by Paul Bagdon
“Hey, mare,” he coaxed the horse, “no reason to get all fired up. You settle down now, mare. You’re OK—no more surprises. You’re fine, mare—nothing to worry about.” He continued the quiet, assuring babble, moving until he stood in front of the horse. He stroked her neck until he felt the muscles relax and the quivering slow and then stop. Jake continued to stroke her until she dropped her head to graze, fear forgotten. He was pleased with how quickly she’d calmed, but not surprised. Cavalry horses are trained to keep their heads under gunfire—but not at midnight with no fight going on, no other sounds of battle. And yesterday this mare had her owner shot off her back in the most horrendous engagement she’d ever see. She’s a good horse, OK. A fine horse.
The sound of bushes moving and a soft snort told Sinclair that the man he’d just killed had left his horse a distance back in the scrub and had come upon Jake on foot. He must have been following me—waiting until I went to sleep to get a drop on me. He returned to the facedown body and stood looking at it. The bear had been tall—approaching six and a half feet, it looked like—and broad, heavy, with wide shoulders. A bandolier was draped over the man’s shoulder and must have crossed his naked chest. Moonlight glinted softly on the brass of the cartridges. A military holster held a sidearm at his hip. Jake could use the gun, and the rifle, too. But he didn’t take them now. The morning would be plenty of time. Just now, the fetid odor of death and warm blood permeated the air around the corpse and Jake felt his gorge rising in his throat. He moved away, finding the bush upon which he’d left his clothes, and pulled on his pants and shirt. The fabric was dry and slightly stiff and felt good next to his skin. His boots weren’t far from the dead man. They’d be there in the morning.
Lots of these crazies around, Jake thought as he walked down the stream. They follow the campaigns, watch the battles, strip what they can from the dead of either side, killing and robbing soldiers who wander off—or desert—from camps. They were like vultures, carrion eaters, defilers of the dead, the dying. Men on both sides of the conflict shot them down with impunity, just as they’d kill rattlesnakes or rabid dogs.
Sinclair sat with his back against the cool surface of a boulder, waiting for his heartbeat to return to normal, hunger again gnawing at him. The man whose life he’d just ended was his first close kill—the term soldiers gave to the killing of an enemy close enough so that his eyes could be seen. Sharpshooting’s a different proposition—not real far from target shooting. So is firing into a bunch of Yanks, knowing the slug would take down at least one of them. There was none of the smell of blood or the dying sounds or the extinguishing of the light of life in the man’s eyes. He sighed. A rifle’s cleaner and a long shot cleaner yet. That damned knife . . . He sighed again. Him or me, he thought. It was him or me.
The flow of the water and the gentle night sounds had a calming effect on Jake Sinclair. He stretched his bare feet out in front of him and his fingers found the wound on his face and then that on the side of his head. Both were dry, the flesh coming together well. There was no heat, no indication of infection. Thoughts and images flickered and flashed in Jake’s mind as his body relaxed. Already he’d begun building a wall around the Battle of Gettysburg and the death of Uriah—a self-protective device that he believed—hoped—would allow him to retain the vestiges of sanity he still possessed. He found it remarkable, quite strange, that his desertion had so little real impact on his feelings. His simple I’ve had enough seemed to cover it, both emotionally and intellectually. The Confederacy, the Union, the war itself, had become abstractions, like thoughts not fully shaped, concepts without definitions. He wondered, for a very brief moment, how far back south the Army of Northern Virginia had gotten in the past day. Then he slept.
Jake hauled his boots onto his sockless feet, tugging and cursing. The morning sun sparkled in the stream and the forest seemed to be a place of calm and peace. The only discordant note was the sprawled corpse of the man Jake had killed the night before. Flies had already gathered in the stream of blood and on and around the body’s face and the rend in its throat. The dead man smelled, not yet of death and decomposition, but of moldy pants, sweat, stale whiskey, and tobacco juice. Jake crouched, grabbed at a shoulder, and turned the corpse over, faceup. Jake’s bowie knife, sticky with blood, had spent the night under the body. Jake picked it up carefully, making as little contact with the drying blood as he could, took it to the stream, and rinsed it, scrubbed it with sand, wiped the blade on his pants, and slid it back into the sheath. He put the sheath in his side pocket; his belt was serving temporary duty as a set of hobbles.
