The most part of the post’s contents lacked any hope of name or emblem. Things were what they were, and you knew it or didn’t. Rush baskets of muddy eggs all gone bad. Dried pinto beans. Dank earthen crocks of cloudy vinegar wherein shelled eggs half floated. Wheels of cheese grey with fuzz. Lard or tallow or some other fragrant grease packed in paired hog bladders and hanging from rafters. Baskets heaped with the forked roots of the magic ginseng. In one corner a tall pile of cured deerhides lay one atop another like a deck of cards swollen from being left out in the rain. Everything was some shade of grey or brown, and nearly everything smelled. I felt some other old world intersecting suddenly with the familiar.
I searched until I found a sack of oats and went out to grain and water Waverley. Whatever adventures he’d had in the past days, he looked none the worse for wear. I took the armload of books out onto the porch and wiped them clean with a rag and rubbed beeswax into the leather until the books looked better than new, dark as mahogany, the gold lettering of their titles shining like fire coals.
Morte d’Arthur. Tristan and Isolde. A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest in individual volumes, and another thick close-printed volume containing all the tragedies. Gulliver’s Travels. Don Quixote as reduced into English by Mr. Smollett. And Dr. Johnson’s Shorter Dictionary, which included as an appendix an alphabetical account of the heathen deities.
When the books were clean, I lined them back on their shelf and figured they were about all the companionship I would have for a while.
I pared the mold from a big cheese and ate the inner slices with withered nubs of sweet dried fruit, the origin of which I could not identify though I guessed they might once have been plums or very old peaches. Long before it grew dark, I went and looked at the little sleeping room in the back. A full-grown man could have stood in the center and touched each wall with his fingertips. The narrow rope bedstead had a sour-smelling and brown-stained ticking stuffed with something that exhaled a deep animal must when I pressed my hand into it. I judged that I would not sleep a wink in this terrifying hole. I took blankets and a pillow out to the front room and made me down a lonesome pallet on the floor in front of the fire. Candles of tallow or beeswax being inordinately expensive and the woodpile being high, I supposed I would have only the hearth to read by.
I sat on the porch and observed the failure of the day with dread until it was nearly gone to black. Then I stretched out on the pallet and began reading the dictionary, taking it very slowly and forming each word whole in my mind in order to memorize it and also to conserve my few books into an uncertain future. I read going front to back, as if a compelling though knotty narrative were unfolding among the definitions and their rigid order. The firelight fell pleasantly golden on the page. It was a cool night, and the heat banking off the hearthstones felt good against the damp and chill of the cove. The sounds of wood combustion and the fall of water over creek rocks and the calls of night birds and the first spring peepers calmed my loneliness some. And really, what better company of a dark night than one of the smart dead Englishmen of yore? I just had to take care, as the fire burned low and I held the book closer and closer to the flames, not to drift off and drop it into the coals and send all those premium words up the chimney in a column of pale smoke. By the first grey of dawn, I had gotten to bandit, and then I fell asleep and did not wake until midmorning.
4
A MAN AND A WOMAN, FULL-BLOODS, YOUNG AND LOOKING LIKE newlyweds, came inside and stood. They wouldn’t look directly at me, but I can’t say that they acted shy. They seemed to have expectations of me. They just stood as if awaiting something, like passengers at a station when the stagecoach is overdue. I tried to talk to them, but they did not understand English, and I tried again and found they did not understand Latin. I waved my hands in gesticulations intended to have meaning leading to commerce. I pointed at various objects and made vivid facial expressions. I said the prices of various items and praised their qualities. But despite all my efforts, the people didn’t comprehend a thing. For all the response I got, we might not have occupied the same moment in time. Then they left.
I waited awhile for them to return, but they did not. I went out to the creek and splashed about, turning over rocks to look for angry pinching crawfish and smiling salamanders. I built a little dam of rocks, and twisted up leaves to make ships, and sailed them on the impoundment and watched them be caught in the force of moving water and pulled to the lip of the dam and swept down to destruction. I thought, This world is a bottomless gorge.
I DIDN’T KNOW the proper way to do anything. But I studied the ledger from the last shopkeep and figured that writing down all the details of every transaction would be a good start. Mainly I needed to write down who traded how much of one sort of thing for how much of something else, since almost no one walked through the door carrying cash money. It was a trade post, and its commerce was mostly swapping the raw products of the earth like ginseng and animal hides for manufactured goods like gingham and hatchet heads and cook pots and plowpoints. Somewhere down the line, the ginseng and hides were converted into dollars, but all I ever saw was the raw leading edge of commerce as it first springs out of the ground.
Once a month or so, a pair of teamsters in an ox wagon would come up from the lowlands hauling new stock. Working together, we would unload that stuff into the store and then load the fragrant piles of hides and rush baskets of ginseng roots onto the wagon.
The teamsters said that some of the ginseng went all the way around the world in sailing ships and was sold to Chinamen, who ate it and believed it made their jimson stand up better. So I was just the second man in a long chain of people working to make that Chinaman stiff.
