All True Not a Lie in It (35 page)

—My son.

The voice is cool. The fire is down to the last embers. My spine aches and shivers up through its core. I squint into the dim. Nothing has changed. The cooking pot is squat above the embers. The shapes of corncobs still hang like icicles from the thin beams. A chicken murmurs once on the roof. It is only this same life. I wonder how long it may have left to run.

I say low:

—Only dreaming. Only speaking to myself.

The voice is almost tender from beneath the blanket:

—No more. Sleep now.

And I do sleep.

Light comes. The two little girls stare at me through a hole low in the wigwam’s bark covering. I am pretending sleep but I feel the eyes roaming. They have crept outside early, they are very quiet in their spying. They cannot have enough of staring at me. They laugh whenever I speak to them. They laugh more when I speak in English,
as if it were a great entertainment. I do not trust them but I like them well enough. They are pretty little girls and full of life.

One of them whispers
wochkonnikee
, the word for the colour white, and then
Shawnee
. I am startled enough to open my eyes. White Indian. There are a few other whites here aside from my men. They are dressed Indian-fashion and look as if they have lived here a long time. If they see me, their eyes find the distance at once, they do not speak.

Now the girls are breathing puffs of air at me. I see the vapour coming through the bark as though their words are trying to give themselves a shape and stick to my skin. My head itches. I pull at my remaining lock of hair and I say:

—You women are always trying to change a man.

The girls shriek with laughter and run off.

The early light comes in stripes like cold fingers on me. The girls have roused me fully, though I have not slept deeply and my head still pains me inside and out. I sit up on my mat, and I see my Indian mother and father taking their breakfast from the steaming pot. They are crouched and silent. When she notices me, my new mother stands. She holds out a large bowl and says
Skillawethetha
. Boy. Her face is young but worn, and tight with effort.

Well, here is another new life for me, I suppose, another beginning. I feel myself to be very young. I say in a hearty manner:

—Well Mother, may I go outside just now?

She stops, her mouth shifts. She wishes me to eat, I can see. But she puts down the bowl and says that I might grind some corn for her. She imitates a grinding motion, watching me to ensure I understand. She reaches for a handful of the dried corncobs that hang from the ceiling like a nest of bats.

I say:

—Ha. Woman’s work.

She knits her thin brows, holding out a cob to me in hope. She
turns to Black Fish, all tears, as she always seems to have ready. I dash the corn to the floor and I shout:

—If I am your son, why do you work me this way? I am a warrior. Look.

I bend low so that the crown of my head is visible and tug at my remaining hair. My Indian mother puts her face in her hands and sobs. I am not much of a replacement for her dead one. Black Fish says:

—Let him go.

His face reveals nothing. He is biding his time, I know one day he will react to my talk and my ways. I bow again to my Indian mother and I leave, feeling sorry. I do not like to make a woman cry. But I am a captive, son or not. We are captives. I remind myself of it. Well if my father is a king, I am a king-to-be. King of the prisoners.

The young man assigned to guard me catches up easy. I am not entirely free yet. He shuffles along in silence dragging his moccasins, sending out ripples of misery and dislike and occupying himself with touching his pimples in tender fashion. In this way we pass up the street of wigwams. In the open beyond them and before the fields, my little sisters are playing with a few other children, squatting at some game with pebbles and dried cobs. It is a serious game. Trades are made. They are hoarding their piles and building banks of snow around them when the older of my sisters suddenly shrieks, swatting her stack of cobs so they go spinning off in all directions. She flings a fistful of pebbles at the others, and one starts to howl. She stalks off, pitiless. I call her Miss Hiss for the noises she makes. She is a fury, like Jemima. But I do not think of Jemima. I do not know what I can do for her or anyone now.

The littler sister spots me watching and comes over, chattering in breathless Shawnee, to hand me a pebble. I crouch to take it and I say in English:

—You are a fine society lady.

She smiles with her chin tucked in and then leans on me and begins to suck her thumb. She pulls at my ear, all dreamy. It seems to do as well as her own.

—You would have my ear if you could, miss.

She looks at me, and I point and say:

—My ear. Ear.

—Eah.

—That is good.

I point again to my ear to show the other watching children and the guard, who is smirking now. The children repeat it after me. I say:

—I can quite fancy myself a teacher, though that is near all I would be able to teach you poor scraps. But for a card game. All-fours perhaps, if we had some cards.

They all go on staring at me, and so I put out my tongue and try to say what it is. It comes out as
Ung
. The children scatter in apparent disgust, even my little sister, who near takes my ear with her. The guard looks disapproving and shifts his eyes away. I suppose I have done some other wrong now.

—O girls of mine, leaving me again!

I groan and clutch at my heart, and I fall to the snow and play dead. Jemima loves this game. Susannah and Israel too. Jamesie—

No.

