When it came my turn to bet, I had little idea what a suitable amount might be. I reached in my moneypurse and separated the Georgia scrip from the paper with the chicken recipe on it. I laid down two of the paper dollars, and someone laughed and another two or three grunted disfavorable judgment. The silhouetted man said everybody knew how Georgia money had set the current standard of worthlessness and that I would have gotten about as far in the game if I
had
tried to play on credit. I picked the paper up and jingled my aunt’s five silver pieces in my moneypurse and everybody settled down. I bet one of the coins and one man objected, but Featherstone picked it up and looked at it and pitched it back down into the pot and it rang against its brethren.
His verdict was that it would do, and the game went on.
When the hand neared a conclusion, four of my five hard dollars lay on the table, and I reckoned I was about to be done with gaming for the day. But when we showed our cards, I took the pot and they all laughed.
The lessons of the Manx schoolmaster stood me well in playing cards, and I kept on winning through the afternoon, and soon they all quit laughing. Featherstone and the one-armed man were the most regular defeatees. Piles of coins in confusing denominations rose in front of me, and I began worrying that the other players would decide to kill me and take my winnings and throw my body off the bluff into the river for the suckerfish to eat. So I kept close counsel. Refused provocation and sought to give none. When my money mounted into unseemly piles, I shoved handfuls of coins into my pockets to keep from offering too much reminder of my good fortune.
Twilight fell and the room became so dark we could not make out the marks on the cards. The first mosquitoes of spring were singing thick around our ears. Finally one of the women rose from the pallet on the floor and shoveled hot coals from the hearth into an iron pot and set it under the table and heaped doty wood on the coals to make smoke. Then she went about the motions of letting there be light. She stobbed a long stick in a crack between floorboards and angled it over the table and took strips of pork fat and wrapped them in loose-wove linen rags and tied them to the end of the stick. She blew up coals in the hearth and caught a broomstraw alight and used it to set the pork strips on fire. It smelled like breakfast. The air all around the table was thick with the rank black smoke from the smoldering doty wood, and the little flame from the pork lantern threw a halo around itself. All the things in the smoky shadows were just murk. For all her effort, the woman had created about an equal balance of light and dark. I still could hardly tell which spots on the cards were black and which were red, but at least the mosquitoes were driven back into the night.
THE TABLE BY
now was made up of me, the one-handed man, three rivermen, and Featherstone. The rivermen had straggled in just before dark, bursting in the door all hilarious and blowing hard from the climb up the hill. The thighs of their pants dark and greasy, a stink of fish and brown water about them. The one-legged man and one of the women sat in straight chairs by the fire, drinking and giggling. The other woman still lay on the pallet asleep, her face to the wall and the dingy heels to her feet hanging off the side.
As the game went on, I noted that for any number of reasons of personal history and local custom, the other men treated Featherstone with a deference I found vexing. A lot of it was physical fear, for if there was any truth amid all the tales passing around that table, Featherstone had left a bloody trail behind him since boyhood. Also, they acted toward him the way my uncle did around the two or three rich men in our county. The cardplayers called him Squire Featherstone and Boss Featherstone and Chief Featherstone. But I couldn’t square their deference with my current surroundings.
—Is this your house? I said to Featherstone.
Featherstone didn’t answer, but the one-handed man snorted and said, He ain’t got but three or four. This is just his hunting cabin. He comes out here to play Indian. He’s built a plantation out on the Nation the match of any whiteman’s in Georgia. Big house and slaves and fields of market crops and everything.
I reckoned that answer missed satisfying my curiosity, but I played on silently.
The men kept calling him Chief and Boss and Squire, and then at one point in the evening, one of the rivermen called him King Featherstone. I laughed, but when I looked around the table it appeared that no one else found the title funny.
