by C. S. Harris
But I wasn’t sure if her words were intended to convince me, or herself.
Thirty-Five
That night, the sky went black long before sunset as the storm continued to bear down in a swirling fury of wind and rain and jagged flashes of lightning that lit up the roiling underbelly of the heavens.
‘At least we don’t need to worry about anyone seeing us,’ said my mother as we slogged through the flooded yard toward the barn. ‘No one with any sense is going to be out in this. And even if they are, it’s too dark.’
She was wearing a pair of Papa’s boots along with one of his broad-brimmed felt hats, and had pulled on his old oilcloth jacket over her dress. She’d shaken her head when I suggested she borrow a pair of his trousers, too, but told me to go ahead and wear a pair of Simon’s, if I wanted. I hadn’t taken two steps away from the house before I was soaked, Simon’s flannel shirt sticking to my skin and my hair plastered down around my head.
‘Except for the lightning,’ I said as an electric sizzle lit up the yard in a pale, ghostly glow. I’d retrieved the two dapple-grays from the coulee as the last of the light was fading from the day, and now led them behind me, their big hooves making sucking sounds in the mud.
‘What I wanna know is, how we gonna see?’ muttered Mahalia, her hands shaking as she drew back the bolt on the barn door. ‘You tell me that. I hear tell there’s sinkholes and sandbars down around Cat Island that can swallow a big old black bear.’
The soft golden light from my mother’s tin lantern illuminated the barn’s dusty interior, empty except for the small pile of moldy hay hastily raked into the center to cover the bodies of the dead Federals. She hung the lantern on a hook near the door, where it swayed, casting macabre shadows over the rough plank walls and dark, cobweb-draped rafters overhead.
I led the two horses into the barn, my step faltering as the heavy stench of urine, excrement, and blood hit me. ‘Oh, Gawd,’ I whispered.
My mother eased the coiled length of rope she’d brought off her shoulder as calmly as if she were a field hand going out to lasso a cow. She was a woman who was no stranger to death, who’d worked unflinchingly with hideously mangled bodies in need of care. And I knew from the distant, cold manner she’d now assumed that she’d slid naturally into the same frame of mind in which she dealt with those crises. ‘Mahalia, shut the door. Amrie, help me uncover them.’
I stood where I was, the bile rising in my throat, my gaze fixed on that musty pile of hay. I willed my legs to move, but it didn’t seem to work.
I expected my mother to holler at me. Instead, she came to stand before me and rest her hands on my shoulders. I realized with a vague, detached sense of surprise that she must now be only a few inches taller than me, because she essentially looked me in the eye.
‘Amrie,’ she said, squeezing her hands with enough force to rock me back and forth. ‘I know this is hard. If Mahalia and I could do it without you, we would. But we can’t. We need your help. This war has forced us all to do so many things we thought we’d never need to do. It’s horrible and it’s brutal but it just … is. Try to remember one thing: these men brought violence to us. All we did was protect ourselves and each other. And now we have to protect ourselves from the consequences. You can’t freeze up.’
I drew in a breath of the damp, foul air and nodded.
She gave me another gentle shake. ‘Come on, then.’
We went to work, the only sounds the rush of the rain and the soft shifting of the old hay. Not long after we’d decided to move the men to Cat Island, Mama had gone out to the barn to – as she put it – ‘bend them’. At the time, it hadn’t made much sense to me. But as we worked to brush away the last wisps of the moldy hay covering the dead Federals, I understood why she had taken care to position them on their sides, with their bodies curled at the waist and their arms extended straight over their heads, like swimmers about to dive into an unseen lake.
Rigor mortis had almost fully set in, making the dead men as stiff and unyielding as if they’d been carved from wood. If my mother hadn’t had the forethought to keep them from hardening straight, I don’t know what we’d have done.
‘How we gonna get them over the horses?’ I asked, settling back on my haunches, my wrists resting on my knees, my hands dangling limply. I was glad the man I uncovered had turned out to be the dark, scruffy sergeant and not the golden-haired captain I’d killed. I didn’t want to look at him; I certainly didn’t want to have to touch him.