I lie still, my head is icy. I feel Death sucking at my breath again. So many times it has come so close.

My furious hissing sister rushes over from wherever she has gone and leans into my face, batting her black lashes and blowing close to my mouth. I do not move. I cannot.

She screams very loud. My ears bang with it. I will never be allowed to be dead, as I have learned.

I sit up and see another little girl watching me closely from where she sits nearby, her arms round her knees. She has quietly
gathered up all the corncobs and pebbles and has them heaped up before her now. I say:

—Hello Miss. Have you won the game?

—Tongue.

She says it perfectly and matter-of-factly, and then spins away looking ferocious and careless, hard as a little bullet.

I think of her sharp little face as I walk in an arc behind the wigwams until I reach the fields. She has an air of complete liberty about her, the way some young children do. As if she cares for no one. I walk and listen to my dull footsteps. I look out over the fields and try to feel some liberty and lack of care myself. The sky is wide and ash-coloured.

Black Fish at my side with an axe.

His face is remote. I know I have displeased him this morning. He walks ahead, saying nothing. After several yards he looks back at me, and I follow. He does not swing the axe, he holds it across his body in both hands, as if it is a thin child.

We walk through a furrow that winds about the strange hillocks humping up out of the fields. He moves quietly but sends back a ripple of disturbance through the air. My guard is disturbed also and shambles along to the side of me with his head down.

When we reach the edge of the woods, the chief stops and turns to me, the axe flat on his palms. I take it. The handle is rough-grained and heavy. I think of what I might do with it, and what it might do to me. My neck is quite thick, I think.

—You are to build a trough for your father’s ponies. Choose any log you like.

I look up. The voice comes from a short way behind, it speaks in English. It is the black man, our interpreter. I have heard this voice
in the nights, singing from the big house, amidst other sounds and talk. This is a noisy place on the whole. A busy winter town, full of its own life. I can hear Miss Hiss bawling from up the track between the wigwams.

The black man says now:

—I have left my whip at home, but I will be pleased to be your overseer.

Saying no makes him smile. A lump of sugar shows between his teeth. His eyes are on the axe. I have no wish to deal with a go-between. I turn to Black Fish and say:

—I am not building a trough. I told you, you have made me a warrior. My hands are not made for stupid work, look at them.

I throw down the axe and thrust out my palms as I used to do for Daddy’s inspections. I boil up old anger and force my gaze to hold steady. If I do not argue, I will have worse to face. Or I will sink into this life and never get out. I know that my men are always listening and expecting escape, I can feel them hovering like a flock of great birds all of the time, even out here. And so I stare hard at Black Fish’s cold face and I raise my voice again:

—Look. Go on. Take a good look. Smell them. Read my future.

Black Fish covers his lips with his fingers and speaks in quick Shawnee. I catch a few words before the black man cuts in:

—He says you need not work, you are his son. There are plenty of workers to build things for your people, plenty of women to grow food for you and your family when they arrive. What do you wish to do?

The black man puts his hands together as if praying. An air of friendliness hovers like a dragonfly over water but I do not catch at it. I say:

—I wish to do as I like.

Black Fish listens to the translation and nods. He speaks again and briefly makes the same praying gesture as the black man, who says:

—All right. We only wish for you to do as you like.

We all nod and go our separate ways. This all seems very simple and sensible and perhaps it is so. I am still too slow and heavy inside to think it through. The black man is whistling something that sounds familiar, but I am too fatigued to recall the tune. My young guard walks beside me again, his hand clamped on my arm. He looks with longing back at the axe.

The days fall past like water dripping. There are shooting contests here. There are fights. The Shawnee take my arm and offer me fights as if they are healthful remedies. I do it but I dislike it. I do not trust my excitement or my pulse. I do not like the feel of my body trying to act as if it is alive. I fight a thickset man with thick arms, we near kill each other, but we catch one another’s eyes in the midst of grappling and both see that it is a stupid false thing to be doing, though we do not stop until I let him push me down into the snow and that is that. I feel myself to be drunken all the time, though there is no drink.

In my permitted idleness I wander about the village with my guard. I hope to see my men to speak to but instead I find the black man lying on a rock by the river in the cold afternoon sunlight. He is the only black in the Indian town. He is treated like a visiting prince of some minor sort, indulged and ignored in turn. Is he free? He must be so. He does no work but the interpreting so far as I can see. He dresses as an Indian, with his headscarf and large rings splitting his ears.

For lack of anything else to do I sit down near him. My guard hovers about us looking uninterested and disapproving at once. He pokes with a stick at the ruff of ice fringing the river, crack crack. But the air is quieter here and queer to my ears. No insects yet, and
still cold. The water is low at the edges. The sun looks thin and white, a cut-paper sun.