by Taylor Brown
He called out when someone walked past, his voice strange with disuse. Before long another man stood beside him, unhitching the ropes with thick fingers. He slid to the ground and leaned against the horse. The blood receded from his vision, leaving old Swinney standing there before him, loose loops of rope in his hand. The boy rubbed the chafed skin at his wrists. He touched his head lightly, the bandage, the long crust of blood.
“I a prisoner, Swinney?”
Swinney shook his head.
“No, boy.”
“Should I be?”
“Colonel said you done him a favor puncturing that son of a bitch. Said he never did like him.”
“So is he…”
Swinney nodded.
“Bled out. Colonel’s orders.”
“And the girl?”
Swinney turned from him.
“Come with me, boy. You need to eat.”
They walked toward the light of the fire. The boy staggered along behind, finding his legs. He was still disoriented, his boots tripping along the ground.
“Where are we?” he asked.
Swinney was to the left of him. He said something, but the boy didn’t quite hear him. He stepped closer.
“What?”
Swinney answered again. Again the boy didn’t catch his words, not fully. He stopped and clamped his nostrils and blew to clear out his ear canals.
Swinney came around to the front of him.
“Your ear?”
The boy tapped his left one, just underneath the bandage. Swinney came around to that side of him and leaned forward to whisper into the ear. The boy heard only strange mufflings, like the whisper of a foreign language.
“I can’t hear,” he told Swinney.
The older man came around to his good ear and patted him on the shoulder.
“I said, a few days north of that farmhouse. It’s been near a fortnight. Doctor said you was bad concussed. Ear ain’t much to lose, considering what you could of.”
The boy nodded. “North,” he said, mostly to himself.
Swinney looked at him a long moment. His belly shook.
“Lucky dog,” he said. He turned.
The boy thought to say something, but nothing came.
He followed the old man the rest of the way to the fire, the men and horses glazed with flame. The boy sat on the white heart of a hickory stump, and the others showed him their smiles, yellow-toothed, dark-gummed. He cocked his good ear toward the fire. They handed him a tin of stewed pork and he slurped down its contents in a single go.
When he handed back the empty tin, he saw the sleeve of his coat.
One of the men leaned into the fire, showing his face.
“She sewn it for you,” he said.
“We had to cut away your old,” said Swinney. “We was going to give you Oldham’s.”
“Oldham?” said the boy.
“Man you killed,” said somebody. “Probably you ought to know his name.”
“You know all their names?” the boy asked him.
A chuckle rose multilunged from men’s chests, choral.
“She wasn’t wanting you to wear Oldham’s,” said Swinney. “She sewn you that one out of old what-have-you.”
“Rags and quilts and such.”
“Bedsheets, too.”
“I heard scraps of old Oldham hisself.”
“A coat of many colors.”
“Yea,” said another man. “Like Joseph’s of old.”
The boy held the sleeves toward the fire’s orbit. Ribbons and patches of cloth cross-laced the coat, thick-stitched. He stood among the men and worked his arms inside the coat and found the cut of it closer than any he’d ever worn, his small frame normally swallowed in volumes of wool. This one hugged him like a second skin. He thought of who’d stitched it, of how she must know the contours that shaped him.
“How is she?” he asked them.
They rustled. No one spoke.
“What the hell y’all done to her?”
The boy looked around, his face darkened.
“Should I of stuck every last one of you? That it?”
One man, then another, put a hand to his knife.
Swinney stepped forward. He cleared his throat.
“We left her,” he said. “She ain’t none of your concern.”
“Says who?”
“Says the Colonel.”
The boy looked to where the Colonel’s fire flickered a good ways off. He knew he should lower his voice but didn’t.
“What does he care?”
Swinney let his hands fall open, silent.
The boy looked at him, his eyes slowly widening.
“The Colonel is married,” he said.
The men shifted on their blankets and stumps. The boy looked at them a long moment. His voice was low. “He’s had his way, then.”
