Michener, James A. (56 page)

'You seem to forget,' another expert said, 'that he was killed not

inside the stand, but outside,' and this evoked such heated discussion that the owners were summoned: 'Was Lewis killed in here or out there?'

'Out there,' a woman said, irritated by the constant bickering over this ancient crime. 'You know that my uncle was tried in court, all legal like, and not a word was proved agin' him. Clean as a baby's breath."

When the owners were back at work in their part of the house, one man said firmly: 'My uncle knowed the coroner, and the coroner said: "Meriwether Lewis was killed inside the house, because the back of his head was blowed off and his throat was cut."

Young Otto was repelled by this talk of murder, rejecting it as one more aspect of the rowdy life he did not wish to lead, and he was about to go outside and play with Betsy when the innkeeper said sternly: 'Time for bed!' But when Otto started to call Betsy inside to sleep with him, one of the men growled: 'We don't allow no damned fleabags in here,' so Otto and Betsy, curled together, slept on the porch.

In the morning they had covered about a quarter of a mile when Otto let out a yell. Still unaccustomed to wearing a hat, he had left his at Grinder's, in the sleeping room, with that passel of dangerous men, so without waiting for his father, he and Betsy dashed back and burst into the stand: 'Forgot my hat.' It was on the floor beside a Virginia man, and when Otto reached for it, the man lifted it and found it suspiciously heavy. Hefting it quietly in his left hand so that others could not see, he guessed the cause of its weight.

He made no comment, but before turning the hat over to Otto he accompanied the boy to the porch, where he said in very low tones: 'Excellent idea, but you would be prudent if you kept it close to you.' And he bowed as if delivering a legal opinion to a fellow citizen.

It was not easy walking the Trace. When rains persisted, freshets formed, and what had been easily negotiable gullies became roaring torrents. Then the travelers would have to camp for three or four idle days until the rains and the rivers subsided. Six men might be waiting on the south bank, heading for Nashville, and three on the north, destined for Natchez, and they would call back and forth, but they could not cross. Each year some impatient souls would try, and their bodies would be found far downstream, if found at all.

Now, in the late summer of 1829, the Macnabs with their dog Betsy and their thirty cows were pinned down on the Natchez

Trace by a rampaging stream, and it was in this frustrating but not dangerous position that they met their second Kaintuck. He was a huge man, well over six feet, with bright red hair and massive shoulders; he was traveling alone and seemed indifferent to danger, for even though it must have been obvious that he was coming home carrying the profit from his trip, bandits had learned not to molest the Kaintucks, who observed one governing rule: if'n he makes one suspicious move, shoot him.'

This Kaintuck, bearded, scowling and irritable, was on his way north to pick up another boat in Cincinnati or Pittsburgh, and the impassable flood infuriated him.

'What the hell you doin' with them cattle?' were the first words he hurled across the treacherous stream.

'Taking them to Texas,' Finlay shouted back.

'You're a goddamned fool to try it.' That ended that conversation, for Finlay had no desire to defend his operation to a stranger. But as night was settling, the Kaintuck bellowed: 'What's the name of your dog, son?'

'Betsy.'

That's a damned good name and she looks to be a damned good dog.'

'She is. She helps us.'

'I'll wager you need her, with all them cows.'

'We couldn't move without her.'

'I'll bet you're a big help, too.'

i try to be.'

That was the beginning of Otto Macnab's fascination with the Kaintuck. During the two tedious days that followed, with the Macnabs only about eighteen feet from the huge man, Otto and he conversed on many subjects.

'Study this stream, son. Looks like a man could jump acrost it, and they say they's a man in Natchez that could. Big nigger with legs like oak trees. But don't never try it, son. Because one slip and they pick your bones up ten miles downstream.'

'Where do you live?' Otto's high voice shouted across the leaping wavelets.

'Goddamnedest place you ever seen. A real hog wallow.'

'Why are you going there?'

'Because it's home.'

'That sounds dumb.'

it is dumb, but it's home.'

