Snapper (7 page)

I stood behind an oak; I could not see the nest flag from there, but I could see the den. Most important, there was no way that he would be able to see me. It had dawned on me as I moved that this man might be connected to Dart and Loretta’s predicament—that I might be, in short, alone in the woods with an armed Klansman. I remembered that girl selling her encyclopedias from door to door. In retrospect, I am sure I should have fled the scene, but I was young, and someone was tampering with my work. I didn’t need the flags to remind me of nest locations, but the references were
important. I couldn’t expect to get paid if I filed a report to the university stating that Pedro’s kids were all fine.

The vixen’s face appeared, and she was watching the nest flag.

I couldn’t predict what he would do next, and I couldn’t be certain of sentries like Rory and the fox. Some birds are born watchdogs: cardinals in particular will raise an alarm at any hint of trouble. Most birds, however, like most animals, will sensibly hide, unless you are actively poking your fingers into their nests.

I could track him only by sound—not the sounds that he made, which I was not close enough to hear, but by following the wake of silence he left on the map of birdsong in my head, and occasionally the uproar he caused if he pissed off an ovenbird, or some other sensitive species.

Wood thrushes were my best informants. Neighboring pairs sing to each other in a chain of call-and-response that occurs in every wood in the Midwest. If one pair fell silent I could place the intruder within fifty or sixty feet of a nest tree. A male indigo bunting will try desperately to get your attention if you stray near its nest—usually, in my experience, by leading you into the thorniest, muddiest, hottest smilax thicket nearby. Any outcry of bunting chirps would give him away instantly. Warblers are passionate about warbling and any reticence from them was a likely sign.

It helps in tracking by sound to close your eyes. I kept well back and moved slowly, looking every few steps at the ground to make sure I didn’t trip on a root or snap a twig or run into a tree. I heard an angry bunting. A pileated woodpecker laughed and winged noisily toward me. I concentrated on what I heard to my right and left and behind me—business as usual. Ahead, canopy birds with a long view fell silent
first, and their cousins nearer the forest floor followed suit. A number of nest flags ahead of me were gone—that, with the silence from that quarter, was a sure sign I was heading in the right direction.

The creek bed diverged and he had taken the left or eastern branch. I took the right or western. Between them lay a huge ridge, and five hundred yards along that I climbed up and lay on the lip on my belly to peer into the valley below. It had been logged the previous summer, and I doubt he knew that. I was going to get a good look at him in the clearing if I could, but I wouldn’t risk binoculars in the sun.

He sat on a tree stump smoking, an indication that he had given up on stealth. He might as well have put on his white bedsheet. He didn’t carry binoculars or water or food that I could see. I was still a hundred yards off, and I didn’t recognize him at all. Perhaps up close he would have been one of Dart and Loretta’s neighbors, but to me he was a vague outdoorsy type—long brown hair in a ponytail beneath a backward camouflage baseball cap, baggy camouflage shirt and pants that hadn’t seen much use—not by my standards, anyway—and new boots that wouldn’t stand up to smilax very long.

A bluebird I called Larry landed on a tree stump twenty feet from his. He lifted his shotgun and blew it away.

There was nothing I could do about it. He spied a brown-headed cowbird watching him and he shot at that too. Unfortunately he missed. Cowbirds are parasites.

He waited for more birds to appear, but they didn’t, so he began retracing his steps. This time he made no attempt to creep. In mid-stride he blasted an indigo bunting off a maple branch, the same bunting who gave him away. He took a shot at a cardinal but missed. Farther down the creek bed
he knocked out a flycatcher nest, AF28, with the mother on the nest lip and three nestlings inside due to fledge within twenty-four hours. He saw Rory watching him from sixty feet up, and he took aim, but he didn’t shoot. Rory was smart. He was probably seventy feet up just in case and keeping most of himself on the other side of a thick branch. Either way it would have been shooting gravity in the face.

Killing songbirds is deeply illegal, even in Indiana. I couldn’t intervene, but I shadowed him back to his car, a pale blue Chevy Impala, and I wrote down his license plate number.

I never reported it, though. At most he’d be heavily fined and stripped of his hunting license. But he’d surely guess who had reported him, and what if he was one of them?

Every white middle-class Southerner in my experience claims some Confederate hero in the family tree. I have never understood this; even today you can sometimes overhear them bragging about the battles their ancestors nobly and gloriously lost. Uncle Dart had enough of this kind of lore to supply ten families. If even a fraction of it could stand up under scrutiny then I must owe my existence to some wildly glamorous Confederate brothel: there is no other way to weave so many illustrious warriors into a single genealogical line.

My favorite among them was a private who stood six feet seven in his socks and served without distinction until late in the war, when he captured seventeen Union soldiers single-handedly. Asked by his commanding officer how he had accomplished this, he replied, “Aw, hell. I just surrounded ’em.”

I had challenged Dart once, in Texas, over dinner. I was sixteen and had become absorbed in the Civil War thanks to
my high school history teacher, a fierce black woman from Alabama. I asked Dart, in my uninformed and adolescent way, whether he didn’t think that ending slavery was worth the cost.

“Now that is a dumb Yankee question,” he said. “That is a question you got from your dumb Yankee high school.”

“But wasn’t it worth it?”

“Let me ask you a Southern question,” he said, laying his knife and fork on his plate, though he hadn’t finished eating.

“Don’t, Dart,” said Loretta.

“Let me ask you a Southern question,” he repeated. “Was it wise or humane to make four million people homeless, unemployed, not to mention uneducated, at the stroke of a pen?”

It took me a moment to work out who he meant.

“Is it a surprise that one hundred thirty years later a third of them are in prison and another third are living in ghettoes shooting each other? Do you include that in your cost of the war? There were cooler heads then. Plenty of cooler heads. But nothing can stand up to a crowd of sanctimonious Yankees wanting to feel better about themselves and damn the consequences.”

“He means slavery could have been phased out, with job training programs and such,” said Loretta.

“That’s not what I mean,” said Dart. “They teach you about Hiroshima in that school of yours? Nagasaki? Dresden?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Where do you think they got the idea for those?”

“It was a war,” I said.

“That’s right. And they looked back eighty years to when William Tecumseh Sherman went to Abraham Lincoln and said, sir, the way to end this war is to make the civilians suffer. I repeat,
make civilians suffer
. And then he burned Atlanta
to the ground. Now does that enter into your cost of the war? Showing the whole world how to mount unbridled barbarism on an industrial scale?”

“I think the world would have figured it out eventually,” said Loretta.

“But they wouldn’t have learned it from us!” said Dart, smacking the table with his open palm. It was only years later that I reflected that his short sharp statement could stand up proudly to any other more flowery iteration of American purpose and aspiration. When I read in the newspapers about interrogation techniques or civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan I always picture Dart’s open hand landing on the pecan dinner table his grandfather made. Despite his selective history and dubious theories he was a man of such integrity that even when he was wrong, he was right.

When I told them both about my birds he got into the Cadillac wordlessly and drove away.

“Where’s he going?” I asked Loretta.

“Hell if I know,” she said. “We’ll find out when he gets back. Come into the kitchen.”

The whole house aside from that dining table was furnished in antiques made in Box County; the kitchen table was a spindly sparse maple thing and the chairs were worn and wobbly. They suggested the modest charm and comfort of the Midwest, in stark contrast to their lavish oak and pecan furniture back in Texas, and Loretta, sitting at that table, seemed taller, broader, and less delicate than she ever had back home. She looked harassed and exasperated, too. I wondered if she and Dart had been arguing before I arrived.

“Sit down,” she said. I sat.

“Tell me what you are going to do when your friend comes to visit you in the forest again.”

“Same thing, I guess. Rory’s a good lookout even if he is a preening, self-satisfied Yankee.” She did not laugh.

“I have another project upstate in two weeks anyway,” I said. “Breeding season is nearly over.”

“So for two weeks you’re going to wander around alone while a man with a shotgun looks for you.”

“I expect he’s already made his point.”

She stood up and crossed to a drawer next to the sink.

“I told your mother not to name you Nathan. Did she ever tell you that?”

“No,” I said.

“She ever tell you your great-great-grandfather was named Nathan?”

“No,” I said.

“He is a blot on the family name I would like to expunge,” said Loretta.

“Why?”

“Never mind.” She fetched a long-nosed black revolver from a drawer beneath the table and placed it on the tabletop.

“If you come across that man with a shotgun again,” she said.

“I’d probably shoot myself in the ass,” I said. She didn’t laugh at that either.

“If he had meant business he would have brought dogs,” I added.

The revolver sat between us, emblematic of something I couldn’t name, for several silent minutes.

“Dart and I have decided to return to Texas,” she said at last.

“Because of all this?”

“Because of all this and some other things,” she said. “Dart needs to work. I can’t have him under my feet all day.”

“But mainly because of the business with the neighbors,” I said.

“Mainly, yes. Can you see any pretty way out of all this?”

“Call the police?” I said, but then I remembered that I hadn’t done that myself. They were Box County police, after all. Even if they weren’t involved themselves, they surely knew people who were, and they let them be.

“We have good neighbors in Texas,” she said. “We’d settle for likable neighbors here. I can’t see that happening.”

“What about Dave and Elia?”

“Working on that. Elia would give anything for a hand-pressed tortilla right now. David knows he’s always welcome to work the ranch. He thinks he may be able to work on his computer stuff from there, though I don’t know how that’s possible. It all remains to be seen.”

“I’ll be sad to see you go,” I said.

“I’d feel better about it myself if you would take this,” she said, pointing at the revolver.

“To be honest, Loretta, it would freak me out just to have it in the house.”

I have since discovered the names of five of my great-great-grandfathers. Nathan is not among them, and I think Dart’s questionable genealogy may have been at work in Loretta’s mind. The Nathan she referred to was Nathan Bedford Forrest: Memphis slave trader turned peerless Confederate cavalry commander turned first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan at a campfire meeting of Southern veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee.

If it was chilling for Dart and Loretta to find themselves surrounded by shadowy neighbors with malevolent intent, at least they could flee back home. It was and is terrifying to me to read about this man at length and reflect or suspect or somehow even know that he is family to me: that if we were to meet, I would understand him—not agree with him, of course, but know him instinctively as I know my own father, my brother, or my uncle Dart.

In some sense he would be easier to understand if he were merely monstrous: as a slave trader, commanding officer at the massacre of two hundred black Union troops in 1864, and Klan founder, he is that. But he is also celebrated throughout the South as a kind of homegrown Odysseus or Robin Hood. On one occasion he ordered his men to lay logs over wagon axles and march them in silhouette over a hill within view of Yankee scouts for several hours. The Union commander surrendered without a fight, believing himself outmanned and outgunned—and was dismayed to learn that Forrest had in fact only a quarter of his own troop strength.

Forrest himself was acquitted of that earlier massacre, though his men were not. He disbanded the Klan after six years, saying it had become a vehicle of personal vengeance. It was revived later by others.

There is no satisfying line through his life: he oscillated wildly between honor and perfidy. It is easy, even conventional, to admire the wisdom that circumscribed the actions of someone like Abraham Lincoln; it is easy to deplore the nature of someone like Sherman, whose appetite for devastation grew as it fed upon the South. Forrest remains unthinkable; the more I know of him the less I understand.

He was famously subliterate and temperamental (though smarter and calmer than his West Point–trained opponents)
and I find, even now, that I wake at times in the small hours with some odd and irrelevant phrase attributed to him ringing in my head.

I done tole you twict already goddammit no!

He speaks in a voice I have never heard in my waking life, and I imagine it is a voice not unlike my own.

Loretta was in the house when Dart returned and I was on the front porch holding that .38 just to see if I could get used to it. I suppose she didn’t hear him, because she didn’t join us. He explained that he had been to see the judge.

“What did you say?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. “Come on,” he said. “Let me show you how to use that.”