by Blake, J
His first time had been the year before when he and John were hunting up along the Escambia and came upon a pair of women scooping mussels from the glassy river shallows and towing a dugout behind them on a bowline. The older was the mother of the younger and offered her daughter’s sex in exchange for the deer carcass they were carrying home on a shoulder pole. The brothers were quick to strike the bargain even though the girl was a softbrain with an drifting stare and a wet vacant smile. She was younger than their sister and her breasts were still only buds and she lay inert on the weedy bank while the brothers took their turns on her. They then gave their attention over to the woman who shied away and said no, not unless they added to the bargain. She had a thin white scar along one side of her face but was striking nonetheless and had full breasts under her worn wet shirt. Edward was about to offer his knife but John said they wouldn’t break her neck, how was that for adding to the bargain? The woman looked from one brother to the other and then told the girl to go sit in the dugout. She lay down on the grass and pulled up her skirts and John fell to her. After Edward had his turn they loaded the deer in the dugout and watched the women pole the boat around the riverbend and then slapped each other on the shoulder and laughed.
He went back out on the street with the sweetpowder taste of the redhead’s skin on his lips and her perfume on his hands and he was feeling very much a man of the world. He would have bought himself a cigar if he’d had any money left. He continued to search for Maggie until the evening vermilion sun glanced redly off the roof tiles and eased behind the palms and then the streets were in deep shadow and the first sidewalk lamps were being fired. He returned to the mules and found John already there and looking glum because he’d found no sign of their sister either. Edward told him about the whorehouse and the passel of pretties who worked there but John scowled and said they had come to find Maggie and not to look for a good time. Edward had anyway been cheated at a price of three dollars, John told him. Edward asked how he knew that and John said, “Hell, I guess everbody knows that but you.” John did not in fact know any such thing but he was angry because they had not found their sister and was in no mood to hear about Edward’s good time in a cathouse. Edward did not press the matter but the idea that he had been cheated was enraging.
They decided to eat supper before renewing the search and went into the tavern and ordered two platters of fried oysters, a loaf of bread, and a bucket of beer. After they’d cleaned their plates John ordered another bucket and when they finished it he suggested they try a taste of something with more bite and Edward said why not and they called for a round of whiskey. They raised glasses to each other and tossed the drinks down in a gulp. It was their first taste of spirits other than the vile stuff they sometimes bought from a downriver swamp rat named Douglas Scratchley and they expelled their breath slowly and grinned at each other. Edward said, “Well now, I guess I know why Daddyjack likes this so much.”
At the mention of Daddyjack, John’s mood darkened again. “He run her off, I’ll wager. I wouldn’t be surprised if she got to talkin smart at him and he hit her. She wouldn’t of stood for it if he did.”
Edward shrugged and said he wouldn’t mind if John treated them to another drink. John said he didn’t have enough money left to buy them even a smell of good whiskey. “If you hadn’t gone and got yourself cheated in that damn cathouse we’d right now have the means for another.”
The reminder rekindled Edward’s anger. “Did that picaroon truly cheat me?”
John allowed that he truly had. Edward said he’d be damned if he would stand for it and got to his feet so abruptly his chair teetered and nearly overturned. “I guess I’ll just go see that son of a bitch.” John said he guessed he’d go with him.
In the central square a different brass band was playing by torchlight for a large appreciative crowd and the sidewalks still teemed with roisterers of every stripe. The air felt heavy and cool. When they got to the brothel the place was doing livelier business than it had been doing that afternoon. A queue of patrons extended out onto the front walk, and through the open door Edward saw a different man now taking the patrons’ money and directing every man in turn up the stairway each time someone else came back down.
He stopped a man coming out the door and asked him what the rate was. The man smiled and said, “Two dollars, son, same as always.” He asked how much time with the girl that bought and the man laughed and winked at the grinning onlookers. “Why, just as much time as you need to empty your breech, boy, so long as you don’t make a damn courtship of it.”
“What’re ye thinkin to do, lad,” a man in the line called out, “sit and take tea with the lass, maybe, before ye get on with it?” Loud guffaws down the line.
Edward asked the first man if he knew a fellow with a checkered vest and chin whiskers and a gold front tooth and the man said, “Walton? He went to get some eats while I was still in line. He’ll be back by and by.”
The brothers went down the street and crossed over and came back without attracting attention and took up positions near the mouth of an alleyway and kept a lookout in both directions. They hadn’t been waiting ten minutes before they spotted the checkered vest heading toward them on their side of the street. John ambled to the edge of the sidewalk and spat into the street and busied himself brushing off his shirtfront. Just as Walton was about to cross over, Edward said, “Mister Walton, can I have a word with you, sir?”
When Walton paused to fix suspiciously on Edward in the dim light John grabbed him from behind in a tight bear hug and yanked him into the shadowed alleyway and Edward leaped forward and snatched the pistol from the whoreman’s waistband. Walton bucked and spun and lost his hat and crashed through broken crates and empty barrels, cursing and trying to shake John loose but John held to him like a hog dog. Edward grabbed Walton by the shirtfront and hit him in the face with the pistol barrel four fast times and Walton’s knees gave way and John let him fall and Edward joined him in kicking the whoreman in the head. The men across the street were all looking now and one of them yelled “Hey! What the devil there!” Edward quickly went through Walton’s pockets and dug out a handful of money. As some of the men started toward them the brothers raced away down the alley and around the corner and into the crowd milling in the square.
