This Old World

by Steve Wiegenstein

  It didn’t take long. In eight minutes he could hear the creaking of a saddle, and two minutes later the rider came into view, rocking nonchalantly with the movement of his mount as if he were out for a Sunday ride in the park.

  Another minute and Charley could tell it was Dathan. He stepped into the road as the man drew close.

  “I don’t need your help,” Charley said.

  “Ain’t offering,” replied Dathan.

  He was unarmed and wore his field work clothes—heavy canvas pants, a collarless shirt with the sleeves half torn off, and a shapeless felt hat that appeared to have come from a different century. His mount, one of the Daybreak stable, smelled its stallmate nearby and snuffed in recognition. Charley’s horse answered with a nicker from its hiding place behind the cedars.

  “So what the hell are you doing out here?” Charley asked.

  “Riding this horse.”

  “I’ll not be interfered with.”

  “Don’t intend to,” Dathan said. “Fact is, I’m not sure you’re up to the task.”

  “Oh, yeah? There’s many a Federal soldier might have thought that way, once upon a time.”

  Dathan looked down at him impassively. “Ain’t it just like a man, to boast when there’s work to be done.”

  Charley spun on his heel, furious, and untied his horse. He had not come this far in his life to be lectured to, spoken or unspoken. He lashed the rifle into place behind him, returned to the road and urged his horse to a trot. Dathan kept pace.

  They rode in silence, Charley trying to stay a foot or two ahead. But that pace wasn’t natural for his horse, so after a few minutes he settled back to a walk. At the next fork in the road, Charley took the eastward branch, and Dathan didn’t question him.

  It was on this road, which wound alongside a small creek and gradually led uphill, that Charley realized they were heading up the valley toward Rockpile Mountain. In another half mile the surrounding forest would thin out as they reached the scanty-soiled slopes, and in a mile the two of them would be shining like beacons above the scrub grass and granite outcrops. He reined up.

  “Listen,” he said to Dathan. “You ever been up this way before?”

  “Time or two, chasing rabbits and whatnot,” Dathan said, suspicious. “Ain’t much game farther on.”

  “Yeah,” Charley said. “Up ahead—” He wasn’t sure what to say. Might as well go straight to it. “Up ahead is where we always used to meet. And by ‘we’ I mean—”

  “I know who you mean,” Dathan said. He squinted into the distance. The two men sat and considered.

  Charley untied the Enfield from his saddle and handed it over. “Follow as far behind me as you can without losing sight. You might want to walk it until we see what’s what.”

  Dathan nodded and dismounted, tying his horse to a pawpaw tree beside the creek. Dathan appeared familiar with the rifle, so Charley didn’t press him. He handed him a box of cartridges from his saddlebag and rode away.

  He came upon Flynn’s wagon where the road skirted Rockpile before turning east again. It had been ransacked, items strewn across the ground for ten feet in all directions. There was blood on the seat, but Charley couldn’t tell if it was fresh.

  “Well,” Charley said into the air. “So there’s this.” He pondered for a moment, then dismounted and tied his horse to Flynn’s wagon. He’d come this far. Charley headed up the hill, shifting his pistol to his back, under his coat. No sense inviting a confrontation.

  If he had the leisure to think about it, he’d wonder what the hell he was doing here, chasing a man he hated with a man he didn’t trust, on behalf of a woman who might well be dead and who had never cared much for him anyway. But those were thoughts for another time. He needed to keep his mind on the task at hand, which was getting up this mountain and coming down again alive.

  Halfway to the top, a voice called out. “Far enough, Pettibone. State your business.”

  “I’m in pursuit of this man Michael Flynn.”

  There was a chuckle. “You’re headed in the wrong direction. Last I saw, he was down by the creek. But come on. We want to talk to you.”

  Charley picked his way up the slope. There was no real path, only level places between the rocks where he could see his way to the next level place higher up. Maybe he should go back to Arkansas, leave these rocky hills to the lizards and the wild hogs. He could take up riverboating again. No, riverboating was done for. Railroading was the thing now. Well, he could railroad along with the best of them.

