The Road to Reckoning (8 page)

‘I have young eyes. I can help.’

‘And I am old, is it? Perhaps you can fetch me a cane and I will turn it to a switch! Sit down, boy.’

I went to my sack and with some slow thought took out my father’s spectacles. Father had need of them for all time and he read his newspaper with them comfortably. I turned and offered them out for mister Stands.

‘You may have lend of them. As to the map, I would not know what I am looking at to help you. Although why I should aid one so set on abandoning me I do not know.’

He rolled again and grunted, taking the spectacles and putting them on as awkwardly as fixing a blindfold with his fat fingers. He looked at the map with his new eyes and said nothing but I could tell he was satisfied. I went back to my eating. He looked gentler now, as if wearing a kindly mask. My father’s face. He went over the map but he told me no more of his plans. When he was done he took off the glasses with care and handed them back without thanks. I folded them and put them in my shirt pocket.

I ate and finished my laced tea as the owls came out. Henry Stands would stop as one called out and waited for the other to reply, drinking some at each successful call.

I was drowsy with my tea and wanted to sleep but he bid me clean out the boiler before I fell and he watered the horses with his own canteen. This required him to tickle their throats up and he poured into them. He had to bite Jude Brown’s ear to make him do this. His own horse was used to it.

He came back to the fire with his head down and waved a hand for me to come in close.

‘Take up the boiler,’ he whispered. ‘Make like you are eating from it and pass me your cup.’

I was afraid at his low voice. This was the worst secret and I could feel it. I could see Thomas Heywood all around me. Mister Stands gave me a hard look. He was warning me to be still and his voice went on as if I would understand.

‘An owl did not answer. Make like you are eating and give me that cup.’ I shook as I handed it over and he looked at me as if I were dead. I ate my empty spoon and he poked at the fire.

‘You see a white beehive over my shoulder in the trees?’

I put the boiler to my mouth as if draining it and studied the tree line. There was a white moon shape with stripes like a hive twenty feet away over mister Stands’s head. It had twigs about it and was halfway up a tree. It blinked and I became hollow.
A face without!
I knew then that it was painted white and striped.

‘We are not alone.’ Henry Stands’s eyes never raised from the fire. ‘Drink your cup. There is another to your right. He has half a face.’

I did not know what this meant. I had to speak but kept it in the boiler.

‘What is it?’

‘Indians,’ he said, and drew on his pipe.

There were no Indians in Pennsylvania. I as a boy knew that. Not for nearly a hundred years since Royal Proclamation and Teedyuscung. But my grandfather and Henry Stands’s father had torn up British paper too. We followed the rivers and valleys that still had their Indian names. Mister Stands saw my fear.

‘They are just hungry, that’s all. They are the worst of them. Thems that stayed or were kicked away and became civilized like your Thomas Heywood. It is good that you have your hat and coat. In the fire they may not see you as what you are.’

I was almost out of my body with fear but Henry Stands kept up our talk as if it was nothing. ‘Tomorrow we will go to Berwick. You may consider if you want to go on.’ He checked once to his gun belt, ax, and knife, and then gulped some rum and began to sing, tapping out a tune on his bottle, which you may know as a fife and drum for soldiers.

He slugged again and chinked the bottle to the boiler in my hand.

‘Is it gone?’ It was the face over his shoulder that he meant. I spoke into the boiler at my lips.

‘Yes, sir.’ I did not know if this was good or bad.

‘So has the other,’ he said. ‘I must check my rifle. Stay here.’ He picked up his knife and went off into the dark to the horses. I sat and watched my hands trembling around the boiler in my grip, praying for his return. I thought of my home in New York, pictured the velvet curtains and the black-and-white-tiled hall. My mother’s coffin in the parlor, when I could not help but grin at all the attention put upon me.

Henry Stands came back and sat down. ‘No harm. The horse would let me know, but you can never tell. You should sleep now.’

Sleep?
I could no more sleep than I could walk to the moon, but I made the pretense. It was only when I went to lie on the ground that Henry Stands noted I had no bed.

