Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories Read online

  ‘As for ourselves, we are too seemly and decent a folk for the matter of matrimony to come between a woman and her friends!’ she says. ‘The more wives a man has, the better company for them, the more knees to dandle the children on and the more corn they can plant so the better they all live together.’

  But still I said, I would be his only wife or never marry him.

  ‘Listen, my dear,’ she said. ‘Do you not love me?’

  ‘Indeed I do,’ I says, ‘with all my heart.’

  ‘Then if your sweetheart should offer to marry us both, would you love me the less for it?’

  But I ducked my head and forbore to answer that, for fear she should ask my beau to take her, too, along with me, since I was so struck with him I could not think that any woman, however set in her ways, would not have him if she got half the chance. Then she gives me a clout on the buttocks and cries out: ‘Now, child, see what a wretched thing this jealousy is, that it can set a daughter against her own mother!’

  But she relents to see me cry for shame and says, she is too old and stubborn to think of marriage and, besides, my young man is so taken with me that he will marry me on my own terms in the English fashion. For they are taught to love their wives and let them have their way no matter how many of them they marry and, if I wanted the toil of tilling a patch of corn with nowt but my own two hands, then he would not interfere with that.

  We were married about the time they were planting the corn, which they celebrate with a good deal of singing and dancing although it is we squaws who break our backs setting the seed. The season of the anniversary of my arrival in the town passed, winter comes again and by the spring I was well on the way to bringing him a little brave. It was marvellous to see the tenderness of my husband’s bearing towards me when the sun grew hot and made me sweat, weary, heavy, peevish, so that I often swore I wished meself in England again; but he bore with all.

  Now, at this time, the general of our village held counsel how all the tribes of this part of the territory should settle their differences and join together in a great army to drive the English off back to where they come from while some of the others said, they should, instead, make treaties with the English against those other tribes who were their natural enemies and so get more guns from the English.

  But I sent word by my husband – the women did not go to the counsels but were accustomed to let their husbands give their messages – I sent word by him that it would take all the tribes of all the continent to drive away the English, and then the English would only go away to come again in double numbers, so eager were they to ‘plant the colony’ with me and such poor devils as I had been. So I told them straight they must make a grand, warlike, well-armed confederacy amongst all the Indian nations and never trust a word the English said, for the English would all be thieves if they could, and I was living proof of it, who only left off thieving when there was nothing to steal.

  But they took no notice of me, and could not agree about the manner in which, if they should wage it, the war should be waged, whether an attack on Annestown by night, creeping on all fours like bears with bows in their mouths; or picking off the Englishmen one by one when they went hunting or out in lonely places; or meeting ’em head on, like an army. Which they fancied best, because it was most honourable, but, to my way of thinking, putting the head in the beast’s mouth. While some still held that the English were their friends because they were their enemies’ enemy. So they fell to squabbling amongst themselves and nothing came of all the talk which was a great sadness to me, for I was with child and so I wanted a quiet life.

  I was scratching away with my pointed stick along the garden bean-row until the very minute the waters broke and I goes running into my mother and, an hour later, as I judge it, for they have no means of keeping exact time, she was washing the blood off my young son.

  My young son we named what would be, in English, Little Shooting Star, and you may laugh at it, but it is a name fine men have carried. And he is strapped into his little board that he might ride on my back in his birchbark carriage and I was as pleased with him as any woman might be. Which is how the fate my old Lancashire lady foresaw for me came to pass, because my boy’s father never sprang from the tribe of Shem, Ham nor Japhet, although his mother resembled more the Mary Magdalene, or repentant harlot, than Mary the Virgin, though the Minister does not hold with that stuff, being a dissenting man, and will not let me speak of it.

  But it would come about that the little lad’s crown must be of tears, not gold.

  Now, the confederacy among the Algonkians breaking up, the depredations of the English upon the villages towards the South grew week by week more severe but our fierce braves held them off a while. The generals of this region held a parley, as to whether all stay and defend our villages or else beat a retreat, that is, stir our stumps and pick up our traps and leave our fields and shift westwards a piece, to new pastures, after the harvest, which was in hand. But this latter they were loath to do, since to the West lay the Rechacrians, a very warlike tribe not easily crossed. And they sent out a war party to give the English a taste of their own medicine, to start off with, but I was full of fear lest my husband not come back.

