Thirteen Moons
by Charles Frazier
PART ONE
...
bone moon
1
There
is no scatheless rapture. love and time put me in this condition. I am
leaving soon for the Nightland, where all the ghosts of men and animals
yearn to travel. Were called to it. I feel it pulling at me, same as
everyone else. It is the last unmapped country, and a dark way getting
there. A sorrowful path. And maybe not exactly Paradise at the end. The
belief Ive acquired over a generous and nevertheless inadequate time
on earth is that we arrive in the afterlife as broken as when we
departed from the world. But, on the other hand, Ive always enjoyed a
journey.
Cloudy days, I sit by the fire and talk nothing but
Cherokee. Or else I sit silent with pen and paper, rendering the
language into Sequoyahs syllabary, the characters forming under my
hand like hen- scratch hieroglyphs. On sunny days, I usually rock on
the porch wrapped in a blanket and read and admire the vista. Many
decades ago, when I built my farm out of raw land, I oriented the front
of the house to aim west toward the highest range of mountains. It is a
grand long view. The river and valley, and then the coves and blue
ridges heaved up and ragged to the limits of eyesight.
Bear and
I once owned all the landscape visible from my porch and a great deal
more. People claimed that in Old Europe our holdings would have been
enough land to make a minor country. Now I have just the one little
cove opening onto the river. The hideous new railroad, of which I own
quite a few shares, runs through my front yard. The black trains come
smoking along twice a day, and in the summer when the house windows are
open, the help wipes the soot off the horizontal faces of furniture at
least three times a week. On the other side of the river is a road that
has been there as some form of passway since the time of elk and
buffalo, both long since extinguished. Now, mules drawing wagons flare
sideways in the traces when automobiles pass. I saw a pretty one go by
the other day. Yellow as a canary and trimmed with polished brass. It
had a windshield like an oversized monocle, and it went ripping by at a
speed that must have been close to a mile a minute. The end of the
drivers red scarf flagged straight out behind him, three feet long. I
hated the racket and the dust that hung in the air long after the
automobile was gone. But if I was twenty, Id probably be trying to
find out where you buy one of those fast bastards.
The night has
become electrified. Midevening, May comes to my room. The turn of
doorknob, click of bolt in hasp. The opening door casts a wedge of
yellow hall light against the wall. Her slender dark hand twists the
switch and closes the door. Not a word spoken. The brutal light is
message enough. A clear glass bulb hangs in the center of the room from
a cord of brown woven cloth. New wires run down the wall in an ugly
metal conduit. The bare bulbs little blazing filament burns an angry
cloverleaf shape onto my eyeballs that will last until dawn. Its
either get up and shut off the electricity and light a candle to read
by, or else be blinded.
I get up and turn off the light.
May
is foolish enough to trust me with matches. I set fire to two tapers
and prop a polished tin pie plate to reflect yellow light. The same way
I lit book pages and notebook pages at a thousand campfires in the last
century.
Im reading The Knight of the Cart, a story Ive known
since youth. Lancelot is waiting where I left him the last time. Still
every bit as anguished and torn about whether to protect his precious
honor or to climb onto the shameful cart with the malefic dwarf driver,
and perhaps by doing so to save Guinevere, perhaps have Guinevere for
his own true love. Choosing incorrectly means losing all. I turn the
pages and read on, hoping Lancelot will choose better if given one more
chance. I want him to claim love over everything, but so far he has
failed. How many more chances will I be able to give him?
The
gist of the story is that even when all else is lost and gone forever,
there is yearning. One of the few welcome lessons age teaches is that
only desire trumps time.
A bedtime drink would be helpful. At
some point in life, everybody needs medication to get by. A little
something to ease the pain, smooth the path forward. But my doctor
prohibits liquor, and so my own home has become as strict as if it were
run by hard-shell Baptists. Memory is about the only intoxicant left.
