The Eden Hunter (27 page)

The sunburnt soldiers laughed as one of them began to joke about frozen fire rats.

 

NIGHT CAME, LEFT, and then came again. At times he would fall asleep with his arm pinned beneath him so that when he woke it would feel numb and useless—like now his arm belonged to some other man—and so he would rise and wait for the blood to flow back down to the tips of his tingling fingers.

 

XAVIER HAD USED the scuffed heel of his boot to scratch a hole in the soft dirt, and into this shallow pit the two of them would aim
their piss so that to the blind creatures of the world below their hot urine must have seemed like summer rain. Kau watched as duped earthworms wriggled to the surface to writhe and struggle. At times he and Xavier would speak in whispers, but for the most part they were silent.

 

AT DAYBREAK HE heard the roar of cannons to the southeast, and later a soldier rode into camp and was met by the officer Clinch. From the piecemeal of the man’s drawling report Kau learned that McIntosh and the Lower Creeks had surrounded the fort after sunset—and then at dawn the Indians had moved through the wiregrass and palmetto and pine in a false charge, whooping as they crossed the burnt cutover separating the forest from the fort. The American soldier had watched this from across the river. He told Clinch that the fort’s cannons fired and the bluffing Indians had been pushed back. The negro soldiers cheered their retreat, and soon the world was again quiet other than the callings of scattered Indians meant to mimic nature. The soldier laughed at that. “Hell, Lieutenant,” he said. “Even I know turkeys are done gobbling come July.”

 

THE NEXT MORNING he looked on as the five Lower Creeks returned from the south in the canoe. Clinch invited them into his tent, and Kau imagined the news they would be bringing him from that man Loomis, the commander of the American convoy. That there had been a massacre of a watering party; that an American had been taken prisoner; that it had been a tiny dancing negro who had lured them into the ambush.

 

AFTER A SHORT while the five Indians emerged from the tent and then Clinch appeared. The officer stood a long time alone at its entrance, and Kau saw that the man was watching him and Xavier. Finally orders were issued, and a soldier brought a brass bugle to his lips, blowing seven short notes that were quickly answered by the pounding of drums to the east. The separate instruments of the separate armies spoke back and forth to one another in a confusion of codes, until at last three figures appeared on the emerald bank of the opposite shore. An eye-patched soldier pointed. “There they is again,” he said. “The chiefs.”

The Indians swam the wide river, and Clinch greeted them on the bank. They had stripped down to their breechcloths, and though two of the chiefs were shaven-headed like most of the Lower Creeks in the camp, the third man had thick, reddish hair and was lighter in color than his companions.

Kau soon realized that the large mixed-blood was McIntosh himself. He was at least ten years older than Clinch, tall and muscled with the sharp features of a hawk. McIntosh nodded to Clinch, then requested blankets with which they could dry themselves. He spoke English and sounded just like what the whites would call a gentleman.

 

THE CHIEFS REMAINED in Clinch’s tent through the morning, and Kau listened as two nearby soldiers whittled pine knots and talked. After a while they began to speak of Chief McIntosh. His mother had been a Lower Creek, his father a Tory from Savannah. He
had led the Indian troops under Jackson during the Creek War, was commissioned a goddamn American general after Horseshoe Bend. Among the redskins he was not William McIntosh but White Warrior. The soldiers laughed. “General White Warrior,” one said, his head shaking. “You believe that?”

But this made great sense to Kau—that a man moving between worlds would require a name for each. The two soldiers left and he leaned back against the hard fieldpiece. He began to imagine Samuel and Beah together on Israel’s island, watching the ships. A tired old man and a frightened woman. Xavier asked him what he was thinking and he told him.

Xavier shaded his eyes from the sun. “You really think they could have made it?”

Kau shrugged and the shackle pinched at his neck. “I don know.”

“That would be a miracle.”

“Yes.”

Xavier went quiet and Kau looked up. Clinch and the three Lower Creek chiefs had come out from the tent. The four men were staring at them, and it was clear that some course of action had been decided. They stepped closer, and Clinch spoke to McIntosh. “Perhaps take the small one,” he said. “He should be easier for you to control.”

