“It’s only a matter of time,” Medkiff said. “Old Death is a’ stalking and won’t be put off the scent.”
Before leaving, Dr. Lewis laid down the law.
“For at least two weeks,” he said, “he must—I say, must—not be moved, as he has already lost more blood than he can spare. Move him and he will die.”
He didn’t tell them, and didn’t need to, that staying in one place for that duration substantially increased the risk of their being discovered. As the doctor packed to go, Jarom emptied his pockets and tried to put money in his hand.
Dr. Lewis refused it. Instead he suggested they offer some to Mr. Cox, who had already compromised himself and his family in giving shelter and agreeing to provide their meals. At the entryway he promised to come back the next evening at a time when he was less likely to be missed, less likely to meet anyone on the road. Prior to going, he knelt to readjust Billy’s bandage, then picked up his instruments, carefully placed them in the satchel, and slipped into the darkness.
Jarom came to know the barn as intimately as he had known any other place he had been since the war began. It was old, a barn within a barn, a survival from the days of earliest settlement. At its heart stood a log crib sixteen by sixteen feet, with a crude door cut into one wall, but no windows, the mud chinking long since fallen out. Light coming between the logs gave the interior a latticing that would have been more pronounced had the light been more direct. Its hand-hewn timbers bore clefts where an ax had scored the barked log for the adze to follow and square into planes. Though none of the wood had finish applied to it, it had worn smooth, as oiled and splinter-free as the old furniture in Mary Tibbs’s sitting room.
Around and above the crib rose a three-bent barn built of generously wide oak boards nailed vertically to a scantling of cedar posts and beams, whole trees shorn and trussed together by mortise and tendon. The intricacies of its construction fascinated Jarom. The boxlike interior was trellised with poles lashed together or pegged to the six main posts in such a way that heavy sheaves of tobacco could be hung and smoked on their skewered sticks in tiers, four high over the alley, two on the shed sides. The undersides of the poles and roof sheathing showed soot-black from seasons of smoke used to cure the hanging tobacco. Ash pits spotted the hard-packed earthen floor. A stale smell of burnt hickory hung in the air that gathered cool and still like the interior of a cave. Randomly spaced along two walls were long slits on hinged members that could be opened or closed, so the hanging tobacco, as Medkiff described it, could breathe.
With little to do but tend to Magruder as best he could, Jarom studied the barn in its particulars and fancied crews of phantom tobacco workers ribbing one another, exchanging stories as they hoisted sheaves from the lowest tiers to the highest. The floor around him was strewn with leavings from previous crops that seemed as old as the barn itself, split stalks with leaves as fragile as parchment or the tissue-thin pages in the Tibbs family Bible. The dry leaves, shaped like a lolling tongue, had the tinge of the auburn or dusky bronze of leatherbound books, and Jarom thought it not unlike a library in ruins, a site of interest to antiquarians.
When it rained with the doors and slits shut, his eyes teared from the burning acidity of tobacco, as intrinsic to the barn as its trusswork. After a few days, he noticed that the structure must have doubled as shelter for stock, at least during winter, for old road apples lay in piles. The faint smell of dried manure blended with moldering hay in the improvised log crib where Magruder lay and where he and Medkiff slept. These combined with the tobacco smell to densen the air with a too-sweet odor of decay. He felt in some tie of kinship with the wider world of mammals that he and Medkiff and Magruder had found a burrow, a den to withstand harsh weather.
After a week of lagging days, Jarom felt a niggling sense of unease that he couldn’t discount as restlessness. The days took on a routine. In the morning and late afternoon Mr. Cox’s son Drury brought leftovers from the Cox kitchen, a chicken breast or joint of tough beef and always some biscuits, though often as cold as the ground on which they sat. Drury, a lank, slow-witted boy whom Jarom judged to be ten or eleven, always brought a small pail of chicken broth, which they ate of themselves and spoon-fed to Billy. After a week of such thin eating, Billy complained to Dr. Lewis during one of his evening rounds.
“Mend or break, Billy,” was all he said, “you can either mend or break.”
