The Robber Bridegroom (10 page)

Then he gave her a smile, where his teeth showed like a few stars on a cloudy evening, and he sang her the song he had heard her sing:

"The moon shone bright, and it cast a fair light: 'Welcome,' says she, 'my honey, my sweet! For I have loved thee this seven long year, And our chance it was we could, never meet. 1

Then he took her in his armes-two, And kissed her both cheek and chin, And twice or thrice he kissed this may Before they were parted in twin."

But then he had to stop, because her tears made his clothes liable to dampness.

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'That is not the news," said Rosamond, "for that is an old story. I will certainly pay you nothing at all for singing it."

"Then I did it for nothing/' said Goat, "and it is all the same to me. And now for the same price I will give you the real news, the latest news, the very truth! Only, it lacks rhyme."

"It will not be any better for me," said Rosamond.

"First: your husband is Jamie Lockhart, the bandit of the woods!" cried Goat. "Second: there was wicked murder done in Jamie Lockhart's house in the night! Third: the first man that brings in Jamie Lockhart's head will get a hundred pieces of gold, and the rest will go without! Fourth: the whole world around will be looking for Jamie Lockhart! Fifth: he jumped out the window and left you alone. And sixth: it all went just as she swore it would go, and I will get a suckling pig."

"Just as who swore it would go?" asked Rosamond, for she got a surprise at the end.

"Why, your stepmother, of course," said Goat>

THE ROBBER BRIDEGROOM 139 and he danced a jig called "Fiddle in the Ditch/' "Everything has now worked out to the most perfect fraction of calculation."

"So you work for her!" said Rosamond. "Where have you been all night?"

"Ah! under your bed," said Goat. "And you never looked there. Then by the window, and I saw you wash his face, and I watched you tumble out after him when he told you good-by. And I have been on the lookout ever since, but I do not think he will come back, for what goes out the window seldom returns the same way."

"Leave me!" cried Rosamond. "And let me cry."

So Goat was leaving, but just then a voice said, "Let me out!" And there was the trunk that the Little Harp left, which they had forgotten to throw out after him.

"What did you say?" asked Goat, bending down to put his ear to the top. "Repeat it, please, for I am a little hard of hearing when there is conversation through a trunk."

"Let me out!" said the voice, a bit louder.

THE ROBBER BRIDEGROOM

So Goat lifted up the lid. And there sat the head of Big Harp, Little Harp's brother, all wrapped up in the blue mud, and just as it came down off the pole in Rodney.

'Will you look what was doing the talking!" cried Goat, and pulled the head out by the hair, holding it up at arm's length so it turned round like a bird cage on a string, and admiring it from all directions.

Poor Rosamond, after one look, fainted again onto the grass, and Goat ran off and left her where she lay.

Setting the head atop his own head, he skipped off down the hill, and he began to kick up his heels to the left and right and cry, "J ai m e Lockhart is the bandit of the woods! And the bandit of the woods is Jamie Lockhart!"

But there was no time at all before the drums began to sound all around, north, south, east, and west, until the very leaves of the trees chattered with it. The branches slowly parted everywhere, and a multitude of faces looked out between.

THE ROBBER BRIDEGROOM 141

Clement heard Goat's cry floating out of the

forest, saying "Jamie Lockhart is the bandit of

the woods! And the bandit of the woods is Jamie

Lockhart!''

"Now there must be a choice made/' he said. He walked away into the forest and placed the stones in a little circle around him and sat unheeded in the pine grove.

"What exactly is this now?" he said, for he too was concerned with the identity of a man, and had to speak, if only to the stones. "What is the place and time? Here are all possible trees in a forest, and they grow as tall and as great and as close to one another as they could ever grow in the world. Upon each limb is a singing bird, and across this floor, slowly and softly and forever moving into profile, is always a beast, one of a procession, weighted low with his burning coat, looking from the yellow eye set in his head." He stayed and looked at the place where he was until he knew it by heart, and could even see the changes of the seasons come over it like four clouds: Spring and the clear and separate leaves

142 THE ROBBER BRIDEGROOM mounting to the top of the sky, the black flames of cedars, the young trees shining like the lanterns, the magnolias softly ignited; Summer and the vines falling down over the darkest caves, red and green, changing to the purple of grapes and the Autumn descending in a golden curtain; then in the nakedness of the Winter wood the buffalo on his sinking trail, pawing the ice till his forelock hangs in the spring, and the deer following behind to the salty places to transfix his tender head. And that was the way the years went by.

"But the time of cunning has come/' said Clement, "and my time is over, for cunning is of a world I will have no part in. Two long ripples are following down the Mississippi behind the approaching somnolent eyes of the alligator. And like the tenderest deer, a band of copying Indians poses along the bluff to draw us near them. Men are following men down the Mississippi, hoarse and arrogant by day, wakeful and dreamless by night at the unknown landings. A trail leads like a tunnel under the roof of

THE ROBBER BRIDEGROOM 143 this wilderness. Everywhere the traps are set. Why? And what kind of time is this, when all is first given, then stolen away?

"Wrath and love burn only like the campfires. And even the appearance of a hero is no longer a single and majestic event like that of a star in the heavens, but a wandering fire soon lost. A journey is forever lonely and parallel to death, but the two watch each other, the traveler and the bandit, through the trees. Like will-o'-the-wisps the little blazes burn on the rafts all night, unsteady beside the shore. Where are they even so soon as tomorrow? Massacre is hard to tell from the performance of other rites, in the great silence where the wanderer is coming. Murder is as soundless as a spout of blood, as regular and rhythmic as sleep. Many find a skull and a little branching of bones between two floors of leaves. In the sky is the perpetual wheel of buzzards. A circle of bandits counts out the gold, with bending shoulders more slaves mount the block and go down, a planter makes a gesture of abundance with his riding whip, a flatboatman falls back

144 THE ROBBER BRIDEGROOM from the tavern door to the river below with scarcely time for a splash, a rope descends from a tree and curls into a noose. And all around again are the Indians.

"Yet no one can laugh or cry so savagely in this wilderness as to be heard by the nearest traveler or remembered the next year. A fiddle played in a finished hut in a clearing is as vagrant as the swamp breeze. What will the seasons be, when we are lost and dead? The dreadful heat and cold-—no more than the shooting star/'

So while Clement was talking so long to himself on the lateness of the age, the Indians came closer and found him. A red hand dragged him to his feet. He looked into large, worldly eyes.

"The settlement has come, and the reckoning is here/' said Salome. "Punishments and rewards are in order!" And she went out to the woods to look for Jamie Lockhart and have his head, for that was the kind of thing she had wanted to do all her life. So she had her claw shading her sharp eye, but her eye, from thinking of golden

THE ROBBER BRIDEGROOM 145 glitter, had possibly gotten too bright to see the dark that was close around her now, and while she scanned the sky the bush at her side came alive, and folded her to the ground.

"All I must do is cut off his head/' said the Little Harp. "Then I can take his place. Advancement is only a matter of swapping heads about. I could be king of the bandits! Oh, the way to get ahead is to cut a head off!" said the Little Harp. And he looked about for some person to tell that to; but the face that looked back at him was redskinned and surrounded by feathers, and it wore a terrible frown. So the Little Harp was taken in the pose of a head-hunter, with one knee raised and one arm high, with his hand around his sharp knife. Red arms twined around him like a soft net, and off he was borne, held fast in his gesture.

Rosamond, who had fallen on a thorn, eventually felt its prick. She came out of her faint and sat up on the ground.

146 THE ROBBER BRIDEGROOM

"Where can I be?" she said, and when she looked behind her and saw the house of the robbers at the end of the lane of cedars, her memory could not collect it all at once, but went slowly up the path, gathering this and that little thing in its sight, until at last it went in at the front door, and she recollected all that had happened. So she began to cry.

"My husband was a robber and not a bridegroom/' she said. "He brought me his love under a mask, and kept all the truth hidden from me, and never called anything by its true name, even his name or mine, and what I would have given him he liked better to steal. And if I had no faith, he had little honor, to deprive a woman of giving her love freely."

Weeping made her feel better, and so she went on with it. "Now I am deserted," she said. '1 have been sent out of my happiness, even the house has thrown me out the window. Oh," she said, starting to her feet, "if I could only find my husband, I would tell him that he has broken my heart."

THE ROBBER BRIDEGROOM 147 Holding out her arms she ran straight into the woods, but before she had gone far, an Indian savage appeared suddenly before her in the mask of a spotty leopard. So for the third time, Rosamond fell down in a faint, and the Indian carried her away.

As for Jamie, he had chosen this time of all the times to finish out his sleep, for he considered it had half been taken away from him the night before. There he lay on the ground under a plum tree, napping away with a smile on his face, while the paths of the innocent Clement and the greedy Salome and the mad Little Harp and the reproachful Rosamond all turned like the spokes of the wheel toward this dreaming hub. If the Indians had not stopped them off, he would have been dead three or four times and accused and forgiven once before he woke up. But while he still slept, the savages found him first, and lifted him, heavy with sleeping like a child, onto one of the little Asiatic horses they had, and tied him down with their sharp threads.

148 THE ROBBER BRIDEGROOM

Then, to destroy the body of the maiden that had been contaminated, the Indians set fire to the robbers' house, and it went up in five points of red flame. The raven flew out over the tree-tops and was never seen again, and the forest was filled with the cry of the dogs.

So there they all ended in the Indian camp. One by one the savages had captured them all.

All, that is, except Goat, who, having turned the head of Big Harp loose on the world, could not get enough of running through the woods with it, crying, "Bring in his head! Bring in his head! A price is on his head!" In this manner he escaped, for the Indians searched in devious and secret ways only, in their revenge, and with his cry he shot straight through their fancy net.

Now this was a small camp, in a worn-away hollow stirred out by the river, the shell of a whirlpool, called the Devil's Punch Bowl. The rays of the sun had to beat down slantwise, and the Indians' dogs ran always in circles. So there all the young Indians danced at sunset, and the old Indians sat about folded up like women,

THE ROBBER BRIDEGROOM 149 with their withered knees by their ears. The small-boned ponies fed on the brown grass, and their teeth cut away with a scallopy sound. The yellow fires burned at regular places, and out of the cloud of smoke which hung in the shape of a flapping crow over the hut of the Chief, the odor of the dead blew round, for the venerated ancestors of the tribe were stretched inside upon their hammocks and gently swayed by the Autumn wind.

On this night, all the Indians, being very tired from their long day's work of revenge, fell back upon their mats and went to sleep with the sun. Having first made sure that all the prisoners were tied and left inside a hut, they put off punishing them until another day, for sleep had come to be sweeter than revenge.

So by the time the moon rose, Goat was running and scampering about the huts where the prisoners were tied, making no more noise than a swarm of gnats.

"Here are these great strong bullies tied up/' he said, "and I am free/'

150 THE ROBBER BRIDEGROOM

So he looked in first one hut and then the other.

Poor Rosamond, on the point of fainting, and very hungry, was waiting for her death. Believing by now that she would never see her husband again, she thought dearly of that old life, and was fond of even the disguise he had worn.

"Now that I know his name is Jamie Lock-hart, what has the news brought me?" she asked, and had only to look down at the ropes that bound her to see that names were nothing and untied no knots.

Goat, passing by and hearing her tears, recognized her at once by the sound, and popping his head through the chink in the door, he said, "Good evening, why are you crying?"

"Oh, I have lost my husband, and he has lost me, and we are both tied up to be killed in the morning," she cried.

"Then cry on," said Goat, "for I never expect to hear a better reason."

"Perhaps he is already dead," said Rosamond. "For I cannot believe, if he were alive, that he

vould not come and find me, whether he is tied ip or not/'

"If he is not dead now, he is as good as dead/' aid Goat. "Is there anything that I could do for r ou in his place?"

"Let me out!" begged Rosamond.

"Well, now," said Goat, "what will you give ae?"

"Anything!" said Rosamond. "Do you want ny locket?"

"No," said Goat. "I don't always want a 3cket."

"Then what do you want?"