So he’s king here, I thought. And the more I thought about the big man, the more I grew dark-minded, for the older men I knew had fought a damn hard war to get shed of kings forever. And they were very convictional in their opinion that if the English wanted to cut the head off their king and then turn right around and bring kings back, that was their sorry business. Here, we didn’t countenance kings and, God willing, never would.
I was just a boy, but the way I saw the table was that Featherstone and I were the major figures. The rivermen and the one-handed man were mere nothing. Spectators. I might add here that I had reached some nether end of exile and desperation and had been dipping into the green liquor now and then, and it was somewhat shaping my opinions to suit itself.
EVERYBODY ELSE HAD
been dipping into the tub as well, and they suffered from equally clouded thinking. Featherstone was drunk to the point that he had gone past stupor back to strange lucidity. And when he reached that point, he began looking for a fight. That much was evident even in the provoking way he glared at the other players and the way he handled his cards and threw them down as if wanting to throw them in his opponents’ faces. Much in evidence at his belt was a long cap-and-ball pistol of scrolled silver metal, with fancy scrimshawed grips worn bone-white in some places from handling and in other places greasy brown from hand dirt. It was pretty, but the pretty ones will kill you just as dead as the ugly. He spent a great deal of time making a show of adjusting its position against his groin.
At one point, he said he had probably put down ten or fifteen men more satisfactory than any of us. One more wouldn’t signify.
At another point, deep in the night, one of the rivermen fell asleep with his head on his forearm but still holding his cards. Featherstone sorted through the deck and put four kings and a three in the man’s hand, and four aces and a jack in his own. Then he kicked the man awake under the table and said, Either get to playing or quit the game.
The man roused a little and itched his scalp and studied his cards. He became suddenly alert. He bet big and everybody else soon folded but for Featherstone. The betting between them grew quite large, and in the end of course Featherstone won.
The man sat thinking a minute, and then he pulled a pistol and said, That’s every penny I’ve got in the world and I might as well be dead without it. I hate to have to do it, but I’m going to kill you if you don’t give it back.
Featherstone said, Calm down. There’s no call for gunplay just because fate holds you in contempt. But I’ll do this for you. On the next hand, I’ll put up everything I’ve won off of you against that old worn-out pistol of yours.
—Hell, the man said. That sounds more than fair to me.
They went about dealing the cards, and Featherstone put down his bet, a pile of hard money glinting in the dim light.
The man sat dazed and unclear as to his next move. Featherstone said, Well, put your bet in the pot.
The man laid his pistol down on the mongrel pile of currency, and just as soon as his hand was back to his cards, Featherstone grabbed the pistol and covered the man and told him to get gone or be shot.
The man said, Yes sir. And I apologize for my behavior. And then he went out the door.
WE PLAYED ON
long into the night. The women slept like a pair of puppies on the straw tick in the corner. At the table, money changed hands over and over, but I won steadily, and Featherstone lost. He became more and more agitated as the play went on. He rose once and briefly pistol-whipped one of the rivermen for winning a tightly contested hand.
In a dark hour before dawn, Featherstone put down a big gold guinea as a late straddle over a pile of Spanish and French silver. He said, Whoever picks up this guinea, I’ll blow out his goddamn brains and leave him lay. He pulled out his artistic pistol and set it on the table in front of him and put his finger to the tip of the barrel and gave it a spin so that the bore and grip swapped ends a half dozen times.
—Who will tempt the wheel of fate? he said.
The atmosphere in the room was suddenly all hush and gravity. Everyone, Featherstone included, sat looking at the pistol as if it was a magic thing, even more potent than a cudgel in a fairy tale to which one could say Beat Stick Beat and have it smite enemies to their knees.
—He’s powerful drunk, but that don’t mean he won’t do it, the one-handed man said. He folded his cards and rose from the table. He walked to the liquor tub and took a dip.
The rivermen at the table looked at each other and then folded and rose as well. Their thought was to leave the pot to Featherstone as tribute. I took it that this was a known ploy of Featherstone’s when he had been losing. There were just the two of us left. The other men stood watching.
