by Blake, J
As she spoke she was rocking slightly and cupping her sex with both hands as if holding to a wound, her eyes wide with the envisioned memory. John felt as if his chest might burst with his rage.
“Her hand was twisted funny and all swollen but she never did cry, she never did. They were drinkin and laughin and said they were goin to sell us to a whoreman in Narlens. They put a rope round her neck like a dog and tied me sittin up against a tree. I musta fell asleep cause next thing I knew it was nearly daylight and the one looked part nigger was layin on his back with his pants around his knees. His throat was cut open and the ground was dark red all around his head and between his legs where she’d cut off his thing. The rope leash was lay in there and she was long gone on the best one of their horses. Nobody never heard nothin. The other two cussed a blue streak when they saw what happened and I started to cry cause she’d left me behind. The fishy one started kickin me and cussin me and the big one told him to stop or I wouldn’t be worth nothin in Narlens. But he kept on and said he was gonna make me pay for what she done to Larry who I guess was the nigger one. The big one grabbed him away from me and they started fightin. The big one got the fishy one around the head and twisted it and you could hear his neckbone when it bust.”
“Damn him!” John said. “I wish I’d killed him, Maggie, I do! The other ones too—all the sonsabitches!” And he thought: Listen to you, you no-good piece of filth.
She looked at him narrowly and then rubbed her eyes hard with her fingertips. And then went on, less hurriedly now, her eyes fixed on the space of bed between them. “We rode all day ever day and he said he wouldn’t put his thing in me no more so I could heal up down there and he could get more money for me. But ever night he made me … made me, you know, put my mouth on him. At first I about choked, but after awhile I got so I could do it all right except when he’d let go and I felt like I was drowning. He—” John punched the mattress between them with such sudden ferocity she flinched and gave him a puzzled look. And then she went on: “He give me whiskey. Said it’d make everything easier. The first time, I drunk it down quick just like I’d seen him do and it came right back up through my nose and burned so bad I couldn’t see for the tears. He thought it was real funny. He showed me how to drink it in little bitty sips till I got used to it. He had me drink with him ever night when we made camp, and after a while I guess I got to like the way it burned its way down to my belly and made my lips get all numb and not care about nothin. He’d laugh when I got so I couldn’t walk straight. Sometimes he played on his mouth organ and I’d dance all around the fire.” She paused again, still staring into the space between them, and seemed to smile slightly. “One night I took off all my clothes while I was dancin and he clapped like he was at a show and called me darlin and kissed me on my mouth for the very first time.”
Now she looked up and past him and her face darkened and her words came faster. “Then we got to Narlens and he sold me to Boland for one hundred dollars. Told me he was gonna miss me awful bad and he kissed me goodbye. I was so surprised and all confused because right away I missed him so much I couldn’t hardly breathe. I come to feel like nobody could hurt me when I was with him. When he left I cried and I cried till Boland took a strop to me to make me quit.”
She brushed brusquely at her tears as if they were pestering flies. She stared fuzzily at him for a moment, then showed a twisted smile and said, “Say, you aint got maybe a little somethin to drink?”
He looked at her for a long moment, unable to find words to tell her what he was feeling. “No. Wish to hell I did.”
She yawned hugely and swayed and caught hold of the bedpost. “Jesus,” she said tiredly. She curled up beside him and accommodated herself, nestling her blonde head on his lap.
“What was his name?” John asked. “The one who sold you like you was some slave girl on the block.”
Her words were muffled against his thigh. “Twelve. Big ole twelve on his eye….” And then she was asleep.
His own fatigue weighed heavily on his burning eyes and he lowered the lamp to the floor and settled himself supinely and readjusted Maggie’s head to the hollow of his shoulder. The thunder was now a distant growling and the lightning had ceased flashing against the shutters and the rain had eased to a light patter.
