by Taylor Brown
“Graverobber!”
Bobcats and backhoes littered the hillside, stacks of wood, and men suddenly everywhere, stepping down from newly arrived trucks, big men with hardhats that gleamed under the halogen worklights flickering to life in the dusk.
Baker felt his velocity build, faster and faster downhill. A workman lurched from behind a yellow digger and Baker dodged him, spinning, running straight again until another man, this one white-chested and tattooed, hunkered low before him, readied. Baker juked left, right, too quick to follow. The man crumpled before him, as if spell-struck, and Baker shot past.
He vaulted a sawhorse table from a higher ledge, the angles right, and landed sure-footed, still running, and felt something whelm up in his lungs, the hot rasp of exertion but something else too, the river nearing, the bridge, his power crescent, too fleet-footed to be caught, and he was almost there when the blindside came, exploding skull to skull from the right, his footing lost, his body wheeling downhill, rag-dolled, toward the river rock.
***
He woke to a halo of grim faces arched over him, above them the bruise of dusk. The square and hair-grizzled jaws were moving but he heard nothing save the monotone ring inside his skull, like a far-off siren.
He turned from the faces, saw where the river ran sunken through crag-rock only a few steps away, the covered bridge straddling the silent sluice of dark water like a shelter of some kind, red-shingled and shadowed from heavy snows and the mean-boring sun.
The voices started to break through the ringing, but barely, like the low gush of running water. More pleasant the lightning bugs, their bulbs flickering yellow like the tiny lanterns of tiny men, moment-bright and gone.
Baker sat up, his world dizzied, and started to stand. A heavy hand kept his butt to the ground. He could not quite decipher the exact words delivered him, their separate shapes and meanings, but understood their message. That he could not come back here. That his kind was not welcome. No dirty-footed mountain trash, no black-handed graverobbers. No trespassing.
“Moss,” he told them. “My mother was a Moss.”
No exceptions, they said. No names carried extra weight, especially names they’d never heard of, like Moss.
Arms hooked underneath his armpits and lifted him to his feet, dizzied, no surety in the ground underneath his feet. Hands ushered him toward the open maw of the covered bridge, that once shelter, now like a tunnel bored through the air where none was needed, a one-way path to his past. No future of Moss land, not even a grave.
His feet crossed the slatted pine of the bridge, the river hissing darkly beneath him, the rocks jagged and black and wet. All around was shadow, night come early in the shingled darkness. Ahead the outlet, the squared light of dusk, the old mountain highway whose broken shoulder would lead him back to his father’s house.
He crossed the threshold, stood, turned to look back the way he’d come. A lightning bug drifted before him, the vertical body and disc-like wings hovering like a miniature hummingbird, that delicate. The white bulb on the tail ignited, yellow-lit, and Baker reached out and caught the luminous being in the hollow of his cupped palms. He could feel the tickling flutter of tiny wings.
He looked up the darkening slope of the hillside, past the gold-spired fencing and the earth-moving equipment, past the worklamps and helmeted men, to the sparse stand of trees where his mother lay buried. So far-off, and not but one way across, this bridge, and that thwarted by men at the far threshold, their arms crossed, their bodies growing one-dimensional in the falling dark, silhouettes only, dark and unyielding as a wall themselves.
Baker clenched his hands into a double-handed fist, maddened and powerless. He wanted recourse, had none. No way to tell them this bridge was his past, this land his future. No voice they would hark, no sledge but his brittle knuckles. He unmade his two hands until they made a prayer shape against his chest.
Only later, after hiking most of the way home, the broken-shouldered highway rising crookedly into the dark upper reaches of the mountains before him, did he open his hands from their steepled place against his chest and see the crescent smear in his palms, luminosity burst against the black lines of grave-dirt. A sad sight to behold, sadder still because he could think of no other end to the short dream of holding the world intact.
He kept on walking, calm-hearted despite the ringing in his concussed skull, walking another mile up the mountain hollows to the dark country of his home, his father’s house, the glimmering shed where his father kept the Christmas lights hidden from his son—or thought he did.
