Tallent had been hanging back but suddenly came riding closer. He said, How about us all just slowing down here.
But even as Tallent was talking, I was reaching under my coat with my right hand to draw something out, a quick motion. And Hindman was already flinching to take a bullet.
But what I pulled out was a leather cigar case and I offered it out to Hindman and said, Smoke? My voice all mild and companionable.
Hindman took a moment’s pause during which he remembered to breathe.
He said, Hardly, you son of a bitch.
Duelists have paced off their brief distances and leveled pistols at each other’s hearts for a great deal less outrage to honor than Hindman’s comment.
But as a former duelist, one who knows the gravity of bloodshed, I shouldered the responsibility of circumspection. I looked around to Tallent and said, There’s civility for you. That’s the way they do up where he’s from. But you can’t hold it against them. They’re bred to it and don’t know any better. I wouldn’t walk across the road to piss on such a man if he was lit afire.
I reined my horse aside and just barely touched him with the spurs. With little transition he leaped forward and went from a dead stop to a gallop. Hindman sat fuming and watching me disappear up the road at a high rate of speed, clots of mud flying back from the hooves of my mount.
Tallent figured his job charged him with staying alongside Hindman, so he did. And all the way over the ridge to the settlement, Hindman pumped him for useful information against me. They rode at the slow rate of conspirators. By the time they crossed the ridge to the townhouse it was coming on dark, and I had been there for more than two hours. And I had not been idle for any of that time.
The people had become all agitated. The Long Hairs were a stubborn and contrary bunch all on their own without my help. Not even hard-shell Welsh Baptist missionaries had been able to civilize them very much. Their head man was named John Owl, and he was all dressed out in turban and whiteman britches and coat, and it must have been clear from Owl’s very posture that we were thick as thieves. So Hindman didn’t have a chance from the start.
When the meeting began, the townhouse was full of people and all hot and smoky with a great fire built up high with hickory logs, and it was all the light there was, but that was aplenty. The place smelled like bear grease and woodsmoke. Hindman got up and stood near the fire and talked, circling about so that he could look at the people ringing the room on the wall benches. He talked slowly, in a careful booming courtroom voice, pausing at artful intervals to let Tallent catch up with him. And Tallent did his best to link Hindman’s words into Cherokee. It was a meticulously accurate job of translation, with no slant or opinion added in my favor, so I worried that Tallent might be taking his silly hand-to-heart oath seriously.
Hindman made a fine lengthy argument, laying out all the many points in favor of everybody picking up and moving west and forsaking hearth and home and everything that’s yours and familiar in favor of a life you can’t even imagine. He said how the new Nation was underlain by fertile dark soil so loose you could harrow it with a currycomb. And none of these inconvenient mountains to contend with, just pleasant hills. He went on and said the Nation had extra-good weather, unlike this place that is a steaming jungle in summer and mud and slush in winter, as now on this particular day of the moon. A nice dry climate out there, but not too dry. And the main thing offered by moving west was to be with their own people, not surrounded by those who wish them ill as here. And the hunting out there was still good and not all killed out. And also schools and churches and courts and that sort of thing. Order prevailed out west. They had their own lawmen on the new Nation. And every head of a household would get from the Government $53.33 in expenses for the journey. What land they gave up here would be made up for, many times over, at the other end. That was the rule of America. Effort would find its just compensation.
He went on and on, but the people were not saying a word or making any expression on their faces. And everybody kept looking to where John Owl and I sat whispering to each other all through the talk. Hindman concluded by saying a great many respectful things about his confidence in the people and their head man, praising their wisdom and Owl’s strong leadership.
Then he said it was only fair that I have a turn to talk before they came to a decision. Saying it in a tone of voice like it was only his generosity that was allowing me to have the floor at all. He went and stood near the door, and Tallent sidled over and stood beside him to tell him what I might say. Traitorous was the word in my head as I watched them murmuring back and forth.
I hadn’t planned a thing in the way of argument. Bad luck to do so. And it was the same way in court. If I wrote it all out, I’d get nervous. Just talking in the spur of the moment was better. And I remembered to use Bear’s lesson about how to use light and quiet.
