In the summer of 1845 Edward Little was sixteen years old and restless in his blood. He knelt beside a tree stump next to the stable and carved intently upon it in the first gray light of day. He had often sat on this stump and watched the sun lower into the trees and wondered how great the distance from where he sat to where the day was still high noon. His family fled to this blackwater wildland just east of the Perdido and nearly two days’ ride north of Pensacola in the fall of ’42 when Daddyjack hied them out of the Georgia uplands following a barndance fracas that left a man dead and occasioned the local constable to initiate inquiry. The killed man was named Tom Rainey. He was a childhood acquaintance of Edward’s mother and made bold to ask her for a turn on the dance-floor. She shook her head as much in warning as in refusal, but before he could turn away, there was Daddyjack before him redeyed with drink and much offended by Rainey’s familiarity toward his wife. Hard words abruptly gave way to grappling and folk jumped clear as a table overturned and then Rainey was staring down in wide-eyed wonder at the knife haft jutting from his breastbone and tight in Daddyjack’s grip. Edward was thirteen and had seen men die under felled trees and from a mulekick to the head and in wildeyed fever in their bunks, but this was his first witness to mankilling and his blood jumped at the swift and utter finality of its decree and at the resolute set of Daddyjack’s face as he gave the blade a hard twist before yanking it free. Rainey staggered and his face sagged as he gaped at the scarlet bloom on his shirtfront and then his eyes rolled up white and he dropped dead. Daddyjack got the family out of there fast as people fell away from the door. The boy was dry-mouthed and nearly breathless with the sense of having just seen something of himself, something at once dreadful and exhilarating and ascendant and not to be denied, some fierce region of his own being that awaited him like a badland horizon red as Hell.
Their covered wagon had lurched along toward Florida on narrow muddy traces that wound through deep pine forests and traversed marsh prairies and skirted shadowy swamplands where the moss hung heavy and the evening haze flared with will-o’-the-wisp. Daddyjack’s horse trailed on a lead rope and their two dogs trotted alongside. At the infrequent crossroads there was sometimes an inn where Daddyjack would rein up the team and step inside to sample a cup of the local distillate while Edward and his brother John watered the animals and listened to the conversations of passing travelers. More than one group of pilgrims they met was headed for the Republic of Texas. The emigrants had all been told the place beggared description and they spoke as if they’d already seen it with their own eyes—the towering pinewoods and fertile bottomlands, the long curving seacoast and rolling green hills, the vast plains that ranged for countless miles out to the western mountains. They’d been assured a man could make a good life for himself in Texas if he but had the grit to stand up to the Mexican army and the roving bands of red savages. It was anyhow sure to become a state before long, Mexican objections be damned. Daddyjack overheard a bunch of them one time and as he hupped the mules back onto the southern track he shook his head and muttered about fools who thought they could get away from themselves in Texas or any other damned place.
One drizzly afternoon on the drive to Florida, when Edward and his brother and sister were sitting with their mother in the back of the wagon as Daddyjack drove the mule team through the blowing mist with water running from his hatbrim, she whispered to them that Jack Little was a murderous man never to be admired and much less trusted. They were the first words she had uttered in over a year and for a moment Edward was not certain if she had actually spoken or he had somehow heard the thoughts inside her head. “That man will eat you up,” she hissed. “All you. If you don’t kill him first.”
The girl nodded with tightlipped accord and stared fiercely at her brothers. The brothers exchanged uncertain looks. Daddyjack’s voice rasped into the wagon: “I’d rather go on not hearin your mouth a-tall than have to hear such crazywoman talk.”
She said nothing more that night or for the next three years, but the fervor in her eyes did look to Edward like the gleam of lunacy.
Their mother was a fairskinned supple beauty with sharp features, but neither Daddyjack nor the children knew—not the woman herself knew—that her roiled green eyes and darkly auburn hair were inherited from a murderous brute who begat her atop a thirteen-year-old girl as the rest of his bandit party whooped over the flaming wagons on a cold South Georgia afternoon and the girl’s family lay about in twisted slaughter. The childmother never recovered from the ordeal’s visitation of madness and she spoke not another word for the brief rest of her life. She wandered in the scrub for days before a tinker came upon her and carried her in his wagon to the next town on his route where she was housed by a grocer and his wife until they realized she was with child and passed her on to the grocer’s spinster sisters. A few weeks after the birth of her daughter she hanged herself from a rafter in her room. Her suicide was the favored conversational topic among the locals for some time but the gossipry soon made even the details of her death as uncertain as all else about her. In time all tales told of her were but fancies.
The infant was taken to raise by a childless Methodist minister named Gaines and his sallow dispirited wife who were on their way to settle in the high country. The reverend christened her Lilith and told everyone she was his niece who had been orphaned by the cholera. She grew up a quiet observant girl who read the Bible and practiced her hand by copying passages from the Song of Solomon, which the reverend’s good wife was disturbed—and the reverend himself secretly piqued—to learn was her favorite portion of the Good Book. She had just turned twelve and offered no resistance when the preacher deflowered her one late evening as his consumptive spouse coughed away her life in an adjoining room. Six weeks later, on the night following his wife’s funeral, he lay with the girl again and wept even as he grunted with the labor of his lust. He told her it was the Lord’s own will that they commit their flesh one to the other and she smiled at his tears and said it was wonderful that the Lord willed such a pleasurable thing—and then laughed at his gaping astonishment at her brazenness. He took her to his bed nearly every night thereafter.
By the time she was fourteen she was pleasuring boys from every corner of the county in exchange for a bit of specie or at the least some general store gimcrack she fancied. She delighted in watching them fight over her. Her reputation began to draw passing drummers and tradesmen off the main road. The Reverend Gaines was the last to know. When he discovered he was no longer the sole recipient of the girl’s favors he was enraged by her perfidy and took to praying aloud every evening for the Lord to redeem her corrupt and bastard soul. He determined to see her married and gone as soon as some dupe might be found who would ask her hand.
