By such route I thus came somewhat unawares upon Memphis. I rode into it at night and it was lit up like Judgment Day, full of folk surging all through the streets right down to the river. I found myself somewhat disconcerted by such population. It was not an entirely cheerful thought to find so many people unexpectedly extant out here in the West. There was music of fiddle and banjo and guitar and piano coming from the doorways of saloons and whorehouses, and the first place I walked into for a drink was full of near-bare women, their clothes so skimpy there was not enough cotton among them to wad a rifle load, and they made it clear to any who entered that they were willing to gap their legs for a drink of liquor or any state denomination of paper dollar, even Georgia money. Neither Washington nor Charleston had entirely prepared me for such a place.
I took a room in a hotel, and during the days following I found that in a town like Memphis the people act like every day is court day. They just milled about in great numbers and drank and whored and listened to music. At night, the big riverboats blazed with lamplight, and their bright tiers of decks jittered in long reflections across the black expanse of the river.
Money that should have been banked for me had not arrived. I waited for it day after day. In the afternoons I would walk down by the river to a sort of bar, a dirt-floored, thatch-roofed lean-to, and sit at a table and read my old boyhood copy of Werther and drink warm beer and watch the white riverboats churning slowly against the current toward St. Louis or booming downstream to New Orleans. Black smoke from their stacks so thick as to make shadows on the water. It was my belief that beyond the Mississippi little existed but empty landscape and Claire.
Little brown frogs lived in the mud of the riverbank, and pink-headed buzzards fell in drunkard angles from the sky and stepped through the mud to eat them, and sometimes the commerce between the two parties went on right at the legs of my table. I would stay until the light on the river’s dull red face fell toward evening and my book became unreadable. Besides, I had read it so many times over the years that the brown leather was dark from my hands and the gold lettering on the narrow spine was entirely worn away and I about knew the words by heart. The margins were scribbled with penciled thoughts of yesteryear, nearly all of which I now disavowed and judged to be juvenile.
The great river parted the country like a gash in meat. The immense space lying beyond its western bank felt like a frightening vacancy drawing things toward it, and the contrary part of me wanted to turn away and ride back home. Another part of me wanted to cross the river by whatever means available and just keep on moving across the wild land and see what it offered or threatened day by day until I died or fetched up against the Pacific in California Territory.
One day, fairly drunk, I put a thin leaf from a river cane in Werther to mark my place and went to the water’s edge and stripped to my linens and set out swimming. I suffered under no romantic idea that I was swimming to Claire. How pathetic that would be. Travel a significant arc of the continent out of mere longing and then possibly find yourself unwelcome at journey’s end.
I just wanted a Byronic Hellespont swim to the far bank. A thing to brag about fifty years down the line, though not likely to mark me as deeply and permanent as Bear’s claw stripes. Things went fine until halfway across, and then the river took hold and carried me downstream. I’ve never been the best of swimmers. I fought west, but the river pulled me its way, southward. By the time I struggled to shore, I was far below the town and had washed up again on the eastern bank. I slogged out of the water and had to flounder along muddy flats and ledges back to the thatch bar. The tender drew me a warm cloudy beer, and I sat and drank it and dried off in the sun until the mud cracked in geometric shapes on my forearms and shins and could be shucked off with a scrub of palms.
The next day, money arrived. The great facilitator.
TWO WEEKS LATER I rode down the main street of the raw capital town of the new Nation, Tahlequah. In hopes of finding Claire immediately, I stared at every woman walking or riding. I passed a mercantile, and a young man coming out the door stopped and looked at me long and hard. I kept going and noted out of the corner of my eye that he was sloping along the storefronts in my wake. He had a pistol holstered at his hip like a gunfighter, and he bore watching.
When I got to the hotel he was still coming. I positioned my horse so that when I dismounted, she was between him and me. When I had both feet on the ground, I put a hand on the grip of the pistol at my waist.
The man walked right up across the mare from me so that we were eye to eye across the bow of the saddle.
He said, I know you.
Well, I didn’t know him. He was a short full-blood, his skin burned by the prairie wind to the color of oiled leather, wearing a dusty overlong black suit coat over jean pants and a white shirt all rusty around the collarless neck. Big brown clodhopper work boots. He looked like a farmer dressed up to come to town.
I said, You have the advantage of me, sir.
—We passed some time together. Up Deep Creek.
—Deep Creek?
—You cooked good porridge.
—Oats?
—Also, we were together down by the river. A flat place. Killing ground.
—Wasseton, I said.
He stepped around the mare’s head and faced me top to bottom. He had his right coattail pulled back behind his holster. Wasseton was all grown up.
What do you do in such a case? I put out a hand to shake.
He looked at it and then, for lack of better idea, he shook back. Taking his calloused hand was like gripping a cow horn.
After you shake with a man ready to draw his pistol on you, what do you say?
Wasseton looked downward.
—You could have saved him, he said.
—It wasn’t up to me, I said. You might recollect that there was an army of soldiers and Tennessee mercenaries calling the shots that summer and fall.
—You could have done something.
—We saved all we could save.
