by Taylor Brown
“That where he got the idea to put babies in jars?”
The slap exploded inside his head. Afterward he could feel the reddened imprint of her hand on the side of his face, hot as a burn. By the time he regained his bearings, she was disappearing up the trail, taking big steps that matched her overlarge boots.
“You son of a bitch,” he told himself.
He got to his feet with his punctured leg as straight as possible, like one of those wooden-legged veterans you always saw in the small towns. He looked down at the fires a last time and was transported back to the tiny lake of fire, the hanging cat, the three men dead. The naturalist’s logic maddened him, and he didn’t want to think why.
Just then he heard her come half-skidding back down the trail, breathless.
“Callum,” she said. “Callum—”
But he was hardly listening. “I’m sorry for what I said,” he told her.
She grabbed the sleeve of his coat and tugged. “I know,” she said. “But did you hear me? There’s a light up there, a cabin.” She pointed up the trail, her eyes bright.
“Light?” said Callum, the word flickering through the dark of him.
* * *
The trail broke onto a dirt yard speckled with castoffs of a sedentary life—feathers of ill-fated birds and piles of stove ash and rinds of unknown fruits. Scatterings of game bones, molding apples the size of cherries. Amid this offal, a one-room cabin rose errantly against the sky, its walls struck wayward as if by violent wind, its foundation a four-cornered piling of incongruent stones gathered seemingly without regard to size or shape or any architectural soundness. The porch floundered. The tin roof was red-rusted. The whole structure whimsy-walled as something thrown up by some slothful forebear in a single day of work, drunk.
There was a rocking chair to one side of the door, in it a sleeping man with a stovepipe hat and a yellow-white beard that hung to his blanketed knees. He was snoring, and when he inhaled he rocked slightly backward in the chair. He held his breath so long, Ava and Callum looked at each other, thinking he might just have died in his sleep. At last he exhaled a long and corrupt sigh, his airway chittering as though something had been trapped in his throat.
Broken glass twinkled at the mouth of the yard.
Callum looked at Ava and shrugged and stepped forward.
Crunch.
The old man snapped awake, his eyes white-rounded, and like a snake striking from the blankets came a double-mouthed shotgun, sawn short for close-in work.
“Halt!” he yelled over the barrels. “I have here ten gaugies of double-aught can turn ye to Solomon’s babe.”
There was a candelabra on a table next to him with a single stunted candle burning, its peers melted already into an inch-thick pool of hardened wax on the tabletop. One of the man’s eyes squinted into a narrow slit, aiming.
“We’re just travelers,” said Callum. “We mean no harm.”
“I don’t like the sound of ye. What’s your name?”
“Callum, sir.”
“Don’t play me sympathies, boy. The Serpent was a sycophant.”
“I ain’t.”
“Maybe I ort to blast you now. Save me the trouble of finding out. I been a misreader of men in times past. I don’t like to be anothern.”
Ava took a step onto the glass.
“Who’s that?” said the old man, swinging the barrels. Callum realized his vision was poor.
“My name is Ava, sir. My friend Callum, he has a wound we’re afraid could infect. We’d be much obliged if you could help us, and then we’ll be on our way.”
The old man leaned back in his rocker and looked back again toward Callum.
“Well now. A bonny one by the sound of her, and mannered to boot.” He nodded appreciatively. “Didn’t tell me ye were so accompanied.” He looked at Ava. “Why you’re holding forth with such a ripe young’un as this, I don’t know, but I might can hep ye.”
“I ain’t ripe,” said Callum.
The old man ignored him. He leaned forward in the rocker and let down the bunny-eared hammers on the shotgun. “Name’s Lachlan,” he said. “Lachlan the Alchemist.” He waved them toward him.
As they walked toward the cabin, a neighboring contraption came into view, a bewildering plumbworks of copper tubing and oak barrels. The copper was spit-shined spotless, the joinery seamless, the geometry of tubes and valves strictly adherent to some grand design. A far cry from the cabin that housed its keeper.
“What kind of alchemy you practice?” asked Callum.
