Fallen Land: A Novel

by Taylor Brown

  “Hell,” said Callum. “All them falls, you’d think it sprung a leak at the top.”

  “You know what this mountain is?”

  “A hell of a rock?”

  “It ain’t,” said Ava. “I mean it is, but what it really is, is a pluton.”

  Callum looked over his shoulder at her, furrowing his brow.

  “A what?”

  “Melted rock from beneath the earth’s surface, bubbled up and solidified. My daddy always held with the Plutonists, not the Neptunists, about such things.”

  “Oh he did, did he?”

  “That’s right. Pluto was god of the underworld, you know.”

  Callum grunted. “How’d your daddy come to know so damn much?”

  “Books, mainly,” said Ava. “But not just that. He went to the University of Virginia, the school of medicine there. Doctored people and animals both. Anything that was hurt, in any of the hollers close. I think it bothered him sometimes, what all he saw. He came home all the time in blood. I think he wanted to understand what made it all work. Lot of people think science is at odds with such, but I think it was in all those workings he was looking for some kind of a god.”

  “You think he found one?”

  “I don’t know,” said Ava. “I’d of liked to ask him.”

  The road beyond the mountain was slop, a red slop that coated the horse’s legs like paint. Reiver snorted as his hooves sunk nearly to his knees, and Callum could hardly imagine how the army’s wagon trains had made it through such a mess. Smoke still poured from the eastern horizon. They crossed a bridge over a muddy red river and forded soupy streams that cut across the road. In late afternoon they crested a high hill and saw before them, for the first time, the full scope of the Union march, a ragged blue line strung crookedly across the countryside, mile upon endless mile, a column composed of men and horses and cattle and wagons, jostling as they made their way, looking from this distance like the roiling current of a new river breaking across the land, pushing east toward the sea. On either side of it was fire, a wide swath of advancing flame and smoke, as if the land were being sucked so dry it simply combusted under the sun.

  “Jesus wept,” said Callum. “Hand me that spyglass, would you?”

  Ava rummaged in one of the saddlebags, finding him the telescoping spyglass that had been the Colonel’s. Callum extended it and looked through the eyepiece, the far-off world brought big and close. He saw whole regiments marching ten abreast, their muskets bristling like forests in the sun, and men driving cattle before them in bustling herds. He saw men on horseback, their saddles festooned with live chickens and turkeys, the birds flapping and squawking at their upturned world, and infantrymen knee-deep in road, pushing wagons and ambulances and caissons through the mud. He saw artillery pieces on their tracked conveyances, the barrels coal-black and mean-looking, the cannoneers trudging alongside, and open wagons piled with rugs and shiny loot. And behind it all a wake of blacks in mottled dress, carrying sacks across their backs or on their heads, with children led by hand at their knees.

  “How many you think it is?” asked Ava.

  “I don’t know. I never seen so many people in one place.”

  “Let me see.”

  He handed her the glass.

  “Jesus,” she said. “There must be ten thousand of them.”

  Callum spat. “I wouldn’t say there wasn’t.”

  They rode on. Everywhere were burned barns and granaries, even farmhouses, some of them with people picking through the ruins, prodding the ashes with sticks or pokers as if they might turn up something that hadn’t turned black and brittle as dust. They were stone-faced with glassy eyes, and they didn’t even look up as the horse passed along the road.

  Come dusk the riders began to hear a far-off thumping in the air. Drums, but not of war. The last trace of sun flared along the western horizon, cold-gone, and a new fire rose in the east, the clouds red-bellied over the trees. Darkness swelled, stars abounding through smoke and cloud, but the eastern horizon remained red-lit, flickering. And still the drums.

  They took a wooded track off the main road that forced them to ride low against the horse, the cross-hanging branches broken only high enough for animals of lesser stature. Stalks of firelight began to rise through the trees that stood before them. Callum stopped the horse and got off. Ava, too. He led them off the trail, through the trees, as the drumming grew louder, deeper. Rhythmic. The sound the world might make if it had a heart, and they moved toward it, silently, as if entranced. The elbow of a creek edged out of the dark. They stepped across. The trees began to thin, open, and before long they were crawling on all fours toward the edge of the tree line.

