by Alix Hawley
I cannot sleep after Will comes to take Lizzy home to her poor mother. I sit up rocking by the empty hearth late in the night. My back aches, and the room is hot and stale, but I do not move. When the door creaks open, I stay in the chair. Daniel steps over the threshold slowly and lifts the light. He is pale and shaking, and smells of rum. At once he says:
—I knew—another child. By that name. Eliza. I knew her. She had reddish hair, lighter than the others in the town. I do not know where she is now. I do not know if they sent her away because of me, I do not know if she is alive—
Words tumble from him. I do not wish to hear of his other life, any of his stories. I say:
—Your granddaughter’s name is Elizabeth.
—I know it. I know it. I found her, did I not? She is all right.
He walks in a tight circle. I say:
—You did not tell us where you were this time.
He stops and looks at me a moment, then he says:
—Oh, I checked my old trapline. I saw your brothers.
—What do you want with them? You have never liked any of them.
He shrugs. He is as restless as an ant, pacing the room.
—Set down the light. What is troubling you, Daniel? You have been like this since you came back. You are white as a ghost now. He bursts out:
—Do not talk of ghosts! They have left me, they do not come when I want them.
—What do you mean?
He swings round to look at me, breathing rum into my face and holding the lamp to it:
—I have to go back. I cannot let them murder me.
—What—murder you? Ghosts? Indians, more likely.
—No. No. Never the Shawnee.
—Who, then? Dick Callaway at the fort? Your friend William Hill will always speak for you, even if no one else will.
Daniel moans as if sick:
—No, no, no. Hill is gone.
—Gone where?
—I do not know. Detroit. Dead, most likely. Gone. I do not feel him about me anymore, he is gone.
—Detroit. Daniel, I cannot understand you.
He sinks onto his heels before my chair, setting down the light and hanging onto my hand:
—The Shawnee took me there to bargain. The British tried to buy me. My Shawnee father would not sell me. He loved me, I loved him. We tried to stop what was coming, the terrible fighting, I did not tell you how bad.
—Daniel, why—
—There was meant to be help, the Virginia militia was meant to come sooner. And then, then, the people at the fort wanted to imprison me. After all I did to help. I cannot be there, but I cannot be here.
—I do not know what you mean.
—I killed a man. I am afraid I did. A man I knew, Pompey, a black man the Shawnee had. It could have been my shot that killed him. He was right, I ought to have bought him, if they would have let me. I keep waiting for him.
He begins to shake harder and gives a dry coughing sob before he steadies himself with his hands on my knee. I do not know what more to say to him. His backbone almost rattles with his shaking. It hurts me to watch. As if he were as little as Jesse, I reach for his shoulders and I tell him:
—We are safe here. The house is new. No ghosts. It was a fair place to build, you were right about that.
He laughs, looking down at the floorboard and rapping on it three times. He says:
—It is all right here, but not enough.
—It is enough. You have made a good home.
—Do you like it? Have I made you happy? It is not enough.
—It is enough.
His fingers grip my knee. I look at his hand, a white scar across its back, and I touch it and say:
—Your poor old ma told me once that you were born hands-first. Reaching for some other place already.
He looks up at me. His eyes are wet, and one has a small spot of blood in the white. He kisses my knee, my palm. His beard pricks at my skin. When he looks up his face is sweetened, softened, like Neddy’s.
I loved his body once. When we were married and very young. His boyish thinness, the narrow patch of black hair on his chest, the slope of his backbone. His thicker legs.
He touches me, his hands asking. I do not stop them. It is a strange relief not to do so, as though we have fallen back in time and we are the way we were when young. No children, Jamesie never even born. Perhaps that would have been better.
Daniel calls me his witch, in his old way. If we could go back, he says.
On the floor before the dry bare hearth we lie. He is thin still, the skin slightly loose round his waist, the hair down his stomach black still. He is scarred everywhere, one quite fresh on his shoulder, another a swollen lump on his back. It pains me to feel his skin come to this. The rum on his breath, the same old taste of his mouth beneath that. Daniel. I pull my head back. He does not try to kiss me again. He only strokes my arms. Above me his face is sweet still, with its deep sad channels. I line them out with my finger. Then I keep my eyes shut.