Xavier covered his mouth with his hand and began to whisper. “I heard of you years ago,” he said quickly. “Do you remember me telling you that?”

Kau nodded.

“I do not think that was an accident.”

Two soldiers approached and Kau covered his own mouth. “No,” he replied. He started to say more but there was no time. He touched Xavier’s hand as the soldiers removed the shackle from around his neck, and then he was pulled away.

 

HE WAS GIVEN over to McIntosh and the two lesser chiefs. They bound his wrists with twisted lengths of leather and then placed him in a canoe borrowed from Clinch. As they pushed free from the beach he looked back and saw Xavier slumped against the fieldpiece. His head was between his knees; his shoulders were rocking. The canoe drifted farther and farther away. There was a small comfort in this, he thought—that after all those angry years as a slave perhaps he had found his way into Xavier’s heart, made a man he hardly knew sorry to see him carried off to die.

 

THEY CROSSED THE river and he was tethered to a tupelo as the chiefs collected their hidden weapons and adornments. It was a very hot day, but still they changed into buckskin leggings dyed scarlet and beaded moccasins. Over their breechcloths they pulled long hunting shirts striped white, yellow and red, cinching them at the waist with wide leather belts.

Three blue scarves were draped over a snarl of muscadine that stretched between twin pines. McIntosh took one of the long scarves into his hands and then wound the silk tightly around his head. The other chiefs did the same, and as Kau watched them tie their shiny turbans he was reminded of a white-robed man he had
seen executed by the Spanish at the African barracoons. The more he saw of the world the more he was staggered by its congruities.

 

THEY WENT EAST in a single-file line. McIntosh led them through the abandoned farms and fields and pastures of Garçon’s soldiers, then they entered the shade of the pine forest and turned south. Each of the chiefs held a longrifle in one hand and a turkey-feather fan in the other. They worked these fans steadily as they walked, so that among their bright colors and preening ways Kau came to feel as if he were being guarded over by some strange race of fluttering birdmen.

 

LOWER CREEKS WERE sprinkled through the flatlands in small clusters. Hobbled horses pawed at the lime wiregrass, while others scratched their ribs against flinty pines. Braves stood among the trees, staring—then ten rushed forward with their wooden war-clubs raised. The chiefs calmed them, and then the braves fell in behind.

They moved on, continuing south. Soon they entered into a part of the forest he recognized from his wanderings. The fort was near. At a creek crossing someone fired a flintlock at them. Smoke lingered within the branches of a distant oak like a fallen cloud, and as it slowly cleared he saw a negro dangle one-handed from a limb and then drop. Four braves splashed through the creek to pursue the sniper, but McIntosh called them back. One of the braves was wearing a loose white shirt and McIntosh asked him for it. The brave gave the shirt over to him, and then McIntosh wrapped it
around the end of a broken branch. A dog barked to the west as McIntosh forced the branch into Kau’s tied hands. The dog barked again and they angled toward it, Kau leading.

They skirted the thicket of greenbrier that ringed the dome swamp. Kau thought of the Choctaw on the platform, dead and rotting, and at times he could even smell him. He held the branch high above his head and waved the white shirt. Twice more snipers dropped from trees and ran, but no other shots were fired.

Finally he saw it—the fort. The gate was shut, and soldiers were watching from the bastions. The Indians halted at the tree line, then pushed him forward out into the burnt cutover. He was alone and in the open, holding his flag. He spotted Garçon a hundred yards off, standing atop one of the bastions with a spyglass trained on him. Kau stared back and saw Garçon turn and shout down orders. The British jack was lowered to half-mast on the distant flagstaff and then raised again. Their signal, he realized, to approach.

McIntosh and the two lesser chiefs left their longrifles with the ten braves and stepped out into the cutover as well. Unarmed, they followed Kau across the black and broken ground. He looked back and saw the braves watching them from the pinewoods. The Ota had not been real fighters in comparison and so this amazed him—that men who lived to kill other men could also have it in them to trust the other, to live under some code of temporary peace. A peace they would refuse to break—not only for their own benefit, but also for the benefit of those killers who would come after them. He once again found himself thinking of a chain.

