"Fine hideaway," he said, and
tossed the derringer into the fire.
"What are you doing?" McCain
said.
"No, no, don't get up," Robert
said, resting his arm across McCain's shoulders. "Those are peashooter
rounds in there. I doubt they could do any serious harm. Let's see what
happens."
The derringer rested between
two red-hot logs, which were crumbling into ash. One cartridge
detonated and a bullet clattered through the top of a tree. The recoil
flipped the derringer backward, burying it in a pile of soft ash.
"Don't know where it's aimed
now, do we? I guess it's a bit like attacking across an open field
against a rifle company that's set up inside a woods. You feel a
terrible sort of nakedness, not knowing which fellow is about to park
one in your liver," Robert said.
McCain pushed himself to his
feet and jumped back into the darkness. The pistol popped again, this
time driving the bullet into a log.
Robert stared silently into
the flames, the list of names pinned between his arm and thigh. The
other men formed a semicircle behind him, looking at one another,
kicking at the ground, their food forgotten.
"How about a drink of liquid
mule shoe, Robert?" one man said.
"I think I'll be having no
more of this, but thanks just the same," he said.
He picked up the list of names
and held it loosely in his fingers. The breeze puffed the fire alight
so that he only had to lean forward slightly to drop the list onto the
flames.
"You're our friend, but don't
challenge us, Robert," another man said.
Robert flattened the sheet of
paper on his thigh and removed a pencil stub from his pocket and
blackened out one name on the list. Then he folded the paper and stuck
it under the log.
"Good night and God bless you
all," he said, rising to his feet. "But the man who brings injury to my
pal Willie Burke will wish Billy Sherman had heated a train rail and
wrapped it around his throat."
PERHAPS obsession had sawed
loose his fastenings to a reasonable
view of
the world,
Willie thought. Or m
aybe he was
diseased and pathologically
flawed, to the extent he was no longer repelled by death and mortality
and defeat and was instead drawn to the grave, to leaf-strewn arbors
and green-stained markers fashioned from field-stones, where the air
was vaporous and tannic and the light always amber and the voices of
friends rose from the ground, whispering lessons he wanted to reach out
and cup in his hand.
And what a companion he had
chosen for his return to Shiloha one-eyed, barefoot, British-born
minstrel named Elias Rachet who constantly plucked at a banjo and
twanged on a Jew's harp and wore his shoes tied around his neck, in
case, as he said, "we have to walk in nasty water and through cow turds
and such."
The two of them stood in the
early morning haze at the bottom of an incline that was dotted with
wildflowers. At the top of the rise was a clump of hardwoods, dark with
shadow, the canopy denting in the breeze. Willie thought he heard the
iron-rimmed wheels of caissons knocking across rocks and the popping of
flags in the wind, the jingle of a bridle and the nicker of a
frightened horse in the trees. He yawned to clear his ears and turned
in a circle and saw only the vastness of the forests and the dark,
metallic-blue dome of sky overhead.
"Jim Stubbefield died right
where the gray stones are at. See, there's five of them, just like big
Indian arrow points that's been pressed down in the ground," Elias
said, pointing. He leaned over and spit tobacco in the grass, then
plucked at his banjo. The tremolo from his strings seemed to climb into
his voice. "Lordy, I can still hear all our boys yelling. Would you go
through it again, knowing what you know now?"
"Maybe."
"I tell myself the same thing.
I always reckon God forgives liars and fools, being as He made so many
of us," Elias said.
Elias was slat-toothed when he
grinned, his face crinkling with hundreds of tiny lines. He looked away
at a tea-colored creek that coursed through the edge of a woods. The
wrinkles in his face flattened and his solitary eye became a blue pool
of sadness. "I kilt a boy out there in them trees maybe wasn't over
fifteen. He came busting down the hill and I whipped around and shot
him right through the chest. A
little bitty
yankee
drummer boy, much like your friend Tige."
Elias sat down on a large
rock, his
legs
splayed,
and picked at his banjo. His callused
feet were rimmed with mud, his mouth down-turned, his jug head
silhouetted against the pinkness on the bottom of the horizon.
"You're not going to cut bait
on me, are you?" Willie asked.
"Both Jim's folks is passed?"
Willie nodded.
"Then I don't reckon they'll
mind. I wish I was a darky," Elias said.
"Why's that?"
"'Cause I'd have an excuse for
taking other people's orders all my life." Then he slapped the tops of
his thighs and laughed and stomped his feet up and down in the grass.
He laughed until a tear ran down from his empty eye socket. "Ain't this
world a barrel of monkeys?"
"Take me to the grave," Willie
said.
"Jim don't hold it against you
'cause you lived and he died."
Elias started to smile, then
looked at Willie's expression and got up from the rock and arched a
crick out of his back, his face deliberately empty.
The water in the creek was
spring-fed and cold inside Willie's shoes as he and Elias waded across,
a freshly carpentered, rope-handled box strung between them. The trees
were widely spaced on the far side of the creek, the canopy thick, the
ground gullied, crisp with leaves that had settled into the depressions
scattered through the woods. Up the incline Elias studied an
outcropping of rock that was cracked through the center by the trunk of
a white oak tree.
He set down his end of the
box. "We didn't have time to dig deep. Don't be surprised if animals
has had their way with things," he said.
Willie opened the box and
removed a shovel and a large square of sail canvas. He spread the
canvas on the ground and began to dig at the base of the outcropping.
The ground was carpeted with toadstools and mushrooms with purple
skirts and moist from a spring farther up the incline. Overhead,
squirrels clattered in the white oak and he felt himself begin to sweat
inside his clothes. The soil he spaded to the side of the depression
was dark and loose, like coffee grinds, and was churning with
night-crawlers and smelled of decay and severed tree roots. The tip of
Willie's shovel scraped across metal.
He got to his knees and began
brushing the dirt from a copper-colored belt buckle
embossed
with the letters CSA, then his fingers touched cloth and wood
buttons and the skeletal outline of a rib cage, wrist bones, and
fingers that were like polished white twigs.
"His shoes are gone. When we
put him in the ground I was sure his shoes was on. I didn't let nobody
take Jim's shoes, Willie," Elias said.
"I know you didn't," Willie
said.
"Maybe it ain't Jim. There was
shooting going on in the trees and people running everywhere."
Willie hollowed the dirt away
from the corpse's shoulders and arms and sides, then brushed at the
face, touching a piece of cloth that had moldered into the features. He
picked up the bottom of the fabric and peeled it back from the chin and
nose and forehead and looked down into a face whose skin had turned
gray and had shrunken tautly against the skull. The mouth was open and
a tin identification tag, still attached to a leather cord, was wedged
perpendicularly between the front teeth. Willie clasped the tag between
his thumb and index finger and lifted it from the dead man's mouth.
Willie spit on the tag and
rubbed it clean on his pants, then read the name on it and wrapped it
carefully with the frayed leather cord that had held it around Jim's
neck and placed it in his shirt pocket and buttoned his shirt flap on
top of it.
Then he took Jim out of the
grave and laid him on the piece of canvas. He could not believe how
light Jim was, how reduced in density and size he had become. There was
no smell of corruption in Jim's body, no odor at all, in fact. The
spring water had washed the blood from the wounds in his head, and the
wind touched his hair and his mouth seemed to form a word.
Where have you been, you Irish
groghead?
Had to take care of a few
Yanks, run them out of New Iberia, set General Banks straight about a
few things. Ready to go home, you ole beanpole?
"You're giving me the
crawlies," Elias said.
Willie folded the corners of
the canvas across Jim's body and face and lifted him in both arms, then
laid him down in the wood box, with the knees propped against one wall,
the head bent against another.
Then, on his hands and knees,
he shoved the dirt back into the hole at the foot of the outcropping,
packing it down, smoothing it, raking
leaves across the
topsoil.
When he had finished, he glanced up at Elias and saw a mixture of
p
ity and sadness in his face.
"He carried the guidon. He was
braver than me. I loved Jim and care not if anyone calls me a ghoul. To
hell with them," Willie said.
"Oh, Willie, would that I
could change your soul as easy as I can rub the burnt cork on my skin,"
Elias replied.
IRA Jamison never got over
being surprised by the way white trash thought. He assumed their basic
problem was genetic. They were born in ignorance and poverty, with no
more chance of success than a snowball in a skillet, but as long as
they were allowed to feel they were superior to Africans, they remained
happy and stupid and believed anything they were told.
They worked from dawn to dusk
on other people's farms, bought at the company store, lived in cabins a
self-respecting owl wouldn't inhabit, saw their children grow up with
rickets and rotted teeth, and with great pride became cannon fodder in
wars whose causes had nothing to do with their lives.
Then a day came when, through
chance or accident, the great scheme of things crashed on their heads
like an asteroid.
What better example than Clay
Hatcher, Ira Jamison thought. A man who had lived most of his life with
expectations of a reward that most people would consider a punishment.
More specifically, a lifetime spent coveting a desiccated, worm-eaten
house that had so little structural value a man with heavy boots could
kick it into kindling.
But Clay Hatcher was not most
people and Angola Plantation was not the rest of the world. The house
had four rooms, a cistern and a chicken run, and was built on a bluff
overlooking the river. Its geographic prominence meant it went to only
one person, the chief overseer. The homes of the other whites who
worked on the plantation, now becoming known in the prison nomenclature
as "free people," were situated down the back slope, at best on dry
ground that didn't breed mosquitoes. Farther on, in acreage that never
quite drained or was full of clay, were the old slave cabins, now used
by convicts.
The house on the bluff was
sunny in winter and cooled by a breeze off the river in summer. Mimosa
trees bloomed in the front yard and peach trees in back. The soil was
black and loamy, too, wheelbar
rowed up from the compost
heaps behind the barns, and the vegetable garden produced tomatoes
as big as grapefruit.
Hatcher had knocked on the
side door under the porte cochere, his battered excuse for a hat in his
hand, his bottom lip crusted with a scab that looked like a black
centipede.
"I hear Rufus is buying the
property where the laundry was at in New Iberia," he said.
"That's right, Clay. Looks
like Roof is about to become a gentleman planter," Jamison said.
"Then he'll be moving out
directly?"
"Yes, directly it is."
Hatcher cut his head and
grinned and fiddled with his hat, his gaze never quite meeting
Jamison's.
"Reckon me and my old woman
should get our things together, huh?" he said.
"I'm not following you."
"Seeing as how I'm second
overseer, I figured you'd want me moving on into Rufus's place. It goes
with the job, don't it?"
Jamison heard a boat on the
river and looked in its direction. "You're a good man, Clay. But we're
in the penal business now. An oldtime jail warden from New Orleans will
be replacing Rufus. I'll be relying on you to get him oriented."
Hatcher turned his hat in his
hands, his face reddening, his jawbones knotting, a band of sunlight
slicing across his eyes.
"Oldtime jail warden, you
say?" he said.
But Jamison did not reply, his
eyes taking on a glint that Hatcher failed to read.
Hatcher licked the broken
place on his lip. "I seen a heap of shit happen on this place. But this
takes all," he said.
"I advise you not to create a
problem for yourself, my friend."