“Why, what’s the matter, Gilly?” Littleton asked with deep sarcasm. “Are you feeling some pain? Let me tell you about pain, partner. Pain is having your leg shattered and crushed up until there ain’t much left but a kind of meat pudding or bloody mush, and having it stuck down in a pinching rock hole with your own weight pushing down on it. But you can’t pull out because if you tried it would hurt even worse. That’s pain.”
“I’m mighty sorry that happened to you, Jeremiah. I am.”
“I bet you are. ’Cause you know how a man like me is prone to deal with such things. I’m an eye-for-an-eye kind of fellow. Hurt me and I hurt you.”
Gilly began to cry, and instinctively pulled away on the cot to increase the distance between him and Littleton.
Littleton glared at him bitterly. “You know what also hurts, Gilly? Taking your own knife and carving your own flesh away, cutting off the pulp that used to be your leg, just so you can maybe get free if somebody helps you. But all the time you’re figuring that there ain’t nobody going to come, and you’re going to just be where you are until you die. That’s pain. That’s more than one kind of pain, all put together.”
“I heard you were walking on a peg now. I hope it works good for you.”
“You’re just full of kind wishes, ain’t you, Gilly! Just as kindhearted a soul as a man could hope to meet. Yeah, my peg works good. I hobble along as well as anybody could, I reckon. But it ain’t a real leg, and I know that every time I bear down on it and feel the squeeze and pinch on the stump where a leg is supposed to be. And that makes me think of you, every time it happens. Ain’t it nice, knowing there’s somebody been thinking of you every time he takes a step, Gilly?”
“Jeremiah, please . . . please . . .” Gilly looked longingly at the open cell door.
Littleton laughed. “You want to leave, Gilly? Then leave! Get up and walk out. Oh, wait. I forgot. You got a busted ankle, right? Can’t walk at all.”
Gilly wailed childishly.
“Get out of that bed, Gilly. Get out and lie down on this good puncheon floor. On your back, please.”
“I—I can’t get out of bed. My ankle. It would hurt too bad.”
“I’ll help you.” Littleton grabbed Gilly’s arm and dragged him off the cot. He hit the floor hard, and screamed terribly in pain as his ankle struck the puncheons. The sound was intense in the little room, but the thick log walls guaranteed that no one who might be outside at this late hour of the night could hear anything.
Gilly’s screams faded to moans, and his lip quivered like a dead-of-winter shiver.
“Time for settling up, Gilly. And I know just how I’m going to do it. Had it planned for a little while now. My wooden peg leg broke on me, see. Fractured right in two, though the two parts didn’t come full apart. That’s why I have that iron band around it. Holds them back in place just like it ain’t even broke. But that band can be slipped off.” Littleton bent and worked at the band, which soon loosened and slid down to the floor. He stepped out of it, letting part of the broken peg leg tilt away to reveal the sharpened splinter tip of the other portion.
“Littleton, what are you thinking of doing?” Gilly asked pleadingly. “Jeremiah, please . . . please . . .” Littleton grinned at him again, cruel-eyed.
“Just going to show you how I can walk on my peg leg,” he said.
“Please, Littleton. Have some mercy!”
“Let me stand for a minute and think on that,” Littleton said matter-of-factly. Then, unhesitating, he lifted the peg leg, aimed the point of the broken piece at the center of Gilly’s chest, and stepped forward.
Gilly did not scream this time. There was not time. His life ended too quickly.
Littleton stood there a full minute, the sharp point of the peg leg piercing all the way through Gilly’s chest to touch the floor below. At last Littleton pulled it free of the corpse, pushed the halves of the peg together, and set about to working the iron band back into place around the splintered pieces.
“No, Gilly,” he said to the man who was beyond all hearing now. “No mercy.”
