Every year they come when the deer’s coats are long and gray and hold tight to the hides—men in wide hats with coarse leggings gartered over breeches, bundles hoppused high on their shoulders, or sometimes willow creels and tow sacks slung from the saddles of pack horses, followed by dogs, women, and young ones, the women’s feet as red under their petticoats as the dirt they'd kicked up from Pennsylvania to New Virginia.
At the crossroads they swing west into the deep-worn buffalo trace, past gap-toothed log walls, and loose-laid roof boards weighted by split saplings and limerock, the courthouse watching from empty window-holes until the path to North Mountain swallows them into creek bottoms thick with trees that rise up to catch the sun between the ridges, where snow lingers in the shade, and a wild tangle of limbs cuts the sun into pieces.
Before laying cabin sills, they ax rings around chestnuts and yellow poplars, and scratch furrows that twist around the feet of the rotting giants. They drop corn into the crooked hoe-scratchings and watch squirrels skitter brave as Braddock over the tree-skeletons after seed. Pile brush high as they might, deer fly over to nibble the green blades pushing up in the pieces of light shafting through the dead branches. And coons shove through later for the green ears.
Most make enough corn to pound into meal for johnny cake to see them back to Pennsylvania in coats and shirts pieced out at the shoulders with rawhide gussets, or their wrists poking from the hollow forelegs of bearskins tied around their middles, the wool of buffalo moccasins instead of stockings against their feet, and every now and then one with an Indian britch flap and leggings tied by whangs to a belt around a buckskin shirt stitched from hides dressed with hot brains to make them soft as boughten goods until the wet shrinks them, and the air hardens and cracks them.
But enough stay to ruin the country. The ones with rifles kill the deer that fatten on their corn, making up in meat for what they loose in grain. The ones without guns course the buffalo through the woods, hallooing like wolves until one of the beasts rips around digging with his horns, and tosses one not quick enough to tree. Then the country looses its voice.
Leave the country be and it moves and talks, like when elk pour through the meadows, horns rising like saplings above the flowing backs, the velvet battle-rags from the spring rut hanging down like Mississippi long moss. Or maybe a tree you thought dead a day ago is suddenly green, and the breeze is playing with the leaves. Only what you thought were leaves are really parakeets fluttering green wings and setting up a chatter.
The air breaths with the scent of the buffalo humped smooth and silvered with moonlight. In the shadows a buffalo snorts. Hooves hurry. Tink-tunk. A cowbell. The breeze swaps around with the stink of brush fire on it. White men, plain as carrion.
I toe quiet into the soft molder of leaves, stepping around roots cocked to trip. A twin glow rises. Eyes gold as wood chips floating in the half dark. Then the flash of a deer's white hightailing. I shove aside vines that wind down from the limbs of heavy timber, and make for the tink-tunk of the cowbells.
Pap and I set crosslegged on the ground under the ridgepole of a brush leento. In front a small pot hangs from a hickory pole, steaming over the fire. Now and again the fire pops and flares sparks. In the clover glade the brush piles flicker, throwing light on the woods in back of the leento. On this side of the burning brush Pap's cattle settle down for the night. On the other side the restless shapes of buffalo stir in the moonlight. Wolves drift like smoke around the herd, on the lookout for a feeble cow or stray calf, eyes bright as candle flame, and tail plumes gliding after. The air smells of smoke and sweat, dung and stewed jerk. A buffalo calf bawls and a cowbell clanks now and again.
Four years ago, when Pap brought cattle to Newfound Creek, the buffalo were already there, goatbearded, man-tall, a dark flood boiling against hills, spilling dark threads through the green. Bulls bellowed and rolled in piss-puddles until the mud dried hard and thick on their dark wool. They pushed tracks in the mud to bake in the sun like cattle tracks, only God almighty bigger than cattle tracks, one hoofprint like two halfmoons staring each at the other. The cows nosed through the clover, minding the long-legged calves, frolicsome as colts, mincing and curvetting, leaving off their play to run and butt at the cows' teats to start the rich flow into hungry bellies.
That time some of the young bulls made free with Pap's cows that lumbered away, bags jouncing, eyes wide with fright when the rutting bulls clambered up their brown-and-white piebald flanks, their fierce, glad bellows mixing with the helpless moans of the tame creatures. Folks have since taken to calling the creek Bullpasture.
Later on, some of the cows dropped calves not wild or tame either. Shaggy, white, and humpless, with thick forelegs. "Just a little of both and not enough of either," Pap said. He penned them in a pole crib, fed them nubbins, killed and skinned them out, and jerked the meat. But not before he pressed the bellows-bright edge of a tomahawk in a cross on their dead foreheads, "to unspell the devil-taint," he said.
