Talcott looked at me and grinned. “You smell anything?” he asked.
“He smells like he took a bath in liquor,” I replied. I looked around. The others were smiling, watching me expectantly. I hunkered down beside the man.
“Buddy, what’s your name?” I asked in a friendly tone of voice.
“Junior,” he said gratefully. “Junior Stamper.”
“Junior. Yall having a party up on that there mountain, Junior? Got lots of liquor up there?”
“Oh, yeah. Old man Collins that owns the hardware store, he bootlegs on the side, you know?”
“His boys up there selling?”
Junior licked his lips. “Oh, yeah. They started out giving and then they commenced selling. And some of the boys has commenced taking. But old man Collins, he’ll git his money outen them one way or tother.”
“Boys laying drunk up there?”
“Oh, yeah. And shooting their guns.”
“They’re shooting their guns at the wind in the underbrush,” Talcott said.
I took him aside. “How’d we find him?”
“Think he wandered away to take a piss and then decided to run for it when he saw nobody was paying him any mind. Only he was so drunk he didn’t know which direction to go in. Run right into our pickets. Except he werent running, he was more like crawling when they found him.” He lit a cigarette. “We could create a diversion somewhere else.”
“We need more men. We need to call the boys over from Beech and Blair. We got to have all of them.”
“No time. Hit will be light in a few hours.”
“Then we’ll send out word. Sit tight tomorry, make them think we’re still holding out. Start pulling back at dusk. They’ll wonder ifn we’re giving up. They’ll keep on drinking, maybe heavier.”
“Chafin will plug Crooked Gap.”
“With what? He wont dare pull men out of Blair. He done sent his reinforcements, and a distillery along with them.”
“He’ll stop them drinking.”
I looked at Talcott steady, with my eyebrows raised. After a moment he started to giggle.
“Hell,” he said. “He aint General Pershing neither.”
I sent out the word to come to the head of Hewitt. Some came before dark, quiet, not so that you would notice, but then there were more of us.
And then Talcott.
I was up the hill with a group of about forty, all of us within their range but hid behind trees. We were shooting less, making them waste their bullets, laughing at the wildness of the racketing above us.
Talcott hunkered down beside me, offered me a bottle of water and I swallowed some.
“Some new boys are up from Madison. The Army’s coming in.”
“Tell me something new,” I said.
“Hit’s the real thing this time. They give us a last warning or they’ll treat us like traitors. They’re sending in airplanes with bombs. Some of the boys is already leaving. The leadership’s in the field, pulling them out personal.”
“No. We’re going over tonight.”
“Rondal, we cant beat the U.S. Army. I been in it and I know. They say the newspapers is full of this here. They say hit’s a revolution and they wont stand for it.”
I flung the bottle down the hill and it busted on a rock. A burst of machine gun fire answered me up the ridge.
“They got poison gas!” Talcott whispered fiercely. “They’re a fixing to use it. I seen that, brother. Hit burns. Hit rots out the inside of a man’s head.”
“So what are you going to do? Turn tail?” I pushed him away and he toppled over backward. “You’re supposed to be so damn tough,” I mocked. “But you got your limit, dont you?”
“I seen the gas,” he pleaded. “Jesus, I was in that Army.”
“You turned tail!”
“Hit’s them that’s turned, not me. They aint no Americans.”
I snatched up my gun and ran from him, up the mountain. I dodged a stand of mountain laurel. Bullets picked chunks of bark from the oak beside me. Then a weight hit me in the belly and I fell. The mountain laurel caught at my arms, held them up.
Legs came toward me like giant scissors. Bits of dead leaves stuck to the blood on my shirt. I was strung out tight, like a hog to be gutted, like a squirrel to be skinned.
Twenty-four
CARRIE BISHOP
I WENT TO THE PUMP TO REST FIVE MINUTES AND SAVOR A DIPPER of water. I sat on the ground with my back against the rough wood of the housing. When I shut my eyes the ground beneath me became unmoored and carried me off into space. A loud crash up on the mountain brought me back to earth with a jolt. I looked around, frightened, but saw nothing.