Don’t think on it. Think of how you found her and got her away from there. Think of how she’s all right. She’s all right because you did good. Don’t think on the other. Things just happen sometimes. Aint nobody’s fault. Things just happen. She anyhow don’t even know. Nobody knows. Nobody but you. Leave it be and don’t think on it, you no-good rotten son of a whore bitch….
5
In the gray dawn the door burst inward and sundered the little table and sent the basin and pitcher clattering across the floor and a trio of city constables rushed into the room. Maggie sprang from the bed with a shriek and ran smack into the clutch of the boniface standing at the door. John groped wildly for the pistol as he came off the bed but it slipped away from him as the lead man struck him with a truncheon. He took the blow on the shoulder and countered with a punch to the man’s throat. But now one of his arms was seized and he was hit hard on the ear and he saw stars and his knees went loose and as he staggered backward he caught a glimpse of the boniface doubled over in the doorway with his hands at his crotch and Maggie vanishing into the hall. The man gripping John’s arm had him by the hair as well and was shouting at him in French and John punched him full in the mouth an instant before a rifle buttplate drove into his face and his nose went numb and he fell on his ass and boots kicked at him and he clubbed at a knee with the heel of his fist and then white light flashed in his head and the fight was done.
6
He came to consciousness on the floor of an iron-barred prison wagon clattering over the cobblestones. Pain pounded in his skull with each heartbeat. The benches on either side of the cage were full of men in manacles, and the few who glanced his way did so without curiosity. He became aware of the chains on his own wrists and of the press and weight of other men sprawled on the floor with him. The pain of his head flared redly as he sat up. He had to struggle to free his leg from under a large, reeking, unconscious man who was naked but for his shirt and socks. On one of the benches sat a man who was completely naked, covering his hairy privates with his hands and looking chagrined. He gingerly felt his nose and winced at its bloated tenderness. He probed the back of his head and felt a raised and tender mass under a sticky mat of hair. His fingers came away bloody and now he saw that his hand was swollen and imprinted with teeth. A man on a bench chuckled and then looked away when John glared at him.
The sun was risen just above the rooftops and blazed brightly in a cloudless sky, but the chill of encroaching winter was in the air. One of the constables rode seated at the rear of the wagon, just outside the cage, and John recognized him as the one who’d hit him with the truncheon. Two more policemen rode up front in the wagon seat, one of them driving the yoke of oxen, the other the officer in charge. When the officer turned to say something to the driver, John saw the bruised and bloated lips of the one he’d punched in the mouth.
When they arrived at the city prison they were led from the wagon in their clanking chains into a dimly lighted passageway and they passed under a huge portcullis of heavy lumber and into a bare yard surrounded by high stone walls manned by armed guards. There they had their manacles removed as they were processed into the prison ledgers and then they were ordered through a set of double iron gates into the prison block and the gates thundered shut behind them.
Nearly two weeks passed before he was taken before a judge who asked how he pleaded to the charges of theft, assault, and intent to commit murder. Not guilty John said. He scanned the sparse courtroom crowd but did not see Edward in it.
The officer in charge of the arrest testified that on the night in question he and his deputies had been summoned to the Mermaid Hotel by the proprietor, who told them that he and some friends had found
a man lying in the alleyway behind the hotel as they were returning from an evening on the town. By the proprietor’s account, the victim was a guest of the hotel named Gaspar Smith. He had been barely conscious but able to tell them he’d been attacked by the defendant, also a guest of the hotel, after an argument over a fille de joie. The defendant had been about to take the girl into his room when Smith happened into the hallway and offered her a better price. A fight ensued and the defendant mutilated Smith horribly in his manly parts and then attempted to kill him by throwing him from the second-floor balcony of his room. The proprietor and some friends had conveyed the victim to the nearest surgeon and then called upon the constabulary. When the officers went to the defendant’s room to arrest him he resisted and had to be subdued by main strength. There had been a girl in the room, yes, but she absconded during the struggle with the defendant. The proprietor had identified her to them as a young prostitute often seen plying her trade along the riverfront streets. And yes, they had gone to interview the victim in the lodging house where he was recovering from his terrible wound as well as a broken leg. He proved to be one Gaspar Surtee, a known thief who had several times served brief sentences in the city prison. M. Surtee would not, however, be present to testify in court. Two days previous he had gotten in a fight with a fellow resident at the lodging house and the other man had beaten Surtee to death with his own crutch.