It wasn’t a question.
The men said nothing. Their assent.
Then he whispered it, the question that remained: “Against her will?”
None of the men looked at him. They looked at the fire or their hands or their boots but not at him. The boy swallowed thickly and thumbed the bandage on his head.
“So be it,” he said. He sat back on the stump and stared into the fire.
Sometime later he discovered a giant pocket sewn into the inner flap of the coat, on the left-hand side, as if made for something specific.
“Say,” he said, “I get something out of all this?”
Swinney stood and pulled an object from beneath his bedroll. The men handed it one to the next, circling the firelight until a woolen sock, heavy as a giant’s foot, arrived in the boy’s hand. He slipped off the sock, and the Walker Colt sat in his lap. It was a giant of a pistol, twice the weight of a newer Colt, built to kill not just men but the horses they rode, this one outfitted with trick grips that glowed like a moon in his hand. It looked made for a man twice his size, a frontier treasure for which men would surely kill. For which they had.
“You earned it,” said Swinney.
“Yeah, you did,” said somebody else.
The boy pointed the pistol into the dark of the man’s voice.
“Five shots left,” he said. “One through my head.”
Nobody spoke, and he knew they wondered what spirits might have snuck through that wound of his. Into his head. What meanness. He did not feel like a boy anymore. He felt old as any of them. Older even.
He rode for three days among them, quiet. Alien.
Waiting.
One night, Swinney pulled him aside.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” he asked.
“Tell me how to get back.”
“You got to be shitting me.”
“Tell me,” said the boy.
The third night, he lay down to rest early. The cold was coming down out of the north and the ground could keep a man from sleeping if he didn’t get to sleep early enough, with some sunlight still left in the dirt, the rock. He pulled the bandage from his head and felt the scabby place where the ball had passed along his skull, an inch from ending him.
After a time he rose from his pallet of old sacks amid the snoring of his compatriots and moved toward the far-off embers of the Colonel’s fire, silent as a wraith, one hand on the grip of his pistol to mask its glow. When he passed Swinney, he saw two white orbs look at him. Just as quickly they disappeared, closed, and whatever they saw prompted no movement.
The boy kept on picking his way among the stones, the heads, making no shadow, no sound. The coals of the Colonel’s fire glowed red, the flames low. His black thoroughbred stood seventeen hands tall, thick-muscled, big haunches twitching in its sleep. A stallion. The boy did not see the saddle sitting in the shadows, but he saw the Colonel’s slouch hat lying there beside him, the twin tassels still gold even for all they’d ridden above.
The boy pulled back the sleeve of his new coat and crouched, slow to lessen the crackling of his boots, and took the hat by the hand indentions over t
he crown. It would cover the scar. As he turned to the horse, the shadow of the round brim crossed the Colonel’s face. The boy saw him shift, his hand groping for the butt of the pistol under his bedroll. By the time the Colonel sat upright, he must have found himself all alone, his gun pointed toward empty space. Leaves, fire-spangled, quivering where the horse had been, hoofprints welled with firelight.
The boy laid his cheek low against the horse’s neck as they crashed through underbrush and low-hanging limbs. He hit upon an old wagon road whose dust shone white and crooked down the mountain switchbacks. The company shunned such roads, where spies could estimate the size of their force, where they could be detected at all. They took horse trails or even game trails instead, or they cut their own where the brush grew thick. The boy had the strongest horse underneath him and he was the lightest rider to boot and he believed he might outrun on the open road whomever they sent to catch him.
He dropped down, down out of the mountains in darkness, his breath and the breath of the horse pluming together, their dust hounding them as they rode. He thought of the men pursuing them, riders with plumes of dead birds in their hats, guns of many hands come to rest finally in their black-creased palms. He knew they fashioned themselves the most devoted Yankee-killers in all the land, and there were but two things that sated them: blood and money. He didn’t have any money.
