by Tom Franklin
The wagon-driver had been looking languidly at Deputy Ambrose who was still aiming his pistol. Now the stranger fixed on Walton those eyes with their enormous pupils.
Naw sir, the man said. It’s yall. Need to get out my way cause I’m in a hurry too. And what I got to deliver ain’t gone wait and ain’t gone want to eat yallses dirt all the way to town.
I beg your pardon? Walton showed the sky his palms—What in heaven’s name was going on here? Had every Negro in Alabama chosen today to assert his independence? Now, look here, the Philadelphian said, his voice rising in pitch. I’m normally very conscious of the lower races—
Hang on, Cap’n. It was Walton the driver addressed. What kind a commander ride all his men to a low spot of trees without sending one or two of em in thew the woods scout a ambush?
Walton glanced at the trees, their dusty twitching limbs and leaves, dawning with danger. Each acorn the squat sight on some hooligan’s “scattergun,” as if Death had stepped onto the road. He swallowed. Why, sir, do you ask?
For a long moment no answer came. Then the Negro said, Ye buck yonder’s demonstration of counting’s done inspired me. Pick one ye men.
Walton peered past the mules to where his troop, such as it was, sat their horses. Why, sir? he repeated.
Don’t sir me. If ye don’t pick one, the man said, I’m gone choose for my own self. He raised his chin to better see the deputies, who were eyeing the trees for ambushers.
I must insist, Walton pressed. Why?
Cause whichever one ye pick, Ambrose called, that feller gone die.
Walton could not move. That’s not true, is it? How? he asked. A demonstration of voodoo?
Voodoo? The colored man’s eyes shrank and his hat flexed back on his head and the wagon began to shake, as if it were laughing. He nodded to Walton. That’s right, boss, he said. Show is. Voodoo fixing blink its eye. Or a feller out in the woods, one. When I count up to five you can see.
The Christian Deputy leader threw Ambrose a panicked look.
One, counted the man.
Not Loon, Walton thought. Not Onan. Both were studying the trees, trying to spot the sniper.
Two.
Perhaps offer myself? thought Walton. As a gesture?
Three.
Ambrose! Of course! Here would be his chance.
Four.
Let him shoot Ambrose.
Walton glanced at Ambrose and the Negro saw, in Walton’s eyes, that he was about to be “sold down the river.”
Fi—
Wait! Ambrose swept his gloved hand toward the west. Go on, ye old snake-doctor. Fuck off with ye.
At which point, not even a display of gratitude, the uppity Negro cracked his whip lash and the farm wagon clacked forward, Walton leaping to the ground to avoid being crushed and the horses scrambling as the wagon banged over the whorls in the pass and then up the opposite hill where weeds grew in the road, dusty white grasshoppers fizzing in the air like fireworks set off by gnomes. When the wagon was gone the pass in the road seemed enormous.
Ambrose sheathed his pistol. Hey, Captain Fool?
Walton found it hard to stand as his knees had jellied. Give me a moment, he said. Please.
When ye ballsack descend back down out ye asshole, I want ye to write a entry in ye diary yonder says we jest got backed down by one old nigger and two old mules. The second-in-command took off his gloves and threw them in the dirt. Shit, he said and turned his horse and trotted away, in the opposite direction the farm wagon had gone.
Walton watched him, then turned to the wagon as it squeaked away. Before he had time to think better, he’d taken off, on foot, in pursuit of the old man. Walton was not one to “pull rank” because of his skin color, but this was uncalled-for behavior from a “darky” old enough to remember how conditions had been before Walton’s northern associates had liberated the slaves. For emphasis, he drew his revolver, which he had no intention of using, and was closing on the wagon, about to grab its tail-gate, when suddenly the driver whoaed his mules and the wagon stopped and the Christian Deputy founder nearly walked into its rear end. He raised his pistol—perhaps a warning shot in the air?—the same instant the tarp in the wagon-bed rolled like a swell of water and a fat bearded man elbowed himself up from the hay on the floor.
Who interrupted my nap? he demanded.
Shrugging the tarp aside, he clomped the over & under barrels of a long black rifle on the wagon’s back rail, so close to Walton the northerner could smell gun oil.
