I said, Might I take weaponry for the road? My father’s pistol?
My aunt looked at me as if I were a fool. She said her opinion was that a gun would get me into more trouble than it would get me out of.
—You’re off to be a shopkeep, she said. Not a highwayman.
At twelve, who wants to be given that news? Shopkeep.
I kept my face free of expression as a stove lid, but my mind visioned long decades stretched out before me to be passed, penned until death, behind a till.
—Knife? I said.
—Well, sure, my uncle said. That’s more in the way of an implement. I’ve still got a big thick-bladed thing of your father’s. You can take it.
I had no certain recollection of my father beyond his artifacts. Sometimes I thought I remembered a dark presence, a partial shape leaned down over me, no features, only a hint of the quizzical in the angle at which the head was cocked, a silhouetted embodiment. My mother had told me many times that when I was just a knee-baby I would ride all over the farm on my father’s shoulders. And that’s the size I was when my father drowned. He was crossing the Pigeon River in a wagon one day, and the whole rig pitched over on him in a heavy spring current and pinned him to the smooth stones on the river bottom and drowned the horse in the traces to boot.
My mother lived awhile beyond him, a decade nearly. And for much of that time she was still mostly a girl. I’ve counted out the numbers and that’s all she amounted to when I was little. A girl, sad and lonely and vague, widowed and dependent, living among her husband’s people. Of my mother, I mainly remember long stretches of days where we would be out from morning until dark running frantic pointless errands. All the way to town for a newspaper, halfway across the county to take a cake to someone she hardly knew who’d had a death in the house. But at some point, there were long stretches where she wouldn’t go outdoors at all for what seemed like several quarters of the year. I’d bring in double handfuls of pale poplar blossoms to her room, then fat green poplar leaves, and finally yellow and brown ones gathered from the lawn to demonstrate the passage of time. She died of some consuming disease. I remember a lengthy period of wasting, hushed voices and darkened rooms, the sound of rattling coughs cascading down the steps, a black iron cauldron of blood-spotted rags boiling in rusty water out by the smokehouse.
Immediately after my mother was gone, some matter of financial beholdenness beyond my ken allowed my aunt and uncle to append our neighboring farm to their own, and so I was at once orphaned and dispossessed. For the nearly three years previous to my exile, they had continued sending me—out of guilt, I guess—to the school in town that my mother had chosen for me. It was taught by a learned and jolly Manxman, and he called it the Latin Academy. That was a grand name for what was just a spare room in his house. It was elevated into an academy, I suppose, by a bust of Horace sitting on the mantelpiece and a big Latin lexicon spread open on an oak stand. Under the Manxman’s teaching, I could soon read anything you put in front of me, and moreover would do so with great pleasure. The conventions of grammar, both Latin and English, made sense to me, and I could parse most sentences accurately, even the great long periodic ones from the previous century. I read yellow and foxed copies of
The Spectator
as if they contained the most current and pressing thought. And I could do sums and knew the facts of the history and myths of Greece and Rome and England, much of which added up to how awfully murderous and lunatic a king will get to acting every so often. It all came to me with considerable ease. The teacher had started me on Latin in the second year, and already I could about get the gist of poems by that selfsame Horace. I still remember one about throwing stones at a lover’s window in the night.
If we few little scholars had learned well and behaved for the most part of the day, the Manxman would break out a deck of playing cards in the afternoon, and we would gamble against him for striped peppermint sticks. He took his teaching of the rules and conventions and logic of all the common gambling games as seriously as the details of Latin grammar.
But now, the best I could tell, the Academy had been declared too expensive to continue, and at twelve—almost thirteen—I had been declared suddenly grown up. I was cut loose on my own. My aunt and uncle had arranged for me to be bound to the antique gentleman. I was to run a trade post out at the edge of the Nation. The clerk who had been running the post had just picked up and gone. Lit out for Louisiana or one of those other places out west. Savage Texas, maybe. And so a new clerk was needed immediately. As far as everyone besides me was concerned, my life was set.
