Thirteen Moons (34 page)

Bear himself I used sparingly. A brief appearance, scripted and dramatic. This was during his waning years.

The next day, in Langham’s honor, we played a ball game, and I took a turn on one of the teams. His description of it, in his book
The
Alleghenies by Horseback,
is accurate enough. The players wore the nearest nothing. Greasy buckskin breech coverings so tiny they would hardly have served to cover a clutch of eggs. No footwear or leggings or shirts. A few players wore cloth headbands and kerchiefs, but that was foolish; they gave handholds for tackles. There were few rules to the game. You first had to come into possession of the little deerhide ball by way of the stick, catching it in the webbed pocket or digging it from the ground. Then you could palm the ball, throw down your stick—or fling it at your nearest pursuer—and run for your life toward one of the goalposts before you were knocked down in the most brutal way. There were no limitations on violence other than that it was frowned upon—but not forbidden—to scratch like a woman. And bringing a ballcarrier down by dragging at the breechcloth was supposed to be outside the pale, but when it was done and resulted in a man revealed in all his deficiency, great hilarity ensued both in the crowd and among the players.

The teams walked toward each other from either end of the ball ground, yelling that their opponents were the veriest quaking rabbits and eunuchs. They whooped war cries and shook ball sticks like they meant to kill one another, and when play commenced they nearly did. The ball was pitched in the air and everyone went for it with a great clash of upraised sticks, though the ball nearly always fell through them to the ground. Then they began raking for it in the dirt and grabbing the sticks of other players to snatch them away. It was a great confusing huddle of men, and the ball was no bigger than a walnut, so the spectators could hardly tell what was happening until a ballcarrier broke free to run.

Players slammed into each other, running flat out, and the sound was both the wet slap of skin and the deeper thump of three or four hundred pounds of meat and organs colliding. Then they wallowed on the ground, skirmishing with each other even though the ball had passed on to another man and he had also been knocked down so that at any one time there might be three or four wrestling matches going on, totally unrelated to the scoring of points. The ball was small enough to put in your mouth, and runners often did just that, sprinting to the goal and then fingering out a slobbered ball and holding it aloft to the delight of their supporters.

It was a sport in which the referees carried long stout whipping sticks and used them with great enthusiasm as they saw fit against the players, thrashing red stripes into pairs of combatants who had wallowed each other around too long or whaling indiscriminately at all the players when the game bogged down into a great pileup, wherein men bit and choked each other and pulled hair and twisted fingers, and the ones at the bottom just hoped not to smother.

Writers invariably found the game charming, and Langham was no exception. I played moderately well that day and was particularly good at the technicalities of stickwork, though I lacked the sheer speed of the younger men in running the ball. When the game ended, I bled from several minor wounds on the shins and forearms and sported a long red scratch from temple to chin—and was, no doubt, grinning from ear to ear with the joy of the game even though my team had lost.

The day after that was Sunday and I took Langham to church, where we all prayed to the Savior and were as sober as deacons. The entire service was conducted in Cherokee, so I acted as Langham’s guide and translator, hovering close to him as his shadow in the pew, whispering the words of the sermon and hymns into his ear, and he was struck by the oratorical skills and poetic flourishes of the speakers.

Langham and I parted as friends, and when his book was published I recall thinking that the chapter devoted to Wayah was more sympathetic than I could have hoped for. He retold the story of Charley exactly as I told it to him, and he portrayed the village and the surrounding lands as a successful social experiment and Bear as a figure from another time, worthy to be cast in bronze. Langham reported, accurately, that I was increasing our land holdings at a frenetic pace, particularly in areas formerly within the Nation. Where the money came from, he could not tell, only that my holdings were already vast, with no signs of me slowing down.

Then, unfortunately, he delved deeper. My life to that point, he wrote, was a captivity narrative turned inside out. But whereas in a previous century Mary Rowlandson and many others had been taken forcibly by the Indians, family killed, terrified, transported into a howling wilderness, I, on the other hand, was thrust out into the wilderness by my own people, my family already dead, myself already terrified. And instead of wishing for deliverance from the savage wilderness and restoration back to my home, I made a home where I found myself.