A sly look twisted the old man’s face. He laid the shotgun crosswise on his lap and leaned forward and reached under the blanket hanging between his feet. He came up with a glass jug the diameter of a tree trunk. It sloshed with a liquid clear as newly sluiced snowmelt, but which rolled heavily around the curved glass, heavier than water. The old man held the jug aloft to the moon. The fluid seemed to quiver, as if possessed by some animate spirit.
“Bottled lightning,” said the old man. “That’s the hell what.”
He unscrewed the cap and touched his broke-angled nose to the rim and snorted. He convulsed with pleasure, his eyes newly awake.
“Take ye a drop,” he said, offering them the jug.
Callum stood still, but Ava handed him the reins and stepped forward and took the offering. She cocked her head toward Callum. “Don’t mind him,” she said. “He’s a little young for such.”
“Am not,” said Callum. He looked at Ava holding the jug under her mouth.
“Best whiskey in these hills,” said the old man, nodding toward the jug. “Ask anybody ’bout the white stuff ye get from old Lachlan.”
Ava tipped the jug to her mouth for a small pull. Callum watched the milk-white contraction of her neck. She pulled the jug away and gasped, sear-tongued.
“Goddamn,” she said.
The old man nodded, happiness in his eyes.
“Y’ain’t so mannered with a bellyful of that, hey, missy?”
Ava grinned and swung the jug around until it bumped Callum’s chest.
His fingers crept slowly over the jug.
“I’ve had plenty of whiskey,” he told them.
They ignored him. He lifted the rim to his nose like the old man had done and took a big sniff. The burn slammed him like an axletree. His eyes teared up.
“Son of a bitch,” he said.
“Get ye a taste. A littlun, a course, young’un-size.”
Thusly tempted, Callum choked down a mouth-size swallow of the stuff, pure folly, and spent the next half minute coughing the fire out of his throat.
“Son of a bitch,” he said. “Son of a bitch.”
“Ain’t it, though,” said the old man, laughing. “Ain’t it.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked at Ava. “Now you say he’s got him the green rot?”
“Not yet. Afraid it won’t be long, though.”
The old man nodded. “Pour ye a dram of that lightning in it, and clean it good. It’ll kill the rot good as any doctor medicine, guarantee you that.” He sniffed. “Best clean the boy, too.” He shook his head. “Ripe.”
“You got a tub?” asked Ava.
“Out back. Fetch it round.”
By the time Callum quit coughing, Ava had a tub set before him in the yard.
“Take off your clothes,” she said.
“What—”
“Off.”
“You heard the lady,” said Lachlan. “Be gettin’ to it if I was you.”
Callum nodded and started to strip down. He went to lay his offings over the saddle, but the horse backed away. Soon he was clutching himself near naked in the yard. The night was cold and moon-shadowed, his bone and sinew adamant beneath the skin.
Ava was inside heating pot water over the woodstove. The old man sipped at the jug, watching him. Callum looked back at him.
“You sleep out here on the porch or something? It must be getting toward dawn.”
The old man studied the sky. �
��We got near on two hours before then,” he said. “Anyhow, I don’t sleep hardly a wink. Never have. Got the sleeping troubles. I lost a wife once for the awfulest snoring ye ever heard. Told me I was like to kill her. She never could get no rest.” He shrugged. “Nothing for it ’cept the whiskey. Puts me straight out. It’s real good for that.”
Callum stepped toward him. “Could I try another? For the cold?”
“Course,” said the old man, handing him the jug.
Callum took a second slug, smaller this time, nonetheless like swallowing a comet. He could already feel the stuff starting to work in his blood.
Ava came out of the cabin with a pot and poured it steaming into the sheet metal tub.
“Get in,” she said.
Callum handed back the jug and walked to the tub. He peered inside and saw an inch-deep mirror of water. He touched the metal with the toe of his foot.
“Yow,” he said. “This thing’s had ages to get cold.”
Ava put one hand on her hip. “I’m heating more water. Now just get on in there and take the dressings off.” She neglected to watch his pouting as she went back into the cabin with the pot.
