by Taylor Brown
“She’s a firecracker,” he warned, his smile broken in the gathering dusk.
Chapter 2
The hills were welling with darkness, the high and fiery treetops here or there extinguished into shadow. The gun smoke had risen at first in billows and now it descended again in a fine ash. The boy removed the noose. He climbed down from the horse and took the repeating rifle from the grip of one man, shocked by how stark white the emptied hands looked against the blueing ground. One of the men was still alive. He’d begun to moan, gut-shot. It could take him a long time to die.
The boy shouldered the rifle. Aimed. The man raised a hand, shielding his face. As if that might stop what was coming. The rifle began to shake in the boy’s hands. He lowered it and got back on the black horse. It was the only animal that hadn’t bolted.
He descended the path down again into the valley. He didn’t look over his shoulder. He looked only to the window where Ava stood, still there. The house, so sorry in daytime, glowed in the dark. He propped the rifle on his knee, the barrel skyward. It rocked this way, that way as the horse descended into the shadows.
They reached the bottomland, where the black marks of marauding hooves still pockmarked the blue slope. The mud was hardened, the pig gone from its sty. The boy could still remember its squeal. He looked up at the window and saw Ava disappear like a ghost into darkness, dissolve. He waited for her to reappear through the front door, a pale and delicate creature in the black frame.
She didn’t.
He stood before the empty doorway and leaned the rifle on the wall. He tried to call out but the words caught in his throat. He tried to say her name but couldn’t. Behind him the Colonel and his men and one of the horses lay craze-limbed on the ground, wrecked, their bodies humped upon the blue swell of turf as upon an inland sea. The long guns of the sharpshooters had caught them unawares.
He stood there at the threshold and did not want to go inside uninvited, not again. He didn’t want to be like them anymore, the ones behind him. Marauders, killers, thieves. He stood looking into the dim blue depths of the house, which seemed colder even and danker than the air outside. He could hear no movement.
He looked to one side of the porch, where a swing hung catawampus from a single chain, the other ripped from its hook by some member of the Colonel’s troop. He looked up at the high ridge from which he’d come, up where the falling sun was still lighting up the tallest trees like bloodred spires, and he saw no silhouettes against the sky or trees, no slouch hats of men sky-lit like they must have been a half hour before. No, they were flat to the ground now, outspilled, and he was here, on the porch. He pulled the coat tighter around himself and palmed the Walker deeper through his belt, burying the blood-painted handle in furrows of cloth. It was very quiet and he could hear the air whistling through his busted nose.
He found her underneath the stairs, her knees huddled up against her belly. She who had been so brave before, now afraid, rocking slightly, her hair covering her shoulders in black streaks. When she looked up, he saw her cheeks were hollowed out and dark, her skin stretched thin and filmlike over the bones in her face. It looked like something eating her from the inside out.
“You all right?” he asked her.
She quit rocking and looked him in the eye.
“The son of a bitch is dead, ain’t he.”
It was not a question.
The boy looked out the front door to the yard, the crumpled bodies.
“I reckon so,” he said.
She took a breath, held it. “Well, I ought to be just dandy, then.”
She nodded once, to herself. Then she stood, quickly, surprising him. He stepped back. They were standing close. She was taller than he remembered. Her eyes startled him, so blue, the rest of her body smooth and pale as poured milk. His eyes came only to the level of her lips, slim and white. He was staring at them. She placed her hands against the small of her back, arching to inhale.
“I suppose you should know about this baby, then,” she said.
“Baby?” He was silent a long moment, his throat tight. “His?”
She twirled and began walking down the hall.
He watched her. “Are you sure? It hasn’t been that long—”
She stopped and turned. She seemed steadier now than when he’d found her, steadier than him maybe. Certainly taller.
“You think I’m lying?”
“That’s not what I said—”
“How many children has he got?”
The boy shifted on his feet. “Twelve.”
“Right,” she said. “Don’t sound like he misses much, does it?” Her jaw ground sideways, and she turned back down the hall. “Told me I’d make him thirteen.”
He followed a little behind her, toward the stairs. She spoke without looking back at him. “So don’t give me no more shit about it. Week or two we’ll know for sure. But me, I already know.”
“I wouldn’t give you shit.”
“Big talker,” she said, “like the rest of them.”
He continued following her down the hall, watching the way her long shoulder blades lanced up and down under the shift.
“How old are you?” he asked her.
She paused on the first step. “Seventeen,” she said.
“Me too,” he said too quickly.
“Bullshit,” she said. “You ain’t a day over fifteen.”
“I am too.”
“I’ve seen you naked,” she said, starting up the stairs.
The boy stayed at the bottom, one hand on the banister.
“So?” he said.
“So I can tell.”
She kept on going up the stairs.
“Well, I just come in here to thank you for my coat.”
“You’re welcome,” she said, still climbing the steps.
“Well, where you going?” he asked her.
She disappeared into the blue gloom of the second floor.
“I’m packing a bag,” she said, “so you can take me and this baby the hell out of here. That a problem?”
