Up in the attic, there are crates of my journals stacked to the rafters. They descend into the past as deep as the Monroe administration, telling exactly what happened to me all the way back to my boyhood. Every date and event remotely worth noting. Enough ink to fill a washtub. Scratched out with every manner of bird quill and steel nib into one long looping line of script that runs a lifetime. Several pages from the fall of 1838 were written with a sharpened stick and boiled huckleberry juice because I had lost my writing tackle back in the mountains. Another whole journal from a few years later is all bucked and stained and nearly unreadable from being soaked during a river crossing in spring floodtime. A few pages were written with a quill taken from an eagle’s wing, which proved less inspirational than I would have thought. The first journals are little handmade coverless booklets of folded paper, a boy’s crude handiwork. From there they make progressions of refinement in craft until, at some point, the journals become uniform right through to now, fine leather-bound books with ruled watermarked cotton paper made by stationers in Washington. I’ve had a standing order for decades. Six a year. They still come every April, a tidy parcel wrapped in brown paper with the ends all neatly folded and tucked, tied with jute twine. And always a nice note from the proprietor, the grandson of the man with whom I first did business. Out of habit, I still fill the volumes, though nothing new happens to me. I go back to the previous century, re-plowing the same old clearings, emending, adding, summarizing, inventing.
I have periods where everything I ever encountered—grass and trees, music, the taste of food, the way people move, the miracle of colors, even my own worn thoughts—seems luminous and razor-cut in clarity, exactly like the whole world seemed to me at seventeen. What a gift at this late date. Memories from deep into the last century come blowing through me and I can hardly stand against their force. We all reach a point where we would like to draw a line across time and declare everything on the far side null. Shed our past life like a pair of wet and muddy trousers, just roll their heavy clinging fabric down our legs and step away. We also reach a point where we would give the rest of our withering days for the month of July in our seventeenth year. But no thread of Ariadne exists to lead us back there.
Nevertheless, let us begin. But not with senator, colonel, or chief. With a bound boy.
1
ONE AFTERNOON IN THE EARLY SPRING, AN ORPHAN, TWELVE years old, rode up a narrow trail through mountain wilderness. He was alone, and rain blew nearly sideways. He carried a long knife at his belt and went with his trousers tucked into his boot tops, affecting the look of a seasoned traveler set out on the open road for a far and uncertain destination. This orphan knew stories, tales of a like-abandoned boy named Jack. As a little child he’d many times heard an old teller, a folk-sayer, some greybeard grandfather on a farm down the road, recount Jack’s Tales with laconic expressiveness to bunches of little fireside children. The boy still remembered some of the lines, and he declaimed them aloud to the landscape around him like a poem or a prayer, for he took comfort in the fact that Jack too was often a wanderer.
Well, he put a little budget on his back,
and he set out.
And days passed,
and nights passed,
and weeks passed,
and months passed,
and he traveled along the road.
The young voice trailed off into the green woods to no response, not even an echo.
THIS BOY I’M SPEAKING of was a version of me, an early incomplete draft. I still have some of his teeth, and we share an inch-long scar—a deep cut from a horseshoe nail—just below our right anklebone.
The trail ahead forked at a big poplar tree, offering simple choices. Left or right? It was a simple time. But I knew even then that you could not just set out in one direction and necessarily get somewhere. You lived in the mountains as if cupped in a puzzle of unclimbable blue ridges and uncrossable black gorges. To travel through that place, you needed to know not only where you wanted to go but also that roundabout was often the only way to get there.
I pondered the choices. Each journey has two possible motions, two directions. Toward life. Toward death. It was like that for me, or at least it seemed so then.
