by Wayne Grady
PART TWO
SEPTEMBER 1848–NOVEMBER 1849
The River’s bank am a very good road,
The dead trees show the way.
Lef’ foot, peg foot goin’ on,
Follow the Drinking Gourd.
1.
The bullet caught him somewhere on his left side below his waist, and knocked him off his horse. He’d been half asleep, dreaming he was sifting through a wooded valley, peering into the trees for Lucas, and the next thing he knew he was lying on his back in the dirt, the air squeezed out of his lungs and Justice dancing above him, trying not to step on his head. There was no pain yet, but he was a soldier; he knew it was coming. Two faces appeared above him: one small and gray, with sharp, shrewd features like those of a merlin; the other blotched and bloated, the texture of a boiled nopal cactus. The big one held him down with one foot while the smaller one flailed at him with his boots, then the smaller one said, “Your turn, Brother,” and they switched. Then the pain started. The small one’s eyes, the last things Moody saw before passing out, were as pale and blue as thin ice on a skim of clear water.
When he opened his own eyes again, pain like an electric current was running up and down his spine and his hip felt like a bag of eggshells. He raised his head and looked around. His tormenters were gone, as was his horse and saddle. The satchel lay open beside him; reaching into it, he felt the Cuvier paper and some linen, but no pistol, no bayonet—and no pouch containing Lucas’s money. He couldn’t move anything from the waist down. Blood flowed from his groin. It wasn’t a good sign.
After a long while, he began pulling his way toward the road. Before he got there he heard a horse and wagon approaching. With a tremendous effort, and ignoring the squelching and crackling noises in his hip, he pulled himself halfway onto the road and tried to raise an arm. A lone woman on a buckboard looked down at him disapprovingly and was about to continue when she reined in.
“Are you drunk?” she said. Her horse snorted. “I passed thee on my way into town three hours ago. I could smell the liquor from here, and there you are still.”
“Not drunk,” he managed, although his tongue was swollen. “Shot and robbed.”
“Indeed.”
“Look,” he said, pointing to the blood-soaked region of his trousers. Her eyes flickered to it. “They poured brandy on me so you would think what you did and keep going.”
Her eyes relented, slightly. “You can’t stand,” she said, but she might have meant it sympathetically.
“I think the ball is still in there,” he said. “I need a doctor. Is there a field hospital nearby?” He paused. She was staring at him. Maybe she’d been speaking Spanish. “Señora,” he said. “La misericordia, por favor.”
At which the ground slipped from under his hand and rose swiftly to meet his face.
2.
When he woke again he was lying on his back on what appeared to be an artillery cart or mortician’s stoneboat. He’d been collected with the dead. The sky was gray and smelled of cordite. It looked as if it would rain, which meant the men would be fighting in mud. Someone had removed his trousers and placed a wad of cloth over his pelvis, but blood was still running down his hip and pooling under the small of his back. He lifted his eyes and saw a woman’s back, a black bonnet outlined against the sun, which haloed her hair. Not the war, then. Unless he was already dead.
“Annie?” he said, and passed out.
3.
The woman was not Annie. Apparently, he was among the living.
“Where is this?” he asked, looking up at the sky.
“Alabama,” she said without turning.
He absorbed the information.
“I was going to Huntsville,” he said.
“Why?”
“I’m looking for someone.”
“For whom?”
“He would have just been passing through.”
She was quiet a moment, maybe waiting for him to give a name. “Not many pass through Huntsville,” she said. “How is thy side?”
Plain speak. He’d heard it in Georgia, where Quakers weren’t welcome because of their opposition to violence and their uncompromising views on slavery. They wore their formal speech, their thees and their thys, like a badge, and paid for their pride with beatings and burnings. But he’d found them interesting. They were educated and didn’t go around bleating about God.
“What part of me is broken?”
“Thy os ilium is intact,” she said, “the acetabulum damaged but not irreparably. Most of the damage is to the upper femur, especially the greater trochanter. It’s shattered, I’m afraid.”
He tried hoisting himself up onto his elbows, a mistake. When he moved, his hip throbbed and bled. During the war, more men had died from bleeding to death than from the shot itself. Or their wounds turned putrid and poisoned their blood. Or the pain drove them mad and their hearts burst like overripe tomatoes.
“You should lie still until the bleeding stops,” she said.
“Why are you helping me?” he asked.
“The Lord flung thee in my path twice,” she said. “I ignored him the first time, and I almost ignored him the second time, too, but since you seemed determined to crawl before Satan, I stopped.”
“Before Satan?”
“My horse,” she said, nodding to the big black that was pulling the wagon. “She would most assuredly have trod on thee.”
“How do you know I’m not dangerous?”
“You can’t move enough to be dangerous,” she said. “I would know thy name.”
“Virgil Moody,” he gasped.
“Good day to thee, Mr. Moody.”
“What’s yours?”
But he was gone again before she could answer.
4.
For four days and nights he drifted in and out of consciousness, long periods of feverish sensation broken by brief moments awash in agony. Cannon fire roared in his ears, men shouted in anger and pain and terror; large, black wings flapped over his head. He reached for Annie, caught his fingers in her hair as she pulled away, saying, “Don’t.” When awake, he lay clammy and cold, his chest shivering, legs twitching, candlelight breaking up into tiny hexagons behind his half-closed eyelids before fading into darkness. At night, he heard his father asking where his mother had put his hat, the flat one with the wide brim that made him look like a Quaker; Sikey asked him if he wanted a glass of cucumber water; wagon wheels rattled over ruts and Casgrain’s shod horse splintered the stable floor. Stephen Austin dealt him a hand of strange-looking cards: a snake, a coffin, a woman who looked like his mother sitting on a swing. He smelled urine. He tasted gunmetal. Gradually the hours he was awake and writhing in pain and horror outlasted those spent in vivid oblivion. He grew conscious enough to believe he was dying, then that he hadn’t died, and then that he probably wouldn’t die.
5.
Her name was Rachel Tanner. She was from Philadelphia, which surprised him at first because he’d detected a Southern gentleness in her voice and manner. But Philadelphia was where most Quakers came from, and so his sense of reality was shifting back into focus. Her eyes were bright and brown, even in the dark, her auburn hair pinned at her nape with a stick and, under a starched bonnet black as a raven’s eye her forehead was smooth and childlike. Her breast pressed against his shoulder when she reached across him to rinse a cloth, and when she tied his bandages her face almost brushed his. She swaddled his ribs and bound his left thigh to his right, to prevent him from moving it, and he lay inert in a tangle of damp sheets on a cot beside the cookstove in the house’s main room, which served as both kitchen and parlor, and there was another room toward the back, her bedroom, he guessed, to which she retreated at night. There was an unheated pantry behind that, from which she brought him cold water and compresses. The house was well made, the joints square and the windows and doors properly framed and sealed. Where was the maker?
His intention was to rest another day or two, until she released his leg
and he could ride, then find the men who’d stolen his horse and gun and money and resume his search for Lucas. He’d come to Alabama on the assumption that Lucas, either with Benah or following her, had gone east, because traveling north from Texas wasn’t sensible unless he wanted to find seven extremely unpleasant ways to die: Comanches (Lucas killed, Benah taken), desert (dehydration, snakebite), mountains (bears, wildcats, cliffs), starvation, freezing, wandering around the Colorado wilderness forever, looking for the right canyon. It was the same south of Texas, in Chihuahua country. No, Lucas would have gone to Galveston and taken a steamer to New Orleans to look for Benah, or else to Mobile if he’d already found her, and then come up through Alabama, from where he could turn either downriver to Kentucky or upriver to Tennessee. Moody had therefore been making his way to Huntsville, thinking that was where Lucas would have met the Tennessee River. He figured he’d arrived a week or two ahead of him, but he couldn’t be sure. In either case, he couldn’t afford to remain idle for much longer.
