FOUR DAYS LATER, autumn sun already set, I walked out to the gallery of the Springs with a glass of whiskey. There sat the razor man, smoking a cheroot and rocking very slightly in a rocker. The exact black suit of clothes from summer. I looked around for the stout boy, but he was nowhere to be seen.
—Have a seat, the razor man said. He palmed the arm of the chair next to him and set it bobbing. I sat one chair down from it and took the Remington out of my vest pocket. It was not much of a weapon. If you stuck out your forefinger and cocked up your thumb to imitate a pistol, the Remington would be considerably smaller. But at six feet of range, it could put a little precise hole through your head from one ear to the other. I set it in my lap and sipped my drink.
—Pretty little gun, the man said. You ought to have bought it in chrome. Then it would look like a piece of jewelry. A brooch.
I was too old to start finding deep personal symbolism in the pistol I carried.
—It’s been my experience in all departments of life that the pretty ones will kill a man faster than the others, I said.
—How’s your thigh? he said.
—Thigh?
He drew on his cheroot and looked upward and puffed out an irritable plosive cloud of smoke.
He said, So I take it that thanks for my generosity is still forthcoming. Oh, well, they say charity is its own reward.
—We could do this all night long, I said. What do you want?
—Me? Not a damn thing. As far as I’m concerned, you can do what you want. You’re of no interest to me whatsoever.
—And yet you’re here.
That got a smile out of him.
—It’s the same old business, he said. Money. That’s all there is. The driving wheel of everything.
—Who? I said. Williams?
—Not just Williams now. I’m representative for a sort of consortium.
—They’ve ganged up against me?
—Yes indeed. A gang wanting their money that you owe them. And failing cash repayment, they want your land. All of it.
—All my land? That’s complicated to define. There’s my land in my name. And the people’s land in their names. And their land still in my name from back when they couldn’t own property, and that’s a lot.
—This is not the least bit complicated. They want everything with your name on it.
I did rough calculations. Not enough room left over for people to live on. Cornfields overlapping one another, cabins standing cheek to jowl, fishermen jostling each other on the riverbanks, and the dead woods thick with frustrated hunters.
—The inhabitants? I said. The people. What of them?
—That’s what the Indian Territory is for. The West.
—No, I said.
—No? the razor man said. No is what you have the freedom to say when you’re in charge. You’re not exactly calling the shots here.
—So what do we do? Duel or what?
He laughed and turned aside and spit a fleck of tobacco from his tongue.
—Duel? he said. I don’t do that ancient shit. I kill people if they need killing.
—If they don’t kill you first.
He took off his hat and showed his balding pate and turned his bagged and wrinkled eyes toward me.
—Kill me first? he said. Good God. I’m a thousand years old. Get in line if you want to take your turn with your tiny pistol. If my job was to kill you, you’d have been dead three months ago.
He sucked a lungful of smoke and I took a drink. We both looked off toward the river. Neither of us said another word, and it seemed a competition not to be the first to speak.
I finally scored the point.
—Here’s the only thing pertaining, he finally said. In the spirit of your old friendship, Williams just sends a word of advice. You need to go home and attend to business and not let love rule your life.
—That’s it?
—Go home, he said. All kinds of shit’s waiting to fall on you when you get there.
10
WHAT FOLLOWED WAS A PERIOD OF LIFE SO EMPTY THERE WASN’T even anything to dream about. All that I had was gone.
Someone should write a sad ballad with that line as title. In a minor key. Fiddles droning, old women keening grim lyrics containing the words broke, ruined, busted, and failed.
As Bear had said, I was a man with payments. I did not want to default. I was no willing welsher. At the heart of the problem was the flow of money backing up my cascades of paper. After the War, government checks were not reliably forthcoming. Neither the long-delayed final payout nor even the annual interest on the $53.33. Nor could my many debtors pay me back what they owed. All kinds of loans remained outstanding. Everything from pure objective business deals to a handshake loan I’d made with an old friend to pay for his twin boys to go to Harvard. Now he wouldn’t even talk to me. A few of my other debtors at least wrote back with excuses. This was the Reconstruction, they all pointed out, one of the most ironically named government policies ever, since its goal seemed to be plowing us all into the ground rather than building anything back up. Money was tight, et cetera, et cetera. As if that was news to me. I’d sit at my desk and read the letters and wonder what rates the razor man charged and if he might offer a volume discount.
There might have been some angle to work, a three-bumper shot I might have made in my youth. But I could not even imagine it now. Some days the weight pressed so hard I lay in bed until sunset, sipping claret and reading novels from before the War: Carwin, Pym, and the like.
Before long, lawsuits began flying. Court dates loomed. All kinds of opportunities for loss presented themselves.
