1.
“Done gone o’er the river,” remarked the hunter. He gestured in the direction of the torrent hissing by the river bank to which they had come. The hunter wore a broad-brimmed green hat adorned with a faded feather that was split and crazed at its tip.
Philip was taken aback by the vehemence of the current where swift flumes of water were gnawing at the mud river-bank and tearing clods away under the feet of the three figures peering down at the flood. Where the path ended at the river’s brink, Philip observed several marks in the soft clay – a man shod in riveted boots had left his imprint at the river’s side.
“It’s Uncle Pomp,” Philip replied. “He has surely come this way.”
The river valley was narrow, only twice the width that a man might pitch a stone, and the torrent occupied most of it, a gloomy place, most declivitous with trees clinging to the steep slopes, or fallen down to lodge against the forest trunks tilted in every direction on the hillside. A serpentine path led down, striking back and forth against the side of the gorge, descending from the high bluff, the way that Philip had come following the traces that Uncle Pomp had left in the wet soil, skid and slide marks engraved by his hobnailed boots in the trail The three fowlers, on an entirely different mission, were ahead of him, their feet wrapped in soft deerskin moccasins except for the tall fellow in a tattered dragoon’s uniform. He wore boots but in bad repair with a split sole that etched the path underfoot with a crooked lengthwise tread.
“We thought we seen a nigger up ahead of us, a white-haired old boy,” the ragged dragoon said.
“A man of color,” Philip replied. “He is not quite in his right mind and has left his cabin suddenly, some five miles remote from here, undertaking some sort of confused adventure in this wilderness. I have come to retrieve him.”
A flat-bottomed weidling was drawn up to the river-bank, chained in place by iron links locked around a black cast-iron stake.
“He didn’t use the punt,” the hunter with the soft-brimmed green hat said. A steel-wire rope slumped over the current from bank to bank, affording a grip to those who might cross the river’s flood making use of the boat or, perhaps, essaying to wade the torrent.
The third hunter was an Indian arrayed in buckskin with a pockmarked face. He clambered down into the weidling and the little barge bobbed underfoot almost displacing him into the torrent. The dragoon and the man with the green hat handed their fowling pieces down to the Indian who stacked the firearms neatly in the punt’s prow. All three men were carrying big sacks of heavy canvas, devised, it seemed, as resort for the birds that they planned to shoot, and they set them in the weidling’s stern. Their birdshot in buckram pouches and the powder for their fowling pieces in horns were suspended from their belts, also cut from canvas.
“If he ventured here without the punt,” the dragoon said, “he is a drowned nigger for sure.”
“Less’n he should swim like a fish,” the hunter in the green hat said.
“Runaway slave?” the Indian asked.
“Freed man,” Philip told them.
“Well, he’s damn-sure a drowned freedman now,” the dragoon replied, stooping to trail his hand in the cold, rushing water.
“Uncle Pomp is a famous swimmer,” Philip said.
“Never knowed a nigger to swim, don’t have the belly for it,” the hunter in the green hat remarked.
Philip shrugged his shoulders and, then, inquired if there was room in the little barge for him to cross as well.
“Suit yourself,” the ragged dragoon said.
For a moment, no one spoke and the water made a sucking sound under the boat and more clods of earth plopped into the stream while the Indian cocked his head like a dog scenting prey, listening intently as if the trees studding the ladder of the hillside were about to speak to him in his Miamee tongue.
“You can hear them five miles away,” the green-hatted hunter said.
“The flocks,” the dragoon said. “You can hear them crying out and the beat of their wings like a brisk storm at sea or avalanches amidst the mountains.”
Philip also cocked his head and listened to the river. The brush and small dangling trees on the hillside rustled in the wind funneling through the deep river gorge but nothing else was discernible to him.
2.
Uncle Pomp had, indeed, been famous as a swimmer when he was a young man.
It is said that slaves had not the slightest velleity toward swimming, let alone any vocation amidst the cold currents, the vortices and depths haunted by turtles and catfish the size of bull-calfs. This disinclination, much noted in the free states divided by rivers from slave territory, was said to be highly advantageous to the planters in keeping their property in its place. Perhaps, the passage over the high seas by which the Africans had been abducted to this land had left a scar in the fortitude of the race, a defect passed from father to son by some secret measure that further disposed this people to servitude.
But Uncle Pomp was an exception proving this rule, a swift and sure swimmer who breasted the cold currents with neither fear nor reservation on many occasions. And this was why Philip, on his mission to return the old man to his erstwhile haunts, was convinced that the Freed Man had, indeed, crossed the Little Miami River, despite is flowing at full spate, and was somewhere hidden in the precipitous country beyond the stream.
Now, since Uncle Pomp, holds a place of importance in this narrative, it falls to me, dear reader, to expand upon my theme a bit so as to inform you about this man and his life and times.
Pompey, as he was called – the name pronounced “pomp-ee” – was born a slave in the country of hills and hollows bounded by the wide Ohio River. In this part of Kentucky, farms are small because the topography is intricate with ridges, sinkholes, and rivers hidden underground that bubble up from small white cliffs of furred chalk. Planters grow hemp and tobacco in that region and Pompey was born on a small grange where slaves and their owners worked side by side to nurture and harvest the bright leaves.
Pompey didn’t recall being particularly mistreated on the plantation where he was raised. As an old man, he sometimes said that he had witnessed a runaway slave dragged back to his master in fetters, his flesh ripped and torn where he had been mauled by dogs. Pompey thought he had seen the slave fed as a quivering, howling morsel to those same savage dogs, although he, also admitted that perhaps this memory was a false one, a fearsome picture in his mind substituting for something that he had merely been told, or, even, only imagined. In any event, slavery’s pangs and injustice became remote, both figuratively and literally, when he was made a free man at the age of 12 as a consequence of his owner’s testamentary bequest – as it were, the slave-owner’s Will accorded to Pompey and his family the greatest legacy of all, that is, the gift to those slaves of what should have been theirs by birth, their manumission and freedom.