Sinclair returned to the body and stripped off the holster and belt. The pistol, mismatched to the army holster with the Union symbol of the eagle embossed on its black leather flap, was a converted Colt .44 revolver with bone grips. The weapon appeared to be in very good shape. It was clean and gave off a faint aroma of gun oil. When Jake spun the cylinder it revolved smoothly with a quiet whirring sound. He noticed that the cartridges in the loops of the gun belt were Colt issue, not army-contracted ammunition. He strapped the belt around his waist and buckled it so that the pistol hung comfortably at his side. He tapped at the dead man’s packets, which held nothing.
Jake’s gaze stopped at a strange-looking necklace the bearlike corpse wore. A dozen or more clumps of flesh of various sizes and in varying degrees of desiccation hung from a rawhide cord around the man’s chest and now rested on the blood-soaked and matted hair of his chest. Jake leaned forward for a closer look, and then recoiled as if struck by an unanticipated, invisible punch to the face. Two of the lumps of flesh were fresh. They were human tongues. Hot bile rose in Jake’s throat as he backed away, scrambling, almost losing his balance. He turned his back on the body and took a series of deep breaths to attempt to quell his revulsion. It didn’t work.
Afterward he walked past the corpse, eyes averted, to where the rifle lay in the scrub, an inch or so of its stock protruding onto the sand. It was a Henry repeating 44.40, in decent condition. Jake held the butt to his shoulder and the sun-warmed weapon felt good and natural as he peered down the sights.
Removing the bandolier of ammunition from the corpse left Jake with the sour taste of vomit in his mouth and a sheen of sweat on his face. He had no more thought of burying the body than he would have had the corpse been that of a cottonmouth.
As he rinsed blood from the bandolier and the cartridges it held, a skinny roan horse clambered out of the brush and into the stream and began to suck water. One of the animal’s reins dragged a thin, wrenched-away branch. Even from ten feet away, Jake could see the gauntness of the animal and the raw spur marks on its flanks. The horse carried a highly polished, full double-rigged Western stock saddle that looked as out of place as a diamond tiara would on a gin-mill whore. Jake waded out into the stream and grabbed a rein before the horse noticed him, and even then, didn’t look up or slow its drinking. Jake give the animal another minute and then led him back to shore and onto the sand. The obviously fatigued gelding followed docilely. When Jake stopped and raised a hand to stroke the emaciated neck, the horse flinched and attempted, weakly, to rear. The roan’s flanks trembled in fear as Jake approached from the side. He quickly released the two cinches and tugged the saddle and blanket from the horse’s back, revealing several festering saddle sores.
Jake dumped the saddle to the side and examined the sores more closely. They were fresh and wet, but now that they were exposed to the air and given that they wouldn’t be abraded further by a blanket and saddle, they’d heal. Jake led the roan into the stream again to drink, and again, after a few minutes led him out. After one more such repetition, Jake worked the buckle on the bridle and removed the bit and headset from the roan. When Jake slapped him on the rump, the horse skittered into the stream, crossed it to the far bank, and disappeared into the woods. Jake smiled and set out to fetch his mare.
While she drank, Jake released the cinch on the army pancake saddle and eased it and the blanket
off the mare’s back. There were no saddle sores. He tossed the saddle aside. As the bay grazed, hobbled once again with Jake’s belt, he went through the saddlebags attached to either side of the Western saddle with lengths of latigo. They were survival treasure chests, bringing a broad smile to Jake’s face. One was half filled with strips and thick knots of jerky. When he tasted it he grinned again: It was beef jerky, not venison, and it was no more difficult to chew than a tough steak. Under the dried meat was an unlabeled quart bottle of amber-colored whiskey. Jake pulled the cork and filled his mouth with the warm liquid. When he swallowed, the heat traveled down his gullet and into his gut as smoothly as silk over a fine lady’s shoulder, washing away the bitterness of the bile that had arisen earlier. A cloth sack of rifle ammunition had rested against the bottle. A pocketknife—a Barlow with a well-sharpened blade—went directly into Sinclair’s pocket.
