But after the Yankee journalist had departed, Bear and I agreed that blather and indirection would not always work, particularly after Bear had passed to the Nightland and I was left on my own. And given Bear’s advanced age, his passage was not an unforeseeable event. So Bear and I spent a long night figuring out how best to tell Charley to the future. Not his history, his story. For that is what it would become, a narrative, with our help or without it. I’d learned something in that regard from my time with Crockett—the way he became a barely recognizable character in print, either for the better or the worse. Similarly, somebody would give Charley’s final days a created shape and meaning rather than leave things the way life actually overtakes us, which most of the time is just one damn thing happening after another, all adding up to confusion. So Bear and I figured that if the story was going to be told by somebody, we might as well go ahead and do it ourselves. Bear had learned enough about the way written history works from my readings and summarizings of Herodotus and Thucydides and Caesar, and by his firsthand encounters with the Old Possum, to know that it’s generally the victors who get to make up the stories and furthermore that they have a great deal of leeway in regard to adherence to facts and especially interpretation and opinions, not to mention outright lies.
We sat around the townhouse fire deep into the night, me drinking a little and Bear not at all, for this was during one of his temperance periods. We told Charley stories different ways to each other, trying alternate versions for how they might play. My tendency was to make up too much, to lay the plot on too heavy. Politics and machinations in excess. As a narrator, I had an overconcern with the why of people’s actions, when really the what is largely all that matters. So of course it was Bear who came up with the idea of leaving everything exactly as it was, telling the story straight through just the way it happened, but flipping it with the underside up. It would be Charley who sacrificed himself for the good of his people, not the other way around. Nothing else needed to change. Charley chose to give himself up in return for the promise that the rest of us could remain. It made a better story and was certainly better for Charley.
—He’ll be like your Jesus, Bear said.
Coming on toward dawn, Bear told his version of Charley complete from start to finish in great detail, touching up the dignity and tragedy, giving it a high degree of shine. And it was so good that about all I could think to add was a little Et tu, Brutus? touch at the moment before execution. It was not much of a creative contribution, but I’m proud of it nevertheless. And later, the journalists ate it up. My part goes like this: Charley looks at Lichen, the head of the firing squad, and says, We have been like brothers, and yet you are to do this to me? Lichen just nods his head. Then the blindfolding and the shooting play out pretty much without further writerly intervention. The End.
We tried the story out on Lichen the next time we saw him, and he liked it so much he nearly convinced himself that it had happened just that way. Like brothers we were, he said.
All during that time, we were busy seven days a week re-creating the world on our expanding boundary of land. The old clans were gone except vestigially, which is to say that most people could remember which one they would belong to if clans still meant anything. So they took enthusiastically to Bear’s plan of organizing his territory by laying out various townships with the names of the old clans. Each would have a small townhouse wherein local business would be conducted by consensus rather than the majority rule that I favored. The old townhouse at Bear’s place would be enlarged and reserved for issues of wider scope.
Bear believed that if we make the world around us a better place to live, our inner selves can’t help but come along for the ride and we’ll get better too. Sometime in the far bright future, we would all live in a world of saints. And who’s to say he was wrong? Certainly not me, at least not vociferously. So I arranged the building of the new townhouse and suggested that a school and a church wouldn’t hurt, in regard to our relations with the outer world. The latter two whitewashed buildings were identical, except that the church was capped with a little gesture of steeple at the door end of its gable. Of course, I immediately hired a teacher and a preacher, nearly indistinguishable young men from Baltimore with no better prospects in life other than come to what must have seemed the ass end of creation for a rate of pay that amounted to little above room and board, and forced them to live together in a one-pen log cabin so small they shared a rope-and-tick bedstead. The two were so much of a size they could share each other’s clothes, three black suits identifiable only by degree of fade to grey.
Bear and I also established a volunteer firefighting corps in the village, calamitous grease fires being a constant fact of life. But he drew the line at police, saying that he thought more highly of his people than to believe law enforcement was needed. And it was my idea entirely to designate a shelf of books in the post as the beginnings of a library, the books loaned out gratis until the time of the next full moon. Because we needed money to fulfill Bear’s vision, we started business enterprises as well, a gristmill, a blacksmith, a saddlery, a shop for constructing wagon wheels and barrels, et cetera, et cetera, all the way down to a gunsmith and a shop wherein women made fine handcrafts, baskets and woven materials and the like. In little more than a year, we had built an entire town based on an abstract idea of the minimum requirements, a few little log and clapboard buildings standing on either side of a road I called Main Street.
It all worked as planned. There were meetings and dances in the townhouses. Children learned to read and to cipher, and some of the people listened to sermons and sang the Methodist hymns with considerable enthusiasm, though many did it phonetically. More money came into the community from the new businesses, and that is nearly always good. Everybody got a piece, including me. And things did get better in very tiny increments.