Northern Kentucky was a perilous place to be a freed Negro in that time. Misunderstandings as to a Black man’s status could be lethal. Furthermore, the heirs of Pompey’s kindly master, several rapacious nephews and nieces, sought a writ in court to challenge the Will and have its provisions freeing the slaves (and, thereby, wasting the property of those kin) judicially overturned. And, so it was tha Pompey with his care-ridden mother and siblings decamped for Cincinnati, then, a group of villages at the confluence of the Licking and the Ohio rivers. In that conurbation, Pompey was apprenticed to a miserly Scottish printer, laboring day and night in the man’s print-shop for board in a cold coal cellar and a few scraps of victuals daily. Pompey was a quick study with a broad, winning grin and he made the old printer’s acquaintances and customers into friends. After a couple of years, it was apparent that the printshop’s real livelihood was dependant upon Pompey’s industry and good nature. This turn of events seemed to outrage Pompey’s master and, when the old fellow was drinking, he was wont to fall into a dark humor, agitated by the strong spirits that he had imbibed, and, in that mood, he would fling aside the old-fashioned powdered wig that he wore exposing his bald pate, and, then, descending upon the poor youth with whip or stave or switch, whichever came to hand. At last, this mistreatment became intolerable to Pompey and, one day, he rose against the printer, bruising his glabrous skull with his fists and boxing the man’s ears until blood flowed freely down his bewhiskered cheeks. Fearing that he had slain the printer, Pompey fled the shop for the canal nearby, a brick-edged channel that ran through the city’s abattoirs and shambles to the river. A hue and cry was sounded and, panicked, Pompey leaped over the embankment into the foul water of the canal, wading in the shadows of heavily laden barges moving downstream toward the river. Finding no point of egress, Pompey was swept out onto the Ohio River, where currents buffeted him, and, he struggled mightily to keep his head above the water. But, to his surprise, Pompey didn’t sink beneath the waves and, indeed, soon found that he was swimming, gliding along the river’s swift, strong current as if born to that occupation. For the first time in his short life, Pompey felt that he was truly free, confident, a man in an element that was utterly congenial to him.
As it happened, the Printer was not much liked in his environs and sympathy, with respect to the affray, was largely vested in the apprentice. Nonetheless, Pompey found it prudent to not return to the print shop and, instead, rode the current, stroking his way to a hamlet a half-dozen miles downstream from Cincinnati. Because he was literate, and, indeed, well-read, Pompey became a sign-painter and because of his ingenuity and industry, prospered in that vocation.
It was at this time that Pompey, a powerfully built and handsome man, albeit with a prognathous profile, and tightly coiled, wooly hair, became something of a lothario, a great favorite among the dusky maids in the vicinity. A kind and considerate lover, Pompey’s prospects flourished among the Mulatoos and Negresses in the neighborhood and, indeed, there were more than a few White women who also cast a longing gaze in his direction. He was said to have sired half of the children of Ethiop tint in the neighborhood and, further, cast the nets of his attraction across the wide Ohio to the slave state of Kentucky where he also had many mistresses. Pompey pursued his amorous fortunes beyond the Ohio River by virtue of his great shoulders and arms that made him wonderfully amphibious. The river, and least of all the virtue of the maids that he pursued, posed no obstacles to his conquests.
Around the time of 25th year, Pompey fell in love with a quadroon wench serving in the riverside manse of a Kentucky merchant. The girl was named Teardrop for some reason, a tall and lissome female with a complexion like coffee much-diluted with the palest of creams. Teardrop’s voice was soft and musical and she so charmed and enchanted Pompey that nightly he swam from the free to slave shore of the great river, not departing from the bowers wherein the girl received him until the dawn was spreading its scarlet light, red as raspberry jam, across the waters of the Ohio. This courtship lasted for several years, during which time, Pompey starved himself and went without proper coat and shoes, in order to husband coins and greenbacks by which he intended to purchase Teardrop’s freedom. Indeed, he urged to broach the issue with her proprietors so that he would be better advised to what sum on money might be required for the success of this endeavor. During that time, Pompey taught Teardrop how to read and, often, he would sit with her on the bough of a tree projecting over the lagoon near the big white house, a place where turtles snapped at the knitting-needles and frogs sang lustily. There, Pompey instructed the girl in letters and, soon enough, she could read the Bible with him, a book over which they schemed their love and ciphered the words, letter by letter.
After hard labor for many months, Pompey had enough money to make a reasonable bid on Teardrop and, so, he coursed across the river, swimming as swiftly as a dolphin. Upon attaining the shore of the slave-holding estate, Pompey sought after Teardrop, looking for her among the cabins where the chattel lived and, even, venturing into the big and smoky kitchens of the house. But Teardrop was nowhere to be found. Pompey demanded knowledge of whither she had gone (or been conveyed) from the other slaves. They simply told him that a man had come, some papers had been signed, and Teardrop, with several others, had departed down the river on a sort of barge with canvas tents pitched on its deck. Pompey would not depart the mansion until, further, information was supplied to him, but there was no one willing to talk, and, at last, the overseer said that he would release the dogs and have them roust the importunate free-man back across the river. Pompey feared hounds and, so, he went back to the river, tore off his clothing and, instead of folding the garments into his oil-sack against the water, flung them (and the bag) into the current. Then, naked as the day he was born, Pompey leaped into the stream and let the powerful sinews of the flood bear him toward those southern places where Teardrop had been taken.
Pompey lay upon his back, pillowed on the silky surge and ripple of the waters, and the sun set and stars wheeled overhead, inscribing the sky with many strange and portentous signs, and, at last, floating on the river, he fell asleep. He expected surcease from his sorrows in the depths of the cool, whispering river, but, instead, found himself washed ashore in a swamp buzzing with biting insects where the mud smelled like rotten eggs. Pompey knew not whether he was on slave or free soil. But he rose, a majestic nude figure albeit shrouded in mucky ooze, and made his way to the thickets and, then, the turnpike that lead him back to his village near Cincinnati. I know not how he found garments to clothe his nakedness. Pompey didn’t tell me that part of his story.
3.
His wild oats sown, as it were, Pompey settled down in the village at the outskirts of the City. He married one of the women that he had courted on the free side of the river, lived with her in some contentment (although he was ever troubled by his memories of Teardrop), and, indeed, fathered a passel of children with his wife, all of them marked by Pompey’s protruding jaw.