At the bar of the tavern they learned they had twenty-one dollars and they agreed it was sufficient compensation for the whoreman having cheated Edward. The barkeeper said, “What you boys do, strike it rich?” and laughed. Edward bought a bottle of bourbon and the brothers went out and mounted their mules and casually rode through the crowded square, not hupping the animals to a trot even when they spotted a handful of roughs from the cathouse shoving their way through the packed sidewalk. The men were studying faces and looking in the door of every public house they passed. Edward eased Walton’s pistol out of his belt and cocked it and held it close against his belly as the mule made its unhurried way through the clamorous street but none of the roughs caught sight of them and a minute later they were back on the north road for home.
8
“We should of stayed and looked some more,” John said. Darkness had given way to a hard blue dawnlight. They had ridden through the night and were deep in the pines, off the Escambia trace and well north of Pensacola and no longer concerned that they might have trackers behind them. “She might of been there. That many people, she could of been in there amongst them and we never saw.”
“She wasn’t there,” Edward said. “She’d been there we would of seen her. Listenin to the music, dancin, you know her. I’d say we looked that crowd up and down pretty good. Anyhow, we’d of stayed and we’d of sure had dealins with them boys from the cathouse.”
“I aint afraid of them.”
“Didn’t say you were and I aint either.”
“Then what do they matter?”
Neither said anything for a minute, then John said: “Could be she wasn’t outside. Could be she was inside somewhere. Worki
n maybe.”
“Doin what? I was in that cathouse, Johnny, I saw the kind of girls they have. She couldn’t of worked in one of them houses if she wanted, not till she gets bigger grown.”
“A lot you know about it,” John said, his face tight. “Been to one damn whorehouse in your life for ten minutes. I’ll have you know some of them places have girls younger than her. Anyhow, I didn’t mean she was bein no whore. It’s other sort of work she can do.”
“Hell, it wasn’t nobody but whores and barkeeps workin yesterday in all that celebratin. The plain and simple of it is she wasn’t there.”
“Then where in the hell is she?”
“Somewhere west, probly. Mobile maybe.”
John spat hard and said nothing more for a while. Then he said: “Daddyjack sees that bottle he’ll sure thank you for it and drink it all himself.”
Edward pulled the whiskey out of the croker sack and admired its color against the light. “Believe you’re right,” he said and uncorked the bottle and took a swallow and passed it over to his brother. They paced their drinks so that the bottle lasted them most of the remaining ride. They didn’t take the last drop of it until they were within ten miles of the homestead and they asked each other if they seemed drunk and told each other not so anybody’d notice and both of them laughed.
9
They smelled the smoke before they covered the last mile of the trace through the heavy trees and came out into the clearing and into the acrid haze lingering over the blackened remains of the house. Only the rock chimney and part of the back wall were still upright in the ashes. The stable stood untouched but the pigpen was open and the pigs were gone. The brothers slid down from the mules and stepped carefully through the ruins and kicked at the larger chunks of black-crisped wood. They studied the ashes closely and came on the stockless and warped remains of the Kentucky rifle and the smaller Hawken but found no trace of bodies. They looked at each other and John’s face was pale and strained but Edward felt only a strange excitement he couldn’t define. The slight whiskey buzz in his head had given way to an excited curiosity and a feeling that his life had already been altered more profoundly than he knew.
“Sons.”
Her voice was behind them and they turned to see their mother standing at the edge of the woods. John breathed “Damn” at the sight of her. Her face was bruised and one eye swollen purple and her hair was in disarray and the upper part of her dress was ripped. She spread her arms wide as if to receive them to her bosom and the torn dress parted to reveal one pale breast and its darkly scarred and twisted nipple.
“He killed her,” she said. Her eyes were whitely wide and seemed fixed on some horror in her mind. “He lay with her, yes, yes he did! He fouled his own daughter. He lay with her I say! And she told him she would tell, she said she would tell her brothers—tell you—and so he killed her and sank her in the creek for the gators and the gars to eat all up. He did! He did!”
Edward said, “What the hell, woman!” He was certain she was gone utterly mad. But John’s eyes were as wide and anguished as the woman’s and his fists quivered at his sides and Edward thought the look of him more frightful than the woman’s crazy words.
She slowly came forward with her arms out to them, speaking fast and breathlessly. “He told me so. After you went off. Told me and laughed and beat me and said he would kill me too and say I tried to murder him in his sleep. Tied me to the bed and beat me. Cut his ownself so he could show you how I tried to kill him. But I got loose. I run out and hid in the woods and waited and waited for you and he set the house afire and he tromped around in the woods huntin me and he … oh Jesus.”
