All True Not a Lie in It (11 page)

I walk on with my heart swollen and sore. I sing to the trees, I count them to occupy my mind. I list the names of horses we have had. Fatsy, Charming, Helen, Houynhym, Swifty, Sausages. Then I turn to hogs, Jub and Plum, good hogs and clever ones, who dug their way out of their pen at slaughter time. I think of Ma in the dusk of the summer pastures calling in the cows:
Here with you, you Ham
. Oh Ma, I think of you now.

I walk on. But I seem to feel breath at my elbow.

In the deepest backwoods it is horse’s breath I feel, though the horse is not here. Jezebel. She has been dead for what seems a thousand years. This is the first time I feel it, the gentle hay-smelling breath. I have not wished to think of it. But Israel has done it. I feel
him again as well, his presence behind me. He has called her up from the dead with some wordless sounds. I quicken to a run though the brush is thick and catches at my face and arms. The sun is setting at my back, everything is rusting red.

I know it now. My dead are following me. I say no but they say yes, yes. Little Molly Black’s teeth chatter lightly. I feel Israel narrow his eyes and grin. I close my own. I say low:

—What is it? What do you want?

My voice is rough and hard. No reply. The horse’s breath is cold but it comes and goes and does not stop. Now it seems to say to me,
You cannot forget
.

I will not think of it. All night I charge on through the brush, branches tearing at my face. I do not stop. The way back is very long. I believe I hear wolves, but my own heart is so loud I cannot tell what I hear.

When day comes, I am still walking, I drag my feet as if I am asleep, I am scratched with thin bleeding lines everywhere, the tip of my ear is torn open, but I go on until I feel nothing and think nothing. Until I stop at the edge of a river. Someone is there.

He is an Indian man sitting fishing on a log bridge over the water far below. All he is doing is fishing. His leg swings light, back and forth, one moccasin dangles from his toes and I see his bare round heel.

The way is very narrow here, my only path straight past him. I see the knobs of his spine curled over his fishing line, his rifle balanced easy beside him.

If I move he will see me. I am trapped, my ribs squeeze my heart, my heart is so loud that I want to rip it out and step upon it.

He goes on sitting and fishing and not going away.

Enough of war, it is not for me. Enough of killing. I say this reasonably to myself. I say to myself, I will frighten him off and go on home. Go on.

Israel, I know you are with me. I close my eyes a moment. Then I ready my shot, and as my finger squeezes the trigger, the man’s head turns, his eyes catch on mine. I am startled that he can move and that his eyes can move, that they are real eyes.

The gun shifts and drops as I fire. His eyes change. He falls without a sound, there is no sound for what seems a long time until his clean splash into the slothful water. He does not come up. The ripples smooth themselves away into green.

As I stand looking it strikes me like water on hot metal. I am a murderer. This is what Israel wished to tell me. I think it is, I think this is what he was saying:
You cannot forget what you are
. Poor Jezebel has been sent to say it again. I have been a murderer all along. I think of shooting the deer after the fire-hunt with you, Israel. I killed it unfairly, too easy, and I killed the horse, and now a man, and perhaps I helped to kill you by taking away your luck.

I walk on. More than ever, I think of getting away to another place. But I drag back to Carolina. I drown any thoughts of the death I have caused, I sink them as the Indian man sank beneath the slow current. I never tell of it. I try never to think on it again. The way the mind can rub out such things is a wonder. But only for a time. They do come back. You cannot forget, no. More than once as I walk I feel the horse’s breath on my cheek, all innocent.

More than once too I wonder whether I would have killed Neddy that night had he been the one to break his neck and look up at me with sad eyes.

T
HE REST OF
the long walk home from war, I catch at it and I hold it in my mind to keep the ghosts from me, before I know who she is. Her profile, white against old Bryan’s dark barn, only her face showing in the frame of black hair like a painting of a face, still as still. Rebecca.

She is a Bryan herself of course, with that whole band behind her. She does not forget it.

—Do I know who you are?

This is one of the things she says, always, in my mind. It comes with a slight lift of her brows as I watch her sweeping. Her eyes are black like birds’ eyes, all pupil. She turns away and says:

—I am tired of looking at you. There are better views to the south.

Her voice is deadly and I kiss her cool grimy hand and she gives me the twisted smile. Every time I see it my heart near stops. My wife.

Months after I return to the Yadkin, I see her real face again when Hill decides to take Ned and Squire and me to watch girls cherry-picking in someone’s orchard. It will be cheering, he says. There is no cheering me, I know. But I go along. Much of the way, Hill offers his opinions of the accomplishments of the whores of
Philadelphia and elsewhere. Ned asks questions and Squire walks along listening. I will admit that my memories of Maria the volcano whore have worn clear through, though they remain fond enough.

I drop back behind Squire and pick up a root, I look up for birds to club it with. Hill is untiring on other subjects also. Some soldiers carried mutilated bodies from the Monongahela River battle all the way to Philadelphia and dumped them in a square to show that peace is impossible. He has heard of this. He now shouts back at me:

—Did you see many men barbecued in the war?

His face is cheerful. Somewhere he has heard that I killed several Indians as well as a few French on the battlefield. I do not know where he has heard this, it makes my flesh crawl. Other people have been giving me fond thankful looks and one old woman in Salisbury asked to touch the bold
hand
of a young one who blasted the filth from our
land
.

