentiments accurately. In the meantime, the colonel had lost interest in the letter and had begun lighting a pipe.
He looked up at me from his puffing and said, You’re the lawyer?
—At times.
—Well, whether this is one of those times or not, I’d like you to listen to something and then hear what say you in response.
He shuffled among the scattered papers and came up with a sheet that he studied to himself a moment and then handed to the scribe.
—Summarize the relevant sections, please.
The scribe read the several pages of the letter through in silence. He looked out the window for a minute of deep contemplation and then, all at one fast swoop, said, During the period of detention, this Cooper sold the Indians popskull liquor at prices that would buy a whiteman bonded Tennessee whiskey. His young clerks traded right by the stockade, where they were penned until the cart they sold from was ordered to be confiscated. After that, they sold liquor from their persons, in coat pockets and satchels. He is said to be a man of such make that he could preach temperance out of his mouth while at the same time digging in his pocket to make change for a bottle and not see any conflict between the two actions. These Indians were about as low as you can get to be. Nevertheless, he sold them liquor in any quantity they desired and could afford, from the demijohn to the noggin. And under his influence they became drunk as lords and about half of them spent their days laughing and the other half sitting with their backs against the stockade palings and their blankets over their heads, either passed out or crying. He was ordered again to quit selling, and he not only continued to do so but raised Cain about our authority to set conditions on him. He was banned from entering the stockade until the primary departure. Unfortunately, this Cooper is also a sharp lawyer and has long been under the spell of an old chief in these parts, and they have overmastered their fraction of Indians for quite some time. And whenever he is not here going buck wild, full Indian in language and customs all the way down to playing their deadly violent ball game, he’s in Washington City dancing at fancy balls and bootlicking every wheelhorse and crony in the Government, which is why his bunch of Indians get to stay in their homes unmolested while all the rest are hunted up out of the woods like hogs in the fall. He has written a great raft of lawyer letters to his Washington City friends complaining that we had no right to deny his legitimate business and furthermore claiming he is owed a substantial reimbursement for vaguely specified expenses, some related to food and other supplies he says he gave the Indians after we failed to meet their basic needs. In conclusion, what are we to do with him?
When the scribe fell silent, the colonel drew on his pipe and puffed smoke. He took the le
tter from the scribe and tossed it back among the clutter.
—Any speculation as to the correspondent? the colonel said.
—Apparently not one of my well-wishers, I said. Perhaps some green young lieutenant unacquainted with the facts.
—Major Cotton, he said. He picked the letter up again and studied the signature and said again, Major Cotton.
—I’m shocked that a man of such rank is so misinformed, I said.
The colonel waited awhile, entranced by the smoke rising from his pipe. His timing was impeccable. Finally he said that he did not intend to altercate. And under no circumstances would he consent to my outrageous claims for reimbursement of expenses. But he had a counteroffer. A deal for services as guide and translator that only I was in a position to render.
—We intend for you to help us bring in the runners, the colonel said.
NEXT MORNING, I watched from up the hill as the fort emptied out in a sad parade. Soldiers on horseback, wagons loaded with provisions under their canvas coverlids, Indians and their slaves following afoot behind, children walking and babies being carried. Everything was a shade of brown, the people and their clothes, horses and wagons, and even the muddy road itself.
And this was not a singularity. There were other such forts scattered about the old Nation, each host to its own drab procession heading out to the West. A whole country shed of its people in the course of a summer.
TWO DAYS LATER, back in Wayah, I sat in the dim midday townhouse with Bear.
—You talked with that colonel? Bear said.
—Haden’s a detestable old sow. His nose was so far up Jackson’s ass for so long he couldn’t smell honeysuckle, even if you presented him with an armload of blossoms. He needs to be gutted, and I had about half a mind to do it. Right through to the backbone with a Bowie knife, which I had on my hip.