The soldiers ate in total silence until their plates were empty but for a scattering of fine clean bones and a few little grey shotgun pellets, and then Perry wiped his mouth on his sleeve and said, Great God. And the rest of them agreed entirely.
Perry said, Every single time I try to cook chickens they end up with the feet burnt to charcoal and the thighs bleeding raw, and hardly any of it what you’d properly call done.
I said, You ought to see what I can do with a beef tenderloin.
THE NEXT AFTERNOON
we made camp in the rain.
—Wet day, Smith said.
It had rained since dawn, rain falling white against the trees.
—We’re famous for our moisture, I said.
Smith and the boys were miserable. I, though, had spent enough years in these wet woods to know how to do. I kept a set of clean dry clothes in an oilcloth bag. At the end of a day’s travel, I’d strip out of my wet clothes and wash in the creek and then dress in my dry evening attire. Come morning, I’d put the traveling clothes back on, wet and cold until they warmed up to body temperature, but that was better than being miserable all the time. Another thing I did that people chose to interpret as an eccentricity was to take an umbrella into the woods for especially wet days. If I was afoot, I would wedge the handle between my knapsack and back, leaving my hands free, and I guess it did look a little strange to meet up with me on the trail.
Perry had taken off all his wet clothes and was naked under his grey wool blanket, which he wore cowled over his head and drooping to his white shins. He went and addressed himself to the fire, standing close, his back to the other men. He opened the blanket and baked for a while.
—I’d take it as a favor if you’d lap that blanket shut before you turn around, the Charleston boy said.
It might have seemed strange to me that these hapless boys should form the sharp edge of national policy, had I not moved among the men who made that policy.
I went to check on Smith, who had built his own fire. He sat in his underwear cross-legged on a blanket with his coat draped over his shoulders like a cape and his boots unlaced and flapped open on his feet. He finished his smoke and knocked out his pipe bowl against his boot heel. His wet clothes hung limp on a tripod of sticks near the fire. His hat was off and his blond hair stood in points, and every once in a while he would rake his fingers through it as if to smooth it down. His little mustache, faint even in brightest daylight, was invisible by the fire. He looked forlorn out there in the woods in the dark. I had brought along a bottle of good Scotch whisky, and in the spirit of conviviality I offered to share it.
—Strong stuff, Smith said after throwing back a shot.
—Smoky and strange. A taste of peat, which as I understand is a sort of swampy mossy kind of plant that the Scots and Irish collect and dry and make fires from, as settlers on the prairie burn buffalo dung. A cord of dry split hickory must be a thing of absolute wonder to such people. But to return to the point, the whisky is extremely passable.
Smith reached to his canteen to cut it, but I would not hear of it. It was necessary to draw the line somewhere.
—Either drink it or don’t, I said. If you’re going to water it down, you might as well be drinking the piss Welch sells at the tavern.
Smith deferred to my judgment and drank the whisky slow and careful. Something about its brown and musty taste carried a tinge of retrospection, and after two pours, Smith began recounting his life—at least his boyhood and youth, for that is all he had to tell. His father an old veteran of
1812,
his mother somewhat younger but now dead. A bout of drear military school. And then, after four pours, he told that every day in these impenetrable woods and mountains left him terrified. He didn’t know a thing about them and did not ever care to know. He wanted to go home. His greatest wish was to operate a store selling clothing, men’s and women’s, of the most recent fashion.
—Then go, I said. And do.
—I’m to make this my life and advance in it, he said. A career.
—Made by whom?
—My father. All the people of the town.
A bound boy, I thought. And then, damned if I didn’t pop right out and say it aloud.
Smith started to get his back up and then thought better of it. He said, I’m meant to come home someday with honors. But they’re not going to be gained here. It would make one’s feelings about this go down easier if they had put up a fight. As it was, they wept. In the camps, some of the women killed themselves. There’s no honor here.
—They already had all the fight beat out of them some time ago.
—Were they any good at it?
—Fighting?
—Yes.
—Now and again, they were. They were once a fierce people, but they’re long since worn down from losing.