Toss ye iron in here, he said. Keep ye hands where I can see em.
Walton complied, blanching at the horrific fellow’s goiter and grizzled brown skin and its pockmarks, gashes, scars, and moles. He wore dark lenses with an eyepatch under one and a bush of wild red hair in a braid hanging over his heart and a sprawling beard that made his head larger. His teeth were red and the rattle of his breath like a dog’s low growl. Perhaps here was a “moonshiner,” Walton thought. Which might account for his pensiveness.
What the hell you supposed to be in them outfits? the odd fellow said. A fucking Mountie? Canader’s a few miles north ways, ain’t it, I? He laughed and coughed.
I’d prefer less graphic language, Walton said, gazing into the rifle barrels. He raised his hands, showing no threat. I, sir, am Captain Phail Walton and those men behind me are my Christian Deputies.
Christian? The man coughed and sprayed Walton’s face with blood. Deputies?
The leader moved to reach for a handkerchief in order to blot the blood from his face when the stranger bopped him on the head with the rifle barrels, dislodging his hat. I told ye don’t move, sissy.
Ouch, Walton said, suddenly dizzy.
The fellow had began to chuckle and the wagon creaked with his mirth. Ye looks like a bunch of goggle-eye dandy boys, he said. In them faintsy getups.
We don’t appreciate that kind of insinuation, Walton said.
Shit, said the one-eyed man. The driver whipped his mules and the operation clattered off, the eerie man in the back laughing or coughing, it was hard to tell which.
Walton began walking backward toward the others, wondering what ilk of black magic he’d stumbled upon. Was the peculiar man in the receding wagon’s bed some “haint” of the backwoods? What monsters still roamed these southern wildernesses? Why, here might be Darwin’s “Missing Link” or a specimen of the fabled “Big Foot” of western climes. Walton put his hands on his hips and watched.
The wagon was nearly out of sight.
Meanwhile, loyal Donny wandered up on his own and nibbled Walton’s ear as the old man’s laughter or coughing hackled over the fields. Walton closed his eyes and summoned what wherewithal he had left and pulled the clammy sack of his body into the saddle without opening his eyes. He let Donny walk himself toward the others and thought about Ambrose. How he’d found the Negro face-down, beaten nearly to death, in a Memphis alley. Rats tearing at his pants leg. Walton recalled frightening off the large rodents and helping the wheezing wretch to his feet, procuring him a bowl of turtle soup and rice and giving his testimony while eating with him and several other hungry denizens of the underclass, the Philadelphian thrilled by his own display of open-minded philanthropy.
And now here rode that same philanthropist with quite a different mind, shivering on his horse, backed down, again, ready in fact to give his own man up. He remembered Ambrose “watching his back” on the riverboat and deflecting the murderous intent to Red Man. Later siding with Walton about the burials. How he’d said “bunker” with such faithfulness.
Perhaps it was time, wasn’t it, for Walton to face the fact: Ambrose was right. He, Walton, was indeed an F-U-L, fool. Wasn’t he out here in the wilderness only because he’d backed out of a duel at a Halloween costume party at an Admiral’s summer home in Boston? With Mother on his arm, he’d gone as a “gunslinger,” red shirt and khaki pants with their extra pockets full of “loot,” the polished riding boots, ascot and hat. For fun he’d worn a real gun, unloaded
of course. After a misunderstanding, a meaty, red-faced Italian “thug” pulled Walton’s leather gloves from his gunbelt and slapped him across the cheek several times despite Walton proclaiming his innocence in the matter of the Italian’s wife. Yet the Italian, dressed as a giant rabbit, shoved Walton into the seaman’s rosebushes. He then kicked him in the crotch and spat upon him and threw drinks in his face. He hit Walton in the back of the head with his, Walton’s, own pistol.