Pompey lived to be an old man and remained vigorous in body, even as his mental powers diminished. His wife died and, so, Pompey, unable to live alone, was installed in a regimen by which he divided his time between the households of his daughters, Portia and Calpurnia. He remained affectionate, and, even, doting, particularly upon his grandchildren, but confusion and strange fancies invaded his mind. He was prone to solitary rambles, long marches in the wild and desolate country at the edges of the city, and, on more than one occasion, Pompey became lost and was returned to his daughters’ whitewashed, clapboard dwellings, where wild roses were entangled in the ivy on the pale fence posts, by kindly strangers who had discovered the old Negro distraught and, even, weeping in the shadow of their orchards or asleep with their horses and cows in their barns. When asked where he had gone, Uncle Pomp, as he was called, said that he was searching for someone that he had lost but that he had not found her, or if found, lost her again. After the disappearance of Teardrop, Pompey eschewed the transit of waterways and did not swim.
Philip lived in his father’s household, a farm with orchards, swine and some beeves nestled in a shady hollow a mile from Portia’s cabin. The fields sown in wheat and dry rusk with okra, pumpkin and beans had been cleared by Philip’s father, one of the first settlers in the region. When the Philip was a little boy, he recalled a visit from an itinerant preacher who read aloud to the family and planted apple seedlings near their cabin. The old man with the long grey beard had a tame wolf with him that Philip remembered as loping along with a limp, although he was uncertain as to whether this memory was authentic or merely the relic of some tale that he had been told. The little cabin where the pioneers had once lived was now a chicken coop and Philip lived in a handsome wood-frame house fashioned from timber sawn at the grist mill in the valley on the Little Miami, but the apple trees had flourished and were still bearing fruit for the grateful inhabitants of that settlement. Philip’s father was a gentle man and couldn’t bear to see animals suffering – he hired-out the slaughter of his pigs and beeves, his wife performing those services with respect to the flock of chickens scratching in the dirt and mast around the house. When Philip completed his studies at the school a mile away, he remained with his family, cultivating bees that browsed and bumbled among the apple blossoms. Philip had the use of all money earned from the sweet produce of his bees and, it was his plan to attend college in Cincinnati and study, perhaps with the Moravians, so that he could become a Latin and Greek instructor – of these two languages he had a little working knowledge based upon tutoring conducted by an itinerant preacher who sometimes passed through the vicinity.
All his life, Philip had known Portia and Uncle Pompey. As a small boy, he had played with Portia’s daughter, Sophie. His father was a staunch abolitionist but didn’t approve of too much fraternity between the races and, so, Philip was cautious in the overtures that he made to Sophie. Portia’s husband operated a forge, a few dozen rods from the traveled-upon way of the turnpike. He was well-known as a skilled blacksmith, although a cantankerous fellow as well, quick to take offense and slow to forgive. He also disapproved to unnecessary communion between Negro and White. For these reasons, Philip concealed his affection for Sophie, an emotion that grew more intense as he reached manhood. On more than a several occasions, Philip had disclosed to Sophie the secrets of beekeeping, how to harvest the honey without damaging the industrious little beasts, and how to winter the insects in the vaults of their hives. Philip rewarded his charming student (she was about four years younger than him) with honeycomb dripping with the bee’s harvest of nectar and pollen from the apple trees. In his diary, Philip referred to Sophie as “Shulammite” said by scripture to be “dark but lovely.”
After several days of rainfall, on an evening in May, Sophie stood wet and footsore outside of the house where Philip lived with his family. Sophie said that Uncle Pompey had wandered away and that no one in the neighborhood had seen him in any of his accustomed haunts. Sophie was fearful that Uncle Pompey had been eaten by a bear or attacked by wolves or, perhaps, fallen into one of the sinister and gloomy dens where the rolling landscape dropped through cliffs and boulders down to the swiftly-running river. Uncle Pompey owned a fine pair of boots – he knew that men are often judged by their footware and Sophie was perplexed and affrighted that the old man had taken those shoes for this sojourn. In her mind, this meant that Uncle Pomp planned to wander far and wide in the dangerous world. Philip lit a lantern and led Sophie back to her cabin at the Blacksmith’s forge and said that he would set out at the first light of dawn to search for Uncle Pompey in the wilderness land divided by the silvery rapids and foam of the roaring river.
And, thus, a few hours before noon, some drizzling rain still irritating the damp foliage and wet mud of this lonely riverside, Philip found himself in the weidling flat-bottomed boat crossing over the Little Miamee.
4.
Water over-ran the sandy bar where the punt might be safely grounded and, when the dragoon and the hunter with the green-feathered cap stepped from stern (whereby they had guided the boat) into the current to pivot the weidling, no one kept hold of the cable strung over the river. The barge slipped sideways, driven headlong against the steep, crumbling bank of the river for a hundred yards downstream before grinding its bottom on a submerged pier of broken boulders. Philip, who had remained in the boat with the Indian, clambered over its side, and stood restraining the punt, knee-deep in the water. The two man dragged the boat to higher ground. All of the bends in river where the water growled relentlessly were draped in an eldritch mist. Upstream, the hunters hallooed to them and, then, came marching along the wet river-banks, splashing through the slop spilled from the flooded stream.
Where the boat had grounded, a burnt patch, dull as a dead eye, marked the place where a fire had been started. A pole whittled from the branch of a tree was thrust between two flame-blackened rocks in the abandoned pyre.
“Here is where Uncle Pomp washed ashore,” Philip said. “He transported his clothing and boots in a waxed haversack and dried himself beside this blaze.”
The dragoon shook his head and sneezed. “Wishful thinking,” he said. “Your man’s drowned for sure.”
The hunter with the feathered hat pointed up to the heights shaggy with wet trees. “There’s red oak atop this bluff,” he said. “It’s acorn season and the birds will come here.”
After securing the weidling, the hunters stood surveying the hillside, squinting up to the overhanging trees looming against the grey sky. By exercise of the imagination, one could discern a kind of channel engraved in the bluff. The slit in the hillside seemed unnaturally straight, a causeway rising like a great inclined ladder between tilted ridges raised like earthen dams to guide and shelter the ascent.
Availing themselves of the narrow upward way, the hunters with fowling pieces and gear commenced their climb. Philip remained below with the Indian who had returned to the punt and was lounging on the wood platform at the stern. He removed a meerschaum pipe from his vest and began to pack it with tobacco.
