Sentinels

by Matt Manochio

  Richardson worked for ten minutes on the wound, stopping every so often to ensure Culliver kept breathing.

  “It’s gonna have to do for now. I’ll redress it back at my office. I need all of your men to help me pick him up and load him into my wagon. I want someone riding in the back with him.”

  “I’ll bring it around.” Noah bounded away without being asked.

  “Today’s your lucky day, Harrison—you ride with the doctor,” Cole said.

  “Talk to him the entire time—I don’t care if he responds to you or not,” Richardson said before Harrison had a chance to offer a relieved “Thank you.”

  “Yessir,” Harrison said, adding, “Thank you.”

  “And water,” Richardson said. “Ask the farmer for some water. But first.” The doctor pulled a tiny bottle of morphine from the bag and delicately plucked out a syringe. Elkton had heard the doctor’s orders and ran for a bucket. Harrison followed.

  Richardson injected the morphine and waited for Harrison to return. Noah wove the wagon along the shoulder opposite the Elkton entrance and pulled the bed as close as he could to Culliver.

  “Let’s lift him,” Richardson said. “Slowly. Someone get in the bed to pull him.”

  Noah handed the reins to Cole and climbed over the driver’s seat and into the bed, waiting for the human cargo. Harrison returned with a bucket and a cup and put them down to help Richardson and the remaining deputies inch Culliver into the wagon. Noah pulled Culliver under the shoulders to center him face up in the bed.

  “Get in there, Harrison,” Richardson said. “And someone hand him the water.”

  The doctor packed his bag and scooted into the coachman’s seat before instructing Harrison, who moved aside so Noah could hop down.

  “If he wakes up, he’ll be in some pain. Keep his hands away from his belly. Try to give him water, and whatever you do, keep his attention away from the wound. Don’t let him think about it.”

  “Doc, you think we should take him to the hospital in Greenville?” Harrison said.

  “No, son. It’s thirty miles and several hours away. It’s my office, or he’ll die.” The doctor steered the wagon around the mess and soon disappeared underneath a far-off canopy of fir trees.

  Noah scanned the road, silently counting.

  “Okay, so, I see nine heads—some of which are still on the bodies,” Noah said. “I’m not even bothering to count the arms and legs—some of which are nowhere near the bodies.”

  “What’re you getting at?” Cole said.

  “That fella the doc’s carting, he’s in one piece because he hid—he must’ve,” Noah said. “Probably rolled himself into the field. Smart thinking.”

  “I’m guessing that whoever did this probably won’t be pleased that they left a witness alive,” Cole said.

  The sheriff turned and addressed his men. “Preston, get back to the doc’s and stand guard by the door,” he ordered Deputy Drew Preston. “Get some soldiers there to help you—and don’t take shit from them if they try to give you any.”

  Preston hopped on his horse and galloped toward town, passing another wagon rumbling its way toward the gruesome cluster.

  “All right, here comes the cavalry,” Cole said. “I asked the general to send some more of his boys out here to help us collect the, well, evidence. We won’t be the only ones getting our hands dirty.”

  Noah and the two other deputies had resigned themselves to the grisly task in the offing.

  “Sheriff, there were footprints in the mud heading toward these fellas here,” Noah said. “Saw them when Richardson asked for his wagon. I counted four sets, some appeared to’ve been made by men wearing boots. Army boots by the looks of it. But some of the others, it’s, well, I can’t.”

  “Spit it out,” Cole said.

  “Some of the tracks weren’t made by boots, but feet—really weird-looking feet, slender-like, almost clawed.”

  “Probably just the way the rain fell and warped them.”

  “Take a look for yourself, Sheriff.”

  “I will. But you also said Army boots? So, what, we’ve got rogue soldiers taking the law into their own hands? And they don’t flinch at killing their own men?” Cole said. “I’ll ask the commander who he had out and about last night other than these two boys.”

  “You think bayonets did all this?” Noah said, sweeping his arm across the road over the bodies and limbs.

  “No, I don’t,” Cole said.