His leg had other plans.
“Your assailant did not stint on powder,” Rachel told him. “You were lucky.”
“Lucky,” he said.
“That I came along when I did, otherwise you would have bled to death. My father was a doctor.”
There was boot damage to the rest of him. His body was so islanded with bluish-green bruises connected by red streaks she said that naked he looked like a calico crab. Six weeks before he could stand, she told him, if an organ didn’t fail, if the bleeding stopped, if the lead ball hadn’t splintered when it struck his thigh bone, if she’d got all the bone fragments out, and if the wound were kept properly drained so that putrefaction didn’t set in.
Now when he drifted it was into more decipherable dreams: Lucas calling to him from the barn, Annie from the river, the Mexican boy nailed to a tree and spitting up blood. He awoke drenched in sweat, hair plastered to his forehead, Rachel dabbing his hip with a damp cloth and talking, always talking, as if to herself while he’d been listening to voices he could not tell her about.
“Who made this house?” he asked one day.
“Robert,” she said, pausing in her ministrations. The cloth was warm; he must still have a fever. “My husband.”
“Where is he?”
“My late husband,” she said.
Robert had died that spring. He’d come in from planting corn unable to speak, his jaw opening and closing but no sound issuing from his mouth. He’d pointed to his throat and fallen dead at her feet.
“There wasn’t a mark on him,” she said. “It was as though he’d been struck down by Divine Providence, as if God had reached into his throat and plucked the life out of him.” She didn’t think it could have been for anything Robert had done, he’d been a pious man, a virtuous husband, steadfast in his faith and his love for her. Perhaps it had been something he’d thought. “Can we die from our thoughts, do you think, Mr. Moody?”
“If we could,” he said, “I’d be dead long ago.”
“But people don’t just up and die for no reason,” she countered, “with no warning, and no sense to be made of it afterward.”
“Yes, they do,” he said. “That’s exactly what they do.” Annie had had no reason to die; he would have found Lucas. He would find Lucas.
“Just because we don’t see a reason, Mr. Moody, doesn’t mean there isn’t one.”
“If we don’t see the reason,” Moody said, “then what’s the good of there being one?”
“To make us look harder.”
“I’ve got more important things to look for.”
“Ah, yes, the man who was passing through Huntsville.”
He tried to talk to her about Lucas, but in his semi-delirious state he could barely explain Lucas to himself. “He’s my son,” he said, inadequately. Rachel wrung her cloth above the basin of cold water and didn’t say anything. “His name is Lucas, and he’s my son.”
“Robert and I were not blessed,” she said.
6.
Two weeks, then a third. Rachel unbound his thigh but left it tightly bandaged up to his waist, and his ribs still hurt like hell when he moved. He was able to sit up in his cot, slide on a pair of Robert’s trousers, take a few cautious turns about the room, but he sank back exhausted after a few minutes. The wound puckered and oozed a pinkish liquid he recognized from the war, and he knew that if it turned green he would die in a matter of days. For another week, however, the effluent remained the color of rosewater, and he was almost able to sleep through the night on his back, though still prey to feverish dreams in which Annie’s face floated up to him through various surfaces, and Lucas’s body dropped silently out of sundry ceilings. He carved himself a pair of crutches from two ash poles, and during the day, Rachel escorted him on undemanding promenades, first up and down the porch, then across the yard to the barnyard gate, then into the barn itself, where he inspected the stables and the granary. He admired the harness room and the hayloft. A week later she took him down to the river, Moody leaning heavily on his crutches, and he saw Robert’s grave and his gold workings, his sluice and screens, his mounds of tailings, looking as fresh as if they had just been worked that morning. He didn’t look into the river itself, afraid of what he might see there. When he discovered that he could manage on a single crutch and carry a pail of oats in his right hand, he began feeding and watering the horses. He was elated; the action produced a thrill of pain in his ribs, but did not start the wound bleeding. At night, Lucas no longer cried out from the barn. Instead, he beckoned from the road.