Water was not a worry, for a spring fed the pond above the barn, its pooled mouth fenced off from the stock. The horses slaked their thirst from the branch that ran past the barn. For provender the three horses fed on spoiled hay during the light hours. At night either Jarom or Medkiff hobbled them near the beds of tender grass beginning to green the hillside. Jarom took the precaution of confining them by day and turning them out at night. Watering them one night, Medkiff pulled some greens that neither of them could identify. Using a small skillet that Drury brought from the kitchen, he fried them in bacon drippings, and Jarom praised them as delicious. For the first few days, they supplemented house meals with the small cache of trail food in their saddlebags—some crumbled cornbread, a few tins of federal meat, even some brandy Magruder had packed along, he said, for snakebites. After the first few days, they made do with whatever Drury brought. When Medkiff complained, Jarom reminded him that they lived in a barn by sufferance, not in a hotel.
Every other evening Dr. Lewis tethered his horse in the grove of trees near the spring and slowly made a path that his feet seemed to know without lantern or moonlight. Sometimes he changed the dressing, but usually he examined the wound for the discoloring of infection and spoke little of Magruder’s condition. Though Billy breathed and slept with less strain, Jarom could see he hadn’t really improved much. Dr. Lewis, who practiced his science in monastic speechlessness, volunteered nothing, but his silence on the subject confirmed Jarom’s worries. Day and night Billy slept, often eight or ten hours at a spell. Like a banked fire, his slack body seemed to smolder, lacking some condition that would either cause it to reignite or extinguish itself. He had withdrawn himself from the world, reminding Jarom of John Patterson’s pet collie after being kicked by a mule. It lay on a pallet for a week or ten days, eating and drinking little while the body restored itself, regenerated its ravaged cells, rebuilt its broken ribs. Pacified, still, Magruder lost all reckoning of time and place, all interest in the world. Sometimes he became delirious, once or twice talking in his sleep. Whatever happened, Jarom repeated the oath he’d made to himself not to desert him.
As the waiting began to fret on him, Medkiff grew less certain. He moped and shambled about, kicking up dust until his edginess got to both of them. Much of the day he spent in the small loft above the two plank doors, his eye to a knot-hole in the siding, keeping a vigil on the fringe of trees within his angle of vision. Brooding on him, Jarom remembered a type Aunt Mary described as “having few eggs in his basket.” Unlike the English essayist whom Jarom had thumbed to in a student reader, Medkiff lacked means to amuse himself. The essayist claimed that he was never less alone than when alone.
Jarom, sometimes restive too, put himself to fulfilling that test with only modest success. He yearned for a book or newspaper and asked Drury to bring him something to read, but nothing in the farmhouse had print on it, and it wasn’t clear that James Cox could read it if there had been. So activity became his antidote to boredom. When he wasn’t squinting through his own peephole, he counted bullets or arranged his loads in geometrical patterns. Once he used their entire stock of ammunition to build a castle, complete with towers and moat. He imagined it as citadel of the Black Prince, himself as the forest bandit Robin Hood. He spent most of one afternoon watching the antics of a red squirrel in a nearby oak. He counted the number of crow caws in an hour and determined the time of day they were most garrulous, concluding that they, like a certain lazy planter he’d known in Logan County, seemed most active in the hour before noon. He imagined himself with Mollie Thomas and the outings they woul
d take when the war ended, the great Mammoth Cave at the top of his list. His ambrotype was worn around the edges, the emulsion softening with wear. He unfolded “Lillibulero” again and tried to hum the notes, mostly on the basis of whether they were high or low on the fence of parallel lines. The tune he improvised sounded like no tune he’d ever heard. He confirmed to himself that he would never be a serenader or valued member of a choir.
Or he was with the horses, nature’s true stoics, who accepted the world in which they found themselves with no discernible resistance or reflection. He spent hours rubbing them down, glossing their tack with gun oil, soothing them endlessly in whispered monotones. Nights he would lead them out for an hour to graze, to water, to exercise, to void themselves. Jarom knew that adopting this brotherhood with horses benefited himself more than it did them. Memphis, accepting the privation as though such treatment was naturally her lot in life, kept him from going low and sullen, helped him strike a truce between the ever-warring domains of mind and heart. For hours on end neither Jarom nor Medkiff spoke, each wrapped in his mantle of gloom, separate worlds within the world of the barn.
