CHAPTER SIX
The Molly Reese presentation had been given so many times that the preacher could have recited most of it without the aid of the papers on the lectern before him, just as the woman did her part without prompting or direction. She had it easier than he, of course, possessing no tongue and being able to produce only the most rudimentary approximations of understandable speech. She was not required to say anything to the congregants.
Repetition of the performance had helped her overcome any sense of shyness or hesitancy she had once possessed. In earlier days she had felt a normal human resistance to letting others see her abnormality, and had gone through life with her mouth clamped tightly shut most of the time. Those who sought to see for themselves what was, or was not, inside the oral orifice were turned away consistently. She would not be treated like some living horror or mutilation.
All that had changed when she met Abner Bledsoe. Something about the man had drawn her, pulled her out of herself, and filled her with fascination for him. Just what it was she could not say. It was certainly not physical—he was a plain enough fellow, to be sure—nor was it a serious interest in his religious teachings. God had done little for her, in her estimation, and she had decided years ago she could and would do without him. And if that meant she would also do without him when she entered the next life, whatever it was . . . well, so be it. Fine with her.
She had met Bledsoe on a street in a town in Virginia. A purely random meeting, made memorable by the injury she had suffered when Bledsoe rode too close to her on his horse and a hoof crushed her foot into the dirt street, breaking two of her toes. She had gone down with a cry and Bledsoe had dismounted to see what he had unwittingly done. It was a fated meeting for them both.
It didn’t take long for Bledsoe to realize that the woman he’d injured had a distinctive handicap. Her first effort at speaking revealed it: muddied, murky approximations of word sounds, only a few of which he understood.
As coincidence or fate would have it, Bledsoe had, only the day before, read the already-famous account of Molly Reese and her bloody girlhood adventure—and a fascinating possibility suddenly presented itself.
“Are you by chance named Molly Reese?” he asked. The woman’s answer was impossible to understand, but it didn’t matter. Bledsoe had continued: “Because if you are, ma’am, we stand to benefit nicely from this encounter, you and I.” From the look of her he could tell she was impoverished, and would surely respond to any prospect of “benefit.”
She did respond. She accepted an invitation from him to dine at a nearby tavern—having not eaten a real meal in days—and her usual defensiveness quickly faded. He told her about himself and his preaching life, working his way delicately around the nature of his motives and interests, allowing her to realize slowly that his “calling” was not really a spiritual one. Rather than be put off by his blatant and unrepentant hypocrisy, she was drawn to it, finding in his willingness to exploit others a ground of hope that perhaps her life could become something better than she had known.
She had not left the preacher’s presence that night, and was still with him when the next morning came. He sent her away from the inn where they had stayed long before he left, so they would not be seen departing overnight lodgings together. They rejoined outside the town. They had not parted since, forming a partnership both personal and professional: He told the sordid Molly Reese tale and she allowed the gaping devotees of the false preacher to stare into her empty mouth while she sat beneath torchlight with her jaw dropped for their viewing convenience. She hated them all but pretended otherwise for the sake of the gifts some of them gave her in pity. In all her lonely life she’d never fared so well as she had since she took up with the preacher Bledsoe.
She’d done better than usual here beside Fort Edohi. Her little wooden collection bowl was filled with coins and other items, even a ring and a locket, a generosity quite surprising and unexpected from a population of people one would expect to be quite poor. She could not account for her good fortune, but gladly accepted it, and without guilt. She’d been deprived of much in her life, and it was surely only fitting that she receive something in recompense.
She’d grown bored, though, sitting there as she had so many times, maw lolled open like an idiot’s, men, women, and children filing by and ogling so they could see for themselves that, yes, indeed, this woman had no tongue in her head! She despised their morbid curiosity, their looks of pity and revulsion. Fools! They could use her as an entertaining display if they chose, because she was in turn using them. The jingle in her wooden bowl more than made up for the shame of being stared at like an object of pathos.
At last the line of gawkers melted away and she stood, giving a quick smile to Abner Bledsoe, who remained on the platform, waving his dignified farewells to the scattering worshipers. She had turned to step away from her post when Bledsoe suddenly made a subtle gesture indicating she should remain, and tossed his head slightly to make her look to her left.
A man was approaching her, a gray-haired, slender fellow in excellent clothes, a man who would have looked more in place in a Boston parlor than in an open meadow beside a frontier fort. She smiled at him and sat down again as he reached her, and thought he looked affluent, maybe able to give her more than the usual pittance.
“Ma’am?” he said pleasantly. “I’m late, I know, but I’ve been occupied within the stockade, tending to an injury. I am a physician, and my name is Peter Houser.”
She smiled again and nodded, putting out her hand for him to shake. He did so delicately, holding her by the fingertips.
“As a man of medicine who is often called upon to tend to injuries involving injury and mayhem, I am intrigued by you. I’ve never had occasion to see the type of injury you have suffered. I would like to make a quick inspection for the sake of my own education. May I?”
She seldom encountered such politeness. Almost no one ever asked permission to inspect her mutilated mouth. They simply walked past, giving no greeting, acknowledgment, or thanks, and gawked at her like a pathetic object rather than a person.
She nodded and dropped open her mouth, turning her face up to the light of the nearby torch. Dr. Houser leaned over and stared in. She studied his eyes as he examined what he saw. He was no idle, ignorant gawker; he looked at her with a knowing and understanding eye. As she realized this, she suddenly clamped her mouth closed.
“Is something wrong, sir?” Bledsoe asked him, having watched all this from the platform.
Houser hesitated, his eyes flicking between the preacher and the seated woman, who now rose to her feet again. “I would like to speak with you privately, Reverend.”
Bledsoe repeated his question. “Is something wrong?”
Houser climbed the little flight of steps leading up to the platform and went to Bledsoe. He put his hand on Bledsoe’s upper arm and gently prodded him to the rear corner of the platform, away from where the woman was.
“Sir, what is wrong?” Bledsoe asked, concerned now.
Houser paused a moment, glanced over his shoulder to make sure the woman would not hear him, then said quietly, “I am afraid you might have been misled by your associate.”
“Miss Reese?”
“The woman who professes to be Miss Reese, you should say.”
“Explain, sir.”
“Sir, if Molly Reese lost her tongue in an act of violence during her girlhood, then the woman standing over there is not Molly Reese.”
Bledsoe jerked as if he’d been stung, his slightly crossed eyes narrowing as he stared at Houser. “Why would you say such a thing, sir?”
“Because the woman there is indeed missing her tongue, but I can assure you, as a physician, that it was never cut out of her mouth. The deformity is one of birth. Her tongue was never cut out because she never possessed one. She was born in her current condition, and if she has presented herself to you as Molly Reese, she has deceived you.”
Bledsoe glared at Houser and for a moment struggled for words. “I—I don’t believe that, sir. I’m sorry. I’m sure you speak what you think is truth, but I tell you, before God, that she is Molly Reese! I have spent too much time with her, shared her story so frequently. . . . I cannot, will not, believe she is anything or anyone other than the Molly Reese I have known for years.”
“Well, then, if she is in fact Miss Reese, then it is her account of her misadventure that is false. For I must tell you with the firmest of conviction, that woman’s tongue was never removed from her head! She lives today in the condition in which she was born.”
“No.” A firm shake of the head. “No, sir. She is who she says she is. She was attacked by her own father, mutilated, then rescued by a being who well might have been an angel sent for her protection.”
“Reverend, with all respect due to you, may I ask you why, then, did the angel not present itself sooner and stop the assault aborning? If protection had been the divine intention, why was it not given before the severing of her tongue?”
“Aha!” Bledsoe said, aiming a stubby, pointing finger at the physician’s face. “You admit, then, that her tongue was severed! You just said as much!”
“I am presenting a hypothetical, not a statement of fact. And that is beside the point in any case. What I say, I say on the basis of trained observation. I know scarring when I see it, and the marks left by cutting and severing. Those are absent from this woman’s mouth. I must stand by what I have declared.”
“You do not know what you speak of!” Bledsoe’s piping voice was getting louder and more shrill.
Houser took pains to keep his own voice calm. “I know that woman never suffered the violence described in the famed Reese narrative. That I know. What I do not know is whether or not the fraud derives from her alone, or from the both of you together.”
“You insult me, sir.”
“My intent is not to insult. I am simply making a physician’s observation of the facts, sir, and—”
He had not finished his sentence before a furious Bledsoe lunged at him shoulder-first and shoved him back toward the rear of the high platform. Houser groped reflexively at the preacher’s shoulder and grasped his shirt, so that when Houser fell he pulled Bledsoe down after him. They hit the ground hard, Houser landing on his back and Bledsoe on Houser’s chest, driving the air from the doctor’s lungs so thoroughly that it seemed it would be forever before he could draw it in again.
Simultaneously an unexplainable sharp pain exploded just to the inside of Houser’s right shoulder blade. It surged through him, worsening when he tried to move. It was the last thing Houser was aware of before he closed his eyes and passed out cold.
Fain was looking down into Houser’s face when the physician came around again. Houser looked up in puzzlement, trying to remember just what had happened, at the same time moving a little. The movement caused a new stab of pain beneath his right shoulder.
“You ought to hold still, Doc,” Fain said, touching Houser’s left shoulder and hold him down. “You took a sharp root stab under your wing, and it’s going to hurt you if you do much moving.”
“Root stab?”
“There was a sharp root poking up from the ground right where you and the preacher fell, and it jammed up right into your back. Long as my finger, it was. If it had struck into you on t’other side, I might wonder if it would have probed into the backside of your heart.”
“Hurts,” Houser said, closing his eyes. “Damn that preacher! He pushed me off that platform—I know he did—because he didn’t like having his fraud revealed.” Houser, growing a bit impassioned, stirred involuntarily and groaned loudly at the pain.
“Easy, Doctor. Don’t stir. What fraud are you talking about?”
“The woman he passes off as Molly Reese. Either she is not Molly Reese, or if she is, Molly Reese never lost her tongue to violence. That woman out there tonight was born with no tongue. As a man of medicine and science, I can say that with certainty.”
Fain did not look surprised. “I knew she was not who and what he claimed.”
“You knew? How?”
Fain smiled. “I knew.”
Houser’s injury, though painful, was not serious. Within an hour of his fall from the platform, he was up and moving about, admitting that in doing so, he was in violation of the advice he would have given had the injury been suffered by someone else. Twice Fain had to replace the bandaging of the doctor’s wound because his movement caused renewed bleeding.
“Doctor, it’s no surprise your wife left you,” Fain said. “You are a stubborn man intent on doing himself harm.”
Houser frowned. “Fain, you know as well as I do that my Beth’s return to Carolina is only temporary, and done for the sake of her ailing father.”
“I know, I know. I only wish she was here so she could be your nursemaid, not me.”
They were in the spacious front room of Fain’s large cabin within the walls of Fort Edohi. The door opened and Langdon Potts entered.
“He’s gone,” Potts said.
“Who?”
“Preacher Bledsoe. I saw his wagon pulling away, him driving. There was a loose wheel, or so it looked to be, so I hailed him to a stop. He didn’t look glad for it. He was in a hurry to leave. I checked the wheel and thought it needed fixing, but he declined it and said it would be fine to travel on. He pulled on out and as he went on, I caught a look inside the back, ’neath the wagon cover. I’ll leave it to you to guess what I saw.”
“The woman,” Fain said. “The one they foist off as Molly Reese. Probably naked as the day she was born.”
Houser laughed, then yelped in pain. “Don’t make me laugh, Fain. It hurts to laugh.”
“I did see the woman,” Potts said. “But she had her garments on. Still, you could tell, just kind of get the feeling. . . .”
“That the two of them ain’t spending their free time studying the scriptures?” Fain suggested. “Maybe doing a little something else?”
Potts nodded.
“They are frauds, you know,” Houser said. “That woman did not lose her tongue. She never had one. I saw it for myself when I examined her.”
“So the preacher’s a fraud, too?”
“Almost certainly. I suppose the woman might be fooling him, but he seems the kind to do a bit of fooling himself. She’s probably some malformed whore that Bledsoe ran across somewhere, and then came up with the notion of presenting her as Molly Reese to spark up his camp meetings a bit.”
“A preacher would do that?”
“If he’s a fraud and hypocrite, indeed he would,” Houser said.
Fain rose in the middle of the night and paced through his cabin, his rheumatic pain causing him to limp. Houser slept on a thick bearskin pallet made on the puncheon floor near the cold fireplace. Houser’s own house stood not far away from the stockade, on the side opposite the great meadow where Bledsoe had held forth, but Fain had insisted that Houser remain close by in case Houser’s injury proved worse than it appeared. He also wanted the physician handy should trouble arise with the bearded man who had lost his leg; that man snored on another pallet on the opposite side of the room.
Potts had a pallet of his own up in the loft overlooking the cabin’s main room. He quietly slipped down the ladder and joined Fain.
“Having trouble sleeping, are you?” he asked his host.
“Tell you the truth, son, I’m thinking of Titus. Wondering where he is and why he ain’t come home in such a spell of time.”
“I wish he was here, too. I came a long way to see him and to tell him about the express plans. I think he’ll be interested in that.”
“I think he will. That’s the kind of thing that would suit him just right.”
The express plans to which Potts referred involved a scheme by some of the backcountry leaders in the Watauga country to create a system of mounted messengers who would serve as a private postal service in the frontier country, carrying mail and messages and the like between the Watauga, Holston, and Nolichucky settlements to the area of James White’s fort and Fort Edohi, and probably on beyond all the way to the Cumberland Settlements. With success, the effort could be expanded later to provide service into the Kentucky country to the north.
It would be dangerous work, requiring bold and skilled young riders to carry it out. Indian dangers would be nearly constant along the wilderness routes. But such a service would be useful beyond measure and provide an avenue of greatly enhanced communication between far-flung settlements. Potts had been drawn to the idea from the first time he’d heard it, and had known that Fain’s son, Titus, would be equally intrigued and as ready to become one of the express riders.
Crawford Fain stared out into the night between the shutters of a side window and sighed. Potts drifted over to his side.
“You worried about Titus?”
Fain said, “Not so much worried as just wondering. Titus is a capable young man, and he can see to his safety as well as anyone I know. But the fact is that these are dangerous times even for capable men. I just hope the boy hasn’t gotten himself into some problem he can’t find a way out of.”
“He’s fine, wherever he is,” Potts said. “He might come riding through the stockade gate come morning. You never know.”
“I wish I did know. He’s the only son I’ve got. And besides that I’ve got a task I need his help with. A job I took on that I don’t know I can do alone. With Titus, though, I think I could get it done.”
“He’ll be back,” Potts assured again.
“Littleton,” Fain said abruptly. He turned and looked Potts square in the face. “Littleton! I just remembered it.”
“Who?”
“Littleton. Jeremiah Littleton. You heard of him?”
“I don’t know. Who is he?”
“A bad man. Outlaw. Been known to rob travelers and emigrants. Runs with a band of outlaws as bad as he is. They killed a man recently while he was kneeling down and giving no trouble. That’s the story, anyway.”
“Why do you mention his name now?”
“I think that’s who old stub-leg over there might be. I’d heard him described before, and his looks fit what I heard.”
“He looks like any number of men you see every day, to me,” Potts said, looking over to where Littleton continued his snoring, lying flat on his back.
“He’s got the scar. Little one up near his eye, right side. Runs back toward his ear a thumb-width or so. Littleton’s got that, they say. That’s what was tugging at my mind but I couldn’t get a full grip upon.”
“Is he the one who killed the man?”
“He leads the gang. Has made bargains with the Indians, and has a few who rob with him sometimes. He’s as guilty as any of them, in my book, whether he directly did the killing or not.”
“Guess we have to keep him from getting away, then.”
“That leg will help with that. Hard to run on a stump.”
“But what if it ain’t Littleton?”
“Let’s go see.”
They walked over to the sleeping bear of a man, whose lips vibrated with each snore. One eyelid flickered but he did not waken.
“Littleton!” Fain said in a sharp, loud whisper.
The man flinched some but slept on. “Littleton!” Fain said a little more loudly. Still he slept. A third call of the name, louder yet.
Littleton started and opened his eyes. For a moment he looked past the two faces staring down at him, then focused in blearily on Fain.
“Littleton, right?” Fain asked.
“What do you want from me?”
“Your name’s Littleton. Jeremiah Littleton. Ain’t that right?”
Littleton shook his head. “No . . . no. Name’s Kirk. Lyle Kirk.” He tried to sit up, then winced sharply. “God!” he swore. “Why’s my leg hurt so?” Then he managed to lift himself enough to see, and the memory came back. “God . . . I’d forgot. Damned Gilly . . .”
Fain looked over at Potts. “Gilly’s the name of one of Littleton’s robbers. I think this is our man.”
“Name’s Kirk,” Littleton repeated.
“Hell you say,” muttered Fain.
“Don’t know no Littleton.”
“Very well, Mr. Kirk. Whatever you say.” And he and Potts withdrew, leaving Littleton alone. A minute later the bearded man was snoring again.
“That’s him, I’m right sure,” Fain said. “I thought maybe he’d spill the truth if we caught him just waking up, but he’s smart. Came up with a false name without so much as a hitch.”
“I suppose he’ll be staying put awhile, whoever he is,” Potts said. “With that leg and all.”
Fain was silent. He went to the bench against the wall and sat down. Potts joined him.
“That task you mentioned . . .”
Fain said, “Man has hired me to make a hunt for him. Not a hunt for bear or deer or any such as that. He wants me to find his daughter who went missing years ago, thought to have been taken by Indians. He thinks she may still be living. He’s heard tales of somebody matching her, of a blond-haired woman.”
“That’s all? Blond hair? Not much to go on, just that.”
“She’s got a marked eye, gray streak in the brown. If I can find a yellow-haired woman with a gray streak in the brown of her eye, she might be his gal. Name’s Deborah, if she’s still using the name she was given at birth.”
Potts was thoughtful a few moments. Littleton snored and Houser rolled over a bit and groaned. Fain pondered the oddity of being in a roomful of injured men when there had been no Indian attack or bandit raid, just a revivalist camp meeting.
“Tell you what,” Potts said. “If Titus don’t get back in time, and you’re still of a mind to make that long hunt for the yellow-haired woman, I’d be glad to go with you and help you just like Titus would.”
“You’d do that?”
“I would.”
“You’re a good boy, Potts. Just like Titus.”
“Thank you, sir. Though I ain’t really a boy, no more than Titus is. We’re both men now. Been men for some years.”
Fain grinned. “You’re right. I just lose my bearings sometimes and forget. He’s a man, and a good one.”
He slumped back against the log wall. “I surely do wish that boy would come home.” Then he began repeatedly casting his eyes toward a nearby shelf. Potts noticed.
“Want your pipe?”
“You’re a good boy—good man—indeed, Potts. Sot weed pouch ought to be right there with it. And if you can bring the flint box, too, I can make a little fire for it.”
Potts got up from the bench and fetched the items. Fain used his flint box to get a small piece of punk burning in a little recess made into the side of the box, and from that lit a splinter he had fingernailed out of the log wall. With that he lit his pipe.
Potts left the frontiersman contentedly puffing and made his way back up to the loft and his sleeping pallet. When Potts awakened the next morning, Fain was slumped to one side on the bench, sound asleep, the now-cold pipe having been dropped to the floor long before.
Littleton was gone, pallet empty. And when Potts checked, he found his own horse missing. He hurried back inside and told Fain.
“I’m smote,” he said. “Plumb smote. I thought he might try to get away like that, but I didn’t figure him to do it right off like that, with his leg fresh gone.”
“He took my horse,” Potts said, trying to make himself believe it. He’d raised that horse since it was a colt.
“He did?” Fain replied. “He’s stout to do such a thing. Hard flint and oak tree stout. Got to give him credit for that—hop out of a stranger’s house in the middle of the night on one foot, fresh-cut leg stump swinging and hurting, then steal another stranger’s horse and get himself up on it to get away, and nobody catch him at it. Yep. That’s stout as they come. And bold.”
“He stole my horse!”
“He did, son. He did.”
It was Houser who spotted the note.
Littleton had written it on a page torn from a Bible, using ink Fain had manufactured the year before from the juice of pokeberries and kept stored in a little crockery bottle on a nearby shelf. The letters were dim but well formed despite having been written without benefit of light sometime after Fain and Potts had gone back to sleep.
Heard you speak, Littleton had written across the Bible page, which he had left in the middle of his sleeping pallet. Saw yellow-hair woman marked eye Crockett Spring three month past.
“I’m smote yet again,” Fain said. “Who would have thought he could have got away like that, the shape he was in? And I never even thought about him hearing what we said, him snoring away like he was.”
“Will you go to Crockett Spring to look for this woman? Is this fellow somebody whose word you can take?”
“Likely not. It’s not much of a clue, coming from such a source as our one-footed friend. But it’s the only real clue I got, and following it holds more promise than just launching out without any hints at all. Will you come with me, Potts? I need the help of younger muscles and bones, and I can’t know when Titus will return.”
“I’ll go, sir. Be glad to. But do you think it’s real, what he says? Maybe he’s just trying to get us chasing off to find this yellow-haired woman so we won’t follow him. If we’re off after her, we ain’t off after him.”
“That could be. But the fact is I’ve made a bargain with Eben Bledsoe, and I must fulfill it. You and me, Potts, we’re going to Crockett Spring.”