Immediately after my mother was gone, some matter of financial beholdenness beyond my ken allowed my aunt and uncle to append our neighboring farm to their own, and so I was at once orphaned and dispossessed. For the nearly three years previous to my exile, they had continued sending me—out of guilt, I guess—to the school in town that my mother had chosen for me. It was taught by a learned and jolly Manxman, and he called it the Latin Academy. That was a grand name for what was just a spare room in his house. It was elevated into an academy, I suppose, by a bust of Horace sitting on the mantelpiece and a big Latin lexicon spread open on an oak stand. Under the Manxman’s teaching, I could soon read anything you put in front of me, and moreover would do so with great pleasure. The conventions of grammar, both Latin and English, made sense to me, and I could parse most sentences accurately, even the great long periodic ones from the previous century. I read yellow and foxed copies of The Spectator as if they contained the most current and pressing thought. And I could do sums and knew the facts of the history and myths of Greece and Rome and England, much of which added up to how awfully murderous and lunatic a king will get to acting every so often. It all came to me with considerable ease. The teacher had started me on Latin in the second year, and already I could about get the gist of poems by that selfsame Horace. I still remember one about throwing stones at a lover’s window in the night.
If we few little scholars had learned well and behaved for the most part of the day, the Manxman would break out a deck of playing cards in the afternoon, and we would gamble against him for striped peppermint sticks. He took his teaching of the rules and conventions and logic of all the common gambling games as seriously as the details of Latin grammar.
But now, the best I could tell, the Academy had been declared too expensive to continue, and at twelve—almost thirteen—I had been declared suddenly grown up. I was cut loose on my own. My aunt and uncle had arranged for me to be bound to the antique gentleman. I was to run a trade post out at the edge of the Nation. The clerk who had been running the post had just picked up and gone. Lit out for Louisiana or one of those other places out west. Savage Texas, maybe. And so a new clerk was needed immediately. As far as everyone besides me was concerned, my life was set.
The morning I mounted up to ride into exile, my aunt stood by the colt’s shoulder trying to weep. The sun had not risen over the ridge, and the world was still grey and foggy. She gave me five dollars in silver and ten in Georgia paper money, a small iron skillet, and a folded piece of paper on which she had written recipes for fried chicken and biscuits.
The last words she said to me were these: Remember to read the Bible and pray and love Jesus and not fall in with the ways of the heatherns.
I rode out from the farm and by sunup was passing through town down the main street. I could smell bacon frying from the hotel kitchen, and the blacksmith was stirring at his banked fire and laying on more oak. A young black girl went carrying a lidded chamberpot toward an outhouse. I was on the road and terrified.
I FOLDED THE map back into its pocket-sized rectangle and tried to remember all the turnings my uncle had talked out, and then I spit valiantly to the side and put a heel to Waverley and reined left of the poplar onto what looked to be the more promising of the two ways before me.
I rode on into the mountains with dark weighing heavily on me. On the early nights of the journey, I had slept at the cabins of people known to the antique gentleman, and he had given me letters to present them, saying to feed me and let me sleep in whatever place they had to spare, which meant the barn in most cases and a bare attic room in another. This would be my first night sleeping alone on the trail, and I was afraid of dark and tried not to think about it coming on so rapidly.
I stopped by midafternoon to allow plenty of time to make camp. The rain had ended, but the trees and brush were still wet when I found a piece of flat ground that backed into an overhanging rock cliff. The dirt under its shelter was dry and fine as sifted flour. The sound of moving water from off in the woods. By the trail, a little stand of grass just beginning to put out new growth after the winter. Opposite the cliff, an open wedge of a vista where a big tree had blown down and opened a gap. Seven layers of mountains faded off in diminishing orders of blue to the west. I stood and looked at the place and imagined it all pitch black, and I was afraid. Then I imagined the same thing with a fire blazing hip-high, and I expected I could put my back to the cliff and sit in the yellow light and wait for morning.
I had the advantage of it. I had to.
I untacked Waverley and watered and grained him and hobbled him where he could graze. Then I made myself a little supper out of the same bag of grain from which I’d fed Waverley. Boiled oats with brown sugar.
Part of my kit was a skein of hemp rope, which my uncle had shaken at me with considerable emphasis, saying, Without fail, hang your food from a tree limb to keep animals out of it.
Back then was a different time. Bison and elk had been recently killed out, but there was still a sight more bears and panthers and wolves than now, so I paid attention to my uncle’s pronouncement. I took the rope and stood under a big pine tree and spotted a likely limb, stout and horizontal, about fifteen feet off the ground. I held the end of the rope drooping in my hand and wondered how I might loft it over the limb. First I tried to fling it. Took two steps of a run and threw the limp rope-end skyward. But it hardly went higher than my head. So I scoured the ground until I found a thin flat chunk of slate as big across as a dinner plate with spalled edges sharp enough to flay hide. I tied it tight to the end of the rope and reared back and, in the style of discus tossers, sent it winging mightily toward the limb. But I forgot to notice that I had my foot on a loop of the rope. Before the stone reached the limb, the rope stretched tight and sprang back, and the rock came flying straight at me, singing a dire whispery song by my ear. It hit the ground edge first and buried itself like an axehead in soft wood. I rubbed my forehead about where the stone would have hit had it come back a few inches southward.
