All True Not a Lie in It Read online

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2015 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 2015 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a Penguin Random House Company. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Hawley, Alix, 1975—, author

  All true not a lie in it / Alix Hawley.

  ISBN 978-0-345-80855-4

  eBook ISBN 978-0-345-80857-8

  1. Boone, Daniel, 1734–1820—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS8615.A821A64 2015 C813′.54 c2014-902489-4

  Cover image: Painting of a Sunset: Souvenir of the Adirondacks, 1878 by Asher Brown Durand.

  © The New York Historical Society / Hulton Fine Art Collection / Getty Images

  Interior images: (map) courtesy of the David Rumsey Map Collection,

  www.davidrumsey.com; (dirt texture) © texturelib.com

  v3.1

  For Mike, Theo, and Kate, and for Jocelyn and Peter

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Author’s Note

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  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

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part 2

  Chapter 1

  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

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I didn’t know much about Daniel Boone when I started writing this book. An image of him burst across my brain: an illustration from a National Geographic article, which I hadn’t seen since I was nine. I don’t think I’d thought of him since. But once I saw that painting of him again, I couldn’t stop.

  American schoolchildren might learn his name in history lessons, but ask most people what he actually did, and you aren’t likely to get much of an answer. He is a slippery character, a peculiar mix of famous and forgotten. The known facts of his life are gripping enough, but he became a myth even during his own time, when wild stories about him spread around the world. Even Lord Byron included him in a poem. My novel continues this myth-making tradition, moving some of the dates of Boone’s chronology, making guesses. So who was he? He left almost no writing. Some say the body dug up and reburied under a monument in Kentucky years after his death isn’t his.

  Certain people have a charisma that imprints itself on time. They don’t disappear. Perhaps they don’t want to. His voice has haunted me for the last few years. My story is about trying to find him. His story is about trying to find paradise, and about what happened when he brought about its ruin.

  —YOUR SISTER is a whore.

  —Your sister is a whore.

  —Your sister is a whore.

  This they bawl beneath the creek bridge like hogs all stuck. I hear it often enough when I am seven years of age. I sing back down:

  —Which makes me a whoresbrother.

  An eye shines up through a crack in the boards, a rock comes for my head and I duck it, but one of the boys sees fit to add low as a judge:

  —His granddaddy had a famous whore.

  —Which makes me a famous—

  Then we fight. I kick one boy’s shins and give the chin of another a crack with my elbow. A hard fist strikes my cheek and I hit out again unseeing with my little bird club. William Hill, who stands to one side watching and grinning, is fetched a bloody nose with the knob of it. Ha. He steps back covering his face and I run shouting insults of my own devising: dungflower is one. I win the fights generally. And what famous thing does that make me? Well.

  But Hill pounds along behind me calling: Dan, Dan. I turn and shout:

  —You know nothing! The King of the Delawares stopped at my granddaddy’s house when I was two! For a cake! King Sassanoon! He had wives enough! And could have killed you all! I was there, I was two years old!

  Hill stops on the path and bellows, all joy:

  —You will be famous, Dan! I will make a book of you!

  I know he is grinning through the blood on his face and his hair like dry straw in his eyes. I know he will not catch me. And I know he has told the other boys what his father told him, what is in the Exeter Meeting records, that whoring is in our blood. Your granddaddy had whores in England. The low voice beneath the bridge was his, it is just the same as his father’s when he leads Meeting. Hill will make up any tale, but this tale is true.

  —Dan, I see you! I will catch you up!

  I go faster. I feel his eyes on my back, the curious unclouded grey eyes of Hill. I have known him all my life. It is too long. When I see him I feel tied to him and to this place with a rope. My Fate has tied me and made a pair of Hill and me, like dumb white oxen bent to the plough. We are built the same way, not tall but strong. We are both clever enough but he is clever in my Uncle James’s school, and I have had enough of school. Our fathers are both in the weaving trade, but his father began in England as a rich woollen merchant, my Daddy has a few looms in the barn here and a little forge that does no good. Sometimes Hill and I are friends, most times we are not, so far as I am concerned. But he watches what I am doing, trying to do just the same if I am throwing my club or pretending to shoot, as though he has no interest in his own life and only wishes to catch mine like a fish. He will never leave me alone.

  I run. At this time it seems to me that I can outrun my Fate.

  —Your sister is a whore! And your daddy’s sister is a whore!

  I am far from the Owatin bridge to town where I left them, the path is narrowing. A branch catches my ear. Two of the boys are running a way behind now, I hear their yelling, but I am faster than anyone. My elbow aches, my feet burn, I hate my shoes. Hill is calling still: Dan, Dan. He thinks I am going up the hills to the pastures but he does not know, he knows nothing.

