All True Not a Lie in It (37 page)

Inside the house I cannot hear so well, and I must admit that I am somewhat relieved. The dark and the smell have also become a relief to me. The young guard coughs outside to remind us that he is still doing his job. The chickens rustle on the roof and one pokes its head down into the smoke hole. My Shawnee mother smiles without looking at me and then turns her back as she tends the fire. I can see she would rather I were not here.

The men’s voices rise. Black Fish is resting on his mat and says nothing at first. But as soon as he opens his black eyes they are on me. He stands and takes up a gun from beneath a blanket in a corner. It is an old flintlock with a poor splintered stock. He holds it out and I take it. I put it to my shoulder and take a sight and say:

—Is this to shoot my men with, now?

He smiles very briefly. I could say: Or shoot you with. But I do not say so. For one thing, who can tell whether the gun actually works?

I watch his face for another break in the flatness, another joke. He says:

—Go off and hunt.

—Hunt what, Father? I am at your disposal.

—What you like.

I expect a smile, but there is none. My mother bangs down her pot.

—A bastard daughter. Excellent wife you must have.

Pompey says this in his stony fashion. The crows are examining the papery old cornstalks and brown leaves the melt has revealed at
the edge of the woods. He sits smoking a pipe of willow tobacco and watching, as if they will try to get away from here if he takes his eyes from them.

I have come by a long route towards the woods, away from the field where my men are at work. I take the gun from my back. I have made a new stock for it and it is a good one now. I give it to my sullen guard to hold and I say:

—Shoot yourself a bird.

And the young man aims straight at the sky as ordered, his face near happy for an instant. He keeps the gun plumb.

—How many daughters, Sheltowee? Big Turtle Who Holds Up the World Entire?

Pompey sucks in his cheeks at this title. The dead one’s name has not settled on me yet. Even Black Fish does not use it for me, though I have heard him calling his little daughters by name, Pimmepessy and Pommepessy. From my sleeping mat with half-closed eyes I have seen him kissing the girls good morning and letting them snatch pieces of maple sugar from between his teeth. I think of Hill’s stories of him burning people tied to stakes, toasting them so slowly they go on dying and dying. There is an art to doing this. How does one learn such an art?

At last I say:

—Plenty of daughters. You?

—None for me.

—No sons either?

—No.

—That makes sense. Who would have Pompey?

The crows laugh and flap off. He curls his lip up over his gapped teeth in a great false smile. For once he looks caught out for something to say. I ask:

—Where did they get you? You have been here a good while. Bedded right in, I would say.

Pompey only shrugs and keeps up his frozen smirk. I say:

—You were captured?

He looks at me. He says:

—Not like you, son of a—chief.

—How is that?

He spits out a few pellets of laughter and says:

—I am no one’s son. And I did not come running to them like a blind man at the end of a sack.

—Ha.

He begins to chew on his pipe. It gets caught between two of his teeth. His mouth twisted sideways, he says round it:

—As I see it, you wished to get yourself caught. And your white fellows with you.

I strike the pipe hard from his teeth, it falls into a puddle of slush where it sticks stem-up. He looks at me, keeping still.

—Well, Turtle. Touched your turtle heart?

—Do you think I wanted us all taken? Do you think I choose to be here?

—I do not think you mind. It has not hurt you any. Some are born lucky, the rest of us have to put up with seeing that.

He hums a little of the whore song, then he says:

—They hate you well enough now, your own people.

Be safe here. Preserve everyone. I remind myself. I do not feel at all safe around Pompey. Carefully I say:

—It will all be for the best. My men know that. Our joining the Shawnee will stop all the warring between us. Make us all better off. We can ally against the British.

His eyes lift to the sky and he gives an idle half-smile. He says:

—We shall all be brothers in the spring. You did tell us so when we took you.

He begins to unwind the blue cloth from about his head. His hair jumps free in its tight coils. It smells of clove oil or something
like it and I wonder whether he has a headache. But I do not ask, and he would not tell me if he had. The pipe is still sticking up out of the slush like a jaunty leg. I say:

—You seem to be a brother here yourself, I might say. But you must have been taken prisoner first. You were somebody else’s slave to begin with.

His eyes go hard and dull. He says:

—You know everything about the lives of slaves, I am sure. Slaves of your own at your fort. They do say you are clever.

—There are slaves there. And I am that. Clever enough.

He rubs hard at a place on his head as if it itches him. The scent spreads. I say:

—We are staying. We are not going to run. Are you?

His face twitches, and he laughs, a forced sound like a bellows:

—Run? Back to Virginia? To whippings and eating beside hogs? To eating hogs’ arses? I do not even remember who I was then. I do not even remember my name.

—Maybe you were a hog’s arse. Or merely a hog.

—Maybe I was.

He is about to knock me down, I feel it coming. I stand still, I dig my feet in.

He stills himself also. It is an effort. His fists are tight, his boil rises.

A long silence knits itself between us. The river chuckles. The guard takes the opportunity to pull the gun’s trigger and fall over with the kick. The bang rings round us and fades away slow.

I crouch and pick up Pompey’s pipe. I try to make my voice solemn when I say:

—Well. Life is good here. Better.

—No mistake. True.