Near the end of the chapter, Langham quoted Calhoun, who had apparently told him that, though I had the money to live wherever I chose, I did not do well for long in the outside world and could only make excursions into it for a few months at a time. Any longer, and I began to experience qualms and panics that did not abate until I retreated to my distant outpost.

The chapter’s final lines go something like this:

And yet when you see him there in the wilderness, it is hard to say what he is for these people. Certainly he is described by them as counselor, guide, business agent, solicitor, friend. But he seems among them rather than of them. Though he grew to be a man among these people, there is a sad isolation about him, a sense of truly belonging to no place, neither this nor any other.

3

F
OR QUITE A FEW YEARS, THE MONEY CAME ROLLING IN LIKE THERE
was no end to it. Growing numbers of mercantiles, real estate transactions, investments. And I still practiced law, but only to the extent that it involved the conveyance of land titles. I built a fine house, not at all on the model of Featherstone’s Cranshaw but more like Jefferson’s Poplar Forest, which I had visited on an overland trip to Washington City, the old genius dead and gone several years and the pretty little summerhouse occupied by a family who did nothing but complain about its inconvenient features and brick up its tall windows one by one until it had begun to look like a bastion without a fort. My house, though clearly under the great man’s influence, was a little larger than Jefferson’s and made of native river rock rather than brick, and it exhibited a few modest improvements in the areas of fenestration and galleries. I drew the plans myself, and for an entire year men within a twenty-mile compass earned their livings hauling rocks and cutting locust fence rails and riving roof shakes. Pastures were cleared, stumps yanked like molars from the earth by teams of oxen, the black dirt of the former forest floor planted in grass. A stable built for Waverley and the string of fine saddle horses I planned for its dozen stalls, a kennel for my half dozen good bird dogs. Artistically arranged garden plots plowed and planted for vegetables and herbs and flowers. A fishpond dug and stocked with trout and bass, so that when I wished a fry-up I could have it at a moment’s notice. A man worked an entire week hewing a watering trough from a great block of stone, and then other men ran piping of hollowed poplar poles from a hillside spring forty rods distant so that Waverley could have a constant supply of fresh water.

When the place was done—all but the hanging of chandeliers, which had not yet arrived from Charleston—I moved in, thinking I had finally made a true home and would inhabit it fully and leave it only when six strong men hefted my coffin to carry it to the upper pasture for burial next to the plot I had in mind for Waverley, who spent his days resting in the shade of a dogwood tree except when he occasionally chose to dash from one diagonal of his pasture to the other at a high rate of speed with his tail in the air as in days of old, chunks of expensive new turf flying in the air behind him. I can admit now that I entertained the pipe dream that circumstances would someday lead Claire to live with us and eventually join us in the upper pasture so that in some way our night ride together long ago might never end.

The house was finished in late May. There followed an entire June of unequaled wetness, weather so foggy and chill I kept a fire going in the parlor hearth night and day. I sat on the front gallery most days, wrapped in a quilt against the damp, reading Ovid and Simms and some other things not distinctive enough to have lodged in my memory. The pages soaked up the damp in the air and became limp as dishrags, and the bindings swelled and buckled. When I tired of reading, I watched the rain fall onto the river’s black face. Or the red cows, standing bleakly in new green pastures, all facing the same direction, with the rain beating on their backs and dripping from stalactites of mud hanging from their swagged bellies. On especially bad days, fog lay so thick in the valley that I could not see the poplar trees growing on the riverbanks, though I could hear the flow of water rushing against the rocks. And then wind would drive the fog off the river and up the cove, and rain fell heavy and sloping, streaking the air like dirty twine.

A daunting number of people worked about the place. Some lived in the house and others in outbuildings. I noted that they all lived rich lives to which I was merely tangential and that as long as they kept working, the place could go on just fine without my being in residence.

AT THE END
of the month, I packed a pair of fat panniers and rode out on a new grey mare. Waverley ran the fence line at an arthritic trot with his head up and ears pinned, offended at being left behind. All I could do to comfort him as I passed was to say aloud what a good and handsome horse he was and how when I returned we would go riding up the gorge together.

