In the face of so much money, men did as they always do; they lost their manners. The prayers went away, and then before long the bear and deer went away too. And Bear always said it like that: the deer went away. Or the deer left. He never said the exact truth, which was that people killed every valuable animal they could hunt down for cash money or in trade for tin pots or gingham cloth at the post, and never acknowledged that the elk and bison didn’t just wander off somewhere else and disappear from this world entirely but were every one hunted down. In a note of unintended irony, the place where the last one in each section of country was killed usually became memorialized in the name of a creek or a cove or a ridge. Or at least with a rotting patchy hide tacked to a barn wall.
Bear described walking up to a badly wounded buck sprawled on the ground too weak to move, one hind leg broken by a ball and twisted beneath it and another ball in its belly, blood blackening the leaves around it. An entire branch of antler sheared off near the skull by another missed ball. Bear remembered the look in the buck’s eye as it watched him coming to cut its throat and sell its skin for a dollar.
—There’s not a prayer for that, he would say.
Bear was always in a wistful mood telling that story. I heard it a dozen times. But back in the trade-hunting days he would not have been wistful. He would have wanted that dollar, would have wanted a great high stack of them.
As for me, I didn’t want to plow my own fields or split my own rails or milk my own cows, so I ended up owning men and women and their children. And if there are any prayers for that, I wish somebody would teach them to me.
Bear was as honest a man as I ever knew, with others and with himself. And still he indulged that self-exonerating version of the past. So it is one of the things I list among his lessons that I’m not now much inclined to ask anyone’s sympathy or understanding, nor am I inclined to ask forgiveness from anyone, including myself.
IN FAIRNESS, I should mention that Bear was also a slaveholder. It was a short and singular experience. In one of those years between the Removal and his death, Bear came into possession of a man named Cudjo, his exact match in age and infirmity, a genuine old African brought over on one of the last of the ships. I never understood how the deal worked, except that it was a notably poor trade involving some old debt concerning ginseng and three or four horses and also carried some element of personal grudge with his trading adversary.
Though Bear understood slavery perfectly, he found the institution remarkably uninteresting, at least on his end of it. Immediately upon taking possession, he told Cudjo he was welcome to hang around if he cared to, but he was not to call Bear his master and he was not to expect much of anything from Bear other than what anyone in the community could expect—which was that if there was food in the pot you were welcome to eat a bowlful. A single bowlful, by the way. Those were the local rules of etiquette. And if that didn’t suit Cudjo, he’d better move on.
In short order, though, the two old men grew enormously fond of each other. Cudjo was a genius of language, and even the daunting proliferating verb tenses of Cherokee took him no time to learn. As soon as they could talk to each other, they found consonance in their boyhoods. Cudjo told a youthful story involving himself and a lion that made a great impression on Bear. Blood and honor and courage and weaponry. They showed off old scars, claw marks from a better time. And they quickly reached an agreement recognizing each other as equal hunters and warriors, representatives of an antique style never to come round again in this world.
Very soon they began making a little joke between themselves at the expense of others. In front of some ignorant third party—particularly if the party was white—Cudjo would refer to Bear as Master. Bear would look at the ground and shake his head and then waggle one bulbous-jointed forefinger and say that being Cudjo’s master was a job you couldn’t pay him a pile of silver money to take on. Nor gold money neither. A man can make the mistake of becoming slave to his own possessions. Cudjo was too much responsibility to shoulder. And so, therefore, no thank you to masterhood.
Then Cudjo would say, Nevertheless, old Bear’s my master now. He holds paper on me.
Then they’d both laugh like a pair of jays.
Bear would threaten to sell Cudjo straight to some brutal bullwhip cotton farm in Mississippi—except, sadly, Cudjo was so old as to be totally worthless. So why bother trying? And then Bear would walk away.
In more serious moods, or drunk, they proclaimed that they were brothers and would lift their shirts together and turn their backs in unison to show their old claw scars, shining in five parabolic silver lines against the darker skin.
For the short time of their relationship, they lived together as equals in the townhouse, and on cool nights of that year’s spring and fall they slept on the same narrow platform closest to the fire, though they both set a boundary at sharing a quilt and so kept separate bedclothes.
Cudjo died shortly before Christmas. He just fell out one frosty morn, walking down the road. Bear saw to it that Cudjo was buried in the same manner as if he had been born in the mountains and had been a member of a clan. Bear took on the job of heaping stones atop the grave himself, though as an old man from the previous distant century, he had every right to beg off from the job.
Bear didn’t deliver much of a eulogy after the stones were heaped up. He just said, You never know when somebody will pull you to them. And then we all walked back down the creek to home.
Those were the years when I was full of industry. No more pining for Claire, at least not much. She was just gone. I had the several mercantiles, all scattered through what had been the Nation’s eastern boundary and about a day’s ride from one another. And there was also the law practice, requiring my frequent attendance at the court days of a half dozen different counties all the way down into the foothills. And the businesses in Wayah. In other words, I spent a great portion of my life a-saddle.
