All True Not a Lie in It (7 page)

—There you are.

He nods and walks with me as I make our trail until we get to the old Indian road southwest, which is quite a high road now, scattered with travellers. We are not the only ones in search of a better place.

I watch for anything to shoot. Anything. I watch for signs, for tracks, for moving shadows, for twitches in the trees and grass, for William Hill-shaped things, though I am glad enough to think we
are going to a new place without Hill and without Friends, with any luck.

I get turkey and deer and my first bull elk. It noses out into the bright Virginia morning and I shoot it clean through the brain. Squire watches. I give him half the liver and we jerk the meat together. Elk liver is very fine. I could eat fifty. I know I will get more.

At times I am visited by thoughts of Israel’s wife in the spring cellar with her bodice open in the dark and the sound of the cold water trickling. She is in the ground now, truly gone. But above this current of thoughts my eyes and ears keep sharp. Out in the air I feel my skin drying and blowing off like a snake’s. This is what I have wanted all my life.

At first I imagine that I have my brother Israel’s hunting eyes, but soon enough they are my own eyes. Israel is lying in one of the wagons. He coughs roughly into the night, he does not stop. I sit awake at the campfire and listen for his raggedy breath. Ma asks a passing Moravian priest for medicine, for any help, but he has nothing to offer but a spittly prayer in German.

I do not go to look at Israel. He does not come out. I can feel him thinning and vanishing, I can hardly bear to think of it. I hear Ma’s weeping and Daddy’s silence, it is full of disbelief.

I will get game, I will be a better hunter than Israel is, and he will live to see! So I say to myself. The thought charges through my blood. I cannot sit still. I ask Ma for Israel’s hunting shirt with the Indian beads, and I put it on and tie up my hair in a plait like his. His little boys, Jesse and Jonathan, peer at me out of the flap of their wagon. They let it drop when I catch them looking. I go off on a three days’ hunt.

I do not forget you, Israel, though when I return you are dead in the wagon, your body gone cold and hard, as I imagine, and your eyes finished, just as the eyes of birds go. I do not go in to see you before Ma wraps you up. Thinking of seeing you this way makes me
feel sick. I do not wish to see Death sitting at your shoulder, breathing cold on what is left of you. I do not wish it to get near me. At this time I do not know how close Death can come.

Ma and Daddy remain in the wagon with the body of their first-born son for some time. When Ma stumbles out at last, a cry rips out of her:

—It came from her, from
her
. It was never in our family. It never was!

Even sweet Ma is marked by Death’s cruelty. She means the consumption came from Israel’s wife. Ma cannot look at Israel’s little girl, who is dark like her mother, and very sick now also. The girl is called Sarah Sallie, after our aunt and our sister. Soon she too is gone.

Again I remember the mother. She was a kinder teacher than most. I am sorry to this day that I cannot recall her right name, though I can picture her hair and other parts of her. Israel called her Little Girl. In the Delaware language he would sometimes say it,
Quetit
. I know it now.

Israel, Ma tells me through her tears that you wished me to have your guns, and your quarter-breed boys to raise once I have my own house. You leave me your life, or perhaps I took it from you in wishing for it.

But for the time I am emptied out without you alive. I hunt in the hills a few days more before we move on. There is nothing to me now but the smell of powder, the loose shake of it in the horn, the dust caught on my fingers when I tip it into the measure and out into the pan. The cool of the lead in my hand and then in the barrel. The hesitation before the catch, the hot spark and crack, the speed of the shot. And the resistance of flesh when the knife goes in and the skin peeling itself back when the cut line is made.

All of it comes from you. In my mind you are a grey shadow always coming across the field with the sun, as you did in the summer pastures. We leave you in a grave near where some Germans
have made a little village in Maryland. I put up a marker, which the Friends do not allow, but I have no care for that. It is a poor enough marker, only a plank with your name spelled out on it, but I could find it now if I wished to.

I cannot see you fully but I imagine you telling me there is more to find, and I always wish to follow you, Israel. I do not know at this time that you will follow me always, trying to get your life back.

We carry on, we find places we might settle. But no place is right. Daddy wishes to be farther from everyone, from everything, from all he remembers. I wish to be farther from where Israel died. I walk far ahead of the wagons, I never sleep in them now. We move on again and again, following the Indian road that bows round with the Allegheny Mountains, until we find ourselves in the Yadkin Valley in Carolina. The earth is a deep rusty red here, it clays up my moccasins as I walk. It seems a good place, with meadows and plenty of forest all round.

Daddy spots a thin man dragging a scythe across the flats near the Yadkin River. He pulls up the horses and shouts to stop the rest of us. Climbing down, he stalks after this man and speaks to him for some time. I see the man nodding, I see the sun trying to flash off the spotted scythe blade. When he returns, he says sharp to Ma:

—Three shillings the mile. What do you say, my girl?

Ma says yes, what else can she say? This sort of land would cost a hundred pounds in Exeter. Daddy buys twelve hundred acres. We stop and begin to unload. It is a pretty enough place, a long empty patch near the forking of the river, with the bluish hills rising to the west. And cheap, yes. She tries to keep her face sweet, though I know she is thinking of the lonesomeness of the situation. No friends here. And no Friends.

