Thirteen Moons (43 page)

They both looked up from their studies and remarked my passage through the court. I nodded and said, Gentlemen, and went on to my room.

I had barely taken off my riding coat when there was a knock. I released the latch and found the two men standing shoulder to shoulder in the passway. They shoved in and closed the door behind them.

—I should ask what this is all about, I said. But what’s the point?

I went and stood against the far wall by the window with my arms crossed.

The older man threw his hat on the bedspread and sat down beside it. He did not look at me, and he seemed very tired.

The young one stood inside the door and glared across the room at me.

—This is all about money, he said. That’s all there is separating us from a full appreciation of one another.

—Who are we talking about? I said.

—Williams. Whose else money you holding?

I thought down the long list of names. Maybe Sloan or Slagle. Most of my other creditors would be civilized enough to have the sheriff serve papers. A few were such earnest Christians that they might just send a Baptist preacher to set my mind right.

—I suppose this is where I take a beating, I said.

The young man clenched his hammy fists and looked at the bulging knuckles.

—Hitting people, he said. Not my line of work.

—I have every intention to pay Williams back, I said. Or Slagle, or whoever we’re talking about. If that matters.

The little old man leaned forward from his seat on the bed and began working his hat around and around again. He seemed not at all interested in the conversation.

—Then pay, the young one said. That’s the simple thing. It’s been a year since your note came due. Be a sport. Give us the money. It being light, we’ll tote it to the carriage ourselves and call this matter done.

He named an amount that would widely cause an intake of breath.

—There’s no money right now, I said.

—And yet you’re here, the younger man said. I asked for rates at the desk. This place ain’t free.

I turned up my palms.

The younger man looked at the man on the bed and said, There’s days I don’t think they can print paper money fast enough to make me keep doing this job much longer.

The little man did not look up or even cease rotating his hat.

—Look, I said. Everything I’ve got is in land. A great deal of land. Not immediately solvent. There’s money coming from the Government to pay off all my notes. But it takes time.

—Time, that’s exactly the problem. Everything would be fine without it. But we’re here to impress upon you the tedious exigencies. Our boss is tired of waiting and wants his money. Business is all this is.

—There’s more to it than that, I said. Williams and I are friends. Going back long before the War.

—Well, sure you’re friends. As long as the money rolls in.

—I had a hand in making him plenty of money when I was in the senate. Road construction money, railroad money, that sort of thing.

—But not lately you haven’t made him any money. And it’s the regular flow that’s of the most particular interest. Look, here’s the way it works. When Williams wants something from you, you’re friends. Gratitude and loyalty rule the day. When you need something from Williams, business is business. Study your contracts down to the last word. I ought not have to tell you this.

I said, No, you ought not.

—So, the money?

—I haven’t got the money. I could show you the papers, the correspondence with Washington. I could have copies of them drawn up. It all goes back quite a way. To $
53.33
at six percent. For more than three decades.

—That’s all you’ve got to offer? Papers and fifty-some dollars?

—Papers that will soon lead to a great deal of money.

—If I hired you to build me a house, would you show up years later and unroll a floor plan and expect payment?

—It’s something you could show to Williams. It’s all coming to a head soon.

—After thirty years?

—Any day now.

The younger man looked toward the older man on the bed, who appeared to have nodded off briefly. His chin was tilted down and his hat was still between his hands. It was at least one in the morning, and he looked exhausted. Grey whiskers were beginning to sprout across his upper lip and the wattled skin under his jawbone. He roused awake and looked around.

The younger man said to him, We stay any longer, he’ll try to kite a check on us.

The older man didn’t make a sign to show his thoughts one way or the other.

The younger man looked back at me and said, Just fuck you and all your sorry lot. Shitting debtors. My bane in life.

He walked out the door and tried to slam it behind him, but it banged the heel of his shoe, so he walked off and left it standing ajar.

