*
Every foot of the way I was scanning the ground for Tennyson’s Spencer, even though I knew it most likely was not there. But I was mindful of Lige Magan saying that Wynkle King was a black liar. I was very interested so to come into the place where the bear had demonstrated her superiority over us. I thought I could see the marks of her actions and again felt the suddenness and the strangeness of her closeness. There was no sign of the rifle.
Not more than a mile or two ahead would surely lie the camp of Zach Petrie. Would they have pickets set this time? Maybe they would be on high alert now. Someone might shoot me before ever they shouted a warning. I gathered myself into myself, trying to fold the mule also into a tiny clenched thing. I plucked out my lady’s gun from my trews and held it at the ready even though such a small weapon looked ridiculous enough. Did Peg consider me a friend or an enemy? She had brought me all the way to the road, but why? Because I had saved her from drowning? Or some other reason? Because we were both Indian? Because? I knew not why. She had made no effort to see me or send a message, though I wondered if either would have been possible. Well, I was going to see her and give her the dress back. I thought again of her going about showing her bare backside in Thomas McNulty’s ruined trews. I nearly laughed at the thought but then suddenly reined in the mule. Something had stirred in the leaves that wasn’t a flame-coloured bird. Something had – and then as if one moment not there and the next there, Peg was on the track. She was wearing a rough brown dress and her feet were bare.
‘What you doing down here in outlaw country?’ she said. ‘With that silly gun.’
‘I—’ I said.
‘You lucky I not one of the sentries, girl, or you be one dead Injun now.’
‘Whyever they shoot a boy on a mule before they even know his business?’
‘They shoot you,’ she said.
‘Well, I know,’ I said. ‘That how it is. But, here you are instead, maybe.’
‘Yep, I here, it’s me. The girl you saved. The girl who shot you. How that shoulder?’
‘It healed up quick and good.’
‘I hear some fool carried you to the boy that hurt you?’
‘I think he hurt me. I don’t recall.’
‘I think you do.’
‘I got two items of business,’ I said. ‘I got your yellow dress here all cleaned of blood and my greatest desire is to fetch back that rifle you saw me with that just don’t belong to me but belong to Tennyson Bouguereau.’
‘You come all this way with that threadbare old dress?’
‘I come to see you too, and to thank you.’
‘For what?’
‘For bringing me up to the road.’
‘You took my hand in that bush when I was just set to drown – we square in the matter of debt. My life, your life. You had no need to come out and see me.’
‘I come out to see you because – because I needed to see you, that all.’
‘I never had no one needing to see me. Goddamn it, I never did. Maybe you fixing to kill me, maybe something in you wants to finish the work you were doing when I stopped you?’
‘Well, that ain’t true. Truth is, I just don’t know why I came. You never do something and not be knowing why you done it?’
‘Well, what is the riddle of life? To-ing and fro-ing, this-ing and that-ing, and not knowing what in tarnation we doing it all for.’
I laughed there under the lightly woven cloth of sky and trees. Suddenly I wondered, how many people were in America? Thousands and thousands. And here we were, just two of them, and one not knowing why she had ridden in there, and the other not knowing even why she breathed in and out. But something in that riddle was wanting to loose itself.
I was just gazing at her. What was I thinking, feeling? Didn’t I feel and think that she was a sort of medicine? Crazy thoughts, but just the look of her? No doubt Dr Memucan Tharpe had lozenges and vials for many illnesses and maladies, so what was Peg the tincture of, what was she the cure for? I got to be honest. She was to me a sort of apparition, a sort of appearance of something. I could sense the heat in her skin under the rough cloth. I only had to reach out with just my mind to feel it. The slight length of her, the dark legs, the thin arms, the face that wanted to talk to you about the very best reason there was for this whole business of hurtful humanity going about in the world. The colours of things are not really just blues and greens and reds, there are softnesses and shadows of colours that slip away from any word to say them. That was how she was coloured. The set of her green eyes, the little slopes of her brown cheeks, the thick black hair shoved behind her ears, the lovely mouth, painted as if by some dainty god – was I not talking in my secret mind and thinking in my secret thoughts like a man? Well, fortunate then I was in my man’s clothes.