—Could you go tell that to the boys? Smith said. He was tired, and the whisky had hit him fast.
I went over and said, Boys, this is not your country, and I guess you feel uneasy in it. But it
is
my country. Colonel Haden is fond of referring to the people hiding in these mountains as fugitive warriors. But Charley’s no warrior. I know him. He’s a dirt farmer. An old man. Tomorrow will go fine. Nothing to keep you awake fretting. Sleep hard and dream of your sweethearts.
The next morning by the fire, with coffee boiling and side meat frying, Smith got all proper and priggish and said, I fault myself for an excess of frankness last night.
What I wanted to do was slap him down a bit with wit and words. Grammar and vocabulary as a weapon. But what kind of world would it be if we all took every opportunity presented to us to assault the weak? I said, It was the spirit of the evening and the Scotch whisky. Think no more of it.
And at least Smith had sense to say, I thank you.
WE LEFT THE
horses tied a half mile down the river and moved up as quietly as we could through the thick ground layer of frosted leaves. Smith lay behind a blown-down hickory trunk glassing the camp. The other three boys were farther back in the woods, sitting with their muskets beside them. Two of them started loading pipes, tamping tobacco with their thumbs like filling a posthole. I looked at the final few leaves on the trees to see the way the wind moved, and then I looked at Smith, who kept his scope to his eye and made no attempt to keep the boys from lighting up, so I motioned back to them with both hands like pushing something down to the ground and they stopped.
Charley and his people had camped on a piece of land where two rivers joined together. It was a configuration of terrain that had an old appeal to the Cherokee and to the people before them. In the old days, they had usually built their mounds and villages in such places, both for practical reasons of defense and agriculture and flat ground for dances and ball games, and also because watercourses held spiritual import for them. I always thought it a sign of their generosity that they found water spiritual even in a land so wet that water is more often a nuisance than anything else.
An old hemlock grew on the highest part of this piece of land. Its stout trunk was still six feet through at head height, and the ground underneath would be soft, hundreds of years deep with a bed of its needles and the loose black earth into which the needles decay. Charley’s people had built insubstantial shelters under the tree, a tentative-looking pole shed and an arbor, both lashed together with vines and roofed with brush and leaves and pine boughs. Provisional structures that would fall apart and melt into the ground in a few seasons. A dying fire sent up white smoke from its bed of ashes, and Smith said he could see muskets propped against the hemlock trunk nearby. Everyone in camp still seemed to lie abed, though the sun had been up for nearly an hour.
That worried Smith. He thought it was a ruse, and he began whispering about ambush and his plans to avoid it, all of which were unnecessarily complicated and impractical and based on the assumption that these baffled and powerless people—whose country had, as if by conjuration, dissolved beneath them and been reconstituted far off on some blank western territory—would put up a fight. I rose from behind the hickory trunk and started walking into camp, and as I went Smith was saying something to me in a hissing whisper inflected like he thought he was issuing orders. I looked back, and a vigorous plume of vapor puffed from Smith’s mouth.
I went on and walked into camp and got between the people and their guns. I collected the two muskets, old worn trade pieces, where they lay propped against the hemlock trunk. They were loaded and cocked. I took out the caps and put the hammers down. I went and sat by one of the fires with the muskets on the ground beside me. There was a woodpile, and I stoked the fire and motioned for Smith and the boys to come on in.
They jingled and crashed and thumped their way into camp and everyone in the two shelters woke up and rose fully dressed. Charley walked partway to the fire and stopped.
—Hey, Charley, I said. Sit down here where it’s warm.
Charley looked at the muskets on the ground and grinned and said, Hey, Will. He came over and sat down.
—I don’t expect we’re going to have any trouble here today, I said.
—No trouble.
The soldiers stood spaced out. They had their muskets aimed generally at the bunched people. I didn’t know all the names. Just Charley and Nancy and their grown boys, Nantayale Jake and Lowan. And the boy Wasseton and the married daughter Ancih, and a few other women. There were several children, all wakening and hungry and crying. The women drew them together and the younger children stood behind the women and leaned out to look from behind the barrier of calico skirts that were thin and pale from long wear. Smith went and looked in the shelters for weapons and found none. He came back out and sent two of the boys off to fetch the horses.
