In the Season of Blood and Gold

by Taylor Brown

  The boy put the palm of his hand against the girl’s belly to push her behind him and her waist was as tiny and delicate as his idea of what was fragile in the world. When he touched her she touched him back, her hand warm on his.

  “No,” said the boy to the sharecropper. “No.”

  The man kept coming.

  “No.”

  At the last the boy lunged unsheathing his knife and a white crack exploded inside his head and dreaming or dying he felt his blade plunge into the liquid underbelly of all that could have happened. All that would have. He saw her eyes come over him, blue-rimmed, the pupils deep and black and wide as wells. All for him. Then darkness.

  Hands upon his face, his brow. Palms smooth. Tough but smooth, callous-shaven. No scratching, no frictive grit. A voice like running water. The layers that bound him were cut away, piece by piece, until he was naked, unwooled, committed to dark.

  More voices over him, whispers and orders he could not decipher. Instead he drifted in a world his own, dark with nightmare. Infection. Dreams of his past, fevered, like his first landing on this shore. The men he pushed under, the men that pushed him. Ladders of them, limb-conjoined, wanting for air. The spouts of exhalation, gargle-mouthed. The groan of the ship sinking beneath them, sucking them under. The white jet of expelled air, last of the pockets that saved him. That shot him to the surface, white-birthed.

  Then and now black-whirled. Nightmare and memory.

  The ship gone, the waves high. The pale slit of coast, like snow. The beach underneath his feet, a new land. The mad stumbling in darkness, black mobs of fliers enraptured by his flesh. Then the lop-sided shack, the man called Swinney who fed him pork and whiskey, who took him in, and then the Colonel, who took them all. After that the foreign land grown mountainous, and meaner, and scarecrow men who haunted ridges, and rib-boned horses beneath them, and always the hunger, insatiable, and the wagons raided, and the barns and the farmhouses, and never so much blood.

  With these fever-dreams came the vomiting. Hours or days long. Hot on his chest, aprons of himself expelled. Sickness and sweat and instruments on his skin, metal-cold.

  One day he could hear the words of the men over his sickbed:

  “How long’s he been like this?”

  “Near a week. Took that long to find you.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Couldn’t really say, Doc.”

  “He’s hardly even whiskered.”

  “Well.”

  “Well, where did he come from?”

  “Shipwreck off the coast, blockade-runner.”

  “Immigrant? Another Irish, with sympathies?”

  “Don’t talk like it. Talks like you or me.”

  “Not anymore he won’t. Not if this fever don’t break.”

  “You best hope he do, Doc.”

  “Shall I, Mr. Swinney?”

  “Otherwise you might find yourself there beside him. Untongued.”

  “Where is your commanding officer?”

  “Don’t you worry your head about it.”

  “Where is he?”

  “With the girl. And you, Doc. You with me.”

  Minutes or hours or days later the sickbed gone, the house too, his world beginning to sway and totter beneath him, uncertain of step. It expanded and collapsed and sweated and snorted, a ribbed joinery articulating beneath him as though the surface of the world sprung from engines hot and deep beneath the soil and rock.

  Sometimes he could not sit the horse, too weak, so they laid him belly-down across the torso of a horse with no saddle, his head lying against one of the flaring sides. In daylight the sun leered sickeningly above him, the trees all warped and gnarled, the world ugly and pale and mean. He shut his eyes against the light. Nightfall he was led stumbling to void himself in the trees, liquid and quaking. A round man, gone strange to him, leading him, an animal on a rope.

  His strength returned slowly, his lucidity too. One day he awoke on the back of the horse. The light was slanted, late afternoon, and he was mad with hunger. He tried to wrestle loose and found himself rope-bound to the animal like a sack of feed or beans or other provision.

  The troop stopped just before nightfall. He called out when someone walked past, his voice strange with disuse. Before long another man stood beside him, unhitching the ropes with thick fingers. He slid to the ground and leaned against the horse. The blood receded slowly from his vision leaving old Swinney standing there before him, loose loops of rope in his hand. The boy rubbed the furrows of chafed skin at his wrists. He touched his head lightly, the bandage, the long crust of blood.

