Stribling loosened the reins and looked back at the yard. It was empty, save for Wooster and Brown. “You all comin?” said Stribling.
“Lead the way, sir,” said Wooster, his coat draped across his arm.
In the Citadel of Djibouti, L. W. Thomas stumbled blindly through the gloom. The column of light from the ceiling helped him find the tin box where he kept his ready cash; when he had emptied it, he looked for the last time upon the nude reclining behind the bar. She gazed back at him, unperturbed as ever. He wished he could remember who she reminded him of, but he knew he never would. “Goodbye,” he said, and passed through the curtains to the lightless back room. He found his pistol and powder flask and a box of round balls and slipped them in his breeches pocket, then knelt and flung the blanket from the edge of the cot and fumbled in the cobwebbed darkness underneath until his hand was on the valise. The leather was cool to his touch; he gathered the handles in his fist and pulled. Then he stopped. He knelt there, the sweat pouring down his face. “Come on,” he said to himself. Horses were in the yard now, and the voices of men. Something shifted behind him, and a board creaked. He turned his head; nothing was there but shadow. He looked at the valise. His heart was thumping now, driving the blood through his temples. “Ah, shit,” he said, and took his hand away. He rose, kicked the valise under the cot, and was about to flee when he saw the playbill on the wall. He ripped it down, folded it, and stuffed it in a pocket of his sack coat. He looked around the room one last time, then he was through the back door. In a moment more, he had caught up with Stribling and his party in the trees along Town Creek. Behind him, he could hear von Arnim shouting his name.
YOUNG ALEX RHEA had loathed Sundays for as long as he could remember, which wasn’t all that long, though it seemed immeasurable to him. There was church, of course, as inevitable as the seasons, hollowed out of Sunday mornings rain or shine. Church was a great conundrum to him; he could never understand why time moved so slowly there, when it moved so quickly everywhere else. Moreover, his father required that Alex wear his shoes and good clothes all day Sunday, no matter what the weather.
This Sunday Alex was once again dressed in the blousy shirt and cravat and black jeans pants and hard black shoes that had once belonged to Mister Carter’s boy Bushrod. All the clothes he owned now had once been the Carter boy’s, for his own had gone up in the fire. He knew that Bushrod had been lost in the war, though Mister Carter didn’t seem to believe it, and wearing the clothes gave Alex an odd feeling. Sometimes, when he was alone in some corner of the yard, and the light was just right—and especially in those strange moments when silence brushed the afternoon and the air grew still and watchful—Alex could feel his vanished cousin passing near or lingering in the hedges. It was not a scary feeling so much as a sad one, and at such times the boy would stop and listen hard to the silence, and sometimes he would speak the other’s name out loud.
On this Sunday afternoon, Alex did not feel his cousin anywhere near. Indeed, the world seemed empty, deserted, as if everyone had gone off without telling him. He was bored almost beyond endurance, sitting in the rocking chair on the porch, trying to think good thoughts as his sister had instructed him to do. The boy was not sure which thoughts were good, but he was fairly certain that, being good, they would be dull and so would arise naturally on a Sunday, and therefore anything he came up with ought to qualify. He was thinking about frogs when the men came into the yard.
Alex recognized Harry Stribling at once. He was leading a horse upon which sat a one-legged man. Alex counted six other men whom he did not know following along behind, all of them looking over their shoulders. Alex leapt up from the rocking chair. “Hidy!” he said.
The men stood or knelt in the yard. Some of them made Alex think of the wild dogs that ranged in the woods around Cumberland, that he had seen crossing the cemetery one moonlit night. Stribling doffed his hat. “Young Alex, ain’t it?”
“Yessir.”
“You know where the Harper house is?”
The boy nodded.
“You run over there and fetch Mister Gawain Harper,” Stribling said. “In return, I will let you ride this horse as long as you can stand it.”
“Honor bright?” said the boy. “You’ll let me ride him?”
“You can depend on it,” said Stribling. “Now, be quick.”
In another moment, young Alex Rhea was trying out his cousin’s Sunday shoes on the road. As he ran, the shadows of leaves flickered across his face like magic lantern slides.
