They hiked upriver and reached the shallows on the following afternoon and there forded the Perdido into Alabama. They walked till sundown and made camp by a willowcreek. They built a fire and talked very little as they ate the last of the boiled eggs and then they rolled up in their blankets and slept. The next day they crossed the Tensaw on a lumber barge and another few miles farther west they paid ten cents each to cross the Mobile on a pulley ferry. Purple thunderheads towered to the south over the Gulf. The scent of the sea mingled with the smell of ripe black bottomland and coming rain. Seahawks circled in the high sky.
The ferryman was a garrulous graybeard with a pegleg and a jawful of chaw. The ropy muscles of his arms stood sharply as he worked the pulley rope and told of having lost the leg to a crocodile in the wilds of southern Florida when he was down there in search of Spanish gold.
“Not a alligator, mind, I mean a goddamn crocodile! I was fordin a mangrove saltpool and never saw the sumbitch till it bit my shin right in two. Sounded just like a dog snappin a chickenbone, only lots louder and for damn sure no chicken ever let out a holler like I did. Ever bit of fifteen foot long and I never saw it till it had me. It’s lots of people don’t think it’s much difference twixt a gator and a crock. Hellfire, it’s only the same difference as twixt a bobcat and a painter is all the difference it is. Get yourself bit by a gator then go get bit by a crock and you’ll know the difference mighty goddamn quick.”
Edward said he had seen a gator kill and eat a redbone in less time than it takes to tell. “Dog was trottin along the bank and the next thing you knew it wasnt nothin there but a bull gator with a mouthful of bloody hide and a big grin of teeth.”
“Gator’s fast all right,” the old man said, showing his skewed and blackened teeth in what could have been either grin or grimace, “but crock’s faster and you’d care a whole lot less to get chewed on by one, I can by damn assure you of that.” He spat a brown streak of juice at a turtle sunning itself on a chunk of driftwood and missed it by a whisker-breadth and the turtle plopped into the blackwater and disappeared.
He asked where they were headed and when Edward said Texas the old man’s mouth turned down and he shook his head. “Aint nothin get me to go to no damn Texas. Ever Texan I ever met been craziern a beestung cat. All them Mexicaners they got there don’t make the place no likelier neither. And they’s Comanche everwhere you turn. They got ways to kill you the devil hisself aint thought of. No, thankee! You boys can have all my share a Texas and ye welcome to it.”
The ferry bumped against the western bank and the old man hopped off and made the bowline fast to a cottonwood trunk. The brothers slung their bedrolls over their shoulders and bid him farewell and hiked up onto the trace and headed south. The old man stood spitting chaw juice and watching them until they were out of sight round the bend.
The sky grew darkly purple with thick rolling storm clouds and early that afternoon a hard rain came sweeping down. It fell for two hours and then abruptly ceased and the clouds broke and the sun shone through. Steam rose off the tamped earth of the river trace and their clothes were dry by sunset.
They put down for the night in a clearing hard by the river. They built a good high fire and some of the wood was yet damp and popped like pistol shots and threw high trailing sparks. They cut thin willow branches and sharpened them to fine points and sharpened too a dozen smaller greensticks. Each then took up a flaming hickory brand and a willow spear and went to the riverbank and stepped down to the edge of the reeds where colonies of frogs were ringing in a steady clamor. They held their torches forth and saw a horde of red eyes shining in the cattails. They worked quickly and with practiced smoothness, gigging frogs on the spearheads and wrist-whipping the willow lances backward to send the frogs arcing up to the higher ground to writhe and spasm in the glow of the fire. In minutes they took four dozen and then put aside their gigs and torches and cut the legs off the frogs and pitched the remains in the river. They stripped the skin off the legs and pinned several legs on each greenstick and roasted them over the fire until the juices dripped and hissed in the flames. Then they sat back against the broad trunk of a huge oak and ate loudly, smacking lips and licking fingers and tossing the thin bones into the river reeds and pausing but to burp. When they were done with eating, Edward took out the pipe and pouch of tobacco he’d removed from Daddyjack’s body and filled the bowl and fired it with a match and took several billowing puffs before handing the pipe to John.
They passed the pipe back and forth and smoked in silence for a time. The wavering light of the fire played on their faces. Then John said:
“What if we was to run up on her?”
Edward looked at him. “On who?”
“Momma. What if we come up on her twixt here and Texas?”
“You been thinkin on that?”
John shrugged “Kindly. I’d like to know how come she just up and went like she did.”
“Cause she’s craziern a drunk Indian is how come.”
“Well, I don’t reckon it’d hurt nothin to ask after her.”
Edward looked at him. “I tell you what—I hope to hell we do find her, cause I want them mules.”
John stared at him for a moment. “I guess she figured she had right to em.”
“Well I figure we got as much right to em as she do. Leastways to one of them. Wouldnt have to walk all the way to Texas if we had us a damn mule.”
They stared into the fire for a time and then John said: “What-all you figure we gone do in Texas?”
Edward looked at his brother and shrugged. “What you figure?”
“I aint give it a lot a thought.”
“Well I aint neither. I figure we just get there and then we see what-all we do.”
“That’s all right by me,” John said. He studied the cloud-streaked sky for a moment and then hawked and spit in the fire. “Still, I been thinkin on it some the last coupla days. I been thinkin how maybe, well, it’d be nice we had us our own place.”
Edward stared at him.
“Why not?” John said, his tone defensive against the argument he perceived in his brother’s eyes. “You’ve heard all them pilgrims talkin about the timberland in Texas. They say it’s ever bit as good as in Florida, better maybe. We could get us a piece of it and work that sumbitch into somethin good. Who knows more about axin trees than we do? Tell me somethin we don’t know about sawyerin. We could have our own mill is what we could have. If Daddyjack wasnt no good for nothin else he sure enough taught us all there’s to know about cuttin wood.”
Edward fell to repacking the pipe. They had never spoken of it but he had always sensed that John desired nothing so much as to work his own land and raise a family and live in the way of most men. The Florida homestead would have been his elder brother’s natural birthright, but now they both of them stood unrooted and Edward knew the circumstance weighed more sorely on John than on himself. As he tamped down the pipe and struck a lucifer to light it, he knew too that he could not favor his own vague and restless yearnings above fidelity to his brother, who was all that remained to him of loyal kinship in the world. If nothing else would do for John but to settle in Texas and work a tract of timber, then that’s what they would do.
Still, there were arguments to be made.
“What if it’s noplace left to homestead?” he asked. “What if we got to pay cash money for this here piece a property ye be so set on?”
“No place left? In Texas? About the biggest damn place ye ever laid eyes on? Where they say the timber just goes on and on as far as you can see and then goes yonder more?”
“I’m just sayin what if?”
“Well, it’s like sayin what if the sun falls down tomorrow is what it’s like sayin. It just don’t make sense.”
“What if, Johnny?”
“Then we’ll work for wages, goddamnit, till we’ve saved up the stake we need,” John said. “It’s others who done it and you know it well as me. You think it’s somethin others can do that we can’t? You and me together, Ward, we can do any damn thing and just show me the man says we can’t.”
So ardent was his brother’s faith that Edward had to smile.
“Listen Ward, Daddyjack was right about one thing. A man with no place to call his own aint but a feather on the wind.”
Edward’s grin widened. “Is that why I been feelin so light in the ass lately?”
John laughed. “Go ahead on and make all the jokes you want, but you know it’s true. You and me, we aint gone stay no feathers on the wind, not us. Hell, Ward, we can have us a nice place, a damn business is what we could have us, if we do this right.”
“Whatever you say, big brother,” Edward said. “Whatever you say.”
They followed the river trace downstream for the next two days in a steady rain that eased to a drizzle as they slogged into Mobile like apparitions of the drowned. The streets lay deep in red mud and the air was heavy with the smell of clay. They checked the hotels first thing and found that no one named Lilith Little had lately been registered in any of them and none of the desk clerks recognized John’s descriptions of her.
They decided to check the liveries and in the first one they entered they saw one of their mules standing in a stall.
“Hey Foots,” Edward said. The mule swung its head to look at him and twitched its ears. The Remus mule wasn’t there.
The stableman had got up out his rocker with a grin when the brothers entered but their apparent recognition of the mule wiped the false cheer off his face. A white bulldog stood at his side growling low with its nape bristled and teeth showing. The stableman hushed it with a snap of his fingers. He was tall and beefy and was missing the larger portion of his nose which looked to have recently been bitten off or somehow torn away and the wound was raw and gaping.
“You boys need yourselfs a mount?”
“Done got one,” John said. “That mule there’s ours.”
The man looked over at the mule and then back at the brothers. “That a fact?” He regarded them closely and then spat to the side. “I guess yall got a paper on it?”
John looked at Edward and Edward stared back at him and then they both looked at the stableman.
“We don’t know about a paper,” John said.
The stableman crossed his arms. “Then yall got no proof the animal’s yours.”
“Don’t need no damn paper to know what’s ours,” John said.
“Reckon not,” the stableman said. “But knowin and provin’s two different things. The law don’t care a good goddamn what all you know, only what you got the proof of. You want that animal, you got to prove it’s yours or you got to pay for it.”
“You got a paper on that mule?” Edward asked.
The stableman sighed and went to a battered desk in the corner and dug a key out of his pocket and worked it noisily in the drawer lock and opened it. He thumbed through a thin stack of papers and extracted a sheet and called the bulldog over beside him and told it to stand fast and then beckoned the brothers to the table and the light of the overhanging lantern. “I reckon you boys can read?”
John reached for the paper but the man put his big hand over it and held it flat on the table. “You aint got to touch it to read it.”
The signature at the bottom of the bill of sale said Joan Armstrong but John recognized his mother’s hand. He looked up from the paper and nodded at Edward. The stableman described her as having hair reddish dark like a roast apple. “Face of a angel but for them eyes. Them eyes seen things no angel ever did I’ll wager you that. And somebody done recent put a shiner on one of them. Tell me true, boys: You know the woman?”
Edward looked away and spat. John said, “We might know her.”
“Thought you might,” the stableman said, looking closely at them both. He told the brothers she’d been there two days ago. “Walked in here with the mule on a lead and said she wanted to sell it. I said how much and she said whatever’s fair. I said did she have a paper on it and she said no. I said who’s it belong to and she said it belonged to her husband who up and died real sudden and didn’t leave her much and that was why she had to sell the animal. You boys tell me now—was that a lie, do you know?”
“No,” John said. “It wasn’t exactly no lie.”
“Not exactly,” the stableman echoed. He pursed his lips and nodded as though mulling a fact of significance. “She was some galled at bein asked for a paper,” he said. “Asked me did she look like a dishonest person. Well, my momma didn’t raise no peckerwoods but she raised me never to offend a lady neither, so I said no mam, I’d be proud to buy the animal if she’d be so kind as to sign this here bill to make it all nice and legal and above the board, as they say.”
“Says here you paid but twenty dollars,” Edward said.
The stableman chuckled. “I started at twelve but she wouldn’t have it. But I could see she was in kind of a hurry to be on her way so I hemmed and hawed and raised the offer one slow dollar at a time and she practically called me a damn thief. I said she was free to go to some other stable and see could she do any better and she said we were probly all in cahoots. I do believe she been around some. But like I say, she looked in a hurry, and when I said twenty was as high as I was ever goin to go she took it.”
“Was there a girl with her?” John asked. “Bout yay high.”
Edward looked at his brother. They had neither one spoken of their sister since they’d abandoned the charred homestead. He himself did not want to believe that what their mother had told them was true, he did not feel that it was, and he was surprised to know that John still had his doubts as well.
“Didn’t see no girl. Come in by her sweet lonesome.”
“Twenty dollars is some less than that animal’s worth,” Edward said.
“That’s a true fact,” the stableman said. The raw nose holes flared over a broad grin. “It’s some of us with a natural-born talent for business.”
Edward took the pistol from his waistband and said, “I’ll give you twenty dollars and this here gun for it,” Edward said.
The stableman laughed and shook his head. “Got a sense of fun, don’t ye boy?” he said.
Edward’s eyes narrowed. The pistol muzzle was pointed at the ceiling but now he slid his finger over the trigger and put his thumb on the hammer. The stableman glanced at the pistol but did not yield his smile.
John put his hand on Edward’s arm and said, “Leave it be. He got the paper and that’s the damn law. Let’s go.” Edward stood fast a moment longer and stared hard at the stableman but the man refused to be stared down and simply grinned at him. Edward spat to the side and tucked the pistol in his pants and the brothers went out into a sprinkling rain.
The stableman went to the door and looked after them and called: “You boys come back and see me you decide you need yourselfs some mounts. I give the best deals in town and that’s a fact.”
The dark sky rumbled steadily as they went about the town and looked in the few other liveries but the Remus mule was in none of them nor Daddyjack’s horse. None of the stablemen had seen any woman or girl fitting the descriptions the brothers gave.
By the time they’d checked the last livery the rain was falling hard once again, pocking the muddy streets and clattering on the rooftops. They went in a tavern and the lantern flames guttered in their sooty glass in the sudden flux of air admitted through the door. The roof drummed with rain and the room was close and dimly lighted and rank with the smell of dampened men too long unwashed. Shadowed faces turned their way and conversation fell off as the brothers stood and slung water off their hats onto the floor. They went to the bar and ordered whiskey and gulped it down and ordered another and sipped at it mutely as the talk in the room gradually renewed. When they finished the second drink they went outside and stood on the small porch and watched the rain.
“Well, it aint like to let up anytime soon,” John said, scanning the heavy sky and then looking down the street to westward. “Last I heard, Texas was still yonderway. Sooner we get goin again the sooner we be there.”
“I aint leavin without that mule,” Edward said.
John looked at him.
“Well I aint. I aint lettin no thievin smitty have that mule for twenty dollars. I don’t care she signed a paper on it.”
“Well hell, bubba, when you decide this?”
“In there just now.” Edward was looking toward a side street and John followed his gaze and recognized the street as leading to the stable where they’d seen the Foots mule. He looked at Edward and said, “That stablebuck looks a rough ole boy.”
“He cheated her of that mule and I aim to get it back. And he don’t scare me none.”
“Didn’t say he did and he don’t me neither,” John said. He looked down the street again. “You want that mule, I say let’s get it.”
Edward regarded the overcast sky. “Be full dark soon. Best wait till then.” He caught John’s look at the tavern door. “I aint scared a him but probly better we don’t front him half-drunk, either.”
John shrugged and nodded. They’d wrapped their firearms in their blankets to protect them from the rain and now uncovered them and checked the locks to make sure they were still dry and then wrapped the guns again. They sat on the porch with their backs against the wall and waited for nightfall and when it came they got up and trudged down the thickmudded street.
The rain had again slackened to a drizzle amid continuing growls of thunder but the clouds were yet thick and roily and riding low. Sporadic lightning shimmered the street with blue light and black shadows. The wind was stronger now and shook water off the trees in heavy splattering sheets. They could hear the river’s swollen rush. The smell of raw clay was strong on the air. The buildings along the main street were closed and dark but for the taverns and pleasure parlors whose windows showed wavering lamplight and resounded with music and laughter. A pair of horsemen draped with slickers went sploshing past, joking loudly about Mobile’s sporting ladies.
They rounded the corner and saw a cast of pale yellow light in the livery and eased up to the door and looked inside. The stableman sat in his rocker sipping from a jug and addressing the bulldog lying at his feet with its chin on its paws. They stepped inside and the dog flexed to its feet with its back roached and fangs bared, growling low.
The stableman set the jug on the floor and rose from his chair and John leveled the Hawken at him from the hip and the man stood fast and looked mournful. Edward took a coiled rope off a stall gate and tossed it to him and told him to tie the dog short to a post. The man did it and then Edward ordered him to hand over the key to the desk drawer and sit back down in the rocker. He bound the man snug to the chair with a length of rope while the bulldog snarled and slobbered and strained against its short leash but did not bark. John fashioned a rope hackamore for the mule and slipped it on the animal while Edward went to the desk and opened the drawer and found the bill of sale and folded it and put it in his pocket.
“We could take any of these mounts we want,” Edward told the stableman, “but we aint here to steal from you, only to take what’s rightly ours. You paid twenty dollars for old Foots, but it was cheatin money cause you know good and well this mule’s worth more, so it’s only fittin you lose what you paid.”
As John began cutting a wide strip off a burlap bag the stableman said, “You thievin me, boys, no matter how you shine the light on it. You gone have the law on you. You sure you want that?”
“How you gonna prove to the law you even had a mule stole?” Edward said. He patted his pocket. “Where’s your damn paper on it?”
“You ever decide you want to make us a fair offer on it,” John said, “you come see us in Pensacola.” He winked at Edward over the stableman’s head. “That’s our home and that’s where we headed.”
John rolled the burlap strip and gagged the man with it. Edward stepped outside to make sure the going was clear and then John blew out the lantern and the brothers doubled up on the Foots mule and rode down the street and out of Mobile in the falling rain.
They rode steadily through the night and most of the next day, taking turns sleeping one behind the other, pushing westward, putting distance between themselves and Mobile. The rain fell and fell. They were sodden to their bones. At first light they began scanning the murky landscape behind them for signs of pursuers. The sagging sky looked made of clay. On the trail along the bottoms the water was to the mule’s belly. They kept a sharp eye for moccasins. The only sounds were of the mule’s huffing breath and splooshing forward progress, the rain pattering the trees and dimpling the water. A dead pig drifted past, its upturned eye dull as stone, and then a dozen white chickens, bloated and giving off feathers to the breeze. When a catfish as big as a boy broke the surface alongside them the mule frighted and Edward was unseated and nearly kicked in the head and he swallowed mouthfuls of muddy water as he struggled to his feet while John got the animal steadied again.
Late that afternoon the rain abated but the sky remained leaden. As the mule slogged through water to its knees they spotted something large bobbing beside a canefield some thirty yards ahead and close to the road. It looked to be a heavy cut of timber but as they drew near they saw it was an empty coffin. Within the next half-mile they came upon four more and all of them empty. The air assumed the odor of rot. Now the road curved around a wide cypress stand and they saw more than a dozen coffins afloat where a graveyard had flooded and the rising groundwater had forced the coffins up out of the softened saturated earth. Most of the coffins were lidless and empty and some were hardly more than a few rotted boards still clung together on a rusted nail. Cadavers in various states of decomposition carried on the slow current of the flood. Most were the color of the earth itself and some were snagged on shrubbery and in the cane and those with upturned faces showed empty black eyeholes and rotted yellow grins against the gloomy sky.
Now they saw two men in black slickers on a nearby rise applying a prising bar to a coffin and the lid screeched and came asunder and one of the men bent over the box and cried out, “Luck!” He dropped to his knees and lifted a moldered hand into view and pulled a ring from its finger and rinsed it in the water and held it up for the other man to see. But the other had caught sight of the brothers and now unslung his rifle and pulled off the rag he’d wrapped around the breech to keep it dry and he held the weapon pointed at them from his hip.
The brothers passed slowly within thirty feet of them and Edward jerked on the hackamore to pull the curious mule’s eyes away from the graverobbers. John held the cocked Hawken propped across his thighs with his finger on the trigger. The men were bonefaced and grizzled and there was nothing in their darkeyed aspect save hard wariness. No one spoke and John kept his eyes on them until he was turned around almost completely on the back of the mule. The graverobbers watched them in turn until the brothers went around the next bend and out of sight.
They camped that evening in a small clearing on a stretch of high ground thick with shrubbery and hardwoods and flanked by a swift creek running high on its steep banks. Edward hacked branches off a water oak and sliced off the wet bark and used the inner wood to kindle a fire while John went to the creek and shot a large snapping turtle for their supper. They cut steaks out of it and roasted them on sharpened greensticks propped against the firestones. They built up the flames and took off their boots and set them close beside the fire and then stripped naked and hung their clothes and blankets on frames fashioned of willow branches around the fire to dry while they ate. When their pants and shirts were dry they put them on and rolled up in their damp blankets and went to sleep.
Edward dreamed that he was back in the cabin in Florida and sitting across the table from Daddyjack who was hatless and wildhaired and stared at him with one sad eye and a socket gaping empty and hung with streaks of dried bloody gore. He did not seem angry so much as curious and somewhat puzzled. Edward’s heart was pounding. He told Daddyjack he was sorry, he truly was, but he’d had to protect his brother. “That’s good,” Daddyjack said, “I aint chiding you for it, brothers ought always to look out for each other.” Then he made a face and shook his head and Edward did not understand and asked what he meant and Daddyjack shook his head again. He turned in his chair and looked out the window into the darkness beyond and Edward saw the ragged red-black hole in the back of his head where the pistol ball had come through. Daddyjack pointed out into the dark and said, “The bitch knows.” And then his mother was at the window and looking in at them and smiling exactly as she had the last time he’d seen her.
He woke in darkness. His face was wet and a sprinkling rain ticked on the foliage. The vague quartermoon shone dimly through scudding violet clouds. The fire had burned down to a bed of bright embers and raised a ghostly smoke in the drizzle. There was a rustling of shrubbery and he distinctly heard someone say in a whispered rasp, “Here. Fire looks like.”
John whispered “Ward” in his ear and lightly touched his face. Edward nodded and rolled out of his blanket and put on his boots. They started toward the trees along the creekbank but they’d gone only a few feet when a rifle blasted from the trees behind them and Edward felt himself clubbed high and hard on the back and he staggered forward and fell crashing through saplings down the bank and into the high water of the rushing creek.
Water seared in through his mouth and nose and he gagged and felt himself being pulled along the bottom by the current and he could not get upright and was sure he was going to drown. He grabbed wildly and caught hold of a root and arrested his downstream tumble and found footing and at last managed to thrust his head out of the water and gulp down air. He grabbed a willow branch and pulled himself grunting up the bank and sprawled on his belly and choked and spewed a gush of creekwater and lay there gasping. The long muscle along the top of his shoulder ached deeply and he felt the warm flow of blood over his collarbone but he could flex and rotate the arm and knew no bone was broken.
He lay still in the grass and listened, trying to mute his heavy breathing and tasting the acrid and muddy vomit in his mouth. It seemed to him he had heard another rifleshot while he was in the water but he wasn’t sure. Now he heard voices in the darkness farther up along the creekbank but could not make out the words. Now somebody was coming his way, pushing though the foliage with no concern for stealth. Edward slipped Daddyjack’s snaphandle knife out of his pocket and opened the blade with a flick of his wrist and crawled deeper into the shadow of a large bush and there crouched and breathed shallowly through his open mouth and watched the slightly lighter patch of sky above the bushtop and listened as the man drew closer.
When the man’s silhouette crossed the patch of sky Edward silently rose up behind him and clamped a swift arm hard around his head with a sureness that came to him as naturally as breathing. His arm stifled the man’s cry as he thrust the knife into his neck and twisted the blade and felt it scrape the neckbone and then he yanked it out and blood jetted hugely and spattered on the shrubbery and abruptly ebbed to a hot pulsing flow smelling of cut copper. It ran off the man’s neck and down his rainslicker and onto the front of Edward’s shirt. The man abruptly went slack and the dead weight of him was unlike any heft Edward had ever felt. He let the body fall. His heart banged against his ribs like a thing becrazed. The blood was warm on his chest and thick on his hands, the smell of it ripe on his face. He had to restrain the impulse to howl.
He was dizzy, weak in the legs. Sharp pain jolted through his neck all the way to his left shoulder. He put his fingers to the muscle joining neck and back and felt the wound. The rifleball had entered above the shoulder blade and exited just over the collarbone, which flared with white pain to the touch. Blood pulsed from the wound. His shirt was sopping.
A rifleshot sounded from the direction of the campsite and a man yelped in pain and Edward dropped to his haunches. A voice yelled, “Harlan, help me! I’m bad hurt!”
He sheathed his knife and sidled over in the darkness to the dead man who he dearly hoped was Harlan. He stripped the man of powder flask and shot pouch and took up the fallen rifle and made sure it was loaded and started making his way back toward the campsite. He moved through the brush in a careful lightfoot crouch, hearing his own breath and the dripping leaves, smelling blood and raw earth.
He was within a few yards of the clearing when the wounded man called for Harlan again. Then his voice went higher as he said, “Oh Jesus, son, don’t kill me. I wasn’t lookin to—” There came a soft thud and the man groaned deeply.
Edward stood up and peered over the bushes and into the clearing where their campfire still cast a dull orange glow. John was standing over a retching man in a black slicker who lay on his side with his hands at his crotch. On the far edge of the clearing lay a man in a yellow slicker in such awkward attitude as only the dead can assume.
Edward stepped out of the brush and John spun around white-eyed with the Hawken held like a club and he saw it was his brother and lowered the rifle and expelled a hard breath. “God damn, bubba!” he said. “I thought sure you’d been shot.” He quickly looked around and lowered his voice. “There’s anothern out there yet.”
“That’s so,” Edward said. “But he aint no trouble.”
“How come’s that? I didn’t hear no shot.”
“Snapknife don’t shoot.”
“Snapknife? Damn, son!” John’s face was alight with admiration and more—with a wild elation of a sort as old as Cain. “Hell, little brother,” he said, gesturing toward the yellow-slickered man, “we put down the lot, you and me! The lot! And them with the jump on us.”
Edward felt himself returning his brother’s grin. The man at John’s feet drew their attention with a low moan. “Hey now,” John said, “lookit here what we got.” He put his boot against the man’s shoulder and pushed him over onto his back and even in the weak light of the coalfire there was no mistaking the mutilated nose of the stableman from Mobile.
“Him and a coupla friends come all this way in the rain to shoot us for a damn mule that wasn’t rightly his to start with.” John grinned down at the stableman and said, “Your daddy oughta taught you to hunt some better.”
The stableman looked at Edward and raised a supplicant hand. “Please,” he whispered. Edward saw the dark stain over his belly where John had shot him and he knew the wound was mortal.
“What you want, hardcase?” John asked the stableman. “Another kick in the walnuts? You want me put you out you misery?” He raised the rifle to drive the buttplate through the man’s terrified face and Edward said, “Johnny don’t.”
John looked at him, rifle poised.
“It aint a need,” Edward said. “Not no more.” His wound spasmed sharply and he clutched at it and yawed.
John hurried to him. “Damn boy—you bleedin!”
He dropped his rifle and eased Edward to the ground next to the coalfire and helped him off with his blood-sopped shirt and examined the wound as best he could in the weak amber light.
“I’m all right,” Edward said. “It just give me a smart is all.”
John confirmed that the round had passed cleanly through the muscle over the collarbone. He told Edward to stay put while he fetched water from the creek. Edward was holding tightly to the wound and staring into the orange coals when he was startled by the stableman’s loud groan.
Then the man’s last breath gurgled from his throat and faded into the night.
John washed out his wound with creek water and fashioned a tight bandage for it from the stableman’s shirt. They heard the whickering of the men’s horses and found the animals tethered back in the trees just off the trail and brought them to the creek to drink. In the Mobile men’s pockets they found two boxes of matches and a honed claspknife and less than five dollars. Among the dead men’s possibles they found bundles of smoked mullet and ears of roasted corn and they built up the fire again and sat beside it and ate.
After a time John said, “I never thought it’d feel, I don’t know … like this.”
Edward saw the high excitement still showing bright in his brother’s eyes.
John said, “Killin a man, I mean. I always thought, well, I don’t know anymore what I always thought…. But I never thought it’d feel so … so damn right.” He started to grin and then remembered who the first man was that his brother had killed and his grin fell away and he shifted his gaze.
Edward had himself been about to grin but just then thought of Daddyjack too. “I guess,” he said, “it depends on who the fella is.”
“Yeah. I guess.”
They ate in silence for a time and then John asked if he thought others would come looking for these three.
“Don’t believe any law will,” Edward said. “I don’t know who these other two are, but no-nose didn’t say nothin about either of them bein law. I figure he might of tried to get the law on us but it wasnt interested in nothin so small-account as a mule the feller didn’t have no papers on anyway. Still, it might could be some kin’ll come lookin for em. We best be gettin on.”
The sky was dawning hard and gray as they stripped the Mobile men of their slickers and weapons, powder and shot. John took the stableman’s black slicker for his own. The man who was sprawled at the edge of the clearing showed a nearly perfectly round hole over his left eyebrow and when Edward turned him over to take off his yellow slicker he saw the larger exit wound in back of the skull. He thought it was a hell of a shot under the circumstances. Johnny always was the shooter.
He replaced his shirt with the man’s unbloodied one and then the brothers rinsed the slickers in the creek and put them on against the continuing drizzle. The yellowslickered man had been carrying a Spanish musket forged more than a century before. John examined it and snorted in disdain and flung it in the creek. The other two longarms were well-kept Kentuckys of .45 caliber with patch-and-ball boxes built into the stocks and complemented with nearly full powder flasks. One of the men had in addition carried a .54 pistol that John quickly claimed on the grounds that Edward already had a handgun and never mind that he lacked the .44 ammunition for it. They recharged the weapons and made ready to ride.
The best of the horses was a sorrel mare. The brothers flipped a coin for her and Edward won. He named the animal Janey in memory of a pretty girl he’d once met at a barn dance but never saw again. All the saddles of the party were worn and cracked. John mounted a sound but nervous bay and led the third horse, an aging dun, on a lead rope. Edward trailed the mule.
At midmorning the sun broke through the clouds for the first time in days. The high waters receded steadily and by early afternoon they were riding mostly through mud. John pistolshot a large rabbit and dressed it and they cooked it on a spit and ate half of it and saved the rest for later. John checked Edward’s wound and saw that it was still swelling and oozing blood. At sunset they camped under an enormous oak on high dry ground and ate the rest of the rabbit and watched the western treeline blazing as if afire.
Next morning Edward was in high fever. The engorged wound showed the color of spoiled meat and the skin was drawn tight. He could raise his left arm only with grimacing effort. “It’s nothin to do but burn it,” John said. “Should of done her yesterday.”
He built up the fire and set a rifle ramrod in it until the metal turned bright red. Edward sat close by and positioned a stick between his teeth and gripped the belt over his belly tightly with both hands. Using the old bandage as a glove John picked up the glowing ramrod and said, “Bite down, bubba.” He pressed the tip of the rod into the rear opening of the wound. The flesh hissed and smoked and Edward shrilled through the stick crunching between his teeth and the tendons in his neck stood like wires. John then inserted the rod in the front of the wound and the hiss was not as loud and to compensate for cooling he this time left the iron in a little longer before withdrawing it. Edward exhaled a shuddering breath and slumped forward and the cracked stick fell from his mouth coated with bloody saliva. The sickly smell of roasted flesh was like grease on the air.
John wiped the cleaning rod on his trouser leg and said, “Reckon we ought do it once more just to be sure she’s done right?”
Edward looked up at his brother’s wicked grin and smiled weakly. “You sorry son of a bitch.”
“Takes one to know one, little brother,” John said. “Takes one to know one.”
Early that evening they came upon a family camped beside a cottonwood grove within sight of the trace. The western sky was a bright red streak smudged with thin purple clouds. Blackbirds squawked in their high roosts and tree frogs clamored without pause. The brothers asked if the pilgrims might spare a bit of coffee and were invited to take supper with them.
They hailed from South Carolina and were on their way to East Texas. The man was a farmer named Campbell, large and slow of speech. His face was badly misshapen, one cheekbone jutting sharply and the other sunken, one eye set higher and deeper than the other, the nose askew, the lower jaw out of line and the upper lacking both front teeth. The scars belied any notion that he’d been born with that face. The man had sometime been beaten near to death.
Farmer Campbell’s voice welled from deep in his nose. He said he’d had his fill of Carolina and had long thought about going west but had been shy about putting his daughters in danger of the damned Indians. But he’d been keeping up with the news from Texas real close and figured that the Texians were sure to accept annexation to the Union, which Congress had approved back in winter. “Soon’s it becomes a state the U.S. Army’s bound to clear the savages off the land so’s a man can make decent use of it,” he said. “Hell, could be the Texians done annexed already. Course now, the damn Mexicans still got to be reckoned with. But they aint no big worry. Sonsabitches couldn’t hold Texas against Sam Houston and two hundred Texians ten year ago and now they threatenin to go to war with the whole U. S. of A. over where the border rightly sets. Well, they keep runnin they goddamned mouth like they doing and they just might find they aint got to worry about no border no more cause they won’t have no damned country to have a border for, by Jesus!”
“You, Douglas Campbell!” his wife snapped at him. “You quit that awful language and all that blaspheming in front of your daughters!” The little girls were about nine and ten years old and seemed amused by their father’s profanity. The farmer shrugged and winked at the girls and they hid their smiles behind their hands. The mother sighed in exasperation and busied herself filling the supper plates.
When Campbell asked where they might be headed Edward kept his attention on his plate of cornbread and beans and possum stew although he lacked his proper appetite and was still feverish. John told the man they were on their way to New Orleans. He said they had an uncle there who made furniture and was going to teach them the trade. Edward looked sidelong at his brother and marveled at his easy way with falsehood. They had agreed not to tell anyone their true destination in case someone should come along behind them making inquiries after two boys who’d but recently killed three citizens of Mobile.
At the end of the meal Edward tried to brace himself on his left arm to push up to his feet and a spasm of pain bolted from his shoulder up through his neck. The woman caught his grimace. “Why, son, you’re hurt!”
Edward tried to make naught of it but Campbell too was solicitous and said if Edward was suffering an injury he ought to let his old woman have a look. “She’s a natural-born healer if ever there was one,” he said. Edward demurred but John said, “Let her see it, bubba. I aint real sure how good I done on it.”
The woman helped Edward off with his shirt and made close examination of the wound and then turned to her husband and he stepped up and took a look at it and then looked at the brothers as if seeing them for the first time. Then he sat down and busied himself packing and lighting his pipe.
The woman commended John’s handiwork with a cauterizing iron but neither she nor Campbell asked how Edward had come to receive such a wound. She ordered the elder daughter to form strips of bandage from a sheet of clean linen stored in a trunk and told the younger to boil a kettle of water and to use a bit of it to make a cup of red root tea. She fetched a handful of wild potato leaves from the wagon and ground them in a small amount of water to form a salve. When the hot water was ready she soaked a clean strip of linen in it and gently washed the wound and patted it dry and applied the leaf salve to it and rewrapped it in a fresh bandage. The younger girl presented Edward with a steaming cup of red root tea and the woman instructed him to drink it every drop. “It’s willow bark,” she said. “It’ll rid what fever you still got.”
Campbell and the brothers kept by the dying fire and drank coffee after the woman and the girls bedded down in the wagon. None of the three spoke for a time and then Campbell asked in a low voice if the boys might appreciate a taste of something a little stronger than just coffee. Edward and John exchanged grins and John said he believed a drink of something stronger would set real well. Campbell looked toward the wagon as if to ascertain that the woman was indeed asleep. He put a finger to his lips and stood up and went to a corner of the wagon and quietly detached a rucksack hanging there and brought it back to the fire and from it he withdrew a corked jug.
“My old woman thinks a sip of spirits is a swallow of the devil’s own spit,” he said. “She probly right. But hell, ever now and then a feller’s got to have him a taste of good shine, else he’s like to lose his sap altogether. Aint that right, you boys?” The brothers assured him that he was absolutely right. They were all speaking in whispers.
“Specially if it’s a wounded man among them,” Campbell said, pouring a generous dollop of moonshine into each cup. “Wounded man got to have all the medicinal help he can get.” The brothers said he was as right as can be about that too.
“So happens I been carry in a real bad wound myself for moren a year now,” John said with solemn mien. “Happened last year at a dance. Sarah Jean Charles refused to take a turn with me. Wounded my poor heart worse than a Indian arrow and I aint recovered yet.” Edward grinned and the farmer lightly slapped his thigh and covered his mouth with his hand to stifle his chortle. The three gently touched cups and took a drink and there followed a succession of soft appreciative sighs.
They drank like that for a while, sipping steadily and smacking their lips. The farmer poured another round and passed tobacco to Edward who packed his pipe and lit it and passed it to John. They smoked and drank in contented silence and then had another round and again toasted each other without words. The moon was high when the farmer poured out a last drink for everybody and they touched cups and drank and then put down for the night.
In the morning the pain of Edward’s wound was much abated and he had no fever at all. The Campbell woman examined it and pronounced that it was crusting nicely and then she bound it anew with a fresh bandage. The brothers took breakfast with the family and the woman packed a chunk of cornbread and a few hocks for them to take with them. They presented Campbell with the old dun in gratitude for his hospitality and his wife’s treatment of Edward’s wound and they thanked the daughters for their kindness too and then they rode off with the rising sun at their backs.
West into Mississippi. Days of fierce sunshine and thick wet heat. Ripe lowcountry smells. They meandered over low hills and through dense pinewoods, through forests full of moss-hung oaks and magnolia trees bursting with white blossoms. Some afternoons the clouds banked huge and dark over the Gulf and thunder rolled and lightning branched brightly and wind shook the trees and rain swept in and churned fresh orange mud. Sometimes it rained in the night and the brothers cursed and slept fitfully in sopping blankets. But in the mornings the clouds came asunder and the sun broke red through the trees and the rivers did not top their banks again in the rest of that sultry summer.
They knew no haste and rarely hupped their mounts to a trot. They sometimes stayed put at a campsite for days. They shot deer and gorged themselves on the roasted haunches and smoked the backmeat in thick strips. They climbed trees to achieve a vista and have a closer look at the clouds and holler their names across the treetops. They swam in lakes and netted catfish from the creeks with their shirts. They napped in the high summer grass. They slept in pastures lit pale as bone by moonlight, under skies black as mystery and blasting with stars. They claimed various blazing comets as omens of their own bright futures. They told each other of the beautiful women they were destined to be loved by, the great wealth they were bound to amass.
They were ferried across the Pascagoula by a labor gang working to repair a bridge and with them shared their bounty of smoked venison and from them learned the game of three-card poker which some called monte. The ante was two bits. Edward was incapable of losing. When somebody held an ace he held a pair of treys. When somebody had a pair of queens he held the four-five-six. John thought he’d won a hand when he laid down three sixes but Edward gleefully showed three eights and took the pot. He won one hand after another and laughed as he pulled in the money. The workmen’s eyes went narrow and their mouths drew tight.
When Edward beat three aces with the seven-eight-nine of hearts to win for the eighth time in a row and increase his winnings to nearly twenty dollars, the aces holder threw down his cards and said, “You cheatin sumbitch!”
Edward sprang to his feet and kicked him in the throat before the man’s knife cleared its sheath. John quickly mounted up and held the others at pistolpoint, his heart kicking wildly, while Edward scooped up the money and then stepped up onto the sorrell mare and cantered off with the mule in tow. John sat his horse and kept the cocked pistol on the workmen until he was sure Edward was well away and then he reined about and lit out at a gallop to catch up to his brother. They laughed and whooped and rode hard till the sun was below the treeline and then they swung off the trace and into the deeper woods and there made a fireless camp and took turns keeping watch through the night but no one came after them.
They came upon a house-raising early one morning as the sun was just beginning to show through the trees. Several families had come together to help a neighbor put up his new cabin in a wildflowered clearing within sight of the trace and flanked by a wide shallow creek. John halloed the folk and asked if they might spare some coffee and the brothers were invited to step down to breakfast. They sat at one of two long puncheon tables and ate their fill of fried catfish and grits with red gravy, cornbread with molasses, boiled greens. They drank steaming cups of chicory. The tables were loud with talk and laughter and the children were enthralled by the two strangers, peering at them shyly and then covering their giggles with their hands when John or Edward winked or waggled their brows at them. They were generous workhardened folk, several of the families having settled in the region shortly after Jackson put down the Creeks, others of more recent arrival. The newest family, they whose house was today being erected, had come from the Alabama highlands to farm Mississippi’s rich bottom country.
When the talk came round to the brothers John offered his lie about the uncle they were going to apprentice with in New Orleans and delivered his low opinion of Mobile and told of the floods he and Edward had come through in Alabama and told too of the graverobbers they’d seen at their grisly trade. Some of the men cleared their throats and cast sidewise glances at the women among them and the women concentrated intently on the plates before them and Edward gave his brother a look to warn him off any such further talk. They mopped their plates clean with chunks of cornbread and then looked at each other and John told the men at the table he and his brother would be proud to lend a hand and their offer was gratefully accepted.
Over the preceding days the building party had felled the timber they would need and trimmed it clean and cut the logs to length and hauled them by oxen to the cabin site. Today they would raise the cabin itself.
The house would be a two-room round-log with top-saddle corner notches and no dogrun. Edward and John grinned at the simplicity of it and the work went fast. At Daddyjack’s side they had erected houses of square-hewn logs, using broadaxes with offset handles to keep their hands clear of the logs as they squared them. All that was required here was to notch the logs and raise the walls by rolling the logs one atop the other by means of skids, one pair of men hauling on the logs from above with ropes as another two men pushed them up the skids with sturdy poles from below. As the brothers worked with the party putting up the walls, other men rived shingles with mallets and froes and shaved them down with drawknives. Against one of the end walls, a group of older children under the direction of an elderly man erected a makeshift catted chimney to be later replaced with one of stone. The warm morning air shook with the steady clatter of axes and thumping of mallets. By the time the women rang the dinner iron the walls and most of the chimney were up and the roof frame was in place.
The men converged on the creek to rinse themselves amid much familiar joking and shoving with each other and remarking upon the brothers’ impressive skill with an ax. Then everyone sat to a dinner of venison stew and roast potatoes and blackeyed peas and yams and cobbed corn and biscuits and gravy and strawberry cobbler. The tabletalk was full of news of who in the region had married and who had been born and who had died. Most of the deaths reported had come by way of violent accident. One man’s skull stove by a kick from a mule. Another man mis-stepping as he crossed a plank bridge and he and the young son riding his shoulders plunging into the quickmoving river where both did drown. Another’s saw slipping wildly from its groove to gash his thigh to the bone and bleed him to death as he limped for home. Among the other news passed at the table was an announcement of a barndance to be held at Nathaniel Hurley’s farm on Saturday evening next. John whispered to Edward that he surely wished they could be here for that, considering all the pretty girls about. When the men had done with eating they took another few minutes’ ease with their pipes and cigars and then went back to work.
While one party of men completed the roof, another, including John and Edward, cut openings in the walls for windows and door, and still another set to chinking the walls with clay. The brothers demonstrated their mastery of a variety of saws and by the end of the day had secured reputations among these men as true craftsmen in timber. The sun was still above the trees when the cabin stood finished. The men clapped each other on the shoulder and each man gathered his tools and set them in his wagon and then everyone sat to a supper of bacon and beans, greens and cornbread.
Then the fiddles and banjos were brought out and everyone gathered on a wide cleared patch of ground and a redbeard called O’Hara sang a song about a girl named Molly in Dublin’s fair city, and then one about sweet County Gal way. When the lead fiddler called a square dance the folk hastened into formations and the fiddles and banjos struck up a lively tune and the lead fiddler called out the progression of actions and Edward and John, who had learned to dance as small boys in Georgia, did join in. There followed reels and waltzes and yet more square dancing, which seemed the most popular sort with these folk. In the light of the lanterns the dust raised by dancing feet cast the entirety of the scene in a softened yellow light and the brothers grinned and grinned every time they caught each other’s eye as they danced with one smiling girl after another.
When they joined a few of the men for a sip from a jug of corn mash behind one of the wagons, Edward nudged John and said low, “You see that applehaired gal I been squirm? Bedamn if she aint givin me the encouraging eye.”
John grinned and said, “I been way too busy mindin that blackhaired filly yonder. See her there—fetchin water for her daddy? Aint she the one?”
Edward affected to scrutinize the brunette and nodded sagely as he stroked his chin. “Well now, brother, I have to admit she aint about halfbad for somebody looks like she’s put out a fire or two with her face.”
John snatched him around the neck and mock-choked him. “You about the blindest son of a bitch!”
Edward laughed as he broke free. “Me blind? I aint the one thinks she’s pretty.”
Some of the men nipping from the cider jug were grinning on them, every man of them himself brothered and familiar with brothers’ ways. The one nearest them leaned closer and said in a low voice, “I got to agree with this one here”—he indicated John with a nod—”about that crowhaired Jeannie Walsh. She’s a pret thing, all right. But you boys be careful not to let any these gals’ daddies hear ye talkin too familiar about they daughters. Some a these men aint so toleratin of it like others of us.”
Edward said, “We weren’t meanin any disrespect.”
“Say now, mister,” John said, “which one’s your daughter?”
“Well, now, truth be told,” the man said, his grin spreading, “I aint got nary one. It’s how come I’m so toleratin.”
The brothers joined in his laughter.
They danced and danced. Their hats showed dark bands of sweat and their faces shone and their shirts were plastered to their chests and backs. When the fiddlers and pickers at last put down their instruments and the dancing was done, the girls they’d been dancing with were called away by their fathers. John and Edward stood and watched them go to their wagons. The daddies were waiting on them and both fathers scowled when the girls turned to wave goodnight to the brothers.
They put down their beds under a cottonwood hard by the gurgling creek and lay on their backs and stared up at the three-quarter moon shining through the branches.
After a time John said, “You seen how they looked at us?”
“They was some flirty gals all right.”
“Not them. Their damn daddies.”
Edward turned and spat off toward the creek. “They just watchin out for their girls,” he said. “It’s what daddies’re spose to do.”
“We’re bout the best they seen with a damn axe or a saw, either one,” John said. “But they know we aint got penny one nor a ounce of dirt to our names. That’s why they looked at us like they did. Only reason. They aint about to let their daughters take up with nobody aint got the first bit of property.” He propped himself on an elbow and looked at Edward. “It aint but one more good reason we got to get ourselfs a piece a land and work it into somethin any man’ll respect. Then we’ll see what one among them’ll object to his daughter on my arm.”
Edward smiled at his brother in the dappled moonlight. “I believe you had you one sip of that jack too much, what I believe.”
“You know I’m right.”
Edward sighed. “I know it, Johnny. Let’s get some sleep.”
Just before he fell asleep, Edward heard John say again, “You know I’m right.”
They slept till daybreak and by then most of the other families were gone. The brothers took breakfast with the family living in the new cabin. Fatback and grits and sweet fresh cornbread and coffee. And after thanking them for the meal and accepting the family’s thanks for their help in the house-raising, they mounted up and hupped their horses onto the western trace and followed their shadows westward.
They forded streams and creeks and rivers and made their way through forests so thick they were steeped in twilight at high noon. Eagles sailed from nests in the high pines and redhawks banked slowly over the meadowlands and tall blue herons stepped long-legged along the water shallows. Sharpbilled snakebirds stood on the banks and spread their wings to the afternoon sun. Owls regarded the brothers from bare-branch perches in the closing light of day. A scattering of wolves still roamed these woods and their aching howls carried through the trees. On some nights panthers screeched so near their camp Edward felt the hair rise on his arms. One misty morning they came upon a black bear sow teaching her two cubs to fish in a creek. The sow rose up growling and huge on her back legs with water pouring silver off her indigo fur and the horses spooked and and the brothers had to fight the reins and then heeled their mounts galloping down the trail.
On a Sunday morning of soft yellow sunrays angling through the trees they witnessed a baptism in a misty creek behind a high-steepled white church. The initiate was a tall man of craggy visage and hair as white as his collarless shirt. As the faithful sang a hymn of joyful salvation he pinched his nose shut and was tipped backwards by a pair of burly men supporting him on either side and he was submerged entirely as the preacher intoned words of purification. When he was pulled back up, gasping and spluttering, a woman a few feet from the brothers leaned toward a friend at her side and said loud enough for Edward and John to hear, “I kindly pity them fish in the crick. They’re like to choke to death on the sins washed off that old rascal!” She caught sight of the brothers’ grins and blushed furiously for a moment before smiling back at them and turning away.
Here and there along the road they found the remains of abandoned wagons, most of them turned onto their side and picked-over to the axles and broken up for firewood. Occasionally they came upon the moldered carcass of a draft animal simmering with maggots. By the roadside one day they found a yawning trunk from which spilled a variety of clothing, including a pair of men’s coats of the same size so that Edward’s hung a little loosely on his frame but John’s fit almost as if it had been tailored for him. The trunk held also a few frilly pieces of women’s undergarments and a woman’s bent hairbrush. The brothers were roused by the feel of the thin cotton bloomers with the lace edges and red ribbon ties. They speculated wildly about its owner and how the trunk had come to be left trailside with such particularly private dainties exposed to the passing world. The underwear conjured a host of carnal notions and their night was restless with concupiscent yearning.
Next day they turned south on the Biloxi road and entered the town late in the afternoon and made inquiries at a livery. They were directed to the western skirt of town where there stood a fine large three-storied house shaded by live oaks and within view of a white stretch of Gulf beach. The trees were dripping with Spanish moss, the air hazy with amber sunlight.
The proprietress was a Mrs. Clark, a woman of middle years and aristocratic mien who welcomed the brothers graciously but informed them that armament was strictly forbidden in the house and told them they would have to leave their guns and knives with their outfits in care of the stablemen. She permitted them to take a drink in the parlor while they looked over the girls and made their selection but then insisted they avail themselves of the bathtubs in the rear of the house before the girls could escort them upstairs. John grumbled that the place sure had a lot of rules but the brothers did as she asked.
They sported merrily in adjoining rooms until gentle rappings on the doors signaled an end to the entertainment or a call for additional payment if they wished to continue their lark. The brothers poked their hard pale torsos into the hallway and exchanged grins and said why not. John paid the floorwoman for another go and she provided fresh towels and they traded girls who ran past each other in the hall in giggling nakedness. Their lickerish roister lasted through the night. By dawn they had each had a turn with the same six girls and they limped down the stairs like battle casualties and hobbled out to the stable and carefully mounted up. They had spent all but their last three dollars and Edward used one of those for a bottle of bourbon to take with them. Every girl of the house stood out on the verandah with Mrs. Clark and blew kisses to them and called them champions and the brothers grinned proudly. Mrs. Clark told them of a house in Nacogdoches, Texas, under the proprietorship of her widowed sister, one Mrs. Flora Bannion, and recommended its services to them should they ever visit that lively town. As the brothers rode away the girls waved goodbye and called for them to come back soon.
That night they sat around their campfire and passed the bottle between them in silent contentment for a while. When the bottle was a third gone they began to talk wistfully about the wonderful time they’d had. When its level dropped below the halfway point they began to compare the various attributes of the different girls. They agreed that Jolene’s breasts were the best shaped and Sue Ellen’s nipples the longest and Belinda’s face the prettiest, that Rose May’s legs were the most beautiful and Cora’s belly for sure the most sweetly rounded and Marcie’s lips the most kissable and Belinda’s mouth the most talented. But when Edward said there was no question Sue Ellen had the best rump John disagreed and said anybody with a pair of eyes could see that the prettiest rear end in the place was Cora’s.
Edward said anybody who thought Cora had a prettier rear than Sue Ellen couldn’t tell a woman’s ass from a sack of yams. John said Edward might or might not know something about yams but he sure as hell didn’t know a thing about women’s asses and come to think of it he didn’t know all that much about teats either since it was plain as day that the prettiest ones were Belinda’s. He’d only agreed about Jolene to be polite but he was damned if he cared to be polite to somebody so ignorant about women’s asses. Truth be told, John said, Belinda’s mouth wasn’t near so expert as Cora’s either.
Well if the goddamn truth be told, Edward said, he didn’t agree with any of John’s choices and had only agreed because the Good Book said we ought be kindly toward the feebleminded and anybody who believed Cora had the prettiest ass of the bunch had to be as feebleminded as it was possible to be and still know how to breathe in and out.
John said Edward knew as much about the Good Book as he knew about women, which was absolutely nothing.
They persisted in this dialogue until the bottle was empty and their lines of reasoning were thoroughly entangled and they had trouble remembering which girls they thought superior in which respects. When they finally rolled up in their blankets Edward said he couldn’t understand it but he was feeling even ranker right this minute than he had the night before.
“Here my poor ole peter’s about skinned bloody and my balls feel like some mule stepped on them and all I can think about is being pressed up against a nekkid girl.”
John said he knew what he meant and wasn’t it a shame a man couldn’t store up the satisfaction he got from a good humping so he could have it handy to draw from in lonely times. “You know, the way a squirrel saves up nuts for the winter.”
Edward said that was about the looniest goddamn notion he had ever heard of and asked John how long he had been suffering from such mental affliction. John’s response was a loud wet snore. A moment later Edward too was asleep.
He dreamt of the girls in the Biloxi house. He saw himself now with Jolene, now with Marcie, now with Cora and Sue Ellen and Rose May all together and writhing happily on the bed. Suddenly his heart jumped at the sight of Daddyjack sitting on the side of the bed in his bloody pants and running his hands over the girls’ nakedness and grinning widely. The girls were laughing and one of them ran her thumb around the rim of his empty eyesocket and the others took turns fondling his crotch and blood seeped between their grasping fingers. Daddyjack grimaced and clutched at his mutilated privates and looked at Edward who was also feeling sharp pain between his legs. “Hurts like fury don’t it?” Daddyjack said. Edward awoke and loosened the crotch of his trousers which had been binding his sore erection. He had dreamed of Daddyjack nearly every night since leaving Florida.
They occasionally came across pilgrim families on the trace and traded venison for coffee or cattail bread or ears of sweet corn. They bathed in rivers and washed their clothes and watched brown otters splashing in the water and chasing each other on the banks. They dozed naked in the sun while the clothes dried and the horses and the mule cropped contentedly in the long grass.
“I don’t know how come we didn’t start livin like this long before now,” Edward said drowsily at the fireside one evening as he lay on his side and stared into the flames.
“Cause we hadn’t kilt Daddyjack before now,” John said flatly without looking at him. He had been moody and closemouthed all evening and was sitting crosslegged and poking at the fire with a stick. His face was shadowed by his hat.
Neither of them said anything more that night, but for the first time Edward wondered if John too had dreams of Daddyjack, and he decided that yes, very likely he did.
They rode under bright sunwashed skies. They rode through oak groves hung nearly to the ground with green-gray tendrils of Spanish moss that looked like hair of the dead, the hair of great witches whose forest it might have been. They rode through fields of pale grass that brushed their horses’ bellies. For most of a day they rode through clouds of burgundy dragonflies which folk of the region called skeeterhawks and whose abrupt shifts in speed and direction seemed to violate all laws of nature and none did alight on them. Crows squalled from the high pines, mockingbirds shrilled from the brush. Fording a wide slow creek they caught the unmistakably malodorous scent of a cottonmouth, the smell so strong they knew it rose off an entire nest and the horses breathed it as well and riders and mounts all looked wildly about but saw no snakes and the brothers hupped the horses splashing across the creek and up onto the other bank and away from that fearsome stink.
On yet another afternoon they dismounted at a creek to refill their canteens and had no sooner stepped down from the saddle than a huge boar came crashing out of the brake and charged at them. The frighted horses broke away and so startled was Edward that he lost his footing and went headlong into the creek as the boar came at him with its sharp tusks forward. The hog ran to the edge of the bank and veered around and spied John standing agape and went for him. John jumped up and grabbed an oak branch and hugged himself fast to it with arms and legs, the branch some seven feet above ground and perhaps half that distance above the snorting boar’s upturned tusks. Then Edward’s longrifle cracked and John heard the ball smack into the boar’s side. The hog staggered and turned and charged again at Edward who stood sopping in his clothes and now snatched up John’s rifle and aimed and fired and the ball struck the animal in the face and its front legs gave way and it tumbled to a heap at Edward’s feet and there shrieked and kicked wildly until Edward fired a pistol round directly between its ears and killed it.
John dropped to his feet from the branch and laughed. “Hoo! The look on your face when you seen that pig comin out the bushes! And the splash!” He threw his hands up wide to re-create the toss of water when Edward fell in the creek. His walk was staggered for all his hard laughter.
“That wasnt near as funny as the sight of you hoppin up on that tree limb, tell you that. I didn’t shoot that sumbitch you’da been up there all damn night, been there till you fell off and he’d of stuck you good then.” But Edward’s grin was weak. He knew he’d cut the more ridiculous figure. He knelt beside the boar and affected to study it intently until John drew closer, still laughing, and then Edward sprang up and caught him in a bear hug and lifted him off the ground and lumbered with him toward the creek. John saw what he had in mind and struggled fiercely to free himself but Edward managed to stagger to the bank with John tight in his embrace and he let a maniacal laugh as he lunged over the bank edge and they went tumbling into the water. They came up spluttering and grappling and now one of them would shove the other’s head underwater for a moment before the other slipped free and assumed the advantage and thus did they dunk each other a half-dozen times until they called the water wrestling match a draw and crawled up on the bank, coughing and cursing and laughing. Gasping for breath, John struggled to say, “But you really ought of seen … how you looked when—” and Edward grabbed him in a headlock and they continued in their wrestling in the creekside grass until the sun was almost down to the trees and both of them were exhausted.
While John butchered the boar in the evening twilight Edward went in search of the horses and found them grazing in a pasture a quarter-mile farther along the trace. They roasted the pig on a spit and the haunches proved stringy but the backribs were tasty and the brothers gorged themselves to greasy satisfaction.
The next afternoon they came on a camp meeting in a wide meadow at the edge of the forest. There looked to be nearly three hundred people attending—men and women, children and oldsters—and the brothers had heard their raise of voices for nearly half-an-hour before the camp hove into view. The day was cloudless and sultry and they reined up behind the crowd and sat their horses in the shade of the trees and watched a preacher in farmer’s clothes declaim from an elevated plank pulpit set on the far side of the meadow. He patted at his face with a balled bandanna and his strained voice carried faintly but audibly at this distance. He was speaking of the countless blessings of the Christian Way, the rewards of the Life of Virtue, and his audience listened and nodded and punctuated his pauses with a chorus of “Amen.”
Now the preacher bade “God bless you” to the multitude and stepped down and was replaced by another minister, this one looking the part, dressed as he was in black suit and black string tie and a widebrimmed black hat under which black hair hung to his shoulders. For a long moment he stood looking out at the crowd without speaking, leaning on the podium as though he might leap over it and into the field of folk. In the midst of this sweltering summer day that had men mopping steadily at their brows and the ladies fanning themselves without pause, he seemed to stand cool and dry.
And now he began to address the brethren about the wages of sin, which were not only death but the everlasting tortures of hell, the horrifying punishments that were the destined lot of lost souls. He started out slowly and speaking so low that the brothers could barely make out his words at the rear of the crowd. But his voice rose as he warmed to his theme, rose and hardened and assumed the pounding stentorian tone of ordained authority. He spoke of roaring hellfire and sulfurous smoke and pains beyond imagination, beyond all nightmare. Spoke of horned and cloven-footed demons with thorned whips, demons whose aspects and essence defied all rational description and whose eternal delight it was to evoke the rupturing screams of the damned. Demons whose laughter was of the Devil’s madhouse and mingled with the incessant wails of the condemned and rang without pause off Hell’s burning walls. He spoke of smells that made the rankest jakes and the odors of the rotting dead seem the stuff of flower gardens by comparison, of stenches beyond any foulness ever known to human breath. He conjured one horrifying vision after another and the crowd had early on begun to moan in terror and self-pity and now some among them were weeping openly and some sobbing in their visions of what lay for them beyond the grave if they did not now act to ensure their soul’s salvation. And now some among them began to howl and roll their eyes and shudder convulsively as the preacher’s terrifying proclamations carried across the meadow and even as John and Edward exchanged uncertain grins their horses began to stamp and shy as they sensed the growing fear and madness around them and the brothers were obliged to rein the animals tighter and speak soothingly into their ear. In another moment the mass of the faithful was taken with jerking convulsions and some fell to the ground and rolled about and all of them moaning and praying loudly to Jesus to save their damned souls. And still the preacher bellowed his perditions. The horses now so spooked they fought against the reins and themselves seemed to be afflicted with the same jerking convulsions of terrified ecstasy that engirt the crowd.
“Damn this!” John yelled at Edward. “Let’s go!”
They reined their mounts around and dug their heels into their flanks and the horses in a single motion rocked back on their haunches and shot forward as if their tails were afire. They didn’t slow from a gallop until they were two miles down the trace and even then the mounts preferred to pace at a nervous canter than settle to a walk.
John said he hadn’t ever seen anything like that before and wouldn’t care if he never did again. Edward shook the sweat out of his hat and said he wasn’t too taken with it either.
“Why you reckon they-all got afflicted like that?” John said.
Edward said he didn’t know. Then said: “Could be they just real hard believers.”
“Believers?” John said. “Believers a what?”
Edward shrugged and now his mount seemed easier about being reined down to a walk.
John slowed his horse and fell back alongside his brother. “What could somebody believe that’d make him do like they was doin?”
Edward looked at him and shrugged again. “I don’t know. What-all they been told, I guess.”
“All them people believe somethin just cause they been told it?”
“I can’t think a no other reason for it.”
“Well, damn if ever I want to believe anything that much.”
Edward grinned. “I believe we aint got too much worry on that account.”
They looked at each other a moment as if each was suddenly seeing something of himself in the other. And then they laughed and rode on.
One late afternoon of lacy pink clouds they forded the Wolf River near a small town from which came such a clamor the brothers thought a celebration in progress. They chucked their mounts toward the settlement and soon spied a raucous crowd of about a hundred people gathered around a large live oak at the edge of town. A pack of dogs ran about in high excitement, barking and yipping, locking up in snarling skirmishes broken up by the kicks of laughing, cursing men.
As the brothers drew closer they saw the noosed end of a rope sail over a lower branch of the oak tree and jiggle down slackly to waiting hands. A moment later the rope went taut and the assembly roared as a barechested Negro with his hands tied behind him ascended into view above the spectators’ heads, his neck stretching to unbelievable length under the strangling noose, his legs kicking madly, his eyes as big as eggs and his tongue bulging and the front of his beige pants staining with urine.
The rope suddenly slackened and the Negro dropped hard to the ground and the crowd cheered lustily as some of the men rushed forward and kicked him and small boys hit him with sticks and women spat at him and the dogs bit at his legs. Then the rope stiffened with a quiver and jerked the Negro to his feet like an immense marionette and again hauled him up in the air and stones arced out of the mob and glanced off his head and now his kicking legs were hampered by his trousers which had been pulled down to his shins to expose his private parts.
A tall chinless man in a stovepipe hat stepped forward and reached up and grasped the Negro’s dangling genitals in one big hand and stretched them out and with a single smooth stroke of a straight razor neatly sliced them away. Blood jumped from the wound and ran bright red down the Negro’s black legs and the spectators howled. The tall man tossed the severed parts into the pack of dogs and there was a fierce brief fray among them and one hound tore away the scrotum and gulped it down and another raced through the laughing crowd with the tip of the dark phallus jutting from its jaws and the other dogs on his heels.
Again the rope went slack and the hanged man dropped hard to the ground. The noose was loosened and readjusted on his swollen misshapen neck and water was flung into his battered face and the mob crowed with delight as the word rippled through the throng: “He’s alive yet!”
The brothers exchanged wide-eyed looks. Edward leaned down in the saddle and asked a man standing close by, “Say mister, what’d that nigger do, anyhow?”
The man looked up sharply and squinted at him and then at John. “Somethin he damn sure wisht he hadn’t!” Several men and women within earshot laughed heartily.
Now the Negro’s pants were pulled off his feet and he was doused with lamp oil and again the noose was tightened and again he was hauled into the air. The man in the stovepipe hat struck a match that sparked sulfurously and put it to the black man’s bloody and oil-sheened legs and in an instant he was entorched. His legs churned wildly as though they might gain purchase on the air itself and bear him away from this horror. He was screaming through the strangling noose loudly enough to be heard above the bellowing mob and Edward had never heard such a scream from the mouth of man, could never have imagined the sound.
The flames rushed up to engulf the Negro’s head and his shivering shrieks rose higher and he convulsed and spun like a great dark fish on a line and now the ropes binding his hands fell away in flames and his arms flailed and streamed fire and then quite abruptly his hands fell and his screaming ceased and he hung limp and was dead.
The corpse continued to burn. The roasting flesh crackled and bubbled and dripped and now the crowd caught the horrid stench and women clamped kerchiefs to their faces and hurriedly pulled their children away. The brothers looked at each other and John said softly, “Sweet baby Jesus!”
The fire licked up along the noose knot and the rope abruptly came apart and the remains fell to the ground in a great burst of sparks and smoldering pieces and some of the spectators cheered and some guffawed and a few women shrieked, some in fright perhaps, some in exultation.
Now the man in the stovepipe hat started back toward the town and he was hastily followed by a sunbonneted woman and a half-dozen boys and girls of varying ages and all of them marked by their father’s lack of chin. Within minutes of his departing the rest of the crowd dispersed. Besides the brothers the only ones to linger were a handful of boys and a pair of men wearing pistols and neckties and aloof looks of authority as they leaned against the tree trunk and smoked their pipes and conversed quietly. The boys closed around the charred corpse and pointed out various aspects of it to each other and elbowed one another and laughed. One of them kicked the dead man’s leg and knocked loose a crisped piece of what had so recently been living flesh and the boys all laughed louder. One of the men at the tree said, “That’s enough now you boys, git along,” and one of them muttered something under his breath to the others and the man straightened up with a sharp look and the boys raced away trailing peals of laughter.
The brothers looked upon the Negro’s mortal residue a moment longer and then reined their horses around and rode on.
They hankered for New Orleans—Dixie City, so called since the U. S. purchase of Louisiana, when New Orleans banks issued ten-dollar notes printed with an English “Ten” on one side and a French “Dix” on the other. The Americans pronounced the French word in their own fashion and more often called the bill a “dixie,” and the word quickly came to refer to the town itself. The brothers had heard about Dixie City’s wicked pleasures and were eager to sample them for themselves. But such pleasures would come dear and they had spent their last six bits on a jug of whiskey proffered by a peddler they met on the trace. So they took work at a timbercamp just east of the Pearl River to replenish their empty purse.
They felled and trimmed cypress and sledded the logs to the river where some were lashed together in rafts to be towed and some loaded on broad-horns or keelboats, depending on the timber’s destination and the waterways that must be navigated to get there. They worked hard the day long and put aside most of their earnings, but they allotted a little of their money each payday as a stake for Edward, the better gambler of the two, so he could sit in on one of the half-dozen poker games held every Saturday night in the crew barracks. Over the next few weeks he came out a few dollars ahead at the end of each of game, but there were too many sharps for him to win consistently.
Then one Saturday evening his luck ran riot and within an hour he’d won more than forty dollars. Whereupon a big Swede named Larsson accused him of cheating. As they stalked outside to settle the matter, stripping off their shirts as they went, the betting on the fight was clamorous. Because the Swede outweighed Edward by thirty pounds and stood a head taller, John had easily got three-to-one odds on his brother.
They fought in the torchlit clearing in front of the barracks, ringed about by the raucous timberjacks calling for blood, for maiming. For all his size and strength Larsson was like most timberjacks awkward and clumsy of foot. Edward was quick on his feet and fast with his hands and could punch with the force of a much larger man. He repeatedly sidestepped the Swede’s lumbering charges and nimbly dodged his great roundhouse swings and countered with flurries that soon made raw butchery of Larsson’s broad furious face. There were outraged cries of “Ringer!” from many in the crowd who had bet big on the Swede. After nearly fifteen minutes of mostly missing with his wild swings and being battered by Edward’s sharp counterpunches, the Swede howled in frustration and charged at him with wide-open arms and caught him up in a bearhug and lifted him off his feet and bit off the top of his right ear.
Edward yelped and brought his knee up hard between Larsson’s legs and the Swede’s eyes bulged and his grip loosened and Edward butted him square in the face and the Swede released him and staggered back on wobbly legs with blood pouring from his nose. Edward hit Larsson a terrific roundhouse on the jaw that sent him sprawling, then rushed in and kicked him in the head again and again and had to be restrained by a clutch of cooler heads before he killed him.
John won more than seventy dollars in the betting. He pounded Edward’s sore back in jubilation until Edward told him to stop it or he’d break his damned arm. On the following morning Edward’s scalloped ear was swollen and caked with dried blood and his back and ribs felt as if he’d fallen out of a tree. But they now had plenty of money and were set to go to Dixie City. They sold the mule to a camp foreman and hired on as polemen on an antique and much-modified keelboat bound downriver with a load of cypress timber and a half-dozen milk cows. They put their horses aboard in the cowpen and on a cool early November sunrise cast loose for New Orleans.
They rode the Pearl’s lazy current down to the delta, occasionally putting in at a river village for a big feed and a night of barndancing and scrapping with the local bullies. One late night on the river all heaven came ablaze with falling stars. “The Leonids,” the captain said. The grizzled crew gasped and pointed like children at a fireworks show. Barrages of comets streaked like burning cannonballs and lit the roof of the world in flames. The brothers gaped.
They took on supplies one early afternoon at a riverside hamlet where a fair was in progress within view of the dock. The keelboat captain gave permission for his crew to attend but warned them he’d brook no reports from the locals of fighting or ill behavior toward the women of the town.
“We’ll be in Dixie soon enough and ye can play the slap and tickle all ye want with the sportin ladies there. But here ye best keep it in your pants and be leaving your fists loose too. I have friends living here and I’ll not have them bullied nor their girls bothered.”
The fair was a small enterprise but a lively one. There were lines of tables whereat ladies exhibited their best quiltwork and men their wood carvings, where women sold servings of their best pies and cakes, bowls of their best stews, small sacks of their sweetest candies. There were pens for stock judgings and prizes awarded for the best hog, the finest steer, the most productive milkcow, the best-laying hen, the loudest cockiest rooster.
The largest tent was that of a traveling show that had but recently arrived in town and attached itself to the fair. A man in a derby hat and a red-and-white striped vest stood at the entrance flap and announced, “Step right up, gents, step right up and prepare yourselves to see some of the strangest sights ye’ll ever see. Marvels and curiosities of nature, aye! And all the more amazing for being true, every one of them, for there’s nought more amazing than the truth, don’t you know?” The brothers looked at each other and shrugged and then paid the ten-cent admission and went inside.
The tent had been partitioned into two rooms by a high folding divider extended from the front wall to the rear. In the first room the brothers saw a green-caped man on a dais eat fire. He shoved the flaming end of a rod deep into his throat and held it there for several impossible seconds and then withdrew it still aflame and brandished it with a grin and everyone applauded. He held the flaming rod out to one of the keelboatmen and asked if he’d like a taste and the boatman stepped back and said, “Hell, no!” and the crowd around him laughed. Then another man took the fire-eater’s place on the dais and this one carried a small sword with a bright thin three-foot blade and he held up a sheet of paper and neatly sliced it in two to show the sharpness of the blade’s edge. Then he put his head back and slid the length of the blade down his throat and as it disappeared into his mouth the spectators gasped. And when he extracted the blade and they saw not a drop of blood on it they clapped and cheered and whistled in awe.
John leaned towards Edward and whispered, “Damn, it’s some people’ll put any damn thing in they mouth, aint it?”
As if to prove exactly how correct John was, the next performer to ascend the dais was a tall thin man with bloodshot eyes and bad sores on his face who pulled a garter snake from his coat pocket and held its wriggling form up high for all to see. In a single swift motion he brought the snake to his mouth and bit off its head and the tent fell absolutely silent as the remaining portion of snake lashed wildly and wrapped itself about the man’s arm like an ancient Egyptian armband. The man then spat the head arcing into the air and the spectators jumped aside to let it fall clear in the midst of them. And then burst into the loudest cheers and applause yet.
The brothers heard a man behind them tell another that he’s once seen a man in Nashville bite the head off a damn chicken and then choke to death on it while the crowd was giving him what was probably the biggest hand he’d ever got in his life.
And now there came onto the dais a brief parade of freaks. A fellow called the Rotting Man who was a biped festering sore. His nose and lips had rotted away and open sores covered his shirtless chest and ran with pus and the man indeed did stink like rotting meat. The Alligator Man had a normal-looking head and feet but was covered from neck to kneecaps with skin as thick and rough as gator hide. Then came a woman with a beard as bushy as any man’s, and a tall sad-faced woman with a third teat about the size of a boy’s fist between her two normal ones. And finally a little redhaired boy of about six who had eight fingers on one hand and nine on the other and no toes at all but for the big one on his right foot. Edward thought the boy had the saddest eyes he’d ever seen. Somebody standing close by the brothers remarked aloud that it looked like the boy’s toes must’ve slid up some kind of way to his hands, and another said maybe his momma bounced him around too much before he was born. Both men laughed and boy looked at them with his sad eyes and the freaks all glared at them in the only show of awareness they had made toward their audience. The Alligator Man put an arm around the redhead boy and led him off the dais and out through a rear flap in the tent and the other freaks followed them away.
Edward marveled at the Alligator Man’s gesture and the freaks’ display of injured pride, at the seeming comradeship of outcasts. For a fleeting and almost frightening instant he felt he should go with them, felt it in a way he could never have explained, yet felt it as surely as he did his beating heart. He looked at John and saw him staring after the departing freaks too. Then John cut his eyes to him and Edward felt an inexplicable sensation of being outside the world but for his brother and he knew somehow that John was feeling the same thing. The brothers showed their teeth at one another. John feinted a punch and Edward feinted a counter and they laughed and punched each other on the shoulder and went into the other room.
Here were exhibits both living and preserved. Each in its own cage were a snapping turtle with two heads, a bulldog bitch with only one eye and solid bone and fur where the other should have been, a three-legged duck, a rattlesnake with two tails and each tail with its own set of rattles, an albino horny toad white as milk. There was also a pair of long benches on which stood rows of glass containers, some no bigger than a canning jar, some the size of a pony keg, and each held some human body part preserved in whiskey, the smell of which was strong in the tent. Several of the jars contained eyeballs. John found himself entranced by a jar holding a single eye as light-blue as summer sky. And then Edward was beside him and looking at the eye too and whispering, “That’s just exactly the color of Maggie’s.” John looked at him and Edward’s brow knit and he said, “What?” and John was surprised to realize he was glaring at his brother. He shrugged and looked away.
“That there’s the eye of a girl stabbed to death by parties unknown,” somebody behind them said and they turned to see the derbied man who had been attending the tent door. “That’s what the feller said who sold it to me. Feller had no idear what happened to her other eye. Did you boys know that a person’s eye will hold a picture of the last thing it sees before death? It’s a true fact. You look real close into that eye and you might can see the face of the man what kilt her. Can be hard to see it, but it’s there, all right. Looked in there real hard myself and if my own eyes aint tricking me I do believe the feller had a full beard and wore a muleskinner hat. Hard to see clearly though, so I figure she mighta had her eyes pret near half-closed while she was dying.”
Edward snorted in derision and moved on to look at a pair of green eyes in another jar and the derbied man shrugged and followed after, saying that those belonged to a fine New Orleans lady who’d drowned herself in the Mississippi when she learned her beau, even as he was en route to her on a steamer, had been killed when a boiler exploded. John lingered at the blue eye and felt a great urge to bend down and peer closely into it. But he was as much afraid of what he might see there as he was loathe to have Edward laugh at him for a fool, and so he went instead to look with his brother at a pair of eyes nearly blood-red with black pupils so wide only the barest rim of brown iris showed. The derbied man said they were of a convicted murderer who’d gone to the gallows swearing he was innocent.
They came to a line of larger jars containing little babies. One wasn’t fully formed and had webbing between its tiny fingers and a lump of flesh between its legs and it was hard to say whether it would have been a boy or a girl. Another was a normal-looking baby boy but for the ragged hole in its belly and back. The derbied man said the child was about ready to be born when his daddy who was a hat-maker went crazy one day and shot his wife twice, once in the head, once in the belly, the second shot naturally killing the baby too.
There were containers with fingers and ears and tongues, some with male appendages. One jar contained a foot which the derbied man said he bought from a fellow in the north country. The man had taken an arrow just above the ankle and the wound got infected so bad his only choice was to die or cut off the lower half of his leg, which he did. “He thought to give that foot a decent Christian burial,” the derbied man said, “but he figured if he did that he’d really and truly have one foot in the grave, and it give him the chills to think on it. But he didn’t want to go around with the foot in his saddle wallet, either, knowing that soon’s as the thaw came it would go to rot. I’m proud to say I give him a good solution to his problem. I told him it’s be a lot better fate for that foot to travel around in my wagon. He sold it to me in a wink when I told him that so long as that foot stays in that jar of whiskey, he’ll always have one foot out of the grave, even after the rest a him’s dead and buried.” The man laughed with his head back and mouth wide, exposing his mostly broken black-and-yellow teeth.
They came out of the tent in time to hear the call for final entries in the shooting contest. Standing shots at a plank target set againt a tree at a distance of fifty yards for the prize of a steer. In addition to more than a dozen of the locals, several of the keelboaters had signed up to shoot. At Edward’s insistence John joined the competition too. He won the shoot handily and then sold the steer at bargain price to the first man to make him an offer.
They glided through the pass and into the open water of Lake Borgne under a bright morning sun. Pelicans crowned yellow and white banked and plunged into shimmering schools of mullet and resurfaced with their baggy mandibles pulsing with fish. The crewmen poled easily across the lake and then through a connection of canals, and on an early Sunday afternoon marked by brilliant blue sky and a scattering of high clouds as white as ginned cotton they entered the Mississippi.
It was the brothers’ first look at the great river the boatmen called the Old Man. They stared dumbly at its immensity. Craft of every description plied the wide reach of its muddy surface. Steamboats the size of city buildings poured enormous plumes of black smoke from their stacks as their huge wheels churned the water white. There were tall-masted schooners and handsome sloops and sleek lighters and old flatboats and makeshift rafts and here and there a skiff hardly big enough to hold a pair of boys.
The crew laid shoulder to the poles to advance the boat against the current. As they rounded a bend the river traffic grew even more congested and the Vieux Carré hove into view. Whistles shrilled and bells jangled and horns blew long and hoarsely. They poled toward the cargo docks beyond the Place d’Armes, the weathered drill field marking the heart of the Old Quarter. The boat swayed in the wake of a passing sternheeler and every blast of the big boat’s horns rippled up the brothers’ spines. Music and shouting and laughter carried out from the Quarter. The air was enlaced with a mix of exotic smells.
“Take a good breath there, lads,” a redhaired boatman named Keeler said as they leaned hard on their poles and paced toward the stern. His big chest broadened as he inhaled long and deep. “Can ye smell it? I don’t mean the cookpot stuff, but what’s just under it. A bit like warm buttered shrimp set amongst fresh roses. That’s Narlens pussy on the air, boys. Dixie City gash. The finest on God’s good earth.”
They worked the boat into the cargo moorings at Tchoupitoulas Street and there they tied up. The brothers helped to unload the vessel and then walked their horses over to a livery across the street where they put up the animals and stored their outfits and arms except for their bootknives and the snaphandle which Edward kept in his pocket. They stripped to the waist and washed up at a pump and took their coats from their bedrolls and were brushing them with damp cloths when Keeler strode up and said, “Step lively, lads. It’s a fine frolic we’ll have, aye!” He had put on a clean shirt and river jacket and slicked down his hair. With him was a lean and looselimbed mate named Allenbeck.
They intended to go directly to a fine Old Quarter bordello of Keeler’s highest recommendation, a house well-stocked with prime high-yellow whores, but Allenbeck insisted they stop in at a tavern for a quick nip to fortify themselves for the walk to the Quarter and the rest of them said why not.
Before they got halfway down Tchoupitoulas Street they had been in four different honky-tonks and two fights. The first fight started when Allenbeck began crowing that he was kin to the snapping turtle and weaned by a momma wolf and could out-fight, out-fuck, out-dance and out-drink any man on two legs on either side of the Mississippi. A barrel-shaped muleskinner stepped up and said, “Oh yeah?” and knocked out a front tooth with the first punch. Allenbeck jumped up and let a high-pitched battle cry and in an instant they were rolling and grappling on the floor and the drover sank his teeth into Allenbeck’s shoulder and Allenbeck was clawing for his eyes to try to gouge them out and Keeler said it was time to move on and hammered the drover on the head with a heavy beer mug in order to dislodge him from Allenbeck’s shoulder. They grabbed Allenbeck off the floor and the four of them scrambled out of there. The next fight was between Keeler and a steamboat stoker, and a Keeler punch sent the stoker backpedaling through the door of a gaming room to crash into and overturn a poker table laden with money. So clamorous was the ensuing donnybrook that it drew spectators and participants from a block away. The brothers and the boatmen slipped away through a side exit and ducked into a tavern two doors down and laughed heartily over steins of beer and glasses of Monongahela rye as the smash and roar of the fight echoed outside in the street.
The sun was red and low when they finally strolled into the teeming Quarter and past a pair of city constables who gave them a wary eye. The night air was piquant with cayenne and perfume, woven with the undersmells of sweat and swamp rot. An empty pillory stood before the Cabildo on Chartres Street and Keeler said no white man had stood in it in the last twenty years but niggers still sometimes found themselves pinioned in it by their hands and neck with a sign on their backs to tell the passing world the nature of their crime. While Keeler bought a fresh bottle of rye in a tavern, Edward stepped into an arms shoppe and purchased a pouch of .44 balls and attached it to his belt.
Although the city had by now been American for more than forty years, the Quarter’s architecture remained chiefly Spanish and its character distinctly French. The smooth locutions of French idiom entwined everywhere with the harder growl of English, the rasp and hiss of Spanish, the grunts and gutturals of tongues so alien they seemed not of this world. “It’s the thing I hate about this town,” Allenbeck said. “All these fucken foreigners and their fucken babble.” To the brothers the city was in many ways reminiscent of Pensacola, only bigger and louder and more Negroid.
The house to which Keeler led them was on Orleans Street. As they drew near it they heard a frenzied pounding of primitive drums and spied a mass of people gathered in a large open area a little farther along on the other side of the street. “Congo Square,” Keeler said. “The city lets the niggers get together here every Sunday and do their voodoo jigs from back in Africa. Used to be they had to do it in secret, but the dancing gets them all worked up, don’t you know, and on dance nights they’d end up fighting and fucking in public all over town. Easier to keep them in control if they’re all in one place.”
The brothers wanted to have a look, so the four of them crossed the street and shouldered their way to the front of the crowd and only narrowly avoided fights with those who objected to their pushing. The crowd was chiefly male, though some of the better-dressed men had women on their arms. There were dozens of dancers in the center of the square, men and women both, whirling and jumping to the beat of the drums, falling to their knees and leaping up again and flailing wildly, chanting in unintelligible tongues, eyes wide, teeth bared. Spectators swayed to the drumbeat and directed each other’s attention to this dancer or that one.
“Hey boys, lookit there,” Allenbeck said, nodding toward a woman the color of raw honey dancing nearby between two muscular barechested men as black as coal and pouring sweat. The woman was statuesquely beautiful, tall and narrow-waisted, with full breasts and rounded hips and rump. She was obviously naked under a thin white shift that clung wetly to her skin, to her long thighs and cloven swell of buttocks and nipples like chunks of coal. Edward’s pulse quickened as he watched the woman drop to her knees with her head thrown back and eyes closed and long hair tossing. She spread her legs wide and her hips were thrusting with wild urgency to the tempo of the drums. She ran her hands up her gleaming thighs and the hem of the shift rode to her hips and she slipped a hand under the bunched dress and stroked herself hard and her lips drew back on her parted teeth and her other hand went to her breast and pinched the jutting nipple. One of the dancing men positioned himself directly before her with his hips swaying and she put a hand to his manhood bulging starkly in his tight pants and he snatched her to her feet and dug his long fingers into her buttocks and pulled her tightly against him and they writhed loin to loin and the onlookers whistled and howled.
Edward could not distinguish between the pounding of the drums and the beat of his own blood. His throat felt tight, his genitals heavy and swollen. He turned to Keeler and said, “Let’s get in that house.” Even his tongue felt thickened. Keeler laughed and said, “I’m right ready meself, lad.” John was grinning like a dog, his eyes aglitter.
The crowd had deepened around them and as they shoved their way out of it Allenbeck bumped hard against some hardcase and there was a brief exchange of blows. Then they were across the street and down the block and in the parlor of Miss Melanie’s House of Languor.
Minutes later Edward was in a small dimly lighted room with a young quadroon girl of spectacular physique whose lips were pulled into a permanently sardonic smile by the white scar across the right side of her mouth. She fixed a look on his mutilated ear for a moment but made no remark on it. She slipped off her chemise and stood naked before him on smooth long legs, her breasts full and dark-nippled. His trousers had not yet cleared his knees when his ejaculate spurted across three feet of space and spattered her mocha belly. The startled girl burst into laughter and said, “Hooo! You the readiest boy I ever did see!”
It was house policy that once a man delivered his load he had received due service, and if he wanted another go he had to pay again. Edward dug the money from his belt purse and handed it to the smiling girl and she relayed it to the floorwoman patrolling the hall. She then helped him off with his boots and pants and drew him into bed and gently pushed him on his back and mounted him. He started to protest that this was no way for a man to fuck but she bent forward and put a nipple to his mouth and began slowly rotating her hips and Edward ceased all complaint. Two glorious minutes later he came like a trace chain was being yanked through his cock. The girl held him close and stroked his hair and called him a sweet baby.
Suddenly there came a thunderous boom that rattled the window shutters and Edward bolted upright. The girl giggled and pulled him back to her breast and said he surely was new to New Orleans if he didn’t know that was the curfew cannon that fired every night as the order for slaves to get home.
A half-hour later they were back on the street and passing the bottle of Nongela among them and telling each other about the wonderful girls they’d been with. Edward asked John how his girl had been and his brother rolled his eyes and grinned widely. Keeler kept saying, “I tole you boys it’s a fine house, didn’t I? Didn’t I tell you?” and they all kept saying yes he surely did tell them, yes indeed.
They made their loud happy way over to Canal Street and bought a fresh bottle of Nongela at a tavern and headed west and got lost and all of them cursed Keeler who was supposed to know his way around the town. On Poydras he regained his bearings and led them along South Liberty and even from the far side of the Protestant cemetery they could now hear the timbre of unchecked revelry and smell whiskey and perfume on the night air. Past the cemetery they turned onto Girod Street and entered The Swamp, the most notorious strip of saloons and brothels and gambling dens in the whole notorious town.
“It’s any kind of fun ye want here, lads,” Keeler told them, shouting to be heard above the din of music and laughter and cursing and threats. “But hereabout they’ll slit your throat for the penny in your pocket and that’s no lie. It’s a dozen killings a week at the least, so keep your wits about. The police won’t come round here and for damn good reason. They’ll likely put a torch to the whole place one day.”
In a public house abounding with unidentifiable reeks and the clatter of dishware they ate a supper of sausage and peppers with red beans and rice. Having done with their meal they repaired to The Hole World Hotel, a sprawling two-story edifice a little farther down the street. It was the sort of hotel, Keeler said, where a man could buy damn near anything he could think to want. “If they aint got it,” Keeler said, “they’ll send somebody out to steal it for you. For a price, naturally.”
The place was packed, hazed with pipe and cigar smoke, raucous with laughter and bellowed conversation, with squealing fiddles and plinky piano music, with singing and strident argument and the calls of card dealers. On a narrow stage along the wall opposite the bar a sextet of girls in red velvet dresses danced and kicked their legs high to show their frilly white bloomers and each time they turned and thrust their derrieres at the audience and yanked their skirts up over their rumps they inspired whoops and whistles and were showered with coins.
“French dancing!” Keeler shouted, nudging Edward with an elbow. “Aint it fine!”
They pushed through to a rude plank bar and ordered glasses of Non-gela and tankards of beer. “Say now, lookit yonder!” John said. He directed their attention to a nearby table on which lay a muttonchopped man with a horribly mutilated face. Even from where they stood they could tell he was dead. The barkeep told them the fellow had been caught trying to switch dice at the table and then taken outside to be taught a lesson.
“Poor fella didn’t, ah, survive his moral instruction, you might say,” the barkeep said with a smile. “Right cheeky bastard. Said he wasn’t doing anything the house wasn’t. ‘Got to cheat when you play with cheaters,’ he said. He’ll lay on that table as a warning to other tinhorns till somebody takes his place or he starts smelling too bad to put up with and then they’ll take and throw him in the river. It’s almost always somebody on that table, you bet.” He explained that the house ran the craps, faro, blackjack, and roulette games, but the poker tables belonged to the players.
When Alienbeck asked if the place had girls the barkeep laughed. “Does the river have catfish, why don’t ye ask?” He pointed to a pair of curtained doors in the rear of the room. “The one on the left’s the kitchen, see, so unless you’re wanting to fuck a bowl of beans it’s the one on the right ye want to go through. It’s a little foyer, like, and a fella sitting there. You pay the gent and he’ll send ye on up to the good mother upstairs. If you like them special young it’s the stairway to paradise. You won’t find them younger than they got here unless you rob the cradle and that’s the God’s truth. There’s one seventeen and she’s a crone, practically. Most aint but fifteen. Hear tell they got two in the other day and neither one yet thirteen years old. I’ve not had the chance to check them out meself. Had a fella here a while ago saying ‘Twelve!’ like it’s a bit too young for it, but I figure it’s like the Mexicanos say: If they’re old enough to bleed they’re old enough to butcher.”
John said he was of a mind to do a little butchering himself right about now but Edward and Keeler were in more of a mood to try their luck at the card tables. John and Allenbeck chided them for limp-dick weaklings and set off across the crowded room.
Edward watched his brother wend his way through the haze toward the curtained door and grinned after him. “I swear, he must have him a hickory dick,” he said to Keeler. “Me, I still aint recovered from that yellow gal.”
“Some fellas can’t get enough of the bearded oyster, that’s true enough,” Keeler said. “I do love it meself as the Good Lord knows, but a man needs other diversion, begad, or he’ll go soft in the brain sure.”
They ordered another bucket of beer and agreed to split their winnings and then found a poker game with two open seats and sat down to it.