  He paints his face up black and red so the babby cried to see and they do go out and all come back, with blood On their axes, and several scalps of yellow hair that he hangs on the ridgepole of the roof, besides plunder of copper kettles, bullets and gunpowder. Also, alas, rum.

  Yet I must say, when I first saw those English topknots, I felt nowt but pleasure though their hair was of my colour; yet the Minister says I am a good girl and God will forgive me for the sins I committed among the Indians.

  As for gunpowder, Tall Hickory, my husband, told me, when the English first give it to the general, years back, the English told him, with much secret merriment amongst themselves, how he should bury it, like seed corn, and watch the bullets come up. And the Indians held it as a grudge ever after, to have been teased like silly children, when the English would have starved dead if the Red Man had not taught ’em how to plant corn.

  Their captive they brought back lashed to the powder barrel and taunted him, how they would set their torches to a slow fuse, left him there in the middle of the village and abused him in their drunkenness for they were devils when they’d got a bit of drink inside ’em, I must admit it.

  ‘Now, my dear,’ says my husband, who was stone-cold sober because he’d a mortal terror of the edge of my tongue. ‘I must ask you to talk to this fellow in your own language, that we might know if his fellow-countrymen will at last remember certain pledges and treaties formerly made between us or do indeed mean to drive us into the arms of the Rechacrians, with whom we are on no friendly terms, so it will be the worse for us, trapped between the two.’

  At first I would not do it because I felt some pity for this Englishman, they were very stern with their captives and made a cruel festival out of this one, what with the drink and all. Then I recall how I saw this fellow riding his high horse along the dock at Annestown when the convicts were unloaded in chains from the holds of the ship and all pity left me.

  When he hears my English, ‘Praise the Lord!’ he cries, and tells me straightaway how I must give over my tribes to the whites in the name of God, the King of England, and a free pardon thrown in when he sees my brand. But I shows him the babby and he calls me all kind of foul names, to whore among the heathen, so I shoves a sharp stick in his belly to teach him manners. He squawks at that but will say nothing of the soldiers or where they might be but only: that the damned seed shall be driven from the land. They took him off the barrel, for they did not want to waste good gunpowder on him, and hoist him up over the fire. Soon he was dead.

  When I went through his pockets, they were stuffed full of coin and all the children come to play ducks and drakes with gold pieces on the river. But his gold watch I wound up and give my husband in remembrance of the one I robbed the alderman of.

  ‘W
hat’s this?’ he says in his innocence. Just then it rang the hours of twelve, it being noon, and he screetches out, drops it, it breaks apart, the wheels and springs scatter on the ground, and my husband, poor, superstitious savage that he was for all he was the best man in the world, my husband fell a-shaking and a-trembling and said the watch was ‘bad medicine’ and boded ill.

  So he went off and got drunk with the rest. I go through the papers in the gentleman’s pockets and find out we’ve put an end to the governor of all Virginia and I tells ’em so, full of misgiving at it, but they was all so far gone in liquor no sense to be had out of any of ’em until they slept it off but just before sun-up next day the soldiers came on horseback.

  They burned the ripe cornfields and set light to the stockade so it burned and our lodge burned when the powder went up so I saw the massacre bright as day. They put a bullet through my husband’s head, he on his feet and all bewildered, I got him out of the lodge when I first heard the fire crackle but he was a big man, couldn’t miss him. And the poor drunk, sleepy savages all mown down. I got the baby in my arms and went and hid in the bird-scare in the cornfield, which was a platform on legs with hide over it, and so escaped.

  But the soldiers caught hold of my mother as she was running to the river with her hair on fire and she shouts to me, seeing me fleeing: ‘You unkind daughter!’ For she thought I was hastening to cast my lot in with the English, which was not so, by any means. Then they violated her, then they slit her throat. So all over quickly, by daybreak nowt left but ashes, corpses, the widow mourning her dead children, soldiers leaning on their guns well pleased with their night’s work and the courageous manner in which they had revenged the govenor.

