The man was digging again, and I stood at the lip of the hole and said, That’s him. Who do I talk to?
The man stopped digging and climbed out of the hole, and when he did I could see that he lacked a part of one leg. Foot and shinbone gone. He walked on a wood peg fitted to his stub with a cup of leather and ties of rawhide strips. His good foot was stained with clay up above the anklebone, and the peg was muddy higher than that. He wore pants turned up to the knee but no shirt, and his shallow chest and upper arms were white as pork fat, and his forearms and handbacks were walnut brown. Despite his otherwise thinness, the man had a melon-shaped belly that lapped over his pantwaist. He stood looking at me, leaning on the handle to his shovel.
—Inside, he said. You need to talk to Featherstone. But I’d bet they’s a right smart number of bay colts in the world that ain’t yours at all.
—Is there any dinner in there? I said. I’m on my way to run a trade post in a place called Wayah and I’ve not eaten today.
—We’ve long since eat, the man said. I don’t know if they’ve left anything.
He threw down the shovel and scrubbed his hands against each other to clean them.
—I’m not asking for charity, I said. I’d be willing to pay for my dinner.
—Oh, you’ll pay, the man said.
I stood looking down into the hole. Red water was collecting in its bottom. Well or grave or what? I wondered.
We walked around back to the kitchen door. The man stopped and pointed down. Look at that, he said. That’s a handy thing.
I examined the doorway and had seen such ingenuity before. It was a timepiece of sorts, a step farther back into the primitive than a sundial. A gouged mark in a floor puncheon. When the line between sun and shadow from the doorframe fell on the mark, it was noontide. All other hours were subject to speculation. It was not currently noon was all the advice the clock offered. I could hardly imagine how such a device might be called handy, for a similarly reliable report on the progress of the day could be had just by looking up.
The man walked on across the threshold, his peg beating like a little hammer on the floor. He disappeared into the darkness.
I stood at the door to the room waiting for my eyes to adjust, and a voice from inside said, What are you standing there for?
I said, I’m waiting for my eyes to adjust.
Another voice with a strong accent I could not identify said, What means adjust?
I reckoned it was a rhetorical question and held my peace until I could see a half dozen men sitting at a round table playing cards. Two women in calico with their hair loose lounged all tangled together on a pallet by the fire, flipping through a limp-paged book and laughing at its contents. The one-legged man hunkered on the edge of the pallet with the women.
I could not tell what any of them were. African. Indian. Whiteman. Spaniard. Nearly all of them wore moccasins, but none of them looked particularly Indian in feature or hue, though most of them were swarthy-complected, and some had straight black hair and some had curly black hair. Nearly all of them wore hunting shirts and leather leggings, and two of them had slitted earlobes. Some talked in English, and a few spoke in an Indian language, and one of them, upon losing at a hand of cards, swore in words that might have been West African, for I had once heard an old white-haired man curse in a similar way, and West Africa was where he said he had been stolen from as a boy. One man with skin as white as mine had a peculiar hairstyle with a wide border shaved bare above his ears and the upper parts grown out long and greased, standing in peaks like meringue and mostly grey but for a crest that was still reddish as the ruff down a boar’s back running from his forehead to a brief plaited queue at the nape of his neck. A hammered silver ring pierced one of his ears.
They struck me as a bunch of people who did not know or care what race they owed allegiance to. I reckoned this was a place where blood quantum held lighter sway than in the outer world, and I judged that being a whiteman here might not be as great an advantage as I generally counted on.
The one-legged man looked at me and bobbed his head toward the table and said, That there’s Featherstone.
He meant their obvious leader, the one with the hair-do. He was a man of about middle age, beginning to go stout through the barrel of his chest. He had thick freckled forearms haloed with ginger hairs, blunt hands with bulgy knuckles punctuating his short fingers. Every line of his face—eyebrows to eyes to cheekbones to mouth—was turned down. He had a thin strong nose and a high forehead and a chaw of tobacco lumped in his cheek. At close intervals he spit juice directly onto the floor. His clothes didn’t give away much. He had on a collarless white linen hunting shirt buttoned to the neck, the cuffs rolled to the elbow. A red kerchief and a necklace of curved black bear claws shining across his chest.
—I need to talk to somebody about my colt that’s out in your pen, I said.
Nobody even looked up from studying their hands. They were busy discarding and drawing and arranging their cards in tight artistic fans and holding their faces inert so as not to give away any of their thoughts.
I said, That bay Waverley colt’s mine. Out back in your pen.
I waited, and when the hand finished, Featherstone put down his cards and said, Son, ownership of a horse is a thorny thing to establish anywhere. Here, it’s well-nigh impossible. And besides, none of us is talking horses right now. That business has concluded for the day. We’re playing cards.
I said, When could we talk horses?
Featherstone said, Regular business hours.
Another man said, That’s noon of a morning till one of a afternoon, with time out for dinner. But we’d admire for you to join us at table if you’ve got any money for us to take off you.
