Fallen Land: A Novel

by Taylor Brown

“Well, why didn’t you tell me to bury the Colonel and all them back at the house?”

  “Him? I wanted that son of a bitch to get his fill of eternal bellyaching. Rest of them, too. Let them moan. I won’t be there to hear it.”

  Callum looked back at her like he would a two-headed woman.

  “Girl, I’m starting to think you might be crazy.”

  She shrugged. “Big talk from you, stealing the Colonel’s horse.”

  “That wasn’t crazy. I needed the fastest horse, so I took it.”

  “Well—”

  The underbrush crackled loudly of a sudden, followed by the high-pitched scream of something not human. Before Callum could even draw the pistol, a sleek shape bounded into the middle of their path, two almond eyes with slit-shaped pupils. Its white fangs caged a small animal, nearly limp, just the tiny paws clawing at the air. The horse shuddered and wrenched its head away, turning broadside to the big cat. Callum yanked at the pistol; it caught in the saddle holster. Behind him Ava rose out of her seat, shooting both arms over her head, outward, her fingers curled clawlike, her black hair haloing her head, and she shrieked at the creature. A shriek high and angry and full of blood, like the reputed shriek of the banshee.

  The cat sank low to the ground and shot away into the woods, making only two or three diminishing sounds, like it flew downhill on great flying strides and hardly touched down its paws.

  Callum got his pistol free and pointed it this way and that toward where the cat had disappeared. After a moment he lowered it and half-turned on the saddle to look at Ava. He was wide-eyed and slack-jawed when he did, like he was looking at a creature of some unplumbable species. The quilt made her seem huge and yoke-shouldered, and her blazing eyes and smooth face, ovate and hard-boned, struck him silent.

  “Showed that son of a bitch,” she said, half-smiling.

  Callum nodded slowly, his mouth still agape, and turned back to the trail.

  “Reckon you did,” he said, his mouth dry, his chest thundering.

  He decocked the Walker and slipped it back into the pommel holster, making sure the leather thong wouldn’t catch again.

  They rode on until a midnight fog crept into the valleys below them. It rose and rose, like a coming flood, until it seeped silver-backed and ghostlike through the woods, the canted trees on every side. Callum prayed for a place to leave the trail and make a fire. They needed light, warmth. An ally in the dark.

  The trail started descending, and the big shoulders of the horse rippled and bulged, the trail steep at times. They happened across a muddy wash where a stream crossed the trail, black-mired, and the horse stepped lightly, unhappy, his hooves disappearing to the fetlocks in muck. He snorted his discontent in dual streams from his huge nostrils, and Callum just coaxed him forward, whispering words of strength in a sweet voice he rarely used. The horse only shook his head and snorted more, as if to say he was the wrong creature for that language. They got through, black mud glistening on the horse’s black legs, and then a shack appeared on the side of the trail. It was dark-windowed, the porch warped and slanted, the stone-masoned chimney crumbling into the yard.

  Callum did not like how close to the trail the shack was. He gave the reins a slight slap to keep them going. The horse eyed the house and snorted.

  “You ain’t gonna stop?” asked Ava.

  “I don’t like it,” said Callum.

  “Me, neither,” said Ava, “but I ain’t seen a better idea in the last two hours. You?”

  “That chimney’s no good for a fire.”

  “Then we won’t have one.”

  Callum looked up the trail, down. Nothing. He hadn’t heard anything suspicious in hours, not since the big mountain cat. He was tired. His eyes were wide open, alert, but his head and arms felt full of lead.

  He rode them off the trail, toward the shack. He was almost in front of it before he realized there could be men in there, asleep already, or not sleeping. Waiting. He halted the horse and stepped down from the saddle, silent. He pulled the rifle from its scabbard and handed it to Ava. She nodded and shouldered the weapon.

  He had the pistol out. He walked toward the front door, which was half-agape to a darkness deeper than the surrounding night. He went silent-footed—his talent. He got just to the door and leaned his back against the wall to one side. He had a two-handed grip on the pistol, its inordinate heft hanging pendulumlike between his knees as he listened for breath inside the cabin, or the click and lock of a hammer. Nothing. He looked at Ava. She had one eye squinted, the other lined down the rifle’s barrel. The horse stood motionless as a sculpture of black stone, no movement save the steady spume of his breath.