I didn’t even rise from the shadowed bench where I sat. I leaned forward into the firelight with my forearms resting on my thightops and my fingertips all touching in a shape like a cage of bones. Feeling in my face and hands the warmth from the fire, and knowing those were all the parts of me visible to the people arrayed in the shadows around the room. I couldn’t see much of them at all, but I pretended I could. I looked into the bright fire and the darkness and talked in a low voice so everyone had to pay attention to hear.
In good plain Cherokee I said, Now, I reckon people can make up their own minds without another windy speech. All I’ve ever wanted was for our people to have as free a choice about where’s home as anybody else in this world. Live where you want to live. Stay or go.
I leaned back into the dark as signal that I was done. My hands and face went black.
Then it was Owl’s turn. And he had a different sense of show. He rose and stood near the fire and put on a face of deep study. Brooding deep and painfully. He paced about and let everybody look at him struggle with his thoughts a long time before he said his say.
Finally, with great effort, he said this. I don’t know any place but here. Neither do you. Any man wants to go somewhere else, walk through that door and keep walking. Don’t look back.
There was considerable stir and mutter from the crowd. But nobody got up and walked out.
After a minute, Owl said to Hindman, Looks like we’ll stay. Said it in English.
The people attending the council were all too polite to stare at Hindman in order to gauge his reaction. But I looked straight at him, and he was flaring mad.
He came stalking my way and loomed over me. Tallent followed right at his heels.
Hindman said, I won’t ever let you ride out ahead of me again. And I want a vote. Every one of these fools needs to be forced individually to own the damned idiot choice he’s making.
Word for word, Tallent rendered that speech exquisitely into Cherokee for the room at large, getting every noun and verb perfect. Nothing added and nothing taken away. And then suddenly everybody was looking at Hindman.
But Hindman was looking at Tallent. You ass, he said. That was private conversation.
I was looking at Tallent too. But I was grinning ear to ear.
I turned to Owl and said, Hellfire, vote ’em if they care to vote.
All the nights following, things went roughly the same. Settlement to settlement, anyplace with a meetinghouse. I won and Hindman lost. He gradually became downcast. You could see he was not used to losing. Especially to some wilderness lawyer who couldn’t be agent to anybody but penniless Indians.
Journeys all eventually reach a conclusion, the bad and the sublime both. The day we rode to the final battle in Wayah was chillier than anything before. We went up and over a high ridge, and there was blowing ice on the wind and old grey snow crusted deep in the trail. Hindman and I spoke little to each other, and Tallent seemed relieved by the silence. We all rode shrouded in blankets. The day was coming up on the briefest of the year, and we had set out late and had made bad time, having to break trail through snow. The long a
nd short of it was, we had to sleep the night on the cold mountaintop. We made fire and strung canvas in the dark. Supper was a mush of bacon grease and corn grits. Tallent spooned it out vaporous into our tin bowls. And then we crawled under all the coats and blankets and saddle pads we had among us and went to sleep under a depressingly starless sky.
I woke up the next morning with the fire dead and the tarpaulin glazed over with frost and the horses shivering with nuggets of ice hanging in their manes and tails. Hindman was up right beside me, spooned close. We two enemies lay like wedded mates in a bride bed until Tallent struck a good blaze and got coffee seething, and then we rolled out of the covers with our hair standing in points and sat cross-legged, grim as death, on our blankets, and supped from the steaming tin mugs that Tallent carried to us. Nobody looked at anybody else. Nothing rougher-looking than middle-aged men at dawn.
From that point our business was over quickly. The Wayah council went just like the others. After the entire Snow Moon of travel together, all the people Hindman had convinced to go west amounted to ten griping malcontents and a half dozen deer hunters hoping for richer game lands, a new place where the elk and buffalo hadn’t all been killed out when their granddaddies were young. That was it. Fewer than two dozen converts after all his hard preaching. Tallent and I rode home, touched with the belief that Bear would have favored our actions that month.