Two or three of them laughed. And then one of them shuffled the cards in a showy precise way. He started dealing out another hand, the cards flying fast and sequential around the table, each card landing in perfect alignment with its predecessor until little discrete piles lay in front of the arrayed players. It took less time to do it than for me to tell it now.
I eased up closer to watch them play. They had a game of Lanterloo going, but they soon came to the conclusion that the doubling of stakes at every hand allowed for a loss of money faster than was strictly entertaining, and Featherstone declared that all the intricate fooling with the ivory counters was womanish.
So they switched to Put, and everything slowed down and concentrated.
After a while of watching, I said to the room in general, Have you got something to eat? Pinto beans? Cold cornbread or just anything?
One of the women on the pallet looked up from the book and said, See what’s in the pie safe.
I went over to it and opened the punched-tin door and discovered a bowl of something grey and greasy and cold. It had set solid. A square-handled pewter spoon stood straight up in it.
I looked at the women and said, What is this?
I thought Featherstone was only paying attention to the cards, but he said, Groundhog meat and cabbage, with cow’s-milk and hog-grease gravy, thickened with flour and the mashed little brain from the groundhog.
I tried to stir it with the spoon, but it rotated in the bowl as one chunk.
—Anything else? I said.
—Set that bowl by the fire and it’ll loosen up after a while, Featherstone said.
—Is there not anything else? I said.
—They’s some liquor in that pail, the one-legged man said.
It was more a tub, half full of greenish corn liquor. A tin dipper with a crook at the end of its handle descended into it. A brown pottery crock of springwater sat nearby. I knew that the water was meant to cut the liquor with, but the crock was full and gave the impression of long disuse.
—How often do you have to refill this water crock? I said.
No one even looked up. Featherstone lifted the corner of his mouth. Not another feature of his face changed. I understood that slight motion to stand in place of a grin. I
dipped into the corn liquor and took my first swig of spirits, and it was like fire coals melted into a cup.
I asked the woman on the pallet what she was reading, and she said it wasn’t her book, it was Featherstone’s. She couldn’t understand more than a few words of it. She tossed the book to me, and the first lines that struck my eye had to do with white bile and black bile and other such internal fluids, and when I flipped to the title page it read The Anatomy of Melancholy. I put the book down and went back to the card table.
A man in a turban, a black tailcoat, and fringed buckskin leggings stood from his stool and said, Here, boy. They might as well take your money as mine for a while.
I sat down at the table, and a player with his back to the western window—so that he had no more definition than a silhouette cut from black paper—said in a flat voice, You not planning to gamble on credit, are you?
All I could see of him in particular was that he lacked a hand on his left side. Just a blunt stub sticking out from his coatsleeve. I was thinking, I am in a land of partial folk.
But what I said was, No sir. I’ve got cash money. What game are we playing?
—We’re switching to Blind-and-Straddle.
It was a game I knew and liked and had amassed great numbers of peppermint sticks playing. Featherstone, having the eldest hand, threw down a blind bet before the deal. He pitched out a little coin of some currency and denomination I did not know. It had a many-pointed figure like a child’s idea of the sun on the tail face of it. Then the dealer shuffled and started tossing, and I found myself sitting at the round table with a pretty good hand of tallowy-feeling playing cards spread in my fist.
The doubling straddle bets that followed involved a great deal of talk and complicated agreements on currency exchange, since they were made in the form of several varieties of gold and silver coins from various states and nations. There were doubloons, guineas, livres, pistareens, florins, ducats, Dutch dog dollars, Scotch marks, Portuguese half joes, Peruvian crossdollars, and even one old smooth-worn bezant. The coinage of all those wide-flung nations converged at this frontier gaming house by some unimaginable but mighty power of commerce, traveling on long and crooked trails. Many of the gold coins had pie pieces sheared from them, and this led to disagreements over the fractional values of the missing slices. Also, bets were made with such slices, and then the argument became whether the fractions were nearer to eight or to four. Featherstone was the ultimate arbiter of exchange, and no one argued with his conversions, no matter how outrageously favorable to him they seemed.
When it came my turn to bet, I had little idea what a suitable amount might be. I reached in my moneypurse and separated the Georgia scrip from the paper with the chicken recipe on it. I laid down two of the paper dollars, and someone laughed and another two or three grunted disfavorable judgment. The silhouetted man said everybody knew how Georgia money had set the current standard of worthlessness and that I would have gotten about as far in the game if I had tried to play on credit. I picked the paper up and jingled my aunt’s five silver pieces in my moneypurse and everybody settled down. I bet one of the coins and one man objected, but Featherstone picked it up and looked at it and pitched it back down into the pot and it rang against its brethren.
His verdict was that it would do, and the game went on.
When the hand neared a conclusion, four of my five hard dollars lay on the table, and I reckoned I was about to be done with gaming for the day. But when we showed our cards, I took the pot and they all laughed.
