Fallen Land: A Novel

by Taylor Brown

  “What you ruminating at now?”

  His eyes snapped open. She was watching him in the dark, a wry smile on her face.

  “Nothing.”

  “Like hell, boy. I can see the wheels turning.”

  “The future, I reckon.”

  “What you see in it?”

  “I don’t know.” He swallowed. “You, maybe.”

  One corner of her mouth climbed higher.

  “Ain’t you a little young for me?”

  He started to pull his hand away. “I wasn’t the other night—”

  She grabbed his wrist, staying his hand—a strength he hadn’t expected in her grip.

  “Callum,” she said. “I was only kidding.” She rolled over in her blanket, pulling him close against her, his hand held in the hollow between her breasts, their bodies fitting together like two spoons stacked in a drawer. “I was only kidding.”

  The trees were mostly bare as they rode, the hills a leafless brown save small copses of sharp-pointed firs like the ones in fancy drawing rooms at Christmastime. The fallen leaves allowed the riders to see much farther and deeper into the woods, though anything in the woods could see out equally as well.

  Ava was not sick so often in the mornings now, but sometimes she rode with her chin tucked into her shoulder, her eyes closed, her face waxen with a sweaty sheen. Unwell. Callum wished he could do something, but the best he knew was to keep mum. Mainly he did. One morning, though, when she wasn’t sick, he saw her feeling her stomach, below the navel, with her hands. He was still swaddled down in his buffalo blanket; she didn’t know he was looking.

  “Which’d you rather?” he asked. “Boy or girl?”

  She turned to him, startled, and swallowed.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Reckon I should, though.”

  Callum shrugged. “Girls are good.”

  She nodded slowly and looked down at herself.

  “Yeah,” she said. “A girl can’t be so much like him.”

  More rolling green balds in the days that followed. These they crossed with bated breath, heeling the horse for speed. Rarely did they see livestock in these hills, though they saw rotting mounds of old hay and telltale herd prints around watering holes and streams. The meat was mostly gone, eaten or stolen or sold. Several times they heard the far-off howling of hounds, but there was no telling what type they were. They could be cattle dogs, guards, strays, man-hunters. Callum told Ava they were cattle dogs.

  The horse kept on, seemingly tireless. Reiver. They watered him whenever they could, and he seemed stronger on grasses than feed. Callum was glad that of all the horses he could have stolen, this was the one he had. He believed there were great animals like there were great men. He told the horse this once, but it only shook its head, like it always did. Callum rubbed him down as best he could in the evenings, massaging the dark shoulders and flanks, but the big horse paid him no mind, munching on whatever grasses or plants or ferns presented themselves.

  The horse made him think of the cremello that he had given away. The one no one would buy. It turned out everyone knew the Frenchman who owned him, an accomplished duelist who had killed ten men with swords. He reportedly made his slaves fight one another for sport, bare-chested in little arenas of cut cane, where the loser was whipped if he could still stand. They were mighty wrestlers, his Senegalese imports—capable of killing by hand—and people said more than one of his enemies had met them. No, no one would buy the great cremello, and the Frenchman and his men were hard upon him—had been for days—and Callum simply let the animal go in the middle of a mud street in New Orleans, in some dirty little quarter along the river where the saloons floated like barges on the muck. He let the reins slide from his hand. It was raining, and dusk, and the bone-colored horse was black-legged from the mire. It had looked at him once, its blue eyes electric in the gray, and then turned and walked jauntily up the street, the commerce freezing around it, everyone turning to look. Callum had turned and run the other way, toward the docks.

  * * *

  They stopped to rest the noon hour in a stand of pale-barked trees. Sweet birch, Ava said. The trunks had long horizontal fissures, the bark patterned silver and light green. The ground was littered with fallen catkins that looked like little caterpillars.

  Ava broke the end off a low-hanging branch.

  “If the sap was running, we could stick a bottle on the end here, catch us a whole mess of it. It’s good to drink.”