I dropped the reins. The colt I had recently named Waverley in tribute to my favorite Walter Scott novel reached an unsupervised halt, hooves sucking into the mud. Rhododendron grew close on either side of the trail, and the wet glossed leaves nearly met overhead. When I looked up, water from my hatbrim ran down the back of my neck and onto the oversized wool coat my uncle had handed down to me. I pulled a map from my coat pocket and spread it open and rested it across Waverley’s withers and studied the markings closely. Raindrops fell on the map, and I bent over to shelter the paper. My forefinger traced the way I thought I had traveled and stopped at the place I thought I had reached. The map was a real map, from a printer’s shop, the result of a survey commissioned by some variety of government that claimed sovereignty hereabouts. My favorite part was a little box in one corner labeled LEGEND where the symbolism of the thing, its intent, lay revealed in pictographs. I had opened and closed the map so many times in the rain the past three days that it was already coming apart at the creases, and I rubbed at the rent places with my finger as if I could mend them back with a magic touch.
The land I had already traversed was displayed in fine detail regarding state and county lines, towns and turnpikes and traces, mountains and rivers. But westward, at a point about where I guessed I was, the map turned abruptly white and all the geographic opinion it ventured further was the words INDIAN TERRITORY, lettered rather big. No fading or tapering off. Everything halted all at once. So the lesson the map taught was that knowledge has strict limits, and beyond that verge the world itself might become equally unspecified and provisional. In my mind, the place thus rendered could be contained within no state and could contain within it no counties or towns. What mountains and rivers the geography held would lack official name and be whatever the few people living there chose to call them day by day. Brown River when you crossed it one time, Green River the next. Or just give it your own name, Will River. Put your impress on the land and see if you could force it to stay how you had decided to call it. The white landscape ahead was apparently open to considerable suggestion.
I HAD FEARED this moment of the journey since the first time I saw the map, five days before. The whole month previous, I had known something worth dreading was about to happen.
My aunt had begun acting coolish toward me. And my uncle, my dead father’s brother, started cursing unrestrainedly in my presence as if I were suddenly a grown man. They had bought a rather fine young horse, new to the saddle. He was bay and had a beautiful narrow head and big quick eyes. At the trot he was fancy with wonderful suspension and hardly a break at the knee, but he was so newly broken to saddle that he often forgot his manners and went sideways if a leaf blew in front of him or a bird flew from a tree. He was full of his own opinions and paid little heed to the suggestions of others, in particular his rider. The tack that came with him was poor. The saddle was dried out and cracked and not much bigger or more comfortable than the hull to a big mossbacked snapping turtle. And also a pair of rush panniers and a leather budget as if someone were preparing for a trip.
Then, one unseasonable warm day, a man I did not know came riding up in a two-horse wagon to visit. He sat a long time talking with my uncle in the parlor. After a while he came out to where I sat under a budding apple tree trying to read a book in Latin, specifically Virgil, and I was to a particularly admirable line about the sun slanting and winter falling. The man had some years behind him. He looked as if he had fought at King’s Mountain in the Revolution and still attired himself in the old style, at least as far as knee breeches and dingy stockings. Of course he wore his own thin white hair and not a powdered wig, and his hat was slouch-brimmed rather than tricornered, and he just had on regular low boots instead of the buckled shovel-nosed footwear i
n illustrations of the Founders, but still he carried about him a strong whiff of those old days, of Washington and Franklin.
The man reached out and shook my hand like I was a man. He asked questions about my schooling and said he had heard I was quick in the way of words.
I just said, Yes sir. There was little point denying it.
Then, out of nowhere, he said, Some people, if they saw an Indian in the woods, would be mighty scared.
I said, Not me.
And then, without further reference, he started talking about Indian country. The Cherokee Nation, where they still ruled. A sort of hole in America, bigger than most states but small in comparison to their old homelands.
The man said, There’s every style of Indian out there. The most isolated and backward and ignorant fraction of their kind are mostly full-bloods, skin almost as dark as a buckeye shell. They don’t know English from turkey gabble, and even if they did know it, they would disdain to speak it to you. They do the old dances and work the old spells and carry on like they still own the world. Come the dead of winter, they crawl in little mud huts not much taller than a clay bake oven, and they don’t come out of their dens in spring till the bears do. Jesus is nothing to them, and the women run everything except for hunting and fighting. Their only law is eye for eye. They’re so casual in the regulation of reproduction that all the parentage anyone can claim is the obvious matter of who their mother was. They don’t even know there’s seven days to a week and twelve months to a year. For them this wouldn’t be March, it would be the damn Wind Moon.
