Natchez

by Paul Lederer

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Greene House was a faded, reddish clapboard home set back among a stand of mature pecan trees. Sunset flushed the grass and foliage, a subtle orange glinting off the windows.

  Dr. Greene led the way into the yard, scattering white chickens as the surrey, driven by Big Joseph, rolled to a stop before the sagging porch.

  Montak guided the wagon into the yard, through the opening in a split rail fence. Ray sat beside him in the box. Spectros was inside the wagon with Inkada, Kesey trailed behind, uncertain of his welcome, riding a big blue roan, leading two other horses, part mustang, his sole possessions.

  As Montak reined up, foot evenly pressuring the brake, Ray saw or thought he did a shadow appear briefly in a window upstairs beneath the gable. A girl? A slight figure, yet he could not be sure. The window itself reflected the blue and orange patterns of late evening.

  Ray stepped down, dusting his clothing with his hat as Montak unhitched the lead bay. Ray glanced again at the window, then helped Montak, sure hands unhitching the weary horses.

  Kesey sat at a distance, smoking, sitting his horse casually, knee hooked around the pommel of his saddle. He could not himself say why he was still with the others. He had been a gunfighter, a buffalo hunter, a drinker, and gambler. He had helped stick up a bank in Kansas, fought Comanches, drifted thousands of miles, all totalled behind stinking, dust raising cows. Perhaps it was the horse. Untied by Montak, the fiery black stallion reared and pranced, then settled as if he had only been stretching his muscles. The stallion seemed to be looking for someone. Kid Soledad?

  Where was the big man, Kesey wondered? That was his horse, Featherskill had assured him. Yet no one had mentioned Soledad. Curiosity. Yet curiosity, Kesey knew, can kill a man as well as a cat.

  Greene went to the back of the wagon as Kesey watched. The door opened and Spectros appeared, hobbling on a cane. The tall, narrow-faced dark man appeared next in the doorway. Kesey caught a glimpse of the wagon’s interior. Odd, it was, with furs and hangings, copper utensils and rows of glass bottles filled with who knew what.

  Kesey slowly swung down from his horse, loosening the cinches on his rimfire saddle. Slowly he collected his remuda and led the three ponies to the dilapidated barn where Featherskill and the giant were rubbing down the bays. The big black was nibbling at some oat hay, but its head came up as Kesey entered the dark, musty barn.

  “Howdy, Will,” Featherskill nodded.

  “Ray.”

  The giant looked around and smiled. He was digging a stone from the off of the lead bay. Kesey set sullenly to work, rubbing down his own horses.

  “I guess we’d better wash up and go up to the house, Montak,” Ray said after a time. He put up the curry comb, leaned the hay fork back against the wall and looked at Kesey. “Will?”

  “I guess I’ll stay out here, Ray.”

  “Why? Not hungry?”

  “It don’t feel right,” Kesey said. The man was silent for a moment, leaning against the partition. “Nobody invited me along, Ray. A man don’t travel where he’s not wanted. That Joseph, he figured me right. I’m not fit for this company.”

  “You’re fit,” Ray said mildly. “A man’s fit to go where he wants, as long as he acts straight. Nobody here cares about what you’ve done before. We all grow, Will. Me, I’ve seen my times of trouble. Careless youth. Spectros—all of us—we don’t give it a thought. You’re as good a man as any that walked the earth. If you want to be. It’s all in how a man grows, how he comes to see himself, admits he was wrong.”

  “I just ain’t comfortable, Ray. I appreciate what you’re tryin’ to do. But I been down, man. I been dirty.”

  “Not with me. Not with these folks. Spectros, he used to tell me, every day a man is born fresh. It’s the way he gets to his feet that morning, the path he walks that day. And I believed it. I still do.”

  Kesey stood watching silently as Montak and Featherskill rolled up their sleeves and washed under the pump. Slowly he walked forward, rolling his own sleeves up. He washed beside them, slicking back his hair with the icy water.

  “Let’s see what kind of grub these Southern folks fix,” he said with a grin.

  A large table was set for them. Greene sat at the head, Spectros next to him. The meal was not fancy, sweet potatoes and ham with greens, but there was enough.

  The girl served them.