I get up to fetch a trencher and the gourd dipper to dish out the stew. I can see him floating, the fire light jumping and jumping so he's there and gone and there again, his legs cut off by the thigh-deep scrub. An Indian with a rifle slanting up, his ears cut and weighted so the rims stretch most down to his shoulders. I go stiff, flushing cold and hot.
Pap sees me. His hand slides up his thigh near the tomahawk in his belt, stops and tightens. He looks like he's trying to shrink down to nothing inside, like a scared dog waiting for the lick he knows is coming.
I see the Indian's face in the dim flicker of the brush piles, his eyes small and bright, a patch of hair standing up stiff as a fodder shock from his shaved head, and tied with rattlesnake skins. He comes to the fire without looking at me or Pap either one and drops easy to the ground, setting crosslegged, his rifle in his lap. His eyes swing from me to Pap and settle on the fire. "How're ye," he says like he has to pry his words loose.
Pap's eyes widen at white man talk coming out of the Indian face.
"Been hunting?" the stranger asks.
"We brung our cattle," Pap says scared-like, trying not to let it show. But the Indian doesn't pay him any mind.
"Plenty good hunting here," he says.
Pap says nothing.
"You can use here if'n you're a mind," the stranger says like he owns the clover, like we're setting in his own door yard.
The stranger fishes in his budget and draws out a hollowed tip of buffalo horn. He kneels by the pot, hugging his gun close to his chest with one hand, and scoops out slices of meat, sucking noisy at his spoon.
I step over and dish out some stew. I look at his eyes that show nothing, at the clean hard muscling of his arms, chest, and hips above the blood-blacked leggings. He sets back, muscles bunching and slipping with the strength in them, not like Pap who shows almost no muscle at all for all he's so strong, with his chest haired curly-black to the collar bones. I try to raise a muscle in my own arm. My eyes go back to the round face, to the long severed ear-loops and the stiff splayed patch of hair in the middle of his skull, his hair shiny red in the firelight. Only it ain't the fire.
"You ain't all Injun," I say, and Pap goes stiff and still, trying to pull himself in like a turtle.
"By half," he says looking up from the pot where he was helping himself to stew. He looks at Pap. "White blood’s nothing to boast of," he says, answering the question in Pap's face before Pap can get to it. "My pap took me from my own mam for his wife to raise. Name’s Dickson."
He settles back easy, chewing slow, his eyes playing on the edge of a thought. Then he lets it out easy, like the guts tumbling from the belly of a butchered bull. He tells it like he's used to laying down his life in front of folks for them to wonder at, his voice distant with things remembered and half remembered, and even beyond remembering. His father was a white man, a trader, and his mother the daughter of a chief in Shamokin by the Susquehanna, a stretch of reflected sky lazing past bluffs of cool pine and hemlock . . . He stops. A cowbell clanks flatly.
Dickson drops the piece of horn in his budget and pulls out a long pipe with a red stone bowl, and a marten skin cased with the head, feet, and tail still on. He digs his finger in the marten's mouth and pulls out something like draw knife shavings diced fine, pokes and presses it into the bowl. He picks a twig out of the fire and holds it to the bowl, drawing on the stem with his mouth. The light puts a glow on his pewter ear and nose bobs. Smoke plumes from his nose, curling upward in the heat-shimmer above the white oak embers. His eyes begin to dream, like he's looking for a picture he can fit words to.
Then he tells it like his mouth is worn to it, about how his Indian grandpap traded the use of his daughter to a white trader for a cut in the price of knives, lead, and powder. How the trader and the old Indian kept dark about it until word spread from his daughter to the other girls and to their fathers. About how the town fathers held a meeting to decide what was a good price for a fifteen-year-old girl. How they wouldn't eye the trader's goods, and turned a deaf ear to trade talk, until he agreed to put up enough goods to buy the girl. If the white man wanted a bitch to improve the breed of his dogs, they said, he should buy her for his house. When the trader finally agreed, the town fathers divided the goods equally among the men who had unmarried daughters in their own cabins.
Almost a year after she stopped drinking or chewing whatever had kept his pap's seed from growing, Thomas Dickson was born in Shamokin. When he was five his pap took him by packhorse to live with his wife in a stone house on the Delaware. Inside the house his words got lost in the hollow booming of his own voice trapped by the plastered walls. His one good memory was of some visiting Indian cousins who taught him to call a turkey to roost as he waited, hidden by the dead leaves of a fallen beech.
