Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories

by Angela Carter

  After I eat my dinner, I saw how the oak trees were full of acorns at this season and thought that I might grind up those acorns between two flat stones, with a bit of effort, and so get a kind of flour, as had been done at home in times of want. I reasoned how I could mix this flour to dough with water. Then I could bake the dough in cakes in the ashes of my fire and have bread with my meat. And, if I wanted fish on a Friday, as was my Lancashire lady’s custom, I could tickle the trout with which the stream abounded, which is a trick every country girl knows and not unlike picking a pocket. Also, it seemed to me, if I dried the mulberries in the sun, they would eat sweet for a month. When I got so far in planning my diet, I thought: why, I can get along here very well in the woods on my own for a while even if I must eat meat without salt!

  For, I thought, I have steel and fire and the climate is temperate, the land fruitful; this earthly paradise surely will provide for me! I can build a shelter out of branches and bide my time until the fuss over the lop-eared overseer dies down, then make my way South in my own good time. Besides, to tell the truth, my nostrils were too full of the stink of humanity to relish a quick return to the world in some bordello in Florida. But I thought that I should travel on a little more, for safety’s sake, into the deep wilderness, so that no hunting party might find me and return me to the noose. Of which I had a very powerful fear and, I may tell you, more dread of the white man, which I knew, than of the red man, who was at that time unknown to me.

  So I walked on another day, taking my living from the country easily enough; then one day more and never heard a voice but the birds’ whistle; but the day after that I heard a woman singing and saw one of the savage tribe in a clearing and thought to kill her, before she killed me, but then I saw she had no weapon but was picking herbs and putting them in a fine basket. So I steps back to hide myself from her lest she be some Indian servant of a planter, although I do think that I walk, now, where no person of my country ever trod before. But she hears the leaves move and sees me and jumps as if she’d seen a ghost so that she knocks over her basket and her herbs spill out.

  I never think twice about it but step across to pick up the spilled herbs for her as if I was back in Cheapside and run to help some fruit-seller that overturns her basket of apples.

  This woman sees the brand on my hand and grunts to herself, as though she knows the meaning of it and will not fear me for it, or, rather, does not fear me because of it, but, all the same, does not like the look of me. She holds back from me though she takes her basket from me again as if to leave me in the forest. But I am struck by her looks, she is a handsome woman, not red but wondrous brown, and it came into my mind to open my bodice, show her my breasts, that, though I had whiter skin, I could give suck as well as she and she reached out and touched my bosom.

  She was a woman of about middle age dressed in nowt but a buckskin skirt and she grunted when she saw my stays—for I still wore my English apparel, though it was ragged—and motioned me, as I thought, that whalebone was not the fashion among the Indian nation. So off go my stays and I throws them into a bush and breathes easier for it. Then she asks me, by signs, to give her the big knife I’d stuck in my apron.

  “Now I’m for it!” I thinks but hands it over and she smiles, though not much, for these savages are not half so free with their feelings as we are, and says in a word I take to mean “Knife”. I say it after her, pointing to it, but she shakes her head and runs her finger down the blade, so I say, after her: “Sharp”. Or, a word you might put into English as: acute. And that was the first word of the Algonkian language that ever I spoke, though not the last, by any means. Then, seeing this old woman with a shape, not, as I can see, marked by child-bearing, and remembering the Virgin Queen my missus taught me of, I try her out with: “Shalom”. Which she politely repeats after me but I can tell it means nowt to her.

  She motions me: shall I go with her? I think the overseer will never come to look for me among the red men! So I goes with her to the Indian town and in this way, no other, was I “taken” by ‘em although the Minister would have it otherwise, that they took me with violence, against my will, haling me by the hair, and if he wishes to believe it, then let ‘im.