  A young soldier brought to a halt what would soon be a meat wagon. The other soldier riding next to him closed his eyes and prayed. The kid driver stood in his seat and his mouth dropped upon seeing the buffet of appendages. He then puked over the side of the wagon.

  “Well, he didn’t do it.” Cole chuckled, and then gave an order any decent man would rue. “All right, let’s clean up. Someone’ll be able to identify them sooner or later.”

  “We can identify our own right now,” one of the horse-mounted soldiers said.

  “I didn’t mean any disrespect,” Cole said.

  Noah squatted before a torso with a hooded head but zero limbs. He grabbed the body by the ragged sheets and underclothing still covering what remained of the man’s shoulders and dragged the body to the wagon’s rear. The soldier finished his prayer and exited to open the wagon’s bed while the coachman composed himself.

  “You wanna give me a hand here?” Noah said to anyone within earshot. “Someone please grab him by the belt—if he’s wearing one—and lift when I do.”

  The praying soldier helped Noah hoist the first of many remains into the wagon.

  “I’m just thankful it’s covered,” the soldier said to Noah, who looked at the wagon bed’s arched canopy.

  Clement, who ranked second to Cole in seniority, rounded wagon’s rear, stood back a distance and nonchalantly tossed two severed arms, one after the other, into the wagon. Noah grimaced with each sickly thud.

  “Score two for me.” Clement raised his arms in victory. “Lobbed them in without the bloody parts touching the canvas.” Clement waited for the soldier and Noah to respond. “I think I’ll just place the legs inside,” Clement said after neither responded. “They’re heavier.”

  Clement chuckled and walked away.

  “You find anything funny about this?” Noah asked the unsmiling solider—Deacons was his name.

  Deacons lifted the right cuff of his blue pants to reveal a wooden prosthetic.

  “Goes up to the knee,” Deacons said. “I stopped finding things funny after the cannonball took it from me.”

  The soldier walked away.

  One of the freedmen approached Noah and waved to get his attention.

  “You wanna know why that boy’s still alive?”

  “Like I told the Sheriff, he ducked into the field.”

  “That’s a possibility,” the freedman said. “Or, the saints who chopped up his buddies let him live.”

  Noah thought about it and shook his head. “Why would they do that?”

  “To let other Klansmen know this is what could happen to them.”

  “Klan could’ve gotten the same message had they gone ahead and killed him.”

  “That leads me to my second theory.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “They want him to think about what happened to his friends—let that set in real good before they finish the job. They ain’t done with him. Just a theory.” The freedman swished tobacco around in his mouth before spitting the juice away from Noah. “Whoever did it, I like ’em—I feel bad for the soldiers, or course. But they brought death to them others, and it rained last night.” The freedman spread his arms and twirled to get Noah to look at the wheat and the water droplets clinging to the stalks. “Them boys might be good luck.”

  Noah waved the man away, about to resume plopping bodies
in the bed when he made a beeline for the sheriff.

  Cole, hunched over a lower half of a Klansman’s body, dragging it by the boots to the wagon, saw the deputy’s approach and dropped the feet.

  “Slouching on me?”

  “Nossir, not at all. Did it rain in town last night?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “It rained here a good amount,” Noah said.

  “That’s not hard to see.”

  “My wife and I didn’t get a drop at our place. We don’t live that far from here.”

  Cole stood upright, resting his hands on his hips and thought.

  “Nah, no rain. At least I don’t recall it. Road wasn’t muddy like it is here. But what do you care? You don’t grow anything at your place.”

  “I know that. Just curious.” Noah walked past a body he meant to haul but mounted his horse instead.

  “The hell you doing?” Cole said.

  “I won’t be but a minute or two.” He rode Wilbur down the road from whence the dead soldiers came and doubled back toward town but stopped near where Elkton’s property ended. He looked things over, returned to the mess, hitched Wilbur to a fencepost and resumed stacking bodies. Cole lifted a severed right arm into the wagon bed at the same moment Noah rested a head next to it.

