My Name Is a Knife

by Alix Hawley

  There must be another horse, they are running and tumbling all over the green hill and in the river among the men and bodies. My throat is in rags with the smoke. I cannot stop coughing and spitting. I bend and turn, I am too long in turning.

  I do not see Israel. I do not see Neddy’s grey. Has my boy gone? I stumble coughing back to the rock where he was. The smoke is less here but still I step on a man as I go, my foot crushes the breath out of someone. I keep running.

  I see him. Down in the grass on his back, his head pointed down the slope, the grey’s reins snarled round his fist and its head yanked downward near his. He is shot. Just below the neck, your poor sore neck, my boy. Your arms are thrown out, your mouth is slackened and bloodied, your blood runs in threads from it. Your eyes have the smallest life in their black pupils, it is trying to surface.

  —Israel, Israel. Get up.

  But he cannot get up. The horse tries to rear as I bend, the heat of my boy’s hand is still in my palm. I take his hand again, I untangle the reins from it, I pull at his arm, his neck snaps back and pours a creek of blood down his shirt. I cannot hurt you this way, Israel, how can I move you?

  I crouch, breathing close to your face, I think to roll you to the river, to float you someplace where I can fix you. The horse blows warm. There is still breath here. But a shower of powder comes at me on the wind. Again the smell of the fort, all that has burned.

  We make our trades.

  Your words, Black Fish. Were they your last ones? Were you thinking of me when you died? Were you thinking of this?

  The powder strikes my eyes. And into them comes another face, another knife, blurred black and running down the hill towards me with a howl. It cannot be how things will go, it cannot be that all has turned into this knife and this howling coming for me forever.

  My boy bleeds round us both. Israel, I cannot see you dead. I take the grey horse.

  August 1782

  SOMETHING I HAVE HEARD from one of the old Welshmen who turned up here seeking land—they are full of stories, they never stop talking.

  He said that the Indians near the Ohio falls are Madoc’s people. This is why some of them are fair, and their language is like Welsh. They call themselves Shawnee, which has a Welsh sound. Madoc left them hundreds of years ago, and one can say what became of him. When I asked why he would have come here, the old man shrugged and pushed his pipe into the hole in his teeth.

  Daniel once talked of a little girl he knew among them—Eliza, he said, with fairer hair than the rest. He told me nothing more about her, and I did not ask. I did not want to know anything about that life.

  But perhaps not knowing is worse. No one tells me my second son is dead. Daniel does not tell me. But Israel does not come back with him, and I know. How could I not know it.

  When Daniel rides up alone on Neddy’s grey horse.

  And the horse looks perfectly well. It is not tired in the least. It stands grazing and looking round at the evening as if it has never witnessed any dreadful thing. There is another old story of a boy who turns into a beautiful horse and gallops off free. Sweet horse, my child on its back, and Neddy too, once. Neddy alone in the earth. Where is my son’s body?

  * * *

  The day after their battle is dry and hot even very early. Before the sun is fully up, I set out to ride to the crossing at the Blue Licks. I have not said a word to Daniel, who has been outside somewhere all night. I take the grey horse, with a shovel and sheets bundled on the saddle behind me. I am the first there.

  It is hotter already, even in the trees, and very hot once I am finally there. I slide down from Neddy’s horse and walk across the river to wet my skirts.

  The first bodies lie on the banks, some partly in the water. More are on the grass below the hillside, and more still on the hill. Dozens of them. They do not look like Indians. They do not look like anyone.

  I walk everywhere, beginning on the flat beside the water and going up on the grassy slope. It is a beautiful place, green as the lawn I have often thought of. My legs dry quickly as the day heats further. I take off my damp shoes. I keep looking.

  The men come later. They have shovels as well. I see Polly running through the river with her arms crossed over her chest, crying. I know Daniel has brought her. He comes over the water slowly. He keeps near me, but not too near. I see him turning over some of the bodies to see their faces. They are swollen—dark.

  Most of the scalps are taken, and flies are everywhere. The smell is of hair and dry grass, with rot beginning already. I hold my cap over my nose and mouth, and I look at each one. But I do not see my son. Or I do not know him. There is no way of knowing. The heat has changed them.

  All day the men work at digging graves, which ends up as one great grave. Polly sits wailing over it. In the evening, dark clouds heap up towards the east, and there is a thunderstorm far away. We do not hear the thunder, but I see the heat lightning. Daniel sits at the riverside as though waiting for someone else, and I walk the flat and the hill again.

  Israel, I am not ready to tell—

  NEVER TALK to me of it again, Daniel—it is the only way I can go on. When I tell him so, he rides off without a word.

  He often goes back to that place. He does not say, but I know it is where he goes nearly every day. He comes back in the night covered in dirt, his shirt blackened, with tears pouring from his eyes. Polly and Jemima sit up with him outside. I hear Martha’s voice more than once. She has always been the sort to flock to sadness. Widowhood suits her, as though she has been waiting all her life for it. They talk on and on. I do not care to know what they talk of.

  Daniel stays alive somehow, though he grows thinner and thinner. He lives on their love of him, perhaps.

  I do not know how I am alive. But the children—the others—go on growing, needing more and more. My Morgan is bursting out of his shirts, leaving none to hand down to Jesse, ten years old already, and Nathan looks set to be an even bigger child than his brothers. The girls need hems let down. I make shirts and underclothes. I make bread, pies, barrels of butter and cream, wheels of cheese, salt pork and buffalo jerk, and cider, though we have only wild crabapples, nothing sweeter. When food is eaten, I make more.

  I cannot sleep—I am afraid I will see Israel as a baby or a little boy, reaching up from his bed with one eye stuck shut from sleep, smiling at me, calling himself Dis as he was only able to say at first.

  I walk into the woods before sunrise, where I fill my apron with so many nuts that my back hurts when I carry them back to the cabin. I pull honeycombs out of bee trees, even when my arms and face are stung. I catch fish in the dark with a net, and once between my hands.

  I cannot bear spaces on the shelves or in the loft. I count jars, crocks, barrels, cobs.

  I lose no mothers and no babies. There are several births at the station, and more coming. My daughter Jemima’s, for one. When it comes, it is a long boy with a broad forehead. She is badly torn and frightened, and can hardly stand or pass her water for weeks. I hope she will be spared any others after this, but she tells me too soon that she is beginning another. I have to stop myself from weeping—I am so angry. I do not know how I can be so full of anger without it choking me to death. But I do not die.

  A few of the cows are birthing calves still, though the season is wrong. The autumn is hot, even into November. Nothing is right, although Squire says the war is over. The war with the British, that is. They will not fight us anymore with their Indian friends, they have abandoned the country to us.

  One morning Daniel gets up from bed even before I do. He goes outside calling for Flanders, Squire, and others, and they ride off upriver. When they return days later, Daniel is filthy and shivering, filled with a queer strength. He says they burned all the Indian towns and fields they found. This was the only thing to be done, this is the end of all, he roars before he has dismounted. He leads the rest in cheering. Late that night I ask him if he found what he wanted to. What I wanted him to. The Cherokee Jim
. He does not answer. He has drunk too much and cannot wake up.

  Not long afterwards, when the snow has settled in, the watch yells early in the morning. Riders are coming from the east. We are all up at once. White men, black horses, cries Squire’s son Moses on the wall. The children ask if they may look, and I tell them to go. Jesse comes running back to me:

  —Come and look, Ma. They have ropes and chains.

  I do look. A long surveying chain swings from a tall man’s belt. Little Nathan crows to see it catching the cold light. Pulling up his heavy horse, the man smiles and waves to the baby. They have come from Virginia, he tells us, holding up a sheaf of papers with a great red seal. Daniel keeps them at the gate, and does not invite them in.

