The Bells of El Diablo

by Frank Leslie

  “Can’t blame them, Jimmy,” Crosseye said. “Been a long fight. They didn’t know Willie like we did.”

  James dropped back down on his knees beside his brother. “Just keep ’em away from me, Crosseye.”

  “I’ll do that, Jimmy.” Crosseye straightened, his eyes serious, doleful. “You need anything?”

  James shrugged. “I don’t know what to do for him.”

  “Probably nothin’ you can do, Jimmy. Just sit with him.” Crosseye gave a fateful chuff, then turned and ambled on out of the cave.

  James regarded Willie for a long time, and then he turned and leaned his back against the wall beside him. He raised his elbow to his knee and stared into the fire, silently praying for Willie’s recovery, hanging on his brother’s every breath.

  He sat there with Willie for a long time, mopping Willie’s head frequently with a neckerchief that he wetted from his canteen, keeping the fire going. After maybe two hours of silence save for the flames’ crackling and Willie’s ragged, shallow breathing, the young Union officer said suddenly, with startling clarity, as though he’d been awake all along, “James? Do me a favor, will you, brother?”

  James had been stirring the fire with a pine branch. Now he laid the branch on the flames and scuttled back over to his brother. “What is it, Willie?”

  The younger Dunn reached inside his bloody tunic and pulled out a gold-chased watch with a chain of linked gold Confederate coins. He held it in his open palm atop his thigh, occasional pain spasms causing the hand and the watch to twitch slightly.

  “Find Vienna for me,” Willie said.

  James shook his head. “Willie, I got no idea what became of her or her family—”

  “Denver City,” Willie said. “Her daddy sent her there, to family, to keep her away from the war. I got a letter from her a couple years ago. I want you to give her this watch.”

  Vienna McAllister had been Willie’s betrothed before the war had broken out. She’d been born into a wealthy plantation family four miles from Seven Oaks, and she and Willie had been sparking since nearly the day they’d both started walking.

  Willie flipped open the gold-finished lid, extended the watch weakly toward his brother. James took it, read the inscription in flowery cursive writing on the inside of the lid. “To my son, Thomas, with love from his father—William Thomas Dunn, 1863.”

  James felt his jaw drop as he looked at his brother.

  “Bought it in Richmond. Had it engraved special.”

  James shook his head uncomprehendingly. “Son?”

  “Didn’t tell no one back home, but that night when I rode out of Seven Oaks for the last time, after that argument with you and Pa about the war, I rode over to Rose Hill. Vienna snuck out of the house to meet me, and we had Preacher Lawton marry us.” Willie stared at the watch before lifting his bleary gaze to his brother and adding, “Was only proper I marry the girl. Besides, hell, I loved her.”

  James thought that over for a time, then nodded in understanding. “How…do you know…?”

  “She had the baby in Denver City. Or she would have by now. I never did receive word. We’d chosen the name the same night we was married. The McAllisters’ firstborn has always been boys. Ours is most likely a boy, too. Thomas….”

  James just stared at his brother, digesting it all. When he had done so, he felt as though his heart had been torn in two by a Union cavalry saber. He felt a great weight settle on his shoulders, and tears began to wash down his cheeks as though a spigot had been turned on. His gut churned, his lungs spasmed as he bawled until he dropped forward onto his hands, sobbing openly, his thick hair hanging down over his face.

  “You’re a helluva fighter, James,” his brother said. “Always was. Despite our differences about the war, I’m proud of you.”

  James looked at Willie, felt a roiling rage rising up around his aching heart. “Really, Willie? You’re proud of me?” Then the sobs turned to laughter—a wild, bizarre, half-mad laughter. “You’re proud of me—are ye, little brother?” He continued to laugh and sob at the same time. Christ, he’d killed him, and Willie was proud of him!

  How could he not have realized what a better man Willie was than he?

  “Wish we’d had you on our side, James.” Willie grabbed his brother’s arm and squeezed, wheezing, “Find Vienna and my boy, James. Give little Thomas my watch, so’s he has something to know me by. And tell—”

  His voice pinched off. James looked at him. Willie was gasping, leaning his head back against the cave wall. All the color had leached out of his face, and his cheeks were hollow. His lone eye was flat, as though an inner lid were closing down over it.

  “Willie!” James took his brother’s face in his hands, and squeezed. “Please don’t, Willie!”

  Willie placed his own hands on his brother’s wrists. He gritted his teeth. “Don’t blame yourself, brother. Just find my wife…my son…give ’im that watch. And all’s forgiven.”

  A faint smile lifted Willie’s mouth corners. The light left his eye. His fingers slackened on James’s wrists, and then his hands fell down like rocks at his sides.

  “Willie!” James screamed.

  Willie gave one last rasping exhale, and then he sat unmoving against the cave wall, staring unseeingly out of his single eye at his brother.

  James spent the night in the cave, holding Willie in his arms. He let the fire go out and merely stared into the black velvet of the far wall, neither asleep nor awake but existing in a no-man’s-land between both worlds, shuddering from time to time when he remembered shoving his razor-edged plow-blade knife into his brother’s chest.

  He’d looked into that lone blue eye, the same blue as his own eyes, and realized what he’d done.

  When the soft gray light of dawn shone beyond the cave opening, touching the sky above the dark pines, James eased his brother down to the cave floor. He felt oddly numb, but clear. Somewhere over the course of the long night, he’d decided that the war was over for him. He was going to follow Willie’s bidding and deliver the watch to Vienna. He rose and walked out to where the other men were milling, eating a meager breakfast of dried chicken, some pecans they’d gleaned from an orchard, and hardtack washed down with water. They hadn’t had any coffee for months.

  Jackie, Cletus, and Moss all stopped talking when they saw James emerge from the cave’s black mouth. James glanced at Moss. “Sorry about last night. I was out of line, Moss.”

  “You ain’t got nothin’ to be sorry about, Lieutenant. I was the one out of line. I am sorry about your brother.”

  Crosseye was down by the horses and the twelve-pounder field piece they’d acquired from a battlefield along which the dead had been stacked like cordwood, cleaning out a hoof with a stick. When he saw James walk out away from the other men, he released the horse’s hoof and ambled over to him, flicking the stick across his thigh clad in torn gray wool. Around his neck he wore a fancy Lefaucheux pin-fire revolver that he’d taken off the body of a dead Union general, wearing the fancy piece for a trophy as well as a formidable weapon, though the ammo was hard to find in the South.

  “You boys go on back to the outfit,” James said. “I’m gonna be takin’ Willie home.”

  Crosseye stared at him, blinked. The others muttered amongst themselves. “That’s desertion, Jimmy,” Crosseye whispered, unable to say the taboo word aloud.

  James looked his old friend and mentor in the eye. “Willie deserves to be buried at Seven Oaks, and that’s where I’m gonna take him.”

  “You comin’ back, Lieutenant?” Jackie Baker asked from the rock he was sitting on, chewing a chunk of stale hardtack, crumbs dribbling into his sandy spade beard.

  “No,” James said. He’d made his decision. When he’d buried Willie at Seven Oaks, he was heading west to find Vienna, to give her Willie’s watch.

  Crosseye said, “I’ll ride with you, Jimmy.”

  “No.”

  “You’re gonna need hel—”

  “Deserters are s
hot on sight, Crosseye.” Any soldier found away from his company without furlough papers was considered a deserter.

  “That’s what I’m worried about, Jimmy.”

  “Don’t worry about me. You worry about gettin’ these boys back to General Forrest’s company. He’ll likely have a new assignment for you. If the war’s still goin’ on after I’ve buried Willie, I’ll be back.” He lied about that last; he was only trying to placate his old friend.

  Crosseye cursed, doffed his hat, and slapped it against his thigh. “Ah, hell, Jimmy—it wasn’t your fault!”

  James walked down and picked up a saddle blanket piled with Coker’s tack under an oiled tarpaulin, and carried it back into the cave. He wrapped Willie in the blanket and sat there for a time while the others rustled around outside, saddling their horses. They weren’t saying anything, as though they were all too shocked for words at the news of James Dunn’s intention to desert. If anyone had told him just yesterday that he’d soon join the ranks of the much-maligned deserters who had helped to decimate the Confederate army, he’d have shot the man.

  “We’ll be goin’ now, Jimmy,” Crosseye said, astraddle his gray mule just beyond the cave. A fine drizzle was falling out of a sky the color of dirty white curtains, ticking off his hat. The mule shook its head, rattling its bit in its teeth. Billy Krieg’s horse stood behind him, its bridle reins in Crosseye’s gloved left hand.

  Crosseye waited as though for James to tell him he’d be joining them after all, but then he said, “I’m leavin’ you a hoss for Willie, takin’ Billy’s.” He touched stiff fingers to his hat, turned the mule, and rode off along with the others, Moss pulling the wheeled field piece by a lead line.

  When they were gone, leaving James alone with his dead brother wrapped in the horse blanket, James left the cave and tramped down the slope to where his own horse stood with Lawrence Coker’s copper-bottom bay. James’s mount was a steeldust gelding that he’d taken off a Yankee farm several months ago, when his previous horse had been killed by a Vandenburgh volley gun in a skirmish in eastern Mississippi. He saddled the steeldust and Lawrence’s bay and then led both up to the cave. He felt heavy and numb, barely aware of the stablike pain in his chest, only vaguely aware of the rain ticking down on his battered, low-crowned campaign kepi.

  With rope from his saddlebags, he tied the blanket around Willie’s body, which was already beginning to stiffen, and tied it so that his arms were close against his sides. A memory erupted in his brain, and he saw a laughing Willie, ten or eleven years old, as James and their now-deceased older brother, Frank, wrapped the youngest of the Dunn brothers up in a quilt and threw him into the pond behind Seven Oaks Manor, one warm spring afternoon, when the redbuds were in full bloom.

  They were pretending that Willie was a worthless pup, and, like a worthless pup, would be wrapped up and drowned. But Willie swam like a toad. He got out of the quilt and came splashing back to shore, throwing mud balls until their mother and two Negro maids came running out of the house, down the long, brick-paved path to the pond. Each had been armed with a wooden spoon, and they gave James and Frank a tanning for ruining a perfectly good quilt and “nearly drowning your poor youngest brother.”

  Only, the maids had been laughing, especially the young, sparkly-eyed Eulia, whom James had once caught with her bloomers down around her ankles in the woodshed, with a bare-assed Frank pumping hard between her spread, chocolate-colored knees.

  James pulled the blanket down from his brother’s face.

  “Willie,” he whispered, running his fingers over the half-open lid, feeling the light caress of the young man’s lashes across his war-calloused fingertips. “Damn it all, Willie.”

  But the eye would not stay closed. The lid was a papery light blue. His cheeks and forehead were the color of porcelain. Lips a thin, lilac line beneath his shaggy blond mustache that all but hid them. The patch looked barbaric on what appeared the face of a bearded boy-child.

  James wondered what had happened to the other eye. Probably shrapnel or a bayonet wound. Maybe a knife. It did not surprise James that Willie might have been wounded in hand-to-hand combat. Doubtless, his opponent had fared worse. Willie had been the most artistic and sensitive of the Dunn brothers. He’d been given to poetry and the piano—Chopin had been his favorite composer—and romancing the young ladies of neighboring plantations. He’d also tried countless times to convince their father, Alexander Axelrod Dunn, considered a “benevolent” slave owner, to give his thirty-odd slaves their freedom. Willie had believed that no man, whatever color his skin might be, should ever be enslaved by another.

  Despite his liberal political views and artistic turn of mind, Willie could be a fierce fighter when aroused, and James and Frank had both worn the wounds to prove it. It had taken a lot to get Willie’s dander up, but once you did, as their father had often said—and as he’d remarked that bitter night that Willie had ridden off to join the Union forces in Washington—“all the saints in heaven couldn’t appease that boy.”

  The elder Dunn, watching his youngest ride off down the wide lane through the mossy oaks while their mother had bawled her eyes out in the rose garden, had taken a sip of his bourbon and said just loudly enough for James to hear: “The damn Yankees are getting one hell of a fighter in that one, and before they let this thing go too far, I hope they realize there’s more where he came from but fightin’ on our side!”