  “What the hell was that all about?”

  “You mean my ride? I was curious, that’s all.”

  “You think we missed some parts?”

  “Not at all. It rained here.”

  “That’s well established, Noah.”

  “No, I mean it rained here, and only here. On Elkton’s property. I’m guessing if we walked back as far as the wheat goes we’ll find dry land just over the perimeter.”

  Cole said nothing.

  Noah pointed down both ends of the road, waiting for Cole to look. “The mudwater ends just beyond where Elkton’s fencing turns a corner.”

  “That’s odd,” Cole said.

  “Yeah,” Noah said. “It is.”

  Chapter Eight

  Lyle, Brendan and Franklin stood at the base of the ten-step stone stairwell leading into Thomas Diggs’s mansion. Diggs, lording over the three, paced back and forth as if he were on a stage.

  “Do you find it at all coincidental that those hicks were brutally killed one night after you three bungled your assignment?” Diggs had earlier been in town when the covered wagon, its white canopy appearing to be a deranged artist’s bloody canvas, headed to the undertaker’s. Traffic on Main Street had stopped. Passersby and shop keeps on each side of the road fell silent as the wagon creaked by. Deacons sat next to the ashen-faced kid driver. Cole and his deputies, and the horse-mounted soldiers, brought up the rear of the grim procession.

  “You mean, like, you figure whoever attacked us killed those Klansmen and the Army guys?” Franklin said.

  “Outstanding, Franklin!” Diggs clapped. “How silly of me for thinking Lyle or Brendan or any of the horses that you rode in on would answer me first. That’s precisely what I am figuring.”

  “Mister Diggs,” Franklin said, genuinely confused. “How would the horses even answer?”

  Lyle and Brendan watched their feet and sighed as Franklin continued. “I mean, a horse could stamp its hoof once for yes or two times for no. I think a parrot would have an easier time answering—”

  “Franklin!” Diggs waited for the big man to quiet. “Let Brendan and Lyle worry about thinking and speaking for you from this point on. In fact, I think Desiree has brewed a fresh pitcher of sweet tea. Why don’t you go inside and have some?”

  “Yessir!” Franklin jumped two steps at a time.

  “Just don’t touch anything!” Diggs snapped as Franklin slid through the front door.

  “Now, gentlemen, back to my earlier thought.” Diggs walked halfway down the steps.

  “You think Toby Jenkins and Leroy Elkton are in on this somehow?” Lyle said. “Coordinating? But how the hell would either of them know when us or the Klan would make our moves? And did they not realize there were two scalawags in the mix?”

  “How indeed.” Diggs resumed his pacing.

  “But we didn’t tell a soul, Mister Diggs,” Brendan said. “Ain’t no way anyone could’ve known we were coming. You asked Lyle to do the job, he contacted us that day and we went that same night.”

  “He’s right. We didn’t meet in town or nothing,” Lyle said.

  “Then that means Toby Jenkins is skilled at keeping up his guard,” Diggs said. “This, when you think about it, makes sense—I’m certain you three stellar examples of sophistication were not the first group to try to make trouble for him. Are we certain those negroes who live on the Elkton farm weren’t the murderers?”

  Lyle raised his hand to respond but before he could:

  “Don’t answer that.” Diggs wagged his finger at the two. “How would you know? You most certainly wouldn’t. But I suspect the sheriff and his merry men will take further interest in what happened at Toby Jenkins’s home, and thanks to Franklin, Sheriff Cole or one of his minions will seek to speak with you, again. Now, I have ways of finding out what the lawmen know—that doesn’t concern you, though. But should my typical channels of information somehow be closed, I want you three—” Diggs furrowed his brow like he was solving trigonometry in his head— “check that, I want you two—dump Franklin into a mine shaft for all I care—to see what you can glean from the sheriff or whoever it is who interrogates you. In fact, don’t even tell Franklin I want you to do this because I’m quite certain he’d manage to confess that he was on Toby’s property and that he’s really sorry and that it won’t happen again. As far as the law is concerned, you weren’t there. You experienced a hunting accident like you so brilliantly said. Franklin was at home sleeping. How hard is that to bungle? But ask questions to elicit answers from the sheriff. At least try to.”