  Callum turned and kicked his boot through the door, leveling the big pistol into darkness. He hurdled forward, tripping over something, maybe a chair, and crashed onto a wood-framed bed, a straw mattress. Empty. He whirled and reeled forward again, probing the barrel into the black. His foot clanged a metal bucket across the floor, and his opposite knee struck a table or desk. He swung the pistol this way, that way. Nothing. He lowered the gun and stood there, silent, the long barrel of the weapon hanging down past his knee. He turned and saw behind him the lighter dark of the front door, and he walked back outside.

  “Empty,” he said.

  Ava lowered the rifle.

  “Goddamn,” she said.

  She got off the horse and led him to the front of the house.

  “We can’t just tie him up out here. Anybody comes along this trail will see him, know we’re here.”

  “Let’s tie him up behind.”

  But the ground rose steeply behind the shack, little place for the horse to stand.

  “Inside?” asked Ava.

  They got the big horse through the door and stood him inside. He was not afraid, as if accustomed to being quartered inside. Callum looped his reins over a bedpost.

  The air in the cabin was thick and heavy, full of mold, but they were too tired to care. The floor was covered with an assortment of untold items, mostly broken or crushed. Ava collapsed onto the bed, enveloped in her quilt. Callum stood by himself in the middle of the one room, turning slowly, shards of glass crackling underfoot.

  “All right,” said Ava. “You can sleep in the bed with me, but no foolishness.”

  “Don’t kid yourself,” said Callum, collapsing next to her on the bed.

  His heart beat at the prospect, but he didn’t care. He was too tired, too cold. Exhaustion swaddled him like a bed quilt. Within minutes he was drifting, and drifting turned quickly to falling, as if the bed itself had fallen right through the floor. It seemed that way for minutes, hours, and then the falling stopped. He opened his eyes to stillness, shut-throated by noose, no horse underneath him, and he saw them coming for him, the men he’d killed or helped to kill. The ones he’d been unable to save. The unburied. They were shot or slashed or burned. Gutted or drowned. They were after him. He found the pistol in his hand, the Walker, butt-first like before. He tried to whip it around like his trick of old. It didn’t work, not this time. The pistol dropped at his feet. The dead men were close, leering, hungry for still-warm blood. He tried to scream but couldn’t, his voice caught dead in the noose.

  He convulsed awake from the dream and found himself entangled with the nearest body, clinging, and then she moved against him, coming awake in the quilt they shared. Her body was warm, as he’d imagined it would be, and so smooth, and before long she moved over him, belly to belly, grooving him, her place slick with heat, and he could remember nothing save the hot dream of himself expulsed into darkness.

  Afterward she told him not to get used to nothing and rolled to her side. He watched his breath cloud over him like some kind of ghost, his mind blank, and then he slept.

  * * *

  The riders thundered down out of the hills after dark, riding toward the stone farmhouse where eager-tongued townspeople had told them the man they sought might be headed. Word of such a man spread quickly upon the valley tongue, and h
ad spread to them.

  The riders fanned out into a ragged phalanx as they crossed the pastureland before the house. They half-surrounded the two-story structure of limestone just as an open wagon pulled by big draft horses came to a halt before the front steps, the animals’ shoulders rippling and twitching with inaction. A white man drove the wagon and another emerged onto the porch, both of them with uncut beards shaved only at the upper lip.

  “Got them Lincoln beards on ’em,” said one of the riders.

  “Quakers,” said another. He spat in the grass.

  In the bed of the wagon lay a hexagonal pinewood box.

  The bearded men looked at the riders, their eyes unshaken.

  “May we help you?” asked the one on the porch. He had a steaming mug of something held both-handed against his chest. His gold wedding band tapped the porcelain three even times, loud. Behind him, the yellow-lit windows of the house began to wink out one after another.

