My Name Is a Knife

by Alix Hawley

  Crying and laughing my girl collapses onto her knees with one arm tight about my leg. Daddy. A streak shoots past us. At once I am laughing and crying with her:

  —Well my girl. Old Tibby is still here. Or was.

  The cat is quite gone out the door. Flanders is a shadow there with his gun, he keeps his eyes on me and not on wherever Tibby ran to. Jemima rubs away her tears with the back of her hand, impatient with them. I say:

  —And where is your ma?

  —Oh—

  She pulls something from under the dried-up straw pallet on the bed. A paper, folded and gummed with a knot of pitch. She hands it to me, watching my face very close. She says:

  —She told me to give it to you when you came back. I knew you would come, even if she did not.

  I peel back the pitch and hold the paper to my eyes, and here is what meets me:

  My brothers have read out the newspapers that tell of your capture by the Indians and call you a Famous Partisan. There are drawings of you that do not look a thing like you.

  If you are alive, you ought to know that we are all right. I hope to be living when you read this letter. I have no way of knowing if you are. I do not care any longer. I will not wait.

  When you did not return from salt making, and we got word you had been taken captive, I kept a lamp in the window for you until we had not enough tallow to justify it. But perhaps it was my son I left it lit for.

  My daughter will give you this letter.

  Rebecca’s words, her hate, striking my brains. No greeting. No signature.

  My daughter. My son.

  My son. I do not wish to see it but I do. Jamesie stuck through with arrows like a saint in a thick old book, all wounds. They were still in his body when I found it, Cherokee Jim put them there for me to see, as I know well enough. The man who told me not to come to Kentucky. To stay where I was in Carolina with my children. A good place. To stay.

  Thinking of this murderer’s words and name, his false English name, my brains hiss in my head, my eyes dry and shrivel, my legs go stiff and again I see my boy. His eyes frozen colourless and his plait covered in frost and earth. I dug him up to look at him and his wounds and I buried him again.

  I did not find the murderer, Rebecca.

  Well. The words are yours but written in a man’s hand, carved hard into the paper as if into bark. Is it a Bryan hand? You were born a Bryan, you have always been a Bryan at heart, though I made a Boone of you in name, and the son and daughter are mine, they are Boones! See one of your brothers penning the letter for you at this table in my house, smiling into his little beard.

  Or my brother’s hand. Ned’s hand—

  I sink down onto the rough tabletop. To my daughter, my daughter, I say:

  —Where is she? Your mother?

  Jemima comes to squeeze my wrists. She says:

  —Gone back to Carolina.

  My girl, you were always so frank. I say:

  —When?

  —A little time after you were taken. Israel went, and Susy too with her baby, and some of Ma’s brothers.

  Israel. My next son after Jamesie, my dead boy. Susy, my oldest girl, whose name the men make free with as if it were a ball to toss back and forth. Gone for months now.

  I look again to Jemima’s face, it shines in the darkening room:

  —The other children?

  —Went with her. Daddy—

  I crunch the paper in my fist and I crunch Jemima in my arms. My daughter. The only one left here. Her cap beneath my chin has the faintest whiff of Rebecca’s old bayberry soap. Old cleanness. I had thought that lost to me too. Some six months I was gone. Jemima, I know now that it was my brother Ned who made you, the first time Rebecca thought me lost for good, but you are mine. And you at least are here.

  She is thinner but strong. Her shoulders rise, she begins her fierce crying again. Between her sobs she says:

  —I stayed. I was waiting for you. I made Flan write a letter to the Indians, I told them not to touch a hair of your head or I would kill them all. But I did not know where to send it, Daddy. And your hair—

  She feels the shaved sides of my head. And here is the past again crashing ahead, things I do not wish to think of. Sweet hands knifing off my hair. Grass-smelling and somehow silky in the palms in spite of all their work. In my mind her lips part, a word is coming. But I do not know which word, which tongue. And I ran from her as well as the rest. Methoataske my wife, will you come with them from Old Chillicothe town, will you insist on leading the march with a skull-cracker in one hand, your shaving knife in the other, out of pain that I ran? And Eliza behind you, fierce as fierce. Your daughter. She wanted me for a father, she wanted my help. Another lost child of mine.