'How's your fire?'

'A fire's always in trouble. With wet sticks, particular.'

'Ours is all right.'

'That's because you ain't dumb, and I am.'

The two talked as if they were equals, which in a way they were, for the big man had ended his education at the level Otto was beginning his, and the more they talked the more they liked each other. The Kaintuck shouted that he'd had a wife, and a pretty good one, but she had died in childbirth: 'You know what that means, son?'

Otto may have been wise beyond his years, but there were certain important things he did not know, and now he faced one of them. Biting his lip and staring at the Kaintuck, he said: 'I think so.'

'Well, ask your father.'

'You tell me.'

'That ain't my prerogative.'

'What's a prerogative?'

'Right, son. Some things is right, some ain't. Ask your father.'

When Otto did he received a totally evasive answer, and it occurred to him that the Kaintuck would not have answered that way, but he sensed that he was caught in a mystery that was not going to be unraveled there by the pounding flood.

In late afternoon of the third day it became apparent that the flood was going to subside during the night and that passage would then be possible, but before it got dark the Kaintuck launched one more conversation.

'What's your name, mister?'

'Macnab, Finlay—and the boy's Otto.'

'That's Scottish, no?'

'You're the first person I've met who didn't call me Scotch.' No comment. 'What's your name?'

'Zave.'

'Zave!' Otto cried. 'What kind of name is that?'

'Best in the world. Named after one of the great saints. Francis Xavier.'

A hush fell over the subsiding stream, and after a long while Macnab asked: 'Is it that you're papist?'

'Aye, but I never force it.'

Macnab said no more. He felt uncomfortable sharing the wilderness with a papist, the more so because when he reached Texas there was bound to be unpleasantness over the matter of forced conversion, fraudulent though Father Clooney's were said to be. He had seen enough of the Protestantism-papism fight in Ireland and he wished for none in the forests of Mississippi.

But as the darkness lowered and shadows crept from the trees like black panthers come to steal the cattle, the Kaintuck spoke

again: 'Macnab, you need help with them cattle.' No comment. 'Else you'll never get them to Natchez.' No comment. 'And I was wonderin' if maybe when the creek lowers . . . and we cross . . .'

'What?' It was a child's voice, trembling with excitement.

i was wonderin' if maybe we could form partners.'

'Oh, Poppa!' The boy gave a wild cry of delight and started to dance about, then grasped his father's hands: 'Oh, it would be so . . .' The boy could not frame his thoughts, and added lamely: 'It would be so welcome.'

'How about it, Macnab?'

'Poppa, Poppa, yes!' For three wet days Otto had watched the big man across the swollen stream and each new thing he saw increased his attachment to the wild Kaintuck. He was strong. He had violent manners when necessary. He could laugh and make jokes at himself. And obviously he had grown to like Otto.

'Where you really from, Zave?' The voice was adult and suspicious.

'Like I said, small town in Kaintucky. Piss-poor place.'

'You mind to settle in Texas?'

'From what you and the boy said, might as well.'

A world of meaning was carried in this brief, elliptical sentence: the conclusions of a man without a home, without prospects, without any visible or sensible direction in his life. If what Macnab said about the glories of Texas and the twenty thousand acres of choice land was true, what better?

Now, across the muddy waters, the Kaintuck pleaded: 'I ain't got no home, really. I ain't got nothin' much but down the river, up the river, and if you really got all that land, I could be mighty useful.' No comment. 'Besides, Mr. Macnab, you ain't goin' to get them cattle to Natchez with just the boy to help.'

'Please, Poppa, please.'

'What's your full name, Zave?'

'Francis Xavier Campbell.'

Good God! In the middle of the Mississippi wilderness a traitorous Campbell from the Moor of Rannoch had tracked down a Macnab of Glen Lyon, and as in the ancient days, plotted his murder. 'Campbell is a forbidden name,' Finlay Macnab cried in the darkness. 'Ever since Glencoe.'

