My Name Is a Knife Read online

  PUBLISHED BY VINTAGE CANADA

  Copyright © 2018 Alix Hawley

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2018 by Vintage Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Hawley, Alix, 1975—, author

  My name is a knife / Alix Hawley.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9780735273290

  Ebook ISBN 9780735273306

  1. Boone, Daniel, 1734–1820—Fiction. 2. Boone, Rebecca Bryan, active 1755—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS8615.A821M92 2018  C813′.6  C2017-907358-3

                    C2017-907359-1

  Text and cover design by Five Seventeen

  Cover image: (painting) Portrait of a Woman, Marie Wandscheer, 1886.

  Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

  Interior image: (dirt texture) © texturelib.com

  v5.3.1

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue: Rebecca

  Part One: Daniel — The Bloody Family

  Chapter 1: June 1778

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Part Two: Rebecca — Broke All He Came Near

  Chapter 18: Autumn 1778

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Part Three: Daniel — Live-Forever

  Chapter 26: Autumn 1779

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Part Four: Rebecca — Indian Book

  Chapter 36: August 1782

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Epilogue: Rebecca

  Acknowledgementnts

  About the Author

  For Theo

  NOW I AM READY to tell the story of Madoc—

  Before he went mad, this Madoc grew up in a bloody house, with a bloody family. You will have to imagine how they looked, I cannot tell you. It was hundreds of years ago, not here.

  He was a prince. His father had two wives, as some kings do, and many fierce sons who loved fighting. Once the old king died, they were all ready to go to war for the crown.

  Each queen wanted one of her own sons to be the new king, but their hearts ached over the bloodshed. Each of them cried in her castle, and Madoc heard his mother’s weeping. Then he took off his armour and left it in a field. He gathered his wife and children, and one hundred other people, and had all of them singing at the shore as ships were built for them: Praise Madoc, our sailor prince and saviour.

  They sang for hours.

  This pleased Madoc. He loaded his new ships with gold, food and fine clothes for everyone. And he went up to the castle and kissed his mother’s tears away. He said she must come with him to a new place, a beautiful place. She smiled then and said she would live out her days wherever he took her. So Madoc led her down to the shore and named his first ship for her, the Queen Christian. He gave its figurehead a gold crown with a pearl as big as a fist—and they sailed into the west for many weeks, through windless days and gales.

  They met with monsters.

  One was a dragon. Its fiery breath burned the mast and sails of one of the ships, and the people on it had to swim for their lives. Madoc rescued them and his wife gave them wine.

  Some others were lost when a storm broke up more of the ships. One of them was Madoc’s own son, the most beautiful of the young men. He had the blackest hair you can think of—

  No one can think of it—

  They could not reach him as he tried to hang onto the broken mast in the waves. Madoc’s wife, the young man’s mother, wept for him as he cried out for help, drifting farther and farther away. His voice stayed in her ears.

  She did not watch as his poor body gave up at last and vanished into the ocean.

  Soon another monster came in the night, blowing a poison at the last ship that sent many of the people into a heavy sleep. They were not dead, but could not be woken, though Madoc tried lowering them on ropes into the sea and blowing trumpets into their ears, and their little children cried and touched them.

  Madoc said they must carry on, and that he was their king now.

  But he was mad, in a quiet way. He thought all the time of his armour, which must have rusted in the field by now. He stopped sleeping altogether, and sat staring. His wife watched him. No one knows her name, it is lost, and what was she queen of, in the end?

  The ship sailed on, until they came to a shore where the sun was just rising—

  * * *

  Daniel, you always began stories to the children that way—Now I am ready to tell. The children still ask for this tale of yours. When my son Jamesie was little, half asleep and sitting on your feet before the fire in our first house, he asked all about how the ships were built, what they were made of, what the monster’s poison was. He loved to know things. He was full of questions. Why, why.

  Jamesie is gone now, more than two years gone, and in his grave somewhere.

  You told him you’d heard it from your uncle, another James, who taught you at the school you ran away from time and time again. And you have run from us. You are gone too. Months now. I hardly think of you any longer.

  The fire in my house is low. I sit watching the embers. Upstairs, my youngest boy Jesse is awake, calling me. He will wake the others.

  When I go to him he blinks at my light and asks for Daddy’s Madoc, the way Daddy tells it. Again. Do you remember this, Daniel? It is a story about you, but not all about you—

  June 1778

  MY FEET ARE SKINNED, I can run no more, I am sorry for it.