Jarom felt after a time that he’d gained a kind of honorary citizenship in the Nation of Barns. He acclimated himself to the discomfort, the dankness, the subtle scents of decay and death. The heady fumes of manure no longer bothered him, nor the stink of horse piss from the corner of the barn where the horses were hobbled during the day. His senses stood persuaded that at some juncture the odor had been naturalized and no longer merited notice, that it had become a part of him, or he of it, so familiar it could no longer be detected. If the smells had dissipated and the air perfumed with the crushed heads of a million roses, Jarom felt certain he would still be uneasy, not really knowing why.
One night when the stars seemed particularly cold and remote, he dreamt the barn transformed into an enormous coffin, a sealed box in which the three of them slowly smothered, cut off from air and food, from light and motion, from the reassuring sounds of ordinary human speech that reminded them they partook of this world not as exiles but speech-gifted witnesses. Earlier, he and Medkiff had played at cards, mostly rummy, with a tattered deck that Drury smuggled to them one noontime with dinner. But Medkiff had grown bored after an hour or two, especially after he discovered that he could win only when Jarom allowed him to. Next morning Jarom marked the progress of silver light striping the strewn floor. As the earth completed its diurnal rounds, he mentally charted their cubicle as it registered change, shifted into new angles and planes, new patterns of alternating glare and shadow. After his early supper he found himself sitting rapt for hours in the thousands of taps a drizzle made on the leaky roof, the tremors it sent along the grains as water seeped into the rotting shingles. He understood that beneath the boredom he and Medkiff were lonely and scared, knowing sooner or later word would reach the wrong ears that the barn had become a hospital.
A SOUND OF COCKS CROWING
Jarom awoke to the usual sound of cockcrows far off and the barking of the Coxes’ house dog, something unusual, for it barked only in the presence of strangers. Medkiff lay curled up in his blankets next to Magruder, both, as Jarom remembered in Patterson’s phrase, still in the embrace of Morpheus. Bootless, pistol in hand, Jarom stood up and put the mechanism on cock, dreading the metallic racheting that announced his presence, though he realized the sound could not be heard beyond the interior of the barn. Moving to the double doors, he put his eye to one of the cracks in the siding and studied the treeline. Light was washing the tops of a butternut tree maybe forty yards away, the brush and scrubby undergrowth beneath it visible only in halftones. Using this butternut tree as a point of reference, he stared at the trunk, acutely aware of any motion that his peripheral vision might detect.
He saw nothing unfamiliar but soon heard a rustling he associated with insects in their millions on still nights in late summer, a persistent fidgeting felt almost as mild tremor. He waited as the intensifying light slowly applied color to the objects, the duns and earth colors whose assembly into morning he had become accustomed to. Though he could detect nothing amiss, part of him sensed another presence behind, within, the screen of trees.
Then one, two, a half dozen crouching figures crept out of the brush and moved toward the barn, rifles in hand. They moved with the stealth of men hunting, one even tiptoeing down the hillside. Jarom readily saw from the blue of their tunics they meant him no good. As he watched them approach, birds began to pipe along the woodline, though the dog continued to bark in its monitory way. Medkiff, also aware of something amiss, had taken his pistol and carbine to the other side of the double doors and observed the bent figures as they approached, so close now Jarom could read the features on their faces. He felt a wave of anxiety as one of the figures, ahead of the rest, marched up to the door. Jarom could see the black belt that girded him with the “US” emblazoned in brass, could see the man’s ankle boots standing just outside the door, close enough for him to touch from under the planking. The man boldly rapped on the stout oak with the aplomb of a neighbor coming to borrow some flour or a dollop of lard. Jarom could see only two of the others, but they stood by with rifles at the ready, suspecting but not knowing for certain what occupied the precincts of the barn, as gray and undisturbed as the entrance of a cave or a sealed mausoleum.
