by Taylor Brown
They were nearing the edge of the field when he looked back a final time. In the distance he saw big Swinney collapse, his head a corona of blood in the new sun. Behind him stood Clayburn, his pistol smoking. Callum blinked, his focus shifting to Ava’s face. It was white. Ghost white. He looked down. Her shift was blossomed with blood, bright as life, and her arms were stringy and pale where she gripped his waist, hard. She drove her face against his cheek.
“Ride,” she said.
* * *
Callum paced the horse a hair short of cruelty. No one could catch them across open country. They crossed an undamaged bridge upriver from the massacre of horseflesh and pushed onward. Whenever Callum would try and check Ava’s bleeding, she would clamp her chin on his shoulder.
“Not yet,” she’d say, her body cloaked now in his patchwork coat. “Not yet.”
Daylight was a long blur. Come dark they topped a hill and looked down upon the campfires of Sherman’s bivouacked army, a whole galaxy encamped beneath the starless sky. Callum turned to look at Ava, his jaw open. She let him look this time. Her eyes were slits, her pupils huge and lightless save strange constellations of reflected firelight.
“Hurts,” she said.
He looked down. Her thighs were trembling, blood so dark upon them it seemed some liquid nature of the horse itself had crept upward in dark jags upon her flesh. She let him open the coat. He did so gently, as if it held some object of great fragility.
The shift was fully darkened.
“Hurts,” she said again.
He swallowed and looked down the hillside to the fires below. He looked back. “I know it does, honey. We’re gonna get you help.”
“No,” she said.
“Yes.”
Callum lowered himself from the saddle. He took up the reins and starting leading the horse down the slope. At the same time he began dropping each of the guns he carried, so as to be no threat to the sentries hidden in the darkness ahead. He dropped them in the dirt, all but one.
* * *
Callum sat on the bare ground outside the surgeons’ tent. Night was deepening overhead. Men in rancid uniform eyed the horse as they strode past, lusting. A boy maybe two years Callum’s senior stood beside him, a musket hung from one shoulder. His guard. Callum watched the shadows of the two surgeons warp and swell against the irregular contours of the fabric, their silent blood labor illumined by a single lantern. The pickets had seen her face and allowed them across the lines. Then the surgeons, into their tent. It didn’t hurt that she was so pretty.
Callum had told them nothing of who he was, who he had been. What atrocities under what authority. He said bandits had shot her. Their home had been burned. She was his sister. One of the surgeons stepped from the tent. He wore gold spectacles, a butcher’s apron, a graying mustache.
Callum stood quickly. “How is she?”
The man’s eyes were pouched and fallen, like an old dog’s.
“I won’t lie to you, son. We were able to remove the bullet, but her condition is deteriorating rapidly. Where is the father?”
“The father?”
“She’s with child. Surely you knew that.”
“He’s dead.”
The man nodded. “And your parents, where are they?”
Callum sniffed. “I’m the only family she’s got.”
The man nodded slowly and squinted out at the many fires.
“You better come in and say your good-byes, then. I don’t know she’ll make it till morning.”
* * *
The boy who emerged from the tent had nothing writ upon his face, a frozen mask the color of bone. Only his eyes spoke into the darkness, twin worlds of storm. He untethered the horse and led him toward the center of the encampment, where the fires were brightest. His guard knew what had transpired inside the hospital tent and followed him, silent.
She had given no sign of his presence, her eyes far off and unreachable, her body sunken and pale. Ghosted away into the world that comes, or doesn’t. Into a history, a story, a fiction. Callum thought of the words of the seer, the weak and yellowing old man who presumed to speak their fate, words perhaps begetting a future otherwise unwritten. Just foul enough for the unknowable architecture of the world to cling to, to construct out of the vagaries of greed and hate, love and hunger, a fate to underpin the unfolding future. And Callum, with his one handhold on a bright world slipping away, found within himself a last faith. Nothing else but this. And he knew how to make of the world what he would. How to shape it to his will.
First he found men in dirty uniform, muddy boots and trousers. These were enlisted men. Infantry. He squatted near the fire of a certain group. Ohioans, they said, from the southern river valley of that state. He asked what they had heard of good Northern men, foragers, hanged by a dead tree in land to the west. Their bodies mutilated, messaged by knifepoint.
They knew of these men and others, droves of men gone missing when they separated from the main column. Their corpses found disfigured, cruel things to send home in a box. It was the work of rebel cutthroats, they said. Guerrillas. Their ire swelled over the talk, their eyes bright with hate.
The thing he needed.
He kept on, toward a fire encircled by horses and men with tassels upon their jackets, silver scabbards that held the reeling of flame like a liquid. Cavalrymen. They had thick dark beards and stared unspeaking into their fire, minds philosophic or vacuous. He didn’t know which. Didn’t care. He knew what way to summon them. He found an officer among them, a man of some power. He pulled him aside and told him of what things he’d done, what things he could still do. The man listened, and so did his compatriots. This intelligence began working its way through the ranks. Climbing.
