They brought Sam Hildebrand’s body by wagon from southern Illinois to Missouri for viewing with several different stories about how he had come to die. It wasn’t even clear how he had ended up in Illinois. The last Charley had heard, Hildebrand was in Texas. But the story was he had moved to Illinois, he had come out of a tavern, been recognized by the town marshal, and shot dead on the spot before he could draw a weapon. Or he had been killed in a fight inside the tavern and claimed by the marshal for the reward.
Or he hadn’t been killed at all.
The mood on Rockpile was glum. It had been raining steadily for a week; the creeks were swollen, forcing everyone to walk in from the high ground—Charley’s route—instead of coming up from the south. The river could no longer be forded. At Daybreak, they had tied skiffs to trees for those who had to make the crossing. Even in a skiff, crossing the river was nerve-racking; the swift current brought limbs downstream at a frightening speed, and a large scour hole had opened up where the road once sloped gently into the stream. Wouldn’t you know, Charley had thought as he fought his way across, right where that Irish son of a bitch could put in a ferry and charge everyone a dollar to cross. Despite the high water, though, the Law and Order League had a good turnout for its Sunday afternoon meeting.
“I tell you one thing,” Horace Landsome said. “If somebody did kill him, it wasn’t a fair fight. The man ain’t been born that could best Sam Hildebrand in a fair fight.”
Charley knew this wasn’t true. Once a fight started, luck was what killed or saved a man, mostly. He’d seen it plenty of times, a seasoned man carried away by a load of grapeshot while the raw idiot standing next to him didn’t even get his hat knocked off. But this was no time to start an argument.
Green Pratt took the news with his usual roars of rage. Their first raid had been a success. They had hung three men, two well-known criminals who had used the war to enrich themselves and the uppity black man Pratt had picked out, given two men severe beatings, and carried a loose woman to Marble Creek and ducked her a couple dozen times. Even better, they had made the St. Louis papers, and now the Law and Order League was the talk of the state. Pratt had been eager to make a new list and spent their meetings shouting for more names, more names, despite the Federal military patrols that now rode the countryside. Charley was ready to quit the group if he could figure out how to do it without getting his own name on the list as a traitor to the cause.
“The bastard!” Pratt cried. “The man should have been given a hero’s welcome, not run out of the state to die among strangers. What’s the name of that town? Pinckneyville? Let’s ride to Pinckneyville and give the marshal a taste of Missouri medicine.”
“I don’t even know where Pinckneyville is,” someone said.
“I think it’s on the Ohio River somewhere,” someone else said helpfully.
“God damn it!” Pratt hollered out. “Shut your traps. All right, we won’t ride to Illinois. Too many damn troops between here and there anyway. Besides, plenty to do here.”
“They’d spot us and hang us before we got halfway there,” the Ohio River man said.
“I said shut up!” Pratt repeated. He made as if to strike the man, but changed course and hit the side of his own head instead. “We gotta go up and see Sam, that’s what we gotta do. Comfort the widow and console the orphan.”
“His wife died last year, is what I heard,” the man said.
This time Pratt didn’t hesitate. He cuffed the man above the ear, and in an instant the two of them were rolling on the rain-slick rocks, locked and punching. Men rushed to separate them. It was a brief flurry that ended with muttered apologies and a handshake, blood wiped from scraped skin.
“All right,” Pratt said, huffy with embarrassment. “We’ll go see Sam. He’s up at the courthouse in Farmington. But here’s the thing. If nobody identifies him, the marshal don’t get the reward money. So even if it is Sam, we don’t say a thing.”
Hildebrand’s body was propped against the courthouse wall in a narrow wagon bed, which Charley suspected was destined to serve as his coffin unless somebody came through with a better one. It was Sam, all right, although his head was gaping on one side from a pistol wound, and his body had begun to putrefy and swell. The group filed past a few at a time, hoping to avoid attention from the Federal troops that lounged about staring rudely at all who came.
Hildebrand’s mother and brothers-in-law, the Hampton boys, stood on the lawn a few feet away, speaking with those who stopped. Charley shook the woman’s hand.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said.
She said nothing, eyeing him suspiciously, until one of the Hampton boys leaned in. “He’s all right,” he said. “He was in the war.”
“You ride with Sam?” she said.
“No, ma’am,” Charley said. “Regular army.”
“Better choice anyway,” said the mother. “For you, it’s over. Sam’s boys, they chase them like barn rats.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Charley didn’t know what else to say, so he moved on.
Harley Willingham, the Madison County sheriff, had been squatting
under a tree at a corner of the courthouse lot. He fell into step beside Charley.
“You all ain’t been doing much lately,” he said.
“Too wet to plant,” Charley said. “Half the field’s underwater.”
“That ain’t what I mean. You know what I mean.”
Charley stopped and looked the man square in the face. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Provost-Marshal.”
Willingham’s face was impassive. “War’s over, son. The quicker we all forget what we did in the war, the better off we’ll be.”
Charley walked on, Willingham keeping pace. He knew Willingham had a point. Green Pratt and his boys could rave and holler all they wanted, and hang a man here and there, but that didn’t change the fact that the war was over and they had lost. One of these days they would be the ones being hung, a prospect Charley didn’t care to contemplate.
Willingham seemed to read his thoughts. “I ain’t looking to arrest you. I ain’t looking to enlist you, either. Just let me know if anything too crazy is getting ready to happen, and I’ll work from there. Come November, I’ll be up for election again, and I’ll need some new deputies. I can see you as a deputy sheriff a lot quicker than some of these damn Germans that’re overrunning the county.”
“OK,” Charley said. “I’ll think about it.”
“You do that.”
Charley waited for Willingham to get out of sight. He had ridden to town in Pratt’s wagon and didn’t want Willingham to see him join them again. For that matter, he didn’t want Pratt to have seen him talking to Willingham,
either. Trouble both ways.
There was a dense cloud on the southwest horizon. Sure enough, they hadn’t gone a mile before the rain started again, this time with lightning.
“Well, God damn it,” Pratt muttered, pulling his slicker over his head and looking back in the wagon. There was Charley, who had to get to Daybreak, and another horseless man from Fredericktown. “Pettibone, I’m dropping you at the Oak Grove turnoff, and you’re on your own from there. It’ll be hard night before I get home anyway.”
By the time Charley started walking from the main road down to Daybreak, it was sunset, or what would have been sunset if there had been any sun to see. His rain slicker had done him little good; he was drenched and shivering, and figured that just his luck somebody would have paddled the skiff to the other side. He would have to holler until someone heard him, someone who was brave or foolish enough to cross that damn river in near darkness.
A glimpse of light and the smell of smoke from one of the huts in the Indian camp tempted him for a moment. But he was damned if he would take shelter with Dathan and his Indian bride, not half a mile from his own house. He worked his way down the bluff in the dwindling light, his lower half covered with mud from slipping on the wet rocks.
As soon as Charley reached the river bottom, he knew he would never cross tonight. He could hear the river’s low roar and could smell the earthy musk of ground covered by water that shouldn’t be covered by water. Out of curiosity more than anything else, he walked ahead.
Then he heard cries and shouts, and knew there was trouble. A lantern waved wildly through the trees. Charley ran toward it.
Flynn, the fool, had built his house too close to the river. He had put everything too close to the river. By the time Charley got there, the hog lot was gone, and two feet of water covered the floor of the house. Flynn, Marie, Josephine, and Angus were frantically carrying everything out of the house to a hump of ground about a hundred feet back.
“Carry it farther back!” Charley shouted as he dashed to help. “You’ll have to carry it again later tonight if it keeps raining.”
“Go fuck yourself!” Flynn shouted in reply, holding up the lantern to see who had arrived. “Help or don’t help, suit yourself. We’ll carry it again once we get it all out.”
Charley waded through the chill water to the back bedroom. The mattress was gone—removed already, or perhaps lost to the water—but the bed frame was still in place. He threw it over his shoulder and fought his way to the door. The children were wading around in the front room, chasing floating papers and toys.
Charley half-floated, half-carried the bed frame to the spot of high ground, followed by the children with armloads of goods. The water was only a couple of feet from it already, and he could feel the current tugging at his ankles. He tossed it onto the highest spot, where Marie and Josephine struggled to throw a canvas over a pile of clothing.
“That ain’t worth doing,” he said, but helped her anyway. Flynn arrived with a trunk over his shoulder.
“God damn river,” he said.
Marie put on a brave face. “Now we can start building that octagon house you are always talking about,” she said. “We’ll put it back here on the high ground.” Flynn just shot her an angry look, and she fell silent.
Charley didn’t want to get between them at this moment. He returned to their flooded house and waded in the door, feeling with his feet for anything that might be a possession. Flynn arrived with the lantern, and together they surveyed the interior.
“It’ll clean up,” Charley said.
“I know that. I don’t need consoling,” said Flynn. They walked into the back room. Nothing left to carry out but a crucifix on the wall. It was ingeniously made, with grapevines twisted into the shape of a man on a cross of two neatly mortised slats.
“I did that,” Flynn said, taking it down.
“Nice work,” Charley said.
“Damn straight. Now let’s see if we can salvage some of my rails.”
From the house to the river, Flynn’s rail fence gradually disappeared into the brown water.
“River’s still rising,” Charley said. “Some of them rails are halfway to the state line by now.”
“I put a lot of work into these rails,” Flynn replied. “Don’t worry, I’ll pay you for your time.”
“Don’t insult me,” Charley said. He waded into the water and started pulling rails, which was a tougher job than it looked. Flynn had fixed each length with two uprights, cross-and-rail style, and in some places he had tied the crossed uprights together. Charley had to admit as he tugged at the rails that Flynn had done a fine job of fence-building.
Finally Charley got some loose and tossed them behind him. Angus, chest-deep, scurried to fetch them.
“Push ’em into the shallows,” Flynn said. “We’ll collect them in a minute.”
Flynn waded further into the water to pull out more rails. Charley stayed where he was, groping in the dark for the bottom ones.
Angus followed his father, who handed the lantern to him. “Here, boy,” he said. “Just hold this high so I can see. I need to work with both hands.”
It seemed to Charley that they were in the hog lot. He remembered that Flynn had curved his fence inward here so there was only a narrow V leading to the water. He felt his way past Flynn to where the ground dropped off, what in normal times would be the riverbank.
“You ain’t getting anything past here,” he called out to Flynn.
Flynn glanced up from his work and nodded.
Angus, too, came forward to see, holding the lantern high in one hand while corralling a couple of rails with the other. Charley thought to warn him not to come too far, that the ground sloped down very quickly and the current was strong, but Angus pushed forward before he could speak. He could tell that the boy was about to say something, because he opened his mouth, but then the rails slipped out of his hand into the deeper water. Charley made a grab for them; Angus made a grab for them. Charley cried out—no words, just a shout, which got Flynn’s attention. He saw what was about to happen and reached for his son.
But the water slowed them down as they grabbed for Angus; the boy’s expression was startled, then frightened, as he stepped in a hole. His head bobbed under the surface of the floodwater. Then the lantern went underwater as well. All was dark, and Angus was gone.