  And then he was in the clearing on top of the mountain, where four of the Law and Order League—Horace Landsome, the Barker brothers from up in the Flatwoods, and a new recruit whose name he had not yet learned—squatted around a pile of farm tools and cooking pots from Flynn’s wagon.

  Landsome barely looked up from under a short-billed cap. “That was a dirty trick you pulled on Green Pratt back there, shooting him like you did.”

  Charley folded his arms. “Almost as bad as the trick he was about to pull on me. At least I shot him front to front.”

  Landsome raised his head and glared at him full in the face. “That you did. I seen the wound myself and tried to stanch the blood. But it couldn’t be stanched because it were too close and too deep. Ain’t that always the case, that the mortal wounds are the ones from closest in?”

  Charley didn’t answer. His pistol scratched the small of his back, but as long as none of these men looked to draw a weapon, it would stay there.

  “So you’re looking for Michael Flynn,” one of the Barker boys said.

  “Yes,” Charley said, keeping his voice low to avoid sounding too nervous or aggressive. “He went on a tear back at his house, pert near killed his wife, shot Mr. Turner. Don’t know whether either of them will live.”

  “Ain’t that hell,” Landsome said. “So now you’re the one out after him.”

  “More or less.”

  “The hell with this Flynn,” said Landsome. “Where’s my horse?”

  “Soldiers took him. I’m gonna have to buy you a new one.”

  The unknown man butted in. “Some of the boys think you were working with those soldiers all along. Think you led ’em right to us. What do you say to that?”

  Charley turned to face him. “Anybody who says so is a liar. What do you say to that?”

  “Easy, boys,” Landsome said. “We’ve already lost more good men than we can afford. Charley, I don’t doubt your word. Jesse, you don’t know Charley here like I do. He fought for the Cause from the very start. Charley’s word is good.”

  “I’m in no mood to be trifled with, Horace,” Charley said. “I’m here for Michael Flynn.”

  “He’s back down the hill,” Landsome said, pointing with a hand scythe that he had been inspecting. “We got the jump on him, but he cost us dear. Killed old Zebo right out, and that after he’d been shot a time or two. Put some lead into Willie Loudon, too, had to take Willie to Greenville to get fixed up. He was reloading when we got him.”

  “I thought the idea was to punish the lawbreaker, not to go back to bushwhacking.”

  Landsome winked. “Sometimes they look about the same.”

  “I’ll take him back and bury him, if you all don’t mind. He’s got family.”

  Landsome stood up, and the other men followed. “Suit yourself. But I have to tell you.” He stretched his arms, and Charley placed his hands on his hips in case he needed to reach his pistol. “You fought for the Cause, so you get a pass this time. I understand what you say about Green, one or the other of you was going to be down in the dirt. And that horse was not my best mount, so with the one we just confiscated we can call it an even trade. But you ain’t part of the League no more, and if you cross our path again, you might find yourself on our list.”

  “All right,” said Charley.

  “Some of Quantrill’s old bunch are going to be through here before long, and they might not be as forgiving. Just want you to know that.”

  �
�Appreciate it.” Charley walked away but did not turn his back entirely, in case one of the men had a second thought. But no one moved, and soon Charley was back at the wagon.

  He followed a trail of crushed weeds downhill and soon enough came across Flynn’s body, face up beside a small creek. He counted a dozen pistol wounds in the chest and head, more than enough to kill, and some smaller ones made by a knife. “Those were just for sport,” he said to himself. But in a moment, Dathan was beside him, shaking his head, and Charley knew he had heard. They said nothing more but started to work dragging Flynn back to the wagon. Since the bushwhackers had taken Flynn’s horse, Charley harnessed the Daybreak mare between the traces. They hefted Flynn’s body into the wagon, threw the spare saddle blanket over it, and turned to the west, stopping to tie Dathan’s horse to the back of the wagon.

  “Long trip home,” Dathan said after a while.

  “Well, I ain’t stopping to camp, not with you up here beside me and a dead man in the back,” Charley said.

  “Wasn’t recommending it,” Dathan said, unperturbed. “Just thinking about how often we ought to switch out the horses.”

  “Oh, now you’re a horse driver?”

  “Not my trade, no. But I’ve done my share of teamstering.”

  Charley knew he probably had, so he held his tongue. But Dathan’s air of superior knowledge galled him. Uppity son of a bitch.

  They passed the old man’s farm, the fields now empty, and turned toward Daybreak. “Michael Flynn, buried in the Daybreak cemetery,” Charley mused. “Now there’s a laugh. He hated them people.”

  “Hated you people, you mean.”

  “All right,” Charley said. “I suppose. Guess we could bury him on his place, but he’d hate that even more, to be planted next to a rebel. We could put him next to his son if we knew where he was buried, but I think old Flynn took that knowledge with him.”

  As if by unspoken agreement, Charley stopped the wagon, and they stepped down to switch out the horses. Charley flipped back the saddle blanket for a moment to view Flynn’s corpse. His eyelids had begun to draw back, and Charley wished he had placed pennies on them earlier. If he’d had some. The slash wound across his jaw from Josephine’s knife, which had launched this whole disaster, now seemed little more than a scratch.

  Across the wagon bed from him, Dathan leaned forward, his lips pursed as if he were ginning himself up to make a declaration about something, and rested his elbows on the side panel.

  “There’s another graveyard on that land,” Dathan said. “I been fixing to tell somebody one of these days, and it might as well be you. We might could put him there. He wouldn’t like the company no better, but at least it wouldn’t be a fronting to the ones left alive.”

  Charley was astonished. “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s just down from where you all had your rope mill, between the road and the river. Ain’t no markers left on it, what ones were there to begin with, ’cause they were wood and I imagine they washed away long ago. But it’s there, all right. I been cleaning it up in the odd days.”

  Charley knew the place, a patch of level ground with nothing much to distinguish it, some nice open space between sycamore trees.

  “A graveyard? That’s the beatenest thing I ever heard,” Charley said. “How do you know that?”

  Dathan averted his eyes. “That’s the slave graveyard there, what it is.”

  Charley snorted in disbelief.

  “You don’t think so?” Dathan retorted. “Son, you know less than you think you do.”

  “I ain’t your son.”

  “That’s for damn sure. Now you think for a minute. You knew old George Webb, didn’t you?”

  “Most certainly.”

  “Ask yourself this. Even in his prime, you think George Webb could have farmed a thousand acres by himself? Or with that son of his?”

  Charley was silent. He’d never considered the matter.

  Dathan went on. “When George Webb sent for his bride out from Louisville, she brought a dozen slaves. Men, women and children. Five years later, that was up to twenty, by purchase and natural increase. That’s how that farm got built up, man—slave labor.”

  “George never mentioned anything about slaves!”

  “Ashamed of it, is my guess. When the missus left him, she took ’em all with her since they were her dower. All but the ones who had died and were buried there.”

  In Charley’s dumbfounded silence, they climbed back onto the wagon and got into motion again. But Dathan was not finished. “And yes, two of them people were my mother and father. Slaves to the missus and to her mother before that. I was born on that farm. Later on, Mr. Webb wrote Mrs. Mary Ellen that it was his desire to buy my freedom, being as how I was a young boy with no real connection to her, but she warn’t about to give him that satisfaction. It took the war to do that.”

  “So you knew George Webb?”

  “Just the way a young boy knows his slavemaster. He was a kind man, and you could tell that the ownership made him uneasy. But he was a man with big ideas for a big plot of ground, and a crew of slaves to work the fields was the fast way to make those ideas come to pass. His boy Harp was a few years younger than me. We would have been playmates except I had to work most times.”

  “Where did you live?”

  “We had cabins in back of the house. That old stillhouse is one of ’em. The rest got tore down and used for something else, I reckon. Barn building or firewood.”

