Fallen Land: A Novel

by Taylor Brown

  “Much obliged,” he said.

  He unscrewed the lid and sniffed. He gave a big smile and sipped. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Goddamn,” he said, snapping his fingers. “I mean Goddamn.” His red tongue squirmed from his mouth to wick the bristles of his mustache.

  Callum looked out at the white-columned main house standing down the drive. Only a portion of one wing was burned, and that not too badly.

  “How come you don’t put yourself up in the big house?”

  The old man snorted and took another sip from the jar. He made a face. “My wife threw me out.” He fluttered his hand. “She’s a mad bitch. Always was. No tolerance for eccentricity.” He took another sip and worked his mustache around, as if cleaning his teeth with the inside of his mouth, then swallowed. “I have the cleanest mustache in Georgia,” he told them. “Ask anybody.”

  Callum looked at Ava. She looked at the old man.

  “So you can tell the future?” she asked.

  He smiled at them and winked. Callum could see the drink going to work.

  “How we know you ain’t just spouting off any old shit comes to mind?” he said.

  The old man bolted up straight in his seat and pointed at them with the jar. “I am a vessel of the Holy Ghost, goddammit.” He leaned back in his chair and pursed his lips and fluttered one hand in the air. “Ask anybody.”

  Callum started to say something; Ava elbowed him in the ribs.

  “Will you read us our future, then?” she asked. “Please?”

  The old man looked over the jar’s rim at her, at Callum. One big yellow eye summed them up, the rest of his face warped strangely inside the fluid reality of the jar. He had another pull, cringed, and snapped his head sideways. He put the jar down in front of him and laid out his hands on the desk, palms upward. He waved them to come nearer. “Give me your hands,” he said. He belched quietly through the side of his mouth.

  They walked forward slowly. The old man had his eyes closed now, his head on his chest, waiting. Ava gave the old man her hand. Callum looked down at the withered tracery of creases and swirls. The mapwork born upon a man’s hand, the scars and scuffs the world overwrit. He placed his hand in the old man’s. The skin was papery, dry as parchment.

  “Kneel.”

  They did, upon a floor of charred miscellany. Fallen roofing and flat-spraddled books, a songbird cage with skewed wiring, its winged heart upturned black beneath an empty trapeze. The man put on an unctuous look, his eyes shut tight, his brow scrunched heavenward. Ash swirled in the shafts of light that punctured the roof.

  “Close your eyes.”

  They did. Waited. The old man’s nose had a kink near the bridge. It whistled. Callum twitched his nose around, impatient. He felt the old man’s thumb begin to move along his pinkie finger, back and forth. Callum jerked his hand away.

  “The hell?”

  Ava cut her eyes at him, cross. The old man kept his eyes closed but smiled, his tongue bulging his cheek, as if at his own joke. He simply held out his open palm, waiting for Callum to put his hand back. Ava jerked her head toward the desk. Callum conceded, but he kept one eye open.

  The old man was still now. His face looked up into the broken roof, the fractured sky. Time passed. There was a frozen clock on the wall. The shadows of the hands seemed to shift. Callum closed his eyes. He felt himself fading. Swooning kindly. This light-slashed darkness a place of sanctuary, hope.

  The old man’s eyes snapped open; his hands clamped closed. Callum’s knuckles cracked.

  “Ouch!”

  Callum tried to yank his hand away. Ava, too. They couldn’t. The old man was too strong. Their arms flailed like caught fishes would. The old man watched them fight. The blue of his eyes was cold now, the madness gone. The pupils yawned wide, black wells in which their crazings were reflected in twin and miniature. Tiny flailings, fleshings, played back at them in worlds their own.

  The old man let go. They fell back onto their heels. Back into the room, the wreckage. The old man pushed the jar across the desk.

  “Take it back,” he said. “I can’t read anything for you.”

  Callum stood quickly. “Thanks anyway,” he said, reaching for the jar. “Appreciate it.”

  Ava stopped his arm. “No,” she said. She stood and leaned toward the old man. She put her palms flat on the desk. Her eyes were smoldering, her voice fierce.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  Chapter 13

  The horse carried them down a road red-cut through pines that murmured in the dusk. Callum looked back into the dying light of the west, then ahead where broken lances of sun grew gradually longer, sharper, on the path before them.

