The Road to Reckoning Page 11

  ‘I said I would. I said your man would not take the high ground.’

  ‘None of that sounds promising.’

  ‘None of this has been promising since I met you!’ He took out his wind-rifle in a single move that made me start and rested it across his stud’s withers.

  ‘You look out for a rabbit or something worth eating. You will need to look about fifty yards ahead all the time. He’ll be gone else. Molly cottontails are not negotiable on the distance they will keep from you.’

  We set off. East as always, the sun above us, but we took away from the road and went higher into the hills. I spent an hour looking down Jude Brown’s neck instead of for a rabbit. I was reluctant to look up. I saw grass, then roots, then a blanket of pine needles go under Jude’s hooves as the map changed around us. We had to duck for the most for the trees swiped at us. The light was lessened through the canopy all above. I was behind Henry Stands so he did not see me not looking for a rabbit.

  I did not understand how I felt, but as I have become older, I have felt similar from time to time. Mostly late at night when sleep wants or in the dark moments before first light. A woeful sense of doubt that had nothing to do with my own ability or that of my sterling partner. Inevitability is not the word. It is drawn from the well of the indescribable. Like throwing dirt on a coffin or those moments when two men know that they are to fight each other and nothing more can be done except protect teeth and eyes.

  I had no more crossroads. Standing across the ditch of the path I was digging was Thomas Heywood. He waited for me. And like all violent, laughing children (for that is still what his kind are even in their grown-up mind) they have nothing better to do than wait for you. In their reasoning there is nothing more diverting or entertaining than your misery. As children and as men they do not kiss good-bye to their families to go out for pleasant company or a drink and meal or for diversion. They go out to spread their misery. Good societies ostracize these felons eventually. But I was now aware that I was in the very lands that these men make their streets and homes when the good has had enough of them.

  Henry Stands’s wind-rifle cracked and broke my stupor. He had shot from the saddle, which is harder than you will suppose, and I looked up in time to see a rabbit fly up in the air like a fish hooked. The silence of Henry Stands’s rifle was a godsend for hunting. It is hard to imagine now but apart from hunting deer and buffalo the flintlock muskets were a terrible weapon. There was a spark and a flat crack, a whoosh of powder and flame before anything left the barrel. Hangfire. Trapping was the word, and that was exactly it. You trapped game; you did not shoot it. Then there came that Scottish clergyman who grew so frustrated at birds escaping his flintlock fowling piece that he set to inventing, and the percussion cap and its fulminate powder made for a near-instant shot, but nothing could match Henry Stands’s weapon of choice. He could shoot a duck and while its partners were wondering why their friend had just keeled over he could take them all like shucking corn.

  ‘That was your task.’ Henry discredited me from his horse. ‘I am to do all the looking and shooting and the cleaning and the cooking, am I? Supposing I do all the eating?’ He scowled at me and I took that to suggest that I was to fetch the rabbit.

  The kill was uncommonly clean. Magical to come from a human device. A perfect round hole on the neck as the canine from a beast might do. Straight through.

  The rabbit was in my arms, his mouth drawn, his eyes wide and still focused on the last thing he saw, his teeth dark and like tiny chips of stone. Everything about him dry. I could not help but compare the end of my father. A death sudden and fiery. A wet death. I trudged back.

  ‘You seem displeased for him.’ Henry put the rifle away.

  ‘It was a good shot, sir.’ That was my best. I held up the rabbit to him.

  ‘No powder. No shot,’ he said. ‘You could eat him now if you wanted.’ He took it and put it in his lap where his rifle had lain and stroked it like a cat as he rode on. ‘He was beautiful. And will be so again in an hour or so.’

  Henry paid no mind to whether I could get back up on Jude Brown as he went off but I was getting mighty good at spotting where I could dismount and get on by the ground and rocks. Jude had also begun to notice these things and sidled to them. Horses will marvel you just when you think them stupid as cattle.