  The men looked at Swinney. His manner was softest and kindest, likeliest to elicit cooperation from the populace before resorting to fiercer means. Swinney rode forward a step, his carriage slumped, his breath ragged and audible.

  “We’re looking for the slave hunter.”

  The man on the porch lifted the cup two-handed to his mouth and took a sip.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but I believe you men have come to the wrong place. We have no slave hunters here.”

  Swinney nodded, satisfied, and began to back up his horse, but another of the riders rode forward. “What you got in the box?”

  The man on the porch rotated the mug in his hand, his eyes alight and unquivering.

  “The body of my aged mother come home to lay aground.”

  “Well, God rest her,” said the rider, smirking.

  Swinney held up his hand to quiet him, then turned toward the other riders. “Obvious we come to the wrong place—”

  Just then a horseman debouched from the trees, riding hard upon the wheel-tracked road the wagon had taken. He was tall upon a gray horse and hatless, only one hand upon the reins despite his speed.

  “That’s him,” said one of the men, a Georgia slaveholder who’d had dealings with him in the past.

  The Quaker men stood stone-faced, watching the rider come. When he arrived before them, they stood between him and the coffin, unarmed and unmoving, gazing into his sunken eyes. Looking for the inward light, perhaps. No sign of any affinity whatsoever crossed the divide between them. No words. Neither they nor the rider paid any mind to the men sitting their horses around them, as if they were entranced.

  When the slave hunter finally announced himself, his name, the pine box began to thump and jolt, the dead come awake, the coffin lid hammered at from the inside. The slave hunter watched, no surprise on his wasted face.

  “You are required by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 to hand him over to me,” he said. He nodded at the box.

  The Quaker stiffened. “That Bloodhound Law no longer applies.” He paused a long moment. Inhaled. “Not since the Emancipation.”

  A smile twisted the slave hunter’s face. “Tell you what,” he said. He leaned forward, his one arm resting on the saddle horn. “You hand him over, I might forget your cellar. Might forget to bar the door and torch the rest them runaways you got hiding in there.”

  The Quaker on the steps looked a long moment down into his coffee mug, silent. Finally he nodded.

  The pine box began to quake again, a scream reeling out of its hollows: “Lemme out! Please Lawd! Cut my throat fore that Clay-Born take me!”

  The riders turned and smiled at one another, at what great fortune had befallen them.

  Here was just the man they needed.

  The slave hunter. The profiteer. The Colonel’s brother.

  Chapter 4

  Callum awoke without opening his eyes. He listened. Just the sound of breath: his, hers, the horse’s. He was back-to-back with Ava, curled up like that baby in the jar, knees to chest and cold. He opened one eye first. Pinpricks of light shone through the rough-sawn planking of the cabin. They were small lights of uniform caliber, violently constellated, a whole galaxy of them. He had not seen them the night previous.

  He turned onto his back and sat up. Ava stirred, did the same. Narrow shoots of light crisscrossed the cabin interior on remnant trajectories. They looked down at themselves, then at each other. Callum looked past Ava to his shadow on the far wall. He shifted to one side and saw a shadow haunt where his had been, this one dark-painted upon the wall as if by a frenzied painter’s brush.

  Blood.

  He crept across the bed, past Ava, toward the dark marking. There was a single glowing hole in the center. Slowly he looked over the edge of the bed frame and saw what he feared he would: Slumped on the floor below the patch of blood on the wall was the remainder of a man, dark-boned and slack-jawed, as though in final awe of the spirit that had evacuated him. He sat in a black pool of stain. He enjoyed no gloves nor boots, and Callum wondered if those items had been what got him killed. He still had his coat, a gray one that housed his rotting ribcage. Callum figured no one had stolen it for all the holes.

  Ava looked over his shoulder at the thing and gripped his upper arm in both hands.

  “I slept next to him,” she said. “Jesus God, I slept next to him.”

  Callum looked at the horse. He was awake, regarding the body with his huge black eyes, no white in them, no concern. He flicked his tail and looked at Callum.

