by Alix Hawley
—Billy, you are Major Smith, are you not?
—I was, yes. I have my militia papers.
—Then you still are. I was appointed commandant of this fort before—I left. And so I may appoint you to that position now, if you will have it.
His eyes drift like clouds. He says:
—Colonel Callaway is the ranking officer—
At this Dick appears with his hair already wetted, grim as if summoned out of his wife’s loving skinny arms. He says:
—What are you doing out? And at this hour?
Elizabeth is behind him with Kezia, angry as her father is. I strike the bell again and again until more people come wincing and squinting towards me. To Billy I say:
—That is so, Major Smith! But I have the right to pass my commandant position to you. I know you are a sensible man and a kind one. The rest of you may think what you like of me, take away my captaincy if you wish. But listen first.
Billy shakes his white head:
—Dan, you may stop that noise.
Dick puts his hand to his forehead and says something loud but I do not hear, I do not choose to stop my banging until he is quite done, at which time I yell raw-throated:
—I have come back to tell you that a war party is already on the way. It will be led by the Shawnee who captured me and the other men.
—Where are the other men?
This from the round little wife of William Hancock who is still gone. She gazes very earnest at me but I will not think of him or the rest. I yell on:
—They may have Cherokee and Wyandot friends with them, and likely some British. What they will do here, I do not know. I do know much about their ways and I do know they are not pleased with our presence.
One of the young men yells:
—Are they pleased with you?
Simon Kenton is a big fellow and a clever one, he is grinning. I laugh and I say:
—I will ask them when they come.
Old Dick gets his words in now:
—He speaks Indian. He will tell them all there is to tell, and in their own tongue, very nice.
I bang the bell and I shout:
—I do speak Shawnee very well, they complimented me on it more than once. And we have no secrets from them, which is not my doing, lest you ask. Their scouts are likely near us already. What secrets do you have, Colonel? You may tell us all, we are your friends.
A small laugh snakes over everyone. I see Kenton smirk. Dick is cooking up a retort, but I say:
—You have no need to be my friend to know that the state of this fort is no joke. When they come, I will talk my best with them, but we must at least make ourselves safe from harm and show our strength. Major Smith, I ask your permission to have all of us put this place in order. I do not know how long we have, perhaps a month. And look round you.
The daylight lifts as I say this. Quite a splendid effect, I will say. It spills gold over the broken stockade, the weak gate with its missing logs, the corner bastions only half built, the well that is no well at all, the dotted heaps of cowshit. All shit, covered in gold. Look.
Billy Smith is blinking against it all. I say:
—I beg your opinion, Major.
He twists his beard. He has always looked older than his years but here he looks quite a Father Time. Very slow he says:
—Boone—Captain Boone—is quite right. I accept the commandant position. We ought to make ourselves safer here, no matter what is to come. It will do no harm.
Old Dick has his hand over the top of his head now and is watching Billy Smith very close. Billy in his nightshirt joins me beneath the boughs of the elm. Some of the other men follow, a parade of white shirts, some so worn their backsides show through. I call:
—Jemima. Bring your scissors.
Quick as a cat she darts back into the fort and out again with her dark plait flying. She comes to me with the scissors. Flanders is behind her, others also, though Dick remains where he is, flat-faced and thinking his own thoughts. The air is not easy, no one is easy, but here they are.
I kneel. I tell Jemima to cut off the lock of hair, my last, the one the Shawnee leave their warriors on top of their skulls.
One thick snip and the hair falls in a black curve on the ground. I think of Methoataske my wife cutting off the rest so long ago in the icy river at Chillicothe. The women stand some distance off but they watch just as the Shawnee women did.
Martha is there with two of her girls, gulping me with her great eyes. No Ned. Well. I do see Squire with his wife and his knob-kneed boys standing in a small row to one side. I get up and I shake my shorn head and take a breath. They all wait, they listen.
* * *
Build the corner bastions higher at the front of the fort. Finish the two on the back side so we can see them if them come from over the river. Get roofs on them. Cut gunslits in the walls and in the bastion floors where they overhang, do not make the slits too big.
Clear the brush close to the stockade. Cut down more of the trees.
Build out the east end, close it all in and get more of the cattle inside, and any hogs we can catch in the woods. Find something to feed them. Find something to feed us.
Fix the front gate, which has the look of an old woman’s mouth. An old whore’s mouth, I will say it before anyone else can. Your sister is a whore. Your wife is a whore. Your daughter is a whore. I have heard it enough in my life.
Dig a goddamned well, God damn it.
These things I tell them to get to first. I feel myself quite a schoolmaster with a set of slugs to teach, I have to line out every step before they begin. Dick does not like it but he feels the rest listening to me for the time, so he goes along. For ten days I drive them hard, we are hard at it as soon as dawn shows itself. Major Billy thinks on all I say and agrees to it. I know I have him now and I am glad of it, he is a good man. Most respect him if they do not respect me, and so they work. Old Dick cannot argue with work.
