Thirteen Moons Read Free Page B

down. Also I still miss him, and the world seems poorer for his absence. To be entirely fair, when I was a boy and young man, Featherstone provided another pattern of manhood entirely different from Bear’s. I’m sure it is one of my greatest failures in life that, of my two flawed fathers, I more closely mirror Featherstone’s example. I heard this account from a number of older men back when I was a boy, for if it was only on Featherstone’s word, I wouldn’t dignify the tale with repetition.
    Until some years after the Revolution, the Cherokee system of justice remained very direct and without interference of judge and jury and lawyer. The penalty for murder was that the clan of the victim became entitled to kill the murderer. I think we could all accede to the fairness of that. But various complications sometimes arose, and as a boy Featherstone was caught up in one of them. His maternal uncle, Slow Water, a man of some considerable property and power within the community, happened to kill a man of the Wild Potato Clan as a result of bad whiskey and high feelings after losing a momentous wager at a ball game. Slow Water had bet several horses, many skipples of shell corn, a house. When the game ended with its final brutal skirmishes leading to a pair of goals scored in quick succession by the opposing team to win the match, the Wild Potato Clan fellow looked at Slow Water and smirked. He didn’t say a word, but just that look, the twist of mouth, was enough. Come winter, he’d be eating Slow Water’s cornbread in Slow Water’s house.
    Slow Water reached to his waist and pulled a long skinning knife from under his coat and ran it through the man’s neck until the point came out the other side. And then he watched the man bleed out right on the bruised grass of the ball field.
    Justice should have played along as normal, with Slow Water hunted down and killed by the men of Wild Potato Clan, and then life would be balanced and ordered again and could go on harmoniously. That was the way it ordinarily was. At worst, there might be one or two further bouts of justice before matters finally settled down. But Slow Water’s clan, the Long Hairs, met and reckoned unanimously that Slow Water was too valuable to forfeit. They agreed to offer Featherstone in Slow Water’s place, and even his mother would not break with the consensus of the clan. Featherstone was then a fatherless redheaded freckled Indian boy of sixteen. His natural daddy had been a Border Scot trader, and his mother’s father was Highland Scot. But in those days identity still went through the women, and if your mother belonged to a clan, you did too. Blood degree didn’t factor.
    Featherstone had not even been in attendance at the ball game. He had been on a pony-club outing, and they had run a string of stolen horses from the piedmont of North Carolina across the Cherokee Nation and sold them outside of Nashville. All in all, it had been a jaunty and satisfactory month of desperate scrapes and high spirits. Hilarious rum camps and long ass-blistering days a-saddle. None of the six-member party was more than eighteen, and they returned to Valley River splendidly mounted, leather pistol buckets hanging paired before their saddles. All of them rode cocky with cash money in their pocketbooks, fine new suits of clothes on their backs, and well-constructed stories to tell.
    Slow Water met Featherstone as he came into town, and the uncle’s face was grim. They stepped aside and Slow Water laid it out. He detailed the sacrifice Featherstone was called to make for his clan. Featherstone was undoubtedly slightly drunk. He said, Well, shit on you. And fuck them Wild Potato boys. Maybe they better watch out I don’t kill them first. And then maybe come looking for you when I’m done.
    Everyone in town knew how the matter stood, and they had come out of their houses to loiter around the squareground and watch Featherstone’s progress. He rode past them, his