* * *
Over the next weeks he comes and goes from the house again several times. He does as he pleases, restless but quieter in himself, decided somehow. I am easier watching him. The air stays calm, hardly a breeze through August.
I am tired down to my bones. Not even harvest yet, and the girls have to help me more and more. In September I know it, I know it for certain, what I have been unable to let myself believe, what cannot be possible. He has what he wants. A fresh life. I am pregnant.
My other life flies off easily as a bird—
Autumn 1779
The Author gives some account of himself and family. His first inducements to travel. He is shipwrecked, and swims for his life. Gets safe on shore in the country of Lilliput, is made a prisoner, and carried up the country.
THE WORDS from Gulliver’s book roll about in my head when I lead the packed horse through one of the narrower passes. We are going up the country too but I am no prisoner now. I never will be again. I am some yards out in front of the rest. We are not quick, with so many of us. But I am easy, I know the way. I tell the story of Gulliver to myself as I used to tell it to the children.
The Clinch River is low, and we get all the animals and children across easy. Into Powell’s Valley with its bristling forest. Not far from where you died, Jamesie. Leaves are spinning down from the maples and birches into the creeks now, as they were when you were killed.
We will not pass close to your grave this time. I will not say so to Rebecca. She is all right, riding at the back with her brothers, who are game to scout out claims farther over the Kentucky River from the fort, on better land I know, and make money to add to their heaps of it. I talked and talked with them in Carolina until they agreed to come. I told them they could turn round again if they didn’t like it. You can always go back.
I have promised my wife a new thick-walled house, with as big a fence as she likes. There are more of us, fresh people, a hundred. It will be better.
My horse stumbles and brays at a rockfall. It stiffens its legs as if it wishes to go no farther back towards Kentucky. See Colonel Dick’s prize bay gelding gaping up twist-necked out of the terrible well after the siege, where it fell or chose to hide itself during the last Hell of shots and fire before the rain set in. The big Dutch well-digger Tice Prock laughing like a crow. Dick muttering about how he should never have had the horse’s balls off, it had been too meek for this place.
Old Dick ought to have had his own balls off. But once the quiet settled and we knew the Shawnee were truly gone, his swelled up instead. He stalked about counting all that had gone wrong, making a tally. Well by my count and the look of the drag-marks on the ground, they had more than thirty dead. We had only Bundrin and London. Nat Henderson muttered about suing someone for the loss of his good black man. But Hancock and his glowing Baptists said it was all a miracle, having changed their minds about the end of the world. Neddy prayed with them. My head seemed set on too tight, with too much stuffed in
it.
The animals never ceased moaning, even when we were able to scrape up some meadow grass and stalks for them. The children kept hearing things, Dick’s Kezia bawled day and night about the sound of shots that were not there but were just going to start, she knew it. London’s little Jacky saw me once as I passed Uncle Monk’s door, and flew back into the dark.
Big Simon Kenton and Alexander Montgomery in his fine beaded shirt came riding in two days after the siege, not scalped at all. The pair of them had kept to the forest after their trip back to the empty Paint Creek town, knowing the Shawnee were about. When they decided it was safe to journey back to the fort, they heard our screaming and saw the smoke from miles away over the river. They made instead for Harrodsburg to tell them we were all lost. They had come back to bury us.
Seeing me outside the gate, big-boned Kenton rubbed his face with his hat and said, I never heard such awful hollering in my life. We were sure you were all dead. I said, And how do you know we are not ghosts? To which Old Dick said, And how do you know it, Captain Boone?
I ought to have seen what he had in his mind by the composed way he said it, by the way his girls never looked at me when I passed.
I sent the children to gather bullets, to get them used to being outside the walls again. Ned’s young Sarah showed me her fingers with the dull metal shine on them. She said it would not wash off, she thought it might never do so. She pressed them onto my forearm to try to mark me, but I did not mark.