I heard the motor as I walked back to the schoolhouse. Then the airplane crawled across the blue sky above the ridge, following its own sound like a dog tracks a coon. A graceful tilt of its wings brought it directly above us. I thought what a pleasant thing it was, then realized it must be spying out the movements of our men. The magic disappeared and I went inside.
Doctor Booker looked up from stitching a bullet wound in a man’s arm.
“Almost out of bandages,” he observed. “They better send more from Charleston.”
I nodded wearily and bent to rummage through a box of supplies when a deafening explosion shook the earth. The windows opposite me blew out, showered us with glass and dirt. I stretched prone on the floor and stared stupidly at my bleeding hands. My ears hurt terribly.
Dr. Booker rose from the debris coughing and flinging his arms through the dusty air.
“I told you they had bombs.” Dr. Mason sat on the floor beside the blackboard. He smiled like a child who has outdone the grownups.
I raised up carefully. The stinging wounds on my hands and face seemed to be scratches and I could see all right. I crawled to the doorway, pulled myself up. Dr. Booker stood outside.
“Sons of bitches!” he screamed. He looked skyward.
I heard a buzzing and wasn’t sure if it was my ears or the airplane returning. I felt drunk and sat back down again. “Is this how they do now?” I asked.
We had ten wounded who had not yet been sent back to Charleston. Dr. Booker examined them. After a while my head cleared and I went to one of them, a boy of about eighteen. He was sobbing. “Did the whole mine go?” He had a shoulder wound and had lost a lot of blood. I brushed the dirt from his bandage, picked the slivers of glass off his clothes.
We carried the wounded outside and cleaned them as best we could, then washed ourselves at the pump. Next to the building I saw a crater deep enough to stand in up to the waist. It steamed as though the land was a live thing with a hunk of flesh torn out, and rivers of loose earth ran down the sides.
“And that was just Sheriff Chafin’s bomb,” Dr. Mason said triumphantly. “Wait until the regular Army gets here. They’ve been refining the whole procedure.”
We treated scores of wounded and I counted at least thirty dead. I glimpsed other bodies carried past the schoolhouse by grim, silent men. They would bury their own.
Then word came that the men were pulling back. Volunteers came from Danville to carry our wounded to the train that would take them to Charleston. We only had two minor casualties left on that last afternoon, and Dr. Mason went home. I had trudged to the pump for what seemed the millionth time when I saw a small knot of men up the dusty road moving fast toward us. One of them waved.
“Call Doc! He’s hurt bad!”
I tried to convince myself it was not Talcott Lloyd who yelled.
“Dr. Booker!” I called, “they’s a man hurt bad.”
He stood in the doorway and wiped his face with a handkerchief.
“That looks like Talcott,” he said. Then he dropped the handkerchief and ran toward them. They carried the wounded man on a sheet of canvas. When Dr. Booker reached them they set him down. Dr. Booker bent over for a moment. I shook my head and whispered to myself, promised myself it would be someone I did not know.
“Put the water on to boil!�
�
Dr. Booker ran alongside them, held the man’s limp arm by the wrist.
I went inside and set the large kettle on the cast-iron stove, added some lumps of coal. I heard them carry him in and hoist him onto the table. I knew without looking that it was Rondal.
“He’s conscious,” Dr. Booker said softly.
I went to him then. His face was turned toward me and he watched me with his long blue eyes. I put my hand to his cheek. His skin was dry and hot, and the stubble of his beard pricked the cuts on my hand.
“Carrie, I cant feel my legs.” He was like a child, pleading. “Hit’s like the bottom half of me was shot away.”
Dr. Booker probed the wound. “Not as much bleeding as there might be,” he said. His voice was low and calm. “Talcott, you and these boys go on outside. Nothing you can do in here.”
“He going to make it?” Talcott demanded.
“Go on out,” Dr. Booker said. “I got to examine him first.”
I held Rondal’s hand. “The Army’s coming,” he said.
