Long Hunt (9781101559208)

by Judd, Cameron

  At that moment, Michael shifted position and his foot slid beneath his weight and bumped the base of the shelf. Fain came around the shelf.

  “Hello, young man,” he said.

  “Hello, sir.” Michael reddened at having been caught as an eavesdropper.

  Crawley came around as well with slow and stiff old-man movements. “Michael? I didn’t know you were there, lad. Do you know Mr. Fain?”

  “I know who he is. Everybody in town’s been talking about Edohi being here.”

  “Why are you hiding like this?”

  “I came in the back door and heard you speaking, and didn’t want to interrupt.”

  Crawley looked at Fain. “Well raised, this lad is. And his sister Maggie as well. I delight in their visits here to my smithy.”

  “A pleasure to meet you, Michael,” Fain said.

  Crawley brought his visitors back around to the front of the shop. Michael took his usual place in a corner, seated on a log section substituting for a stool. Crawley said, “Speaking of what you saw, it so happens that Mr. Fain and I were talking about something I have told you stories about before, Michael.”

  Michael said, “Loafhead. I heard you talking.”

  Crawley said to Fain, “The question of Loafhead’s reality has been a concern to this young man. Am I right, Michael?”

  The boy nodded abashedly.

  “Michael,” Crawley said, “I have told you of being born in the climes of Loafhead’s district . . . but I have learned that Mr. Fain here has done me one better. He lived within the very forest of Loafhead, Skellenwood. In a house built within that very huge cavern where the ogre was born and lived.”

  Michael saw in his memory the figure with the distorted brow, moving down the dark Jonesborough street bearing the body of a senseless man. Overwhelmed, he had to ask: “Sir, Mr. Fain, is he real? Is he real? Loafhead?”

  “There is more than one kind of ‘real,’ young man. The kind of ‘real’ that makes you afraid of Loafhead, the walking, living, breathing kind of real . . . he isn’t that kind of real. Not anymore.”

  “He is dead?”

  “He died years ago.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I do know. Know it absolutely. You can trust me on that, son. I promise.”

  “But he was alive once . . . He was real?”

  “There was once one who some people called Loafhead. He was no ogre, just a man. A man who knew misfortune in his time and was forced to live mostly apart from other people.”

  “Was there . . .” Michael cupped his hand over his eye and brow, imitating the deformity he had seen on the man on the midnight street. “Was there this?”

  “There was. There from his birth. He covered it almost always beneath a cloth mask worn over his head.”

  Crawley listened intently. These were things he had not heard before about the legend from his homeland.

  “Loafhead died in his cave?”

  “Not in his cave. He died here, in America. He came here aboard a ship. He lived in America for several years, and took to the woods just like he had done in his homeland.”

  Crawley was silent, absorbing lore that to him was as new as it was to the boy. Crawley had known the tales of Loafhead for years, but none of them had spoken of his death or of a journey to America. Was Fain spinning tales of his own creation, or were there parts of this legend Crawley simply had missed?

  “Mr. Fain, could there have been more than one Loafhead? Maybe another one living in America? Maybe still alive today?”

  “To my knowledge, son, there was only one who was ever called by that name. He lived; he died. He was a human. Then he was a legend. The human passed; the legend went on. Loafhead is not real, not anymore. I can tell you that, son, with great assurance.”

  PART FOUR

  CRALE

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Littleton leaned back on the bench and rested his shoulders against the wall of the newest incarnation of Ott Dixon’s traveling makeshift tavern. With a grimace of effort and some pain, he hefted his peg leg up across his knee so the drunken woman near him could see it better.

  “I never saw a real peg leg before,” she said. “I’ve seen men with crutches and walking sticks and such, but never a wooden leg. She reached out toward it, hesitated, then touched it and drew her hand back as if fearful she had violated some limit of acceptability. “Is it hard to walk on it, Mr. Kirk?”

  “Easier all the time,” Littleton said, his own voice slurred by the effects of rum. “The longer I wear it, the easier it gets. Pinches sometimes, though.”