A small Virginia militia turned up much too late. All we had for them to do was help rebuild the wrecked parts of the fort. Until Dick came out with his plan to have me court-martialled for giving us up to the Indians, for putting us all in danger of murder over and over again. For playing double all my life here.
He wrote to Logan’s Fort and got silent black-headed Lieutenant Ben Logan on his side, and they decided to try me there before him and the other officers. Coming to announce this to me, Dick said he took no pleasure in doing his duty, but I saw his grimness was cut through with joy. He had been waiting very long to see me a prisoner of the right sort.
They took my gun and tied my hands to my saddle horn, I laughed when they did it. A group of us rode the twenty miles to Logan’s Station, southwest along the Kentucky River. Jemima and Flanders kept to the rear, they did not talk to me. I pulled up my horse for a minute when I saw the crab orchard I found my first time in Kentucky. In blossom then, in paradise. Now grey and unbreathing. Well.
Colonel Dick gave my horse a kick and on we went. Logan’s Fort had a defiant squat look, set in its pickets. Lieutenant Logan told us the Shawnee had been about doing mischief but could not do much of it. He showed us very proud how he had built a long covered ditch from the spring to the fort. For a time we all stood about listening to the slow glugging of the water and acting as though my wrists were not bound. I thought to tell Logan how easy his ditch would be to blow up or poison with a rotten carcass, but I did not.
The court sat outside though the air was cold. Ben Logan has a nephew who was one of the salt boilers taken prisoner with me, I remembered it when I saw Logan’s face shift beneath his black brow as Dick announced me formally. The witnesses were marched up: Kenton was told to tell the jury about our Paint Creek trip. Was it a stupid time to leave the fort? Yes it was. Was anything of value taken at the town? Only a scalp, Kenton mumbled round his big teeth. Then Hancock stood and talked long and preacherly of my ways at Old Chillicothe, my loving friendship with my Indian father and others. He said he had prayed and prayed for me, but now was the time for truth. And Ned had to say he overheard me during the siege talking to someone outside the walls about a wife. A Shawnee wife? Yes. And perhaps a child. Neddy looked out with his mild face, innocent as a pat of soap.
He did everything backward, everything wrong, he ought to be broken of his commission! So Colonel Dick could not stop himself from yelling. Then I got up. I said I had all along been using a strategem to fool the enemy and keep us safe. That is all I had ever done. I sat myself down on the ground, the chill of it came up through my backside. I was tired of saying so, they were tired of hearing it.
White-headed Major Billy stared me up and down as if he were ciphering. Dick then strode forward and asked that Jemima tell of anything I had said to her in private, but I got back up and said very quiet they would have to kill me first. Old Dick’s face was a fiery triumph. But Logan said he would not call up Jemima. My daughter stood at the rear with Flanders, she watched and held herself with her arms crossed about her. I know she was still seeing me too close to Martha in my cabin at the fort.
There is an easy trail to the falls of the Ohio from Logan’s, as I know. I could have ridden off on it once Logan and his jury decided there was no proof of my having done any wilful wrong, in spite of Old Dick and Hancock and others. No proof of it. They made sure to put plenty of weight on that word. Logan is a careful man. Privately to me he said he was giving me this chance, but he wondered where his nephew was now.
Logan, I know I am in your debt. You and the jury watched me go back to my horse. I have never seen Old Dick in such a cold rage but he believes in order, he listened to your rules.
I could have ridden straight for Old Chillicothe. But I did not. I turned for Carolina.
And now I am here walking back again, past my son’s hidden grave to the east. I do not stop to say so to Rebecca or the others. I do not say I have seen inside the grave. I do not tell them anything. I am so sore thinking of all that has happened since that day, Jamesie, my tongue dries up and takes on a grim taste. I know I will never talk of it again. It will go well this time, I know it with all my guts, which I trust as they are mine.
