Gideon looked at True. She appeared to be serious about this matter.
“You could call him Old Dick,” she said. “Sounds about the same.”
Gideon took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “We’ll see.”
She smiled then, and looked at him with sympathy. “I never got to know Judge Biddle like you did. I only saw him in his carriage or walking to the courthouse. What was he like?”
Gideon thought for a moment. “Dignified. Careful. In the courtroom he was always in control. To me he was friendly and respectful. He always tried to make me feel welcome, in many different ways. I think he was happy to find someone else who liked shotguns and bird hunting.” He shrugged. “He didn’t really get to know me all that well. And I guess I didn’t really know him all that well, either.”
“Why would such a man kill himself?”
“I don’t know. But I intend to find out. Because there has to be a reason. You don’t just sit down in a chair and aim a shotgun at your breast and press the trigger for no reason.”
True took David onto her lap. She tried to spoon some broth into his mouth. David made exaggerated smacking motions with his lips while most of the stew dribbled down his chin.
“Did the judge hold himself high and mighty?” she asked.
“I don’t think Judge Biddle ever looked down on anyone.” Gideon had noticed how sensitive people in Colerain County were to any perceived slight. Even True was that way. Almost resentful, they seemed to be. Many were laborers and servants, so maybe they were used to being looked down on. “I would call him generous,” Gideon said. “In his will, Judge Biddle gave almost everything he owned to the poor people of the county. He gave a hundred dollars to his housekeeper, Mrs. Leathers. And he gave those things to me.”
“How much do you think that gun is worth?”
He saw where this was going and kept his mouth shut.
True turned an amused smile on her husband. “It was the judge’s gift to you. You don’t want to sell that gun, it’s up to you. Though we could use the extra money. That second horse is going to be expensive to keep. And I wouldn’t mind having a nice table to eat on.”
Gideon thought their current table was just fine. He decided to change the subject.
“I want to talk to your grandmother,” he said. “Ask her what she remembers about the preacher, his trial and hanging. In fact, I plan to go see her tomorrow.”
True quit trying to feed stew to David, who had begun to fret. She opened her blouse and gave the child her breast.
“My gram might tell you something,” she said. “Get her talking, she’ll go on half the night, fill you up with coffee—or rum—and tell you story after story. But you’re a stranger, even though you’re married to me. She might just run you off.” She gave Gideon a sympathetic smile. “I’m sorry my kin don’t treat you better.”
“I’ll win them over.” Gideon grinned. “Maybe I just need to show them that Dutch folks can be more than”—he thought of what her father had said—“dirt-grubbing krautheads.”
“Don’t talk like that.” She grew serious. “We’re a clannish bunch. More than once I’ve heard my gram say, ‘The bad and no good on the back of a stranger,’ or ‘Put the stranger near the danger.’” She touched her lips to David’s downy head. “I have told you before, she’s got the sight, same as I do.” She looked critically at Gideon, as if challenging him to contradict her. “And she has an evil eye. My pa says it’s so powerful and so little under her control that she daren’t look at a creature belonging to herself and admire it too much, or it will lay down and die.” She rested her cheek on David’s head. “When I was little, she scared me. Truth be told, she still does.”
I’ll go to Jesus,
Though my sin hath like a mountain rose
Eight
He wore the star, carried a rifle in the saddle scabbard.
Dark clouds massed over the mountains to the west. They seemed to come from a single source beyond the horizon, as if a great fire raged there. The wind lifted Maude’s forelock. It whistled among the branches and poked chill fingers down Gideon’s collar. The sun rising behind him cast a lurid glow on brambles and popple stands—then was cut off by the thickening, spreading clouds.
Maude had a neat economical shuffle, a running walk that was comfortable to sit. She had a lot of spirit; she could run like crazy when he let her go—he’d won races on her back home. The mare had been a present for his fourteenth birthday.
Gideon felt a twinge. His father would have never given him the filly if he’d known his firstborn son would ride away on her six years later, leaving behind the carefully tended farm where four generations of Stoltzes had lived and worked and prayed, and where two generations—no, three generations now—lay buried.
Staring into the past, he no longer noticed the mudholes and shale ledges in the road past which Maude quickly and smoothly made her way.
***
After leaving the farm, he had ridden her west through the settled farming country to the gray-green Susquehanna. At Harrisburg, wagons by the score were lined up to cross the wooden camelback bridge spanning the mile-wide river. Not wanting to wait or pay the toll, he turned Maude north and rode out of the town. The next day they found a broad quiet stretch, shallow water partway across until it deepened and Maude had to swim. He gave her the reins. She held her head up and grunted and snorted, churning her legs as the current pressed against her right side, pushing them downstream. Finally she cleared the channel and regained the rubbly riverbed. She splashed through the shallows and clattered through the rocks on the far bank. She shook herself and, seeming to decide for them both, turned north again.
Later they left the river and continued west on a rough road hewn down a tight valley. The few farms they encountered had been freshly cut out of the forest, stumps still standing in the fields, cornstalks pushing up around them in erratic fashion. He bought lodging one night at a farm; the next night at an isolated cabin where dwelt a taciturn Negro man. When his money ran low he worked at a tannery for a few weeks. Then he rode on, following the barest trace of a road through a water gap in a ridge and into an adjacent valley. He continued down that valley. He met a lumber crew and stopped again and worked for another fortnight, bucking up big chestnut trees that the axmen had cut down.
From the day he left home, he spoke not a word of Deitsch—only the English that he knew he needed to make his way.
One day a man fell in with him at a crossroads. The Tattered Man—for that was how Gideon had thought of him ever since—rode a big black mule. He said he was a preacher and dug out of his saddlebag a Bible whose cover was as worn and shiny as his coat. He aimed the book at Gideon, sighting along the spine. “I will not sermonize at you,” he said, “for I can see that you are a man who knows his Redeemer liveth.” The Tattered Man grinned, revealing broken brown teeth. “You show the inner light,” he said, “even if you are a blamed Dutchman.”
The way climbed past walls of lichen-scabbed rock. It wound among thick-trunked oaks and pines with huge spiky cones that looked like medieval weapons. At the top of the ridge, the Tattered Man halted his mule.
Before them the mountains lay jammed together, the rugged terrain covered with forest. Gideon could see the green rounded tops of the hardwood trees occupying the slopes, the darker green spires of hemlocks jutting up from the stream bottoms. Ridge followed ridge to the horizon. The view made him think of a great green blanket laid down on trash and rubble. A proverb came to him: We’s lond, so de leit. As the land, so the people.
“The Seven Mountains,” the Tattered Man said. “Paddy and Long and Thick and some others which I don’t know their names, or if they even got names.” The man intoned: “‘The seven heads are seven mountains, upon which the woman sitteth.’” His face, grimy and unshaven, assumed a genial smile. “The woman being the Whore of Babylon. Revelations, chapter seventeen.” He continued, his voice swelling until he roared like a revival preacher. “‘An
d upon her forehead was a name written: Mystery! Babylon the Great! Mother of harlots and abominations of the earth!’” He fell silent, winked at Gideon. “Git ye up, mule,” he said. He boot-heeled his mule once, twice, and on the third wallop the big twitch-eared beast commenced walking again.
The trail switchbacked down into the wooded valley. As they descended, the Tattered Man told story after story. He once shot a panther just as it sprang at him, the ball striking the cat in the open mouth, and the varmint fell dead at his feet with its whiskers touching his boot. He nearly smothered when the well he was digging caved in, and he lay there with the cold clay stopping up his mouth, listening to people screaming and hollering as they worked to dig him out, and a bright light shone before his eyes, the word of God entered into him, and his whole being was filled with peace. Right then, he knew he would follow the Lord. The Tattered Man explained how he and his brother had stood a donkey on planks and put him to a big plow mare to make this mule, his people had always rode mules instead of horses, on account of mules were smarter and stronger and had more staying power.
When he could get a word in, Gideon asked if the Tattered Man was going all the way to Adamant. He’d heard it was a go-ahead town, a place growing by leaps and bounds, a settlement where a man could find work, make a new start. And he was intrigued by the name: It meant unshakable, steadfast, determined. Just as he was determined to make of himself something more than a digger in the dirt, a tiller of the land.
“Adamant,” the Tattered Man said, “Well, of course I am going there with you. Wouldn’t be a Christian thing to do, now would it, to leave you here alone in this wilderness.”
The sky had grown gray and dark, and Gideon smelled rain. He did not look forward to spending a wet night in the woods with no shelter. And something about the Tattered Man had begun to bother him. Maybe it was the way he bobbl’d on, as if his stories were the only thing of interest in the world. Or maybe it was something else, something more sinister. He had no idea who this ragged, grubby stranger might be. Gideon tried to think of a polite way to detach himself from the man. But he didn’t want to get lost in these seemingly endless mountains, either.
As if divining his thoughts, the Tattered Man said, “You could turn tail right now, Dutch, and head back to wherever it is you are from. I won’t tell you no lie, there’s peril amongst these ridges. Wolves and panthers and bears as common as barnyard fowl. Rattlesnakes and copperheads ready to strike out and pizen your horse. Wildfires that can burn you up, floods that can sweep you away. And there’s bad men, like William Jewell Jarrett. You heard of him?”
Gideon shook his head.
“Where do you come from, you have not heard tell of William Jewell Jarrett?”
Gideon thought about where he did come from. He pictured the fertile fields sectioned off by rail fences. Big red barns and whitewashed slat-sided tobacco sheds and stone-built houses with hollyhocks next to the door, and peach and cherry and apple orchards and creaking mills along each stream and graded roads that went orderly from farm to farm, and all at once he was more homesick than he had ever imagined he could be.
The Tattered Man reined in his mule. He chuckled, looked sidelong at Gideon.
“Speak of the de’il,” he said, “and his horns appear.”
From the brush next to the trail in front of them stepped a gray horse. Its rider wore a brimmed hat with a low crown, a butternut blouse, and a long unbuttoned duster. The man had a scraggly beard. Above a hooked nose the man’s dark eyes showed as much emotion as a copperhead’s. The Tattered Man walked his mule up to the gray. The mule touched noses with the horse, whimpered softly, and passed along to stand beside the horse, facing in the opposite direction.
Maude flicked her ears back, and Gideon glanced over his shoulder. Another horse and rider had emerged from the brush behind them. The horse stood sideways across the trail. In his hand the rider held a sword with a long blade.
“Oh, once I had a glor’ous view,” sang the Tattered Man in an off-key baritone, “of my redeeming Lord.”
Beneath Gideon, Maude began to dance. Yesus Chrishtus. Money they would want, though he had precious little.
“My God has me of late forsook, he’s gone, I know not where.” The Tattered Man whooped out a laugh.
They would take Maude. Yes, they would take her, and they would take his life. His heart hammered and he felt a liquid warmth fill his chest. He closed his hands on the reins and thought Go! and Maude shot forward, her iron-shod hooves clanging on rock. The highwayman’s hand whipped across his body, grabbing for a pistol at his belt. As Maude spurted between the skittering gray horse and the stolid black mule, Gideon felt his knees slam into both men’s legs.
Maude lunged, and they were through. She pounded down the trail. He dug his fingers into her mane and leaned forward on her fast-flexing back. He heard a deep boom and a yowl past his head like an angry hornet and another boom. The top of Maude’s ear suddenly vanished. Onward she ran.
***
His heart pounding, he surfaced from the memory of an event more than two years past that remained as fresh to him as if it had happened yesterday. He took a deep breath. He was in Colerain County, in Panther Valley, riding to the house of his wife’s grandmother to ask her about any memories she might have concerning Judge Biddle. He looked at Maude’s ear, saw the missing incurved top inch. Ever since that day in the Seven Mountains, her pretty head had been all schepp, lopsided.
If only that had been the worst of it.
He stretched upward in the saddle, sat down again, and worked a kink out of his back. He rubbed Maude up and down her neck, murmuring to her, and watched her ears swivel back toward him. They continued their way down the valley. Forest walled the road on both sides. A raven croaked from a snag, then shut up and watched them pass.
They forded a small stream that came murmuring out of a side hollow. Passed a log schoolhouse in a clearing, its single window covered with paper greased to a translucency with lard. No horses were hitched up outside, no smoke rising from the chimney. Lessons would not commence until the harvest was in.
They rode on. Out the corner of his eye he spied a strange object in a tree—as he stared, Maude came to a stop beneath him. What is that thing? His first impression was that it was a human heart plucked out of someone’s breast, pierced and hung on a branch six feet above the ground. But no, it was only a hannselnescht, a hornets’ nest, constructed around a branch in a small maple. A dead nest—the frosts had killed the hornets, and their nest hung there gray and heart-shaped and unraveling, paper tatters fluttering in the wind.
He clucked to Maude. He felt her sweet, easy gait beneath him. It took him back into the past again, back to the Seven Mountains.
***
Fleeing, he had pushed Maude on for most of a mile. Where the trail leveled out and the footing was good, he urged her to gallop. When he figured he had put some distance between himself and the bandits, he stopped and dismounted. Maude’s sides heaved, and sweat foamed her chest. On her ear a maroon ooze of blood surrounded a white rim of cartilage. The wound had bled down into the fuzzy ear opening. Maude shook her head, pulled at the reins, sought to graze.
Du bisht ein zwickel, ein fulshtennich zwickel.
You are a fool, a great fool.
He’d stopped because he had spotted a spring in a glade that the trail cut through. He led Maude to the spring, and she drank from the spring’s outflow. Finished, she took a few steps and began gathering in the green grass with her lips, clamping the blades between her teeth and tearing them off with little sideways swipes of her head.
What if they’d hit her in a hindquarter? What if he’d put his head on the other side of her neck? The ball that had clipped her ear would have drilled his skull.
With shaking hands, he scooped water and drank. The sweetest water he had ever tasted. In the bottom of the spring the water came bubbling up from a pea-sized opening in the sand. It looked like a mouth. The mouth opened and closed,
opened and closed, saying: Fool. Fool. Fool.
He mounted again. The Tattered Man had praised the staying power of his mule. Gideon knew mules. From the age of eight he had plowed behind a three-mule hitch. Mules were patient. They didn’t give up. He considered the broad muscled rump on the Tattered Man’s mule as he urged Maude onward.
After an hour he stopped again and made his way off into the woods on one side of the trail. He draped his slicker over his shoulders, sat down heavily against a tree. Maude stood at the end of her reins. Clouds snagged on tall treetops, flowed around thick trunks.
He had no idea where he was. He had tried to keep to the better-traveled paths where twice the trail had forked. He had come upon no recent marks of wheels or hooves.
Rain rattled against the leaves high overhead. His stomach growled. That morning he had eaten the last corn dodger he’d bought from a farmwife two days past. He was bone tired. He leaned back against the tree and pulled the slicker around himself. Figured he’d rest for a minute.
When he opened his eyes, it was almost dark.
He lurched up in a panic. He had let go of the reins, but Maude hadn’t gone far: he spotted her, a black shadow among the trees. He stood in the gentle rain and heard a far-off rumble of thunder.
The Tattered Man had played him for a fool. They had shot at him, tried to kill him. If he went home now, wouldn’t he have a story to tell? But he hadn’t struck out on his own just to go back and point at a mare’s ear and say, “Let me tell you about the time when …” No, he was not going back. He was going on ahead, through the mountains to the town called Adamant. He would not give up. He would never give up.
Hastily he led Maude through the trees in the direction of the trail. He slowed as they drew near the place where he thought they’d left the path. He crept onward in the waning light, his eyes scanning the ground. Where was the trail? His stomach constricted—was he now utterly lost? No, there it was: a band of dirt slightly darker than the forest floor.
A Stranger Here Below Page 6