'I know Glencoe,' the voice from the other side said, 'but that was a long time ago. I am Campbell from Hopkinsville, not from Glencoe, and I seek to join with you.'

'Please!' came the boy's voice, but in the night Finlay warned his son about the infamous behavior of the Campbells at Glencoe:

'I can hear my grandfather's voice: "Wherever, whenever you meet a Campbell, expect treachery." Across that stream waits a Campbell.' And through the long dark hours Finlay kept watch on his ancestral enemy, as if the dreadful crime at Glencoe had marked with blood-guilt every Campbell who would come along thereafter.

At dawn, as Finlay expected, big Zave Campbell gathered his muddy possessions, stepped down into the receding stream, and came directly toward the two Macnabs. Finlay, preparing to fight if necessary, shouted: 'Come no more!'

But Otto, seeing in Zave a needed companion, cried: 'We want your help!' and in that fragile moment he settled the argument, for he ran and leaped into Campbell's arms.

'Come with us, Zave!' he cried, and from then on, it was four : who went down the Trace: Finlay Macnab in command; Otto watching and listening; Zave Campbell, with a home at last; and the dog Betsy, terrified of the big man's commands. Under his tutelage she became twice the shepherd's companion she had been before, for when he told her to 'Git!' she got.

From their meeting at the flood they faced two hundred miles to Natchez, and often as they walked—ten miles a day now—Zave complained: 'Hell, I walked up this whole distance and now I'm walkin' down.'

'You asked to come,' Finlay growled, and each day during the first ten he kept close watch on Campbell, waiting for the sign that would betray the intended treachery. As the eleventh day waned he began to perspire so heavily that Otto asked. 'Are you sick, Poppa?' and he replied: 'I sure am. Don't you remember that it was on the eleventh night at Glencoe that the Campbells cut the throats of the Macdonalds?' Otto said: 'Last time you told me they shot them,' and Finlay snapped: 'What difference?'

When the sun set, Finlay refused to go to sleep, satisfied that once he closed his eyes this Campbell would cut his throat; instead, he sat against a tree, rifle across his knees, and when Otto rolled over at midnight and opened his eyes, there his father waited. They both looked a few feet away to where Zave snored easily, and when the boy arose at dawn nothing had changed.

Campbell was never told of the night-long vigil, but on the twelfth day Finlay astonished everyone by blurting out: 'Zave, nobody herds cattle better than you. When we reach Texas and get our land, you can have your share. You earned it.'

'You can build your barn right next to ours,' Otto said.

'You any idea how big twenty thousand acres is, son?' With a twig as chalk and a sandy bank as blackboard, Zave lined it out:

'Six hundred forty acres to a square mile. Six-forty into twenty thousand, that's thirty-five, thirty-six more or less square miles That means six miles to a side. So my barn ain't goin' to be very close to your barn.'

That day he showed Otto just how far six miles was going to be: 'Remember this little stream, way back here. I'll reckon the miles as we drive the cattle, but you keep in mind how far away this stream is,' and as they walked off the miles the boy gained his first sense of how vast things in Texas were going to be. He had thought of his future home as a kind of farm; the way Zave explained it, the place would be an empire.

Zave then took in hand Otto's real education: 'I'm surprised you cain't shoot proper. I was your age, I could hit me a sparrow.' Using his own long rifle, he taught the boy the tricks of hunting, especially the art of rapid loading: 'Cain't never tell when that second shot, fired prompt, is goin' to turn the trick.' He drilled Otto in firing accurately, then reloading at finger-numbing speed: 'You got to do it in rhythm, like a dance. And always in the same order. Prop your gun. Right hand, grab your powder horn and pour in just enough. Right hand again, grab the wadding. Left hand, take the ramrod from its place, jam it down the muzzle, tamp down the wadding. Left hand again, ball from the pouch, slide it in. Right hand, take the percussion cap and fix it. Both hands, fire!'

When Otto began dropping birds and squirrels out of trees and reloading instantly for the next shot, Zave was ecstatic: 'Macnab! I think we got us a real man on our hands.'