I
read on into the night until the house falls quiet. Lancelot is
hopeless. I am dream-stricken to think he will ever choose better.
At
some point, I put the book down and hold my right palm to the light.
The silver scar running diagonal across all the deep lines seems to
itch, but scratching does not help.
Late in the night, the door
opens again. Scalding metallic light pours in from the hallway. May
enters and walks to my bed. Her skin is the color of tanned deerhide, a
mixture of several bloodswhite and red and blackcomplex enough to
confound those legislators who insist on naming every shade down to the
thirty-second fraction. Whatever the precise formula is for May, it
worked out beautifully. Shes too pretty to be real.
I knew her
grandfather back in slavery days. Knew him and also owned him, if Im
to tell the truth. I still wonder why he didnt cut my throat some
night while I was asleep. Id have had it coming. All us big men would
have. But through some unaccountable generosity, May is as kind and
protective as her grandfather was.
May takes the book as from a
sleepy child, flaps it face down on the nightstand, blows out the
candle with a moist breath, full lips pursed and shaped like a bow. I
hear a hint of rattle in the lungs as the breath expires. I worry for
her, though my doctor says she is fine. Consumption, though, is a long
way to die. Ive seen it happen more than once. May steps back to the
door and is a black spirit shape against the light, like a messenger in
a significant dream.
Sleep, Colonel. Youve read late.
Funny
thing is, I actually try. I lie flat on my back in the dark with my
arms on my chest. But I cant sleep. It is a bitter-cold night and the
fire has burnt down to hissing coals. I dont ever sleep well anymore.
I lie in bed in the dark and let the past sweep over me like stinging
sheets of windblown rain. My future is behind me. I let gravity take me
into the bed and before long Im barely breathing. Practicing for the
Nightland.
Survive long enough and you get to a far point in
life where nothing else of particular interest is going to happen.
After that, if you dont watch out, you can spend all your time
tallying your losses and gains in endless narrative. All you love has
fled or been taken away. Everything fallen from you except the
possibility of jolting and unforewarned memory springing out of the
dark, rushing over you with the velocity of heartbreak. May walking
down the hall humming an old songThe Girl I Left Behind Meor the
mere fragrance of clove in spiced tea can set you weeping and howling
when all youve been for weeks on end is numb.
At least that
last one is explainable. Back in green youth, Claire became an advocate
for flavored kisses. She would break off new spring growth at the end
of a birch twig, peel the dark bark to the wet green pulp, and fray the
fibers with her thumbnailthen put the twig in her mouth and hold it
there like a cheroot. After a minute shed toss it away and say, Now
kiss me. And her mouth had the sweet sharp taste of birch. In summer,
she did the same with the clear drop of liquid at the tip of
honeysuckle blossoms, and in the fall with the white pulp of
honey-locust pods. And in winter with a dried clove and a broken stick
of cinnamon. Now kiss me.
at mays urging, I recently agreed to
buy an Edison music machine. The Fireside model. It cost an
unimaginable twenty-two dollars. She tells me the way it works is that
singers up North holler songs into an enormous metal cone, whereupon
their voices are scarified in a thin gyre on a wax cylinder the size of
a bean can. I imagine the singers looking as if they are being
swallowed by a bear. After digestion, they come out of my corresponding
little cone sounding tiny and earnest and far, far away.
May is
relentlessly modern, which makes me wonder why she takes care of me,
for I am resolutely antique. Her enthusiasm for the movies is beyond
measure, though the nearest nickelodeon is half a days train ride
away. Sometimes I give her a few dollars for the train ticket and the
movie ticket, with some money left over for dinner along the way. She
comes back all excited and full of talk about the thrill of the compact
narratives, the inhuman beauty of certain actresses and actors, the
magnitude of the images. I have never witnessed a movie other than once
in Charleston, when I dropped a nickel into the slot of a kinetoscope
viewer and wound the crank until the bell rang and put the sound tubes
like a stethoscope to my ears and then bent to the eyepieces. All I
perceived were senseless blurs moving tiny across my mind. I could not
adjust my eyes to the pictures. Something looked a little like a man,
but he seemed to have a dozen arms and legs and seemed not to occupy
any specific world at all but just a grey fog broken by looming vague
shapes. For all I could determine of his surroundings, the man might
have been playing baseball or plowing a cornfield, or maybe boxing in a
ring. I lost interest in the movies at that point.
