FROM MY FRONT PORCH, I can look beyond the shining rail lines and across the river and up to the big blue mountains sitting against the sky like embodied truths, like perfect beings without fear or desire. This day they are just a scant shade darker than heaven. Workers have rigged cables thick as a man’s arm from one high blue ridge to the next across the great span of a deep green cove hollowed out by a bold stream once clear as glass and now the color of shit. A steam engine turns wheels, and the sagged cables tighten, and the biggest tree trunks—old giant poplars and hemlocks and chestnuts and oaks, some of them twelve feet through, remnants of a younger, better world—come rising slowly out of the cove depths. They fly through the air.
But at such distance, even with my glasses, I cannot see the cables, so the backlit cylinders of the old dead trees rise into the sky like an ascension, stately and full of grace. Up in those coves toward the highest ridges is where Charley and his people fled and were caught. The mountain fastnesses. The old flyers end up at a siding near the river to be loaded on railcars.
Every day the passenger train rolls by, between ten forty-eight and ten fifty-five in the morning. After breakfast, I wait on the porch. I sit tipped back in a straight chair reading Lucretius for the second time this year. I consult my watch. The twelve-gauge Parker rests propped against the rail of the porch, which at this late date has settled and pitches at a slight angle to the horizontal, declining from the front door to the steps that descend into the yard. As a concession to age, I’ve fitted the stock of the Parker with a rubber pad inside a sleeve of leather laced tight to the stock. Altogether, it is an aesthetic that pleases me. Dark oiled leather, worn walnut, steel with the bluing rubbed away from much handling. The grip fits my hand at the exact angle of the diagonal silver brand across my palm.
I have gotten the railway I once wanted so badly.
And what has it brought? The ravages of tourists and logging.
And what has it taken away? Everything else.
Every afternoon the log train rolls east, the trees so freshly cut I can smell them like incense on the air as they pass. I can tell whether they are mostly oaks and chestnuts or hemlocks and poplars, and thereby I know what pieces of the mountain have most lately been taken down. The black and hideous locomotives spew coal smoke and throw off cinders and shake the ground. They are ruinous noisy machines that hold no reference to anything in the green world or to the past in general.
I cannot bring myself to shoot the dead trees, so I shoot tourists instead. The distance from which I can hear them coming varies. Windless mornings like this with the fog still hanging on the river give the longest warning. I check my watch. Ten-thirty. I wait and read.
The thing I’ve always admired about the ancients is their ability to clarify the obvious, like the first mapmakers entering an undiscovered country. Lucretius holds the reasonable and obvious opinion that without space nothing could happen because there wouldn’t be room for movement amid all the clutter. Everything would jam up against everything else and squeeze to a stop. Case in point, the attic of my house. It is crowded with all the artifacts of my life. Wooden crates of old notebooks and business papers, volumes of yellow-paged literary journals, a crate of clouded Murano champagne glasses from one of which Davy Crockett once drank Moët’s. Also a small wooden box in which my young self kept its tiny art objects. A perfect obsidian bird point with flaked edges as sharp as broken glass, a few little faceted stone crosses that Nature—or the artisans of some old original people from before Noah’s flood—salted in the earth for us to find and be struck with wonder, a prehistoric clay pipe bowl fashioned in the shape of a man and woman rutting each other in such a convoluted manner that all you see is asses and elbows and nether parts. And a thin wristlet of Claire’s hair which she plaited for me to remember her by, back in another world. I wore it against my skin until it threatened to fall apart. And also at some deep stratum is there a tattered map, a rusty key, a moth-eaten wool coat with maybe some slight fragrance of lavender left in it if you breathe deep enough?
Now, when I climb the steep stairs to the dark attic, I cannot find the map or key or coat. I can’t even make my way five feet through the congestion of the things I have accumulated in a near century of living. All matter and no space left for me to move forward.
And according to Lucretius, time works similarly. Without it everything would happen all at once. A beautiful and horrible explosion of simultaneous events, an instant of awful frenzy and then, ever after, black nothing. So of course time is necessary. But nevertheless damn painful, for it transforms all the pieces of your life—joy and sorrow, youth and age, love and hate, terror and bliss—from fire into smoke, rising up the air and dissipating on a breeze.
We all, when we’re young, think we’ll live forever. Then at some point you settle for living a great long while. But after that final distinction is achieved, survival becomes at best uncomfortable. Everyone and everything you love goes away. And yet it is your fortune to remain. You find yourself exiled in a transformed world peopled by strangers. Lost in places you’ve known as intimately as the back of your hand. Eternal rivercourses and ridgelines become your only friends. That is the point when living any farther either becomes ridiculous and amusing or else you fall away and follow all Creation through the gates of death to the Nightland.
