All True Not a Lie in It (34 page)

He is strong but, like me, not such a tall man. As he waves, the women take him by surprise and drag him into the cold water. He goes in face first and comes up with a great raw gasp. The river level is up to the women’s knees, they bend to hold him under again. One takes hold of his hair and pulls up his head to let him breathe. The crowd of watchers enjoys it, some are calling and pointing, the children are running back and forth.

Hill roars and flips over like a fish and rolls the woman with him, pinning her below the surface. She thrashes beneath him, white drops shower the air and the bank. I am put in mind of ducks coupling, the same surprise and violence. He holds her down and his lips pull back from his teeth in a frozen grin as he looks to us through the splashing. Four women come running to pull him off. They do not drown him, though well they might. They drag him away up the riverbank, I do not see where they take him, though I hear him yipping as if he is being pinched by one of his whores.

The soaked woman stands shivering, her clothing clings to her. She crosses her arms over her breast with a terribly sad countenance. An old grandmother covers her with a blanket and speaks into her ear, but her face does not change.

Is this to be the way we all go? Young Brooks behind me says in confusion:

—I did not know them for Baptists.

Callaway says:

—I hope you have had the dunking call from the Lord. But no matter if not, they will take you regardless.

It seems a time-eating way to kill some twenty-seven men. Each man is taken down into the river in turn. The women strip them of their clothes and then scrub and knock and bang them as they struggle for their breath in the water, but nobody fights hard now, even poor Sam Brooks with his broken arm. Afterwards they are sent in blankets to the fire trench, where they sit looking stunned and brainless, even colder than before. Waiting for what is next.

I am the last. The old woman approaches me with a younger one, their wet leggings frozen and cracking. I raise my arms so that they might pull my shirt from me. I let them take down my leggings and remove my moccasins. The cold and their eyes whip my skin.

If I speak to them, perhaps they will not kill us today. It is a tiresome thought and I am very fatigued. But I take a breath and I say:

—You are experts, ladies.

The water numbs me quickly and now my heart does rip along as if I have been given a dose of something. Perhaps it will stop now, perhaps the cold water will be my last bed.

But they start on a hard washing such as Rebecca would give to a sheet from a sickbed. I am spared laundering poles. Instead their fists and feet strike me all over, their knuckles scrape up and down my ribs. The one still unhealed sends up a screech. A hand knocks my side and my head, my muscles ball up. The rocks on the riverbed gnaw into my backside, but I am pushed down so hard that I do not try to move. The old woman grimly takes up my feet in turn and drags a rock back and forth over the soles of them, bending my toes back. The younger one has hold of my knotted up plait and works my hair loose. She takes my head in her two hands and lowers it into the icy water. My lungs suck in and my old hurt ankle aches to the
marrow. My heart beats beats beats. I keep my eyes open and I can see her face, which looks half melted like the rest of the world.

When she lets me up I am alive. I gasp:

—I am only a man. Have pity.

But my attempts at Shawnee only make them duck me again. My loose hair wraps around my neck and face like weeds. Here I will drown surely. I am going. I open my mouth. A rock thumps my breastbone, a rough cloth scours my belly and my lower parts. The old woman at her work shows no interest in these that I can see. Her mouth is still and her arms scrub away.

My cold brain wanders back to Pennsylvania when some girls caught me swimming bare and threw a bucket at me. I stood and showed them my arse and I said: Remember this, tell your grandchildren one day.

The younger woman pulls me up from the water again, I cough and spit and shake. I see her face with its round brown eyes and small nose. Now she is still, waiting for me to speak this time, it appears. Some of the other women are chattering, running into the water up to their knees and then back to the fire. A couple of my men still have the spirit to catcall from the bank.

I stand straight so they can see all of me and I say:

—White men need the most washing, I see.

I force my voice into a brief hoot. The women give a short silvery breath of laughter at once as I stand turning to ice, all bare and all pitiful. But I do not die. Through my rattling teeth I say:

—Clean enough for you now?

They drag me out and bundle me firm into a woollen blanket like the others. I remain standing on the bank. My teeth rattle on, my skin stings and itches and my wet hair sticks to me as if afraid. Indeed it might be afraid if it could know its fate.

The sky is heaped up with heavy clouds. I watch them slowly roll past.

The women busy themselves at the end of the fire trench, pulling off their leggings and wrapping blankets about their waists. Then they come for me again, their arms out and beckoning.

The younger of my laundresses pushes me down and rubs at my head with another blanket. She smells of wood smoke, as I notice, being so unusually clean of smell myself. When she has finished, she wraps one of my hairs tightly around her finger and tugs sharp.

I see the hair come away and stick to her arm, making a crooked
S
there.

She pulls out another and another, then a few at once. Then a fistful.

The pain rings through my scalp and worms down into my neck and arms and fingers. The roots of my hair seem to run all through me. Rip rip rip. I try not to shudder as her hands take hold of the next hank. I keep my face flat, I stare at her bare legs through the opening in her blanket. At once I know how wolves must feel at night, with howls bursting to get out of them. No. I will not think of wolves. Around me my black scrawls of hair in the snow look like a cipher.