  Quiet, flitting around the room like a lost bird looking for an open window.

  “My daughter, Berta, gentlemen,” Dr. Greene said. Ray and Kesey stood and nodded. The girl flushed at the mention of her name, at having attention directed to her.

  After a moment Berta was through serving and she vanished into the kitchen to remove her apron. When she reappeared she sat next to Kesey who drew back her chair uncertainly then woodenly sat himself.

  “Eat, gentlemen,” Dr. Greene said with a smile. He saw the general nervousness and would have none of it. “Country manners, Montak. Eat and enjoy it, laughing allowed.”

  Montak went to the meal with a healthy appetite, as did Inkada who hadn’t eaten well for days. Berta ate shyly, poking at her food. Kesey seemed too tense to eat in public. A long time on the range did that to a man.

  After dinner Spectros and Greene retired to the parlor; Inkada and Ray followed them. Kesey excused himself and went to the stable to sleep, refusing all offers to take a room in the house. Montak had fallen to sleep in an overstuffed chair near the fire.

  Greene lit a cigar and leaned back comfortably himself. “It is enjoyable having company. It’s been a long while since we have had visitors. Perhaps I revealed that when I insisted you stay here. Poor Berta,” he said in a lowered voice, “she hardly knows how to conduct herself.”

  “A young girl needs company,” Spectros said. “I cannot believe a doctor is not more a part of the social whirl, sir, if you will excuse the observation.”

  “At one time we were. When Kate—my wife—was alive, before the war, these rooms rung with laughter.”

  “What happened?” Ray asked.

  “What happened, Mr. Featherskill? I gave aid and comfort to the enemy. That is called treason.” Greene blew a smoke ring, the blue smoke rising lazily toward the high ceiling.

  “There was a hail in the yard one night. I came down. A man had his leg nearly shot off. He wore a blue uniform. I hardly noticed it. Doctors are not supposed to take part in politics, not in any way. I tried to patch the man up, yet he died. And when he died, he needed to be buried. Then they found him here. I buried him myself, under a pecan tree. I wrote his wife.”

  “And since then Natchez would not accept you?” asked Spectros.

  “My patients are the poor, the black, the foundlings.” He smiled at Inkada. “It is very hard on Berta.”

  “It’s a shame,” Spectros commented, “when I think of the many towns out West where there has never been a doctor, where people die of things like cholera, a broken leg, where women suffer in childbirth…”

  Inkada had another thought. “There was but one Union soldier. Alone. In those times?”

  “But one. His mission, I assume was most perilous. He was a Captain Morrison.”

  “Did he ever say what happened?”

  “No.” Greene shook his head. “But someone knew. General Toures himself came riding after him that very evening, yet the man was already dead.”

  “Toures,” Ray said. “The name continues to come up.”

  “What?” Dr. Greene’s thoughts had wandered. The older man glanced at his cold cigar and placed it aside. “General Toures has been our only friend,” Greene said. “I believe he favors Berta. There is an age difference, yet her life might be brightened by such a union.”

  “Dr. Greene,” Spectros asked suddenly, his eyes fixed on the twisting, yellow-gold of the fire, “have you ever heard of a man named Blackschuster. Black, perhaps.”

  “No, no such man,” Greene said. “Although we have our share of anonymous men, especially Under The Hill.” />
  “Like Bangston,” Ray Featherskill suggested. Inkada’s eyes opened wide, and he leaned forward, studying Ray.

  “Bangston is hardly anonymous,” Greene said, smiling bitterly. “He is a cutthroat.”

  “And a slaver,” Inkada said. “Ray, you have crossed trails with Bangston? A big man, very strong. He wore a striped shirt when I saw him.”

  “We crossed trails, crossed swords nearly,” Ray replied. “Didn’t care much for him.”

  “I saw him,” Inkada said in a hushed voice, his words eyes glittering in the firelit room. “Back in the swamps. He was taking slaves.”

  “Slaves?” Dr. Greene laughed despite himself. “Impossible!”

  “No. I saw it.”

  “Telingas, maybe?” Ray asked Dr. Greene. The doctor was surprised that Ray knew the term. Spectros and Inkada had never heard it before either.

