I sat thusly through much of the afternoon. I cried some, thinking that if the normal ties and accouterments of human beings kept falling away from me at the rate they had been doing lately, I’d soon become not much different from that little bear out wandering alone in the woods. I came to the conclusion that I was too old to throw myself on the mercy of the wild and become a wolf child. There’s a time in infancy when they will take you in, offer up a dark teat to your human mouth and raise you in accord with their own lights, which would be both lovely and brutal. But I’d long since passed that time. Now wolves would give me a hard look, allow me one step to turn and run, then come charging to bring me down.
I looked through the gap in the trees and studied the view west. Little tatters of fog hung on the mountainsides here and there. The air was damp and fresh. It was a big green world, brightening up for spring. Another country lay out ahead of me. Blank as could be.
I spread what was left of my kit before me on the ground. I had my budget, the map and key, my long wool coat, my bedding, and the kettle and nearly a pound of coffee grounds that I’d kept out of the panniers the evening before. Some oats and two books wrapped by my own hands in an oilcloth bundle. A collection of Arthur tales and
The Aeneid.
I looked around and all there was to add to this pathetic array was the sorry little turtle-hull saddle. I went and threw it off into the brush and figured the porcupines were welcome to eat it for the salt of horse sweat if they cared to.
That would have been a fine time to meet up with one of those magic beggars from the old Jack stories. Little wizened men who, if you give them a penny or a crust of bread instead of a clout on the head, will hand you an item—a basket or tablecloth or bowl—that produces a lavish spread of food on request. Like a big portable Sunday dinner that never ends. Fill Bowl Fill. But no such beggar presented himself.
As I’ve said, it is so often the case in life that you have but two choices before you, or at least that’s all I’ve frequently been able to see. That day, it came down to these two: keep going and hope to hit the trade post before I starved or go back to the farm.
The farm was several days of backtracking away, and in the end I’d fetch up on my aunt’s front porch. But it was not as if I could take back my old life. That was over. She’d just run me out into the woods again. So I spent one more knifepoint night under the ledge, and then the next morning I put my budget on my back and kept going west, hoping to find a way through the woods.
2
I
’M LOOKING FOR A BAY COLT, I SAID. HE’S GOT AN INSIDE CALKIN
broken off his right front shoe. I’ve been following after him for some time, but I can’t see him here. I gestured to the cut-up roadway. Have you seen men go by with a string of horses?
—Might have, the girl said. A day or two ago. Might have seen them going up the river to where they always run their horses.
She squatted in the road drawing pictures with a sharp stick in the dirt, her dingy skirt draping about her feet. The girl did not even bother to look up at me, so about all I saw was dark hair falling to either side of her face from a strict white part. Scratched in the dirt around her were the heads of horses, their flowing manes and flared nostrils and arched necks thick with cords of muscle.
—I’m not to go there, she said. You’ll have to find your own way.
—I didn’t ask you to guide me, I said. Directions is all I’m wanting.
—It’s pony-club trash stays there.
Everybody east of the Nation despised the pony clubs, which had been going on since shortly after the Revolution. It was what the young Indian men did when war became something they were not allowed to compete in anymore. They’d steal horses east of the boundary line and run them across the Nation, where their own law applied, and then sell them out in Tennessee or Alabama or Mississippi to white people not inclined to ask very many questions about the provenance of a fine horse offered for sale at a bargain price. At that point, the pony clubbers would steal some more horses and run them back in the other direction.
—How do I get to this place? I said.
—Three turnings from here. Left at a fork in the road, right at a bend in the river. Then start looking for a old track commencing next to a big hemlock and running hard uphill.
THE CABIN WAS
set all around with mud and stumps. Set picturesquely atop a bluff overlooking the midsized river and a distant range of mountains. It was nothing special, an unpainted one-room dwelling lidded with curling grey shakes. At one end, a chimney of smooth stones hauled all the way up from the river.
Out in front, a man was digging a hole. He had been working some length of time, for he was in so deep all I could see was the top of his bald head. At rhythmic intervals, the metal end of a shovel sent sprays of red dirt flying onto a conical pile. I could hear loud voices and laughter coming from inside the house.
I walked up to the hole and looked down at the man. In there with him, he had a ladder of peeled poles lashed together with rawhide strips.
—Hey sir, I said.
The man stopped digging and turned his face up to me, but he didn’t say anything. His face was round and white looking up out of that dark hole.
—I’m trying to find a colt that got away from me, I said. A bay, name of Waverley. Can any of you here help me?
—They’s a bay colt around back, the man said. But I don’t exactly recall him saying what his name was.