My mother shook out the length of rope she’d brought and stooped to tie one end around the waist of Sergeant Jules Boyles. ‘Leverage,’ she said, and threw the other end over the shadowy beam overhead. ‘Bring up one of the horses, Amrie, and hold him steady while Mahalia and I lift the sergeant.’
Sometimes in my dreams I still see that scene, wrapped always in the golden light of the lantern, dust motes shimmering in the close damp air. The storm raged on around us, thrashing the limbs of the unseen live oaks and pecans of the yard and banging a loose board somewhere in the night. The rain hammered on the roof and shot off the eaves with a force that swaddled us in a deafening roar.
‘Easy boy. Easy,’ I whispered, bringing the first horse up, the shuffle of his hooves muffled by the loose hay. ‘There.’
The big gray shivered nervously, spooked by the smell of blood and death. His ears flickered, nostrils distending on a panicked snort as a streak of lightning lit up the shadowy interior of the barn in a blinding flash. I watched my mother and Mahalia wrap the other end of the rope around their fists, legs braced, the muscles of their backs tightening and bunching.
Both had always been strong women. But they were even stronger now, their bodies honed and hardened by years of the kind of work that had once been the province of only men. The dead Federal rose slowly into the air, his body frozen in the bizarre U-shape into which my mother had positioned it before death hardened muscles and joints in a fixed lock. The rope creaked, and he spun in a slow, graceless pivot, arms and legs suspended downward in a way that sent spindly, nightmarish shadows dancing across the barn’s dirt floor and rough walls.
‘Amrie,’ said my mother, jerking my attention to her again. ‘Back the horse up beneath him now. Quickly.’
‘Back, boy,’ I said softly, pressing the horse’s heavy left shoulder. ‘Atta boy. Whoa.’
Mama and Mahalia let the dead man’s weight settle face down across the saddle. The horse shuddered, head jerking up.
‘Easy boy. Easy,’ I said as my mother moved quickly to lash the Federal’s extended arms and legs together.
‘Don’t you think maybe we oughta cover him with an old blanket or something?’ asked Mahalia, hugging herself against the cold, her face a mask of terror.
My mother looked up from testing her knots, a lock of wet hair falling over one eye. ‘Even with a blanket over him, he’d still look like a dead man. And I frankly don’t have any blankets to spare. If anyone sees us, they’re going to know what we’re hauling – blanket or no blanket.’
‘Maybe. But at least it wouldn’t be obvious we’re hauling dead Federals.’
Mama just grunted and went to untie the rope from the sergeant’s waist. Then she hunkered down beside the golden-haired captain.
Like the sergeant, he lay on his side, bent at the waist, arms extended over his head as my mother had positioned him. She’d also removed my arrow from his back and hitched up his trousers. The cold calculation of all this wise premeditation troubled me, even as I had reason to be grateful for the wisdom and fortitude that had inspired it.
I hadn’t wanted to look at his face again, but I couldn’t help it. His lower jaw had sagged in death and was now locked open, as were his eyes. But there was no doubt in my mind that these were the eyes of a dead man. They were sunken into his head and glassy, like the eyes of the lifeless bass Finn and I used to string on a line and leave cooling in the water while we kept fishing.
‘Amrie,’ said my mother gently. ‘The other hors
e.’
Afterward, I would look back on that dreadful night and marvel at the ruthless single-mindedness with which two women and a girl could go about disposing of the corpses of the men they’d killed. The war had taught us so many things: how to spin wool and weave cloth; how to fashion our own shoes from old saddle leather and sturdy canvas; how to plow fields and mend fences.
Now it had taught us to kill, and how to protect ourselves from the consequences of those killings with a grim purposefulness that would have been unimaginable even a year before.
What we called Cat Island wasn’t really an island at all, but a low area of bottomland and swamp that stretched along the Mississippi to the northwest of St Francisville. A tangle of bald cypress and tupelo, oak and sweetgum, sugarberry and wild azalea, it had once been riverbed but was now marshland cut by sluggish bayous and shadowy lakes rimmed with rushes and cane that thrashed and bent with the wind.