The bowler-hatted man—whose name was Joseph Barbato and whose speech was yet so severely hindered by his broken jaw that he was obliged to write down his answers to the court’s questions—and the mustached man, whose name was Willard Moss and whose nose now angled decidedly to one side, both testified that earlier on the evening in question John had not only robbed them of their pistols and money but had viciously assaulted them as well. Their stories were corroborated by the teller who’d worn garter sleeves that night and gave his name in court as Harris Wilson.
Testifying in his turn John called his accusers liars and explained how he had rescued his sister from the brothel in The Hole World Hotel. The court listened to him intently until he was finished. Then the prosecutor turned to the judge and spoke briefly in French. The judge nodded and then turned to John and asked him why his sister was not present to testify on his behalf. John said it was as the constable had told them, she’d run away while he was being arrested, and he had no idea where she might have gone. The judge eyed him narrowly and then turned to the prosecutor who arched his brow and shrugged.
John glanced from one to the other and hurriedly said that even if he couldn’t prove that Surtee had been attacking his sister, the constable himself had said that Surtee was a known thief, and since no one questioned that Surtee had been thrown from the balcony of John’s room, the least that could be reckoned about the man’s presence there was that he was set on thievery. Surely a man was within his rights in attacking a thief he found in his quarters.
The judge raised an eyebrow and turned to the prosecutor, who clasped his hands behind him and fixed his gaze on the floor at his feet The judge regarded John solemnly for a moment and then leaned back and looked up at the ceiling and pursed his lips and drummed his fingers on the bench. Then he sighed heavily and looked down at John again and pronounced him guilty of petty theft and minor assault and sentenced him to three months in the city prison.
7
In the sameness of his days the time passed slowly. He worked and ate and slept and dreamt. Dreamt of Daddyjack pointing at him in accusation. Of his mother standing over Daddyjack’s dead body and laughing down at him. Of his brother walking along dark cobblestone streets with a pistol in each hand, calling his name in the shadows. Of Maggie dancing and swirling her skirt and showing off her pretty legs. Of her sitting on the porch with her heels up on the railing and himself sitting on the steps below and sneaking glances up under her dress and her catching him at it and smiling and letting him look. Dreamt of hiding in the bushes and watching her bathe in the river shallows. Of watching her kneeling at a log on the riverbank and being humped from behind by a bearded stranger who in the next instant was Daddyjack. Dreamt of the courtroom of his conviction where the judge was now Daddyjack as well, fresh scrubbed and robed in black and blackpatched over his missing eye and looking down on him not unkindly. Saying, “I aint forgivin you now or later, boy, you know I aint, but ye best remember what-all I taught ye if ye gone have any honor about yeself at all. Remember: you can die hangdog or with a ready dick. It’s all the real choice a man got in the world.”
The block he’d been assigned to was roused before daybreak every morning and fed a breakfast of bread and molasses and coffee before being manacled by the ankle, two men to a chain, and taken out and put aboard a prison wagon. Every day they were driven to a different part of the city and put to work cleaning the streets and alleyways and ditches. They were prohibited from speaking to one another as they shuffled along in pairs, their leg chains rattling, one man of every pair wielding a spade and the other carrying the canvas collection sack, the bored guards trailing behind with shotguns in the crooks of their arms. They daily filled the sacks with all manner of refuse, with offal, with dead dogs and cats, with rotted meats and produce. Sometimes they found a dead baby in the alleyway garbage, and whether the infant had been discarded dead or alive none would ever know.