Her gaze had gone to something behind them and her arms closed tightly over her breasts. They turned and saw Daddyjack limping out of the woods from the other side of the clearing and coming on with the big Hawken in his hand. The crotch of his trousers was stained red and he wasn’t looking at the brothers but only at the woman as he came now at a gimping trot and cursing her loudly for a hellish whore. The woman whimpered and began backstepping stiffly toward the trees. Daddyjack stopped short and threw up the Hawken and fired. The ball passed between the woman’s legs and belled back the skirt of her dress and pulled her down.
And now John was running at Daddyjack with his knife in his hand and howling and Edward ran after him calling for him to stop. Daddyjack watched them come and swung the Hawken by the stock neck and caught John on the shoulder with the barrel and knocked him to his hands and knees. His eyes were wild as he gripped the Hawken by the barrel with both hands and stepped up to John with the rifle raised high over his head like a club. Edward cried “NOOOOO!” and the pistol was in his outstretched hand and cocked and pointed and it cracked flatly in a small huff of smoke and the ball pierced Daddyjack’s left eye and exited behind his right ear in a bloody spray of brain and bone and he went sprawling onto his back with his arms flung wide and his teeth bared and his remaining eye wide and unbelieving.
The woman sat on the ground and stared at her sons as they gaped upon the body of Jack Little, her hands over her mouth, covering the smile so bright in her eyes.
10
They carried the body a half-mile into the timber and took turns digging a deep grave under a wide water oak overlooking the creek. The Hawken leaned against the tree trunk and its powderflask and ball pouch lay alongside. Edward searched Daddyjack’s pockets and found tobacco and a pipe and matches and a money pouch containing six dollars in paper currency and silver. And he found the razor-keen snaphandle knife with a tapered seven-inch blade that had killed Rainey up in Georgia those years ago. Scratched into the wide top part of the blade were the initials “H.B.” Edward folded the blade back into the haft and put the knife in his pocket.
The crotch of Daddyjack’s pants was sopped with thick dark blood but there was no rip in the cloth nor sign of a bullet hole and Edward’s curiosity would not be denied. He undid Daddyjack’s belt and began to tug down his pants.
“What are you doin?” John said. “Don’t do that!”
Edward tugged and grunted and got the pants past Daddyjack’s hips. His privates were wrapped in a bloodsoaked bandanna. Edward removed the covering and exposed a nearly severed phallus and a slashed scrotum from which one testicle was missing.
“Sweet Baby Jesus,” John said softly. Then said: “Damn it, pull up them britches! Oh, goddamn, pull em up!”
They gently eased the body into the grave and Edward dropped down in the hole and closed Daddyjack’s remaining eye and carefully placed his hat over his face and then climbed out and they shoveled the dirt over him. They worked without talking while a flock of crows squalled loudly in the high branches. When they got back to the ruins the sun was almost down to the treetops and their mother was gone with both mules.
11
They built a fire in front of the stable and got a hatful of eggs from the hen roost inside and boiled them for supper in a small blackened kettle they found in the ashes. Edward cleaned and loaded the Hawken. He recharged the pistol too but lacked a bullet of proper .44 caliber size and so packed it with a load of smooth gravel he’d scooped from the creekbank.
They were agreed to abandon the homestead. They neither one desired to remain on this burnt piece of ground that held their father’s accusing bones and the likely possibility of visits from agents of the local order. Daddyjack had often gone to the nearest villages for supplies and a bit of conviviality in the taverns and was the sort people did not forget, the sort they would surely begin to ask after in his prolonged absence.
They sat before the fire and stared into the wavering flames and listened to the hoots and croakings and splashes and the sudden beatings of wings in the surrounding night. The sky was thinly overcast, the moonlight ghostly pale. A heavy mist off the creek drifted in through the trees and made a yellow haze around the fire.
“The son of a bitch,” John said.
Edward glanced at him but said nothing.
“Listen,�
� John said, “I know the woman’s truly bout half-crazy, but it aint real hard for me to believe some of what she said. It aint real hard to believe he got good and drunk and all hotted up and got him a notion about Maggie. He was always lookin at her legs when she’d put them up on the porch rail the way she used to. You know good and well he did.”
Edward said nothing but he recalled that all of them had watched Maggie’s legs when she put them up like that and they’d all grinned whenever they caught each other looking.
“But kill her? I cant hardly believe that! Sweet Jesus, his own daughter. Bad enough he’d … you know, do it to her. But he couldn’t of killed her.” He spat into the fire and turned his face away. “Could he done that, Ward, you reckon?”
Edward did not look at him. “I don’t know.”
“God damn it,” John said softly. And then after a while said: “That was a hellacious good shot.”
Edward looked at him. “I never even aimed. Goddamn luck is what it was.” He grimaced and spat viciously. “Shit! Luck don’t hardly seem a fit word for it.”
“Does to me,” John said. “Luckiest thing ever to me.” He paused and dug in the dirt before him with a stick. “You didn’t have no choice about it. You know that.”
Edward shrugged.
“It was him or me.”
Edward stared at the flames.
“He was fixin to bash out my brains.”
Edward spat into the fire and said, “I guess.”
“Guess all you want but he was. You hadn’t shot him it would of been me you buried yonder.”
His voice was strained and Edward glanced at him and saw that his face was unnaturally pale in the firelight. They watched the fire slowly burn down. The darkness gathered closer.