Money, though, was not at the head of the list for me. The worst loss was to see the land go. Our holdings were not one big square country. We had our core territory, which was fairly regular in its borders. But nearly half the total was scattered about in pieces, some of them two days’ ride away. Bear’s vision had been far-flung, and some of our original purchases at the land auction had defined the outer boundary of his imaginary homeland. It was left to me to fill in the empty spaces of our map as time went on. But for all kinds of reasons, that hadn’t happened.
So those broken tracts were the first to go. And it hurt me awfully deep when I signed the papers on the river land that included the Drowning Place where Bear had fought his namesake battle. A man wanted the land to grow corn on the flats by the river and to log the steep mountainsides of oak and chestnut, and he was willing to pay cash money.
ABOUT THIS TIME, I began to lack the strength of spirit to manipulate visiting journalists to my ends. But they kept coming nevertheless. So I delegated Conley. A poor choice, it turned out. His first and only adversary among the tribe of journalists was a writer from Lippincott’s Magazine, and Conley failed utterly in the contest. Needless to say, the main thing about failing against journalists is that your defeat fetches up in cold print for all to read unto eternity, same as the Celts against the Romans at Telamon.
Conley spent two days giving the usual tour of the community. The grey and off-plumb schoolhouse and church. Various oddities among our citizens to represent local color. A weary ball game with neither bloodshed nor gambling. A few remnant basket weavers and potters doing their work under a drooping shed roof.
And then, after some months, Conley was sent a fresh copy of Lippincott’s in which the article appeared. As if he might be proud of his contribution.
He didn’t even try to hide the story from me. I still read widely, and he realized he couldn’t get a lot past me. He came to the house and handed me the issue in question all fearfully, as if he expected me to fall into a rage as I read.
The story started out pleasantly enough, pretty much like they had for decades. The southern mountains are a land of forgetting. Railroads and telegraphs, work and hurry, are left behind at the first pass. An entire paragraph on the beauteous landscape largely untouched by man.
So far, so nice.
But then the article turned to
a catalog of varied local rumor and misinformed shit-ass opinion in regard to me. I was portrayed as a deep mystery, existing only to be solved by the writer. Local folks had been scrounged up to say all kinds of things about me, and since the tales had been collected at considerable effort on the writer’s part, they were thus presented reverently as entirely possible facts. And the various possibilities were arranged in descending order.
Number one. The Indians living in the colonel’s vast boundary of land were a Christian people existing in peace and prosperity for many decades. He had been their benevolent sachem, their white chief, who had accumulated for their benefit a territory nearly as large as some minor European countries. Specific examples of such tiny nations were not forthcoming, though perhaps a little embittered borderland principality fitted into a seam between France and one of her several neighbors was intended. But sadly, our vast and hard-won homeland was shrinking day by day under the current unfavorable economic conditions of the South. Leaving us all in jeopardy.
Number two. For decades, the Indians had been little more than slaves, abused and bled white by the melancholy colonel, who ruled over them and a vast lawless wilderness as autocratically as a pharaoh, claiming for his personal property every penny of congressional appropriation since the Removal, which amounted to a squandered fortune. And now the whole kingdom was falling apart due to a combination of poor stewardship and outright malfeasance.
Three. The Indians were godless heathens, living in a state of primitive licentiousness and unbridled passion, and the colonel had not only condoned such a retrograde state but immersed himself in their manner of free love and pagan rites with great enthusiasm for such a long time that a great many half-breed children and full-grown adults milled about his grand estate with noses embarrassingly like his own. He herded the people toward Christian ways only to the extent that it looked favorable to outlanders. As long as his people kissed the Bible and said something convictional about Jesus loving them when visitors came calling, the colonel was happy. Otherwise, it was fine with him if they went right on praying to the souls of animals to beg forgiveness for killing them or believed whatever they wanted about witches and herb doctors and spirit healers. An unidentified white woman in the area was quoted as saying that the colonel hadn’t moved the people further toward Christian conduct because it might cut down on all the relations he had with their women. Another unidentified source said, There’s enough of them running around saying he’s their daddy that just the boys of them would make a pair of baseball teams.
Finally, the Indians were nothing but a sad remainder of primitive humanity, debased and starving, living in total isolation and disarray, and the colonel was a madman chained to the floor of his own house.
And that was but the first couple of pages. Illustrated with a fine etching of high jagged peaks and deep jagged gorges and tiny human figures dressed in the current fashion standing by a boiling river and looking upward toward impossible summits in rapt attention. From that point on, it just got worse and worse.
When I finished reading, I sat in my chair by the fire and closed the magazine and set it on the side table. Conley was already trying to figure what other kind of job he might do henceforth. Plowman, scrivener. You could look in his face and see that he believed his future sent back miserable tidings.
I said, Everybody with an inkpot and steel pen and an hour to kill gets to take a shot. About all you can do in defense is present them a moving target.
I made a little faking motion with my head and shoulders, an old ballplayer’s move.
—Yes sir, Conley said.
