“I’m the founder and president of the Cudahy Packing Company.”
“Very well. And what is your education, sir?”
“I have a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University.”
“And what was your field of study?”
“Economics and business administration.”
“Economics and business administration? Very impressive. And during your time as a student, did you ever study linguistics or speech pathology?”
“I did not.”
Black was out of his chair again. “Objection, Your Honor. Mr. Cudahy’s education has no bearing on the fact his child was stolen for ransom. Defense counsel is leading this jury down the primrose path.”
“It’s exactly the opposite, Your Honor,” Ritchie said. “Mr. Cudahy’s ability to tell one person’s voice apart from thousands and thousands of others just like it is of keen bearing in his testimony. His ability to say with what he called a ‘one hundred percent certainty’ that the voice on the other end of the line that called his home on the morning after his son’s disappearance was Pat Crowe’s and no other is the only quality with which he could make any kind of identification. And I ask you, are we to believe, is this jury to believe, that when a man’s life is at stake we should take Mr. Cudahy’s word for it when he has neither the experience or education to come to such a conclusion?”
Judge Sutton wrinkled his brow. He seemed exasperated already even though it was only the second hour of testimony. “Objection sustained. Mr. Cudahy swore under oath that he believed the voice he heard was that of the defendant, and I see no reason why that fact should be challenged at this point.”
Ritchie, flabbergasted, turned to the audience, broke the fourth wall. “Why, if Pat Crowe were, say, a Hungarian with a certain and distinguishable vowel harmony or maybe spoke with a south Turkish accent, then we might say, ‘Well, that’s pretty unique in this town.’ But his voice is not unique, is it? It’s one of more than fifty thousand!” He turned to the judge. “And you say that’s no reason for me to challenge the ability of Mr. Cudahy to discern between the accents of a number of citizens that make up half of this city’s population?”
Judge Sutton slammed his gavel. “Mr. Ritchie, there will be no place for grandstanding in my court. One more outburst like that from you and I will find you in contempt.”
“I apologize to the court, Your Honor. I will cut at this apple from the other side,” Ritchie said and reasserted himself in front of the witness stand. “Mr. Cudahy, in the year 1899, how many people worked for you?”
“I can’t say to an exact figure.”
“Well, estimate. Put us in the ballpark, if you would.”
Cudahy shifted in his chair. “Maybe three thousand. A little more.”
“You’re close. According to your employment records in the year 1899, some forty-six hundred people worked for you.”
“That sounds right.”
“It doesn’t just sound right. It’s an exact figure taken from your own documents. Now, of those nearly five thousand people who worked for you in that year, how many did you know by name?”
“In that year specifically? It’s impossible to say. That was over five years ago. I make a concerted effort to get to know as many of my employees as I can.”
“Well, according to your best guess just moments ago concerning how many folks worked for you in that year, you were off by sixteen hundred. So would it be safe to say you maybe knew a third of your employees by name? Perhaps less?”
“I was and still am the owner and operator of a large business,” Cudahy said, his voice heightened. He was aggressively on the defensive now. “And like I already told you, it would be nearly impossible to know every person who worked for me on a first name basis. There simply isn’t enough time in the day. I, sir, am one of the single largest employers in this city and have been for some time now. That’s why we have a managerial structure in business.”
“Yes, sir. That only makes sense. But let me ask you this. Earlier you said that Pat Crowe worked for you in the stockyards for some time. To be exact, he was an employee of the Cudahy Packing Company for seven months in the year 1899. In that time he worked mainly as a cargo loader. That is to say he worked largely in the capacity of hauling beef from the slaughterhouses into railroad cars for transport. Now, is that a high-ranking position in your company?”
“No, sir. It is not.”
“And would you say that, as the owner and chief executive officer, you get to know many of the folks who work as cargo loaders in your stockyards?”
“Not as many as I would like.”
“Then how, sir, can you say that you knew Pat Crowe well?”
“I never said I knew him well. I said I knew him.”
“What you actually said not even thirty minutes ago was that you’ve known Pat Crowe for a number of long years. You said you talked with him in person a number of times and that you knew his whole person. His whole person. You, sir, talked about him like you worked with him in close capacity every day. I wrote it down here,” Ritchie said and flipped over a page on his notepad. “You said that, and I quote, ‘It would be impossible to mistake him. He’s a character of whom it is hard for any man to forget.’ And now you’re telling us you didn’t know him well? Well, sir, which is it?”
“I know him well enough.”
“Well enough to remember him distinctly when he only worked for you for seven months when you can hardly even remember how many people worked for you in that entire fiscal year? In an area of your business you admitted to hardly ever having direct managerial contact with?”
“Yes. I’ve answered this question twice now. I knew the man well enough.”
“Well enough to be able to distinguish his voice over the phone more than a year after his last day of employment, all because he had an Irish brogue?”
Black shot out of his chair so fast he nearly kicked it over. “Objection!”
“Don’t bother, Your Honor,” Ritchie said and headed back to his seat next to me at the defense table with a grin and a strut. “I withdraw the question.”
VIII
DAYBREAK ON THE highveld. A tin sun and cold sunburst. Another morning gathered without color or warmth as my new Boer brethren and I rode horseback across the thirstland. For three days we’d traveled and nary a sign of man in all that time. The whole empty gray veld as lonely as a lunar valley. Here and there a baobab tree chattering with blue monkeys. Here and there a dusty cheetah as starved as a wolf in winter.
We rode near on thirty miles through the powdery afternoon. Along a rutted road, our bullock wagon rumbled and ached as if on the verge of collapse. Scalding wind blew dirt like sleet. Above, a scarred sky of high cirrus. I wiped the dirt from my face and drank from my water bugle. I raved for roast beef and honey biscuits. Nothing here to hearten a man but his own jollities. Fritz and I jibbed back and forth for a spell as we strode over the red grasses south of a sharp line of kopjes. Telegraph wires skirting an abandoned rail line had been cut and buried for miles at a stretch by a British reconnoitering party. Ahead, nothing but more cinder plain magnetizing in its longness.
We camped for water under the fragmented shade of an umbrella tree while the sun burned the hottest hour of the day, and then continued on through the cradle of the midlands. By and by we came upon the remains of a sugar cane farm ten miles west of Pongola. Dolerite cliffs bordered the ash land. The farm, sunken by fire, lay in a giant heap of blackened stick and rubble that was still smoldering even though Fritz calculated the fire happened days ago. Maybe even a whole week. Fires on the veld could simmer and smoke for a month before wafting out, he said.
He took off his pith helmet and wiped out the inside with a handkerchief and spat. I halted alongside, told my horse to shush. The six infantrymen behind us sullen and slumped of shoulder, the long war stamped upon their faces. A trio of sp
ringboks nosed through the scrap and ash. Bearded vultures, also in trio, watched our arrival from a felled tree trunk split down the middle like the abandoned makings of a canoe.
We dismounted our horses and searched the remains. Searching for what, we did not know. A body to bury. A machete for salvaging. A cask of good cape rum left unmolested by the fire and those who had started it. I wiped off the seat of my pants and looked over the scorched canebrake. So barren from fire, it didn’t appear burnt, but frozen. A gray sun behind gray cloud over a gray landscape that looked nothing like countryside in the midst of war, but one long since deserted after war.
Fritz pitied the sight and took some wheat papers out of his shirt pocket. His tobacco baggie dangled from his teeth by the pull string. “Cane in these parts used to grow twenty, thirty foot high. Good carrizo cane. Now look at her, this country.”
I pushed my hat back and mopped my brow. “Looks a lot like home to me.”
“What’s home to you?”
“Flatness in every direction,” I said.
A cryptic howling echoed over the surrounding hills.
All the men looked east. Fritz finished rolling his cigarette.
“Wolves?” I asked.
Fritz shook his head. “You’re on the wrong continent to hope for wolves, cowboy.”
“Jackals, then?”
“Ridgebacks.”
“Ridgebacks?”
“British scout dogs. They picked up our scent.”
“Hell, that ain’t hard. You all stink worse than skunk trappers.”
“Stink or not, it’s time to pull foot,” Fritz said and mounted his horse after sparking his cigarette, the howls of the pack dogs growing closer over the dusking hills. We seven raced hard along the woodland edge of the Vaal River, the upland thick with groundcover of wild dagga and dogbane blossom. The hills rose taller the farther east we traveled, and soon enough, almost by accident, we found ourselves in a deep cut between the ridges. The road so narrow we were forced to pace our horses in a single line through the passage.
Sky echoed with voices that were not our own. The ridge above us crested with the faraway shapes of men. Fritz stopped his horse. His was the face of a man who saw his own death coming slowly from a short distance away.
I swung my horse around to flee in the direction we had come as the man behind me dropped from his saddle sideways and hit the ground with a thud. I loosed my pony and nearly landed facedown after getting my foot caught in the stirrup trying to dismount in such a hurry. I got on my haunches in the dirt and turned the man over.
He’d been hit square in the chest with a rifle ball. A clean shot through the heart and not a sound heard. No crack of gunshot, no rifle echo.
Only the hollow voices above.
I crouched behind my horse and drew my left hip pistol. Three of the Boer fighters at the back of our train retreated west through the cut. A volley of rifle fire like unexplainable rainfall from a cloudless sky picked them off in a matter of a few wild seconds, and their horses fell with them. I looked in every direction. Twenty yards away, Fritz returned blind fire from horseback and was clipped three or four times before he could even see long enough to aim. His horse took as many bullets. The salvo rang out from both sides of the kopjes, and still I couldn’t see a single shooter.
All of the men dead except for me.
No time for calculating dumb luck.
Evening sky dark around the edges but nearly as light as full day looking straight up from the bottom of the ravine. I might as well have been a dot of red paint on white paper for whoever was on the other end of those rifles.
I crawled on my stomach through the dust with a pistol in each hand and hadn’t made it more than a few feet when I felt the bullet hit me in my left shoulder. The shot close enough to my spine that it emptied me of breath. I rolled onto my back and sucked at the sky. Could not get any air into my lungs. I patted my chest above my heart and groped around inside my shirt along my collarbone, searching for an exit wound.
There was none. The ball stopped somewhere in my shoulder blade, deep in the muscle. Wondered maybe if it went into my lung. Probably must have as hard as it was to draw wind. I panted and continued crawling without being able to breathe beyond shallow hiccups. Rifle shots caromed off rock and dirt, inches from my head.
My vision blurred and I spat blood. Keep crawling, I told myself. They haven’t killed you yet. I looked back. My horse shot thrice and kicking its legs on the ground. The ping of bullets nearly missing me as I pulled myself through the brush. Voices yelling overhead, words inaudible. Finally after squirming for nearly fifty feet along the base of the escarpment, I was able to screen myself in thorn shrub. I sat up against rock and strained for breath. Blood down my back, hot as sweat. The upper half of my left arm had numbed, and my fingers tingled as if I had fallen asleep on the limb. Lucky it wasn’t my good shooting hand. If there was such a thing as luck in a bind such as this. Surely there was. Had the bullet hit an inch more to the left or the right, I would have died in considerable pain.
The rifle fire ceased momentarily. I looked around. A small pass as narrow as a staircase through the kopje some forty feet yonder. Steep but manageable.
I could make it if I tried.
On the other side, back the way we came before, was a stretch of shallow river, if I remembered right. I waddled up and out of the gulch with my dead arm dangling and the other clutching my revolver. Twice I collapsed to my knees. My throat swelled from thirst. If offered toilet water I’d have drank the bowl dry. Time lapsed languorously, and so unaware of its passing was I that when I ascended the ridge, night had fallen completely.
I fell to my stomach again and writhed through the olid undergrowth toward the direction in which I thought I might find water. I could hear the tracing of water, could smell river. Voices echoed in the distance still. The ridgebacks howling. Maybe a good two hundred yards away. From what I could tell, it sounded like they had climbed down into the gulch to look for me. Hadn’t figured on me being able to climb out. Hell, I hadn’t given the proposition much chance myself. On and on I crawled through the tall grasses, heedless of all else save for my thirst and the pulsing pain in my shoulder. At the edge of the wadi, I stumbled down a slope and nearly lost consciousness but pulled myself to the riverbank. If I never did anything else with the remainder of this life, I would drink water until my gut burst. I may die yet, but I won’t die thirsty. When I got to the waterline I thrust my head into the stream and nearly drowned myself gulping. The water tasted like I imagined urine might taste, and more than likely it would make me sick enough to shit out my organs in a soup, and I did not care.
I drank and drank until my stomach cramped. I turned onto my back and gasped for sweet air and then drank some more. Finally full, I ripped off my shirt and buried my shoulder into the frigid mud. I pawed mud onto the gash for a salve to plug the bleeding and slow any infection, and then closed my eyes.
What followed for the next few hours I could not say.
When I woke again the night was still Cimmerian.
Wan light and utter quiet. Needle grass quaking in moonglow. I sat up and could no longer feel any pain in my shoulder, but my left leg stung worse than electrocution. The river trickled behind me. I went to roll up my pants but could not on account of my calf having swollen three times its normal size. I tried peeling off my boot in vain. My foot gorged too fat. Had to get the jackknife off my belt and saw at the leather. A great amount of pain, but I didn’t scream. Pain worse than removing a bandage from a bad burn. I cut and cut until I finally made an incision all the way to my boot heel. I lay back and shook my leg until my boot wiggled off, and kicked it away, exhausted.
My foot was the size of a miracle fruit. A wonder it hadn’t split my boot apart at the stitching while I slept. My stomach heaved and I vomited down my shirt like an infant unable to control his reflexes. I g
urgled up bile and spit it clean of my mouth. There was blood in my vomit, and I figured death wasn’t far along but it sure was taking its sweet time in arriving.
Hardly able to bend over again, I ripped my pant cuff all the way to the knee. Enough moonlight to see I’d been snakebit. I pawed at the piercings where fang had punctured skin. Two or three times I’d been bit just above the ankle. Hard to tell with all the bloating, but it was at least two times.
I stood on my good leg and hobbled about to find my revolver in the mud. The kind of snake and the severity of the venom were hard to gauge, but I didn’t count on the dose to be anything shy of lethal. Maybe a mamba or a viper, the only two types I knew of by name in the area. I patted my pockets and found my cowhide flask. Sloshed it around to measure how much was left. Maybe an inch of whiskey. I tipped it back and stood for a moment but was unable to keep it down. More puke down my shirtfront. I gagged so hard I nearly asphyxiated on my own regurgitation. Impossible to walk in my condition. I crept into the river and, keeping to the slow running shallows, floated down it some distance.
Wading was all I could manage.
I drifted downstream for miles. The flickering fires of British encampments in the bluffs beyond, glowing orange flecks of campsites all over the distant dark hills. No telling where I was headed or how I might stumble upon remedy. The river turned at several bends but remained flat until morning broke over the range. I treaded water and never allowed myself deeper than where I could stand. There was no route to follow. For nearly half a day longer I sloshed my way down the watercourse, figuring it must lead out of the war land at some point. Finally, at long last, I saw a farmhouse set back against a stunted maize field. Purple maize as bright as coneflower. I’d never seen corn such a color except as ornaments in a cornucopia.
I paddled toward the shore.
The snake bite gave me more pain than the gunshot ever could. The swelling in my leg had risen halfway up my thigh by the time I dragged myself out of the river. A slow venom but nasty business all the same. My pants had come wholly apart on the left half and I tore them off all the way to my beltline. I reapplied a mud poultice to my shoulder to stopper the bleeding as best was possible. I didn’t want to fathom how much blood I’d lost or how severe the infection.
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