David Liss - The Whiskey Rebel

Both men laughed the way adults laugh at the whimsical wonderings of children. Phineas looked down, as though the notion somehow embarrassed him.

The woman pointed at her neck, and then made the eating gesture once more. I saw now that she wore a necklace, an elaborate and filigreed carving of bones in the shape of a beautiful starburst. She said something, which sounded not to me like the language of savages. I realized only once Andrew had cocked his head that she was speaking in a kind of broken French, yet I required no translation to understand.

“She will trade her jewelry for food,” I said. “I doubt she has anything else of value.”

“I think she’s got sommit else,” Hendry said. “Sommit I’d trade for.”

“Shut up,” said Phineas, surprising everyone.

“What, you don’t want that nice jewelry?” he said to the boy.

“Shut up,” said Phineas. “Just shoot ’em. That’s all.”

“I’d rather wait till they do something I don’t care for and then shoot ’em,” said Hendry. “But I might take that pretty thing she’s got round her neck.”

“Surely,” I said, “you are not so base as to let her give up the only thing she has in the world for a few morsels-not when we can spare the food.”

“Maycott!” Reynolds shouted. “Sit your woman down. She’s come off her leash again.”

I would not give Andrew a chance to respond, for any response would almost certainly be incendiary. “They may be savages but we are Christians. We shall feed them, and if you don’t like it, you may certainly shoot us.”

Andrew blanched, and I knew what he feared: that he would be humiliated once more and then be given no recourse to preserve his honor. Yet Reynolds seemed untroubled by my speech. He picked up a rabbit bone and stripped it of its boiled meat. Then, after due consideration, this Solon of the West nodded his head, his ruminations complete. “Green idiots,” he pronounced. “Let ’em stay, then, but ’tis on yer head.”

I gestured for the two to sit. We understood they were not to be given their own food and that Andrew and I would have to give of our own portions. Some of the others did as well, but many of the settlers steered clear, not wanting to stand with us against Reynolds. The Indians sat by our fire, hunched over the food we’d given them, eyes darting about like wary animals. They ate with their hands, smearing dirt and blood on their food. The woman was missing two fingers on her left hand, and the wound looked recent and raw.

I had thought Phineas a sensitive boy, but he watched the two Indians from the outskirts of camp, hands on his gun, never taking his eyes off them, waiting for some menace that never manifested itself.

Andrew tried to make conversation with them, but the woman said nothing more and the child, if she could speak-our language or her own-never showed a sign of it. They ate their pigeon-it was what he liked best, so of course it was what Andrew had volunteered to first give-and corn pudding, and when they were done they moved some fifty feet from the rest of us, curled up upon the ground, and went to sleep without delay. Andrew said nothing to me of what I had done for the Indians-and for him-but when we went to sleep he wrapped his arms about me, I about him, and we slept together as lovers in a way we had not since leaving for the West.

I awoke in the night to the sound of two gun reports in rapid succession. It was distant, but I knew the sound. I sat and looked about me. The fire burned and no one was disturbed. I convinced myself that I had dreamed it, but in the morning I knew better. The Indian woman and child were gone when I opened my eyes. Reynolds and Hendry acted as though nothing had happened and offered no comment, but Hendry, I saw, wore the elaborate bone ornament around his own neck.

He leered at me, evil delight in his narrow eyes. “The boy done it. Woke ’em up, dragged ’em off, and done it. Like Reynolds told yer, ’tis on yer head.” He walked away, laughing as though it were the greatest joke in the world.

Andrew and I chose not to speak of the incident. Instead, I rode by Phineas. The suggestion that he might have shot those Indians in cold blood terrified me, but it fascinated me too. What, I wondered, would drive a boy to so unspeakable a crime?

“They say you hurt the visitors,” I said, after a period of quiet. I had already observed that, in the West, conversations often began with a respectful period of silence.

“I ain’t going to speak of it.”

“You may speak of it to me,” I said, hoping my face showed warmth I did not feel.

Phineas said nothing for some time, and I thought better than to repeat my inquiries. Yet he surprised me by finally breaking his silence, perhaps an hour after I had first raised the subject. In a flat and lifeless tone, like an oracle whose mouth is but the instrument of a remote spirit, he told me he had lived, since the age of seven or eight, in a settlement some twenty miles from Pittsburgh, the great metropolis of western Pennsylvania as Mr. Duer described it. “Hain’t no Philadelphia,” Phineas told me, “but ’tis big. Biggest place I ever saw afore I come east. Maybe a full thousand people there.” He and his father traveled to Pittsburgh five or six times a year, and Phineas had grown up knowing how to read the ground, the leaves, the sky. He was a tracker, as I saw every day we were on the road with him. He tasted the earth and sniffed the air, as much beast as human being, as much Indian as white man.

One day he traveled the road not only with his father but with his mother, little brother, and older sister as well. Both his mother and little brother were ill-feverish and vomiting-and were in need of a physician. The only one in hundreds of miles was to be found in Pittsburgh, or so they thought, but when they came to town, they discovered that he had been killed three weeks earlier in an argument over the best way to dress a roast duck.

They had no money to remain in town, not even for a single night, and so with an ailing woman and child, they returned to the woods to make their way back to their cabin. They were not a mile and a half outside of Pittsburgh, however, when they were set upon by a trio of Indian braves. It was late autumn, but it had grown warm in what is called Indian summer, for it is the season when Indians go on the warpath one last time before spring. Accordingly, these men were near naked, their heads shorn and shaved into savage designs, their faces and bodies covered with demonic symbols that made them seem creatures of Hell. Indeed they must have been, for they paused hardly a moment before one slit Phineas’s father’s throat. That atrocity was hardly complete before a brave held Phineas’s mother so she would be made to watch, then another picked up her younger son by his foot, twirled the toddler about over his head, and dashed his skull into a tree. Only then did they do her the mercy of slitting her throat.

One brave grabbed Phineas, the other took hold of his sister, each man clamping a hand over the mouth of his prisoner. At this time Phineas was but nine years of age, his sister eleven. They had witnessed the death of their parents and of their sibling, and they were not permitted to cry out in grief and terror. While one of the Indians held his sister, the other began to cut off her clothes with a fierce knife, long and twisting and gleaming in the flicker of sunlight. The one that held Phineas, entranced by this orgy of violence, let slacken his grip upon his prey, and Phineas managed to stomp hard upon the brave’s moccasined foot. It was too futile a blow to do serious damage to so strong a creature, but it was sufficient to loosen his grip. Phineas was free, and he fled into the woods, leaving behind the bodies of his parents and his brother, and consigning his sister into the hands of monsters, where she most likely remains today, presuming she was not burned alive, as is sometimes the custom.