  “Telingas…” Greene pondered, eyes thoughtful. “Maybe so. I know they are out there, wretched creatures.”

  “What are Telingas, Ray?” Spectros asked.

  “Africans, really. Men imported illegally for slavery, freed by the war, unable to speak English, to understand what has happened to them. How they came across the ocean, why. I have heard they believe they have been taken to the moon, that they live in fear of the swamps. Am I correct, Dr. Greene?”

  “Yes, I am ashamed to admit, it is as you say. Ashamed for Mississippi; ashamed for the South.” Greene was silent for a moment. “At times we hear them. Drums beating slowly deep in the swamps, fires glowing. Perhaps they are praying for return to their sweet, far away earth; for deliverance from the moon men.”

  “They are devils.”

  It was Joseph who had spoken, He had entered the room with coffee for the men. “Devils.”

  “Only unfortunates, Joseph,” Greene suggested.

  “They came from the land where you originated,” Inkada said. “The same blood flows in their veins as in yours.”

  “No,” Joseph said emphatically. “Dr. Spectros, I have heard that the white men in Europe once lived in caves, killed each other with clubs. If you were to meet one of these cavemen in the swamp would you embrace him as a brother?”

  “And so the Telingas belong nowhere…” Spectros was affected by the situation of these men. Who could help them, release them from their moon bondage? “Shall they live forever in the swamps, in fear?”

  Joseph, slightly abashed, served the coffee. Ray posed another question.

  “This General Toures, Dr. Greene. Just who is he? What is he?”

  “A fine and honorable man, Mr. Featherskill. He fought with valor during the war, until his wounds forced him to retire to his home. A man of resolve and compassion. As I have said, he is our only friend in Natchez. He cried all night long when his daughter was injured…”

  “Melinda?”

  Dr. Greene lifted his head curiously. “Why, yes.”

  Spectros too glanced at Ray—he knew much of the goings-on in Natchez for the length of time he had been here.

  “She was thrown by her horse, hit her head against a boulder. It was a severe injury.”

  “You treated her?” Spectros asked.

  “No.” Greene shrugged slightly, watching the twisting fire. “It was odd. Very odd. I looked at her at midnight. The girl was dead! I tell you—she was dead! Toures cried like a child. Yet she survived somehow. General Toures told me later that he had, by sheerest luck, found a specialist from the East who had experience with these injuries. Melinda Toures was dead—or so I declared—yet within three days she was riding again. Perfectly healthy, perfectly gay.”

  Th fire had died to dully glowing embers. Cigar smoke still hung in the air. Spectros felt his eyes growing heavy, from fatigue, from age, the effect of the firelight. He was ready to excuse himself when Greene rose and offered to conduct them to their rooms.

  “Thank you,” Spectros said. The old man was helped to the stairs by Inkada who was to share his room, a pleasant, high ceilinged, white room with eastern exposure. Fresh linen had been set out.

  Greene closed the door and bade them good night and Inkada drew off his boots with the weariness that still plagued him. Dr. Spectros stood near the balcony door, gazing into the swamps where he thought he saw, at moments, a dimly glowing fire.

  “Sir?” Inkada said, “Shall I extinguish the lantern?”

  “Yes, do so.” Spectros stood a minute longer, then turned back toward the bed, the darkness broken by the pale light of a rising crescent moon above the low line of cypress.

  “Sir?” Inkada saw that the old man had not moved.

  “It is nothing, Inkada. Only—one wonders at the fortuitous appearance of this doctor from the East who was able to cure a seemingly dead girl. It is curious, Inkada. It causes one to speculate, this remarkable occurrence.”

  “Yes, sir. It causes one to speculate,” Inkada agreed quietly. “It causes one…” The tall dark man, still weak from his deprivations, fell to sleep with that sentence in his mouth, incomplete. Spectros smiled remembering when he had first met this man, those long years ago. A jealous sultan had wanted to murder Inkada, and only his intervention had saved the man.

  Yet Inkada had repaid that debt, many times. He could have gone, perhaps should have, to live his own life, to search for a woman of his own, to raise a family.

  But Inkada stayed, as Ray had after Socorro, as Montak stayed. Good men. The best, they were. Spectros stood a moment longer before sitting in a straight-backed, red velvet chair where his own dreams wandered for a moment before he fell to a deep, quiet sleep.

