Shadow of an Indian Star Read online

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  hadow of an Indian Star

  A Novel Bill and Cindy Paul

  with Julie Mooney

  SHADOW OF AN INDIAN STAR: A NOVEL

  PUBLISHED BY SYNERGY BOOKS 2100 Kramer Lane, Suite 300

  Austin, Texas 78758

  For more information about our books, please write to us, call 512.478.2028, or visit our website at www.bookpros.com.

  Printed in Hong Kong. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the copyright holder, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in review.

  ISBN: 978-0-9755922-2-9 ISBN: 0-9755922-2-X Copyright© 2005 by Bill and Cindy Paul

  Author photo by Sharon’s Photography

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication (Provided by Quality Books, Inc.) (Provided by Quality Books, Inc.)

  Shadow of an Indian star / Bill and Cindy Paul with Julie Mooney.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-9755922-2-X

  1. Chickasaw Nation—History—Fiction. 2. Historical

  1. Chickasaw Nation—History—Fiction. 2. Historical II. Mooney, Julie. III. Title.

  PS3616.A925S43 2005 813'.6 QBI05-800199

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2005921719

  This is a work of fiction. The names of the main characters, places and events are not figments of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblence to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is purely intentional. This is the story Bill Paul’s grandfather told him.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  To all American Soldiers, then and now.

  Acknowledgments

  Eight years ago, this story was little more than a family legend, but we believed that the Paul family saga was so compelling that it should be shared with others. That undying belief led us

  down many paths, and became an all-consuming task that would take years of research and organization. Eventually, the story made its way to Ken Atchity of A.E.I., Inc. who shared our vision. Until then, we had been like a ship without a rudder, but Ken gently guided us through the storms of our own ignorance. To Ken Atchity and Chi-Li Wong of A.E.I., and all their associates, we extend our sincerest gratitude. Thank you for believing.

  Our gratitude and deepest respect also goes to the editors of The Writer’s Lifeline, Inc. To Kendra Mitchell, who was with us at the very beginning and spent countless hours offering guidance, thank you. To Andrea McKeown, we are forever grateful. Through her expertise, she helped us take our chunk of coal and polish it into a diamond. (And like a mother, she patted us on the back when we needed to burp!) Julie Mooney, who became a friend as well as a mentor, helped us shape and carry the story to the level of our vision. Our heartfelt thanks for her kindness, understanding, and patience. More than once, she had reason to quote us a scripture from the Bible: “Am I your enemy because I tell you the truth?”

  Our extreme appreciation goes to Governor Bill Anoatubby of the Chickasaw Nation for his support and invaluable contribution to the epilogue - he has bridged the gap between the end of our story and the Chickasaw Nation today. To Glenda Galvan, Chickasaw Nation Historian, we express our sincere thanks for her assistance and guidance in keeping the Chickasaw Nation’s history and traditions accurate. Special thanks to Adrianne Grimmett of the Pauls Valley Historical Society for sharing her wealth of knowledge of Pauls Valley history and providing us with numerous photographs.

  To our children, Amy, Yancy, Caleb, Alan, and Adam, and their families, who probably needed tranquilizers but continued to patiently listen to the story, although they’d heard it repeatedly, you have our eternal love.

  Finally, we thank each other. Over the past eight years, we’ve found ourselves taking turns offering encouragement and support to the other, when it would’ve been all too easy to give up. Without that mutual love and support, this story might never have been told.

  Foreword

  I can still see the old man standing there, leaning against a tree. He was a little, short, three-quarter blood Indian with high, broad cheekbones and deeply creased skin. Dipped in water, he probably wouldn’t have weighed 150 pounds. But he was tougher than most of the men who towered over him. And even to the end of his days, his eyes never lost their sparkle. His name was William Ikard Paul, but his friends called him Pike.

  We grandkids called him Pop.

  When I was a boy, my cousins and I used to cut wood with him. He’d say, “Let’s stop and blow for a while,” then lean against a tree and chew on a matchstick while he caught his breath. Pop always had a matchstick or a toothpick between his teeth. Not long before he died, my aunt gave him a solid gold toothpick.

  He would tell us stories while he rested. Or lecture us on the proper way to build a fire, or how to shoot a man. “Boys, never take out a gun unless you’re going to use it. If you have reason to pull a gun, never talk or hesitate. Just raise it to the third button on a man’s shirt and pull the trigger.”

  One day when it was just Pop and me, I asked him if the town of Pauls Valley, Oklahoma was named after our family. He replied, “That’s a fact.” I asked him if he would tell me about it. He said he would, “but it’d take a spell.”

  It did. Over the next several years, as I grew into manhood, I would sit wide-eyed while Pop regaled me with tales so full of adventure, they seemed to come from the pages of a wild-west story book. They fired my imagination and fueled my dreams.

  At least for a time.

  As I got older, I got to disbelieving. Somewhere along the passage of years I decided he’d just been “making up a windy” to occupy his time.

  Pop had been dead for two years when his stories came back to life for me. My wife Cindy fell in love with those old Paul family legends, and her several years of research verified nearly everything he had told me, and unearthed a good many things he hadn’t. Most of it was right there in the historical record, just waiting to be found.

  Even the wildest of Pop’s tales was true.

  —Bill Paul It all began in the spring of 1995, when I was struggling to finish up my master’s thesis. We had recently come across pictures of five generations of Bill’s family, and had just had them matted and framed and hung in the living room: Smith Paul, Sam Paul, Joe Paul, Bill’s grandpa “Pike,” and Bill’s dad.

  I had my notes spread out on the floor one night, and was trying to concentrate. But for some reason, I found myself drawn to Sam’s picture.

  I didn’t know a thing about the Pauls’ story at the time, beyond the legends I’d grown up with. But that night, the strangest sensation came over me. It was so strong it was almost like a voice: “There is a phenomenal story here.”

  For the next several years, I spent Saturdays, every other Friday, and an awful lot of lunch breaks doing research. I never planned where I would go, but every time, I somehow ended up where I needed to be. I never came away empty-handed. Not once. Through it all, I had the strongest feeling I was being led to each new discovery.

  —Cindy Paul

  Book One

  Smith Paul

  “Ikhimilo”

  One time when Pop and I were feeding my daddy’s cows, I asked him why our middle name was “Ikard” and what the word meant. Pop launched into the story of Smith Paul’s first heroic meeting with the Chickasaw and how he came to live among them. He told me Ikard was an English pronunciation of the Chickasaw word for “fearless,” the name they gave Smith at that first meeting.

  Now, because of Pop’s reputation as a bullshitter, I chuckled at what I thought was just a great tall tale, and had lots of fun repeating it a
round the family for the next thirty years.

  Cindy and I were two years into researching my family’s story when I got my hands on a Chickasaw-English dictionary. For kicks I thought I’d look up “fearless.” And there it was. In the Chickasaw dialect it was spelled ikhimilo.

  That’s how I found out that my Pop, my father, and I bear living testimony to Smith Paul’s act of bravery—the act that won him the respect of the most fearless warriors in that part of the country. I gave that middle name to my son, and my nephew bears it too. I suspect Smith’s legacy will be alive in my family’s names for generations to come.

  —Bill Paul What’s always struck me about Smith Paul is the sense of destiny that ruled his life. Most of us drift through our lives like a ship without a rudder. But from beginning to end, Smith Paul’s life was full of purpose. He was either seeking a home for fairness and decency or, once he’d created it himself out of the wilderness, fighting to maintain it.

  —Cindy Paul

  Chapter 1

  September 18, 1824: New Bern, North Carolina

  The sixteen-year old boy stood motionless at the edge of a moon lit field, his gaze lingering on the tidy two-story saltbox house from which he’d just come. Its red gingham curtains were drawn

  tight against the early autumn chill; feathery smoke wisped from its chimney. The midnight-damp of the grass had begun to chill him through his boots, but he couldn’t will his feet to take another step. Everything in the world that mattered to Smith Paul lay asleep inside the four walls of that house.

  He had made it this far in the darkness, treading ground as familiar to him as the sound of his mother’s voice. He’d eaten this peat-black Carolina soil as a toddler, fashioned rough marbles from it as a young child, clucked his father’s big bay mules across it when he grew old enough to help with the plowing. But beyond this last furrow, the familiar ground grew hummocky, then brambly. After that it sloped away toward a wide wagon road where, sooner or later, everything familiar would be behind him.

  Smith slipped the pack from his back, rested his rifle in a crook of the jagged worm fence, and tipped his head back to the coldfired stars. He breathed in the bitter spice of hickory smoke, savored the slow jangling of the crickets in the auburn grass. His farmer’s body, tuned to the rhythms of seasons and the cycling of days, told him it was well past midnight. Time for burrowing deep under woolen covers, stocking feet poking out to catch the waves of heat from the cast iron stove. On any other night.

  But not this one.

  Some time between now and sunrise he’d need to be on his way. He had tucked a loving note of explanation inside his sister Lettie’s right slipper, so that no one would waste time looking for him. But he couldn’t leave yet, not with this niggling sense of unfinished business tugging at him like a hungry calf.

  He needed to do one last thing before he could go; he needed to find a way to say good-bye.

  Smith wondered sadly at the dark events that had thrown his young life into shadow. This time a year ago, his mother had been the picture of health. But three months later, on Christmas Eve, she’d taken to her bed. An event so rare for Tamsey Paul, staid farmer’s wife, that it had alarmed her children.

  Christmas morning had dawned silent and still, bereft of the usual merry chaos. Rhesa Paul sat before the stove, wringing his hands. Smith mixed up a quick batch of johnnycakes for the younger children, then slipped quietly into the back bedroom to see his mother.

  Where his breath caught in his throat. The illness had transformed her overnight; her once-glowing skin had taken on the pallor of an invalid, and her eyes had retreated deep into their sockets. She sat up in bed and smiled, but the smile seemed ghastly against her sallow features.

  “Son, would you fetch me a damp cloth and my hairbrush? I can’t bear for the young ones to see me like this.”

  “Of course, Mama,” Smith said obediently. He brought her the things, then stood by, shuffling uncomfortably, while she wiped her face and smoothed her gown. But her hand trembled weakly as she lifted the brush.

  Smith watched for a tortured moment as she wrestled with the light, familiar object. Then he took it from her hands and began the slow, meticulous task of combing out her long auburn hair. When it was smooth and gleaming like new brass, he selected a trio of green silk ribbons from her basket to celebrate the day and plaited them into the long, thick braid she wore down her back.

  “I must’ve done something right to have been blessed with a son like you,” she said tenderly. “I believe you got that braid neater than I ever did myself.” She enfolded him in a weak embrace, then added with a sigh, “I suppose I’ll be asking you to plait it up for me from now on.”

  “You’ll be doing it yourself again in no time,” Smith reassured her, not believing a word of it.

  That winter, Smith Paul watched his mother grow ever more frail and birdlike. By seed time, Smith’s father Rhesa had hired a high-tempered young woman named Elizabeth Daw to care for his ailing wife and the younger children, for Tamsey had become so weak she couldn’t even hold baby Clarissa in her arms. By the time the new green corn was shooting from the soft Carolina soil, Tamsey Paul was in her grave.

  The loss of his mother grieved Smith as nothing ever had before. He nursed a deep, abiding need to be alone, to mourn her in private. But this was the one thing Elizabeth Daw seemed determined to prevent.

  Betsey, as the girls called her, got along just fine with Smith’s younger brothers and sisters, but she had a bee in her bustle where Smith was concerned. She’d shadow him about the house, nagging and nitpicking. Nothing he did ever pleased her.

  “She’s got no right to order me around,” Smith had complained to his father. “She’s not my mother!”