As if well abreast of these thoughts she said:
‘I see you got yourself a second pair of trews. I don’t say I relished the last pair. You should’ve seen me returning to camp. Like a buck-naked child. Folks laughed till they wept.’
Then I was laughing again. ‘Anyway I am told that gun be in your camp.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘you come down and we see about it.’
‘You say?’ I said. ‘It may be that Wynkle King senior sold it to your bossman Mr Petrie. So I don’t know if he’ll want just to give it.’
‘What were you planning to do to get it so?’
‘I were planning to steal it.’
‘Well, that always a good plan,’ she said, and broke out laughing herself.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Nearer the encampment there was a picket every hundred yards. Colonel Purton’s raid had put them on a war footing.
‘Whiskey,’ called out Peg each time we came close to one and of course that was her word of safe passage. I had dismounted anyhow and was leading the tired mule. He took a great suck of water out of the creek when he got down there. There was no moving him till he was satisfied. Peg was looking at him.
‘That one thirsty critter,’ she said, easy as you like, stroking his dark brown neck, a gesture the mule appreciated judging by the way he shivered his muscles.
‘Best mule we ever had,’ I said.
‘You was riding him last time when I shot you, ain’t that right? If I had known it was you I would not have shot you, Winona Cole.’
‘Oh? Well, I was going to shoot you if I could have so I guess it makes no odds.’
We were just looking at each other. Simple. I was half glancing at the camp now and its five or six rough cabins. Plenty of horses tethered under the trees. Here come the summer flies, they were thinking maybe. Going to be shaking their fine heads and swishing their tails like the strange mechanisms of big fleshy clocks. Something about a horse or a mule touches the human heart. Goodly godly critters. There were no washerwomen this time but there was plenty to-ing and fro-ing in the camp. Even rebels got to make the stew. Looked at one way there was an air of paradise over everything. Birds have no allegiance to Union or otherwise so they were generous in their whistling and calling. The music of birds. I guess everything comes from that, the dances of simple country folk, the old songs that both cure and trouble the hearts of listeners. I want to say how I felt in that moment because I didn’t think I had felt much like that before. I knew when gazing upon Thomas and John Cole there was a strong feeling of safety and regard. I would have spoken for them in any court before God or man. Before the Great Spirit herself. I would have said item by item all that they had attempted on my behalf, just as if I were their blood-attested daughter. I was a fragment, a torn leaf, torn away from the plains. Everything we were had been cleared off the earth. Without Thomas and John maybe there would have been only what the lawyer Briscoe called perdition – the sudden exit that followed a sentence of death. I might have starved out like one of those dried prairie dogs you find among the lupins and the grasses. Then that must have been a species of love. I never gazed upon Jas Jonski with much of feeling, except I was very curi
ous to find what his kiss tasted like in my mouth, which I never did find, as far as I know. But gazing on Peg made my legs wash with flame. My stomach grew warm and I felt an infinite gratitude to the Great Spirit that Peg had been made, and set on the ground to live. It was as if to stand near her was to stand mid-current in the flow of a river.
I tied my mule under the trees by the stream because I couldn’t walk him up to the unknown horses since there’d be mares or stallions maybe would unsettle him. A mule will not ever be a father or a mother, in my mule’s case a father. Lige Magan used to tell a story about a chimera born to one of his grandfather’s mules but that happened once in a hundred years, he said. Such an animal was considered to be the harbinger of fabulous harvests – ‘Guess just not in our case,’ said Lige philosophically.
Anyhow I walked up the rough river meadow to the houses side by side with Peg.