6
I HAVE LITTLE TO SAY ABOUT MY ROLE IN THE WAR. AS A SUBJECT, the entire period bores me senseless. My tolerance for stupidity is at low ebb, especially when the stupidity’s my own. Of course at the time, right after Sumter, I was wildly enthusiastic for armed conflict in the way only politicians can be. And of course I misjudged the degree of rancor between North and South and reckoned in ’62 that the Union splitting in twain would be no more bloody than when the Methodists did it in ’44.
On the floor of the senate in the days after the bombardment, I promised that we mountaineers and Indians would fight the final epic battles of the War at our guarded passes and mountain fastnesses. I somewhat shouted out that proclamation, as I recall.
Foolish, yes. But eloquent.
As the war years passed, however, I became more and more sad when I thought about cranking out that old rhetoric, for it came to pass that I was prescient in knowing that I would indeed fight the War’s last losing battle. Neither bloody nor grand, however, but doomed. An anticlimactic end-time resistance in the clouds.
I celebrated the start of the War by raising new facial hair, a drooping mustache and the dashing little triangular tuft of whisker that some cavalrymen grew beneath their lower lips, called an Imperial in honor of a recent feckless French emperor. Mine, though, grew in mixed with grey, for I was no longer young.
There are enough old men claiming to be colonels around the South these days to make you think the Confederate Army had only one rank other than general. Every little crossroad town has two or three of them sitting on a bench, whittling and spitting and swapping pocketknives. Some county seats have as high as a dozen. But I was indeed a genuine colonel, though nobody would ever have called me a soldier. I had no training or experience and, prior to ’62, had never served a day in uniform or fired a musket very often, not even for purposes of hunting. My venison tenderloins and bear haunches were provided for me by the Indians as trade. However, I was not completely lacking in expertise with weaponry. I’ve discussed my proficiency with dueling pistols. And also I could—and still can, if called upon to do so—handle a shotgun with astonishing accuracy and enthusiasm. I am a somewhat legendary wing shot against quail and pheasant, not so much for the sport as for the braising or roasting that follows. The only real suggestion of military training I ever displayed was an ability to open a champagne bottle in the style of Napoleon, with one dramatic spewing stroke of a saber blade.
But in those days, anyone volunteering to finance a legion out of his own pocket was welcome to name his own rank and all of those below him. So I became an immediate colonel, and I needed officers beneath me. Since Tallent was my head bookkeeper and chief assistant and old friend, he suddenly became a major. For lieutenants, we recruited the best of the boys working in the various enterprises. In truth, we were a legion of lawyers and bookkeepers and shop clerks. About all the difference the War made in their duties toward me was that on rare occasions, when we couldn’t avoid it, Yankees shot at us.
And we were a legion, not a regiment, mind you. I have always been quick to correct anyone who got it wrong. Legion, I say, a full by-God legion.
I first called us the Drowning Bear Zouaves, for I wanted to lead the most extravagantly exotic bunch of soldiers in the whole Army. It ought to have been enough that we were mostly Indians, with just a smattering of Highlanders. And that a few among us even went armed with spears. But for some reason I wanted us dressed out in the ridiculous Zouave costume to boot. All I can say is, it was a different time, different fashions, and I was not alone in my momentary enthusiasm for baggy gauze pantaloons and tasseled fezzes. There were a number of Zouave regiments, though only in those first months of conflict when much of the country, both halves, acted as foolishly as drunks in the moment before a bar fight. Luckily, several among us, Tallent included, didn’t care to wear outfits that they thought made them look like harem girls, and they went so far as to threaten insurrection if I ordered them to do so.
Remember, I was already into the middle years. The time of life when several of your parts start hurting that never did before, and I’m not just referring to various joints and knuckles. Of course, old is relative. I’d trade everything I have right now to be in that youthful shape again. But I believe the only reason I spent those four years living rough and bivouacking in the woods and riding horseback from place to place in heat and cold, rain and shine, was to keep Bear’s people from being scattered into regiments where I could not dictate their treatment and where I could not work to keep them out of the fighting, to keep them from coming to any harm I could stand in the way of.