The second saddlebag held a ten-foot loop of horsehair rope, more jerky, a sack of tobacco and papers, and a real find—a cylindrical tin container of lucifers with a tight cap that would keep them dry in any weather. A few .44 cartridges, a bandana that stank of sweat, and a single lady’s leather glove comprised the final yield.
Jake carried the bottle, a handful of jerky, and the horsehair rope to a shady spot and went to work fashioning a pair of hobbles for his mare. He left the saddle in the direct sun, at least for a while—he swore he could still smell the stink of the dead man on it. He hated to cut the rope. It was a fine piece of work and it’d taken someone a good long time to put it together. As he worked with his knife and the rope, he lowered the level in the bottle a good three inches and finished and replenished his handful of the jerked beef. After an hour or so he walked, not too steadily, to the saddle, hefted it, and brought it into the shade. If there had been vestiges of the odor of the bearlike killer, there no longer were. The saddle smelled of itself—of perfectly tanned, blemish-free leather cut and assembled by a true craftsman. He ran a finger over the ornately rendered initials cut into the inside of the left fender of the saddle: JTW. A man who knows quality, he mused.
Jake realized that everything he’d gained from killing the insane scavenger was the result of someone else’s loss. The saddle and jerky had no doubt been the property of a Pennsylvania family whose farm the Confederate army had swept past—with the scavenger following it. The rifle may have belonged to a soldier. The pistol wasn’t military issue, but that meant little. Men on both sides carried weapons they owned into battle. Even the horse Jake rode wasn’t his. Beyond the occasional ripe melon from a neighboring plantation’s patch, Jake had never stolen anything. Now things were different—totally different.
Sinclair switched hobbles on the mare, the new set giving her a few more inches between the restraints, making walking easier, but still precluding any gait beyond a walk. He threaded his belt though the loops of his pants and the cut in the sheath of his bowie knife. The blade had been at his side so constantly that he felt less than dressed without it.
The saddle fit the mare well. Her withers were wide and accepted the saddle well. She flinched as Jake drew the unfamiliar back cinch, swung her head back to see what the strange-feeling thing was, and then, satisfied, forgot about it. The blanket that had been under the military saddle on the mare’s back, Jake realized, was a bit small. It’d do for now, but he’d replace it as soon as he could.
The release the whiskey provided was welcome. Jake tipped the bottle again and again, but was quite surprised when he noticed that it was empty. He hurled it across the stream onto the far shore, where it struck sand, rolled a few feet, and came to rest, reflecting the bright sun in spikes of light that hurt Sinclair’s eyes. He drew the .44, considered blasting away at the bottle with it, and decided against doing so. He’d already attracted one crazy—why draw another with gunfire? He aimed down the barrel of the pistol, enjoying the weight of it in his hand, acutely aware of the potential power it possessed. He spun the cylinder to hear the oiled whir, which reminded him for some reason of the workings of the silver-cased watch his father had carried in his vest pocket.
He eased down onto his back, put his right hand, still holding the pistol, on his chest, and slept soundly, dreamlessly.
CHAPTER THREE
It seemed to Sinclair that the damned heat would never break. The sun had a good start on the day when he awakened from his drunken sleep, the pistol still resting on his chest. A shaft of white-hot light through the canopy of leaves and foliage above him pinpointed his left eye as soon as he opened it, skewering his brain, setting off spasms of headache pain he suspected would be with him for several hours, if not for most of the day. He shifted his head to avoid the spear of sunlight but couldn’t avoid the heat. A greasy sweat had already broken on his face and neck, and his body felt like it was wrapped in a thick, damp blanket.
His mind took him back to when he’d first experienced the effects of sapping, unremitting heat. Jake and his pal Todd St. David had, for a couple of nights, snuck out of their beds well after midnight, met halfway between their respective plantations, and visited the slave quarters beyond the main barn at Todd’s place first, and then the quarters on Jake’s father’s land. They’d rained handfuls of pebbles on the shanty roofs and raced between the shacks, moaning eerily. The highly superstitious field hands and their families had been paralyzed with fear. After the second night of haunting, many of the slaves had nailed dead chickens to their doors to scare off the evil spirits. After huddling in corners shivering with fear all night, the field workers were lethargic in the hundreds of acres of cotton the next day. Overseers reported the problem to the fathers of the boys, and night guards were posted at both plantations. Jake and Todd were identified as the spooks. Their punishment: two full days each picking cotton with the field laborers. No special treatment of any kind was to be given to them—they’d work sunup to sundown with the slaves they’d frightened. Both boys discovered what the field hands already knew: Hell existed on earth. It was August in the endless expanse of cotton in Georgia.
Jake had dropped before noon the first day. A white overseer—under strict orders from Jake’s father—had doused him awake with a splash of tepid water and put him back to work. A hand working alongside the boy offered him a misshapen, falling-apart woven straw hat that was already sopping wet with sweat—Negro sweat. Jake had thanked the laborer but turned the offer down. After passing out a second time, Jake wore the hat, Negro sweat and all. It kept him on his feet the next day and a half.
He remembered the heat as an evil force—more evil than the stingy cotton bolls that tore his fingertips and left them raw and bleeding. More evil than the powdery dust and grit that fouled his eyes, his throat, his nose, his ears, that made a deep breath impossible and generated an unquenchable thirst that refused to yield to the scoops of water a boy brought around every couple of hours. The sun had pounded at him—at all of those in the fields—relentlessly, without mercy. Jake staggered, sweated, puked, and picked—for two eternal days he dragged his sack up and down the symmetrical rows of cotton plants, hating each one a bit more than he hated the plant before it.
Todd St. David was carried back to his mansion bedroom the morning of the second day, his skin sallow, dry, all its moisture gone, where he stayed in his bed for almost a week. Jake finished his two days.
He remembered his conversation with his father the evening of the second day.
“Long days, Son?”
“Yessir. Real long. One of the hands gave me a hat. At first I didn’t want to wear it. Then I did.”
“So I heard. That boy went without a hat for the rest of the day, you know.”
“Yessir.”
Jake’s father sipped at his bourbon and branch water. “What do you think of that, Son?”
“It was nice of him, Pa. Thing is, they’re used to it, used to picking all day, the heat, the dust, all that. Still, it was awful nice of him.”
“Used to it, Jake?”
“Sure. Todd’s pa said s
laves have thicker skulls and smaller brains and the heat can’t penetrate as much as it does on white people. And their skin—it doesn’t get as hot as ours does. He said they like it out there, singing and carrying on.”
Mr. Sinclair considered for a moment. “You ever listen to the words of those songs the hands sing, Jake?”
“Well . . . some, I guess. They’re sure not happy songs. A couple are about dying and being carried away to heaven. There’s one about a river that’s cool and sweet, too.”
His father leaned forward in his chair, closer to his son. “It’s my belief that those Negroes suffer from the heat and dust as much as a white person, Jake. That they experience the same pain you did, the same muscle ache, the same thirst—everything.”
“Then why do we put them out there, Pa?”
“Because the cotton must be picked, Jake. Because someone has to pick it. And because they’re slaves. Slaves are supposed to sweat for their masters. The Bible tells us that. The South didn’t invent slavery—it’s been around for thousands of years, and it’ll be around for thousands more. And—our way of life has its roots in slavery, Son. The South as we know it was at least partially built by slaves. We need them, just as they need us to look after them, feed them, keep them safe.”
“Kind of tough on the slaves, though,” Jake observed.
“Maybe,” Jake’s father said. “But it’s not your place nor mine to question the Bible, Son. What is, is.” He looked into his empty cut-glass tumbler. “I believe I’ll have another toddy this evening,” he said, holding the glass out to his son.
When Jake returned with the drink he handed it to his father and took his seat. “Todd’s pa says slaves are animals—maybe a step up from a horse or a dog, but not people like we are. Is that true, Pa?”
Mr. Sinclair took a long drink. When he looked back at his son his eyes were strangely sad, as if he’d just heard some very bad news. “You go on out and look in on the horses, Jake—make sure the hands gave each of them fresh water. We’ll talk again about this.”