This was an accurate description of Otto. The confusion caused by his abrupt separation from his mother, the long walk to Cincinnati when he was first seeing the world, the loneliness at night, the fight with the bear, the constant departure of the steamboats he loved, leaving him always on the wharf, the catches of conversation about murders and explosions and sudden hangings—these unchildlike experiences, assaulting him so constantly, had aged him far beyond his years. Save only for the experiences of puberty, he was really a steely-eyed young man better prepared in some ways for the Natchez Trace than his more ebullient father.
But they were both hardened to the road by the time they completed their first two hundred and eighty miles and approached the bustling city of Nashville. There Finlay made a characteristically bold decision: ‘What we’ll do, Otto, is buy us as many cattle as we can handle, and we’ll drove them to Natchez, put them on the boat to New Orleans, and sell them at a huge profit when we get to Texas.’ Once this grandiose plan was voiced, no counsel from the experienced travelers in Nashville could dissuade him, and when stockmen pointed out that it was four hundred and eighty miles to Natchez, a right far piece for a man to drove cattle, he snapped: ‘Shucks, my grandparents herded cattle clean across Scotland.’ When he had left, with his thirty head of good stock, one of the sellers said: ‘He’ll find that Tennessee ain’t Scotland.’
They would need a dog to help them, and Finlay knew they could never find one of those flawless dogs of Scotland and Ireland that could herd sheep and cattle better than a man, but they could find themselves some mongrel who would nip at the heels of strays. Since one dog would be about as good as another, Finlay left the selection to his son, and the boy identified a collie-sized female with the kind of face any boy would love. Her name was Betsy and she was owned by a family with three sons, each of whom had pets galore. When Otto asked, in his quiet voice, his blue eyes shining, what she would cost, the mother cried, almost with relief: ‘Take her!’ but two of the boys bellowed that she was their dog, whereupon their mother said: ‘All right. Five cents.’ And for this amount the deal was concluded.
Betsy had a reddish coat, a pointed nose and a set of the swiftest legs in Tennessee, but she also had a devious, calculating mind and was prone to stop and study whenever a command was given, judging whether Finlay really meant what he was saying. If she detected even the slightest hesitation, she ignored him and went her way, but if he shouted ‘Damnit, Betsy!’ she leaped into action. She was, in certain important ways, brighter than either of the Macnabs and she intended to train them, rather than the other way around.
The one weakness in her plan was that she quickly grew to love Otto, for he would play with her, test her running, wrestle with her, and keep her close to him when they slept on the ground at night. He also fed her, meagerly at times, but no matter how hungry she became between the food stands run by the half-breed Indians or between the deer shot by Finlay, she always sensed that she was getting her fair share of the food; if her stomach was growling with emptiness, so was Otto’s.
With their cattle they could make only eight or nine miles a day, but at least they did not have to worry about pasture for their herd, for the Trace provided ample grass. Slowly, slowly they edged their way toward Texas.
Some eighty miles into the Trace they came upon the first of the notable stands, those extremely rude taverns which sometimes had food and sometimes did not, depending on whether the surrounding Indians had brought in their crops. This one was the infamous Grinder’s that the Kaintuck in Cincinnati had warned about, a rough cabinlike affair containing two rooms, in one of which travelers could sleep on the floor, and a spacious porch covered by a sloping roof, where overflow travelers also slept on bare boards.
This time the stand had food, and when the broth and meat and potatoes had passed around, the men began to talk of Meriwether Lewis’ tragic death twenty years earlier in 1809. ‘Mark my words,’ a Tennessee man said when the owners of the stand were out of the room, ‘someone in this house shot him in the back, and I have a mind who done it.’ He looked ominously at the door.
‘You seem to forget,’ another expert said, ‘that he was killed not inside the stand, but outside,’ and this evoked such heated discussion that the owners were summoned: ‘Was Lewis killed in here or out there?’
‘Out there,’ a woman said, irritated by the constant bickering over this ancient crime. ‘You know that my uncle was tried in court, all legal like, and not a word was proved agin’ him. Clean as a baby’s breath.’