My watching men have gone silent. I see their bruised faces and eyes from their run down the alley of beatings. They can see what further misery is coming for them.

I say loud:

—You have made a fine turkey of me, ladies. I am good and plucked.

—Your feathers are poor.

The woman speaks Shawnee to me slowly. I try to catch her eye but she folds in her lips and seeks out the next hairs. Her smoky smell puffs round her lightly as she moves her arms. I sniff and I say:

—I can only make do with what I was given.

—You should have asked for better. More.

She says
more
in English. She pats my forehead where the hair has already backed off of its own accord, as I will admit. It is a cool
and efficient pat. Then she plucks out a handful from the back of my skull. My eyes water.

—Well, and are you the local barber? Or medicine man? Or woman, should I say?

She does not answer but hands me the ribbon from my plait, now faded to grey. Findley, I have kept it. I clutch at this damp sorry thing you gave me. You got me here and you are gone, somewhere you are laughing at me.

She goes on to the next plucking, smiling at Will Brooks’s curls. I am certain that my head wears a great bright halo of agony and is twice its usual size. Well perhaps this is how angels are made. I raise one aching arm to touch the sore bared flesh, I feel the long lock left at the crown.

—Ah. For ease of scalping.

I mime the action on myself. I am shot with the old blue recklessness I have felt before. A couple of my men snort and the women smile pityingly. My barber woman says:

—You can keep that.

—Can I? Thank you.

—Warriors do.

—What?

—Warriors.

She faintly mimes a raised axe. I say:

—Does this make me a warrior now?

She shrugs with her whole body and says:

—It is supposed to be so.

—Well well. Does it work?

She only looks at me, and so I flip my remaining hair in her direction. The old woman who washed my parts grins suddenly with bright teeth and makes a gesture that I understand. My barber woman smiles thinly too and says:

—She says your hair is—

—I know.
Limp
is the word you are searching for.

I stand and I open my blanket. Her face does not change. I will admit that I am less than impressive in this condition. I feel my men behind me, I hear some of them chuckling. In English I shout:

—You have evidently done this before, beautifying men’s heads for them. Making them less limp. We could give you a job back at Boonesborough. What do you say boys? Plenty of shaggy types there. Limp types too.

I turn to the whites huddled under their blankets scratching at themselves. A few are holding the ends of their wet hair. No one laughs further.

Well. I should not have mentioned the fort. The Shawnee could take it easy enough. Hair by hair, scalp by scalp. Burn everyone. Burn the place to stumps, let the grass grow over the burned black rectangle until there is nothing at all to show it had ever been. I see it, the bright wild grass and clover all along the river, the meadow whole and empty again. Beautiful and horrible. Which?

At once everything here is pointed and venomous.

Other women set to plucking the men’s heads now. My barberess has moved down the line. I shout:

—What else are you going to do?

—What do you want?

She is calm as ever, but her voice shows a small note of surprise and I know that I have trapped her attention. In English I say:

—I said what else will you do, Delilah? Curl it up for us? Perfume it? Mine is clean. It is limp. It will not hurt you.

I twiddle the lock around my fingers. Everything I say feels hollow, though the words come easy enough. A wave runs through the men, and a few bark out expectant laughs again, their eyes on me.

The woman only turns away and begins the walk back up to the town. I stop moving my head about. My skin is damp still and very cold. Callaway pulls his blanket tighter. He gets to his feet and
begins to walk up the beach as if he is making to leave. Some of the Shawnee women point and call in alarm:
Napeia. Napeia
. The rooster. His final lock of red hair has the look of a cock’s crest falling over. He turns back and says:

—No, the question is what are
you
going to do now, Boone?

T
HE TRANSFORMATION
they perform on us is real enough. Now we are something else entire. Clean. New. No longer white. The stinking stained heap of our clothes stays at the riverbank for burning. We are given new clothes. We are given new families. All of us are new people.

I am to be Black Fish’s son and live in his house.

So surprised are we that we go along. They speak to us differently, they are softer, their faces are softer. We are replacements for their dead men. We are their dead men come back.

This strikes me now as a generous and clever idea, though at the time I could not believe in it. We whites are stingy with our dead, we hoard them and put them away, as I know. We roll their stories about like pebbles in our heads until they are polished and rattling and all we have left. And our dead are gone. That is what we say. Gone. I tell myself mine are gone. I will not think of them.

The house is covered with sheets of elm bark and flecks of moonlight get in, all speckled. It is like living under a hen. I would prefer to keep outside, but they tie me in at night. The woman sighs and
turns. The little girls roll about frequently. The man is a silent sleeper. He has the look of a grave, a mound covered to the forehead with a blanket. But many things make me think of graves.

For lack of anything else to do in this long night, I call to Squire in my mind now. I imagine a small, flickering trail like a cannon fuse licking its way along through the woods, all the way back to the fort. I will it to keep going and not go out.

—Squire. Hey-o.

We have never spoken of the difficulty between us. The silence now is a great disappointment to me. I want a word from him very much. Any word would do. Any word at all: pincer, pie, prick. O Squire, I am such a fool that I laugh aloud.