He sets a long while, the smoke drifting past unseeing, dreaming eyes. He looks at me. "If you’re willing, I'll take you hunting sometime."
I wait for Pap, but he says nothing. I wonder what it would be like to call up a gobbler. Tom Dickson sets a mite longer, his eyes dreaming in the fire. Then he shakes himself loose of things dead and gone, and rises without a word and walks away, melting into the woods the way he came out.
Pap waits till Tom is out of ear-shot before rearing up, a tomahawk is in his hand. "Chris," he says with his eyes on the woods, his words coming quick between puffs of breath, "keep clear of that one. He's fixing to work some devilment . . ." He waits for my answer. "D'ye hear?"
"Yessir."
Christopher Mayfield thought most about Tom Dickson when it came time to fetch water from the run, the hickory lugs biting his fingers, the water jerking and slapping the sides of the hollow gum log sections that did for buckets, like water was alive, wanting to get out, soak down, and work its way back to the run.
He thought back to the time when Tom came and took supper with them. Tom's face that said nothing it didn't want you to know. Tom picking up a piece of meat clamped between his thumb and knife blade, tearing off bites with his teeth.
It would be fine, Chris figured, living in a town like Tom told about, with people close around, where the men just readied the ground, poked in the seeds, and left the women to fret over and tend to their growing. Almost Chris could see the white smoke hovering peaceful in the trees, and hear the lazy hum of talk by evening fires in the cabins about nothing in particular.
"Hit ain't bad now, living in a town," Tom said. "Chases away the lonesome fright just knowing you can get there if you're a mile away or a hundred."
Chris reckoned he knew what Tom meant, remembering the acorns and chestnut mast plunking the roof boards and popping the crisp leaves in the early fall dark, like the ghosts of Braddock's army running through the woods. It set his guts to gnawing just to think of it.
Pap listened, his face coloring. He looked like a young one with his thumbs tucked in his fists. He talked as stern as he could make himself, but the fear showed anyway. It galled him to know he couldn't stop Tom, that Tom wouldn't stop until he emptied himself of talk. Then Tom would just up and leave and say nothing.
"They got the cinches pulled tight as they'll go, I'm thinking."
Chris swung around, oversetting one of the heavy gums, spilling the water. Blood thumped in his neck. He let go his breath. "Where in hell did you come from?"
Tom squatted and leaned his rifle against his knee. He dipped both hands in the unspilled gum bucket, cupped out water, slurped at it, and let the rest dribble down his chest where it beaded on shiny brown skin. He pulled his hands across his scalp to dry them. The hair stood up stiff and splayed over the coiled rattlers.
Chris sat down in the dry grass and leaned backward on his elbows, letting the sun bake his chest and legs. Tom dug in his shot pouch and reached a piece of sassafras root to Chris who chewed without talking. Tom propped his rifle in a notch on the lip of the gum bucket. Chris sat up and humped his back to the sun. He reached over and fingered the hard edges of the rifle barrel.
"Want to shoot it?" Tom asked.
"You ain't joshing?"
Tom grabbed the rifle and started off for the woods. He always acted like you had to do what he wanted and no hanging back.
Chris followed Tom through a brake of red shumack to a stand of hickory saplings. Tom held out the gun for him to take, but Chris minced around the lightning stock like a dog coming at a snake, trying to figure a way to grip it without it biting him in the bargain. He finally slid his fingers around the oily iron and wood. The butt plate went natural to his shoulder.
"Keep a tight grip," Tom said. "If'n it hangs fire, keep still, it might could go off yet. Set the back trigger and jest squeeze the one in front."
Chris lowered the gun and pulled back the lock curved delicate as a swan's neck until he felt it catch. Tom took it away and fresh primed it with powder from a hollow piece of bone he kept plugged with a tapered peg. He gave the rifle back to Chris, who full cocked it and raised it to his cheek, laying the bead on a squirrel creeping down a bent sapling near the roots. He centered the bead in the notch of the hindsight with his right eye.
"Keep both eyes open," Tom said.
The squirrel caught the movement of the gun and skittered to the off side of the tree.
"He seen me."
"Wait." Tom picked up a bark chip and sent it spinning past the tree on the left. An ear and a whiskered nose sprouted from the right side. Chris set the back trigger and squeezed. The shot rocked him backward. He didn't remember the sound, only the trees whispering back the dying echo. There was a white blaze on the tree where the ball grazed it. The air smelled of sulfur. Tom took the gun, cupped his hand around the muzzle and blew the smoke out of the barrel through the touch hole.