When the owners were back at work in their part of the house, one man said firmly: ‘My uncle knowed the coroner, and the coroner said: “Meriwether Lewis was killed inside the house, because the back of his head was blowed off and his throat was cut.” ’
Young Otto was repelled by this talk of murder, rejecting it as one more aspect of the rowdy life he did not wish to lead, and he was about to go outside and play with Betsy when the innkeeper said sternly: ‘Time for bed!’ But when Otto started to call Betsy inside to sleep with him, one of the men growled: ‘We don’t allow no damned fleabags in here,’ so Otto and Betsy, curled together, slept on the porch.
In the morning they had covered about a quarter of a mile when Otto let out a yell. Still unaccustomed to wearing a hat, he had left his at Grinder’s, in the sleeping room, with that passel of dangerous men, so without waiting for his father, he and Betsy dashed back and burst into the stand: ‘Forgot my hat.’ It was on the floor beside a Virginia man, and when Otto reached for it, the man lifted it and found it suspiciously heavy. Hefting it quietly in his left hand so that others could not see, he guessed the cause of its weight.
He made no comment, but before turning the hat over to Otto he accompanied the boy to the porch, where he said in very low tones: ‘Excellent idea, but you would be prudent if you kept it close to you.’ And he bowed as if delivering a legal opinion to a fellow citizen.
It was not easy walking the Trace. When rains persisted, freshets formed, and what had been easily negotiable gullies became roaring torrents. Then the travelers would have to camp for three or four idle days until the rains and the rivers subsided. Six men might be waiting on the south bank, heading for Nashville, and three on the north, destined for Natchez, and they would call back and forth, but they could not cross. Each year some impatient souls would try, and their bodies would be found far downstream, if found at all.
Now, in the late summer of 1829, the Macnabs with their dog Betsy and their thirty cows were pinned down on the Natchez Trace by a rampaging stream, and it was in this frustrating but not dangerous position that they met their second Kaintuck. He was a huge man, well over six feet, with bright red hair and massive shoulders; he was traveling alone and seemed indifferent to danger, for even though it must have been obvious that he was coming home carrying the profit from his trip, bandits had learned not to molest the Kaintucks, who observed one governing rule: ‘If’n he makes one suspicious move, shoot him.’
This Kaintuck, bearded, scowling and irritable, was on his way north to pick up another boat in Cincinnati or Pittsburgh, and the impassable flood infuriated him.
‘What the hell you doin’ with them cattle?’ were the first words he hurled across the treacherous stream.
‘Taking them to Texas,’ Finlay shouted back.
‘You’re a goddamned fool to try it.’ That ended that conversation, for Finlay had no desire to defend his operation to a stranger. But as night was settling, the Kaintuck bellowed: ‘What’s the name of your dog, son?’
‘Betsy.’
‘That’s a damned good name and she looks to be a damned good dog.’
‘She is. She helps us.’
‘I’ll wager you need her, with all them cows.’
‘We couldn’t move without her.’
‘I’ll bet you’re a big help, too.’
‘I try to be.’
That was the beginning of Otto Macnab’s fascination with the Kaintuck. During the two t
edious days that followed, with the Macnabs only about eighteen feet from the huge man, Otto and he conversed on many subjects.
‘Study this stream, son. Looks like a man could jump acrost it, and they say they’s a man in Natchez that could. Big nigger with legs like oak trees. But don’t never try it, son. Because one slip and they pick your bones up ten miles downstream.’
‘Where do you live?’ Otto’s high voice shouted across the leaping wavelets.
‘Goddamnedest place you ever seen. A real hog wallow.’
‘Why are you going there?’
‘Because it’s home.’
‘That sounds dumb.’
‘It is dumb, but it’s home.’
‘How’s your fire?’
‘A fire’s always in trouble. With wet sticks, particular.’
‘Ours is all right.’
‘That’s because you ain’t dumb, and I am.’
The two talked as if they were equals, which in a way they were, for the big man had ended his education at the level Otto was beginning his, and the more they talked the more they liked each other. The Kaintuck shouted that he’d had a wife, and a pretty good one, but she had died in childbirth: ‘You know what that means, son?’