  “How did you lose that part of your leg?”

  Littleton drew in a deep breath and put a cocky expression on his face. “Cut it off. Pulled out my knife and just sawed it right off.”

  The woman gasped and put her hand to the base of her throat. “Oh my . . . oh . . . oh my!”

  “Didn’t have much choice about it,” Littleton went on. “I was trapped down in a hole in the ground. A sorry scoundrel had pushed me into it, and my foot and the bottom part of that leg were stuck in a crack in the rock, and already shattered up and ruined. Even if I’d been able to pull free, which I couldn’t, I’d have lost the leg anyway. Somebody would have had to cut it off, or it would have mortified and rotted off. . . . Only thing I could do was cut myself free.”

  “How could you endure such pain, Mr. Kirk?”

  Littleton smiled at her. “You can call me Lyle. I can endure a lot. I’m a strong man.”

  She smiled weakly. “You must be! You must be so very, very strong!” Then a long sigh, hidden poorly.

  She asked, “Who pushed you into the hole in the ground?”

  “Man name of Gilly. Worthless piece of rubbish . . . scrawny rat of a man. Outlaw and murderer. His intention was to murder me.”

  “Men like that come to bad ends. That’s what my papa used to tell me. Bad ends.”

  Littleton wondered if her papa had ever warned her about the ends that could came to women who drank too much liquor and talked too freely to strangers. He hoped not. At the moment, he was looking for a woman without scruples, without inhibition, without morals or fear of consequences.

  Littleton said, “Gilly will find his bad end, and bad it truly will be. I already have something in mind for him, me and old peg leg here.” He rapped the wooden leg with his knuckle.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Something Gilly would never forget the rest of his life . . . though he won’t have a ‘rest of his life’ ahead of him at that point.”

  “You’ve got to tell me!”

  Littleton shrugged. “If I tell you, maybe there’s a thing or two you could do in return for me. Kind of a thank-you.” It was as subtle as Littleton was capable of being.

  Her expression rapidly transformed into one of smiling comprehension.

  “My cabin is just up the hill from here,” she said.

  Littleton chuckled, taking another swig of rum. “I don’t even know your name,” he said.

  “It’s Rachel. But it don’t matter what my name is.”

  “I think I’m going to like you, Rachel.”

  “Oh, Mr. Kirk, Lyle, I know you’re going to like me! I’m going to make sure of it!”

  “Then let me show you Gilly’s ‘bad end,’ ” Littleton said. He drew out his knife and pressed the tip of it beneath the metal band the smith had made him after the leg cracked and split at the roadside burial. The band held the split wooden leg in one piece. Littleton worked the band loose and slipped it off. Then, with the splintered section of the leg swinging off to the side almost as if on a hinge, he showed Rachel what he had in mind for Gilly, whenever he got his hands on him.

  Littleton had never had much attention from women, except those willing to exchange feminine affections for money. Thus he was surprised when it began to appear that Rachel’s willingness to be with him bore no financial motivation. She simply accepted his advances. He hardly knew what to think of it.

/>   Once the iron band was back on the peg leg so that the prosthetic would function again as a single piece, Littleton left Dixon’s with his female companion and followed her as fast as his handicap would allow as she took them up a trail through thick woods behind Dixon’s tavern. Watching her move along in front of him, he noticed an oddity in her gait, a limp that revealed that she, too, was somewhat lame. Her right leg was slightly shorter than her left, giving her a decided stutter in her stride. Suddenly, Littleton’s pride in himself for having attracted the affection of this woman lessened. Might she simply be paying attention to him because he and she were both cripples?

  The trail narrowed as it climbed and they passed through a laurel thicket that crowded in on both sides. Beyond the laurel was a clearing and in it a small cabin. Smoke poured from the chimney and Rachel came to a halt, Littleton coming panting up beside her.

  “Oh, I’d forgotten,” she said, watching the smoke curl up.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “There’s someone still here. I thought he’d be gone by now. I’d forgotten he was here at all.”

  Littleton wondered if maybe Rachel was merely a sporting woman after all. Not many women would take a man into their home overnight and then simply forget about him.