"I missed."
"No you ain't . . . Barked him."
Chris ran and looked behind
the tree. The squirrel lay on the ground, its paws drawn up, blood on its nose.
He picked it up and hefted it, feeling it limp and lifeless in his hand. He
tucked it in his shirt. Its fur prickled his skin. The head hung out, the
dead eyes liquid, staring at nothing.
When Chris pushed back the cabin door and stepped over the sill at dusk, he held the front of his shirt bunched tight in his fist to keep the four squirrels from spilling. The dry blood glued his shirt and skin together. A squirrel head hung out of one side of his shirt below a carven button, and a tail drooped out of the other so he looked like he had one long squirrel wrapped around him.
His mam looked up, her hair the color of dead leaves, her cheeks wet and shiny.
Before she could say a word Pap reached around from behind and grabbed his wrists. Chris felt the anger in his grip. Pap moved quick, like he had planned it all beforehand. He stripped a rawhide string from his moccasin flap and wound it around Chris' wrists so hard it cut into his flesh. He turned Chris to the bed and pushed him on the buffalo hides and straw where he lay atop the dead squirrels. He felt Pap untie the knot in his belt, and reach underneath to undo his breeches buttons. The squirrels were coming unglued.
Pap went to the shelf behind the door and came back flexing a hickory like the one Chris saw a man use on a servant girl tied to the whipping post in front of the log courthouse. It had been pealed and hardened in flame. A thin groove spiraled through the sooty wood from one end to the other. Fornicator, he remembered them calling it. Pap lifted his shirttail. The squirrels tore loose from the blood that had dried into the linen and thumped to the floor. Pap kicked them aside.
The groove bit like teeth. His hind parts flinched. In his mind Chris saw the servant girl's breasts shake, torn skin fluttering delicate as spider web from the rod. Sobs pushed at his throat, but he pushed them back and held them down with his belly muscles.
Swoosh smack, swoosh smack. The pain sank down inside him. For a time there was only the sound and the numbed jumping of muscle. But the pain was coming out again, a ways off yet, easing over him like it was taking pity, trying not to hurt too much at once. His silence only made Pap lay on harder. A sob burst from his mam’s throat, as if she were making the sounds for him. He knew she saw the stick pink and red with blood like he minded the servant girl's blood. Then the light faded and he was lost in a dead stupor and Pap quit.
When Chris awoke, the door shutter was open wide, letting sunlight spill across the floor and over his legs where he lay on a quilt pallet. His mam was working at the supper board criss-crossed with dents from heavy knives. He watched her scutching the nettles drooped across the block, chopping with a wooden blade at the stalks to get at the soft stuff inside , handling the stalks with a piece of hide so the hairs wouldn't sting hands that were almost as hard and shiny as the table. When she looked up and saw him awake, she came over and pushed his hair off his brow. He opened his mouth to speak, but couldn't. When he tried, his throat squeezed shut, and it was like if he pushed out the words they would be sobs, because his eyes burned with held back tears.
In three days Chris could
get up and walk stiffly, but he still made no sound. More than ever he wanted
to be like Tom and not let his face show the hurt. It must have worked, he
reckoned, because Pap never would look him in the face any more.
Chris went to the clover glade before dawn, in his hand a blazing stick of fat pine wedged in a split piece of green hickory. He moved steady on the path, reaching the pinewood ahead, pushing its light deeper into shadow, the fat sizzling, the flame flaring behind as he walked in the circle of its shine. He shoved through the scrub stuff that fringed the big woods and stepped silent into the glade. His eyes poked ahead after shapes in the black maw gaping before him. The glade swallowed the light. The flame fluttered to the night's gentle breathing, casting a quivering puddle of light that showed only a little patch of clover and his legs with no feet. The clover softly wet his legs above his moccasins.
He flung the lightwood whirling in a wide arc into the glade, saw it bounce, shower sparks, and come to rest crackling in the clover. The light left a blue streak on his eyes, and the night came close and touched him with gentle fingers.
Without seeing, he made for the giant chestnut, like a pup to its mammy's teat. It was shiny to the touch. In the dark he fingered the deep dents and scars slashed in it by the horns of buffalo, coming here for years out of human knowing till the tree hung out only curled rags in summer and flung down a fistful of scant mast in fall.
In his mind he could see the flowing backs, the power in their humped shoulders and short forelegs—a shaggy sweep of muscle and bone flowing forever, the trees going down before their blind push and prod, opening a place in a solid stand of chestnut timber for sun to come and clover to grow.