  I lie gasping on my belly in the cane and the mud. I cannot run back. The sun beats me hard on the side of the face. My eyes burn, gnats come in a cloud for them. All night I have lain here. Two days and nights I have run, and behind me is so much, the grassy smoky scent of her skin, the sleeping mat in our house, the bark walls letting the night through. Her eyes with creases round them like stars. And my Shawnee father’s eyes also, black as black, looking for the son he took to replace the one we killed, but I am gone.

  If they left straight away, if they kept to the Bullskin Trace, they will be no more than a day behind. If my father took time to gather more warriors and supplies, if he sent perhaps first to Detroit for British help, they will be some days yet. Perhaps some weeks, perhaps a month if luck holds, if I have any luck left.

  My guts stir, they
will not hold, they go liquid. The river gagged me up miles from where I set out to cross. I limped a few miles more before I could go no farther. The fort, my fort, the dreadful place with my name, it is not far from this great canebrake that has snagged me. If it is still there and has not been burned to nothing.

  Hold your guts in you ape. Now look. In my mind I see the gate, I see myself walking straight up to it. I know just how I appear, filthy and starved, my gun wet and dirty, my hair all plucked but for the warrior’s lock plastered down the back of my head now, my shirt lost, my feet swelled dead white with water and beaten into platters from running. White Indian, they will say. Or perhaps only Indian, with a bullet as a further greeting.

  Rebecca, I am near to you and the children now, whatever state you are in.

  A gnat in my ear-hole. Mud in it. I pull my cheek up out of the sucking riverbank and crawl backward into the shallows to clean myself in some fashion. My hands ache. They are not young. I wash out my scratched eyes, I take a little water to ease my cracked tongue. I pick up the gun, I crouch hidden in the cane and I listen.

  A hum. A patter. Footfalls.

  Someone just downriver, up the high bank above the cane. I muster my voice and I cry out Hey, but it becomes a long cough.

  —Who is it?

  English. No soft-singing Shawnee. The snap of a gun lock, a hard yell, Here, the charge of legs running. My dried lips say:

  —Wait—

  —Where are you? Answer.

  —You know me.

  —Who?

  I cough again, I say it. I say my name, my old name, though I hardly want it in my mouth:

  —Boone.

  A hesitation. I cannot see the man but I know he has stopped. I hear him rummaging about himself for a moment. Then very careful he speaks:

  —You said Boone?

  —Yes, yes. Do not shoot me for God’s sake.

  He crashes down the bank into the canebrake like a great mad dog. I do not move. His gun shoves through the stalks at me, then his face with a lead ball between his teeth.

  —Flanders. Flanders.

  My daughter’s husband, still spare and swarthy and long-necked as a baby bird, as though no time has gone. He spits the lead into his hand and says:

  —Jesus, Sir. Bless me. Christ almighty.

  —Rebecca—

  His face is all astonishment, though it tightens now. My head booms. I say:

  —And—your wife.

  I cannot force my girl’s name past my teeth. Jemima. So many times I have seen her dead in my mind, her and my wife and all the rest. Flanders says:

  —Jemima is up at the fort.

  —The fort.

  —We are not far.

  I laugh, though my laughing is only panting, I say:

  —I know where we are. It is standing?

  Flanders crouches to hear me and says it is. He looks up the bank now. I hear them also, quick steps coming along from where the fort is. They will have heard him yell. Down they crunch through the broken cane. All eyes, all faces I know, boiling up with rage, swelling with it like dried fish in a pot. Dick Callaway is first with his flattened-down hair and his old militia jacket. As soon as he sees me his gun nuzzles at my ear. My own gun is no use, it is wet, and a makeshift thing. I force myself to speak:

  —How do, Dick. In a red coat too.

  —You bastard, back here alive?

  I am struck with another fit of coughing. I manage to say:

  —Am I alive?

  The gun butts my cheek.

  —What did you say, Boone?

  I can do nothing but laugh again and cough as others arrive and stand gawping. Flanders crouches to thump my back and haul me upright. Dick has not lowered his gun, his grey eye glinting like a pearl out of the dull squinting flesh round it. I breathe in, but he says first:

  —None of your lies.

  He twists the gun and bangs my ribs with the stock very clumsy but hard enough. Flanders drops his thin arm from mine. My lungs rattle and before I fall the words burst from them:

  —Tell her, tell my wife I am here, tell her they are coming, tell her what they are going to do—

  THIS SMELL STRIKES MY NOSE and the back of my throat with the worst sort of familiarity, when you think you have forgotten a thing but find you have not. Dirt, dung, cooked meat, hair.

