Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier

anklebone, and the peg was muddy higher than that. He wore pants turned up to the knee but no shirt, and his shallow chest and upper arms were white as pork fat, and his forearms and handbacks were walnut brown. Despite his otherwise thinness, the man had a melon-shaped belly that lapped over his pantwaist. He stood looking at me, leaning on the handle to his shovel.
    —Inside, he said. You need to talk to Featherstone. But I’d bet they’s a right smart number of bay colts in the world that ain’t yours at all.
    —Is there any dinner in there? I said. I’m on my way to run a trade post in a place called Wayah and I’ve not eaten today.
    —We’ve long since eat, the man said. I don’t know if they’ve left anything.
    He threw down the shovel and scrubbed his hands against each other to clean them.
    —I’m not asking for charity, I said. I’d be willing to pay for my dinner.
    —Oh, you’ll pay, the man said.
    I stood looking down into the hole. Red water was collecting in its bottom. Well or grave or what? I wondered.
    We walked around back to the kitchen door. The man stopped and pointed down. Look at that, he said. That’s a handy thing.
    I examined the doorway and had seen such ingenuity before. It was a timepiece of sorts, a step farther back into the primitive than a sundial. A gouged mark in a floor puncheon. When the line between sun and shadow from the doorframe fell on the mark, it was noontide. All other hours were subject to speculation. It was not currently noon was all the advice the clock offered. I could hardly imagine how such a device might be called handy, for a similarly reliable report on the progress of the day could be had just by looking up.
    The man walked on across the threshold, his peg beating like a little hammer on the floor. He disappeared into the darkness.
    I stood at the door to the room waiting for my eyes to adjust, and a voice from inside said, What are you standing there for?
    I said, I’m waiting for my eyes to adjust.
    Another voice with a strong accent I could not identify said, What means adjust?
    I reckoned it was a rhetorical question and held my peace until I could see a half dozen men sitting at a round table playing cards. Two women in calico with their hair loose lounged all tangled together on a pallet by the fire, flipping through a limp-paged book and laughing at its contents. The one-legged man hunkered on the edge of the pallet with the women.
    I could not tell what any of them were. African. Indian. Whiteman. Spaniard. Nearly all of them wore moccasins, but none of them looked particularly Indian in feature or hue, though most of them were swarthy-complected, and some had straight black hair and some had curly black hair. Nearly all of them wore hunting shirts and leather leggings, and two of them had slitted earlobes. Some talked in English, and a few spoke in an Indian language, and one of them, upon losing at a hand of cards, swore in words that might have been West African, for I had once heard an old white-haired man curse in a similar way, and West Africa was where he said he had been stolen from as a boy. One man with skin as white as mine had a peculiar hairstyle with a wide border shaved bare above his ears and the upper parts grown out long and greased, standing in peaks like meringue and mostly grey but for a crest that was still reddish as the ruff down a boar’s back running from his forehead to a brief plaited queue at the nape of his neck. A hammered silver ring pierced one of his ears.
    They struck me as a bunch of people who did not know or care what race they owed allegiance to. I reckoned this was a place where blood quantum held lighter sway than in the outer world, and I judged that being a whiteman here might not be as great an advantage as I generally counted on.
    The one-legged man looked at me and bobbed his head toward the table and said, That there’s Featherstone.
    He meant their obvious leader, the one with the hair-do. He was