“You can’t ride, Mr. Moody,” Rachel said, anticipating his thoughts. “You can barely walk.”
The thieves had taken his army greatcoat. Rachel gave him Robert’s winter broadcloth, which had pockets and a collar and a single button, but was thick and warm if the wind came from behind. As the nights grew colder, her woodpile became depleted; it was on her mind, because she talked of Robert and the many things he had done that she now had to do, such as cut and split firewood. Moody found that by leaning on a single crutch he could work the bucksaw and a six-pound splitting maul. He toiled in the mornings, the broadcloth secured by the button and his leather belt. He balanced the wood on the chopping block, then brought the maul down, trying not to split his foot in half. Waiting for the throbbing in his hip to stop, he watched Lucas disappear over the horizon, looking back only once to see if Moody was following him. Benah danced on the clothesline. To ease his conscience, or perhaps to cover his lack of one, he told Rachel about Lucas. “Not my son,” he told her, “Annie’s, but he was like mine, as good as mine.” He knew Rachel believed she was harboring a warmonger, and now a slaveholder, and he tried, with only middling success, to explain to her that he was neither. “We raised him together.”
“She belonged to you?”
“We belonged to each other,” he said. “I took her from my father’s plantation because I wanted to save her.”
“But you owned her, did you not, Mr. Moody?”
Rachel was adept at asking innocent yet damning questions. He had saved Annie, damn it. He had saved Lucas, too. He was proud of that. Rachel’s questions came at him like the ticking of bullets through undergrowth.
“I didn’t own her,” he said. “I rescued her from slavery. Isn’t that what you do?”
“Were you and Annie man and wife?”
“No, how could we have been?” The law forbade marriage between blacks and whites, as Rachel well knew. That hadn’t been his fault. “She stayed with me because she wanted to.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because she didn’t leave,” he said. It was a circular argument, useless in law, he recalled from his studies in New Orleans, but useful in life.
“Women don’t leave,” Rachel said. “What choice did Annie have, do you think?”
“I don’t think she had any regrets,” he said, “at least not before Lucas ran off.”
“Lucas ran off?”
“Yes. That�
�s why I’m here. I’m trying to find him.”
“It must be hard for thee to dawdle like this.”
“I’m not dawdling,” he said. “I can’t use my leg.”
“Do you not have regrets, Mr. Moody?”
“Regrets?” he said, startled. “Of course I do. Too many to count.”
But he did count them. When kept awake by his hip, he lay on his cot listing regrets like a miser. That his father was a slave owner; that he had left Annie and Lucas to fight in a war he didn’t believe in; that he had killed that Mexican boy while he was praying; and, most of all, that he had allowed Lucas to leave, and had not gone after him in time. And then came the thousand smaller cuts: that he had left law school without taking a degree; that he had become mixed up with Stephen Austin, sold his own house in New Orleans, moved to Texas; that he had ever met Millican. He was awash in regrets. He tried to think of one that he could safely mention to Rachel that would stand for the rest and yet seem trifling.
“I wish, for example,” he said, “that I had buried the elephant bone.”
“The elephant bone?” she asked, as though feeling his forehead for fever.
He told her about finding the bone, and about Annie foretelling that trouble would come from it, and that she had been right. Lucas had run off, Annie was dead, and now he’d been shot. He didn’t say how Annie had died.
“It wasn’t an elephant bone,” he said. “It was a mastodon femur.”
“A mastodon?”
“A kind of elephant.”
She smiled. “All your answers seem to go around in circles,” she said. “Like wagons.”
7.
He still had the Georges Cuvier paper—the thieves hadn’t thought it worth taking—and the sketch of the incognitum that was mounted in Peale’s museum in Philadelphia, which Cuvier had identified as a mastodon.