Otto may have been wise beyond his years, but there were certain important things he did not know, and now he faced one of them. Biting his lip and staring at the Kaintuck, he said: ‘I think so.’
‘Well, ask your father.’
‘You tell me.’
‘That ain’t my prerogative.’
‘What’s a prerogative?’
‘Right, son. Some things is right, some ain’t. Ask your father.’
When Otto did he received a totally evasive answer, and it occurred to him that the Kaintuck would not have answered that way, but he sensed that he was caught in a mystery that was not going to be unraveled there by the pounding flood.
In late afternoon of the third day it became apparent that the flood was going to subside during the night and that passage would then be possible, but before it got dark the Kaintuck launched one more conversation.
‘What’s your name, mister?’
‘Macnab, Finlay—and the boy’s Otto.’
‘That’s Scottish, no?’
‘You’re the first person I’ve met who didn’t call me Scotch.’ No comment. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Zave.’
‘Zave!’ Otto cried. ‘What kind of name is that?’
‘Best in the world. Named after one of the great saints. Francis Xavier.’
A hush fell over the subsiding stream, and after a long while Macnab asked: ‘Is it that you’re papist?’
‘Aye, but I never force it.’
Macnab said no more. He felt uncomfortable sharing the wilderness with a papist, the more so because when he reached Texas there was bound to be unpleasantness over the matter of forced conversion, fraudulent though Father Clooney’s were said to be. He had seen enough of the Protestantism-papism fight in Ireland and he wished for none in the forests of Mississippi.
But as the darkness lowered and shadows crept from the trees like black panthers come to steal the cattle, the Kaintuck spoke again: ‘Macnab, you need help with them cattle.’ No comment. ‘Else you’ll never get them to Natchez.’ No comment. ‘And I was wonderin’ if maybe when the creek lowers … and we cross …’
‘What?’ It was a child’s voice, trembling with excitement.
‘I was wonderin’ if maybe we could form partners.’
‘Oh, Poppa!’ The boy gave a wild cry of delight and started to dance about, then grasped his father’s hands: ‘Oh, it would be so …’ The boy could not frame his thoughts, and added lamely: ‘It would be so welcome.’
‘How about it, Macnab?’
‘Poppa, Poppa, yes!’ For three wet days Otto had watched the big man across the swollen stream and each new thing he saw increased his attachment to the wild Kaintuck. He was strong. He had violent manners when necessary. He could laugh and make jokes at himself. And obviously he had grown to like Otto.
‘Where you really from, Zave?’ The voice was adult and suspicious.
‘Like I said, small town in Kaintucky. Piss-poor place.’
‘You mind to settle in Texas?’
‘From what you and the boy said, might as well.’
A world of meaning was carried in this brief, elliptical sentence: the conclusions of a man without a home, without prospects, without any visible or sensible direction in his life. If what Macnab said about the glories of Texas and the twenty thousand acres of choice land was true, what better?
Now, across the muddy waters, the Kaintuck pleaded: ‘I ain’t got no home, really. I ain’t got nothin’ much but down the river, up the river, and if you really got all that land, I could be mighty useful.’ No comment. ‘Besides, Mr. Macnab, you ain’t goin’ to get them cattle to Natchez with just the boy to help.’
‘Please, Poppa, please.’
‘What’s your full name, Zave?’
‘Francis Xavier Campbell.’
Good God! In the middle of the Mississippi wilderness a traitorous Campbell from the Moor of Rannoch had tracked down a Macnab of Glen Lyon, and as in the ancient days, plotted his murder. ‘Campbell is a forbidden name,’ Finlay Macnab cried in the darkness. ‘Ever since Glencoe.’
‘I know Glencoe,’ the voice from the other side said, ‘but that was a long time ago. I am Campbell from Hopkinsville, not from Glencoe, and I seek to join with you.’
‘Please!’ came the boy’s voice, but in the night Finlay warned his son about the infamous behavior of the Campbells at Glencoe: ‘I can hear my grandfather’s voice: “Wherever, whenever you meet a Campbell, expect treachery.” Across that stream waits a Campbell.’ And through the long dark hours Finlay kept watch on his ancestral enemy, as if the dreadful crime at Glencoe had marked with blood-guilt every Campbell who would come along thereafter.
