—That’s all fine, Dony said. But that was a long time ago, and you’re about to have to stand up in court and account.
—Yes, that. But we’re days away from testimony, and the future will be what it will be. And you have several more pages in your hand.
—They’re not part of the report. More in the way of a personal journal.
—Well, that’s an explanation, but not an excuse. Let’s hear them.
—Private, Dony said.
—Great God, I said. Back in the dim past I published poems that were blood straight from the vein. Every line was pain, and yet I laid them out for the public view. Read on.
—This has to do with last night, Dony said, and his voice changed slightly when he addressed himself to the page.
The campsite the Senator selected was his favorite, he claimed, situated in a flat place at what he called the gap of the mountain. There was a stone ring filled with old charcoal, and a long view back toward the western summits. We settled the horses and collected wood and struck a fire in the pit and sat cross-legged on our bedding admiring the view. The Senator did not even begin cooking our supper until after dark, and I was, by then, faint with hunger. We had eaten only biscuits and tea since dawn, and the meal he cooked took hours to complete for he prepared an elaborate stew from a pair of unidentifiable midsized game birds with chopped bacon and onions and an entire bottle of red wine and a great fuss about the thickening of the sauce and the roasting of potatoes. The key to the dish, he said, was a long slow meeting between birds and fire and wine.
Very long, as it turned out. So, we had plenty of time as the night wore on to brew a full black pot of coffee, which proved necessary to keep me awake until our dinner was ready.
During the cooking and the coffee interlude, Cooper talked about literature of the present moment and politics of an antique time. He still held grudges against Jackson and mourned the untimely death of Crockett. His primary interest in that era—which seemed to him recent and to me dead history—was to find the exact point where America veered wrong. When it came to literature, though, his was a generous spirit. Everything he read, new and old, seemed to enjoy his full approbation, which I took to be the sure sign of a lonely man, indiscriminately happy for the company of a fellow human voice.
It felt like midnight when the Senator declared the stew done and opened another bottle of wine and served our dinners into tin bowls. For a time neither of us spoke, but only concentrated on the result of his long cookery, which was splendid. I ate, I’m afraid, without regard to manners. Hungry and tired from the trail, sitting inside a warm yellow circle of light in the middle of a chilly black wilderness—the meal seemed the best I had ever eaten. And the wine—the same excellent burgundy he had poured so profligately into the cooking pot—was perfect, and I said so. He did not even offer a thank-you but instead criticized his browning of the onions and his selection of the wonderful accompanying wine, which he said lacked the necessary sad autumnal quality, but it needed to be drunk for otherwise his enemies would take it from him and swill it with pork rinds and pinto beans. His opinion of the meal was that he could have done a lot better all around. The dish fell mournfully short of his mental image of the perfect stew composed from game birds and wine. But it was the best he could do, given the materials at hand and the time available.
I begged to differ as to the quality of the meal and asked what in this brief life does not fall under the same disclaimer as to time and materials.
Afterward, we drank more coffee and looked at the fire, and he talked about the puzzling methods by which the native peoples of the Andes form constellations by looking at the shapes of the black parts of the sky rather than the individual stars. And also the indigenous ghosts of this very mountain region, one of which was noted for her ability to skewer a man on her long sharp forefinger. After a drowsy period, he aroused briefly and said, Hark! Do you hear wolves?
Then he fell suddenly asleep. As for me, the many cups of coffee buzzed in my head. I lay awake until near dawn, watching the sky pass through the limbs of trees, and gave names of my own devising to the passing shapes. The Great Miasma. Sixteen Random Points in the Dark. The Greater and Lesser Guinea Fowls.
Come morning, I was awakened by the sound of clanging pots. The Senator was busy brewing coffee, frying eggs and bacon. My headache was blistering.
When Dony was finished, I said, Not a bad start. We’ll work on it some more tomorrow.
DONY AND I eventually made it to court, and it was a sorry show. Boring, really. In the past, my interest in court had been artificially enhanced by the fact that I got paid when I showed up to lawyer. So, this appearance being gratis, I won’t go into detail.
I had been left with no honorable choice but tell the truth against myself. It was painful at the time, like one of Granny Squirrel’s formulas where you raked yourself all over longways—including the tongue and the privates—with a seven-barbed scratcher made with the sharp bones of seven animals, and then again crossways with another scratcher made from the barbs of seven plants, scraping deep until the blood ran.
In retrospect, though, I believe we should all have to testify against ourselves at some latter point in life. Lay out our flaws with a clerk writing it all down for the permanent record. It is a bracing and chastening experience, and I rather got into the spirit of the thing during my time on the stand.
The upshot was that Dony stepped in at the final moment before my utter annihilation and offered all the Federal money they had withheld from me all these years to pay off most of the core of our land, a fraction of what Bear wanted but enough to live on. Better than nothing, but not a gift. Not a cent more than what we were owed down the long years of principal and interest. But at least the people would have an ongoing place to live.
For me, it was more like an execution halted halfway through. I was stripped of everything but my house and just a few acres to live on. Little but taters and beans ever after was their vision for me. At least in the negotiations, I stuck firm on including in my holdings the long slope of pasture up to the dogwood tree where Waverley rests.