***
Come dawn, the blue-ridged highlands grew around the flat mirror of the lake, upthrust, their peaks articulated out of darkness against the rising light. Senior’s johnboat chugged across the water in blue puffs of smoke. He pulled up to the warped dock where he stored the boat and tied it to a rusted cleat. He climbed out, another night’s catch heavy over his shoulder, and zigzagged down the uneven planking, no sleep to steady him.
He needed to sell off his catch while it was fresh, and the riverfront grills would already be opening, happy to buy fresh fish at a big discount, no questions asked. He trudged toward town. Before sunup there were few police around to ask questions, no heat to turn his catch foul-smelling and unsellable.
All night, his boy’s dinnertime bitterness had stung in his mind. Senior had only done like the rest of the family, the Mosses, selling off the land at a good price, and the money he’d stuck in a trust for the boy’s future, college or tech school or something. Baker believed he could get a full ride playing football, despite his size, and maybe he could. Still, he needed a way to bridge one future to another, should the first go crooked of its aim. In Senior’s experience, only money and firepower made you any kind of real change in the world.
***
Senior stood on the deck of the river grill, the chairs still stacked on the tables, most his catch sold off to the cook preparing for Sunday brunch. The cook had thrown in a can of cold beer, and Senior popped the ice-crusted top and slurped the contents, the river flowing past in white V’s around jagged hunks of rock like the kind he’d blasted once from sheer mountainsides.
He was thinking of that, his past, when a boom exploded in his chest, a blast from upriver. Senior dropped to his knees, his ears ringing, his beer foaming across the deck. No one else in the county had the explosives for that kind of blast.
No one else.
He was still on his knees, his hands gripping the deck railing, his eyes set stinging on the water, watching for debris, for blood, when the flowers came cascading down the dark shoots of water in bright flurries, wheeling and fresh, the petals like frozen outbursts of color. He saw them and knew they were lilies and azaleas cut long-stemmed from his wife’s garden, cut by his boy, flourishing the river like some kind of parade, and Senior thought of the short-cut fuses of his dynamite, cut to blow so much quicker than the labels read, and he could think of nothing but his boy, his boy.
He closed his eyes to the blossoming flood, the terrible hemorrhage of beauty in the river, and crumpled fully to the deck, hearing only the river run onward, so jagged-toothed and sweet.
IN THE SEASON OF BLOOD & GOLD
Pale light crept into the black stanchions of pine, the ashen ground, the red center of dying coals. The camped men rose silent and broke the bread of old pillage, hard as stone, between blackened fingers. One of their number looked at his own. Soot and powder, ash and dirt. Neat crescents accrued underneath the nails, trim and black, like he’d tried to dig himself out of a hole in the ground. Or into one.
Some of the others chewed loudly, bread dry in dry mouths. No tins rattled. There was no coffee, not for some days. He wanted always to talk in this quiet of early morning, to speak something into the silence that uncoupled them from the close pallet of slumber. That assembled them into the crooked line of horsemen, no colors among the trees. No badges, no uniforms. He wanted to ask what quietude might linger if they hovered here long
er in the mist, did not mount and ride. But they always did.
So he sprang up first. He shoved the last crust down his gullet and kicked old Swinney where his britches failed him, an inordinance of cloven white flesh.
“Goddamn katydid,” said Swinney, second-in-command.
“Least I ain’t a old ash-shitter.”
“You be lucky to get this old, son. Right lucky this day and age.”
The boy set his cap on bold.
“Lucky as you?”
Old Swinney hawked and spat a heavy clot of himself into the coals.
“Luckier.”
They rode horses of all colors, all bloods. Strays they called them, tongue in cheek. Horses that offered themselves for the good of the country, under no lock and key. The quality of a man’s mount was no measure of rank, a measure instead of luck and cunning and sometimes, oftentimes, cruelty.
The boy went to mount his own, a fly-bitten nag with a yellow-blond coat in some places, gray patches of hairless skin in others. She’d been a woman’s horse once, most likely. The men had used to joke about this. Then one of their favorites, an informal company jester, was blown right from her back. The mare had stood there unmoved, flicking her ears, biting grass from the trampled soil. No one save the Colonel enjoyed a horse so steady. They left off joking.
The boy stuck one cracked boot into the stirrup, an ill-formed shape clanged from glowing iron by an idiot smithy. Or so the men had told him. They told him many such things, their faces fire-bitten and demonic over the cookfire, the embers circling them like burning flies. The boy believed them all. Never the facts, the names, or the settings. But what they were getting at, this he believed. There was faith in their eyes, so black and silvered—like the move of steel in darkness. He believed in what hands torqued them to speak.
Rays of dawn shot now through the black overhang of trees, spotting the ground with haloes of warped design. The rest of the men slung themselves into their saddles, a cadre of stiff-jointed grunts, and some of them stepped their horses into the light unawares. The boy saw them go luminous among the black woods, specter-like. Like men elected to sainthood. Faces skull-gone, mouths hidden in the gnarled bush of their beards, showing only their teeth. The equipage of war hung by leather belts, pistols and knives and back-slung scatterguns of all gauges. This hardened miscellany jolted and clanked as their horses tapered into the long irregular file of their occupation.
They rode the forest until the white face of the sun hung right above them and the insects clouded so meanly men soiled their cheeks and foreheads with dirt and ash. The horses flicked the mosquitoes from their rumps with their tails. The skin of man and animal both grew spattered with spots of burst blood. They rode unto the verge of a small green valley of sparse trees. There was a farmhouse down there, a barn. Out of habit they stopped for lunch though there was little to drink and less to eat. They stopped within the cover of the trees so as not to be seen from the valley below.
When the boy dismounted his horse, old Swinney slapped him on the shoulder.
“Welcome to Virginny,” said the old man.
“Virginia?” said the boy, his eyes going wide with wonder.
He crept toward the edge of the trees, his face dark amid the shadows. He could feel the older men’s eyes upon him, their ears attuned to the snap of stick or shrub. They listened because he made no sound, this boy, the lightest of foot among them. A former horse thief, his skills translated readily to their pursuits. At last he stared down upon the rough-planked barn, the once-white house, the single white pig mired in a sagging pen of mud. He stared down upon Virginia for a long time, a stranger unto this country.
When he returned the men were tightening the holsters they wore and sighting their rifles and sliding their knives back and forth in their sheaths, back and forth, making sure no catches might slow the draw. At this juncture the boy was possessed of a French dueling pistol of uncommon caliber. He mounted up and pulled the heavy j-shaped weapon from his belt and thumbed the hammer back. The filigreed metal of the action spun and clicked into place over the rich wood frame scarred by countless run-ins with his belt buckle, tree branches, roots where he’d dropped the thing practicing his pistoleer skills.
Swinney stood below him.
“You got any bullets left for that thing, boy?”
The boy held the pistol toward him butt-first.
“She’s a firecracker,” he warned, smiling.
When the older man reached for the pistol the boy dropped it sideways from his hand and hooked it upside down by the trigger guard and spun the gun upon its axis and caught it by the backstrap, the trigger fingered, the barrel at Swinney’s chest, the older man’s eyes wide with fright.
“Let them sons of bitches learn the hard way,” said the boy.
In fact he did not have any bullets. He was out.
Swinney’s eyes narrowed and he shook his head.
“What you need is a good ass-whooping, boy. Not them parlor tricks.”
The boy spun the gun twice and stuck it in his belt.
“Now don’t you go getting jealous on me, Swinney.”
The older man made a derisive gesture and waddled down the line.
The provenance of the pistol was known—one of a pair from the vast arms collection of an officer they’d kidnapped from his bed. The boy’s first of such prizes. He’d been promptly swindled of one of the guns in a bet over the height of a sycamore fated for firewood. That left him one pistol and five balls for the smoothbore barrel. Two went to target practice, one to drunken roistering, one to a duel with a blue jay on a fencepost (lost), and the last plumb lost along the way.
He could only wait now for another of his comrades to fall. Be first to scavenge.
“Hey, Swinney,” he called. “You think they’re down there?”
“Somebody is,” said the fat man, turning back down the line.
The boy sat his horse and made ready to maraud. When their leader rode past, the boy could smell him. The Colonel was riding the line with words of exhortation, of glory and honor and duty and triumph. Then he rode out into the light and struck his saber heavenward, no gleam upon the corroded blade. They spurred their horses’ bellies at the slashed order of charge and dropped down into the valley upon a thunder of hooves.
The cavalcade fanned out as they descended, tearing divots from the soft turf. The boy, so scant of weight, pulled ahead of many in the onrush. He was not first to the house but first onto the porch, his horse needing no dally to stay her should shots be fired. The porch planks gave beneath his boots, sodden or thin-cut or both. The door was standing wide and he ducked into the sudden dark. Pistol first, knife second. The ceilings were low, the furniture neat. No roaches scattered before him. No people. Other men clamored through the door behind him. Outside, war whoops and the squealed slaughter of pig.
No one in the front rooms, the rear, the kitchen. He found the stairs and shot upward into the blue dark of the second floor, the balls of his feet hardly touching the steps, the drop-point of his blade plumbing the gloom ahead like a blind man’s stick. The curtains were all drawn, the floor dark. He stepped from one room into another. Quilted beds neatly made, wardrobe of cheap wood. Then he crossed the threshold into still another room, this the darkest.
He swung the pistol toward her white back, the dark hair all upon its contours like a black eddy of streamwater. She had not heard him, was watching the other door. Her thin shift was open at the back, skin pale as bone. He swallowed, suddenly nervous, and realized how hungry he was, his stomach drawn up empty inside him. Heart, heart, heart again. It sounded in the cavity of his chest. The pistol began to quiver like a pistol should, whelmed with power.
His voice a whisper: “Ma’am?”
She spun on bare feet, kitchen knife clutched to chest, face silly-hard with courage, fear.
“Which side?” she asked him.
“It don’t matter which.”
She was not looking at him, not listening eit
her, staring instead into the black tunnel of the barrel like she might jam the pike by willpower alone.
He looked at her and then at the gun, kinking his wrist to better see the thing. An object foreign to him. He lowered it to his side and sheathed the knife as well and the two of them stood staring at one another, unspeaking.
“What’s your name?” he asked finally, dry-mouthed, his words hardly crossing the six feet of space that separated them.
She pointed the kitchen knife at him.
“Nancy. Any closer and I kill you.”
The floorboards jolted, steps upon the stairs. He shot across to her, past the blade.
“You got to hide.”
“Nowhere to,” she said. “I’ll take my chances.”
“They ain’t good.”
A bearded sharecropper with tobacco-juiced lips, black-gritted, clopped into the room. A Walker Colt hung loosely in his hand. He saw the girl and smiled.
“Christmas early,” he said.
The boy stood beside the girl, mouth agape. She spoke to him without looking.
“You a man or I got to protect my own self?”
His mouth closed. Slowly he raised the dueling pistol ornate and empty at the older man’s heart.
“I don’t reckon it’s Christmas yet,” he said.
The man spat a black knot on the floor and leveled his Colt at the boy, casual-like.
“Now, Mr. Walker here, he beg to differ.”
The boy went to thumb the hammer back but back it was.
“Where them pistol tricks, boy?”
“Don’t reckon I need them.”
Black caulking divided the man’s teeth.
“You killed yet?”
“Plenty.”
“No. I knowed you was a virgin the day we took you on. I knowed by plain sight and I know it still. You want to be a man? Tell you what, I’ll let you watch.”
The fingers of his free hand began to unbutton his britches and he began to walk slowly across the room, legs straddled.