Nothing got by me back then. I had feelers out in every direction. At one point, the legislature came up with some freakish bit of minor lawmaking designed to encourage silk production. Our state, after all, has aplenty of mulberry trees, and its leaves are all a silkworm will deign to eat. The bill offered all kinds of subsidies and legal benefits such as easy incorporation, which was then neither common nor much encouraged by state law. Elsewhere, in the lowland counties, the silk incentives went largely ignored. But I took one look at the state’s offer and saw immediately what an easy cow it would be to milk. And the way I found to work the new law to our advantage didn’t have an awful lot to do with visioning the Indians picking apart cocoons and winding silk thread onto bobbins and selling it at market in Charleston or Philadelphia.
For appearance’s sake, I did go so far as to put in an order for a package of silkworm eggs and applied for a government check to pay for them. And then I set about incorporating the Indians. Turned them all into shareholders in the Cherokee Company. And their business was not just silk but encompassed all their joint interests, or at least the ones I found interesting. Most particularly, the corporation interested itself in the ownership of all that enormous boundary of land Bear and I had been buying and buying for years and holding together with spit and promises and, now and then, kited checks. We set the corporation up with limits so that each shareholder could own property individually but could not sell to anyone but another shareholder. However they thought of themselves—as a people, a community, or a tribe—was their business. As far as the state was concerned, they were now a legal corporation.
Before I’d even finished drawing up all the paperwork, the little black worm eggs had hatched into black threadlike worms and then they fattened on mulberry leaves and shed their skins and turned pale. But then, before a single one of them had spun even an inch of thread for a cocoon, they all curled up and died. And that was the end of the mountain silk trade, which was fine with me. Bear said any enterprise that depended for its success on little wiggling grubs was bad for the soul. The
one exception being, of course, the making of yellow-jacket soup.
The worms died. But the Cherokee Company lived on.
Some of my detractors claimed my whole purpose in such dealings as the silk trade was just self-interest, to make it easier to sell the Indians all my cheap, steep mountain land. Others said I was following old Bear’s wish to re-create a homeland for them and undo all the Federal Government’s efforts to move them out and make way for progress. They said Bear was an upsurger, perhaps a revolutionary, and had long ago sworn never to make peace with the white men and had cast a spell on me and set me on my present misled course, and thus together we had accomplished what Tecumseh and Osceola and many others could not—to fight for a homeland and hold out against the Government. Others among my critics said I was making a wilderness kingdom for myself to lord over like some biblical patriarch, and in darkened voices they said that whether my rule would be benign or despotic was still to be determined.
IT WAS ONLY natural at some point that I would stand for election. My first office was the state senate. It just meant a couple of months out of life every two years to travel down to the capital and have a brief convivial drunken time of lawmaking. The state’s needs were fairly limited back then. From my first term, I mainly remember that the rotunda of the capitol was a space that sweetened every voice. Under its dome, a crow would have sounded musical. Most Monday nights during the session, between dinner and the drinking hours, some of the members of the house and senate gathered there to sing the old sentimental songs. One night, a young house member, a rich dandy from down at the coast with a splendid affected voice, sang one of the sad songs from the Winterreise. Then later, over pints at the Sir Walter Tavern, he translated that particular song and summarized the others to me. The songs were chapters in a story about a wanderer grieving for his failure at love, and in one song he writes the name of his beloved on the ice of a frozen creek. I was proud to announce to the table that I had performed the same futile gesture years ago and had agonized for much of a year over thoughts of the creek melting, the water that had shaped the six letters flowing away from me, passing from one watercourse to another all the way to the Mississippi and then down to the salt Gulf to mix with the oceans of the world. That’s the way you think when you’re that age. At least some do.
5
IT OCCURS TO ME THAT I MIGHT BE GIVING THE IMPRESSION THAT those years of my life after Claire were lived monkish. That I still waited for her, celibate as some pining heroine in a novel. That path never entered my mind, partly because I believed it futile, Featherstone being capable of living as long as Granny Squirrel. Year after year, I did not know whether Claire loved or hated me or, worse, did not think of me at all. Had Claire been fully mine since I won her as a boy, I would have lived a life of utter fidelity. No doubt in my mind whatsoever. Even the way it turned out, it is fair to say that I was, in a way, forever faithful to her. First point in evidence, I never married. And, two, I have never had a woman for very long. Neither point entirely of my own choice. Nor have I ever denied a woman. So I’ll pause here to make a few brief comments in regard to love’s ravaging histories during my middle years.