And that was about it. Dony went back to Washington. I went back to my diminished home. To some extent, it felt like I had never been in this world at all. Which was all right with me as long as the people could go on with their lives about the same as always, if that’s what they wanted to do. Bean bread most of the time, deer meat when they can get it. Booger Dances on winter nights, Green Corn Dances in summer. A fellow named Swimmer taking over working the spells and formulas where Granny Squirrel left off. The thirteen moons rising and falling through the long round of the year.
IT’S A BAD IDEA TO LIVE TOO LONG. FEW CARRY IT OFF WELL. BUT nevertheless, here I am. In retreat but still in play, so to speak. Dying mid-stride would have suited me better than living on and on into withered old age. I’ve never required the death that Featherstone hoped for: drawing blood to the last breath, pistol fire lighting his path to the Nightland. I just wanted to keep busy, moving forward through the world, not letting it bog me down, resisting the netherward pull as Bear did, all the way to the end.
These days, Bear’s old question—If you’re to die tomorrow, do you spend the time praising Creation or cursing God?—seems much less theoretical than it did back in the winterhouse.
In the old days within Granny Squirrel’s recollection, before the arrival of the Spaniards and their metal hats, living long was different. Little changed during your span of time, birth to death. Individual people, of course, came and went, but that’s the unfortunate transitory nature of people. The physical world surrounding you, though, remained about the same from start to finish. Short of utter apocalypse, the landscape was what it was throughout one’s brief life. Animals all the same. No unexpected pigs or elephants erupting confusingly into the world. Food was food. Clothes remained clothes. Meaningless innovations in hat styles had not yet occurred. All that you had learned in childhood remained largely in effect
lifelong. When you got old and approached death, it was not an unrecognizable world you left, for we had not yet learned how to break it apart. Back then, about all that changed during your time on earth was that a few big trees had fallen and many new trees had grown in their places. Trunk diameter, really, was all that was in question. Whether you measured the span with your thumb and forefinger or your outstretched arms.
All of which may or may not reduce your sadness at leaving the world. Does overwhelming change, the annihilation of all you know, create an intensity of memory that would not have existed otherwise? When all you know is lost and gone forever, does it become sweeter in the mind? Does it make you want to let go or hold on even tighter?
All I can say is that we are mistaken to gouge such a deep rift in history that the things old men and old women know have become so useless as to be not worth passing on to grandchildren.
A STRICT SENSE of justice would call it only fair for me to live in poverty and not in my comfortable house with lovely May to watch over me. But when did fairness ever rule our lives? It is best not to study too much on who gets what they deserve. It can lead to an overly complicated interpretation of God’s personal attributes.
Fair or not, I gained a second fortune, smaller than the first but comfortable. And I did it the easy way. Some years after I lost everything, the railroad began pushing into the mountains. Tunnels were dynamited through sheer rock, deep gorges spanned with high trestles. The usual tedious business of construction—made epic, however, by the highest mountains and steepest grades east of the Rockies. And I’m sure that amid all that work we must have had our own John Henry, worthy of a tragic spike-driver blues. And also our version of that perfect song about pines and the head caught in the driving wheel and the body on the line, the narrator pleading to know where his woman slept last night. You don’t cut train tracks through such country as ours without a lot of blood on the rails. How else to explain the recent stories of a headless engineer roaming the Swannanoa grade at night, swinging a lantern and looking for what he lost? A spirit haunted by the railroad and haunting it at the same time.
I had invested a little money in the railroad company in the dim past before the War, sometime right after I went out with Calhoun scouting a route for a possible line across the mountains. I’d forgotten that old investment, and it was missed in the bankruptcy. But I do remember what a pleasant trip that was. Paid for by railroad money, so we went first class. No trailside bivouacs for Senator Calhoun, only the best of inns. He was an interesting companion, wise and frightful and crazy. I learned a lot from him. And if pressed I could tell you the weather every day of the journey and particular songs a fiddler played at an inn one night down on the Saluda River. But that would be beside the point. The point is that suddenly some old paper stuffed in a desk drawer was like the beggar Jack meets in the tales. With a bowl that will brim with food on command. Fill Bowl Fill. The money came rolling in again, enough to live on quite comfortably and even to send me on a fashionable grand tour of Europe. Now, though, I have train tracks running between my front porch and the river. No headless engineers on this stretch of track, but plenty of other ghosts.
THE TELEPHONE CALLS keep coming, almost weekly. I walk down the hall and take up the black earpiece on its braided cord and listen to the hiss and crackle of static on the wire like the sizzle of distant gunfire. A voice that might be no more than a spirit says its one syllable over and over. Possibly my name.
—Will? Will?
No louder than a breath of air.
—Present, I say. Right here still.
And then I say, Claire? Claire?
Is she even alive? Odds are against us on that. Nearly everybody I know is dead.
—Please speak louder, I say. Please speak.
Nothing but a sound like ham frying.
Claire’s telephone calls are flesh wounds of memory, painful but inconclusive.