At dawn, as Finlay expected, big Zave Campbell gathered his muddy possessions, stepped down into the receding stream, and came directly toward the two Macnabs. Finlay, preparing to fight if necessary, shouted: ‘Come no more!’
But Otto, seeing in Zave a needed companion, cried: ‘We want your help!’ and in that fragile moment he settled the argument, for he ran and leaped into Campbell’s arms.
‘Come with us, Zave!’ he cried, and from then on, it was four who went down the Trace: Finlay Macnab in command; Otto watching and listening; Zave Campbell, with a home at last; and the dog Betsy, terrified of the big man’s commands. Under his tutelage she became twice the shepherd’s companion she had been before, for when he told her to ‘Git!’ she got.
From their meeting at the flood they faced two hundred miles to Natchez, and often as they walked—ten miles a day now—Zave complained: ‘Hell, I walked up this whole distance and now I’m walkin’ down.’
‘You asked to come,’ Finlay growled, and each day during the first ten he kept close watch on Campbell, waiting for the sign that would betray the intended treachery. As the eleventh day waned he began to perspire so heavily that Otto asked: ‘Are you sick, Poppa?’ and he replied: ‘I sure am. Don’t you remember that it was on the eleventh night at Glencoe that the Campbells cut the throats of the Macdonalds?’ Otto said: ‘Last time you told me they shot them,’ and Finlay snapped: ‘What difference?’
When the sun set, Finlay refused to go to sleep, satisfied that once he closed his eyes this Campbell would cut his throat; instead, he sat against a tree, rifle across his knees, and when Otto rolled over at midnight and opened his eyes, there his father waited. They both looked a few feet away to where Zave snored easily, and when the boy arose at dawn nothing had changed.
Campbell was never told of the night-long vigil, but on the twelfth day Finlay astonished everyone by blurting out: ‘Zave, nobody herds cattle better than you. When we reach Texas and get our land, you can have your share. You earned it.’
‘You can build your barn right next to ours,’ Otto sa
id.
‘You any idea how big twenty thousand acres is, son?’ With a twig as chalk and a sandy bank as blackboard, Zave lined it out: ‘Six hundred forty acres to a square mile. Six-forty into twenty thousand, that’s thirty-five, thirty-six more or less square miles. That means six miles to a side. So my barn ain’t goin’ to be very close to your barn.’
That day he showed Otto just how far six miles was going to be: ‘Remember this little stream, way back here. I’ll reckon the miles as we drive the cattle, but you keep in mind how far away this stream is,’ and as they walked off the miles the boy gained his first sense of how vast things in Texas were going to be. He had thought of his future home as a kind of farm; the way Zave explained it, the place would be an empire.
Zave then took in hand Otto’s real education: ‘I’m surprised you cain’t shoot proper. I was your age, I could hit me a sparrow.’ Using his own long rifle, he taught the boy the tricks of hunting, especially the art of rapid loading: ‘Cain’t never tell when that second shot, fired prompt, is goin’ to turn the trick.’ He drilled Otto in firing accurately, then reloading at finger-numbing speed: ‘You got to do it in rhythm, like a dance. And always in the same order. Prop your gun. Right hand, grab your powder horn and pour in just enough. Right hand again, grab the wadding. Left hand, take the ramrod from its place, jam it down the muzzle, tamp down the wadding. Left hand again, ball from the pouch, slide it in. Right hand, take the percussion cap and fix it. Both hands, fire!’
When Otto began dropping birds and squirrels out of trees and reloading instantly for the next shot, Zave was ecstatic: ‘Macnab! I think we got us a real man on our hands.’
The hunting experience that Otto would remember longest, however, came early one morning when he was following a squirrel as it leaped through the trees. From the north came a soft whirring sound which increased until it was a dull persistent thunder, and when he looked up he saw coming toward him more birds than he had ever imagined; the sky was dark with them, and as they came in always-increasing numbers, the morning sun was blanketed and a kind of twilight fell over the earth. All morning they came, a flock so great it must have covered entire counties and even large parts of states, an incredible flight of birds.