“You needed to have not done such a foolish, dangerous thing.”
Ellie plucked at the quilt, gaze locked on a square of gingham. “You wouldn’t listen.”
“I know.” He tucked a finger under her chin and lifted her head. “I owe you an apology, Ealasaid. I haven’t been listening. Not about this, not about your mother. I couldn’t, wouldn’t believe forgiveness would be that easy. I’m sorry.”
There were still circles under his eyes, but the grief and guilt had left them, and a lump rose in Ellie’s throat as she saw he’d finally let her mother go. He saw her. Granted, he wasn’t particularly happy with her at the moment, but the Darkness had been defeated, the necromancers stopped, everyone was alive and . . . “Mrs. Dixon says you should talk, the people of power in the new world.”
“Not stay wrapped up in our own hurt pride, discarded from the life we knew.” His lips twitched. “Yes, she spoke to me as well. We should definitely talk, the people of power in this new world.”
“We?”
“We.” Her mouth opened as she realized what he meant, and he smiled. “It’s time to build a new life.” Leaning forward, he brushed a fall of curls back off her face and kissed her forehead. “Past time.”
The Collector
Ron Collins
It was just morning, but already heat rose from the road that ran from Summerville on up through Chickamauga. Damned hot for September. Nathaniel breathed it in as he walked into town. He was hungry, but that was no different than ever.
“The President’s been shot!”
The runnerboy would have bowled him over as he rounded the corner, but Nathaniel caught him with his good hand. The kid was a scrawny white boy in loose dungarees, his eyes big from the unexpected collision. He waved a four-sheet rag over his head, and carried a pile of papers under his other arm.
“McKinley shot at rally!” he yelled as he slipped away and ran down the street. “Read it for a penny!”
Realization of what the kid was saying finally caught up.
“Is he dead?” Nathaniel called.
“Nah,” the boy replied over his shoulder. “Just shot.”
Nathaniel gazed after the kid.
William McKinley, the man he and the fellows on Teddy’s Hill called King Billy, had been shot. The idea made Nathaniel smile. If he had a penny, he would buy that paper and he would read it with all the grim satisfaction he could muster up.
McKinley promised black folks so much, but he’d done so little. And despite saying he didn’t want a war, he still sent the Maine to Cuba, and there wasn’t no one could tell Nathaniel that King Billy didn’t do that on purpose. More than two-hundred-sixty men gone just like that.
And it wasn’t just the dead who’d paid for Cuba.
Nathaniel ran a hand over his stump.
He still felt the hand sometimes, and sometimes when he woke up, he would reach out to grab shoes or his hat or something else just to find his arm swinging around, useless as a broomstick. Yes, the image of King Billy lying on a surgeon’s board while a sawbones fished around his fat gut for a bullet made Nathaniel smile. Bastard deserved it. But Nathaniel had more pressing problems than wishing ill on William McKinley. His last meal was more than two days gone, and he needed a place to stay before rain came. Crazy Carl down in Summerville told him to come to LaFayette because of a house where he might find a meal if he was willing to work. Work had never bothered Nathaniel any other than it was damned hard to find, even for a man who had served.
Carl said the old woman who lived there was strange. Touched. Had a bit of the magic of some kind. That didn’t bother Nathaniel so much, either. He wasn’t afraid of no witch, ’less she carried a rifle or wore a hood. Besides, Crazy Carl was more than a bit touched himself. Carl caught the “shine shakes” when he didn’t get enough, and he didn’t know nothing more about the woman beyond that she was touched, and that things grew crooked on her property. Said he didn’t wanna know. Said it was too dangerous to find out, then he shook his head and twitched his hands back and forth. “She ain’t right,” he said from between blackened teeth. “But she cooks a great meal.”
Which was good enough for Nathaniel.
His stomach rumbled.
He had to find that house.
LaFayette had grown up over Cherokee country—a thousand people maybe, and three times that in dogs and horses. It had roads of flat red clay, a schoolhouse, a courtyard, and nothing much of anything else. Men had fought for this ground often, but Nathaniel couldn’t see exactly why.