  “It’s not running now?”

  She shook her head. “All the sap goes to the roots in fall. That’s why the leaves turn color and die.”

  She broke the branch in two and rubbed the pieces together.

  “Smell that,” she said. She held up the waxy place where she’d rubbed.

  “Like medicine,” he said.

  She nodded. “Wintergreen.”

  “Maybe you ought to chew you some.”

  She stuck him in the gut with the branch. Fast. She was smiling.

  Later they lay down to eat their meager ration of hardtack, softened slightly with water from the beef bladder. They crawled to the edge of the trees and looked down upon a tidy cottage, whitewashed and smoke-spired. In the yard, a rawboned woman was splitting log after log with a heavy maul, red-faced with effort, her forearms rippling in the sun. Behind the cottage stood an elevated outhouse, and behind that a grove of yellow-hearted stumps. A baby cried inside the cottage, no one to soothe it. The woman kept on, machinelike, yelping as she split each log. Baby could cry and cry—no matter, not if the coming cold slipped through the doors and windows unbattled.

  Callum looked at Ava. “Could of been you, I reckon.”

  She nodded. “I done it before. Two years running I did.” She pulled his hand to her arm, under her quilt. “Feel that,” she said, making a muscle. It was small but hard as river stone.

  “Where’s yours?” she asked, smiling. She reached for his arm.

  Callum shook loose and stood. “We better get on.”

  She cocked her head at him.

  “What’s wrong? Afraid mine’s bigger?”

  “Shit,” said Callum, dismissive.

  But he was.

  Toward dusk they left the road along a scarce tangent of trail. They needed a place to bed down for the night. The trail ran crookedly amid a thick and shadowy growth of firs. They flushed a brace of grouse, fat-bodied birds that had taken up shelter in the evergreens. As they skittered through the air, Callum wished for the shotgun lying beside the would-be whiskey poacher. They would need meat soon.

  This path broke onto a sparsely wooded ridge. Long-fallen hunks of rock covered the slope, each of them bearing furry green moss. Delicate ferns peeked out of their cracks and fissures, as if those little plants had been what split the mighty granite. Beyond this the ridge verged unto a small valley. A small highland village sat upon the valley floor, hunkered in shadow.

  Callum, silent, dismounted. His eyes were wide, captive. He crawled to the cliff’s edge.

  He couldn’t believe it.

  There, in the failing light, a long string of varicolored horseflesh alongside a low-roofed building. A tavern. The windows of the place were all lit up, flickering. It was full.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said.

  Ava appeared next to him. She was prone, squinting. “What is it?”

  “Them.”

  “No.”

  “I guarantee you it is.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “I just can. What other force of so many riders would be all the way up here?”

  “We better get out of here,” she said.

  Callum slowly shook his head, his eyes on the valley.

  “I got to go down there.”

  “You got to what?”

  “I got to talk to Swinney. Tell him I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me that killed the Colonel.”

  Ava reached over and took the lapel of his coat.

  “What you got to do is get back on the horse
with me so we can ride the hell out of here.”

  Callum kept his eyes on the tavern, the windows’ inner glow. “You’re the one asked me to ride you out of harm’s way, and that’s what I been doing.”

  “That’s right,” said Ava, “and I’d like to see you follow through.”

  “If I tell Swinney I didn’t do it, maybe they’ll leave us alone.”

  Ava yanked on his coat lapel so he would look at her.

  “Listen, Callum, that ain’t gonna do it. Just telling him that.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Please just get on the horse with me and let’s get out of here.”

  “I aim to,” he said. “Soon as I come back.”

  “And what if you don’t?”

  He gently removed her hand from his coat and got to his knees, then his feet, and started back toward the horse. He could hear Ava coming behind him, could almost feel the angry words pent in her throat.