  He had the reins resting loosely in his lap. Ava squeezed his right hand. He didn’t squeeze back. She had been trying to talk about it, what the old man had said, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  He had wanted the old man to take it back, his vision. To renounce it. To say he was a liar. A charlatan. A man whose words carried no weight. For those words had struck him like a weapon, a stab in the gut. He had made the old man gag on his pistol before Ava could pull him away.

  It hadn’t helped. They haunted him, the old man’s words, and the hidden darknesses between the trees seemed only to lend them credence. The cold sting in the air, the sharp-winged bats, the broken pack animals brained and discarded here and there on the side of the road. And Callum worried at what he was becoming. What might have slipped into him as he lay upon that sickbed months back. What curse. He worried that he no longer deserved to live, and yet that he would be the one who would. The only. He worried that most of all.

  “One of you,” the old man had said. “One of you will die before the year is out.”

  That night they bedded down in a dry ditch that fed a pair of dead fields. Weeds had grown man-high across the plots. Even the horse could hardly be seen. Callum wanted, needed, a fire. Some warmth and light. Around them the weeds whispered. He stared into the red core of the blaze. His heart felt like an alien thing in his chest, clutching and unclutching beyond his control. He felt it as real living flesh, the myth of forever stripped away, so it seemed the very points of his rib bones could puncture it. He looked up at Ava and saw a string of life tapping faintly beneath the skin of her neck. It made a shadow with each beat. He saw how skinny she was, how pale and weak. He felt like crying—it welled up in him too fast to stop. He drove his face into his hands, the sobs soon battering him, his fingers webbed with slime. He looked up.

  “He could be wrong, couldn’t he?”

  Ava squeezed her temples with one hand and looked down between her legs. “Might could.” Then she looked up and took a breath through her mouth and slid across the ground toward him. “Course he could,” she said. “He’s probably just some loon.”

  “But that he said it. Spoke it out there.” He looked down into his hands. “I can’t get it out my head.”

  Ava cradled his head, and he cried against her chest. He felt like the boy he was, the boy he wanted to be. But boys were too weak for the world outside this field of weeds, this fire. This girl.

  “It can’t happen,” he said.

  Ava pulled his face up to hers. “It won’t.”

  “It can’t.”

  “It won’t. Not if you don’t believe it, it won’t.”

  He looked up at her. “I want it to be me,” he said. “I just want it to be me.”

  Ava cupped his jawbones with her hands and thumbed the tears from below his eyes. She almost smiled. “I don’t,” she said. Then she kissed him, pulled her mouth away and looked at him. “Neither of us is gonna die, hear me? No matter what some seer says. He couldn’t even tell us which one. I never should of taken us in there. I’m sorry. But it’s done with now, and whatever comes, we’ve got to meet it standing up.”

  Callum nodded, trying hard to believe, trying not to see how sickly she looked, how purple the hollows of her eyes, how close to the edge of something he couldn’t
stop. Her end, or the end of the thing she carried.

  “Look at me,” she said. “Look.”

  He did.

  “I love you.”

  “What?”

  “I love you,” she said again. “Goddammit.”

  Callum’s mouth opened; his blood sprang. He drove himself into her arms, the two of them toppling to the ground in a tangle of limbs. There they lay, clutched so close they could hardly breathe. She clung to him, burying her face in his neck. He told her he loved her. He always would. Soon they were grappling and pawing, driving their bodies yet closer, as if each might claw a way into the very flesh of the other, as if their blood was some kind of home.

  * * *

  Callum woke once in the middle of the night and stirred. When he opened his eyes, there was Ava across from him, facing him. Her eyes were closed, her brow knit even in sleep. In the faint glow of the coals he could see pale scrawls in the ash and grit upon her cheeks. Tears. Her face glistened, and a little ways off he saw a little dried pool where she’d been sick sometime in the night. Callum made a decision then. The one he didn’t want to make. It was hard inside him. Certain. He closed his eyes and went back to sleep.