The little older man rose and looked in the mirror over the dressing table. He rubbed his hands down his face to compose it. He touched the pale bags under his eyes with two fingertips as if to press them back into youthful tautness. He put his hat on his head and adjusted the angle of the brim with great precision. When he was satisfied at its cock, he stepped up to me and for the first time looked me in the eye. He made a little movement, no more extensive than a shiver. A straight razor with a tortoiseshell handle appeared in his hand. With one gesture, he flipped the flickering blue blade open one-fingered by the crook end of it and reached out underhanded and slit me a long thin wound through my trousers.

It went from a few inches above my knee up the inner side of my right thigh all the way to the nub of my groin.

By the time I bent and grabbed myself two-handed, the razor was folded back into its handle and had disappeared into a coat pocket.

—I noticed you dressed on the left, the little man said. You can thank me for my attention to detail any time you care to.

Blood ran between my fingers and wet the front of my rent trousers and dribbled down my shins and wet my socks and shoe tops.

HALF AN HOUR LATER,
I sat spraddle-legged on the edge of the bed with the Gypsy palm reader kneeling between my feet. I wore only the bedspread gathered around my middle for modesty. The Gypsy dabbed at my thigh with cotton-wool soaked in peroxide. White foam rose up along the length of the wound.

—This is not greatly worse than shaving nicks I’ve had, she said. It’s long, but it ain’t much more than broke the skin.

—That’s not how I bled.

—Well, I guess it’s a powerful place to be cut, she said. But looks like you’ll have to live awhile further.

She leaned and kissed the inside of my knee. A little generous rough cat’s-tongue lick in addition.

The Gypsy getup—green headcloth, red skirt, yellow waist sash, and cream peasant blouse—lay in a bright puddle just inside the door. She wore only my white terry bathrobe gapped open above the waist to show a long shadow between her breasts. Her brown hair was wet and combed in one swoop straight back all the way from her hairline to her shoulders. Across her crown you could still see the parallel tracks of the comb teeth, all the way to white scalp.

Looking up at me, with the red lipstick and dark makeup washed away, she looked like what she was, a moderately pretty woman from Valdosta with a crease or two beginning to deepen around the corners of her mouth and eyes.

—You lay back and be still and I’ll go easy on you, she said.

I WOKE UP
at the first edge of grey dawn and opened my eyes to the Gypsy supplementing her income from my wallet. She turned and found me awake and fanned the few bills like a hand of cards. She made a show of holding them to the window, studying their marks. In her most oracular voice she said, In recompense for a great deal of pleasure, you will suffer a minor financial loss. Then she plucked out a twenty and put the tens and fives and ones back in their places.

Twenty dollars, I thought. An acre of good farmland. Ten acres of steep mountainside.

—And now the palm, she said. Complimentary.

She sat on the edge of the bed and scratched a match head and lit the candle. Held my hand tilted to the light. She looked confused. Nothing seemed to factor. She traced her fingertip down the old wide burn scar from Featherstone’s spit crank. A white stripe running diagonal from the base of my forefinger to the hand heel.

—This confounds everything, she said. It cuts across heartline and lifeline both. It’s the fate you’ve got, for whatever that’s worth.

She kissed me on the brow and blew out the yellow teardrop of flame and went out the door.

I fell back into hovering half sleep and then emerged into full consciousness some brief time afterward, singed and weary and defeated by the night’s long tiresome events. The light was rising to full dawn outside the window. I dressed and walked through the empty lobby and across the dewy lawn. Soggy shoes and socks. The river was uncommunicative no matter how much I stared at its face, but I waited on a bench by its side until the dining room opened, and then I went in for coffee and one soft-boiled egg, woefully undercooked and quivering mucus in the cup of its little crystal pedestal.

9

T
HAT AFTERNOON I WENT OUT DRIVING HUNG OVER THROUGH
the countryside, following the river road in a slender racing cart I kept stored in a shed behind the Springs. The spokes of the two wheels were painted yellow, and the upholstery of the seat was red and tucked and rolled, and all the members of the frame were lacquered glossy black. I carried a little flat silver flask in one hip pocket and a little flat Remington vest pistol in the other. In case the razor man reappeared.