Well I felt sick and ugly but I told her she was a poetess, and she rolled her eyes to Heaven before clutching at my hand and saying yes, she has written a poem. Indeed, more than one poem. She began to hurt my bones with her clutching. Her neck was all lollops of fat.

Now Hill asks again:

—See many scalped?

—No.

I am sick of his questions, I have no wish to think of the army or of anything I have done. The defeat is already infamous. Hill is writing a song about it, the General’s battlefield death, bleeding all over his red sash, and all the rest:

The sad death of Braddock in fifty-five
,

Soon there was nobody left alive
.

Such is Hill’s songwriting. He says he will have to make all of it up if I tell him no more. He is starved for interest in life, he moans. I say:

—I told you, no.

And so he begins to sing again: Poor Britons, poor Britons, poor Britons remember. His singing is insistent. I am not fond of this song and I am not fond of Hill singing it. And I am sick of this life and this walk. It is a long walk, a whole morning.

Hill has hopes of seeing cherry-picking girls caught out and having to relieve themselves somewhere in the trees.

—I will feed them all cherries with this very hand until they can no longer resist nature.

When we arrive out of the forest, he plants his feet and stands shielding his eyes from the high sun. Neddy laughs, and Squire says in his dry fashion:

—There are boys already up in the trees getting cherries, your admiralship, and a few girls getting their own. Best hurry before they take them all.

Hill marches forth, followed by Neddy. Squire looks to me, but I wave him on and stay where I am. The cherry trees are thin and young for the most part, all full of upward effort. Only one row is old enough to make any shade. Here two girls sit, the shadows making a net over them. They are sharing black cherries from their basket and looking straight at me. One is the face, the girl from Bryan’s frolic. Rebecca.

They are very still as they sit eating. Rebecca moves her hand slowly to the basket, and I see what an effort there is in her stillness. She is full of trapped life. Her heart beats and beats beneath her clothing. She will keep me alive. She is another chance. My own flat heart swells and struggles in its pit.

I watch for a time, hardly breathing, then I force my legs to move. I walk over and sit directly beside her. Her mouth is full of dark fruit, she does not trouble herself to try to speak. I watch her jaw move and the stain spreading out onto her untroubled lip. She slips two more cherries in.

The other girl stares at me with her big deer-eyes. She is the sister who came out of the barn and took the dead owl from Ned. I say:

—How do.

The sister blinks and says:

—How do you do.

She has a stopped-up way of talking, with her hand hovering about her chin. She also has black hair and eyes but a paler, thinner face. I say:

—You are sisters.

She twitches herself about. I smirk at my stupid pronouncement. Rebecca plucks more cherries from the basket. The sister ventures a remark about the heat and peeps at me a while longer. Then she gets up and wanders over to where Neddy and Squire have sat in the sun with several of the girls who are minding children. Hill is hovering. I see him lick his palm and shine his latest gun with it and walk up to show it to them:
See this
.

I remain where I am. I take out my knife.

Rebecca has another cherry. A bee from the hives across the orchard drops onto her wrist. I flip the knife over my knuckles and in and out between my fingers. She pays no heed. Her eyes stay on the bee as it crawls towards the fruit. She turns her wrist and does not flick the insect away. It gets to the cherry, its fat lower body quivers as it sucks. She stretches her fingers lightly. She appears to be contemplating one of the world’s marvels, that is to say her own hand.

Now she closes her fist around the bee, I see her do it. Its buzz goes on, though dampened. I say:

—Are you a witch? What evil do you have in mind for that innocent creature? Has it ever done you any harm?

She goes on holding it. It does not sting her, or it does not appear to. Her face shows no pain, at any rate. It shows nothing.

I throw the knife. It is a gentle throw. It catches the edge of her white apron and pierces the lace.

For half a moment she stops chewing. Aha. I say:

—Nice afternoon.

She says nothing. I go on:

—Nice apron.

I take up the knife and flip it again, and then throw it once more with a touch more force so it goes straight through the fabric of her apron and pins it to the ground.

If she tries to get up, the apron will rip to shreds. It is a flimsy fine thing, not homespun. It is expensive.

She keeps up her stillness and silence. The bee drones on in her fist. If it is stinging her she shows no sign of it. I toss the knife again and again, I make reckless holes all along the cloth, closer and closer to her thigh. All the time she does not move. It seems to me she wants to laugh. She eats more cherries, and I watch her chewing and daintily removing the pits into her other marvellous hand. I say:

—A shame to get cherry juice on it.

Now she opens her lips as if to speak, but she only pops in another black cherry from the basket. She spits the pit far off towards the forest. Dark juice sits in a bead on her lower lip and drips purple onto the white cloth of her apron. The knife is still embedded at an angle. I nod in the direction the pit flew and I say:

—Well now there will be another tree. Perhaps a little far from the orchard, though. You can call that your own when it grows up. Pick all the fruit for yourself.

A pit bounces against my skull. Juice travels down my temple. She looks up at the sky as if it were nothing but rain beginning. She opens her fist at last and the bee sits in her palm swaying its head before it flies off crookedly. She goes back to her cherries. I say: