Original Sins (2 page)

Corliss Rainey was removed from a debtors' prison in England and put on a ship. He was working as an indentured servant to a farmer in tidewater Virginia when he met Buck Tatreaux, the son of a Cherokee woman and a French trader. Tatreaux did odd jobs for Rainey's master. One day the farmer sent them both to Williamsburg for supplies. They headed toward Richmond instead. On the way they further darkened Tatreaux's skin with berry juice and charcoal, cut off his braids, and scorched his remaining hair into kinks. They rubbed lard over his muscled body until he gleamed with apparent good health. Rainey put on a stolen set of his master's clothes. In Richmond they found the slave market, and Rainey put Tatreaux up for sale. Rainey soon drove away with more money than he had ever before seen. He supplied the wagon and headed down a dusty road through well-tended farmland toward the hazy mountains. At the foot of the mountains he hid.

Tatreaux meanwhile had run away from his new master. He scrubbed with sand in a stream until his skin was its usual copper color. With a sharp stone he hacked off his kinked hair. Then he ran for the mountains.

Rainey gave him his clothes, and a hat with the braids attached, and the two set off up the mountain. At times the slopes were so steep that they had to hitch ropes to trees and haul on them, to help the mules drag the wagon up the narrow rutted path to the pass. Upon reaching the pass, they saw below them the valley, heavily forested but dotted here and there with cleared land and cabins and sheds. And on the far side, the rugged walls of the neighboring plateau.

Rainey and Tatreaux found their spot, up against the gullied plateau wall. They built cabins, cleared land, raised crops, bred animals, went courting, and married daughters of the Scotch-Irish and German farmers, who had flowed into the valley along the more conventional route southward from Pennsylvania. Their children married and cut down more forest and spread out down the valley with their backs against the plateau wall. By the time the bodies of Rainey and Tatreaux had been turned into topsoil, the forested valley had become rolling green fields, grazed by cattle and enclosed by fences. A Tatreaux son married a Rainey daughter, and they had two sons. When the time came for these two to find wives and build cabins and start their own farms and families, one balked. Maybe the genes from his wayward grandfathers rebelled. From the pastures up against the plateau wall he could see the dusty road down the valley, jammed with people heading south—wagons piled high with household goods and drawn by mules or oxen. These people drove livestock and talked when he ambled down about a new Eden just beyond the foothills at the end of the valley.

He announced that the valley was too crowded, that he couldn't stand knowing exactly what he'd be doing and seeing the rest of his life. He tied his belongings into a pack and hoisted it on his back. His mother cried and loaded him down with beef jerky and corn pones. His father stared at him with glum outrage. The boy assured them he would return and report on what he found. They all knew he wouldn't.

What he found: mountains. Peak after towering peak, separated by narrow valleys, most of which already contained cabins and corn patches. Through the Blue Ridge Mountains of what was to become North Carolina he walked; into the Holston Valley; across the Clinch River; up through Cumberland Gap, following the network of narrow hollows until, like an eddy against a cliff, he couldn't go any farther, and so came to rest. Jed and Raymond were his descendants. Emily and Sally were descended from the brother who stayed behind. Donny's ancestors had been brought to the valley farm from coastal Virginia along approximately the same route taken by Rainey and Tatreaux.

Rainey and Tatreaux's great-great-grandson (Emily and Sally's great-grandfather) left his farm one day wearing a grey uniform with gold braid and a hat with a plume, and riding a prancing black stallion. He returned three years later on a half-starved nag, missing his plume, several gold buttons, his left eye, and his right hand. He found his house half burned, his cattle butchered, his fence posts ripped out, and his fields lying fallow. Calling Donny's forebears around him, he announced, “Yall are as free as I am now. Which ain't saying much. You can leave if you want to, or you can stay here and try to keep from starving with the missus and me.”

Donny's great-grandmother left, joined the stream—of rejoicing freed slaves, of defeated soldiers in tattered grey with missing limbs, of victorious soldiers in tattered blue with missing limbs, of brisk scavengers from the North—that flowed through the ravaged countryside. She joined other celebrating Negroes, parted from them, stopped and harvested crops, stood in lines at federal relief kitchens in roiling towns. She meandered through Tennessee and down into Alabama, then turned around and came back to the valley farm where she gave birth to Ruby. Mr. Tatro never rebuilt his farm; he eked with his remaining hand. His son, Emily and Sally's grandfather, moved down valley into Newland, where a cotton mill was being built, and took a job as superintendent. Young Ruby and her mother went along as house servants. Ruby still bore the Tatro family name.