First light rose colorless over hills crumpled and creased into one another, a sheet enameled over a miscellany of untold items, of corpses and rock and whatever else gave the earth its shape. Sparse trees bristled from the hillsides gold-leafed, a touch of red. The season was turning, and fast. He had been out of the world for what seemed an eternity, and if he could just see her, he thought she might embrace him surely as the coat she’d made him. Their courtship so short, seconds alone, but the true shape of him displayed forevermore in the event that split them. He thought this would count above all else.
At a high outcropping of rock, he tethered the horse and climbed to the flat top to surveil the terrain behind him, the terrain ahead. Dust rose from the road far behind him. Whether of riders in pursuit, he could not say. Plenty of others traveled these roads. Couriers, runaways, men of uniformed war. Militia and home guard, too. Enemies all for a boy of his position and exploits.
He let the horse drink at a rock-strewn stream and drank some himself and set off again. In daylight he left the main road and traveled parallel, rounding into and out of sight of its commerce, his path much slowed over the closed ground. When darkness fell, he returned to the road.
Day and night he rode to see her. His Ava. Dusk of the third day he rode out onto a ridge and saw farmhouses of the sort he sought, houses like hers in the valley bottoms. Swaddling them were forests richer with autumn than the forests out of which he rode, more abrupt spurts of red and yellow against the green. Whether by time or altitude, he could not say, the land of his past mainly evergreen, few colors to mark the seasons. His heart swelled upon the vista below him until he saw the black kink of river that lay in his path, no bridge in sight.
He rode down the ridges until he reached the riverbank, where the road attenuated into a long white spear under the shallows and disappeared. A wooden barge sat beached on the bank, a ferryman dozing on the afterdeck.
The boy hauled the horse to a stop alongside and kicked the hull.
“Hey there.”
The ferryman opened one eye beneath the shadow of his cap. He eyed the boy and the horse he rode and the hat he wore.
“Ten bits to cross,” he said. “No bartering ’less you got something to drink.”
The boy looked out at the flat river, the black surface vented here and there with hidden currents. Then he looked behind him at the road. Then back again to the river, deep as the nightmares that plagued him. The shipwreck.
“Two bits,” said the man again.
“Where’s the nearest bridge?” the boy asked him.
“Bridge? Two bits is cheap, son. Specially for a man with a horse like that one. Course, if you got you a drop of whiskey—”
“I need a bridge, sir. No ferries.”
The man looked hurt.
“Well, if you’re extra partial to bridges, the nearest is ten miles yonder. Them sons a bitches blown her last month. Dynamite. But she’s still operable, least tolerably. Don’t you go telling nobody, though. That’s in confidence.”
He winked.
The boy looked upriver in the direction indicated. Then he tipped his cavalryman’s hat at the ferryman.
“I’m much obliged, sir.”
As he hauled the horse down to the soft flats of the riverbank, the boy knew his pursuers would learn all they needed to know from this man. They would know what condition he was in, what condition his horse. They would know what direction he was headed, how much ground they could gain on him by taking the ferry. And, most of all, they would know he was not a boy without fear.
He stopped the horse a ways down the bank and looked back over his shoulder at the dozing ferryman. The boy knew how he could remove all of that knowledge from the man’s head. All that might betray him. And he could prove to them what kind of a man he was. A kind better left alone. His fingers touched the butt of the Colt. A moment later he gripped great fistfuls of the horse’s mane and shot away toward the bridge.
He began to catch shapes quivering upon ridges he’d crossed, dust rising from paths he’d taken just hours before. They were gaining. He stopped for nothing, and still they gained.
They overtook him two days later in the valley of the farmhouse. It was the Colonel and two of his fastest riders, the Colonel riding hatless on a big blood bay, the other two flanking him. The trio broke from the trees diagonal to the boy in a flying wedge, the Colonel leading with his horse pistol drawn, the others with Spencer repeaters already shouldered like buffalo hunters of the plains. It was just the three of them, riding light for speed, and it was plenty.