  “Let’s get on,” said Callum. He got off the bed and stuffed the pistol into the front of his trousers and buttoned his coat and led the horse out the front door. Ava followed quickly behind him, glancing back at the body against the wall.

  Callum had not unsaddled the horse the previous night, but the horse had not complained. The light in the east was pale through the trees that wickered the ridge, little color as yet. He got the small bag of feed and draped it over the horse’s neck. He and Ava took turns drinking from a beef bladder of stream water, and it went down cold in the cold morning light. The dirt at their feet was gray, the rocks on the trail black.

  “How ’bout some breakfast?” asked Callum.

  “Ain’t hungry,” said Ava.

  “I wasn’t asking if it was just you that was hungry.” He paused a long moment and looked at his boots. “You seen dead men before?”

  “I never slept next to one.”

  “Well—”

  “Well, that man in there was sitting there staring at us all night, and I didn’t even know it.”

  “I reckon he was looking a lot farther off than that.”

  “It ain’t funny, Callum. Not to me.”

  Callum moved so he could see him in there, hollow-skulled, the goo of self dried up long ago. His vacant gaze had watched them move, sleep. He looked at Ava.

  “You wanna bury him, don’t you?”

  She nodded.

  He scratched his chest as if he had hair there to itch him.

  “All right. I’ll try and drag him out. Why don’t you look for somewhere to dig the grave and something to dig it with.”

  She nodded.

  Callum went back into the cabin and stood over the man. His bones had not gone bleach-white like those of old animal carcasses he’d seen, not yet. Dark strips and patches of tissue gummed the underpinnings like a rotten effigy. The hands and feet were webbed by old flesh or sinew, the flesh gradually disintegrating from the pale dome of the cranium, the skull itself rising openmouthed through the dead tissue that bound it. The teeth were yellow and complete save a gap where a musket ball had struck him in the mouth. Closer, he saw bone fragments stuck to the wall.

  He took a breath and gripped the lapels of the gray coat and hauled the body across the floor, toward the door. It was lighter than he’d expected, and he was dragging well until one foot hooked a bedpost and the whole leg came loose at the hip.

  “Shit.”

  He kept hauling, the head silly-necked and lolling like a drunkard’s. The bo
dy started to come apart limb by limb, the connective tissue hardly more than dust, only the coat and trousers keeping them together. By the time he got him out the door he had little more than a woolen uniform of bones. Then the head caught a rock and cracked loose and rolled a couple of feet away. Callum looked around for Ava and didn’t see her. The head stopped face-first against a large stone. It had a big hole blasted in the rear where the musket ball had exited. Callum turned the skull toward him with his boot and stared down into the black barrels of the eye sockets.

  “You better not haunt my ass after all this.”

  “Callum.”

  He straightened.

  Ava had the blade of a shovel she’d found, no handle, and she slapped it in the palm of one hand.

  “What are you doing to that body?”

  “Nothing. He’s coming apart on me.”

  “There’s a trail out back. Goes to a small plot of pasture.”

  “I don’t think he’s gonna make it that far,” said Callum, rolling the skull back toward the rest of the body with his foot.

  “Then wrap him up in your coat.”

  Callum stiffened and pulled his coat closer around himself.

  “Don’t sound sanitary.”

  “It’ll be fine,” said Ava. “He’s all dried out.”

  “But you sewn me this coat.”

  “And now I’m asking you to put it to good use.”

  Callum snorted through his runny nose. Then he turned his head and pinched the bridge of his nose and blew a thick tail of snot onto the trail.

  “Careful your brains don’t go missing,” said Ava.

  “Nobody asked you.”

  Callum unbuttoned the coat and laid it out flat on the ground and piled in the slack-limbed carcass at odd angles of the joints and wrapped it all up like a picnic. Then he stuck his pistol through his belt and followed Ava up a steep trail behind the cabin, slipping on wet rocks, cussing under his breath. They came out into an old pasture just big enough to graze a few animals. Ava got on her bald knees and started digging two-handed with the naked shovel blade, as if it were a trowel. She dug and dug. Black-handed, dark-browed. Before long she’d carved a black scar of soil in the grass.