My guts go on worrying. How many men have we got? Some fifty, if we count the black men here, and all the older boys who can shoot. I send a few of the young hotheads out scouting, and big Kenton with Nat Henderson’s black man London to Harrodsburg and Logan’s Fort asking for support. They are both quick riders. I watch them go into the afternoon, hoping we will see them again, and the horses, we have none to spare. My breath and my feet are still all wrong, but I work and work.
We set the children free from Madam Elizabeth and her speechifying. I post the younger boys to stand watch in pairs along the river and the fields, they are not to go too far. I have Jemima set the little girls to making bandages, though there is not much cloth to be had. Squire’s small wife Jane does not look wholly well but she says she cannot sit still. She has a few women try their hand at weaving nettles with the underbelly wool of the buffalo skins we have got, perhaps it may work.
I watch, I watch everything, even when I am not on guard duty in a bastion or at a gate. With their mothers the bigger girls keep at the crops and at hauling water from the spring to fill every bucket and pot we have. Even piss pots? unhappy little Kezia Callaway barks at me, and I say, Yes those also. She huffs off through the gate all incredulous to tell her daddy. Colonel Dick is keeping himself to himself, patrolling close to the woods on his fine heavy bay gelding. Perhaps he may shoot something useful, such as his leg.
Each day I watch. I watch until I am half blind with it. But I see nothing, no tracks, no scouts.
By the tenth day we have made some progress, though the bastions are not near done and the stockade is still open at the east end. The men are slowing with the heat, their trust in the work is low. The complaints and the questions grow louder. What is this all in aid of? Why the hurry? We ought to go after them before they can get to us. I did not come out here for this.
What did you come here for? Why did I lead you here, why did I open this place? This I think but I do not say it. I work. The stockade building is very hard. We fell tall pines, then limb them and haul them to the fort by rope and
cow, we have no good oxen left.
I am not strong, I am not as I should be, but I work in the shadow of the wall where I hack my hardest at the log ends with an axe to make points before we heave them upright. When we have another up and steady in the row, I kneel a moment to stop my head swimming.
Squire is beside me. He takes up my axe and chips at the log to finish off its spike, though he looks as weak as I do. I say:
—Not enough days. Well into July already, and the dark comes faster each evening.
—Dark for them too. Less time for travel every day.
—Time is not the same for them.
Squire gives me a queer look as he chops, a pine chip flies at my face like a wasp. I rub at my cheek and say:
—I thank you for that. Get back to your shop, we need guns that can aim just as well.
Amusement visits his face for a moment. I say:
—I have much to thank you for in truth. For burying Jamesie for me. And for Rebecca.
His eyes go dark. He keeps chopping. I say:
—Jamesie was a better axeman than either of us.
He says in his quiet fashion:
—He would have been a good man.
—Yes.
Well. Would have been seems to me the saddest string of words there is. The future that cannot be. The dream of it. Some part of my mind is always dreaming it.
The sun is crossing the top of the elm now, it is always rolling across the sky. I take the axe back and set to work again. The men shout out, near ready for this log to be hoisted into its hole. The point is ready for catching at the belly of anyone who tries to get over the wall. Feeling quite queer and dizzy I stop and I say to Squire:
—I owe you my apologies also. I thought something of you that was not true. I know it was Ned with Rebecca.
Squire stands and takes up the end of a puddle of rope to loop round the log. He says:
—You ought to go and see Ned. Been very sick too, still in bed with ague.
—I ought to.
But I do not go. I shout for the party bringing the next log to hurry themselves, we do not have time, there is no time here.
* * *
The evening is dry and clear and so we work on. I am hacking out a narrow porthole in the new stockade wall when Squire’s boy runs up panting so hard he cannot get a word out. I put my hand on his shoulder, it sticks with the sweat there:
—Moses, what is it?
He swallows air. A tiny bat flies round his head as though it would kiss his cheek. The thin bare skin of its wing brushes his face, he swats at it and tears off running. He looks behind to see if I am following. I do follow as quick as I can go. He runs round the back wall towards the riverfront, where he leaps up onto a stump. His little brother Isaiah is there gawping, and Moses at last breathes out:
—Look.
He watches my face, he knows I see. The shadowed shape of a man across the river, kneeling in the open at the water’s edge. The face of my father Black Fish comes into my sight as faces do out of trees sometimes, out of leaves or streams. Invisible until you go looking.
Who? In the dimming light I see this man’s straight posture and light skin, the one dark lock of hair atop his head as mine was, his parts are hanging, he is quite bare. For a moment I think it is my own self, my past self from before any of this happened, walking naked up out of the river to meet me here again and tell me what to do. I cry out in Shawnee. Keela. You.
The man freezes. I shout for the men on guard duty and in a moment two come at a trot with their guns. Moses and Isaiah have their thin arms about each other now, and Isaiah twists back to look to me.
It is beginning, it is now, we are not ready—
The guards holler for the gate to be shut. Before it is done, Major Billy comes out with his gun cocked and I say:
—Do not shoot, Billy. Not yet.
He calls:
—Who is it?
