A Thousand Moons, Page 2

  It was just that you wanted to do something. In that world if there was a misdeed, you felt like there should be something done to balance it immediately. Justice. Even before the whitemen came I think it was like that. My mother used to tell a story about my own people hundreds of years ago. There was a band that spoke our language but that had separated out from us and they began to eat their enemies after battle. They began to come to the places where we buried our dead and eat them too, stealing the corpses away in the night. They would try and capture one of us and eat us. How I trembled to hear that story. Eventually our tribe went to war with them, and killed many. In the end the last of them were in a big cave and we set piles of wood into the mouth of it and said if they didn’t stop eating people, we would light the wood. They didn’t want to stop so the fire was lit. It burned for a week, deep in the mountain.

  But if that was terrible to hear as a child it seemed also to speak of justice. Justice. To do something to right things immediately. You wanted to do that. Even if it meant killing. Otherwise much worse would be in line to happen. Thomas McNulty and John Cole felt it too, it was part of that world where we tried to live. They had defended the farm that time against Tach Petrie and his gang like I say who came with their guns to take the money earned from tobacco that year. They were brave as anyone that ever lived.

  But we were poor and two of us were Indians.

  There was no crime in hitting an Indian anyhow, as I said. Lige Magan went to the lawyer Briscoe who of course was his friend and his father’s friend for affirmation of that and he affirmed it.

  Lige Magan came back in dark pensive mood.

  Thomas McNulty and John Cole didn’t really have anything but me. I mean, that they couldn’t live without. That they would give their lives for. So they said. It was terribly painful to hear them say that and then say they felt so bad that the one thing they had of such value had been injured and they didn’t know what to do. And that maybe, as Lige Magan had found out, they couldn’t rectify it even if they knew how.

  Further west they would have just started shooting, if they could pinpoint the culprit.

  Thomas McNulty wondered would there be any good in scouring up and down Paris for vagabonds and vagrants and maybe going up and down the roads hither and thither on the same mission. John Cole said that in these days the roads were nothing but vagabonds and vagrants. Thomas McNulty sighed and said they had been such themselves many is the time.

  They kept asking, ‘Did you even see who done it? A stray person? Someone you knew?’ I kept saying, ‘I don’t rightly know.’

  I went and stood by John Cole’s leg like a dog that isn’t sure if it has done wrong or right.

  Because I thought I should know and wondered if I did. I did remember very vaguely struggling away and out of the town, and then stumbling along like an injured pony till I got to the lawyer Briscoe’s house and Lana Jane Sugrue his housekeeper called her two brothers and they ran me home in the lawyer Briscoe’s buggy. I might have been crying and I might not. The brothers, Joe and Virg, hardly dared look at me, I saw them looking at each other nervously. I remembered the fields and wastelands rushing by as they frothed up the little pony. Every bump in the track I felt in the hard transom. And then they left me with hardly a word at the back of Lige’s.

  They didn’t leave me round the front.

  CHAPTER THREE

  It was Jas Jonski broke my face could have been my story. Of course it could. I didn’t have it in my head though. That’s where stories should live. Clear as a nice high stream in the hills. Jas Jonski, a man I had never even kissed. It was all too black to see. This little tempest of shaking kept going through me, head to toe. Someone had forced his way into me too because I was all rags and tatters down there. I could have told them I thought it was him but I don’t know what wild horses would have held them back from killing him. It would not matter what John Cole was then, angel or Indian, it wouldn’t have stopped him. He’d have gone into town with a fire of vengeance in him and nothing could have saved Jas Jonski.

  I didn’t want John Cole strung up. And I didn’t have the story just right in my head neither.

  You only had to look like you done something wrong in America and they would hang you, if you were poor.

  Anyway maybe I intended to put the matter right on my own account. I remember having that thought. It was the bravado of my distress. There was a time for your father and mother to fight your battles, I remember thinking, and there was a time to fight them for yourself and I had reached that time I reckoned.