  We camped on a slope that had a creek at the bottom and lots of good flat rocks. We were in the trees and the grass and were well secluded, which I liked. It was still hours until dark but Henry Stands was of the mind that in the hills if you found a set you should make it rather than be stuck in the dark with no place to go later on.

  Henry found a good stump-like boulder and the rabbit slapped on the table, his white belly showing, and this bit I was dreading, but Henry saw my ill-face and gave his wicked smile, which he used when he felt that a lesson was in order.

  He pulled out from one of the pouches about his belt a short double-edge, as thin as a sheet of paper and bright as a mirror.

  ‘This is your skinning knife.’ He twisted it before my eyes. ‘You don’t use it for anything else or you’ll be buying another one.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to wash him first?’

  He grunted. ‘Ain’t nothing cleaner than a rabbit.’ He showed me the rear end. ‘Clean as you when you were born. He has to be so to keep others from finding him.’ Before I could look elsewhere he had nicked it around this area and between its legs where I guessed its business was.

  ‘Now you go straight up like cutting cloth with scissors,’ and he went up its white fur straight to its neck with a sound just like cutting cloth, as he said, and my mouth made an O with the simplicity of it.

  ‘Then you peel him free.’

  The fur came away like taking off a coat, no blood, and I was amazed, even smiled, and this pleased Henry.

  ‘See. He don’t mind. He knows he’s for use.’

  He cut it to its feet and minded me with a point of his knife. ‘Now, you don’t cut off his feet. You twist them off. You’ll blunt any knife if you cut it and that will make an expensive meal.’

  He twisted the bones and I did not like this and turned my head from the awful sound. I raised a question to cover his work.

  ‘Have you never married, Mister Stands? You have no children?’

  ‘You asked me before.’

  ‘You said you were past liking women.’

  He was cutting around the neck. ‘Again, do not cut through the bone.’ The rabbit was now a good deal thinner. Its inner side was a creamy white and it wore its fur like a cape as Henry went to work on its head.

  ‘There was a woman,’ he said as he admired the rabbit. ‘And a boy.’

  ‘A boy?’ I was pleased.

  ‘He died at six weeks old. I had newspapers that I had not thrown out that were older.’

  ‘What happened?’ I regretted asking this but the question came natural. He did not seem to mind.

  ‘Oh, I had some money when I had done being a ranger. I told you I took my father’s inheritance before he died to stay away from him. I played rough for months and met a girl who worked in a bank.’

  ‘What was her name?’

  ‘Mary.’

  ‘That is my aunt’s name!’

  ‘It was not the same woman. I was a drinker and she was a drinker. We had a baby and rented a room above a newspaper office in Bend.’

  ‘What happened?’ I said again, and bit my lip at my repetition.

  ‘Well.’ Henry concentrated on the rabbit. ‘He didn’t eat. He didn’t take the breast. He was sick every day. He was called Henry.’

  ‘That is terrible.’

  ‘No. It was. But these things go if you work on them. It seemed foolish to have to bury such a small thing and people who didn’t know him being sorry for you.’

  ‘What about your wife?’

  He wrenched the skull from the neck and gave me the head. It was bloody. ‘Bury that a little or we will have disturbance in the night. We we
re not married. She left two days after. I wrote to her family when I sobered but never got no reply. As I said, I am done with women. Scratch a hole and put some leaves on that head. I will gut the body while you’re gone so you do not raise your stomach hereabouts.’

  I took the head in cupped hands and he dropped the four feet on top. I said, as politely as I could, ‘I suppose six weeks is not a long time to get to know someone. That would have been easier.’

  He wiped his hands on his coat, then seemed to regret it with a cuss. ‘No. I knew him. You’d be surprised what you gather in such a time. Now be quick, we will need water next. I will use his guts for fuel. Don’t look if it displeases you.’

  I went uphill and knelt to scrape a hole. I put that head with the wide eyes and feet in the hole and covered it with the earth and some leaves and a stone on top to keep it so and paused to study it. It was a good grave for a small thing.