  Rhesa had put a silencing hand on his eldest son’s shoulder and asked him to try to get along.

  So Smith gritted his teeth and hung his hopes on the day that she would be gone, when she wouldn’t be dogging his steps and making free with his mother’s things. But that day never came.

  One morning, when Smith discovered Betsey emerging from his father’s bedroom, he realized that she had moved from her small servant’s quarters near the kitchen to the big four-poster bed Rhesa had, until recently, shared with Smith’s mother.

  Maybe, he thought, his father was as much in need of comfort as the rest of his family. In due time, if the little ones could heal and move on, surely Rhesa would also be strong enough to let Betsey go.

  But at summer’s end, Rhesa had married the girl.

  In a private moment, Smith had taken his new stepmother aside and told her in defiant tones that he’d accept her as part of the family. “But don’t you ever start thinking you can replace our Mama.”

  Smith hadn’t intended to be unkind, only to clarify the boundaries. But to Betsey Daw Paul, it was a declaration of war.

  The final blow had come yesterday morning, when a local constable appeared on the Pauls’ front porch with the news that a fine saddle horse had turned up missing from the McKeon farm nearby. One of McKeon’s hired hands claimed to have seen Smith hanging around the timber at the edge of his employer’s field the evening before.

  Betsey let out a brassy laugh. “This one? It would only surprise me if he didn’t steal it!”

  “But I…I was right here all last evening!” Smith stammered. “I was out front tanning hides—you could see me from the kitchen window, clear as day!”

  Betsey stuck out her pointed chin and turned her back on him.

  Smith protested loudly, expecting his father to come to his defense. But when Rhesa opened his mouth to speak, Betsey silenced him with a smoldering gaze. Rhesa glanced helplessly from his son to his new wife, then hung his head in despair. The constable issued Smith a writ to appear before the judge the next day.

  Betsey glared triumphantly at Smith before leading her husband into the house.

  That moment had marked Smith Paul in some dark and secret place. Betsey had won the battle; all that remained for S
mith was to admit defeat and make his exit.

  Now, standing at the moonlit edge of his father’s field, Smith suddenly knew what he needed to do. He turned right and marched along the edge of the stubble field until it gave way to meadow. At the farthest corner, near a clump of dogwoods, he knelt down beside a carefully mounded grave. The fine white cross he’d fashioned out of ash still bore the dried garland of red clover Lettie had plaited during that long night sitting vigil with her mother’s body. Smith pressed his fingers to the letters he’d lovingly carved: Tamsey Wheelton Paul, Beloved Wife and Mother, 1787-1824.

  “Good night, Mama,” Smith whispered into the Carolina darkness. Then he rose to his feet, shouldered his pack and his rifle, and headed into the night.

  Chapter 2

  Autumn, 1824: North Carolina / Tennessee

  A wild, indomitable spirit had run in the veins of the Paul family for generations, a mercurial energy that had driven Smith Paul’s famous ancestor John Paul Jones to lash his warship, the Bon

  Homme Richard, to his foe’s, winning victory over the superior vessel even as his own sank beneath him. That same fierce, unpredictable tempest fueled generations of charismatic leaders and inspired visionaries, and it also created belligerent drunkards and dangerous hotheads. When focused, it challenged injustice, championed freedom, and lit the way for peace. When unfocused, it wrought havoc with all the violent chaos of a tornado whipping the earth. It could manifest as violence, bravery, egotism, genius, magnetism, mysticism, even what some might call madness.

  It made Smith Paul a seeker.

  For as long as he could remember, Smith felt compelled to wander. Any injustice, any knotty problem would send him tramping across neighbors’ fields and rambling for hours through the wild, boggy places of coastal North Carolina.

  But it wasn’t wanderlust that compelled him. Smith didn’t feel the “call of the trail,” like true vagabonds; he wandered in order to find something. Problem was, he had no idea what he was looking for. But he trusted, to whatever fates moved the universe, that he would know it when he found it.