  I stand wet in the back gateway of the fort with the river behind, Flanders propping me up. Old Dick and the rest are talking on back at the bank. The big front gate across the fort from us is wide open with no one watching it. Anyone about is watching me, as I can tell. And what I see hurts me.

  I take a step inside before Flanders tightens his grip on my arm. Boonesborough. Still the rectangle we laid out, the idea of a rectangle at least, though nothing here is straight. The cabins still along the walls, some with windows broken. The stockade fencing between some of the houses coming down in places, and wide open on the east side. The shingle roofs gone grey and loose over the winter. Powdery heaps of dust round the hole that should be a well but is no well. Another hole next to it, just as dry.

  An old cow rubs its chin against a broken section of paddock fencing in the middle of the fort. Still broken. Its bell clanks in unmusical fashion. Flies suck at its eyes and it does not blink.

  Oh Christ, this place. I cough again and I say slow:

  —All these months—what have you all been doing?

  Flanders warns me with a small shake of his head. Old Dick at my back sends an elbow to my side and I fall forward, Flanders catching me before I tumble to my knees. Dick is not so old, he only acts it, but he is not accustomed to hitting. He rubs his shoulder and cannot bring himself to look at me, he is angry I have made him do it twice now. He says:

  —What have you been doing all these months?

  Others are coming. White-headed Billy Smith appears out of his cabin saying Who is this now—but Old Dick turns to Flanders and says very tight:

  —I will decide what is to be done with this person. Put him somewhere and keep your gun on him.

  Well. This is all the announcing I get. Dick has had enough of striking me for now, he strides to his house in the little row beside the paddock. He chose that place for his children’s safety, away from the walls, though there are not half enough walls here. A crack gapes in his door when it bangs shut. He has put up a flag on a pole on his roof, it twitches in the breeze.

  Flanders holds me where I am. The others mill about, they are not easy. Billy Smith keeps where he is in his doorway. Not a word, nothing, even from the hobbled horses. John South’s old wife stretches out her window to bob her neck about as though she is taking sips of wind. Flanders moves an inch from me.

  And Squire.

  My brother in the doorway of his gunsmith shop, between his house and Callaway’s. I know him even with the light going and my eyes so poor and full of dirt. All his life I have known him and his slouched outlines. Squire—

  I limp a step or two towards him and the pain of my torn feet stabs up my legs again. Flanders takes my arm back very gentle, I stop for his sake. My brother does not move. The silence is hard and thick, Squire, even from you.

  All I can do is cough and cough and sit my arse down hard on the ground. When the fit stops, I try to stand, but I cannot do it. Flanders is watching the other men, uncertain. All the faces stare like crows over bones but not your face, Rebecca, not yours. Where in Hell are you? God damn it all, I will find you and you will hear me.

  —What have you done with her, you sons of bitches?

  Flanders speaks into my ear but I throw him off, I drag myself across the fort through all the shit. No graves, no markers. A horse nickers and blows warm on my arm. I will not feel any ghost of yours, Rebecca, no cold breath on me. Have they made a prison house, have they put you there because of me? Have they made a burying ground outside?

  No one stops me, they only watch. Let them watch me. I get to the front gate, I stand holding myself up and looking out over the flat, the darkening
fields of corn and flax and the rest. The great elm on the left, the elm I once thought was a sign that this was a good place. And the sound of the spring, which is the only sound. And stumps, still not dug out, with the look of wicked little creatures from one of your fairy tales, Rebecca. I ran here hardly stopping, I ran from them, I ran for you, to tell you they are coming.

  Nothing moves over the bare ground or the fields or little orchards, nothing in the meadow beyond these, all the way to the line of the forest. There is nothing. No one else comes. With the last of my strength I hobble back into the fort with everyone gawping and whispering. Old Dick visible in his window, unsure of what to do with me. And Flanders taking my arm again:

  —Sir, Dan, wait.

  I do not wait. I shake him off, I get myself along the wall to my cabin door. I go inside and suck in the air. The window is broken but the smell in here is its own, empty, overlaid with a whiff of cat. Nobody. Nothing, nothing.

  Until a body is throwing itself at me from the doorway behind, crying and snatching at my arms. I stagger—

  Not Rebecca. Not my wife. Almost her, in this dimness. But I know my daughter, my girl Jemima, with her mother in her face. Her black eyes swim and swim, they are as black as Rebecca’s, they do not leave mine. She twists my skin in her fingers as if testing it is real flesh:

  —Daddy Daddy, you are here—

  Daddy Daddy—how many children have called me in this way. But I will not think of other children. Here is Jemima. Here I am. Home.