  I close my eyes to them both. It is all I can do now, I will keep them hidden. To my girl I say:

  —Jemima, letters mean nothing. It would not have helped.

  Her voice goes sharp:

  —It would have helped. Everyone said you were dead or gone to live Indian forever. I knew you were alive, I knew!

  And what I am to say in the face of such belief, I do not know.

  * * *

  Jemima brings back some jerked meat and the cat and a fat-lamp, and crouches in its spitting circle of light. I cannot eat. I ask for ink and paper, she runs and begs these from one of the neighbours, without saying it is me who wants them. Her eyes do not leave me, but when Flanders comes in, I tell her she ought to get some sleep, and after another embrace she goes next door with him for the night. I hear her through the wall. Stop it. Daddy will not go anywhere. You do not have to guard his door.

  I sit at the table with the paper. The lamp sizzles. The fort is quiet but for a few of the horses nickering. I think Old Dick might come for another look at me but he does not, no one comes.

  I look at the empty page and I write:

  Dear WIFE

  I have not written a word in months. My hand is stupid as a child’s, the quill bites the bone of my thumb. The pain in my feet and my eyes hammers at me. I crawl over the dirt floor and feel about under the bed and the pallet for something else of hers, something better. A tin bowl dented in. A beetle husk, bones of a bird or mouse. Dried leaves, dried catshit. Quite a witch’s recipe. And a small scrap, tucked under a bed rope, it comes away when my fingers find it and pull.

  In the circle of light, it is yellow as egg yolk. Rebecca’s. She has always had it, it was something of her mother’s, some bit of silk. She only took it out of her workbox and showed it to me the one time, her eyes shining in a private fashion. She rubbed it between her fingertips as if she were a sleepy child with a bedsheet. Well. Her ma must have been very fine, I do not know.

  Our Jamesie, my Jamesie, was not a lover of sheets. He said he liked to be cold, do you remember it, Rebecca? Well I am sure you do. Yet Squire buried him wrapped up tight in one of our wedding sheets. I wrapped him again after I checked his grave and made it a better one. All I could do. He is all right, out of this life. But what do you think you are doing, leaving yours? I am your life, this is your life. I left everything for you. And so I will tell you here first, before I tell anyone else. You know well enough that the Shawnee will not leave me be after I ran from them. I know too much now of their country, their towns, their ways. They made me one of them, I am one of them. They will come soon. They will find me, and then we will see what they will do.

  My compliments to you. I wish only to oblige you in your wishes. Is this what you wish to hear? That I will be scalped, burnt slow, ripped to shreds, fed to dogs? That I will have to first look my Indian father in the face?

  I DO NOT FINISH this letter. I do not add, And perhaps my Indian wife also. How can I tell my wife of my other wife?

  I will write, I will tell you what I have done. But not yet.

  I lie on the bare bed, it sags beneath me. I sleep hard. I dream of a deer. In the dream I shoot it in the gut and it wanders off leaking blood. I chase it through the woods the whole day until I find it at
twilight lying at a campfire, where it turns into a woman when it sees me. It is you, Methoataske. I believe it is.

  I sit with her at her fire and she talks some, telling me things of the invisible world. Animals, tracks, marking, signs. Things I have always known how to see. And things I have not seen. Ghosts in everything there is, even in spoons. Manitoc. She once told me this word, but said it was not the same as the word for ghosts. She could not tell me just what it meant. Only that she saw them, anyone could see them if they knew how to look. My ghosts were people, they were different, they seemed poorer. I told her so and she smiled.

  Her daughter, my daughter, played with spoons. She named one after herself. Eliza—

  Do not think of them. Do not think.

  My heart is tired. I cannot think of them in another life. I do not feel my old ghosts now as I lie alone in the cabin. Not my boy, not my brother, not my old daddy and ma, not the men who came out here to look about the country with me, not the other prisoners dead at Detroit where I left them. And not anyone else dead through my fault. They will not speak to me now after all I have done, they will not help me.