Jarom could hear the breath of the man outside the door, could even see the dark, unshaved follicles on his chin. My only strategy, he told himself, is muteness, to wait for those outside to push ahead or retreat to the treeline with a report that the barn is deserted. This latter, he realized, was a wish with no fulfillment, neither likely nor even possible. Then the man at the door stepped back, whispering something inaudible to one of the others, and the two of them moved back to a patch of horseweed to heft a large pear-shaped stone. First putting their rifles down, they lifted it to their waists and came forward under the heavy load. Six or so feet away, they heaved it against the door with great force, knocking off a rusted hinge and splintering some planks. The blow came with such effect that the upper portion of the door collapsed into the barn, bent from the still secure lower hinge. The impact exposed the dark interior of the barn, and light splashed across the earthen floor.
Jarom and Medkiff, realizing their stratagem had failed, both fired at the same instant, placing the muzzle of their pistols between the slats and awkwardly directing the barrels toward wherever they could see or imagine a human form. In the confusion, Jarom saw two of the six bluecoats fall and not get up and two more wounded, though remaining on their feet. Shots from the treeline thunked in the oak planking around him, and one or two penetrated the interior, but no one was hit. One of the two remaining members of the assault party sprinted back to the cover of the trees while the other held his comrade, who was dragging one leg and hopping. Jarom heard a shout in the direction of the trees, and the firing stopped as abruptly as it had started. This is to give all of us some time to weigh our choices, Jarom thought, and reload.
Putting his eye to the crack again, Jarom saw Dr. Lewis making his way down the hill, waving a tobacco stick with a handkerchief affixed. It occurred to him that Dr. Lewis had led them there, probably because he was forced to. When he came within earshot, two troopers stepped out of the woods and cautiously descended the hill part way, taking up another wounded man, who hobbled, half-crawling, up the slope. They dragged him into the woods.
When the doctor approached within a few feet of the door, Jarom shouted for him to stop right there. Jarom put his mouth to the slit and asked what regiment the troops were from, who commanded it, and, most importantly, how many men he was facing.
“Major Cyrus Wilson of the Thirtieth Wisconsin is in command,” Dr. Lewis said, “and he would like to speak for himself if you’ll let him come down under a flag of truce.”
Knowing he had little choice, Jarom said that he would. But he also knew that whatever this Wilson had to say, he and Medkiff and Magruder were done, that they would leave the
barn either as prisoners or corpses. Neither escape nor negotiating their freedom seemed possible. The doctor trudged back up the hill to fetch the major, the sunlight off his bald dome bright as a breakfast dish.
Jarom made certain that the first object Major Cyrus Wilson saw as he stepped into the interior of the barn was the business end of his navy Colt. As the other door swung open, light flooded the interior and forced Jarom to blink, shaking his concentration. Medkiff stayed in the loft where Jarom had posted him. Magruder, helpless but awake, was still rolled up in his blankets.
Jarom suppressed the urge to scream and turned his mind to business. He hunkered onto his bare heels, resting his back against one of the stanchions. He motioned for Wilson to do the same as one might offer a seat to a visitor in one’s office or parlor. Wilson, a decent-looking man of fifty or so, lowered himself and folded his feet under him Indian style. Jarom looked him in the eye to read what he might find there.
“Would you like a smoke?” Wilson asked.
“Yes, I would,” Jarom said, after considering a few moments.
So Wilson rolled one for himself and passed the fixings over to him. Jarom carefully laid his pistol aside, discreetly placing it beyond the major’s reach, shaking some of the red makings onto a paper, sealing the edge with spittle on his tongue and passing it across his underlip. Then he drew the strings and with exaggerated politeness passed the bag back. From his breast pocket he drew a packet of lucifer matches, whisking one into flame against the post.
When the cigarette was lighted, he took a drag and spit out an invisible particle of loose tobacco. Jarom sucked on the cigarette, the first in many weeks, and spewed forth a stream of silver smoke that hovered like a miniature cloud in the chill air.
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