by Taylor Brown
“I believe those Yanks might of shot us if it hadn’t been me at the reins.”
“I know it,” said Callum.
“If you hadn’t of fallen off getting on.”
“I know.”
She bent again to the water, her two faces converging, and Callum thought of what she’d said, the slip of fate that had put her in the saddle instead of him. A sudden upwelling stole his breath, a spark of something wild-born, fearless, and he surged forward as her lips came glistening upward from the stream and pressed his mouth against hers. She placed her hands on his chest to push him away, as he thought she might, but she did not push. She had let him do the other things, and now she let him do this.
After he pulled away, she licked the remnant stream water from her lips. She seized him by the lapels of the coat she’d sewn him and kissed him again, hard, then held him at arm’s length. From there she cocked her head at him, a strange faraway expression coming into her eyes.
“You know, you’re just about the age my baby brother would of been had he lived.”
Callum rubbed his chin. “Oh?”
Ava hovered there a moment, eyes lost to some interminable distance, and then they were back again, blazing into his.
“I might,” she said.
“Might what?”
“Have plans for you.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” she said, patting his cheek.
Before Callum could reply, she stood. She set her hands on her hips, elbows cocked, and looked at Reiver.
“I reckon I ought to be the one taking the reins from now on,” she said, arching her back. She set her front teeth into her bottom lip, restraining a grin. “Seeing as I was the one got us out of that mess.”
“Shit,” said Callum. He was on his butt, his palms splayed behind him on the ground. He squinted one eye up at her. “Only if we got Yanks around us don’t want to shoot a girl.”
“A girl?”
Callum pursed his lips. “A pretty girl?”
She offered a hand to help him up. When he reached out, she briskly retracted her arm.
“Oh, excuse me,” she said, a rip of smile splitting the hollows of her face. She turned to mount. She climbed into the saddle, then slipped behind the cantle onto the horse’s bare haunches, bowing a little in mock courtesy. Callum smirked and mounted, taking the reins. He reached into his coat pocket and held out the apple behind him, for her.
“I shouldn’t,” he said.
She took the apple. She pressed herself against him, resting her chin on his shoulder. “But you did.” Her breath tickled his ear. She wiggled slightly, and her breasts felt heavier than they used to. Swelling, perhaps, with motherhood. He could almost feel the twin pricks of her nipples through his coat, awake and alert, asking him questions to which all of his answers were yes. Yes, yes, yes. She took a bite of the apple and handed it back.
They rode on amid the slow roll of cotton fields, riders newly buoyant and sweet-mouthed. Above them hung the ashen sky, hourless and strange.
* * *
They stood in a dense copse of trees, ash-floored, their horses saddled behind them. Men going about their palpations of torso and limbs in a surreal quality of light. The sun above them an elliptic orb, fog-diffused, a paleness over the claustrophobic membrane that domed them. The black stakings of the trees cast lancelike darknesses across the ground.
A quarter of their number could not be accounted for. Scattered, shot, taken prisoner. The remaining troopers toed black streaks in the ashen ground. The crackle of dead leaves and clang of weaponry, old soundings of dominion, as muted now as the light that bathed them. One of their number groaned from the base of a tree, and the others saw blood leaking through the broken pilings of his teeth, rich and bright. To a man they wished they could clamp shut his mouth for the sake of quietude, for however long it took to silence him.
None did. The big man, Swinney, had walked into the diagonals of light that cut through the close huddling of trees. They looked at him. He grasped the cuff of one overlong coat sleeve in his palm to keep it taut. He wiped his forearm under his nose like a schoolboy. A long worm of snot glistened on the fabric when he dropped his hand.
“I don’t know about you, but I think I had about enough of this. It’s one thing to goose-chase a son of a bitch across a whole state. It’s a whole other to do it straight on into the heart of a goddamned army.”
Men, their heads down already, nodded.
“I say we haul it back up into the mountains before the mob of us is digging holes in a prison up north somewheres, for to sleep in. Tree-high walls and nigra guards to keep us in.”
