The Road to Reckoning Page 9

  Mrs Carteret hauled me back by my shoulders, hushing me all the while, but I had more.

  ‘There is my book! It has Mister Colt’s details and my father’s hand. Take me to Mister Colt! Jude Brown is my mother’s horse! He is mine!’

  Mister Markham brushed me off him although I had not come close.

  ‘Son, we do not wish you harm. But nor do we fly to the corners of the earth on a child’s whims!’

  The corners of the earth?

  ‘We wish only to protect you. All will occur in its good time. The asylum is the safest place for you if you truly believe that a man may be out for you. You are in the arms of the Lord and, through my strength and honor, under the protection of the law. I promise that I will write a letter as soon as you are safely secured in St John’s.’

  Mrs Carteret whispered to my ear, ‘It is for the best, child. The Lord preserved you and sent you to me. Praise be.’

  She almost cursed at the ringing of the bell above the door and left me in the room with mister Markham. He looked at me sympathetically but I could respond only with red.

  ‘My horse cannot be sold, sir,’ I said. ‘I have already lost my mother’s wagon. I am not an orphan as you know it. I have a home. I only want to go home. I am despairing that no-one is willing to assist me!’

  Mister Markham was not listening. He was straining his concentration to the hall. My life had been penned into his notes. The asylum door was already closing. I imagined only a great stone edifice and a door like on a castle in picture books and maybe my image was not that wrong for all that. I listened to the mumbles in the hall with him.

  Mrs Carteret was insisting on someone. Their voices were muffled and polite and then stress began to rise in her feminine inflection as women of her ilk do when trying to be forceful. I heard her squeal as her own door pushed her aside and I recognized the voice that had flung her wide.

  ‘Move, harpy! I am coming in, damn you!’

  It was Henry Stands! And he was right to call that damn woman a harpy who had spirited me away like a siren with promise of eggs and bacon.

  The door of the parlor crashed and there was the long coat and old hat and the guns.

  And a giant in mister Markham’s sight filled the doorframe.

  Mrs Carteret shadowed but Henry slammed the door on her. I could have told her that Henry Stands had no time for women, even in their own houses. I hoped there was a mister Carteret who would come to defend his old wife. He would get his jaw broke for his trouble and regret meeting her when Henry Stands was done.

  Henry Stands gave me no eye and only looked mister Markham up and down and snorted derisively through his beard as I should have done when I judged him.

  ‘This boy is with me,’ he said. I could smell the rum on him. ‘I have been bestowed by his father to take him home.’

  ‘And who are you, sir, to barge in so into a Christian home?’ mister Markham pushed himself up on his chair arms. A mouse before a bear.

  ‘My name is Henry Stands.’ He stiffened up right tall and so did I. ‘I am obliged that you looked after the boy whilst I had business. We will move along now.’ He took my hand and I squeezed it back until my nails bit.

  Mister Markham smarmed in his seat. ‘Oh! So you be the same Henry Stands who put that red mark on the boy’s cheek? Who abandoned him last?’

  ‘The very same.’ He tipped his hat. ‘Thank you for looking after the boy.’

  ‘Are you a blood relative, Mister Stands?’

  ‘I gets around.’ He pulled me to leave but mister Markham had already written a sheaf of paper about me with his pen.

  ‘I only ask, Mister Stands, because Thomas here is now the property of the St John’s Orphan Asylum for Boys. We will ensure that his family is found, and safe passage for him back home. You may relinquish your responsibility to him.’ He pulled his waistcoat over his shirt, showing above his pants. ‘He is in my care. And I speak for the law.’

  Henry Stands stood still as if he came to this house every day to collect his rent, and mister Markham shrank a little.

  ‘The law you understand is the law of advantage.’ Henry turned on him fully. ‘I would spit that these boys in your “asylum” get a dollar a month to be looked after by your church. And you get half to see to it. You get them sewing or cutting wood and making plows to make them a trade, you say, and sell on their work for profit. Each boy you take in is cents in your pocket. So you will rush to get him back to his family, will you not, man who has not introduced himself to me?’

