by LeMay, Jim
Mitch stood up. “Well, let’s git this load finished and back to Main Street. T’morra we pack our food an’ scratch an’ load Stony’s trucks. The next day, we’ll git on our way.”
As they finished loading the cart, they were surprised to see Maude approaching from down the street. They exchanged greetings, and then Maude said, “Your men in the draw said I’d find you here. As it happens, you’re just the three I wanted to see. By the way, thanks again for inviting us over to dinner this evening.”
Then she hesitated, looked down as though collecting her thoughts. They stood there, waiting, wondering what she could want of them.
Then she looked at each of them in turn and said, “Larry woke up with an upset stomach this morning. He won’t be over for dinner tonight. He just turned eighty this year, and he’s sick more and more often. He may not make it through the winter. Virgil’s almost his age, and his wits come and go. Sometimes he wanders away and forgets how to get back. I’m sixty-eight, and these winters aren’t all that friendly to me anymore either. Clarence is only in his early sixties, but he’s none too healthy for all that.”
She was looking at them steadily now, almost fiercely, any trace of hesitation gone. Matt knew exactly what she was going to say next. He’d had a similar run of thought the previous day while thinking of John helping the oldsters through their last years.
“I want to ask you a favor,” she continued. “Not for me, but for John.” She cleared her throat. “I want you to take him with you.” Matt heard indrawn breaths from Mitch and Lou. Apparently they hadn’t expected this at all.
She continued quickly, in her best classroom-lecturing manner. “The only two young folks left until last year were John’s mother, Helen Moore, and Scott White. They died last winter. It shouldn’t have been that way – both of them were only in their thirties – but Helen had always been rather sickly. Most of us were sick from the flu last year, but Helen caught pneumonia and was too weak to survive it. And Scott spent too much time with her trying to help her. He got it before any of us knew how bad he was.
“The rest of us are so old and frail we won’t be around much longer. This is no place for a young boy to be raised. When the rest of us are gone – ”
“Well, uh, Ma’am,” Mitch interrupted, almost desperately Matt thought, “a scrounger gang don’t seem like a right good place to raise a child. We can barely feed an’ take care a ourselves. An’ this ain’t the safest life for a kid neither.”
She dismissed his statement with a wave of her hand. “I don’t mean for you to raise him yourselves. I wouldn’t let him go anywhere with you barbarians if I thought you meant to keep him. But ever since you mentioned those people down the river – the Kanes? – raising all those kids, I’ve been thinking about them. I just want you to take him to them, leave him there. I’m sure Hanna Kane would welcome him. She sounds like a natural mother.”
“It’s a far piece from here t’ there,” said Mitch. “It won’t be the safest trip with Chadwick’s men lookin’ for us.”
“You apparently feel it’s safe enough to risk going yourselves,” she said, glaring at Mitch defiantly. “Listen, he needs to be raised and educated with other children. He hasn’t been around others his own age much. There used to be kids in the few other communities around here, but the few folks who survived the pandemic had the good sense to move away. I don’t want him stuck in these rotting ruins, watching us turn senile and die one by one. I wish to God I’d tried harder to get Helen and Scott to take Johnny out of here when they had the chance.”
“What does John think of going with us?” asked Matt.
A hint of a smile softened her fierceness. “Sometimes he wants to go so bad he almost hops up and down. But sometimes he gets sad when he thinks of leaving us.” Apparently she had discussed this with John and the others at length. The reason she had allowed John to accompany Matt to the river town was obvious now: to let them get to know each other better.
“Think about it, Mitch,” rumbled Lou. Then he almost broke one of the gang’s tacit rules, almost mentioned their irretrievably lost families. “We’d want the best for him if he were one of our kids.”
“We’ll have t’ run it by the men,” said Mitch. “It’s them’ll have t’ decide. We never had kids in the gang before.”
“Thank you, Mr. Mitchell,” she said. “That’s all I can ask, that you and your men consider this. But it’s not like you’ll have him from now on, just until you get to the Kanes’.” She turned around and started back to the main street.
