David Liss - The Whiskey Rebel

“Roast it on the fire. Don’t boil it. Boiling’s too tough.” He winked at me as I, with some effort, reached out and took the thing from him. Later, when I examined it, I found it had not a scratch upon it, and that, for all I could tell, Mr. Dalton had reached out, grabbed it by the neck, and strangled it. Not precisely Hercules in his crib, but near enough to astonish me.

Richmond said nothing during this exchange, but he shook his head once in a way that made me feel as though I had walked into a disagreement between the two of them.

Dalton was equally useful in selling us supplies that we required, including seed for our first crops and ropes for land clearing, giving us a pup to be raised as a hunting dog and, most useful, an old work horse whom he called Bemis. I later learned that the beast had been named after the skirmish at Bemis Heights, the pivotal encounter of the battle at Saratoga, in which both Mr. Dalton and Mr. Richmond had served under Colonel Daniel Morgan. Mr. Dalton told us that Mr. Richmond was the marksman who dispatched the British general Simon Fraser, a shot that changed the course of the battle and thus of the war itself, given the victory’s influence on France’s entry into the conflict. It was something I loved about my country. In a war with countless turning points, one never needed to look far to find the men who had worked the levers upon which all depended.

With the occasional assistance of our new friends, Andrew managed to fell eighty trees within three weeks, and so the call went out that there was to be a cabin raising. I had thought our camp building had been a significant gathering, but a cabin raising turned out to be an event of an entirely different order. Mr. Dalton had it put about that he wished everyone to help, and as a prominent distiller of whiskey for the region and an employer of more than ten men-his whiskey boys, who traded his wares-his wishes were always obeyed. From as far away as twenty-five miles, dozens of men arrived for what was to be a four-day frenzy of work and merriment. When it was completed, we had a home and we had friends. The house was rough, and so were the people, but life seemed much easier than it had at first.

Through Andrew’s skill and industry, and with the aid of our new friends, we managed to improve upon our uncouth cabin week by week. Though there was much to do outside the house, Andrew found time to construct for us a bed, a dinner table with chairs, and a tolerably comfortable rocker, and to set to work on a wood floor, though this would be a long and ongoing project. He could make simple household furnishings quickly, so he was soon trading for other necessities: blankets, plates and cups, and even a tablecloth and some rough flaxen napkins. These were difficult times but sweet ones. Never had Andrew and I spent so much time together alone, without visitor or distraction, and we delighted in taking refuge in each other, a soft relief to our hard surroundings. The world was only unfamiliar challenge, but in our cabin we could find familiar delight.

Those early weeks now seem a blur to me as, with the warmth of spring turning to the heat of summer, we spent our days engaged in little more than the business of surviving-or, perhaps more accurately, attempting to understand how we were to survive. Andrew cleared land-backbreaking labor which I feared might be the death of him and his horse. Even with all his strength poured into the work, it yet confounded him, as he pulled saplings from the ground and chopped to the stump a near forest of oaks and birches and sycamores. They gave up their earth grudgingly, and Andrew would return from a day’s work covered in dirt, his hands caked with blood. I would gaze out upon the land and be unable to see what his efforts had yielded.

Yield it did, though, and at last enough land was cleared for a small planting. I would spend my mornings tending to corn and vegetables in the hopes that enough would grow for us to have some food in the fall. Many in the West planted Indian style, sowing the seeds upon the earth in a formless scatter and hoping a sufficient number took, but Andrew and I were more methodical, tilling the earth, planting in rows, giving each stalk room to breathe and grow.

The purchase of an old spinning wheel-it required significant repair at Andrew’s clever hands-allowed me to spin flax, and my needle was often busy in repairing our clothing and making new from the cured skins of Andrew’s hunts. Only a few months in the West, and with his beard, hardened muscles, sun-reddened skin, and buckskin clothes, my husband had become a true border man. He would come home at night, exhausted and hungry but content to eat the meager repast I could provide-corn pone from our stock of meal and meat from what animals he had hunted, given what flavor we could by an always diminishing supply of precious salt. Venison was a rare treat, for he had little time to hunt deer, but almost without effort he might kill a turkey or bear or even a rattlesnake, which were ever lurking; no trip to our own gardens could be conducted without vigilance. In some strange compensation, the woods afforded a species of pigeon so insensible to danger that to kill it one need only walk up to one and hit it with a stick.

This was our life. After his dinner, Andrew lay down upon our rough bed while I lit candles (which I learned to make with my own hands from bear fat!). Perhaps I might spin awhile or, if I could steal an hour, pore over my copy of Postlethwayt’s Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce or James Steuart’s Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy. Even in the wilderness, I still sought inspiration for my novel, now little more than scraps of dead characters walking though their fictional lives like ghosts-empty and evacuated, present but incorporeal. Despite my bone weariness, I knew that this book resided somewhere inside me, wanting only its time of quickening, awaiting the right alchemy of idea and story and setting. The West, or perhaps the scheme by which we had come west, held something for me, but I could not say precisely what. I could not name it, but it was there.

We were often enough called upon by what was there styled neighbors, though the nearest lived more than half a mile away; these visits were often a strange mixture of backwoods civility and the hostile curiosity with which outsiders are often regarded.

Mr. Dalton and Mr. Richmond sometimes ate the evening meal with us, and I sensed that they imposed upon us not only because they had taken to Andrew but also because our hospitality allowed us, in a small way, to compensate them for the pains they had taken on our behalf. Dalton and Andrew talked at great length about land clearance. Mr. Richmond said little, but he did not seem uneasy or resentful of Mr. Dalton’s interest in us. I surmised that Mr. Richmond was simply a quiet man, who rarely found in the routine of ordinary life circumstances that required speech.

While Andrew and Mr. Dalton talked-of how we were neglected by the East, of how the government in New York (and then Philadelphia) would not send soldiers to fight the Indians, and of how Hamilton’s schemes in the Treasury Department would destroy the poor man for the sake of the rich-Mr. Richmond would sometimes aid me in washing and replacing the dishes. He might sit with me while I spun or sewed, content to sip his whiskey and look as though he thought about significant things. Once, however, he turned to me and offered me a rare smile of crooked teeth. “Andrew is a great friend to him.”

There was something more than his words to what he said, but I did not understand it. I only replied simply, “I am glad of it. You have both been good to us.”

Richmond said nothing, and then, after a moment, “ Dalton is a good friend to have, but not to take advantage of.”