Those Who Went Remain There Still (9 page)

Jacob Mander rode first up front, with his son Nicodemus behind him.

Then Titus, then John, then me.

IX

To the Bottom of the World

The others singled me out, but I suppose that’s not surprising. I am the oldest, yes. And I’ve been gone the longest, true. And my beliefs have diverged from theirs quite significantly—there’s no denying it.

I wonder if that’s where the real rub lies.

Meshack is younger, and stronger, and a little closer to this place. It startled and upset me to see how swiftly his sturdy, specific way of speaking relapsed into false contractions and low expressions when he was confronted with the families. But then I realized that it is no weakness, and no affectation. He interacts with them better when he speaks their language, and his self-imposed exile has lent him authority over them.

I do not think he realizes it. I think he was shocked when the other riders obeyed him.

Titus looked equally astonished at being obeyed by members of his own clan; and if he doesn’t learn to better hide his surprise, he’ll lose that power before he’s learned to wield it.

***

We arrived at the Witch’s Pit around midday, but it took hours to set up camp. I’d forgotten the extent to which the old biases run so deep, and how even the smallest task is a chore. Every small event, and every small job was a challenge to someone’s honor, someone’s family, or someone’s pride.

It was ridiculous.

“The fire ought to go somewhere over here,” Jacob said, lashing his horse to a low branch on a near tree. He pointed at a spot close to the edge of the cave’s entrance.

Carlson pointed a few feet in another direction. “Don’t be daft. That close to the mouth, and we’ll smoke ourselves out before we ever get inside. We need to put it farther off, closer to the center.”

He meant the center of the clearing.

Around the entryway to the Witch’s Pit there was a wide swath, so neat and bare that it might’ve been cut that way on purpose. The surrounding grass was low and brown; it wasn’t stamped or crushed, it had merely withered in a loose and swirling pattern that spewed outward from the cavern.

***

I’ve heard it said that a cave is a living thing, and that it has its own breath, and blood, and systems. But I’ve also heard that the air inside can go rancid and poisonous, given time and lack of room to circulate.

And that’s what I recalled, standing beside my horse and facing the ink-black crevice on the side of the hill.

I imagined a hole in the world that breathed out noxious, killing vapors.

***

Jacob stepped away from his horse. “It can go right over here. That cave’s so big and deep, we’re not going to smoke a damn thing out. And we don’t want to stick it too close to the trees.”

“It figures,” Carlson said. “A Mander don’t know how to make a fire in the forest without burning the place down.”

Titus took two long-legged strides and set himself between them before it could go any further. It astonished me how swiftly he moved, and how instinctively and immediately he understood how fast these things could escalate.

“Both of you old assholes shut yourselves up.”

Nicodemus joined in then. “Whose daddy are you calling an asshole?”

“Now don’t do that,” Titus told him. “Don’t do it. I’m calling asshole any man who tries to start a stupid fight for no good reason except he wants to hit something. You two step back and leave each other be. We got a job to do, and we’re gonna do it—even if it means three of us have got to tie the three of you to one of these trees and leave you there.”

I heard the click of a gun’s hammer cocking. Not half a second later, I heard two more. I froze.

I believe that Nicodemus drew first, but I can’t say for certain. I do know that Jacob had drawn up too, and that Meshack was right alongside them.

Meshack’s gun was newer and brighter, and it was much larger. I have to say it was some sort of rifle, but I’ve never been terribly interested in firearms and I don’t know much about them.

The long gun got everyone’s attention. Both of the smaller guns were aimed at it, and while they were pointed away from Carlson, he drew his own stubby revolver and stood to the side. For a moment I was uncertain who he meant to threaten, but his family loyalties won that battle. He went shoulder to shoulder with Meshack.

“Gentlemen, please!” I said. I held up my hands and tried to move closer, but I was shaking with terror.

“Stay out of it, John,” Meshack growled from the side of his mouth. I don’t think he was angry with me. I think he meant to protect me, for I was the only man present who was unarmed.