I wrote down in the ledger all the comings and goings of the objects that passed through the store, and sometimes I would also note what clothes the people wore when they came to trade or what the weather was that day or what their mood seemed to be at the time. How their hopeful expectation faded to resignation as they saw how little a basket of ginseng or a deerhide would bring when converted into cloth or axeheads.
VERY FEW WHITE people lived back in these remote mountains, and they were mostly misfits self-exiled to the woods and falling into only two categories, drunks and preachers. The latter category included actual ministers and missionaries and also all manner of backwoods social reformers, philosophers, and political theorists, men who came walking through the door with their eyes vibrating from the energy of their frequently crackpot beliefs, hardly waiting to state their names and shake your hand before launching straight into reforming your opinions on the Holy Trinity, the Apocrypha, the Whig Party, or paper currency.
All in all, I tended to prefer the drunks. A good many of the Indians had reached the same opinion and had become drunks themselves, Bear among them. When he was not off hunting, he came in almost daily for his shots. Nearly sixty, he still stood an unbowed six foot three inches tall. He paid mostly with deerhides and ginseng and credit like everybody else. But he was not like the others in that he was a talker. He always came in the door telling something in mid-story. At first I could not understand a word, but he kept talking relentlessly, and all I could do was listen.
Bear almost always brought the makings of a meal with him. He squatted on his hams by the hearth, cooking as if he were at a campfire upon the high ridges. He made every kind of thing but mostly soup. There was one where he stirred up a bowl of bird eggs and poured them into a pot of seething broth hanging over the fire from a crane. The eggs broke into pale yellow shreds like torn paper. He also made a thick soup out of roasted brown meat skins boiled with cornmeal. That one was my favorite. My least favorite was yellow-jacket soup, which Bear considered a great treat. The hard part was digging up the nest, but he had some trick about it so he rarely took more than a sting or two. He’d put the nest near the fire to loosen the grubs, and when they came wriggling out he’d pick them up one by one and drop them in a skillet to brown in hot bear grease and
then boil them, and it did not make a pretty soup. In point of beauty and simplicity, his cockle soup took the prize. Pale yellow chicken broth afloat with pink rooster cockles like strewn rose petals. He would eat a bowl or two of whatever he had cooked and then take out down the road, leaving me with enough to eat on for two or three days.
I remember trying to return the favor by giving him one of a pair of oranges that the teamsters had left as a treat. Bear had not experienced oranges before, and he watched me eat mine before he started on his own. It took him an hour to finish. He peeled it slowly and studied the differing sides of the peels and smelled them and smelled his fingers. Then he ate each section very slowly, sniffing each one before he put it in his mouth. He savored every moment of his consumption of that orange. When he was done he collected all the pieces of peel and dried them in the sun like deer jerky. A month later, they had lost most of their color, but they still held the ghost of the orange’s aroma, and Bear kept them in a gourd sealed with a wooden stopper to hold in the scent that would have to do him until another orange made its way into the mountains.
BEAR WAS CHIEF in these parts. All the features of him—his clothing, his passion for hunting, his grasp on the unfolding world and its sad divergence from a clear sense of order and justice and beauty, even his hatchet-blade nose—were relics from the previous century. Down the creek not far from the trade post, he had a farmstead in the old style, with cabins and a winterhouse, cornfields and corncribs, a menstrual hut, orchards and corrals and lean-tos. And, because Bear was head man, he had built an old-style townhouse, the public building in which meetings and dances and ceremonies of a spiritual character took place. Also a great deal of lounging and loafing and gossiping and telling tales. The village itself, called Wayah, was nearly a mile farther downstream, after the creek had fed into the river.
The way I eventually pieced it together, the history of Bear’s people was something like the following. In another century, these had been the kind of people that if you didn’t watch out trespassing through their country, they’d make moccasins from your back skin, drumsticks from your thighbones, put your teeth in a dry turtle shell for a rattle to make dance music. Warriors, all of them, of either sex. If the men didn’t kill you with hatchet or knife, they would take you home as a prize. Then it was the women who would flay you and set you on fire. And not by way of some precious venereal metaphor. The women would skin and burn you alive.
That was then. The people had been fighters, but after two hundred years of mostly losing to white men, the fight was nearly beat out of them. They had become dirt farmers.
It is tempting to look back at Bear’s people from the perspective of this modern world and see them as changeless and pure, authentic people in ways impossible for anybody to be anymore. We need Noble Savages for our own purposes. Our happy imaginings about them and the pure world they occupied do us good when incoherent change overwhelms us. But even in those early days when I was first getting to know Bear and his people, I could see that change and brutal loss had been all they had experienced for two centuries.
Many of them were busy taking up white ways of life that baffled them. With every succeeding retreat of the Nation and every incursion of America, the old ways withdrew a step farther into the mountains, deeper up the dark coves and tree-tunneled creeks. It was not any kind of original people left. No wild Indians at all, and little raw wilderness. They were damaged people, and they lived in a broken world like everybody else.