—You playing on? Featherstone said.
I reasoned that a wise man would walk away. But I was half drunk for the first time in my life and tired, and I was looking at three queens, a king, and a deuce. I firmly understood that combination to be a pretty good hand under almost any circumstance. And I was weary of Featherstone’s ways. Something made me throw down the deuce and draw from the deck.
—What manner of fool are you? Featherstone said.
I sat looking at a second king. I fanned my cards on the table, face up. All around, everybody’s expression changed.
—Now’s when you lay down your hand, I said.
Featherstone spread his cards. A pair of fours.
Featherstone looked at his cards and then at mine. He started laughing.
—Why, hellfire, he said. You’re the first one of these hens that ever called me.
I raked over the various specie with the crook of my hand and wrist. It was a bright and lively pile indeed.
—It’s the rule of the game. You have to give me a shot at recouping, Featherstone said.
—Well, I said.
—We could play the game where if I win I kill you, and if you win you kill me.
—I thought that’s what we just played, I said. And if I understand this game right, the object is to win something you want. I don’t want to kill you.
—All right. How about the one where if I win you lose everything you’ve got, all your winnings, that horse you say is yours, the clothes on your back if I have a mind to take them. And if you win you get a girl of mine for yours. I’ve got one to spare. She’s outside in the springhouse, for she didn’t care to expose herself to this trash.
—Your deal, I said.
AN HOUR LATER
I walked toward the springhouse. The narrow rectangle straddled the springhead and the first ten feet of its stream. It was built open-slatted to let air move through it. Candlelight shone yellow through the slats until I was near enough for the sound of my footsteps to be heard inside. Then the candle was blown out and only the moon shone down. I opened the door and stepped in. Shelves on one side filled with brown crockery. Milk jugs sitting up to their shoulders in cool water. The spring rose up from its deep source and smelled of wet earth and the stones at the center of the world. Whatever you believe and whatever god you pray to, a place where clean water rises from the earth is someway sacred.
But overlying that holy fragrance, and at great odds with it, was the clabbered smell of milk and cheese. Moonlight fell in bars through the slatted walls, and all I could see was the form of a girl in a loose shift dress. A table and chair, a book and a smoking dead candle. There was no color to anything, just the blue of moonlight and the black of shadow. The girl took a step back, away from me, and the bars of moonlight and dark moved up her form. I could see her pale bare feet below the dress. And then her wrists and hands, but not her face. Her head was down, hair forward.
I didn’t know how to account for myself. Saying
I won you from your daddy in a card game
seemed a poor start.
The barred light glinted on silver bracelets circling her thin wrists. The only sound was the water rising from the seams in earth and the bracelets ringing against one another as she took another step away from me.
I was not a tall boy, and the hem of my long wool coat nearly swept the ground. It was warm and stout with a deep collar and wide lapels so that when I buttoned it to the top, it covered my face almost to the eyes. It still had some of the lanolin in the wool and would turn a light rain, though in the sun it smelled strongly of sheep.
I’m cold, she said. She was shivering, and her silver bracelets chimed faintly.
I unbuttoned the coat and opened it wide. My winnings jingled in the pockets. I said, Here.
The girl stepped in close to me and I closed the coat around us. My arms circled her, and I put my hands on her back, the points of her thin shoulders, and then her narrow waist, though I could hardly feel a thing about her through the thick wool. She stood against me with her arms straight at her sides. She leaned her hard forehead against my own, for we were of a similar size. We stood together shivering. I could smell her scent, some attar or fragrant water. Lavender. I held her and it was like falling down a well.
I said, I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time.
At the moment that sentence fell spang from my mouth, I knew it was both foolish and true, though neither served as excuse for the other.
She said the obvious. You just met me.
—Nevertheless, I said.
—Nevertheless, she said.
I said, You’re mine.
Of course, that girl was Claire. But I was not to know her name until some years later. I could have stood there and held her forever.