  Their clean, pretty town was built within a low wood fence or stockade, the houses built of birchbark set in gardens with vines with pumpkins on ‘em and the cooking of their meat savouring the air, as it was about dinner-time. They were cooking what they call succotash, a great pot on an open fire and a naked savage squatting before it, calm as you please, fanning the flames with a birchbark fan. The town was surrounded by tidy fields of tobacco and corn and a river near. But no kind of beast did I see, nor cows nor horses nor chickens, for they keep none. She takes me to her own lodge, where she lives by herself on account of her business, and gives me water to wash in and a bunch of feathers to dry myself, so that I was much refreshed.

  I had heard these Indians were mortal dragons, accustomed to eat the flesh of dead men, but the pretty little naked children playing with their dollies in the dust, oh! never could such little ducks be reared on cannibal meat! And my Indian “mother”, as I soon called her, assured me that though their cousins to the North roasted the thighs of their captives and ceremoniously partook thereof, it was, as you might say, a sacramental meal, to honour the departed by devouring him; and I have often disputed with the Minister on this point, that the Iroquois dinner is but the Mass in a state of nature. And the Minister will say, either: that I lived so long with Satan that I grew accustomed to his ways, or, that the Romish Mass is but the Iroquois feast in britches.

  As for me, all I ever eat among the Indians was fish, game or fowl, boiled or broiled, besides corn cooked in various ways, beans, squash in season and etc. and this such a healthy diet that it is very rare to see a sick body amongst them and never did I see there any either shaking with palsy or suffering toothache or with sore eyes or crooked with age.

  The weather being warm, at first I blushed to see the nakedness of the savages, for the men were accustomed to go clad in nowt but breech-clouts at that season and the women with only a rag about ‘em. But soon I thought nothing of it and exchanged my petticoat for the bucksin one my mother give me and she gave me a necklace, too, of the beads they carve from shells, for she said she had no daughter of her own to pet until the woods sent her this one, whom she was thankful to the English for giving away.

  There was no end of the kindness of this woman to me and I lived in her cabin with her, for she had no husband, since she was, as it were the midwife of the tribe and all her time taken up with seeing to women in their labour. And it was to make potions to ease the labour pains and the pains of the women in their courses that she was picking herbs in the woods when I first saw her.

  How do they live, these so-called demi-devils? The men among them have an easy life, spend all their time in leisure and idleness, except when they are hunting or fighting their enemies, since all their tribes are constantly at war with one another, and with the English, too; and the werowance, as they call him, he is not the chief, or ruler of the village, although the English do say that he is so, but, rather, he is the man who goes the first in battle, so he is commonly more courageous a man than the English generals who direct their soldiers from the back.

  As for me, I stayed with my Indian mother in her hut and learned from her Indian manners, such as sitting on my knees on the ground to my meat that was spread on a mat before me because they have no furniture. I learned how to cure and dress robes out of buckskin, beaver and other skins, and to embroider them with shell and feather. I had a housewife with me in my apron pocket and my mother was very pleased with the steel needles, likewise with the tinder-box, which she was glad to get, while my carving-knife she thought a wonderfully convenient thing, they having no notion of working metal although the women make good pots out of the river clay and bake them in an open fire very cleverly while you never see a beard on any man, since they contrive to shave themselves all over
quite close with razors of stone.

  And I should say that one or two guns they did have, for a little while before I arrived among ‘em, there came a Scotsman, swapping guns and liquor in return for dressed robes and, as for the effects of the liquor, I shall say nowt about it except it sends ‘em mad, but, as for the guns, they soon learned to use them.

  The harvest coming on, they gathered up their corn, a very poor, small sort of corn, to my way of thinking, the heads just that much bigger than my thumb, and we dug holes in the ground six or seven feet deep and what of the corn we did not eat we dried and stored away under the earth. But the digging was a great labour for they have no shovels or spades except what they steal from the English so we made shift with sticks or the shoulder-bones of deer. And if I have one quarrel with my tribe, it is that the men will have nothing to do with this agriculture, although it is heavy work, but go fishing in the creek or chase deer or engage in dances and such silly performances as they say will make the corn grow.