Mitch stared thoughtfully after her for awhile, as if turning this over in his mind. Then he turned back to the cart and said gruffly, “Let’s git this thing loaded so we can git the hell outta this rat trap town.”
As Matt and Lou trundled the cart back toward the main street, Mitch said, “Okay, we take the kid as far as Billy an’ Hanna’s. But that’s it. No fu’ther. An’ he sure as hell better keep up.” Seeing how badly Mitch was limping and remembering how well John had traveled with him, Matt realized that John would “keep up” more easily than Mitch.
Then he grinned as he realized that Mitch had had no intention of running this by the gang. Lou thought of this too. He looked at Matt and winked.
Chapter Ten
John squatted under a thicket scanning the river. His eyes roved constantly, observing from the edge of his vision as Matt had taught him. Matt had explained, and John had verified by practice, the futility of focusing on individual objects in the dark when looking directly at them. A chill wet wind out of the northwest that threatened more rain, although a few stars poked through the clouds here and there, forced him deeper into the blanket he hugged around him.
It was the morning of the seventh day after Maude had made her request and Mitch had grudgingly acquiesced. Since then the men had spent a day cleaning and oiling weapons, washing clothes, packing their scratch, and loading Stony’s trucks, then five days transporting the truck to the river and transferring it to the rafts and boats. This proved a daunting chore for the final three days because of the intermittent, sometimes pounding, rain that turned the roads to brown soup and kept them chilly and miserable. The rain had brought an unseasonable chill that still remained.
Even John’s spirits, high at the beginning of their venture, began to flag at the end. He didn’t miss a single trip bringing truck to the river because of Mitch’s lectures on him being a burden to the men or slowing them down. He wasn’t about to give Mitch an excuse to change his mind and leave him behind at the last minute. He worked so hard that he fell asleep early every evening, completely exhausted. He continued to be a favorite of the younger guys. They liked having him along, especially after they found that he could pull his share at least as well as the diminutive Kincaid. In fact, John was almost as tall as Jack and more sturdily built.
The sky gradually brightened until finally the eastern clouds became suffused by an opalescent glow. The gang would be stirring soon, and they would be off down the river on the most exciting leg of their journey. He could hardly wait.
Matt had trusted him to take his place guarding this section of the river while he went back to camp to rouse the others. He knew Matt probably wouldn’t have entrusted him with this duty if Lou Travis hadn’t been hiding a little way downstream – with their enemies still hunting them, guarding the camp was too important to leave solely with a kid – but it still made him feel important that Matt let him occupy the post for even that short a time.
John found Matt enigmatic. He liked the man nearly to the point of adulation, had learned a lot from him, and respected what he thought of as his great intelligence. But some of his mood swings were a little scary. He was usually quiet, remained aloof from most of the gang’s conversational bantering, and contributed little to their occasional meetings, which they called confabs. (Though when he did speak at those gatherings, the others seemed to value his comments.) And sometimes for no apparent reason, he would turn brusque or almost surly
to John. He treated the others in the same way, but when he spoke harshly to John he usually became apologetic immediately after and seldom did so with the others.
Such an instance had happened just that morning. John had approached Matt as he sat at this very guard post. He had quietly spoken Matt’s name. Matt started violently, whirled around with his rifle ready. He snarled, “What the hell are you doing here?” John started in his turn, apologized, said quickly that he couldn’t sleep, just wanted to join him and hadn’t meant to make him mad.
Then Matt had unexpectedly quietly laughed. “I’m not mad at you, John. I’m mad at me. If you had been one of Chadwick’s men, I’d be dead now.”
