by Taylor Brown
“You weren’t kidding.”
“About pissing myself?”
“About the world being on fire.”
Afterward, Lawton sets to work on a can of beans the old man left out for them, working the rim with the prong of his Swiss Army knife. His brow is dark, his tongue lumping his cheek like a dip. Hunter watches him.
“What you find out last night?”
Lawton shrugs, intent on the can.
“Nothing. Old man wouldn’t tell me shit.”
“About Daddy?”
“About anything.”
“What y’all talk about, then?”
“Nothing, really. Went to sleep right after you.”
“Bullshit you did. I heard y’all talking. Must of been a good hour you were at it.”
Lawton’s knife slips, gouging the web of his thumb.
“Fuck.” He holds the bloody place to his lips and sucks.
“Lawton.”
Lawton lowers his hand from his mouth, examining the wound.
“I don’t know what to tell you, brother. You must of been dreaming again.”
Hunter grabs the can from Lawton’s hand and chucks it over the railing.
Lawton watches it tumble down toward the canopy, his jaw open.
“Hey, I wanted to eat that.”
“Then you shouldn’t be such a dick.”
Lawton holds him in his blue eyes; they almost dance. Now he smiles, starts down the ladder.
The tide has come and gone in the night, the coals of the cookfire sogged. The trees wear high-water marks on their feet. Uncle King’s iron gambrel still hangs from the tree branch, but the guts and castoffs are gone. A few bones scattered this way or that, a mess of earth churned over by hoof and claw, like a battle in the dark.
They look around, Lawton tugging on the end of his beard.
“All that not-talking last night,” says Hunter, “you least could of asked him how to get out of this fucking place.”
Lawton squints at the sun coming sideways through the trees.
“We follow the way the shadows point. West. We’ll hit the creek we come in on and find our boats.”
He leads the way, cutting a path with short, precise slashes of the machete. Woody vines and palmetto fronds, sliced, hang in place a beat before they fall. Hunter trails in his wake, ducking under branches and stepping over shallow creeks slippery with roots. They are black to the knees, their exposed skin angered with bites and scratches. The swamp is alive around them, choral, full of beasts unseen. Feral hogs on their own trajectories, like something slashed on a chalkboard, and songbirds that drape themselves tree to tree. Men as well, with minds fixed like stone, who make jagged lines across the world, unbending from one decision to the next. And below them all a creature that moves in silence, big as myth.
The light streams red at their backs. Hunter watches Lawton thumb the tattoo on his arm between slashes of the machete, and he touches his shark’s tooth on its length of string, fingering the barb.
55
Fort Caroline, August 1565
A volley of gunfire shakes the air, and Le Moyne comes fast awake. Now a second volley, more distant, in echo of the first. He rolls himself from his hammock—prescribed by the surgeon to keep the insects from his wound—and takes up his crutch. He hobbles from the hut in his bedclothes, making for the wall, following the planks set like bridges across the muck. Yesterday at noon, alien sails sprang along the horizon, and Laudonnière ordered the men to their stations. They donned their breastplates and helmets, took up their halberds and spades and guns, and readied themselves along the wall. Even Le Moyne. He stayed awake long into the night, his arquebus laid across his lap, waiting for what enemies might come. Spaniards, probably. Catholics who loved blood. But late in the night his chin began to drop. Again, again. It bounced from his chest. Men were snoring along the walls, too tired to fear their deaths. Too hungry. Le Moyne’s hammock called to him, his waiting cocoon.
Now it is morning, and men stand all along the palisade in defensive position, their armor gleaming, their weapons booming fire. Powder smoke curls over their heads, wind-churned, and Le Moyne throws down his crutch and climbs the wall, his wound protesting every rung. He sees a fleet of seven ships arranged in battle formation, big as islands in the river, their gunwales lined with armored men. Their weapons are aimed heavenward, iron stalks belching fire and smoke, and Le Moyne realizes the men along the wall are cheering. The soldier nearest him grabs his shoulder and shakes him, his face huge with glee.
“Ribault!” he cries. “It is Captain Ribault! We are saved!”
It is the twenty-eighth of August, 1565. The resupply ships have arrived.
* * *
Earlier that month, Le Moyne began venturing forth from his hut. His wound was a puckered mouth, messy as a babe’s at table, but there was no rot. Several of the wounded were not so lucky. They lay abed, their bodies stormed black with decay, death slowly chewing them from the world. Meanwhile the sun glared down, angry, so hot the very air faltered and swayed, heat-stricken, and the river steamed like bathwater. The men of the fort staggered beneath the heat, covered in a slime of sweat and mud. Many now slept in their filth, surrendered to it, and they made but little progress in shipbuilding. The weather seemed only against them, lashing them again and again with afternoon squalls that made soup of the fort. The spirits of the men seemed worn, dwindled like unstoked flames. Their heads bobbed stupidly on their necks, their faces blank. Two of the garrison’s best carpenters were killed stealing Indian corn. The master shipwright concluded the Breton—their way home—would not be ready for sail as soon as hoped. The men wanted him shot.
Le Moyne spent his days of convalescence on a stool set next to the door of his hut, taking the sun, sketching, or fiddling with the tongue stone in his pocket. The men who passed him were mostly shoeless, their clothes in rancid tatters, their bodies red-burned and flaking, welted with bites and sores. They scratched and dug at their bodily nooks. Bits of food clung in their beards. One day he watched a hook-nosed tailor named Grandchemin—his neighbor—root through the crotch of his pants with one hand, stepping into the light to examine what curiosity he’d found. Whatever it was, he crushed it between his fingers and went back inside his hut.
A voice behind him:
“Ah, the glory of France.”
Le Moyne turned, startled, to find La Caille at his side. His friend was grinning, his black beard dagger-sharp as ever.
“New France,” Le Moyne reminded him.
La Caille gazed about them.
“Is it so different, my friend?”
“I should say.”
La Caille squatted down to Le Moyne’s level, the necklace of boar tusks rattling at his throat.
“And when, my friend, were you last in the lesser quartiers de Paris?”
Le Moyne frowned. “Still, I never thought I would die in a mud street like this.”
La Caille clapped a hand on his shoulder, waving his hand toward the anchored hulk of the Breton.
“Confidence, man, you could still die at sea.”
* * *
Ribault. The man who commanded the Charlesfort expedition in ’62, erecting markers of French dominion along the coast. He comes ashore beneath the blaring of trumpets, the salute of guns. A man who cuts the air as he walks, his nose sharp as something hewn from marble, his beard a fiery red. His face freckled, flecked as if with some lesser’s blood. Rugged men flank him on every side, armed for war.
“They say he is the greatest seaman in all of Christendom,” whispers the soldier next to Le Moyne. “Look at him. Can you not believe it?”
He can. Surely the man has been sent to relieve Laudonnière of his command. There are rumors that the admiralty is displeased. Le Moyne doesn’t care. That night they slaughter a pig from Ribault’s stock and roast it whole on the spit, and wine spills among them like so much blood. The laughs of the men are softer, less wicked and sharp, and they huddle long into t
he night, tale-bearing about their cookfires. In the morning they rise crimson-tongued, full of piss and hope, and stagger down the riverbank to bathe, emerging white-scrubbed from the river like new men.
56
Altamaha River, Day 5
“You’re shitting me.”
Lawton is staring at Hunter’s boat, canted among the ferns of the logging road. Their father’s ashes are missing. The bag was riding just aft of the cockpit, secured beneath the crisscrossed diamonds of black elastic cords.
“You sure they were here when we left?” asks Lawton.
“I’m sure. I even thought of bringing them.”
Lawton turns an eye on him.
“Well, why didn’t you?”
“I been carrying them the whole damn trip. Why not you?”
Lawton growls and squats. The tide came in the night and shifted the boats. They are still tied to the tupelo, but the bushes in a small radius have been smashed, flattened by swinging hulls.
“You sure you had them secured good?”
“You know I did,” says Hunter. “You been bird-dogging my ass the whole time.”
He kneels beside the boat and palms the deck behind the seat, there where his father’s ashes had been, as if he could read their whereabouts by touch. There are slight scratches in the plastic hull. Absently he traces them, feeling his brother’s anger throb in the air. Lawton is squatting on his haunches, beard in fist, eyeing the forest like something he will burn to the ground. Just then, an answer rises through Hunter’s fingers—a logic—and he looks more closely at the deck.
“Lawton, look here.”
Lawton comes near, looking over his shoulder. On the deck, knife-scratched like a glyph, is a single word: UP. They look, and there above them hangs the black bag of ashes, dangling from a tree limb like a sack of food in bear country.
“Hell,” says Lawton.
The rope crosses the limb and slants through the trees, anchored to a sapling. Hunter slips the knot, dropping the sack into Lawton’s waiting arms. He walks up to him.
“Funny the old man knew what was in the bag, you not talking to him and all.”
Lawton looks at the bag in his hands, like something he’s just discovered. He seems almost to jerk, shoving the bag toward Hunter.
“Probably thought it was lunch is all. Didn’t want them hogs to get at it.”
Hunter takes the bag. It’s dry, untouched by the tide. He leans into Lawton’s face, squints.
“Better check them eyes of yours, big boy. I think they’re turning brown.”
* * *
They break from the creek, sliding back into the big river. The sun is climbing, the water gleaming like polished brass. Hunter looks over his shoulder, trying to see the high platform where they spent the night. He can’t. The cypress grows too deep in the island’s heart, far from the winches and saws of old, hidden by an army of second-growth timber. Already it seems a dream.
Cottonbox Island appears, a green fin of pine that splits the river. In high school they would anchor here, drinking beer and throwing footballs in the waist-deep shallows. Lawton would have the floating cooler tied to his belt, the big cube tumbling and crashing whenever he surged and dove for misthrown balls. He said it was better than parachute sprints.
He dips his paddle in the water and broadsides his boat, looking at Hunter.
“Let’s lunch here. Somebody threw my breakfast in the woods.”
He grips the sides of his cockpit and lifts himself from the seat, the hull quivering beneath his balanced hands, his legs unfolding from the boat’s hollows. He slides feet-first into the river, bouncing as he touches bottom. He looks up, teeth clenched in grin.
“It ain’t a hot shower.”
Hunter gasps as the water swims up his shorts. It seems so much colder than two nights ago on the bridge, as if the river is skipping seasons, sliding straight into fall. He starts to say something, but Lawton has already shrugged out of his vest and ducked under the water, a ball of white flesh hovering beneath the river. He breaks the surface roaring, the angular slabs of his body flushed pink, his veins glowing a cold blue. The water blades from him, clear and bright, and his shoulders look geologic, like formations of freckled stone. He wades back to his boat and peels up one of the deck hatches, rummaging.
“You gonna fix us lunch?” asks Hunter.
Lawton tosses him an MRE in a desert-tan pouch.
“Meal, Rarely Edible,” he says. “Compliments of Uncle Sam.”
Hunter tears it open with his teeth. Inside he finds a pouch of marinara sauce with meatballs, a packet of raspberry drink mix, a bag of cookies dotted with pan-coated chocolate discs—generic M&Ms.
“Yum, yum, yum.”
Lawton pulls his smartphone from a clear plastic dry bag.
“Best try it before you pop a woody.” He holds the phone aloft like some instrument from the days of sail. Hunter tears the white plastic spork from its cellophane wrapper.
“You got any signal out here?”
Lawton doesn’t answer. He has his own MRE hanging from his teeth now, his thumbs tapping away at the phone. The device looks tiny in his overlarge hands, out of place.
“Weren’t you seeing some Air Force girl last Easter?” asks Hunter. “Chopper pilot?”
“Helo.”
