The Whipping Boy (43 page)

“General Grant had been in charge for a while, and he didn't mind throwing the men around, we knew it by then . . . You don't want to hear about this, do you?”

“Yes, I do.” Tom pictured the graves in the basement at Bokchito—the soldiers beside the orphans. He had slept among those graves.

Mr. Haskell turned and looked out the back window. “I don't know why this puts me in the mind of the durn war. I must be nervous.”

“I want to hear about it.”

Mr. Haskell looked at him with a little smile, as if gauging whether Tom meant it or not. “Well. The general put us on the attack, and it was no going back. I never saw so much traffic as I did at the Wilderness. Long wagon trains of supplies. We were going after Lee, and the general was piling it on, putting everything he had to it. He brought out regiments of artillery that had been around Washington for most of the war. Movement all over the place. And prisoners—I remember one big old barn full of about sixty Rebels, and such a collection of long-legged, shaggy-haired, lantern-jawed specimens you have never seen. The South was running out of men by that time, and they were getting em out of the hills. We met em in the woods south of the Rapidan River and fought for two days in there. It was quite an event. So much shooting going on that the brush was catching on fire. I saw a two-foot oak tree that'd been cut down by bullets. Couldn't breathe half the time. And seventeen thousand of us dead, it turned out. We were convinced it was Chancellorsville all over again.”

Mr. Haskell looked at his watch, and Tom got the feeling that he had suddenly become self-conscious, perhaps a little emotional. He cleared his throat. “I remember how the boys felt when they learned we weren't going to retreat. We were just going to keep driving south. The sons of bitches were singing. Hell, I was singing, too. We were tired of losing. And then they met us again a few miles away at a little old courthouse. They'd dug trenches and thrown up a breastwork in the shape of a horseshoe around this courthouse. It started raining. We tried every goddamn thing to overrun em. I never saw men act that way, before or since. They weren't men. They'd jump out of them damn trenches and fire, with men handing up guns until they fell, then another one would jump up in his place. Dead three-deep in the trench, and it didn't make no difference. The men weren't normal—on either side. They'd gone over the line. I figure most of us, Blue and Grey, were crazy. The Rebs finally pulled out, but they dug another line not far back, and so it went on, skirmishing and fooling around. In about a week's time, we had us another thirty thousand dead men. And you know what? In the evening time, you'd see trading going on between the two sides. Men meeting up between the lines, trading newspapers, laughing and talking, right out there in the open. We'd take them coffee and they'd bring us tobacco. Honest trading, all fair and civilized. Why, you'd have thought we were old friends.”

Mr. Haskell turned back to the window looking up the hill. “All I can see is the top of that building. I guess it's no use watching. We've got about fifteen minutes.”

The chicken stirred and purred in Tom's hand. Haskell looked at it. “Anyway, that isn't what I was going to tell you. That's why I don't talk about the war, one of the reasons. Old windbag gets going and he can't stop. One thing reminds him of another.”

Tom glanced beyond him, through the glass toward the building over the hill.

“All I started to say was this old boy in our regiment bit off live chickens' heads and ate the durn things. He'd carry on, yelling, make all kind of noise, he'd grab up that chicken and bite its head off and
eat
it, then and there.”

“Why?”

“Said it got his blood up for the next day. It was a sight I didn't particularly relish, him squishing and chewing on a live chicken head, but the worst part was that most of the times he did it, the next day we'd have a fight on our hands. It got to be a prophecy, like he had a direct line to the generals. Old Chicken Head would do his act, and sure enough, the next morning before light somebody'd be kicking us awake. You could usually tell when they woke us up with their boot like that, saying ‘Keep it quiet, boys, keep it quiet,' that it wasn't going to be a day to loaf.” Haskell's gaze wandered through the broken front window, and his voice had an edge in it again. “Cold Harbor was next. They'd pushed us to the limit by then. Lee would just dig in, fight, and retreat, then dig in again, and they were killing a lot more of us than we were of them.” He hesitated, as if unsure whether to go on.

“What was Cold Harbor?” Tom asked.

The old man's face had grown stiff with emotion. “I don't know why they called it that. It was just a little old dusty crossroads outside of Richmond. That night we didn't need Old Chicken Head to prophesy a fight. We knew we were in for it. The Rebs had drawn up a long straight trench. We were so tired from marching that we couldn't think. That night, before the attack, something happened to us and we all started extra restless. We got desperate, I guess. It was like we all went crazy at the same time. We'd seen too many messmates fall in these trench attacks. We lost faith. It just fell through all at once, and you've never seen anything like it—men trying to find some scrap of paper to write their names on, pin it to their coats so somebody'd be able to identify their carcasses and notify their folks. Bury em with a name if they were lucky. Licking their pencils, trying to make the letters black. I don't care to remember that night. There ain't nothing worse than losing faith, Tom. I figure dying is nothing next to it.”

“Did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Pin your name on your coat.”

Mr. Haskell laughed, breaking some of the tension in the darkening room. “I did. Far as I was concerned, I was already dead. The next day Grant ordered an all-out assault. Fifty thousand of us attacking that line at once. I took a couple of minnie balls in the leg and a piece of something in the side, and by some miracle didn't get infected and didn't get nothin sawed off. Didn't get under a doctor, which was probably the luckiest thing ever happened to me. I ended up catching a train at a little old place called Hanover Junction, headed back north. There was a whole trainful of us, the halt and the lame, moaning all the way to Washington.” He laughed. “I still remember thinking how God-awful that trainload of men looked. I was sure glad I didn't look that way. Took me a while to realize that I
did
look that way, bad as the rest of em.” He shook his head.

Tom was standing across from him, still holding and unconsciously petting the sleeping chicken.

“You know, Tom, I don't mean to pry, but you looked just a little like that when I first saw you after you got back. Did you get into some kind of fight?”

Tom's awareness of the darkening room became painfully acute. He hadn't expected this question. “Might say so,” he allowed.

“Were you the cause of it, or did it get done to you?” Something happened to Tom now that had never happened in his life. Without warning, as if lightning had struck him, hot tears started pouring out of his eyes. At first he tried to hold them back, but he sobbed once, and then overwhelming waves rolled over him, and, still holding the sleeping chicken, he put his head down and stood there, grieving.

Mr. Haskell touched Tom's arm. “I'm sorry, son. I didn't mean to trouble you by asking that. Just forget what I said. And whatever it is on your mind, let it be. Give it time. Keep your faith.”

Mr. Haskell took up his shotgun. “It's been a half-hour, and my time's up. I'm goin up there now. I don't want you with me. Go to Tahlequah. It's only five or ten miles from here. You've had enough trouble. Give yourself some slack, Tom. No reason for you to be in this.” He stopped at the door and laughed. “And don't ever let nobody put you in a durn trench.”

When Mr. Haskell left, Tom put the chicken down and dropped slowly to his knees, disabled by this strange experience of grief—for the sin he had committed, for the war, for the woman he loved, for the fathers, for the amazing world that was revealing itself to him, the evil wrapped inextricably around the good. Still on his knees, he rested his head on the floor.

After some time, he heard a crack and jumped as if it had been a whip across his back. Out the back window, he saw that Mr. Haskell had just reached the top of the rise, and in the gloom of near night, he saw him hesitate and shift the shotgun. He heard a second crack and saw Mr. Haskell fall backwards. For a moment Tom stood transfixed as the old man lay unmoving in the snow. A man in a black duster appeared over the rise. Aiming a gun at Haskell, he pushed the old man over with his boot. He looked down the hill toward the station and then disappeared back under the rise.

Tom ran out the front door and sprinted toward the winter-thinned brush at the base of the hill. He circled around and climbed the hill, slipping in the slushy wetness, wiping his eyes. Jake, Sam, LaFarge—he wondered if any of them were alive. At the top of the hill he could see both the gutted building and the other one, with lights in the windows. Near it, in the yard, were three buggies with hitched teams, and he walked from the woods toward the building, using the buggies for cover. Two men wearing high boots and western hats came out of the house, walking fast toward the buggies. They were talking excitedly back and forth in Cherokee. Someone at the front door yelled something at them, but they didn't even slow down. They were stout, middle-aged men wearing long dark coats.

As they climbed into a buggy, one of them spoke breathlessly, saying what sounded like “He . . . had . . . no . . . money.” The other one caught sight of Tom just as his whip came down across the horses, and they lunged forward and clattered away.

A door in the big building slammed. Tom was close to the burned-out, roofless building, and he went against a wall around a corner in order to avoid two shapes emerging from the other porch. Broken glass littered the ground under his feet.

“. . . down at the station,” he heard one of them say.

“It's a goddamn old man.”

“Look, we better check that damn station.”

“Boss gone haywire, if you ask me.”

“Yeah, well, he's got too damn much goin on out here at once't, that's for sure.”

As they went down the hill, Tom heard them continuing to talk back and forth, fast.

***

The apprentice with the pencil mustache had lank black hair, hollow black eyes, and a strangely expressive chaw-filled mouth that grimaced, sneered, and made loose lips. Watching this mouth was part of the unpleasantness. Although it didn't seem to Jake that he had blacked out for long, he had definitely gotten featherheaded. He wanted to tell the mouth that he could quit now, that was all he needed to do, he'd handled the assignment. But Jake was unmoored and mute, floating, at one point completely away from himself, doing a little watching and thinking on the outside, standing in the corner of the room like an angel, taking it all in—his head lolling there, looking like the hindquarters of bad luck, with his grey hair springing up, while the mouth paced around, as if he was mentally afflicted. He had whacked Jake in the skull, shoulders, and neck with the butt of his gun, and now he was trying to decide what to do next. The angel-Jake didn't feel hatred or anger exactly. He considered floating out of the room to look for Sam, but feared that if he got very far away, he might just float on, to wherever non-churchgoers went.

He really didn't want to lay down his knife and fork quite yet. He had unsettled accounts.

The next thing he knew, he was looking at a squarish, fattish face, so close that he could see the flakes of the eyes and could feel the burning tip of a cigarette in the holder between his teeth about an inch from his own chin. It was Ernest Dekker, peering in to see if he was alive. Jake sure hoped that he was still alive, because Ernest's face was not his idea of the first thing he hoped to see on the other side. He didn't know whether to play possum or what. Ernest had asked him a question that he couldn't answer. He hadn't heard it, even.

“Lookin for somethin?” Jake eventually said, which caused Ernest to jerk upright as if he had been smacked on the rear end.

“You know what I want. Where is it?”

Jake tried to concentrate through the fog. “Funny way to get an hombre to remember something. Knock him on his thinker.”

Staring at him with his bloodshot, bulgy eyes, as if he was almost in a trance, Ernest said, “My father favored you. He gave you the best territories. He liked you. Why'd you kill him?”

Jake kept trying to blink away a dark spot, and he realized that part of the problem was his own hair, smeared with something, down in his eyes. “I was two hundred miles away from your father when he died.”

“You had the woman do it, didn't you?”

Jake just shook his head slowly, a gesture that involved some pain in his neck. “Nothin gets through to you, does it?”

“Gets through just fine, Jake,” Ernest said contemptuously. “You talked the old man into taking the money out of the bank. Your woman friend was all over town asking questions about him and me. She followed him in St. Louis. Our banker fully described her, and took her name.”

Ernest let that sink in, and, as uninclined as Jake was to worry about any charge made by Ernest at the moment, he did worry a little. After all, he'd worried on his own.

“We're wasting time,” Ernest said. “I've got three men downstairs trying to sell me ten thousand acres. I need it for the package. But I need my money to work with, Jake. That's why you're here. I want you to tell me where it is.”

Jake didn't know what to say. Stubbornness was one thing, but this man didn't hear what a person said. It was like talking to yourself, and Jake didn't have the strength for it.

Ernest seemed to take his silence as caving in, and he added, mollifyingly, “Now, I know we've been dealing rough here, but you have to understand the stakes. This isn't some chickenshit invoice for hinges and screws. This is land, a lot of it. I'm willing to forget the past to get it done. All you have to do is get me the money back, and I'll consider the matter closed. You tell me now, right now, and I'll even offer you one more chance at part of the winnings. Jack Peters has pulled in over five thousand dollars, cash in the bank. Some of the others are doing even better. Dandy Pruitt can retire with a crapper in his house. You'll be able to do the same. We've still got over half our debts out here that aren't converted yet. I intend to bring in every cent owed to us for a second package, and you can cover the Choctaw Nation.”