* * *
The riders rose from the cold pallet of slumber, beds of molding leaves. White shafts of near-naked trees towered above them toward a blue sky. The morning was bright and cold, pure, like the Lord’s Day always seemed to be. Limbs creaked, bone to bone, and they were thinking of food, coffee, hearth, blankets—other things they no longer possessed—when the eastern sentry stormed upon them at a gallop, his face red. He reeled his horse through the trees, the animal’s teeth bared against the hard yank of the bit.
“He’s in that field!”
“Who is?”
“Him!”
The sentry snapped his horse around and whipped its hindquarters and rode hard away. The others followed. They cut their hobbles and mounted their horses and gouged them onward, dropping out of the trees into a wide field flanked by a river, a covered bridge. There in the field was the boy on the black horse, alone, his hat tilting back on his head. The horsemen rode down upon him. Clayburn was first out of camp behind the sentry, reins in teeth, his pistol drawn. The boy sat his horse, unmoving. Watching. He wanted parley, perhaps.
He would have none.
Clayburn seemed to slow a moment, straightening, uncertain, until the other riders began to catch him and he redoubled his speed. The boy made a small gesture, a tip of the hat perhaps, and then he whirled on his horse, whipping the animal for speed. He lashed the rump one side and the other, again and again, making for the river. But the riders would catch him this time, no matter his horse.
Boy and horse disappeared into the covered bridge, and the riders followed close upon him, following the one-armed tracker high upon his horse like some double-goer of the Colonel. The horsemen became shadows of themselves beneath the rafters, the line of them hungry to end this. This boy, this chase, this war. The boy emerged from the far end of the bridge, and the riders were hard upon him, arched for glory, when the square of daylight before them erupted, the naked rafters of the bridge illuminated like a tunneled chapel, the world of their becoming undone in a fury of power and light.
* * *
The boy broke from the darkness of the bridge and drove the animal head-on into the belched awakening of flame, smoke, shot. Ambush. He had been told to cut for safety on the near side of the river, bu
t he rode on instead to his own riddance, the violent certitude of which he had convinced himself. That if he ended here, she would be safe, his evils the better claimant to a prophecy that ended in the ground. No fate would let such as him out of this. He rode on into the artillery guns aiming down the throat of the bridge, the rifles exploding into the ruptured torrent of flesh within its walls. He waited to be cut down by the death shrieking invisibly through the forest. He waited until he had cleared the firing line, and the thunder had lapsed, and all you could hear were the moans of the stricken, the undead, echoing from the mouth of the bridge. He turned, sitting the horse. The roof of the bridge collapsed. Below, a red cloud churned slowly downstream.
* * *
A young cavalryman looked inside a small satchel he’d found on one of the bodies.
“Good Christ.”
The captain stiffened. “Watch your mouth, Simpson. What did you find?”
The young man emptied the contents into his palm, a pile of white-pointed fragments. The captain plucked one from his hand and held it to the light.
“Bone,” he said. “Finger joints, looks like.”
“What kind of a sick son of a bitch—”
The captain snorted. “A dead one, like the rest of them.” He flicked the bone away.
Callum stepped up to them. “Sir,” he said, “I really got to be getting back to camp.”
The captain had a long pointed beard, jet black, and an upturned mustache. He adjusted his navy slouch hat. “What you got to do is what you’re told to.”
“That wasn’t my understanding of the deal.”
The man looked at him like he was a dog, some nameless mongrel.
“You turn Judas on your own brothers and think it warrants immunity? Son, you’re lucky you aren’t swinging from a tree like the rest the guerrillas we’ve been rounding up.”
“My sister, sir, she’s dying.”
The man snorted. He looked from the boy to the bridge and back again.
“And whose fault is that?”
Callum felt the blood rush to his face, hot, and the ground beneath him seemed to be slipping, a cold void where once he’d been standing. He could not get enough air. The whole world constricted on him, pinning him down, and he thought his heart might scream out of his chest, explode. He staggered to the horse, put a hand on his saddle. He felt sick, more than sick. That he was the sick thing, the sickness itself.
“Don’t you mount that horse,” said the captain. “You do, you’ll be sorry.”
The other cavalrymen turned from the gore of the bridge to watch this boy claw at the ropes and ties of his saddle. The captain slid his revolver from its holster and let it hang by his side. The boy struggled to set one foot in the near stirrup. He began to pull himself up. The captain raised his pistol along a straight arm. The young cavalryman closed his fist around the fleshless tarsals, watching the boy.
“Don’t,” he whispered.
Callum hugged Reiver’s neck and slid his far leg over the horse’s rump. The captain primed his hammer. Callum turned the horse down the road at a slow trot. The captain held the base of his skull beneath the barrel of his revolver a long moment.
“God favors a fool,” he said. He dropped the gun back to his side and nodded at the young cavalryman. “Simpson, you and Brown go pull that son of a bitch off his horse. And bind his hands.”