And furthermore, the antique gentleman said, from old-fashioned Indians like that, they vary in every degree all the way to ones you can’t tell from white men. Some of them have as high as nine parts in ten Scots blood, and might as well take to wearing plaid skirts and honking on the great pipes. Those kind of Indians own slaves and plantations, dress in tailcoats, eat off china plates with silver cutlery, and have grand crystal chandeliers swinging over their mahogany dinner tables. That rich bunch speaks English as well as any man among us and better than most. A lot of them can’t even speak their own language.
He paused and said, You understand what I’m saying?
I said, Yes sir. Even though I didn’t understand at all.
With that, he was apparently done describing the ways of the Cherokee, and he looked down the front yard to the paddock by the barn where the new young horse stood.
—That your horse? the man said.
—No sir. Not that I know of. They just got him.
—How old?
—Three or four.
—Which?
—Three, I believe.
—And not cut?
—No sir.
—So still a colt.
—Yes sir. If four’s the mark.
—At four, he’ll be a stallion. And maybe a good one, the way he’s put together.
We looked at the colt together awhile, and then he said something strange. He said, Will, when it comes right down to it, not many men can afford to cross the woman they bed with. Not and live in any peace. I hope you won’t think too bad about your uncle.
I studied on his comment and then just said, Yes sir. For I knew even then that it is often good to wait for events to unfold around you.
He went back to the porch where my aunt and uncle sat rocking and looking anywhere but my direction and not speaking with each other at all. I tried to go back to Virgil but could not attend to him. I watched the antique man as he crossed the yard and effortfully climbed the steps up to the porch and took a chair. He drew a sheaf of papers from the inside pocket of his coat. He talked and they listened. He went through the papers each by each and pointed out particular features with his index finger. Then they all rose and went inside, and I figured it was for a quill and inkpot to invoke the law and, as if by sortilege, foretell my life.
That night my aunt and uncle asked me to keep my seat after supper and dismissed their own children to bed. My cousins were ill-tempered ignorant little beings, a brown-headed three-year-old boy who had yet to utter a word of human language and a somewhat older girl barely more inclined to converse. I generally paid no more heed to them than to the yard chickens.
When they had trudged up the narrow stairs to bed, my aunt set a plate of cold cornbread and a glass of buttermilk and a sugar bowl in front of me by way of dessert. I crumbled the bread into the milk and sprinkled it with sugar and mushed it around with a spoon and began eating. We three sat awhile in the dim kitchen without talking, and there was just the sound of my spoon clicking against the glass. The flames of the cooking fire died out and the embers sighed and settled into a bed of ash on the hearthstones. A sphere of motes and minute insects vibrated around the flames of the pair of candles on the table. I pushed the glass away with one finger and held my face still, blanking my mind.
This is where they lay out my life, I figured.
—I can’t hardly stand it, my aunt said. He’s but a boy to send off like this.
She dabbed at her dry eyes with a wadded handkerchief.
—He’s twelve, my uncle said.
She thought a moment and then added, Going on thirteen. As if that larger number had some further power to settle the matter.
My uncle pushed his chair from the table and went into the parlor and came back and set a big iron key in front of me and unrolled a map on the table.
—That’ll let you in, he said, touching the key. And this will get you there.
He smoothed the map two-handed against the tabletop and set the pewter candlesticks on each end of the paper to keep it from rolling back up.
The key was hand-forged and fancy on the butt end, which was shaped like a lover’s knot. The business end, though, was crude and had just two cutouts to bypass the wards, and anybody with a nail or a rattail file and half a mind could pick whatever lock it mated with in a matter of seconds. I looked at the key closely, for it seemed to figure into my future with some importance. But I did not pick it up. Nor did I ask where the lock might be.