For the next few years, I lived, you might say, in transit, bedding in taverns and boardinghouses and hotels and the private estates of business and political acquaintances. Mail waited for me at my regular stops, correspondence from the indispensable Tallent. He supervised the young men I had working for me in the various mercantiles and other enterprises. They were smart boys, every one, ranging from fourteen to seventeen and none of them bound by papers. They worked for wages and could quit whenever they cared to go.

I traveled frantically those years: Savannah, Charleston, Wilmington, Washington, New York, Philadelphia, and many lesser points in between. I had a map darkened with lines of ink tracing my routes until the scribble looked like letters to an imaginary language. I went horseback, stagecoach, sailboat, railroad, and steamer. Living one night at a time in hotels and taverns and camping in the woods when I had to. Feeling every afternoon as the shadows got long that I was without a home in the world. Roaming and blue. Most of the travel was purposeless, carried out in exactly the desperate spirit of fleeing from pursuers. It was romantic, in a certain sense. Especially if you’re not the one doing it.

Out in the wider world, I behaved about the same as did many other youngish southern men who were rich and free before the War. We hunted and gambled and went to dinner parties and dances, and in whatever time was left, many of us lawyered and some of us were elected to public office, jobs that were not particularly time-consuming. We took horses as a religion and could talk endlessly about their physical features and abilities and personalities. The worst of us could fill an entire dinner’s worth of conversation just detailing his best mount’s style of jumping and its manner and attitude as it approached a fence. We would walk a mile to catch a horse in order to ride a hundred yards, and we traded horses among ourselves as intensely as poor men do pocketknives.

The Washington parts of my life were mostly cold business, conducted for the benefit of Bear’s people and myself and, I believe, in service of fairness and justice in general. I had learned the ways power flowed through that city, the big channels and the creeks and little streams, and I could navigate all of them to my favor with the help of friends I had made in years past, though I missed Crockett and was saddened to see Calhoun turned old and grey and a little foggy-headed.

In Washington those days, winning or losing each skirmish was a side issue. The main idea was to keep your pieces in play. I had learned ways to leave things unresolved for years using various strategies, none of them lacking brass. I’d fight fifty confusing little actions in all directions in order to win the main battle. And I never let up.

For example, though the War Department still wanted to send us to the Territories, I kept the Government occupied with the argument that it was only fair that Bear’s people should share in the payout for the land of the old Nation. Why not? The circumstance that Bear’s people owned their land and hadn’t been living on Nation land at the time of the Removal was beside the point. And if America doesn’t stand for property rights, what does it stand for? The land of the Nation was our heritage, ancestral homeland. Sacred places, et cetera, et cetera. Lost for all time. And—by the way—what land is not sacred? It all is. It’s all sacred or else it’s all just fit to be shit upon. It is impossible to construct an argument to prevail against that last assertion, and also hard to live up to its strict requirements.

And, too, I claimed Bear’s people were owed the same payment that all the other Indians from the Nation got paid for travel expenses to the Territories: $
53.33
a head, plus six percent interest, compounded annually. The fact that Bear’s folks had not made the trip west did not faze me one whit. It had no bearing on the argument. And the interest, especially, kept my attention, for the years since the Removal just kept rolling on.

When I wasn’t meeting with someone in a position to help advance our cause, I sat at the desk in my room at the Indian Queen drinking cup upon cup of black coffee and writing letters to members of Congress and assistants in various agencies and undersecretaries. A loopy line of ink, stretching on and on, referencing the past and demanding a future. Memory and hope spinning out in an endless trail of paper. It would have been easy to see all those blackened pages as something highly abstract, having at best a specific reality expressed only by other paper in the form of currency. But the reality was otherwise. It found its truest expression in something as fundamental as dirt. Land. And, ultimately, the life—plant and animal and human—that can exist atop it. I never let that slip from my mind.

All in all, I didn’t win or lose during my stays in Washington. As I’ve said, that was not entirely the point. But I kept our ball in play, and during that time our territory expanded and became fairly autonomous, at least as much as the modern world allows.