Inconveniently, though, many of the Indians were ripe for battle and could not be argued out of enlisting. They saw the War as a rare opportunity to collect on old debts against the Government, felonies and misdemeanors stretching back to General Rutherford’s fire-and-blood trek through the mountains in the previous century and, beyond that, all the way to when murderous Spaniards wore metal hats with crests like a cock’s comb.
All I could do was ensure that we spent as much of our time as possible staying out of the Yankees’ way. My idea of how to conduct war was to lead my legion off into the mountains and wrap ourselves in the deepest wilderness, where we could not even ride our horses but had to walk them by their reins, scrambling up rocky paths and black-dirt game trails. Guarding the passes for the end-time battles.
The summer of ’63 we spent in profound isolation high on a mountain. I dispatched letters to Richmond declaring that we were immersed in the job of digging out saltpeter for gunpowder from a great overhanging rock cliff that Bear had discovered as a young boy in the previous century. No one could deny our new nation needed gunpowder. What we dug, though, was pitiful. You could not have powdered an artillery piece for one battle with what we took out that summer.
But we saw not a soul other than ourselves for all that time, and we had a fine dry camp sheltered by the high ledge, which the Indians called a cave. Many among us spent a great deal of time hunting, and we ate pretty well on mostly wild hogs and a deer or turkey now and then, and we stayed up late, smoking and watching the fire and reading, for I always had a satchel of books with me—Arthur tales, The Odyssey, The Aeneid. I would read aloud to the Indians, translating on the fly, and they enjoyed those old tales immensely and would repay the favor with tales of their own, stories of little magic moon-eyed people that secretly share the world with us, and monsters that live in water or in the sky or under the ground, also the visible real animals and their intelligences only slightly different from ours. I had heard nearly all the stories a
thousand times from Bear in the winterhouse, but I still loved them and believed you could always be enriched by them every time they came around. The days and nights went like that, on and on. A little work, some hunting, a great deal of lounging by the fire and telling tales and cooking. We ran out of liquor pretty soon, and it was the kind of place and time where that did not matter at all. I liked being settled for those months at the cave and was peaceful and content because, as a younger man, I had often gone years without sleeping in the same bed for more than a few nights in a row. All in all, that summer was about as pleasant as war can be. Or life in general, without any further qualification. In that cool green elevated world, it was rather hard to tell that it was fighting season in Virginia.
Not long after that happy interlude, though, I began to feel that something had gone a little off with my nerves. People began to think of me as prone to occasional disorder. And I guess I was. I know I was turbulent in my thoughts, my mind beginning to darken. Anger shadowed me during those war years. I fastened onto ideas and could not let go. I developed, for example, deep and persistent notions on the rendering of soldiers’ clothing proof against moisture, thereby promoting cleanliness and reducing chills of the body, thus preventing the spread of infectious diseases. I made a pest of myself writing letters to Davis and Lee on the matter. In demonstration of my proposals, I often wore an entire suit of clothes treated with a concoction of beeswax and a thick piney herbal mash so that I rode bone dry in a squall, but my clothes hung stiff on my frame and I crackled when I walked and smelled at all times like an old moldered tent pitched in the forest. Imagine an entire army marching in such attire. And yet, I must add, more of our men died of disease than from Yankee steel and shot. So draw your own conclusions as to my delusion.
I’ll admit I sometimes let anger take me toward improvidence. In one action we could not avoid, the son of a great warrior from back in the days of the Red Stick Wars was killed by the Yankees. It was a stupid skirmish I should never have let happen. We were assigned to guard a bridge. No one had attempted to cross it for days, so we got up a ball game. And then damned if the Yankees didn’t come along right in the middle of play, taking us at a disadvantage. We ended up winning the skirmish, but there were several casualties, including the great warrior’s son. In the final moments of fighting, the Indians took revenge by scalping Yankees both living and dead. Two days later, my younger officers were appalled when a journalist came around sniffing after a sensational story. Tallent and his lieutenants despaired at what might appear in every Yankee paper, in screaming great type at the head of the front page. REBEL INDIANS SCALP SAINTED UNION DEAD. SAVAGE CONFEDERATES MUTILATE BODIES OF SACRED FALLEN MILLWORKERS.