  SIXTEEN

  When I came back Henry Stands had chopped up the rest of the rabbit. I figured he would roast it but I guess he did not go for that or did not have the tools for it for he just dropped the pieces in the boiler and mixed it up with the sofkee and plenty of water for a stew of sorts.

  He had made a good fire pit and the guts burned well and helped sharpen my hunger. It was still daylight and a daylight fire is very pretty. It is less welcoming than one in the dark but has the advantage that you are not blinded to see what is going on around, but it smoked a lot.

  I looked up and watched the smoke going through the trees like a stack. I thought on the night with my father when I had looked up the mountain at those forester fires and felt companionship with them. I hoped there were not men now that looked up into the hills for fires.

  Henry let the stew boil for a long time and took to his gin. He laid off his belt with his guns and leaned on his bedroll on an elbow and did not talk to me as he drank. We had not melted a block of tea so I just drank water from a canteen. I did not mind. I felt sorry for our talk earlier but I had nothing to say to make up for it. I just listened to the boiler bubble and hoped that that rabbit’s family was not relying on him for anything.

  I distracted myself with my future again. ‘How are we to Stroud, Mister Stands?’

  He stretched and sighed and swigged his bottle. ‘We are just north of White Haven. Mining country. I think if we head southeast out of these hills and cross the Lehigh we will be into Monroe county and the shades. Tomorrow afternoon we will make it.’

  I grinned. Stroud and the law and then the Delaware. Then New Jersey. Then home. To mister Colt first (I had no doubt about that no matter how much I missed my own bed), but two days and I would be in my home with my aunt and recount the terrors I had known. Comfort her in her tears for her brother-in-law, pat her shoulder as she rocked against me in her chair and I would say, ‘There, there.’

  She would worry about what we were to do. I would calm her worries. I could sell spectacles like my father. I could sell them by post. I could sell guns similarly for mister Colt now that I had the names of clients who would doubtlessly require return business.

  We ate in twilight blue; there would be less flying insects to bother us that way, the fire yet to draw them. The birds were giving their final calls for the night and we left the horses free to eat of the grass. They grazed in a close circle like they were tying ribbons around us.

  The rabbit was good and sweet like a cakebread but I would have liked to have made tea before we had used the boiler. Henry Stands must have sensed my need for something and passed over his gin. I dislike gin, as I have said, but in the open you will take anything to warm you and everything tastes better in the open air.

  I gulped it—to try and not taste—and Henry Stands smiled at my grimacing blush as I passed it back. But the gin worked well in welcoming me to the night, and with the meal under it I felt warm and good.

  The night came in and I still had some pieces of coal and put these in the wood-fire with some more kindling. I did this without bidding and Henry Stands watched me with a studious eye as if he had just seen me for the first time.

  I sat on the blanket that I had taken from Jude Brown and took off my coat to use as a cushion of sorts. I stuck the wooden gun into the back of my belt for it stuck against my ribs when I sat. I hoped Henry Stands would have sympathy again and share some of his blankets with me.

  This was only our second time sleeping out although it had something right familiar about it. I thought we had done it many times. I had become used to the sense of lying on the ground and of crackling fires and being in the company of only one other. I realized that this time had been more spent with my father and that was the real of it. I had lost all sense of time and days. Even now I could not tell you how long I had been gone from walls. My recall is mixed together like stirring paint. Two weeks almost or thereabouts, all encompassed in a day’s worth of memories, which I am writing as if you asked me for a story after supper as we smoke cigars and drink labeled whiskey.

  Henry corked his bottle and, still lying against his bedroll, began to sing. His voice was more like talking than singing, as if he was being forced to do so, and I had begun to think that this was one of the consequences of his drinking.

  ‘Now soon some still Sunday morning

  The first thing the neighbors will know

  Their ears will be met with the warning

  To bury old Rosin the Bow

  My friends will so neatly dress me

  In linen as white as the snow

  And in my new coffin they’ll press me

  And whisper, “Poor Rosin the Bow.”’

  He waved his bottle at me. ‘Go tie the horses,’ he said, and repeated his song, and I heard the cork pop again as I put my back to the fire.