Most of the local residents scarce took note of them, so commonplace were the prisoner collection crews. Occasionally a bevy of girls just come of age might happen by, nudging each other and giggling behind their hands and blushing furiously at the prisoners’ salacious leers and broad winks. Packs of schoolboys taunted them and sometimes made a game of dashing up in a crouch to touch their leg chains and dart away again. One day a boy ran up to touch the chain manacling John to a hardbark graybeard with a “T” branded on one cheekbone and the graybeard spat expertly between his teeth and hit the boy square in the eye and all the convicts laughed to see the kid scamper away with a wail. “What ye damn well get!” one of the guards called after him.
The graybeard’s name was Lucas Malone. John ofttimes found himself manacled to him for the day’s work. Malone was more likely than most to violate the rule of silence whenever the guards were beyond whispering range—remarking salaciously on the attributes of one or another of the females to pass on the street, making jokes about the guards, sometimes simply cursing the weather, the early mornings now so cold their hands and feet ached, some days so windy it seemed their ears might freeze and break off.
John’s acquaintance with Lucas Malone was further fostered by their proximity in the prison block where they held claim to adjoining pallets at one end of their long narrow cell. On his first night in the cell John discovered that the length of the floor was askew and every spill of a slop bucket or errant portion of piss ran down the stone floor to the lower end of the room. A hierarchy had therefore been established whereby the toughest inmates had their pallets at the higher and cleaner end of the cell and the weakest had to endure life at the filthy nether level. At the time of John’s arrival the higher floor was held by Lucas Malone and an inmate named Hod Pickett, but after one night of sleeping in the soaking reek of the low end of the cell John went to the other end and carefully looked from grinning Lucas Malone to slit-eyed Hod Pickett before deciding that any graybeard who had been able to hold his claim to the highest portion of floor against all challengers must be uncommonly ferocious, and so he challenged Hod Pickett instead. Fifteen minutes later one of John’s eyes was badly swollen and his lips were bloated hugely and his knuckles were puffed to the size of bird’s eggs. But Pickett was unconscious and had to be dragged to the other end of the floor along with his pallet and would not be able to see clearly through either eye for days to come nor to take a deep breath for the pain of his broken ribs and it would be weeks before he could again swallow properly or talk coherently for the punches John had landed to his throat. Lucas Malone had helped John arrange a pallet adjacent to his own, chuckling the while and remarking: “Bedam
n, boy, if you aint but a wildcat. I guess the only way I’da whupped you is to kill you.”
John learned that Lucas had lived the greater part of his life in various highcountry regions of his native Tennessee and had made his way chiefly by working other men’s land. He was vague about his legal troubles back home except to say he’d had a few. He did admit to departing the state posthaste following a poker game in which a fifth king mysteriously appeared in the deck to turn tempers nasty and a man ended up dead on the floor.
“All I ever hankered for was a grubstake to buy me a plot of land to work for meself,” he told John. “I kept hearin Texas was the place for prime land at a cheap price and that’s where I was headed when I got thowed here.”
He’d come down on a flatboat from Memphis and immediately on landing in Dixie booked his passage on a steamer to Galveston. But the boat would not be shipping for another three hours and so he decided on a stroll through the Quarter. He’d not been in town an hour when he stood confronted on the sidewalk by an outraged man at whose wife Lucas had boldly winked as they’d passed on the sidewalk. The man’s suit and high hat looked expensive, as did the wife’s lacy dress and parasol. A crowd of onlookers quickly gathered as Lucas rejoined that if the fellow didn’t want anybody winking at his wife he ought instruct her not to smile so invitingly at strangers as she had at him. When the furious fellow raised his cane as if he would strike him, Lucas punched him on the jaw and sent him sprawling. The man’s head hit hard on a cobble and he was unconscious for five days before he came out of it. The pending murder charge was put aside and Lucas drew six months in the city prison for major battery. He was due for release but two weeks before John.