With the peg leg put together again, he studied by candlelight the copious amount of blood staining it. Someone would be sure to notice if it remained that way. But it was dark and the street would be empty at this hour. He could make it back to the inn without anyone detecting the bloodstains. Then, in his room, he could whittle away the stained wood and burn the shavings in his fireplace.
He didn’t do it, however. As he considered the inevitability of the discovery of Gilly’s death come morning, and the fact that it would immediately be detected that Gilly had been murdered, he realized he needed to be gone. He went to the stable where his stolen horse was, saddled it, and sneaked it out. Within minutes he was riding out of Jonesborough, heading in the direction of the Doe River country, where the surrounding terrain was rugged and mountainous and a man could find a hundred places to hide.
He pondered the fact that he was abandoning the preacher Bledsoe, who would be furious that yet another “angel-rescued” human display had left him in the lurch. The hell with him, Littleton thought. Bledsoe was nothing but a fraud and deserved any hard times he found.
Littleton was a murderer now. And murderers had to flee. It went with the status.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
James Corey awakened from a deep and very restful slumber, and had no immediate notion where he was. He lifted his head from the feather pillow, then sat up and looked around the cabin. Only when he looked out the window to his right, a window built into the rear wall of the one-room cabin, did he see the woman and feel the murk of alcohol-enhanced sleep lift sufficiently to let him remember.
He’d met her on the road while he was traveling with the preacher and the one-legged man. They had not seen her, hidden as she was in roadside brush, but he had, and had caught her signal to leave her presence unrevealed. He had subtly signaled back, hoping she could rightly interpret his silent instruction to stay where she was; then he’d ridden on nearly a mile with his companions until they had drawn near enough to their destination of Jonesborough to see the first cabins on the far outskirts of the settlement. Then, making the excuse of having dropped his knife somewhere along the last mile or two, he’d parted from his traveling companions and gone back.
She was still there, as he had hoped. And also as he had hoped, he soon learned that she was exactly what he’d thought she would be: a “woman of easy virtue.” He’d known so many women like this one that he could usually tell the breed with little more than a glance. This one he found more appealing than most he’d encountered through life: She was raven-haired and well proportioned and possessed a starkly beautiful pale-skinned face that contrasted intriguingly with the black of her hair. He learned from her that she had been sleeping in the brush along the trail when he spotted her. The noise of the first two travelers passing had awakened her and she had sat up in time to see Corey, and for him, alone of the three, to see her in turn.
Her name was Sadie Cleaver, and she was a woman of road and trail. Much like Ott Dixon plying his liquor trade from settlement to settlement, she moved through the countryside selling the only thing she had to offer: her “favors,” as people tended to so delicately put it. And though she was often lonely and felt of little worth in the world, she was happy at least to be unencumbered and to make her home wherever she happened to be. She was sure she knew the backcountry as well as any scout or hunter, or even Indian. She doubted there was a single hunter’s shed or unused cabin or dry cave she did not know the location of, and had not occupied at one time or another, sometimes alone, sometimes with paying male company.
Sadie had led Corey to the cabin in which he had just awakened and had entered the place so casually he was sure it must be her own. There were signs the place had been occupied and used recently.
She had left Corey sleeping in the cabin and gone to a nearby creek for a wash, but when she returned he was awake and waiting for her. “I’m going to go
on to Jonesborough this morning,” he announced. “The ones I was traveling with are probably wondering what became of me. When I left them I told them I was going back to look for a dropped knife.”
“I hope what you found was better than just a knife.” She smiled coyly at him. She secretly loathed the men she consorted with, and despised their very looks and touch, but she was a woman of business. Teasing and flirting with good-paying customers such as James Corey were simply part of what had to be done.
Corey laughed. “Oh, much better, much! And if I didn’t feel the press of time on me, I might be ready for another round of ‘knife hunting.’ ”
“I’m going nowhere. If you can put off leaving for a little while, and if you’ve got another coin or two tucked away somewhere, we can . . .”
Corey didn’t reply directly. He waved a hand at the cabin. “Is this yours?”
“Oh no, no. Just one of the places I’m allowed to stay when I need to. This is a Crale cabin.”
“Crale cabin?”
“One of Tom Crale’s lodgings, in fact.”
“Am I supposed to know Tom Crale?”
“No. Few folks know the Crales, or even know of them. The Crales keep it that way. Most of them don’t even use the Crale name, just to keep themselves that much more hidden. They ain’t a usual kind of family. Tom’s the most different of all of them, the most secret. He uses the Crale name, but it don’t matter in his case because he’s almost never met or seen by anyone.”
“Is he one of your paying customers?”
“Oh no. No!” She paused and shuddered like a cold wind had hit her. “The very thought of—No! I wouldn’t be able to bear touching him, much as I ’preciate him.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“The Crale lump.”
“The what?”
“The Crale lump. There’s been several Crale men to have that over the years. At least one or two Crales with such a lump are alive at any given time, as a general rule. It grows out of the forehead and goes down over one eye, usually. Tom’s is that way. His grandfather had the Crale lump, too, but it didn’t cover his eye.”
“What a family! How did they come to be like they are?”
“I think they kept too much amongst themselves. In ways they shouldn’t have, if you follow me. That’s one of the reasons they use other family names besides Crale. It helps them disguise that they’re marrying among their own kin.”
“Oh.” He looked at the cabin again. “Why does this Tom Crale let you stay here, if you give him no favors?”
She looked Corey square in the eye. “Because Tom Crale may be the single kindest, tenderest man I’ve ever known. You know how I met him?”
“How could I know?”
“I ran into him way over by the Nolichucky River. He was returning baby birds to a nest. They’d fallen out in a storm, and he found them, and took time to use the one working eye he has to find their nest. How many men do you know who would do that? Tom Crale is a good man. A truly good man.”
Corey had known a few truly good men in his day. He didn’t like them because they were so different than he.
“Why isn’t Tom Crale here now?”
“He has places he stays all over the over-mountain country. Mostly with other Crales, but he’s also got cabins like this one, and old hunter stations, even a couple of big hollow trees he’s been known to curl up inside of to sleep. Little secret refuges. He goes wherever he can be that people ain’t likely to see him. That’s why so few know of him. He lives in secret, and listens, and watches. Everything. He watches cabins being built, settlements going up, fields being broken. He watches the Indians along with the whites. Some of them know him; they respect him as having a special place on the land. They believe his face, the way it is, comes from being touched by God and made special. They don’t hurt him and he doesn’t hurt them. But whatever he does, wherever he is, he hides. He might as well be a spirit, the way he can hide himself.”
Corey thought about that. “He hides because of his . . .”
“Because of his ugliness. The Crale lump. He spends his life mostly apart so folks won’t make sport of him or be afraid of him. Children cry to see him, and it torments him. He loves children, loves birds, animals, hates even to hunt, though like anybody he does hunt to stay alive. He’s like the Indians in thanking the prey he kills for having given up their lives to help him keep his.”
“How do you know so much about him?”
“I’ve spent hours talking to him on those rare times I’m able to find him. He’s one of the few men I’ve known who is happy just to talk to me. He doesn’t judge, or condemn; he’s just kind. And he listens. He’s one of my few real friends.”
“But even somebody like you, who thinks the world of him, can’t even consider touching him.”
“It’s true. And sad.”
“All I can say is better him than me. I’m too fond of the female touch to even think what it would be like if every woman ran from me. Hey, all the Crales don’t have that same kind of growth on them, I take it?”
“Most look just like anybody else. Though there’s been a lot of them sickly in various kinds of ways because of kin marrying kin.”
“Kind of a sorrowful tale,” Corey said. Though in fact he cared not at all. Empathy was not part of his nature.
Sadie paused. “Come here,” she said. “I want to show you something.”
“Well!” Corey declared with a nasty smile. “I like the sound of that!”