* * *
Callum rode within the parallel lines of blue-clad horsemen, his wrists bound uselessly behind his back. The sun was at its highest, the trees black and crack-limbed, the sky paler than a robin’s egg. He could smell smoke but saw none on the horizon. The cavalry riders caught the rear guard of the army column along the dark wake of a churned-over road. The earth here was no longer red. It was black, how it got closer to the coast. The captain sent a courier toward the head of the column with news of ambush, victory. Callum searched the nearest faces for that of the surgeon. How he was to find him again in this sea of men, of hangdog faces thousands deep along the roads, and wagons that all looked the same, and ambulances and buckboards covered in mud and soot—he hadn’t thought of that. He knew he couldn’t do it with his hands tied behind his back.
The courier returned and spoke with the captain, who nodded and gestured toward the boy. The courier rode toward him. It was the man called Simpson. He cut the boy’s horse out of the line. Reiver snorted but consented. Simpson slowly slid a knife from a sheath on his belt. Callum watched the round black eye of the horse track the blade as it neared them. He could feel the power swelling underneath him.
“Lemme see your hands,” said Simpson.
Callum whispered to the horse. “Whoa,” he said. “Whoa boy.” He rotated on the saddle to give the man his hands. Simpson slid the knife between his wrists and cut the pigging string that bound them. “Somebody says you’re free to go.”
“The captain?”
The man shrugged. “Somebody up the line. Thought you deserved it, after what you done.”
Callum massaged his wrists. “I got to find my sister. There was a surgeon that was helping her.”
“What’s his name?”
“I don’t know.”
“Company?”
Callum shook his head.
Simpson spit a bullet of black juice on the road. “Can’t really help you, then. Wish I could. Reckon you just gonna have to go looking for him.” He swept his hand ahead. The mud-covered parade of soldiers and carts and mules and horses receded far into the distance, what seemed a whole nation stretched out in file. The road wound them out of sight, then held them up again upon a distant hill, unbelievably far off. Callum took up the reins.
“Hold on,” said Simpson.
He plugged his tongue into the corner of his mouth and cut his eyes left, right. The other cavalry riders had continued on. The two of them were alone on the road but for stragglers, ex-slaves following the march into some gloried future. Simpson turned on his saddle and dug under his bedroll. Out came the Walker Colt, butt-first. He held it out.
Callum hesitated a moment, his head cocked.
“Yours,” said Simpson. “Don’t go telling nobody I gave it back to you, huh?” He wiggled the butt. “Thought you might be needing it.”
Callum took the gun. Turned it over in his hand.
“Appreciate it,” he said. “Couldn’t spare no extra powder and shot, could you?”
Simpson spat.
“Don’t push your luck.” He touched a couple of fingers to his hat brim. “I hope it goes well with your sister.” He turned his horse back toward the column and rode off.
Callum stowed the gun beneath his own bedroll, hidden. His stomach was hollow and cold, his breath short. He glanced up at the sky a long moment. Searched its emptiness.
He took up the reins and rode off toward the procession, fast, as if in flight.
* * *
“You seen a surgeon with gold spectacles, gray mustache?”
The trudging soldiers looked up at him on the horse. White eyes in smoked faces. Some were hardly older than he was. Maybe a year. They shook their heads or shrugged, went back to their labor. Trudge, trudge, trudge. He continued up the line, asking for the surgeon.
They crossed a river by pontoon bridge. The water was black. Broad mangrove roots shouldered from the shallows. The guards let him pass on the horse. The road wound itself over a small rise on the other side, and he was asking, asking, when he heard moans and screams behind him. Everyone turned to look. The bridge had been cut loose on the far side, swinging toward the center of the river. Dark-skinned followers of the march wailed and splashed into the current, marooned on the far shore, their hands thrown skyward. Hysteria. Their bodies cut white daggers in the current, pointed downstream. Freedom’s novitiates, newly unslaved, now abandoned. Some dove headlong into the waters, true believers, and others were forced in, screaming, as those behind them pushed for their chance. None made it. The waters here were too quick, too dark and cold.
“Goddamn nigger
s,” said somebody. “Everybody knows they can’t swim.”
An officer galloped up the line, an arm straightened east.
“Move!” he yelled. “Keep moving!”
He gave the boy a hard look but kept riding the line.
By dark, Callum had ridden most of the column. No surgeon. Not that he had seen. The soldiers lit pine knots in the falling dark, red meteors that smoked above the road. He watched the burning snake of them, miles-long, wind and flare over the countryside, hell come on parade. The dark was cold, the flames almost welcome. His hands were bloodless underneath his gloves, and trembling. He hadn’t eaten for two days.
The soldiers fanned out in an annex of fallow fields to make camp for the night. Callum wandered among the fires of strangers. Men soot-faced and strange from warring, addled and nervous with darting eyes. Others gone mean, eyes hunting the dark with a sliver of teeth, a squirming tongue. He gave no thought to the looks they gave him, his horse. He was dazed, mindless, hungry. He kept looking for her. Kept asking.
“Boy?”
Callum turned. He’d been squatting before a jumble of weak coals that had been abandoned, staring into them. Not thinking. Unable to think. Animated by want alone. When he saw who it was, he bolted upright and removed his hat.
“Doc?”
“Heard you been looking for me.”
“How is she? Is she—”
The dog-faced man removed his wire spectacles.
“I don’t know.”