The hunting experience that Otto would remember longest, however, came early one morning when he was following a squirrel as it leaped through the trees. From the north came a soft whirring sound which increased until it was a dull persistent thunder, and when he looked up he saw coming toward him more birds than he had ever imagined; the sky was dark with them, and as they came in always-increasing numbers, the morning sun was blanketed and a kind of twilight fell over the earth. All morning they came, a flock so great it must have covered entire counties and even large parts of states, an incredible flight of birds.

'Passenger pigeons,' Zave said. 'Always have flown that way, always will.' Once when the birds were low overhead he fired a musket at them, and they flew in such packed formation that he brought down eleven, and the eating was good.

On they went, two Macnabs, a Campbell and a dog, droving cattle through lonely and forlorn land as their ancestors had done for centuries in the Highlands of Scotland, and at last they arrived in Natchez, that French-Spanish-English-American town of great

beauty perched high on its hill above the Mississippi, with its squalid row of half a dozen mean streets down on the flats, where the great boats docked, where the saloons never closed, where boatmen from Kentucky and Tennessee lost in an hour what they had slaved four months to earn.

As they drove their cattle along the main streets, lined with expensive and glamorous houses, Otto knew instinctively that he and his companions were not intended to stop there; threatening stares of passers-by in costly clothes told him that, but he was not prepared for what he found when Finlay and Zave herded their cattle down the steep streets leading to the waterfront. Now they passed into an entirely different world—of sweating black porters, shouting women, steamboats with their engines banked being warped into position, side by side, and bands of musicians playing music endlessly. Natchez-under-the-Hill was its own town of several thousand, and here the commerce of the great river basins-Ohio, Missouri, Mississippi—came temporarily to rest in huge warehouses that groaned with the produce of America.

It was an exciting place, a steaming hodge-podge of black and white, of Virginian and New Yorker, of buyer and seller, of slave and free, and many a man who now owned one of the big white pillared houses on the hill, with many servants proclaiming his wealth, had started buying fish and timber on the wharfs.

But it was also a frightening place, with knives flashing in the dark, and Zave Campbell showed young Otto the spot where one of the greatest knife fighters of them all, Jim Bowie of Tennessee had demonstrated his ferocious skill. 'Bowie had this fierce knife and he allowed hisse'f to be tied to a log, and his enemy, he was lashed down too, and there they fought it out, slashin' and duckin', and Bowie cut his man to shreds.'

'What did he do then?'

'He asked his brother Rezin to make him an even bigger knife Foot and a half long, with a heavy guard protectin' the handle from the blade.'

'Why did he do that?'

'He said: "When you're strapped to a log, you cain't have a knife that's too long." '

'Can I see him? Where is he now?'

'Who knows? They run him out of Tennessee.'

When it came time to arrange for the cattle to move south toward New Orleans, Macnab discovered two painful truths: the cost of taking them by steamboat was prohibitive, and he had wasted his energies bringing them down from Nashville. 'Man,' he

was told, 'we find all the cattle we need in New Orleans. They bring 'em in from everywhere.' And when Finlay pointed out that he intended to take them on to Texas, the speaker guffawed: 'Hector, come here and tell the man!'

Hector was a dumpy fellow in his forties. He had been to Texas and proposed to return as soon as the two boilers for his sawmill reached Natchez from Pittsburgh, where they had been bolted together and caulked. 'Cattle to Texas?' he said. 'That's the craziest thing I ever heerd of. Cattle run free all over Texas, millions of 'em. I hire two Mexicans to keep the damned things off'n my place.'

'Are you telling the truth?'

'Come here, Buster.' The sawmill man called everyone Buster, and when he had Finlay seated on one of the pilings of a wharf he explained: 'Cattle been breedin' free in Texas since the Creation, or as some say, since the Spaniards arrove. Cattle everywhere. Big . . . huge horns . . . best eatin' beef God ever made, and, Buster, strike me dead if they ain't all free. You just go out with your lasso . . .'