  I will say I was very ashamed. I was very ashamed that Rosalee had to clean me. I was in a stupor of shame. I couldn’t speak, not even to myself, about that. So in place of speaking I thought – I will settle the matter for myself. Well that was brave enough I guess. Thoughts like that are good for a while, for a moment. But how do you carry them out?

  *

  It could be I am talking about things that occurred in Henry County, Tennessee in 1873 or 4, but I have never been so faithful on dates. And if they did occur, there was no true account of them at the time. There were bare facts, and a body, and then there were the real events that no one knew. That Jas Jonski was killed was the bare fact. Others were killed too but their killers were known. Who killed him? That was the big question in the town, for a little while. For longer than you might think. Maybe they still talk about it, down there in Paris, Tennessee. If I say that here following are the real events, you will remember that they are described at a great distance from the time of their happening. And that there is no one to agree to or challenge my account, now. Some of it I am inclined to challenge myself, because I say to myself, could that really have happened, and did I really do that? But we only have one path across the mire of remembrance in general.

  Beyond the lawyer Briscoe and maybe a few others, in the minds of the townspeople I was not a human creature but a savage. Closer to a wolf than a woman. My mother was killed like a shepherd would kill a wolf. That’s a fact too. I guess there were two facts. I was less than the least of them. I was less than the whores in the whorehouse, except maybe for them I was just a whore, in the making. I was less than the black flies that followed everyone in the summer. Less than the old shit thrown to the backs of the houses.

  Just something so less you could do what you wanted to it, bruise it, hit it, shoot it, skin it.

  Just because John Cole raised me up as something so gold, he said, that the sun itself was jealous of me, didn’t mean anyone else in the wide world thought that.

  *

  The lawyer Briscoe was what Thomas McNulty called an ‘original’. When I hear Thomas McNulty’s voice in my head, the word is more properly written riginal. Lige Magan said there was no one else like him in all the broad lands of America. Not that anyone knew of.

  ‘A course,’ said Lige Magan, ‘I ain’t met everyone in America.’

  The lawyer Briscoe – I never heard him referred to by any other handle – was about sixty years old at the time I got work with him. He still had a head of wiry hair which he kept tamped down with a jar of hair-oil. That hair-oil. It stunk like a rotten cabbage. And the thing I always marvelled at was how clean his hands were. Of course he had no farming to do. But he had little pumice implements that he used for rounding off his nails, and he picked out any bit of dirt with a silver point.

  He had been too old to fight in the war but that had probably been a good thing, he said, because like many in Tennessee his head was only dizzy with where to rest his allegiance. His party maybe was life.

  He had an office in his house full of glimmering wood so that you might think water was lying just there on the floor, making it shift and tremble. He placed me at a little table in the corner, to do the numbers, beside a window that looked out along the high road. He wanted me to see who was coming and who was going and sometimes he asked me to note down the names, if I knew them. A lot of the people passing were the same people from day to day. There was Felix
Potter the carter for instance, who had his name painted on his cart. If it was a new face I would ask the lawyer Briscoe to hurry to my little window and peer out. I had to make way for his stomach, which stuck out before him. That way I got to know nearly everyone in Paris that had business along the road. Then when someone came to engage him in work, I would usually have some idea who they were, and if there were papers proper to that person already in existence, I would gather them out of the documents cupboard.

  Those documents were sometimes speaking things, sometimes silent as snow. There were lists of every black soul bought and sold in Henry County at the Negro Sales Office, which was the lawyer Briscoe’s father’s work. The monetary history of Mr Hicks’s store was there, and four other general stores too, seventy years of provisioning, and years and years of government contracts to supply the vanished Indians — and fifty old sere pages doing the accounts for militias that helped herd the Chickasaw and Cherokee out of Tennessee.

  It had proved impossible to civilise us, the documents said. It made me cry to read such things. There was nothing more civilised than my mother’s breast, and myself nestled there.