*
I didn’t think this could end well but what had brought me there, though still a mystery, I could nearly touch and itemise. A sense of it like you might sense a lion behind a rock. It hovered just beyond my reach of thought. The rifle certainly, but also other more ghostly things. It was reckless, reckless to be there in the first place. But being with Peg didn’t make me uneasy. I never felt less uneasy since my mother’s arms lay down my back and she unspooled her stories.
‘I going to ask Aurelius what we can do about the gun. I know it was your gun because I seen it there on that mule. What’s more you tried to shoot me with it.’
‘Ain’t Aurelius Littlefair –?’ I began, not sure how to proceed with that question.
‘What?’ she said.
‘Ain’t he a fierce sort of person?’
‘Aurelius? He just what he is. Zach Petrie went off this morning early with his men so I can’t ask him – unless you know how to spirit talk?’
‘I don’t.’
‘Well, see, the armoury is up there beyond the last shed. If we got your gun it’s there on a rack.’
‘Like I say, Peg, money passed hands, I don’t know …’
‘You want to try or not? I don’t care.’
‘I afraid to talk to him, I heard – Peg, I heard he was hanging freedmen along the ways and I seen that and I don’t know – maybe he just hang me.’
‘Child, he ain’t a demon. I tell you. He always good to me. My father was his best scout during the war. They were close in like buddies. I just ask him. It can’t hurt. I weren’t thinking that Winona Cole were scared of anything or anyone.’
‘I don’t fear living things.’
‘Well, he ain’t dead, I can tell you, he ain’t dead.’
So then we were up to the first little cabins of the living quarters. There were pantaloons and cotton front-button shirts and ladies’ underthings and such like hung in festoons at the back of the cabins. I supposed those washerwomen had gone on regardless of raids or less important matters like that. Someone was cooking up a mess of oats in a huge black pot but there was no one tending that just then. For the horses I thought. Unless renegades crave oats too.
‘You be waiting here, Winona, my friend. I go in and beard the demon.’
She treaded in across the porch on her bare feet and disappeared into the dark of the cabin. The windows were small, for defence. You could stick a rifle out through them would be about the size of it. The day even though it was only just summer had taken a turn to compete with the fire under the big pot for heat. I could feel the force of it touching my head and I wished I had thought of putting on a hat. Lige Magan’s admonishing face swam inside my head. ‘Now, Winona, what did I say, what did I say?’ He was right to favour hats. A huge swamp of yellow light fixed down on the camp. The wide river seemed fattened with temperature. Brightly it pushed along, singing that pebble-song of rivers. My elation had persisted but now without Peg I began to fret a little, and wonder should I make my own path to the armoury and just grab that sacred gun. I wondered should I do that. Why would Aurelius Littlefair, the most evil and venal heart in Tennessee, want to give a gun back to Winona Cole? Had I said to Peg it belonged to Tennyson Bouguereau, a man that Aurelius Littlefair had seen fit to make an effort to destroy? Or, did I know now that it wasn’t him at all, but Colonel Purton? And I thought, had Colonel Purton done that just to stir the nest, just to make an official document with the lawyer Briscoe that would warrant an attack? I supposed that could be the case. I was congratulating myself on this fancy when Peg poked her head out the door and told me to come in.
‘Step lively there, soldier,’ she said.
So I entered into the very hall of evil. So it seemed to me. There were many devils and creatures of dark ilk in my mother’s stories – they were often the most cherished characters of us children. Cherished because they made us squirm and sway with fear. The room was bare, clean, and strangely to me like one of the lawyer Briscoe’s well-kept rooms – before the Petrie gang burned them. There was an air of clemency and order. A line of regimented books sat on the shelf. The table was full of piles of paper all squared off and shipshape. There were maps and pictures – indeed, this Aurelius Littlefair, named for a philosopher emperor, was working on one of the maps with a red-leaded pencil. Making a line for something, I could not say. Like those men that ran the railroad right across Turtle Island with the stroke of a pencil. He didn’t look immediately. Rather than a fiery creature with horns he was a sort of miniature general. He wore a light grey jacket and his beard was combed and his moustache carefully trimmed – I could somehow imagine him doing that, peering into a dim mirror, and clipping the hairs. Maybe singing the while. He was as trim as a boat. His grey hair went back across his sun-darkened face, and his eyes were grey. When he now looked up and smiled the only blemish was a mouth of forsaken teeth. Then he set his eyes on his work again and went on with the marking of the map.
