The Scribe (19 page)

As they walked, Canby stepped over one of the mounded rows away from Billingsley. With every other forward step, he crossed another furrow, drawing out the distance. He stepped up his pace toward the dogs' tails bobbing ahead of him, as they worked the field out front.

“I have read Malthus,” Billingsley said.

After a moment he heard the sound of Billingsley's boots resume walking, rasping in the cut stalks. Then they stopped.

“Bird,” Billingsley cried. Canby raised his shotgun, though the dogs were still trotting ahead of them. His eyes darted for a gray silhouette against the sky. It was empty.

“I suppose I regret this,” Billingsley said.

Canby began to sprint, to put more distance between himself and the shotgun's barrels, but he heard the shotgun boom and felt the ripping of birdshot across his back, a rash of puckering burns, each of them a hot pinprick of pain. The second blast knocked him down on his face. Then he heard the sound of Billingsley's boots coming toward him.

Canby tried to turn onto his back, but the searing pain, against the jagged rubbing of the stalks, stopped him. He lay on his side, trying to get his shotgun out from beneath him as Billingsley advanced, reaching into his vest for more shells. And then, like a shadow, the dog man was coming up behind Billingsley with the snake stick in his hand. He raised it and brought it down on Billingsley's head so swiftly it was a blur in Canby's vision.

Then Canby's sight was fading as he felt the blood leaking out of him from what felt like hundreds of holes in his back. There was only the hearing, then, for what seemed to be minutes, of the sound of the stick falling as methodically as a scythe in wheat, a machete chopping sugarcane.

With a heave, Canby turned himself over, his back on fire and singed by the dry stalks that scraped his wounds. He opened his eyes.

The dog man stood with the stick hanging by his side. Its knotty end was clotted and dripping with blood. Billingsley lay at his feet, his head a pulp of tissue through which Canby could see patches of skull. At intervals his legs moved, writhing like a snake that has been struck.

The dog man picked up Billingsley's shotgun, broke the action open. He pulled a fresh shell from his pants pocket and fitted it into the top barrel, snapped the action shut again.

“Tell me, Mister Canby,” the dog man said, “you take that bribe from Mamie O'Donnell?”

“No.”

The black man nodded. “Didn't think so. You a good man, Mister Canby. You gone heal up all right. Yes, you'll be all right.”

Canby seemed to have to fight his way through the pain to speak again. “I know you. You're Tunis Campbell, aren't you? How many years gone now?”

“Three years on the chain gang and two down here on the Billingsley place. Yessir, Tunis Campbell, that's me. And Fortus is my boy,” he said. He fitted the double barrels into his mouth.

“God!” Canby shouted, trying again to rise. “Don't!”

Campbell pulled the barrels out of his mouth far enough to speak again. “Ain't no use, sir. I'm dead and gone and long ago bound to hell.”

He put the barrels back into his mouth and, reaching down with his right hand, worked the trigger with his thumb. Canby thought he saw the damage before he heard the shotgun's blast, watching the red mist flying upward into the perfect cobalt of the autumn sky before the finality of the gun's report confirmed it. He lay back against the rustling stalks then and watched the sky diffract to a blue pinprick. He felt the darkness coming to take him and allowed himself to go.

November 3

H
IS EXISTENCE WAVERED BETWEEN SHEETS OF
flame and leaden weight. His face still pressed earthward, gravity upon him like a burden nearly too great to bear, but at some point the dry earth of the Billingsley plantation had been replaced with a cotton sheet, smooth and cool against his cheek. His back, however, glowed like a bright plain of burning pain. At times when it flared brightest he went away, into the darkness again. He dreamed that he lay in a gulch and that his back writhed and undulated with the glistening black of the feathers of vultures that had roosted on it. He felt their scarlet beaks, dripping with offal, pecking at his flesh. They fought over the choicest perch upon him and he woke screaming to bursts of white light, hospital smells, the sweet wisp of ether that took him away again.

And, once, he dreamed of Robert Billingsley. Standing over the buzzards with his arms raised as though to conduct their feasting. Grown taller, thinner, clad in a suit of sheening black himself, lips moving, forming words Canby could not
understand, whether chanting or cheering the buzzards, the dreamer could not determine. Only the last word came clear above the singsong chant and the rustling of the buzzards' shuffling wings:
Canby
.

“Easy there, boy. Thomas, you're safe.”

Canby felt the dream withdraw from him like a foul tide receding. The hospital smells returned. “Vernon?” he said.

“Yes. Open your eyes, for Christ's sake. I'm here.”

Through a cracked eyelid, he saw that Vernon sat on a chair beside the bed, his hat set on his lap. Vernon smiled.

“Goddamn. Will I ever get out of Atlanta?”

“Glad to see you've still got some of the old salt left in you. I don't know if you'll ever get out of Atlanta, but I'm surely glad you made it out of Mableton.”

“It was him.”

Vernon nodded.

“The whole time. Right in front of us.”

Vernon nodded again and pulled a cigar from his vest. He kept nodding as he lit it and puffed the ember to life. “I'd not have believed it,” he said.

Canby rested his face against the cool sheet. “How bad is my back?”

“You'll need another little while to heal up. We're all just glad you didn't bleed out. You know, it was Underwood found you. He's a sight better policeman than I'd have predicted. He took himself off to Vinings and then to Mableton after he'd talked with Julia. It was him who put you facedown in a wagon bed and damned near ran the horses to death to get you here.”

“Last thing I remember is the sky.”

“Yesterday I sat here and watched Doctor Johnston pick all those pieces of shot out of you.
Pick
with the tweezers;
plink
into the pan, over a hundred times. That's one patient man. He weighed the shot, after. Right at two ounces of lead. I'm proud of you.”

Canby flexed his shoulder muscles tentatively. They worked. The burn was still there, bright on the surface, then fading to a dull ache beneath the skin.

“I'd advise you to keep your shirt on next time you go courting Miss Julia, but she's already seen it. Came down from Vinings. She's lucky she missed that first part of it, though.”

“Where is she now?”

“Either at the grocer's or at my house, I imagine. She'll be glad to hear you've come around. I'm hopeful she's cooking something at my place.”

Canby nodded, felt a wave of fatigue come over him. He willed his eyes to stay open and lay in silence for a few moments watching Vernon smoke.

“Billingsley,” he said at last. “Goddamned Billingsley.”

“I did not believe it. Till I heard it from the man himself.”

“What?”

“He told me so.”

“That can't be. I watched him die.”

“Oh, no, Thomas, he did not die. Underwood left him in the field. But he didn't die. When they brought him in, his head looked nearly as bad as his bird dogger's, I'm told. They stitched it back together as best they could. I told them to make a quick job of it and I don't think Doctor Johnston liked that. I told them, ‘Just fix him up good enough for us to hang him.'”

“They brought him here?”

“Yes.”

The hospital room's door opened behind Canby and he worked his hands underneath him as quickly as he could, trying to rise. Vernon reached out a hand toward him but seemed unsure of where to touch his peppered back, his shoulders.

“Don't get excited,” he said. “They treated him here, but he's in the tower now. Spot Twelve, as a matter of fact.” Vernon's eyes rose as Canby heard the door shut. “Good evening, Doctor,” he said.

Canby heard the man's measured footsteps on the floorboards before he stepped around and into his vision. The doctor had kindly eyes, bespectacled, and he wore a neatly trimmed beard flecked with gray. He waved at the thick smoke in the air as though it aggrieved him before extending the hand to Canby.

“Frederick Augustus Johnston,” he said. “I'm pleased you've made it. For a time there a positive outcome was not at all assured.”

Johnston bent close to Canby's back, touched him lightly on his shoulder, the small of his back. His hands were cool.

“I would have liked to have cupped you, Mister Canby, as a safeguard against infection, but your wounds were too extensive. How is the pain now?”

“Tolerable.”

“We'll continue the morphine a day or two longer, then.”

“How soon until he's discharged, Doctor?”

“Two or three days at the earliest.”

“We have pressing police business. There's a hanging he's needed for.”

“Of that I wash my hands, gentlemen,” the doctor said, and patted Canby, gently, above his spotted shoulder. “Good evening.”

Vernon watched until the doctor had shut the door behind himself. “He's a good doctor, whatever the gossips say.”

“What do the gossips say?”

“Some ugly business about bad debts in Carolina. That's the way of it, isn't it? A man gets ruined in the East and heads west to start fresh with a new slate.”

“Grady should write him up in a story. What happened back East?”

“Negro trouble,” Vernon said, and stared at the cigar in his hand for a moment. “Anyway, Billingsley came around enough yesterday to make a confession.”

“What did he say?”

“No details. He said he did it, that's all.”

“That's not much of a confession, is it?”

“It was enough to haul a judge in for him to plead.”

“Did you get a sentence?”

“Right then and there. He's to be hanged by the neck until dead as soon as he's able to stand up on his own. Meantime, Billingsley's said he'll make a full confession when he's ready.”

Canby snorted. “When will that be?”

“When you come to take it.”

Vernon fingered his hat and looked around the room as though seeking a place to douse his cigar. Canby breathed deeply for a moment, trying to quiet his thoughts.

“All right,” he said at length.

“Good,” Vernon said. He set his hat on his head and began to rise from the chair.

“Just a minute, Vernon.”

Vernon settled back into the chair but did not remove his hat.

“I need for you to get a book to me. They may have it at the Young Men's Library Association. I'm sure there's a copy in Billingsley's library if you have men there.”

“Oh, rest assured I have men there.” Vernon reached into his jacket and pulled out his pocket notebook, fished a pencil from another pocket. “What's the title?”

“
Essay on the Principle of Population
,” Canby said. “Author is T. R. Malthus.”

“Malthus, huh?” Vernon said, his pencil pausing. “
Malthus
. I should have no trouble remembering that, goddamn me.” He folded the notebook and tucked it and the pencil away. “I'll send Underwood and have him bring it around.”

“And Vernon? You might as well tell Underwood to bring his Bible with him.”

“All right, then. I will. Good night, Thomas.”

Malthus
, Canby thought as he heard the door shut again. The very book had sat on Angus's shelves throughout his childhood. When he closed his eyes he could even remember the printing Angus had owned, the slim leather-bound volume in its place among the other works. Red binding, it was.

He kept his eyes shut for a long time. The weight on his back had returned, heavier now by a measure of bitter remorse.