The two huntsman were forty feet up the chute grooved in the hillside when they discovered that their comrade was not following and, indeed, taking his ease in the shallow-draft punt. They shouted down to him and waved their shot-guns in the air, but the Indian didn’t follow, barely moved at all, singing out simply: “I don’t go up there.”
The hunters, suspended in their ascent, shouted down some imprecations upon the fellow, denouncing him loudly and with vehemence, although with no observable effect on the man tarrying below. The Indian simply lit his pipe and, enwreathing his head in a kindly cloud of smoke, cried out again: “No, I don’t go there.”
Cursing now more at the steepness of the climb than at their comrade’s obstinacy, the two men turned once more to the upward way. Their firearms impeded their ascent and their progress was slow.
“Why won’t you go?” Philip asked.
“I know this place,” the Indian replied. “I recognize the ghost-trail to the top.”
“What is there?”
“Dead men, evil spirits,” the Indian said. He sucked at his pipe and the river swirled by glazed with its swift brown currents and, like ants climbing a tree’s trunk, the two men with their guns continued their ascent.
“I have to go too,” Philip said.
He traced the rivet marks of Uncle Pomp’s boots in a slick of mud at the base of the chute. Then, turning his eyes to the boulder-cluttered channel, Philip found foot- and hand-holds and began to climb toward the bluff-top. The stony steps in the groove seemed exactly measured to the span of a man’s body and the climb imposed a kind of rhythm on his motion, an instinctive confidence that arose from always finding a grip or a toe-hold exactly where he expected. It was as if many thousands had made their way to the heights before him, moving in the dry sluice where steps and rungs felt as if they had been carefully placed or, perhaps, simply worn into the hillside by long use, stones either lodged exactly where required or hand-holds chiseled into the rock. To be sure, the way had been long-neglected and there were places where the stony treads underfoot failed, other slick and steep places where the storms had polished the hillside channel and made it perilous, but, mostly, Philip climbed with ease, following the ancient way, and, the higher he ascended, the more he understood in his muscles, how he should use the causeway, how it had been designed and, even, engineered, and that this was not the work of nature but rather an cunningly contrived path, one that had been climbed so, often, that perhaps it would be best to simply shut one’s eyes and be blind to the dizzying height, climbing on instinct, and the sculpted path’s partnership with that instinct, alone.
Because of the accommodations of the upward way, Philip reached the top of the bluff without difficulty and, indeed, only slightly winded. The hilltop was shady with trees standing at noble intervals among mounds and hillocks. An exposed platform of rock was at the top of the causeway and Philip saw that some marks had been pecked into it, tallies, it seemed, and shapes like shields or turtle shells. As far as he could see, the trees were mostly red oak and their acorns were strewn in great abundance under the great spreading boughs. The wind blew fresh across the bluff tops and Philip could see some greasy smoke rising far away on the hilltops, sulphur-fires that planters had set to preserve their orchards and seedling crops from the advancing devastation of the birds. The sky seemed to be clearing and the trees now cast comely shadows on the great lawn, here and there swollen with grassy tumors, and there was no trace of the pigeons, although bird-song resounded over the meadows, the fluting of many small fowl playing in the green fields.
5.
The sun now clad the park-like expanse atop the bluff with dappled green shadow and the morning’s mist was distilled to a fine, mellow vapor rising from the damp grass and wild-flowers. The two hunters ranged far ahead of Philip, their errand unlike his and, thus, suitable to greater alacrity. He heard them baying to one another like hounds, no need for silence on this hilltop because they were not stalking prey – rather, the great flocks of pigeons were advancing toward them, as, yet, remote, unheard and unseen, but certain (at least so the fowlers believed) to visit this place so abundant with berries and fallen acorns, beech-nuts, and every kind of seed dropped from the tall trees to delight the foraging birds. Philip moved more slowly, searching the grass for the marks of the old man’s passing, ranging back and forth across the great level woods on this high promontory over the river below.
Relatively level, the bluff’s summit encompassed an area many acres in extent bounded by precipitous and tangled ravines that plunged to the bottom-land around the river. Philip observed the irregularly shaped edges of the hilltop rose a dozen feet or more above the enclosed park thereby creating an impression that an entrant into this space was confined within a vast, shallow bowl, albeit one indenting the summit of the bluff. The peaceful glade and the pleasing swell of hillocks encompassed between the edges of the bluff, at first, seemed little noteworthy to Philip’s inquiring eyes – a pleasant rural scene but with nothing particularly picturesque to delight the senses. Uncle Pompey’s footprints were not discernible and Philip supposed that the old man, exhausted upon reaching this place, had sought some covert in which to rest awhile, probably concealed behind one of the grassy mounds along the perimeter of the hilltop. Therefore, Philip walked to the edge of the ravine, scrambled up the steep side of the embankment overlooking the steep green declivity and, then, looked along that rampart for signs of the fugitive. Glancing through the play of light and shadow, Philip saw something pale within the enclosed forest. Setting forth in that direction, Philip again descended the inner side of the embankment, slipping and sliding among the acorns and leaves and seeds on the incline. The pale form among the trees was a small mound, white because paved with flat chalk stones. Clearly, this low wave-shaped knoll was not framed by the hand of nature, but something man-made. Philip kicked at the pale stones embedded in the earth, remarking to himself that the small paved hillock was something like the shell of a tortoise.
Two rods beyond the knoll bearing the scales of flattened stone, Philip saw another mound, this shaped a bit like a ridge riding the crest of a rounded green hillock. And, then, in exact alignment with those two mounds, Philip saw other breast-high ridges and swellings, a series of barrows, it seemed, arranged to point toward the river like an arrow. With increasing excitement, Philip now apprehended that the entire landscape had been sculpted, raised up in ramparts and embankments, heaped into mounds like the top of a man’s head or a woman’s breasts, here and there, paths still partially paved with white stone leading to small ponds lying in the shadow of the high fortifications running in a continuous ring along the edge of the bluff. The ponds weren’t accidental, but, rather, constructed, it seemed, built like an intermittent moat, although inside the hillside ramparts and, therefore, not defensive unless the thing to be protected against was within the great enclosure.
Philip’s breath now came swift and rasping against his throat and the back of his tongue. He had forgotten Uncle Pompey and, now, concerned himself with tracing the lineaments of this vast human work, abandoned now and enigmatic, rising in barrows and ramparts all around him. What was this place? What race of giants had dwelled within these high earthen embankments? Where had these mysterious people gone? How could such mighty works have been raised atop this lofty hill only to be abandoned?