The remaining game animals had become harder and harder to hunt by the year, for the simple reason that they had been killed down so far that some of their members—buffalo and elk—had entirely ceased to be. And the rest of the big animals—deer, bear, wolf, mountain lion—had become scarce. The people did not draw relationship between the tall stacks of stiff hides that went rolling off by the wagonload to Charleston and Philadelphia and the sudden lifelessness of the woods. It felt more like the end of an era, as if some mythic replacement was happening. The fierce old beings were dying. All those beautiful fleet animals falling away into history. And rising up in their places were just fat hogs and beeves and stupid greasy slot-eyed sheep, so fainthearted they sometimes died of fright merely from being shorn. Try to shear even a deer and it would likely cut you into jerk meat with its delicate black hooves. How bear and catamount would react to being shorn is not even a matter open to speculation. You’d die at the onset of the encounter.
With most of the wild game gone and war an impossibility, the whipped and embittered men took up farming, which had for all time been the province of women. The women, with their main jobs gone, became about as powerless as white women. Previously, the women had run the clans, but now the clans were failing and falling away. Clan law had itself become illegal. The old marriage ceremony had involved the man bringing meat and the woman bringing vegetables, and the union of the two had meaning far beyond just the individuals. Now, nothing made sense at all anymore.
Bear and his people were deeply bewildered by the strange new world forming up around them. It was a different country, where you had to own land by paper deed even to have a place on earth to be. Otherwise, you’d go wherever the buffalo and elk had gone. Everybody footslogging toward the Nightland together.
All the pressure of the new world was to scatter like white people and live on little lonely isolated homesteads instead of the companionable townships with their warm smoky townhouses and constant gossip and intrigues and friendships and quarrels and romances. Everything was changing, even clothes. Many of the people, men and women both, had forsaken their deerleathers and taken to wearing the same flimsy fabric as poor whites, except they liked to add a red or blue headband. Some of them had even forgotten their old names and went only by white sorts of names, like Sam Johnson or John Samson. Some of them mixed old names and new names, Walter Onion-in-the-Pot, for instance. A few of them, the older people like Bear, just abided by the old names.
But to be honest, some of their old names did not translate well into our language. Take Onion-in-the-Pot. That was a perfectly good-sounding name in their language and not the least bit ridiculous, but it renders poorly in ours. I guess we, being the victors, get control of the words, those denoting people and places both. Happily, though, a few rivers and creeks and coves seem to be resistant to our ownership. They persist in holding on to their old names even into the present. Cataloochee, Tusquitte, Coweta, Cartoogecha. Unfortunately, hardly any of the mountains have kept their real names, which is understandable since they make such grand ways to commemorate our dead politicians.
About ten years before my arrival, as the result of an unfavorable treaty, the boundary line between the Nation and America passed over Bear and his bunch like a dark cloud shadow and settled a half day’s ride to the west. As part of the treaty, Bear and his bunch could choose between moving west with the Nation or taking a little deeded homestead of a mere few hundred acres down the river about ten miles in return for a whole world of land that had previously been theirs. It didn’t take a lot of thinking. They stayed where they were out of deep affection for that unsteady and vertical and mostly empty piece of mountain country. They moved downriver to the new homestead for a few years and then a little way back up when Bear made a trade for another piece of larger acreage but with less flat ground. Moving was not a great hardship. No one owned much of anything at all. Log houses no bigger than barn stalls, so simple you could build one in a day or two. For furniture, maybe a table and chairs and a rope bedstead. Some tools and farm implements so simple their names rarely contained more than three or four letters. Plow, axe, hoe, adze, froe, maul. Also a few chickens and a cow. And some pigs foraging free range in the hills with identifying marks slit in their ears.
During this time of rattling around, Bear grew to appreciate the concept of private ownership of land, an essentially ridiculous new idea. A great many Indians had a ragged time coming to terms with it. Bear, though, saw the usefulness of land ownership, saw
he could press it into service despite its flaws and its ultimate falseness, for indeed the fleeting nature of our instantaneous lives dictates that we pass through the land almost as briefly as water passes through us, and with no more real claim to possession. Bear began buying land, bartering land, working deals until he outright owned a small tract of about two thousand acres, a homestead situated so deep in the mountains as to be generally worthless. A little bit of it was good bottomland with rich dirt suitable for cornfields and gardens and orchards, but most of it was cove land with bold creeks and steep wooded slopes. Bear moved his people there—at that time a few hundred souls—and built a wattle-and-daub townhouse in the old style to focus their attention in the direction he wanted it to flow. Everyone settled along the riverbank and built their cabins and began going about life in the old way, dancing the old dances and believing everything they had always believed about the force of moving water and tall mountains. Bear took it on as his job to see that the world they inhabited remained recognizable.