David Liss - The Whiskey Rebel

His face darkened. “You’ve made a mistake. There are more of us than you suspect, and we are in places you would not credit. We are determined, and we cannot be defeated.”

“Then you will have to know triumph with fifty fewer dollars.” I rose from the bench and strode away. Alas, for form’s sake I could not watch what happened next, though I heard it clear enough. The Irishman pushed to his feet and attempted to pursue me, but he took only half a step before something suddenly jarred him, shortened his step. A moment of disorientation, in which he could not account for all that happened, and then his falling upon his face. I heard the satisfying thump of aging Irishman upon snowy earth.

It had been but a little thing to pretend to vomit while encircling my piece of twine around his ankles. It would not keep him entangled for long, but it would be enough.

I now looked back to see him force himself up and back to the bench that he might examine my little trick. His hat had fallen off, and I saw he was indeed hairless, his skull like a tanned and leathery egg. He dusted the snow off said hat and replaced it. It did not afford him the dignity he had hoped.

“I believe you’re the one who has made the mistake, Irishman,” I said. “I fear neither pain nor death. The only thing in the world I feared this morning was that I should not be able to find thirty dollars anywhere in this world.” I took out from my coat the gathering of notes and held it up. I waved it at him. I mocked him with it. “Now I have twenty dollars to spare. So get gone under cover of your sharpshooter, I care not. I’ll find Pearson and then I’ll find you.”

I actually did not get to the end of that sentence, for at some point around I’ll find Pearson a third party crashed into my back, knocking me to the ground so that I struck my head. Once I was down, the Irishman cut himself free while his friend pulled the banknotes from my hand, and the two men ran off, leaving me down in the snow, cold and despondent, happy only that he had left me his very good bottle of whiskey.

Spring 1789

We were told that we must limit our belongings to necessities. The roads, they said, were not serviceable for wagons or carts, and all we needed would be provided for us once we arrived at Libertytown. We sold nearly everything, taking a few clothes, Andrew’s tools, and some favored items, including some books-though not so many as I would have liked.

We convened in Philadelphia, where we were to be guided by Mr. Reynolds and two others, who sat astride old horses, tattered and slow, with rheumy eyes and puffy red sores that jutted out through their hair like rocks at low tide. There were mules to bear our packs, and we traveled at their sluggish pace on dirt paths sometimes wide and clear, sometimes little more than a hint of an opening in the forest, sometimes so soft and marshy the animals had to be aided to keep from stumbling. In the worst places, logs had been set down to make the road passable. On the steep paths through the Alleghenies, the beasts were often in danger of falling over entirely.

There were twenty of us, excluding our guides. Reynolds wore somewhat rougher clothes than those in which we had first seen him. These were undyed homespun, and a wide-brimmed straw hat that he kept pulled down low. In our parlor, Reynolds had seemed a kind of rusticated country gentleman, the sort of rude clay that the American experiment had molded into republican respectability. Now he was revealed as something far less amiable. He showed no friendly familiarity toward us and acted as though he did not recall our previous meeting. Andrew’s efforts to converse with him were met with rude barks, and at times I found him staring at me with cold predatory intensity. The scar across his eye, which I had taken as proof of his revolutionary duty, now appeared to me more the mark of Cain.

Of the other two, Hendry was of some forty years, slender of form, high-pitched of voice, with a long nose, narrow eyes, thin lips, and a face that appeared designed for spectacles, though he did not wear them. In attire, Reynolds cut the form of a hardened country farmer, but Hendry seemed a parody of a stage-play country rustic. Yet I was to learn that this was the true garb of the border man: a raccoon hat and buckskin leggings and an upper garment called a hunting shirt, a fringed tunic made of doeskin that came down to his thighs. On some men, these clothes would look manly, even heroic. On Hendry, with his foxlike face, they looked absurd.

In New York or Philadelphia, he might have, with different clothes, passed for a poor scholar. In the wilderness, he looked to me nothing but a cunning low creature, cruel and heartless, and more foul-smelling than any other species of man. Like the majority of the tribe of the West, he either did not approve, or had not yet been made aware, of the functions of the razor, but his miserly face yielded only a scraggly outcropping of pale whiskers here and there. Clearly visible under this sparse growth was a most lamentable skin condition, cursing him with a reddened and scabby appearance. It must have caused him considerable discomfort, for he scratched at himself almost incessantly, sometimes with absent interest, other times with the repetitive fury of a cat with an itchy ear.

The third of their number, Phineas, was but a boy, or what should have been called a boy in more civilized climes-fifteen or sixteen, by my reckoning, with fair hair and sunburned skin and a narrow blade-shaped face. He dressed in frontier clothes, but his gaunt frame left him aswim in his hunting shirt, which came down so low on him as to be almost a gown.

Phineas took to me at once. Perhaps he saw me as a kind of mother, or perhaps he merely noted that I looked at him with compassion. He would often ride alongside me a portion of each day, and if he did not speak, he took some pleasure in the companionable silence. At mealtimes he made certain that I enjoyed a superior portion, and he often reserved the softest and most secure spot for me. He looked at Andrew with indifference but not hostility. For Phineas, it was as though Andrew did not exist.

Of the settlers, eleven were Americans, the rest were French. Andrew had learned serviceable French during the war and so was able to discover that these people had sailed all the way from Paris, lured by agents of William Duer into settling the lands of western Pennsylvania. These French pilgrims gave us our first true cause to wonder about Mr. Reynolds’s veracity. He had told us that all the inhabitants of Libertytown were veterans. Who then were these Frenchmen? He had told us that crops they grew on their fertile lands had made them comfortable, but whence came the money? If there were no roads that could support cart or wagon, how were the crops brought to market? They could not be sent east without spoiling; they could not be sent west, for the Spanish did not permit American traffic upon the Mississippi.

For the first few days of our journey, Reynolds listened to our questions, though he would not answer but only grunt or shrug or shake his head. When we were a week or more out, he began to exhibit signs that this reticence was, for him, the height of patience and manners. When I asked him about the means of transporting goods, he looked at Andrew and spat. “Does that bitch ever shut up?”

Andrew, who had been walking alongside me, only a few feet from Reynolds’s horse, rose to his full height. “Sir, step down and say that to my face.”

The boy, Phineas, turned away, but Hendry let out a shrill laugh, shockingly like a tiny dog’s bark.

“You ain’t challenging me, Maycott,” Reynolds said. “You live and die as I please, so keep your mouth shut, and that goes twice for that woman of yours. She’s pretty enough, but, by God, does she ever stop talking?”