All True Not a Lie in It (28 page)

I leave for a treaty-making where the land company buys a piece of Kentucky from the Cherokee for silver and guns and shirts, but I do not see the murderer there. I look among the young Indian men sitting along the riverbank. Some of them do not like the bargain. They sit skipping pebbles across the shallows and muttering that the country is still theirs. The heavy son of a chief, watching his father making his mark on the treaty paper, shouts:

—All writing is lies!

Hearing this, I leave and make trail for the company axemen.

The next year, on my dead legs, I drag the family out again with all the rest of my dead followers. I tell Rebecca we are going, we will not be stopped, we will not give in. I tell her Jamesie would wish it. The words have a sour taste.

She says:

—How can you use him for what you want? How—

She does not speak to me again through the journey. But I have no wish to speak.

Others come, some of the first party who sold up and have nothing left here, or who think the adventure of it worth the while. Richard Henderson, a long-nosed hawkish man with grey hair, whose land company it is, says he will give me two thousand acres and pay some of my debts. He keeps just behind me as I lead. I use my old prize tomahawk to hack at the fresh brush and saplings that have begun to grow up again. We all hack, a great broad wagon road we build, the Wilderness Road. We let the rest of the world in. My country is already a ruin, and so why not? My paradise. Of my making.

When we reach Kentucky, we find the bones tucked in the empty gut of a dead tree. An arm-bone is broken and the gun is gone. The powder horn is there still, pushed behind the hips. I know the initials carved in it, the back-bent shapes of the letters
J
and S.
It is his. Stewart’s. So is the skull. I stare it down, I put flesh back on the cheeks and jaw and eyes back in the raw sockets.

What happened to you, John? Did the Shawnee find you and kill you?

Or did you want them to find you? Were you waiting for your chance when you broke your arm and hid in the tree for shelter? Did you try to find your way back to them?

I had thought there were no ghosts here, but Kentucky is all salt. The salt is old blood seeped out into the ground, the beautiful grass all growing out of blood and bones. John, I wish I had never seen yours.

We hack on. I find the place for a fort near the Kentucky River. A great spreading elm in the centre of a meadow. This will be it, I say. This, here.

No one questions me. Henderson falls to his knees weeping for joy and cuts out a piece of sod he says he will keep always. He christens the place Boonesborough. We set about building. Hill appears again on a new horse. He has taken it upon himself to write to the newspapers in Virginia about our murdered boys. It is known everywhere, he says, and he is breathless with tales of some there who have taken it upon themselves to avenge us. A Mingo woman, sister of a chief, axed through the belly, her unborn child dragged out and left planted upon a stake. The rest of the group killed too and strewn about in pieces. Some Cherokees murdered also, any Cherokees the Virginians could find. Hill sets his grey eyes on me like guard dogs. He had hoped to find a certain one to kill himself, he says gently. He touches my arm and gives me a newspaper to keep. It is thin and soft in my hands, worn like a skin. I cannot read. I cannot think. I do not wish to.

We bang together fort walls with cabins attached in lines, taller blockhouses at the corners. We begin the stockade of pointed logs, but no one has much interest in seeing it through. The men are mainly interested in hunting and claiming land for themselves or to sell. Rebecca dreams one of her dreams, a house made of salt, where she can lick the walls and window frames and floors. The first time she tells me one of her dreams since she fell into deep silence. For so long we have lain in the same bed not touching, and moved about the small cabin not touching. Now at the table, she smiles for a moment, before her face is veiled with shame to have shown a smile, a part of her old self no longer in existence. She bends her head to her work, mending a linen sheet like the one she sent back to wrap Jamesie’s poor body in. Wedding linens from her granddaddy, packed all the way to this place.

Rebecca. This terrible way my Fate has evened things between us. Taking away your other first child. Our first child.

Your hand moves quick, your stitches twist. You were always an impatient seamstress. Mending irritates you, the rips and wear should never have happened in the first place in your eyes. I watch your hands and my first stupid thought is of our wedding night, when we were so young. The next stupid thought is that I might get that buried sheet back for you, Rebecca. There is nothing else I can get back.

We sit still as the stumps that serve as chairs in that poor cabin. I have bought glass for the windows from Henderson’s store, and I dragged Granddaddy’s cabinet here out of the forest, but the floor is still dirt. In the end I speak. I say her dream has the sound of one of her old Welsh tales. After a time, she says:

—It is. A princess tells her daddy the king that she loves him as meat loves salt. Then he exiles her.

—I will have to remember that this is the way to treat unruly children.

—He is sorry for it in the end. She was right.

—About salt.

—About love.

—Aha. You know all about that, oh queen.

I am joking, but she looks stung suddenly, and I think of the shock of the strange baby who became Jemima. We both bristle. I sit a moment, then I reach out to stop her hand as it stitches. I say:

—Rebecca. Our boy is better where he is.

She stares at me with her eyes black and surprised and the needle bright in her fingers. She says:

—No, he is not. He is not.

Staring, we show the ugly angry raw meat just beneath our skins. I want to tear mine out and dump it at her feet like the deer I once dragged to her house. I go out to bang at the stockade with its missing side and its gaps. All the world’s cracks gaping.

