David Liss - The Whiskey Rebel

He made his way back to Pittsburgh, where he told his story, and men ran out into the forest armed with guns and hatred of the Indians. The idea that Indians might be human beings with souls, capable of good as well as evil, is disregarded as romantical rubbish. Every evil the white men have done the Indians is forgotten, but every crime against the white men by Indians is branded into their souls. These men hate Indians with a passion hardly to be understood if not felt, and no opportunity for taking an Indian’s life must be neglected. Phineas’s story was the sort of thing that unleashed their most feral passions. They muttered curses, blaming not only the savages but also the men back east who would spare no money for the protection of the West. They had no choice, they said, but to take matters into their own hands.

In the woods, they found nothing, not even the bodies, but their blood was up, and they could not let the incident pass. Instead of killing the fiends who had committed these crimes, they marched back toward town with Phineas in tow, to a small cabin just outside the city full of Christianized Indians-seven in all, including two small children of their own. The Indians did not resist. They had no weapons to fight with, but the men barricaded them inside their home and set it afire. As the flames rose, Phineas could hear their voices rising in song, calling upon the Lord to carry them home.

Phineas told me this story without inflection or emotion. It was as empty and hollow as an old legend, one from a stranger’s childhood, without connection to his own experiences. When he finished, he turned away from me. At first I thought it was shame, but I soon decided it was something far more visceral. The story had been like phlegm that lodges in the lungs. It must be expectorated and, once gone, is thought of no more.

After a long silence I said, “Did you kill those Indians last night?”

He did not look at me. “I ain’t never going to let an Indian live if it’s in my powers to kill it. I aim to be a great Indian killer, like Lou Wetzel. You ever hear of him? He’s killed more Indians than any man in the West.”

“Is that truly what you wish?” I asked, not knowing what else to say.

“Wishing don’t signify. ’Tis what I am. Now you know what I done you won’t be my friend no more, but there’s no helping it. Not now. You’ll see, though. The West changes you. It don’t let you be a Christian. I’m what the West made me, and you’ll be what it makes you.”

It was now near the end of the day’s travel, and soon he was occupied in the business of making camp. I left the poor boy and made my way back to Andrew, who asked nothing of what Phineas had told me, and I told him nothing. I told him nothing because I sat there lamenting the horror that was now our lives. We had traded what little we had in exchange for a passage to Hell, and I could not end the question that repeated itself in my own mind: What have I done? I would not have Andrew asking the question of himself.

As for Phineas, he was never again kind to me. In truth, he grew hostile, even predatory. He had regarded me before as a mother; now he joined with the other men in gazing at my body with hungry interest. He glared at me if I walked too slowly. If I stumbled, he pointed and laughed. I grew fearful of him and kept my distance. The men were fiends and I could hate them, but his youth made Phineas’s hardness far more frightening.

Ten days later, days filled with tension and fear but no further incidents, we arrived in Pittsburgh, though only with the greatest of difficulty. We could not simply stroll into town, the way being made near impassable by great mountains of coal. Instead, for the last few miles, we were piled, beasts and all, upon a great flatboat that made its way down the Monongahela, propelled by burly men, muscled and bearded, mostly shirtless, who thrust great poles into the riverbed to force the lumbering conveyance forward.

The landscape was both rugged and beautiful, certainly sublime in its untamed majesty of undulating hills and thick forest. The city itself was another matter. Even before our flatboat docked, I could see that to call Pittsburgh a town would be like giving the name of feast to a moldy crust and a sliver of hard cheese rind. It was but a muddy clearing with the most uneven and haphazard log cabins, all stained with coal dust. There were no roads to speak of, but mud passageways that were, to the credit of the city founders, arranged with a Quaker regularity. The people looked more savage than civilized. The better sort wore rough homespun in cuts that were a mockery of fashions some five years past, though I looked with relief upon even the most outdated satin petticoat or laced waistcoat. Otherwise it was naught but buckskins and hunting shirts for the men, rough burlap gowns for the women. The men were all bearded and rugged, and a disproportionate number were missing an eye. The women, for their part, were often misshapen and hunched, with faces ravaged by weather, hands clenched and arthritic like demonic claws. It was the rare citizen who possessed even half his teeth, and all the people, like the buildings, were black with coal dust.

We trudged through the muddy streets of Pittsburgh, looking at the ramshackle houses in stunned silence, growing more filthy with each step. This, we knew, was going to be our dream from now on. This dirty, muddy grid of rude shacks would come to seem to us, as weeks turned into months and months to years, as a glorious metropolis. How long until this decrepitude came to seem like the glories of New York? How long until we lulled ourselves to sleep with the fanciful notion of what we would do once we arrived in this city of delights?

Duer had arranged for us to lodge separately with different residents of the city for the night. In the morning we were to be led to our plots of land. Andrew and I were given a space on the floor-naught but dirt packed hard and smooth-of a miserable cabin, somewhat larger than most others but cramped and cold and smelling like a tannery. This room, which seemed to me little better than a ranger’s tent, was shared by a couple with three children, and, indeed, a pair of pigs, which wandered in and out of the house at their leisure. It had a single room, though there was a separate bed for adults and offspring. They had rough furniture, made from barrels and shipping crates and hewn logs, and the meal that night was a stew of Indian corn and potatoes, cooked with a sour meat from their freshly slaughtered old milk cow. Only later did I learn that our hosts were one of the most prominent families in town.

The meal was served not with water or wine or tea but with liquor, a kind of western rum, of which I had never yet heard. The husband, the wife-even the children-drank it as though it were sweet nectar, but I could hardly manage a swallow. It tasted to me like poison set afire, but Andrew, perhaps savoring the distraction of something novel and unthreatening, sipped as though it were a prized claret. “How is it made?” he asked. “With what varieties? How is it aged?”

“Aged?” our host had asked.

“Yes,” said Andrew, who had some limited experience making wine in his youth. “Like wine, it is aged, is it not?”

Our host laughed. “’Tis aged from the time we put it into the jug to when we drink it. Don’t last that long. Around here, you see, there ain’t no money. Where would money come from? Ain’t no roads back east, and the damn Spanish won’t let us use the river. You want to buy something, you buy it with whiskey. You want to sell something, you get whiskey for it. This here is our money, friend, and ain’t no one can be bothered to turn money into prettier money. There’s nothing to be gained by doing so.”