David Liss - The Whiskey Rebel

“I reckon I am,” Andrew said. “But what work is that?”

“They bring you out here,” Dalton said, “and they leave you here. And why not? Tindall and Duer-they don’t care if we live and would rather we die, for they can then turn about and pass the land along to another victim. It’s why they don’t trouble themselves to do aught about the redskins. But we look after one another here. Many folks on the border have turned savage, hardly better than Indians, but we don’t let that happen. New folks get the help they need, and all we ask in return is that you do your share when the next new man arrives.”

“Of course,” said Andrew. I saw he was moved by the kindness. Perhaps back home he would have made free with his emotions, but the western frontier was no place to be a man of feeling.

“Now, you’ll need a place to sleep,” Dalton said, “so we’ve come to build you a shelter. And we had better get to work if we’re to make any progress before the sun goes down.”

So it was that our first day upon our new land showed us both the lowest depths of human greed and evil and the great generosity of the human heart.

They were wondrous in their skills, felling trees, cutting them to size, and, with ropes slung across their shoulders and feet dug in like horses, dragging them to where they might be of use. My innocence, coupled with their single-minded labor, in which they were more like buzzing bees than men, led me to believe that they might build a cabin entire upon the spot, but such luxury was not to be ours. Their design was instead what is commonly called a half-faced camp-a shelter made of logs, composed of but three walls, with a fire built on the fourth side to keep the inhabitants warm and the beasts at a distance. The roof was made of a combination of crossbeams and thatching and would be of limited value in any great rain, but it was far superior to the wild nothingness to which I had believed we had been consigned.

Andrew had brought with him the tools of his trade, and the hardened frontiersmen were pleased and impressed by his carpentry. It seemed he possessed some special new way of bracing the logs together, and they were glad of his addition to the community, if that term could be used for such isolation.

While the men worked, the women provided me with instructions on how best to build a fire and fetch water and regaled me with more information than I could hope to absorb on the spinning of flax, the preparation of bear meat, the uses of bear fat, and a thousand other things I could not recall the next day.

Our rude shelter was completed shortly before dark, and I thought we should be left alone to our first night in the woods, but it seemed that the assistance they provided was, in part, an excuse to gather. The fire that burned outside our shelter was joined by a series of others, and soon the women were roasting meats, boiling porridge, and teaching me to make a kind of western bread called johnnycake, made of nothing but corn flour and water and grilled into flat pieces useful for taking in a travel bag.

These women were helpful but reserved-suspicious, I believed, of what they saw as eastern refinement: my education, my manner of speech, my obvious fear of the West and its environs. Yet they did their best with me and explained about the settlement, a rough and loose confederation of cabins, bound together by little more than vague proximity and a few points of social contact: the church, which lacked any sort of clergyman unless an itinerant wandered through; a rough imitation of a tavern called the Indian Path; a mill; and Mr. Dalton’s house. He owned the whiskey still, which made him something of a grandee.

I struggled to feel at ease, but Andrew seemed to have no difficulties. These Westerners valued competence above nearly all else, and he impressed our neighbors with his skills that day. Of these men, two in particular interested me. One was a man my own age, not yet thirty by my estimate, one of the few to keep his face free of whiskers, though it was possible that he could not grow them. He was handsome in a rugged sort of way, with wide eyes that seemed forever lost in thought. He had assisted in the hard labor of building the half-faced camp, and in so doing he had exhibited extraordinary strength. More than once he had been called over by some great bull of a man who wanted this smaller man’s assistance in rolling a log or pulling an unmovable lever. Yet, though he exhibited in a thousand ways signs of great strength and no aversion to using it, his interactions lacked the open ease that most men exhibit with one another. At times he and Mr. Dalton exchanged a quiet word, but mostly he kept to himself. Now that the time of merriment had come, he neither ate nor drank as much as the other men but only sat by Mr. Dalton’s side, sipping his whiskey while others gulped, smiling politely at jokes while others guffawed and brayed laughter.

The second man piqued my interest also because he was so different. He was no older than Mr. Dalton, but while the great Irishman’s power rendered him ageless, this man had something of a scholarly look about him and seemed to me almost old. He wore not the rough clothes of a border man but the practical breeches and shirt and coat of a successful tradesman of the middle rank. He kept his gray hair long and his beard short, and perched upon his nose was a pair of little round spectacles.

He sat upon the ground with the other men, and he drank his whiskey with them, but I observed that on several occasions he turned to look at me. When our eyes met, he turned away and reddened slightly. I have been gazed upon by men before, sometimes in the predatory manner of a Colonel Tindall, but here was something else. I did not know what it was precisely, but it neither frightened nor offended me.

The other women noted his interest as well, and while they talked and gossiped, one creature, a rugged and meaty woman they called Rosalie, with hair somewhere between straw and white, let out a snort. She told me she was not yet forty. She had once been, perhaps, pretty, but now her face had been leathered by the elements, her hands calloused and sun-spotted. “That Scotsman should learn to keep his eyes to himself or I reckon your husband will relieve him of one of them.”

“Who is he?” I asked.

“He was a schoolteacher,” said another woman, older and thicker than the first and with but three or four teeth in her head. “In Connecticut, they say. But there was a scandal with a married woman. And now here he is, gawking at you like you ain’t got a husband right before him.”

“He don’t belong here,” said Rosalie, “and would never have no companionship neither if it weren’t for Dalton. He and the Scot make their whiskey together and are friends, like. But then Dalton has his own way with friends.”

All the women tittered at this, and I suppose if I had felt more at ease with their company I should have asked about this secret, but as they did not volunteer I did not inquire. I think they did not like my reserve, and one of these women whispered something in the ear of another, and she, in turn, looked at me with face frozen for a long moment before she burst out in laughter.

I loathed this feeling of being unwanted and longed to join the gathering of men. I would have even consented to drink their whiskey if necessary. As I lamented my state, the Scottish gentleman, whom they called Skye, rose from his seat and approached our fire. The women began a fresh round of whispering and laughter but fell into an awkward silence as the man came toward us and took a seat in the dirt next to me.

“I beg your pardon, Mrs. Maycott,” he said, in a Scots brogue that reminded me of my father, “but we haven’t met. I am John Skye.”