I’ve sewn straps onto sacks so they can carry their bags more easily. I don’t know how much food or water we’ll need, not knowing how far we’re going. I made the bags heavy enough that they’ll feel some confidence, like I’ve provided for them and we’re going to be all right. I feel more like a mother these days, even as I’m sending my children into the wilderness, away from shelter, toward bounty hunters and maybe wolves. I don’t even know if wolves would eat a girl, but I’m sending us toward them anyway.
There’s no way to tell which is the fastest horse in the dark. I let Polly pick her favorite. It’s a black one, sturdy enough, who doesn’t protest as I lead him out and throw a blanket and saddle over his back and slip a bit through his teeth. I learned all this from Bob, who brought me here to show off what he knew. Everything’s heavier and harder than he made it seem. With a little grudge I give him some respect. I pull a stool over to hoist the girls up. Polly is giggling like mad and Delphy’s eyes are wide, scared. I crawl up, the horse sidestepping from the weight of me, and fix myself between them, holding Polly in front of me and making Delphy hold me from behind.
“Now we’re quiet,” I say.
They don’t respond.
“Only time you make a noise is if you fall off.”
Silence.
I kick the horse a couple of times before it senses what I’m after. In the tarry dark, no sun to follow, I aim it for the north road, away from Pensacola, toward Indian lands, toward paths that go west and somewhere near my daughters’ father.
After about a mile the horse figures out how to gallop, and we all make little noises like women and clutch each other hard.
March 11–12, 1788 Le Clerc
I ADMIT TO BEING lonely for my horse. Though she did not speak, she seemed to understand me with her muscles and fur, and now that I’m alone in the woods, peering at the little breakages of sticks that suggest a man’s footstep, I think how much better it is to be seen even by a beast than not at all. How lucky these men are that I am hunting them.
I am already disheveled from a night in the open air, though I have a sturdy blanket that wraps beneath and above me, just the size to warm one person. The forest here has been burned by Indians within the past year, so a fine layer of ash still lies under the winter leaves, and my breeches are sooty. I address my hair, but without a glass I cannot confirm its arrangement. The criminals will not care how I look; they’ll only see me for a minute at most as free men. Then, depending on their instincts and response, they will either be killed by my own hand or taken back to Hillaubee to be killed by Seloatka, who in these uncertain territories happens to be the chief of all of us. I use a dogwood twig to clean my teeth.
My Indian wife has covered the bottom of my boots with a soft felt, and I walk quickly on the balls of my feet into the dawn. A casual listener might interpret the noises I make as a dry wind, or the distant patter of a riverbed. Birds that avoid me on horseback congregate when I’m on foot, as though I leave uncovered seeds in my wake. You cannot love a bird as you love a horse, perhaps because the eyes have no rest in them, but I assume some tissue connects them just as the species of humans are joined. Do both feel no sorrow? I scare up a barred owl, the only kind I know that can hunt his prey with light, and I pause as it falls from its branch in a heavy swoop, gliding off through the beams of March. It would have been easier to study the animals of the New World than its inhabitants. I would face less resistance, and would by now be already published. It is not wild to imagine that my father, wherever he is, might read my name in a borrowed journal and feel some pride. But I pursue my interests not because of but in spite of my lineage. I am tired of its stale order; surely I am not the first to see that it has no future in a world increasingly scientific and democratic.
And here in these woods, in these endless, wall-less woods, not a soul can say I do not belong.
I play a game with myself: How did a white man meet a black man meet an Indian? The white man is the negro’s master, and the Indian a hired guide. The Indian and the white man are trading partners, and they purchased a black man to do the shooting. The black man and the Indian are both slaves, fugitive, and they found some low drunkard in a tavern to join their scheme. They are all sons of the same mother, born of three separate fathers. If this story is ever told, will someone ask what a Frenchman was doing on their trail? Will this become the sort of tale where even the name of my horse is remembered?
I could stay here and never return to any company and become a man entirely attuned to the seasons, who after several years loses the gift of speech, then of empathy; maybe that’s what it would take to make me miss my mother’s garden.
And then I see them.
The light is still dim, but the figures moving at the farthest edge of the forest are bipedal and slow. They are each earth-colored, as though the dirt has ballooned up into the shapes of men.
I HAVE SPENT my life looking for them.
I said I left my wife because I was bored and unhappy with our privacy, lonely again within our walls, but this was only a partial truth; I made these confessions to her but had no firm thought of escape until she left on a Tuesday and came back on a Thursday and said she had been in another man’s bed. What did I expect? I had been the first to profit from her disloyalty, and surely could not assume a complete reform. I asked her to explain her behavior, and she asked me to explain mine. Love is not giving up, she said. I felt, with some righteousness, that she had gone further in the direction of giving up than I, but she believed that mine was the first offense and deserved repayment.
“Do you want me to leave?” I asked her. “Are you unhappy?”
“Ask yourself that,” she said.
I wanted to inquire if she loved me but could not bring myself to, not wanting to hear her deny it. I felt newly forsaken.
“You’re a decent man,” she said, “and moderately clever. You’ll sort it all out. You’ll see what I mean. Then, if you like, we can try again.”
We fought for three days and, despite using all the reason and passion at our disposal, came to no conclusion.
I was brokenhearted, not because I lost her particular love, but because now there was no one to call me theirs.
I packed two sturdy suitcases and threw myself recklessly onto the world, searching for a place free from the strict classifications of France so that I might write about it with the sheen of discovery and rebuild my self-esteem. I was more than just a lover, and grew grateful that she had freed me to become what I considered the apex of modern society: that is to say, a scholar.
Because the earliest ship out of Dunkerque was northern bound, I went first to Norway, where the atlas of my childhood had shown mountains that looked as frothy as waves or piling clouds. I believed the Arctic ice would hold something elemental, but I found a society little different from the one I left, with each man in his house and frightened of what he didn’t know. I can’t say much of my time there because I was still engaged mostly in my own misery, a condition that is anathema to pure observation. I was cold, and the women reminded me of her, their every glance suggesting infidelity. Tiring of the snow, I boarded a boat for the New World. We were told that the American was calling himself an individual, that there at last was a country free from the fetid strictures of the past. At each juncture I did write a letter to my wife, without return address, to inform her that no matter what she might imagine, I adored her.
The great eastern cities of America were priming for rebellion when I arrived, and this was heady, to watch the lines between men dissolve — or rather, to wait for their dissolution. Despite the rhetoric, I saw few encounters between poor and rich; even at the most impassioned talks on liberty, a slave would circulate with glasses of wine. Nights, I would open the window of my rented rooms and listen to drunkenness on the street, repeating the anger and ardor to myself until I’d found the paper to write it down. One evening men stormed out of a tavern with a large doll and set it alight beneath my window, though the smoke from the burning cloth sent the rioters away coughing. I was left alone to watch the body turn to cinders, and despite it being inanimate, its abandonment pained me. I turned to maps again, saw the borders of the colonies bleed out into forest and field, and so departed the coast for the interior twelve years ago, just as war was breaking out, for it wasn’t war I wanted to see, not even if it promised something new; what seemed to set this country apart from its cousins was not its ache for a republic but rather the hearts that held that ache. And in Boston and Philadelphia, even under the sway of drink, few men opened those to me.