John never allowed his surveillance of the river to falter. He certainly knew the importance of identifying their enemies if they approached. He was, after all, a member of the gang until they left him with the Kanes, and subject to the same threats they were. As his gaze swept the river and its banks, he thrilled at its pre-dawn magic. Ripples moved almost invisibly across the dark surface. The far shore bristled with ranks of tall phantoms that he decided were malevolent giants. No, not giants! The deadly plant men of Barsoom, as described in A Princess of Mars. Similarly, the long dark shape that split the water just downstream was a giant alligator. Twittering and scuttling sounds grew louder in the surrounding brush: the sounds of small life awakening.
So this was what it was like to be a scrounger! The days of rain and mud were forgotten.
John turned at a crackling sound behind him in the edge of the thicket. Matt was approaching him clutching something wrapped in cloth. John opened the blanket to admit him. After Matt got settled, he unwrapped the cloth to reveal some cold cornbread Stony had prepared the evening before and smoked fish, and gave half to John. They ate in silence as the ripples in the water brightened to scintillating jewels. The burgeoning light turned the plant men into trees and the ominous alligator into a sandbar. The waves slapped gently just below their feet, and the first day birds began arguing behind them.
Miller came to get them as the first brilliant sliver of sun appeared over the rooftops to the east, and led them to the boats. John noted with relief that the clouds had largely dissipated; the chance of rain that day had become remote after all. The craft, loaded with truck and their belongings, had been floated from the pole barn down the little creek east of town and tethered just upstream of where it entered the Missouri. For security’s sake, this had been done the night before just after dark.
Soon the craft were edging out of the mouth of the creek. Mitch and John led in the first rowboat, and Stony brought up with one in the rear. Between them were the two large sturdy rafts that Mitch, Stony, and Doc had built while the rest of the gang transported the truck from Newcastle. The others poled the rafts. Each raft was furnished with a large paddle affixed to the stern that remained unused at first. All the craft were heavily loaded. The food, cooking and medical supplies, and most of the men’s personal scratch were divided between the boats while the rafts carried the truck and the four carts.
They started out in the shallows, but gradually Mitch led them further out into the river. He didn’t take them all the way to the center where the fastest current would make the clumsy rafts awkward to control, but far enough away from the bank to take advantage of the lesser current to pull them along. The men poled the rafts until the water was too deep. Then the rafts were kept from being dragged to the swifter center by sculling with the rear-mounted paddles.
Having no experience with boats, John was both terrified and exultant. Mitch showed him how to row while they were still in the shallows, but the loaded boat was so heavy he was glad when the current took over. The sky cleared completely, the day warmed, and the gentle undulation of the river was soothing, almost hypnotic. The overgrown riverbanks appeared so impenetrable that the rest of the world seemed serenely remote. The river’s gentle movement and the quiet rhythmic slap of waves against the boat made time seem to stand still. Mitch didn’t speak very much, but that fit John’s mood perfectly. He felt a little intimidated by this taciturn, scowling man anyway. He decided that this was the most pleasant thing he had ever experienced.
Later in the morning he noticed that Mitch and the others had been watching the banks of the river downstream, especially the closer northern one, and asked Mitch why.
“We’re watchin’ for people,” he answered. “Sometimes they ain’t so friendly. An’ sometimes they think they have a right t’ our truck. I reckanize this part a the river, and there wasn’t nobody livin’ here last time we was by. That was a couple years ago though. Things change. So we keep a eye out.”
Just after midday they ate some smoked venison. After that Mitch became much more attentive to the shore. Then, about mid-afternoon, he raised his hand and waved it in a circle for attention from the men in the other craft, pointed for the shore and then started rowing toward it. The men turned the rafts with difficulty and sculled until the river grew shallow enough to use the poles. “They’s some folks ahead we don’t want t’ run into right now,” he explained to John.
Once ashore with the craft anchored and hidden as well as possible under the overhanging boughs of the trees, they went further up the bank to hold a confab.
“I saw we was comin’ up on McClellan’s piece a water,” said Stony. “What’s the plan?”
“Yeah, they’s right aroun’ that next bend,” said Mitch. “I thought we might hole up here till after dark an’ then slip past.”