The house was at the edge of town, and had a look that spoke of a lack of men-folk. Untended trees grew from around the back along one side. The grounds were weed-choked, and the wild posies and violets were pitiful, drooping in the heat.
He labored up the porch steps and straightened, putting his hand to the small of his back. The door had been white, but was now peeling to weathered grayness. The floor was bare planks with gaps between the slats. It squeaked as he walked, but at least it was in the shade.
Lot of work to do here, he thought.
The door opened a crack before he could knock.
The old woman peered out. She wore a light-colored shift that was probably just a sheet that had been stitched and quilted. Her hair was a gray wad at the top of her head. She gazed up at him with red-rimmed eyes.
“What do you want?” she said.
“I could dig those flowerbeds for you,” he said, nodding at the ground out front. “Make ’em look real pretty.”
The door opened further. Her skin was white like bread dough and creased with lines. She looked at him with such intensity that time seemed to stop.
“You got no hand,” she said. “How’s a man with no hand goin’ to work?”
He covered his stump in that reactive motion that made him angry with himself. “That’s right, ma’am. Lost it in San Juan. But I can handle a spade and a hoe. I’ll do it for dinner and a place to sleep.”
She looked at him like she was grading cattle, and once again he felt her gaze pick at him. Something feral rose in defense. Her assessing eyes made him feel naked. They made him see his pa, who’d slaved not more than fifty miles away from here till Sherman burned his swath through Georgia, and who lived free until someone said they caught him stealing a pig and put him up over an oak tree. Made him think of his ma dying of cough when he was maybe five.
His teeth clenched as the woman eyed him.
Nathaniel was a man—a free man of the nation who taught himself to work with wood and to plant corn and to handle a gun true enough that Roosevelt himself wanted him on San Juan Hill. He was a man who’d taken a bullet through the palm and kept fighting and kept fighting and kept fighting until the gangrene rose up and told him different. Now this old woman looked at him to see if he was able to do a dinner’s worth of gardening.
“Do the work,” she said, her voice shattering his thoughts. “Dinner comes if’n you’re worth it.”
* * *
It was good to work, good to feel sweat rolling over his shoulders and earth on his fingers. The woman’s flowerbeds were hard-packed from disuse and weeds had grown up a criss-cross of roots, but the rusty red soil turned for him just fine and the work let his mind wander.
He thought about William McKinley and about Cuba.
He remembered thinking about Georgia’s red clay as he sat in pain on the black ground of San Juan and the doctor poured rum down his throat and gave him a wooden block to bite down on. He remembered the grain of that wood, remembered marks made by the teeth of men before him, remembered blazing pain and screaming through his clenched jaw for God or his ma or anything else to make it stop. He remembered thinking his hand, with its half-moon nails, looked out of place on the black soil.
Which brought him back round to King Billy and to red soil.
<
br /> He pursed his lips together as he worked. Each turn of the blade split the ground, and with each split, he listened to the earth breathe.
“Hear it?” Pa had said to him as a boy. “Hear it sing?”
And Nathaniel had heard it. He always did hear the rhythm under things, but he never knew anyone else did till his Pa shared that with him. Told him it was their secret. “Ain’t no one need to call you on it, hear?” he said. “It’s a song special-like for just you’n’me.”
That wasn’t the only special-like secret he and his Pa had kept. There was the hidden path Pa showed him, a trail that ran down to the creek where a man could hide if the troubles came too hard, and there were the occasional trips to the hooch bar run by Samo. And, of course, there was his name—Gamba, a name his Pa called him one night after one of those hooch runs. The name was special, Pa said. It meant warrior, power, strength. But it also had t’be kept quiet, Pa said, ’cause of the way the folk here feel ’bout names from the past. So that, too, was a special-like secret for just him and his Pa.
Throughout the morning the ground cooed to him low and strong with a melody he got lost in. It was nearly noontime when it sharpened to a pitch so shrill he had to look up.