  * * *

  The next morning they came upon a modest homestead. A cabin, a barn, a springhouse, a large pen for hogs. The place had been raided, but not too badly. Nothing burned. Two live hogs in the pen. A man and his wife were outside, on hands and knees, working with spades to mend their trampled garden. The man had one leg, a veteran. When Ava and Callum rode into the clearing, they smiled and waved. Callum knew he’d found the place.

  The woman fried them each two eggs in a lake of crackling lard and gave them both a slab of fatback. She was fat-cheeked and big-boned, with kindness in her eyes. She couldn’t quit saying how lucky she and her husband had been, that the Yanks hadn’t done them worse, like they had so many others. The officer in charge of the foraging party had told his men to leave them their two prized Saddlebacks, big black hogs with white rings around their middles. They’d already slaughtered enough that day, he said.

  Callum and Ava shoveled the fatback and eggs still steaming into their mouths. The couple sat on the other side of the table and watched, pleased, if a little astounded, at how fast the riders bolted their food. The husband, drinking his chicory coffee, said he’d been with the Cold Steel Guards of the Forty-ninth Georgia Infantry, and he’d lost his leg at Second Manassas back in ’62. He had an iron-flecked beard and hard, clear eyes, and he said he’d been lucky that day, despite his leg. Callum liked him.

  The food grew heavy after breakfast, after so many days of light stomachs, and Callum and Ava both felt a big sleep coming on. The older couple had a fire going in the hearth, and blankets, and the woman said they were welcome to them if they wanted. Ava fell asleep first, swaddled on the sofa in a big patchwork quilt, the fire coloring her face. Callum wanted to sleep, too, badly—it seemed that no one since Lachlan had been so kind, so warm and safe—but he asked for a cup of coffee instead. Then he sat at the table, across from the couple, and began telling them how he needed their help.

  Chapter 14

  She had not wanted him to leave. Had screamed and clawed at him, and he had been adamant, unbending, so much older of a sudden, this day, than before. He could feel it. He would send someone for her once he reached the coast, he said. And he told her he would make it. Promised he would. But he’d carved the name of his relations in a stripped piece of pine bark and slipped it into her coat pocket, in case. She’d screamed and clawed more at him; he would not be moved. He was the one they were after. The one with a bounty on his head. He told her she would be safe with these friendly hog raisers. He told her the riders would follow the trail of the horse on the road. He told her they would never know she’d stayed behind.

  He told her he loved her.

  He rode out on a farm road at dusk, heading east, and it was the hardest thing he’d ever done. But right, he told himself. Right. Because she was in peril every second she was with him. The older couple would keep her well and fed. They knew she carried a child, though it didn’t show yet. They knew it was a thing conceived in outrage, and that she’d been sick and he worried for her health. All this he’d told them at firelight, as Ava slept. And they’d said they would take care of her until he could send help.

  Still he felt his guts unspooling inside him as he rode, his insides tethered as surely to her as a rope or length of chain, and how she hurt going out of him, her presence, her hard and pretty edges tearing him up as they went. But he had done the right thing, he told himself. The only thing. For he feared the ride itself could kill her, if not the clutches of those who pursued him. They were his fate to bear, to outrun or not. He had gotten her out of the mountains with winter coming, when she could not have survived again on her own, not pregnant. But now he feared, against everything, that she was safer away from him—as far away as she could get. Let them come after him. Only him. And if they caught him, she couldn’t be hurt.

  He rode on into the eastern dark. The sun glared bloodred at his back, as if in anger at the world it saw. At him especially, perhaps, for taking so long to make this right.

  * * *

  The riders exploded from the trees, a flood of ashen horseflesh and pale faces. Their scream broke across the clearing, choral, echoing within the walls of the cabin, the empty barn, the little springhouse.

  They dragged the hog raisers out of the house, a red-cheeked woman and her one-legged husband. They dragged him by the collar of his nightshirt. He hopped and hopped, then buckled before their leader. His wife knelt beside him, shaking, her hands clasped prayerlike before her chest. The one-armed man looked down at them. Something winked to life in his hand, metallic. Like a tiny star. And he took up the husband’s hand. The first finger came off with a pop. It lay squirming on the ground like a large pale worm. Its owner screamed through his teeth, not opening his mouth. Not telling what he knew.