Then I riffled the magazine back to the starting page of the story and studied it further, looking particularly at the author’s credit.
—Rebecca? I said. That’s a fetching name.
Conley shrugged.
—Pretty? I said.
—I didn’t take note, Conley said.
I just looked critically at him.
—She was pretty, he said.
—Awfully, awfully pretty, I said, and smart as can be? Snapping grey eyes and little curls of pale hair escaping around her temples from underneath the brim of whatever kind of stylish yet unusual hat she was wearing?
—Something like that.
—And about all you said while she was here, no matter what question she asked, was Yes, ma’am?
—If she’d requested me to deny my Savior, that’s the answer I’d have given.
—And that business about me chained to the floor?
—I just acknowledged that it is a current rumor.
—That’s what they’re saying?
—You’ve not been seen out in the world much these days. People get to talking.
Conley paused a long time, and then he said, But damn, she was plenty pretty.
—Well, I said. That’s all right. Pour us a drink and we’ll commiserate about women and their hard hearts.
THE WORST PART was the walk up to the precipice. But after I had been pushed off the lip of the cliff and was falling in midair, everything relaxed.
The Government sent down a man. F. A. Dony, Special Agent, Bureau of Indian Affairs. He escorted me to the nearest court town. Just the two of us on a three-day jaunt.
The final night of the journey, we camped by a river. Had a fire going and dinner done. Lounging on our blankets, yellow light flickering halfway up the tree trunks, woodsmoke, all that sort of thing. Dony had been sitting a long while writing in a tight hand on big loose correspondence sheets.
—Read me the opening of what you just wrote, I said.
—It’s private correspondence back to my supervisor at the Indian Office. Government business. A sort of report.
—Last time I paid attention, the Government dealt with Indians through the War Department, and what they wanted was to send all of us west.
—Times change.
—Read me just the first two lines of what you’ve written. We’re men out traveling together in the wilderness. Show some collegiality.
—You may not like it.
—Name me something I do like these days.
—All right. The opening lines are these:
I have just completed a journey through the wilderness to the nearest court, including a memorable bivouac atop the Soco Mountain, with no other company than the notorious Colonel Cooper. Contrary to expectation, he has been a charming companion and a trusted guide, so long as one is willing to bide one’s time and patiently indulge his idiosyncrasies.
—As is necessary with every person I’ve ever known, I said. Every damn one of them. So, all in all, a very good and fair beginning, ignoring the fact that we are still on our journey rather than at its end. Not out of the woods yet. But let’s call it poetic license and go on. Your writing fascinates me.
—Second paragraph.
I arrived here expecting to find a thief, an enemy. I found instead a man embattled, beset on all sides. He is being sued by everyone he knows and also by a good number of strangers. Creditors from a dozen counties in four states are trying to seize the land he owns to settle their claims. And the Indians occupying the land in question, the people he has lived among for nearly half a century, are also suing him, their former White Chief, on the grounds that a significant portion of the land had been bought on their behalf. But much of the paperwork memorializing that intent has never been legally filed. So they have been left with little choice. If they do not get in on the suing, they may be left out entirely. But there are few hard feelings in either direction.
In fact, coincident with their lawsuit, the Indians have issued a proclamation making all his descendants members of the tribe for all time. Though from what I can tell, that is an empty symbolic gesture since he never married and has no legitimate heirs.
Against all prudence, the Senator seems intent on testifying against himself in court. Yesterday while riding tack and tack up a rugged mountain trail, I asked him why he insisted on following this self-destructive course. He a
nswered that when he was a boy, cast out by his own people, these Indians took him in and had ever since been his only family and this land his only home. And if a man lacks something to fight for, he is truly bankrupt.
None of which negates the fact that these people are in a precarious situation, liable to be evicted if the Senator’s enemies prevail in court. At issue is a vast territory. But deeds have gone unrecorded for decades, loans in many directions have been defaulted on and then covered by three-party checks and old promissory notes reassigned so many times that the paper is limp and greasy and feather-edged from handling and the signatures are unreadable palimpsests. Collateral sometimes involves mules and futures on shell corn and next year’s peach crop. By such manner of business, the ownership of a wide swath of mountain topography has become all tangled in the courts. The Senator’s many opponents are trying to seize his land and evict the Indians from it and then parcel it off and sell it.
Dony stopped and said, That’s as far as I’ve gotten.
—Real good, I said. Not a major point of disagreement between us. No denying that I put the people in a position where they had to sue me to keep my enemies from taking all the land I’ve accumulated for a half century all the way back to Bear’s original four hundred acres. We were buying land after the Removal at such a furious rate and with such complete consonance between ourselves that it didn’t seem to matter much whose name was on which paper. We knew what we meant to do. Make a homeland with boundaries as big around as we could draw them. Though not as big as Bear’s mind could encompass. So one way of looking at it is that we were doomed to failure from the start.