Read Online Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier - Free Book Online

body off the bluff into the river for the suckerfish to eat. So I kept close counsel. Refused provocation and sought to give none. When my money mounted into unseemly piles, I shoved handfuls of coins into my pockets to keep from offering too much reminder of my good fortune.
    Twilight fell and the room became so dark we could not make out the marks on the cards. The first mosquitoes of spring were singing thick around our ears. Finally one of the women rose from the pallet on the floor and shoveled hot coals from the hearth into an iron pot and set it under the table and heaped doty wood on the coals to make smoke. Then she went about the motions of letting there be light. She stobbed a long stick in a crack between floorboards and angled it over the table and took strips of pork fat and wrapped them in loose-wove linen rags and tied them to the end of the stick. She blew up coals in the hearth and caught a broomstraw alight and used it to set the pork strips on fire. It smelled like breakfast. The air all around the table was thick with the rank black smoke from the smoldering doty wood, and the little flame from the pork lantern threw a halo around itself. All the things in the smoky shadows were just murk. For all her effort, the woman had created about an equal balance of light and dark. I still could hardly tell which spots on the cards were black and which were red, but at least the mosquitoes were driven back into the night.
             
    THE TABLE BY now was made up of me, the one-handed man, three rivermen, and Featherstone. The rivermen had straggled in just before dark, bursting in the door all hilarious and blowing hard from the climb up the hill. The thighs of their pants dark and greasy, a stink of fish and brown water about them. The one-legged man and one of the women sat in straight chairs by the fire, drinking and giggling. The other woman still lay on the pallet asleep, her face to the wall and the dingy heels to her feet hanging off the side.
    As the game went on, I noted that for any number of reasons of personal history and local custom, the other men treated Featherstone with a deference I found vexing. A lot of it was physical fear, for if there was any truth amid all the tales passing around that table, Featherstone had left a bloody trail behind him since boyhood. Also, they acted toward him the way my uncle did around the two or three rich men in our county. The cardplayers called him Squire Featherstone and Boss Featherstone and Chief Featherstone. But I couldn’t square their deference with my current surroundings.
    —Is this your house? I said to Featherstone.
    Featherstone didn’t answer, but the one-handed man snorted and said, He ain’t got but three or four. This is just his hunting cabin. He comes out here to play Indian. He’s built a plantation out on the Nation the match of any whiteman’s in Georgia. Big house and slaves and fields of market crops and everything.
    I reckoned that answer missed satisfying my curiosity, but I played on silently.
    The men kept calling him Chief and Boss and Squire, and then at one point in the evening, one of the rivermen called him King Featherstone. I laughed, but when I looked around the table it appeared that no one else found the title funny.
    So he’s king here, I thought. And the more I thought about the big man, the more I grew dark-minded, for the older men I knew had fought a damn hard war to get shed of kings forever. And they were very convictional in their opinion that if the English wanted to cut the head off their king and then turn right around and bring kings back, that was their sorry business. Here, we didn’t countenance kings and, God willing, never would.
    I was just a boy, but the way I saw the table was that Featherstone and I were the major figures. The rivermen and the one-handed man were mere nothing. Spectators. I might add here that I had reached some nether end of exile and desperation and had been dipping into