—Make sure to get that Beaver Creek land, he said, jabbing at the marks on the ground. That’s some good land. And Snowbird, all that rough land up in there. Elk Creek, from the river up to the source on both sides, all the way to the ridges. All that sidehill land around Hanging Dog. That whole Buffalo drainage.
On and on. When he was done, he had laid out a place to make a stand, a homeland in the image of the world of his youth, where we all, in our heads, most truly reside. A little bit of river-bottom farmland, good water, and a large proportion of mountain hunting land considered very nearly worthless by whites. Coves and creeks and ridges, all steep and jungled. The kind of place most people say has no value except to hold the rest of the world together. Bear’s plan was to undo all he could of the past and draw his people together again into townships. The bad years after the Revolution had scattered them into the mountains, where they lived isolated up coves, an unnatural way of doing, at least for the Indians, though the immigrant Scots seemed to like it fine. His new world would, of course, be on a smaller scale than the old, a plan enforced by our inability to buy three or four million acres of land. As is the case with all of us in life, what Bear would settle for was not as encompassing as what he wanted, but it was a great deal better than nothing at all. His dirt map was a claim of ownership on a space of earth. Not his claim alone, but his people’s.
As he saw it, the imagining of a homeland was the hardest work. The buying of it he took as a small matter delegated to me. Like he could just think it so and I would make it be.
THE AUCTIONEER WAS a hen of a man with a big prow-shaped barrel to his body and a little head with tiny close-set emotionless eyes peering out at the world from atop his long sharp nose. He chanted numbers in a rapid rhythm like song, if chickens sang. We bidders made minute gestures with fingers and chins and eyelids and elbows. My sign was a double tap of forefinger to cheekbone. The signals were of such great but ambivalent significance that when the parcel in question—eight hundred acres of steep woodland—was finally knocked down with a sharp rap of wooden mallet on tabletop, half the drunks in attendance snapped into wakefulness and hadn’t a clue whether they had bought land or not. The whole crowd let out a cheer, for it was the last parcel up for bid. I went to the table and signed the papers on that final parcel and left the courthouse.
I walked down the main street. In the afternoon light the clapboard buildings and the muddy street and muddy board sidewalks looked antique. The little mountain town, though, was so recently settled that the cemetery held only an unlucky few markers rising off-plumb from long grass, like death was an idea that had failed to catch on. The main street sloped off to a river and afforded a vista of an old townhouse mound. Rain and time had begun smoothing its pyramidal angles and its entry ramp into a general round pile. The Indian village that once spread all along the river had been gone since the Army burned it down during the Revolution. A cornfield stood in its place, the new crop only a green haze along the furrows. The townhouse too was gone, though it had stood and been occupied by an old firekeeper when I had first ridden through this valley years earlier. I remember sitting by the fire drinking herb tea with him and eating peaches from the new crop, and we spat the peach pits into a hole in the dirt floor where one of the posts supporting the roof had rotted away.
When I reached the hotel, the bar was filled with men celebrating the end of the long auction. It had taken almost two months to sell off our state’s portion of the Nation, and I had bought all of it I could afford and a great deal that I could not.
I ordered a cup of coffee and a shot of Scotch whisky at the bar and carried them to a big round table crowded with buyers. They were all listing their acquisitions and detailing their victories and defeats in a swirling conversation, voices overlapping one another around the table. Drinks came in a steady stream from the bar. Stabs of light angled through the seams in the closed shutters and made Jacob’s ladders in the thick smoke of pipes and cigars. I was tired from the long bout of commerce and only half listened. When the men were done bragging on themselves, one of them said, We’ve not heard from Will, and he bought more than all of us.
—More in quantity, another man said. But mostly what nobody else wanted.
—Some of it’s wasteland so steep a red hog couldn’t traverse it, someone said.
—How much did you buy?
—I don’t exactly know, I said. I bought what I needed to buy.
—But how much?
—In acres? I said.
—What else measure would you use for land? They don’t sell it in quarts.
—He’s awfully cultured and drinks French wine and reads their books. He probably keeps track of his holdings in arpents. Or else he’s bought so much he goes by the square mile.