The boy could feel his eyes like round white antler nubs in his face.
“No, ma’am,” he said.
He stood stone-still a moment, and then he shook out of it like a man coming awake from ice. He thought of the bodies in the yard where she would see them. He went looking for a blanket. His boots clopped down the hall and he went into the nearest room, a study of some kind, the walls lined with glass jars. He started to step forward but stopped, a stench. He looked down and saw a gleaming wreckage of broken glass, a chemical smell overpowering the small room. He stopped, standing on one foot, taking in the sight of the room from one wall to another.
There were strange white shapes curled on the wrecked floor, their skin and bodies shriveled. Shrunken. Others on shelves, in jars or tanks. There were creatures he almost recognized but did not, like distant cousins of the animals he knew. Lizards with unknown markings written geometrically on their skin, tiny mammals curled fetal-like on broken glass, a snake with white scales. His stomach twisted up inside him like a worm on hot stone. It reminded him of a carnival show, like all that was strange or holy had been given no respect, been stuffed into a jar and drowned in chemicals, some kind of strange afterlife.
He turned his head away. The men of the troop had wrecked all this, he was sure. They wrecked everything, strange or beautiful no matter. He turned to go but saw a small square-cornered jar on a shelf just inside the door. The rest of the shelf had been swiped clean of specimens, but not this, left fully intact. Inside the jar floated a tiny white creature, unborn. It had four limbs, he saw, and thumbs, too, and closed eyes with creases at the lids like the crow’s-feet of an old man. It had a tiny organ, male, like a white acorn, and a long veined tube protruding from the belly that swirled and swirled around the jar and ended with a tiny knot of twine to seal off the surgical cut. The creature was curled into itself, as if with a stomachache.
Slowly, as if not to wake the thing, t
he boy reached out and touched the lid of the jar. He rotated it in place until he could see the notched spine impressing the delicate skin, no terrain of muscle to protect the bone, just smooth flesh.
He heard a creak at the top of the stairs: Ava coming. Quickly he hid the jar in his coat and hurried out of the room and into the hallway, then outward into the yard, carrying the thing close to his chest. He went to the big bay the Colonel had been riding, dead now, and stuck the jar in one of the saddlebags. Then he undid the girth strap and dragged the saddle out from underneath the animal’s belly. It was a cavalry McClellan from before the war, re-covered in rich russet, outfitted with hooded stirrups and brass moldings and a hair-padded seat. A fine saddle, fit for an officer to ride.
He threw it over the horse he’d been riding, the stolen black one which had been so steady beneath him. He looped the mohair cinch underneath the enormous belly and secured the strap to the quarter ring, snugging it. He took the bridle and placed the snaffle bit in the horse’s mouth and fitted the noseband and browband and throatlatch, the rosettes glinting like stained coins in the darkness. He slid the rifle into the bootleg scabbard, the pistol into one of the two holsters that hung across the pommel. He left the Colonel’s bedroll pack strapped to its cantle grommets. The leather tube held a heavy buffalo blanket that many had lusted after on a cold night.
Above him, stars had begun to prick through the darkened sky, no moon. He heard Ava coming down the hall. He looked down at the Colonel, the man’s heart spilled into the grass. Dead, dead, dead. But even now the man scared him. He whipped the coat off his shoulders and snapped it flat above the body. It hovered a moment, winglike, then began to drift down to cover the details of the killing from the girl’s eyes.
“Callum,” she said. “Don’t do that.”
He pulled the coat back just before it touched the body.
“You know my name?”
“Course I do.”
She stepped off the porch and came walking through the yard, her thin body swaddled in a bed quilt, her long legs covered to the knee in men’s riding boots. He could see she had tied a bedroll of things slantwise across her chest and shoulder like an infantryman. She also had a larger bundle tucked under one arm. She stood over the Colonel. Callum watched her look down into the ruined chest, the hollow where the man’s heart had been.
“It’s a sorry sight,” he said.
Ava looked up at him. “Sorry ain’t a thing to do with it,” she said.
But he saw she was a little uncertain of step when she walked up to the horse. She put a hand against his haunch.
Callum took the bundle from under her other arm, gently, and fit it into a saddlebag. Then he boosted her onto the back of the horse, careful where he placed his hands, and slung himself into the saddle from the other side. She put her hands on his hips to steady herself. He turned the horse toward the high ridge from which he’d come, the way south. They both looked a last time over their shoulders at the house white in the valley, the bodies dark in the grass.
Callum expected she might say a few last words over this scene, blessing or curse, but she said nothing. She just turned back around and put her chin on his shoulder, just beside his good ear.
“Let’s go,” she said.
Callum nodded and urged the horse onward, south, the only direction they could go. Winter would come quickly from the north, and so might warring men, leaderless now, who loved blood, and how much better it was with vengeance to sweeten the glut.
They rode up the same path he and the horse had descended hardly an hour before. He knew no other. He was glad that it was full dark now, and no moon. He didn’t want to see again what he’d done. When they passed the spot, the noose swung slowly over the path. The two men were there. Dead. The third was gone. He’d dragged himself into the woods, thought Callum. To die. He said nothing to Ava. They kept on riding into the night, higher and darker as the hours wore on.