For many years I entertained the belief that I would meet someone, a woman who would be my woman in a deeper way even than Claire. A true wife. The woman. And I was not content to wait for fate to throw such a woman in my path. I would fling myself in hers. In Washington, I discovered again how the steep inclines of the galleries to the Senate chamber provided opportunities for meeting ladies of a certain kind. Which is to say, high-minded and of a desirable class and nevertheless somewhat desperate for male companionship; otherwise, why would they inflict Senate speeches on themselves? And if I happened to be in a position to ask them to join me at an embassy party or a reception at the White House, all the better. None of them made a perfect fit, but many were good company for a while. I remember one fairly plain woman, twentyish, sitting with me on the lawn of the White House for an Independence Day picnic, her pale summer dress falling all around her like cake icing in the remnants of light from a long summer day. Fireworks spewed across the sky and lit her upturned face and she was suddenly beautiful. The spectators made spontaneous sounds of ooh and ahh. Toward the end of the show, balls of fire the size of moons fell to earth and killed two or three of the spectators, and we were both appalled and drawn closer to each other. The brevity of life, and so on. We were somewhat intimate on the ride back to her hotel in the shelter of my carriage. I remember her string of pearls broke, pearls spilling onto the seat and rolling across the carriage floor.
And there were certain other women scattered all along my usual routes of travel. One lovely woman lived in a little two-store town shoved right up against the base of a great humped mountain a day’s ride north of the nearest railhead from Wayah. I loved her dearly. For several years, I made the long detour to see her on the way to and from political business in the Nation and Washington City. She was a schoolteacher and a spinster, and much taller than men commonly like their women to have grown. All she ever told me of her age was that she was on the down side of thirty. She had beautiful soft hair the color of a dove’s breast and green eyes and creamy long legs that turned under into unfortunately long narrow feet, but she had a behind with curves to break your heart. At least, they broke mine. There were times I would ride a hundred miles out of the way for a night with her. She had spent the previous ten years tending her father, who had been blinded when she was a girl by the kick of a horse he was blanketing out in a paddock in an ice storm. So when I visited, it was fairly easy for us to carry on however we liked as long as we kept it real quiet. For a while, it was a close call whether she was the one woman or not. And I still don’t know. I never had the chance to finish finding out. Her father died suddenly of a stroke, and soon afterward she began dying of consumption, and it was a lingering death with all the translucent beauty of the disease. And at the last all the brilliant blood.
At the opposite end of some scale to which I do not entirely subscribe were all the heart-gladdening whores at Welch’s place. I lump them into one capacious category along with the Senate ladies. I would not have discriminated against them and would have taken any of them as a wife if my heart had told me to. But in its mysterious way, it didn’t. One pretty aging whore among them, though, has stayed in my memory all the way to now because the first time I was with her she grabbed my ready member in her fist and said, Wherever I go after I die, I hope I never see another one of these bastards again for all eternity. That didn’t portend well for the remainder of the evening. But she went to work and rode me as if her passion knew no bounds. Four times that night, according to my old ledger.
At one point well after the onset of middle age, I courted the very pretty young daughter of a fine family from the county seat. Her grandfather had been one of the town’s founders just after the Revolution. When a treaty moved the boundary line between America and the old Nation a notch westward, he rushed in to grab the best newly available land and had thus become important. The pretty girl was half my age and fairly stern-tempered, but she was attracted to the romanticism of the Indians and the good she thought she might do among them. She and a grievous widow aunt came visiting Wayah to tour the area and see all my enterprises—the post, the smithy, the mill, the craft shops, the school and the church, the farm with its slaves and paid Indian workers, the wagon roads we had built. The day had about it the air of talking to bankers about taking out a loan of considerable scope. We rode three-across in the second seat of my best carriage, the grievous aunt sitting blackly in between. The aunt was about my age, give or take a few years, and I found that fact gloomy.
Everywhere we went, people came to the carriage and asked favors, complained about their neighbors, detailed conflicts entirely unrelated to me. They all expected me to adjudicate. The pretty girl said hardly anything. She looked off into the distance. About three in the afternoon after a long day of touring, the aunt said, So, Will, you?
??re king here? I said, No, ma’am. No kings here. Not these days.
That pretty girl and I went far enough in the direction of apparent matrimony that the principal newspaper in the capital ran a piece of gossip stating that the rumored nuptials of the senator, a man of fairly full years, and the beautiful young Miss Amor should give hope to old bachelors everywhere.
Then, very suddenly, she married a young army lieutenant. In considerable haste, I should add. The timing such that later the arrival of their first child might fall within an agreed-upon span—a sort of social grace period—wherein the birth would have to be accepted as at least possibly horribly premature. All I got out of it was a tearstained letter.
And all along the way were brief mountain resort passions. Summer flings. Over the years the women I attracted were transformed from bored nearly grown daughters still accompanying their parents into youngish spinster aunts. And then into faded widows and pale unhappy wives and the occasional desperate nanny.
In the last category I was once forced by overwhelming desire to make my way, long past midnight, onto the servants’ floor up under the eaves of the Warm Springs Hotel for an assignation with the beautiful, sad-eyed keeper of three miserable outsized blank-faced children, the get of a plantation owner from near Cheraw. I was powerfully drawn to her for the loveliness of her thin mouth and because, when I first saw her on the lawn near the river, she was carrying a copy of Werther even though she had no opportunity to read it, her attention being occupied with keeping the idiotic and bovine children from falling into the water and being carried away into Tennessee.