Callum stood looking at the ice-cold tub, knowing what it would feel like on his back and shoulders. He heard the old man throat down another pull on the jug.
“No idea what fortune has befallen ye.”
Callum looked at him.
“What?”
“Ye got no idea.” He lowered his voice, conspiratorlike. “That girl. Bet ye be a dead boy wasn’t for her. And pretty as a song. Even I can see that.”
“I don’t know,” said Callum, looking at the blurry reflection of himself in the moonlit sheet of water, the dark and puddled being.
“Yes, ye do,” said the old man. “Now I’d get in the got-damned bath if I was you.”
Callum put his feet in first. The steaming water was now lukewarm, cooled by the metal. He sank his underclothed buttocks inside, so he was sitting there with his hands clasping his knees, minimizing how much flesh touched the tub.
Ava came back out with a second pot. She poured it in between his legs, some of it splashing his bare skin.
“Shit, girl, that’s hot.”
“Get that dressing off, why don’t you. That’s why we’re doing this.”
“That and the ripeness,” said the old man.
Callum gave him the baddest look he could. The old man just grinned at him. Ava started back inside. The old man touched her arm just before she went in the door, gentle and courteous as could be.
“Would you mind fetching a cup for the young’un, Miss Ava? He’s got the thirst on him, and I ain’t no miser.”
She nodded and went inside and reappeared promptly with a tin cup. The old man poured a good-size portion of the clear liquid into the cup. He rose from his chair, no small effort, and shuffled down the steps, across the dirt yard to the boy in the tub. He handed the cup to him.
“Nobody ever taught ye to drink whiskey, did they?”
Callum shook his head.
“Just sip it,” said the old man. “Like something precious. That’s the hardest stuff ye like to find, in these hills or out.”
Callum took the cup. The man shuffled back to his rocking chair, a little buoyancy in his step, whether from liquor or something else, Callum didn’t know. He took another sip of the liquor. Like lightning had struck in his mouth. He put the cup down on the ground beside him and slowly peeled the dressing off his thigh. The wound was a puckered mouth, red-lipped. Around it a faint halo of discoloration.
“What happened to ye leg?” asked the old man.
Callum was really starting to feel the drink course through him.
“I got stuck by a saber.”
“What for?”
“Stealing back my horse.”
The old man rolled a gnarled knot of his beard between his fingers. He squinted at the horse standing at the edge of his yard.
“That’s a might-fine piece of horseflesh.”
Callum settled himself back against the tub.
“I might of stolen him,” he said. “But for good reason.”
The old man cocked his head toward the door of the cabin.
“For her?”
Callum nodded.
Lachlan smiled. “I reckon God’ll pity ye then, same’s Adam.”
Callum looked at himself, his torso now taking up the bulk of the tub, his limbs splayed over the edges, so that he looked like some tentacled creature creeping out of a cave.
“I don’t know ’bout pity,” he said. He paused a long moment. “I done things worse.”
Ava came out of the cabin then with two pots trailing long traces of steam and poured them both into the tub, careful not to burn him. She went back inside the cabin, and Callum watched her disappear into the far corner where the woodstove must be. The old man set the jug on his knee and leaned forward.
“And now they’re after ye,” he said.
“What makes you think that?”
The old man tapped the jug of corn liquor with his index finger. “This here is white gold in these hills. That climb’s steep enough to skin ye nose. No man goads himself straight up like that less he’s after trouble. That or fleeing it. It’s a pretty sight up here, but nobody comes just to look.”
Callum wiped his nose with the back of his hand.
“I reckon not,” he said.
He looked out at the horizon. Pretty it was. The nearest hills jutted visibly into the sky; the farther ones diminished quickly into the night. Above them the stars. They seemed to pulse slightly. Things were going liquid on him. His jaw loosened.
“You’re right,” he said. “We got some people chasing us.” He looked at the old man. “You ain’t gonna throw us out for it, are you?”
The old man patted the shotgun leaning on the wall next to him.