‘God, boy! You are ill prepared!’ He made me drink some rum. ‘Keep your shoes on and take my roll and blanket. I will stay up. They may come back. They would have seen my guns.’

‘You could bring your rifle here,’ I suggested.

‘Then they would know I had seen them. Now set down. You may sleep. I will sleep some in the morning when you will make me tea. Nothing will happen while I sit here.’

I lay down and watched him, the blanket about my face. He made a new pipe and had plenty of rum to see him through. I thought I had a dream of him cleaning his pistols and mumbling songs but I cannot tell that as true. I slept well with that giant sitting above and my father’s glasses against my breast. A quilt about me in the shadow of the valley.

At sunup I used the last of the canteens for tea for I was not about to go down to the stream alone. Mister Stands was asleep but I guess he had kept his vigil for he had draped his kerchief across his eyes and lay on his coat deep gone. I still had cheese and crackers and I spread these on the sack for breakfast and hoped mister Stands would share some of his jerky. I tried not to stir him, but my striking a new fire for the tea jumped him awake. He growled and rolled over in his coat but he could not complain if I was making him food. I burned myself again and again striking the fire and making the tea; everything about tea is always red-hot despite its reward.

I put the mug near his face and he breathed it in. He sat up and drank it all and took my cheese and crackers without a word. He did not look like he enjoyed mornings but I put that down to the rum. He handed me the mug and I poured tea for myself.

‘Get some more water,’ he said. ‘I will feed the horses and get us ready.’

I thought of asking him to come with me to the water but his face was not pleasant. I drank my tea carefully, as the enamel cup kept it hotter than anyone could stand, and then went off as told.

An hour gone and we were moving. I ached and was sore in the worst places but mentioning would get no favor and would probably go bad for me. I went on as carefully as I could. Mister Stands must have sensed my discomfort for he was positively human and sang to himself sometimes and called back to me with much conversation, which was a great distraction.

‘My wind-rifle is from the empire of Austria,’ he said without provocation. ‘You see this pack?’ He slapped a leather satchel on the flank of his horse. ‘That is its accoutrements. They are its only problems, but no less fuss than powder once you gets used to it. The man I took it from was unable to have it worded to me how to operate—being dead—but I was lucky to have a forester in the Seventh who had been with Lewis’s party. I take it that your schooling covers them boys? Anyways, Merry Lewis had him the selfsame gun. He demonstrated it to every Indian tribe they met. That man wrote a million words but he mentions that gun on page one. It was maybe twenty or thirty years old even then. Gunpowder ruins a gun. It is doomed the moment it is fired. You should tell your mister Colt about it.’

‘How is it that it can fire so many shots?’

‘You do not understand about air?’

‘I do not.’

‘I imagine your britches know better. The gun has a reservoir in the stock that I must pump. It is good for seventy shots, I have found. The first forty will kill anything. After that I am just winging and wearing down. Say now.’ He pulled up and looked about. We were on open road at about ten in the morning. ‘This looks like a spot. I will show you and let you show me. A boy should know how to fire a rifle.’

I now understood mister Chet Baker’s words. Henry Stands liked to shoot. I suppose this habit had come from the war and his ranger life. What men make of themselves after violence leaves is up to them. I could only imagine what Henry Stands pictured when he shot at trees and rocks.

He unsheathed and drew out the gun. It was brass, wood, and steel and was clean with it. The leather stock was rounded and he explained that this was the reservoir for the air.

‘Once empty it can take me an hour to fill it. She carries a load of twenty-two. Forty-six bore.’ He pointed out a tube along the barrel. ‘I can fire forty shots in about a minute.’

I knew that to be impossible. This was an old-man brag. He led me off the road into a meadow and scanned for a target.

‘What you have to consider is that Lewis and Clark went across the land and did not get attacked once. Hundreds of tribes. And you gotta ask yourself why that was.’ He scowled at me as if I was holding out the answer on him.

‘Why?’

