All True Not a Lie in It (27 page)

My heart grows with the desire to be moving. I am tempted. I take up my gun and say:

—We would be back in a few days. Five at most. A week at the utmost.

Rebecca, I feel your eyes as though they are hooks. They run along the gun and then look away towards the younger children, who are running about holding sticks to their foreheads like horned beasts. I see Squire cleaning his gun and glancing at me.

—No. No. I had best stay, Russell.

But the thought of remaining caught here for a winter makes me feel quite drowned. I look to the sky, it is grey and unhelpful.

The sound of a small axe breaking the air with precise cuts enters my head, clang clang clang. Jamesie is chopping kindling in a small clearing near us. He works with perfect rhythm, like a little bell calling for order. The Mendinall boys are sulkily chopping with no rhythm at all, but Jamesie continues in his fashion.

—Jamesie.

The boy’s ears redden. Not really a boy—seventeen years of age at this time. His face keeps up its old cautiousness permanently, and it seems to me that fathers can always see through the grown bones down to the young child they knew first. I correct myself:

—James. Would you ride back with a party for more supplies and meet us back here again as quick as you can?

His face lights and is quickly serious again. He says carefully:

—I could.

I walk over to him and take his axe. I say:

—All right. You and these two friends of yours can go. They have complained long enough of being here. Make men of you all.

James half-smiles at the great Mendinall brothers, who keep their surly faces but stand straighter. Russell shouts for his oldest son:

—You will go along, Henry. Take two of the Negroes, Adam and Charles.

He motions to two of the black men who lead the pack horses. I say:

—We had best keep Hill to ourselves. He might work at his book, it will keep him occupied. But send Crabtree with the boys. He knows what he is about in the wilderness.

Crabtree is one of the lone men game to settle. He is grey-haired and past fifty, but a good shot and a storyteller, which the boys will like. He looks up from his horse’s shoe and says:

—I will accept that compliment, Boone, from you.

He tosses his hat to the ground and I toss mine at him. James gives one of his short measured laughs, which always sound as though he has thought them out first. Then he throws his own hat a small way and laughs again.

In the valley bottom, the women are happy enough to rest and unpack a few more of their things, in spite of the lack of bread. Rebecca takes to the rocking chair in the evenings, she has found a grassy spot for it. Her eyes are heavy-lidded and her mouth is small. She is very still, smiling down at the baby. Martha has another new one, born not long ago. I saw her eyes through the gap in the tent as I passed by during her labouring. She gave a cry and willed me to look look look.

We build stone fire rings, they have the look of a bracelet in the dark. Squire works nearby but we say nothing to one another.

Ten days pass, and all the noise of the group settles to a hum. Even the cattle and hogs are quieter, browsing and rooting in the remaining grass and the reeds along the creek. Hill enters one of his damper periods as there is so little excitement here. He does not care to hunt. He writes in cramped hand on his papers. He reads them to one of the slaves, London, who listens with fortitude. Occasionally Hill trots about on his horse, singing. But from a distance away in the hills, one can hardly hear a thing.

I take my boy Israel on an afternoon hunt up the valley. He has dark hair with red in it, which he wears plaited up. He lopes ahead with his bird rifle. He turns back to shout:

—Daddy, you must have more shot for me.

I recall his bright face, his hand turning out his bag, his grin. For a moment he has a look of my dead brother, his namesake. My boy, it makes me uneasy for you. If one could know what was coming, would one want to see it, or would one avert one’s eyes and carry on?

Israel gets a turkey. We find several more, and for sport we take a few songbirds with our clubs as well.

The girls run up and down collecting bright leaves. They have some plan for these. They do not let on what it might be.

The younger boys are restless. They follow the girls, they watch Susy’s legs as she runs. They walk along the trail west of camp to see what is there. They talk of Kentucky often and loop back to where I am from time to time.

One of the lone men is even more restless and turns thief. He takes horses and skins and creeps off before dawn. Later in the morning he is back. Out of the forest he comes, his face greased with sweat, his eyes skipping like small flies.

—They are dead. All murdered.

His voice is loud in the extreme. He shuts his palm over his mouth in what strikes me as a tender motion.

Say nothing more. This is what has been coming for me all along. Here: a black bloom of nightmare opening its face every night, every minute. Let yourself think of any other thing and there it is, showing its red throat.

