Now that Lavelle no longer had Emmeline’s letters, he was in trouble. They had been his passport through the South.
With them in hand, to all intents and purposes he was a Confederate soldier, charged with the task of bearing sad news of a comrade to a grieving sweetheart. A man of serviceable age without such evidence, if accosted, would be classed either a deserter or a spy.
Emmeline had left him only the Love Elegies, a small parcel of food and some Confederate money to see him by. The girl had taken it upon herself to free him but not with the blessing of the plantation’s mistress. He would, therefore, be pursued. Not just by Bayard Clinch and his hound but by any Confederate party which might call at Le Petit Versailles seeking provisions. In light of this probability, he decided he would keep to the swamps until well clear of the plantations.
The swamps of Louisiana, Lavelle soon discovered were a place unto themselves. There was more swamp than Louisiana, it seemed, and they looked different and sounded different from anything he had ever previously experienced. Hoots and trills and cackling calls of every description, mixed with squawks and screeches and spiralling sweet-song.
Then the silences. Oppressive and so heavy they pounded the eardrums. The waiting-silences, as Lavelle thought of them. Swamplife waiting to dart or to dive, or to swallow or snatch a smaller inhabitant.
Then the whole cacophony of sound would start up again … in celebration of life … or death. Lavelle, in the middle of it all, didn’t know which.
He heard nothing. The thump of the body against his own caught him completely unawares. Knocking him face down, breathless, on the mud bank. Then, strong thighs were astride him, a ham of a hand gripping the hasp of his neck, bruising his face into the mud. The heel of the ham-hand then squashed him further down, for emphasis.
‘I shuh don’t want kill you.’
A runaway.
‘I’m a Yankee – on the run too!’ Lavelle managed to get out. The grip loosened for a second. Then tightened again.
‘Don’ trus’ no white folk fo’ nuthin’!’
‘Listen!’ Lavelle squeezed out, the vice-like grip even further mashing his face downwards. ‘Why would I be out here if I wasn’t on the run?’
The grip again loosened. Lavelle turned his face upwards, recognising the runaway. It was the burly house-slave, who had first ushered him into the presence of the Labiches. Behind him, in the shelter of a tree, stood Cupid, the girl who had brought him food. Lavelle looked from one to the other. The two looked at each other. The girl spoke, keeping her eyes averted, telling him that she and ‘Easy Money’, as she called her companion, had been planning to get him out of Versailles. Instead, finding him gone, had decided it was a good thing because ‘Clinch an’ his dog’d be huntin’ you … an’ pay no ’tenshun to us!’
Easy Money let Lavelle go. He got up and dusted himself down.
‘So that was it! You were going to free me as a distraction – bait for the dog – while you two made off?’
He laughed at the two of them, now sheepish before him. ‘Well, now – you’ve made a right dog’s dinner of it because that hound is going to come high-tailing it right here after me and eat your black hides,’ he said loudly at them and set off on his way. He hadn’t gone ten paces when they were behind him. He stopped and turned. Cupid confronted him, telling him she and Easy Money were going to Virginia too, to join Lincoln’s men. ‘So Mistah Yankee – you go your way to Virginny an’ we go ours … but they’s both the same way!’ and she stood, saucy as you like, challenging him to defy her.
What would they be like, Lavelle thought, when millions of them got free? There’d be no gainsaying them then. He shrugged, turned and trekked off again, them jabbering at each other and plashing through the water behind him.
‘Join with Lincoln’s men, be damned!’ he said to himself.
That night, as they made shelter they heard it. In the distance – maybe a mile away. High above all the other sounds. High and lonesome and calling them. The blood-baying cry of Beauty.
The effect was to halt all movement, muffle all sound.
‘It’s the dog!’ Easy Money said, in a kind of awed reverence. ‘May the Good Lord save us this night.’
Much and all as they had tramped through miles of water to shake off pursuit, it had been to no avail. Bayard Clinch and his Beauty seemed to have a line to them like a homing arrow. They’d never out-smart nor out-run the beast.
Neither Easy Money nor the girl had a weapon. Likewise Lavelle. Before leaving the Sugar House he had searched for something that might suffice as a makeshift weapon. All he had found was a slender steel rod of about two feet long, broken off from what looked like a large ladling spoon. He had grabbed it, hoping that, at worst, it might help him spear a sluggish swamp fish or a scuttling, soft-shelled crab. Now, it was all that lay between them and a return to captivity. Or worse.
First, Easy Money secured a short and jagged stump of cypress branch. The length of cord that circled Cupid’s shift at the waist became the tie that bound Lavelle’s steel rod and the wood together into a makeshift spear.
The thrashing sound of man and dog came closer.
Easy Money and Cupid lay flat on the ground. Lavelle covered them with branches already gathered. They were safer there than up a tree, where if the dog found them they would be trapped – and Catahoulas could climb. At least on the ground, if Lavelle killed the dog or … He shuddered at the alternative, even distracted it, they had some chance of escape. Some.
Lavelle moved off a distance, staying in the open. For the plan to work the dog had to see him as well as scent him. With eyes like that, Lavelle was sure the dog had darkness vision.
Then came the night-renting howl, silencing all else.
Lavelle held his stance, shouted and then started to run. From somewhere behind he heard the yell of the stalker, ‘That’s him! Go get him, Beauty!’
Lavelle ran as fast as heaven and earth would allow, away from where the two petrified slaves hid. The baying had stopped. He could not hear the great Spanish war-dog. Now he would have to rely on instinct to do what he must do. Then, from behind, he heard the splashing sound, the spring-bound haunches and great striding forelegs scarcely touching land or water in their eagerness to get to him.
Lavelle, his fleeing back to the dog, felt fatally exposed. His every instinct was to stop, turn and face his destroyer. But he needed the dog to be hurtling forward, in full flight, when it attacked. Now, it seemed as if the very earth beneath Lavelle’s feet trembled with the bounding mass of muscle and bone in his wake. He prayed he wouldn’t stumble, fall flat on his face, the dog land on his back, tear out his neck.
Lavelle listened, trying to sense the moment. The silence that would signal the second when the dog would leave the swamp in one mighty bound; sail above the ground towards him like some flying hell-hound.
Then at once everything seemed to stop – the noise, the pounding paws. The swamp silence descended. The killing moment had arrived.
Clear as the knell of death, Lavelle heard it. The low purr in the throat. The sound he had heard the day Clinch had let the brute slather all over him.
He stopped. Turned. Dropped to one knee and rammed the spear-base into the soft underbelly of the swamp, its point at a forward angle. At the same moment the dark and speckled cloud in the air hurtled towards him. Would the makeshift spear hold?
For an instant Lavelle thought he had mis-timed his turn, that the sheer savagery of the dog’s killing leap would cause it to overshoot his timid spear.
Then, as if his whole body had been hit by a twenty-six-pound ball at close range, Lavelle was bowled backwards, the cypress branch ramming against his groin, the agony causing him to lose his grip of it. He landed on his back, the dog half over his face, its hind legs clawing for purchase, the stench of its smell overpowering. Then the sound that rose out from its belly, suffocating him. Going down his throat into his own body, hideously howling within him.
He had sprung the trap, impaled the beast. But it was far from dead.
Lavelle struggled to get out from under the dog and onto his feet.
But as he did, so did Beauty.
The steel rod had pierced the animal through so that either end protruded, the beast’s chest and back both bleeding profusely. Undeterred, the Catahoula immediately came at him, the object of its hate, as if nothing else – not even its own existence – mattered. In vain Lavelle tried to fight it off but its strength sent him backwards, off the mudbank and into the green-slimed water.
He went under the water, the weight of the dog submerging him, its face eerily lit above his. Eyes blazing at him through the gurgling water, jaws opening in slow swirling motions trying to get at him.
Lavelle’s own mouth and nose were suffused with swamp slime. He couldn’t move the dog and he couldn’t breathe. As he struggled for air it seemed the watery haze now forming in his head would drown him. The giant jaws would be denied their purpose as nature had intended – that of tearing him limb from limb. Instead his lungs would fill with comforting, green, swamp water.
It all seemed absurdly comic.
Images swam before him – the dead Patrick … radiant … borne up on angel’s wings; Ellen … laughing … mouth wide open … head back … nostrils flared; Stephen, his rifle pointed at Lavelle – and then the shot. Oh, Christ, he felt the shot!
Then the girl was pulling him from the water.
‘C’mon Yankee, don’ die on us two niggers yet!’ And she was laughing at him, their ‘saviour’, Clinch’s gun on the bank beside her.
Lavelle turned, looking for the dog. It was on its back beneath the water, paws at half-mast, the great gaping hole of the shotgun blast in its side. He peered down closer just to make sure. Thought he saw the ice-blue light fade, finally flicker and leave the great hound’s eyes – like burnt out coals – empty of all fire.
‘The dog wuz only actin’ nat’rilly,’ Cupid said, still laughing at him.