—I don’t know for sure how much, I said. I haven’t added it up yet.
—Man’s bought so much land it’s not worth his time to bother counting.
—It was a right smart of land he bought. In old Europe, they’ve made countries out of less territory.
—Dukedoms at least.
—Principalities.
One man raised me an ironic toast, To the Prince of the Goddamn Indians.
Someone else said, The Duke of the Wasteland.
Glasses clinked together.
Everybody drank except for one man who declined. He said, Andy Jackson spent his whole life trying to get shut of Indians and the goddamn Nation, and Will’s trying to put it back together. I’m not drinking to that.
The table had reached a high pitch of drunkenness one degree short of pistol-pulling time. They were at the point where men need a clear direction pointed out to them or else they become dangerous.
I raised my glass and offered a toast, not to the old Nation or the new but to the sanctity of private property. It was a popular concept and received the approbation of all in attendance.
When I reached my room, late into the evening, I sat amid my piles of papers and tallied my recent purchases and added them to my previous holdings and was somewhat stunned to find that the sum could fairly be spoken of not in thousands of acres, or even tens of thousands, but in hundreds of thousands.
It was every kind of land. Not everything Bear wanted but a lot of it. I had bought whole chains of mountains, long ridges, and the entire runs of several bold creeks along with the slopes that drained into them. Every penny I had made from business and law was gone. And still, only a minority of the transactions were straight sales. The majority involved promissory notes, loans supported by other loans, kited checks, and lines of credit cosigned by figmentary personages. None of it tallied. I had constructed deals of such complex usury that I didn’t even understand some of them. But the next morning when I rode out of that town, my saddlebags bulged with contracts and deeds and notes. I had transformed Bear’s imaginary dirt map into a great convolution of interlocked promises memorialized by a cascade of paper into a vast tract of actual mountain land.
THREE DAYS AFTER the auction closed, Bear and I went walking up the cove to Granny Squirrel’s cabin. The bold creek ran white over green rocks and the trail was muddy from spring rain. Bear was dressed in his best old-time fringed buckskin shirt worked with beading of red and white. And contrary to the law of things that says old folks, no matter what height they once attained, will end up squat and humped and hobbled, Bear stood tall and lean and straight, and he walked with a long loping stride that left me puffing trying to keep up. He had pulled just a part of his long hair into a plait terminated with a large amber bead, and the rest was let to swing free about his shoulders. He carried a long rifle drooped across his left forearm, but it was more as a fashion accessory than as a weapon, a defining implement that made him feel young. And it was important for him to feel young, for we were on a mission of love.
Granny Squirrel’s cabin was about the size of a pony stall, and the roof shakes were as mossy as the creek rocks, and it was pressed down into the head of the cove as tight as a tick in the i
ntricate folds of a hound’s ear. Speckled chickens moved in a body across the dooryard. Red peppers hung in lapped strands from the porch rafters to dry, for she liked her food with a great deal of pepper and sage to the point that no one else would eat it, and that was the only secret of her longevity that she would share with others.
We stood in the trail and Bear called out greetings and the old woman came onto the porch and billed a hand at her brow to study her visitors. She motioned us inside with a two-beat gesture of her first and middle fingers.
She was cooking bean bread. The little room was filled with the smell of wood fire and the imminence of food. We sat beside the hearth and watched the light shift in the embers, and for a long time nobody said anything. Granny Squirrel had the manner of many conjurers, all aloof and held within themselves and proud of their particular notion of enchantments.
When the bread was ready and we were busy unwrapping it from damp fodder blades and scalding the palates of our mouths, Bear told her our mission. He knew she could write in Sequoyah’s syllabary and that she kept a little book of her formulas. She had traded for the blank books at the post. Her clients had reported that she sometimes consulted their pages as she worked. He had little interest in the doctoring parts of her knowledge, for he had never been sick a day in his life, and at that time neither had I. So she could keep the ones such as When They Piss Like Milk; When Something Is Causing Something to Eat Them; When a Tooth Comes Out, to Throw It Away With.
