All True Not a Lie in It (13 page)

I stand and look in a circle about me, checking for sound or smoke from anywhere. A pair of Bryan’s slaves is at work far up in one of his fields, talking now and then. Their voices carry, slow and easy. The house at the end of the flats is quiet, closed in on itself like a basket with Rebecca and the children in it, Jamesie and my own little Israel now, as well as Jesse and Jonathan. The other Bryan houses are not so far off. The fences are up. The cows look stout enough, and cows can kill, as you know, poor Jezebel. Surely happiness is some protection. It is natural to feel so. But I feel also that if I could stand on a clifftop and look down, the farm would be a tiny rough island in the darker ocean of wilderness. All the toil of hacking down trees, dragging out stumps, clearing away brush, for this.

I want to look into the dark.

I sigh, which I do not like to do. I want to run off. I throw down the plough. The horse snorts and sets to work tearing up a clump of
thin grass. I close my eyes and think of last winter, when I crossed the Blue Ridge for the first time after a slave herding cows in the mountain pastures showed me an old trace. His name was Burrell, and he had a broad face and a thin neck. I gave him a few swallows of my whiskey for his help. He said there was more he could show me, but I had no more whiskey. So I followed the trace west myself for two days. I found many creeks and springs and a lot of ginseng, which I took to sell, and the game was very good. In my mind I can see every tree, every nick in the bark, every plant, every animal shit, every sign.

But I had to come back. And now it is spring, there is no end to this work and this place. The wind in the trees has a sound like waves. When we wanted a real story, Ma always used to tell us of her own mother’s crossing of the ocean. Her poor little Ma from Wales, going off to a fearsome new world. She was certain the ship would fall through a hole in the water straight into Hell but was glad enough to think of any end to being so seasick.

The wind drops, the sound lessens. I am still here. Well. I sit and lie back and strike my head on another small stone. My head throbs. Now I foresee myself turned under in the Bryan burying ground or in this very field, pressed flat with a cartload of the red soil, my face mashed by a spadeful of it.

A soft rushing sound comes, like the breath of someone running along lightly. Something is coming for me. My heart sets to beating hard. I have not felt them for a time, the dead ones who trail along behind me. I am alive, I have Rebecca, I have children. But here also are the dead. I feel their coolness and their interest once more.

They will dig me up: so I think. I laugh and the laugh goes flat in the dirt.

I get up. Nobody is here. The horse sees me and lays its ears flat against its head. I still have the speckled rock in my hand, and I am sighing again.

Fate hands me another exit. Though at the time I do not wish to take it.

Rebecca is boiling over with fear of attack, and her fear is pointed straight at me. It is late spring now, and everything is bone dry. It has hardly rained in a month. The Cherokees and Iroquois have raided settlements up and down the Yadkin Valley too many times in the last weeks. Not enough food, as the new-planted crops are drying up. And more settlers are coming in all the time, claiming more of the land. Some are thieves looking to take anything they can get. They stole a young girl from Halseys’ over the creek. We gathered the militia and got her back before they could hurt her, but Halsey said she did not speak for a week. Now the Halseys have gone. So have others.

Rebecca pulls me out the door when the children are asleep. The insects are fiddling at a high pitch. The fat-lamp sizzles and spits inside. She is listening hard to every sound and she has a twist of my shirt in her fingers.

—Do you really wish to stay here? Do you?

Her black eye is sharp and her voice is soft. She knows how to pierce me through. I know she is foreseeing my death and possibly her own. Or capture and imprisonment. Her eyes flood with a rush of pictures of the children captive or dead, but she pushes them down. She cannot think of them so—who can think of their children dead?

—Daniel.

The withering fields, the corn and wheat failing. The endless work. I look out towards them through the dark. The dull home militia training, marching back and forth with a straggling group of farmers. Now Rebecca grips the back of my neck as if I were a pup and she trying to shake me out of this. Her hand says:
Am I wrong to want a peaceful life? No
.

—Daniel, even some of the Indians are leaving now. I saw a group of Catawbas going north with all their things. They want no part of the fighting. Why would you want to stay?

The week before, I went on my militia duties with Squire to patrol a pair of the far backcountry farms. We found Jennings and his son and slave lying face up in their wheat, all shining and buzzing, black and green, cloaked in suits of flies. Their scalps gone and their eyes also by that time. The boy was some thirteen years of age. I could hardly bear to look at him, I was so sorry.

The body of a Cherokee was face down outside the door of their cabin in its own buzzing suit. Someone had got one shot in. We buried all of them, though some leave the Indians out in the air to rot. I did not tell Rebecca, but she knows. There was no one inside the house, but I saw a woman’s gown on a hook and a child’s cap on the bed.

She turns her back to me now and says:

—You smelled the smoke.

—You smelled it first.

A stupid joke. I did smell it, we all did. It travelled in the dark from the north last night, probably one of the Carters’ places, too much smoke to be burning brush. Too tarry and black, with too much stench, the kind that sticks to skin. Rebecca looks at me, her eyes fill with tears in an instant and she blinks them away. We do not bring up the smoke again. She moves back and forth like a switch in the air, and then goes inside.

She only wants to be gone. Her body has lost all its trained stillness. Daddy is the same, unsettled all through, worn down by Ma and age, his Carolina dream collapsed. So has the dream of Rebecca’s grandfather. In spite of all his land here in the Yadkin Valley, he has brushed the dirt from his hands and stood up to go. The retreat is sounding.