  When I see the lane beyond the holly bushes I dodge down it and run hard all the way up to Granddaddy’s square stone house, where I never go. No one goes here. The boys will not see me, I am too quick. The house is built of the same brown stones as Meeting House in the township, though it has the look of a sick cousin. Granddaddy’s hounds bark and tug on their chains outside the old cabin he never knocked down. My heart thumps. I suck in the kitchen-garden smell of onions and graves.

  Once inside the big house I bang the door and I stamp my feet on the flagstones. I have never been here without Ma or Daddy. I hear my heart in my e
ars. The indoor air is quiet and queer and has a mossy smell. I say:

  —Hello.

  No one answers. Aunt Sarah, that is to say one of the whores, must be in back of the house spreading out the washing. She goes nowhere else, she is cast out of Meeting and the Friends only suffer her to live with Granddaddy because he needs looking after. Perhaps she is sat down in the grass sniffing up the grave smell of the garden and sniffling over her husband the outsider. He left her and took up with another woman, but then came back when he got sick. This husband is now dead, and sad at being stuck in the earth alone, as I imagine. Daddy could not allow an outsider into the Friends’ burying ground. The Meeting leaders have put him in charge of it, which is a satisfaction to him. He is not satisfied with much else. He makes sure the ground is flat after buryings. He walks about on it with his bandy legs.

  I go along the hall singing “I Care for Nobody,” my oldest brother Israel’s favourite song. I toss my club as he does, and I think of the Delaware king walking on this floor with all his wives. I was here then and I did see, though all I recall is a red blanket on someone and a lot of moccasins. I am struck by a wish for moccasins. I go quietly as an Indian now over the floor. No sound in the house. Perhaps Granddaddy has died.

  I stop in the doorway to the right. The room beyond is dim and stinking with the curtains drawn. They have put Granddaddy’s bed there. He is in it, twisted and bony. I look hard. He is breathing. When again I say hello, he starts and tugs up his face, as though I might be a Meeting leader, or perhaps the spirit of King Sassanoon popped out of the wall with a scarlet blanket on and feathers in my hair.

  Do you see me, Granddaddy? I do wonder. He squints under his brows, snarled and white as roots. His wet mouth hangs low on the left side. I keep where I am. Up and down goes his chest. Daddy told me all proud that Granddaddy was born in 1666 when the city of London burned down, and now he is so old, and still breathing. Think of him whoring and all unclean before he came on a ship here to Pennsylvania and had to tell Meeting everything he had done before they would allow him in. He had the new Meeting House built as penance, straight at the centre of the township, with all the roads running off from it. And he named the town Exeter after his old home in England. But perhaps this was wrong, it was there he did his whoring. It is not a lucky town, I think.

  People smile when Granddaddy is mentioned, and they nod kindly as they do about wise old men, but it is false. He was all right until Aunt Sarah married out and people began to talk of our bad blood. His crooked old right thumb slips about upon his quilt as if he is running the weaving shuttle back and forth, as if he still keeps up his old trade, as if he were still quite a young man inside. As if he still had all his money and had not spent it on the whores of his youth and on this new place, as if he could fornicate any time he chose. As if he were in paradise. He dreamed of it when he turned up in this new world. This gives a queer feeling in my guts and so I call goodbye, but Granddaddy coughs and waves his arm towards the pot beside the bed.

  —Fetchit.

  I fetch it from under the great carved black cabinet. I am glad the pot is clean. While he sits up and scrabbles at his nightshirt I say quiet:

  —You had a whore.

  —Eh?

  He has a baby smell, milk and piss, but more sour. His arm trembles. I breathe in and I say:

  —But—you had fights. You saved two Indian girls when a gang stole them.

  My Daddy has told us this story, it was before the new Meeting House was built, and the Delawares and Catawbas came along their old trail and stopped all the time to trade here. Some bad white men snatched the girls, but Granddaddy spoke hard to the men and gave some money and got them back. I think of a young Granddaddy winning all the fights. I say:

  —I fought a gang. I did it just now. Look.

  I hold up my bloodied elbow. Granddaddy is filling the pot loudly. His face is half dead and he stares at me as if I am full of lies. I steal a glance at his parts, they have a sad lifeless look. Piss drips from him onto the sheet. He holds out the pot with his shaking arm. It will tip, it will all tip out. He says in a rough voice:

  —What do you want here? Eh? Who are you?

  My stomach leaps into my throat and I near shout: I will not be old, I will not be like you. I will win all the fights, I will never tell my secrets. I will not go rotten like you in this place. I will find a real paradise. You never did.

  Aunt Sarah is clicking along the passage on her wooden heels. Granddaddy rocks his head in the direction of her noise and frowns. He had to beg forgiveness in Meeting for her marriage to the outsider. I think of that man buried in some unfriendly ground, all bones now. Again I say goodbye. And now I run out the back door of the house and over the grass and the sheets going white in the sun.

