Missy Jay stared at the girl’s eyes in amazement as the sounds of horses clopping down the gatehouse lane echoed in the chapel. She continued to listen in stunned silence as the sounds disappeared into the night.
“Master John wouldn’t leave me, this our home. Where a man go to ’cept home? There ain’t no other place out beyond these fences. He wouldn’t, he wouldn’t leave me.”
Sally said, “They gone Missy Jay, gone for good, he told for her to come alone.”
Missy Jay trod the paths in Miller’s bog for the next two days until she reached the cave. Though the night was cool, she was panting and she knew her heart was quitting. She entered the cave and walked past the fire pits where she had danced for Briggins all those years ago in the black masses. She half fell into the water and pulled to cross under the ledge but her life ran out and she bobbed to the surface on the near shore before sinking into the pool.
A year and a month after Appomattox, Augie journeyed north and passed a few lost souls still tramping south upon the sides of the road. The last of the hobbling gray wraiths retracing their steps to the shotgun shacks they’d quit in ’61. The wagon was headed north to Virginia with a load of peaches and Augie delivered them to the grocer in Fredericksburg. He had contracted for a fair price and the merchant did not try to cheat him. He took his profit and purchased supplies from a funeral home and a dressmaker in the city. As he took the main road out the sound of hammers and the hawking of goods filled his ears; the city had traded the exigencies of war for the rapid life of commerce. The wagon was loaded with a fine bolt of velvet cloth, sturdy needles and a good pair of scissors, strong thread, and a jug of embalming fluid. The leather satchel by his side contained the tools of the undertaker’s trade. The wagon ranged out of the city and up tree-lined lanes headed east to Billie’s mountain.
Augie hid the wagon off the trail and covered it in cuts of pine branch. He took his shovel and unhitched the sorrel horse. He loaded its saddlebags and led it by tether up the trail to the old hunter’s clearing. Toward afternoon he started digging and by nightfall he had rolled the rocks away to free his friend from his tomb. He held his lantern and waved it over his friend. Termites and other critters scampered around his body and his eyes were eaten away, the sockets now hollow orbs of pure white bone. He built a fire and by its light he took out his undertaker tools and split Billie’s belly and chest open with a straight cut from the loins to the neck. He washed out the dried and parchment-like innards of the stomach and chest and scrubbed the bones of the rib cage with a wire brush that he dipped in the bucket of embalming fluid. Augie worked with a bandana tied around his nose and mouth, the sound of a gospel tune humming beneath the cloth. He spent the late evening by the fire sewing each gold coin from the strongbox into a little pocket of fine velvet cloth he had cut and sewed into squares. He placed each piece in Billie’s innards, hoping the cloth would keep them from jingling in the wagon. In the morning he sewed Billie up and carefully wrapped him in the white undertaker’s strips of cloth like the ancient pharaohs of legend. He lifted Billie from the ground loaded with treasure and straddled him across the back of the sorrel, tying his arms to his legs under the girth, and led the horse down the mountain.
The wagon rolled south for fifty miles until, on the horizon, a bridge with a toll rose out of the wavering heat. A hundred yards out he heard a rough brogue and saw the stripes of a huge red-bearded Union sergeant emerge from the tollhouse. Ten riders on fabulous stallions came abreast of the tollhouse and he knew they were the chase crew, the hunters whose prey were the smugglers who saw the tollhouse too late and tried to turn and run for it. Augie knew the tollhouse was there and he knew it was manned by Irish. He kept his pace and whispered to Billie, “This is it, brother, I hope you made some friends up there.”
The sergeant held up a mammoth hand and lilted the air with his brogue.
“All right lad, let’s see what’s in the wagon; you have your bills of lading.”
Augie handed over the bill of lading for the peaches.
Two riders dismounted and circled round behind the sergeant to the back of the wagon.
“That’s fine lad, but this is for the other direction. What’re you bring’n back to the boys in Sommersville, whiskey, guns?”
“My best friend, Billie Dunphey.”