  A clearing opened before them. In it were black men, a ring of them dancing, their bodies cut jagged against a towering blaze. Their drums haunted the edges of firelight, palm-struck. Their fire rocketed into the sky. The house that had presided over them was but a smoking hulk, nothing save the brick-mortared chimney still standing through the flames.

  He and Ava watched them a long time, their throats constricted. They watched the unbonded slip and flow of their limbs, the writhing concordance of their bodies. The backs of the men had grown wide and cruel under generations of burden, like wings or the muscle for wings yet unspread. Several of them bore slender blisters of scar, pale and lustrous as worms in patterns of crisscross or cat-o’-nine. The breasts of the women hung heavy and oblate under their shifts. Callum and Ava watched and watched. They had planned to ride the night nearly through, but they did not want to leave the edging of trees that hid them so close to the fire, the drums, the men and women full of song.

  * * *

  The sun was red, dying, when the riders tore into town upon the heels of two bloodhounds. The hounds had black faces, slack-jowled and long, like whiskied men of another life condemned now to this sorrowful occupation of scenting blood and shit, of heeding the barks and cur slaps of angry men.

  The woman was in her rocking chair, nothing for supper to eat, her needles scraping against each other like the arms of a fly on a loaf of bread. The sharp points of them went still when the two hounds stopped in the road before her house, sniffing just where the horse had stood.

  A man on a smoke-colored gelding sat his horse before her porch, not looking at her, looking instead at the gouges on the steps, the ruts in the road where the piano had been dragged. Behind him hovered a group of riders in what some called the multiform, no sign of rank or allegiance among them beyond the quality of their horses, the way they sat them. Some of them spat and grumbled; others scoured the square for something to look at, women maybe. A few stared unblinking at the man on the smoke horse. None got off his horse to hunt the broken buildings for something of worth. It was obvious this town had been emptied, undone.

  The two dogs circled the spot where the black horse had stood. They stopped, unsure which way to go. The woman watched them. The boy and girl upon the horse had been so mud-caked and hungry-looking they’d given her a glimmer of hope for her boy. That youth could survive so much. Desperation, hunger, murder. She could see it. What it made of them, she didn’t know, nor what her boy would be. She didn’t care as long as he was breathing.

  The man dismounted the horse and looped the reins around the porch balustrade. He mounted the porch steps with a mechanical clop-clop-clop that disturbed her somehow. She saw that he had only one arm under the cape he wore. He stood blocking out the sun, so that she and her rocker were eclipsed in the long lance of his shadow. Dark come early, and cold.

  “Which way did they go?” he asked her.

  She made to keep up her knitting. “Who?” she asked, looking with a spurious air of concentration at the most recent work of her needles, as if she’d made a mistake that might or might not require rectification.

  He stepped closer. “I don’t have the time, woman.”

  There was Georgia in his voice. She worked her tongue along her tall bottom teeth, her receded gums. “Manners, neither,
I reckon.”

  He stepped so close that it was unnatural not to look at him. Still she refused. She looked at her own hands, the splotches where the sun had left its mark, the once slender-boned fingers grown fat-knuckled and gnarled like those of an old crone. Out of the corner of her eye she could see his single hand, fleshed the color of bone, creeping slowly up the side of his trouser leg. Each finger moving with a mind its own, and slow, a grotesque mimicry of the webbed predators that resided in the corners and nooks of her home.

  Suddenly her hand was seized in a vise of five tiny arms, hard enough to bruise, and a band of cold metal slid over her ring finger. Then she saw what it was, the razor fine-honed to a wink.

  “Tell me which way they went at them crossroads,” he said, nodding ahead, his thumb on the trigger.

  “And you Georgia-born,” she said.

  “Tell me or lose the finger.”

  She inhaled big into her sunken chest. “I lost worst,” she said.

  She looked away, waiting for what she expected to come. It didn’t. He removed the cigar cutter. He was silent for a long moment. She could feel his eyes on her and her handiwork.

