David Liss - The Whiskey Rebel

“Hendry and Phineas’ll be here soon. They’ll take you out to your plot. I can’t go with you.” He looked out to the expanse of wilderness. “I ain’t made to feel welcome.”

Andrew said nothing, allowing the silence to cast its own withering retort.

“I got to get back east to my wife,” said Reynolds, as though we were all old friends. “She’s pretty, like yours. It don’t suit for a man to be too long away from his wife.”

Andrew remained silent.

“Look here, Maycott. Let me give you some advice. I know we ain’t got along on the way out here, but I had to keep order, and that’s what I done. Don’t mean I got anything against you. And the way things are with Tindall, don’t think I don’t know. I say, so what if he wants your wife? What does it signify? He’s an old man, probably can’t do much anyhow. Why not give him what he asks? You get something for it, and it don’t really cost you anything.”

“Would you prostitute your wife?” Andrew asked.

He shrugged. “Depends on what was in it for me. If I was in your shoes, it’s what I’d do. I ain’t been put up to this by Tindall. I’m just telling you what I think.”

He put out his hand for shaking, and when Andrew did not take it he shrugged and walked across the grounds, disappearing into the stables.

We waited there an hour until Hendry and Phineas appeared on horseback. They provided ragged horses for us to ride, and soon we were upon a dirt track through the wilderness, well beaten and pocked with hoof marks and old manure.

We rode through barren landscape for more than half a day. The land was thick with oak and sugar maple and chestnut and birch trees, surrounded by brambles and boulders and rotten logs as large and ornate as monuments. Animals too; we saw deer scatter and bears off in the distance, and the occasional wolf loped along our path, mouth open in lazy defiance. There were other wild things too. Along the barely discernible path, from time to time, we passed clusters of cabins and dirty, ragged people who stopped their toil to watch us. One-eyed men looked up from their fieldwork or tree felling or tanning. The women stared like feral things, their faces sun-blasted and soulless, their bodies twisted and bent, far more terrible in appearance than the most wretched creature I’d seen in Pittsburgh. I understood without being told that, though life in the West might be hard for men, it was doubly so for women. Once the hunting and farming and clearing were done, a man might settle down with his whiskey and his twist of tobacco, but a woman would still be cooking and mending and spinning. I feared in my heart that I should become one of those broken, horrid things. I did not tremble to lose what men called beauty, but I feared the loss of my spirit and humor and love of living, the things I believed made my soul human and vibrant.

Finally, and seemingly without cause, Hendry called for us to stop. We were upon a spot of the forest no different, as far as I could tell, from any other. While he picked at a scab on his face, Hendry gazed about, taking stock of tree and rock and sky.

“Looky there,” he said, pointing to a large boulder up ahead, maybe a quarter of a mile. “That’s the north border of your land,” he said. “Them thick trees we passed back there, the ones with white paint on ’em, that’s the southern border. Lotta rattlesnakes near there, if you care to mind ’em. Don’t matter to me. The rest of it runs from here to the creek on the east and west to the other creek. Unload the mules, and good luck to ye.”

“What?” I cried out. I wanted to be as stoic, as sturdy, as Andrew, but I could not help it. “You’re going to leave us in the wilderness with no roof over our heads?”

“Shelter ain’t my worry,” he said. “My worry is getting the animals back. This is your land, what you bargained for, so here it is. Do with it what you want. You don’t like living on it, go find a room in town. It’s nothing to do with me, though I’d advise you to be on your guard for painters. Too many of them about this spring.”

“What is a painter?” asked Andrew.

Hendry looked at Phineas and they both laughed.

“They don’t know about painters,” Phineas said, with an unmistakable tone of cruelty. “Guess they’ll find out.”

Hendry’s nose had begun to run as a consequence of his mirthful snorting. He wiped it with his forearm. “You talk smart, but you’ll get a good schooling, won’t you, maybe in its jaws? A painter is like a cat, if you know what one of them is, but about ten times bigger, and it likes to eat fresh and tender eastern folk.”

I’d had quite enough of Mr. Hendry. “I believe you mean a panther. If you wish to mock people for their ignorance, you ought at least to say what you mean.”

“Call the critter any name you like. It’ll tear the bubbies right off you all the same.”

“Enough. You are going, so get gone,” Andrew said. He put a hand on my shoulder.

“That’s a good thankee for one what’s brung you home.” Hendry snorted.

Phineas eyed me unkindly. “Don’t signify. They’ll be dead ’fore end of winter.”

“You can’t leave us here.” How I hated the tears that welled up in my eyes, but I could endure it no longer. “Are we to sleep on the ground like animals?”

Andrew shook his head. “I know how to make a shelter and endure far worse than this. We’ll make do, never you mind.”

“I cain’t say what you brung in your packs,” Hendry said, “but from the looks of you I reckon you come with nothing and expect the spirits of the woods to raise you up a wigwam. Well, good luck, I say, for yer on yer own now.”

“I don’t doubt they’ll do fine,” said a voice from behind us, “but if you please, my good turd, they won’t do it alone.”

I turned and saw two dozen men and nearly that many women, some of whom had children clinging to their skirts or babes in their arms. There were beasts-a quartet of sturdy horses, a pair of mules, and half a dozen frolicking dogs. Nearly all the men wore western attire, and they carried guns and knives and had tomahawks looped to their belts. They looked like white savages, clad in beast skins and furs, and yet for all that a humanity shone through.

The one who’d spoken stepped forward. He was a tall man, almost a giant, I thought, and looking every bit the frontiersman in western garb and reddish whiskers, which were, if not long, then at least ornate. His mustaches, in particular, drooped down from his face with a curious flourish. This man removed his raccoon cap to bow, revealing an entirely bald head.

“Lorcan Dalton at your service,” he said, his voice redolent with the tones of an Irishman. Returning the hat to his head, he said, “We’ll get to more introductions soon enough, but first let’s get these villains back to their master.”

“Hain’t no call for unkindness,” said Phineas.

“You want kindness, you quit Tindall,” Mr. Dalton said.

Hendry turned his horse to face Mr. Dalton. “You act like we ought to fear you, Irisher.”

Mr. Dalton grinned, showing a mouth of regular brown teeth. “Reynolds used to bring out the new ones. He doesn’t do it now, does he? Guess maybe that pretty wife back east don’t like the scar.”

Hendry said nothing. He and Phineas tied together the horses and mules and rode off without a backward glance.

“I never lament seeing the back of Hendry,” said Mr. Dalton, “and I’d only relish the front if there were a bullet in it. He’s worse than any two Indians and only makes amends for it with his lack of cunning. Now, then, let’s let the women start making us some repast while we men get to working. Lot of folks come out here, Mr. Maycott, who never got their hands too dirty before, but you don’t look like that sort. You look like you’re equal to some hard work.”