by Taylor Brown
Le Moyne lies upon his corn-husk mattress, fully clothed, listening to the bedding crackle from the heavy swell of his breath. He tries to will them to silence, those husks, to quell the storm of his heart. Outside, whispers and the patter of boots, the rattling of armor and swords. This much he can hear over the roaring of his own blood. He closes his eyes and tries to pray:
Quand je marche dans la vallée de l’ombre de la mort …
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death …
La Caille, friend and bunkmate, is gone, fled among the night-beasts of the woods. Earlier that evening, as Le Moyne stood at the latrine relieving himself, a Norman set himself alongside him, slightly too near for comfort. The man stared straight ahead, unbuttoning himself, then spoke in a voice none but the two of them might hear.
“It is to be tonight. You would do well to remove yourself from your quarters, Le Moyne.” The man loosed his stream, speaking through gritted teeth, never once turning his head. “They have resolved to cut the throat of La Caille, believing him enemy now to their aims.”
“But La Caille spoke for them.”
“Not well enough. His heart was not in it, they say. Their plans for you, I cannot say.”
Le Moyne finished, quickly.
“Merci.”
The Norman acknowledged his gratitude with but the slightest dip of his chin. Le Moyne walked hurriedly across the fort grounds in search of La Caille, willing himself not to dash. He found his friend in the hut they shared, rubbing oil into his boots.
“Tonight,” he told him. “It will be tonight.”
“How do you know?”
Le Moyne told him of the man at the latrine.
“And he is a true man, this Norman?”
“Yes, I believe so.”
La Caille pulled on his boots, calmly, and fitted his belt and dagger. He took his arquebus from next to the door. He had known this night might come.
“Come with me into the forest, Le Moyne.”
“No. I told them I would recommend myself to God at such an hour. It is this I will do.”
La Caille placed a hand on his shoulder.
“You are a fool, my friend.”
“C’est possible.”
“May God be with you.”
“Et toi, mon ami.”
So here he lies, alone, wreathing himself in prayer, donning the old words of power like maille and armor. He tries to give them weight and consequence, his harried breath forming the very verses that deny his fear, that belt and strap him against the world to come. Outside, muted shouts and the pounding of fists upon doors. He hopes the nobleman Fourneaux was wrong, that their God might yet set his gaze upon this savage land, his will steered at least in part by the prayers of those here beset. Le Moyne prays and prays, the tongue stone held tightly in his palm.
The door is flung open and in bursts a storm of metal-clad men, mutineers in breastplates with weapons raised. Le Moyne can hear little of what they say over the loud silence of so many iron mouths, each waiting to speak its fury.
* * *
Dawn finds him on his bed, alive and unhurt. He’s been confined to his quarters until the sun has fully risen. Rise it does, upon a world truly new. The whispers travel quickly, hut to hut. The nobleman Fourneaux, leader of the mutiny, led twenty arquebusiers into Laudonnière’s chambers at midnight, setting his weapon against the commander’s throat. He took the keys to the storehouse and armory, controlling thereby the flow of bread and blood through the fort, and Laudonnière was led in chains to the Breton, a prisoner now of the very ship that once marked his power. Other squads of armored mutineers snaked silver-backed across the grounds in dead of night, breaking into the quarters of all who had set themselves apart from the conspiracy. They stripped them of their weapons and confined them to quarters on pain of death.
“Where is La Caille?” they asked Le Moyne.
They’d encircled his bed, the fuses of their arquebuses smoldering like madness in the confined space.
“Fled into the wilds.”
“The savages will dismember him,” said one.
“If the beasts do not,” said another.
“Perhaps,” said Le Moyne.
The leader of the group stepped forward, dagger in hand.
“Perhaps we should kill you in his stead.”
The words struck Le Moyne deep in the gut, fear erupting hot in his belly like an organ pierced. But he clutched the tongue stone yet harder in his hand, and a flight of black words burst from his throat without thought: “I wish you would, pig-suckler, and damn your own soul to hell.”
A grin twisted the leader’s face. He sheathed his dagger, and in the long night that followed, Le Moyne thanked God again and again for that curse, however vicious, protecting him as surely as any rote prayer.
In the days that follow, the mutineers, sixty-six in all, draft a warrant to sail into New Spain for the obtainment of provisions. They force Laudonnière, shackled within his floating prison, to endorse it as lieutenant of the King of France. The Breton is found to be in need of too much repair, so they outfit the two newly built shallops for their journey, taking a great store of bread and munitions and wine reserved only for the sick. They say they will make the Spanish Antilles by Christmas night and slaughter the Catholics during midnight mass, and if they meet any resistance upon their return to Fort Caroline, heavy with shot and plunder, they will tread the place underfoot.
They leave on the eighth of December, their masts crossed dark against the dawning sun.
BOOK II
The old man walks back and forth across the water, needing only the thin aluminum skin of his boat to perform this feat. He is wiggling his arms and lolling his neck. He is rolling his ankles and spreading his toes. The sun is rising, and he has been standing long dark hours under the stars, watching the eternal night that flows beneath his feet, like a world before God or light. He has been awaiting his prize, the riparian king of old.
In those hours, when the milky eye of the moon is hooded by cloud, he believes he can see into the creature’s ken. He can see wrecked ships, double-masted or paddle-wheeled or bearing the steel blossoms of screws, and he can see the giant timber-bones of shattered rafts. He can see cypress dugouts foundered like coffins, home to giant catfish, and peaceful navies of sturgeon cruising through the depths. He can see men clad only in skins, gazing upward for the long-fallen sun, and men in strange billowy garb, hunting the bottoms for the golden twinkling of their god. He can see an evil man, sallow-faced, staggering drunkenly in the muck, looking for the pair of boys who sunk him. And he can see one of those boys grown old, his body bruised with ink, his hand unable to close for the tender white worm it holds.
Blood brother.
Some nights, in the blackest of hours, he can see his two children holding hands, chained to the black anchor of his guilt, planted like a crooked cross in the river’s bottom, and above them all passes the creature he seeks, dark as storm, waiting to swallow them up.
26
Altamaha River, Day 3
The water lies shrouded in mist, like the ghost of a river, the trees but shades in the pre-dawn. The world is inchoate, dew-wet and not yet real, coming out of its own dream. They slide their boats into the water, finding the dark muscle that pulls them along, and Hunter watches his brother become a shadow of himself in the mist, amorphous as story or myth, a storm rolling slowly downstream. Hunter paddles faster, harder, to keep him blooded and fleshed, the brother he knows.
The sun scatters the mist, white traces lingering only along the banks, and soon the world springs brown-green under a blue dome of sky, the river written in a brown scrawl. Lawton turns toward him, his beard wilder with each day uncombed, his teeth straight-cut as if with a power tool. He’s pointing to the left bank.
“Gamecock Lake. Back through them trees. You remember them limpkins we saw?”
Hunter nods. They were boys when their father pointed them out, a pair of wading bird
s high-stepping through the shallows on stiltlike legs, probing here or there with their long curved bills. They were fat-bodied, like baby ostriches, their brown feathers white-flecked as by snow.
“Hunted near extinct from the old days,” said their father. “Ain’t often you see one.”
They sat a long time in the old man’s johnboat, watching the birds stalk the shallows, their whole heads disappearing underwater, looking for hard prizes of snails and mollusks. Finding nothing, they would stilt forward, forward, to another spot, their knotty knees back-bent like elbows.
“See them long-toed feet, look like rakes? They can walk on lily pads with them feet.” Their father’s face slowly hardened as he watched the birds, his teeth grinding sideways in his mouth. “Course people ’bout killed them off, like most every damn thing else on the river. Overhunting.” He turned to face his sons, their open faces. “People like to think the world ain’t that bad. They assume there’s Somebody up in the sky looking out. If you remember one thing, remember this: Assumption is the mother of fuckup.”