  But my mother said: “There is no harm in it and it keeps the men out of the way.”

  By the time the weather turned, I was rattling away in the Indian language as if I’d been born to it, though not a word of Hebrew did it contain so I think my old Lancashire lady was mistaken that they are the Lost Tribe of Israel and, as to converting them to the true religion, I was so busy with one thing and another that it never entered my head. As for my pale face, by the end of the harvest it was brown as any of theirs and my mother stained my light hair for me with some darkish dye so they grew accustomed to my presence among them and at six months end you would have thought she whom I called my “mother” was my own natural mother and I was Indian born and bred, except my blue eyes remained a marvel.

  But for all the bonds of affection between us, I might still have thought of journeying on to Florida as the weather grew colder, such is the power of custom and habit, had I not cast my eye on a brave of that tribe who had no woman for himself and he cast his eye on me but never a word he says, it seems all along he intends to do the right thing by me, so it was my mother said to me at last: “That Tall Hickory you know of would like you for his wife.” Tall Hickory being what his name signified in English, and as common a kind of name amongst ‘em as James or Matthew might be in Lancashire.

  And now it comes to it, I wept, for he was a fine man.

  “How can I be that good man’s wife, mother, for I was a bad woman in my own country.”

  “A bad woman?” she says. “What’s this?”

  So I told her what I did to earn my living on Cheapside; and how I was a thief by natural vocation. As for my whoring, she was very much surprised to hear that English men would trouble to pay for such a thing as I had to sell, for the Indians exchange it free or not at all, and, as for my virginity being gone, she laughs and says: “If you were not good, nobody would have had you.” But she grieves over my thievery until at last she says to me: “Well, child, would you steal away a bowl or wampun belt or robe from out of my hut and keep it yourself and deny it to me?”

  “How could I do that, mother,” says I. “If I should need anything, I may use it and give it to you again as you do with our needles and the tinder-box and the knife. And so it is with such-a-one and such-a-one—” naming our neighbours. “And to tell the truth, there is nowt in all the village excites my old passion of avarice, while as for my dinner, if I need it, I may have a share in any cooking pot in the Indian country, for that is the custom. So neither desire nor want can make a thief of me, here.”

  “Then you are a good woman in spite of yourself among the Indians and so I think you will remain,” she says. “Why not marry the young fellow?”

  Now, certain men of the village, such as the general, and the priest, as I might call him, seeing he dealt with religion, had not one wife but three or four to till their fields for them and I did not like that. I would be the only one in my husband’s lodge, a fancy of the old life that I could not lose. And she puzzles over that, although she herself was never any man’s wife, having, so she tells me with a wink, not much liking for the sex and much fondness for her own.

  “As for ourselves, we are too seemly and decent a folk for the matter of matrimony to come between a woman and her friends!” she says. “The more wives a man has, the better company for them, the more knees to dandle the children on and the more corn they can plant so the better they all live together.”

  But still I said, I would be his only wife or never marry him.

  “Listen, my dear,” she said. “Do you not love me?”

  “Indeed I do,” I says, “with all my heart.”

  “Then if your sweetheart should offer to marry us both, would you love me the less for it?”

  But I ducked my head and forbore to answer that, for fear she should ask my beau to take her, too, along with me, since I was so struck with him I could not think that any woman, however set in her ways, would not have him if she got half the chance. Then she gives me a clout on the buttocks and cries out: “Now, child, see what a wretched thing this jealousy is, that it can set a daughter against her own mother!”

  But she relents to see me cry for shame and says, she is too old and stubborn to think of marriage and, besides, my young man is so taken with me that he will marry me on my own terms in the English fashion. For they are taught to love their wives and let them have their way no matter how many of them they marry and, if I wanted the toil of tilling a patch of corn with nowt but my own two hands, then he would not interfere with that.