You’re left with nothing but your moods and your memory. Pitiful and powerful tools.
I COCK MY HEAD to aim an ear toward the first low-pitched rumble from upriver. I put the book down and take up the Parker.
At this moment on the train, Pullman porters in white jackets walk the aisles much the way they do before reaching long tunnels cored through the mountains. For the tunnels, the porters lift the yellow flames of candles to touch the charred wicks of kerosene lanterns swinging from the ceilings, and they warn passengers not to be alarmed by the sudden onset of darkness. As they approach my house, the porters go through the passenger cars lowering windows on the side exposed to my front porch, and they tell the tourists that the sound of a discharging firearm should not cause concern.
It is a deal I have struck. I promise to use loads no greater than birdshot, and the railroad administrators and the local sheriff promise to ignore me.
I rise and stand and carry the Parker to the porch rail. When the locomotive approaches, the engineer blows the whistle and waves. The armatures to the drive wheels pump relentlessly. I put the padded cup of the gun butt to my shoulder and aim rather generally. I trip one trigger. The kick steps me back. I brace myself and fire the second barrel.
The forlorn echoes are nearly lost in the clamor of the train. And if the birdshot even carries as far as the tracks, it rattles off the car windows like the first hard pellets of rain at the front edge of a thunderstorm. It is partly my railroad, and fine birdshot is harmless against metal and glass. The whistle blows two short friendly notes, and the locomotive turns the curve and drags its train behind. In the end, just a fading rumble coming from down the river and black smoke settling over everything before the mountains form up again, shorn and damaged and eternal.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I WOULD LIKE TO REMIND THOSE READERS FAMILIAR WITH THE SOUTHERN Appalachians that Thirteen Moons is a work of fiction. The geography and human history inside these covers have been filtered through my imagination. The village of Wayah, for example, will not be found on a map. Nor should my Valley River be confused with the Valley Town communities that existed on the Cherokee Nation. All historical figures and locations are used fictionally, and sometimes I’ve changed their names and sometimes I have not. Will Cooper is not William Holland Thomas, though they do share some DNA. The capture and execution of Tsali is still a matter of considerable disagreement both in regard to fact and interpretation, but however it actually happened, it was most certainly different from Charley’s story here. In other words, anyone seeking historical or geographical fact should look elsewhere. I would suggest these books as a start:
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p; Duncan, Barbara R. Living Stories of the Cherokee. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
Duncan, Barbara R., and Brett Riggs. Cherokee Heritage Trails Guidebook. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
Ehle, John. Trail of Tears. New York: Anchor Books, 1988.
Finger, John R. The Eastern Band of Cherokees, 1819–1900. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984.
Godbold, E. Stanley, Jr., and Mattie U. Russell. Confederate Colonel and Cherokee Chief: The Life of William Holland Thomas. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990.
McCarthy, William Bernard, ed. Jack in Two Worlds: Contemporary North American Tales and Their Tellers. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.
Perdue, Theda. Cherokee Women, 1700–1835. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998.
Speck, Frank G., and Leonard Broom, in collaboration with Will West Long. Cherokee Dance and Drama. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951.
For help along the way, I would like to thank Barbara Duncan, education director of the Museum of the Cherokee Indian; George Frizzell, head of special collections at Western Carolina University’s Hunter Library; and Wanda Stalcup, director of the Cherokee County Historical Museum. I hope none of them will be too bothered by the liberties and detours I’ve taken with the facts they aimed me so directly toward. I would also like to express appreciation for the libraries of Appalachian State University, Duke University, Florida Atlantic University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Western Carolina University.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHARLES FRAZIER was born in Asheville, North Carolina. Cold Mountain, his first novel, was an international bestseller and won the National Book Award in 1997, as well as the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Also by
CHARLES FRAZIER
cold mountain
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2006 by 3 Crows Corporation
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
A signed and numbered limited edition of this work has been published by Random House, Inc.
The excerpt on Part Two (Chapter 1) is from “Raglif Jaglif Tetartlif Pole” by Leonard Roberts from Jack in Two Worlds: Contemporary North American Tales and Their Tellers, edited by William Bernard McCarthy. Copyright © 1994 by the University of North Carolina Press.
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Charles Frazier, Thirteen Moons
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