  I run up into the hills and into the woods. With my club I get a squirrel down from a secret elm I know. The squirrel is a red one with a fair-sized tail. I sit in the tree for some time in hope of getting a wild pig for my Ma, but I have never got one yet, and there is nothing more about worth having. I want to go farther but the night is coming now. I wait until the shadows are stretched, and I make my way down the side of the valley and back along the creek bottom, through my two uncles’ farms and across to the back of ours. My body is all aches and scuffs and bruises from fighting and hunting.

  As I come round to the front of the house, Ma steps out holding up the lantern, which makes her look ghastly. She touches my sore cheek but she does not ask what has happened. I show her the squirrel tail and she smiles as she turns her face to the dark. As I put the tail down the front of my breeches I think again of Granddaddy and his parts, and of how his life has gone, and how my Daddy’s has gone too, slowly rotten all through like an old egg.

  Oh Ma and you others all gone now, all of my dead, you know that I begin well.

  MY SISTER the whore is shown before all the Friends at Exeter Meeting like a grub spaded up. She stands at the centre of the room, and we all sit up on the benches round her to see. Sallie has got her confession prepared. She holds the paper before her face and talks as if she has got a mouthful of chewed potato. Unusual for her to talk so flat, she could run a blab-school if she liked. Heels-up Sallie, the boys say. Give her a tap and over she goes. Always the last to leave a bonfire or someone’s new barn in the dark.

  I watch her tip back and forth on her famous heels. Her cap is slipping to one side, she tugs a curl out over her ear and lifts her eyes to see who is watching. Her fellow stands a few feet away looking out the window. I listen for words of interest but the only ones I catch are I was too conversant and fornication. She admits to all of it though it is evident enough to anyone who takes one look at her belly from the side. And everyone does look.

  This is not usual Meeting. The air has a stunned feel as if a shot has just gone through it. The leaders have summoned all of the Friends. The benches are full. Even the Friends from the country farms have driven to town for it.

  Daddy bursts into sad perspiring, his smell rises up like bread. He is set to get up and walk off. But Ma’s fingers tap upon little Neddy’s head, and so Daddy sets his jaw and keeps himself on the bench beside her. I slide my feet in circles. I want to laugh. My sister Bets creases her nose like a fox, and my oldest brother Israel does laugh under his breath.

  —This is my confession.

  So Sal finishes, but one of the widows near the door begins to swat her haunch and complain of ill winds. Bets chokes a giggle and whispers in Ma’s voice:

  —Do you suffer from wind, my dear Danny?

  I give her a poke. Hill’s father carries on with Sallie and her fellow:

  —In truth you were too conversant with one another before this day.

  His voice is a wealthy man’s voice, every word rings like a coin falling. His face has its usual rosy look, but it becomes imaginative for a spell. I become imaginative also. I have not at this time witnessed any conversant doings at our house beyond those of the cows and bull, which are not e
ntirely interesting, being so brief. At this time I am an innocent boy, but I am interested in many things in my mind.

  Hill’s father asks Sallie will she now be married before all these Friends.

  She says she will. Her fellow takes a sip of air through his teeth and says he will take her to wife.

  Well it is done. Easy. Sal sneaks a look at us, she is thinking, That is that. Her eyes are bright. I hear her give her finger joint a pop, as is her way. Not a whore any longer. A wife. Safe, like magic. Well. God is not immune to performing tricks, perhaps He pops his finger joints also.

  —And your confession? Plenty of time.

  Hill’s father has turned to the fellow, his voice is kindly enough in asking. In his mind, we might sit here all day, but Sallie’s new husband says a brisk no thank you! He is not a Friend, he is an outsider. Perhaps he is not so certain he wishes to be inside the Boone family after all. But too late. He twists his feeble beard like a wick and squints, though I know he is not squint-eyed. He is keeping his eyes from his new wife’s lower half. Everyone else is still looking.

  Hill’s father walks a few paces across the centre of the room and then turns in quick hope to Daddy:

  —The truth is all that we seek in this life. Confession makes us new. You will confess now, Friend Boone?

  Daddy rises, just as Granddaddy had to when his own daughter did the same:

  —My daughter was too conversant. This is true, yes. I am very sorry for allowing it.

  For a moment Daddy stretches his neck like one prepared to say more. He looks at Hill’s father’s legs. His fingers twitch as if they might test the weight of that good heavy cloth suit. Daddy is a poor enough weaver himself, though he cannot understand why. He can see this cloth is good. He would like it not to be. The leader’s life has gone right, his suit says so. The deep grey of it defeats Daddy and he says:

  —In the future we will be more c-careful.

  His stammer noses out of its dark rabbit-hutch as it does at such times. His face goes hard, he touches the top of his head where his hair is gone. He has a love of escape and a love of being angry. See the ship thundering off from the grey English shore, young Daddy’s chin thrust over the bowsprit, away from other people and their ideas and money and churches to find a home for Granddaddy and himself and his brothers and sisters. It was meant to be better here.