If he got back.
Wooden Foot seemed confident. Still, there was a vast country lying ahead of them. And no denying that some of the tribes were angry about the presence of the Army and the steady westward waves of migration.
Fenimore Cooper switched his tail and frisked back and forth ahead of the riders, bolting now to the left, now to the right but always loping back with joyous barks. Charles wondered if the dog was happy about not being hitched to a travois just yet.
Boy saw a blue jay bickering in a shrub and clapped his hands in delight. Charles puffed his cigar and patted Satan. Growing smaller and smaller in the immense wooded landscape, the Jackson Trading Company passed out of sight and into darkness.
12
A thunderstorm roared over the city of Richmond. Rain poured from the eaves of the City Almshouse and splashed the gravestones of Shockoe Cemetery immediately to the south. The noise of the storm kept patients awake in the charity wards this bleak September night.
One patient lay on his side, knees drawn up to his chest, arms clasped tightly around them. His cot was on the end of the row, so he was able to face the bare wall and hide with his thoughts.
In the dark high-ceilinged room men turned and groaned and rustled their bedding. A matron's lamp floated through like a firefly. A young man with a completely white beard sat up suddenly. "Union Cavalry. Sheridan's cavalry on the left flank!"
The matron rushed to his bedside. Her voice soothed him to silence. Then her lamp floated away again.
The Almshouse had been a Confederate hospital at the height of the war. Toward the end, it became temporary headquarters for the Virginia Military Institute, which had been forced out of the Shenandoah by the ferocity of Phil Sheridan's horse. Since the surrender, several wings had reopened on a temporary basis to care for mentally disturbed veterans, the human debris cast up by the tide of war and left to lie on the shore of peace, abandoned, forgotten. At present the Almshouse sheltered about fifty such men. Hundreds more, perhaps thousands, huddled in the South's ravaged cities and wandered its ruined roads, without help.
The patient on the end cot tossed and writhed. A familiar awl of pain pierced his forehead and turned, boring deeper and deeper. He'd suffered with the pain, and a broken, almost deformed body, ever since he took a near-fatal fall into ...
Into ...
God, they'd destroyed his mind, too. It took him minutes just to finish the thought.
Into the James River.
Yes. The James. He and fellow conspirators had planned to rid the Confederacy of the inept Jefferson Davis. They'd been discovered by an Army officer named ...
Named ...
No matter how he tried, it wouldn't come back, though he knew he had reason to hate the man. In the struggle that ensued after the discovery of the plot, the man had pushed him through a window above the river.
He vividly remembered the shocks of the fall. He had never experienced such pain. Outcrops of rock slammed his head, buttocks, legs as he went bouncing downward, finally striking the water.
He had a recurring nightmare about what had happened next. Sinking beneath the water, clawing against the current to reach the surface, and failing. In the dream, he drowned. Reality was different. Somehow, by effort or by chance, he no longer remembered which, he'd dragged himself to a bank downstream, vomited water, and lost consciousness.
Since that night he had been a different man. Pain was a constant companion. Strange lights frequently filled his head. Lying on the cot in the midst of the storm, he saw them again, yellow and green pinpoint flashes that blossomed to starry bursts of scarlet, fiery orange, blinding white. As if all of that wasn't a sufficient portion of suffering, his memory constantly betrayed him.
Somehow he had reached Richmond and survived the great conflagration that leveled so much of the city the night the Confederate government fell. He lived by prowling the night streets, committing robberies. His most recent had yielded but two dollars and the handsome though old-fashioned beaver hat sitting on a shelf above his cot. He'd gone without food for long periods — two, even three days sometimes. Then there was a blank, after which he awakened in the Almshouse. They said he'd collapsed in the street.
Why could he remember some things at certain times, and not at others? Then again, a whole new set of recollections would be clear while the first ones were beyond his mind's grasp for hours, or days. It was all part of the damage done to him by ...
By...
It wouldn't come.
The rain fell harder, a sound like drumming. His hand crawled around under the cot like a blind white spider, seeking something he did remember. He felt it, pulled it up, hugged it tightly to his filthy coarse patient's gown. A torn magazine, given him during one of his lucid periods. Harper's New Monthly for July of this year.
He was able to recall paragraphs from the section called "Editor's Easy Chair." The copy described the Grand Review of Grant's and Sherman's armies in Washington, lasting two days in ...
In ...
May, that was it.
In the dark, he squeezed his hand into a fist. I should have marched. People kept me from it. They kept me from playing the role I was born to play.
He could picture it. He was riding a fine stallion, bowing from the waist to acknowledge the cheers of the mob, saluting President Lincoln with his saber, then riding on, his great steed moving in a high-stepping walk while the mob, sweating, awestruck, chanted as one:
"Bon-a-parte. Bon-a-parte."
He was the American Bonaparte.
No, he should have been. They kept him from it, those men named ...
Named ...
No use.
But he'd remember them someday. Someday. And when he did, God help them, and all their tribe.
He listened to the drums within the rain most of the night. About four he fell asleep. He awoke at six, clutching the torn Harper's. Although free of pain, he was still wretchedly unhappy. He couldn't think of the reason.
He couldn't even remember his own name.
BOOK TWO
A WINTER COUNT
It is to be regretted that the character of the Indian as described in Cooper's interesting novels is not the true one. ... Stripped of the beautiful romance with which we have been so long willing to envelop him, transferred from the inviting pages of the novelist to the localities where we are compelled to meet with him, in his native village, on the war path, and when raiding upon our frontier settlements and lines of travel, the Indian forfeits his claim to the appellation of the noble red man. We see him as he is, and ... as he ever has been, a savage in every sense of the word.
I was born upon the prairie, where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I want to die there and not within walls.
13
Silver fans of water rose as they crossed the stream in the dazzling morning. The richly silted valley glistened after rain. Indians working fields of squash and beans and ripening pumpkins waved their man-made hoes and shouted greetings. Upstream, blurs now, stood the solid post-and-beam lodges, covered with grassy sod; the traders had passed the Indian dwellings on then-way to this ford.