“What?”
“Helo. We don’t call ’em choppers.”
“That’s funny, Lawton. I don’t remember giving a fuck.”
Lawton grins.
“I’m just checking in. Work stuff.”
Hunter tears open the pouch of meatballs and sauce. It looks like someone threw up a nice Italian meal in an airsickness bag. He sporks the red gruel and shakes the raspberry drink mix in his water bottle, a milky pink foam. Soon his belly is full, his head dreamy with influx. Sugar and sodium, fat and protein and electrolytes. He burps. He holds the bowline of his boat and kneels, letting the river swim over his shoulders, whispering its power. He’s been in so long he’s numbing to the cold.
Lawton has put away his phone. He stands waist-deep in the river, shoveling his rations into his mouth. His beard has dried into its old wild form, fire-orange, and the muscles of his temples and cheeks pulse darkly as he chews. His freckle-dusted body is trembling slightly, his nipples dark as stone. Beneath him the river looks almost burnished, a brassy hue. It breaks at his waist, curling downriver in long snakes and folds. Hunter lies back, letting the river lift him, shoulder his weight. He closes his eyes. His limbs feel lengthened, drawn out in the current’s will. His blood swims with the tide. The sun rises, high as a god, as it has again and again through a thousand histories, and for a moment he is legion, inseparable from all those who lift their faces at noon, who have and who will. So many believe a kingdom will come that makes light of every day, gold of every hour. A world of future myth, tinted gold, in which the rivers will be stilled, and nothing will be lost, and no secrets will lurk in the bottoms. But the kingdom is here, he knows. Now. Ten thousand fortresses risen and dashed, and the rains fall yet in the mountains, and the river moves.
The day goes sudden dark, like a hood coming down, and he opens his eyes. The river is black, the sun lost behind a gray whale of cloud. Lawton looks small and far away, his body shockingly white, as if the blood runs cold beneath his skin. He is talking but Hunter cannot hear him, the voice heavy and muffled. He lifts his ears from the water.
“What?”
“You awake?”
“I’m talking, aren’t I?”
“You could of been dreaming.”
“So what if I was?”
“You eat a good solid meal?”
“Enough. Why?”
“Good,” says Lawton. He turns and starts readying his boat.
By noon a cloudbank, heavy and dark, is crowding the western horizon, and they are under way. A cold wind rises behind them, riffling the surface, a shiver across the river’s back.
57
Fort Caroline, September 1565
&nb
sp; The shadows are long, the day ending, when shouts rise along the ramparts. Six vessels of unknown origin, sighted off the coast. They are sailing right for Ribault’s resupply ships, now anchored at the river’s mouth. Le Moyne, newly free of his crutch, hobbles toward his bluff above the fort. Others are already gathered, breathless as they watch. Some have shimmied into the trees. All look across the delta, the vast expanse of brown marsh where the tide flows in and out. The alien fleet drops anchor across from the resupply ships. Le Moyne and his companions can hear the bleat of trumpets, the vessels hailing one another over the water.
“Les Anglais?” says someone.
“Let us hope.”
Below them the fort is still, all work ceased as men stand poised on high vantages, stretching to see. The shadows lengthen, lancing toward the scene at the river mouth. It has been hardly a week since Ribault arrived to take command, but the days have been long and full, new colonists and old working side by side to rebuild the earthworks and palisades. Foodstuffs have been brought ashore from Ribault’s ships, the bakery chimney emitting a constant chuff of smoke. The world seemingly returned to form, as if destiny shines newly upon their work.
The two lines of ships hover in opposition, motionless, like pieces upon a chessboard. Perhaps they await some cue, an opening dictated from a throne across the ocean. These chessmen of kings. Without warning the foreign ships erupt, their sides flashing in unison, long shoots of flame leaping from their guns. The hull timbers of the French ships splinter and quake, receiving the blow, and the sound of cannon fire comes rolling inland, tumbling over the river and marsh and slamming into the men on the bluff.