Nathaniel squinted against afternoon sunshine to see two men approaching on horses. One wore a star. Both wore sun-beaten hats and mustaches.
“What you doing there, boy?”
“Working the flowerbed, Sheriff.”
The sheriff walked his horse toward Nathaniel, pursing parched lips and making a thick sound deep in his throat. He pulled a rifle from its holster and used the barrel to push the brim of his hat up his forehead. Even from this distance Nathaniel smelled whiskey on the lawman’s breath.
“Looks like Tilly’s got herself a niggerboy to do her up right,” the sheriff said to his deputy.
“Half a one, anyhow,” came the reply.
The two shared a laugh.
The sheriff lowered his gun to Nathaniel before sliding it back into the holster. “Any trouble, and you and that tree goin’ to get acquainted,” he said, cocking his head toward an elm at the edge of the woman’s property. “Understand?”
Nathaniel’s eyes narrowed. “Yes, sir.”
And he did understand. Doesn’t matter that you volunteered to serve if the man with the star don’t change. Doesn’t matter none at all. Just like it doesn’t matter that King Billy promised to finish the job Abe Lincoln started.
The sheriff nodded and pulled his reins. Both lawmen left, their horses plodding through the Georgia heat.
* * *
The woman—she agreed her name was Tilly when Nathaniel asked about it—stared at the flowerbed as if she couldn’t see the ground had brought the posies back up and that Nathaniel had shaped it into a bowl that would hold the rain that was surely coming later that night. Her brows rose, and she stared at him with one eye wide. He felt it again, that cutting mark of her gaze that hit someplace deep in his gut.
“Hope you don’t mind stew,” she finally said.
“No, ma’am. Don’t mind that at all.”
“Neighbors will squawk if’n I have a negro man sleeping in with me. So you’ll get the porch.”
He nearly laughed at the image of him and her on a bed together, but he stopped in time.
“It’ll keep the rain off,” he said.
She looked at Nathaniel. “You split wood with that hand?”
“Yes, ma’am, I can split me some wood.”
“Split a cord tomorrow and you can stay another night.”
“That’s fair.”
She served dinner on the porch.
The stew was plentiful and thick, and tasted like it came from the heavens. It had rabbit and chipmunk and some kind of fish that Nathaniel couldn’t place. Cabbage and carrots floated in the gravy. He didn’t feel her presence here, maybe because they both sat on the porch facing out so they didn’t look each other in the eye. Or maybe she had let her guard down, or maybe he was just imagining it all before.
They spoke about the weather and the rain that started rattling on the roof. She asked him about his hand, and he said he left it buried in the ground. He asked about her family and she said they had all died at one time or another, and that she collected things, but fell silent when he asked about what things those might be. He left her silence alone. He understood there were things a person didn’t want out in the open.
Crazy Carl was right, though. There was something strange about her, something that gave him the upset stomach. Her stare left him with almost-things running through his mind. Almost images. Almost scents. Almost . . .
He ate three bowls of her stew, though, and sopped each up with the fresh cornbread he’d smelled baking all day.
When he was done, she brought out a flat mattress along with a worn sheet. Though the mattress had long been pounded flat, Nathaniel thought it was like sleeping on a cloud.
He woke to the smell of oatmeal.
* * *
He worked all the next day, interrupted by nothing more dangerous than glances cast by children walking from town to the the schoolhouse, and the newspaper runnerboy who brought along news that it seemed King Billy was going to recover. Runnerboy said McKinley was already sitting up and giving people fits from his sickbed.
Cryin’ shame.
That night they ate on the porch again. Nathaniel’s back ached, but a cord and a half of firewood lay stacked outside the door. He would have done more, but the axe broke, and it took him two hours to make it sturdy again.
The stew was better the second night.
“The root cellar could use some fixin’ tomorrow,” Tilly said.