“I know it. We heard this morning.”
Dr. Booker pulled off one of Rondal’s boots, poked his foot with a needle. No response. He looked at me and shook his head. “We’ll just stop this bleeding,” he said softly.
Rondal gasped for breath. His chest heaved.
“No, son, dont you do that!” Dr. Booker emptied a syringe of morphine into his arm.
I bent close to Rondal’s ear, said his name over and over. After a time he breathed more easily and his hand relaxed in mine.
“We’re going to put you under with the ether,” I said. I brushed the hair from his forehead with my fingers. “We got to see what’s hurt inside of you.”
“What difference?” he mumbled. “We done lost it all.”
I soaked a piece of gauze in ether. “I got something to tell you,” I said. “I never told you before because I didnt want to trouble you. I’m going to have a baby. And I want that baby to have a daddy. So you still yet got to fight.”
“Aint it the preacher’s baby?”
“No. Hit’s yourn, Rondal.”
He swallowed hard and his forehead wrinkled. “Hit’s daddy is in one hell of a shape.”
I kissed his forehead. “You’ll be just fine.” I covered his nose with the mask.
“I aint made it over that mountain yet,” he murmured.
“You will,” I said. “I’ll git you there. Now you count backwards from a hundred.”
He sighed, counted only to ninety-one and the ether carried him off.
Dr. Booker found the bullet quickly, dropped the dark red plug into a bucket.
“Spinal cord stopped the bullet,” he said, “and it’s snapped clean in two.”
I craved fresh air but I couldn’t remove my mask.
“Nothing else in bad shape. How’s his pulse?”
“Steady.”
“I’ll close up fast. Let him come back around. And better insert a catheter.”
He stripped off his mask and gloves and went outside to speak to Talcott. I wiped Rondal’s face, then my own, with a cool cloth. Then I inserted the catheter, pulled his overalls up over the bandage around his midsection, hooked the galluses over his shoulder. I looked out the window. A steady stream of men passed down the holler, retreating before the Army arrived.
Talcott and Dr. Booker came inside.
“One thing sure, he cant stay here,” Talcott said. “Even ifn it is bad to move him.”
“Who can say what will happen if he’s moved,” Dr. Booker answered.
We watched in silence until Rondal came out of the ether. His eyes fluttered and he turned his head but seemed to look past us.
“Hey, brother,” Talcott said uneasily, “me and a couple of the boys will tote you back to the train in a little bit.”
“No!” I said sharply. They looked at me. “He wants to go on.”
“He aint in much shape to want, is he?” Talcott said.
“He dont want to go back to Charleston,” I insisted. “Just because his legs is paralyzed, that dont mean his mind is.”
“You think me and him could survive Justice County? Why, they’d shoot us in a minute. Assuming, of course, that Don Chafin didnt. Aint that right, Rondal?”
Rondal stared.
“I’m taking him to my Homeplace in Kentucky,” I said.
“You’re a-taking him? A little slip of a gal?”
“They’s got to be a wagon around here someplace, and a team of mules. I’ll take him right over the road.”
“Be a hard trip,” Dr. Booker said.
“No harder than getting him to Charleston.” I realized that I was crying and wiped my face with the back of my hand. “I’ll get him on the train in Logan.”
“Dangerous for a woman.”
“Anybody stops me, I’ll tell them he’s one of theirn. And I’ll carry me a gun hid. But I aint going back to Charleston, no more than he is. You know me, Dr. Booker, and you know I mean it. He’s the daddy of my baby, and I aim to take him home.”
“This here is crazy,” Talcott said.
“Ask him!” I was screaming. “He aint deaf! He’s a-listening to you! Ask him what he wants to do.”
Dr. Booker stepped close to him. “Rondal, listen to me. You understand me?”
Rondal nodded his head.