The morning I mounted up to ride into exile, my aunt stood by the colt’s shoulder trying to weep. The sun had not risen over the ridge, and the world was still grey and foggy. She gave me five dollars in silver and ten in Georgia paper money, a small iron skillet, and a folded piece of paper on which she had written recipes for fried chicken and biscuits.
The last words she said to me were these: Remember to read the Bible and pray and love Jesus and not fall in with the ways of the heatherns.
I rode out from the farm and by sunup was passing through town down the main street. I could smell bacon frying from the hotel kitchen, and the blacksmith was stirring at his banked fire and laying on more oak. A young black girl went carrying a lidded chamberpot toward an outhouse. I was on the road and terrified.
I FOLDED THE
map back into its pocket-sized rectangle and tried to remember all the turnings my uncle had talked out, and then I spit valiantly to the side and put a heel to Waverley and reined left of the poplar onto what looked to be the more promising of the two ways before me.
I rode on into the mountains with dark weighing heavily on me. On the early nights of the journey, I had slept at the cabins of people known to the antique gentleman, and he had given me letters to present them, saying to feed me and let me sleep in whatever place they had to spare, which meant the barn in most cases and a bare attic room in another. This would be my first night sleeping alone on the trail, and I was afraid of dark and tried not to think about it coming on so rapidly.
I stopped by midafternoon to allow plenty of time to make camp. The rain had ended, but the trees and brush were still wet when I found a piece of flat ground that backed into an overhanging rock cliff. The dirt under its shelter was dry and fine as sifted flour. The sound of moving water from off in the woods. By the trail, a little stand of grass just beginning to put out new growth after the winter. Opposite the cliff, an open wedge of a vista where a big tree had blown down and opened a gap. Seven layers of mountains faded off in diminishing orders of blue to the west. I stood and looked at the place and imagined it all pitch black, and I was afraid. Then I imagined the same thing with a fire blazing hip-high, and I expected I could put my back to the cliff and sit in the yellow light and wait for morning.
I had the advantage of it. I had to.
I untacked Waverley and watered and grained him and hobbled him where he could graze. Then I made myself a little supper out of the same bag of grain from which I’d fed Waverley. Boiled oats with brown sugar.
Part of my kit was a skein of hemp rope, which my uncle had shaken at me with considerable emphasis, saying, Without fail, hang your food from a tree limb to keep animals out of it.
Back then was a different time. Bison and elk had been recently killed out, but there was still a sight more bears and panthers and wolves than now, so I paid attention to my uncle’s pronouncement. I took the rope and stood under a big pine tree and spotted a likely limb, stout and horizontal, about fifteen feet off the ground. I held the end of the rope drooping in my hand and wondered how I might loft it over the limb. First I tried to fling it. Took two steps of a run and threw the limp rope-end skyward. But it hardly went higher than my head. So I scoured the ground until I found a thin flat chunk of slate as big across as a dinner plate with spalled edges sharp enough to flay hide. I tied it tight to the end of the rope and reared back and, in the style of discus tossers, sent it winging mightily toward the limb. But I forgot to notice that I had my foot on a loop of the rope. Before the stone reached the limb, the rope stretched tight and sprang back, and the rock came flying straight at me, singing a dire whispery song by my ear. It hit the ground edge first and buried itself like an axehead in soft wood. I rubbed my forehead about where the stone would have hit had it come back a few inches southward.
—Reckon you’re just required to attend without letup, I said aloud.
I went at the job again, with greater care as to foot placement, and soon had my budget and panniers swinging limp ten feet off the ground. Bears could bat at it until dawn and not do themselves any good.
I went looking for firewood, wanting a grand pile of it to shore up against black night. I hauled armload after armload. As I reached for a last fallen stick of oak, a copperhead newly awakened from its winter sleep, colored and patterned in brown-and-tan shades of old leaf fall, jacked its front end off the ground and struck at my hand. Its mouth flew open as if on hinges, like flinging open a valise with a pale-pink satin lining. The motion of the strike was a jerking lurch, more awkward than I would have guessed. When the snake saw it had missed its mark, it turned across itself and went flowing across the forest floor in retreat.
