Fallen Land: A Novel

by Taylor Brown

  “Don’t know?”

  The surgeon wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. Dried blood grouted his cuticles and nails.

  “I’m afraid she was in no condition to travel. We had to find somewhere to leave her this morning. Somebody to take her in.” He held his hands in front of his chest, open, as if holding something the size of a man’s skull. “I tried to find you. She was in terrible shape.” The man waited for an answer. There was none. He closed his hands, clasping them before his chest. “I gave her to a foraging party.”

  “Gave her?”

  The man nodded. “I told them to find a house that would take her in. I told them, though, told them if they touched her, I’d be liable to get real liberal with the capital saw should any of them come in with a minié ball before this war is out.”

  “Which foraging party?” asked Callum.

  The man looked away. “I don’t know. One that was going out.”

  Callum rolled the brim of his hat between his hands.

  “God damn you.”

  “Well, where the hell were you? You were the one should of been here, finding a place to take her in. Where were you? Off killing, that’s what I hear.”

  The boy halved the space between them in an instant.

  “Maybe I ain’t done.”

  The surgeon looked down at the boy, his eyes sad and round. No fear in them. They had welcomed too much for too long.

  Callum took a step back, exhaled, his shoulders slumping. He shook his head.

  “You don’t understand.”

  The surgeon replaced his spectacles, hooking the curved wires behind his ears. The apron that hung from his neck was bow-tied at the rear, the front slashed and splattered darkly with the undoings of so many men. “You’re right,” he said. “I don’t.” He crossed his arms. “They went south off the road. That much I know. I’m sorry.”

  Callum just nodded, saying nothing. He turned and started west through the camp. He needed to backtrack along the road to the bivouac site of the previous night, then begin searching south.

  It was full dark now. The stars were high and bright, the night black and cold. Wood smoke stung the air, and the hacking laughs of killers and thieves. They watched him pass, this vagrant ghost of a boy whose too-big boots shuffled stubbornly along, whose coat showed an amalgam of fabric bolts and scraps from the backs of dead men. A boy who trailed a saddled stallion that might fetch a year’s wages at auction. Word had spread of such a rider that morning. A killer with a boy’s face, a steed the color of night.

  He heard the whispers.

  He kept on, the lead slithering audibly through the grass behind him before arcing upward to the horse’s bridle. He passed a circle of infantrymen circulating a bottle among their number. Their bayonets were fixed to their rifles, arranged into a wood-framed tepee of blades that flowered toward the sky. He heard them talking low as he passed. He paid them no heed, kept walking.

  The lead burned out of his hand, yanked, a hot scoring even through the gloves he wore. He turned. There were three of them, infantrymen, the outer two with rifles, the center one with the limp end of the rope. The man had a heavy black beard and the navy kepi of an enlisted man.

  “Keep walking,” he said.

  Callum hawked and spat. “Or what?”

  “I think you know what.” He grinned. “But don’t worry, we’ll take real good care of your horse for you. Looks like it could use some feeding anyway.”

  Reiver snorted and spasmed, as if to throw flies off his back. The massive cage of ribs corrugated his hide. Callum looked at him, then looked at the men. He raised his arms out to either side.

  “Nothing like cold blood. Best use the sharp stuff, though. Don’t want no officers to hear.”

  The man stepped closer.

  “Don’t think we won’t.”

  “I’m right here. Hundred ten pounds, dripping. Just stick me and get it done, because I ain’t leaving without my horse. I got a girl to find, and you, you got a deep rung of hell to damn yourself to. Best get to it.”

  The black-bearded man stepped even closer, too close.

  “Don’t shit with me. Get smart and get walking.”

  Callum sighed. “If that’s how you want it.” He took a deep breath and threw down his arms and drove his right boot upward into soft tissue. The man’s face twisted as he fell to his knees, clutching his groin. Callum snatched the lead and clanged a boot in the nearest stirrup, and he was out of range before either of the two riflemen could try to stop him. He raced across the camp at a gallop, dismaying many, slowing to a lope only as he crossed the outer perimeter, so as not to alarm the pickets standing guard.

  He and the horse rode hours down the road, west, before turning off into the woods for a few hours of sleep. He still had his flint. He was cold but found himself afraid to build a fire, afraid of what creatures or men it might invite. It was an unexpected fear. He staked Reiver with a long lead of rope and huddled himself in the gnarled knees of a giant cypress, the empty pistol in hand. He knew the Colonel’s men were gone, dead, and the slave hunter too, but the cold in his gut told him otherwise. With no one to chase him, hunt him, the world seemed wrong. Nameless fears hunted the peripheries of his knowing, echoes of the men who had been chasing him for all those weeks. Ghosts, he knew, real if only in your own head.

  There was one redemption that shone in this darkness like a gate lamp of the world to be: to find her. He searched for her in his mind. Hunted her in every cabin he could imagine, every farmhouse. He found her in a thousand different ways, a hundred different places. He couldn’t stop. Sleep finally came over him, a welcome opiate, but the world it offered was little better, corrupted by nightmare. He saw their faces. In the bridge. Lit with revelation. Saw their bodies exploding in red bursts, startlingly red, torn limbs ricocheting from ceiling and siding. And the horses screaming, their eyes and teeth white with fear. The innocents.

  Before dawn he was on horseback, riding, hoping to be anywhere but where he was.

  * * *

  He found the field where the column had camped two nights ago—the night he had brought Ava bleeding to the surgeons. Pines in the east bit the first glow of a new day. In the dim minutes before daybreak, he saw the littered castoffs of an army twirling and fluttering across the field. Rolling papers and journal pages. A collapsed and abandoned tent, white, and rolling cans of purloined foodstuffs from neighboring farms. Libraries of stolen philosophy and tragedy and science lying flat-backed on the ground, their pages sailing in the wind like Oriental fans. Countless craters of dead ash, cold coals, and the yellow-hearted stumps of trees sawn off for a better night of sitting.

  The buzzards were already in flight, spiraling.

  He climbed down from the saddle and led the horse across the grounds, searching for something to eat. He passed a birdcage hanging from the limb of a dead tree, empty. More empty jars and cans. Thighbones from chickens and hogs, sucked clean and cracked for the marrow inside. Someone had already picked over the leavings. Locals, probably, eating the waste of their plundered storehouses before it turned queer and worm-ridden. Toward the center of the field there sat a makeshift dining table, an unhinged door laid over a whiskey barrel. The table was set. Porcelain dishes and saucers, a sterling silver serving dish and candlesticks. A place of feast.

  He lifted the lid off the serving dish; a mash of beans and corn bread coated the edges. It was hard as stone. He scraped free a pile of shavings with one of the dinner knives and put them on a china plate painted with blue filigree and a scene of men on horseback. He pulled out a chair to eat. Reiver lowered his head over Callum’s shoulder and snorted.

  “I hear you, boy. I hear you.”

  Under a buckboard wagon, down with a smashed wheel, he found a wicker basket of spilled apples. He brought it back to the dining table. The apples were bruised and soft where they had rested against one another or the ground. He carved out the dark places of three apples and set them on a plate for the h
orse. He found three matches in the pocket of a discarded shirt and used them to light the dinner candles. When the ruddy yolk of sun overwhelmed the trees, it found boy and horse breakfasting by candlelight, the boy picking pale chunks of apple off the tip of his knife like hors d’oeuvres at a fancy dinner. Meanwhile, a yellow stab of feathers jetted from shadow to shadow around them. A songbird. A canary. It sang like a tiny alarm in all that ruin.

  He thought of the world they might have, he and Ava, if only he could find her. The two of them working their own little plot of land on the Gosling plantation, having their own tin-roofed cabin beside one of those streams full of tadpoles and baitfish. He could see her on the porch already, rocking a baby to sleep, as he rode in from the fields at dusk. He could see a slim band of gold on her finger, her black hair dashed all upon her shoulders like something wild, her blue eyes glowing. They would sit on the porch and watch the lightning bugs hang like tiny lanterns in the coming dark. They would eat streak o’ lean and buttery greens, johnnycakes smothered in sorghum. They would know no matter how bad it got, how lean the times, they had seen worse. They would not have much, but it would be enough.

  He was headed south before the sun had fully cleared the trees. There was a dark creek running through a deep fold in the ground, the current tripping and pulsing against the stones. Too steep for Reiver to negotiate. Callum slid down its banks and watered the horse from the upturned bowl of his hat. He lifted up the trembling clarity again and again, like an offering of some kind. He needed Reiver fast and strong and tireless. He needed to find her. If not today, tomorrow. Soon. He feared he wouldn’t. Feared there would be nothing really to find. A slant-nailed crucifix, a mound of loose earth.

  He tried not to think of that.

  He rode a farm road that skated south between cotton fields. They were unharvested. Empty. The first quarter mile of split-rail fencing that bordered the road had been cannibalized for fuel by the army. Here or there lone timber rails littered the shoulder and road. Endless streaks scored the dirt where rails had been dragged by man or mule for burning.

  Buzzards were up against the climbing sun. He cut east toward them along a lane double-rutted from wagon traffic. Cotton fields ended; an orchard began. It was scorched. He watched each straight-planted aisle of stunted apple trees fall away into an ornate tunneling of branches, the columned trees condensing into a long-off vanishing point, a tiny speck of light. Then a new tree would swing into the foreground. It went on like that for a long time. Tunnel after tunnel. A white farmhouse appeared through the trees. It was sided with shiplapped heart pine and wore green storm shutters. The near side was stained black from the wind drift of a fired chicken coop.

  In the yard a dead bird dog, a spaniel. It was liver and white, its hindquarters destroyed by a close-in shotgun blast. Callum turned away from the sight too late. He rode past and helloed the house from the saddle. No answer. He tied off the horse at a hitching post and started toward the front steps. The door was ajar. A spool of dried blood the color of molasses zigzagged up the porch steps and into the house. He knelt down and touched two knuckles to it. Day-old. Tiny black ants hovered motionless in the coagulant, entombed.

  He gave the door a quick knock and helloed again. Nothing. He turned sideways and slipped through the partially opened door, no groan of hinges. A staircase took up one half of the foyer, a hallway the other. Closed doors to either side, windowed. He looked down. The blood trail wormed its way between his boots and turned right, skirting underneath one of the doors. He looked up and saw the twin-bore mouths bearing down on him. He hove onto his side as a torrent of crystalized glass blew sideways across the hallway behind him. He scrambled on all fours down the hallway and into the kitchen, his ears ringing. He looked for a back door, an escape from this room. There wasn’t one.

  “I’m unarmed! I don’t mean no harm.”

  A woman’s voice called out, rasp-throated with the gravel of age or wear. “I’m like to kill any little son-bitch comes sneaking in my house, harm-hunting or otherwise.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You looking to loot me, too, that it?”

  “No, ma’am. I’m just looking for my girl is all.”

  “Your girl?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Come to this doorway here with your hands up.”

  “You ain’t gonna go and shoot me, are you?”

  “Probably I’m not.”

  Callum got to his feet and walked slowly back to the shattered door frame. He had his hands up. The woman was sitting on a fainting couch tufted in red velvet. She had the white-swirled hair nest of a sophisticate, streaked crazy on one side, and a handsome fowling piece with twin barrels, one of them still smoking. In the lady’s lap lay a bloodied spaniel, its ribs swelling and laxing too quickly, its breath ragged and audible. It was licking the louvered flesh at the inside of her elbow, slowly. It didn’t look at him.

  She did. Wetness came into her eyes like a dam breaking. “They shot my dogs,” she said. Her face had begun to twitch, the sunken skin prodded by strange tics. “Why would they do that?”

  “I don’t rightly know, ma’am.”

  “Evil,” she said. “Pure as pure.”

  Her eyes narrowed.

  Callum shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

  She jutted her chin at him.

  “You one of them?”

  He looked into the black bore of the twin barrels, shaped infinitylike. “I don’t much know what I am,” he said.

  “Too bad,” she said. “I’d have liked to shoot you.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I better be going.”

  “Don’t.”

  He took a step back. “I got to. I got to find my girl.”

  The barrels began to shake. “I’ll be your girl.”

  “Much obliged, ma’am. But—” He took another step back. “But I got to get on.”

  “Don’t leave me,” she said. “He’s dying.” She looked at the dog.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  She wasn’t going to shoot him. He was out of the door and down the steps and around the house and on the horse before she started screaming for him. She was still screaming when he passed the charred carcasses of hens that radiated from the fired coop into the far end of the yard, how far they’d gotten on flaming wings. Still screaming when the lane veered southward and the house was lost beyond the trees.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  * * *

  He haunted the roads the day long, a scarecrow rider on a horse that blended well with the land to which she was lost. He found nothing. Not her. No sightings, no rumors. Char-colored killings littered the land. Crazed minds. He was given incongruent accounts of raiding parties, none of them with a girl. He was given food and shelter in some instances, the barrel of a gun in others. He was given preaching on the Coming of God, the Leaving. Given safe passage by a band of Confederate cavalry riders, bearded and red-eyed, who said Sherman was advancing on Fort McAllister, near Savannah. They said if it was overcome, the city would surely fall. He was given shot and powder by a faceless man dead in a ditch, a case of the flux by a maggot-ridden turkey he stole from the buzzards.

  He went fireless in the long nights and he feared what dreams would come. He did not want to close his eyes. The world had drawn down on him, the sky tattooed with death. Spiraling, spiraling. Everywhere a corpse. The cold sun cut him hard in the daytime, and the bite of smoke, and come sundown he just wanted the light. She was never out of his mind. When the nightmares came, the visions of men gone faceless, she was the good thing he knew existed. Knew. He was with her again. On the horse and in the beds they’d shared, wrapped up in the buffalo blanket for one of those long cold nights they’d spent on the ground, their limbs tangled for warmth. She was slapping him or kissing him, holding him tight, or him her. She was a thing torn out of him, which hurt a hundredfold worse than a saber or knife.

  He found nothing. No hints, no clues.
It was like she had vanished, winked away by some magician. Like she had never even existed. He began to call his own sanity into question. Whether her advent had been the work of his own imagining. Whether he was something more than a killer. Something less. A ghost that would wander the land forever, searching.

  Then, on a cold morning somewhere west of Savannah, he happened upon a clan of negroes washing themselves in a roadside ditch. They had their few possessions wrapped in gingham bundles, scattered along the bank, and a fire going to warm themselves after their bath. The women were naked to the waist and they covered their breasts as he rode up. They said they were headed toward Savannah, to find the savior Sherman. To follow him north. They had seen a white family on the road east, a week ago, with a dark-haired girl in the bed of their wagon. They said she’d been alive.

  Callum’s heart surged. It had to be her. It had to. He rode east toward the coast, the land of their hope. He thought surely she was close. He was a week crossing and recrossing the army’s path, searching, and she was around every bend in his mind, in every house and cabin, in every wagon he saw, and yet she wasn’t. He didn’t find her. No sign nor rumor. Nothing.

  He reached Savannah. Occupied. Sherman’s army had marched to the sea and captured the once-mighty city, presenting it like a gift to Lincoln. Bluecoats marched through the streets. There was broken glass and the reeling of drunken men, the periodic report of gunfire. Pistols mainly. Men dueling in the streets, too much peace, and people selling corn dodgers through their basement windows, afraid to come outside. He rode neatly squared streets shadowed by live oaks, down cobblestones to the brown river lined with flat-faced buildings whose windows echoed with laughter and screams, grunts and shrieks. He did not find her amid the riverfront taverns or the cotton warehouses or the shadowed monuments of square on square, the bronzed generals of more glorious wars, or in the green-tangled cemeteries with their ghostly statuary, their mossy oaks weeping in the breeze. He did not find her before the Customs House or the City Exchange or the State Arsenal, before any of the imposing buildings now draped in victors’ flags, or in the churches or hospitals or colonies of poor in the gutters and alleys.