They nodded again. Conceding.
“You yellow son of a bitch.”
The men looked. It was Clayburn. He had his back to them a few feet off. A bright sluice of piss came spraying from between the triangular propping of his legs, slicing right into a gopher hole in the ground. At the same time they could hear the open and shut of his cigar tin, the snip of his cutter. When he turned his head over his shoulder again, he had a new cigar between his teeth. He’d kept his aim true on the gopher hole, no-handed.
“That army is marching in two columns. Only safe in numbers, and they know it. Like a herd of something. Them foraging parties is light infantry, too cocked for plunder to be a problem. We haunt the edges of everything, and they know it.”
“Didn’t seem that way today,” said somebody. “Seemed a whole lot different, in fact.”
Clayburn let off several final spurts, short rockets that disappeared into the ground. He finished and turned around. No time to button himself, but buttoned he was.
“You’ve seen what the Yank is doing to this state, this far south. You think anybody’s going to stop them? And what do you think we’ll have to come home to then.” It wasn’t a question. “Catching this little son of a bitch is all we got. It’s either that or go hiding in the mountains with winter coming.”
He ground the tobacco sideways in his jaws.
“Now Mr. Swinney here, I think we all know he’s got some kindy soft spot for the boy. Who knows, maybe designs beyond that. I heard a queerer things myself.”
A few of the men chuckled.
Swinney’s face reddened. “Now hold on,” he said. “The truth is, I just don’t think he done it, the killing.”
Clayburn let his eyes slide over the big man, his pudgy fingers.
“The truth?” he said. He spat. “I don’t think that’s for us to decide. We got us a trustee for that.”
He looked over at Old Lawyer Sawyer, a slight man in round-rimmed spectacles with an unshaved shadow of beard. A pale man, meant for offices and libraries. Not for any of this.
“Now Mr. Sawyer, Esquire, whose head is it gonna bring them bounty of U.S. notes from that bank in New York?”
The men seemed to lean toward him almost imperceptibly, the trees, too. The sun itself so close, the thin man could feel the speckling of sweat underneath his skin.
“The boy,” he said. “The boy will.”
* * *
Along the horizon before them hung yet more towers of smoke, still as brushwork in the colorless wash of sky. Callum knew they must be crossing the gap between parallel army columns advancing across the state, crossing the no-man’s-land that divided them. They were a night and two days trekking south along farm tracks and byroads that ran through sparse forests of pine where the understory lay browned and fallen, through vast cotton fields with farmhouses ransacked by foraging parties. Yards littered with upturned furniture and smashed china and bolts of calico and other fabric that fluttered like spent ghosts. Grounds perforated by ramrods in the hunt for buried treasure, the outbuildings fired to coal-colored hulks, the ruins slowly disintegrating. Long whirls of ash were carried off by cuts of wind, like the whip of powder from snow-laden roofs.
“I just realized,” said Ava.
“What?”
“The genius of it.”
Callum looked over his
shoulder at her. Her eyes were wide, staring.
“Of what?”
“All this. Sherman. Think: Nobody’s going to want to fight any longer, they don’t have nothing to come home to.”
Callum looked at a dead dog by the side of the road, shot, its tongue blue and stiff.
“It’s hell is what it is.”
Ava nodded. “Exactly.”
Everywhere they saw only women and blacks and the youngest of boys, as if some plague had taken just the men. Before an unravaged homestead they saw a mule-drawn cart piled with jumbles of household sundries to a height nearly comic, an errant tower of bed frames and grandfather clocks and ladder-back kitchen chairs cobbled together by irregular lengths of rope and improvised knots. Standing before this ill-fated chariot, the refugees: a long-faced woman with her brow all shadowed under her bonnet, her two small boys beside her with sullen faces puffy and round. Little men who already bore a visible spite for the world in which they found themselves. The three of them watched the two riders pass through their land. They stood frozen, grim, as though posing for a daguerreotype. Around them moved the blacks, their onetime slaves, helping to load the wagon still higher.