As far as he could see, the landscape all around bore the marks of habitation – flat-topped earth platforms now sprightly with trees atop them, innumerable pyramidal mounds, high walls, also, studded with trees and split by notches as if entry-gates, bright ponds skirting the the length of the ramparts, bright as pearls strung along the edges of the hilltop. The enclosure narrowed to a space about 20 rods wide, an area where the bluff-top was squeezed to a ridge, and, then, beyond, another irregularly-shaped enclosure, even larger than the first, occupied the north lobe of the hill’s brow. Here were also tumuli of varying descriptions, small ponds nestled against the earthen embankments and several low mounds bearing white stones as if tracing the armature of a turtle’s shell.
Philip found that he was walking very quickly, tracing out the edges of the rampart, and sweating in the moist, warm air. He had forgotten his mission. Perhaps, the mysterious mounds were laden with treasures. Once, a young man of his acquaintance had cut into a barrow with his spade and discovered the thigh-bone of a giant, a colossus that would have measured more than nine feet tall. The lost tribes of the Israelites had been on this Ohio hilltop and reared up mighty works. Centurions from Rome, perhaps, had conquered these lands or Trojans venturing beyond the pillars of Hercules had been blown across the sea to this place or the gentile Nephites and Lamanites that the Mormon scriptures chronicled, with their pyramids and treasures of gold, had built this ancient fort. This was the mighty capitol of the lost race of Mound Builders, now utterly abandoned, the haunt of the bear and the wolf and cougar. Philip was overcome with excitement and he sat down, for a moment, dizzy with discovery, resting his back against one of the great, spreading red elm trees. Then, there was the report of a firearm, the sound rumbling across the park-like meadows. Another shot sounded. Philip remembered Uncle Pompey and, so, he stood and walked slowly in the direction from which the fowler’s piece had been fired.
6.
The dragoon lowered his firearm and squinted across the park encompassed within the grassy and forested ramparts. On this promontory, the mounds were as closely arrayed as waves on the sea.
“You’re wasting shot,” the huntsman wearing the green cap said.
The dragoon emitted a whistle between his teeth, as if summoning a dog.
“There was a buck over yonder,” he told the huntsman. “White-tail.”
“I didn’t see no deer,” the huntsman replied, surveying the tumuli and the distant ridges thrown up at the edge of the bluff.
“I seen a white-tail,” the dragoon maintained.
“Couldn’t hit nothing at that range, regardless,” the huntsman said. “Not with bird-shot.”
“I swear I seen a white-tail,” the dragoon said. He tilted his muzzle-loader and began to re-charge the piece.
“We ain’t huntin’ white-tails no how,” the huntsman in the feathered cap said. “This here is a pigeon hunt.”
The two men sat on the grass with their backs to a single tree, each gazing toward the horizon in a different direction. The far-off sulphur fires smudged the sky, now clear and blue overhead. The sun shone on their faces and warmed them and the vapors in the air were perfumed with the scent of wild-flowers where bees were murmuring and the wind whispering in the ears of the innumerable trees – for forests as much as men have ears – counseled that the day had been long and the hike brisk and that, now, it was time to rest awhile.
7.
The old black man stooped to pluck a bloodroot flower, a whorl of unblemished white haloing a delicate apparatus of deep yellow filament and anther. Some folks called bloodroot Sweet Slumber and its effects were reputed to be somnolent. A tincture from the blossom was good against warts, at least so it was said, and, therefore, Pompey added the flower to the bouquet that he had picked. All things are useful – even those blossoms merely beautiful, and, without medicinal effects, are beneficient because beauty is a thing that gladdens the heart and a remedy against melancholy.
Cradled in his arms were bundles of aster mixed with goldenrod, forest lilies, purple horsemint and lavender bittercross with blue wake-robin that, when infused as tea, induces labor and child-birth. The forest was full of remedies and balms, growing bright-colored among the litter of acorns fallen from the red elms.
Like a bumble-bee, Uncle Pomp wandered from flower to flower. An observer of this picturesque scene might have likened its protagonist to King Lear rambling amidst meadows, although not wreathed in that diadem of nettles less bruising to his brow than the royal crown. Drawn by the delightsome flowers, the old man sauntered back and forth among the swelling protuberances of the mounds, themselves vibrant with blossoms.
Then, the report of a firearm echoed over the hilltop, although Uncle Pomp was oblivious to that sound, so deaf that he didn’t even cock his head in the direction from which the gun had fired. The gun discharged again.
This time, Uncle Pomp felt a sharp sting, more biting than that of a honey-bee, the poisoned lancet, as it were, of a big wasp lazily circling the meadow as if it were hawk. Pomp reached for the place that he had been wounded and his fingers withdrew from his forearm dampened by blood. Turning his wrist, Pomp saw that the stab where he had been bitten was flowing with blood, not a deep wound, fortunately, but one easily stanched with the green leaves of yarrow that he found growing in abundance on the side of the rampart overlooking the deep green ravine.
The ridge-wall enclosing the bluff-top opened like a door, a notch in the embankment and Uncle Pomp entered the green swale and looked down upon the tree-tops beneath a fractured rock face crowning the hillside. The view over the lush river valley overgrown with its jungle of trees appealed to him and Uncle Pomp was tired from his exertions and footsore. He pillowed himself on the soft grass covering the mound and removed his fine boots, setting them to each side of his hips so that they could not be stolen without rousing him. The broad prospect over the deep valley and wilderness pleased the old man and he gazed, as if rapt over the landscape, the deep green of the leaves around him and the myriad eyes of the blossoms in the glass giving way to the cool blues and greys of the remote horizon, the sky overhead patrolled by hawks circling, the first harbingers of the approaching pigeon flocks.
The sun was sultry upon Uncle Pomp’s bronze brow. The intensity of his view over this far country had tired his old eyes and, so, he closed them to rest his gaze awhile. It was silent for him, because he was stone-deaf.
8.