The man across the water has no gun. He is not quite so tall as Black Fish, he is narrower, so thin he looks unfleshed. Who is he? He staggers into the water with his hands up, then falls flat as if his bones have given him up. I expect no answer from him. But he lifts his head and yells quite bold:
—William Hancock. I am no Indian.
Hancock. My heart gives a great leap and hangs high in my chest, it does not know what to do next. One of my fellow captives, adopted at Old Chillicothe town by the Shawnee who called himself Captain Will, who was kind to Hancock and to me. Though he once told me every man and horse in Kentucky belonged to him and I did not believe it, I did not listen. He told me to go home.
I call:
—Hancock.
He has got himself to his hands and knees, his head is hanging low, but I hear him clear:
—Boone. Ha. So you are here.
Major Billy tells the guards to get the canoe and go over to him. These men toss me a look as they push off the bank into the blackening water. Others have come out the back gate and stand silent along the river. There is only the dip and splash of the paddles as the canoe returns, and the bullying question of Kezia Callaway, who has run away from her ma and got out of the fort: Who is it? Who is it? Colonel Dick pulls her to him and keeps his arm about her. He is watching hard.
The guards have to lift Hancock out of the canoe, and nearly tip him over into the water. He rights himself, he is a skeleton tottering up the bank at me. He stretches his arms high, and says:
—I give myself up. Though Boone owns me. And all of you.
He turns to the rest and he gasps:
—This Boone promised them the fort. Promised everything there is.
Mr. Hancock who arrived here yesterday informs us of British and Indians coming against us to the number of near four hundred, whom I expect here soon. If men can be sent to us it would be of infinite service. We are all in fine spirits, and have good crops growing, and intend to fight hard.
I do not recall promising everything there is. If I did it was only
The goddamned people here do not use their goddamned ears
Please tell my wife Rebecca Boone that I am
Fine spirits!
Four hundred
THIS LETTER I WRITE in my brains first. I lick the ink off the nib and look at the empty paper. There is no sense to it, to any of it.
Four hundred coming.
Some sixty men here, if Kenton and London return from Harrodsburg and Logan’s Fort with more very quick. And one further, if Ned recovers from his sickness. If he does not recover, my Fate will be fixing things for me again, no matter what I want. But I will not think of Ned, living or dead.
Some two dozen women and children.
Numbers race all through my blood. I will write them down and send them to Virginia in hopes their army will be moved to save us, and perhaps first save me from the people here. I wish to write: I only promised the fort to stop the Shawnee attacking it outright and killing everyone, I bought us time and what is better than time? But there is no time now.
I write. I blot the page with ink spots like a rash, but I do not try to beautify it. No time, no time, the lack is all I can think of. I give this letter to young Alexander Montgomery, the brash copper-headed fellow, I tell him to ride hard with it and get back as fast as fast. Off he goes into the dusty sunrise without thinking to argue with adventure, or with me.
Colonel Dick has sat in talk with Hancock all night. I see him come out into the morning and hand his own letter to another young man who he sends off into the morning on his own best mare. I do not care what he has to say about me in his lengthy fashion. Daniel Boone saith this and William Hancock saith the other and Daniel Boone ought to be hanged drawn and quartered. I have heard enough of it from Flanders, who Dick had sit listening with Billy Smith and others. Hancock told them the Shawnee plan is to offer us the king’s flag again, and if we do not want it, they will batter down our fort with their swivel guns from Detroit. I am tempted to laugh out, I say:
—Artillery just for us?
How will they get swivel guns through this wilderness?
Flanders looks as though he has been slapped. He says:
—They will live on our stock and crops till they starve us out, Hancock said so. He heard all their talk at their big council.
—Well Flanders. I did tell you they were coming. Now we know it will be soon.
He nods his birdlike head and sets his lean jaw. I go on:
—Did Hancock say anything more?
—About what?
—About me.
Flanders looks off to see who is passing at the cracked window. Belief in me is washing away. I rap his forehead with my knuckle, he pulls himself up tall and leaves my cabin. The cat comes in and pisses in a corner before swishing out again with its tail up like a whiff of smoke.
* * *
Hancock’s wife Molly opens her door, she is all surprise, but she is a short round woman with a nose too small, and always has a look of surprise about her. Perhaps it is God she is surprised by and what He has failed to do here. Her husband often used to lead the Baptists among us in their prayers by the river. I have seen no praying since I returned.
—Mr. Boone? Captain?
Molly’s fingers twitch about her cap. She does not know what to call me. In truth I do not know what to call myself. I say:
—May I come in?
She twitches further and sticks out her teeth but she says I may, and so I do with my poor guard Flanders at my back. A pot sits above the fire, it smells of a bone boiling. I say:
—For the starving invalid. I know how he feels.
She smiles and then drops her smile quick as I take up a bowl and fill it. I carry it to the bed where Hancock lies pale and flat as an old book left open. Well well, I can read.
—Hancock. William.
He opens his lids and looks about him as if he thinks he has awakened in Heaven at last. His eyes fog over quick enough when they settle on me. I say:
—Eat this, it will help you. Then we will talk.
He sits up in his odd springing fashion, the bed shakes and the bowl slops. He says:
