Eye for an Eye

by Mark C. Jackson

  “You can call me anything you like,” I squared up. “How’s yer nose?”

  “You caught me last night. It will not happen again.”

  Jacks stepped up to the case, peered in, then squared up within inches of Olgens. “Don’t believe I ever seen a nigger second before.”

  Olgens stayed his ground. “We are here, sir, to accompany the gentlemen at hand. If you take issue with my being here, then you will take it up with Mr. Creed and Mr. Brody.”

  Wearing a smug look on his face, Brody nodded to Jacks to back off and said, “No matter who wins today, Edward, you will see the good Mr. Olgens Pierre in jail by sundown, or worse, for the murder of our dear, departed Baumgartner.”

  Olgens reached into the case, pulled out both knives, and held them up to Brody.

  “A knife? You call these knives?” Brody asked and started laughing.

  I made no acknowledgment to Brody, Jacks, or Olgens.

  “Do you choose one of the two? Or . . . can I offer you this one?” Olgens held both knives by the blades in one hand while he elegantly waved the other hand over Frenchy’s knife lying in the case.

  Brody flinched, then pointed at mine. Olgens offered it to Jacks who then gingerly passed it on. Brody held it in his right hand, flipped it twice and over to his left, then back to his right. He nodded to Jacks.

  Olgens gave to me my brother’s knife. I was already intimately familiar with its weight and cut. I ran my finger across the blade, drawing a little blood. I caught Brody’s eye and wiped the blood off with my thumb, then licked it. I nodded to my second with acceptance.

  “Both have chosen their weapons,” Olgens pronounced to our invited guests and a smattering of morning onlookers. “I ask but one question of the duelists. Will the gentlemen be tethered or untethered?”

  I nodded again, not expecting my opponent to agree.

  “Tethered,” Brody said, with only a breath of hesitation.

  “Tethered it is then, sirs.”

  Olgens drew out of the case a thin strip of leather about six feet long. He gestured that we shake left hands. Brody’s hand was soft, like a man who had done little real work throughout his life. Jacks tied Brody’s wrist while Olgens tied mine with only a two-foot length of leather swaying between us.

  With the formalities complete, and one hand each bound together, we began to fight.

  I gathered the slack of the tether and yanked tight, pulling Brody into me. Stepping aside and from behind, I reached around to his right and sliced him lightly across the chest. He took a blind swipe and sliced my left thigh, cutting through the deerhide and drawing blood. I pushed away, spinning him back into a fighting stance. Not once did I take my eyes off of him.

  “You come here to my home insulting me, I will kill you now,” Brody said matter-of-factly.

  “Feel your chest, sir. If I wanted, you’d be dead.”

  He touched his shirt with his knife hand and pulled it away to see blood. A slight frown crossed his face. I knew Brody was afraid. Bound together like this, I could almost feel his heart pounding through the leather.

  We walked slowly in a circle. My thigh ached and I felt blood seeping from the wound. I heard nothing from our two parties as they stood under the oak trees on either side of the fighting ground. There was no cheering, only the silence of the early morning and our feet brushing through the grass.

  Brody lunged at my left arm and shoulder. Still holding the leather bindings taut, I spun to my right and sliced his left forearm. As he glanced at his new wound, I yanked hard, pulling him off balance. I fell backward onto the grass and with my feet in his gut, flipped him over me. He slammed to the ground. I yanked once more, hard, wrenching his arm out of its socket. He tried to scream but could not. As he lay gasping for breath, I rolled to my knees and, still pulling on his arm, held my brother’s knife to his throat. He tried to slice me again but I pinned his other arm down with my knee. The knife in his hand, my knife, dropped to the ground. I picked it up and with my left hand, cut the bindings that held us together. I tossed the knife to Olgens.

  Jacks stepped in front of me and raised a pistol. From behind, I heard a sizzle and shot. Jacks flew backward to the ground with a hole the size of a silver dollar exploded in his chest. I twisted around to catch Billy lower his smoking pistol.

  I still held Brody down with my knee. I did not know if he saw Billy shoot Jacks for he lay very still with a dazed look on his face. I softly whispered, “This ain’t your home, ya goddamn Brit . . .”