  Mister Markham flushed and spouted as if to burst: ‘I am a God-fearing man, sir! I work for a charity under God!’

  Henry Stands pressed my hand and I looked at it grow white.

  ‘I am a man, sir, who takes back prisoners who have absconded. I have spent a time walking those men back to jail. I have heard their stories about your asylums that set them on their way.’

  Mister Markham’s flush went away and he paled, his lips white with anger. ‘That boy is under my protection and is a record of the law, sir!’

  I had never seen Henry Stands draw a pistol in the short time I had known him. They were there, his pistols, as ornaments on the man, and in truth I had seen him hold only one of my father’s Colts and his magnificent wind-rifle. To see him throw down, to hear the leather scabbard scrape, was fearful and final. He did not do this for show.

  Henry Stands pulled on mister Markham and I guessed that for mister Markham this was the first occurrence of such a sight in his life for his eyes near outgrew his spectacles.

  Henry Stands cocked his pistol.

  ‘So protect him.’

  You did not want to hear that voice.

  Mister Markham shivered under the gun. His demeanor reduced from firebrand to corpse, his eyes wider than them eight-dollar frames. He put up his hands and it would shame me to describe the sound of his pleading whines.

  Henry Stands put back his pistol. ‘Stay sat,’ he said. He leaned to the door with me still in his other hand, mister Markham gone from his mind.

  ‘Come, son,’ he murmured.

  Son, he had said! And I absorbed the word like sunlight in winter. He had still not used my name and until that point in our association he had only ever called me ‘boy.’

  I never asked him why he came back. I have pictured often that he went on up the road in the night, in the rain, and cursed me.

  He had found shelter under trees and drank his rum and cursed me.

  He ate his corn dodgers and jerky and cursed me.

  And then, somewhere in the dawn, he had looked back along the road and cursed me louder and came back to get me. And cursed all the way.

  He pulled back the door and Mrs Carteret stood on the stair with a shotgun and cocked it to us.

  ‘Mister,’ she said calmly as if the steel were a rolling pin. ‘I don’t know who you are but this is my house. I have girls here. If I shoot you I am in my right. Let the boy go. The Lord has him now, you Hoosier trash!’

  I looked up at Henry Stands and he pulled me behind him but his eyes were fixed to Mrs Carteret.

  ‘Ma’am.’ His voice was cleaner than I had ever heard it. No rum-and-tobacco harshness. ‘I have never shot a woman.’

  I think me and Mrs Carteret expected more from him but I think Henry Stands thought that enough. She must have looked at his past down her shotgun’s twin barrels pointed at his eyes and seen the same as mister Markham. This was not the first time he had stared down a gun. She let the barrels point to the floor.

  ‘You swine!’ she hissed through her tears. ‘God help that poor boy. God save him from Hoosiers!’

  I tugged his sleeve and brought down his ear. I was still in my smock and naked beneath but I would want my things. Henry nodded and threw his look back to Mrs Carteret.

  ‘The boy’s book for his business. Bring it. And his clothes. I will fetch his horse.’

  I pulled him down again and he began to hush me but I insisted.

  He put his hand t
o his holster. ‘And the wooden gun, ma’am.’ I tugged him down again and Henry took off his hat when he rose.

  ‘The boy says, “Please,” ma’am.’

  FOURTEEN

  I changed from my smock behind Jude Brown on the ferry to Nescopeck, glad for the clean clothes that were just a bit still damp. I buttoned up and watched Henry Stands look out over the river and across the green waiting for us on the other side. He had on his long coat and had his back to me with his black horse at his shoulder. There was one man at the rope and another at the punt. They had drooping hats, slack jaws, and grins and were mindful to keep their hunched backs low in Henry Stands’s presence but winked at me all the while.

  Henry Stands’s back lifted and fell in deep breaths as he took in the Susquehanna. I watched him and although I knew he had done me a great deed I felt further from him. You may know this. It is as when a neighbor does you a service that you do not expect or a stranger stands up on your behalf. It is almost an embarrassment. To a boy beholden to a strange man it is better to stay quiet than say too much thanks.