He ripped the pull-cord on the outboard, the motor roaring to life beneath his hand. The birds crashed skyward on panicked wings.
Gone.
Lawton tilts his paddle to look at his watch.
“Let’s go see if we see some. Like old times.”
Hunter sets his paddle across his lap.
“What happened to the big hurry you were in day before last?”
“We got time today,” says Lawton. He doesn’t say why.
It’s a backwater lake, deep, islanded with vast constellations of water lilies. Here or there a lone cypress rears itself umbrellalike from the middle of the lake, as if to shade anglers at their labor. But they see no boats tucked beneath the trees this morning, nor limpkins stilting through the shallows. Nothing, really, a lagoon seemingly deserted, like an abandoned movie set. Lawton slowly back-paddles, his boat rotating before the scene, his face grim.
“What?” asks Hunter.
Lawton tucks in a new dip, screwing the can closed with the palm of his hand.
“Nothing,” he says. “I just thought we might find more of them birds here by now. Daddy’d said they might be making a comeback.”
“I guess not.”
Lawton’s face tightens. Hunter looks out at the deadened place, wishing he could call up a flock of birds along the banks, a hobbling of limpkins for his brother.
“You really think they could walk on lily pads?” he asks. “On water?”
Lawton looks at him.
“You don’t?”
* * *
They pass beneath the powerlines upstream of Altamaha Park, listening as thousands of volts thrum over the river, and a battleship-gray sheriff’s boat rounds the bend before them. A single big deputy stands at the helm. He has on a ballcap and sunglasses, a low-profile PFD with a star stitched over the heart. Lawton brightens, wiggling upright in his cockpit.
The deputy slows his approach, dropping the craft into neutral as he slides alongside their boats. He looks down from the center console, his teeth bared in grin or menace.
“Loggins, you carrot-hair son of a bitch, I thought it might be you.”
Lawton is grinning.
“Steve-a-rino, you luggy bastard. Where’d your belly go?”
“Snuck off with the carbohydrates.” The deputy pats his trunk. “So the wife tells me.”
“How’s the Sheriff treating you?”
The deputy palms the wheel.
“Got me on river patrol now and then. Can’t complain.”
“Hunter,” says Lawton. “You remember Steve Andino, played left guard?”
“By name,” says Hunter. “I think you graduated when I wasn’t but in eighth grade.”
Andino nods, then straightens and removes his cap.
“Hey. I was real sorry to hear about y’all’s daddy last year. That’s some real bad luck.”
Lawton nods grimly, his lower lip pouched. He looks out at the water, scratches his nose with his thumb.
“Yeah. Least it was this river he died on. Reckon the old man would of preferred that, instead of bed.”
The big man nods. “Sure.”
Lawton spits and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, then squints an eye up at the deputy.
“So lemme guess. You got a call from some angry little film man, saying a red-bearded maniac assaulted him up Miller Lake?”
Andino reseats his cap and chuckles, extracting a can of dip from his back pocket.
“Something like that.” He looks up, as if reading a description pasted to the underside of his hat brim. “Suspect is a red-haired white male, approximately twenty-three years of age, built like a diesel bush-hog with an attitude to match.”
“Sounds about right,” says Lawton. “Though I hear your shit poetry there at the end.”
Andino puts in a dip and screws closed the lid.
“So what happened, you hit some guy?”
“Hell, I didn’t but cuff him for not having any manners. For saying Daddy never taught us none. We ran into his crew filming a big cypress up there, acting like they owned the place. Littering all over. If I assaulted him, he would of known it.”
“He bleed?”
“Not even. But I’m happy to stand up, he wants to press charges.”
Andino unscrews the cap of an empty water bottle and holds it under his mouth, loosing a black string of tobacco juice.
“I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” he says. “Sounds like he was asking for it, besides which we got a no-blood-no-foul policy out in the county. Otherwise we wouldn’t have any room in the jailhouse.”