He could see Garçon more clearly now. The General was in full uniform and had his sword strapped to his side. His oiled hair fell down from under his tricorn in a loose and untied river. They stopped at the edge of the moat, and Garçon called down to him from the bastion, ignoring McIntosh and the other two chiefs. “Caught again?” he asked.

Kau quit his silence. “Yes,” he said. “Me and Xavier both.”

“So you do speak,” said McIntosh.

They went to the bridge and the gate opened. Kau saw a negro crowd gathered in the sun. He blinked and then coughed as the stench of livestock and sewage washed over him. Three frightened soldiers were sent walking across the cutover—toward the waiting braves—before the chiefs would agree to enter the fort. McIntosh made to include Kau with these collateral prisoners, but Garçon spoke out. “No,” he said. “He comes along.”

 

GARÇON LED THEM inside his tent and Kau stood by the table, his hands still bound in front of him. Garçon went to him. “Are you hurt?” he asked.

Kau shook his head. “No.”

“But of course you are not well either.”

“No.”

Garçon walked behind the table and faced the three chiefs. In their striped shirts and blue turbans and scarlet leggings they looked like magicians from one of Benjamin’s fairytales, the wise men described in Samuel’s Bible stories, those three kings from the East.

“I know Creek,” said Garçon.

McIntosh spoke: “English will do.”

“Wonderful.” Garçon sat and then began to drum his fingers on the tabletop one two three four, one two three four. “You have come here to surrender?”

“The reverse.”

Kau saw Garçon’s eyes narrow. “I have heard of you,” he said. “White Warrior, is it?”

“If you prefer.”

“I believe I do.”

McIntosh lowered himself into a chair as well, but the two lesser chiefs remained standing behind him. He said something to them in Creek and they left the tent. There was a silver knife on the table, and Kau watched as Garçon plucked at the handle with his fingernail. The knife spun like a blurring chance wheel, and no one spoke until it finally slowed and then settled. The blade was pointing at Garçon and he shuddered. “Well then,” he said. “Your terms?”

McIntosh talked of Clinch and his soldiers across the river, Loomis and his sailors in the bay. He brushed dust from his leggings. “Surrender and I promise you will be treated fairly.”

“Just me?”

“I do not know really.”

“So an offer of nothing.” Garçon sipped water from a glass, then twisted a finger in his long hair. “Let us begin again,” he said. “Under whose authority do you come here to negotiate with me?”

McIntosh sighed. “The United States and its army.”

“But you are not in America.”

“And you are not in England.”

Garçon looked over at Kau. “What do you think?”

He could hear a quiet sound coming from behind the white curtain that hid Garçon’s quarters—a girl, whimpering—but if McIntosh could hear her he did not show it. Both men were watching him. The crying stopped and Kau spoke: “I think you gonna die if you fight them.”

“Quite correct,” said McIntosh. “Very good, you.”

“And that is why you left us?” asked Garçon.

“In part.”

“Yet now you are in a worse situation than me, true?”

“No better.”

“And what of Beah and that Samuel?”

“Gone. Dead.”

Garçon nodded. “And my Xavier? You took him from me, remember?”

“He made his own mind.”

“And then changed it perhaps?”

“He did.”

“And where has that led him?”

“Caught like me.”

“I see.”

McIntosh interrupted: “There is another matter for us to discuss.”

“Then speak of it,” said Garçon.

“I have been told that your men attacked a party of American sailors.”

“Attacked, you say?”

“A prisoner was taken, an Edward Daniels.”

“Oh, my. Poor boy.”

“Indeed,” said McIntosh.

“Quite amazing.”

“In what way?”

“That your armies would know to be waiting here in the wilderness. That they would anticipate the disappearance of this sailor. Amazing.”

Kau saw McIntosh wipe at his eyes. The man looked tired. “Just say what you mean,” said McIntosh. “There is no point to these games you are playing.”

“Fine.” Garçon walked his fingers along the length of his sleeve. “I am saying that your Daniels was bait on a hook. I am saying that this is not my game but yours.”