In the close confines of the river gorge, a green den mostly occupied by the rambunctious stream of the Little Miamee, the Indian heard a fowling piece fired on the hilltop above, and, then, a second shot, possibly some kind of signal. It didn’t matter because nothing could impel him to climb the processional pathway ascending the hill to the place of ghosts. The dead were enemies to man, except, of course, his own ancestors who were spirit-guides radiant with light. He knew the hill-top was cursed and that the colossal and ancient dead held their councils there and no good could come of climbing the bluff to encounter them.
The dewy vapors from leaf and branch formed a pale mist over the forests crowding the white feathery rapids upstream. The punt bobbed a little, cradled on the edge of the stream. Sun cast beams down even into the depths of the valley where the Indian sat in the boat. The warmth made him drowsy and chant of the river was soporific and, so, he set aside his meerschaum pipe, and closed his eyes to rest them.
A canoe cut through dark waters, moving silently like a sharp iron knife drawn across a piece of meat. Without speaking, the shadowy figures in the canoe disembarked at the river’s edge, wading through shallows that neither splashed nor rippled but were, rather, like a yielding substance into which the men sunk their feet. The processional way ascending the steep, shaggy hillside to the blufftop was now illumined by torches, bundles of dry river-cane flaring where posted along the steep path and the men from the canoe filed upward. The sun was shining still somewhere in the sky, but that light was indefinite and diffuse and did not affect the brightness of the torches or the bluff’s bonfires that were burning with the radiance of flames against the darkness, although there was no darkness except to the extent that the mind was confused by the spectacle and that perplexity, somehow, dimmed the day and made it blurred as well. Several great bonfires were raging atop the bluff and flames spiraled up into the sky, embers spinning as they rose into the heavens. Several drums sounded, beating like a man’s heart, and he felt the concussion of drum-mallets against stretched deer-hide as if it were a pulse within his own chest.
More canoes were now grounded along the shoreline. More figures climbed the ladder of boulders squeezed between the parallel embankments leading to the hilltop. On such a solemn occasion, the dancers and other celebrants should have worn roaches on their heads, porcupine fur and spines but, when he inspected the profiles of the men, marching in solemn order up the side of the bluff, he didn’t perceive those headdresses – something was not exactly right and the scene before his eyes seemed skittish as a young horse, now approaching him closely and, then, retreating. But the river was full of fish and the woods, which God has made for man, were teeming with deer and, where the woods gave way to prairie, herds of bison were grazing. The places where the White men had built villages or heaped up logs to make cabins or, even, made canals full of chastened, captive water as dead as the pale hands that had cut those grooves in the land – all of these blights on the landscape were overgrown by trees and green brush – and the iron roads, as well with track and rail, had been torn-up and twisted into corkscrews like the ivy clinging to the old trees. The hillsides were all erupting in flame and the drums beat ever more loudly and, when the next canoe came ashore, and disgorged its cargo of warriors, eight or nine or ten of them from a birch-bark canoe slender as a young woman, he saw what was wrong with the men and why their heads were not crested with porcupine or deer-tail roaches – the men’s heads were attached to their throats upside down so that their mouths were where their foreheads should have been and their nostrils opened upward to the sky so that, if it rained, such men would surely drown from the water falling out of the sky. The intervals between drum beats decreased until there was a continuous roar and, then, he opened his eyes and, looking up at the bluff, bright against the blue sky, saw that much of the hillside was white with snow, that snow blanketed the hillside, ankle-deep an odd thing to see in this warm month with the trees all in leaf and the wild flowers underfoot.
Then, the Indian recognized that the uproar in the air was the harsh, metallic sound of a million pigeons, all of them shrieking with the sound louder than the grinding bellow of a sawmill. Above the snow-covered slope (he now saw that it was pigeon droppings), the trees were black with birds, branches all pressed to the ground so that what had once been a noble, and erect forest now seemed all bent over, crabbed as an old woman bearing a load for firewood athwart her shoulders.
A stone’s throw upstream, a cascade of birds, unfurled from the bluff-top, dived down to dip their beaks in the stream. The birds descended in a dark column, too densely packed to see through, feathers touching feathers as the birds cascaded downward to the water, landed for an instant, and, then, sprayed sideways and upward, darting back to the heights. The pillar of descending birds was thunderous as the waterfall that it simulated, a continuous deafening roar, and where the flock plunged into the river and, then, rebounded splashing and pulsing upward, the pigeons fell in such numbers that they crushed one another and feathered rafts of dead fowl, like bouquets of flowers, floated down the river so that the Indian thought there are more killed here than atop the hill where the sound of the guns could be faintly discerned. Overhead, the sky was crisscrossed with aerial rivers of birds, twisting and turning in all directions.
– Behold, the Indian thought, the legions of ancestors have come to us and it is a fearsome thing, indeed.
9.
When his eyes were closed, his confusion lessened and his mind found its way back to his childhood where all was clear and bright. He saw his mother’s face and her hands. Then, the sun rose over a broad river. The heat from the sun softened his mother’s features so they were malleable as tallow, changing before his eyes. Her work-hardened hands didn’t soften. He felt her touch his cheek and, then, Teardrop appeared to him, her countenance dimmed a little by the tears that he was shedding.
The river was broad but it was no obstacle to his strength and the current buoyed him up so that his arm-strokes propelled him more swiftly forward. Beyond the river, there was a pleasant place, shaded by trees where sheep were wandering in the meadows, cropping the green grass. Pompey felt the grass soft and cool underfoot. With Teardrop, he sat on a knoll under an elm that spread its branches overhead. He had a small banjo and he played for Teardrop and she sang, although he didn’t understand her words – it was his deafness that now intervened and, when he recalled that he couldn’t hear, he saw his fingers strumming the banjo and observed that Teardrop’s mouth was open to sing, be he couldn’t hear anything at all. The world was silent except for the rhythmic rise and fall of his own breath, something that he felt more than heard.
He had gathered flowers and wound them in wreathe to wrap around Teardrop’s brow. She stood before him, her feet also bare, and danced for him, a shuffling step that gladdened his heart. Teardrop extended her hand to him and he took it and felt that the skin on her fingers and palms was also work-hardened, ridged callouses that he stroked with his own fingers. Some sheep, curious as to the human beings among them, approached and Pompey saw their black eyes and wooly heads and felt their breath sweet with clover on his arms and belly. The mounds around them were shaped like the curves of a woman’s body and, on each low hillock, there were lovers, men and women embracing, and the sun shone on this graceful company and, even those lovers whom he knew to be dead, seemed joyful to him, playing stringed instruments or pipes.