“Figured that might be the case.” Lawton pulls on his beard, his eyes flicking across the surface of the river. “Say, while I got you here, you heard anything funny about Daddy’s death?”
“You mean foul play, like?”
Lawton nods.
The big deputy crosses his arms, tapping the bottle against himself, working the wad of chew in his mouth. “Not specifically. Coroner said blunt-force trauma followed by drowning, consistent with a sturgeon strike.” He squints out at the riverbanks. “But there’s been some funny things going on down the river, that’s true.”
“Them couple researchers that went missing?”
Andino nods. “Never found hide nor hair of them. But it’s a big river, been swallowing people up since the timber raft days.”
Lawton scratches his chin. “How long was this after Daddy was killed?”
“Two, maybe three months. The fall.”
“Anything else?”
“Not really. Somebody seen a boy throw a pair of stray cats over the powerlines up at Sansavilla, tails knotted to watch them claw each other to death. Said he had blond hair, a funny accent. Carried a rifle on his back. Other people seen a old man carries a spear in his boat, talks to himself. Seems harmless enough. The state’s been upping their flyovers, looking for meth labs and marijuana grows. We had reports of boats at funny times of night, comings and goings. Nothing solid, though. You know how it is.”
“These comings and goings, y’all investigated?”
Andino shrugs. “What’s to investigate? Ain’t been any crimes we know of.” He thumbs the embroidered badge at his chest, one of the star-points slightly unstitched. “To be honest, Sheriff ain’t seemed too interested in pursuing it.” He drops his hand and spits again in the bottle. “If you know what I mean.”
“You know anybody I should talk to, I wanted to hear something more?”
Andino rubs the back of his neck, grimacing, not wanting to uncage the words behind his teeth. “Well, you ain’t heard it from me, understand? But there’s a dude named Dillard Rollins has a stilt-house up Crooked Lake, just past where the old railroad crosses over.”
“That’s, what, a half mile up off the river?”
Andino nods. “People call him Wild Dill. Runs a baithouse, so he says. But we caught him selling all kinds of shit up there. Sugar whiskey and p
re-rolled joints for the shad fishers, canned beer without a license. Illegal venison and alligator. Antler velvet, for the over-fifty crowd looking to harden up. If there’s anything fishy going on, he’s liable to stink.”
“When’s the last time y’all busted him?”
“’Bout a year back. Parole violation, he hadn’t been making his check-ins. We had to go up there three times before we got him.” Andino spits in his bottle, his eyes flicking over the spout. “Makes a body wonder if he’s got a camera at the mouth of that slough, sees everybody coming.”
Lawton nods slowly, hearing him. “Somebody might could foot it in, though, down the old railroad tracks. What you think?”
The big deputy turns and spits the rest of his dip over the far side of his boat.
“I think I don’t got any opinion on that.”
Lawton is quiet, still thinking. Andino turns the key and the four-stroke outboard murmurs to life, chugging low.
“Tell me something, Loggins. You hit that guy just so they’d send me out?”
Lawton looks up at him.
“How would I know it’d be you?”
“You knew it would be somebody,” says Andino. “But it ain’t my job to block for you no more. Best you keep that in mind.”
He drops the boat into gear and says his goodbyes, curling downriver before taking the boat up on plane. Hunter looks at Lawton. His arms are crossed high on his chest, as if after a good meal, and Hunter can almost see the words flaring behind his eyes: actionable intelligence.
27
New France, February 1565
The people of Utina dance at their arrival. They are red-painted, as if parboiled, a blood-colored throng that quivers along the riverbank. Le Moyne watches them from the boat, his weapon heavy against his shoulder. He wonders how to capture the brutal torquing of their forms on paper, the heavy thump of hammered thighs and chests. When he steps down the gangplank, first of a thirty-man force of arquebusiers, the natives come forward to touch the iron of his gun. It wrecks them. They tremble with glee. The sound of l’arquebuse has carried all through the land, from sea to mountain. Here is the great weapon that will speak fire against their enemies.