  He wanted the Walker for this. In the stolen satchel he found a powder horn, felt, and shot. He set the pistol to half cock, freeing the cylinder to spin, then began measuring powder into each of the six chambers, rotating through them one by one. He cut wads out of the felt, then set one over the mouth of the first chamber. He seated a lead ball over that, then rammed it home with the loading lever, gritting with effort. The men of the troop had always said that round balls were better man-killers than the army-issue conicals, but you had to cast your own and they were hell to load. He found a snuffbox full of caps. He forced one onto each of the nipples with his thumb.

  He unbuckled the brace of pistols and hung them over his shoulder, then straightened his coat and buckled them over the outside of it. He stuck the Walker through one side, his sheathed bowie knife through the other. He uncoiled a long length of rope and tied it to a nearby chestnut, then started back—rope in tow—to scour the ridgeline for a path into the valley.

  Ava followed behind him. He found a steep slope of dead leaves, populated by a few bare-limbed trees. He crouched at the edge of the slope and spread handfuls of dirt across his cheeks and forehead. He was studying the geography of the descent, the various trees and thickets where pickets could be posted between him and the tavern.

  Ava stood behind him, arms crossed.

  “You go off like this and I might not be here when you get back. Reiver, neither.”

  Callum looked at her. “I have to do this.”

  “You die down there, you better hope I live a real long time. Because that’s all the goddamn peace you’re gonna get. Soon’s I die, I’ll be hunting your sorry ass through heaven or hell or wherever they see fit to send fools like you. You won’t ever hear the end of it.”

  Callum sat at the edge of the decline, his boots hanging over. He looked up at her, making his eyes as big and round as possible.

  “Please don’t go.”

  Before she could say anything, he reached over and squeezed her calf through her boot, then stuck the rope in his teeth and slid over the edge on his backside. His boot soles struck the base of the first tree dead-on. In this fashion he picked his way down the slope, leaving the rope at the bottom for when he came back. If she left him and took the rope, the climb back up would be treacherous and long. Probably not a climb he could make before daylight.

  He squatted a long time at the base of the slope, studying the terrain, letting his eyes adjust. The clouds were with him. No moon, no stars.

  Up here the picket line would be loose and infrequent—probably it would. There wasn’t too much for them to worry over in terms of security. After a time he spotted the mark of many a lazy picket: the red cherry of a pipe or cigarillo flaring in the darkness. From the height of the ash, the man looked to be sitting or squatting against one of the few trees that dotted the valley. This one stood to his right. Callum looked for a second picket to his left. He couldn’t spot one, but the only cover—several trees and thickets—was a good ways away. He reckoned he could slip through the line unnoticed, striking a direct course for the tavern.

  The ground to cover was less than a quarter mile. He accomplished that distance at a quick pace, keeping his head low so as not to silhouette himself against the granite slopes thrust upward from the valley behind him. The rock-strewn grass made little sound or prints under his boots. There were some bare-looking fields, and he skirted these as best he could, a small dark figure scurrying along the ground, propelled by that audacity of youth the gummed old men of the land were so pleased to denounce from their rockers, flanked by their spittoons and surrendered hounds.

  He thought if he could just tell Swinney he was innocent, it would do them some good, at whatever risk. He did not know if Swinney would believe him. Was not sure it mattered. But he felt compelled to voice the words into the old man’s ear, to show them to the old man as he would some doomed artifact in a disappearing world, just so someone else would know of its existence. He had to.

  Ahead of him the tavern pulsed with light and sound. The rest of the town was dark-windowed and silent. A seeming ghost town. The doors surely bolted or barred against the ruckus, no candles to tempt or invite the band of riders. Next to the tavern stood a long and narrow storehouse of some kind. Feed store, maybe. He faced the rear of it. Beyond the building lay the dirt main street of the town. A porch lipped the rear of the storehouse under a tin awning. On the porch, cartons and sacks sat in nearly complete shadow. Nearer him, an old wagon sat rotting in the yard, vines grown around a busted wheel.