H
OW YOU SCALP
someone is like this. Cut a small round down to the bone beneath the hair on top of the head near the front. Put your foot on the back of the person to be scalped, pull the hair at the edge of the round. The whole comes free easy enough, easier than skinning a deer.

Jamesie, you once asked me how, and I refused to tell you, but I do not see why I should keep it from you any longer. If you are listening. But perhaps you cannot hear me, perhaps you do not wish to.

In my mind I write it:
James Boone, son of Daniel and Rebecca Boone, was killed October 1773
. But I do not know the day you died, I cannot write it properly in Granddaddy’s Bible record, and my heart breaks and breaks for it. Every minute my heart is dying but it does not stop though I tell it to. I do not know how it can go on.

I have wondered too about the sound of the skin surrendering itself up and how the head left behind must feel. I have seen the hair dangling from the dried scalps stretched on hoops in Indian villages. And black Indian hair turned in by English scalpers for Governor’s money. I could do it if I had to. I would do it hour after hour and day after day if I had the opportunity. When we find Russell’s slave Adam hiding in the woods, he gibbers all the terrible things he heard as he hid behind a log at the boys’ camp,
despite having stuffed his fingers down his ears. I do the same at night for months.

James asking for help. For Daddy. For death.

I can hear it, his poor voice thickened and without words at the last. The echo of it spreading out across the night country, shivering like wind over water or over the grasses of Kentucky. For ever. The father, which is to say me, only two miles away, did not hear.

Squire goes to bury them. They were so close to getting back to our camp with the supplies we sent them for. He tells me the bodies were left in ruins. Hurt everywhere. But not scalped. They do not take white scalps in peacetime. This is all Squire will say. He shakes his head when I ask him to say more.

I force my breath into a rough laugh. I chop at a tree. Pale chips fly back at me. Let them blind and choke me. I am not alive. I try to see the murderer’s face. I ask him in my mind what point there is in killing boys for sport, without a fair fight. What point there is in killing a boy you know to speak to, but a boy you know nothing of otherwise. Aside from the fact that he did not like to smoke. And that he was my boy.

I let bears get too near before I shoot. I let deer get too far away.

If I were really to see his face, what might I do? I think of every burning and ripping and carving up there can be. There is nothing else. I can think of nothing. I can think of him no more. And Jamesie is hidden under the earth, I cannot see him. I did not see him dead. I did not go back for him with the burying party.

I will not think of the murderer’s name. I will carve it out from my brains. And I will not think of you, Jamesie, I cannot allow myself to speak to you now. You are gone and the fault is mine and I am not alive, but not with you. I do not know where you are.

I chop in my boy’s straight rhythm, clang clang clang. I cover his crying voice, I try to make my hands into his. It comes to me in my sister Hannah’s soft words that he is like Christ, exalted by the
suffering, sent straight to Heaven like a shot from a gun. So far away that I cannot hear him now, and he has no need to hear me.

But this is little comfort. There is none. I believe in the human agony on the cross. I have seen what people will do to one another. And I believe in the story of God being unable to help his son and therefore not being much of a God at all.

I will say that after the attack, I want to go on. Russell turns back straight away, his face fallen in and his neck shrunk into his shoulders. His boy Henry was murdered too. The Mendinalls go with him, having lost their two boys also. So do half of the others. I scream at the rest of the group that we are carrying on, as though Kentucky will blot out everything and rewrite it all beautifully. Terrified and half-starved people will go anywhere, looking for someone to follow. We walk for some time. Then I dare to look Rebecca in the face. It is a terrible face, a painted wall holding itself up. She has not looked at me once since she handed me a linen sheet for Squire and the others to bury Jamesie in. Nobody speaks.

When the burying party rejoins us, I agree to turn back for Carolina. We leave the bedsteads and furnishings on the trail. I stand Granddaddy’s black cabinet up in the trees with its doors gaping open. Martha and Jane huddle the children together, telling them to keep silent, and cover the babies’ mouths with rags. Squire leads. Ned and my boy Israel walk the cattle and hogs with their guns ready. Snow begins.

And when we are back, I am dead. I work the fields again, dead. I dye all my clothes with black walnut. I try to dye my hair blacker with it. I lie on the ground. When a new land company agent comes asking me to lead a road-building party into the wilderness, into Kentucky, I say I will do it, but first I wait for the birth of our next
child. The child is stillborn into a hot June full of flies. A boy. I do not wish to see him before he is buried.