They came on not firing at first to save the horse he rode. They headed him off right before the porch of the house. He called out to her over them, and they smiled from behind the long barrels of their weapons, pointing him down. Ava appeared in the window of the room where he had first and last seen her, where she had perhaps sewn the coat he wore with those white and slender fingers that spread now flat upon the windowpane like a prisoner’s.
“Off the horse,” said the Colonel.
He had his horse turned broadside to the porch steps, the front door.
“Didn’t hear you,” said the boy, cocking his ear toward him.
A blow landed across his back and he fell forward. His hands streaked across the sweat-slick musculature of the horse, helpless. It was too lean to grip. Too hard. He landed shoulder-first in the yard and his wind left him, thumped out of his lungs. He rolled onto his back and looked bleary-eyed at the men and horses, their shapes warped and wavering as those seen from below the surface of a well. He could not get enough air.
The Colonel shucked his near foot from the stirrup and brought his other leg over the pommel and dropped from his horse without ever turning his back. The gaunt hollows of his face, his cheeks, looked down into the boy’s. The upturned points of his mustache sat upon his face like a black smile. He reached out of sight and his hand came back, placing the slouch hat on his head, pulling the brim into place.
“I give a boy a chance, and look what it gets me. All for a goddamn woman.”
“Her name is Ava,” said the boy. “I saved her.”
The Colonel pulled him off the ground by the coat.
“But can you save yourself?”
The boy heard the patchwork of colors strain against the stitches that bound them, begin to tear faintly but not to give.
“I saved her,” he said.
The butt of the horse pistol came hard across his temple, his jaw, his nose. Bone and cartilage succumbing to harder matter. The Colonel dropped him, broken, to the ground.
“Get her, then,” he said. “Go in and get her.�
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Faintly the boy saw a hand against the sky, a finger pointed heavenward. Wayward from the house, the window. The boy could not see if the Colonel was wearing gloves or if his hand was just that black with gunpowder and soot.
“Go get her.”
The corners of the boy’s vision were darkening. He looked up at the Colonel, tall above him, his chest pushed out. Pleased. He was standing that way when his heart exploded from his chest. Only after seeing it did the boy hear the shot. More followed in quick succession, long plumes of smoke bursting from the trees, the Colonel’s two riders shot from their mounts. One of the horses screamed, struck too, the others thundering in flight. Their hooves shook the ground. Then silence.
Soon he found other men around him, strangers, these in uniform. Gray or blue, he could not tell. They asked him who he fought for and what company and what name. Their breath was rancid, their words quick. He could not answer them. They asked him how he came by such a horse and was it not stolen. They asked him whether he was a deserter or a bounty jumper or a coward or a foreigner, and he could not tell them. They told him the men they’d just killed had died trying to kill him, and they could only honor the dead by carrying out their final wishes.
They said they did not want to waste another bullet.
They rode him up onto the ridge where he’d first looked down upon this valley, this state. They slung a rope over a heavy limb and sat him on the horse he’d stolen and slid the noose over his bare neck. There were three of them. He did not fight.
Below him the forests glimmered firelike in the last rays of sun, colors as brightly variegated as the coat he wore. He could hardly swallow for the snugness of the rope. He looked down at his Ava, a white cutout in the black upper window, and he was sorry she would remember him this way. He looked down upon that whole country so pretty in the fall, in the season of blood and gold, and he was no longer a stranger unto the land.
A man stepped forward to bind his hands. He was wearing the Colonel’s slouch hat slanted rakishly over his brow like some kind of joke. Another had a repeating rifle propped over his shoulder. The third was scratching his groin, smiling, his long sharpshooting rifle cradled across his chest. The boy put his hand into his coat. Slowly, to provoke no alarm. They watched him. He pulled the pistol butt-first from where it hung hidden in the folds and offered the bone-white grip of it to his captors, one finger on the trigger guard.