We stay. As soon as I can, I get out the gun and ready myself to set off exploring. Daddy looks up from where he is splitting shingles for the new house, though there is no house yet. He is set to hurl his axe at me.

—Where do you think you are going?

—Anywhere other.

After I serve him up his own words he sits down heavy upon a stone. The land needs clearing, the logs need building into a cabin. The wagons where Ma and the others and all the children are living need unloading. Granddaddy’s cabinet is the one piece Daddy has taken out. It sits crooked and black on the ground. Daddy eyes it, his face hard. He is still full of Israel’s death. His hands are set upon his bandy knees.

—Had you not better get to work here?

I think to say: N-nah, not today, his words again. But instead I say:

—I am going on a long-hunt. A month at least.

This is all that I will say now. I keep my countenance pleasant and still, what can one say to it? His face sinks as he watches Lawyer Daniel, the son of his old dreams, drown forever. I am lucky that my hands said nothing of blacksmithing and weaving when he used to try to read them. Daddy often stares at his own hands and says, as if he is arguing with someone: I have no sympathy for the materials, none at all.

Here in the Carolina backcountry, he is casting his loose eye about to establish us and to grow himself again like a cabbage. He does not wish to talk of Israel again. And we do not talk of the past, though Neddy sometimes mentions Pennsylvania and old times with a wistful air. I see him down at the creek now where young Squire is crouching, intent on fishing. Ned is trying to dry his feet, standing on one and swabbing at the other. He was made for happiness. He has always been happy, he has always pleased everyone
with his company. This dragging discomfort is not to his taste, but he tosses a careless smile at me when he sees me. He sings in his pure sweet voice, it carries over the twilit flats:

The sun was sunk beneath the hill
,

The western clouds were lined with gold
.

When Ma touches her eyes and says he sang this for her in the old house in Exeter, Daddy says very loud that it is all sold now, it might as well never have been built, there is no such house! And Ma goes sadder at the thought of her homeless children and goes down to Neddy with a cake, trying to make her darling boy happy again.

Daddy, you never liked to be reminded of old times, as I know. You thought there were always better things coming. But the past keeps sniffing after us here.

Daddy appears fatigued. He blows his nose and peers into his handkerchief in case an answer has emerged there, he looks at his hands again as if they will change. But he has no choice with me, as he can see. He understands me to mean I am good for nothing else. His eyes say,
You in those clothes. You are not my first son. Israel was to be the hunter
. I hear a slight shudder in his breath. He scratches all round his neck and says slowly:

—Do not vanish entirely, Dan.

But I do think of vanishing. Daddy knows it. He sends his blacksmith apprentice Miller along when I go off for my hunt. Miller is eager and glad to be away from Daddy and all the land-clearing and homestead-building, but he is unsure of himself in the backwoods, and his arms are too long for the poor short-rifle he has. So I leave him to keep camp and I go alone through the bright autumn forests, trapping all along the Yadkin and hiking up into the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where the air is indeed bluer and thinner. In this air I can follow the animals’ thoughts and I know which way they will run. I know which way I will find them lying in the trap
and which way they will gnaw at their caught legs. They do not think, they do not have the words for thoughts, they are driven about by their blood’s whispers. I listen until I can hear the hissing. I remember Israel first showing me how to find their marks on the ground or in the trees. He seems far off now, a memory only. I look at the animals’ blood when it goes from wet to thick, I smell it. I keep a tally: thirty deer in a single day. At the camp, Miller keeps firing off the numbers of skins hurriedly under his breath. For some time I am near happy.

Over the next several years, I travel all through the forests whenever the weather is warm, and I hunt through the autumns and winters. I bring the meat to my family, I sell the hides down in Salisbury. Selling the hides takes the shine from it. The traders’ fingers are blunt and unseeing. If there were a way, I would slap the skins back on the carcasses and send the creatures off, to have the more to catch again. Selling them does bring me plenty of money, enough to bring home and keep some over. I buy a new gun. I am fond of money. And I wish for more than I have. More of everything.

One night Miller wishes to go to the frolic at old Morgan Bryan’s big place upriver. He is curious, as apprentices are not meant to go. And charming Neddy, smiling and smoothing his black hair, with no care for trouble, says:

—Why not?

I will admit I am happy enough to be persuaded. Ned and I steal out of the house as dark falls and get on Daddy’s favourite horse, Jezebel, barebacked. She is a good mare, light on her feet in spite of our double weight. Miller follows wary on the pony. All the way Ned sings “Courting” and “Women and Wine” in his sweet clear voice. I laugh and try to sing along but I cannot get into Neddy’s key.

Some at Bryan’s are taking it in turns to shoot at a straw target. The echo of the shots quivers across the dusk.

—Here at last. The famous marksman. King of the tomahawk.

This from one of the many big well-off Bryan boys, his hair like a banner on fire in the torchlight. He holds up his hands as if in surrender. Miller and Ned laugh and I say:

—Then you have been waiting for us. Your party so bad as that?

Bryan grins and crosses his arms and says:

—Give your tomahawk a twirl. Get it out, give the girls a good look.

One of his brothers says:

—Keep your weapon to yourself in public if you can, Boone, ha!

I say:

—Send me word when you learn how to leave yours alone.