  The babby bust out crying. One of these brutes, hearing him, came beating among the scorched corn and pushes at the bird-scare, knocks it down so I fell out, flat on my back, the baby tumbles out of my arms and cracks his head open on a stone, sets up a terrible shrieking, even the hardest heart would have run directly to him. But this soldier puts his knee on my belly, unfastens his britches intending to rape me, he’d need the strength often to hold me down but all at once leaves off his horrid fumbling, amazed.

  ‘Captain!’ he says. ‘Look here! Here’s a squaw with blue eyes, such as I’ve never seen before!’

  He takes a good handful of my hair and hales me to where the captain of these good soldiers is washing his bloody hands in a basin of water cool as you please while his men pick over the wampun and the robes for trophies of war. He asks me, what is my name and whether I speak English; then Dutch; then French; and tries me in Spanish but I will say nothing except, in the Algonkian language: ‘I am the widow of Tall Hickory.’ But he cannot understand that.

  They found out I was not indeed a woman of the Indian blood at last by a trick for one of ’em fetched my baby from where they’d left him bawling in the cornfield and showed him his knife, making as if he would stick the sharp blade into my little one.

  ‘Thou shalt not!’ I cried out while the others held me back from him or I should have torn out his eyes with my bare hands. How they laughed, when the squaw with feathers in her hair shouted out in broad Lancashire. Then the captain sees my burned hand and calls me a ‘runaway’ and says there will be a price on my head over and above the bounty on the Indians. And teases me, how they will brand my cheek with ‘R’ for ‘runaway’ when we gets to Annestown so I cannot whore among the Indians no more, nor amongst nobody else. But all I want is the loan of his handkerchief, dipped in water, to wipe the cut on the babby’s forehead and this he’s kind enough to give me, at last.

  When I got my babby back and put him to nurse, for he was hungry, then I went along with the soldiers, since I had no choice, my mother and my husband dead and, truth to tell, my spirit broken. And what squaws were left living, that I used to call ‘sister’, trailed along behind us, for the soldiers wanted women and the women wanted bread and not one brave left living in that part of the New World that now you might call a ‘fair garden blasted of folk’. And the river watering this earthly paradise running blood.

  The squaws blamed me, how I had brought bad luck on them and cruelly repaid their kindness to me. But, as for me, my grief is mixed with fear over the memory of the overseer I had the ears off of, that all this will end in a downward drop, once I am back where the justice is.

  We gets to a place with a few houses and they had just finished building a church and: ‘Here is a morsel plucked from Satan,’ says the one that widowed me to the Minister, who tells me to thank God that I have been rescued from the savage and beg the Good Lord’s forgiveness for straying from His ways. Taking my cue from his, I fall to my knees, for I see that repentance is the fashion in these parts and the more of it I show, the better it will be for me. And when they ask my name, I give ’em the name of my old Lancashire lady, which is Mary, and stick by it, so I live on as if I were her ghost, and all her prophecies come true, except it turns out I was Our Lady of the Massacre and I do think my half-breed child will bear the mark of Cain, for the scar above his left eye never fades.

  The Minister’s wife come out of the kitchen with an old gown of hers and tells me to cover up my breasts, for shame, but the child cries and will not be pacified. Yet she is decent, and the Minister, also, as their acts now prove for they would not let the soldiers take me to Annestown with them but offered the captain a good sum of money to leave me with them, for the sake of my innocent baby. The captain hums and haws, the Minister adds another guinea, the fine soldier pockets the gold and all ride off and the Minister would give my child some Bible name, Isaac or Ishmael or some such name. ‘Hasn’t he got a good enough name already?’ says I. But the Minister says: ‘Little Shooting Star is no name for a Christian,’ and a baptised Christian my boy must be if his soul may be admitted to the congregation of the blessed though the poor thing will never find his daddy there. And when shall these dead rise up and be avenged? But, as for me, I will not call him by the name the Minister gave him; nor do I talk to him in any but the Indian language when nobody else is there.