  But numbers didn’t weep and were needed for everything.

  He was very keen that I keep a wary eye on that road. This was so he could stay alive as much as anything else, because strangers at that time in Tennessee after the war were not a trustworthy commodity. And the lawyer Briscoe’s views in truth were very East Tennessee for a man that lived in the west of that state. East Tennessee had many that had wanted not to secede. Not only were there oftentimes gaggles of soldiers but also mysterious dark men that might have been soldiers once but had lost at that. Twilight was an awful busy time sometimes on that road. This was even though the new governor was all for the old rebels, and they had got their votes back too, whereas the previous one had been all for the Union, and taking the votes off them – or indeed because of that dance of time.

  He himself sat at a big table that had come in on the first carts to Tennessee. Nearly a hundred years before, he said, before Tennessee was even Tennessee. His great-grandfather was the first Briscoe in. The lawyer Briscoe had strong feelings about Tennessee. He liked to talk about its old beginnings and he often used an old Tennessee phrase when he was talking, ‘between the mountains and the river’. That’s where Tennessee lay, according to the lawyer Briscoe, between the Mississippi and the Appalachians. I guess it did lie there. ‘Between the two rivers’ was a phrase for West Tennessee, because sure enough it lay between the Tennessee river and the Mississippi.

  The lawyer Briscoe had what you might call big ideas about the world in general. He was an enthusiast for what he called ‘unfashionable causes’. I think I must have been one of them. He thought that the old president Andrew Jackson had done great mischief to the Chickasaw long ago by driving them away to Indian Country. As for Ulysses S. Grant, the present president, he sighed a lot about him. A good soldier maybe but did a good soldier make a good president?

  The lawyer Briscoe was married to a woman from Boston and had seven children but his wife had taken the children away with her back to Boston. In her place he had Lana Jane Sugrue to keep house for him, and her two brothers, Joe and Virg, who drove me out to Lige’s that time. Lana Jane was from Louisiana and used words like couture and coiffure. She was very small and wore a hat indoors and out because she was nearly bald.

  I sat at my little table and I kept the books. And then at six John Cole would come get me in the cart, because the lawyer Briscoe’s house was south of Paris and there was no need so to run the gauntlet of the town. John Cole prompted by the silence of the journey would talk about New England where he was born and all his adventures in the world with Thomas McNulty, which had been many. Sometimes he was gay enough and told me humorous accounts of things but most of the time John Cole was a person that liked to say serious things.

  ‘Most important thing in the world,’ he said, ‘is anyone who bring harm to you, he likely die.’

  The seasons would sit in backdrop to his words and if it was winter he would be buttoned up nearly to the two black sparks of his eyes and myself likewise but somehow he could always keep the talk going, even in the icy days.

  When he was around Thomas McNulty, which was as much of the time as he could manoeuvre, he barely said a word.

  When Thomas was dressed as my mamma, either way he was just the same. His voice didn’t change or anything like that. After he came back from Kansas he didn’t put on the dresses so much. If the lawyer Briscoe was a riginal, he was one too. Thomas McNulty always said he came from nothing. He meant it to the letter of the phrase. All his people died far away in Ireland, just as mine did in Wyoming. They died of hunger and many Indians died of the same complaint. He said he came from nothing but he lived with kings and queens now. It never entered his head that we were nothing too.

  He had this way of jutting out his face when he talked about John Cole, and his chin would go up and down, like the latch on a machine. John Cole was always in Thomas McNulty’s good books. He would blush saying things about him. Just ordinary things, but his cheeks would flush when he said them.

  ‘Guess we gotta ask John Cole about that,’ he would say, perhaps, if it was a point of argument. Then his face would jut out. He didn’t mean it to be funny but I would laugh. I am sure he saw me laughing but he never paid it any heed. He never asked what was amusing me anyhow. And if he had I couldn’t have said.