His mother had warned him against slave-catchers. An alarm swept through the company of lovers. The slave-catchers were abroad with nets and canvas sacks into which they would hustle black people and, then, spirit them across the river to be sold into bondage. It was a ghastly trade and those involved in that traffic were monstrous creature of darkness and, when they spoke among one another, their voices sounded like the high-pitched squeak and rattle of a cotton gin. Pompey was afraid and so he turned over on his belly and faced into the grass and felt that if he couldn’t see the slave catchers than he would be invisible to them as they were to him. He clenched his eyes tightly shut and pressed his forehead into the grass and, expecting to feel the lash laid across his shoulders, instead felt something soft and wet applied to his back, a salve or balm of some kind that soothed him, a caress that urged him down into the darkness of deep sleep.
Then, someone had put smelling salts under his nose, a stench of ammonia mordant, reluctantly he opened his eyes to the sod on which he was pillowed and, then, a man’s hands were guiding him, turning him over to see a vast, dark, whirling cloud of wings overhead, the sky writhing with birds, and everywhere red-eyes and yellow beaks, trees breaking down with their weight so that masses of fowl as broad and long as hogsheads collapsed to the ground all white as snow with their dung.
A man was leaning over him and he grasped at Pompey’s wrists and lifted him up. Everything underfoot was slick with white pigeon droppings and he slipped and slid was he was led away.
10.
It was far from impossible that the Trojans blown by gale westward across the Atlantic had entered the great St. Lawrence Seaway, thinking it to be a harbor from the stormy sea and, thence, had sailed their trireme barks among the Great Lakes having access to the Erie and Miami canal, then, freshly built with their hundred locks and neat brick-walled channels, and having paid their necessary tolls and cropped their masts so as to fit under the low bridges along the way, come south from the great lake to the Ohio and, then, turned their vessels upstream to the confluence with the Little Miamee river, sailing to a point beneath bluffs salubrious with breeze above river bottoms where they founded their city, Troytown, a place encompassed by many miles of fine, well-built earthen ramparts where platforms that mimicked the acropolis-heights of their native Mediterranean were raised, mounds surmounted by gleaming temples overlooking plazas with henges of wood and stone. So it was that Troytown was founded here upon this lofty bluff, walled and defended many years before, even, the time of Christ, a wonder and terror to the savages ranging through this wilderness.
And it was to this place that the hero-king Aeneas came, father of cities, and defeated the tribes that roamed these woods and valleys, burning the fields of maize and squash and beans and reducing the palisaded villages to burnt tinder and ashes, subjugating some by force of arms but making others friends by alliances. Then, the proud Sachem of the ancient ones, the Miamee, offered his daughter in marriage to the Trojan ruler and, on a stormy afternoon, the Dardanians went forth into the country hunting the white-tailed deer, and there Aeneas met Pocahontas, or another like her, Minnehaha, or perhaps lissome Sacajewa, a girl as dark and comely as Shulammite, and when the rain fell and the thunder rumbled and the lightning split the sky, Aeneas sought shelter in a cave hollowed into the cliffs above the river and with him the Sachem’s daughter and there, in that bower veiled by falling water, they consummated their passion and, when the sun had dissolved the dark clouds, returned in triumph to the city on the hill and, perhaps, that maiden, once the queen of this New Troy, was buried in this place, entombed in one of the conical mounds, a pretty place under leafy trees with a pond spread out like a mirror under the knoll to reflect its rounded shape to the skies...
Thus, Philip’s revery as he rested among the sepulchral mounds in the ancient city, a confused succession of images that brightened his mind with fitful figures, all arrayed in gleaming armor or the finery of feathers the color of blood or lapis lazuli, an ornate tangle of fantasies that was suddenly dispelled by the sound of a banshee, at first, a single banshee, crying out over the wilderness, then, another banshee and another. Then, Philip opened his eyes and saw the trees and the slumbering knolls and the blue sky and the closest of the sulphur fires flying its smoke overhead like a pennant was no longer motionless against the far horizon, but now in motion, the clump of greasy smoke at first the size of a man’s fist, then, the size of man’s torso, then, larger spreading upward into the sky, and, then, a howling tempest of pigeons toppling downward with a sound like a terrible storm at sea. The birds darkened the sky, solid masses of pigeons passing overhead, and, then, suddenly dissolving into dark shreds, vortices of feather spinning off from the main column and spraying down to cover the brush and grass under the trees, a living carpet of pigeons with still others dropping to alight on them so that, here and there, heaps of birds, as round as a barrel writhed on the ground. It was an agony of motion that shredded trees and stripped the shrubbery, millions of the birds hustling here and there to build airborne nests, a calamity of owls and hawks and bald eagles tearing apart the pigeons mid-air and dropping bloody gobbets down into the sea of roosting and strutting birds, spinning up tornados among them, spiral columns that rose and fell sweeping across the great masses of fowl like cyclones raging across the prairie.
The huntsman’s guns roared, paused and roared again, but the sound of the firearms was drowned-out by the cackling, harsh cries of the flocks, forming in sky-borne legions to drag their shadows across the foraging fowl carpeting the mounds and embankments, breaking down the little trees, making the great elms all shaggy with a living garment of wings and eyes, feathers and clawed feet.
Philip thought that this no mere phenomenon of nature. The enormous flocks of pigeons were a visitation, an emblem of some particular manifestation of destiny that he couldn’t interpret. This abundance was sinister, relentless, an apparition too strange to abide for even a minute but which lasted for an hour, for many hours – who knows? Time had stopped and the clocks in the sky couldn’t be read because their faces were blocking by the millions of birds swooping down onto the embankments of the ruined city.
11.