JUST AS BEAR and I had suspected, the writers kept coming. We were too exotic a story to let be. They wrote about the last vestiges of the old ways. Our land accumulating at a frightening rate. Old Indian chief and young white son carrying out a plan to hold their place on earth against the forces of progress and the wishes of the Government. The first few writers were mostly a novelty and a welcome diversion. But each one was a little less charming than the last, and pretty soon they were just a nuisance. By about the fifth or sixth, I quit taking most of them seriously and just made up answers to their questions as suited my mood. And Bear acted like a house cat that disappears when strangers come visiting and pops back out when they’re gone. I told one of the writers that our fields were so nearly vertical we planted our corn with a shotgun and had to breed a race of mules with legs shorter on one side than the other for plowing. And when he asked how we transported the corn down off the mountain, I said, In a jug. He appeared to believe me, so I was encouraged to go on and tell him that every church in that corner of the state, except for our Indian congregation, either conducted services speaking entirely in tongues or else took up serpents as recommended by Jesus. Both the writer and I had taken a few rounds of Scotch at the time. The story appeared as fact in a well-known national periodical, along with the obligatory descriptions of the beauty and ruggedness and unmatched remoteness and mystery of our mountains.
Of course, several of the preachers from the better churches in the nearest county seat were particularly angry with me, and the Episcopalian lit into me directly from the sanctity of his pulpit. Also, a newspaper editor took me to task in his paper, addressing to me an Open Letter expressing his outrage at the shame I had heaped on the region in much the same terms as the preachers. Moral outrage was apparently the order of the day. But I didn’t pay too much attention to any of them on the grounds that some preachers live to be angry, and the newspaper was of the other political party from mine. As to the Episcopalian in particular, I had always believed prayer ought to be conducted on our feet rather than on our knees, since God seems in all other departments of life to require us to stand upright and a
ccount for ourselves. I immediately dashed off a letter to the paper in question, saying it was a sorrowful but true fact that some people, mainly newcomers to the region, fail to appreciate the subtleties of frontier humor; however, such lack of taste was not sufficient grounds to evoke an apology from me.
Just to show I had not been cowed, I told the very next writer passing through that Hog Bite—humped over poking a stick in the dirt to plant squash seeds as we passed his garden plot—was performing a very powerful conjuration believed to affect weather worldwide. Every mark he scratched and hole he poked had enormous significance. If there were typhoons in Calcutta and drought in Italy, blame Hog Bite. That story too was immortalized within the covers of one of our higher-class monthly periodicals and was later cribbed by yet another writer in a quarterly of nearly the same water. So for a time Hog Bite was famous, at least among our better-read visitors, and he began charging as high as twenty cents to re-create the sacred weather ritual.
OF COURSE I took some of the writers seriously, the ones who might be useful and the ones too sharp to be trifled with. I will let one example stand for many. His name was Langham, and as a writer he specialized in mountains. His descriptions of a walking trip through Europe, titled Views Afoot; or, The Alps and Pyrenees Seen with Knapsack and Staff, had been well received, and I may even have read it. But several years had passed since his last book, so he had been forced to set out on another journey, though he lacked enthusiasm for hard travel. He had ridden up from Charleston, intent on following the mountains north as far as he could stand to travel, going it alone without guides but with a thick sheaf of letters of introduction, including one from Calhoun.
So the next morning I saddled Waverley for a brief ride to tour Langham around. This was a few years after the Removal, and Waverley had become an old gentleman horse, nearly deaf, with silver around his muzzle and threaded in his black mane. His hip joints rose angular beneath the skin, but he remained bright-eyed and eager to be lunging forward, so much so that I had to rein him back to a walk as we set out. We started at the old trade post, childhood source and root of all our fortunes, and then rode into Wayah, where I displayed the new enterprises to Langham: Indians shaping barrel staves and riving shakes and tanning hides and even, a couple of them, forging plowshares and the complicated mechanisms of muskets, the locks and other such parts. Blacksmiths beat musical rhythms on red metal as we visited their shed. The silversmith shop turned out passable earbobs and necklace pendants and the like, and a weaving shop produced good stout cloth from wool sheared from our little mountain sheep, spun into thread on drop spindles, and woven to broad goods on handlooms. And there were nimble-fingered women shaping oak splits into closely worked baskets of all shapes and sizes. Markets for all these goods had been found in both Charleston and Philadelphia as well as in the nearby towns, and thus the village was, as I pointed out to Langham, the state’s largest center of manufacturing and commerce west of the foothills, a distinction perhaps only of local interest, since every time I traveled, no matter where I went, I was told that a certain mercantile or tavern or hotel was the largest between Washington and New Orleans. Of course, I showed Langham the schoolhouse and the church. And I mentioned the temperance society conceived by Bear when he began to fear that the drinking of ardent spirits sank any people of whatever color into a state of degradation and violence.