Walton’s cheeks burned at the memory. Hadn’t he, bleeding from rose thorns, knelt and begged his beefy opponent not to murder him? The man flipping off his rabbit hood now, blood speckled on his faux fur. Hadn’t the Italian agreed to let him go only if Walton removed his pants, crimson shirt and underwear and crawled naked from the party? The mob of them (including a “loose” woman) following in their buggy—not part of the agreement—costumed in masks and gaudy outfits and top hats, swinging lanterns and spewing him with bottles of champagne. Banging cans and firing pistols at the stars. Later, the first strains of morning light had caught him sneaking through a back alley; a Boston police captain on his way to the station-house nabbed him as he tried to sneak into Mother’s hotel. Wrapped in a dirty shirt, Walton was thrown in jail. His head shoved in the chamber pot by the degenerates in his cell. Lice in his hair. Instances of painful sodomy. Mother, her carriage-driver holding her arm, her handkerchief over her mouth and nose, fetched him out of the jailhouse. She’d brought him a scarlet hood and would only suffer his company if he wore it. His darling betrothed Miss Annie’s younger brother had returned Walton’s grandmother’s diamond ring along with a letter he’d only read once but could recite from memory: Dear Phail, please tell me which Parties you plan on attending in the Future so I will not. Never speak to me again. You should spell yr. Name with a “f.” I wish you were dead. Or I was. Somebody. I hate you.—Sincerely, A.
Hadn’t Walton traveled “coach” on the railways south to this wasteland of dry sugarcane and human detritus in the very costume of his shame and with the sole intention of getting himself murdered? Would that not show them all? Did you hear? Phail’s dead! Killed in battle in a southern wilderness. He was no coward after all. We were so wrong about him. They’re going to publish his logbook. A perfect plan: South then dead. Yet somehow he’d discovered a niche for himself. His leadership had given these shiftless men shift. He added focus to their lives. He was their salvation. And might they not be his?
He gazed across the fields of brown to where faithful Loon and Onan waited, glancing at the trees around them. Thus far Walton had squandered chance upon chance for the glory of death in battle, “kill or be killed,” to even his score on God’s night sky of a chalkboard. Red Man should have been Walton’s kill, not Ambrose’s. Hadn’t that rightly been Walton’s mutiny to quell? And those deserters ought to have died impaled by Walton’s sword, not killed by Ambrose’s Winchester. And only moments ago, this wretched man-thing with his enormous rifle and rebellious Negro! They were obviously criminals. Yet was the man-thing dead? Was the Negro?
Was Walton? Had he fought like a man or surrendered his sidearm without a thought? The Christian Deputy leader straightened in his saddle. Strength had returned full force to his knees and he rose in the stirrups and clasped his pommel and nodded as he rode up alongside his men.
Deputy Loon, he said. Deputy Onan. He smiled grimly. Let’s go get that son-of-a-bitch.
Neither man moved.
I see, their leader said. He lowered his gaze. So I’ve lost my authority completely. Not that I blame you—
Naw, Onan said from the side of his mouth. It ain’t that. He and Loon were casting their eyes fearfully at the trees. We jest don’t want that nigger’s friend in the woods to shoot us.
Ned’s face in her dreams but gone when she opened her eyes. She lay in warm hay, it moved with her breath. She was glad there wasn’t any shit in the stall now but there had been some here before. Her face was away from them but she knew that of the three women behind her two were having her time of the month and one was past prime. She tried to sit up but her hands were bound behind her. She rolled over.
They wore black dresses and veils. She didn’t know who the two in back were but the one in front was Mrs. Tate, she could tell from her smell of her dead husband. She blinked and blew hay from her face and rolled over. They’d put her in a barn stall made secure with bars like a jail cell. Hay for sleeping. Slop jar in the corner. Nothing else.
Mrs. Tate held the Mississippi Gambler in her hand. What did you plan to do with this? Cut my throat?
Yall poisoned me, she said.
The ladies said nothing.
Mrs. Tate, Evavangeline said. Did I answer ye questions wrong and this is what I get?
I’m sorry, said the little woman. She handed the knife away. But you can’t say names here. We don’t have names here. You’ve been bitten by a struck dog. I saw the marks on your arm while you bathed. These other ladies have witnessed them as well. So we have no choice but to confine you. For your own safety. See if the ray bees have got you.
No, she said. She wriggled up against the wall and fell forward, her ankles bound as well. I ain’t got none, I swar. That dog was my own pet dog. It never had no ray bees.