‘So what your name?’ he said.
I could barely think fast enough and I nearly said Winona.
‘Bill, sir.’
‘You a bosom pal of my Peg?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘How in the world you meet each other? Maybe that one of the mysteries of the world. How folks meet. Nowhere to meet in all of Christendom but you say you meet.’
He drew some more, wetting the red lead with his blanched mouth, marking, circling. Then he seemed to be done with that task, and pushed himself and his chair back from the table, and tipped the chair onto its rear legs, and balanced there. Now I could see he wore high black boots so polished that the room wanted to nest in them, windowlight and shadows.
‘My Peg she say that we got a rifle belonging to you. I find that strange, but if we do, I will be very content to return it to you. I don’t ever like to think my men pick up things that don’t belong to them unless by right of war. The spoils of war by long tradition are due to the trooper and the centurion, Mr Bill. Ten thousand years of human affairs don’t gainsay that. I would be obliged to you to hear how you think we might have inadvertently come to be in possession of that gun?’
‘I ain’t quite certain of the facts around it, sir,’ I said. ‘I heard from a man called the Reverend Wynkle King that he had found my gun and sold it to Mr Petrie.’
‘Sold it to Mr Petrie. Fancy. I’m acquainted with this reverend although I don’t believe there’s a bishop alive in America would allow that man his title in these times. Let us go to the armoury and have a look for this rifle.’
Peg now beamed with pleasure and seemed inclined to think that all was going splendidly. I was expecting still at any moment for the talk to veer in the wrong direction. For there to be uproar and fisticuffs. But there had been nothing of the kind and now this elegant little man, who even Lana Jane Sugrue might have praised for his pristine couture, rose from his chair. His spurs rattled a muffled tune on the earthen floor, beaten flat and sprinkled with sawdust, maybe against spits.
The armoury was not locked nor even protected by a sentry and it was a little building just the same as the sleeping sheds e
xcept by some unknown means they had brought in very old gun cabinets gleaming with glass and wood. I had a feeling they had been found somewhere or were legitimised as proper spoils of war. Anyway the racks were filled with army muskets, repeaters like the Spencer, and other more ancient weapons. There were pots of gun-oil and well marshalled rags.
The little general looked along the rows.
‘I think I know all our weaponry. Why, Mr Bill, many of these guns have stories – some even have legends attached. You see this one here?’ he said, pointing at a long-barrelled rifle of some sort, with beautiful dragons chased into the breech. ‘That one fought at Antietam under Lee, when Lee outdid McClellan even though that fool outnumbered us. McClellan’s trouble was, Mr Bill, he could not count. I hope you have your numbers?’
‘I do,’ I said. I was nearly going to say I worked for the lawyer Briscoe but thankfully stopped myself.
‘I regret that Peg is a child of the wilderness. Not because I chose that, but because history itself chose so. As soon as ever we may bring our cause to victory, I will be sending all the children to school. For education is the same thing as salvation. Without education we will have no citizens and no country. Do you see your gun?’
I walked along the cabinets. There were dozens and dozens of them. But a Spencer rifle is a particular thing of some beauty. Suddenly I saw it and my heart beat faster with joy, as if I had found a living thing from which I had been long separated. To search and search and then to find – it seemed to me that the experience of life had rarely that outcome. But there it was. Its old sleek self. I opened the cabinet door that squeaked against the intrusion and pulled down the rifle, and turned the breechblock over to check the name. There it was, LUTHER, cut in by a proper silversmith, all curlicues and flourishes.
A Thousand Moons Page 13