  CHAPTER NINE

  On the morning of the following day, Spectros met the famous General Toures. With flash and flare a pair of mounted guards, barbered and stiff in coats and ties, rumbled into the yard, circling it as if they suspected ambush.

  After a moment a fringed surrey appeared, guarded by two outriders, and with the pomp of a visiting dignitary, the great man himself appeared.

  Dr. Greene waited on the porch, hand in the pockets of his white pants, cigar in his mouth. Spectros was upstairs on the balcony at that moment. General Toures reined up, stepped athletically from the surrey and tied up, moving with the stride of a military man to the porch where he took Greene’s hand firmly.

  “Sam,” Dr. Greene said warmly, “won’t you come in?”

  Toures was a square-shouldered, vigorous man in his fifties. His hair was still full and dark, his eyes hard as flint. He threw an arm around Greene’s shoulder and walked with him into the house.

  Spectros watched the men step down and spread out in the yard below, then he dressed slowly, wondering what could cause such insecurity. Toures was a military man, and these guards evidently men with military training. Yet the war had ended ten years earlier. Was it perhaps only habit? These men acted as if they expected an attack at any moment.

  Spectros dressed and went out the doorway into the hall. Joseph was sitting in a chair under the window, arms crossed, glowering.

  “What is it, Joseph?” Spectros asked as he came up to the big man.

  “Nothin’, sir. Nothin’ at all.” The black man gazed at the floor a long moment before adding, “I don’t like this General Toures. He’s no good for Berta, and he shouldn’t be here.”

  “You have reasons for feeling this way, Joseph?”

  “I have reasons. But ain’t nobdy asked me, so I don’t say a word. If Dr. Greene thinks the man’s his friend, it wouldn’t do to talk against him anyway.”

  “No,” Spectros agreed, “it wouldn’t do to speak against the man to Dr. Greene. But perhaps you’ll tell me why you don’t like him.”

  “You?” Big Joseph studied the tall, gray-haired man and shrugged, “Why would you be interested, sir?”

  “It would be difficult to explain. But I am interested in this man, Sam Toures. Think it over, Joseph. I would like to hear what you have to say.”

  “All right, sir. I’ll think on it.”

  Spectros found the two men in
the parlor, sipping brandy. Greene got to his feet and introduced them.

  “Dr. Spectros, General Samuel Toures.”

  “Sir,” Spectros said taking the general’s hand. “I have heard much about you.”

  “Nothing bad, I hope,” Toures smiled.

  Spectros simply smiled back and took the seat Greene offered him, refusing the brandy. Toures was a man who smiled easily, but only with his mouth. The eyes remained flint-hard, the lines of his face set.

  “You are a doctor as well?” Toures asked, crossing his legs as he reclined in the chair.

  “Not a medical doctor,” Spectros replied. “Yet I have had some experience in that area. I was trained under a Dr. Black.”

  Toures looked suddenly as if he had been slapped across the face. He nearly choked on his drink. A nerve had been touched.

  “You did not complete your studies, Doctor?” Greene asked.

  “No. My teacher and I suffered a difference of ethical opinion,” Spectros said mildly. He studied Toures who had managed to regain his composure.

  “Unfortunate,” Greene said sincerely.

  “Where was it you studied, sir?” Toures asked.

  “In the East.”

  “Philadelphia, Boston?”

  “Not in the United States,” Spectros said.

  “In Europe, then.”

  “No, not in Europe. In a land farther to the east, sir, where doctors study unusual crafts, exotic medicine.”

  Toures leaned far forward in his seat. He was fascinated, inordinately so. Obviously he wanted to know something in particular, and equally obvious was the fact that he had had dealings with another man from the East—Blackschuster.

  “I do not understand,” Greene said, frankly puzzled.

  “Life and death are seen differently in other lands,” Spectros said. “Aging is sometimes retarded remarkably. Life and death are seen as relative parts of a continuum. There are men who tamper with this science; men who play with life.”

  “It seems the possibility for abuse would exist,” Greene commented. Toures had not said another word, yet his eyes had not left those of Spectros.

  “The possibility does exist,” Spectros said. “The temptation is great.”