  Charley found himself rethinking everything he had ever known. Daybreak, the community of dreams, built on a foundation of slave labor. Old Mr. Webb a reformer and a slaver. Could a man be both? Could a community grow a dream of equality from such a rootstock?

  Strangely, the more he thought over these questions, the more at home he felt with Daybreak. He was not such an outcast after all, the man who fought for the wrong side. It turned out that they all had their own blend of impurities.

  They rode in silence for miles until they reached the Indian camp. “Cedeh was a child here, too,” Dathan said. “I used to come up here on Sundays with goods to trade, and we’d roam the woods. I never forgot that little gal.”

  They had reached the steep descent into the river valley, and Dathan stepped down to walk beside the lead horse. “So you see,” he said before moving out of earshot. “I got as much right to live here as you do. More, maybe. And if we don’t want to bury old Flynn in the Daybreak cemetery, we can put him down with my people.”

  “All right,” Charley said. “Ain’t no better nor worse than any other burying spot on the earth.”

  At the river’s edge, Dathan parted from him wordlessly, walking away to who knows where, and Charley ferried the wagon across by himself. The first cabin up from the river was where Jenny, Mrs. Smith’s former serving girl, had taken up residence. She stepped out of her door as he approached. She was barefoot, wearing a faded calico print dress, and in her hand was a spoon. Charley stopped the wagon.

  “Mr. Turner’s passed,” she said.

  Charley took off his hat and placed it on his lap. He closed his eyes for a moment.

  “Well, that is a bad end to a bad week,” he said. “Can’t say I didn’t see it coming. But it is sad news even so.”

  Jenny nodded solemnly, and they faced each other in the quiet. “Mrs. Turner told us how you tried to save them, him and Mrs. Flynn, and how you went out after Mr. Flynn.”

  Charley glanced over his shoulder. “Flynn’s back here,” he said. “Wasn’t my doing, but I figured he would need buried somewhere.”

  “You are right about that,” she said. “You can’t deny a man his six-by-two.” She looked down at the spoon. “I’ve been making soup.”

  Charley could think of little else to say and was about to chuck the reins on his horse again, but Jenny spoke up again. “I don’t mean to be forward,” she said.

  “That’s all right. You’re not being forward.”

  “No, I mean with what I
am about to say.”

  Charley waited in puzzlement.

  “This is the first time I’ve ever had so much as a room to myself, much less a house,” she went on. “Before this I had half a room and half a bed in the fourth floor of Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s house, which I shared with another girl. And before that just a spot on the floor with me brothers and sisters.” Charley smiled to himself at the faint Irish tone that had crept into Jenny’s voice with the memory. “So now here I am with a two-room house, with a stove of my own, and a mountain to see out my front door and a river to see out my back. You folks may have gotten used to this, but to me it feels impossibly grand.”

  The simplicity of her feelings cheered Charley’s heart. “Yes, ma’am, you are right about that,” he said. “I forget what we have here that—”

  She cut him off. “Don’t ‘ma’am’ me yet, please,” she said. “I am simple Jenny, and hope to stay that way for a long time to come.”

  “All right,” Charley said. “If you think it proper.”

  “What’s proper and improper is not for me to judge,” Jenny said, turning away slightly. “I am no lady.” She paused. “Sometimes, when Mrs. Smith was away, the old man—Mr. Smith—would call one of us girls down to his rooms. It was none of it to our liking, but what could you do if you didn’t want to be turned out into the street? So I was in no haste to return to Philadelphia.”

  She looked him in the face. “These past years have damaged us all,” she said. “Me as much as anyone. And here you are, an old rebel at your age and an outcast to many, yet trying to help the neighbor and correct what wrongs you see. And in my calculation that’s a fine thing, whatever side you fought on in the past. For I am leaving my past behind and plan on doing the same with all who can do it as well. Let the dead bury the dead, as the Good Book says.”

  She smiled, and Charley could feel himself blush. “I have a fine two-room house, Mr. Pettibone, and in the afternoon I will make tea. And on Sundays I will be pleased to go walking, and if you should come by I would like to serve you tea and walk out with you.”