And here came tall and burly and thickly mustached Jack Little, making known he was from Tennessee and a hewer by trade and in search of a wife. He said his father hailed from County Cork. The preacher invited him to supper and introduced him to his orphaned “niece.” Lilith was now fifteen and as eager to get free of the reverend and the whole damned state of Georgia as he was to be shed of her, and although nobody knew a single certain fact about Jack Little except that his accent had little in it of Tennessee and that he was hale and hankering to be wed, she perceived him as an opportune means for effecting her escape into the world.
They married three weeks after their introduction. Immediately following the ceremony the Reverend Gaines announced that he had sold his house and holdings to Jack Little and was returning to the itinerant life of spreading the Blessed Word. Within the hour he was departed for places unknown. Jack Little gestured awkwardly toward the house and told his bride, “I wanted to surprise you.” Her wet-eyed speechlessness he took for joy. In fact she stood stunned by the world’s unending ironies and the cursed character of her luck. Her husband smiled at her evident happiness.
The moment Jack Little shut the bedroom door behind them on their wedding night she assumed her frailest face and her eyes brimmed as she told him she was heartsick and more ashamed than he could ever know because two summers ago she’d had an accident, had slipped and fallen astraddle the gunwale of a rowboat and sundered her maidenhead and thus robbed herself and him too of the dearest present a bride could give her husband. She wept into her hands. He gave her a narrow look but decided to make no matter of it. He’d been intimate with no women in his life but whores and needed to believe she was cut from finer cloth and so refused to entertain suspicions. In bed she responded with such fervor to his urgings that he counted himself lucky indeed to be wed to one so freshly young and uninhibitedly eager to pleasure her husband. He felt he might be in love.
He went to work at a timbercamp a few miles into the deepwoods. John was born in early winter and a year later came Edward. In the summer of the following year Lilith was in her sixth month with Margaret when a scowling pair of yellowbearded brothers named Klasson showed up in town carrying long rifles and inquiring after a man called Haywood Boggs. They claimed he was a bad actor who’d murdered their uncle four years earlier in western Kentucky and was now said to be living roundabouts. Their description of Boggs was discomfitingly familiar and somebody finally pointed them toward the logging trace that led to the timbercamp.
Three days later Jack Little drove a team into town with the stiffening bodies of the Klassons laid out on the wagonboards behind him. A crowd of townsmen including the constable gathered to behold the rawly dark rifleball hole over the glazed left eye of one corpse and the other’s battered and misshapen head set in a jelled pool of blood and brainstuff and swarming with fat blue flies. The camp foreman had come along on horseback to verify Jack Little’s story of what happened. The Klassons had appeared at the camp on the previous morning and dismounted with rifles in hand and hailed for a man named Boggs. When the foreman stepped forth and said there was no such fellow amongst them one of the Klassons spotted Jack Little and threw up his rifle and fired and put a hole through the high crown of his hat. Woodcutters scattered for cover as the other man fired and missed too. Jack Little ran into the side shed where he kept his rifle charged and dry and grabbed it up and rushed back out and set himself and shot the first man dead as he was raising his gun to fire again. He ran to the second man who was almost finished reloading and cracked him across the face with the flat of his riflestock and knocked him down and then drove the buttplate into his skull a half-dozen crunching times to assure no further threat from him. The fray was done by the time the rest of the woodjacks came running in from the timber to see what the shooting was about.
He had never seen either man before in his life, Jack Little said, and he could offer no explanation for their attack. The constable scratched his chin and shrugged and for lack of warrant to do otherwise he ruled it a matter of self-defense. By right of the local law Jack Little had first claim to everything in the dead men’s outfits from horses to guns to saddlebag possibles. He kept the guns but sold the horses and the possibles for a tidy sum. And that was the end of it. In a tavern that evening everybody agreed that the Klassons had mistaken Jack Little for somebody else. “They surely did make a mistake,” one fellow said, speaking softly and looking about to make sure Jack Little wasn’t around before he added: “Even if they didn’t.” There was a chorus of ayes and laughter and much sage nodding of heads.
Eleven years passed. The only book in the house was a Bible left behind by the Reverend Gaines. The mother used it as a primer to teach the children to read and letter while they were still quite young and she saw to it that they kept those skills in practice. Daddyjack instructed the brothers in the ways of using tools from the time they were big enough to heft a hatchet. As soon as they were of a size to lift and aim a long gun he taught them to shoot his Kentucky flintlock named Roselips and the two caplock Hawkens he’d taken off the Klasson brothers. Both of the Hawkens had octagon barrels and double-set triggers and stained maple stocks with oval cheekpieces. One was a halfstock .54 caliber and the other a massive fullstock .66 caliber piece that weighed over fourteen pounds and which the brothers were thrilled to learn could blast a ball through a double plank of oak at two hundred yards. He taught them to measure out a charge quickly by pouring enough black powder to cover a rifle ball in the palm of their hand. They laughed at each other when the big gun’s recoil knocked them down. From their earliest years they were strong and rangy. Working an axe gave them long muscles like ropes. John was the taller, Edward the quicker, and both had wrists like pickhandle heads. Like their father they naturally inclined to violence and made easy practice of it. They regularly bloodied each other in fistfights sparked by sheer exuberance while Daddyjack looked on and lauded every punch landed. He taught them the proper way to drive a knee to the balls, how to apply an elbow to the teeth and a backfist to the throat. How to gouge out an eyeball. How to break a nose with a head butt and stomp on an instep and uncouple a knee with a kick.