Something hangs in the air, a deceitful whiff. Our agreement surprises us, we do not trust it. I see a great unhappiness stiffening
him. Then his bones give way and he stretches his arms in a lazy manner as if he has no cares at all. In his usual fashion, he says:

—They may still kill you, you know. Your new brothers.

—I do know. They did not kill you, though. They have not yet.

Pompey’s hands are above his head, the fingers spread like branches against the sky. He swings them down and says:

—That is where they bury their dead. See the sticks?

He points to a small open place a distance through the trees. Painted sticks stand in the ground there, some weathered and some bright. I say nothing. He does not frighten me. He smiles and says:

—The sticks are hollow. So they can breathe, the dead. On their journey to the next world. It takes three days and nights. Did you know?

I cannot speak. I cannot. He looks at me all curious and says:

—Well, Sheltowee. Which of your many daughters is the famous whore that everyone knows?

The black man’s voice hunts me, it slides after me when I am in the woods with the gun and the guard. It catches me up.

You wished to get yourself caught. And your white fellows with you
.

I cannot lose either the voice or my young keeper, who is closer than ever now that I have let him shoot the gun. I step over the slushy ground and crusts of snow. I am heavy-footed and noisy. Let the game run off from us, I do not care. But the memory of hunger on the march is ferocious, like a beast writhing in the gut. My eyes quicken and sharpen with it in their old way, seeking out animal movement in the trees.

But why hunt? Why feed them at all? I load the old gun and I hand it back to my guard.

—Enjoy yourself.

He whips it away, most happy to have it again. But his face drops when he looks at me. He thinks of Black Fish, and he will not abandon his duty. He motions that we should walk on, that I should follow him, and I do. Indeed I keep to his very footsteps and I near step on his heels more than once. Running now would be no help. There is the tiny chance that he might shoot me, for one, though I have seen his aim now. I do not wish to be a month dying of a gunshot wound. And if I were to get through the woods, who would help? The other small forts that popped up round us have already been drained of their terrified settlers. Boonesborough is the last.

My mind keeps settling on my Indian mother’s teary face. It sinks me into a miserable low feeling. Do not think of weeping Ma in Carolina. Do not think.

I keep my eyes on my guard’s back. He walks quietly enough, this way and that, his head up, seeing nothing. We go deep into the woods with no sense to our movement, no catching of any traces. After a time I cannot help myself, and I give his shirt a tug. I say:

—What is your name?

After a moment, he says:

—Kaskee.

—All right, Kaskee. Look. No, look down. Here. A deer has been lying here. This is the sign, the way the needles have moved against the direction of all the others. Do you see? Easy. Signs are everywhere. Your people know this.

The guard looks at me all earnest, likely understanding nothing. My Shawnee is still weak enough. I pantomime running on the spot, making antlers with my fingers against my forehead. Then I lie down in the whispery slick needles under the boughs. Kaskee nods in a serious manner and lies down too. Well. What else is there to do?

We lie here a long time, our legs growing stiff and cold. A tidy heap of deer droppings sits near our heads. But I do not wish to move. I begin to whistle an old song of my Ma’s from the times we
went to the high pastures in summer, one of the tunes she would hum to the cows as she herded them in for the night, patting their heavy sides. Come you and you, come in come in. It is a pleasant little tune, it shakes the song about whores from my ears. Ma singing it and I roasting the birds I caught for us. Martins and blackbirds and songbirds. My heart lifts for a moment and I close my eyes and whistle on. Kaskee is listening. But before I finish he gives me a little shake and tells me to get up, we must hunt. He stands brushing dirt and needles from himself, but I remain where I am.

—You go on. I will be just here.

Now comes a crash out of the brush. It is directly before us, unmoving. I can see its soft fringed brown eye and the velvet on its short points, the bald fly-bitten patches on its flank, the winter hair beginning to fall. A buck. I take up the gun from the ground and half-sitting, I get it through the chest. It falls at our feet with a final thump. The shot is clean. The holes are small and hidden in the hair, the buck’s face is peaceful. Its brown eye is even closed, as if all it has ever wanted was to be shot by me today.

—Well.

This is all I can think to say. Signs are everywhere, yes, but who can say what they mean? I know nothing. Kaskee blinks and touches his mottled chin.

The breath cuts through the air from close by, hard and ragged. Kaskee turns to look, but I know the rhythm of his mad panting. Johnson. Gambolling, though not in a very duck-like fashion, and lolling his tongue as he does so. He capers about in the small clearing. The corners of his mouth have dried white patches upon them, his matted beard is like a frantic creature clinging to his face. His eyes are red but they clear when they light on me. He sweeps a great bow and then performs his weird boneless dance in a circle around the deer, stepping high. Kaskee relaxes and smirks. Only the Little Duck. His own keeper catches up now, looking fed up to the teeth.
I say:

—Johnson. This deer yours?

—Is this the sound of the Lord I hear? Or only my private lord? A lord just for me?

His head is cocked and his tongue is still hanging out and so he speaks stupidly. He means to sound stupid. He squeals. His guard is speaking to mine, waving an arm as if to say:
Look what I am forced to put up with
.

—Ease up, man. They are tiring of you. You will get yourself killed, acting this way.