In addition to the Castle Tree, the coral Cadillac from New York, and their failure to succumb to polio, The Five had been given other signs, for as far back as they could remember. For instance, they had built a hut, like the first little pig's, in the woods behind Emily and Sally's house, sinking large sticks into the ground and lashing them together with vines and covering this frame with leafy branches. They would fashion loincloths from dish towels and leather belts, then paint each other's faces with the juice from squished mulberries and stick fallen crow feathers in their hair. Then they would dig with sticks into a small hill they had decided was an Indian burial mound, despite amused denials from parents.

But The Five
knew
it was a burial mound. The main highway through town had been part of the major north/ south Indian war-path. Honest Injun's was a shack on this highway that sold country hams and jugs of molasses and chenille bedspreads and silver reflecting balls that people put on pedestals in their front yards. Also for the front yard, flamingoes on one foot, miniature Bambis, smiling plaster darkies in livery. Towering over all these objects of wonder (which their unimaginative parents would never let them buy) was a statue of a huge red Indian in a loincloth, with dark braids. Standing at his feet and looking up, The Five decided he was almost as tall as the Castle Tree. Between his massive moccasined feet was a pond, at the bottom of which were several green iron frogs with bowl backs—ashtrays, they looked like. Customers dropped pennies into the water and won a prize if one landed in a frog. Most people missed, as evidenced by a thick layer of pennies in the bottom. The Five were sure at least twenty-five dollars in pennies would accumulate before Injun Al got around to cleaning them out. But Jed and Raymond's father had once gotten a penny in a frog, before Jed and Raymond were born. His prize still sat on their window sill. It was a small grey teepee of plastic birch bark, laced with plastic cord and stamped with the words “See Rock City.” On its bottom was stamped “Made in Japan.”

Injun Al French, squatting in his fringed buckskins and feathered war bonnet, with The Five and his daughter Betty squatting in a circle around him, often told them about the days when his ancestors had hunted the surrounding hills and valleys and had stalked on the packed earth underneath the very highway outside his shop—to make war or to find game, in search of a warmer or cooler climate. He explained why Cherokee country was so mountainous: After the Flood, the Great Buzzard flew low over the earth while it was still soft. Where its wings dipped down, valleys formed. Where its wings swept up, mountains appeared. He told about the first people on earth, a brother and a sister. He slapped her with a dead fish, and she had a baby seven days later. (That day at lunch Raymond sneaked up and slapped Emily with his tuna sandwich, but nothing happened. They decided it was because Raymond wasn't her brother.)

It was also Injun Al who taught them the old Cherokee trick of notching their middle fingernails at the base with penknives the day school got out. When the notch had grown out to the tip, it would be time to return to school. They had only to consult their fingernails to know how much vacation was left.

“I didn't know Indians had to go to school,” one remarked.

“Oh yeah. Uh, well, I reckon they didn't,” Injun Al replied. “They'd use it—you know—to tell when the Moon of Roasting Ears was starting, and all like that. When the heap big frost was due.”

He often assured them the area was filled with burial mounds, that their hill was most likely one. Then he would urge them to try their luck some more at the frog pond.

The fact was that each time they dug in their mound, they found an arrowhead or a pottery shard. Once Jed even found a jagged piece of flint they were sure was a tomahawk head. The message was clear: They were not alone. Clues had been planted. The afternoon would end with whosever turn it was, branches tied on his or her arms, doing a dying eagle dance—swooping and dipping, limping and faltering, while the others sat in a circle and drummed on Quaker Oats boxes.

Then there was the cave. Its mouth was about a yard high. You squatted and crept down a narrow chute for a dozen yards, emerging in a black cavern. It had served as a powder magazine for Confederate troops. The Five kept down there a huge stack of comic books, wrapped in a chain from a swing and locked with a padlock. Shining flashlights over the walls, they found initials and dates scratched in the limestone—one read July 6, 1864. July sixth was Raymond's birthday. There had to be a connection. And on the floor Donny found a button with CSA embossed on it. When they cleaned it with brass polish and Q-tips, it turned out to be gold—pure gold, Raymond announced as he bit it.