‘Say you’re an Indian. Say you’ve fought white men before. Seen armies of ’em. And what do you do before you attack?’

‘I do not know.’

‘You let them fire their single shot at you and then you swarm at ’em. But old Lewis there brings out his gun and right in front of them can rattle off a dozen shots without a break. That is the diplomacy of firepower. But he made sure they never saw him empty the gun or load it up. To them it was without limit. Now, to them Indian minds, for all they know the whole party has these guns. There is no smoke, no reload, no powder, and there could be a million white men marching over the hills with this new medicine. They were afraid. And if you make a man afraid, you don’t have to kill him. Remember that.’ He put the gun in my hands.

‘If you can put fear in a man you can beat him. It is not what you can do. It is what you might do that is the thing. No-one ever sees a man standing on his pile of the dead. He does not carry his destruction with him. Now take a set.’

I knelt and pushed the fat stock into my shoulder. It was not as heavy as I had thought. He bid me to find my mark and I set on a boulder the size of a bull.

‘It has a ball in the chamber. Cock it one hand. One hand, mind, or I’ll take it from you. Hold your other hand as far along as you can, stiff as feels right, and she will steady.’

‘Who made this?’

‘An Italian. All Italians are genius. There is a man in Philadelphia who makes them also but
only for sport or fancy. This is a soldier’s gun. Stop your breathing and take your shot. There will be no spark so don’t flinch your eye.’

I held my lungs and fired. There was the crack and a lesser kick and smoke blew off the boulder across the field, fifty yards away.

I did something magical!

Too few times in a person’s life does something wondrous occur but it is the sharing of the experience that elevates it. Henry Stands saw it in my grinning face and there was nothing in the years between us. He had done this once for the first time also. I forgot my troubles for a moment.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘See that lever in front of the hammer? You push that to the right and hold the gun up just enough and you’ll feel a new shot roll down.’

I did so, and other than the roll and set of the ball this was a silent action.

‘Now it is ready to be cocked and fired again. Go on. You can kill that rock no more.’

I shot again and was rewarded with another puff of stone.

‘How is it that men do not use these all the time?’ I marveled.

‘Well, it is not perfect. And powder is an industry. There is no profit in air. Its worse attribute is that the pump must be used often to shoot again.’

‘But you could stop an army before that!’

He took the rifle and stroked my fingerprints from it.

‘I heard said that Napoleon made it death to own one. He was fearful that there might be an army with ’em.’

I stood up. ‘It is as you said.’

‘How is that?’

‘Put fear in a man.’

‘Now you know how no Indian went for Merry Lewis. Shame he killed himself. Real shame.’

This was a dark end to our talk and we went back to the horses in silence. We rode on but there was no attempt by mister Stands to distance himself from me. I was alongside him when Bloom Town appeared below us, and I guess that street looked up right curious at two partners riding in with the sun at their backs.

Henry Stands had a lot of tricks learned from the road. He paid a mother in a log house a pistareen to use her grease and stove and cooked up some belly slices and beans he had bought from mister Baker. She gave us soda bread for free and a plate each and we sat outside on her porch to eat. Mister Stands shared but grumbled about the bill I was gathering.

‘There will be a reckoning according on this, deadhead,’ he declared.

The mother had three children who ran around almost naked.

‘Why don’t you play with them awhile,’ he said. ‘I could do with not looking at your face in front of me for a spell.’

‘They are babies. I do not like children all that much.’

‘You are a baby. And I do not like children, yet here you are.’

I did not like his proclivity. ‘Do you not have family? No wife?’

‘I do not.’ He ate angrily. ‘I am past liking women. I do not like their talk.’

‘Why not?’

‘You meet a woman and you will strive to fit.
I will do this, I will do that,
you say. And what do they say? I will tell you.
He will do this, he will do that.
To hell with them.
You drink too much, you smoke too much.
All the things they forget that you did when you met them. They do not complain if you work too much, that I note. But you will have twenty years to learn this between grass and hay. It will do no good to you now. You will wake up one morning and be mad like all of ’em.’