A low day. I drove aimlessly at high speed along the road that followed every bend of the river.

At some point after I had turned around and headed back to the Springs, the left wheel started working itself off the axle, wobbling and canting a considerable degree off plumb. I pulled up and sat, wondering how one went about fitting the hub back secure without tools.

One of these tall slouching proud mountain men came walking down the road. He hardly deigned to look at me and would have kept on walking had I not called out and requested that he fix my wheel.

Perhaps my tone was inappropriate.

The man said, Step out into the road a minute for me.

As soon as my second foot touched the dirt, the man hit me three times in the face. The last two blows were particularly well aimed, as they were struck while I was falling. The horse backed a step against the traces and then stopped. I lay in the road and watched the man walk away.

I raised up onto my elbows and called out, Sir. I meant of course to pay.

But the man kept walking and did not even turn to look over his shoulder before he rounded the next bend in the road. I rose upright and tried to spit and clear my mouth, but instead of the manly gob I intended to produce, my lips spluttered and sprayed blood as from an atomizer down the front of my fashionably pale driving coat.

WE MET ON
my way back into the Springs with the wheel wobbling and my mouth swollen and scabbing in two places. A spot of blood rising through the fabric on my upper thigh where the razor cut had opened back up. A dark figure walked ahead of me, shaded by a black parasol scalloped like a bat’s wing with its decoration of crepe. All the heavy layers of women’s mourning attire pulled downward by gravity from bonnet to hem, all black. Upon passing, I removed my own slouch-brimmed hat and gave a nod of greeting. The widow looked up, her face vague behind the veil. So I did not immediately recognize Claire.

But she did me. She lowered the parasol and lifted her veil with a hand gloved in black kid. She said, Will?

Then the leaf-filtered afternoon sun fell on her face. The shock of recognition. Much awkward surprise on both our parts.

I must have looked to her as if I were wearing a mask bearing only a few points of correspondence to the face she had known and maybe loved all those years ago. But Claire was still immediately the same to me, a recognition deep past the point of heartbreak.

Mourning suited Claire, her pale face against the black. I sat on the cart seat and remembered swearing to her years and years before, up on the Lizard Bald, that whatever separations life might throw at us in the unimaginable future, whenever we met I would hold her close to me. No matter what. All my young heart urgent behind my oath.

Of course, I had broken my promise out on the new Nation. And now again an embrace eluded me. How to hold the Woman in Black?

Instead, I climbed down from my seat and stood in the road facing her and said, Are you well?

An idiotic question. Claire’s face was white as cotton. She was not well, not at all.

But if we did not exactly dash into each other’s arms, we were at least warm in our meeting. Sad smiles on both sides. Claire would not climb up and ride back to the Springs with me, so I fell in beside her when she turned and continued walking downriver. I led my horse and festive cart behind us by a long swag of reins. Claire’s muddy black skirt trained in the road.

In the years since I had seen her, Claire had lost a lot. The owl-faced baby had grown halfway up and then died of a fever and congestion of the lungs, blood flowing from both ends. And Featherstone had finally passed to the Nightland. His second death was surely only a little more satisfactory to him than the first, for he did not go nightward in a blaze of pony-club gunfire. He was thrown from the back of a young stallion. Bucked off headfirst into a fence post. Old bones shattered to powder all down his frame. After a brief period of unconsciousness, he came awake and wiped a smear of blood from his brow and directed that he be carried into the parlor and seated in his wing chair of death. He called for a tumbler of Scotch and a wet cloth. He drank and wiped his brow and fell asleep. He died by the fireside exactly like the first time, except this one was final.

So Claire had come back home. Where else to go, alone in the world as she was. But not entirely lost, for she was wealthy from selling out all of Featherstone’s holdings.

—He was awfully old, I said.

Exactly the wrong thing. For which I have a talent.

