by Taylor Brown
He rode Christmas the night through, and he thought out of some alignment of stars or winds or gods he would find her on this night, of all of them, and he rode the dark hours among men prostrated by whiskey and whoring and he was wrong. Nothing. Come daylight he rode south, out of the city.
He rode shell causeways between flooded rice fields full of empty sky, passing the quieted guns of Fort McAllister, the great earthwork fortifications still fronted by an abatis of felled trees, their snarled crowns sharpened to stakes. He’d heard it took Sherman’s army only minutes to storm the place, charging through all the entanglements, the ditches and buried torpedoes, overrunning the men within. Old Glory now whipped from a flagpole in the center of the fort.
Callum rode on south, down the coast, toward that lost destiny of theirs, carrying the tiny hope that Ava had somehow made it that far. That she was waiting for him there, in a place as good as they’d ever dared imagine. A hope, he knew, as feeble now and ill-born as any he might allow. In time, the rice paddies gave way to salt marsh and swamp, a sea smell blown in on the wind. Dark arteries of brackish water spiraled and spread thin-fingered through marsh and sedge. Sharp white birds with S-curved necks stood one-footed among the browned sawgrass, watching him. Reiver reared once at a half-submerged length of timber in a creek that shouldered the trail they rode. Callum yelped when the log writhed and kicked itself into the water, an ancient reptile whose yellow eyes and armored snout veed through the current like an ironclad gunboat. Not since Louisiana had he seen one of those.
There was a beach. At dusk he would tie Reiver off on a piece of driftwood and strip naked, standing waist-deep in the cold embrace of the tide. So cold. These were his ablutions, a boy alone on the shore under falling darkness. He was weightless and numb in the water. Afterward he huddled close to a fire raised on the naked sands, trembling, the blood flushing back from the deep parts of him where it went to hide, once-white and cold-gone corners of him glowing, tingling like the return of a soul.
Strange creatures littered the beach, the remnants of another world. Jellyfish like snow-blue snot and armored crabs the size of big tortoises with daggerlike tails. He lost track of days, weeks. He ate what he could. Turtles, ghost-colored crabs, fishes circumscribed in pools by an outgoing tide. After a time, the sands narrowed and he rode inland along a worn road of brown dirt.
* * *
Dawn. A healthy tree axed across the road.
Ambush.
Reiver sensed it—must have—surging toward the felled pine, leaping it just as smoke bellowed from the trees. Callum flinched, hearing balls zip through the branches all around them. He dropped close to Reiver’s neck, feeling the sweat against his cheek as they thundered down the road, leaving the highwaymen behind them.
They rode a mile farther, hard, then slowed to a walk. Callum looked behind him. No one. He let out a breath, relieved, then reached for the beef bladder to take a drink. Reiver yawed suddenly sideways in the road, as if he’d lost his balance. Callum started to correct him, then didn’t. Something wasn’t right. The horse’s gait seemed broken of a sudden, his shoulders and flanks firing all out of sequence, his legs jerked as if by vicious strings. His withers twitched, and he twisted his head as if to throw something off of it.
Callum slid from the saddle, his chest tightening. He removed his gloves and circled the big horse, his fingertips tracing the great dark swells that made him.
Please no. Please no.
There it was, just above his right leg. In his side. An angry red mouth, swollen and leaking in ribbons down his leg, bright against the towered black.
Callum could hardly breathe. He undid the cinch and pulled off the saddle and blanket. He dropped them on the side of the road and stripped off his coat and pushed it against the wound.
“You’re okay, big man. You’re okay.”
Reiver turned his head out to the side to look back at him with one of those eyes that was round as the world and had no white in it. He knew Callum was lying. His breath was coming ragged now, loud and irregular, and Callum could see his teeth. His great ribbed sides flared hugely, like wings trying to break free from beneath a tautened hide. Callum’s hand felt warm now. He looked at it. The blood had pushed through the coat. It wasn’t going to stop.
This great machine that ran on blood, its hide not made of the armor that Callum once thought. Not invincible, as he had believed. As he had so badly needed to. How easily it had sprung a leak, the work of a tiny half-ounce ball of lead, the rich red stuff fleeing into the light. Callum could hear the animal’s breath whistling through the wound. He stuck his thumb against the hole to plug it, but soon the big horse was coughing, his great lungs filling up, his teeth gone red.
Reiver’s front legs gave first, buckling, and he crashed to his knees in the road, then to his chest, his muzzle clapping in the dirt before he rolled onto his side, his great belly coated in grit and leaves. Callum fell to his knees beside him. He touched the big horse on the head, gently between the eyes, then bent close to his ear, whispering to him. He told him how good he was, how good and how strong. He told him he was the king of all horses, the noblest thing God had made. The handsomest. He told him they were brothers, the two of them. That he would never forget him. That he loved him. He loved him so much. And when he finished telling him, Reiver was dead.
Callum lay a long time in the road, holding him, his ear against the barrel chest. Hearing nothing shoot through it, no blood, the great heart stilled and cooling. He cried. He pushed his nose between the ribs and cried into the salty coat, the dried sweat and horse smell. He didn’t care who might find him or what they might do. He didn’t care for anything save the last bit of warmth leaving the big horse like a spirit. He wanted it so badly to stay.
It didn’t.
He stood, finally, and wiped his eyes. He left Reiver there in the road. Had to. He left his coat on him to keep him warm. The one Ava had made. He slung the saddle wallets over his shoulder and started away on foot, looking back now and again as the dead horse grew smaller behind him, a shape mounded darkly in the road. Featureless now, a pile of coats or heap of coal. A thing grown smaller and smaller.
Gone.
* * *
He was two days walking. Clutching his own arms, shaking. He slept nearly in the fires he made, woken by cinders burning through his shirt. He needed a new coat if he was going to find her, and a horse. He couldn’t find her if he was dead.
The coat came first, the morning of the second day. Callum found a black man dead in a ditch. He’d been shot in the throat. His eyes were still open, looking right down his nose, like he’d been trying to see the wound that killed him. He had a hatchet gripped in one hand. It looked like he’d meant to ambush someone—for their horse, perhaps—and chosen the wrong rider. Callum stared down at him.
What would he have done?
He knelt down next to the man. Those naked white eyes, staring, seeing nothing. He pushed down the lids. He pulled off the man’s coat, a rancid wool-jean shell jacket with a six-button front, gray where it wasn’t stained. There were at least two bullet holes in it, with patches of blood dried in the muslin lining. He put it on, wondering how many dead men had worn it before he did. He stuck the hatchet through his belt.
He dragged the man off the road, along a narrow game trail that led into the woods. He dragged him until the trees and palmetto cleared. Before them rose a dirt-speckled ring of shells, tall as a man’s house. He’d heard tell of such shell rings but never seen one. They were built circling old Indian villages. Built of refuse. The pink sea meat scraped quivering from the shell, the leftovers cast off. Over generations the empty shells accrued into a rampart of sorts, nearly circular. There were no natives now, not here. Nor huts nor fires. He dragged the dead man into the center of the ring and let him go. The coal-dark limbs lay splayed over the ground, the palms colorless. Callum was going to bury him, proper, like Ava would have made him do. It was the least he could do, given the coat.
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br /> He knelt down and began digging with his hands, but it wasn’t like he thought. It wasn’t just dirt. The soil was full of broken shells, droves of them, sharp middens that didn’t want to come out, that gnawed his fingertips until they were raw. He tried and tried, his fingers beginning to bleed. No use. It was like a wall just beneath the surface, trying to keep him out.
The man lay there, limbs askew, shells around him barnacled and broken. Callum sat beside him, his legs spread wide, spent. He had exhumed a huge bluish shell, spiraled, with a pointed base and spiked crown. He picked it up and shook the dirt out of it. He tried to look inside, but the inlet curved quickly into shadow, like the contorted innards of a trumpet. He shook it, then held the cool hollow place to his ear. Ocean surf sang into his ear canal. Startled, he dropped it. He drew up and fled from under the high walls of the place, all those sea skeletons that might speak to him in the same strange tongue. It frightened him and he didn’t know why.
The next day he found himself in a citrus orchard, slim black trees heavy-hung with bright globes of fruit. Nearly ripe. He sat against a tree and skinned an orange on the blade of the dead man’s hatchet. The sweet acid of the wedges swished around his mouth. The flies swirled around his sweetened fingers. He ate fruit after fruit, glutting himself on the sweetness. He sucked his fingers, one by one. They stung, raw from the day before, but he didn’t care. He licked the tips, the knuckles, the webs that split them. His lids grew heavy.
* * *
“You kilt him?”
He opened his eyes to the voice, a woman’s. He squinted at her, a slave woman with a wild streak of white in her hair. Other orchard slaves were gathered behind her, their faces coffee-colored, their picking baskets green. He’d fallen asleep underneath the tree.
“Killed who?” he asked. “What? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Like hell you don’t,” said the woman. “He was heading north. To Savannah. You got his hatchet.”
He looked down at the bladed implement sitting in his lap, the edge glazed with juice.
“This? I—I just found him. I wasn’t the one that killed him.”
She grabbed the hatchet, and Callum, by instinct, yanked it away. The blade winked between the webbing of her fingers. An accident. Blood blossomed from her hand, into the sunlight. She grasped her hand bleeding to her chest, like a wounded animal.
“He was my son!” she screamed. “My son!”
Chapter 15
Callum peered through the palmettos at the big house. Beside it stood the stables, green-trimmed and cavernous. He crept slowly through the undergrowth, careful of twigs, his saddle wallets hanging over his shoulder.
He’d run from the slaves in the orchard. He hadn’t known what else to do. The woman had fallen to her knees, wailing for her son. He hadn’t meant to hurt her. Not any of them. He had only wanted to talk to them. To ask them where they were, and what day it was, and if they knew of the Gosling Plantation and if it was close. If they knew of a dark-haired girl, hurt, brought this way in a wagon. But he couldn’t ask any of that, not after what he’d done. After delivering that kind of news. He’d just run.
He crept toward the stables now, pistol in hand. Stranger’s stables. He needed a new horse. To find her, he did. He surveyed the grounds and saw no one moving, just the horses standing motionless through the open doors. He scampered out of the brush and into the barn. It had that familiar smell: alfalfa and manure and horse sweat, the tang of iron tools hanging on the walls. He tiptoed down the aisle, sizing the stock, running his palm over the swells that powered them. Some retreated in their stalls; others offered themselves for praise. He chose a big red roan and saddled her. It was an ancient Grimsley saddle with hair padding and beveled stirrups he found hanging in the tack room. He rigged his saddle wallets and mounted.
Just as he rode out of the stable doors, a white man rounded the corner. A boy. Thin, thin as he was, and Callum looked at him as if looking into the trembling mirror of a well, like a younger version of himself. So strange. The boy had a knife hanging from his belt, a shotgun cradled in the crook of his arm. Callum drew down on him with his revolver and primed the hammer and did not shoot.
Not this time.
Not again.
He wanted to say something, but the words caught in his throat.
He wheeled the horse onto the shell road and spurred it toward that future of tunneled oaks. But even as he gained velocity he knew this engine beneath him was not strong enough, was not his salvation. He could see already the noose hanging over him, the bleed-out of a slaughtered animal. He wanted a place to go but had none, no walls of centuries past. No ancestors, no progeny. No Ava. Only the road ever lengthening before him. He heard the hollering of a second man behind him and spurred the horse still harder. The shell road shone bone-white under the noon sun, the bleached backs of a thousandfold sea shields crackling underneath his hooves, protesting, as if he were something come newly wicked upon their prehistoric world. He wanted that sound to end, the crackling.
The first shot bellowed behind him. Shotgun. Then another. He was struck still stirruped from the horse, dragged, a red trail of himself scrawled across the armored path of ridges and spines. The horse stopped, stamping away from him. Callum lay there on the old shell road, his spirit spreading brightly beneath him. He heard the boots of men coming for him. The boy and another man.
“It ain’t him, is it?” asked the boy.
“Nuh-uh. Look at that coat on him. Deserter is what he looks like.”
Their boots. The shells. In his skull the dark crackling of broken backs took on weight and precedence, growing slowly into the thunder of far-off hooves, hard-riding. A big dark horse that would always run.
Their shadows cast him.
“You want to string him up?”
The man sniffed. “Best we can do for a horse thief.”
Callum opened his eyes. Past the men, the noose. To the house. It rose like a great white arrow from the earth, as tall as it was wide, upon columns round as oaks. He saw a lone figure in a window. The second story. A girl. Black hair, white arms. A body motionless, alone, like a watching ghost.
Ava?
He blinked.
She was gone. The window black.
Shadows crisscrossed him. The tickle of rope. His chest was burning, his breath short. His eyes were open but barely. The outspill of his saddle wallets glittered on the road. He saw a jar. The jar. On its side. A babe, unborn. A seed. He looked up. Bare branches fissuring the blue sky. He closed his eyes. A naked white tree glowing in perfect darkness.
He felt the rope scratching his neck.
Tightening.
They’d tied the other end to the pommel of the saddled horse.
The boy squatted before him, his boots creaking as he did.
“You got some last words?”
He looked past the boy, to the house. A figure came out the front door, black hair wild as she tromped down the steps, her white shift clinging tightly to her body. He felt her high in his throat. The most beautiful girl he had ever seen. Alive. Like a miracle from the house. He blinked, almost afraid to believe. His jaw hung slack, amazed. The boy said something, but Callum didn’t hear him. Wasn’t listening. His eyes only on her. He started to say it, the word that would save him—Ava—when the older man turned and slapped the horse’s rump.
He was yanked skyward, shut-throated by the noose. His hands went to his neck, his feet kicking crazily beneath him. His head felt huge and red, ready to burst, and he couldn’t breathe. He fought his eyes open. He had to see her. She was on the shell road now, running toward them, her arms swinging hugely, her cheeks glowing red. A vision that burned. He tried to reach for her, to point her out, but his arms would not obey him, thrashing the air like a man drowning. He tried to scream her name and couldn’t. He saw her as if at the end of a darkening tunnel, her belly flat against the shift as she ran.
The baby, he thought. The baby. She should be showing b
y now. The loss boomed through him like a knell, a big echo of everything gone, and his heart swelled huge even as the darkness rushed in. A heart swelled big as a house, with chambers for them all. For the baby gone, and the horse, and the unborn brother in the jar. For these men even, who watched his spirit jerk from his body. For all of them, all over this land, who knew nothing of what they did. And for her most of all. A heart so huge and red, so full it could never die and yet. He tried to open his eyes a last time now, and the world was tiny, a pinhole of light in the great dark. Then gone.
* * *
A voice: “Cut him down! That’s him! Cut him down!”
A snap. He slammed back to the ground, coughing and choking, and there were hands at his neck, fighting the rope. It loosened. He rolled onto his back, drinking air, and looked up. The darkness bled slowly from his vision, and out of it came those blue eyes, bright as whole worlds.
Epilogue
Spring
The sun was lowering in the west, coming in slantwise through the stable doors. Callum ran the curry comb along the great swells of the red roan. A mountain of flesh, red in her face and legs and mane, her barrel white-powdered as if with snow. In her right flank a sprinkling of solid red corn marks amid the mixed hairs. The places the shotgun pellets had gone in, where the hair had grown back only red, like some memory of the hurt. In Callum’s own hip a mottled pattern of hard white welts, scars he sometimes thumbed through his shirt. He wiped down the roan’s coat with a sheepskin mitt, polishing it to a sheen, then gathered up his grooming tools and walked into the tack room. Implements of iron and leather and hemp hung on the walls, telling him it was time to go home. He put away his brushes and combs, his rags and hoof picks, and walked out under the late sun.
The man and the boy were coming in from the fields, their horses’ hooves crunching on the road. They were his distant cousins, Goslings, whose family had taken Ava in. The two of them were brothers. They stopped. The older one had lost three fingers with Clinch’s cavalry at the Altamaha River in 1862. He spat off the far side of the horse from Callum, then leaned cross-armed on the pommel, the reins looped in one hand.
