“Army of the Cumberland. I heard he was good. Lincoln almost put him in charge of the whole shebang.”
“It would've been a mistake. He was a stubborn Kraut, and he read too much history. He'd have thrown away the best we
had defending Little Roundtop with a copy of Napoleon's
Maxims
in one hand.”
He smoked for a moment in silence. “I fought the Cheyenne in Nebraska.”
“I fought them in Dakota. They were worth fighting.”
“I deserted.”
I let that one drop all the way to the ground. “I guess you had your reasons.”
“I thought so at the time. After Custer and the Seventh wiped out Black Kettle at the Washita I couldn't see celebrating my freedom by making slaves of some people I didn't have any complaint with. That's how I wound up here. I'll warrant there's a firing squad waiting for me at Fort Kearney.”
“In that case you were right to keep running once you started. The army used up all its sharpshooters in the war. What's left would shoot you in all the places that didn't count and some lieutenant would have to walk up and put a ball in your head with his side arm.”
“I wouldn't mind too much if the lieutenant was Henry Flipper. He's a Negro, first one to graduate West Point. I never knew him, though; he came after I left. I read about it in the
Toronto Mail
. Could be he's whiter than some whites. They tell me that can happen when you live among them.” He got rid of some ash. “But even if it was him and he was black through and through, I wouldn't take to being shot for a coward. The cowardly thing would have been to stick and keep on doing what I'd been. Most of the brave things that are done get done because someone was more afraid not to do them.”
“That may be your problem,” I said. “Too much education.”
“There isn't a day goes by I don't cuss out that damn schoolteacher.”
The lantern began to flicker. It was running low. He stood
up, turned down the wick, and took the lantern off its nail. He looked down at me from the doorway.
“Not that it will do you any good,” he said. “There's a stronghold on Cree Lake up north where some of Sitting Bull's Sioux live. They didn't turn themselves in with the old man and they're pledged to fight to the death to avoid going back to America. We trade with them sometimes. Brother Zoan speaks a little Sioux and is friendly with their leader, Wolf Shirt. He's been known to offer hospitality to desperadoes from below the border.”
All the cold went out of me then. “Did your Brother Zoan see Lorenzo Bliss and Charlie Whitelaw there?”
“He hasn't been there in a month, but when a door opens for a man on the run, it doesn't take him long to find it. I'd look for your fugitives there before I went anywhere else.”
“Wolf Shirt would have to be worse than Geronimo to harbor a bunch like that.”
“Whitelaw being Cherokee would help. It's a Sioux trait to look down on every tribe that isn't Sioux, but they don't hate the others the way they hate Americans. Americans at war with America are another story. That's why Wolf Shirt trades with us. The fact that Bliss and Whitelaw are wanted would only sweeten the pot. Indians will do just about anything to inconvenience the big chief in Washington.”
“Do the Mounties know this?”
“If they don't, they will. Canada has no beef against the Sioux for what happened to Custer, but after what this gang did on the Saskatchewan, the Mounties would track them through hell and fight the devil on his own ground.”
“That's the first good thing I've heard you say about a bunch of white men.”
“
Canadian
white men. Canada never took slaves.”
“Thank you for the information. I'll follow up on it just as soon as I finish with Brother Babel.”
He looked down at me from the doorway, sucking on his cigarette.
“Babel has long arms,” he said then. “As long as your legs. Some men try to stay outside their reach. That's a mistake when you don't have room to run. You want to get inside them if you plan to do any damage.”
“You betting on me?”
He dropped the butt and squashed it out, shaking his head. “If anyone in Shulamite had money to bet with I wouldn't put mine on you, and there aren't any takers on Babel. He'll kill you, all right. I'd just like to see someone in your situation get a better chance than those chickens.”
I actually slept the
rest of the night. I'm an old man now, and wakefulness has never been among my maladies. It might have been then, if I'd had any hope of surviving a fight with Brother Babel. When you know how a thing is going to come out and that nothing you do will change it, you can stop thinking and rest. I wrapped myself in my blanket, tugged the badger hat down over my ears, put my head down on my kneesâand the next thing I knew there was sunlight sifting through the places where the chinking had fallen out from between the logs and the noises outside of a settlement coming to life.
The door opened and Brother Enoch stood just outside it with his Spencer across his thighs while a man whose name I didn't know, but who had been present among the members of the Committee of Public Vigilance when our camp was broken, set a tin cup of steaming coffee and a plate heaped with scrambled eggs on the ground inside my reach. That meant at least one of Queen Fidelity's chickens hadn't yet gone to the altar.
Smelling the eggs, I realized I was famished. I shoveled them in using the wooden cooking spoon provided and drove the chill
out of my bones with the hot coffee, either one of which would have passed muster in San Francisco; as indefensible as slavery was, it had taught some talented people a good trade.
“Let's don't keep Brother Babel waiting,” said Enoch when I set aside the plate and cup. “He ain't as patient as he looks.”
He and the other man flanked me to the meeting hall. The sky, clear yesterday, had turned the color of tarnished silver and rolled down almost to the ground. A dull pain in my cracked ribs, nearly healed now, told me we were in for a change in the weather. The air smelled and tasted of iron.
They had shoved and stacked the trestle tables against the walls in the great dining room and uncovered the windows, but the gray sunlight was inadequate, and so pitch-smeared torches burned in brackets and a wagon-wheel fixture with lanterns attached hung from the center rafter, casting pools of shadow at the feet of the assembled citizens of Shulamite. There were right around a hundred of them, the men in overalls and flannel, the women in print dresses and gingham, all homespun. The collected years of enforced servitude had taught them all the skills necessary for a community to survive amid the desolation of unsettled territory. No cry went up when I entered with my escort, and no cheer either when Babel came in a few minutes later, attended by another member of the committee; the spectators remained silent in their wide circle, their faces as solemn as the jury they were. This was no sporting event but an execution.
I looked for Philippe, Fleurette, and Claude, wondering if they had left as Queen Fidelity had promised. I spotted them finally near the south wall, the woman and the boy standing atop one of the tables to see above the heads of the crowd. Philippe nodded slightly when our eyes met. His expression was grave.
No one stood along the west wall. There below the stuffed moose head hung a black cloth the size of a bedsheet, with a chalk drawing on it of a cross with a skull and crossbones suspended beneath the axis, surrounded by symbols that meant nothing to me. It might have been painted by a moderately talented child. In front of the cloth sat Queen Fidelity in her rocker. The effect of those stacked headsâmoose, skull, old hagâwas comical and ghastly at the same time. She looked exactly as she had the night before, in spectacles, ratty shawl, and steamer rug. A fixture of the building, she might have been picked up, chair and all, in the adjoining room and set down on that spot without stirring.
She could have been mistaken for an ebony carving for all the life she showed as I was led to the center of the plank floor and stopped with a prod of Enoch's Spencer. Babel joined me a moment later, and we stood four feet apart without speaking. He had on loose woolen trousers held up by braces and a faded striped shirt made from enough material for two garments of ordinary size. His bare feet were as big as skillets and gripped the floor as if they had been bolted in place. My head came to his breastbone. I could have hidden behind his bulk on the back of the little mustang. His big face was blank; given the atmosphere of black magic, I might have thought he was in some kind of trance if I hadn't attended my share of prizefights and seen that same lack of expression on the faces of the combatants. There were no thoughts in that great inverted kettle of a head beyond those connected with my annihilation.
Most of the details of the ceremony that preceded the fight were lost to me, busy as I was attempting to attain that same mental state in regard to Babel. When Queen Fidelity arose finally, with the assistance of a woman on each side wrapped in an identical white sheet secured at the shoulders with pins, she
was barely taller than she had been sitting. Behind the chair, nearly touching the cloth, stood the black-covered platform I had seen in the other room, moved there and set up with a collection of clay vessels arranged at precise intervals in a straight line. She lifted the largest of the jugs and, raising it above her head, offered it to the four directions, the way I had seen Indian shamans do with a medicine pipe. As she did so she recited something in a singsong language that I identified belatedly as English, sprinkled with foreign terms such as
loa, rada,
and
petro
. Lowering the jug, she turned and poured some of its contents into each of three smaller jars on the platform, muttering something that I thought at the time sounded like Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, though I don't credit it now. After setting down the big jug she took a handful of sand or coarsely ground flour from another vessel, then turned and stepped in front of her chair and let it sift out the bottom of her fist to the floor in a rotating motion, so that the pattern roughly resembled the shape of the skull painted on the black cloth behind the platform. Then she stood aside while the two women in sheets came forwardâor rather backward, as they advanced with their backs turned away from the wallâuntil they stood on either side of the crude skull on the floor.
The planks beneath my feet began to vibrate. The spectators stamped their feet in a precise three-beat rhythmâblam blam
blam,
blam blam
blam
âlike fists beating a drum, only amplified by the number of beaters and with the inescapably eerie effect of a hundred people acting in unison without a signal and without one foot missing the beat. It made my scalp move.
While this was going on, the women in white gyrated to the rhythm, twisting their torsos and snaking their arms about their head, but without moving their feet, which were bare and like Babel's fixed to the floor. The dance itself looked joyful, but
whenever I glimpsed their faces, they were glued into the motionless empty grin of the skull on the cloth and the skull on the floor. The room began to fill with the heat of overactive bodies and the thick musk of sweat. I began to feel woozy, and wondered if the breakfast I'd eaten had contained some kind of drug. I was pretty sure it didn't, and that the ceremony was not meant to upset me before the fight. It all had the feeling of something that had been done many times before, that no longer needed rehearsal. For all I knew, they did it before every event, even the ordinary ones, like Christians saying grace before eating.
Some, I noticed, did not take part in the stamping. These included Brother Hebron and the members of the Committee of Public Vigilance, who stood in one corner with their arms folded and their eyes on Brother Babel and me. I couldn't tell whether they disapproved of the ceremony or were indifferent to it, or if they were just waiting for the fun to start. Enoch especially looked eager, tapping one foot out of rhythm with the stamping and unfolding his arms to flick at his face from time to time in a nervous tic. Despite what Hebron had said he looked like a man who had a bet down on the outcome.
I have no idea how long the dancing and the stamping went on. It couldn't have been as long as it seemed. When it stopped, all at once so that the silence boxed my ears, the two women were wet and gleaming and their sheets were plastered to their flesh, showing their nipples, navels, and pubic mounds as clearly as if they were naked. Their heavy breathing was the only sound in a room that rang with silence like the inside of a great bell.
I didn't let them distract me. I had eyes only for Babel, who sank into a crouch the instant the stamping stopped. That was my signal; I charged him, intending to catch him off balance. But a stone wall is always balanced, and he didn't budge an inch as I hit him with all my weight behind my right shoulder. His
long arms closed around me in a bear hug that would have ended the fight there and then if I didn't bend my knees and duck out from under, driving my bootheel into his bare instep as I backpedaled.
That part of the foot is one of the four or five most painful places you can hit a man, but he showed no reaction. Instead, he lunged and backhanded me with a long sweep of his right arm. His knuckles struck the right side of my head like a tree limb; a blue-white light burst inside my skull, and I went down on one knee. He was still coming and I hung on to enough sense to throw myself to the side and roll and come up outside his tremendous reach.
He had fast reflexes for a man his size; for a man of any size. He pivoted just as I let go with a right that I had brought up with me from the floor, shifting his chin so that my knuckles raked his jaw without making square contact. I was still dizzy from the blow to the head, and off balance. He stepped aside, something struck me in the small of my back, and I sprawled headlong to the floor.
I had reason then to thank Hope Weathersill, the madwoman on the Saskatchewan. The buckskin Chief Piapot's Cree had wrapped around my trunk to heal the ribs the woman's bullet had broken had dried as hard as boilerplate. Babel's kick to my back might have cracked my spine if I hadn't still been wearing it. When I scrambled to my feet and turned to meet him again, he was hopping around in a limping circle, trying to walk off the pain of a broken toe. I butted him in the sternum, hard enough to sprain my neck and knock the wind out of a man of normal proportions and take him off his feet. Babel, however, just backed up a step. But it was enough for me to throw both arms around him and snap my head up hard under his chin, colliding with a crack I felt all the way to the ground.
Once again I backpedaled before he could close his arms around me. He blinked, shook his head, spat out a tooth, and went into a fighter's crouch, rocking on the balls of his feet with his big, half-closed fists out in front of him. He knew something of the science of boxing, which made him as dangerous as any man or beast this side of a bull elephant. I feinted with my right, then ducked left, his own left whistling past my ear. I jabbed with my left, but he blocked it with his right and followed through with a blow that caught me in the chest and paralyzed me to the waist. I scissored my knee up into his crotch, but his was higher than most men's, and the pain wasn't enough to slow down his momentum. His looping left fist had by this time completed its circle and caught me behind the neck. My knees buckled, but the blood returned to my head before I finished falling. I dove between his knees, got my shoulder up into his crotch, and lifted with all my strength. Log bridges don't lift, stone viaducts don't give. He was rooted there. One of his hands closed around my belt in back and he pulled me out from between his legs and lifted me off my feet and threw me away. I had a sensation of flying, of the whites of eyes as the spectators in my path recognized the danger and got out of my way, and then I piled up against the base of a trestle table stacked against the wall.
This was no ordinary fight in as many ways as I could count. There should have been cheering and shouting, but the great hall might have been empty for all anyone raised his or her voice for Babel or against me. In that gulf of silence I found enough of my wind to stand and turn again just as the big man bore down on me in his closed crouch.
Instinct told me to get out of his way. Brother Hebron's voice in my head was louder.
Babel has long arms ⦠. You want to get inside them if you plan to do any damage.
This time I didn't feint. I stuck my right in his face, and as he moved to block it and swoop his own right around, I ducked underneath inside the circle of his arms and hit him with a combination, left-right-left, treating his head like a light bag. That was when he closed his arms around me and squeezed. I heard the ribs Hope Weathersill had broken giving way again just before my lamp went out.