The two who had approached the bed snapped the tarp down when they saw the shrouded figure in the wagon. Their eyes were wide like they’d seen a banshee in a graveyard on a moonless night and they looked to the sergeant for guidance.
Angus had told Augie that the crazy Irish would fight any living thing at the drop of a hat but their superstitions put them in a dreaded fear of the dead.
“How’s that, lad?”
“He died the night ’fore Appomattox. Had me promise ’fore he bled out that I lay him to rest on a knoll overlook’n his field.”
The sergeant looked off into the distance and back at Augie and asked, “Is it green, his knoll?”
“Lays like a blanket, grass so thick.”
“Raise that gate. Can’t you see this lad needs to be on his way? Danny, a tune, your caps lads, don’t be daft, Billie Dunphey go’n baile.”
The ten horsemen doffed caps as the wagon passed; the sergeant warned, “Keep to the east lad ’til the gap. It’s my boys the way down, tell ’em Sergeant Riley seen to you. Don’t go west, roads full o’ English. Danny, pipe up now, lad.”
As Augie crossed over the bridge he could hear a harmonica and a ballad gliding in the air behind him following him and Billie home, “Come all ye that hold communion . . .”
The next spring Augie took his team of sorrels down the great road that ran like a thread through Sommersville County. Its high center and smooth crushed stone eased the way for the two Belgian sorrels pulling the wagon. It was the boulevard of the fancy folks that his father had damned, and, as he passed the ornate gates of the plantations every mile or so, saw each one still had its hinge bolts knocked loose from the stone pillars. The foreigner had let it be known the conquered had no privileges; that there was no sanctuary from his will no matter the rank you thought you had bought before Gettysburg.
He reached the Sommersville plantation and rolled over the shadow of its black wrought-iron gate in the roadway. The top hinge was wrenched free of the stone pillar, and the weight had leveraged the gate over, twisting the bottom hinge into the shape of a gnarled horseshoe. The iron lettering “SOMMERSVILLE” lay upside down upon the cobblestones. He looked down the lane and saw the windows of the top floor shattered, and the shutters showed the blackings of a fire that had gutted the garret and licked to the roof.
The ruins of a lost civilization. He spat and nickered his mounts to move on. Augie drove the team at a trot to the farms near the river and did not let up until the wagon reached a newly built farmhouse. It was on good land, fed by a fresh spring, and a creek ran out back of the house. Augie jumped down and knocked on the door, and Billie’s widow, Bea, answered, saying with a warm smile, “Hey you.” He whispered a greeting and she said, “It okay to talk, it so warm tonight I put Willie and Hick in the loft, they swimm’n all day so they tuckered out.”
Bea had the wiry look of a hardscrabble daughter, but she had beautiful eyes, the impossible green that is found only among the folk that’d come down out of Appalachia a hundred years ago.
Augie said he had forgotten something and went to the wagon and pulled a haversack out from a cavity underneath the seat and returned to the kitchen. Bea had lit a small candle, and the light throbbed upon the simple surroundings of her dwelling. Augie emptied the contents on the rough-hewn pine slats of a table cleaved from a single stump. The sack spilled its bounty of candles, cans of lamp oil, apples, peaches, bread loaves, a smoked ham, tobacco, cuts of bacon, coffee, mixing flour and yeast, and a sewing kit upon the knots of the wood.
Bea gushed at the sight of it. “Augie, you do’n us right.”
“I didn’t look when I come up, but did Tay finis
h that fencing like I told ’em?” Augie asked.
She gushed, “Tay come out with six hands and they split and fenced it for three days solid and Tay said you got them do’n even more next week. It don’t make for no sense, we got pigs but ain’t got no horse and don’t need so much fencing.”
“I’m getten studs. I’m gonna put ’em here and work ’em with Willie. And if cousin Hick stay’n on, they’ll both need to start learn’n; I’ll bring some colts.”
Augie looked at her now across the candlelight, and she came across to him and sat in his lap. He put his arm around her waist and she twisted to face him, brushing the hair from his forehead with her fingertips.
“I think of Big Billie often times, Bea. I think if it weren’t for you tak’n to him first, it would have been us that got hitched,” Augie said and smiled at her.