The salt runs when autumn comes again, and the game begins to run out too, fleeing from those here so starry with the ease of Kentucky hunting that they shoot everything they see.

I hear some of the smaller children talking in bed. Our little Jesse says:

—The food is all bloody here. I can taste the blood
all
the time.

The others talk of the bad smells, making a list. We all smell of old meat from every pore. Old Dick Callaway bawls with rage when someone shoots a steer of his within the walls, and his red-headed nephew Jimmy cannot stop himself from shooting an old bull buffalo that wanders up towards one of the blockhouses. He has the ideal logical shot, just behind the eye and straight out the same place on other side. He says so. Well. The shot does bring it down fast enough, but how can we use all that meat?

No salt.

The carcass rots and stinks and hums with flies and birds just beyond the wall. It bloats and turns green. Colonel Dick and Jimmy ignore it. The women run past it on their way to the spring, their aprons up over their faces. They always run all the way to the spring at any rate, but now they run the faster. The well inside the fort is still unfinished.

The dead buffalo’s stink is no worse than ours, trapped with livestock and their dung, and ours, and drying skins and smoke and rotting clothes. Susy’s shift slides down her shoulders, the sleeves shredded. Soon she is going about in not much more than her bodice and a petticoat. One evening she comes to me with Will Hays and says they want to be married. She cannot wait any longer, not another day. She tells me so with her mouth firm, holding up her pretty face and shoulders as if saying:
Look at what I have to live with
. A bird swoops behind her in the twilight as she argues:

—I know how to cook and do everything already. Everything.

Her hands are over her belly. She is not sixteen.

I am voted magistrate, to Colonel Dick’s disgust, and so I perform the wedding. Susy, it is all I can do for you. I have tears in my eyes, as Daddy did when he married Rebecca and me. After the ceremony I tug at Jemima’s ripped skirt and remark that soon we will be like Adam and Eve in their innocence, without clothes at all. Holding the cat Tibby to her cheek, she fixes her stare on me and says suddenly:

—I wonder where Adam and Eve were buried, Daddy, do you know?

Jemima, no longer a child, always listening. And Jemima, you near are buried. They take you too.

S
HE COMES
into the cabin, bunching her hair up under her torn cap and hopping on one bare foot. She says she stabbed the other on a broken cane. She holds it in the air so I can see the blue bruise circling the small bloody mark. Rebecca offers to bind it up, but she says:

—No, Ma.

Then you hop out again into the afternoon, and nobody stops you, Jemima. You disappear.

In my mind I see: down at the river, she unties the fort’s only canoe, thinking to dangle her sore foot in the cool water. She calls to Colonel Dick’s two girls to go with her. The air is warm, insects skitter over the river surface. A fish jumps and leaves hardly a ripple. The girls all lie together in the canoe bottom, waiting for the clouds to make shapes of themselves. A tower, a bunch of grapes. The current tugs the boat gently, and their talk drifts away, and birds begin calling. Jemima sits up to look. They are almost at the far bank. The bushes are thick and dark and faces are in them.

The Indians have them ashore and bundled off before anyone at the fort sees. Young Fred Gas on the watch hears only the cry and call from the opposite bank. He looks out from the blockhouse and
they are gone, the air already still and the canoe riding high in the water, empty.

Three days they are gone, and we behind them, always behind, snatching up the strips of skirt and the strands of hair they tore off to make a trail. I follow the trail, I see nothing else. The first night, when we stop to sleep a few hours, I see white shreds of cloth against the dark behind my eyelids. I want to murder Colonel Dick every minute, always bellowing: No, not that way. He takes some of the men and rides off in his own direction. I plunge my group through the woods, seeing no sign, hoping only that we might head off the Indians and catch them higher up the river. It is only thanks to a snake, its head crushed by a club, that I know we are on their track.

I will be first. I will beat Dick. So I tell myself. My jaws and fists ache with clenching. We run on, I keep us running. And when we are on them at last on the third evening, I see Jemima’s eyes instantly catch me as I raise my head from the ridge, where I lie like a snake myself behind the trees. In the hollow below, the Indians are making their fire and cleaning their guns. The girls are against a tree, tied to each other miserably, their fingers twined in each other’s hair. Then Jemima’s face lifts at once, her eyes wide, her belief like a torch. Her triumphant, insisting yell: That is Daddy!

We find them. They are saved. We kill some of the captors before they run. I shoot one, he falls into the fire, I do not know whether he is dead. This is the truth, the end of it. Hill writes the story, of course, and sends it off to the newspapers:
We will draw a veil over the scene of happy reunion
. But so many holes in the happy end. He does not know that when we first set off after them, I waste an hour going back to the fort to change my damned Sunday shoes for moccasins I can run in. I lose the trail twice. I lose it entirely, I have no idea where to go next, my head is empty. It is a miracle
that we catch them up. Or pure luck, a worse thought. And Hill does not know what Jemima tells me later, that one of the Indians asked her to pick lice from his head at night, and she did so. Jemima, I have to say my first thought was to seek his face, not yours. The long, hollow murderer’s face. But he was not there.