Wasseton looked off down the street, thinking. But I knew enough about gunplay not to look where he was looking or even at his face. I watched his pistol fist.
He said, I been wanting to kill you a long time.
If I was him, I’d have wanted to kill me too. So there weren’t any hard feelings on my part.
—Factor this into your judgment, I said. None of us, not me nor Bear nor any of us, chopped up any soldiers. Your people put us all in danger. We made the only deal we had left. You’d put us in a corner.
—It wasn’t right, what you did.
—What would you have had us do different?
—What you did wasn’t right.
He was still looking away.
—Look at me, I said.
And he did. Eye to eye.
—I’ll agree with you, I said. What happened was wrong. It was all wrong from the start. But what else was there? I’m not saying that as an excuse. I’m wanting to see if there was an option that escaped us.
—I don’t know.
—Me neither. And not from lack of thinking about it.
Wasseton looked off down the street again, deciding what to do.
I said, If there’s a bar in this town, why don’t you close your coattail over your pistol and we’ll go sit and have a drink together and not kill each other today.
He was a sensible young man, always had been. He took me up on my offer and told me to call him Washington. Times had changed.
I was the one buying, so of course we drank the best they had, which was at least from Tennessee, second only to Scotland, and not by coincidence but by direct lineage. We talked for three or four drinks about our mountain homeland, how it had been and how it had changed since Washington last saw it. And then, at a certain point of whiskey camaraderie, we contested to name all the colors the mountains and their foliage are able to take on. Any tinge there is between white and black. We competed to find exceptions but could not score points against e
ach other. We didn’t even bother talking about green. Without question, every shade of it would be accounted for by our homeland. We went straight to red, but found that all degrees from the faintest pink to old blood were expressed by the leaves or flowers of some plant or another or by the autumn sunset sky. We went on down the colors, even all the purples, including puce. And the yellows including cadmium, which I had to describe to Washington, and he immediately named both a flower and an autumn leaf as examples of it. Blues were a little harder, but we managed to cover all the shades from robin’s egg to the indigo of ironweed to the unnameable color of the tallest peaks just before full dark in late summer. We drank another whiskey to celebrate our stalemate.
Washington said he had never gotten used to this edge of the prairie and found the great flat emptiness to the west like a suckhole in a river, like the Leech Place, pulling you toward destruction, whereas the uprisen and folded mountains of his youth held you protected down in them like being cupped in the Savior’s hands.
—So they’ve saved you? I said.
—A little bit. Most of the time. You’re enough to make a man backslide.
—Come on home, I said. Sometime before long, just throw a leg over a horse and ride on back. We’ll make a place for you.
Out on the street, we shook hands and began to part. And then I said, I’m out here looking for Claire Featherstone.
—On out of town a ways. Big brick house. Hard to miss.
And it was hard to miss. Its shape was etched in my memory. Cranshaw. A massive plug of brick and a row of white columns across the gallery.
I knocked at the door. Presented a card to the same woman, now a little greyer and stouter, who had passed my card back to me several years before. She showed me into a parlor, where I sat for a long while listening to the pendulum of a big clock knock down the passage of time at each end of its arc.
Claire came sweeping in. She had changed some, become a full woman.
—Why are you here? she said. Said it pretty much in midstride, barely through the door.
I had ridden a thousand miles and had been fool enough to expect our first meeting to be a rush together, teeth clashing in a urgent first kiss as in olden days.
I shook my head, turned my palms up. Gestures of confusion and defeat.
—I wanted to see you again, I said.
—You might have written saying you were coming.
—It was a sort of spur-of-the-moment trip.
—How long have you been on the road?
—I left Charleston in the spring.
She summed the intervening months in her head and said, You could have written. But she said it softer.
—I wasn’t sure I’d make it. I came the long way.
We sat. Tea was called for. We had a moment. Reminiscences, et cetera. The glories of youth. Time’s winged chariot. All very polite. No sunburned buttocks or late-night river couplings allowed.
Then another black woman, younger and darker than the one who’d answered the door, came into the parlor carrying a wailing baby bundled in little white blankets. All you could see was a face like a barn owl’s, just as round and flat and pale and fierce. Like all babies. If they had the physical means, they’d kill you without conscience to fulfill their slightest immediate desire. Same as house cats, which if they weighed two hundred pounds would not accede to our existence for a single day.
The woman presented the baby to Claire. She took it in her arms and turned halfway from me and made an adjustment in the upper portions of her clothing.
How could one have the courage to take a thing so predatory to one’s breast? God knew something fundamental about the nature of his own creation when he failed to give babies teeth and claws.
Claire turned back over her shoulder to me and said, Featherstone is out riding. He rides for hours every day in every weather. He won’t be back until dark. He will be sad to have missed you.
—Well, tell him I’m sad to have missed him too. My aim has never been quite as true as I wish it to be.
We were polite to the point of disgust. I began saying the things you say in preparation to leave. Claire leaned and kissed me on the cheek. The barn owl rested fiercely in a crooked arm between us. I gave a little head nod of a bow and left without another word, for I wanted to think I still had some pride left. I didn’t say, Write me, or anything of the kind. I figured that chaste kiss was my last communication with Claire.