“I be straight with you, because I know you want it. You aint never going to walk again. It aint likely you’ll live long, but I cant say for sure. You could git the breathing problems on you and go just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Or you could hold on a while. Could be a few years. Maybe the influenza will carry you off. But nobody knows for sure. Trip be hard either way you go. You’ll be susceptible. I’ll leave it up to you, son. You want to go with Carrie or you want to go back to Charleston?”
Rondal didn’t answer.
“You hear me, son?”
Rondal nodded. He closed his eyes. “Carrie,” he whispered. “Carrie, take me.”
Talcott threw up his hands. “Then I reckon I’ll have to come too, git myself shot at.”
“Hit will be safer for all of us ifn you dont,” I said. “I got my own way of doing things. You go on back to your wife and younguns. You can come visit him when things quiet down. Now if you want to help, go on and see if you can buy a wagon and a team of mules offn some farmer. And git me a jar of applesauce or something else soft while you’re at it.” I turned my back to him and pulled some money out of my dress, all Rondal had given me in case of an emergency.
He went out slinging his arms to show his disgust.
“You better take some morphine,” Dr. Booker said. “I’ll fix you up a bag.”
“What kind of life,” Rondal mumbled. “The blood sucked outen me…”
“We’ll do the best we can,” I said.
“You wouldnt have come offn that mountain,” he said. “You would have stayed with me.” He lost consciousness again and I laid down to sleep before we set out.
Talcott returned with a wagon and team of mules, sold reluctantly and at a high price by a nearby farmer. Rondal was still alive but senseless when we set out before dawn. I endured another argument with Talcott, then Dr. Booker burst into tears as we were about to leave. He looked old and shrivelled in the gray light.
“Will you stay in Charleston?” I asked him.
“I got no place else.”
“Write to me. The post office is Henryclay, Kentucky. I’ll let you know how he does.”
They rigged up a sheet across the wagon bed to shield Rondal’s face from the sun while I changed into a faded green cotton dress I’d brought along. I strapped a pistol to my calf with a pair of bandages. Dr. Booker and Talcott carried Rondal out on a board. After they lifted him into the wagon I untied the red bandana from his neck, found a pocket in his overalls and stuffed it inside. I inspected the mule team. They seemed to have pleasant enough dispositions for mules.
“Gert and Myrt,” Talcott told me. “Both of them old, or he
wouldnt have sold them. Gert kicks from the left sometimes. Think you can handle them?”
“I’ve drove more mules than you seen,” I said.
I settled myself onto the buckboard and took up the reins. I felt the cracked leather straps with my fingertips, lifted them to my nose. They smelled like home.
“Geeeyaah!” I shouted and cracked the reins sharply. The mules lurched forward and I waved but never looked back.
We reached the mouth of Hewitt by the time dawn broke and turned up the main road. It was choked with rednecks headed in the opposite direction. They largely ignored us in their haste to flee before the Army arrived. A few yelled, “Where you going, honey?”
“To shoot Don Chafin,” I’d answer, and they’d laugh.
I stopped below Sharples at mid-morning and pulled back the sheet. I was afraid to look for fear Rondal would be dead, but he was awake. I gave him some water, spooned some applesauce down his throat, gave him some more water.
“You hurting?” I asked.
He nodded his head, tried to speak. I took a syringe from the bag beside him, filled it with morphine.
“I put your bandana in your pocket,” I said.
“All right,” he croaked. Already his eyes were fluttering shut. I emptied his catheter and turned him over on his stomach. When I kissed his hand, his fingers curled around my thumb. I yanked the sheet back over the wagon bed.
When we started our ascent of the mountain we were alone for a time. It was slow going. The wagon tipped from side to side as the wheels rimmed the deep ruts. Dusty blackberry bushes whipped at Gert’s flanks and scraped the sideboards. Gunfire crackled occasionally off to the right.
In a great curve of the road we met three armed men. Two wore the white armbands of Don Chafin’s volunteers and the third was a state policeman. I spied them above and behind me when I first entered the curve, and I forced myself not to watch them as I maneuvered the team through the hairpin turn. When I finally faced them they were leaning on their rifles and grinning.
Storming Heaven Page 28