Claire made a puffing sound. Somewhere between angry huff and stifled laugh.

I yammered cringefully onward, not the least cool and contained within myself but saying exactly what I was feeling, that Featherstone was the biggest son of a bitch I ever knew. And yet now, finding that he had passed to the Nightland, I had to admit I loved him in some regretful way. What a bastard. And yet the world withered a little without him in it. Part of me still wished I’d put a ball through his heart way back then instead of just his thigh.

Claire put her hand on my arm and said, I miss him pretty bad too.

Then she said, Not long ago, I saw you in a dream and you were about the age when you fought that stupid duel. A young man.

She sounded disappointed in me for succumbing to the passage of time, as if its marks on me were a personal failure. But I had been assured by many women her age and much younger that I remained remarkably and attractively youthful. Concessions to this odious middle passage of life were few. My hair, though increasingly grey, persisted across most of its former territory. And I had not grown an entire belly but only displayed a slight virile thickness through the barrel. But of course there’s no arguing against the dreamworld. Its requirements are strict.

She said, I’d guess you’re carrying a flask?

—Tanqueray and lime. There’s some left.

She reached out a hand.

I took the flask out of my pocket and unstoppered it and wiped its threaded mouth carefully with a clean handkerchief.

—Ever the gentleman, Claire said.

She took a pull and then wiped with her own handkerchief, cambric trimmed in black. Twisting around the rim in parody before she handed it back.

—Looks like a rough day for you, she said.

I touched my beaten face. Looked at my pocket watch and did the arithmetic.

—Rough seventeen hours, I said.

—There’s a great deal of gossip about you here, she said. Senator, colonel, white chief. But beset all about by creditors and ill-wishers and lawsuits.

—They have time to talk about me? I though you occupied all their attention. The Woman in Black. Tragic and melancholy.

Claire reached her black hand back out, and I put the silver flask in its curve. She turned it up and finished it and handed it back.

—But, good God, Will, a Warm Springs Gypsy? How the mighty have fallen. I would have preferred a more extraordinary melodrama.

—Me too. But just so you’ll know, I’m planning on changing everything about my life real soon.

—Well, that will be fun to watch.

I turned my palms up. I live to serve, I said.

She was quiet for a while. The broad river was smooth and brown, and at some point in our walk we passed a big flat rock in the middle of the water on which someone had planted a Rebel flag. The handsewn artifact drooped in sun-bleached folds from a pole only head-high. It was meant to signify something about identity and defeat, though what I could not say. Too many possibilities.

Claire said, Featherstone greatly regretted being too old to fight Yankees, but he was thrilled when Stand Watie and his Cherokee cavalry captured that Union ship. He reckoned it a first in military history.

—What river was that boat on?

—I don’t know the name of it.

—Must have been pretty narrow.

—Was it bad for you?

—What?

—The War.

—When we weren’t needing to scalp people, it was mostly fine. A long camping trip. But all in all, the second stupidest thing I ever did.

—Second?

—Right behind letting you ride away in the wagon that day.

Claire said, You don’t know how long I hurt.

—I hurt now.

—For the record, this is not a contest and I was not talking about you and we’ll not allude to that day anymore.

I had sense enough to reach out and touch her, a hand on the black shoulder, a joint of bones I knew the shape of in my strongest memory. I told Claire about my dreams of her in the winterhouse with Bear. Dreams that still came to me at least twice yearly. Her fleeing from me, slipping through my arms like smoke when I tried to hold her.

I said, From the time I was thirteen, it was you or no one.

—You ask too much.

—That’s my gift.

When we were three or four river bends from the Springs, Claire said, You drive on. Let’s deny them further topics of discussion for today.

But before I could turn, she reached out and tapped two fingers to the hollow below my bottom lip.

—Perhaps you should grow an Imperial.

—I had one. But I cut it off after the surrender.