  “I reckon I should go,” Littleton said, annoyed that he’d been forced into an uphill trek, a difficult task for a man on a wooden leg, only to have it lead to nothing but having to turn around and retreat the way he’d come.

  Rachel started to speak, but stopped when the cabin door opened and a sandy-haired man stepped out. He was average in every way, from height to size to appearance. On his nondescript face was a beaming smile.

  “Good day to you, Rachel, and to you as well, sir!” He advanced at a fast clip, hand out.

  Littleton, accustomed to a life of dodging almost everyone and of mistrusting strangers, reflexively wanted to draw back from this oncoming incarnation of friendliness and good humor. He wished for half a moment that he had kept his rifle with him, as he usually did, rather than having accepted Dixon’s invitation to store the weapon with Dixon’s own guns inside the tavern. But as the man reached him, grin intact and with nothing threatening visible in his demeanor, Dixon decided there was nothing to be concerned about. He put out his own broad hand and engulfed that of the stranger, who said, “James Corey, sir. I’m pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  “Lyle Kirk,” said Littleton. “Pleased as well.”

  Corey pumped vigorously at Littleton’s hand. Littleton looked over at Rachel, thinking of what surely would have happened with her had this stranger not appeared, and wondering why all his luck seemed to inevitably turn bad.

  When Corey learned that his new companion, “Kirk,” had been traveling through the region, his interest in him intensified, and questions began.

  “I’ve been on the move myself,” Corey said. “Trying to find my wife, who has gone missing. Her name is Deborah and her hair is yellow. Her real identifying mark, though, is her left eye, which has a streak of gray—here.” Corey pulled down his lower eyelid and pointed at the bottom portion of his iris.

  Littleton stared past Corey, his mind pushed back to the day he had lost his leg and the night he spent on a pallet in the home of Crawford Fain at Fort Edohi. Corey’s words brought to mind things he had overheard Fain talking about in the darkness to the other, younger man who had been there that night.

  “There’s somebody else besides you looking for your wife,” he said. “Crawford Fain. The one they call Edohi.”

  “Edohi?” Corey frowned. “How do you know that?”

  “I heard Edohi himself talking about it to another man when I was at his fort. He’s been hired by someone to find her. I don’t know who hired him. If he said, I didn’t hear it.”

  Corey’s expression darkened. “Who would hire the famous Edohi to find my woman? And why?”

  “I don’t know, sir. I heard what I heard, and no more. But I saw a yellow-haired woman with a marked eye myself, once. At Crockett Spring on the Holston.”

  “She was well?”

  “Seemed to be, as I recall.”

  Corey was different after that, the light friendliness replaced by an intense, brooding manner. He paced incessantly and quizzed Littleton nearly to the point of rudeness in hope of figuring out more regarding why the famed woodsman Edohi would be seeking his woman.

  When Corey left Rachel’s cabin to resume his journeying, Littleton went with him. This partnering up was not planned or thoroughly talked out; it was just a natural progression of events and conversation. Littleton had lost interest in Rachel, who seemed more plain every time he glanced at her, and who was out of reach, anyway, with another man hovering about. Having a traveling companion actually become more appealing than the idea of a dalliance with a plain-faced, lame slattern.

  They retrieved their horses from Dixon’s horse pen, and Littleton’s rifle from the tavern, and took an eastward route. They went east because Corey had heard a rumor of late that Deborah might have been seen in the vicinity of the town of Jonesborough.

  They had traveled no more than two miles from Dixon’s tavern when they met a man on the trail, walking back toward them. The man carried a small jug and had it tilted up to his lips when first they saw him.

  “Thirsty gent,” said Corey as he and Littleton reined to a stop.

  Littleton was looking intently at the man on the road. The uplifted jug partially blocked his view of the face, but when at last the man lowered the jug, Littleton made a little noise of surprise.

  “What is it, Lyle?” asked Corey.

  “Do you know who that is?” Littleton asked.

  “Never seen him before that I know of.”