  “Who you making that scarf for?” he asked her.

  “Myself. Winter’s coming, you know.”

  “No,” he said, “you knitting that for a man.” He bent in close and examined the design, the neat stripes. “For a boy,” he said. “Woman your age only gives that much love to a boy.”

  Her limbs went hot and willowy. She thought of sticking him in the eye with one of the knitting needles, but they felt too heavy to lift.

  He knelt beside her.

  “Think of your boy, woman. Think of him making it home, only to find his mama dead. Maybe the one good thing left to him, hung broke-necked from the rafters like a nigger.” He leaned in closer, his breath whiskey-hot, unrighteous. “What do you think that would do to him?”

  Slowly she lifted a finger in the direction the boy and girl had gone. Her hand palsied, her eyes downcast, her aim yet true.

  * * *

  Dawn. Ragged shapes of light began to puncture the far tree line. Closer, the fire smoldered, dull red coals pulsing in heaps of ash. Cold smoke hung lazy upon the air, the naked chimney black-bricked by so many hours of fire and soot. Everywhere long traces of ground fog whited out the grass and clay of the clearing.

  Callum blinked the sleep from his eyes. He was not sure what had woken him. He looked around, saw a small black boy crouching behind a fallen tree several feet away. Callum waved at him. The boy raised one hand over his barked bulwark and waved back. Callum raised himself off the ground on his elbow, and he thought first of food. He gestured for the boy to come toward him.

  “Have you got anything to eat, by chance?”

  The boy nodded yes.

  “It ain’t all burned?”

  The boy shook his head. “We got some hid.”

  “Could you bring us something?”

  The boy froze, his head cocked, his eyes going wide.

  “Dogs,” he said. “Dogs!”

  “What?” said Callum, looking around. “What?”

  “I got to go,” said the boy. “Got to tell everbody.”

  He turned to run but looked back over his shoulder at Callum. He shot his hand into the pocket of his overlarge pants and tugged hard, tugging free an apple. He underhanded it to Callum, then shot away across the clearing toward the far-off huddling of negro cabins, the soles of his feet so much lighter than the rest of him.

  Callum strained to hear whatever the boy had heard, frantic, turning his good ear this way and that. Finally he caught the distant bark of a dog, then another. He shook Ava.

  “Get up,” he said. “Get up.”

  He turned, unhobbled Reiver and untied his line from a nearby tree, his fingers slipping madly on the hard knot.

  Ava was coming unsteadily to standing. “What?” she was asking, her eyes half-closed. “What is it?”

  He took her roughly by the arm and hauled her toward the horse, unspeaking, and boosted her into her place. Then he cinched the saddle and stuck his foot through the stirrup and hauled himself upward. His hand slipped off the dawn-slick pommel. He fell flat onto his back in the leaves, hard.

  “Callum, get up! Callum!”

  He opened his eyes to Ava looking down from the saddle, her hands on the reins. She held out her arm and shucked one foot out of the nearest stirrup. They grasped each other at the forearm, and he struck one foot through the stirrup and climbed onto the back of the horse. She whipped the reins even before his foot was out of the stirrup for hers. They tore across the clearing, past the charred ruin of house, toward the road they’d left the evening before. Callum looked behind him and saw the negroes fleeing their cabins for the woods, quick with fear.

  Ava struck them upon the road, the clay red and hard-churned by the army that had passed down it. They crested a rise and dropped so fast their guts sang quivering into their throats. They landed charging steeply downhill and found themselves in a white sea of fog, the road but a rumor before them, the trees like the faintest shadows out of the corner of an eye. Even so Reiver shot them forward, forward, forward, into the blindness, and Callum, unsaddled, could feel the power of the horse’s haunches exploding underneath him, a violent mechanism seemingly unbound by the weakness of flesh. He knew the sun must be crowning the horizon, if not the trees, but he could see nothing, no light beyond the blankness of fog. Callum pulled one of his pistols and twisted to look behind him. The fog swirled between the narrow channel of trees.