I walked around the house, and there was a stock pen with a dozen ill-sorted horses standing hock-deep in black mud. There was not the first sign of fodder, and the horses looked to have given up hoping for any. Waverley stood with his head hanging over the top rail looking at me. I went to him and started to scratch his ears but he pinned them back and wouldn’t commit to recognizing me. I stood awhile figuring what to do, my eyes unfocused, looking toward a slatted springhouse beyond the pen and then off across the valley to the mountains. I went back around the house.
The man was digging again, and I stood at the lip of the hole and said, That’s him. Who do I talk to?
The man stopped digging and climbed out of the hole, and when he did I could see that he lacked a part of one leg. Foot and shinbone gone. He walked on a wood peg fitted to his stub with a cup of leather and ties of rawhide strips. His good foot was stained with clay up above the anklebone, and the peg was muddy higher than that. He wore pants turned up to the knee but no shirt, and his shallow chest and upper arms were white as pork fat, and his forearms and handbacks were walnut brown. Despite his otherwise thinness, the man had a melon-shaped belly that lapped over his pantwaist. He stood looking at me, leaning on the handle to his shovel.
—Inside, he said. You need to talk to Featherstone. But I’d bet they’s a right smart number of bay colts in the world that ain’t yours at all.
—Is there any dinner in there? I said. I’m on my way to run a trade post in a place called Wayah and I’ve not eaten today.
—We’ve long since eat, the man said. I don’t know if they’ve left anything.
He threw down the shovel and scrubbed his hands against each other to clean them.
—I’m not asking for charity, I said. I’d be willing to pay for my dinner.
—Oh, you’ll pay, the man said.
I stood looking down into the hole. Red water was collecting in its bottom. Well or grave or what? I wondered.
We walked around back to the kitchen door. The man stopped and pointed down. Look at that, he said. That’s a handy thing.
I examined the doorway and had seen such ingenuity before. It was a timepiece of sorts, a step farther back into the primitive than a sundial. A gouged mark in a floor puncheon. When the line between sun and shadow from the doorframe fell on the mark, it was noontide. All other hours were subject to speculation. It was not currently noon was all the advice the clock offered. I could hardly imagine how such a device might be called handy, for a similarly reliable report on the progress of the day could be had just by looking up.
The man walked on across the threshold, his peg beating like a little hammer on the floor. He disappeared into the darkness.
I stood at the door to the room waiting for my eyes to adjust, and a voice from inside said, What are you standing there for?
I said, I’m waiting for my eyes to adjust.
Another voice with a strong accent I could not identify said, What means adjust?
I reckoned it was a rhetorical question and held my peace until I could see a half dozen men sitting at a round table playing cards. Two women in calico with their hair loose lounged all tangled together on a pallet by the fire, flipping through a limp-paged book and laughing at its contents. The one-legged man hunkered on the edge of the pallet with the women.
I could not tell what any of them were. African. Indian. Whiteman. Spaniard. Nearly all of them wore moccasins, but none of them looked particularly Indian in feature or hue, though most of them were swarthy-complected, and some had straight black hair and some had curly black hair. Nearly all of them wore hunting shirts and leather leggings, and two of them had slitted earlobes. Some talked in English, and a few spoke in an Indian language, and one of them, upon losing at a hand of cards, swore in words that might have been West African, for I had once heard an old white-haired man curse in a similar way, and West Africa was where he said he had been stolen from as a boy. One man with skin as white as mine had a peculiar hairstyle with a wide border shaved bare above his ears and the upper parts grown out long and greased, standing in peaks like meringue and mostly grey but for a crest that was still reddish as the ruff down a boar’s back running from his forehead to a brief plaited queue at the nape of his neck. A hammered silver ring pierced one of his ears.
They struck me as a bunch of people who did not know or care what race they owed allegiance to. I reckoned this was a place where blood quantum held lighter sway than in the outer world, and I judged that being a whiteman here might not be as great an advantage as I generally counted on.
The one-legged man looked at me and bobbed his head toward the table and said, That there’s Featherstone.
He meant their obvious leader, the one with the hair-do. He was a man of about middle age, beginning to go stout through the barrel of his chest. He had thick freckled forearms haloed with ginger hairs, blunt hands with bulgy knuckles punctuating his short fingers. Every line of his face—eyebrows to eyes to cheekbones to mouth—was turned down. He had a thin strong nose and a high forehead and a chaw of tobacco lumped in his cheek. At close intervals he spit juice directly onto the floor. His clothes didn’t give away much. He had on a collarless white linen hunting shirt buttoned to the neck, the cuffs rolled to the elbow. A red kerchief and a necklace of curved black bear claws shining across his chest.
—I need to talk to somebody about my colt that’s out in your pen, I said.