I went out to the yard and Featherstone came riding up. He was slimmer than previous, not quite an old man but getting there. And just as vain in regard to dress. He wore the latest style of riding attire and a little round pair of smoked glasses. No hat. His hair was still full to the temples, though cut short and entirely silver as new-honed steel. He didn’t seem the least surprised to see me standing in his front yard. He dismounted and dropped his reins and walked straight to me.
I put out a hand to shake, but he reached with wide arms and grabbed me in a bear hug.
—I’ve missed the hell out of you, he said after he let me go.
He insisted we take a walk. He had something he wanted to tell me. He did not think I would believe it.
We walked silently a long way toward the bleak western horizon. Nothing worth describing. The sort of place they have plenty of out there.
I finally pulled up and said, Tell me what you have to say, and we’ll see whether I believe it or not.
His story was this: He was currently living a second life after dying a death that did not meet his approval. It happened a few years before, during the bad times after the Removal. On the same night, young Ridge and Boudinot had been gutted by Ross men in their front yards, with their wives and children watching from the upper windows. Old Major Ridge was shot dead by an ambush party while taking one of his boy slaves into town to be doctored. For months afterward, the survivors among the Ridge bunch fought the Ross bunch in a bloody feud. Featherstone sometimes rode out at night, fighting on the side of the Ridges. It was like a return to the glorious days of his youth—pony clubs, pistol flash, and hoofbeat. Risk and blood. Moonlight and magic. But on a chill drizzly night when he felt he was about to take a cold, he decided to stay home. He felt every year of his advancing age in the aching joints of his traitorous body. After a dinner of roasted hen and baked sweet potatoes and collard greens, he went to his study and began reading, once again, some witty lines from Don Juan. An amber inch of smoky Islay whisky quivered in a heavy glass on a side table. He slouched in his wing chair with his tall-booted feet on a stool and the fire logs burning low, their split faces checked and grey, beginning to hiss instead of crackle. And then he had a strange pain in one side of his head. The Byron fluttered into his lap. He fell asleep, and in his sleep he died the death of a saint, not even waking briefly enough to mark his own passing. The kind of death God awards to a bare few of his most beloved. Painless and unforeknowledged.
Yet enormously disappointing. All his life he had wanted to die riding against enemies at a gallop with pistols flashing and a plume of back-flung gunsmoke marking his passage out of the world.
I didn’t approve of an easy death for him either, and I said so. Especially not a death of inexplicable mercy when he deserved at least a fair share of the worst that could be laid on him by God or man. There wasn’t even a slight degree of justice in the death he described. For the rest of us, the punishment begins somewhat previous to passing, in the pain and suffering and fear that comes before. And in the hope for living too, for that is also a part of the punishment. Why should Featherstone, especially, get off clean?
—My feelings exactly, he said. Which is why I believe I was brought back. So that next time I can go harder. I arose the next morning at dawn with a blinding headache and a slight lack of firm grip in my right hand and a discernible droop to the eyelid on that side. All famous tokens of death. But I also arose with a great determination to set some things right during my second life. And the first thing I turned my attention to was Claire. I
’d not previously treated her entirely as I should have. As a wife, so to say.
—Great God, I said.
—And I want to square things with you too, he said.
—If you keeled over right now, the single shred of justice would be the fact that the only two significant scars your hide would carry into the grave are from Bite’s teeth and my pistol ball.
—Now, see, that’s where you’re wrong, Featherstone said. You’re making a young man’s mistake. You need to let your anger fall away. It won’t get you where you want to be. It’s poison. But it will rise from you like smoke from a fire if you let it go. And anger is not a becoming feature as you grow older.
He reached out to me and touched me on the shoulder. He said again, Let it go. Stay here with us awhile.
All I could do was shrug off his hand and say, A little too much marital bliss for a bachelor to stand. I mounted up and rode away.
I RODE WEST. The way to the Nightland. But also, in the mythology of my mother’s people, the direction of new beginnings, where when you’ve fouled your life past all understanding, there’s still hope. The direction of last-chance salvation. When the sunset was in my face I made camp.
I slept on the open ground and watched the enormous sky off and on between brief bouts of sleep. It was a dark night, without any moon at all and utterly cloudless. The air was dry and the stars were sharp points in the dark and there seemed to be a great many more of them than I ever remembered seeing before. And then it came to my attention that it was a night of meteor showers. Spouts and shoots of light, both thin and broad, arced overhead. So I got my scope from its leather case and stretched out its articulations and lay on my back in my sleeping robe peering into the universe. For hours I looked through the eyepiece, as if down into a well. And the longer I looked, the deeper down I thought I saw. The shape of Creation appeared like a funnel, a maelstrom, a maw. Vertiginous. Made to swallow us down its narrowing throat.
Then I heard a slight rustle in the long grass, and a young grey wolf went walking by on slender legs just past the end of my ground cloth, and it gave me one glance down its long snout as it passed, a moment’s locking of eyes, and then it was gone without ever changing its gait or in any other way passing judgment or even opinion concerning my unexpected presence.