But I
understand that a movie has been made about my earlier life, and May
described it to me in enthusiastic detail after it played in the
nearest town. The title of it is The White Chief. I didnt care to see
it. Who wants every bit of life youve ever known boiled down to a few
short minutes? I dont need prompting. Memories from those way-back
times flash up with great particularityeven individual trees, dead
since long before the War, remain standing in my mind with every leaf
etched distinct down to the pale palmate veins, their whole beings
meaningful and bright with color. So why choose to enter that
distressing grey cinema fog only to find some lost unrecognizable
phantom of yourself moving through a vague and uncertain world?
In
summer i still rally myself to go to the Warm Springs Hotel, a place I
have frequented for more than half a century. Sometimes at the Springs
Im introduced to people who recognize my name, and I can see the
incredulity on their faces. This example Im about to tell happened
last summer and will have to stand as representative for a number of
similar occurrences.
A prominent family from down in the
smothering part of the state had come up to the mountains to enjoy our
cool climate. The father was a slight acquaintance of mine, and the son
was a recently elected member of the state house. The father was young
enough to be my child. They found me sitting on the gallery, reading
the most recent number of a periodicalThe North American Review to be
specific, for I have been a subscriber over a span of time encompassing
parts of eight decades.
The father shook my hand and turned to
his boy. He said, Son, I want you to meet someone. Im sure you will
find him interesting. He was a senator and a colonel in the War. And,
most romantically, white chief of the Indians. He made and lost and
made again several fortunes in business and land and railroad
speculation. When I was a boy, he was a hero. I dreamed of being half
the man he was.
Something about the edge to his tone when he
said the words chief, colonel, and senator rubbed me the wrong way. It
suggested something ironic in those honorifics, which, beyond the
general irony of everything, there is not. I nearly said, Hell, Im
twice the man you are now, despite our difference in age, so things
didnt work out so bright for your condescending hopes. And, by the
way, what other than our disparity of age confers upon you the right to
talk about me as if Im not present? But I held my tongue. I dont
care. People can say whatever they want to about me when Ive passed.
And they can inflect whatever tone they care to use in the telling.
The son said, Hes not Cooper, is he? He blurted it out and was immediately sorry to sound completely ridiculous.
Even
to me it sounded ridiculous. Almost as if the boy had asserted that
Daniel Boone or Crockett yet lived. Perhaps Natty Bumppo. Some mythic
relic of the time when the frontier ran down the crest of the Blue
Ridge and most of the country was a sea of forest and savanna and
mountains prowled by savage Indians. A time of long rifles and bears as
big as railcars. Bloodthirsty wolves and mountain lions. Days of yore
when America was no more than a strip of land stretching a couple of
hundred miles west of the Atlantic and the rest was just a very
compelling idea. I represented an old America of coonskin hats erupting
into the now of telephones and mile-a-minute automobiles and electric
lights and moving pictures and trains.
Maybe there is an odor of
must and camphor about me. But I live on. My eyes are quick and blue
behind the folded grey lids. I am amazed by their brightness every time
I gather courage to look in the mirror, which is seldom. How possible
that any living thing from that distant time yet survives?
I
could see in the sons expression that he was doing the arithmetic in
his head, working the numbers. And then his face lit up when he
realized that it summed.
I am not impossible, just very old.
I reached out my hand to shake and said, Will Cooper, live and in person.
He shook my hand and said something respectful about my awfully long and varied life.
Excerpted from Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier Copyright © 2006 by Charles Frazier. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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