But we’d pay whatever price she asked for the love formulas. To Make a Woman Lonely; To Protect Against False Thinkers; When They Flee from You, to Make Them Return. Those sorts of things. We needed help. We were love-struck and in pain always. Endless running pain, perfect and inexhaustible. We were impaired and wanted fixing. Bear was stricken with love for a harsh woman. And as for me, I either needed something to make my distant love come to me or else to release me from my anguish over the loss of her.
—Too costly to do it that way, Granny Squirrel said. I don’t much care for writing, so I charge steep for it. Real steep. But I can work the formulas without you having to buy the book. What’s the names of these women?
I blurted out Claire’s name, and Granny Squirrel started shaking her head immediately.
—I’m the one set the spell on you to begin with, and mine don’t come unstuck easy. I’m not saying you’re a goner, but don’t raise your hopes too high.
When his turn came, Bear didn’t care to call his tormentor’s name. He said, This job will take some doing. Some long trying. And I’m not wanting to journey up here and pay you every week for another go at it. The way I see it, I can either hire a man to plow my cornfield every spring, or I can buy a plow. I’m looking to buy a plow.
He reached into an old bag that had once been a shot pouch and drew out a spray of silver coins and fingered them out into a rainbow array on the tabletop. He elbowed me, and I started digging in my pockets and added a greater pile of specie and a thick fold of notes.
—No paper, Granny Squirrel said. I’ve got no use for it. But she began raking the silver with a hook of hand and wrist to the table edge and down jingling into her lap. She said, You understand this might be no more use than buying a key without its lock? Sometimes it’s more than words.
Bear and I went walking back down the cove, me carrying the rifle and him with the little book in his hand like he was carrying a live coal back to a cold hearth.
Bear’s formulas went on and on for many pages in the little book. One by one, I read them to him, and he repeated the words. Let her be marked out for loneliness. Let her be blue. No one is ever lonely with me. I will never become blue. That sort of thing. Then he did whatever action might be required to go along with them, one of which had something to do with splinters of wood from a lightning-struck hemlock tree. Amazingly, they took effect almost immediately. Sara again veered toward him, and before long she was sexing him down well and frequently. This lasted all through spring and summer and autumn. He never slept in the townhouse, but only rested there during the day to build his strength for the nightly bouts. He spent the afternoons watching the fire and drinking a great deal of ginseng tea, figuring if it worked on a Chinaman’s pizzle it might well do the trick for him. He stuck close to home and was happy and tired all during the entire life span of the tree leaves—pale spring nubs, big wet green fleshy July spreads, sepia withers falling in tight spirals and long glides down a deep-blue autumn sky. And then, when the first snow fell, that was the end of Sara’s desire for him. Things went back chill between them like it had been before. No more feats of love for Bear.
Bear tried taking her little presents. Bundles of pine fatwood split into fragrant kindling. Bead necklaces and silver earbobs. A ham of a deer. Nevertheless, she offered nothing in return.
And when he tried doing Granny Squirrel’s spells again, they failed utterly.
One November afternoon by the fire, he complained at length about being cut off from the pleasures Sara had to offer and reminisced fondly about the stirring, lengthening nights of early autumn.
I said, Indian summer. I meant it funny, but he was not aware of the term, and when I explained it to him he failed to see the relevance. The ironic tone was never one of his greatest strengths.
As for my formulas, during those three seasons after our pilgrimage to Granny Squirrel, my erotic life consisted exclusively of an experiment in projection of thought across distance, a thing Granny Squirrel claimed would occasionally work and sometimes wouldn’t. Sad but true. There was no telling, really. It was like so much of life: nearly hopeless, but you must go ahead and try.
What I was to do was train my mind to throw its force westward, thinking toward Claire these brief expressions: Come to me. Come to me. Can’t you hear me? Can’t you hear me? Thinking the words over and over through all my daily rounds until they said themselves, whether I was waking or sleeping, like a constant drone or a chiming in the ears, calling across the incomprehensible and ghost-ridden distance between us. Come to me.