  The land is not ours after all, it turns out. The claims were all done wrongly. They tell us they are sorry. The tall man holds out the papers, which Daniel snatches. Looking at them, turning pages over, his face cracks open. He says: But—

  Then he sinks onto his heels with his head in his hands. He tries again to speak:

  —What, not a single acre?

  His old injured ankle rolls, and he tips to one side.

  I cannot watch. I go to the cabin with Nathan heavy on my hip. Before I am inside, I hear Daniel’s voice, loud again. He is telling the officers we will move west, towards the Ohio. Towards the Shawnee land, which he knows. I know all of it, he says. We will move this whole place. His voice is louder and louder, desperation holding it up.

  When he comes indoors, his face has hardened, as if it has turned to marble—as if it will not change again.

  * * *

  We stay the winter. Daniel vanishes on a long-hunt, refusing to take anyone with him. I smoke the meat the boys bring in, and pack some with snow in barrels so there is always plenty. I think all the time of leaving. Perhaps the yellow house in Carolina is empty and quiet, waiting for us to come back, as though none of this happened. I can fill it with food, plant the fields and garden. The soil is good there.

  Polly crashes into the cabin, bringing snow and damp, and demanding with her noise that everyone look.

  —Polly, if you are unable to contain yourself, go and pick nettles.

  —I cannot do anything, I cannot do anything.

  She is always weeping, wiping her eyes and mouth on her apron and sleeves. She has taken the weeping over from Daniel. I cannot bear it.

  —Go and rock the baby for Jemima then. Peel onions. Do something with yourself. There is plenty to do if you open your eyes.

  —My eyes do not work anymore, Ma, they are too unhappy.

  Before I can stop myself, I am shaking her:

  —You have no right. You have no—

  I nearly say children.

  She knows it. She bursts into loud tears without taking her gaze from mine, weeping for what she has imagined for herself and lost: a real mother and father, my beautiful son for a husband, children. And she is young still. I try to remember it. When I was the age she is—but I do not wish to remember.

  I let her go, and say:

  —Polly, I am sorry. There is no help for some things. Work will ease you.

  She runs outside before I have to think of anything else to say, before she can shout my son’s name, or Daniel’s, or anyone else’s. I send Reba after her. My anxious Levina gets up from her thread winding and says:

  —Ma, what if the Virginia officers come back while Daddy is gone? Will they make us leave?

  She takes my arm. Holding in a sigh, I tell her:

  —I cannot see the future, sweet.

  Becky, brushing the table, squints at her crumb-covered palm and says:

  —I wish you could read hands. Daddy said his daddy could, but he never looked at mine.

  —If I could—

  But I do not finish this thought. I do not know how to finish it.

  * * *

  Daniel returns with a grey beard and a heap of furs, salt and meat, as wild as though he has a chest full of treasure. He lays it all at the door, full of his peculiar force. No tears now. His skin is dried out, as if his tears have tanned it.

  When he sits a moment to let the children see him, he sets his hands on his knees and says he has found us our new home, and we are going. Very quickly he has the children packing up, taking apart the beds and penning in whatever hogs they can catch. He does not ask me—I do not say anything.

  I bend my thoughts into the shape of a lawn. There may be one somewhere. Though the greenness brings to mind the battlefield, the grass growing over the bodies.

  With Susy and Jemima and their families, we leave the station on a spring morning. The last I remember of it is Polly without shoes in the empty cabin. She has decided to stay behind with Martha, near to the resting places of the bodies they loved.

  How can you leave them alone?

  How can you leave us—How can you leave—

  I will not leave my children and grandchildren, and I will not stay here. Polly has found her kind. She and Martha stand in their doorways watching us go. Squire will look out for them. He will not move Jane again. Daniel waves his arm high, then rides on ahead. When I look back, Polly and Martha remain where they were. Daniel is beyond sight. He left Neddy’s grey horse.