I didn’t see Ancih’s husband and said so to Charley.
He said, George is out hunting. Gone two days.
—With anyone else?
—Maybe some others. Maybe alone.
I told Smith what Charley had said, and Smith said, We’ll wait awhile and see if some more come in.
—They are not likely to come in if they see us, I said.
—They either will or they won’t. We’ll sit here today and start walking them out in the morning. And by the way, don’t ever ignore my orders again.
I was fairly furious at his high-handed manner and the assumptions he was making about how the lines of authority ran within our little party. I started to remind Smith that I was not under his command and had not taken a cent in pay from the Government and would do as I pleased and call my own orders. I managed to hold my tongue but resolved within myself that all Smith had to do was utter one more word and I’d mount up and ride away and they could discover their own route out of the mazy mountains and wave hand signals in the air to communicate with their captives.
But Smith looked tired and white-eyed with fatigue and the nervous strain of this woods duty, which had been confusing and frightening to him. His fatigue made him look every bit as young as he was, maybe younger, and I remembered that he was so fresh out of school he still remembered how to read a little bit of Greek. I thought about the previous weeks of travel and camping, how Smith didn’t sleep well in the mountains, jumping at every sound of falling leaf and foraging possum. Every morning he awoke twisted in his blankets, more exhausted than when he went to bed. I had once been like that myself. As a boy alone in the world, I slept best after the first grey of dawn began rising and dissipating the fear that collected in the dark. Now I found the woods narcotic. The blacker and noisier the better. Bear’s old lessons in fearlessness and my own experiments in nightwalking had brought about the transformation.
I decided to exercise a certain amount of sympathy for Smith’s nervousness and said, A day of cooking and eating and resting by the fire wouldn’t hurt any of us. And then, in the casual tone of bidding good morning to a stranger you pass on the roadway, I said, Do not fear the universe, young lieutenant.
Smith did not have a response, and when the boys returned leading the horses, I turned my attention to the food. Smith and his boys had the inevitable potatoes and bacon, a partial sack of flour with little yellowish miller-moth grubs working in it, and a few bruised cabbages. I had a pannier full of my own stores, not caring much for army victuals. Cured ham, lard, salted butter, white cornmeal, dried beans, grits, dried apples and peaches, porridge oats, dark sugar, cinnamon, black tea, green coffee beans, and a small hand mill to grind them. Also a tin of ginger candies and a bottle of good Tennessee whiskey. And Havana cigars wrapped carefully in oilcloth.
I put Perry to work helping cook while the other two stood watch at the edge of camp. Smith sat looking at the fire in a daze. Charley’s people went back into the shelters and talked among themselves, and then Charley and Lowan and Jake came and squatted by the fire. I roasted coffee beans and directed Perry in the assembly of a big pot of porridge with dried peaches minced in it and flavored with a profligate amount of cinnamon and dark sugar and butter. The children ate it and became all big-eyed with wonder at the taste, and the soldier boys, including the lieutenant, were not far behind in their appreciation. I took just a little of it in a tin cup, and mostly sat drinking coffee and enjoyed watching the people eat. All in all, it was a companionable breakfast. Charley and I talked and Smith sat listening as if he expected to catch a word now and then.
Charley said, Where we going?
—Where the Nation is going, I said. You live on the Nation.
Charley said, I’m abiding by the old lines.
—You’ve got to quit thinking that way, I said.
—Then where we going?
—Going west, I said. A long way.
Charley made an exhaling noise between his teeth and lips like a long string of F’s.
Later in the afternoon, the soldier boys squatted on the ground, gambling penny stakes on tic-tac-toe, the grids scratched in the dirt with the point of a knife. Perry did not have a firm grasp on the logic of the game; otherwise no money would have changed hands as every game would end in a draw. As it was, he played as if the outcome were as random as casting dice or flipping a coin. He, of course, lost steadily and seemed to think the other two possessed enormous luck. After a while, I went over and said, Look, son. Put your marks where I say.