Here lived black bear and white-tailed deer, bobcat and mink, river otter and deadly water moccasins that slithered through the thick undergrowth of dewberry and wood sorrel and dark green, feathery ferns. No one had ever bothered to build levees here, so the land flooded every spring when the river rose with the northern thaws. Normally much of the area would still have been inundated in June. But this year, the high water had peaked early, with long stretches of dry land already emerging from the festering muck.
Even in daylight, it was a forbidding place. At night, with lightning flashing on the underbelly of thickly bunching clouds and silhouetting the tops of the wind-thrashed trees against a ghastly white glow, it was terrifying. I could hear night-feeding bass flopping in some unseen stretch of bayou and a furtive rustling in the dark wet tangle of thick saplings and underbrush up ahead. I tried to tell myself it was just a possum or a raccoon. But my heart pounded in my chest, and my mouth went dry.
We cut down the bluff to the bottomland, then followed a narrow trail that snaked along the side of a low ridge. The wet humus underfoot was slippery and treacherous, the air heavy with the stench of dank vegetation, sour mud, and decay. I led the first horse, with Mama and Mahalia following. No one spoke, although whether it was from fear or respect for the dead, I couldn’t have said. I tried not to focus on the muffled thump of the horses’ hooves, tried not to think about the two dead men tied face down across their saddles and growing colder with each step.
Then a sizzle of lightning showed a streak of white just ahead, a ghostly gleam against a darkly sullen stretch of water that appeared for only an instant and then was gone.
‘There it is,’ I said.
The path opened up into a grassy stretch along the bank of the bayou. A massive felled oak tree, its bark long ago eaten away by beetles, the smooth inner wood bleached by the action of sun and rain, lay with its rotting root mass raised to the sky, its broken top thrusting out over a motionless expanse of water that brooded dark and unknowable in the night. The gaping yaw left when some forgotten hurricane toppled the tree and tore its roots from the earth had half filled over time with silt and dead leaves and debris. But it was still deep and wide enough to form a tomb.
My mother paused beside me. Her face glistened with rain, her hair hung in dark wet clumps, her chest rose and fell with a combination of exertion and what I realized with shock was a rare agitation she was trying desperately not to show. Then her gaze met mine, her eyes fierce with a determination that was at once tortured and vulnerable. And in that one, unforgettable moment I felt closer to her than I ever had before, even as I was simultaneously aware of all the many aspects of my mother that I did not know, that I had never known and that would probably always elude me – the parts of herself that she kept hidden away from me, or perhaps that I had simply never bothered to try to understand. And it came to me that, for the first time, I was looking at her as a woman with her own needs and fears and wants, rather than simply as my mother.
She said, ‘I wish it was farther from town.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘But I’m afraid I’ll get lost if we try to go much further.’
‘It’s far enough for me,’ said Mahalia.
My mother nodded and turned to untie the shovel we’d lashed to one of the saddles.
We took turns scooping out the sodden leaf litter and loose dirt. I tried not to think about the beetles and spiders that could be lurking there.
‘That’s good,’ said my mother at last.
I looked up at her. Lightning forked across the sky, a quick slither that reminded me of the darting strike of a snake’s tongue. The rain had eased up by now, but the wind still blew showers of droplets out of the leaves of the nearby stand of willows to pepper our faces with a cold sting and dimple the dark water beside us.
I saw her throat work as she swallowed. Then she turned to fumble with the knots at the captain’s wrists.
Her fingers were clumsy with cold and exhaustion and fear. The wind whipped and flattened her sodden skirts against her legs and flapped the hem of my father’s oilcloth coat. I sank the blade of the shovel deep into the soft earth and went to help her.
We brought the horse to the edge of the hollow and shoved the body off the saddle. He flopped back into the hole, arms still extended stiffly over his head, his face turned up to the moonlight that peeked unexpectedly from the shifting clouds overhead. His skin was pale and puckered now with gooseflesh as if he were cold. For one hideous moment, shadows from a fingerlike wisp of cloud moving across the surface of the moon made it look as if he breathed.
‘Amrie,’ said my mother, touching my arm. I turned away.
The sergeant fell half in, half out of the cradle of roots, so that my mother had to clamber down into the muddy hole with the two dead men and arrange them better. I told myself that once you’ve dissected a week-old cadaver pulled from the warm waters of the Mississippi, death must surely lose some of its horror. But I noticed a pinched look about her nostrils when she climbed out of the hollow, and decided maybe there were limits to the callousness that sort of experience imparts.
We stripped the saddles and blankets from the horses and threw them in on top of the men, along with their knives and pistols, their cartridge boxes and canteens, the pocket watch and other personal items we had found. There was much that we could have used, for materials of any kind were rare and precious these days. But Mama said it was too dangerous to keep anything – and the truth was, we wanted no part of any of it, anyway.
We worked silently to cover them with the soil and leaf litter we’d shoveled out. I could hear an owl hooting in the distance and, nearer, the soft plop of some night creature hitting the water of the bayou. Now that it had quit raining, a swarm of insects descended upon us. The wind had died, and the air was thick and breathless, like steam rising from a boiling pot of spinach.
My mother straightened slowly. ‘I think that’s the best we can do.’
We stood at the edge of what was now only a shallow depression. Mahalia cleared her throat. ‘I reckon we ought to say some words over them. Seems like the Christian thing to do.’
I looked at my mother. She still held the shovel clenched in her muddy hands. In the moonlight, her face shone so pale and hard it might have been carved from alabaster, and her eyes were focused on some bleak, inner place. But she nodded and swiped one crooked elbow across her wet face.
‘In the midst of life we are in death,’ she said solemnly. ‘Oh Lord, Almighty Savior whom our sins justly displease, deliver us not unto the bitter pains of eternal death. Thou knowest, oh Lord, the secrets of our hearts. Shut not thy eyes to our prayers, but spare us Lord most holy. Amen.’
‘Amen,’ murmured Mahalia and I together.
It was only later that I would come to wonder precisely which sinners my mother was praying for: the dead men, or the women who had killed them.
Thirty-Six
By the time I awoke late the next morning, the sky was a clear, hard blue baked by a golden sun that dried the mud in the lane and shimmered in the fresh gree
n grass of our empty pasture.
I came downstairs to find Mahalia sweeping the leaves and twigs blown by the storm onto the gallery. ‘Where’s Mama?’ I asked.
‘She done gone to give them horses to the Underwoods. Hear tell they refugeeing to Texas.’
I nodded. As rare and precious as horses had become around here, it seemed almost crazy to be giving away such beautiful animals. But it was simply too dangerous to keep the two distinctive thoroughbreds anywhere in the area. Texas sounded like a good place for them.
Checkers was lying in a patch of sunlight at the top of the steps, and I went to sit beside him. He spent a lot of time sleeping in the sun these days. I wrapped my arms around his neck and pressed my cheek to his sun-warmed back. For some reason, I had expected the world to look different today. But it didn’t. I could hear a mockingbird singing from the branches of a nearby live oak; a small yellow butterfly hovered over the bright red flowers of the salvia that grew along the walkway, wings fluttering in the breeze. The air smelled fresh and clean from last night’s rain, and the sun on my skin felt warm and good. I didn’t understand how everything could be so much the same, when I was so different.
‘You all right, child?’ Mahalia asked, looking over at me.
‘Yes,’ I lied.
That afternoon, I found my mother seated in a chair beside the parlor’s cold hearth. She wore a homespun dress of saffron yellow, with her hair washed and neatly drawn back into a graceful chignon. She looked nothing at all like the kind of woman who could carefully position a dead man’s body in anticipation of rigor mortis or bury him in a hollow hidden deep in the swamps.
She had a gold chain wrapped around one clenched fist, and when I asked, ‘What’s that?’ she opened her hand to show me the trinket that lay against her palm.
It was a large locket formed of two halves of heart-shaped, clear crystal rimmed in gold and hinged to hold a familiar curl of hair.