  “Mister Diggs, so what if this is connected?” Lyle said.

  “I want that negro’s property. And if Elkton and Jenkins are—how do you Americans say it?—in cahoots with one another, then it requires some creative planning on my part. But not right away. The Army will be out in full force tonight, and for the foreseeable future until this all dies down. And as inbred and stupid as Klansmen are, even they wouldn’t be foolish enough to seek revenge so soon after the last night’s shenanigans. We all must wait, but while we wait, we will make prudent use of our time.”

  “Understood,” Lyle said. Brendan nodded.

  “Very good,” Diggs said and then sighed. “Now, if you will excuse me, I have to rid my house of Franklin and his odor. Be a dear, both of you, and wait here for him.”

  “Ain’tcha gonna invite us inside for a cool glass of sweet tea?” Lyle said with a smile.

  “Fine. One glass each.” Diggs grimaced at the prospect of such filthy men soiling his abode. He got Lyle’s attention before he entered. “Take the glasses with you.”

  Chapter Nine

  “What do you expect me to do with them?” Brady Young, Henderson’s undertaker, directed the soldiers to park the wagon behind his office building, a lonely two-story structure hidden by a hangman’s oak and some evergreens off a Main Street side road.

  “I didn’t know where else to take them,” said the young coachman. “I mean, it ain’t like a battlefield funeral, unless you want us to dig a ditch and throw them in and mark it. Except for the soldiers, I don’t know who they are.”

  “Someone does.” Noah Chandler stayed mounted on his horse next to the wagon. “Sheriff Cole’s back in town, and he expects word will spread enough so that whoever knows these gentlemen and finds out they didn’t come home last night will stop by the office for any news.”

  “Well, what do you want me to do?” said Young, a scrawny, bespectacled, sixty-year-old imp of man, whose head came up to Noah’s chest. “Lay out the bodies and try mixing and matching the pa
rts? Good Lord, you’re asking me to solve a human jigsaw puzzle.”

  “We can’t have their loved ones poking their heads in the back of a wagon, Mister Young,” Noah said. “That’s unseemly.”

  “You don’t understand, there’s no way I can embalm this—uh—assortment. And I’m not about to try to figure out which arm or head goes with which body.”

  “The deputy’s right, sir,” said Deacons, the wagon’s passenger. “There’s no way you can ask some potentially grieving widow to keep plucking heads out of the wagon to see if it belongs to her husband. This ain’t like trying to pick the ripest melon. I’m thinking you should lay out the seven heads and the bodies with heads right next to each other, and keep ’em covered.”

  “And where do you want me to do this? In my office? I don’t have the room. I’ve got one table.”

  “Deputy Chandler, I counted three bodies with heads and four severed heads,” Deacons said. “Maybe it’s possible to place the torsos on the doc’s table and strategically place the heads—”

  Young raised his hands to halt the conversation.

  “First, I am not a doctor, and you’re asking me to arrange my embalming table to look like an offering to Satan. No sir.” Young, a transplant from Maine, ran his hands through a tangle of gray wiry hair. “The best I can do is line them up like the soldier said, and underneath a tree for some shade. They’re gonna start stinking in this heat. Hell, they already are.” Young stood at the rear of the wagon and waved his hand through a vortex of flies.

  “Closest morgue to us is at the hospital in Greenville,” Noah said. “We could make that trip and drop off the bodies, but I think it’s cruel to ask whoever’s attached to them to travel that distance.”

  “What’s next? Do you think I’m going to use my bed sheets to cover them?”

  “Ain’t you got a bunch of tarps back there?”

  “No, I ain’t got any. Well, a couple, but nowhere near enough to properly display this—”

  “Assortment.” Noah completed the sentence. “Tell you what, I’ll head into town and buy some sheets or blankets. The good taxpayers of Henderson will spring for it.”