  He takes us upriver into the woods. We have to pass close to the Blue Licks, though he does not take us across the water there, but farther upstream. Then we go along a wide buffalo road beaten through miles of meadows. He will not say where we are going, though he keeps asking us to see how beautiful it is. See! The grass is coming up a pale green, nearly blue, rippling like a stream. The older boys ride at the front with him, and he tells them about the first time he saw buffalo in Kentucky, how fat they were from the good grass here, how they fairly begged to be shot. He sits easily in the saddle, his voice warming. I pull my shawl down to get the sun on my head, but I am not warm.

  After days of riding and running with no buffalo to look at or shoot, the youngest children begin to complain, but Daniel says:

  —Do not be tired yet! Look, here we are.

  He turns his horse to face us. The road has ended at the Ohio River, at a narrows, where the banks are chalky. There is a tumbledown wharf and a blockhouse with a great hole in it. I say:

  —And where is here?

  —Home.

  The water is foamy grey, rising with the melt. It sends a bilious taste up into my throat.

  —There is nothing—

  —There will be. One day a beautiful town, a city, you will see. The most beautiful.

  —Will I?

  —Will I, Daddy?

  Jesse asks him, brushing his hair from his face to look around, and Daniel says of course he will. You will be your daddy’s eyes when he is gone.

  For now home is an old boat on the white bank at this place he calls Limestone. Will and Flanders set to putting up cabins along a rail fence, and Daniel and the older boys make a square stone foundation facing the river. For a trading post, a tavern, he says, with sweat dampening his head. For you, little girl.

  I do not believe it. But he does, and his belief makes a truth of it. His happiness is so convincing, like a gift in a shining box. I can see how others see him. I can see how I once saw him, when I was young.

  We can sell to people going west. There are enough of them coming through.

  We can buy skins and whiskey from the backwoods sorts. Ship them up to Pittsburgh. Look, it is a perfect landing place.

  I am afraid he is wrong. But he is right, more than right. People do come along to buy flour and salt, traps and shot, and to sell their corn whiskey and apple cider. Ginseng is the next thing, one of the rough old back-country men says, handing over a curly root. Make a man of you, he says, thrusting it up and down between his thighs with a grin. Daniel adds this to his belief. I hear him telling some of the other travellers that ginseng is the way to make good money.

  But nobody has money. It is all trade. Venison for powder, a few pelts for a barrel of meal. A bundle of that hairy ginseng for a f
ew nights’ lodging. Will tries to help Daniel with his accounts, keep a correct record in straight lines, but Daniel only laughs and says he knows himself and Will is better at business than he will ever be. And he goes on trading and writing crooked columns in his book, and forgetting.

  By summer, the tavern is busy every day. He buys a black woman, Easter, from a traveller. He beams when he tells me he has done it for me, as if he has settled one of his accounts for good. Easter has many opinions and is fond of telling them, but she is a hard worker and Nathan loves her ringing voice.

  All the settlers coming through know Boone’s, and Boone. They come to hear him talk of Kentucky, to ask him the best ways to go, the best land to claim. If I am not brewing ale, I am serving or cleaning the bedrooms with Easter. My body is glad for the work. It lets me fall asleep for a few hours unbroken, with no sight of my lost boy in my dreams. This is an open place. We can see everyone who comes.

  A pink-skinned boy without a hat walks up out of the grassland on his own one afternoon. Where is his family? Lost, dead. This is all he is able to say for himself. He has a round baby’s face. I give him a plate of soup, and Daniel says well well, he can stay here. He will be our boy now. He is happy to announce his loving generosity to the tavern, and the boy, Isaac, is eager to attach himself. He follows Daniel everywhere, doing all he is told.

  Will gives us another young black girl, Luce, as part of a payment for some land to build a warehouse on. She is very young but she has a little child, Sammy, who trails around after her. She is a good worker too, and calm with the children. In the mornings I send her out with my young Nathan to help Jemima with her little ones. They are always in and out of the cool river like their mother, who is soon to have another baby, but cannot stop wading with her skirts hiked up under her growing belly. I do not bother trying to tell her to keep out of the heat.