  “Willie,” James whispered again, leaning down and pressing his lips to his brother’s cold forehead.

  Chapter 5

  One month later, after he’d taken his brother home to bury him at what was left of Seven Oaks—which wasn’t much except the manor house with a gaping hole from a cannonball in his father’s library—James was headed west and thinking of the last time he’d seen the old man, when a young man in a ragged uniform stepped out from behind a tree and into the trail before James’s horse.

  “Ease down out of that saddle now, mister, and we won’t blow you all to hell,” said the young federal soldier, who held a cocked Starr .44 in his dirty, bare hand.

  “But first,” said another, older man, “kindly remove them pistols from them holsters and toss ’em down here. We’ll take them, too. Griswolds, eh?”

  James knew that his twin Confederate-made .36s, as well as his gray cavalry kepi, marked him as a Confederate. A Confederate too far north at this point in the war, as he was just now crossing northern Missouri.

  He’d long since passed Chattanooga, from which black smoke had curled unceasingly into the hot, damp air, as well as several other charred Southern cities. When he’d lit out from Seven Oaks, his father screaming at him and waving a sword from the second-story balustrade—the old man could abide James’s killing his Union-turncoat brother, but not deserting the Confederacy—he’d followed mostly secondary wagon roads, including the one he was on now. At night he’d slept in abandoned barns or along lonely creeks, though a couple of nights he’d holed up in whorehouses, the pleasures of the flesh acting as a balm against his memories of death and destruction.

  Nearly every day, it had rained. Now the rain had stopped but the road was muddy. There was a farm off to the left, the ground around it scorched, trees blown to black skeletons from canister shot. There was an old tavern and general store on the right. The low-slung, clapboard hovel had a hole in its roof, and a dead man in a tattered Confederate uniform hung from a charred tree to the right of the place, near a wheelless wagon and a dead mule. The man’s neck was stretched to a grisly length, his body so bloated it was bursting through the seams of his clothes.

  James looked at the two bearded men in dark blue Union rags before him. He studied them sadly—their tangled, tobacco-stained beards and wild, hungry eyes. The war had been nearly as cruel to the federal soldiers as it had been to the Confederates. James’s horse nickered, and then he heard a slapping thud behind him and saw a third man in what was left of federal blues step out from behind a stock pen sheathed in half-burned shrubs and
stop in the trail behind James. The slapping had been made by the loose sole of his boot. Bare toes stuck out, white as snow.

  Deserters, these men. James knew the look in their eyes. He probably had that look himself, though he was somewhat better attired in his navy blue linsey-woolsey shirt under a tanned buckskin vest, and black twill trousers. A red neckerchief was knotted around his neck. He wore a fresh pair of high-topped brown boots that he’d retrieved, like most of the rest of his gear, from Seven Oaks. He wore his two Griswold & Gunnison .36s in soft leather holsters positioned for the cross draw on each hip, and he had a Green River knife sheathed near the pistol on his right side.

  He’d found his mount, only a colt when he’d left for the war, running free in the woods around Seven Oaks, somehow overlooked by both federal and Confederate soldiers. It was a chestnut stallion with the rare rabicano markings, as though the ends of the bristles of its chestnut hair were lightly brushed with cream.

  James turned back to the two men facing him—a young man and an old man, equally haggard. The deserters were after his horse and his pistols, and he couldn’t blame them. But without the horse, he’d have to find another, and he had damn little scrip and specie in his pockets—all of it Confederate and likely worthless out West.

  James’s voice was mild as he said, “You’re pickin’ the wrong carcass, old sons. This one ain’t dead yet.”

  “What’s that?” said the old man. He and the young one were each holding Springfields on him. The man behind him—a stringbean with buckteeth—was aiming a Sharps straight out from his shoulder, the hammer rocked back.

  “He said he don’t believe so,” said the young, tangle-bearded boy beside him, speaking loudly, as though the older man were deaf—probably from a cannon blast.

  “Oh, he don’t believe so, does he?” The old man’s pale, puffy face clouded up and got ready to rain as he stumbled forward. He stopped and took steady aim at James’s head, narrowing one eye as he stared down the rusty Springfield’s barrel.