The lessons of the Manx schoolmaster stood me well in playing cards, and I kept on winning through the afternoon, and soon they all quit laughing. Featherstone and the one-armed man were the most regular defeatees. Piles of coins in confusing denominations rose in front of me, and I began worrying that the other players would decide to kill me and take my winnings and throw my body off the bluff into the river for the suckerfish to eat. So I kept close counsel. Refused provocation and sought to give none. When my money mounted into unseemly piles, I shoved handfuls of coins into my pockets to keep from offering too much reminder of my good fortune.
Twilight fell and the room became so dark we could not make out the marks on the cards. The first mosquitoes of spring were singing thick around our ears. Finally one of the women rose from the pallet on the floor and shoveled hot coals from the hearth into an iron pot and set it under the table and heaped doty wood on the coals to make smoke. Then she went about the motions of letting there be light. She stobbed a long stick in a crack between floorboards and angled it over the table and took strips of pork fat and wrapped them in loose-wove linen rags and tied them to the end of the stick. She blew up coals in the hearth and caught a broomstraw alight and used it to set the pork strips on fire. It smelled like breakfast. The air all around the table was thick with the rank black smoke from the smoldering doty wood, and the little flame from the pork lantern threw a halo around itself. All the things in the smoky shadows were just murk. For all her effort, the woman had created about an equal balance of light and dark. I still could hardly tell which spots on the cards were black and which were red, but at least the mosquitoes were driven back into the night.
THE TABLE BY now was made up of me, the one-handed man, three rivermen, and Featherstone. The rivermen had straggled in just before dark, bursting in the door all hilarious and blowing hard from the climb up the hill. The thighs of their pants dark and greasy, a stink of fish and brown water about them. The one-legged man and one of the women sat in straight chairs by the fire, drinking and giggling. The other woman still lay on the pallet asleep, her face to the wall and the dingy heels to her feet hanging off the side.
As the game went on, I noted that for any number of reasons of personal history and local custom, the other men treated Featherstone with a deference I found vexing. A lot of it was physical fear, for if there was any truth amid all the tales passing around that table, Featherstone had left a bloody trail behind him since boyhood. Also, they acted toward him the way my uncle did around the two or three rich men in our county. The cardplayers called him Squire Featherstone and Boss Featherstone and Chief Featherstone. But I couldn’t square their deference with my current surroundings.
—Is this your house? I said to Featherstone.
Featherstone didn’t answer, but the one-handed man snorted and said, He ain’t got but three or four. This is just his hunting cabin. He comes out here to play Indian. He’s built a plantation out on the Nation the match of any whiteman’s in Georgia. Big house and slaves and fields of market crops and everything.
I reckoned that answer missed satisfying my curiosity, but I played on silently.
The men kept calling him Chief and Boss and Squire, and then at one point in the evening, one of the rivermen called him King Featherstone. I laughed, but when I looked around the table it appeared that no one else found the title funny.
So he’s king here, I thought. And the more I thought about the big man, the more I grew dark-minded, for the older men I knew had fought a damn hard war to get shed of kings forever. And they were very convictional in their opinion that if the English wanted to cut the head off their king and then turn right around and bring kings back, that was their sorry business. Here, we didn’t countenance kings and, God willing, never would.
I was just a boy, but the way I saw the table was that Featherstone and I were the major figures. The rivermen and the one-handed man were mere nothing. Spectators. I might add here that I had reached some nether end of exile and desperation and had been dipping into the green liquor now and then, and it was somewhat shaping my opinions to suit itself.
EVERYBODY ELSE HAD been dipping into the tub as well, and they suffered from equally clouded thinking. Featherstone was drunk to the point that he had gone past stupor back to strange lucidity. And when he reached that point, he began looking for a fight. That much was evident even in the provoking way he glared at the other players and the way he handled his cards and threw them d
own as if wanting to throw them in his opponents’ faces. Much in evidence at his belt was a long cap-and-ball pistol of scrolled silver metal, with fancy scrimshawed grips worn bone-white in some places from handling and in other places greasy brown from hand dirt. It was pretty, but the pretty ones will kill you just as dead as the ugly. He spent a great deal of time making a show of adjusting its position against his groin.
At one point, he said he had probably put down ten or fifteen men more satisfactory than any of us. One more wouldn’t signify.
At another point, deep in the night, one of the rivermen fell asleep with his head on his forearm but still holding his cards. Featherstone sorted through the deck and put four kings and a three in the man’s hand, and four aces and a jack in his own. Then he kicked the man awake under the table and said, Either get to playing or quit the game.
The man roused a little and itched his scalp and studied his cards. He became suddenly alert. He bet big and everybody else soon folded but for Featherstone. The betting between them grew quite large, and in the end of course Featherstone won.
The man sat thinking a minute, and then he pulled a pistol and said, That’s every penny I’ve got in the world and I might as well be dead without it. I hate to have to do it, but I’m going to kill you if you don’t give it back.
Featherstone said, Calm down. There’s no call for gunplay just because fate holds you in contempt. But I’ll do this for you. On the next hand, I’ll put up everything I’ve won off of you against that old worn-out pistol of yours.
—Hell, the man said. That sounds more than fair to me.
They went about dealing the cards, and Featherstone put down his bet, a pile of hard money glinting in the dim light.