“Just duck ye hear that glass a-cracklin’,” he said.
Callum nodded. “I can do that.” He cupped some water and splashed his face. All of him was getting looser, but there was power slinking through him, too. He could say most anything.
“Now we got this one-armed son of a bitch hunting us, too,” he said. “I don’t even know who.”
The old man straightened, the jug frozen halfway to his mouth.
“One arm, said ye?”
Callum nodded. “Just a one.”
The old man lowered the jug to his knee.
“How tall is he?”
“Tall,” said Callum.
“Scarce meat disguising the deader parts of him, bones and skull?”
Callum nodded. “That’s a way to put it.”
The old man took the shotgun from the wall and laid it carefully across his lap.
“I don’t know what ye done to have the man sicced on ye. Not sure I want to know.”
Callum sat upright in the tub.
“You’re talking like you know him.”
The old man nodded. “Of him. I know of him. No mistaking the description. Name’s Clayburn. That be his Christian or surname, I don’t know. Seems he ain’t got but the one.”
“Who is he?”
“Bounty hunter. Been hunting fugitives since the forties, slaves mainly. Be a rich man he didn’t have a bad habit of killing off them darkies fore he collected the bounty on ’em.”
“What happened to his arm?”
“Manassas. Good for the Yankees he got discharged so early, I reckon.”
Callum grew conscious of his own jaw, agape. “Son of a bitch,” he said. Then he narrowed his eyes, suspicious. “How’d you come to know all this?”
“Them drovers,” said the man, gesturing toward the valley. “They bring news from all over. I go to the road twice a month. Sell my stock. Ye didn’t think I brewed all this whiskey just for my own thirst?”
“Son of a bitch,” said Callum.
“He is that.”
The old man held the jug hovering in limbo between his mouth and lap, his bad eyes glazed dista
ntly in the candlelight.
Callum ground the heels of his hands against his forehead. “I had a awful feeling about that hollow-eyed son of a bitch,” he said. “If you just want us to get on—”
Just then Ava came out with a pot and a foamy rag, headed for the tub. Callum straightened.
“What’re the menfolk talking about out here?” she asked, her spirits high. “Nothing scrofulous, I’m sure.”
Callum looked at old Lachlan, Lachlan at him.
“Course not, Miss Ava. Nary a cuss fouled these tongues, not gentlefolks like us.”
“Uh-huh,” she said.
The old man nodded toward Callum. “Ye got ye a real good boy here, I learnt me that. Look after him good, he’ll do ye likewise.” He swallowed on a dry mouth. Gathered into himself. “It’s a evil moment in the world, this war. Evilest I seen, or will. Sticking together is about all there is left, I reckon.” He lifted the jug right to his lips. “That and good whiskey, a-course.” He took a long pull on the liquor, longest of the night.
Ava allowed a one-cornered smile on her mouth. She dumped the last pot of hot water into the tub, and then she took the rag into her right hand and went to work cleaning Callum’s wound.
Callum reached quickly for the tin cup and drew the liquid through clenched teeth. Her scrubbing was unmerciful—had to be. When she was finished with the soap, she rinsed the rag in the water. The only place to do so was a dangerous spot between Callum’s legs. He held his breath. Ava washed the soap out of the wound with the clean rag, and then she took the tin cup from his hand. She took a long gulp from its contents, followed by a fierce shake of the head. Then without warning she poured a long stream into the wound. Callum clenched his windpipe against the scream, but it came anyway, a high-pitched screech as the white liquor sizzled—so it felt—in the raw flesh, killing whatever had taken up residence under the skin.
When it was over, she took another deep slug from the cup. Callum did the same. Then another. He looked over at Lachlan, and the old man had gone double on him, man and ghost of man. Callum looked heavenward, the stars grown tremulous. They swirled like glow bugs. He looked at Ava. She was wrapping a new dressing around his thigh, the material torn from her quilt. Her fingertips were light against his skin, and she took great pains to position the dressing just so, sliding her fingers underneath it here or there to test the snugness.