  “I a prisoner, Swinney?”

  Swinney shook his head.

  “No, boy.”

  “Should I be?”

  “Colonel said you done him a favor puncturing that son of a bitch.”

  “So is he—?”

  Swinney nodded.

  “Bled out. Colonel’s orders.”

  “And the girl?”

  Swinney turned from him.

  “Come with me, boy. You need to eat.”

  They walked toward the light of the fire. The boy staggered along behind, finding his legs. He was disoriented, the ground uncertain. He had never been so hungry.

  “Where are we?” he asked Swinney.

  “Few days north of that farmhouse. You was sick for near on two weeks.”

  The boy nodded. “North,” he said, low.

  Swinney looked at him a long moment. His belly shook. “Lucky dog,” he said. He turned.

  The boy thought to say something, but nothing came.

  He followed the old man the rest of the way to the fire, man and horse glazed with flame. The boy sat on the white heart of a hickory stump, and the others showed him their smiles, yellow-toothed, dark-gummed. They handed him a tin of stewed pork and he slurped down its contents in a single go.

  When he handed back the empty tin he saw the sleeve of his coat.

  One of the men leaned into the fire, showing his face.

  “She sewn it for you,” he said.

  “We had to cut away your old,” said Swinney. “We was going to give you Oldham’s.”

  “Oldham?” said the boy.

  “Man you killed,” said somebody. “Probably you ought to know his name.”

  “You know all their names?” the boy asked him.

  A chuckle rose multi-lunged from men’s chests, choral.

  “She wasn’t wanting you to wear Oldham’s,” said Swinney. “She sewn you that one out of old what-have-you.”

  “Rags and quilts and such.”

  “Bedsheets too.”

  “I heard scraps of old Oldham hisself.”

  “A coat of many colors.”

  “Yea,” said another man. “Like Joseph’s of old.”

  The boy held the sleeves toward the fire’s orbit. Ribbons and patches of cloth cross-laced the coat, thick-stitched. He stood among the men and worked his arms inside the coat and found the cut of it closer than any he’d ever worn, his small frame normally swallowed in volumes of wool. This one hugged him like a second skin. He thought of who stitched it, of how she must know the contours that shaped him.

  “How is she?” he asked them.

  They rustled. No one spoke.

  “What the hell y’all done to her?”

  The boy looked around, his face darkened.

  “Should I of stuck every last one of you? That it?”

  One man, then another, put a hand to his knife.

  Swinney stepped forward. He cleared his throat.

  “We left her,” he said. “She ain’t none of your concern.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says the Colonel.”

  The boy looked to where the Colonel’s fire flickered a good ways off. He knew he should lower his voice, but didn’t.

  “What does he care?”

  Swinney let his hands fall open, silent.

  The boy looked at him, his eyes slowly widening.

  “The Colone
l is married,” he said.

  The men shifted on their blankets and stumps. The boy looked at them a long moment.

  His voice was low: “He’s had his way, then.”

  They said nothing. Their assent.

  He whispered it, the question that remained: “Against her will?”

  None of the men looked at him. They looked at the fire or their hands or their boots but not at him. The boy swallowed thickly and thumbed the bandage on his head.

  “So be it,” he said. He sat back on the stump and stared into the fire.

  Sometime later he spoke up:

  “Say, I get something outta all this?”

  Swinney pulled something from his coat and the men handed it one to the next circling the firelight until the woolen sock, heavy as a giant’s foot, arrived in the boy’s hand. He slipped off the sock and the Walker Colt sat in his lap, the crescent pearl of the grip like a tiny moon.

  “You earned it,” said Swinney.

  “Yeah you did,” said somebody else.

  The boy pointed the pistol into the dark of the man’s voice.

  “Five shots left,” he said. “One in my head.”