DURING THIS PERIOD
of rambling, I was out one Saturday night in Charleston, searching for entertainment. Streets full of people. Many choices, both wholesome and otherwise. I declined to enter a flea circus said to have performed before the previous king of England. I pictured the king as some fat sot, a wigged geezer humped over a little table of tiny trapezes, teeter-totters, tightropes, carousels, and upright wheels. The old man with a great magnifying glass in his hand, one eye squinted closed and the other swelled big as a turkey egg by the curvature of the glass, the iris watery blue and the rest yellow as tallow and cut through by blood vessels zagging about like red lightning bolts. I figured all those splendid particular fleas that had fallen under the royal gaze must surely be dead, for even fleas of extraordinary talent live short lives. So what was the point?

Farther down the street at a small theater, I paid a steep fifty cents and went in. The audience shifted about in wooden chairs. Oiled floorboards squeaked against their nails. Directly, a young man in a vaguely military jacket of blue wool with gold buttons and piping on the sleeves came onto the stage and lit the gaslights and turned the flames up high. Metal mirrors focused their yellow light on the closed stage curtains, which depicted a brilliant scene of blue ocean and a three-masted sailing ship moving athwart broken lines of whitecaps. The house was left nearly dark, and it was so quiet you could hear the hiss of the gas burning. A string duo—banjo and fiddle—took position at one end of the stage. The narrator, in a cream-colored suit of clothes and a floppy black tie, emerged and stood behind a lectern at the other end. The curtains juddered open and revealed a canvas stretching across the stage between two great spools taller than a man. Enormous letters of a shadowed three-dimensional character spelled out
BRAVARD’S MAMMOTH PANTOSCOPE OF THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER,
the words surrounded by ornamentation meant to suggest ancient scrolls. The musicians struck up a solemn tune and then, out of sight, someone turned a crank. Gears -engaged with a clatter, bearings began grinding just audibly beneath the music, and the canvas began moving slowly across the stage, feeding from the full spool toward the empty. The painting was claimed to be three miles long and would take most of the evening to be displayed.

The narrator bellowed out, Behold the mighty Mississippi.

The first scenes depicted a steamboat, its decks and galleries and long salons all populated with very particular portraits of the passengers, each rendered in ways to identify their class and occupation. Tinners, glassblowers, ventriloquists, gamblers, cutpurses, dentists, and all variety of merchants and confidence men; planters, traveling ladies and their handmaids, fortune hunters, and actresses hardly more virtuous than harlots, judging by their appearance. We in the audience were meant to imagine ourselves among those pilgrims, journeying down the river, encountering at each moment the dangers and temptations of travel.

The spools kept turning, and riverbanks began passing by. We encountered other steamboats, one of them aground on a shoal and brilliantly afire, and then we passed a broken pair of stern-wheelers in the cluttered buoyant aftermath of collision. The many passing towns were said to be rendered in perfect accuracy, each with its church steeples and white houses and docks for wooding and taking on passengers and cargo, and the narrator said each of their names and told something distinctive about them, even if it was only that the citizens were noted for their cheese making or their honesty.

The musicians played a sort of ambling leisurely theme for peaceful scenes of rolling down the river. But when the boat passed a tepee encampment of Indians on the river’s upper reaches, the banjo player took out a small drum and struck a simple four-beat pattern with emphasis on the offbeat. Later, as scenes of a barn dance scrolled along, the fiddler played a jig. And farther down the river, when slaves danced outside their cabins, the banjoist took a solo turn.

The skies, I thought, were particularly well done. Yellow moonlight through blue broken clouds, sunrise through thin river fog. Blue days and grey progressing in a rhythm suggesting actual life. Black storms formed and then lightning forked down, all enhanced by clever manipulation of the lamps and colored filters, gauze screens and reflectors. At appropriate moments, smoke was made to drift across the stage to suggest fog.

The river went on and on, in all its variety and sameness. It made you want to travel, to be on the open road, to pass through numberless towns, each different in some barely discernible way from the last. To meet people who would aid your passage or oppose it. To weather the weather. To feel the curve of the continent passing under you. The slow flow of landscape changing from one expression of itself to another. Salt flats and pine flats, mountains and rivers. And of course there was the matter of Claire existing somewhere out in the territory beyond the Mississippi enriching the show.