  I could always talk to Thomas McNulty about everything just as easy as you’d like, until I found the limit of that.

  *

  Rosalee Bouguereau maybe was sad too when the dress was put aside because it was she who had directed operations as the queen in the shadows and she had gone to the trouble of cutting a hundred bits of white cloth and twisting them about and sewing them as small roses under the neckline. Rosalee Bouguereau had been a true slave till lately as I say but if her mind was on that she didn’t show it but only a leaning towards what might best be called happiness.

  She wasn’t happy the day I came home with bruises. She was mighty distressed as she cleaned me off. She had to go in between my legs. She must have seen a lot of hurt to women when she was a slave.

  But of course West Tennessee didn’t like black folks either side of the war.

  ‘They don’t like no black man getting up,’ Lige Magan would say. ‘It all just butternut country.’

  Lige had the easy-going humour of the victorious soldier that has noticed the perils of victory.

  ‘East Tennessee,’ he said, ‘was all Lincoln country in the war, they fought in Union blue, just like us – but this West Tennessee – cotton fields and Confederate jackets.’ He was shaking his head at this bit of history, as if a thing confounding and confusing, which it was.

  ‘I guess Grant he ain’t so bad,’ said Thomas McNulty. ‘No friend to no butternuts.’

  Rosalee Bouguereau couldn’t give two hoots about Ulysses S. Grant and the way things turned out maybe she was right in that. She just wanted her pies to come out as she had willed them to do and for us to be at our ease in the winter evenings when weather kept all dreams indoors, and she wouldn’t have chosen to be cleaning up after what happened to me, I would wager good money on that.

  Her brother Tennyson was trying to work a field for himself and otherwise work for Lige and Lige gave Rosalee a wage for her work in the house and so Rosalee reckoned she had dominion over herself. Just about.

  I can’t report all these years later that she was welcome in Paris no more than John Cole or myself and she had to keep her eyes to the ground when she walked there. But she did walk there and went into the haberdashery by the back as careful as you like. She knew her ribbons better than old Ma Cohen the haberdasher’s wife, I would say that.

  She cleaned me that day with the very grace and gentle murmur of a mother.

  For a woman who had never been married she knew more about marriage than Thomas McNulty in various particulars. I knew noth
ing about it in any particular. I guess a whiteman’s pastor could have prepared a girl for marriage though I would doubt if such instruction could have been given to me since they wouldn’t allow me schooling when I was a little girl. Anyway it mattered not a whit because Rosalee had tried to see to all that. She explained to me how the engines of love would work and what went where and how to brook all that and she explained what men probably liked and what they probably didn’t like. This was at the very limit of her knowledge, I’ll be bound. She had no model for her wisdom only being a woman herself and in her early years as I say she had lived in the old slave shacks that were still north-west of the great infield in Lige’s place, falling back into the weeds and weather. There used to be three dozen slaves. In there, she said, humanity was a book without a cover.

  She had got a little enamel basin with hot water in it and a clean rag and she dabbed away at me. Oh mercy. She knew well what had happened but we didn’t either of us have words for it, as I recall. The language she employed was gentleness and she cleaned me off and then she put her two arms around me and rocked me and said I was such a good girl and wasn’t to mind. But I did mind, terribly, of course. As well she knew. Rosalee’s eyes had that queer half-yellow half-orange colour of a harvest moon, I never did see the likes of those eyes again on anyone. She was a kind woman that had been treated like she was nothing for a long time. Lige had a big theory that she was a queen. He liked to say that.

  ‘Who knows but that she might be a queen,’ he’d say.

  Up to this point, Jas Jonski had been going to be marrying a happy girl. Although Lige’s farm, according to Lige, wasn’t worth two cents after the war, it gave us enough for immediate needs. And I was in good work. And these had been good days for John Cole and Thomas McNulty too because it was after the great emergency that had befallen Thomas at Fort Leavenworth when his old captain Major Neale swung to his rescue and saved him from the gallows.