Chapter Twenty-Nine

The little gun popped like a whip crack. The slug punched into Cole’s ribs, carrying him from the saddle. There was an instant of free fall, then the ground came up and slammed him hard and he felt the rush of air from his lungs.

“What you gone an’ done, girl?” Book’s voice sounded far away.

“Couldn’t jus’ let him take you back to Fort Smith, Levi,” Cole heard Jilly say, her voice as plaintive as the hawk’s cry.

Cole felt himself sliding down a long dark tunnel, the voices of Book and Jilly Sweet growing rapidly more distant. He tried rolling over to get to his hands and knees, but he was having difficulty just trying to breathe. He tasted bile in the back of his throat. If he was shot in a lung, he was going to die that same painful prolonged way Bat Belgraves had died. He fought as hard as he could not to die, but he was falling faster and faster down that dark tunnel. And then a distant howling brought him gradually to the light, a yellow flame of light that danced up from the ground. “You ain’t kilt him, Jilly!”

It took a moment for Cole’s eyes to focus fully on the dancing flames of the campfire and in the distance he heard the mournful call of a coyote in the surrounding darkness. The blue-black face of Leviticus Book hovered above him, the edges of his eyes egg-white, his teeth smooth and slightly rounded, gleaming like sea shells behind his parted lips. “I thought maybe Jilly kilt you sure,” he said.

Cole’s throat was so dry he could barely swallow. Book put a canteen to Cole’s lips and said: “Drink it slow.” Some of the water trickled down the sides of Cole’s mouth as he tried to get his throat to work. A dull ache crawled up through his core, and, when he tried shifting his weight, it felt like someone was twisting a knife blade against his ribs. The pain turned suddenly sharp and snatched his breath away, and he fainted.

* * * * *

“You lost some blood,” Book said once Cole had regained consciousness. “I did the best I could to stop it.”

Cole was presently focused enough to test the wound with his fingertips. A cold wet bandage covered the area.

“Tore up a pair of Jilly’s clean drawers,” Book said. “It was all we had to make a bandage with.”

Cole pulled his fingers away, saw the smear of blood on them. “The bullet’s still in you,” Book said.

“Why didn’t you take off when you had the chance?” Cole rasped.

“Jilly wanted to. She thought for sure she kilt you.” Book looked down at the bloody bandage, then back at Cole. “I ain’t guilty,” he said. “And I ain’t gonna start being guilty of anything now. If you die, then so be it. But it ain’t gonna be because I just left you out here to bleed to death.”

Cole noticed the butt of his self-cocker sticking from the waist band of Book’s pants. “That’s my pistol,” he said.

Book looked down at it. “I’m holdin’ it for you.”

“That’s mighty kind of you.”

“There’s been enough gun play,” he said. “You up to eatin’?”

Jilly Sweet appeared with a plate in one hand, a fork in the other. She knelt down beside Cole, stared at him, said: “Brought you some beans, a biscuit. Ain’t much, but it’s gonna have to do.”

Cole tried to take the plate from her, but the effort was more than he could stand. Just the movement alone sent a wall of flame through him.

“Better let me,” she said. Cole opened and closed his mouth around the forkful of beans she fed him. In spite of the pain, he felt half starved, half sick. “I jus’ couldn’t let you take Leviticus to Fort Smith,” she said. Her gaze was defiant. “I di’n’t want to shoot you.”

“Then why did you?”

Cole saw her shift her gaze to Book.

“He’s my man, you di’n’t give me no choice.”

Cole ate a few more forkfuls of beans before the retching started. Whatever had gone in, came back up. His skin felt hot and damp like the air over a Southern swamp. He could feel a fever growing in his blood. Maybe the bullet hadn’t killed him outright, but, if the wound became infected, there was still a better than even chance he would die. It was another lesson the war had taught him—the bullet didn’t always kill you outright.

Book came back over and squatted next to Cole. “Either finish me off, or get me to a doctor,” Cole said.

Book saw the beaded sweat covering Cole’s face. He knew the same thing Cole knew. “I’ll ride off to the north,” he said. “There’s pines up on that far slope. I’ll cut some poles, make a travois. Go soon’s it’s light.”

“Whiskey,” Cole said. “You got any whiskey?”

“Mash. Got a little bit o’ mash.”

He left, his boots crunching on the frozen ground, returned in a few seconds with the bottle. “Try this,” he said.

Cole drank what he could, trying to put a fire in his belly to fight the one in his brain. He thought of Bat Belgraves, the way he’d died, the time it had taken. He didn’t want to die like that, slow, a minute at a time. He wanted it to be quick, not eaten up by a fever-fueled blood infection.

“Go on, drink the rest, you want to,” Book said, as Cole tried to hand him back the bottle. “You need it a whole lot more’n me.”

Jilly Sweet’s wide-staring eyes softened from the defiance they had held earlier. She looked like she wanted to say something to Cole, but realized there were no words that would change anything. Her face recessed into the shadows.

“She’s feelin’ bad about what she done,” Book said. “You want me to make you a cigarette?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but reached inside his pocket and pulled out paper and tobacco, and began rolling a shuck. He twisted off the ends and handed it to Cole, then struck a match off the heel of his boot, and held the flame to the tip. Cole drew in a lung full of smoke and it felt good, a small comfort from the pain.

Cole watched as Book rolled himself one. “Learned lots of bad habits in the Army,” he said. “The use of tobacco was one. Liquor was another.” Then he looked over his shoulder, into the deep shadows where Jilly Sweet was sitting. “Loneliness,” he said. “That’s another thing a man learns about in the Army. Learns to crave a woman just as much as he craves whiskey and tobacco once he’s gotten himself a taste for ’em.”

Book struck a second match to light his own cigarette and the flame flared against his coal-black features. Twin flames danced in his dark eyes for a moment before he snapped out the match.

Half of Cole’s brain was buzzing with the low hum of the fever slipping through his bloodstream. Book’s deep, resonant voice rode the edges of his consciousness and he tried to stay with what he was saying. “Guess the whiskey and tobacco and women ain’t so bad, though,” Cole heard him say. His face was tilted toward the stars and Cole wasn’t sure if he was talking to himself or to Cole. “That was all the Army ever taught me, I’d be a happy man.” He looked down at Cole, his face a black moon, his eyes glitteringly wet. “I know you probably like most white men, thinkin’ wan’t nothin’ better for a black man than to be able to shoot them Rebel white boys and get away with it.” His eyes became fixed on Cole, like he was trying to see inside his skull. He shook his head slowly. “I never took no pleasure from it, seein’ a boy get shot in the face, have his legs and arms blown off, hear him screamin’ for his mama and the Lord Almighty. Ain’t nobody human can take pleasure from somethin’ like that.”

It felt like demons were crawling over Cole’s skin. He closed his eyes. Book was saying something about being forced to hide in trees and about a Rebel officer who had a long wiry beard and played the fiddle. None of it was making much sense to Cole because the buzz in his blood had grown as loud as a hundred cicadas and it felt like his veins were stretched taut as piano wire. The ground beneath him began a slow spin that grew faster and faster until he felt his fingers digging into the cold earth, trying to hold on. Then he knew with all certainty that he was going back down into that dark tunnel again, only this time he wasn’t sure he would be coming back up.

* * * * *

Something bright pressed against Cole’s eyelids and he opened them just enough to see slits of blue sky overhead. Jilly Sweet came into view.

“I made coffee. You able to sit up and drink some?”

Sometime during the night the fever had raged and brought Cole murderous dreams and a sick feeling that rotated in his belly. He nodded, and she put a tin cup of coffee in his hands, which shook so badly the coffee sloshed over the edges and she had to take the cup away from him.

“Levi’s off cutting some poles to make a travois,” she said. Cole saw her staring toward the distance. “Gone up to where them trees is at. Told him watch out some big ol’ bear don’t get him. He laugh and say … ‘Jilly don’t fret all the time.’ But I do.” Then she turned her head just enough to look at Cole out of the corner of her eye. “So much trouble,” she said, then turned back again to watch the distance.

Cole slipped in and out of consciousness several times. At one point, he felt himself being lifted and placed on a blanket. He opened his eyes and saw Book’s face high above him. “That should do,” he said. “Leastwise we can travel with him till we find someone to heal him or bury him.”

Every inch of Cole’s skin was on fire, and every jolt over a rock or rut in the landscape brought him untold misery. He began to pray for death. It seemed ludicrous that such a small gun had brought him so much misery. He slept in fits, woke in starts, bit the inside of his cheeks until he could taste blood. It all seemed so unreal, that he would die at the hand of a slight, brown-skinned girl whose only two possessions were her fierce loyalty and a hidden Derringer. As he rocked and bounced along on the travois, he felt like death was following along behind them, like some lean and hungry wolf just waiting for the right opportunity. He wondered what Ike Kelly’s thoughts had been in those final seconds of his life. Did he even have time for final thoughts, like Cole was having now? He closed his eyes and prayed that, when it was time, he would face the old wolf honorably and without fear.

The sky turned sullen, the sun lost behind a blanket of gray smudge. Cole felt the sting of hard snow against his face and eyelids. He opened his mouth and let the snow touch his tongue. He thought it an omen, that it was snowing, that the sun had gone out. He watched the fading landscape, sought the old wolf.