Despite all my efforts, Claire failed to come. At one point I became so desperate I went back to Granny Squirrel. She prescribed various courses of herbs and going to water and scratching the skin of my chest and arms with trimmed turkey quills until I bled. I performed all her cures one after another and then all together, and still Claire had not come to me. And neither was I free of desire for her. As a last effort, late in the fall, Granny Squirrel suggested finding a hollow among rocks along the banks of a river bend, a place all full of little sticks and shredded leaves and dead insect husks formed by high water into a shape like a bird nest. Then boiling the entire nest in a pot to make tea and drinking it for four days while otherwise fasting. I did as she directed, and the only result was that I emptied myself in painful wrenching spasms from both ends. After all that failure, she said perhaps my only hope was to become a conjurer myself, a sorcerer’s apprentice, and work nonstop in my own behalf. But when she held two beads between her thumb and fingers and let them move themselves around, what the twiddling told was that I lacked the aptitude and qualifications to become a conjurer. She would not state what those attributes were, but there was no doubt I didn’t have them. She suggested that I brace myself against failure.
Two days later, the stage came sloshing into town, a freezing rain just beginning to glaze the canvas of the lowered side curtains. The narrow tall wheels sank so deep into the mud that the spokes were stained red halfway to the hubs. I came out of my office into the street, and the driver handed me down a letter from Claire, soiled from months of travel. Even his gauntlets were wet and muddy, and the places where he held the letter pinched between thumb and forefinger came away dark and wet. I broke the seal standing in the rain. It was dated near the equinox and arrived on the day of winter solstice. I scanned down it with the rain falling on its face. It was about like the few others I had received since the Removal, written as if to a mere acquaintance. How are you? I am fine. The new Nation was a l
ittle hillier than she expected. The new plantation house was nearly finished to the exact plan of the first, and Featherstone insisted on calling it Cranshaw. And so forth. Not one blissful memory or hint of yearning for me.
The letters had begun at the rate of about one a month and then dwindled gradually to one per season of the year. Each one becoming slightly more distant in tone. I began to dread their arrival and had suggested in my last letter that if she was so intent on receding from me, she should write each succeeding letter in a smaller and smaller hand until at some point, even with the aid of a magnifying glass, I could no longer make out the words, and then she would be gone.
2
THE FIRST OF MANY JOURNALISTS FELL UPON US THAT NEXT SUMMER. He was a skinny, tallish Yankee with a big head of curly dark hair, and his black suit was worn to a green shine at his elbows and cuffs and the seat of his pants, and he did not even carry letters of introduction. He was writing a travel piece about the southern mountains for a magazine I had never heard of. I can’t remember whether it was a monthly or a quarterly. All we were to him was just a day’s rest on the trail and a brace of paragraphs in his article. Which was lucky for us, because we—and by we, I mean Bear and I—were unprepared to answer his questions about Charley and exactly how he came to be dead and we came to still be living in our homeland instead of displaced to the West.
I told him how the wealthy white Indians on the Nation had referred to Bear and his people as animals with names. But by a set of legalities and treaties and circumstances too convoluted and ironic to be easily explained, Bear’s people—who were the most pure-blooded and traditional in their habits of all the survivors of the original clans, people for whom the concept of private property held no meaning and who offered a great challenge to every sect of invading missionaries, whether Baptist or Quaker, because they did not even have words in their language to correspond with the concepts of sin, repentance, grace, heaven and hell, damnation and salvation—had come to live outside the boundaries of the Nation on private property to which they held legal deeds. Bear had set up a world of his own on his little parcel of land. And it backed up onto a vast and beautiful range of mountains so wild as to be unowned. On the Nation, no one held deeds to property because all the land was, by their customs and laws, held in common. But Bear had papers. And except for the singular fact that white people put great stock in them, he held them in so little regard that otherwise he would have balled them up and used them to light a fire or to wipe his ass. I talked on and on and hoped to muddy the issue about Charley in particular, for his manner of death troubled me a great deal and had darkened Bear’s mind as well. I used the difficulty of translation with Bear to deflect questions aimed directly at him.