On idiot impulse, with no prior thought whatsoever, I did as I had seen an older boy do with a blacksnake. I grabbed the copperhead by its tail and cracked it like a whip. Its head flew off and hit the trunk of a redbud tree twenty feet away with the sound of a knuckle pecking on a door. I stood amazed. As I carried the snake back to camp, holding it near the bloody stub of its neck, the body kept coiling about my wrist.
Oats don’t make much of a supper, so I gutted the snake out and skinned it and draped it across a green stick over the fire. And even then it still moved while it first cooked, coiling and twitching. When the meat fell still and became done, I cut it into pieces about corncob length and ate the white meat off the backbone and the keen ribs, thinking this: People say snake tastes like chicken and, by damn, it does.
Just before full dark, when it had chilled off enough to put on my uncle’s wool coat, I went to piss by a thick stand of huckleberry bushes. I stood there unbuttoned with myself in my hand, all relaxed, eyes vaguely taking in the scenery. Out of the bushes twenty feet away erupted a young black bear. It was skinny from sleeping all winter and was only a few months past following its mama around and probably as scared as I was, but it came forward all in a rush, bouncing along, huffing air and grunting, and it looked much larger than the space it occupied. In mid-flow as I was, I could do little but hold out my left hand, palm foremost, and say, with a note of considerable urgency, Wait.
And, oddly enough, the bear did wait. It came to a skidding halt and stood still, looking confused in its expression like a dog justly chastised for bad behavior. I dribbled to a conclusion and went running back to camp, fumbling with the buttons of my britches as I fled, coattails dragging the ground behind me. The bear chased me a few strides and then lost interest and eased back into the brush and was gone.
At that point, sleep did not seem a possibility. I guessed that in this landscape the varieties of threat were likely not to fall entirely within the bounds of reason offered by rock and snake and bear. I had kept some coffee grounds and a tin pot out of the panniers, and I sat up most of the night drinking coffee, feeding the fire, watching the edge of dark for movement, and listening for the approach of killers and wild animals and the malignant supernatural forces said by many cultures to inhabit the wilderness. There was every kind of noise out in the woods, but mostly just the colt shifting about and taking deep, sighing breaths. I jumped every time he moved and expected to see a shape form up out of the darkness and loom and then come at me, and the least threatening thing I imagined was the young bear. I tried laying my father’s knife naked-bladed on the ground beside me and practiced reaching to its elkhorn handle without looking. More often than not, I grabbed a handful of dirt. So I just took the knife up and held the handle tight and pointed the upcurved tip of blade at the dark.
Shopkeep, I thought. And maybe I said it aloud.
There were a right smart of boys my age sleeping in houses under a big pile of quilts with a mother and father bedded nearby. A great majority of boys were not squatting alone in the dark with a knife in their fist, without a soul in the world much concerned whether or not they made it alive until dawn lit up the east. I told myself that I would bury the knife deep into whatever crossed the edge of firelight.
—There won’t be any call for Wait ever again, I said to the night.
A HARD RAIN
fell during the early morning, driven on a high wind. But it blew from a favorable quarter, and the shallow ledge kept me dry. I slept many hours after the first grey of morning. When I stirred shivering from under the blanket, I found a blue day already under way and Waverley gone and my panniers as well. My budget, still tied to the rope, lay sodden on the ground, pasted with the blown petals of dogwood blossoms.
I rushed around all in a panic, looking in the brush for the colt or for a great bloody pile of wolf kill. But nothing presented itself.
And then I went looking along the trail for tracks and the story of theft or abandonment they might tell. But again, nothing was revealed. Any marks of hoof or paw or moccasin that might have been were all washed away. I remember having a great desire to yell at the top of my voice.
Help, I suppose, would have been the word. But I swallowed that impulse back into my chest and instead put two fingers to the front of my mouth and whistled loud and long, hoping the colt would whinny from down the trail and come trotting back. I did it again and again until my lips and cheeks were numb, and then I stopped and sat amid my bedding and looked at the white ashes of the fire, still smoldering and smoking.