All True Not a Lie in It (12 page)

—You shot me. You shot me.

I feign injury, I feign death on the grass. And I hear her voice for the first time. It is low and a little rough. She is still looking away when she says:

—Do excuse me. I could hardly help where the stone wished to travel to.

I say:

—Begging your pardon also. I could hardly help where my knife wished to go.

I see her do it, she pulls up her skirt so her stockings show. They are faintly streaked with grass. Her ankles are narrow. She wants me to see. Now she covers them again and smoothes the apron as though there is nothing at all wrong with it. As though she cut it full of holes herself and dotted it with juice and stuck a knife through it for an ornament. She flicks her black eyes at me and they eat me whole.

I always say I was so bold because I was trying her temper. She might shoot me yet, if I am to see her again in this world.

—Here you are.

I am loud and bloody. I want to make her speak, I want to hear the scratches in her voice. Her glossy eyes, all black with no keyholes and no key.

In her granddaddy’s yard I have butchered the deer I dragged here, I have piled the cuts up tidy on the skin. I stand and I wipe my brow and wait. She and her sister live here, her pack of half-brothers live with their father. As I reason, the Bryans are rich but still need food. It seems to me a perfect gift, a mess of uncooked meat, a gift she cannot ignore and will have to deal with.

Standing in the doorway she looks me over. Suddenly I feel my coat of blood and sweat, I see the dark spreading stain I have left on the ground. A house slave appears behind her, followed by the nervous big-eyed sister, Martha. She puts her hand to her mouth while the black woman laughs a disbelieving laugh and folds her arms. To her Martha says:

—Jean, hush.

I swab at my forehead and I laugh back:

—Here you are, just as I said. A butcher’s life is a hard one. You see how hard?

Rebecca vanishes. I go on standing like a great bloody infant who has just got itself upright and does not know what to do next. Martha goes on looking, her hands pressed together at her waist. Jean laughs again, shaking her head, and I say:

—You will not get fresher meat. Alive-o. Or near enough. Might get up and run off yet.

But Rebecca reappears with a bowl. She sets it precisely on the step. She returns to the doorway. There she stands as though the house were a ship and she a figurehead.

I go close and I see the milk. The white surface is as innocent as the moon.

—A cat, am I?

I grin and pick up the bowl, I am glad to bloody it with my hands though it is already none too clean and the milk is sour as I can smell. I put my tongue out, I hold the bowl in the air and speak to it soft:

—So you and I have found one another at last. We both need a good scrubbing. Is there no help for us here? No one to get us clean all over? But perhaps the girls of this house know nothing of clean. Perhaps they are all unclean. Perhaps it is my lucky day.

I lick the rim. Martha stares on. Now Jean stops laughing, and Rebecca begins.

Soon enough we are in old Bryan’s big house, the lamps are all lit though it is not dark, not quite dusk. Daddy sweats next to the bank of lanterns, but he is smiling. He begins loud:

—Friends.

A flicker crawls over his face, the word is still bad to him. He is still no Friend, though he has been appointed a magistrate here in the Yadkin now, which he feels down to his bones, and so he keeps these straighter than usual. Rebecca’s half-brothers stand in a great row. Old Bryan, Rebecca’s granddaddy, sits in a rocker, looking cobbled up of the wrong parts. His brows are lowered at his new kin. Perhaps he is thinking that there is still time to have us out of here. But no. Daddy is stuttering out the marriage vows for Neddy and Rebecca’s sister, Martha. Our young Neddy has made his choice, or perhaps it has been made for him. Perhaps the owl was only his first gift that evening. Martha looks rounder than usual, and not just her eyes. But no one speaks of it here, we need no further talk of fornication in the family. Ned looks content as ever and Martha keeps hold of his arm as she says yes, she will be his wife.

And now for my turn. I am occupied with keeping myself as still as Rebecca is. Out of the side of my eye I see her breast rise slightly. She is alive, she is seventeen years of age, I am twenty-one. She is near as tall as I am. I pull myself up.

At this time I cannot believe that she has agreed, I cannot believe that it will happen. Some disaster will now roll in, fire or stampede or instant plague. Daddy turns, his face is clouding. Do not go bandy, Daddy: this I think at him as in old times. He slows his talk, making every word a smooth separate pebble in his mouth. No stammers over my name. Daniel.

I know I am his favourite among us now that Israel is gone, though I do not know why. Daddy, I try to ignore the shine of your teary eyes and the way your face has gone so old, but for a moment I do get foggy myself. I have to cough before I can say:

—Well all right, if you say so, I will take this woman to wife.

This woman. My wife. A miracle and no disasters. I give my head a shake, I want to laugh and laugh. I grip her hand.

Well. It is done. Old Bryan has the air of one dragged out of a tomb and forced to put up with this life again. Rebecca’s stepmother brings herself to kiss Ma. Two of the little boys press their mouths to the rum jug, hoping for it to sweat. Hill looks up and down my wife, all ideas about her possibilities. He hoots with his hands circling his mouth:

—Good night. Good
ni-i-ight
. Thumping big children to you. Give her a thumping, Boone! Who has the bottle?