I sat inside myself, awaiting the terms of exile.
As my uncle talked out the route, his finger limned the journey on the map, crossing wiggling rivers and climbing up what he said were deep valleys to pass through narrow mountain gaps. He told landmarks and described turnings. Left at such and such a place, right at another.
There were many such places. Which apparently meant that there were also many wrong turnings lying in wait as well. They all began to blur together.
And then when the map went white, he talked on but no longer ran his finger across the paper. I looked at the blank space, and the child in me thought for a minute that traveling through the territory so depicted would be like moving through a dense fog where near things lacked clear form or color and far things might as well not exist at all. But then I knew that the white only stood proxy for a real world, an indication merely that the mappists had not reached that far in their thinking. Still, I figured the place was the next thing to an undiscovered country and that what few people lived there were alone among the animals and the indifferent shapes the land took.
When he was done talking, my uncle looked at his wife and made the slightest outward gesture with his hands, like getting shut of something.
My aunt looked to me and said, Well?
—I’ve got a pair of questions, I said.
—Ask ’em out, she said.
—Am I now a bound boy?
—I wouldn’t call it that, my uncle said.
—But there are papers, my aunt said. We’ve signed papers.
—It’s seven years is all, my uncle said. And you’ll be paid a stipend for your service.
So to the next question. It involved a fancy matchlock pistol that had been my father’s. My mother used to take it to a window and show it to me, unlocking its wooden box and lifting the lid slowly as if within lay treasure. Light fell on a beautiful bright art object nested in blue velvet. The trigger guard was worked in
scrolling, and the thumbpiece to the hammer seemed as big to me as a dogwood leaf. If I had to go out and travel the world alone, sole relic of a dead family, that pistol, stuck down in my pantwaist with just the beautiful sweet curve of ivory handle showing at my hip, would serve as fine passport.
I said, Might I take weaponry for the road? My father’s pistol?
My aunt looked at me as if I were a fool. She said her opinion was that a gun would get me into more trouble than it would get me out of.
—You’re off to be a shopkeep, she said. Not a highwayman.
At twelve, who wants to be given that news? Shopkeep.
I kept my face free of expression as a stove lid, but my mind visioned long decades stretched out before me to be passed, penned until death, behind a till.
—Knife? I said.
—Well, sure, my uncle said. That’s more in the way of an implement. I’ve still got a big thick-bladed thing of your father’s. You can take it.
I had no certain recollection of my father beyond his artifacts. Sometimes I thought I remembered a dark presence, a partial shape leaned down over me, no features, only a hint of the quizzical in the angle at which the head was cocked, a silhouetted embodiment. My mother had told me many times that when I was just a knee-baby I would ride all over the farm on my father’s shoulders. And that’s the size I was when my father drowned. He was crossing the Pigeon River in a wagon one day, and the whole rig pitched over on him in a heavy spring current and pinned him to the smooth stones on the river bottom and drowned the horse in the traces to boot.
My mother lived awhile beyond him, a decade nearly. And for much of that time she was still mostly a girl. I’ve counted out the numbers and that’s all she amounted to when I was little. A girl, sad and lonely and vague, widowed and dependent, living among her husband’s people. Of my mother, I mainly remember long stretches of days where we would be out from morning until dark running frantic pointless errands. All the way to town for a newspaper, halfway across the county to take a cake to someone she hardly knew who’d had a death in the house. But at some point, there were long stretches where she wouldn’t go outdoors at all for what seemed like several quarters of the year. I’d bring in double handfuls of pale poplar blossoms to her room, then fat green poplar leaves, and finally yellow and brown ones gathered from the lawn to demonstrate the passage of time. She died of some consuming disease. I remember a lengthy period of wasting, hushed voices and darkened rooms, the sound of rattling coughs cascading down the steps, a black iron cauldron of blood-spotted rags boiling in rusty water out by the smokehouse.