  The one-armed man took up the hand again, then thought better of it. He began to unbutton the man’s fly. The woman’s mouth went crooked and black. She jabbed her finger toward the springhouse.

  * * *

  Callum caught the stench before he saw what was raising it. It was dawn and he’d been on the horse an hour, having slept but little. The smell slipped through the trees and turned his gut. He broke from the woods. There was a slate river, dark-rocked, the near bank leveed by flesh of every color and pattern, the bodies of horses and mules piled upon one another like so many bags of sand or meal. Hundreds of them. Beasts broken and no longer of use. Executed. A culling of the herd, of the lame and jaded. Those that could no longer serve the army, ridden nearly to death, needing only a bullet. Callum rode on amid their number. Heads twisted one way, legs struck another, rigor-limbed into the groins and mouths of their neighbors. They gaped at him. White horse teeth retched smiling in death. Black orbs unlooking at the reflection of boy and horse sliding warped through their orbit.

  Callum looked down at himself, cut alien in their eyes. So unlike himself, a figure skeletal and pale, long-faced and concave under the dark oval of his hat. Some cavity yawned open inside him, cold as the morning without, and he knew something was terribly wrong. He knew it without thought, as sure as steel in the gut.

  His face was hot, his insides cold. His stomach clenched on him, clenched, clenched, clenched, and then he heaved, a yellowish fluid ejaculated down the side of the horse. It glimmered in the sun. He had made a terrible mistake. He pulled the reins to one side and dug his heels into the horse. He buried his face into the mane and let him run.

  A terrible mistake.

  * * *

  “Where is he?”

  The girl wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

  “Where’s who?”

  Clayburn squatted down in front of her. He cocked his head to one side. “You like dogs?”

  The men behind him chuckled, their chests quivering silently underneath their capes and coat
s. The fat man, Swinney, drove his beard into the crook of his thumb.

  The girl looked at the two hounds. They looked back, their jowls grueled with desire.

  Mean. Born or bred, no matter. Vicious.

  The one-armed man had produced a coil of rope. He came toward her, smiling.

  * * *

  The big horse, slick with sweat, thundered through the trees. Callum’s jaw was unhinged, the air cold in his mouth. He could not quit his chest from heaving. He should never have left her. Never. No matter the risk, the danger. He pushed a gloved hand out against the sky.

  Trees finally broke: the clearing. Dark scores wrinkled the bowl of light, a stitched ellipsis he squinted to see. He dropped down into the land of the hog raisers and found himself halfway across the field when the sight reared before his eyes. He hauled viciously on the reins. The black legs went rigid, the ground sliding torn beneath their hooves. Twenty white faces turned to look, half-blind, arms held high to block the risen sun. Then Clayburn, two hounds surging and snapping from the end of his arm like some evil appendage. Behind him a stake, a slump-tied creature naked but for a tattered shift. She was quivering.

  Ava.

  Beside Clayburn stood Swinney, looking. He took off his hat and held it against his chest. A round bald head, a round gray beard. Callum looked at him. The guns were coming out. The boy held his place and cocked his head. He was looking at Swinney. Only at him.

  The old man looked back. His chin moved, at last, and he might have smiled, just one corner of his mouth. His face was sad, knowing.

  Callum spurred the horse. They tore across the field, scattering the hobbled horses set to graze on the brown grass. The air crackled with gunfire. He looked over his shoulder and saw the men running and shooting, making for their horses. He saw old Swinney go toward the girl, his knife pulled. He cut her loose.

  The air sang around Callum. He ducked low to Reiver’s neck. Around them were the hobbled horses. These were not the ones the men had ridden out of the mountains. They were too new, too pretty, too little of something other. He drew down on a pretty bay and put a bullet in her haunches. She screamed and the others reared, spooked. He saw a second fall, shot by accident. Mania sprang upon them like contagion. They went walleyed, spooked, and he was lost amid the stampeding flesh, the rearing and screaming. He kept low in the saddle. There was Ava, running toward the edge of the field, away. He wheeled the horse and raged toward her. Men jumped back from the crazed horses. They raised their hands against the sun, blinded, and tried to aim. They spewed fire and smoke. Ava turned to look as he rode upon her. She raised an arm. He leaned far out of the saddle and took her arm and slung her onto the back of the horse.