  I remember once back home in New York waiting in line with my father at some store—the butcher’s would be it for it was early morning and the smell of blood and sweet sawdust before breakfast made me want to be sick. My father sent me over the road to the drain and I stood there for a time feeling bad. People passed me, hundreds of them, all ignoring a boy on the curb looking like he had been kicked by a horse. Then a man in a white-striped jacket and boater stepped out of the herd and put his hand on my back.

  ‘Are you all right, boy?’ he said kindly. ‘Do you need some help?’

  My father called and waved and indicated that it was okay, somehow miming that I was with him. This man, about my father’s age, raised his hat and mimed back that he understood by winking across and then the same down to me and he receded once more into the whirl of the crowd.

  I had said nothing. But it occurs to me often that at that time that stranger had broken from his morning, from his purpose, to come to my aid. I did not need him but it is the offer of being willing to invest that matters. By coming to the curb he was submitting to enter my troubles and I may have had a heap of them, a thousand of brick that he was committing to. And to Henry Stands now I did not know how to say thanks enough. My voice was small. No man across the street to speak for me and acknowledge another man’s concern. I would just keep quiet and respectful.

  I expected Henry Stands to hand me back my father’s spectacles. I had seen the image. Him on his big, black stud, seventeen hands high, me on Jude Brown below him and his enormous arm passing the gold rims down.

  ‘I came back because I owed you these,’ he would say. ‘That was the measure of it, boy. I’ll be along now.’

  But he kept the glasses and we rode off the ferry side by side with our horses stepping like dancers away from the water until the grass clasped their hooves and we were on the road east again and to Stroud, where the law would be informed of Thomas Heywood.

  If I had known better, had the Devil’s view of the world, I would have begged of Henry Stands to cut that ferry’s rope and leave the Susquehanna behind as if it were China, another world entirely. That may have stayed my fate, slowed down those who were doubtlessly upon us, upon us as dogged as stars toward midsummer and just as without feeling for the men they look upon.

  We had lost some of the day, the better half, Henry Stands would say, but he cheered me greatly when he informed that we were only sixty miles from Stroud. I had begun to measure that town as home even though it would still be two nights more past it before I would get back to mister Colt and then truly home. But Stroud seemed like civilization. There would be law, stone buildings. Doors to lock.

  Henry Stands pulled up. We had turned off the river road and began to climb again between the tall trees, this land the same as that beyond Berwick.

  He took out his Tanner’s map and fumbled on the spectacles. We did not dismount, being saddle-folk now, and I sidled up beside him.

  ‘Well.’ He blew. ‘Straight east to Stroud. Sleeping and eating. Shouldn’t be more than two days all along.’

  ‘Then we should get on!’ I said eagerly. ‘I am not hungry. We could pass dinner!’

  ‘We will pass supper. We have little belly-timber.’

  ‘I have my sofkee,’ I declared, but even I found the word unpalatable by now. I dreamed of stew. I had been cheated of eggs and bacon that very morning and thought of seeking a nest but was sure that Henry Stands would disapprove.

  He studied the atlas. ‘If we cut from these hills, northeast, we will hit the Wilkes-Barre road. That is a stage road. High ground, but there are towns there. Mostly patch-towns.’

  Patch-towns were those built by the mining companies for the workers and their families. You paid everything to the company. They paid you and you paid them rent out of the wage and bought your food and tools from them. If the anthracite ran out or was not profitable the company moved on. The towns did not and became right poor. The hills were filled with small mines that the townsfolk dug themselves beneath the veins. Not room-and-pillar mines, you understand, just holes in the ground or cut into the hills and mountains. Risking death for pails of black diamonds to sell on the road and to heat their shacks.

  ‘Maybe we could do some business.’ He put the map away.

  ‘What business?’ I asked.

  ‘You have your father’s book. You know the details of the gun. I have fired the piece. You have that paper from a president. What one man can do another can do.’ He rose up. ‘Do you not think that we could sell those guns? You with your father’s schooling and me with my honesty. What say you, son?’

  I looked around to the trees for guidance and smiled weakly. ‘I do want to get on. If we move off going east, will we not add time to our days, sir?’

  ‘A little. It will mean entering the Shades of Death a bit more than when you came through the gap.’

  ‘Shades of Death?’ I am sure I was not alone in questioning such a locale.

  ‘The Great Swamp. It is the place of the Wyoming massacre. You will find that when Indians triumph and kill white folks it is called a massacre. When whites accomplish the murder of Indians it is called a battle.

  ‘I see it this way: if your Thomas Heywood is following—though I’m sure he is long drunk and given you up for dead—he will not take the high road. Between here and Stroud is hills and forest. If we go north a spell we will be on higher ground. See a man following us yesterday.’ He strapped his horse’s neck and began to move on. ‘Besides, I need a drink and your Mister Markham may set his women on the road to find you and wed me.’

  I had no choice other than to accept that Henry Stands was right. Thomas Heywood may have shrugged me off as dead. He may have laughed over a campfire with that Indian-hatband fool that it was shouting at the moon to go after a boy and a wooden gun. They would have drunk me away and tossed the empty bottles to smash on the trees.

  But he might not have, and I was in danger still and that thought is enough for a boy without a roof over his head.

  Henry Stands pulled up again. ‘Show me that thing again.’ Henry Stands held out a gloved hand. I rode with my sack at Jude Brown’s neck, so I took out the model gun as quick as he asked.

  He balanced it, played its hammer and trigger like he was tuning a fiddle.

  ‘I can do what another can.’ He tucked it in his broad belt. He had my spectacles and my gun now. I was being boned like a fish. ‘I shall play your father and allot upon selling these things stalwart as I can be. Let us off the road.’ He kicked his horse on.

  I looked at spring about me, up to the sun. Behind us the ferry that cut our journey, and I saw in my mind four horsemen waiting for it to come across. They could not perceive that I would take the harder road. This was how I could beat him. Cheat him and set the law at him. And should he find me before I could do the right thing he did not know that I had Henry Stands in front of me. And a little of me hoped that t
hat might happen, the same way on stormy nights you hope, just a little bit, that it might get worse before it gets better.

  FIFTEEN

  From southeast to northeast across Luzerne county are the Shawnee and Lackawannock ranges. They bisect the land, and about six miles parallel from these are the Wyoming and Moosic. These four mountains are like the pepper and salt pots that a man in a barroom will use to weigh down a map to plot his next day’s ride. And in between these corner-set pots, as God looks down on the map, is the Wyoming valley that even people who have never seen it are familiar to sing about around a piano. It has a beauty in winter, spring, and summer that you do not have to look for, but it is crowded more than you think.

  In ten years the mines had doubled the population, but as I said, when these patch-towns’ owners ran out, the people found it hard. Harder still now the whole country was suffering and anthracite land is no good for farming.

  Henry Stands’s notion was to skirt the Nescopeck and Berks mountains and meet the Wilkes-Barre road, which we could ride to Stroud. And then, God, I am nearly home! This detour would count for nothing! Any way you tossed it I was little more than sixty miles to Stroud and then the Delaware and home. My aunt Mary’s face was almost welcoming.

  ‘This is a stage road,’ Henry called back to me. ‘Although they are not on my map, there are towns. There is one that begins with S that I cannot remember. Lot of towns begin with S. That is the Dutch for you. Even the president is Dutch now.’

  He yawed like a ship as his stud picked a path upward and I watched both their rumps rolling in front of me. It was easygoing as the ground was good, which was for the best as Jude Brown was no Conestoga. Those were the big horses that pulled the canal barges and those huge Lancaster county wagons all across Pennsylvania to the sea, before the railroads. Funny how you never hear about obsolete things, obsolete people. Those horses and their drovers gone in a puff of steam. I guess there is not a lot of usury and subsidy in a man with a team of horses or a coal mine that serves only a couple of towns.