* * *
In the spare hour before dawn, they stopped to rest. Time and again during the night’s ride, Callum had heard a snap of twig, a crackle of brush, like the sound ambushing men would make, and he’d ridden all night with his good ear cocked and his shooting hand on the revolver, afraid. Ava set to building a neat tepee of twigs over a small ball of dry wood shavings. Up here in the mountains, everything seemed wet. Not soaking, but moist to the bone. She had her own knife she’d brought, a folding one, and together they flayed the bigger sticks and branches to get to the drier wood.
Ava had thought to bring a brass match safe. Callum watched her light the doomed little structure she’d made. The kindling crackled, took light. Before long the twigs glowed red and collapsed to greater flame. They piled on the bigger fuel piece by piece, squatting close to the fire, both on the same side to avoid the smoke.
Ava got out the salted meat she’d brought and gave them each a thin shred.
Callum held his by one end, watching how easily the wind made it quiver.
“What we supposed to do with this? Strum ‘Dixie’?”
“You got something better?”
Callum put his piece in his mouth, eyeing the rest of the meat while he chewed.
“How’d you hide that from the men?” he asked her, chewing, his mouth open.
“I didn’t. The Colonel gave it to me before they left. Had them steal it from Old Man Tatum one valley over.”
“I bet they cleaned out the whole county like that.”
“Seemed like,” she said. “When you were on the sickbed, they came home nearly every evening with plunder of one kind or another. Old Man Tatum used to make that white ’shine. One night they got hold of a barrel he had hid in his cellar and drank themselves blind in the yard. They’d hauled in this buckboard from God knows where, and they burned it. Danced around the fire half-naked, screaming like little devils. One of them kept dousing his arm in whiskey and taking a match to it, lighting it right off his arm in this blue flame.”
“Until he lit his whole self on fire.”
“They told you.”
“No,” said Callum. “But somebody’d kill himself about once a month doing something like that.”
She shook her head, her vision far off.
“Somebody threw more ’shine on him once he started burning,” she said. “I think the person throwing thought it was water. I hope he did. Any case, the man ran off flaming into the night, running just this straight line, like he could get away.”
Callum could see the reflection of the campfire dancing tiny-flamed in her eyes.
“How far he get?”
Ava shook her head, looking into the fire.
“Far,” she said. “Near to the tree line. Lot farther than I’d of imagined.”
He nodded. They both stared into the fire, the wood glowing red at the heart, the bark white with heat. He looked at the saddlebag, the square bulge of the jar.
“So what happened to your family?”
“Mama, she died when I was a baby. Daddy and my older brother, Jessup, they both joined the militia in ’62.”
She didn’t add anything. Callum knew what that meant. They were gone. And her in that house all alone.
“I’m sorry.”
She straightened. “You ain’t sorry, not really. Nothing against you. Nobody is. You hear the same sad story so many times, that’s all it is—a story.”
They squatted there, silent awhile, palms open to the heat.
Callum eyed the saddlebag and bit the inside of his bottom lip.
“Say,” he said, “was your daddy some kind of a—”
She sniffed. “He was a doctor,” she said, “and a good one.”
“Well—”
“And what about you, then? Where are you from?”
He wiggled his fingers in front of the flames. Shrugged.
“No place, really.”
“Ain’t that mysterious.”
“I ain’t big on talking about it is all.”
“Fine,” she said. “But
I’ll get it out of you, somehow.”
He looked at her.
“Will you now.”
“I have my ways.”
“Uh-huh.”
She sat back, her palms flat on the ground.
“You got to talk to somebody, you know. And I don’t see nobody else round here to chat with.”
He grinned. She, too. They looked around, bright-eyed a moment, but the smiles slowly died on their faces. The world was dark beyond the small ken of their fire, so dark, and the notion of somebody else out here, anybody else, struck them silent, as if the mere saying of the thing could call up something evil—men or demons or ghosts.
“Let’s get on,” said Callum.
She nodded. They threw dirt on the fire and spread the ashes and coals around to hide the heat, the fire’s newness, and climbed back on the horse. Callum urged it back onto the trail. He looked up at the moon.
“Ireland,” he said.
“What?”
“Ireland.” He cleared his throat. “That’s where I’m from, originally. Come over when I was eight.”
Ava leaned closer.
“With your family?”
He shook his head.
“No, this family the priests had put me with.” He paused. “One that took in orphans.”
“Oh.”
“We come over in steerage, into New Orleans. Trying to escape the workhouse. The famine. The men, they were supposed to help dig these canals down there.”
He paused.
“Work wasn’t there?” she asked.
“No, it was. Plenty of it. But so was that yellow fever.”
“We heard about that.”
He nodded. “I got kicked around for a while after that. This place, that place. What they called a ‘double orphan.’” He shrugged. “Soon as I could, I ran away. Started to stealing horses, figuring I was too young to hang.”