'What's a lasso?'

'Mexican-style rope. You form it in a loop, and you won't believe ; me when I tell you what a tricky hand can do with that loop.'

it's hard to believe what you say.'

'Texas is different, Buster, and you got to accept it on faith. If : you carry them cattle on to Texas, all you can do is give 'em away. You sure as hell cain't sell 'em.'

'What should I do?'

'I'd sell 'em right here. As beef.'

'They won't bring what I paid for them in Nashville.' He spat. 'And all that trouble on the Trace.'

The sawmill man clapped him on the shoulder: 'Buster, sometimes plans go sour. They promised me, solemn, that my boilers would be here six months ago. I'm still waitin' and I'm still payin' I for my room, such as it is.'

Macnab and Campbell spent five days trying to reach the best

; deal on the cattle, and Otto was surprised one afternoon to hear

I them telling a prospective customer that they had thirty-three

head to sell, for he knew that his father had left Nashville with

I thirty and had sold two to stands along the Trace that needed beef.

There should be twenty-eight for sale, but what he did not know

was that it was physically and morally impossible for a Macnab or

a Campbell to pass through territory containing cattle without

enlarging his herd. By old established practices, they had acquired

an additional five head.

In the end they had to sell at a severe loss, but the transaction was not without its benefits, because the buyer was a man who ran a repair shop for steamboats, a kind of inland ships' chandlery, and when through casual conversation he discovered how experienced Finlay was in such matters, he pressed him to accept a job serving the big riverboats. At first Finlay demurred, so the man said: 'Help me and I'll double the price I offered for your beef.'

This was too gratifying for a trader like Macnab to refuse, for as he explained to Campbell: 'We make a neat profit on the animals, and we can save money for our start in Texas.' He went back to the man and said: Til take the job, but you must employ my friend Campbell, too. He's a mighty worker.'

Tve seen Campbell on other trips. He eats big and works little.' He would not hire the big Kaintuck, but Macnab did find Zave a job sweeping out a saloon, and when the three settled in to Natchez-under-the-Hill as if it had always been their home, Texas grew farther away.

The only problem was Otto. He was eight now, not much taller than before, and the long tradition of the Macnabs required him to get started on his education, but schools were not a major feature of Under-the-Hill. There were some on the upper level, but it was difficult to get to them, and when Finlay inquired, he was told quite bluntly: 'We do not look kindly upon boys from Under.'

There was, however, a woman on the lower level, now married to a roustabout, who had once taught school in the rowdy town of Paducah when it was still called Pekin, and she said that she could teach Otto reading, writing and numbers up to the rule of three. She was a mournful lady, spending much of each class telling the boy of her more fortunate days in Memphis, where her father sold furniture and coffins, but she developed a real liking for the lad and gave him a rather better education than he might have received in the more fashionable classrooms of the upper level

It was curious, Otto thought, that the two towns were so separate; a person could live his entire life in one, it seemed, without ever venturing into the other. Under-the-Hill was the bigger, the more flourishing and also much the wilder, but just as he had discovered on the long walk through Maryland that civilization could consist of a cabin in the wilderness throwing light and comfort into the darkness, so now he knew where the good life lay in Natchez: it thrived in those big, clean, white houses atop the hill, and whenever they had the chance, he and Zave would climb the steep streets and walk aimlessly beneath the arching trees, looking at the mansions.

'You ain't to think, son, that everybody in there is happy,' Zave

cautioned, and he showed Otto two especially fine houses from which a boy and a girl, desperately and hopelessly in love, had come to Under-the-Hill to commit suicide. And he also knew which big one had contained the man who had run away to Pittsburgh, abandoning his wife and two daughters.

'My father ran—'

'Don't tell me about it!' Campbell thundered, and Otto pondered these complexities.