The single apple was long gone, and hunger hard upon them now, a darkest coring in their bellies. Even so, they made no move toward the farmhouse, the cart. Something hard in the faces of the woman, the boys, deterred them. Something perhaps the two riders carried in their own faces, hammered visages of bone and flesh that floated through the land like the war masks of primeval clans, each of them rival to all others. Callum watched the cart being loaded and his mind was full of stratagems, predatory, of how he might hold them at gunpoint while Ava rifled their pockets for food, yanked open their cupboards and sacked their root cellar.
He closed his eyes, shook his head. He looked away, toward the trees. As soon as he did, the hunger was back in his belly, hollowing his insides, making him want, want, want. He worried what it could make him. Something he didn’t want it to. He remembered the flesh of that apple, their only food in three days. Snow-white and red-skinned, sweet as any gift. It seemed only to make him hungrier. He reached one hand inside his coat pocket. Felt Ava’s fist balled there against the cold. Felt the hard ridging of her knuckles, the small hand bones strung like some delicate instrument. He gave his heels lightly to Reiver, accelerating past the scene at the farmhouse.
That night, they bedded down without dinner. They risked a fire, knowing the Colonel’s men would still be off somewhere regrouping, licking their wounds. Ava laid down her quilt, then stood staring into the flames. Callum watched her touch her stomach, almost absently, like she sometimes did. He knew it was still flat, hard as a board beneath her dress.
“I’m sorry we don’t got anything to eat,” he said.
She looked at him. “You got nothing to be sorry for,” she said. She looked back at the fire, keeping both hands on her belly. “I’m hungry, but it ain’t that.”
“What is it?”
The tendons in her hands stood out. “I don’t rightly know. It’s just it feels so heavy sometimes, inside me, knowing it’s partly him. I don’t want it to, but it does.”
Callum sat up quickly and swallowed hard. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Ain’t your fault. I’ve said that before.”
“I was thinking,” he said. He paused. His heart felt weak and strong at the same time, beating fast.
“Yeah?” she said.
“Yeah,” said Callum. He rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand, looking into the fire. “I was thinking you could maybe just pretend it wasn’t him that put it there.” He paused and looked up at her, crinkling his brow. “Like maybe, one day, you could just pretend it was me.”
Ava looked back at him, her eyes going wet. She knelt down on her blanket and put a hand on his knee and looked into the fire.
“Maybe,” she said.
Callum stared into the fire, too, this miniature of hell growling before them, the red embers somehow pretty despite, and when he looked up again Ava was waiting for him, her eyes the fiercest blue. She kissed him slowly, her tongue searching his. She ran her hand up the back of his neck, threading her fingers through his hair, and then she pulled him onto the ground, clutching him in the cradle of her thighs, her heels hooked into the backs of his legs. She rocked herself against him, her eyes widening, locked into his, her breath ragged in her throat.
“Yes,” she said, and he didn’t know if she meant yes to him or to the question of the child. She must have known, for she lifted her mouth to his ear: “To all of it.”
Two days south, they sat Reiver on a knoll over a small plot of land. There was a house, a barn, a smattering of crooked trees. The gate of the hog pen had been trampled by its inhabitants. Everywhere they lay arrested in the outspill of flight, a pathetic diaspora of swine flesh shot or bayoneted in the field between the pen and the creek. Only the hindquarters of the stock had been taken. The unbutchered remainders, hulks pink and gray, lay slumped in perverse auras of blood and viscera, their front hooves spraddled before them as if to drag their unlegged bodies to safety. The riders had been four days without food. Here was their boon.
Chapter 11
For two days they followed a black jag of creek that cut eastward between cotton fields and emptied pastures. Most of the picking was done, but here or there late-planted cotton had exploded into seas of stormy bolls, ash-dusted, hovering low over the fields like so many thunderclouds. Always Callum was glancing over his shoulder, every ridge and shady grove pregnant with menace. Any moment their pursuers could bloom darkly upon a distant hillside, emerge out of a bottom or ravine like something loosed out of the ground.
