She glanced at me with a harsh little glint in her eyes.
“Is that what you would like to be, Abraham, a cavalier?”
I couldn’t tell her how I had a burning hate against Pa. He was born with a rotten eye, and I reckon that’s how come he was so ornery—he never learnt to read or write. I could have been as word-blind as Pa if I hadn’t willed myself to read. I would scribble words in sand and snow, or on whatever
foolscap
I could find. My college was the bark of a dead tree.
I didn’t want to be no cavalier, with all that finery and fluff. But it was my own cruel way of belittling Pa and poking fun at him.
“Ma’am, I’d like to learn from books and accomplish a little with that learning.”
Pa had never been fond of the few books I had—the Bible
, Æsop’s
Fables
, and
A
Thousand and One
Nights
. He complained that reading near the fire kept me from my chores. His face would twist up with that rotten eye if he caught me with a book in my hand. Sometimes he’d shake me until I was silly, and knock me down. I wouldn’t fight with Pa. But I didn’t want to live all my life in the woods, pecking away at hardscrabble.
Hannah told me about her own hard life—I was dismayed to learn she was no more than twenty. She said the puckers near her mouth had come from her fondness for a clay pipe. She was enamored of Indian weed, but weed alone couldn’t have put so many marks on her face.
Her Pa had worked her to the bone, trying to make poor Hannah his
second
wife, her Ma being an invalid and all. Sometimes she had to spend half the day fighting him off. It wasn’t all that rare in the hinterland to find fathers marrying up with a favorite daughter. Still, it disheartened me to imagine Hannah’s Pa wanting to poke her.
“I was the family mule and milk cow,” she recalled. Hannah had to cook and sew and attend to her brothers and sisters. She’d had no more schooling than a jackass. “I never learnt to cipher, and I barely learnt my ABCs.” But she knew enough to memorize the hymn book after the preacher recited the hymns for her. She was a shouter at church. And she would cry out a hymn while the preacher was reciting the service. Her throat warbled like a songbird as Hannah Armstrong sang me one of her hymns.
Lord Jesus is in my arms
Sweet as honey, sweet as jam
Strong and hard as country ham
Jack had courted her on account of the hymns, she said. It mystified me that they had met in church.
“Is Jack a religious man?”
“No,” she said with a smile that softened the pucker lines—and suddenly I saw the pretty gal she must have been before her Pa had worked her to the bone.
“Are you religious?” she asked.
“I don’t believe in the divinity of Jesus,” I said.
“Neither does Jack.”
“Then what was he doing in church, ma’am?”
“Trying to kidnap me.”
Jack was riding with his Boys, after bloodying up a little town and feasting himself on a farmer’s wife, when he heard Hannah’s voice, and couldn’t recover from it. “It haunted him. That’s what he said.”
The Boys had never been hypnotized by lady shouters and their cries to Jesus. But Jack walked right into the church—a cabin without a window that my own Pa might have built. This cabin had to burn candles on the sunniest day, she said.
“And did he drag you out of church, ma’am?”
She knew all about the Boys from Clary’s Grove. Hannah had seen Jack ride on his horse, proud as a border bandit as he went around pillaging people. But she still wouldn’t have gone with him, even if her face was all on fire. The ruffian got down on his knees in front of that congregation of farmers and their kin. Her Pa was mortified. He couldn’t conceive of losing his own little girl. He whisked her away from church and locked her up in the cellar. She didn’t have to tell me what happened next. He forced himself upon Hannah while she screamed, and her brothers and sisters heard all that commotion and
carnage
. They wouldn’t interfere with their own Pa, but none of them had counted on Clary’s Grove. When Jack couldn’t find Hannah, he followed her Pa home, bust into his cabin, ripped open the cellar’s trapdoor, went down into that pit of black clay, saw Hannah in the dark, sittin’ there like a bruised animal. He swaddled her in his own shirt, leapt out of that clay pit with Hannah in his arms, while her Pa begged for his life. Jack had an inclination to murder the whole family, but he was clever enough not to harm Hannah’s kin. She might have shivered at the horror of it all, and then blamed him. So he sat her down on his saddle, washed the blood and filth off Hannah’s face, and delivered her to Clary’s Grove.
It must have been like entering a new kind of paradise for Mrs. Jack, away from those predations of her Pa, but I didn’t see much that was heavenly in that sinister cabin she called home. It didn’t even have a proper dirt floor. You entered the cabin at your own risk. It was rife with little caverns and holes, and I worried about mud slides for the babies and piglets of Clary’s Grove. Jack’s own booty troubled me the most—rings that were still attached to some poor devil’s blackened finger, a snuffbox brimming with ants, a few dented skulls, gold teeth with the remains of their bloody roots, sacks of shit that the Boys must have collected to fling at their enemies, I suppose. The stench could burn off a man’s nostrils, and as much as I admired Hannah, I never got used to it.
I had to be neighborly so I sucked on Hannah’s pipe. The tobacco was like a bomb in my head. But I couldn’t sleep because we had visitors—three ragged men with soot on their faces and scars on their cheeks, and the darting yellow eyes of maniacs. They were pilferers and vagabonds who preyed on frontier women. And they must have been from some far country, or they wouldn’t have come near Jack Armstrong’s camp.
Their yellow eyes had a preternatural gleam. They were carrying long, rusty knives. They poked around in the mud and dust outside the door; Clary’s Grove was either wet or dry, depending on where the creek happened to gush from under the ground.
“Mother Cunt,” they said to Hannah, “are ye the whore of Babylon or another harlot?”
I hunkered up on my pallet to rush at these vagabonds, but Hannah whispered for me to stay put.
“I’m Hannah Armstrong,” she answered in the voice of a church shouter, “mistress of Clary’s Grove.”
“Well, we are desperate characters. And if we don’t have the run of your yard, you’ll never see the light of day again.”
She sang to the vagabonds. “Lord Jesus is in my arms.” And she must have seen the Lord while she sang. Her face lit up, and the sweetness of her voice confused the vagabonds. Now I understood how Hannah had hypnotized Jack and the Boys. But I couldn’t just sit there. So I stood up on my battered knees and faced these pirates.
“Be gone,” I said. My mournful squeal broke the spell they were in. They commenced to roar and slap their sides, while their scars rippled.
“Brothers, the mistress of Clary’s Grove is living in sin, with Lord Jesus. Have you even seen such a tall pilgrim in your whole life?”
These pirates shouldn’t have taken their brutal yellow eyes off Hannah. She ran out the cabin with her long rifle, clutched the barrel with both hands, and struck the first and second pirate with the silvered edge of the stock. Their blood began to spew, and their skulls seeped a strange white fluid. I heard the crack of bone as they seized their heads and wandered about, half blind. But the third pirate rushed right past her and was about to attack one of the babies with his knife. I was roaring mad. I tripped the sucker, grabbed him by the seat of his pants, and hurled him out the cabin like a sack of shit. And for a moment I did think of becoming his finisher once and for all. These pirates preyed on women. Wolves had much more honor than they did, but I just didn’t have the stomach to become a one-man execution party . . .
The Boys returned after a week with dust in their mouths. They were pilferers of another kind. They might have plucked all the feathers out of a full-fledged camp, and battled for the spoils of war, but they would never have harmed a lone woman. The Boys were widow makers, yet Jack would often give up half his treasure to whatever widow he and the Boys had made.
After all their rooting around, they returned with nothing but some potatoes and a bag of beans. Hannah didn’t scold them. She knew they were hapless cavaliers. They’d destroy a town and then rebuild it in their own reckless fashion. They couldn’t hold a hammer or plumb a straight line with a carpenter’s awl. And the Boys were stupefied when they discovered that the crooked cabin they had built with their own hands now had a wooden floor. I’d also corrected the walls.
Jack Armstrong commenced to groan.
“Abraham,” he said, “we brought you here to convalesce, not to prettify.”
Hannah watched him with the shrewd eyes of a shouter. “Jack, that’s small thanks. We have a creek right under the cabin you built without a floor. We might have lost a child in one of those secret wells. And he’d be floating down the Mississip before we ever found him.”
“Mother,” Jack said, “it’s awful hard to acknowledge the deeds of a new friend.”
And then the Boys took to admiring the new strictness of their walls. They saw me as a wizard and I let them think I was. Jack noticed the book I was carrying in my pocket—a penny edition of
Æsop’s Fables
that had also served as my ABC. It was bitten and raw at the edges, where Pa had thrown my book of fables into the fire. I burnt my hands rescuing it. And Pa would have thrown it back into the fire if my Angel Mama, who wasn’t yet an angel at that time, hadn’t shielded me from Pa’s blows.
It’s his learnin’ book
, she said.
Let him learn.
She had no butter. So she blew on my hands with her sweet breath and bathed them in her own spittle. And she sang to me about Jesus. Ma had been a shouter at church, just like Hannah. But she commenced to cry in the middle of her song. I wanted to catch Ma’s tears in my red hands, and I couldn’t. So I held on to
Æsop
with all my might, even when I near drowned in the Mississip, or when I had to fight off ruffians in Orleans. They could have my pantaloons and my coins, but not
Æsop’s Fables.
Jack asked me to read the fable I liked best, but I sang it like a shouter at church.
“Four Bulls slept in the same field, and the Lord of the Lions was desirous to have these Bulls become his dinner.”
“What the hell was stopping him?” the Boys asked, unfamiliar with the rhapsodic charm of a fable.
“Dunderheads, the four Bulls would have ruined him with their horns,” said Jack. And he begged me to continue.
“The Lion had to conquer by degrees, had to proceed with a program of whispers and malicious hints, to sow discord among the four Bulls, to foment jealousy and disunion, until each Bull was suspicious of the other and fed in different parts of the field. And then the Lion devoured the four Bulls one by one.”
Jack commenced to crow. “Ain’t that our motto, Boys? Never let a Lion into your house.”
The Boys sucked on their clay pipes and drank from their own little jars of whiskey. Soon they were snoring and swallowing their own spit.
“That’s not the motto at all,” said Mrs. Jack. And I realized soon enough that she had all the sagacity of a frontier judge. “The four Bulls are the heroes . . . and the victims here. They fell prey to their own disorder and disunion. No man or Lion could have defeated them four at a time.”
“Mother, be quiet,” Jack said, fingering his gambler’s glove with the five metal digits. And he meant to crown her with his jar of whiskey—that’s how mean he looked. I couldn’t have abided that, even if Jack had succored me in his home. And it wounded me to watch Hannah. She wouldn’t pull away from the madness in her husband’s eye. As he strode up to her with his wild glare and his menacing glove, I plucked the jar out of Jack’s hand. The Boys were astonished, and Jack was struck dumb with indignity. No one had ever interfered with him in his own house.
The Boys weren’t worried about
my
welfare.
“Jacky, if you break her bones, who will feed us, who will mend our clothes? We can’t get along without Mrs. Jack.”
Jack didn’t have to listen to his own Boys; the whiskey had unmanned him. He sank to his knees and commenced to snore. The Boys couldn’t even hold on to their whiskey jars. They flopped beside Jack. The piglets squealed and the babies wailed on my new floor. Hannah was trembling, and I trembled too. We hadn’t conspired against Jack, but it felt as if we’d traveled the globe together—and I could have been her father, brother, son.
But I feared for my own life in a cabin filled with desperados who wore armor imbedded in their bodies and grunted in their sleep like backwoods cavaliers. I wanted to light out of there, to be rid of the Clary’s Grove Boys—rid of myself, rid of Mrs. Jack and return to the maelstrom that had sucked me under. I ought to have drowned, and did, a dead man who suddenly bolted out of the bottom, full of barnacles and stink weeds and fish in my pantaloons, and landed on the shore like a helpless sea monster, rescued by pioneers who’d carved a little clearing on a bluff, hidden from nature and mankind, and where a vagabond like me might collect himself and find his own future.
2.
A Feckless Candidate
T
HEY
WERE
STUNNED
when they saw me, assumed I was an apparition, since no one had ever come back alive from that desperados’ den. They pawed at me, pinched my arm. The town had abandoned all hope for their Abraham, hadn’t even bothered to raise up a rescue mission. But I couldn’t cash in on my own good luck. My venture with Offutt soon petered out. His store was still standing, though Offutt himself had disappeared with all the saddles and bags of salt. I lived in that deserted store with nothing but dust and dried beans, and a few field mice to keep me company around the bare walls and barren front room. Offutt stole the glass from our window, stole the counter, stole the chairs. That lonesome store rocked in the wind like a prairie schooner and moved an inch or so every time we had a sandstorm. I’d hug my knees in the corner and pray that those howling pellets of sand wouldn’t eat into my eyes.