“What’s so bad ’bout this McClellan?” asked Leighton. “Is he out t’ git you guys too!?”
“No,” said Lou, “at least not that we know of, but it seems smart to keep our whereabouts as quiet as possible. News travels fast on the river. If the McClellans know where we are, the word’ll git back to Chadwick in no time.”
“Besides,” said Doc, “if they catch y’, they keep a little a your truck for a ‘toll’. We need t’ keep all we can this time.”
“Let’s try t’ git a little rest,” said Mitch. “I don’t want t’ leave till on t’wards midnight. Then we need t’ keep on goin’ till we git t’ Billy’s.”
“You bet,” said Doc. “I’ll sleep a lot better oncet we’re off a this fuckin’ river.”
* * * *
The clouds had returned, partially obscuring the moon and stars, so it was quite dark when they pushed off that night. A chill wind whipped up the river, making the rowboats bob like corks and soaking their passengers with bone-chilling spray. Mitch and Stony maneuvered their crafts with difficulty, but the heavier rafts rode the water better and the rafters stayed dryer. After they rounded the bend Mitch had pointed out as being between them and McClellan’s people, it marginally blocked the wind. A half-mile beyond the bend, Mitch shouted something to John above the noise of the wind and choppy waves and pointed toward the shore. John thought he saw a long regular structure that might have been a stockade. Since the current propelled them at a good rate, Mitch rowed only intermittently and then only to correct their course or to avoid snags, though John didn’t know how he spotted the snags; he didn’t see them until they were right upon them.
The journey dragged on interminably. John sat huddled in his now-soaked blanket, his stomach beginning to rebel against the roiling river. He had seen the river whipped by worse winds on his trips to the river town with Scott, but he hadn’t been on the river then and he was sure glad the waves weren’t that rough tonight. He began to revise his opinion of river travel.
After what seemed an impossibly long time, the sky lightened somewhat though it was now more overcast than ever and the wind still whipped the water. At last a sullen dawn arrived to reveal a gray world. The water, sky, and even the vegetation along the distant banks were variant shades of gray. As if he was aware of John’s discomfort and wanted to give him some hope, Mitch shouted to him over the sound of the wind and spray of water that they were getting close to Kane’s Cove.
Mitch continued to survey the shoreline. Abo
ut midmorning he announced rather grimly, “We got comp’ny.” He again raised his arm and waved his hand in the circle that called for the men’s attention. He pointed toward the north bank. John’s gaze followed his finger a little nervously, wondering what threat now faced them. Mitch and his men seemed tough enough to protect themselves, but strangers were no more welcome to them than they had been to John’s small, relatively helpless community. He saw a dugout canoe bouncing across the wind-chopped waves toward them. The foremost of the two paddlers was waving his arms. When he saw he had their attention, he resumed paddling.
Mitch’s posture relaxed. He almost smiled. “Friends for a change,” he said. “We even been lookin’ for these folks.” He took up his oars and began rowing toward them.
In a surprisingly short time, the paddlers deftly stopped their canoe alongside Mitch’s rowboat. They laughed and panted as they shouted greetings to Mitch, Stony, and the men in the rafts, as the rafts tried to move closer without swamping them in the rough water. John saw that they were both young, about the same age as Miller and Rossi, clad in buckskin jackets and trousers, woolen shirts, and knitted woolen caps.
“What’re you river rats doin’ out here on the river on a day like this?” said Mitch. He had to shout to be heard above the noise of the wind and the river.
“Lookin’ for you-all,” one of the youths shouted back.
“And we’re lookin’ for you,” said Mitch. “We’re headed for y’r place.” Then, when he saw them looking curiously at John, he said, “’Scuse my manners. This here’s John Moore, an’ John, these muskrats is Buck an’ Willard, Billy Kane’s oldest boys.”
“Since you’re looking for us,” said Matt, squatting on the edge of the lead raft, “you must know a little about the trouble we’ve had.”