“No, I can’t. I may be old and unarmed, and you all may think I’m uncommonly strange, but this is my problem too, same as it’s yours. What if it ends here, like this? What if you kill one another, all five of you?”

No one answered me, and for all I knew none of them were even listening to me. Their eyes were narrowed and unblinking, twitching back and forth between one another. I could see them making their calculations, making their bets. They were guessing and gauging whose gun or aim was most likely to fail, and whose was most to be feared.

So I continued. “You make Heaster right, if you die this way. You make that despicable old man right. He thought you couldn’t do it. And those people you left back at his old place, they don’t think you can do it either. Is that how you want this to end? Or would you prefer…”

***

A shadow flickered fast, past the spot where I could see clearly out of my eye’s farthest corner. I blinked and tried to see it better without taking my stare away from the men with the guns.

He was smallish for a man, but he walked like a big fellow. He was walking like a man who was comfortable, in a world where he was master and Adam and king.

As soon as I’d gathered this much, he was gone—and there was no sign that he’d been there at all.

***

Jacob risked giving me a look, since he was facing me anyway and it didn’t cost him any safety to do so. “Something wrong with you, devil-worshipper?”

“No,” I said quickly. Just as quickly, I decided against defending myself of the charge. “I’m only distracted, and distressed. All of
you know it—that I’m not a man who knows how to hold a gun. I haven’t seen one fired since I lived here last, and they make me…uncomfortable.”

I was admitting too much weakness and I knew it. I changed the subject. “You can make that old dead bastard right, or you can make a liar out of him. This is your chance to be men, and not squabbling boys, kicking over one another’s toys. You’re smart men. All of you are. Now
act
like it, for heaven’s sake. Meshack,” I said to him, imploring him—because he was the one I knew best, and trusted most.

“Meshack, put the gun down. Titus, I know the two of you are friends, or almost friends. Blessed are the peacemakers,” I said, searching for the familiar old phrases that were so far lost to my memory. “For they…blessed are the peacemakers.”

“For they shall inherit the earth.” Nicodemus was the one who finished the verse. He didn’t lower his gun.

“In my experience,” Carlson said, “the peacemakers inherit the earth a little too early for their health.” He didn’t drop his gun either.

Meshack said, “He’s right.”

“Meshack,” I tried again to appeal to him, but he shook his head.

He told me, “No. It’s different here. It’s
still
different. I know you’re trying to help, but you just don’t remember.”

***

I was prepared to argue with him. I opened my mouth to do so, but then I closed it again. The man was back; he was right there, beside the mouth of the cave. He wasn’t watching the stand-off.

He was staring at me.

I stared back. What else could I do? He was the first ghost I’d ever seen, and I couldn’t take my eyes away.

I knew he was dead. He
had
to be dead. The living have sharper edges. They take up space. They don’t make the air around themselves hum and quiver, like the hot surfaces of an oven curdling the air in a kitchen.

The details were hard to discern. He was not very tall, but he was brawny and wide-shouldered. His suit hung heavy on his limbs; it wasn’t cotton or wool. It had more density and less
give
, and I thought it might be buckskin—like the Indians sometimes wore.

He pointed at a spot off to the side of the cave’s maw. There was a place where a pair of trees grew up against the sheer face of the hill, their roots winding between the rocks.

And then he wasn’t there anymore.

***

“What are you looking at?” Jacob demanded. He could see me best; as I said, he was facing me—looking over Meshack’s shoulder I was directly in his line of sight.

“I’m not…not anything,” I breathed. I wrenched my gaze away from the cave and confessed very slightly, “I only thought I saw something.”

“What?” Meshack asked without turning around to look at me.

“Someone,” I clarified, but not completely. “Gentlemen,” I appealed again. “Please. No guns. Let us do this task, prove our terrible patriarch a liar and a fool, and return to our homes.”

I looked at the hillside wall again.

Jacob let the barrel of his gun droop. I couldn’t win them with reason, but I could distract them with curiosity. I made note of this, as the other barrels tipped until they all pointed at the ground.