Riding in a car across the Cherokee River bridge, they always held their breath—to ensure that the bridge wouldn't collapse underneath them. And in the underpass with railroad cars overhead, they always pressed their palms against the car roof to keep the underpass standing. The only thing they hadn't yet been able to master was flying. One autumn they went every day after school to the hill behind Emily and Sally's house. Arms outspread, they'd run down the hill, throwing themselves into the air when they picked up maximum speed and flapping their arms frantically. They had been sure it was merely a question of time until they would soar off into the sky. They tried tying leafy branches to their arms. Then cardboard wings.

But apparently there was some message in their
not
being allowed to fly. They lay on their backs in the dead grass with their hands under their heads and watched with envy the vast swarms of birds on their way south. “Look! The sky has chicken pox!” one would exclaim. They watched and they wondered—where were the birds going, how did they know how to get there, what if you got separated from your mother and father and from the trees you were used to? Their envy would fade into relief. They'd roll down the hill, leap up, and race toward warm fires, hot suppers, and mothers whose embraces and kisses they could impatiently shrug off.

When The Five had been small, Donny's mother Kathryn had babysat them through the sweltering summer afternoons. They went on hikes, darting across the fields like a school of minnows, with grasshoppers whirring up all around and with the tall grass tickling their bare legs. Against Kathryn's protests, they overturned each stone they came to and squashed every nest of black widow spiders. In the woods, they found forked sticks and crept through the leaves searching for lurking copperheads. The most they ever found were occasional blacksnake skins, bumpy and thinner than onion skins. They would study these, and the crisp brown shells of locusts gathered from tree trunks, and try to understand how creatures could shed their familiar coverings and still exist. They grew new skins, new shells, maybe even nicer than the old ones—but what happened in the meantime? There they were, helpless larvae, cold, naked, and unprotected. It would be better, they concluded, to stick with the skin you already had. They would race to a nearby hedgerow and pick hundreds of honeysuckle blossoms, pinching off the ends and pulling out the stamens until droplets of sweet nectar popped up, which they would lift away with their tongues, gorging themselves like insatiable bees. They would end up in the pond behind Emily and Sally's house, drifting around and crashing into each other in tractor-tire inner tubes. Then they would sprawl on the red clay shore and mold from clay a replica of Newland—the mills and factories, the river and Cherokee Shoals, the train tracks, Pine Woods, the mill village, the hill, and the Castle Tree—and the mountains all around.

Kathryn had beautiful hands—dark brown on the backs, light pinky-purple on the palms. The white children studied them with wonder. With her long fingers she molded delicate figures—people, animals, bowls. The Five would watch her handsome dark face with its high cheekbones as she bent in concentration. With their clumsy fingers they would try to copy her deft twists and pinches at the balls of clay, gentle smoothing motions with the fingertips, careful indentations with the nails. They made doll-sized dishes for their hut and left them to bake in the sun.

Once Kathryn had each of them build a model of the house he or she wanted to live in later on. Donny built a castle with turrets and crenellated walls and placed it on the hill overlooking town. Kathryn looked at it critically and said gently, “Donny, honey, you can't build up on that hill.”

“Why not?”

“Sure he can,” said Raymond, frowning as he built a heliport on the roof of his mansion.

Kathryn smiled sourly and shrugged.

Sometimes they would hear the whistle of a train whooping around the bend on the far side of town. They'd race away, trampling their models, heading for the low stone wall that overlooked the valley. Usually the engine would arrive just as they did. The Five would count the cars and insist on Kathryn's yelling over the clacking wheels and the roaring engine the exotic names painted on the sides—Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe; Delaware and Hudson; Duluth, Winnipeg, and Pacific; Spokane, Portland, and Seattle; Canadian Pacific; Soo Line; Illinois Central; Frisco Line …. Heading north, open cars carrying mounds of coal from Appalachia, iron ore from Alabama; cattle cars; flatcars loaded with huge hardwood trunks, or cotton bales; refrigerator cars filled with produce, meat (corpses, Raymond insisted). Heading south, car after car of new automobiles. You could walk along these very tracks in one direction and end up at the Atlantic Ocean. Follow them in the other direction and you'd reach the Pacific. From sea to shining sea they stretched. Probably all trains eventually ended up in New York City, they decided. As the caboose passed, The Five would wave tentatively: “Wait? Take us with you?”