“That’s not what I’m talking about. Nothing like that at all. This has to do with Tom.”
“Well . . . ain’t that wonderful!”
She led Corey across a small meadow to the base of a hillside pockmarked with great limestone outcroppings. The entrances to narrow caverns and tunnels, most of them mere cracks in the rock big enough to accommodate a small animal but certainly not a human, covered the face of the rumpled stone bluff. But when Sadie led Corey around a large, slablike boulder embedded in scree at the base of the escarpment, he saw a larger cavern entrance, wider than a cabin door and big enough for a man to enter without having to stoop very deeply to do it. Sadie led Corey to that entrance, then paused to look at the angle of the morning sun. She nodded happily. “Good,” she said. “We’ve come at the right time. For a little while in the morning, there is enough sunlight spilling onto this cave door to maybe let you see what I want to show you. I hope so, anyway.” She ducked inside.
“You’ve got me puzzled, woman.”
“Come on in.”
At first Corey thought what he was seeing was the product of some earlier people who had roamed this land, some native tribe who had left their marks in colored images on stone. He’d seen a painted cliff like that once in one of the more rugged mountain areas of North Carolina.
A closer look at this particular bit of artwork on the stone, though, showed it to be the product of a much more recent hand. For one thing, the art, apparently produced mostly in the media of colored clays, coal, crushed berries, and chalky stones, depicted cabins and wagons and men bearing long rifles.
“Tom Crale drew these?” he asked Sadie.
“He did. He’s quite an artist.”
“I reckon so.”
There was more farther back in the cave, where the wall was smoother, but the light was mostly lost and Corey could not clearly see what Sadie pointed out to him. All he could tell was that it was seemingly the image of a face. Farther back yet, there was something else painted, but Corey could not make out at all what it depicted.
“We need light,” he said. “I’ve got my fire makings.”
He exited the cave, gathered what he needed, and with his flint and steel and punk got a small fire blazing. Lighting a little bundle of sticks and shielding the flame with his cupped hand, he reentered the cave and illuminated the image of the first face on the wall.
“So that’s him?” he asked Sadie. He was looking at a quite well-rendered image of a deformed face, o
ne side of the brow expanded and drooping like melted wax, lolling out and over, completely hiding one eye. Though it was merely an image, Corey found himself reflexively pulling back from it, moving his little torch away so darkness could mask the unpleasant visage again.
“Good God! Is it really that bad for him? Is he really that . . . ill made?”
She nodded sadly. “He is.”
“Why would a man take time to paint a picture of his own face on the wall of a cave? Especially if he is so ashamed of it that he hides it from the world?”
“Bring your light down a little farther.”
The fire played on the next image, the one that could not be made out at all before. Corey studied it by the flickering little torch flame, and when he glanced around at Sadie, he saw that her face was tearstained.
The image on the wall was another face, yet also the same one. It was Tom Crale as he would have been with no deformity. The man had drawn an image of himself, from his imagination, as he would have liked to be.
“I’ll be,” Corey muttered.
“He showed it to me himself,” Sadie said. “It made me cry to see it, and he couldn’t understand. He asked me why I was crying to see his face when it was beautiful.” She tried to say something further to Corey, but her voice choked and she could speak no more.
He studied the face on the wall. “I’ll be,” he said again.
Sadie spoke. “Tom has drawn pictures in hidden places like this all over the mountain country. This is the only place I have seen him draw his own face, though.”
“What does he draw other places?”
“Mostly the kinds of things he drew at the front of this cave. Things he has seen while watching people. Farmers digging, hunters bringing in game, Indians building their homes or traveling . . . things like that.” She paused and looked again at the rendering of Crale’s undistorted face, drawn to it. “Most people don’t know of Tom by name, or that he is the one who makes these images. Most just attribute them to the ‘cavern man.’ But I know it’s Tom, bless him. I’ve seen him doing his work.”
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