  After a while, the tale comes how, two years or more before, the Indians came by stealth to a plantation to the north, murdered an overseer and stole away a bonded servant girl. The gardener saw them drag her off by her yellow hair. I think to meself, how the gardener must have settled a score on his own account, good luck to him, and if they choose to think I was forced into captivity, then they have my leave to do so, if it makes them happy, as long as they leave me be. Which, because the Minister has a powerful desire to save my soul, and his wife fond of the little one, having none of her own, they do, for they’ve paid out good money to keep us from the law. And don’t I earn my keep, do all the rough work, carry water, hew wood.

  So I scrubbed the Minister’s floor, cooked the dinner, washed the clothes and for all the Minister swears they’ve come to build the City of God in the New World, I was the same skivvy as I’d been in Lancashire and no openings for a whore in the Community of the Saints, either, if I could have found in my heart the least desire to take up my old trade again. But that I could not; the Indians had damned me for a good woman once and for all.

  By and by the missus comes to me and says: ‘You are still a young woman, Mary, and Jabez Mather says he will have you for a wife since his own died of the flux but he will not take the child so I shall keep him.’ But she will never have my little lad for her son, nor will I have Jabez Mather for my husband, nor any man living, but sit and weep by the waters of Babylon.

  The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe

  Imagine Poe in the Republic! when he possesses none of its virtues; no Spartan, he. Each time he tilts the jug to greet the austere morning, his sober friends reluctantly concur: ‘No man is safe who drinks before breakfast.’ Where is the black star of melancholy? Elsewhere; not here. Here it is always morning; stern, democratic light scrubs apparitions off the streets down which his dangerous feet must go.

  Perhaps . . . perhaps the black star of me
lancholy was hiding in the dark at the bottom of the jug all the time . . . it might be the whole thing is a little secret between the jug and himself . . .

  He turns back to go and look; and the pitiless light of common day hits him full in the face like a blow from the eye of God. Struck, he reels. Where can he hide, where there are no shadows? They split the Republic in two, they halved the apple of knowledge, white light strikes the top half and leaves the rest in shadow; up here, up north, in the levelling latitudes, a man must make his own penumbra if he wants concealment because the massive, heroic light of the Republic admits of no ambiguities. Either you are a saint; or a stranger. He is a stranger, here, a gentleman up from Virginia somewhat down on his luck, and, alas, he may not invoke the Prince of Darkness (always a perfect gentleman) in his cause since, of the absolute night which is the antithesis to these days of rectitude, there is no aristocracy.

  Poe staggers under the weight of the Declaration of Independence. People think he is drunk.

  He is drunk.

  The prince in exile lurches through the new-found land.

  So you say he overacts? Very well; he overacts. There is a past history of histrionics in his family. His mother was, as they say, born in a trunk, grease-paint in her bloodstream, and made her first appearance on any stage in her ninth summer in a hiss-the-villain melodrama entitled Mysteries of the Castle. On she skipped to sing a ballad clad in the pretty rags of a ballet gypsy.

  It was the evening of the eighteenth century.

  At this hour, this very hour, far away in Paris, France, in the appalling dungeons of the Bastille, old Sade is jerking off. Grunt, groan, grunt, on to the prison floor . . . aaaagh! He seeds dragons’ teeth. Out of each ejaculation spring up a swarm of fully-armed, mad-eyed homunculi. Everything is about to succumb to delirium.

  Heedless of all this, Poe’s future mother skipped on to a stage in the fresh-hatched American republic to sing an old-world ballad clad in the pretty rags of a ballet gypsy. Her dancer’s grace, piping treble, dark curls, rosy cheeks – cute kid! And eyes with something innocent, something appealing in them that struck directly to the heart so that the smoky auditorium broke out in raucous sentimental cheers for her and clapped its leather palms together with a will. A star was born that night in the rude firmament of fit-ups and candle-footlights, but she was to be a shooting star; she flickered briefly in the void, she continued the inevitable trajectory of the meteor, downward. She hit the boards and trod them.