Often a watering path would intersect with the creek. They would ride its soft ground away, leaving tracks, and then return by another direction. Whenever they met a larger road, they would mingle their prints with those of its regular commerce, hoping to leave a record of disappearance in this direction or that. They never remained long on the road, though. Not during daylight. They didn’t want witnesses. Before them, the smoke hung in a dark stratum recalling the much-rumored factory skies of the North.
They avoided the burned towns, mills, gin houses, planters’ factories when they could. They wanted to avoid the souls left wrecked in their wake. People desperate. Violent. But everywhere was destruction. Cotton, king of the land, smoldered wherever they looked, in scorched fields and tumbled black barns and warehouses. It shrank as it burned, curling into itself like a spider might, the stacked bales collapsing into smoking heaps and mounds. Seeing all that, Callum knew it wasn’t just the will of the people that Sherman sought to break, like Ava said. It was the South’s very ability to fund itself, to turn the cotton into guns and cannons and shells, hardtack and haversacks and men-at-arms.
They saw gristmills toppled into the streams that served them, damming the current in a bubbling mess, their water-wheels canted out of the water like something from a destroyed steamship. It rained, and the coals were still so hot they hissed. There were sawmills fired black, and storehouses and granaries and single-crib barns that would hardly have fed a family for a single long winter.
The second day, the creek cut straight across a plantation, and they stopped at a little distance to survey the place.
“Think we ought to chance it?” Ava asked.
Callum was squinting at the place. Everything was burned, even the big house.
“I think it’s all right,” he said. “I don’t see anybody around.”
They rode on, in between the fallen structures, tie beams and king posts jutting out of the wreckage like blackened bones. There were smoky bottles gathered in the ashes of the dairy, a big horned anvil sitting upright on the floor of the blacksmith shop, its oak base burned from beneath it. Not even the slave quarters had been spared. They sulked in their rows, hardly recognizable, whispering smoke. There was no sign of the inhabitants.
Someone had tried to save the gin, they saw. It had been
dragged from the structure that housed it, and it sat now in a little dirt yard by itself. The boxlike frame was scorched, as was the spiked cylinder inside it, spun by a hand crank to separate the seeds from the lint. So charred, it looked like something more evil than what it was. A torture device, perhaps, for tearing flesh from bone. Something you could stick a man’s hand in if you needed him to sing.
Farther on was a mule-driven press for baling cotton. The mule was still in its harness, chained at the end of the turning arm. It had been unable to escape the fire’s heat, trapped as it was in the circular orbit of its labor, the rut its hooves had cut. The animal’s inner side was burned terribly, a gruesome new country that attracted flies.
Ava climbed down off the horse. She looked up at Callum.
“You got the knife?”
He handed it down. She walked up to the mule, unfolding the blade.
“Somebody should of done this already,” she told it. She touched it on the head. “I’m sorry they didn’t.”
She reached under and cut its throat.
The following day they struck upon another railroad, torn up and bent like the others they’d seen. There were long straight stretches of railbed, and Callum knew the army must have heaved up whole miles of track at once, blue-coated men lining the rails as far as the eye could see, each upending his own crosstie. The ties had been stacked and burned as before, the rails twisted and corkscrewed around the oaks and pines. They rode some ways along the track, wending through the debris, now and again passing old boxcars thrown from the rails, heeled over and rusting in the trees like ships run aground and others left abandoned on forgotten sidings. The cars swarmed now with runaway slaves of every color—coal and chocolate and caramel and sand—living in the square-mouthed caves, the dark squalors jumbled with debris.
“Freedom,” said Callum.
“If that’s what this is, they need a new word for it.”
“You think any of them would trade it back?”
“I reckon not.”
Two men, twins, sat perched upon one of the boxcars like giant birds. They were squatting on their heels, their bony knees nearly as high as their shoulders, and they had long jaws and shaved heads. Callum waved at them as he passed, and they waved back, both raising their inner hands, chained together at the wrist.