The year 1830 passed, with Finlay earning substantial wages on the waterfront and with Zave Campbell promoted to bartender, where he could steal from both his boss and his patrons. The trio was prospering financially, but Otto was not advancing in much else, for he had mastered about as much learning as the Paducah woman could dispense and was beginning to lose interest. Also, he was reaching the age when circumstances rhight throw him in with the rowdy urchins who pestered ship captains when their boats were tied up, and Otto himself worried about this, because everything he had so far observed inclined him toward an orderly life away from the excesses of Under-the-Hill. In that whirlpool even children witnessed murders and shanghaiings and young women committing suicide and endless brawls, and he had no taste for such a life. At age nine he had become more than cautious; he was a little Scots-German conservative set so firmly in his ways that they would probably last a lifetime.

One aspect of life Under-the-Hill he could not adjust to: the presence of so many women. It occurred to him as he looked back upon his travels that he and Finlay, and even Campbell, had always moved where there were no women; on the trails, along the waterfront, in the stands of the Trace, it had been a man's world. Even in settled Cincinnati when they talked with people who had been in Texas, they had met only one woman, the Arkansas lady who had fled.

But now they were surrounded by young women, and he perceived that even tough men like his father and Zave sometimes wanted to be with them, those very pretty girls with only first names, and although he did not understand fully, he knew it must be all right. What irritated him, though, was that the girls sometimes showed as much interest in him as they did in Zave and his father, pampering him and petting him and offering to cut his hair. They were, he realized, doing this so as to impress Finlay and Zave that they were the motherly type, and he grew quite sick of the attention.

But his irritation was forgotten whenever Zave and one of the young women from the saloon took him down to the waterfront,

with rifles to shoot at objects floating down the Mississippi. Then he liked it if Zave's girl cheered when he hit a bottle and Zave did not, or when with two quick shots made possible by adroit reloading he shattered two bottles.

'You're a little sharpshooter,' a girl said one day as she kissed him, and this he did not protest.

That night he was startled when he overheard his father proposing to a new arrival from Pennsylvania that the man purchase his Texas scrip: 'Partner, I'll sell you this for half what I paid, and you can see the figures right here. Twenty thousand acres, one thousand good American dollars.' The newcomer said he would think it over, carefully, for his heart was set on Texas, and he visualized the twenty thousand acres in terms of the ultra-rich farmland of Lancaster County. He might never find such a bargain again.

Otto was distraught by his father's proposal, and he discussed it with both his teacher and Zave, and they, too, were appalled. The Paducah woman went boldly to Macnab and said: 'You have a treasure in your son Otto. Don't waste him in this sewer.'

'You're doing well here. I'm doing well.'

'I have no choice. You do.'

'A hundred men have started Under-the-Hill and moved up. And I'm to be the hundred and first. You watch.'

'And what in hell will you have if you do move up? Take your kid to Texas and make him a man. And take that worthless Campbell with you.'

Zave was even more insistent: 'Finlay, I'm workin' here only to save money to get to Texas. This is the cesspool of the world. I just been waitin' for you to say the word.'

'You've got a good job, Zave. I got a good job.'

'And Otto, he's got nothin'. He should be on a horse, on open land . . . and so should you and me.'

One night, after work, Finlay broached the subject with his son. They were living in one room over Zave's saloon, where the accumulation of eighteen rootless months lay scattered about. 'I think, Otto, that in another year we'll have enough money to buy a house on top. A hardware store, or maybe a general one like we had in Baltimore, with a good German bakery.'

'People on top ain't always happy,' Otto said. 'Sometimes they do terrible things.'

'Where'd you hear that?'

'Zave told me. He showed me where.'

'What would you like to do?'

Almost defensively the boy drew Betsy to him, cradling her head in his lap, for he was afraid to expose his true longings, but under

his father's pressuring he blurted out like the little boy he still was: 'I'd like to get aboard one of those steamboats, and stay aboard when the whistle blows, and just sail and sail, and then maybe have a horse on a great big farm where me and Betsy can run forever.'

Next morning the man from Pennsylvania came to Macnab's shop and said he'd take the scrip, but Finlay said quietly: 'Yesterday it was for sale. Today it ain't. My son wants it.'