When I am upstairs with Rebecca, I can still pick out his shrill shouts among those of the crowd below. For a moment I fear he will set to telling stories of my first marriage to little Molly Black. I almost fear little Molly will chatter her teeth in my ear. But Hill is laughing like a crow now, trying to convince himself of the merry time he is having, though I know he wants what I have.

I have a wife, a real wife, beside me. I am struck by a thought of my Uncle James’s red face after my sister Sallie’s wedding, telling me to find myself a woman, marry her first. When I was small he would pet and spoil me, rubbing my nose with his bristling whiskers, wielding his jollity like a club for bashing at disappointment. Not enough land, spiteful neighbours, a poor school to run, a dead wife, no new life here. Though I did not like his school, I remember him talking about ancient times, Jericho and Greece and Troy and Rome, which he knew I liked, and sometimes he would press sweets into my pocket until it tore. He said: Danny, you will have to do better than I have.

Hill yowls and a dog sings after him outside. The dancing reels along like a brawl. The boots seem to have increased their weight, the thump of a body falling rises up to us on a current of hard laughter. The air in the house seems a mouthful of liquorish breath let out. My own breath is liquorish, I admit, and Rebecca’s is lightly so, though she keeps her mouth closed to a pinpoint and seems hardly to be breathing at all. The bed trembles. It is not our
doing. A loud stumble and roar downstairs and Neddy’s slow easy laugh from across the landing where he is with his own new wife. Ah-ha-ha. Ah.

Well Uncle James, here is my bride, my new life. To your health. I take another swallow from the jug for good measure.

Rebecca beside me is in her nightgown where Bryan’s house slave Jean propped and primped her before leaving the room with a wink when I appeared. Her hair is cobwebby, black and soft against the pillow. The candle gutters as the dancers shake the walls, it reflects in shudders in her eyes. She is as still and quiet as ever and seems to want for nothing. I feel little guns going off all along my limbs and up my back. I am near to being purely happy, though there is plenty I want at this moment. I say:

—Here you are. Here we are.

She is unmoved. Someone below is singing “Black Betty” in the saddest wail.

Well. My hands seem dumb hammers as I fold them over my chest. I send out a prayer to Maria and the others in Philadelphia, I hope I will do better here. If I had my knife I could make a few holes in her nightdress. Look for dimples.

I roll onto my side and grin at her and say:

—Do you remember the cherry orchard?

At this she inclines her head towards me and says:

—Marriage has turned you sentimental.

In her voice is a flint lightly struck. The possibility of a spark, if not a spark itself. I say:

—It is known to do so.

—Rum is also known to do so.

—Well. Milk is too. Have you brought a bowl along for me tonight?

She says nothing. She winds a strand of hair around each finger on one hand. I say:

—At any rate, you are married yourself. You should know what it is like.

—True. I am married.

She says so as if it is nothing to do with me. I touch her hair.

—Mrs. Boone. Poor woman.

—Do I know who you are?

This is first time she says it. She gives me a sudden vicious little smile and I am seized with tomcat joy.

She catches her breath, I feel it.

Nine months later, we have Jamesie. Rebecca, you know that I have counted it out. I know he was mine.

Y
OU CAN HAVE
a new life for a time. But it does turn old, everything does.

Rebecca loses no shine for me. The truth is that I am full of aching for her, I am near always so, even now, after all that has happened. When we are new married, her face appears in the corn. Or the axe-edge of her shoulder blade does, or her ribs riding up under her skin as she lifts her arms, or the tiny cushion behind her sharp knee. She is built of weapons, I tell her, and she agrees: Yes I am. I know all of her, every inch, I cannot leave her body alone, even in my mind in the fields. At night I call her a Welsh witch, or Beautiful Helen, Queen Not-of-Troy but of the Backwoods, and I lie her down and kiss her low on her back and feel her silent laughter in her backbone. There is the proof of it.

Little girl, I wish I could see you now, any part of you.

Her grandfather’s fields are dull. The soil is good, things grow readily. But everything here has the taste of Bryan property, a rusty weepy taste. Besides I have never been one for cropping. I am a poor enough ploughman, I make wobbling furrows, I strike any rock in any field. The work presses on me like an anvil. The corn is like lead. In truth I hate corn, God damn the corn, I would like to hear it all pop itself to nothing. But I stupefy myself. I sink my thoughts
into Rebecca and our bed and anything that takes my mind from the plough.

Do not think of the army or the French or the Indians. That life is not for you. This is life
.

This I hear in Ma’s voice. I stop and bend to clear away a speckled chunk of rock. The horse throws back its head.

Do not think
.

But it is easy enough to think of the French and the Indians. They are closer to Carolina again and more unhappy than ever with those settled here and those pushing farther to the south and the west. And now the British, that is to say the true British in the old country, want to tear us up by the roots. We are still Britons, our settler militia flies the King’s flag, but we are not subjects enough, it seems. We go too far, we get in everyone’s road, we interfere with their fur trading and their treaties, planting ourselves here wherever we like, moving into places they do not want us. It is all a game, all cats and mice. At any rate I find myself neither cat nor mouse.