All True Not a Lie in It (45 page)

The prison hut has room enough for Callaway and Hill and the rest to congregate and haunt me further. My first night here, they beat me to death in my mind. The Indian man I killed as he sat fishing so long ago stares at me all curious, Jezebel’s breath cools me.

I feel compelled to defend myself. I tell them I tried to do right. There was no other way. But I feel mean and sick as I think it. The next night I wait, my whole body waits, my teeth grit against each other. I chip a piece from one, and the part left behind is pointed and jabs at my tongue every chance it gets. But the dead do not turn up again to listen to further sorry remarks.

I sleep a short while, not a deep sleep.

—A dozen deer. Three buffalo. Jellies, your favourite drinks, any innards you fancy.

The singsong voice snags me in the dusk of this windowless house. It is outside the door. I make myself answer:

—Could be reckoned excessive.

The voice says:

—We wish to keep talking of our victorious journey to Detroit, so we let our food grow cold. There is always more. We have more meat cooked and start our dinner fresh. A simple idea, but clever also, do you not think?

—You might have brought me some. Cold or no.

—They will feed you eventually. Perhaps. Did they say they would?

—Pompey, nobody says much to me now. Thanks to you.

Pompey cannot seem to keep himself away. His face is close to the chink in the logs. I can hear him breathe in and place his lips to the crack.

—Your trouble, Sheltowee, is that you do not understand it here.

A burst of laughter pops from the big house like a bubble of sap in a fire. Pompey laughs too. Then he says:

—They are sincere. They tell the truth. You think they are lying or dissembling, you think everything has another meaning or is part of a game. But they mean what they say. They believed in your Pekula’s madness because you said he was mad. And when they start over, they start over. It is a good weapon. They told you they would not hurt you, a head man like you. They told you that you might do as you like. They made you their son and they believe you to be their son, but you did not believe it. You said you would stay and then you made to leave. You are not to be trusted.

—Am I not?

I am curiously sad at this thought. I stretch my arms behind my head and open my chest to the dark room.

—No.

—You were the one who wanted me to leave.

—You think so.

I wait to be left alone again in all my badness but Pompey is still breathing there. A curl of tobacco rises. Old Bryan rises too like
another spectre, shaking fistfuls of money, his money wasted on me, his debtor for ever. Bryan, are you dead now as well? I have been here for months, and you were so old.

—You do not trust me alone even in here, I see, Pompey.

—Would I ever have put my trust in you?

I hear him spit and strike a flint. He says:

—White Indian.

—Black Indian.

I feel the way a rat must feel when between the teeth of a dog, twisting its spine to squeal and make the dog listen though its rat language cannot be understood. I shift myself closer to the wall where Pompey is. I say:

—You are a black Indian. If not a very good one. I am not wrong. I can tell the truth also, if pressed. You had no wish to remain with them in the clearing on that evening, making eyes at me and my horse. Do you not remember it? I do.

A shuffle, a loud puff. He is standing. He says:

—White Indian is right enough. All you whites think you are born clever enough to see through anything. Can you see through this wall?

At once he begins to sing one of his Shawnee tunes. Over his voice I call:

—You belong to them. Or you would like to.

He cuts off the song:

—I could say the same to you.

—Why did you want to go, then? Why did you want to go with me? And afterwards, why did you go telling my father that I was trying to leave him?

—Were you going to leave, Sheltowee? All alone?

A heavy silence thumps down. I do not answer. His disappointment in me is like a thick fast fog, I feel it spread through the chinks in the walls. Even the feast sounds have receded. Perhaps everyone
there is neck-deep in one of the roast deer or buffalo. Then Pompey says low:

—There are plans for you.

—So I can judge. Will you tell me their plans for my fort? If it is still there.

—Perhaps you will not be in prison for ever. I will not leave
you
all alone here. We think of your comfort. We are your brothers in this land.

Even his willow tobacco has an offended smell. I hear the way he is choosing his words. He is knitting himself to them with that
we
. He is trying to deepen the hole he is caught in here, make it more fast, make it his own. Well Pompey, you and I might have been brigands together, running through Kentucky, taking what we liked, selling our knowledge of the Shawnee to the highest bidder. Then cutting it up, twisting it about, and selling it again. Getting the Indians cleared out, opening up the land, selling it too, like Hill. Richer and richer. Did you see us that way?

—We will see to it that you wish to stay.

He speaks in Shawnee now, a tight formal version. Then he is gone, and sounds from the big house come again, and women’s voices make a haze of words that I cannot understand, and it is night again.

I am not crazed yet. Not at this time.

The door opens with a scrape. The prison hut has been built in white style like a log cabin and the door is made of logs lashed together upright. The light angles in, I get to my feet.

Delilah, carrying water and a plate of food. She tilts her face up at me as she bends to place them on the ground.

—How do. You are not the usual turnkey.

She gestures towards the food. I say:

—From last night’s feast? The remains of the twelve deer, the three buffalo?

She is turning, but before she is out the door again, I say:

—Did my father send you specially?

She points to the plate again and says:

—It was good food.

—It
was
? That does not bode well for me.

—It was. Last night.

—But no longer.

A smile spreads up her face and then drifts off.

—Try.

I take up a strip of meat and sniff it and chew a bite. It is cold and tough and sinewy. I mime choking on it but she is not persuaded. Feeling quite a fool, I swallow it down in a lump and I say:

—Thank you for the provisions.

—From your father.

—Is that so. Well, and will my father be visiting me himself?

She shakes her head and says:

—He is occupied.

—Ah. I have heard of his planning. Though not what it tends towards.

Her quick hand touches the side of my head where my hair is growing back. No longer a warrior, most likely. Her hand is curious and, I think, pitying. It draws away quick. At once I am struck by a wish to tell her about Jamesie, about the feel of his head under my palm when he was new. But I put my hand on my own skull and I say:

—Always soft-headed, some have said.

She is going, but from behind the door she says:

—You are still his son. He will not be cruel.

I
SAVE SOME
of the meat and some of the water, for who can tell when I will have more? I find that I am not so ready to die. Or not to starve to death at any rate.

No further food this day or the next.

I think of Delilah for a time, I even call to her once, but I hear only the usual coming and going in the town. The light through the walls deepens its colour and so I know that dark is coming on again. I sing a little tune:

For the want of a nail, the shoe was lost
,

For the want of a gun—

Will anyone answer? No. But I have always liked to sing when alone. When I was a boy in Pennsylvania, it kept others from me sometimes. If I sang wildly enough in the woods the other boys would snort and lob a rock or two but leave me alone. But if I tried to sing sweet like Neddy and sounded as though I were trying, they would crash out of the bushes and call me an arse and we would fight. Toadmouth. Arseholemouth. Well, Hill, you were with them sometimes, I have not forgotten it.

I think about what Pompey said, that the Shawnee are straight in their meaning, that it is a good weapon. That the rest of us are the ones making a virtue of deceit, pawing through everything as if
it were a great trunk with a false bottom, the real treasure hidden away. Perhaps that is true enough.

I eat another strip of the cold venison. Chewing it is work. I rummage in my pouch. They have left me a few of Hamilton’s silver trinkets and sweets. A dented ring, a single earbob, a few thin coins. I feel for the King’s profile. Sir! Would you have me back in your army?

I flip them over my knuckles until they fall and I have to feel about to find them again.

An odd wish strikes me, a peculiar taste for sugar, perhaps to cover the taste of the old meat. I am not generally one for sweets, but now my teeth ache for it down to the roots as if I were really a boy again. I find one boiled English candy from Hamilton’s secretary among my few belongings. What became of the rest I do not know. There must be mice about. I must be sleeping hard at night, harder than I believe. This thought unnerves me. I open my eyes until the lids feel pinned back. It is near dark now. I crunch the sweet. Shadows cross the dirt floor and stay there.

When Hill and Callaway were in this house and went quiet, I thought it was as if they had gone beneath the ground. I was outside then. But now it seems to me that this whole place is a fairyland, the place under the hill where the unwary stay for thousands of years once they stray in. Where people disappear to. Rebecca’s stories, and Ma’s. Hamilton’s too, for all that. A ring of toadstools by the light of a full moon, a little door under a tree root, a drugged drink, and you are gone. Gone. Perhaps the fairies have added meat-packed horses to their list of tricks to get people here.

To myself I say: They are keeping you alive. You are alive, you must be. You are still here.

I am heavy-headed. My limbs fall about and I sweat. I open my eyes wider until they dry out and pain me. I think again of being a child. Indeed I feel that I am a child, I can see through my old
childish eyes. Some girls in the town ate mushrooms in the woods all unknowing that they were deadly. One little girl from Meeting, Lucy was her name, Lucy Black, the sister of Molly, my little first wife. She survived the summer fever but not this. Her coffin was among the others being carried to the burying ground on a hot summer morning. I had been watching pigeons strutting along a fence as if to show what they could do. But the wooden coffin wobbled on the men’s shoulders. I saw it, I must have. I saw a boot dangling from it, I saw the black leather cracked over the toe, a button loose and dangling too. But how can I have seen that?

Things get into the head somehow.

Do not sleep. I close my mind to the idea. There is no sleep. Sing again, keep yourself awake, wake everyone else. Take a breath.

I sing a mumble with no words. It is not Shawnee. It is nothing.

A low answer arises from outside the door. The surface of my brains is covered in cracks, like dried mud. I try to speak. Slowly I manage to say:

—Pompey.

I am filled with relief. But the silence hisses around me. I try again:

—Taking the air?

Still no reply. Pompey wishes to frighten me. I say:

—I would be happy to receive you, had I the power to open the—

My tongue is too thick and dry to finish. The water is gone. When? I have Hamilton’s silver ring gripped in my fist. I stumble and bang against the door. Now comes a whisper, a single word, but what? I cannot understand it.

—What? What did you say?

I am desperate for it now, even for Pompey’s taunting, but there is nothing more. I think on it for hours or days, I do not know which. My mind reaches for it, it stretches itself beyond its powers. I think the word is
go
. Or
gone
. Or some other word I cannot reach.