When they began accompanying him into town to get supplies they discovered the yet greater joy of fighting somebody besides each other and before long even bigger and older boys trod lightly in their presence. One Saturday in town a sixteen-year-old tough fresh from North Carolina got into it with John in an alley. The other boy had the advantages of thirty pounds and three years in age and thumped John steadily in the first few minutes while the surrounding crowd of spectating boys cried out for blood. Then John’s persistent counterattacks began to tell. When he butted the other boy in the face and broke his nose the fellow’s eyes flooded with tearful panic and he pulled a claspknife and cut John across the chin. Edward jumped on him from behind and pulled him down and wrested the blade from him and slashed the boy’s fending arms and hands while John stove his ribs with one kick after another and the other boys yelled “Kill him! Kill him!” They might have done so if a big-shouldered storekeeper hadn’t come out wielding a shovel and sent the lot of them scattering. That night Daddyjack stitched up John’s chin and the next day showed them how to defend against a knife and how to fight with one.
“There’s always plenty a reason to fight in this world,” Daddyjack told them. “For damn sure to defend yourself and your own. Truth is, you can fight for any reason ye fancy. But heed me now: Whatever you fight about, be willin to die over it. That’s the trick of it, boys. If you’re ready to die and the other fellow’s not, you’ll whip his ass sure every time.”
“What if the other fella’s ready to die as you, Daddyjack?” John asked.
“Well now,” he said, showing his teeth, “that’s when the fur does fly and the fight gets interestin.”
The brothers grinned right back at him.
Through those eleven years Jack Little remained ignorant of his wife’s wanton past, but then one afternoon he was in the farrier’s shop repairing a grindstone mount when a passing drummer who was having his horse newly shod asked of the small assembly if any of them knew whatever had become of the little redheaded whore.
“You boys know the one, from back about ten year ago when I was last around here. She was hardly moren a baby chick but she used to do it in the woods and charged but half-a-dollar. Sweet thing would settle for two bits if twas all you had. Had the nicest titties and roundest little rump this side of New Orleans. What in thunder was her name?”
The men cast nervous glances to the rear of the shop where Jack Little had been overseeing the smith’s apprentice in straightening the grindstone’s axle and was now staring at the back of the drummer’s head. The smitty tried to warn the drummer with his eyes but the man was stroking his thin imperial and looking at his feet in an effort to recall the girl’s name. “Ah, yes,” he said, “Lily. Foolcrazy darlin Lil. Why, that girl had a way of—”
Jack Little was on him in a bound, clubbing him in the neck with the heel of his fist, punching him to the floor, kicking him in the face and ribs and crotch and he would have killed him sure if a handful of men had not wrestled him out of there and held him fast while the drummer was carried off to an inn where he would recover sufficiently over the next few days to manage the reins of his team and leave town forever. When the men let go of Jack Little he glared at them all but none would meet his eyes nor speak a word. He heaved the grindstone onto the wagon and giddapped the mule for home.
Edward and John were slopping the pigs when he drove the wagon into the stable and came out with a coil of rope and a rawhide quirt and dropped them at the base of an oak and stalked into the house, his face dark with rage. A moment later they heard their sister scream and he came out dragging their mother by the hair with one hand and fending off ten-year-old Maggie with the other. The woman was struggling like a roped cat and the girl kept trying to bite the hand that gripped her mother’s hair and Daddyjack swatted her off her feet. He dragged the woman to the tree and held her down with a knee on her chest and tied her wrists together with one end of the rope. The girl went at him again swinging both fists and he backhanded her once more and John rushed in and pinioned her in his arms and pulled her away and she was screaming, “Let her be! Let her be! Let her be!”
He lobbed the free end of the rope over a branch and caught it and jerked up the slack and then hoisted the woman a good two feet off the ground by her bound hands and made fast the end of the rope around the tree trunk. She kept trying to kick him as he grabbed her dress by the neckline and ripped it open and yanked it off her arms and tugged it down over her hips and off her legs, stripping her naked. She was turning slowly at the end of the rope as he snatched up the quirt and began whipping her with hard fast strokes.
She yelped with each strike of the quirt as it cut into her back and breasts and belly. She was quickly striped and streaked with blood from teats to thighs. John looked stricken but kept his tight hold on the girl and she was crying and screeching, “Stop it! Stop it!” And though Edward too was horrified, he felt something else at the same time, something attached to the horror and yet apart from it, something his twelve-year-old heart could not have named but which thrilled him to the bone even as his throat tightened with shame.
Daddyjack beat her for less than a minute and then flung away the quirt and embraced her about the hips and pressed his face between her breasts, sobbing and mixing his tears with her blood. Then he eased her down and untied her hands and massaged the circulation back into them and brushed the sweated hair out of her eyes as she lay still and watched him without word. He told Edward to fetch a cloth and a bucket of water and when he brought them Daddyjack helped the woman to her feet and gently swabbed the blood and dirt off her back and buttocks. Each time he touched a laceration she bit her lip and tears spilled down her face.
“Give me it,” the daughter said, holding her hand out for the cloth, and Daddyjack let her finish the cleaning as he supported the woman upright. The daughter made a thorough job of it, mopping even the blood that had trickled into her mother’s patch of private hair. The worst wound was at the left nipple which the quirt tip had torn loose and the only whimper the woman let was when the daughter dabbed the blood from it with the cloth.
Dadddyjack then cradled her up in his arms and carried her into the house and set her gently on the bed and covered her lower privates with a blanket. He had the girl bring him a threaded needle and ordered the boys to stop looking upon their mother’s nakedness and they reluctantly left the room. He gave the woman a folded cloth to bite on and then sewed the nipple back in place as best he could while the daughter held the lantern close for him. The boys listened intently at the door but never once heard her cry out. It was a successful but clumsy surgery and the woman would bear the ugly scar to her death. When Daddyjack was done she looked bloodless pale but her eyes were red as fires and she watched him looking on as the daughter gingerly applied grease to her wounds.
Once the woman had been tended, Daddyjack took the girl outside and led her and the boys to the creekbank and sat them down and explained that he’d whipped their mother because she had been a whore. “She dishonored me as much as herself,” Daddyjack told them, “and lied to me about it. Dishonored you too, all of you, since you got to live with the fact of being born of a woman who whored. What I did to her she’s had comin for a long time.”
“You ain’t God!” Maggie abruptly shouted, startling Edward and John who looked at her like she might have lost her mind.
Daddyjack pinned her with a glare. “Missy,” he said, “you ain’t never goin to be near big enough nor old enough to talk that way to me. I won’t shy from stretchin you on that tree if you don’t show proper respect.” The girl defiantly met his hard look as John sidled over and put a hand on her shoulder and she held her tongue. In recent months John had assumed an attitude of guardianship toward their sister that Edward found somewhat puzzling because Maggie had never given the least sign of wanting or appreciating anybody’s protection.
“I blame naught but my own foolishness for marryin her,” Daddyjack said. “I thought because she was so young and her uncle who raised her was a preacher she couldn’t be but pure. That was damnfool thinkin and I admit it, but just the same, that son of a bitch ought have told me she’d been a whore, and he ought not have lied about her being orphaned by the cholera, which I finally come to get the truth of from people who knew it, people from down in the lowland where she was born. Come to find out she was born tainted. Her momma was a crazywoman who murdered her husband and then drowned herself when your momma was just a babygirl. That’s right—that’s just exactly what they told me. I never did let on to your momma that I knew. Figured it didn’t much matter. Figured just because her momma was crazy didn’t mean she had to be.”
He paused to spit and to study the sky a moment.
“Now I know it does matter,” he said. “I believe your momma like as not has some of the same craziness her own momma had. I’m tellin you so you’ll know for a fact she ain’t a right woman. I reckon it’s something in the blood. It’s what made her be a whore and then lie to me about it and taint my honor and yours too.” He fixed Maggie with another look. “You ought to pray Jesus she ain’t passed that bad blood to you as well, missy, though it’s startin to look to me like she surely did.”
Maggie flushed and looked away.
“She’s still your momma, though,” he told them, “and she’s still my wife and that’s a fact and nothin’ll change it. Ye can pity her if you’ve a mind to, since she caint help what she is anymoren a rabid dog can do other than it does, but I say ye be wise never to believe a word from her mouth.”
He did not raise his hand to her again for the rest of the time they lived in Georgia, though every now and then he’d plunge into a drinking binge of two or three days during which he glowered at her a good deal while muttering to himself. For her part she refused to speak. During the following year she said not a word to anyone, although she carried on with her obligations as always, including her conjugal duties to Daddyjack. She communicated with the brothers through gestures and facial expressions, commanding their attention with a clap of her hands and directing them to their chores with a jut of her chin or a pointed finger, putting an end to their horseplay in the house with a hard-flung sopping washrag and a stern gaze. At first Edward was amused by her dedicated muteness but he soon tired of it and he sometimes wanted to shake her and demand she quit the silliness. He thought she might be every bit as crazy as Daddyjack had said.
Maggie required neither gestures nor broad looks to understand their mother. She seemed able to read her eyes, to know her thoughts without the need of speech. John was fascinated by the uncanny bond between the women. He remarked upon it to Daddyjack one day when they were hewing oak. Daddyjack said he had noticed it himself but was not impressed. “It’s lots of crazywomen old and young can shine with each other like that,” he said, “especially if they of the same blood. Like mother like daughter is what they say, and I believe it’s a true fact.”
If Daddyjack was bothered by his wife’s refusal to speak he did not let it show except sometimes late at night when Edward was awakened by the heaving and panting of their couplings and the ripe sweetsour scent of sex filled the small house. Daddyjack’s voice would be low and rough in the darkness, exhorting her: “Tell me, woman! Tell me how much you like it! Tell me, damn you!” His mother would moan softly and the bed would toss even more convulsively and moments later Daddyjack would issue an explosive breath and collapse upon her and they would lie there gasping loudly in the dark for a few moments before pulling apart into their separate silences.
Throughout their marriage Daddyjack and Lilith had regularly attended the Saturday night barn dances held all about the county, but after the whipping she would dance no more. Daddyjack said he was damned if they’d quit going to the shindigs just because she refused to kick up her heels. He continued to hitch up the team every Saturday evening and drive the family to the dances. He told his wife that as far as he was concerned she could sit on a bench against the back wall till her ass grew roots but he was going to have himself a time, by Jesus. And he always did, dancing with girls who’d heard the story of the Klassons from the time they were children and were both terrified and thrilled to be whirling in his arms as their fathers and brothers watched after them anxiously and hoped Jack Little would turn to someone else’s womenfolk for the next dance. His own daughter was now approaching an age and fairness of face and figure to draw attention, and she did love to dance, but it was clear to every man and boy in the place that her daddy kept a sharp eye on her even as he danced on the other side of the room and few were the young fellows brave enough to risk his ire by asking Maggie for a turn on the floor more than once of a Saturday night. Then came the night Rainey asked Lilith to dance and Daddyjack put a knife in his chest. Then came Florida.
They made their homestead in the deep timber, well off the main trace, on Cowdevil Creek near its junction with the Perdido River. The shadowing forest towered around them. They cleared a tract and built a two-room cabin and a stable. Lilith and Maggie planted a vegetable garden in a clearing that caught sun for part of every day. The mosquitoes were unremitting and the summer humidity made warm gel of the air and alligators ate the dogs in the first few weeks. Yet game was plentiful and they never lacked for fresh venison or wild pig and the creek was thick with catfish and bream and snapping turtle. They often spotted black bear lurking at the edge of the surrounding woods and they sometimes heard a panther shriek close by in the night. Huge owls on the hunt swooped past the house in the late evenings with a rush of wings like maladict spirits. They kept the stable and the henhouse bolted tight after dark. They hewed timber and trimmed it and sledded it to the creek and rafted it to the river where a logging contractor showed up on a steamboat every six weeks or so to buy it and float it downriver to sell to the lumber companies.
“It’s a good place we got here, boys,” Daddyjack said one evening when they all sat on the porch steps at sunset and he was mellow in his cups. Maggie sat in a chair with her feet up on the porch railing. “Ever man needs a place to call his own,” Daddyjack said. “You boys remember that. Without a place to call his own a man aint but a feather on the wind.”
But his drinking had now become dipsomaniac and his demons more frequently slipped their chains. In his sporadic besotted rages over the next three years he would accuse their mother of having coupled with that Rainey fool like a common yardcat, with him among others, from the time she was hardly more than a child. “The whole county probly knew about it, by damn! All these years they were laughin at me, laughin at Jack Little, the fool who married the whore! Probly still laughin!”
She endured his bitter tirades with a stonefaced silence that only stoked his fury, and, if he was drunk enough, he’d strike her. At such times John felt pulled between allegiance to Daddyjack and an impulse to protect their mother. But he could never bring himself to intervene. His sister would look at him with such accusation he felt cowardly. Edward warned him not to mix in their parents’ scraps and not to pay heed to Maggie, who was likely to be crazy as their mother.
“Crazy’s got nothin to do with it,” John argued. “She’s our mother, dammit! He ought not to hit her!”
“And she’s his wife,” Edward said. “It aint for us to push into it.”
At times now Daddyjack denounced their mother for her girlhood whoring even when he was fully sober. The hate that passed between his parents had become so rank Edward believed he could smell it like rotted fruit.
And yet they still mated. Not as often as before but more ferociously than ever, snarling like dogs over a bone, like they were set on drawing blood from each other. Edward knew John and Maggie heard them too, though they never spoke of it. His sister had lately become moody and increasingly reticent with her brothers and was even more closemouthed than usual following a night of their parents’ loud coupling. Her brooding troubled John but Edward simply shrugged at it, remembering Daddyjack’s admonition: “Like mother, like daughter.”
One early morning they woke to find Maggie gone. She’d slipped out in the night and saddled Daddyjack’s horse and made off as quiet as a secret thought. Daddyjack admired her nerve even though she’d taken his horse. “Wasn’t the least bit of moon out last night,” he said. “And I heard a painter yowlin in the south wood just before I blew out the lamp. Girl might be loony as a coot but she got more grit than many a man I could name.”
Then he saw the look on his wife’s face, saw she was pleased that the girl had absconded, and his good humor vanished and he cursed her for having raised a worthless thief of a daughter.
John wanted to go in search of her right away. It was his guess she had gone to Pensacola, the nearest town of size. Daddyjack agreed. “It’s the surest place she’ll find a whorehouse to work in,” he said, and gave his wife a spiteful look. He stroked his mustaches in thought for a moment before deciding to let the brothers go after her. “I don’t care if she comes back or not, but I want that horse. You catch sight of it you fetch it home, hear?”
A few minutes later they were mounted bareback on the bridled mules and ready to go. They each carried a small croker sack of food and a knife on his belt and each had three dollars in his pocket. “Don’t be long about it,” Daddyjack said. “If she’s there you ought find her right quick.”
“What if she’s hid out, Daddyjack?” John said. “I guess it’s lots of places she could hide in a town.”
“Don’t matter if she’s hid out or not,” Daddyjack said. “If she’s there you’ll find her. Blood always finds blood. If she went clear tother side of the damn world and you followed after you’d find her. Blood always finds blood. Now yall get goin.”
All show of pleasure had fled their mother’s face. She hugged herself tightly and regarded the brothers with a darkly fretful look that John was oblivious to in his distraction over Maggie and that Edward pointedly ignored, reasoning that if she wanted to say something she could damn well open her mouth and do it. “Let’s go,” he said, hupping the mule forward with his heels.
Pensacola was loud with celebration on the sultry afternoon the brothers rode into town. It was America’s Independence Day and the first Fourth of July for Florida since gaining statehood four months earlier. A brass band blatted in the main square and boys dropped firecrackers from the red-tiled Spanish rooftops onto the sand streets below and laughed to see how they frighted the animals. The brick sidewalks were thronged with uniformed soldiers and swarthy sailors, toothy Negro dockhands, straw-hatted farmers, burly timberjacks and sawyers, finely outfitted gentlemen escorting ladies in frill dresses shading themselves with lacy parasols. Jugs flowed freely and yapping dogs raced through the crowd.
“Whooee! They kickin they heels, aint they!” John said.
Edward grinned back at him. “I’d say we picked the right day to be here, son.”
On a high wooden platform a dark-suited man in white muttonchops orated about Florida’s glorious future while overhead fluttered the American flag and alongside it a flag striped in five bright colors emblazoned with the words “Let us alone.” A salt breeze blew off the bright harbor just a block beyond the square and rattled the palm fronds and the brothers hupped the mules to the foot of a long wooden pier. They dismounted and walked out onto the dock and stood looking at the cargo ships laying ready to receive lighters bearing lumber and cotton and naval stores. A flock of pelicans sailed past just a few feet over the water and a flurry of screeching seagulls hovered above the docks. When they first settled in Florida the brothers had sometimes smelled the sea when the wind came strong from the south but this was their first view of it. In contrast to the close and deepshadowed world of tall timber the vast blue expanse of ocean and sky made them lightheaded.
They hitched the mules in front of a tavern on the corner of the square, agreed to meet back there at dusk, and split up to conduct their search, Edward in the side streets and John in the square. As Edward wended his way through the crowds he fixed closely on every blonde woman he spotted. Then he rounded a backstreet corner and heard “Hey, handsome!” and looked up to see a pair of pretty girls, a freckled redhead and a dusky mulatto, grinning down at him from a wrought-iron balcony. They were in bright white underclothes and the sight of their legs in tight pantalettes and their breasts bulging over the tops of their corsets nearly staggered him. “Get on up here, you rascally-looking thing, you!” the redhead called, and both girls laughed and beckoned him and the redhead squeezed her breasts and blew him a kiss.
He went inside and a goateed man wearing a checkered vest and a pistol in his waistband told him he could have the girl of his choice for five dollars and he had a plentiful selection. He had a gold front tooth that glinted in the light. Edward said he didn’t have but three dollars and the man said all right then, since they weren’t too awful busy at the moment he could have a special rate of ten minutes for three dollars. Edward handed over his money and picked the redhead.
His first time had been the year before when he and John were hunting up along the Escambia and came upon a pair of women scooping mussels from the glassy river shallows and towing a dugout behind them on a bowline. The older was the mother of the younger and offered her daughter’s sex in exchange for the deer carcass they were carrying home on a shoulder pole. The brothers were quick to strike the bargain even though the girl was a softbrain with an drifting stare and a wet vacant smile. She was younger than their sister and her breasts were still only buds and she lay inert on the weedy bank while the brothers took their turns on her. They then gave their attention over to the woman who shied away and said no, not unless they added to the bargain. She had a thin white scar along one side of her face but was striking nonetheless and had full breasts under her worn wet shirt. Edward was about to offer his knife but John said they wouldn’t break her neck, how was that for adding to the bargain? The woman looked from one brother to the other and then told the girl to go sit in the dugout. She lay down on the grass and pulled up her skirts and John fell to her. After Edward had his turn they loaded the deer in the dugout and watched the women pole the boat around the riverbend and then slapped each other on the shoulder and laughed.
He went back out on the street with the sweetpowder taste of the redhead’s skin on his lips and her perfume on his hands and he was feeling very much a man of the world. He would have bought himself a cigar if he’d had any money left. He continued to search for Maggie until the evening vermilion sun glanced redly off the roof tiles and eased behind the palms and then the streets were in deep shadow and the first sidewalk lamps were being fired. He returned to the mules and found John already there and looking glum because he’d found no sign of their sister either. Edward told him about the whorehouse and the passel of pretties who worked there but John scowled and said they had come to find Maggie and not to look for a good time. Edward had anyway been cheated at a price of three dollars, John told him. Edward asked how he knew that and John said, “Hell, I guess everbody knows that but you.” John did not in fact know any such thing but he was angry because they had not found their sister and was in no mood to hear about Edward’s good time in a cathouse. Edward did not press the matter but the idea that he had been cheated was enraging.
They decided to eat supper before renewing the search and went into the tavern and ordered two platters of fried oysters, a loaf of bread, and a bucket of beer. After they’d cleaned their plates John ordered another bucket and when they finished it he suggested they try a taste of something with more bite and Edward said why not and they called for a round of whiskey. They raised glasses to each other and tossed the drinks down in a gulp. It was their first taste of spirits other than the vile stuff they sometimes bought from a downriver swamp rat named Douglas Scratchley and they expelled their breath slowly and grinned at each other. Edward said, “Well now, I guess I know why Daddyjack likes this so much.”
At the mention of Daddyjack, John’s mood darkened again. “He run her off, I’ll wager. I wouldn’t be surprised if she got to talkin smart at him and he hit her. She wouldn’t of stood for it if he did.”
Edward shrugged and said he wouldn’t mind if John treated them to another drink. John said he didn’t have enough money left to buy them even a smell of good whiskey. “If you hadn’t gone and got yourself cheated in that damn cathouse we’d right now have the means for another.”
The reminder rekindled Edward’s anger. “Did that picaroon truly cheat me?”
John allowed that he truly had. Edward said he’d be damned if he would stand for it and got to his feet so abruptly his chair teetered and nearly overturned. “I guess I’ll just go see that son of a bitch.” John said he guessed he’d go with him.
In the central square a different brass band was playing by torchlight for a large appreciative crowd and the sidewalks still teemed with roisterers of every stripe. The air felt heavy and cool. When they got to the brothel the place was doing livelier business than it had been doing that afternoon. A queue of patrons extended out onto the front walk, and through the open door Edward saw a different man now taking the patrons’ money and directing every man in turn up the stairway each time someone else came back down.
He stopped a man coming out the door and asked him what the rate was. The man smiled and said, “Two dollars, son, same as always.” He asked how much time with the girl that bought and the man laughed and winked at the grinning onlookers. “Why, just as much time as you need to empty your breech, boy, so long as you don’t make a damn courtship of it.”
“What’re ye thinkin to do, lad,” a man in the line called out, “sit and take tea with the lass, maybe, before ye get on with it?” Loud guffaws down the line.
Edward asked the first man if he knew a fellow with a checkered vest and chin whiskers and a gold front tooth and the man said, “Walton? He went to get some eats while I was still in line. He’ll be back by and by.”
The brothers went down the street and crossed over and came back without attracting attention and took up positions near the mouth of an alleyway and kept a lookout in both directions. They hadn’t been waiting ten minutes before they spotted the checkered vest heading toward them on their side of the street. John ambled to the edge of the sidewalk and spat into the street and busied himself brushing off his shirtfront. Just as Walton was about to cross over, Edward said, “Mister Walton, can I have a word with you, sir?”
When Walton paused to fix suspiciously on Edward in the dim light John grabbed him from behind in a tight bear hug and yanked him into the shadowed alleyway and Edward leaped forward and snatched the pistol from the whoreman’s waistband. Walton bucked and spun and lost his hat and crashed through broken crates and empty barrels, cursing and trying to shake John loose but John held to him like a hog dog. Edward grabbed Walton by the shirtfront and hit him in the face with the pistol barrel four fast times and Walton’s knees gave way and John let him fall and Edward joined him in kicking the whoreman in the head. The men across the street were all looking now and one of them yelled “Hey! What the devil there!” Edward quickly went through Walton’s pockets and dug out a handful of money. As some of the men started toward them the brothers raced away down the alley and around the corner and into the crowd milling in the square.
At the bar of the tavern they learned they had twenty-one dollars and they agreed it was sufficient compensation for the whoreman having cheated Edward. The barkeeper said, “What you boys do, strike it rich?” and laughed. Edward bought a bottle of bourbon and the brothers went out and mounted their mules and casually rode through the crowded square, not hupping the animals to a trot even when they spotted a handful of roughs from the cathouse shoving their way through the packed sidewalk. The men were studying faces and looking in the door of every public house they passed. Edward eased Walton’s pistol out of his belt and cocked it and held it close against his belly as the mule made its unhurried way through the clamorous street but none of the roughs caught sight of them and a minute later they were back on the north road for home.
“We should of stayed and looked some more,” John said. Darkness had given way to a hard blue dawnlight. They had ridden through the night and were deep in the pines, off the Escambia trace and well north of Pensacola and no longer concerned that they might have trackers behind them. “She might of been there. That many people, she could of been in there amongst them and we never saw.”
“She wasn’t there,” Edward said. “She’d been there we would of seen her. Listenin to the music, dancin, you know her. I’d say we looked that crowd up and down pretty good. Anyhow, we’d of stayed and we’d of sure had dealins with them boys from the cathouse.”
“I aint afraid of them.”
“Didn’t say you were and I aint either.”
“Then what do they matter?”
Neither said anything for a minute, then John said: “Could be she wasn’t outside. Could be she was inside somewhere. Workin maybe.”
“Doin what? I was in that cathouse, Johnny, I saw the kind of girls they have. She couldn’t of worked in one of them houses if she wanted, not till she gets bigger grown.”
“A lot you know about it,” John said, his face tight. “Been to one damn whorehouse in your life for ten minutes. I’ll have you know some of them places have girls younger than her. Anyhow, I didn’t mean she was bein no whore. It’s other sort of work she can do.”
“Hell, it wasn’t nobody but whores and barkeeps workin yesterday in all that celebratin. The plain and simple of it is she wasn’t there.”
“Then where in the hell is she?”
“Somewhere west, probly. Mobile maybe.”
John spat hard and said nothing more for a while. Then he said: “Daddyjack sees that bottle he’ll sure thank you for it and drink it all himself.”
Edward pulled the whiskey out of the croker sack and admired its color against the light. “Believe you’re right,” he said and uncorked the bottle and took a swallow and passed it over to his brother. They paced their drinks so that the bottle lasted them most of the remaining ride. They didn’t take the last drop of it until they were within ten miles of the homestead and they asked each other if they seemed drunk and told each other not so anybody’d notice and both of them laughed.
They smelled the smoke before they covered the last mile of the trace through the heavy trees and came out into the clearing and into the acrid haze lingering over the blackened remains of the house. Only the rock chimney and part of the back wall were still upright in the ashes. The stable stood untouched but the pigpen was open and the pigs were gone. The brothers slid down from the mules and stepped carefully through the ruins and kicked at the larger chunks of black-crisped wood. They studied the ashes closely and came on the stockless and warped remains of the Kentucky rifle and the smaller Hawken but found no trace of bodies. They looked at each other and John’s face was pale and strained but Edward felt only a strange excitement he couldn’t define. The slight whiskey buzz in his head had given way to an excited curiosity and a feeling that his life had already been altered more profoundly than he knew.
“Sons.”
Her voice was behind them and they turned to see their mother standing at the edge of the woods. John breathed “Damn” at the sight of her. Her face was bruised and one eye swollen purple and her hair was in disarray and the upper part of her dress was ripped. She spread her arms wide as if to receive them to her bosom and the torn dress parted to reveal one pale breast and its darkly scarred and twisted nipple.
“He killed her,” she said. Her eyes were whitely wide and seemed fixed on some horror in her mind. “He lay with her, yes, yes he did! He fouled his own daughter. He lay with her I say! And she told him she would tell, she said she would tell her brothers—tell you—and so he killed her and sank her in the creek for the gators and the gars to eat all up. He did! He did!”
Edward said, “What the hell, woman!” He was certain she was gone utterly mad. But John’s eyes were as wide and anguished as the woman’s and his fists quivered at his sides and Edward thought the look of him more frightful than the woman’s crazy words.
She slowly came forward with her arms out to them, speaking fast and breathlessly. “He told me so. After you went off. Told me and laughed and beat me and said he would kill me too and say I tried to murder him in his sleep. Tied me to the bed and beat me. Cut his ownself so he could show you how I tried to kill him. But I got loose. I run out and hid in the woods and waited and waited for you and he set the house afire and he tromped around in the woods huntin me and he … oh Jesus.”
Her gaze had gone to something behind them and her arms closed tightly over her breasts. They turned and saw Daddyjack limping out of the woods from the other side of the clearing and coming on with the big Hawken in his hand. The crotch of his trousers was stained red and he wasn’t looking at the brothers but only at the woman as he came now at a gimping trot and cursing her loudly for a hellish whore. The woman whimpered and began backstepping stiffly toward the trees. Daddyjack stopped short and threw up the Hawken and fired. The ball passed between the woman’s legs and belled back the skirt of her dress and pulled her down.
And now John was running at Daddyjack with his knife in his hand and howling and Edward ran after him calling for him to stop. Daddyjack watched them come and swung the Hawken by the stock neck and caught John on the shoulder with the barrel and knocked him to his hands and knees. His eyes were wild as he gripped the Hawken by the barrel with both hands and stepped up to John with the rifle raised high over his head like a club. Edward cried “NOOOOO!” and the pistol was in his outstretched hand and cocked and pointed and it cracked flatly in a small huff of smoke and the ball pierced Daddyjack’s left eye and exited behind his right ear in a bloody spray of brain and bone and he went sprawling onto his back with his arms flung wide and his teeth bared and his remaining eye wide and unbelieving.
The woman sat on the ground and stared at her sons as they gaped upon the body of Jack Little, her hands over her mouth, covering the smile so bright in her eyes.
They carried the body a half-mile into the timber and took turns digging a deep grave under a wide water oak overlooking the creek. The Hawken leaned against the tree trunk and its powderflask and ball pouch lay alongside. Edward searched Daddyjack’s pockets and found tobacco and a pipe and matches and a money pouch containing six dollars in paper currency and silver. And he found the razor-keen snaphandle knife with a tapered seven-inch blade that had killed Rainey up in Georgia those years ago. Scratched into the wide top part of the blade were the initials “H.B.” Edward folded the blade back into the haft and put the knife in his pocket.
The crotch of Daddyjack’s pants was sopped with thick dark blood but there was no rip in the cloth nor sign of a bullet hole and Edward’s curiosity would not be denied. He undid Daddyjack’s belt and began to tug down his pants.
“What are you doin?” John said. “Don’t do that!”
Edward tugged and grunted and got the pants past Daddyjack’s hips. His privates were wrapped in a bloodsoaked bandanna. Edward removed the covering and exposed a nearly severed phallus and a slashed scrotum from which one testicle was missing.
“Sweet Baby Jesus,” John said softly. Then said: “Damn it, pull up them britches! Oh, goddamn, pull em up!”
They gently eased the body into the grave and Edward dropped down in the hole and closed Daddyjack’s remaining eye and carefully placed his hat over his face and then climbed out and they shoveled the dirt over him. They worked without talking while a flock of crows squalled loudly in the high branches. When they got back to the ruins the sun was almost down to the treetops and their mother was gone with both mules.
They built a fire in front of the stable and got a hatful of eggs from the hen roost inside and boiled them for supper in a small blackened kettle they found in the ashes. Edward cleaned and loaded the Hawken. He recharged the pistol too but lacked a bullet of proper .44 caliber size and so packed it with a load of smooth gravel he’d scooped from the creekbank.
They were agreed to abandon the homestead. They neither one desired to remain on this burnt piece of ground that held their father’s accusing bones and the likely possibility of visits from agents of the local order. Daddyjack had often gone to the nearest villages for supplies and a bit of conviviality in the taverns and was the sort people did not forget, the sort they would surely begin to ask after in his prolonged absence.
They sat before the fire and stared into the wavering flames and listened to the hoots and croakings and splashes and the sudden beatings of wings in the surrounding night. The sky was thinly overcast, the moonlight ghostly pale. A heavy mist off the creek drifted in through the trees and made a yellow haze around the fire.
“The son of a bitch,” John said.
Edward glanced at him but said nothing.
“Listen,” John said, “I know the woman’s truly bout half-crazy, but it aint real hard for me to believe some of what she said. It aint real hard to believe he got good and drunk and all hotted up and got him a notion about Maggie. He was always lookin at her legs when she’d put them up on the porch rail the way she used to. You know good and well he did.”
Edward said nothing but he recalled that all of them had watched Maggie’s legs when she put them up like that and they’d all grinned whenever they caught each other looking.
“But kill her? I cant hardly believe that! Sweet Jesus, his own daughter. Bad enough he’d … you know, do it to her. But he couldn’t of killed her.” He spat into the fire and turned his face away. “Could he done that, Ward, you reckon?”
Edward did not look at him. “I don’t know.”
“God damn it,” John said softly. And then after a while said: “That was a hellacious good shot.”
Edward looked at him. “I never even aimed. Goddamn luck is what it was.” He grimaced and spat viciously. “Shit! Luck don’t hardly seem a fit word for it.”
“Does to me,” John said. “Luckiest thing ever to me.” He paused and dug in the dirt before him with a stick. “You didn’t have no choice about it. You know that.”
Edward shrugged.
“It was him or me.”
Edward stared at the flames.
“He was fixin to bash out my brains.”
Edward spat into the fire and said, “I guess.”
“Guess all you want but he was. You hadn’t shot him it would of been me you buried yonder.”
His voice was strained and Edward glanced at him and saw that his face was unnaturally pale in the firelight. They watched the fire slowly burn down. The darkness gathered closer.
“If you feelin sorry for it,” John said, “well, I know you only did it cause of me.”
Edward blew a hard breath. “You aint got to say anymore about it.”
“I know I don’t. I just wanted to say that.”
“All right, you said it.”
“All right then.”
Edward well knew that what was done was done and would never be undone, not by any power on this earth. No matter how much his brother might set himself at fault and no matter how much they might talk of it and no matter what he might do in the rest of his life, none of it would ever change the fact that he’d fired the ball that blew the brains out of their daddy’s head. It was a truth as unchangeable as his blood and bones and there wasn’t a thing to be done about it, not now or ever.
He was feeling something else as well, something he couldn’t put name to. Something to do with the way their mother had looked at them as they carried off Daddyjack’s body.
After a while they went into the stable and bunched some of the straw into beds and took off their boots and lay down. Neither spoke for a time and then Edward said, “What I cant believe is he cut hisself like that. Not like that.”
“I believe he went crazy,” John said. “He was always sayin how momma and Maggie was crazy, but it could be he got craziern either a them ever was.”
“You’d have to be awful goddamn crazy to cut your ownself like that.”
“Could be he was.”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
They lay without speaking but neither fell asleep. John said: “I wonder where all she’s headed?”
Edward thought about that a minute. “Hell, I’d say.”
John leaned away from the straw and spat. “Well then,” he said, “I guess it’s a damn good chance we be seein her again, aint it?”
And now in the first gray light of dawn Edward carved intently with the snaphandle knife on the stump beside the stable. He finished just as the sky began to redden and John rose from a fitful night’s sleep. They rolled their blankets and tied them tightly and hung them across their backs like arrow quivers and they put the rest of the eggs in a croker sack. Armed with the Hawken and the pistol and their knives they set out for the western trace. John paused at the treeline and took a rearward look at the burnt house. But Edward did not look back. He was sixteen years old and restless in his blood and he had carved his farewell into the stump alongside the stable: “G.T.T.” Gone to Texas.