OFFICIALLY, THE BATHING HOUSES
closed an hour before dinner, but it was always possible—for a handsome gratuity—to obtain a key from an attendant. Three in the morning, Claire and I in the water neck-deep. Moonlight falling pearly all around us. The air was so cool and damp that steam rose thick from the surface of the spring and made the summer moon and stars look large and vague. I could hardly see her, though she was barely more than an arm’s reach away. The river flowed all but silent behind us, its sound like a deep exhalation. The lamps of the gallery had long since been puffed out by the white-coated attendants. Only a single yellow insomniac window remained lighted all down the long face of the hotel. The thirty-five columns pale in the moonlight. The lawn already silver with dew and the whitewashed tree trunks ghostly all the way down to the riverbank.

Despite my fervent suggestion to the contrary, Claire had insisted we wear bathing costumes. We moved around in the heavy water like two loads of dark laundry.

—My God, I said. We’ve seen every square inch of each other. Whence arises this sudden modesty?

—Sudden? she said. That was a very long time ago. Another world. We’ve long passed the statute of limitations on those memories.

—Not for me. They’re equivalent to capital murder. Unforgivable. I could mention certain particulars.

—As a person, there are elements of you that just won’t do.

—O wad some Power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us!

—Yes, that’s just the sort of thing you need more of.

—I’m working on it. Day by day.

We swirled about each other in the sulfur-smelling water. Claire’s hair curled at her temples and at the back of her neck exactly as it had at sixteen. At sixteen, I had thought Claire was the prettiest thing I had ever seen. And also at seventeen, eighteen, twenty-three, thirty. But now, these many years later, she was only some of the person I remembered. I had never guessed she could ever look like this. She had been awfully pretty, but now she was beautiful. Rich beyond my imagination to conjure. She seemed full and complete. Though the rational, unenraptured part of me figured that no one, man or woman, gets to be full and complete ever. We all go about burdened with the reality that we are the broken-off ends of true people. It is the severe vengeance Creation takes on us for living.

Notwithstanding, she looked awfully good in the steam and moonlight.

I lifted a dripping hand out of the water and touched her damp hair. It was all gathered up in the fashion of the day. Bunched and rolled and crimped.

—I wish you’d do your hair the way you used to, I said.

—I don’t remember.

—A thick braid down your neck. And when you took the braid apart and raked your fingers through your hair, it fell long and waved and wild across your shoulders and down your back.

—You recall so exactly?

—I’ll revise. When you undid the braid, your hair was waved at the ends and ruched at the nape.

I swam close and reached behind her to pull out the various pins and barrettes that held it in place, but she pulled away from me. Water swirled. Steam rose to the Green Corn Moon.

—This is not easy for me, she said. How to grow old?

—Going to water is a start, I said. It’s supposed to do you good.

SCATTERED ABOUT MY ROOM,
a great deal of widow’s lingerie. Sheer and fragile as the shed skins of snakes. Claire held an item to the lamplight and it was luminous and of no color at all, like the stripe in the ribbon of lamp flame between the blue base and the waved yellow top. So slight I could not tell what part of the body it was shaped to fit. She dropped it to the floor, and it fell slowly as if nearly weightless.

Claire did not pretend that she did not drink, as many women do, by taking only patent formulas, proper and medicinal but strong with alcohol and laudanum. She mostly drank London gin, clear and straight. She had taken quite a bit of it through the evening, and sometime around four in the morning she went to the open window and leaned out and retched briefly into the darkness. Then to the washbasin, where she poured tooth powder from its perforated tin very liberally over her wetted finger and scrubbed out her mouth.

—There, she said.

She smiled, but her eyes were wet and a little red in the lamplight.

We tried kissing, and contrary to my expectations, we were more awkward at it than we had been at sixteen. A skill diminished by time. Back then, the awkwardness had arisen out of our rush to melt into each other. Though
melt
is not necessarily the right word. We collided with some hope that all the pieces shattered in the collision might form a pleasant pattern afterward. Now it was the avoidance of collision that was our trouble, the insistence on pulling back into the limits of our individual persons, so carefully delineated all these years.