  As he cried out, I cut an exact circle on top of his head, grabbed a handful of hair, and with a pop, pulled his scalp off.

  I sang in praise to Watonga and danced circles around Brody and Jacks. Seconds seemed like hours. I did not hear the gasps and cries of neither parties nor bystanders. In my mind, the world became a righteous blur of green trees, grass, and blood. I placed the fresh scalp on my belt with the others and began to walk away.

  Sophie and Olgens stood over Brody’s wreathing body. “You did not kill him?” I turned back to face them both. Rage contorted Sophie’s face into that of a devil.

  “You were supposed to kill him!” She screamed and snatched Frenchy’s knife from Olgens’s belt. She lunged toward Brody with the blade raised above her head. “You will die today, you bastard!”

  Brody’s wife suddenly dropped to her knees and leaned over her husband. Sophie blindly stabbed, burying the blade deep into her left shoulder. Olgens grabbed his sister before she could swing down again and wrenched the bloody knife away, dropping it to the grass.

  “They would hang you for his murder,” he whispered, dragging her away.

  There was not much the physician could do for Brody except wrap a bandage around his head. I was fairly certain he would live. For his wife, it seemed much worse. She lay quiet next to her husband, shivering, her teeth chattering. The physician gently turned her and stuffed a piece of cloth into the cut. In an instant, the cloth was soaked with blood. The next piece also became soaked. He placed his right palm over the wound but could not stop her bleeding. Olgens still held Sophie tight some distance away from the scene, the only ones standing over the woman and the doctor were Juliette and I. Billy leaned against one of the oaks, watching us all.

  “She’s goin’ to die by his hand,” Juliette stated clearly. She reached down and with her fingers, dug up a handful of dirt and grass. She glanced to the physician, then to me, and shook her head.

  I poked the doctor. “Juliette’s right, by your hand she’s gonna bleed to death, you need to get out of the way.” He did not move. I pulled my knife, grabbed his hair, and pointed the blade at Brody. “Do ya wanna end like him?”

  As soon as he stood, Juliette knelt down and filled the wound with the dirt and grass. I reached in and held my hand over hers as we both pressed against Mrs. Brody’s shoulder. The bleeding slowed. I caught Juliette’s eye. “He ain’t no doctor,” I said and gave her a wink. She gave me back a smile.

  Brody began moaning and thrashing his arms. He reached around, pulled the bandage off, and tried touching what was left of the crown of his head. He screamed as his fingers pushed into the exposed mush that lay between skin and skull. His eyes rolled wild.

  Sophie had gone limp in Olgens’s arms. He gently stroked her hair. As I walked past them, they both stared at me without a word.

  “Hey mate, where you going?” Billy hollered.

  I kept walking. Where to, I did not know.

  “Hey mate,” Billy caught up with me. “Helluva a bloody morning, ay? How ’bout a drink?” He paused. “Uh, Zeb, you be cut pretty goddamn bad on your leg, mate.”

  “You’re mighty happy, ain’t ya?” I said. “For me just scalpin’ your brother.”

  From behind me, Olgens shouted, “Mr. Creed, we have unfinished business, sir.”

  I shrugged them both off, for I wanted to feel nothing but the glory of the morning.

  CHAPTER 28

  The cut on my thigh was bleeding again, enough to soak
through the sewed-up buckskin. I lay next to Billy in a wagon, flat on our backs, covered by burlap bags. All I smelled was the sickly sweet rot of the sugar beets they once held. The short road between New Orleans and Broussard’s plantation was not smooth but filled with wagon ruts, so every jolt we took, a shooting pain increased to include the whole of my left leg. Benjamin Brody did not know how good he cut me.

  “He was my uncle,” Billy exclaimed, a little too loud.

  “Who?” I whispered.

  In the dead of night, I did not know if our words carried above the groans of the old wagon.

  “Jacks, Uncle Eddy.”

  He took a long swig off the bottle he carried with him and nudged me with it. I took one long drink and handed it back. I thought for a second on how to respond. “Well, sir, I’m mighty grateful for you killin’ your old Uncle Eddy. I wouldn’t be lying here next to you under these God-awful bags of shit if it weren’t for you killin’ him. He wasn’t no Brit, was he?”

  Billy took a long breath and exhaled. “I hated the goddamn son-of-a-bitch.”

  “The night I killed Baumgartner, you stood out on Sophie’s front porch with Brody and your uncle. Hell, I wanted to kill you.”

  “I understand, mate, and a worthy reason in your mind with all that you knew. However . . .” I felt his breath on me as he turned his head. He lowered his voice to a whisper. “By you knowing the true nature of things, way upriver, you would never have followed and would have been lost.”

  “Why?”

  “Why would you have been lost? I thought it obvious. You couldn’t find your way through St. Louis to Frenchy’s without me.”

  “No, no. Why me? Why lead me down here to kill your brother?”

  “Sophie wanted him dead. Frankly, I’m glad you left him living. Though I still don’t understand the fascination with cutting another man’s hair off.”

  I thought it odd that he did not flinch as Rudy lost his head, yet he found issue with the taking of a scalp. “Your brother, wherever he goes in this world, he’ll suffer from losin’ the top of his head. An’ I will always be the man in this world who wears his scalp at my waist.”

  “As it should be, I suppose.” Billy sighed.

  “You didn’t answer my question, why me?”

  “Right time, right place. We knew about you not long after you punched ole Fitzpatrick’s glasses up on Green River and decided to break from the fur company. So happens, you got caught in Baumgartner’s snare. When him and Rudy came through St. Louis, taking yours and the other furs on down the river, word got out of two brothers. One shot dead with one left dying somewhere near Arrow Rock. Curious I was, so I left St. Louis and went to see if it might be you and still alive. The night I sat drinking with the good doctor I knew . . . you were the one. The one Sophie kept talking about, was going to make things right.”

  I lay in the jostling wagon, thinking back, trying to find a reason why I might be so special, so important that Billy would assist me in my journey to kill two men. I felt a burning, deep, as if somehow I had been used beyond my will. Though that made no sense, for it was I more than anyone else who wanted Rudy and Baumgartner dead.

  “I still don’t understand.”

  “Do you remember a night, two years ago, when you and your brother were last in New Orleans? On the porch of Sophie’s house, you stopped a man from entering?”

  I closed my eyes. “I remember stoppin’ a man who openly held a pistol. It was late and I needed fresh air. He came up the steps. He didn’t see me in the shadows. I knew Sophie was inside and when he flung the door open an’ pointed the pistol straight at her . . . well, I had to do somethin’.”

  “You saved her from assassination.”

  After I hit him with the butt end of my knife, he went down. There came such a commotion and he was carted off. I did not see his face it was covered in so much blood. Jonathan and I left New Orleans the next morning, early. I never knew the outcome of the man, nor the reason why he was to shoot Sophie right there in her own parlor.

  For a few long seconds, only the squeak of the wagon wheels could be heard. Billy whispered, “A strong impression you made on her, mate, she never forgot. When your name came a floating down the river along with word of your escapades at Rendezvous, a message was sent to fetch you, so to speak . . . But, as I have already mentioned, Baumgartner snared you and things went awry. It then became my duty to help you seek your revenge.”

  “Why?”

  Even in the back of a rolling wagon, hidden under stinking burlap bags, I felt him tense up at my simple question. He took another long drink. Then, “As I said, mate, for reasons that go back many years, I hated that son-of-a-bitch uncle of mine, and Baumgartner . . . as much as you.” He spat the words out as if they were poison on his tongue. “I hate my brother even more.”

  I remembered the evening at the opera, Billy always standing a little behind, Brody’s sharp words and demanding him light his cigar. The utter disrespect Brody and Jacks showed in public to their own flesh and blood.

  We lay in silence for a while. If I were to die that night, I wanted the whole story. “Frenchy?” I asked in a loud voice.

  From the driver’s side of the buckboard, Olgens rustled the bags. “Shhh now, if we’re found out, they’ll kill us ’fore we get there!” The wagon kept clattering forward.