Bear himself I used sparingly. A brief appearance, scripted and dramatic. This was during his waning years.
The next day, in Langham’s honor, we played a ball game, and I took a turn on one of the teams. His description of it, in his book The Alleghenies by Horseback, is accurate enough. The players wore the nearest nothing. Greasy buckskin breech coverings so tiny they would hardly have served to cover a clutch of eggs. No footwear or leggings or shirts. A few players wore cloth headbands and kerchiefs, but that was foolish; they gave handholds for tackles. There were few rules to the game. You first had to come into possession of the little deerhide ball by way of the stick, catching it in the webbed pocket or digging it from the ground. Then you could palm the ball, throw down your stick—or fling it at your nearest pursuer—and run for your life toward one of the goalposts before you were knocked down in the most brutal way. There were no limitations on violence other than that it was frowned upon—but not forbidden—to scratch like a woman. And bringing a ballcarrier down by dragging at the breechcloth was supposed to be outside the pale, but when it was done and resulted in a man revealed in all his deficiency, great hilarity ensued both in the crowd and among the players.
The teams walked toward each other from either end of the ball ground, yelling that their opponents were the veriest quaking rabbits and eunuchs. They whooped war cries and shook ball sticks like they meant to kill one another, and when play commenced they nearly did. The ball was pitched in the air and everyone went for it with a great clash of upraised sticks, though the ball nearly always fell through them to the ground. Then they began raking for it in the dirt and grabbing the sticks of other players to snatch them away. It was a great confusing huddle of men, and the ball was no bigger than a walnut, so the spectators could hardly tell what was happening until a ballcarrier broke free to run.
Players slammed into each other, running flat out, and the sound was both the wet slap of skin and the deeper thump of three or four hundred pounds of meat and organs colliding. Then they wallowed on the ground, skirmishing with each other even though the ball had passed on to another man and he had also been knocked down so that at any one time there might be three or four wrestling matches going on, totally unrelated to the scoring of points. The ball was small enough to put in your mouth, and runners often did just that, sprinting to the goal and then fingering out a slobbered ball and holding it aloft to the delight of their supporters.
It was a sport in which the referees carried long stout whipping sticks and used them with great enthusiasm as they saw fit against the players, thrashing red stripes into pairs of combatants who had wallowed each other around too long or whaling indiscriminately at all the players when the game bogged down into a great pileup, wherein men bit and choked each other and pulled hair and twisted fingers, and the ones at the bottom just hoped not to smother.
Writers invariably found the game charming, and Langham was no exception. I played moderately well that day and was particularly good at the technicalities of stickwork, though I lacked the sheer speed of the younger men in running the ball. When the game ended, I bled from several minor wounds on the shins and forearms and sported a long red scratch from temple to chin—and was, no doubt, grinning from ear to ear with the joy of the game even though my team had lost.
The day after that was Sunday and I took Langham to church, where we all prayed to the Savior and were as sober as deacons. The entire service was conducted in Cherokee, so I acted as Langham’s guide and translator, hovering close to him as his shadow in the pew, whispering the words of the sermon and hymns into his ear, and he was struck by the oratorical skills and poetic flourishes of the speakers.
Langham and I parted as friends, and when his book was published I recall thinking that the chapter devoted to Wayah was more sympathetic than I could have hoped for. He retold the story of Charley exactly as I told it to him, and he portrayed the village and the surrounding lands as a successful social experiment and Bear as a figure from another time, worthy to be cast in bronze. Langham reported, accurately, that I was increasing our land holdings at a frenetic pace, particularly in areas formerly within the Nation. Where the money came from, he could not tell, only that my holdings were already vast, with no signs of me slowing down.
Then, unfortunately, he delved deeper. My life to that point, he wrote, was a captivity narrative turned inside out. But whereas in a previous century Mary Rowlandson and many others had been taken forcibly by the Indians, family killed, terrified, transported into a howling wilderness, I, on the other hand, was thrust out into the wilderness by my own people, my family already dead,
myself already terrified. And instead of wishing for deliverance from the savage wilderness and restoration back to my home, I made a home where I found myself.
Near the end of the chapter, Langham quoted Calhoun, who had apparently told him that, though I had the money to live wherever I chose, I did not do well for long in the outside world and could only make excursions into it for a few months at a time. Any longer, and I began to experience qualms and panics that did not abate until I retreated to my distant outpost.
The chapter’s final lines go something like this: