‘He shot him fair and square and received a wound in return.’
‘Petrie?’ said the colonel. ‘You bring me to my business. It’s Zach Petrie leads these nightriders, cousin to that late dastard Tach Petrie you mention. Aurelius Littlefair his goddamned lieutenant. And they have nigh on fifty riders. Why don’t they come in from the woods? Because they have a hundred dark crimes on their heads. Murders, hangings, and ravishments. Ravishments beyond belief. The cold bare cruelty of it. Mr Cole, you may be familiar with the emperor Aurelius?’
‘No, sir,’ I said.
‘A great philosopher of Ancient Rome. Aurelius Littlefair is no goddamned philosopher. He is a cold cruel man. Zach Petrie he be a tumultuous bear. A tumultuous bear. His claws are bared, and he desires, he desires to stir them in blood. But he ain’t so black as Littlefair.’
‘Colonel,’ said the lawyer Briscoe, ‘you reckon these men might be responsible for the attack on Tennyson Bouguereau?’
‘I know they are. Sheriff Flynn was able to capture one of his boys, called Wynkle King. He was found drunk in Zollicoffer’s saloon. Sheriff Flynn brought him to me. King told me everything and denied it in the morning. Too goddamned late.’
Wynkle King was another one of Jas Jonski’s go-about best buddies. He had stuck in my memory because Jas Jonski had said his friend had a bladder ruined by moonshine – had to piss every thirty minutes – one of Jas Jonski’s ‘riotous good stories’.
‘And why, Colonel, did they beat that poor man?’ said the lawyer Briscoe.
‘Because Bouguereau was once a slave, that all. No more nor less. A black man alone in the twilight and out of the dark trees they swoop. Hunting prey. The Petries had forty slaves to work their place – lost them all to freedom – vain transitory splendours. That’s Goldsmith, Mr Cole.’
I was thinking he mightn’t have the whole story there but his very tremendousness seemed to forbid me saying anything.
‘That a cruel reason to nigh ruin a man,’ said the lawyer Briscoe.
‘Cruel reasons rule these times,’ said the colonel, with a flourish of his dank and matted hair. ‘Looking into these matters be bread-and-butter work for Sheriff Flynn. As usual as sunlight.’ He had taken off his elegant hat about two speeches back and now bestrewed himself on his chair like a suit of old clothes thrown carelessly there. He had his right hand gripped on the handle of his sword, still scabbarded and splendid with its lupin-blue enamel.
‘Sheriff Flynn’s a good man despite his troubles,’ said the lawyer Briscoe. ‘Because of his troubles, maybe.’
I wanted to ask what troubles, but I didn’t, and nor did the colonel. Maybe he knew already. Anyway he wasn’t thinking of Sheriff Flynn and his troubles in that moment.
CHAPTER NINE
‘They been hanging men, you know, along the five roads,’ went on the colonel very quietly. It was eerie to hear him in the darkened room. ‘Yes sir, the five roads that lead in and out of Paris have all seen their work. If you were a Negro, Briscoe, I would say, Walk thou not alone. Or even you, Mr Cole. For Petrie’s men will take you and without a Christian thought beat you down and fit you for a rope. That a fact.’
‘There are folk in Paris who don’t think that’s wicked,’ said the lawyer Briscoe.
‘There are people in Paris who don’t, that’s true,’ said the colonel contemplatively. ‘So we must proceed all to the letter of the law. Law shifts about these days too.’
Then we were almost content to have a long silence. I could nearly hear the creaking of the ropes and see the hung faces. We had seen men hung like that ourselves, I remembered, on the long journey down from Michigan. I remembered that. Thomas and John believed I was asleep but I saw it. And I thought of the soft breast of Rosalee and what a monumental soul she was. I hoped it did not disgrace a boy that I cried quiet tears in the twilight but how could I do otherwise? I was lower than Rosalee but to me she was higher than any mere God. She was the only creature who had kissed me on the lips and I thought she was the carrier of the mercy of angels.
Then there was the solemn question of what Colonel Purton was going to do about things. It was such a maze of death and difficulty. In a certain way, he said, with equal solemnity, he understood the likes of Zach Petrie. Old rebels like him could vote again now in their own country but they had grown used to havoc and slaughter. Petrie had a violent sense of a man who was wronged, and he was cradling that to his chest evermore, said the colonel. The lawyer Briscoe silently agreed. I could sense in all they said the danger, the sorrow. As a child of sorrow I could hear the under-songs in what they spoke of. The fall of things that had been precious, the rise of trouble and the taking away of joys. It was one of those strange times when I understood the whiteman better. That in his own sphere of suffering he was not unlike myself, though he might scream at me for saying so. He had no good word for Aurelius Littlefair, who he said again was a bandit of the blackest heart. Wynkle King half said and half didn’t say, avowed the colonel, that it was Aurelius Littlefair struck down Tennyson with a billhook with an intent not just to kill but to cut off his head. But Zach Petrie had a different fame. You could hear in the colonel’s voice a grudging respect. And I remembered the curious care that Thomas McNulty had given the grave of his brother Tach, dug after all not twenty feet from Lige’s cabin. An adversary of the most atrocious sort, and yet … As for a boy like Wynkle King, he was only a drunkard with a drunkard’s tongue and a dicky bladder.
But Zach Petrie had lost a whole world.
In Tennessee, said the colonel, there were thousands of aggrieved souls like Zach Petrie. Men so disgruntled by the war they couldn’t breathe the air of peace, it choked them. And were such that no new times could please them, no matter how close they came to what they had fought for.
‘You let them make an army of themselves again, what we have so far will be only to have sown the wind,’ said the colonel. ‘We will reap the whirlwind.’
‘And the city shall be taken, and the houses rifled, and the women ravished,’ said the lawyer Briscoe. ‘Zechariah, 14:2.’
‘Zach Petrie, 1874,’ said Colonel Purton.
The lawyer Briscoe laughed, but there was a faltering beat to the laughter. He replenished the colonel’s glass as if in tribute to his wit nonetheless. The colonel acknowledged the gesture by raising the glass to us both. The purple face, the ruptured lip. Then they seemed more content with silence. But creatures who know each other may be very talkingly silent.
‘Sir, may I ask, what will you do?’ I said.
‘We must ride against him,’ said the colonel. ‘I’ll lead my men down here at daybreak.’
‘Do we have the laws to do that?’ said the lawyer Briscoe.
‘I’ll bring the papers required,’ said the colonel.
‘May the Lord protect us,’ said the lawyer Briscoe.
*
That night I was in sore need of Rosalee’s closeness. I felt battered by the colonel’s elegant talk. I felt small and lightless. What was my injury beside this teeming history? And yet lying with Rosalee, as slowly the heat of her body leaked into me, I returned to a sense of myself. An injury to one soul might be of small account in the great and endless flower-chain of human injuries. But was not the law designed to peer at each, one by one, and give everything equal weight betimes? This I had learned from the lawyer Briscoe. It seemed to be a curing truth. Rosalee was curled about my back, I was pressed into the C she made of her body, and made another close-written C in the darkness. Our coverings were scant and threadbare. Her breast was so warm it felt like wings on my back.
*
Thomas McNulty, John Cole, and Lige Magan had risen and gone out to their labours as the owls were going to bed and the farm was still in its clothes of darkness and silence. How lonesome the things in the parlour looked without its people. The rough old table, the antlers holding the battered hats, the picture of Polk on the wall. Lige Magan had set himself to put in four acres of corn, just, he said, ‘to jum
p the muscles another way’. I had not seen them the night before either. I had looked for them but they had long since crept to their rest. Planting corn was a hammer to wakefulness.
And there was a great caution in me against speaking to them. If I had seen them I would have been obliged to speak, for the sake of honesty. It was the easily torn spider’s web of what we were that gave me disquiet. Old soldiers of the Union army but also a deserter and a freedman. I didn’t want them torn from their farm on my account.
But my foolish thought or the thought I had considered foolish – to do something about things myself – had planted itself. It gave me strength to notice strength in myself. Like a small slim lucifer gives fire to greater fire.
A Tennessee mule is not a small creature. I was happy when Tennyson Bouguereau appeared in the gloom of the stable-house and helped me saddle up. Great heaving and grunting but never a word. I told him where I was hoping to go that day, and I explained to him why. I told him everything that the colonel had said and Tennyson gave every sign of understanding for he stood there amazed at my words. Just as I might have declared, in cold judgement of the world I knew, he didn’t believe any Christian alive thought it was wrong to hurt him. That no court, no lawyer, and no lawman would think it was so. And yet he was hearing my speech.
He might be having trouble making sounds but he wasn’t having the least trouble hearing them.
He turned out a stirrup for me and I stood in near. I was so close to him that I smelled the hyacinth on his skin. He smiled at me with his barn-wide smile. I knew he didn’t think I was a cur of an Indian, not at all. He knew what I was. He knew what we were. Proper souls just waiting on some never-coming dawn-light, some sort of soul anyhow.
I hoiked up my foot and lodged it in the stirrup. He got his shoulder under my backside. Just before he performed that kindness, he gripped my free hand and didn’t shake it but veritably squeezed it.
Now I could believe myself to be on righteous duty in the service of Tennyson Bouguereau, if also secretly myself. He hoisted me into the saddle. Then in dumb show he bid me wait while he went to fetch something. All this in sign language like Indians themselves sometimes do.
He was back in a trice and strapped an old holster to the mule and shoved in his Spencer rifle. He lashed on a square of ripped burlap to hide it.
He was a handsome, tidy man. An emperor. What was that good man’s name that the colonel had mentioned? He was an Aurelius.
It was that time of morning I guess when folks liked to stir along the road. Serving girls going into town with baskets, some barefoot and some in dusty shoes. The dawn had brought the quiet trees forth in their black garb. And farmers I half knew drawing great carts of things, bushels fastened with twisted straws, baskets frothing green with the spring harvest. A high long tobacco cart, carrying other freight the while, thundered by. It had been a courtesy to greet everyone you passed in former days, even for an Indian person. But not in those days. The fulgent sunlight belied the frosty eyes that glanced at me. Little groups of Negroes passed along, whether local workers or wanderers I couldn’t know. It was as if every heart was dumbstruck. I kicked along my mule, glad of the rifle slugging in its holster. The burlap had slipped sideways and the sunlight flashed off the breechblock, as if to say, be wary, be watchful of this rider.
*
The lawyer Briscoe’s yards teemed with horses and mules. A bubbling stew of necks and tossing heads. Colonel Purton and his lieutenants were shouting orders and I could hear them from back along the road. The militia were like a big haberdashery of blue cloth, just like real Union soldiers, but sometimes a jaunty hat flew about like a fancy bird. Mostly young men, with a hungry look to them. The lawyer Briscoe was on his front stoop, taking papers from the colonel, and writing away at other papers lying before him. It looked like they were going to have everything trim to the law, in best lawyer Briscoe fashion. I felt slight and thin in my clothes but Tennyson’s rifle gave me at least a sense of extra bulk.
I lopped my reins at a spare pole and walked up to the stoop as casually as I could. Just to look like I was arriving to work. Now I could see that on some of the papers were lists of names, no doubt the roll call of the gathered boys.
‘I am supposing, Colonel, we still under the shelter of the Calling Forth Act as regards this militia.’
‘Damned if I know,’ said the colonel, ‘anyhow, we called forth, and that a fact.’
‘We have seventeen hangings petitioned against Petrie’s men and we have so many burnings and killings and we have one of his own men in drunkenness attesting to the most brutal and foul assault on Mr Tennyson Bouguereau, freedman of this county.’
‘That the cent makes a dollar of this,’ said the colonel. ‘I ain’t got no qualms, we ride forth because we called forth by law and justice. I have countersigned that order of the town commissioners and they got that paper from goddamned state legislature or some other gaggle of geese. What more can civilisation do for us?’
‘Nothing,’ said the lawyer Briscoe. And he signed off his last paper with a flourish. I knew that among his many weighty titles he was commissioner for the railroad and I supposed he was some other mighty thing for the militia too. No kindness and no cruelty in white-eye America was ever done without a piece of paper somewhere tipped in. Even an Indian girl like me bobbed up to look like a clean-faced boy knew that. All my people had been killed clean to the letter of the law, I did not doubt. Not our law, but our law was just words on the wind.
‘I got a lieutenant here knows the exact spot where they gathered,’ said the colonel. I was noticing that any letter of the alphabet that needed his tongue to touch the top of his mouth gave off little explosions. ‘Where a little creek called Beasley enters the West Sandy Creek. Well, we got a three-hour ride so we best be riding.’
And he swung away with his thin face and his scarecrow body and even by just stirring seemed to gather his men to themselves so that somehow out of a moiling mess of mounted riders he pulled them into a perfect column two deep on the narrow road. I stood by the lawyer Briscoe’s watching head. He was tapping the table with his pen. It had done its work and the work he could do in this enterprise. And I counted them going out his gate and got to all of two hundred. I remembered the colonel saying that Petrie had fifty followers so maybe that would make a great ruinous flood of men against him.
The lawyer Briscoe was a wise old man. He didn’t even look round at me.
‘You coming now to work?’ he said. ‘I think you ain’t.’
‘I have a little business over by Beasley Creek,’ I said.
‘I think you do,’ said the lawyer Briscoe.
*
My mule was pulling the reins and fretting on his tether because the yards had emptied of his kind and he was anxious to follow. So was I, though not a man among them was my kind, that was true. Anyhow I trotted out onto the Huntingdon road and followed the long column at a distance of two, three hundred yards. A long way back so the outriders wouldn’t pay me heed.
Who was that small person seeking justice? I cannot say. As I trotted along I told myself over and over the legend of my mother’s courage. But was this an instance of courage in me, or reckless folly?
The column streamed eastward. A high cold sky was speckled with stray blues and greys like a bird’s egg. But a reluctant sunlight was trying to measure the height of the sky with long thin veins. I supposed I could measure it in feet and yards myself if I had a ladder high enough. But what was it to know such things? Was the sum of what my mother said not of more use to me? That if I persisted, if I went on far enough, in good faith, I would reach her again alive. I would reach my sister, and my aunts, I would find all the medicine of my people’s love, all the to-and-fro and majesty of their lives.
I rode along less fearful than I might have been. I was thinking. If Jas Jonski was the heart of it, this was just so many miles off that centre. My quest to avenge myself had leaped a wall into that further place that contained
the justice of Tennyson. I thought I could work my way back too if I had to. I thought I could attend to this, as the lawyer Briscoe might say, and then leap the boundary again on a lithesome pony of thought.
And do so not because it was blind folly but because my mother had shown me how to shuck off fear and have the courage of a thousand moons.
CHAPTER TEN
Maybe some of those militia boys had Indian grandmothers too because they took to the tracks that bordered farms and then picked their way through the wooden hills by trails so faint I thought only an Indian could see them. Now the column had lengthened by a measure of two as they settled into single file. I had all the secrecy of the first budding trees now. I could follow the chink-chank of the militia’s progress and all the other small sounds of metal and horses. Not too much Indian about that cacophony but it might have served for the likes of Zach Petrie’s men, with all the strange deafness of whitemen. Young birds sparkled up out of the underbrush. You could sense the ten thousand eyes of animals that must have noted our passing through easily enough. Noted and kept back, kept quiet. The trees were not so high hereabouts, they looked like things that had grown back after old clearances. The farms themselves looked strange and dirty, though all good land I knew, and even all these years after the war there were stretches of it with the memory of blackening and levelling as old revengeful rebels had gone through. Jesse James himself the famous robber had been through all this country with Quantrill, just as Parkman said. Fences were still down in many places and the cabins themselves black as the throats of chimneys. Even ten years after the war. Maybe each burned farm was a Union soul, and each let thrive a Confederate. If there were crops set in it was corn and tobacco mostly. Just like out on the big roads, few figures in the fields waved a greeting. Some did. That nice lazy hat-waving of Tennessee farmers. I was seeing all this from my allotted distance. Most often the trees were scraggy though they hid the militia from view. Suddenly I would see them, pushing on. Soldiers going to a fight have a special air. It’s not their usual covering of distances. I remembered my uncle’s men leaping onto their horses and going away from the camp just like that. Sort of sombre and gay at the same time. Expectant and maybe frightened, a little. I thought, how strange and good that my astonishing mother had gone with them, now and then. To raid or rattle an enemy. To take horses, to take women too. To kill with a fierce and honest hunger. To persist, to last, out there on the plains.
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