  There is too much to think of. How we are to get out from beneath all of what is coming. How I will save everyone who does not want my saving.

  I turn myself over on the bed and stare at the chipped wall. I do not wish to think of Martha but I do. When I had to stop and sleep an hour on my long run back to this place, I dreamt of her. Rebecca’s sister, like her but not so settled in her skin. Her narrow hips and white thighs against earth and flattened young corn, as I saw her once. Her mouth opening, the V between her legs opening. Her endless want, the way she was before I left. Now I know what she was about, trying to keep me from knowing that Neddy, her husband, had fathered Jemima on my wife. I pulled away and she gripped me with her limbs and her insides. Stay. Stay. Even in the dream I knew enough to go.

  She is here though. I heard her voice outside before night fell entire, talking low with some of the other women. Much later I hear her knock in the dark and say my name soft through the door. Daniel, Daniel? She makes a great question of it, asking everything of me. I do not reply and she goes away, but I know it is only for the time.

  Methoataske did not ask me to stay. She never asked. Always quiet when we lay together on our sleeping mat. Gentle arms and hands, at times a gentle laugh. I loved to hear it. I wish she had asked me. I do wish it, Methoataske, though I do not know how I could have done it.

  I ran from you and my Shawnee life to save this place. I close my eyes.

  * * *

  I wake with my brains knocking against my skull, and I have to empty my sick bowels into the shallow bowl from beneath the bed. I am filled with a panic to get outside. As I hobble into the grey dawn with the stinking bowl, Jemima hears my door opening and is beside me before I know it. Flanders comes out rumpled with sleep, and she sends him in again. She has her buckets with her. Bold as she ever was, she says:

  —Come out to the spring with me.

  I point at my raw feet and I say:

  —I cannot get far in this state. Seems I am quite at your mercy, my girl. You will have to help me.

  She laughs her clear ha ha as I set down the bowl:

  —I will get some water for you too, poor prisoner Daddy. And you might get a crust of bread. If we had any bread.

  Prisoner. Perhaps I am one again. Off my girl runs with her buckets, she aims a smile back at me. Flanders pokes his thin neck and his gun from the window and he gives me a cautious nod. Other women are coming from their cabins with their own buckets now. They stop for a long look at me, my half-naked state and my half-shaved head. One says my name loud. Daniel Boone.

  Old Dick’s sturdy little daughter Kezia gives me a dog-eye. I nod and I say:

  —How do, ladies.

  They are surprised at my voice. Now the girl’s mother Elizabeth Callaway emerges across the way and tells them to come, and off they all gaggle into the dim morning. One of them says prisoner, but not in Jemima’s laughing fashion. I may be one today, if Old Dick has his way. Did you see him. Look at him. Look. Half Indian and half dead.

  Martha is not among them. Nor have I seen any sign of Ned yet. Well. They will keep. None of my difficulties flies off easy, as I know.

  I follow slow to the big front gate to watch for what may be coming. When she has her water from the spring, Elizabeth sends Kezia hurrying back to the house with it, and sets to calling the children to her school beneath the great elm just beyond the walls. She stands in the front gateway with her arms crossed but pays me no heed. The children dart looks at me as they run past, out to the tree. Once she has them sat down she stalks the line of them before she flattens her hand upon her thin chest and says:

  —Children, pay no mind to the prisoner lately returned from the Indians. Now. Heart and stomach! Heart! And! Stomach! Who said it?

  One of the boys raises a hand, but quick enough she answers herself:

  —Queen Bess said it at a speechmaking. She was the daughter of Henry Eight. She had red hair and no beauty, but she gave a fine speech before her army as the wicked Spanish came in their ships to attack her land. She had the heart and stomach of a man, and so she said, and so she and her men won the victory.

  The boy pipes up quicker this time, it is my brother Squire’s boy Moses sitting with his chin on his knobby knees:

  —What happened to the wicked enemy ships? Did they come back?

  Moses, if you knew what was coming.