  We were married about the time they were planting the corn, which they celebrate with a good deal of singing and dancing although it is we squaws who break our backs setting the seed. The season of the anniversary of my arrival in the town passed, winter comes again and by the spring I was well on the way to bringing him a little brave. It was marvellous to see the tenderness of my husband’s bearing towards me when the sun grew hot and made me sweat, weary, heavy, peevish, so that I often swore I wished meself in England again; but he bore with all. Now, at this time, the general of our village held counsel how all the tribes of this part of the territory should settle their differences and join together in a great army to drive the English off back to where they come from while some of the others said, they should, instead, make treaties with the English against those other tribes who were their natural enemies and so get more guns from the English.

  But I sent word by my husband—the women did not go to the counsels but were accustomed to let their husbands give their messages—I sent word by him that it would take all the tribes of all the continent to drive away the English, and then the English would only go away to come again in double numbers, so eager were they to “plant the colony” with me and such poor devils as I had been. So I told them straight they must make a grand, warlike, well-armed confederacy amongst all the Indian nations and never trust a word the English said, for the English would all be thieves if they could, and I was living proof of it, who only left off thieving when there was nothing to steal.

  But they took no notice of me, and could not agree about the manner in which, if they should wage it, the war should be waged, whether an attack on Annestown by night, creeping on all fours like bears with bows in their mouths; or picking off the Englishmen one by one when they went hunting or out in lonely places; or meeting ‘em head on, like an army. Which they fancied best, because it was most honourable, but, to my way of thinking, putting the head in the beast’s mouth. While some still held that the English were their friends because they were their enemies’ enemy. So they fell to squabbling amongst themselves and nothing came of all the talk which was a great sadness to me, for I was with child and so I wanted a quiet life.

  I was scratching away with my pointed stick along the garden bean-row until the very minute the waters broke and I goes running into my mother and, an hour later, as I judge it, for they have no means of keeping exact time, she was washing the blood off my young son.

  My young son w
e named what would be, in English, Little Shooting Star, and you may laugh at it, but it is a name fine men have carried. And he is strapped into his little board that he might ride on my back in his birchbark carriage and I was as pleased with him as any woman might be. Which is how the fate my old Lancashire lady foresaw for me came to pass, because my boy’s father never sprang from the tribe of Shem, Ham nor Japhet, although his mother resembled more the Mary Magdalene, or repentant harlot, than Mary the Virgin, though the Minister does not hold with that stuff, being a dissenting man, and will not let me speak of it.

  But it would come about that the little lad’s crown must be of tears, not gold.

  Now, the confederacy among the Algonkians breaking up, the depredations of the English upon the villages towards the South grew week by week more severe but our fierce braves held them off a while. The generals of this region held a parley, as to whether all stay and defend our villages or else beat a retreat, that is, stir our stumps and pick up our traps and leave our fields and shift westwards a piece, to new pastures, after the harvest, which was in hand. But this latter they were loath to do, since to the West lay the Rechacrians, a very warlike tribe not easily crossed. And they sent out a war party to give the English a taste of their own medicine, to start off with, but I was full of fear lest my husband not come back.

  He paints his face up black and red so the babby cried to see and they do go out and all come back, with blood on their axes, and several scalps of yellow hair that he hangs on the ridgepole of the roof, besides plunder of copper kettles, bullets and gunpowder. Also, alas, rum.

  Yet I must say, when I first saw those English topknots, I felt nowt but pleasure though their hair was of my colour; yet the Minister says I am a good girl and God will forgive me for the sins I committed among the Indians.

  As for gunpowder, Tall Hickory, my husband, told me, when the English first give it to the general, years back, the English told him, with much secret merriment amongst themselves, how he should bury it, like seed corn, and watch the bullets come up. And the Indians held it as a grudge ever after, to have been teased like silly children, when the English would have starved dead if the Red Man had not taught ‘em how to plant corn.