“It was ’cause Billie was so nice and you were so ornery when you was young. I didn’t know you real good then.”
“Don’t ever apologize to me again, Bea, for lov’n Billie, you need to see to that, it’s a stand’n order from now on, woman.”
She looked at him and nodded.
“Hey, I hear tell Casey had t’others go’n in Sloane’s the other night tell’n the boys the crazy money you spend’n on horses in Orleans. He says you been bringing ’em up and that you got folks all over hold’n ’em for you.” Bea said it with questioning eyes.
“I aim to raise a thousand of ’em right here, and they all for you and Willie.”
“Where you gett’n all this money?”
“Billie give it to me.”
“What? Go on now, you funn’n me, Billie didn’t have no two coppers to rub together.”
“Is that right? Best then you heard it from me. Billie were hold’n out on you.”
“I swear you’re a man of mystery. What we gonna do now with a thousand horses? The Yankees here already; they’ll take ’em.”
“Take ’em? Hell, they too damn lazy to steal, steal’n hard work. I swear them fools got more coin than a hundred men in a hundred years could count, and they got some hanker’n for good steeds. They gonna buy ’em by the score from us. They ain’t even gonna blink an eye when I tell ’em the price. We sell five hundred of ’em for a profit, we won’t know what to do with all the coin that’s com’n our way.”
“A thousand you said? What we gonna do with the other five hundred?”
“We’re gonna sell to our boys at cost. They gonna need ’em in a few years when they chase them fools back up the same roads they’re burned crawl’n down here. You’ll see. Those fools gonna be gone soon enough; it gonna be our county ag’n. And this time, no more yes, sir’n a bunch of prideful fools like ’fore the war. It’ll be our kind runn’n things.”
“You got it all planned, huh?”
“All of it. I already told the reverend we’ll be down Sunday morn.”
“Gosh Almighty, is that your way of ask’n, no kneel’n?”
“Am I stay’n here tonight?”
“You’re putt’n the cart before the horse, ain’t you, Mr. Powell?”
“I ain’t never bought a pony yet I didn’t see could run first.”
“Is that right? You should reckon on gett’n throw a few times.”
“That right? I ain’t met a pony yet I couldn’t break.”
“You ain’t tried to break a wild pony with green eyes as far as I know.”
“Truth be told, I usually don’t even name ’em until they broke.”
“You ain’t got to worry about that, Mister Powell.”
“How’s that?”
“This one gonna be named Missus Powell ’fore your ass get in any saddle.”
“Hot damnation, woman.”
Toby was staring at his mother and father and he knew they were discussing whether he would ride. He couldn’t hear, but he could see the intensity in the taut frame of his mother and the iron grip she had on the reins of his father’s horse as she pulled herself up to meet his face. Molly said, “Promise me, John, that no matter what happens you don’t leave Toby down there.”
“Molly, I would never . . .”
“No, John, he comes back, we put him in the earth here. Promise me you won’t leave him behind. You won’t leave him down there. Promise me!”
“I promise, Molly, Toby comes back.”
Molly let go of the reins and John wheeled Bull toward the group. “All right, daylight’s burning, let’s get to the Old Mission and catch up with Caleb and Joe.”
The company spurred their horses and in a tumult raced south toward the southern mountain.
Molly went to the porch and watched Toby flying along with the war party. Without turning to her mother she said, “Toby didn’t even say goodbye.”
Mother Martin rested her knitting in her lap, and with a quiet wave of her hand said, “Boys is boys; he thinks it’s an adventure. That shouldn’t be what concerns you. It’s Gabriel that will bring the brimstone. Gabriel’s ridden his whole life searching for a reason to justify his need to kill, and now it came, like a gift and knocked in his front door. The killer angel hunts them heathens now and justice be his wings. Toby left a sweet boy, I fear what Gabriel will bring us back from down there.”