* * *
And here it is, all you have to do: plant a crop of corn. Build any sort of pigsty. Call it a cabin and have acres, all yours. Cheap! Cheap! Sound like a chicken saying so.
I did just that on a flat northwest of the fort some time ago, over the Kentucky River where a few buffalo roads meet. So it is mine. Far enough from the fort, which is no place at all. We will start fresh there. It is what we will do.
Rebecca’s half brothers and their families and blacks, a couple of her Bryan uncles, some cousins of mine are all with us. The Bryans make noise about loyalty to the old king, and think they will be safe to say so in the new territory, which might go back to English rule yet if the fight goes that way. I do not care what they believe, so long as they are here.
Early snow begins before we are out of the mountains and on the flat of the Warrior’s Path. But it is light drifting stuff only, and does not sit thick on the ground. There is plenty of grass for the livestock, the children are all right. When we camp each night they toast corncobs at the fires and spin the turkeys on the spits the women hang up over the flames. My son Israel gets plenty of those, he hardly has to go off the trail to find one perched in a tree. I tell him they like the red in his hair. This makes our young Miss Polly laugh and make gobbling noises and say that animals love Israel, and Israel grins and says he loves them too, well-cooked in his belly. His grin is so much like my dead brother’s, who was Israel also. Well the two of you would have liked to know each other.
We keep moving each day, though we are very slow. No one is about, I feel it. Too late in the year for war parties. Still my eyes seem to jump out of my skull if I see any movement, or even before I see it. Without quite wanting to I am looking out for you, my father. What my eyes wish for is your soft footprint, your sign, a thin sharp blaze raked into bark where only I will see. Your knife dropped in the snow to point me the way you have gone. Your face waiting. And some way behind you in the trees, more faces, Methoataske’s and young Eliza’s.
* * *
We see no one, no sign, the rest of the way down into Kentucky. It is December and cool when we reach the edge of the meadow beyond the fields outside the fort, close enough to see the walls we put up, gone wet grey now. I stop us at the tree line, I will not go any closer. I look over towards the great elm o
n the flat, it is still standing, no leaves on it now. Bile burns a quick trail up into my mouth. This was where my father stood watching the fort and hoping we might make peace.
I send my son Israel out across the empty fields towards the walls. He makes a white flag of a shirt for a joke, and though I tell him there is no need for it, I am glad he goes waving it. He leaves dark prints in the thin skin of snow. Now he is inside and we sit waiting.
I do not go to Rebecca. She has ridden much of the way with Lizzy before her in the saddle, keeping close to the Bryans. They have told her it will be good to get fresh land, that there is more we can all have. When I do look at her I see tiredness on her face, the tiny channels in the corners of her eyes. Her belly is swollen now. She does not look much at me, she acts again as though I am dead or might be so any minute. She does not like to touch me, perhaps in case her hand goes straight through me. But Rebecca, it will be all right.
My legs wish to get me across the Kentucky River and onto my own land away from this dreadful place. I do not look at where the peach orchard was, at where we had our talks. It is burnt now and covered in snow at any rate. I do not look at the place where Pompey’s body lay half bare and wrestled over by pigs. If I saw a pig I would shoot it.
One of the children howls back in the trees, his ma hushes him quick, but the noise makes me think of the children during the battle. I find I am watching the ramparts as if my own self will appear, waiting for the next attack all unknowing what to do. This makes me feel sick all through. And no one is on the ramparts now.
Israel comes back out, followed by Squire’s thin shape, and Ned’s. They stand in a knot close to the fort wall and so I get up, I go forward with my gun on my shoulder. Over the field I yell:
—Tell Dick he has no need to come out! Tell all the rest. We will be across the river, away from here. Tell them.
They have started towards me when someone bursts round the corner of the walls at a run. Jemima. She bolts across the white field with her head down and her arms tight to her chest. I go to meet her, but seeing me, she halts some feet away. She is thin, her face too pointed, she holds a bundle against her body. The memory of old anger falls over her eyes as she stares. She says nothing. I do not know what I can say. I try a laugh, I say:
