All True Not a Lie in It (48 page)

—From where? Another town?

Methoataske’s hands keep working busily. The seeds split softly: crack, crack. She says:

—In the south. No name. A moving town, not Shawnee. It is gone now. My town.

—Your town also?

—Yes.

—You are not Shawnee?

—I am now Shawnee. I was Cherokee once.

She speaks matter-of-factly, as if I should have known. All I am able to say is:

—Ah.

A flash tries to ignite in me. Ignore it, stamp it to death. I close my lips. I reach for my happiness, smooth and clear and thin as a ball of glass. Straighten your mouth. I say:

—Then you are a captive too, you were adopted here.

—Once.

I do not wish to know, I do not wish to know this. I wish to brush her past away like the seed husks, as she seems to have done, as they seem able to do. But I cannot stop myself. I say:

—Eliza. She came with you?

—No. Later.

—But from the same town?

She shrugs again, she is maddening. This talk is maddening. She says:

—The town moved after the attack. Maybe the same town, maybe not. We move our towns.

—The Shawnee attacked the people there again. Your people.

—One of the wars. A little war only, not your big war now against the British. Her parents died.

I push at her, still burning in the pit of my chest. A lump of coal is there, a stone, an eye. I say:

—Died. Killed. Murdered.

—Yes.

So simple is this word against everything.

I stand, opening and closing my hands. I want to see the girl, I move towards the doorway, but Methoataske stops me, her hand tight on my arm:

—They gave her to me. I had no people.

—She was an orphan. What did they do to her family?

The eye in me bulges and burns. Everything burned to the ground, flesh and bone gone to charcoal and dust. Orphans. Orphans are left, orphans survive. Jonathan and Jesse. My own children. My
heart bangs dull and familiar. She presses my arm faintly and then lets go. She says quietly:

—She came from another town first. She is maybe some white.

The reddish hair. The English. Someone else’s captive, traded in and passed on. I spin back to look at Methoataske, I grip her:

—Where did she come from? You do not know? What was her name? You have never asked her?

—No. Why? She will not say. She is young.

—If I ask her, she will say.

Another shrug, a slow one. I turn back, I stand in the doorway, I hear the girl turn over and sigh. I cannot wake her. I cannot drag this out of her. The eye inside me is wide, it is demanding, I cannot close it. It wants to know everything, it cannot leave the past alone. To Methoataske I say tightly:

—In Carolina there was a big Cherokee with a long face, an over-tall man. A sad face. You know of him? He called himself Jim. Big Jim.

I spit the words in two pieces. She might know him, she might well be his sister. His wife. She might have learned her English words from him, in his voice. I sit in expectation of an answer. I expect to have all of the answers. But now she is quiet, her eyes perplexed. She says:

—I do not know that name.

Her words are so simple, so straight. She is so separate from me, sitting calm on her stool with her seeds. I kick over her basket. She is confused by my rage. She does not touch me. She says:

—I had a different name then too.

—What name?

—Gogiv. Crow, in Cherokee.

Still she does not move, but she says:

—Everyone remembers things, but why say so? Maybe not to talk is better. The girl is my girl now. She is your girl now.

She knows that I will not turn away from this. I feel her quiet certainty like a cool wind. She picks up her basket and takes up a seed with her fingertips. Crack crack. The past is stuffed with the dead, I know. I cannot look at them. Look at what is here now: Here is my wife, here is my daughter, here am I. We are all in pieces. We all move about, everything moves, as it seems to me. These pieces have landed here for the time, but who can say when they will fly apart again?

I
F ALL IS
nothing, you might well have a share of it.

You might well start again. Again.

You might well start here.

You might well continue on with your wife, touch her and sleep with her and eat her food.

You might well keep the girl as your own. You might well love her. She holds on to your ankle if she is close enough. She never blinks, she is worse than the eye in your chest. Her fingers are strong.

These are things that I tell myself. I do not know whether I believe them. But I tell myself.

When I cannot see her sharp little face, I ask her. She is riding on my shoulder again as we walk back from the woods. Her feet dangle against the gun. They are bare, the day is bright. We are looking at the towers of clouds when I say it:

—Do you remember the other place you lived in? The other town? You remember your Ma and Daddy, I imagine.

Her sudden stillness is terrible. A bird flaps up out of the bushes and spins quickly in the air, flying away from us and into the trees, flashing its bright underwings. I think of the children left to wander the forest after attacks, surviving on something. Indian, white, black children. Sometimes they run if they see us, they hide in the trees
rather than say anything, they store up the scraps of what they have seen and turn them into God knows what. Once Squire saw a boy from one of the Indian camps that had been burned and routed. The back of the boy, shirtless and blistered and raw, the brown skin left around the edges. Running away at full tilt. Squire never caught him.

Out of nowhere Eliza says coldly:

—My
father
is a great big man. My
mother
is a great big woman with big feet. They have a chimney and big dogs to eat everyone.

—Is that so?

When I say nothing else, her legs slowly relax against the gun again and we carry on home, both of us easier with this story.

We do go along. This is our life. The crops grow well. Boonesborough recedes to a grey point. I can see all of it and none of it. I stop looking. In Eliza I can see Jemima of course, and Susannah, and Jamesie too. I see the wariness, the sudden bursts of confidence, the big eyes always watching.

I am asleep when the door is pushed open. Methoataske is instantly awake beneath my arm, Eliza rolls and sits up. Pompey’s face is almost invisible, there is no moon and the fire is near out. But the slow amused voice in the dark is his.

—You are wanted, Sheltowee. At the council house.

—Now?

—Does that not suit you?

—All right, I am coming.

I find my leggings and moccasins. I feel Methoataske and Eliza trying to see me. I say nothing, I walk out after Pompey. The night is loud with insects, moths touch my cheeks. We pass by the hunched wigwams, feeling our way along the walls until there is a swath of light from the open door of the big house.

—Not going to send me to prison again, Pompey?

He laughs low and slaps the log wall of the hut as we go around it. He says:

—The bridegroom never likes to leave the nest, as I said.

He seems at ease with me again, his laugh is warm enough. I have not escaped to any freer life, I am still here, as he is. Pompey, I remember this.

He leads me in. The raw light makes me blink, the fire is heaped up and blazing with sparks.

Black Fish is standing before it. His lock of hair is slightly dishevelled from sleep. He gives me a small smile, an indulgence for the bridegroom. The warriors are talking. A few of the whites see me with bright awake eyes. Jackson looks doubtful and tired, Hancock smiles very broad.

Black Fish raises his hand for quiet and says:

—This evening, hunters have seen the duck. Not far.

I think only of fat ducks flying by in some insulting fashion, perhaps relieving themselves upon the chief. Pompey sees my lack of understanding and bends to tell me:

—The little bastard duck, if you are wondering which one in particular. Pekula.

I see Johnson’s lean face again, all long jaws. I had forgotten it but here it is. I say:

—He is alive? Here?

—There were other men with him in the woods beyond the fields. We could not catch up with them.

Black Fish looks to an elder warrior, who speaks quickly. I say:

—Is Johnson—Pekula—here?

—No.

Pompey says:

—Away with the spirits, the little madman.

The Shawnee laugh, the fire leaps. Black Fish steps forward again. He says:

—The white fort is strong, we know. They have more men. We will not wait to take it.

His eyes hook into mine. Hold your face still. In truth it is easy enough to show nothing, I am so perplexed and so surprised that I am empty again. So often I told them that the fort is too strong, and full of sick women and bawling children. And now to myself I have said: It is gone.

I cannot think.

Pompey is looking at me with his lips tight. Black Fish is looking at me, my men are looking at me. A tremor is holding itself back, waiting to open a great cracked seam in the floor.

Slowly I say:

—Of course. We will not wait.

Black Fish nods once, his eyes go behind their doors. The talk pools into planning and drinking and loose celebration. My mind runs everywhere. The fort. Johnson made it back there alive. There must be people there. It must still exist. All of you still alive, is this what you were saying to me in my sickness? Did I have it so wrong?

There will be more deaths. The fort will be ready for a fight now, there will be no surprising it. Death, is this what you were here to tell me? That you would wait a while?

Black Fish’s face is sure and set. His profile stands out sharp in the firelight.

My heart leaps like a caught trout. The fire spews sparks and ash, a curl of smoke drifts out the hole into the night. Pompey grins at me, leaning forward and mopping his forehead with his blue scarf. He shakes it out like a flag and begins to sing.

It is happening. It is already happening, Daddy. The past circling back, pushing down the door.

T
HE MESSENGERS
ride out very early, before most of the men are up to hunt. They are going to the other towns to enlist their allies and prepare the attack. When I close my eyes, I can see an army massing and rolling forward like waves. I hear the hoofs pound off. Their rhythm is stern but has a catch of joy, it travels through the earth. The sound carries.

I go to hunt. I think on the feel of the gun, which is not so very good a gun, but I will make a new stock. I think on the stock I will make, the wood I will choose for it. The dew is wet and not frosted. The grass does not crunch, it slides like hair underfoot. I hook my finger around the trigger, I watch for movement in the sky, my finger pulls back and bang, a duck falls out of the air. It lands with its beak open, looking disgusted but reconciled to its end. Eliza sits on the rock where I told her to sit, she is watching hard.

The women are preparing over-much food, gutting and plucking and skinning. Joints and limbs hang in the trees.

Methoataske brushes out her hair like a blanket over her body, like a Quaker cloak. I touch it. I call her
Squethetha
, Little Girl. I give her a woodpecker I got. It has bright black and white wings and a silky crest. I have no Governor’s silver left to give her, only this. She smiles and takes the bird. I give a wing to Eliza, a crow’s, black with
an oily bluish cast and a leathery handle. She turns it into a fan, she will not let anyone touch it. She fans her face, in and out of shadow.