  He knew the dogs could not pace the speed of the horse, and he had not heard any barks over the clamor of Reiver’s hooves for some time. He twisted to look again, and this time something was there: a slender blade of shadow in the fog, a vision of horse and rider flickering like a candle flame. He raised his pistol to aim. The barrel jolted at the end of his arm, above their pursuer, below. Momentarily the rider disappeared into the fog, then loomed visible in another spot, and he could not tell if it was the same rider or another.

  He thumbed the hammer back and the gun kicked unexpectedly, triggered by a jolt in the road. A cloudburst of smoke was left hovering in the fog until the rider tore it through, dark tendrils torn ragged and swirling. Now more riders could be seen in pursuit, horsemen seemingly born legion of smoke. He fired twice more into the shadow shapes of them; they came on undaunted. He started to worry them something spawned of an addled mind, dubious imaginings. Then the first blast of shot erupted bulblike in the fog, and another and another.

  Plenty real.

  He turned back to Ava and swelled his lungs to make himself as big and wide behind her as he could. He imagined his back like that of those slaves he’d seen. A terrain cruelly built, inviolate, shield-shaped like a symmetric battering of flesh. He closed his eyes and tried to believe something of such stead bodied the stitching of his coat. He encircled Ava’s waist as tightly as he could, determined to hold on even if he were hit.

  He felt Ava’s body hesitate a moment, then tense, urging the horse for speed. He looked over her shoulder and saw a throng of blacks on foot parting before them. They were clothed in tatters and shreds and nearly all of them shoeless, with bindle sticks over their shoulders or bedrolls. Pilgrims. They watched wide-eyed as the horse passed before them, and then they were gone, and all around the horse on every side was a bristling of bayonets. Men blue-coated with haversacks looked up gape-mouthed with surprise, fear, bringing to bear their rifles amid the clicking of cocked hammers.

  “Johnnies!”

  A riot of shots erupted on the road behind them, a clash of steel, their pursuers having ridden head-on into the rear guard of the army column. Ava turned Reiver around and around amid the sudden chaos of fire and smoke, the blood and screams. The heads of men and horses reared disembodied from the miasma in frozen visages of gritted teeth, fear, the glint-eyed lust for blood.

  Callum looked down and saw an infantryman’s face swing toward them, spinning, swe
eping his rifle out of the fog. The soldier saw who sat at the reins—a girl—and swept past them. His barrel emitted a long tongue of flame into the belly of a man upon a horse opposite them, an old battler of the Colonel’s troop. The man screamed and fell, twisting from the saddle. His horse dragged him away by the stirrup.

  A gap yawned open in the melee. Callum slapped Reiver’s rump even as Ava saw it. Reiver bolted off the road and through a wet ditch. He leapt a rough-cut pasture fence and they raced away across the open ground.

  * * *

  The sun hung over a land burned dry of fog, only the smoke left to threaten its dominion. Girl and boy and horse traveled down a line of trees grown guardlike on either side of a stream between cotton fields. Ava reined Reiver in at a cut in the bank. The stream’s current rippled in the sun like shard glass on stone. Prints of hooves and paws and feet, shoed and unshoed, indented the bank, a catalogue of many days and nights past. Together it looked as though the beasts of the field had warred here for power of the drinking hole, a stoving mob of all species.

  They dismounted and descended the bank to drink. None of them left more than the tracest prints in their wake, not even the horse. It disturbed Callum, somehow. Just the cold, he told himself. The ground too hard. But still it seemed strange to him, like they were not of such weight and substance as the things that had come before them. He wondered if ghosts knew they were ghosts. He was not so sure they did.

  He knelt before the stream and touched his hands to the bank. No, they were here. The ground was just that cold, just that hard. It glowed in his palms.

  Ava knelt beside him. The three of them bent to drink together. He looked at Ava, her reflection. Her face was moon-pale, sharp-cut as a man’s with hunger and plight, her handling of both. She cupped a handful of water to her mouth, drank, then looked serious-eyed into the stream, as if watching for the right moment to drink again.