Nathaniel looked at the old woman. Maybe it was just that he was growing easy with her, but she seemed different tonight, calmer, like she had made her mind up over something, that maybe he was gonna be all right.
“Stuff down there needs replacing,” she said, gathering his bowl and rubbing it as absently as he might rub his stump. “Things need sorting, old bags carted up.”
“Sure,” he said, pushing away from the table.
* * *
The old woman tottered as she led Nathaniel across the knotted yard to a set of cellar doors barricaded with a sturdy padlock. Clearly no one was gonna steal from Tilly. Whereas the rest of the place was rundown and in disuse, the cellar door’s white paint was fresh and spotless. The lock guard was rusted in places, but still held good and solid.
The woman bent to the lock.
The door swung to expose a dark gap in the earth and stairs leading down. A dank smell nearly overpowered him. Nathaniel had lived through war and spent time at a surgeon’s ward, but this odor was something beyond description.
“I said it needed cleaning,” she explained with a shrug.
Nathaniel felt stillness here. Silence. The low hum of the ground that always filled his head was gone.
“Can’t get to the back of the shelves myself no more,” she said. “And it’s getting too long since its last scouring.”
Her head cocked up and she gave him a glance that was held a touch too long. Was she nervous today? Afraid? He looked at Tilly standing in a frock in the middle of a morning yard, and but couldn’t for his life place why she should be afraid or worried or anything much else.
“I might start at the back and work my way up,” she said.
He nodded and stepped down the stairs.
The cellar was well dug, the walls smooth and sharply cut. The top steps were dry and sturdy, but mold made the last three slippery. Light streamed down to help his eyes adjust. He felt a flash of claustrophobia then, a brief pain that pierced his chest, then released. He shook his head. What was wrong with him? He never minded being in closed places before, kind of liked it, really. But the root cellar gave him the pressures. The wa
lls seemed to bend, straining in like they might squeeze him into nothingness.
He put his hand to the wall. It made him feel better. He moved deeper into the cellar, thinking about the labor gone into it. Slaves? Neighbors? Free Indians? Had Tilly’s man dug this before going to fight the war? She was old enough. Could have lost her husband in Atlanta, or Antietam, or anywhere. Had her man fought to keep Nathaniel’s pa in chains?
The passageway opened into a chamber.
The air was damp here, cool enough to raise pimples. Light was just enough he could see shelves filled with bulbs and boxes and twisted roots wrapped around like balls of twine or like tentacles of sea monsters he once imagined on the boat to Cuba. Soft mold grew over a bag of something in one corner.
“See all the way back?” the old woman called.
He saw another doorway deeper into the cellar.
“Yes, ma’am,” he bellowed. “I’ll start there.”
Nathaniel stepped to the edge of the darkness, and put his hand to the doorway. A scream came inside his head, a pulse of pain that seemed to start at the base of his palm and stream through every part of his body. He pulled back as if his hand was burnt, but the screaming still echoed. Another shrill voice joined it, then another and another.
He heard the old woman grunt from above. Hinges strained as he turned. The door slammed and the darkness was complete. The scritch of lock on brace crawled over his spine. The click of the key was loud as a shotgun blast.
The voices faded to silence.
“No!” he yelled as he ran blindly back to the stairs. He crashed upwards and pounded on the wooden door above, pounding and pounding, but knowing no one could hear him.
This was no root cellar, he realized. This was a crypt.
He saw it clear then. The screaming voices were remnants of other men who had been caught up before him. He felt their spirits as distant vibrations in the soil, and he remembered Crazy Carl’s voice when he spoke of the old woman. Why hadn’t he listened to him? Why hadn’t he followed his instinct?
Nathaniel crashed his shoulder against the door until it bruised. Nothing. He ground his hand into the earthen wall and thought it might give, but it was too strong and would not budge. The sense of sound came back to him though, the music, the beat in the distance that had always been with him. It was far away now, muted as if muffled by the pillow he slept on the past two nights. But it was there and its presence made him feel better, even though he couldn’t quite make out its pattern.
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