—Reckon you’re just required to attend without letup, I said aloud.
I went at the job again, with greater care as to foot placement, and soon had my budget and panniers swinging limp ten feet off the ground. Bears could bat at it until dawn and not do themselves any good.
I went looking for firewood, wanting a grand pile of it to shore up against black night. I hauled armload after armload. As I reached for a last fallen stick of oak, a copperhead newly awakened from its winter sleep, colored and patterned in brown-and-tan shades of old leaf fall, jacked its front end off the ground and struck at my hand. Its mouth flew open as if on hinges, like flinging open a valise with a pale-pink satin lining. The motion of the strike was a jerking lurch, more awkward than I would have guessed. When the snake saw it had missed its mark, it turned across itself and went flowing across the forest floor in retreat.
On idiot impulse, with no prior thought whatsoever, I did as I had seen an older boy do with a blacksnake. I grabbed the copperhead by its tail and cracked it like a whip. Its head flew off and hit the trunk of a redbud tree twenty feet away with the sound of a knuckle pecking on a door. I stood amazed. As I carried the snake back to camp, holding it near the bloody stub of its neck, the body kept coiling about my wrist.
Oats don’t make much of a supper, so I gutted the snake out and skinned it and draped it across a green stick over the fire. And even then it still moved while it first cooked, coiling and twitching. When the meat fell still and became done, I cut it into pieces about corncob length and ate the white meat off the backbone and the keen ribs, thinking this: People say snake tastes like chicken and, by damn, it does.
Just before full dark, when it had chilled off enough to put on my uncle’s wool coat, I went to piss by a thick stand of huckleberry bushes. I stood there unbuttoned with myself in my hand, all relaxed, eyes vaguely taking in the scenery. Out of the bushes twenty feet away erupted a young black bear. It was skinny from sleeping all winter
and was only a few months past following its mama around and probably as scared as I was, but it came forward all in a rush, bouncing along, huffing air and grunting, and it looked much larger than the space it occupied. In mid-flow as I was, I could do little but hold out my left hand, palm foremost, and say, with a note of considerable urgency, Wait.
And, oddly enough, the bear did wait. It came to a skidding halt and stood still, looking confused in its expression like a dog justly chastised for bad behavior. I dribbled to a conclusion and went running back to camp, fumbling with the buttons of my britches as I fled, coattails dragging the ground behind me. The bear chased me a few strides and then lost interest and eased back into the brush and was gone.
At that point, sleep did not seem a possibility. I guessed that in this landscape the varieties of threat were likely not to fall entirely within the bounds of reason offered by rock and snake and bear. I had kept some coffee grounds and a tin pot out of the panniers, and I sat up most of the night drinking coffee, feeding the fire, watching the edge of dark for movement, and listening for the approach of killers and wild animals and the malignant supernatural forces said by many cultures to inhabit the wilderness. There was every kind of noise out in the woods, but mostly just the colt shifting about and taking deep, sighing breaths. I jumped every time he moved and expected to see a shape form up out of the darkness and loom and then come at me, and the least threatening thing I imagined was the young bear. I tried laying my father’s knife naked-bladed on the ground beside me and practiced reaching to its elkhorn handle without looking. More often than not, I grabbed a handful of dirt. So I just took the knife up and held the handle tight and pointed the upcurved tip of blade at the dark.
Shopkeep, I thought. And maybe I said it aloud.
There were a right smart of boys my age sleeping in houses under a big pile of quilts with a mother and father bedded nearby. A great majority of boys were not squatting alone in the dark with a knife in their fist, without a soul in the world much concerned whether or not they made it alive until dawn lit up the east. I told myself that I would bury the knife deep into whatever crossed the edge of firelight.
—There won’t be any call for Wait ever again, I said to the night.
A HARD RAIN fell during the early morning, driven on a high wind. But it blew from a favorable quarter, and the shallow ledge kept me dry. I slept many hours after the first grey of morning. When I stirred shivering from under the blanket, I found a blue day already under way and Waverley gone and my panniers as well. My budget, still tied to the rope, lay sodden on the ground, pasted with the blown petals of dogwood blossoms.
I rushed around all in a panic, looking in the brush for the colt or for a great bloody pile of wolf kill. But nothing presented itself.
And then I went looking along the trail for tracks and the story of theft or abandonment they might tell. But again, nothing was revealed. Any marks of hoof or paw or moccasin that might have been were all washed away. I remember having a great desire to yell at the top of my voice.
Help, I suppose, would have been the word. But I swallowed that impulse back into my chest and instead put two fingers to the front of my mouth and whistled loud and long, hoping the colt would whinny from down the trail and come trotting back. I did it again and again until my lips and cheeks were numb, and then I stopped and sat amid my bedding and looked at the white ashes of the fire, still smoldering and smoking.