Along the edges and a little ways in the woods saplings bent over, scratching the mold. Limestone boulders were scraped smooth and white as giant eggs, and slabs of bark curved out of the grass, black and rotting near the roots of trees skinned bare to their middles.
He leaned his back to the trunk and slid to the ground. He sat a long while, watching the sky pale to yellow, watching the sun edge its way over the stiff mountain spine and rest for a space before it got up to move again. The sun flooded red into his eyes. He had to squint through a fine water mist to where the trees at the far edge of the glade pricked up, looking small as garden stubble. The tide of sunlight moved out into the glade, striking sparks on the clover and burning off the dew.
While Chris watched, a piece of the dark stubbly line of trees broke off and started into the clover. Just a little piece of the dark woods getting bigger, moving in a heavy trot toward the chestnut till he saw it was a buffalo bull. But never had he seen the like before. A single horn hooked sharp around like a sickle out of the black wool on one side of his head. Likely, Chris imagined, he splintered the other on a rock or tree, or hooked it inside another bull so hard it broke. He was bigger than any of the buffalo Chris had seen, but humped lower, stretched longer. And he was jet black, like he had been hacked from a mountain of coal, with a pied white face and black-rimmed eyes like gaping skull sockets. He came to a dusty wallow, pissed, and commenced rolling in it with satisfied grunts.
Then One Horn reared up, mud hanging to his sides, his eyes fixed on the woods behind Chris. Chris turned. At the edge of the woods another bull stood, shorter and thicker than One Horn, his power bunched forward into a giant head and high shoulders that spindled away to puny shanks. His horns were black, shiny as pistol barrels, narrowing off to fine points.
The animals were still as boulders, eyes alive in the flat faces. Then a flick of tails like triggers unlocking hammer springs, and they came together fast, tearing the ground with thick front hooves. When they met, One Horn worked his head to one side, driving the length of his sickled horn under the shoulder of the short bull who fell like his legs were axed short off.
The short bull lay on his side, his round-ribbed bulk heaving his breath in and out like a bellows, his legs stiff in the air as the blood seeped slowly out of the deep well of his body. The short bursts of his breathing stopped and only his legs jerked, not knowing his body was dead. One Horn went back to the wallow.
After it was over, Chris waded through the dew-chilled clover and picked up a long hickory pole. He levered the body of the short bull upright on its knees. He pulled his fine-honed butcher knife from the tow cloth belted about his shirt, and with both hands on the buck-horn handle, leaned his full weight on the blade, drawing it down the ridged backbone. He seized the loosened hide in his fists and pulled down a flap from the hump, uncovering the shiny fat on the ribs. He mounted astride the backbone, and pulled a tomahawk from the tow cloth behind his knife. He hacked at the ribs, twisting the blade, prizing the ribs away from the backbone with the tomahawk. He lay belly down on the dead animal and plunged his arm past the elbow into the slippery hot innards, searching out the liver. He pinched it hard, reached his knife down with his other arm, and razored off a piece. He put it in his mouth, tasting of its strength, letting it slide only half chewed down his throat.
He slid down and sat with his head against the curly wool. One Horn was gone from his piss puddle. Wolves white as sheep were snuffing in the mud. He felt a tick working its way out of the buffalo wool and into his ear. He slapped at it and a yelp pierced his brain like a moccasin awl.
The sun was gone, the sky just beginning to show itself. He was still backed against the giant tree, his ear still wet where the wolf had put its nose. The wolf drifted back to sit in a circle of other long white shapes.
Down in the glade lights were bobbing. Six lightwood knots to the stride of men walking Indian file. The wolves loped off for the woods, hearing what he couldn't yet—the whisper of feet in the clover. By and by he saw the copper shine of shaved heads, and the white paint around Tom's eyes and on his cheeks and mouth, the pale flicker of the blazing pine shaping his face out of the dark.
Chris spoke first. "Did you . . ."
"Yes."
Tom lowered the light. With his finger he flipped the black strands in his belt against his naked thigh. The hair caught the light in gleams, and Chris made out Pap's hair and the bloody flap of the scalp.
Chris' stomach churned. He started to breath hard. Blood roared in his ears. "You ne’er touched her."
"No ... Now let's git," Tom said sudden-like, as if killing was nothing to fret over now it was done, or maybe he wanted to be gone before word reached Estill’s.
Chris looked at the few clouds
in the sky, brightened by the sun hidden by the black mountains. And of a sudden
Chris realized that not only couldn't he see the glade, he couldn't call it
to mind. It seemed like he had already seen it for good and all when he saw
it last, and likely wouldn't see it again—ever.