  “I have. Last time I saw him was at Fort Edohi. He was outside it, up on a platform, preaching to the crowd.”

  “That man’s a preacher?”

  “That man is the preacher! That’s old Camp Meeting Abner! Abner Bledsoe himself! You know of him, don’t you?”

  “Course! Everybody knows about him. Your religious folk will travel miles just to hear him jabber. But that can’t be him, not drinking like that. That wouldn’t be his way. He preaches hard against drunkenness.”

  “It’s him. No doubt about it at all. That’s Bledsoe.”

  The man on the road hadn’t noticed the two riders until he’d finished his long draw on the jug. Now he looked at them with an expression of worry and the manner of one who might turn and run at any moment. But he didn’t run, and Littleton put his horse into motion and rode slowly up to the man.

  “Good day, preacher,” he said.

  The man gave a very nervous chuckle. “Preacher? Why do you call me that, sir? I am no preacher!”

  “I know who you are, Bledsoe. I can tell it from your crossed eyes, and I’ve heard your voice before, too. Heard it while you was preaching.”

  The man’s lips moved without sound, a look of distress came onto his face, and he stepped back. The jug slipped from his fingers and struck a stone embedded in the ground at his feet. Shattering, the jug spilled its last dwindling contents into the dirt.

  “Confound and blast!” the drunken man said. “I’ve lost the rest of my . . . water.”

  Littleton wrinkled his nose. “Might be for the best, sir. From the smell of it, I think your water has had some corn get in it and go to whiskey.”

  “Whiskey! No, sir, I think not. Why would a man such as myself, a man of God, partake in whiskey?”

  “Oh, so despite what you said, you are a preacher!”

  “I am . . . I . . . I mean to say . . .” He let the thought die. Then, to Littleton’s surprise, the man’s eyes grew livid and moist. He was beginning to quietly weep.

  “Sir, it was just one small jug,” Littleton said, feeling uncharacteristically empathetic toward another person.

  Corey drew nearer, “I’ll go back and fetch you another from Dixon’s, if you want me to.”

  The older man shook his head and st
ared at the ground. “No. Best I just do without. A man in my position has no business drinking himself drunken, anyway. It’ll ruin me if word of such got out.”

  “You’re Bledsoe, ain’t you,” said Littleton, not as a question but a statement.

  Bledsoe surrendered, and dodged no more. “I am. And I’ve backslidden bad, my friends. Turned away from the right to embrace the wrong. The very kind of thing I’ve condemned in others I’ve done myself.” He paused, frowning in thought. “And for the first time, I think I understand a little better those who fall prey to such things. I have maybe been too harsh a judge in my time.”

  “Well, sir, one thing I can tell you: You’ll face no judgment from the likes of me. Nor, I suspect, from my friend Mr. Corey there. Neither of us is a stranger to sin, nor prone to wag a finger at others.”

  Bledsoe swabbed his face with the heel of his right hand. “I am grateful for such lack of condemnation, sir. You are a man of kind heart.”

  Littleton chuckled. “That’s me: one kind heart, ten good fingers, and five toes.”

  Bledsoe, noting the wooden leg, laughed at Littleton’s joke. “You are a big man, sir, to laugh so at yourself. I’m afraid I, for one, have lost much of the ability to laugh at all in the past several days.”

  “May I ask you what’s happened, Reverend?”

  Bledsoe seemed to wilt. His voice was weak and trembling as he replied, “A woman, sir. A woman.”

  “Somebody you met?”

  Bledsoe shook his head. “If you mean recently, no. She traveled with me, helped me with a portion of my meeting presentations. . . .”

  “The Reese woman.”

  “You know of her?”

  “I know she was generally part of your camp meetings. You’d tell her story and she’d sit there and loll her mouth open for folks to see where her old daddy carved out her tongue. Right?”

  “Right indeed. But she’s departed from me. Took my money and abandoned me. Just a common harlot and thief she turned out to be. Treated me easy indeed.”

  “Well, at least she couldn’t jabber at you like a lot of women do, talking your ear off.”