PART TWO:
THE DESCENT
CHAPTER ELEVEN:
THE OLD MISSION
* * *
Caleb and Joe rode hard for two days but never caught sight of the raiding party. The trail was fresh, though, and the prints of the fifty tracked to the Old Mission of Saint Peter of Alcántara. The mission was built at a crossroads. It was one of those places that for reasons lost in time rose as the foci of travelers and wanderers that would last millennia. Whether it be the folds in the land or the alignment of the stars, the pagan nomads of the old world and the missionaries in the new deemed it the place where the last leg of journeys began. These places are sacred until such time when for reasons unknown the world moves on and the land swallows the sacred again, and all that remains are the ghosts of unanswered prayers.
It was at this point that migrants to Tin City had to decide if they were taking the flats around the mountain or over the Crossing.
The mission stood as nothing more than four broken-down walls. To stave off the cold, the wood had been burned by pioneers making their way across this empty track of land over the last hundred odd years, causing the stone walls to crumble without its bracing. The ruins had a bell tower, and somewhere in the mists of time, the tower’s base broke free from the top of the adobe walls and slid off its mounts. It toppled vertically so that it landed upright. Twenty feet of it stood unbroken along the outside wall looking as if the mission beneath it had been swallowed by the sands, and only the tower with its crowning stone cross pierced out of the fabric of the earth like a sewing needle.
Joe spotted the tower’s cross in the wavering light of the horizon and told Caleb to look for the scouts of a rear guard. Caleb and Joe split by fifty yards and moved toward the mission, the horses moving in a steady walk as if they too sensed a predator.
Three hundred yards in the distance, Caleb saw what he thought was a foot behind a flowering bush.
He signaled to Joe who said softly across the expanse, “Don’t kill him.”
Caleb drew a bead on the leg from three hundred yards with his long rifle. He estimated where the knee would be from where the foot lay and aimed his rifle, waiting for man and horse to balance; waiting for that quiet moment the horseman feels his and his mount’s breath are the same, and he squeezed gently. The report was swallowed by the expanse of sand, and only a faint echo off the tower rumbled back to him from across the plain. The warrior spun up and ran for three steps before collapsing on his shattered knee. He began crawling for the wall of the old mission.
Joe yelled, “Great shot,” and galloped after the lookout. He rode hard and caught the crawling warrior ten yards from the wall and clunked him over the head with his rifle butt. Joe leapt from his horse and jumped on the man’s back
, tying his hands with a cord.
Caleb remained on horseback and scanned back and forth across the landscape thinking there might have been more than one warrior left behind to delay pursuers. Seeing nothing moving, Caleb raced for the old mission. He let the reins drop and grabbed two pistols and bolted into the four walls of the mission ready to fire in any direction, but the mission was silent and empty. Caleb ran back to Joe.
They took one arm each and with the scout’s face pointed at the ground they dragged him to the mission, his toes cutting rows in the sand. They tied the warrior’s hands around one of the last remaining adobe columns. Caleb took another rope and bound his feet. The knee wound was horrific, and Caleb could see the top of the kneecap peeled around, but the scout remained stoic, not so much as a grimace when Caleb flipped the patella back into place. He took a bandana from his pocket and put a tourniquet above the scout’s knee and cinched it tight to keep him from bleeding to death.
The warrior had on a red vest that looked like it had once been bright but was now faded and worn, as were his dungarees. He was barefoot and wore nothing on his head and his hair lay long, wild, and tangled, the strands running in no navigable course.
Caleb said to Joe, “Is he bleed’n out?”
Joe answered, “No, good shot—all bone through the knee, he was easy to ride down.”
The warrior held his head face down, the twisted locks of hair concealing his face. For a brief moment, his head rose slowly, and Caleb and Joe saw that his pupils were like the hot red embers you find still burning in the hearth the morning after a night’s hot fire. The burning melted in a callow yellow. He looked from Caleb to Joe, slowly turning his head from one to the other as if he were measuring them. He appeared to have no fear or apprehension about the flames he knew were coming and slowly lowered his head again without making a sound.
Joe said, “He’s dying, see his eyes. His insides have quit on him, that’s why he got left behind, he’s rotting from the inside out.”
Angels of North County Page 18