  My shadow came down the trees as I went to the horses, who were chewing and eyeing me. I had to move only ten feet away to lose the light and I took up their reins in a vagueness, each of them either side of me, Henry Stands’s big stud making the night blacker. If anyone looked at us I would not be seen.

  I looked out to the fire from under Jude Brown’s head and watched Henry Stands’s neck go back with his bottle to the sky. That would be the end of one of them gins. I went to the saddle of his horse for the rope but never made it. A hand on mine!

  A skinny arm hoisted me up and round and into the filthy face of Thomas Heywood, grinning at me like a skull.

  I tried to yell but my throat had shrunk to nothing and he pulled me close so I could smell the whiskey on his breath and the sickly sourness of his clothes.

  ‘Well, well, I’ve been following you like the moon, boy! I’ve been watching you sleeping,’ he hissed. ‘I found your wagon. Followed your horse.’ He pushed me into the giggling belly of Indian-hatband, who dragged me away toward the trees.

  God bless the horse of Henry Stands! Jude Brown just stood like a steer but Henry’s horse leaped backward with his head whipping when the trash went for the wind-rifle’s holster. Heywood cursed and let him go, then grabbed me again so I was held between the two by my shirt and hanging like meat.

  Over the fire I watched Henry Stands rise at the commotion, but he stopped moving as the two other roadmen stepped to the fire with their rifles at their waists. His horse snorted to his side too late to warn him and resumed gnawing at the grass instead now his excitement was over. I will give Thomas Heywood and his boys some credit: they moved quietly when they had need to. Cowards do.

  Henry Stands looked to his belt on the ground, and the two on him cocked guns to cool his thoughts.

  With the fire amid I could see them only as half figures, their faces under their hats just shadows, but I could see the silver hair and whiskers of one and the black coat and lifted collar of the other, he who I had perceived before as just coat and hat.

  At the snapping of the rifles Heywood and Hatband threw down also, but their guns to my head.

  I stared into the barrel of first one and then the other of my father’s guns. Heywood pushed m
e forward, his fist tight on my collar, his knuckles against my neck.

  ‘Don’t move, old-timer!’ Heywood put the cold steel hole on my cheek. ‘Move and I kill the boy!’

  Henry Stands scratched his beard, looked at all four of them, from boots to guns.

  ‘Reckon you kill the boy whether I move or not.’

  Heywood shook me. ‘That’s a fact. But how it happens is up to you. Shoot him in the face. Quick for him. Or hang him in front of you. Slow for you both. Which will you have?’

  Henry lowered his face, now black under his hat-brim. ‘You lousy son of a bitch.’

  And Henry reached down for his belt.

  ‘I said stop, you bastard!’ Thomas Heywood fired high into the trees, shot to warn, to tremor the wood and our nerve. The birds woke again. Jude Brown reared away and to Henry’s stud for protection, and Henry stopped moving as the rifles went to shoulders.

  Henry Stands straightened, sucked in his gut, and raised his chin.

  ‘So you be Thomas Heywood? The bravado that shot the boy’s father in the back? Or are you some other nameless son of a bitch?’

  Heywood brought the gun back down to my head. ‘Well, ain’t that digging your own grave, old-timer. That’s a bad step. Bad step. I was just going to take the boy. You scratched yourself now. You know my name. That’s not good. Not good at all. You leave me no choice, mister. No choice. I would have to save my neck.’

  ‘We’ve already gone to the law, son. Judge Tanner in Danville. Marshals are out for you. You thought on that? You put up now and you might get good jail-time. Any more killing won’t go better.’ He turned to the others. ‘And you boys. No-one’s looking for you. No sense in letting this sorry bastard hang you. Clear out.’

  He spoke as if that were the only thing for them to do, as if he had known them all his life, their trusted friend. The rifles pointed at him were just candy canes that he had given them as appeasements. ‘Think about that,’ he advised.

  I could not see if they contemplated and it was Heywood who spoke for them.