—Daniel. Danny.

Rebecca’s voice drifts from the doorway. I say:

—You know I never turn down a fight. Not even one against corn.

Again my words are stupid ones. I exhale through my teeth, a sigh by another name. I say:

—My Daddy will sell me six hundred of his acres, and we can have a better house. I know you would like that. Clapboard and an oak floor.

I do not think much of this idea, but perhaps she will. One of the children, likely Jamesie, breaks out of sleep with a cry, and Rebecca goes to him. He is never a happy sleeper.

I look out at the slight movement in the dark fields, the breeze shifting the low dry crops.

A great stone rolls from my back. It is not the thought of running from the Indians or the French or the attacks. The relief is in having a reason to turn from this silent, wily soil and all its demands. To leave it to itself and let it go wild and find somewhere else. Anywhere other, Daddy, as you once said.

All right. I move towards the door and lightly I call:

—We will go then, Mrs. Boone. If you like.

The woman with thin yellow hair and a sorrowful face picks at her skin. She seems to get no satisfaction from this activity, but she keeps at it. No one knows her, though we all sneak looks and wonder what has happened to her. Her chin begins to bleed, but she picks on with her trembly fingers.

Fort Dobbs, which the Carolina governor has built between two creeks some miles east of our place, is packed. Not enough air or light. The ceiling has the feel of a tight hat. We are jammed into one of the cabins along the north stockade with a dozen others. Between long silences, the women converse about better times and
are fierce in their judgements. The walls are raw logs, we snag on the rough wood like pelts.

—Your fancy apron would enjoy itself here.

Rebecca gives a small laugh, trying to keep bitterness out of the sound. The room stinks of stale fear. Baby Israel wails continuously and serves as the voice for us all. Jamesie at least is heavily asleep for once, his face upturned as if in great hope. I have told him that we are in the dungeon of a castle waiting to see the king. Mosquitoes sing above the watery trench outside the wall. One is in here singing. We have all had a good swat at it but to no avail. The baby’s crying heightens. The sound is a contagious one, and the other babies begin to cry, like wolves taking up each other’s howling.

The yellow-haired woman bursts out suddenly:

—Plenty of bad mothers about. Plenty. All too easy to become a mother.

She returns to her picking. The wailing goes on.

My brother Israel’s boy Jesse is curled next to my feet, his arm stiffened with a splint and tucked into a sling Rebecca fashioned from a shirt. He has been my boy since not long after his father’s death, but he is never quite at ease. He and Jonathan have orphans’ carefulness and bad luck. I say:

—Does your arm hurt you?

He says:

—No sir.

—Uncle Sir will do in this place.

Jesse looks up at me with a smile, quickly hidden. He shifts his weight and tries to give the air of one pleased with where he finds himself. He never wishes to make trouble. His face is very white in the dim, like a moon shining up from the bottom of a well, and I know his broken arm is sore. He fell from the loft in the barn and did not cry, he only came walking to find me with his forearm hanging loose from the elbow. Often he injures himself in some
fashion, as though life lays traps for him everywhere. With a sudden nod, the picking woman says:

—I could take that one, give him a home.

Jesse turns to her, his eyes widening. To the woman I say:

—No, thank you all the same.

She gives me a hard-done-by look and folds her arms for the time. To Jesse I say:

—Hungry?

I have a strip of jerk in my bag, I rummage for it, but Jesse shakes his head. I rub his hair and am sorry that there is nothing more I can do. I stand, but there is no room to walk about. Rebecca is nursing the baby beneath her shawl, so there is some quiet interspersed with small smackings. With her eyes shut she reaches up for my arm and says:

—Fine lodgings you have selected this evening.

She wishes me to joke with her and make her easy. She is sorry to have brought me here. But my limbs are prickling, and I do not reply.

I sit again and cover Jesse’s ears without thinking. Beneath the idle remarks, I hear them. Wolves, or Indian and French mockeries, as if the babies’ crying has brought them prowling. I put my ear to the splintery gunslit in the back wall. Jesse shifts about, Rebecca says too loud:

—What do you hear?

The shadows beneath her eyes are like petals. For a moment I want to touch them. Others sit up and listen. She asks me again what I hear, and I tell her nothing now.

—You would tell us if you did hear something? Daniel?

She is staring at me. So is Jesse, so is everyone else in the room. Jamesie rolls over and opens a sleepy eye. The yellow-haired woman stills her picking. Now I also speak too loud:

—Nothing there. The watch will be coming past soon. You will hear them. Go on, sleep now.

They quiet. My eyes adjust to the night as it deepens. The moon rises and drags the dark about. The noises of breathing and sleep begin to press upon me. I step over bodies to listen at the different walls. I hear a brief yip, it is not distant.

For a wild moment I am pierced as if by something sharp as a jewel. It stabs up to my skull, I see cold blue everywhere. Something is about to happen, surely. The thing that has been coming for me all my life. Here am I. Ready for murdering, or for being murdered. For anything but this trap.

Nothing comes. The stoppage and silence cannot be borne. If there were a proper window I would leap out of it before my Fate can catch me as it is always catching Jesse. I would surprise Fate by dodging off in a different direction, I would make some change from what is. At this time I believe it would be possible to do so.