I sat thusly through much of the afternoon. I cried some, thinking that if the normal ties and accouterments of human beings kept falling away from me at the rate they had been doing lately, I’d soon become not much different from that little bear out wandering alone in the woods. I came to the conclusion that I was too old to throw myself on the mercy of the wild and become a wolf child. There’s a time in infancy when they will take you in, offer up a dark teat to your human mouth and raise you in accord with their own lights, which would be both lovely and brutal. But I’d long since passed that time. Now wolves would give me a hard look, allow me one step to turn and run, then come charging to bring me down.
I looked through the gap in the trees and studied the view west. Little tatters of fog hung on the mountainsides here and there. The air was damp and fresh. It was a big green world, brightening up for spring. Another country lay out ahead of me. Blank as could be.
I spread what was left of my kit before me on the ground. I had my budget, the map and key, my long wool coat, my bedding, and the kettle and nearly a pound of coffee grounds that I’d kept out of the panniers the evening before. Some oats and two books wrapped by my own hands in an oilcloth bundle. A collection of Arthur tales and The Aeneid.
I looked around and all there was to add to this pathetic array was the sorry little turtle-hull saddle. I went and threw it off into the brush and figured the porcupines were welcome to eat it for the salt of horse sweat if they cared to.
That would have been a fine time to meet up with one of those magic beggars from the old Jack stories. Little wizened men who, if you give them a penny or a crust of bread instead of a clout on the head, will hand you an item—a basket or tablecloth or bowl—that produces a lavish spread of food on request. Like a big portable Sunday dinner that never ends. Fill Bowl Fill. But no such beggar presented himself.
As I’ve said, it is so often the case in life that you have but two choices before you, or at least that’s all I’ve frequently been able to see. That day, it came down to these two: keep going and hope to hit the trade post before I starved or go back to the farm.
The farm was several days of backtracking away, and in the end I’d fetch up on my aunt’s front porch. But it was not as if I could take back my old life. That was over. She’d just run me out into the woods again. So I spent one more knifepoint night under the ledge, and then the next morning I put my budget on my back and kept going west, hoping to find a way through the woods.
2
I’M LOOKING FOR A BAY COLT, I SAID. HE’S GOT AN INSIDE CALKIN broken off his right front shoe. I’ve been following after him for some time, but I can’t see him here. I gestured to the cut-up roadway. Have you seen men go by with a string of horses?
—Might have, the girl said. A day or two ago. Might have seen them going up the river to where they always run their horses.
She squatted in the road drawing pictures with a sharp stick in the dirt, her dingy skirt draping about her feet. The girl did not even bother to look up at me, so about all I saw was dark hair falling to either side of her face from a strict white part. Scratched in the dirt around her were the heads of horses, their flowing manes and flared nostrils and arched necks thick with cords of muscle.
—I’m not to go there, she said. You’ll have to find your own way.
—I didn’t ask you to guide me, I said. Directions is all I’m wanting.
—It’s pony-club trash stays there.
Everybody east of the Nation despised the pony clubs, which had been going on since shortly after the Revolution. It was what the young Indian men did when war became something they were not allowed to compete in anymore. They’d steal horses east of the boundary line and run them across the Nation, where their own law applied, and then sell them out in Tennessee or Alabama or Mississippi to white people not inclined to ask very many questions about the provenance of a fine horse offered for sale at a bargain price. At that point, the pony clubbers would steal some more horses and run them back in the other direction.
—How do I get to this place? I said.
—Three turnings from here. Left at a fork in the road, right at a bend in the river. Then start looking for a old track commencing next to a big hemlock and running hard uphill.
THE CABIN WAS set all around with mud and stumps. Set picturesquely atop a bluff overlooking the midsized river and a distant range of mountains. It was nothing special, an unpainted one-room dwelling lidded with curling grey shakes. At one end, a chimney of smooth stones hauled all the way up from the river.
Out in front, a man was digging a hole. He had been working some length of time, for he was in so deep all I could see was the top of his bald head. At rhythmic intervals, the metal end of a shovel sent sprays of red dirt flying onto a conical pile. I could hear loud voices and laughter coming from inside the house.
I walked up to the hole and looked down at the man. In there with him, he had a ladder of peeled poles lashed together with rawhide strips.
—Hey sir, I said.
The man stopped digging and turned his face up to me, but he didn’t say anything. His face was round and white looking up out of that dark hole.
—I’m trying to find a colt that got away from me, I said. A bay, name of Waverley. Can any of you here help me?
—They’s a bay colt around back, the man said. But I don’t exactly recall him saying what his name was.
I walked around the house, and there was a stock pen with a dozen ill-sorted horses standing hock-deep in black mud. There was not the first sign of fodder, and the horses looked to have given up hoping for any. Waverley stood with his head hanging over the top rail looking at me. I went to him and started to scratch his ears but he pinned them back and wouldn’t commit to recognizing me. I stood awhile figuring what to do, my eyes unfocused, looking toward a slatted springhouse beyond the pen and then off across the valley to the mountains. I went back around the house.