  Nobody spoke, and he knew they wondered what spirits might have snuck through that wound of his. Into his skull. What demons. He did not feel like a boy anymore. He felt old as any of them. Older.

  He rode for three days among them, quiet. Alien.

  Waiting.

  One night Swinney pulled him aside.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” he asked.

  “Tell me how to get back.”

  “You got to be shitting me.”

  “Tell me,” said the boy.

  The third night he lay down to rest early. The cold was coming down out of the north and the ground could keep a man from sleeping if he didn’t get to sleep early enough, with some sunlight still left in the dirt, the rock.

  After a time the boy rose from his pallet of old sacks amid the snoring of his compatriots and moved toward the far off embers of the Colonel’s fire, silent as a wraith, one hand on the grip of his pistol to mask its glow.

  When he passed Swinney he saw two white orbs look at him. Just as quick they disappeared, closed, and whatever they saw prompted no movement.

  The boy kept on picking his way among the stones, the heads, and making no shadow, no sound. The coals of the Colonel’s fire glowed red, the flames low. His black stallion stood fifteen hands tall, thick-muscled, big haunches twitching in his sleep. Unsaddled. The boy did not see the saddle but he saw the Colonel’s slouch hat lying there beside him, the twin tassels still gold even for all they’d rode above.

  The boy pulled back the sleeve of his new coat and crouched, slow to lessen the crackling of his boots, and took the hat by the hand indentions over the crown. As he turned to the horse the shadow of the round brim crossed the Colonel’s face like a black halo. The boy saw him shift, his hand groping the butt of the pistol under his bedroll.

  By the time the Colonel sat upright he found himself all alone, his gun pointed toward empty space. Leaves, fire-spangled, quivering where the horse had been, hoof prints welled with firelight.

  The boy laid his cheek low against the horse’s neck as they crashed through underbrush and low-hanging limbs. He hit upon an old wagon road whose dust shone white and crooked down the mountain switchbacks. The company shunned such roads where spies could estimate the size of their force, where they could be detected at all. They took horse trails or even game trails instead, or they cut their own where the brush grew thick. The boy had the strongest horse underneath him and he was the lightest rider to boot and he believed he might outrun on the open road whomever they sent to catch him.

  He dropped down, down out of the mountains in darkness. His breath and the breath of the horse and the dust of the road all mingling into a white plume that rode upon their heels like some hounding ghost of their own making. He thought of the men pursuing them, men with feathers of dead birds in their hats and guns of many hands come to rest finally in their black-creased palms.

  First light rose colorless over the hills crumpled and creased into one another like a sheet enameled over a miscellany of untold items, of corpses and rock and whatever else gave the earth its shape. Sparse trees bristled from the hillsides gold-leafed, a touch of red. The season was turning, so fast. He had been out of the world for what seemed an eternity and if he could just see her he thought she might embrace him surely as the coat she’d made him. Their courtship so short, seconds alone, but the true shape of him displayed forevermore in the event that split them. He thought this would count above all else.

  At a high outcropping of rock he dallied the horse and climbed to the flattop to surveil the terrain behind him, the terrain ahead. Dust rose from the road far behind him. Whether of riders in pursuit he could not say. Plenty others traveled these roads. Couriers, runaways, men of uniformed war. Militia and home guard too. Enemies all for a boy of his position and exploits.

  He let the horse drink at a rock-strewn stream and drank some himself and set off again. In daylight he left the main road and traveled parallel, rounding into and out of sight of its commerce, his path much slowed over the closed ground. When darkness fell he returned to the road and the gallop.

  Day and night he rode to see her. His Nancy. Dusk of the third day he rode out onto a ridge and saw farmhouses of the sort he sought. Houses like hers in the valley bottoms. Swaddling them, forests richer with autumn than the forests out of which he rode, more abrupt spurts of red and yellow against the green. Whether by time or altitude he could not say, the land of his home being evergreen, few colors to mark the seasons. His heart swelled upon the vista below him until he saw the black kink of river that lay in his path, no bridge in sight.

  He rode down the ridges until he reached the riverbank where the road attenuated into a long white spear under the shallows and disappeared. A wood barge sat beached on the bank, a ferryman dozing on the afterdeck.

  The boy hauled the horse to a stop alongside and kicked the hull.

  “Hey there.”

  The ferryman opened one eye beneath the shadow of his cap. He eyed the boy and the horse he rode and the hat he wore.

  “Ten bits to cross,” he said. “No bartering less you got something to drink.”

  The boy looked out at the flat river, the black surface vented here and there with hidden currents. Then he looked behind him at the road. Then back again to the river. Deep enough for nightmare.

  “Ten bits,” said the man again.

  “Where’s the nearest bridge?” the boy asked him.

  “Bridge? Ten bits is cheap, son. Specially for a man with a horse like that one. Course, if you got you a drop of whiskey—”

  “I need a bridge, sir. No ferries.”

  The man looked hurt.

  “Well, if you’re partial to bridges, the nearest is ten miles yonder. Them partisans blown her last month. Dynamite. But she’s still operable, least tolerably. Don’t you go telling nobody though. That’s in confidence.”

  He winked.

  The boy looked upriver in the direction indicated. Then he tipped his cavalryman’s hat at the ferryman.

  “I’m much obliged, sir.”

  As he hauled the horse down to the soft flats of the riverbank, the boy knew his pursuers would learn all they needed to know from this man. They would know what condition he was in, what condition his horse. They would know what direction he was headed, how much ground they could gain on him by taking the ferry. And, most of all, they would know he was not a boy without fear.

  He stopped the horse a ways down the bank and looked back over his shoulder at the dozing ferryman. The boy knew how he could remove all of that knowledge from the man’s head. All that might betray him. And he could prove to them what kind of man he was. A kind better left alone. His fingers touched the butt of the Colt. A long moment later he gripped great fistfuls of the horse’s mane and shot away toward the bridge.

  He
began to catch shapes quivering upon ridges he’d crossed, dust rising from paths he’d taken just hours before. They were gaining. He stopped for nothing. And still they gained.

  They overtook him two days later in the valley of the farmhouse. The Colonel and two others. The Colonel riding hatless on a big blood bay and the other two flanking him, the trio breaking from the trees diagonal the boy in a flying wedge, the Colonel leading with his horse-pistol drawn, the others with Spencer repeaters already shouldered like buffalo hunters of the plains.

  They headed him off not firing at first to save the horse he rode. They headed him off right before the porch of the house and he called out to her over them and they smiled from behind the long barrels of the weapons with which they would rob him of the chances twice given him at moments of dubious survival. Twice given, twice squandered. This the boy thought as Nancy appeared in the window of the room where he had first and last seen her, where she had perhaps sewn the coat he wore with those white and slender fingers that spread now flatly upon the windowpane like a prisoner’s.

  “Off the horse,” said the Colonel.

  He had the bay horse turned broadside the porch steps, the front door.

  “Didn’t hear you,” said the boy, cocking his ear toward him.

  A blow landed across his back and he fell forward. His hands streaked across the sweat-slick musculature of the horse, helpless. Too lean to grip. Too hard. He landed shoulder-first in the yard and his breath left him, knocked out of his lungs. He rolled onto his back and looked bleary-eyed at the men and horses, their shapes warped and wavering as those seen from below the surface of a well. He could not get enough air.

  The Colonel shucked his near foot from the stirrup and brought his other leg over the pommel and dropped from his horse without ever turning his back. The gaunt hollows of his face, his cheeks, looked down into the boy’s. The upturned points of his mustache sat upon his face like a black smile. He reached out of sight and his hand came back placing the slouch hat on his head, pulling the brim into place.

  “I give a boy a chance, and look what it gets me. All for a goddamn woman.”

  “Her name is Nancy,” said the boy. “I saved her.”

  The Colonel pulled him off the ground by the coat.