  There were no windows in the rear of the tavern, only on the sides. Light bled outward from these, making strange shadows against the side of the storehouse. A cryptic drama, the dark shapes of men warped and reeling against the wood-planked wall.

  Callum hid behind the old wagon, watching. He was about to cross to the porch of the storehouse when a man burst from the side door of the tavern. He lurched across the alleyway and caught himself against the side of the storehouse. He leaned his forehead against the wall, and it seemed he might stay that way. Then he turned and used his butt to jolt himself back to standing. He belched. He staggered a ways toward the rear of the tavern and faced the wall, unbuttoning his fly. He steadied himself with one hand and let fly a fine stream against the side of the tavern, heedless of the backsplash flecking his boots and trousers. After a moment he put his other palm against the wall and stared down at himself, brow furrowed, as though his organ were an object of no small curiosity to him.

  Crouched behind the wagon wheel, Callum watched the gold arc steam against the unpainted clapboard, a dark hill-shaped stain. Many another such mark soiled the side of the tavern, some overlapping. Callum was pleased to see them. They were fundamental to his plan.

  The capacity of Swinney’s bladder had long been a subject of conversation among the men, so frequently did he dismount to relieve himself. It was common knowledge that a child of four years could have outlasted the fat man were they to imbibe equal measures, and shame him handsomely if the drink were whiskey—which for Swinney it often as not was, and would certainly be so on this night.

  The man finished, buttoned himself, made his way back into the tavern. Callum crept across the open space to the rear porch of the storehouse. He leaned his back against the wall and slipped as far into the shadows as he could. He slid the crate at the top of a stack beside him a few inches sideways to make a slit. Now he could watch the side door of the tavern, and who came out of it. He took the Walker in hand and lowered the hammer down from half cock so that it would make the strongest statement possible when he thumbed it back.

  He watched, hardly breathing, as men staggered outside to sully the wall. Men he recognized. They were dust-ridden from hard riding and red-eyed, and he saw new details upon them: light blue trousers with yellow striping, steel-frame Colt’s revolvers holstered or belt-stuck at least four to a man, spit-shined U.S. belt buckles worn upside down. He thought of the empty cavalry horses they’d seen pass some days before, wondering if their fallen riders had provided such so
uvenirs.

  He settled in to wait, remembering the night big Swinney had taken him in. The night of the wreck. Callum had been on deck, under a moonless sky, as they made the run into Wilmington. He was what the crew called a monkey, doing whatever odd jobs were needed: by turns messenger and servant and nurse. The ship was a side-wheel steamer, narrow-built and long with a shallow draft. It had been constructed in the English shipyards, just for running blockades, and it was painted dark gray to match the sea at night. They were coming in from a stopover in Nassau, where shirtless blacks had loaded them with supplies from a merchant vessel out of England. Three hundred barrels of gunpowder, Callum was told, and five thousand Enfield rifles. Cartridges, too, and caps and swords. The supplies would be shipped by rail to Augusta or Richmond, to the depots there.

  They were running without lights, as they always did. Coming across from the Bahamas they’d been burning coal, leaving a bent tower of smoke in their wake, but they’d switched to smokeless anthracite as the coast neared, so as not to give themselves away to the Union men-of-war blockading the coast. This was not their first run up the Cape Fear River into Wilmington, and Callum knew the river itself was as treacherous as the warships that guarded it. He knew that was why pirates before them, like Blackbeard with the candles in his gnarls, had called it home.

  They were going to shoot the narrow passage into the river, New Inlet, under the protection of the big gun batteries at Fort Fisher. They were in the shoal waters along the coast, still out of range of protective fire, when they were spotted by a three-masted corvette off the starboard bow. Immediately it sent up a signal rocket to mark the blockade-runner’s position, a glowing hook against the sky. Callum was sent aft to tell their signalman to fire their own decoy signals at right angles to their course.