If you don’t exhibit any symptoms, we’ll set you free and you can be a citizen of our town. And if you do have them, we’ll shoot you quickly and burn your remains.
But I got to go, Evavangeline said.
Why? Because of those children? If you tell us where they are, Mrs. Tate said, we’ll bring you some milk.
I had enough of yallses milk.
Well. If you change your mind, tell the guard here and she’ll let me know.
Mrs. Tate and another lady walked out of the barn. The guard moved a wooden bucket near the door and spread a dish towel over it and sat holding a pistol. She flung the knife which stuck in the wall. For near an hour Evavangeline tried to talk to her, but she may as well have been asking a salt block for a nickel for all the good it did.
Jest give me my knife, she begged.
The lady ignored her.
Eventually she gave up and fell asleep and dreamt again of Ned, this time wringing a pullet’s neck with his hands and tossing it to her to pluck and secret the feathers away in a bag for a surprise pillow she was stuffing. Settling against the kitchen wall and breaking wind and letting her pull off his boots and then dragging down his britches. She woke with hay stuck to her face and beyond the bars her guard knitting a boy’s sweater.
Ned had made whiskey money by whoring her out to passing men, signs along the road saying “Yung Gurl One Dolar” and with arrows directing customers to their house. Once a town lady big in her church stole a bunch of the signs and Ned tracked her to her house and killed her dogs and a peacock and threw them on the roof and said if she ever messed with his signs again he’d come back and burn her place to hell with her in it and all the younguns. She and her children had replaced the signs immediately, and after that everybody left them alone and a man or two a week was their average. More at Christmastime.
Once he was showing her how to make stew with the coons she’d brought in. Their hides were nailed to the logs outside to dry, hung over holes in the walls to stop the wind. It was not so cold that she needed to be bundled up, the fireplace glowing in one room and the stove in the other, and she moved around the dark smoky kitchen in a short dress made from a flour sack. He was at the woodstove dropping carrots and taters and onions into a bubbling pot that painted the air the color of a pretty picture. She walked barefoot on the dirt floor, then began to dance, humming, Ned’s large fingers dropping in celery and parsnip and she grazes the slope of his shoulders with her little biddy tits and he spins in his chair and grabs her onehanded by her ribcage and pulls her face into his beard.
Another time she got mad at him for bedding a coon-ass whore and tried to poison him with gun powder but he smelled it in the grits and put her out and said never come back and she’d lived outside in the ya
rd for near a month with him never once looking at her as she shrank and shriveled from lack of food not willing to catch a coon ner wildcat ner skunk jest waiting for him to forgive her fore she died. He’d come out to feed the chickens and step over her where she was asleep in the dirt. If he was riding his mule he’d ride it right over her. If the mule hadn’t liked her so much it would of stepped on her a hundred times. But then Ned forgive her when the thaw come and he was out of money and more men was showing up needing they corks pulled. He took her back and burned her clothes and fed her and doctored her wounds and wormed her and cured her of the head lice and scrubbed her red in a tub and dried her on his shirt and then held her nekkid up in front of him lying down his arm purring.
He said, Evavangeline.
It was the only time she ever heard him say her name. Till then she hadn’t known she had one other than Gurl. Every morning after that when she opened her eyes she repeated it to herself, so she wouldn’t forget it. She remembered every hit, kiss, bite. She remembered the time he fed her watermelon heart. She would of drawn his face in the dirt with a stick but earth and wood couldn’t do him justice. She could of smelled him in wind blown past a dead skunk if only there were wind of him to blow. He told her he must of got the ray bees from one of them coons though he never saw no sign of em. He said he hadn’t told her yet cause he didn’t want to scare her. Wanted to be sure she didn’t have em too. But now it was time for him to do what he had to, he said, before he got all cross-eyed. He said he could feel his eyes crossing right now.
They were sitting beside one another by a fire in the yard. He’d been burning furniture out of the cabin all morning and not saying why. She leaned in to look at his eyes. There was something wrong with them, they were yellow and jumpy, toadfrogs drowning in shots of milk.
I can’t drank water, he told her, slobbering. Can’t stand the sight of it. He twitched. My thoat’s all swoll. Come I’s to hit ye last night? It’s cause ye offered me a sup of water. Member?