Somehow in the chaos created by the flock of pigeons, Philip came upon a hillside where every leaf and twig had been stripped from the trees and their trunks and boughs were all lime-white with pigeon droppings, an empty corner in the whirling colony of pigeons where the dung fell from the sky like half-melted snow and covered the embankment and mounds with its white deposits. Philip saw something stirring in the snow-white glaze of manure, a form half-drowned in the stuff, and staggering through the slippery dung, found a man’s back and shoulders and the flanks of his body entirely painted white, matching the manure on both sides of the recumbent figure that lay twitching in the snow-colored carpet of filth. Philip bent over the figure and saw that it was Uncle Pompey lying face down in the foaming white masses of dung. He stooped and rolled the old man over and, then, the Negro’s black skin shone dark against the fields of bird-lime – the front of the old man hadn’t been painted by the dung deposited by the pigeons and so his black face and throat contrasted with the beds of pigeon manure in which he was lying. Philip called the old man’s name, but he didn’t stir at the call. Then, he remembered that Uncle Pomp was stone-deaf. He raised the black man from the dung in which he was embedded and tried to lead him toward the hill-side. But footing was unsteady and Philip slipped several times, and, then, Old Pompey fell over on his side and rolled down the slope, inert as a stone or log. Philip followed him into the hollow, lifted the old man up, and carried him on his shoulders, Uncle Pompey was surprisingly light. He was bootless and his bare feet bobbed alongside Philip’s hips as he carried him toward the path downward from the hilltop.
On the steep way down the bluff, flanked by the embankments, sometimes, Old Pomp was draped over Philip’s shoulders, sometimes, behind him pressing forward with an urgent weight toppling down the steep hill, sometimes, ahead clasped around his mid-section, by Philip who shoved him ahead, catching him under the armpits when he dropped over steep portions of the trail. At last, they came to the base of the bluff and saw the Indian waiting at the punt and, upstream, a standing black waterfall of birds plunged down from the bluff top to crash into the water or strut through its shallows or swarm over the river banks. The cacophony was deafening, a sound like iron and bronze falling from the sky.
12.
They waited for the hunters to come down from the high bluff. Philip saw that Uncle Pomp’s feet were unshod, bare, and that they were bruised and bleeding from the sharp rocks over which they had come during their descent.
At last, the hunter in the green feathered cap appeared, lugging huge globe-like sacks of dead pigeons. The sacks were heavy and they leaked blood onto the trail. The hunter said that the ragged dragoon had attempted to carry too heavy a weight of prey down from the hilltop and that he had fallen some distance on the steep trail and, perhaps, broken his leg or ankle. It was difficult for them to speak because of the clatter and roar of birds dropping to the river water and, then, bursting upward in tight mobs that seemed to rotate as they flew.
The dragoon approached, limping heavily, and, almost spherical with bleeding, limp pigeons bulging out of all of his pockets, tucked under his suspenders, and engorging his trousers. He wore a half-dozen pigeons under his hat, beaks and feet dangling down like ornaments over his ears and forehead. His ragged jacket was splitting at the seams with dead fowl and he half-dragged and pushed three great linseed-treated canvas pouches over the trail toward the weidling.
When Philip tried to urge Uncle Pomp into the punt, he put forth both of his hands and pushed back against the young man. Then, he loped away, splashing through the shallow water where feathery rafts of dead birds were floating. Philip followed after him and dragged him to the ground on the river-bank.
The Indian approached with a spool of rope and they bound Uncle Pomp hand and foot. He opened his mouth as if to wail but made no sound. The Indian and Philip lifted the old man set him gently in the punt. There was no place for the swollen bags of dead birds in the flat-bottomed barge and, so, after some dispute it was agreed that Philip and the Indian with Uncle Pomp bound at the ankles and wrists would make the first passage against the river. The glen was shadowy now with vast numbers of pigeons passing to and fro over the river gorge.
13.
Uncle Pompey looked up and saw the dark river of birds undulating overhead. He looked down to his feet and saw that he was fettered and that his toes were bleeding. What had happened to his fine boots? A man is known by his footware.
The punt rocked like a cradle under him. He saw the birds in their torrents overhead as black as the slaves, so many thousands gone, dragged down to Egypt by pharaoh’s army. He tried to gesture at the birds, but his wrists were tied.
The birds cast a great tumultuous shadow down on the little barge. The souls of the slaves filling the sky were dark not because of their skin color, but because they had gone through the fires of oppression and been singed and burned and charred by them. The river below was dark with the shadow cast by the flock and the fowl were dark against the sky that was otherwise bright and blue and so there seemed to be two rivers, one of them feathered, and one formed from water flowing parallel together across the earth.
At last, the slave-catchers had captured him, had seized Old Pomp, and manacled him hand and foot. They were taking him into bondage downriver in Memphis.
The souls of slaves, many thousands gone, whirled overhead. Uncle Pomp wanted to join that great dark flock moving across the sky. He struggled to sit up. The river here was difficult, braided with white-water rapids.
Philip saw Uncle Pompey somehow surge to a crouch and, then, hurl himself into the river. The old back man spun in the air, splashing buttocks first into the stream, but, then, he turned over on his face and sank like a stone, the white bird-lime on his shoulders and the back of his head, showing ghostly pale under the torrent and, then, vanishing. The current was too swift for Philip to plunge into the water after Uncle Pompey and so he shouted to him and cried out to the Indian to extend the punting oar toward where the old man had sunk beneath the water. The Indian passed the pole to Philip and he seized it, but, then, the punt rotated sideways and was dragged down the river by the swift water and it took them many minutes to regain control over the barge and to bring it safely to the opposite shore. By this time, no one had any idea where Uncle Pompey had fallen into the water or where he had gone.
14.
Let my readers follow me down river on the Little Miamee around many circuitous bends, beyond ribbed sandbars, and places where cliffs brood over the water like tombstones. Follow me over rapids casting foam in the air and beyond shallow murky lagoons and past places where flooding has destroyed the trees and left them standing in the black ooze with their bark all abraded and their naked trunks white as clouds in the sky.
I am unable to tell you where Uncle Pompey’s body at last came ashore or, indeed, if his corpse ever emerged from the dark water to be entrapped in deadfall or snared by weirs of thorn and shrub half-drowned in the river. But I can tell you that three miles from the crossing, a single dead pigeon washed onto a finger of glistening sand extended out into the river. At the place, the water was clear and crystalline and there were no other dead pigeons floating in feathery clumps down the stream.
Where the pigeons had congregated in their millions, the eye was unable to distinguish one bird from another – they were all part of a single amorphous mass and no sooner did you focus upon one of them, then the pressure of the others in feathery crowd attenuated your gaze and weakened it and, so, paradoxically, where there were millions of birds the fowl were invisible as individuals.