  There came a long pause. Then, in a whisper, Billy continued, as if he recited his words from a book. “Knew him, growing up in Barataria and New Orleans. Used to help him sometimes find . . . women of a certain color. He was particularly fond of quadroons, if you know what I mean. It’s how he and Sophie met. He was a bloody powerful man and could have any woman but she placed her spell on him, keeping him from all the others. She had another man in secret. He and Frenchy were partners in certain business deals in New Orleans. When the baby came, she decided who she wanted and sent Benjamin to kill Frenchy. As you found, my brother is not the most courageous of men. Frenchy’s heart was not cut out but was broken and shamed. He disappeared into the swamps of Terre Bonne with the baby, never to be seen in Louisiana again, leaving his kingdom in the hands of his own brothers. All that he built, all that he plundered, slipped into debauchery and decay.”

  The wagon was slowing. Our time of talk was almost done.

  “But what of Sophie?”

  “She could never spell me like she’s done you and all the others. So we have an understanding.”

  “Like me an’ the others.” I whispered to myself. “And Frenchy?”

  “Especially Frenchy. Even more so does the daughter have her spell on him.”

  Asking no more questions, I lay there, still feeling burned. Even more burned by hearing Billy speak what sounded like the truth.

  “I’m glad you took his scalp and left him alive. He deserves it,” Billy said slowly, as if he savored every word.

  The wagon stopped. Within seconds, the silence of the swamp surrounding us was deafening.

  Olgens lifted one of the burlap bags and shined the oil lamp on us. “Shhh now, I tell you, we are almost to the gate. You must be ready for anything.” He stopped and jerked his head away, as if he heard something. “Dawn is approaching,” he said in a low voice and covered us back up.

  The wagon lurched forward.

  Billy cleared his throat. “Margo will be with the unmarried women and her boys will be with the men. Their names are Abe and Sturgis, Abe being the oldest. All three know me, but you . . .” He felt for my hand and pressed a coin into its palm. “This will secure their trust.”

  Holding the coin for a few seconds, I rubbed the two faces with my thumb and forefinger, wondering which side was the back, which might be the front. I placed it in my belt and sighed.

  “When all here is done,” Billy whispered, “you and me, mate, we’re sailing to Texas. Volunteers are gathering now in New Orleans. I hear they give away the bloody land.” He sounded excited. “Though we might have to kill a few Mexicans once we get there.”

 
; I said nothing, as I had not considered any possible future to come.

  The wagon’s wheels ground to a stop. Olgens shook the top bag and sat quiet. I heard footsteps and heavy breathing.

  “You there, boy. Where you come from an’ who’s yer master?”

  “Come from Laura, sir. Master’s name’s Higgins, sir.”

  Through the cloth of the bags, I could see the shadow of a torch as the man lifted it up to get a better glimpse of Olgens. I held my breath.

  “Don’t see no badge, boy. Master Higgins let his niggas roam free?” The man took a shallow breath and chuckled.

  “No, sir!” Olgens paused and fumbled through his pockets. I felt Billy tense up. I held my knife in one hand and with the other, ready to throw the bags aside. I heard a piece of paper being unfolded.

  “Yes, sir, I got this here from the proprietor an’ he say should be good ’nough.”

  There was more shallow breathing then the rustle of paper as the man handled it not two feet from my head. “Ain’t got no badge, just a piece a old paper.” More breathing. “What you sent here to do, boy?”

  “Sir, Master Higgins say he sent word on ahead to ya’ll . . . I’s to collect yall’s cane cuts an’ put ’em in these here bags an’ deliver ’em on back to the proprietor at Laura . . . an’ Master Higgins say get a receipt else he beat ole Olgens good now.”

  “Olgens yer name?”

  “Yes, sir, Olgens be my name.”

  From somewhere beyond the road, I could hear the earliest egrets began to stir, their caws echoing through the cyprus trees.

  “Hum, ain’t never heard a nigga called Olgens before.”

  “No, expect you haven’t . . . sir.”

  The man walked slowly around to the back of the wagon, dragging the wood handle of the torch along the shallow sideboard, and stopped. With the fire raised above his head, I could see his large upper-half in silhouette. “All these here bags empty?” He switched the torch to his left hand and fumbled with one of the back latches. The wagon began inching backward. “Ho boy, hold them mules!” He hollered, then silence.