WALL STUTTS MOVED quickly, was gone from his hiding place before the smoke of the shot drifted away. He knew he had hit the yankee sergeant and scared the living shit out of the fat civilian who was holding him up, and it was a good day’s work already. Stutts knew that sharpshooting the yankees this way was utter folly, but, the fact was, he enjoyed it. Nevertheless, he was pushing his luck. He figured, if he could just collect the bounty on Gawain Harper, he might ease off toward the Indian Territory and see what was what out there. Certainly he did not intend to be in the neighborhood when the Captain launched his rebellion. Moreover, he intended to take the Henry rifle with him.
The Henry lay across his pommel now as he guided the horse through the woods. He heard riders on the road and assumed them to be yankee cavalry, come to see what the commotion was; he grinned at the thought of old Thomas left holding the bag. Stutts had never liked the man, nor trusted him, not that it mattered much anyhow. What mattered now was getting a clear shot at the Harper boy, and in broad daylight, too, and right under the noses of the bluebellies. Quick. It needed to be quick. And it would serve old man Harper right, who had run Wall Stutts off the railroad for having a little fun with the niggers. Stutts grinned as he came out of the woods onto a back street off the square. He was enjoying himself, and he knew just the place where he could lie in wait behind the old Harper place.
GAWAIN HARPER WAS not at the old Harper place, but way off down by the Mississippi Central Railroad, in a shallow cut dug by contract slaves in the ’forties with picks and shovels and wheelbarrows, while Frank Harper looked on from the back of a horse. Earlier, after Stribling left for the Citadel, Gawain had thought he might call on Morgan, and no doubt would have, had his aunt not presented him with the Navy Colt. But the pistol drew all his concentration, as if it were the thing he had been traveling toward for forty years, and it would not be put aside. He sat in his room, the smell of grass and lantana and oak leaves riding on the breeze through his open window, with the pistol and its implements laid out on the desk before him. He held the flask in the palm of his hand; it was smooth copper, shaped like an oversized fig, heavy with powder, with a tarnished brass measuring spout. Like the pistol itself, the flask was satisfying to hold, as though it were ripe with some secret purpose beyond mere utility.
Gawain Harper knew a good deal about guns, had seen what they could do to animals and to men. For most of his service (after he had rid himself at last of the worthless flintlock conversion), he had carried the same Enfield rifle, had polished its brass with ashes and water, had carved his initials into its greasy walnut stock, had cleaned it a thousand times (a job he loathed, but it was like bathing a bedridden old relative: you had to do it, so you did), had wiped blood and fragments of flesh from its bayonet, had looked down its barrel at living human beings and squeezed the trigger—sometimes he heard the report and sometimes he didn’t, and sometimes felt the bruising shock against his shoulder and sometimes not—and seen them fling up their hands or clutch at themselves or run away. And, if the line was advancing, he might walk over them, and always he tried not to look, and always he looked anyway, as though that were a part of the bargain he had sealed with them in the instant he pulled the trigger. For a while, he could remember each of their faces, but in time they all became one face, vaguely familiar, like one he’d seen before on the street or in someone’s parlor, eyes not accusing but startled and a little sad. He saw the face often. Waking in a dog tent on a moonlit night, Sir
Niles snoring beside him, Gawain might see it in the random designs painted by the moonlight on the thin canvas. Or in the leaves or naked branches overhead when they had no tents. Or in dreams, or reflected in the smooth surface of a pond. He supposed he would always see it, only in wallpaper patterns now, or water stains on the ceiling, or on the other side of a hearth fire in a place where he ought to be safe. So Gawain Harper knew about guns and their ability to transform, not merely a single human life, but generations stretching away into the mist of long tomorrows.
Now here was the Navy Colt, blued and burnished and lying expectantly on the desk where he used to try to write poetry. Gawain did not like pistols; they always seemed to misfire on him, or fire off all their chambers at once, or let loose on their own later in the day when he least expected it, and they appeared to be useful mainly for driving tent stakes. As an infantryman, Gawain had never carried one, though for a time he did keep a single-shot Derringer in his haversack. It had a bore the diameter of a pencil and a trigger that appeared magically when you cocked it, and it took a microscopic percussion cap. One idle afternoon, Gawain found the little pistol in the bottom of his haversack among tobacco crumbs and grains of rice, and it occurred to him that he had never fired it, did not know if it would fire, nor what effect it would have on the candidate if it did. So he traded it to a comrade for a pair of wool socks. But this Navy Colt was different from all the other pistols he had seen and scoffed at. It had been his father’s and now it was his, and he had a use for it that he would not have imagined in his most extravagant dreams.
So, in the end, he did not call on Morgan Rhea this Sunday afternoon. Instead, he put on his frock coat and slipped the pistol in the back of his waistband where it could not be seen, and put the flask and a dozen balls and a scrap of paper for wadding in his pocket, and took up his Panama hat and slipped out the door and, of course, met his father in the hall.
The old man was barefoot and in his shirtsleeves, a bristly growth of white whiskers on his face, his thin hair disordered. He was staring at the bright square of the window at the end of the hall where the gauzy curtains undulated in the breeze.
Gawain did not want to stir up his aunt, so he spoke softly to the old man. “Hey, Papa,” he said. “What you doin?”
“Who is that?” shouted old Harper, lifting a crooked forefinger (a mule had bitten it nearly in two, years before) at the curtains moving in the sunlight.
“Who is what, Papa?” said Gawain, following the old man’s point. “There ain’t anybody there, just curtains, is all.”
Old Harper squinted at his son. “She was gone before I knew it,” he said, his voice loud in the silent house. Gawain winced. “Hush, Papa,” he said.
“Gone like that,” said Harper, and snapped his fingers, though they made no sound. “That boy of mine could tell you if he was here, but he ain’t here—no, he’s off whorin in Memphis.” He gestured toward the curtains again. “You talk to her, see what she wants.”
“Papa, I—”
The old man cocked his fist; the knuckles were hairy, and the knotted fist still seemed big as a ham to Gawain. “You do what I say! Go on!”
Gawain turned then, walked to the end of the hall, paused, and walked back again. When he came to the old man, Gawain put his lips against the hairy ear and said, “She wants you to lay down for a while, Papa.”
In an instant, old Harper’s face went empty, soft, the eyes puzzled now. “She does?” he said.
Gawain Harper led his father to the hot, foul-smelling room where he lived—the windows were closed and the curtains drawn—and sat the old man down in his chair. Then he pulled back the curtains and tied them in knots so they wouldn’t move, and threw open the windows, and pulled down the bedclothes. At last he took the old man’s elbow and guided him to the bed with its broken mattress. Old Harper lay down and arranged himself on the dingy sheet with his hands clasped on his breast, and Gawain adjusted the pillows under his head. For a moment Gawain stood by the bed, looking down at his father’s face. The eyes were wet now, and held neither malice nor any memory of violence, only puzzlement, as if they looked upon something too quiet, too gentle, for Frank Harper ever to understand. When Gawain turned away, he found his aunt standing in the doorway. He walked past her without a word, down the stairs and into the sunlight.
He walked fast through the fields and stumps and young timber to the railroad. He did not expect to encounter any yankees back here, and he knew from old usage that the walls of the cut would mute the sound of his shooting, and if it didn’t, that was just too bad. He remembered that a city ordinance used to be in effect against discharging firearms on Sunday, and the thought of it made him laugh.
He came through a stand of young pines, and there was the cut. He slid down the muddy clay bank to the railroad, and for a moment he stood transfixed in the solitude that embraced him, breathing in the hot smell of the crossties and the heavy summer smell of Queen Anne’s lace and blackberry vines. He noted that some of the ties were new-cut, no doubt laid by the yankees, and the rails were spiked and lined and of a heavier weight than he remembered. Taken all around, the Mississippi Central was in better shape than he’d ever seen it, and as he looked up the cut toward the place where the rails curved gracefully into the trees, he realized that here, at last, was one thing that had not only survived the war but been improved by it. The thought took him by surprise, and he knelt between the rails, the pistol dangling forgotten in his hand.
“Say!”
The voice startled Gawain. He looked up and saw an apparition standing on the lip of the railroad cut. “Say!” Old Hundred-and-Eleven said. “You seen any ginsang down thar?”
A QUARTER MILE away, Wall Stutts tied his horse in a grove of trees just west of the Harper house. A low stone wall, one of the few in the county, ran along the edge of these woods. It was overgrown with privet, honeysuckle, wild roses and morning glories, skirted with a white fan of daisies and drowsy with the murmur of insects. From here Stutts could see the front yard and the columned portico of the house. He sat down in the leaves behind the wall and bit off a chew of tobacco, the Henry rifle lying across his knees.
XVII
When he heard the rider turn off the road, Solomon Gault’s first thought was that Stutts was returning. Irritated, he set his manuscript aside and rose to his feet, wondering what fool thing the man would have to tell him. He was tired of these peckerwoods. At moments like this, Gault wished he had never stayed in Cumberland County. He should have crossed the river and gone to find Sterling Price in Texas. Should have gone down to Mexico. Should have, should have, should have—
He ripped off his spectacles and dropped them on the manuscript. The flame of his anger leapt inside him, burning away the thin veneer of reason that ordered his mind. He was choking on it, as his wife had choked and gagged when the diphtheria closed her throat, and the child’s— He had them placed in the same coffin and dug the grave himself and watched while Mister Garrison said the words over them. Then he filled it himself, ignoring the priest until at last the man went away, and they all went away, and it was only him then, and the slide of the shovel in the cool earth. Then he saw the shape of a man through the trees, leading his horse. When Gault’s horse nickered, the man stopped. Gault knew it wasn’t Wall Stutts then—this man was too big, and cautious, as if he had not expected anyone to be here. “Who is that?” said the man.
Gault fought to control himself, to find a voice he could use. “A friend,” he said, drawing the pistol from the pocket of his coat and slipping it into his waistband. Then, when the stranger walked into the clearing, Solomon Gault felt his anger evaporate, to be replaced by the scent of opportunity he had followed all his life. In that moment, he was willing to concede that perhaps there was a God after all.
LIEUTENANT VON ARNIM had seen the men cross the road. He put his horse into a canter and, when he reached the spot, pushed her a little way into the cedars and listened. Then he backed out, turned the horse
around, and saw the body lying in the yard of the Citadel of Djibouti. He pushed the horse into the yard. “Thomas!” he shouted. “You! Thomas!” When he got no answer, he turned to his escort. They were cavalry just come from the depot at LaGrange, most of them brand-new at the trade, the rest grown fat in garrison. They were sitting their horses, the youngest ones staring at the dead man, their eyes round as double eagles, and the sight of them pushed Lieutenant von Arnim into a room he had not visited in a long while. “Goddamn you!” he bellowed. “Don’t sit there with your fingers up your ass! Get into the woods and find these goddamned rebels!” He did not wait to see his order obeyed, but holstered his pistol and slapped the spurs to his mount and forced her up the steps toward the black hole of the open door. He had to fight her, cursing through his clenched teeth; at last she went through, terrorized in the gloom, blundering into tables and chairs and benches, and von Arnim had to fling himself out of the saddle before she reared and crushed him against the ceiling. “Goddammit, get out then!” he cried, and broke a chair over her rump and sent her flying back into the sunlight. Von Arnim drew his pistol, looked around, saw the curtain and found the back door standing open. He kicked the cot over, pulled down a stack of boxes and sent mice scurrying. He picked up the mandolin by its neck and smashed it, then spied in the open box a stash of candles. He holstered his pistol again and dug through the box and found some loose matches. “All right, then, damn you,” he said. He dragged the bedclothes into the front room, jerked bottle after bottle of raw whiskey from the shelves and poured the reeking stuff over the blankets, soaking them. His hands were trembling so that he could hardly strike the match, but he lit it and cupped the flame, then lit a candle, then another, and dropped the candles onto the blankets and saw the flame catch, leap greedily for more. He piled chairs onto it, old newspapers, books, a leather valise, the straw stuffing from the whiskey crates, while the smoke swirled into the shaft of sunlight pouring through the roof. Then the flames leapt at him and he backed away, turned and staggered out into the blinding sunlight, his face streaked with sweat and soot, and saw, with the same amazed and unbelieving jolt that Lazarus must have felt when he woke from the dead, the escort still milling in the yard, some of them dismounted even and gawking at the body as if it were a prize fish, or a slaughtered calf, or a goddamned pot of geraniums.
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