The eldest Mander quit looking at me and then did something that Meshack later assured me was quite brave: he turned to see the spot that so deeply occupied my attention.

“There ain’t nothing there,” he correctly observed.

“I could’ve sworn I saw something.” I took the moment of relative peace to move behind them and around them, over to the place where the dead man had stood. I lifted my right leg and propped myself against it. I leaned against the hill and around its side, as much as I could. I ran my hand along the rough bark of the tree and tried to engross myself in this activity—anything to calm myself. My heart was still racing from the near-chaos of the moments before; but by the sounds of things, the rest of the men had already returned to their prior, more manageable levels of strained discord.

“What’re you doing?” Meshack asked. He was the first to join me, and I’d guessed right—he’d already slung his rifle back over his shoulder, into a holster that was strapped there. The sun glinted off the long, fierce-looking thing, and I winced to see it so close. Behind us, I heard the reluctant clacks of the other guns being un-primed, and re-holstered.

“I thought I saw something. And now I think I’ve
found
something,” I announced.

The other four men crowded around as tightly as they could without actually touching one another. They leaned around me.
We peered between the trees, at the V in the fork where the trunks grew apart.

Carved into the rock, there was a short message. I traced it with my fingers. I scraped out what dirt and lichen I could, until the words were fully revealed.

“What’s it say?” Carlson asked.

I’d forgotten that most of them probably couldn’t read. So I said the words, sounding them out because the spelling was creative, to put it kindly.

“I can’t make out this first part,” I admitted. “The rock’s too worn. But the rest of it says, ‘killed a thing here.’ And it’s signed. It’s says…” I poked my finger against the ‘D’ and held my breath. “It’s signed ‘D. Boone.’”

Someone behind me let forth a low whistle, and the men began to murmur.

“Let me see it,” Carlson insisted. He put a hand on my shoulder and urged me back, out of the way. Even though most of them couldn’t read it, they were going to touch it.

“Would you look at that!” Jacob jabbed his gnarled index finger at the letters. “Would you look at
that
!”

“I’m looking, I’m looking,” Carlson said.

The two men were elbow to elbow. They were within one another’s breathing space, and they were smiling. Not a minute before, they’d been prepared to shoot.

Their enthusiasm was a true marvel. Meshack craned his neck around too; and he said, “It might be real. You think it’s real?” he asked no one in particular, I thought. But then I realized he was aiming one eye over at me.

I started to answer, but Titus beat me to it. “Who else would go to the trouble?” he asked.

Jacob pulled his hat down off his head and punched it happily. “Daniel Boone. You know, I wonder if that don’t mean the old stories about Heaster Senior got any truth in them.”

“The ones about him working on the Road?” Carlson shrugged. “It ended not too far from here, up at the river. There’s a real good chance Boone passed this way.”

Titus was grinning as big as the rest of them. “I bet it’s him, all right. I bet he’s the one who cut it there. He used to do that, you know. He signed his name on things, when he was exploring. That’s how he marked his way.”

I didn’t know if that was correct or not, but I didn’t argue.

“Look how he spelled ‘killed,’” Meshack said.

And that was the first I realized that Meshack had learned how to read, somewhere along the line. He couldn’t have learned it at home; I wondered where he picked up his education.

Between the bobbing heads crowded around the inscription, I read it again.

…cilled a thing heer

D. Boone

While the men chattered excitedly I wondered also, “Was he the man I saw?”

I knew enough about the man to know the engraving might be real; and I knew enough to understand why my ordinarily cantankerous companions were, for the moment, as excited as school boys. Heaster might’ve been our literal patriarch, but Boone was the father of us all—the George Washington of our commonwealth.

His creative spelling only made him more appealing. As I understand the lore, he was barely literate, prone to wandering, occasionally violent; and he lived most of his life in fear of debtor’s prison due to a score of terrible land speculation deals.

Yet even so, he was a patriot and a warrior. He was the man who cut the Road.

And I don’t believe you could find a man in Kentucky who wouldn’t say Boone’s name with pride.

***