Nobody even looked up from studying their hands. They were busy discarding and drawing and arranging their cards in tight artistic fans and holding their faces inert so as not to give away any of their thoughts.
I said, That bay Waverley colt’s mine. Out back in your pen.
I waited, and when the hand finished, Featherstone put down his cards and said, Son, ownership of a horse is a thorny thing to establish anywhere. Here, it’s well-nigh impossible. And besides, none of us is talking horses right now. That business has concluded for the day. We’re playing cards.
I said, When could we talk horses?
Featherstone said, Regular business hours.
Another man said, That’s noon of a morning till one of a afternoon, with time out for dinner. But we’d admire for you to join us at table if you’ve got any money for us to take off you.
Two or three of them laughed. And then one of them shuffled the cards in a showy precise way. He started dealing out another hand, the cards flying fast and sequential around the table, each card landing in perfect alignment with its predecessor until little discrete piles lay in front of the arrayed players. It took less time to do it than for me to tell it now.
I eased up closer to watch them play. They had a game of Lanterloo going, but they soon came to the conclusion that the doubling of stakes at every hand allowed for a loss of money faster than was strictly entertaining, and Featherstone declared that all the intricate fooling with the ivory counters was womanish.
So they switched to Put, and everything slowed down and concentrated.
After a while of watching, I said to the room in general, Have you got something to eat? Pinto beans? Cold cornbread or just anything?
One of the women on the pallet looked up from the book and said, See what’s in the pie safe.
I went over to it and opened the punched-tin door and discovered a bowl of something grey and greasy and cold. It had set solid. A square-handled pewter spoon stood straight up in it.
I looked at the women and said, What is this?
I thought Featherstone was only paying attention to the cards, but he said, Groundhog meat and cabbage, with cow’s-milk and hog-grease gravy, thickened with flour and the mashed little brain from the groundhog.
I tried to stir it with the spoon, but it rotated in the bowl as one chunk.
—Anything else? I said.
—Set that bowl by the fire and it’ll loosen up after a while, Featherstone said.
—Is there not anything else? I said.
—They’s some liquor in that pail, the one-legged man said.
It was more a tub, half full of greenish corn liquor. A tin dipper with a crook at the end of its handle descended into it. A brown pottery crock of springwater sat nearby. I knew that the water was meant to cut the liquor with, but the crock was full and gave the impression of long disuse.
—How often do you have to refill this water crock? I said.
No one even looked up. Featherstone lifted the corner of his mouth. Not another feature of his face changed. I understood that slight motion to stand in place of a grin. I dipped into the corn liquor and took my first swig of spirits, and it was like fire coals melted into a cup.
I asked the woman on the pallet what she was reading, and she said it wasn’t her book, it was Featherstone’s. She couldn’t understand more than a few words of it. She tossed the book to me, and the first lines that struck my eye had to do with white bile and black bile and other such internal fluids, and when I flipped to the title page it read
The Anatomy of Melancholy.
I put the book down and went back to the card table.
A man in a turban, a black tailcoat, and fringed buckskin leggings stood from his stool and said, Here, boy. They might as well take your money as mine for a while.
I sat down at the table, and a player with his back to the western window—so that he had no more definition than a silhouette cut from black paper—said in a flat voice, You not planning to gamble on credit, are you?
All I could see of him in particular was that he lacked a hand on his left side. Just a blunt stub sticking out from his coatsleeve. I was thinking, I am in a land of partial folk.
But what I said was, No sir. I’ve got cash money. What game are we playing?
—We’re switching to Blind-and-Straddle.
It was a game I knew and liked and had amassed great numbers of peppermint sticks playing. Featherstone, having the eldest hand, threw down a blind bet before the deal. He pitched out a little coin of some currency and denomination I did not know. It had a many-pointed figure like a child’s idea of the sun on the tail face of it. Then the dealer shuffled and started tossing, and I found myself sitting at the round table with a pretty good hand of tallowy-feeling playing cards spread in my fist.
The doubling straddle bets that followed involved a great deal of talk and complicated agreements on currency exchange, since they were made in the form of several varieties of gold and silver coins from various states and nations. There were doubloons, guineas, livres, pistareens, florins, ducats, Dutch dog dollars, Scotch marks, Portuguese half joes, Peruvian crossdollars, and even one old smooth-worn bezant. The coinage of all those wide-flung nations converged at this frontier gaming house by some unimaginable but mighty power of commerce, traveling on long and crooked trails. Many of the gold coins had pie pieces sheared from them, and this led to disagreements over the fractional values of the missing slices. Also, bets were made with such slices, and then the argument became whether the fractions were nearer to eight or to four. Featherstone was the ultimate arbiter of exchange, and no one argued with his conversions, no matter how outrageously favorable to him they seemed.