After each call, I climb the hill to the bench under the dogwood tree and visit Waverley for a while. With little effort, I call up images of Claire’s face at twelve, seventeen, twenty-three, thirty, fifty-two. Perhaps my memories are accurate, and perhaps they are purely an act of creation. I have nothing to test them against one way or the other, for I don’t believe Claire ever had her picture taken. And I know Bear never did.
I’ve heard that Crazy Horse, a noted recent Sioux, successfully avoided the diminishing stare of the lens. A wise move on his part. Crockett would approve. Wander off the stage of history and leave only a moving target. A mystery.
When I was young, photography was barely a glimmer in the eye. And even much later, living remote as we did, we had little opportunity for portraits. I have a memory, though, and a physical artifact supporting it, that I cannot explain. I remember very clearly, years before the Removal when I was still just an orphan boy, that a circuit-riding photographer passed through in a covered wagon trailing a reek of chemicals. He was a kind of showman with a great deal of long dark hair slicked back from his brow and extravagant sideburns and mustaches. He and his little Chinaman assistant had become woefully lost in a journey intended to be from Charleston to Washington City. They stopped at the post for directions and to ask if they might ply their trade out in the yard for a day or two to make some traveling money. They had a stuffed pony under the arched canvas lid of the big wagon. The showman told me that in cities the pony never failed to attract the young children and their mothers. I mentioned that we had a right smart of live ponies in the vicinity, but he persisted in his belief that the dead pony had special power to draw customers. The assistant dragged it out from the wagon’s clutter and stood it up in the yard, and it looked old enough to have come from the time of the Phoenicians. It had dull glass eyes as black and blank as gobs of axle grease, and its red hair was rubbed down to the dry hide in patches around its withers and muzzle and knees. The photographers were only there two rainy days. They came inside at night and drank coffee in the post, and the showman fell asleep and the assistant and I talked about books long into the night. Even though I invited them to sleep inside or at least on the porch, they retreated under the wagon bed together and moved on before dawn of the third day without even cooking breakfast. I know for a fact that Claire did not come to have herself memorialized with the pony, for she was off in Valley River and there were no customers other than myself. I paid a dollar for a portrait. One buck. I remember this all as clear as day.
And I have the proof. Open the hinged case and see even now, resting in faded blue velvet, a dim silvered picture of a boy from an olden time. His face is hopeful and earnest and he’s looking straight forward, right into the camera. His arm is hooked over the neck of a threadbare dead pony standing stiff and slightly off plumb and staring black-eyed and aslant into infinity. The boy hugs the pony to him. He’s not smiling, but the expression on his face says Yes to whatever might come along.
The problem is chronology. The history of photography. Numbers won’t exactly sum. If my memory is correct and that’s me in the picture, daguerreotypes did not yet exist. If that’s not me, who is that very familiar boy eager to press forward into the world?
Was there some slick-haired showman and his genius assistant several years ahead of Daguerre and the rest of the world with their invention, trying to make a buck with a camera and a dead pony in the hinterlands, imaging Indians and countryfolk? I doubt it. But who is to say?
I’ve got that picture, and it looks an awful lot like me.
ALL IN ALL, I’m glad I don’t have such a specific remembrance of Claire at that age. What if her photograph had been made in bad light that left unflattering shadows, squinted eyes, a tight-lipped mouth like an axe cut? Her beauty all diminished by mechanics and chemistry? I’d just as soon have nothing to contradict my memory, which, regarding her, is a clear stone with a thousand facets. When I forget one, I can always make up a replacement.
And the same for Bear. No pictures, I’m certain. You couldn’t have beat him with a st
ick and gotten him to submit to the dead Cyclops eye of the camera. His younger brother, though, was photographed in his later years. In profile. And there is enough similarity between them to serve as adequate memorial. Steep cheekbones and hooked nose, thick hair cut square to the shoulders. I don’t require any more than that. My memory works fine without further prompt.
I am glad to think that Claire and Bear succeeded in avoiding the camera. I see their achievement as an enviable resistance against the modern age. When everything is immediately available and infinitely reproducible, nothing is valuable. How can it be? How many times might beauty or heartbreak or love be replicated and still have meaning? It is like running the soul under a die press. Reproduction breeds worthlessness. Claire and Bear remain singularities.
I believe fervently in what I have just said. But of course right this instant I would pay an enormous sum of money for a little daguerreotype of either of them, the filigreed case crusted with powdery corrosion, face blurred and no bigger than the tip of my littlest finger.
I do have a copy of the one photograph ever taken of Featherstone. From the later years. He is indistinguishable from the Old Possum. Exploding white hair, little marsupial eyes looking out cold and fierce onto the world.
As for myself, I sat for photographers any number of times, from middle age to antiquity, and the results were widely reproduced in newspapers and periodicals. Captions underneath identifying me as white chief, senator, colonel, all that sort of thing and more. Pictures from the period when my successes were widely honored, and also the period where I was sued from all directions. In my opinion, those portraits vary in small degrees from looking like memorials of coffined cholera fatalities to the images in Wild West newspapers of dead outlaws killed in gunfights.