  I lift my arm, but I cannot get enough words from my throat before I cough and cough again. Moses and his little brother Isaiah turn to see, Elizabeth gives a loud set of claps and refuses to look at me. She does not know what is coming, she knows nothing.

  Two of the younger men are making their way in my direction from Old Dick’s place, they are unhurried but coming straight. One is John Holder, married to Dick’s daughter Fanny. His sleek narrow head is like an otter’s, he is tilting it at me. The other is copper-haired Alexander Montgomery with fringe all over his hunting shirt and a broad smile on his face. Well I have no need to hear their thoughts just now. I turn and limp back to my house, where the stinking bowl still sits outside the door. Before I have shut myself in, Jemima appears, slopping water with her quick gait. She holds out a bucket:

  —Here you are. Flanders says you ought to stay in for now, for Colonel Callaway’s sake.

  —You are always in a hurry, duck.

  —What is there to wait for? You ought to sit down, from the smell of your pot.

  Her nose wrinkles as she looks behind her to where Holder and Montgomery are outside. I shut the door and I say low:

  —Leave it for those two. Listen now, we will have to wait some time but I do not know how long. You will be my eyes today. Any sign outside?

  —Of what? We have not seen a buffalo in weeks.

  —Indians. Shawnee, Cherokee. Or British, for that matter.

  She is holding her nose now and creasing up her brow, and I am struck by a memory of the egg-headed English governor, Hamilton, at Fort Detroit doing the same when he promised safe passage for my people, if I would only give up my ridiculous fort and my ridiculous claims on his Indian allies’ land. We should all be quite safe, go and live as British again within his walls, which are true walls and not the sorry fallen-in ones we have here. Well. In Jemima’s ear I say:

  —Did you see anyone? Anything at all?

  She shakes her head:

  —Next time I will take the gun with me. Though Flan used up most of our shot trying to hunt this winter. I am a better shot, Daddy, likely better than you now.

  —I believe it, my g—

  I cough before I can finish the word right. She laughs, she says:

  —Your girl, I know I am, poor old man.

  Jemima, I am sorry for it, and for all you have endured because of it, but I say:

  —Do not forget it. Say nothing for the time. And be on the watch for any movement—

  —I kno
w what to look for.

  Her eyes burn black. Rebecca’s eyes made young again, no hate in them, no cloud. She leaves me, singing loud. I hear young Holder and Montgomery tell her good morning. They do not knock, but they wait for a time listening. I know Old Dick has sent them spying. I give them no satisfaction, I only set the stinking bowl outside my door, then I go in again and hum a Shawnee tune until my throat cracks and I finish with a great chorus of hacking.

  * * *

  I have to lie down though I do not wish to do it. I go on coughing and puffing like a bull for a time, I have no tobacco to soothe myself with. Through the broken window I can still hear Madam Callaway going on about Henry Eight, fond of listening to her own knowledge. I do not hear any of the children answering, though I can see them in my mind, sitting on the bare ground under the elm, where anyone can see.

  Squire’s boys there—

  I must say it, there is no way not to say it. I know this. If anyone will listen to me.

  I get up. Flanders or Jemima has left my poor makeshift gun on the floor next to the bed. I take it up, I break the stock off to show just how harmless I am.

  With both pieces I hobble over to my brother Squire’s gunshop. He is in the shadow at the back of the building, trying to get his fire lit. But he looks up from snapping his flint, his face all bony hollows. I do wonder just how bony I look, my rib cage feels set to shove off through my skin. Bright as I can, I say:

  —How do, gunsmith. I am in want of many things. A shirt is one. But particularly a new gun. I restocked this barrel with a limb I found on my way back here. Best lock I ever had in my life. I was in a hurry but it works well enough.

  He says nothing. He has never been one for talk. At last he scratches his cheek and he says:

  —Who gave you the barrel?

  —My Shawnee family.

  —Your Shawnee family.

  —Yes.

  Squire’s mouth thins and stretches. I feel mine do the same, as though I were his broken mirror. I think to tell him more but I do not do it. After a time my brother says: