Fallen Land: A Novel

by Taylor Brown

  “You weren’t.”

  He shrugged. “Turns out you ain’t ever too young in Louisiana, long as you steal the wrong man’s horse.”

  “Hell, I could of told you that.”

  “Well, somebody did. Little late.” He sniffed. “They were hunting me hard. I had to get out of there, out of the state, really. So I went down to New Orleans and got on as a hand on this blockade-runner.”

  He paused again.

  “Well, what happened then?”

  He leaned and spat. “The blockade.”

  * * *

  The trees murmured coldly with dawn, like they were waking from a long slumber. Callum did not know their names, most of them. Some of their trunks rose dark and straight from the earth, others gray-gnarled or twisted or green with lichen. So many of them in their ranks, as different as the forms of men. Some scorched by lightning, others uprooted as if by violent calamity. Chestnuts, he knew those. Red-gray, with twisting, furrowed trunks and sun-yellow leaves.

  He took trail to trail, bearing southward whenever he could, the land rising higher and higher by slight degrees. The paths they rode were not well beaten, but traveled enough to worry him. The mires where falling streams crossed the path had hardened into the many hoofprints of loaded horses or mules. Here or there they passed the black scar of an old fire. Whoever took or needed to take such high and narrow roads through the mountains was no one he wanted to meet. Outlaws, fugitives, spies. Men jealous of such a horse and such a girl. Men like those he’d ridden with, men maybe like him.

  The horse was strong, even with two riders, and its strength disguised the steepness of their ascent, so that by noon of this first day the trail broke onto a sparsely wooded ridgeline high above the bottomlands. They looked down upon whole valleys flushed red and yellow, white-housed, even a smattering of livestock to fill the pastures.

  Callum stayed the horse. He was tired, and the hills were golden with sun. The fears of the night seemed no threat to him now, not in the sun, the shine, and he just wanted to sleep awhile. He got off the horse and dallied the rope to a nearby tree.

  Ava looked down at him, awake.

  “We going to stop here?” she asked. “In daylight?”

  He had never known that sunshine could be so heavy. It pulled at him pleasantly, at his eyelids, the warmness good on his battered face.

  “Just a little while,” he said.

  She licked her lips and made a small nod of her head, outward, toward the hills.

  “Okay,” she said. “But give me the pistol.”

  He looked down at the white grip of the Walker. He had it stuck in the front of his pants.

  “Just gimme the goddamn thing,” she said.

  “All right,” he said. He lifted it up to her. She hefted it, looked at one side, the other. She held it like she knew how to use it.

  “Careful,” he said.

  “Just get some sleep,” she said, and scooted forward into the front of the saddle. “I’ll wake you when it’s been long enough.”

  He nodded. He was light-headed, heavy-eyed. He sat back against a tree, in the sun, and did not think of anything. He let his eyes close, his mind drift.

  “So where you reckon we’re gonna go?” asked Ava.

  He lolled his head against the back of the tree and opened one eye.

  “South,” he said.

  “That’s not a place. It’s a direction.”

  The sun was warm on Callum’s face, despite the season. He closed his eyes.

  “They got sunshine there,” he said, “and winter’s coming.”

  “I got a good feeling we’re gonna need more than sunshine to keep alive.”

  Callum opened his eyes just to the thinnest slit. The hills glowed, the tiny houses white as the dream of a house, a valley.

  “There’s more,” he said.

  He didn’t mean to say this, not yet. But the hills were gold, the sun warm, and he could not seem to help himself.

  “I got a elbow cousin,” he said. “Down on the coast. Georgia. Second cousin to my grandmother—some such—on my mother’s side. Her husband’s a planter. Got himself a plantation, a big house, everything. Grows rice down there, maybe citrus. Has him like fifty slaves or something.”

  Ava was quiet a moment.

  “What’s their name?”

  “Gosling.”

  “Not very Irish.”

  Callum shrugged. “Well, he ain’t. She come over as a house servant. Man’s wife kicked the old bucket.”

  “You better not be lying to me,” she said.

  Callum had closed his eyes. He opened them just barely, again to the hills, the valleys, everything storybook from such height.

  “No, ma’am,” he said. “I wouldn’t lie to you.”

  He closed his eyes and let himself swoon on this dream, heavy and warm, like eating a pie of some kind, apple or pear or peach. He did not hear anything from Ava. Just the steady breathing of the horse, an animal needing no dream to make it strong.

  Chapter 3

  He was there beside that great swollen river, chocolate dark under the sun, and he was thirteen years old again. He was hiding amid the bony knees of a great cypress, hidden in shore reeds. Out in the river, a tramp steamer blew its horn, as if to alert the people of Vacherie, Louisiana, that a horse thief lay in wait.

  No one seemed to hear.

  It was a sugar plantation. The manor house was built high off the ground, its cypress bones fleshed with fired brick. The Acadian trappers he’d met coming south from Plaquemine said it was owned by a former French naval officer. They said he owned a great cremello stallion, cream-white with crystal blue eyes, that would fetch a handsome price in the back alleys of New Orleans or Baton Rouge. They spat and winked.

  He waited the day long, in the reeds, and watched. Clouds wheeled over him like big tufts of cotton in the blue sky. He thanked them when they shrouded the sun. He was a year out of that last orphanage, the one in Alexandria, and he was ready for a horse that would change his place in the world. He’d been stealing coldbloods—draft and plow horses that kept his belly full a week when he sold them. He was ready for a hotblood. A thoroughbred. Something that could keep him full for months, maybe a year.

  Come dark, the windows of the big house flickered golden, and no one was about. He could move like a whisper and did, floating across to the barn. There was a pinch-faced attendant with narrow black mustaches, sharp at the ends, as if to impress somebody. He was sitting in a ladder-back chair alongside the barn, scraping his supper from a tin plate. A single-shot scattergun sat propped on the wall beside him. In an hour, he was asleep.

  The stallion, they said, was called Le Magnifique. He stood more than sixteen hands tall, and he glowed like the ghost of a horse in the cavernous darkness of the barn. He came right to Callum’s hand, and his nose bloomed pink beneath the hair of his muzzle. Callum took no saddle. He rode him bareback out of the barn, across the manor grounds, and onto the river road. Slave cabins lined both its sides, built low-roofed at the foot of the levee, and when the great white horse trotted past, carrying its strange rider, everyone in their dirt yards looked away.

  So easy.

  That night, miles distant, he slept in an untended field before an abandoned sharecropper’s cabin. The stars were bright and many, like some gift, and they gathered all around him on every side, as if to comfort him. The horse stood tall against them, like a thing made for night, and seemed happy out of his barn. Callum had tied him off on a single dead locust in the middle of the field, its crown all jagged, and he himself made a pillow of his coat against its trunk. He had come a long way from the workhouse in Tipperary. He could still remember when they’d installed the triple bunks to accommodate the flood of new inmates, and they’d put him on the top because of his size. The ceiling was so close against his face, like someone had mortared him into a stone coffin, and it had been like a scream in his chest to get out. And here he was now, in the open night, and in just a few days,
in New Orleans, he would be a man who could do as he would, his coat pockets heavied and sure.

  He fell asleep to that, from a dream into a dream, and it was good until the ground began to shake, to thunder with hooves, and he knew they were coming for him.

  * * *

  “Callum!”

  His eyes snapped wide. He felt it in the ground: riders.

  “Up!” she said. “Come on!”

  She had the horse on the edge of the trail. She leapt off with the reins in hand and he reached out and grabbed hold of the horse’s tail and together they pitched over the ridge and headed nearly straight down, just missing all the trees grown twisted from the slope. The horse slid and pitched, scrambling on the loose ground, unhappy at the slant of its world, and Callum followed, his stomach in his throat. Ava, huge-quilted, led them, her boots skidding on the wet stones and roots. They went head-on into a bed of brambles and stopped. They crouched amid the thorns, hearts crashing in their chests, and tried not to breathe.

  Riders appeared above them on the trail, riding hard, as if in pursuit or flight. Three of them, black-coated, and the last looked hard at the ground as he passed. Nevertheless, they rode on. Callum did not know them, not specifically, but they struck him as something he knew. White men, desperate, their cheeks hollowed, nothing but viciousness to keep them alive. He knew some of that. And he knew there was real danger in these highlands, and no one could help you.

  They waited a long time, silent, maybe a quarter of an hour. Callum knew they could be outriders of a larger force, even his old troop pursuing them, and so they waited long enough to make sure the fast riders were long gone and no one behind them.

  Finally they ascended the slope together. Callum boosted Ava into the saddle, then mounted up.

  Ava broke the silence. Her words, hardly a whisper, seemed loud and dangerous, like they might drown the sound of danger coming down the path.

  “Those riders—you think they’re fleeing somebody, or chasing them?”

  Callum squinted down the path before them, behind them, too crooked to see very far in either direction.

  “I don’t rightly know,” he said.

  “You reckon it’s us they’re after?”

  Callum wiped his nose on the sleeve of his coat.

  “They’re liable to be after anything they can get their hands on, I reckon.”

  She reached around him with the pistol.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He nodded and took it back. He lowered the hammer and double-checked that it rested over an empty chamber for riding. Chances were in his favor for that. All but two were empty. They had the repeating rifle as well, a Spencer carbine. Good to have but unwieldy in an ambush. He’d left the Colonel with one of his big dragoon pistols still gripped in one hand. He hadn’t wanted to prize it free, nor take any of the blood-soaked revolvers from his belt. He wished he had.

  Maybe the men of the troop were after them, maybe not. They had loved the Colonel as a father almost, a man of great cruelty who nevertheless protected them, led them, eclipsed any guilt of theirs with his own. At his behest they had razed and butchered, no reason but hunger and the Colonel’s orders. Without him, Callum worried what they might do, how viciously they might grab for a new purpose, a new mission, and what better motive than love and vengeance neatly twinned. They had long ago forsaken the war of newspapers for the one they carried everywhere with them, and which had no colors, no sides, and which could be fit neatly to any new opportunity that presented itself: ambush, pillage, torture.

  Outside of Asheville, they had disemboweled a man for attempting to fornicate with a hog. They had bade him carry out the task by his own hand, his own knife into his own white belly, as the Colonel said the great Japanese warriors had done, sometimes thirty or fifty at a time, on their knees. All this for disgrace. For letting their master die. The Colonel had a word for this, something silly-sounding from a book, but no one had laughed. The hog man had been unable to accomplish the deed, hardly pricking his skin, so the men had strung him to a tree and slit him a wide gash just below the navel, like a mouth. The boy had swallowed the bile that scorched his throat when the man’s tubing came spilling onto the ground, wet and blue.

  He could not appear weak before them, only the boy he was. Their eyes ignited at weakness, sight or scent. And yet he had always felt protected by them. They had not made him do the things they did, not yet, and for that he’d felt them almost as brothers to him, elders, who rode as killers among the killed and would make him a man to be feared. And what more could a boy ask for in lands like these, in this cold and high place where such men commanded the roads?

  They rode the same ridge for the rest of the day, no place else to go. The leaves were at their brightest now, curling and crackling on the black limbs of the trees. He had to wonder why the colors changed so brightly in this land, what made them turn so fire-colored and alive-looking just before they fell, just like a match struck on the thumb would flare terrifically in a dark room, moment-bright, then burn quickly down to a cinder, nothing but dark smudges between a man’s fingers.

  He looked through the slatted trees to the golden ridges beyond. Here and there a spurt of the brightest otherworldly red marked the hillside. The color explosive, lifting, like a hemorrhage from the earth. Callum looked hard for these sights, and they made him ache. He knew the falling land was telling him something, and the message yearned in his throat to be spoken. But he would not speak it. Could not. When Ava fell asleep on the back of the horse, he took her cool white hand in his own for a long moment. Her palm was calloused like a boy’s, her finger bones delicate. He placed her hand back in the pocket of his coat, where she kept it warm.

  They had originally planned to ride more in darkness than daytime, to keep themselves unseen on the roads should anyone come asking. But he had decided after the first night that he would rather be able to see what was coming on the roads or lurking in the brush.

  So daylight.

  They rode sunup to sundown in the following days. They slept in their blankets, and their fires were small and hot-burning and a good ways from any known path or road or trail. The ground was cold. They curled themselves close to the embers for warmth, nearly encircling the heat head-to-head, boots-to-boots. Ava apportioned the meat in what the men of the company would have called “quarter rations,” and there was good feed for the horse from the Colonel’s provisions. At night he would hobble the horse’s forelegs and stake it and loop a nosebag over its ears, letting it eat. It fed better than they did and probably deserved to.

  One morning, Callum woke to a terrible retching. He turned over in his buffalo blanket and saw Ava huddled on her knees before a chestnut tree, her both hands planted on the trunk, her head hung between her arms, making sick. She’d cast off the quilt, and her rail-like body quaked beneath the muslin dress.

  “You okay?”

  She straightened and turned to him. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

  “It ain’t nothing,” she said. She stood. “Let’s get moving.”

  Callum started to say more, but she walked past him, to the horse.

  Day after day they climbed. The land grew colder, harder. Ava was sick sometimes in the mornings, but she never complained. Callum tried to eat less of what was rationed him, but she wouldn’t take more.

  The wind seemed to blow upward out of the valleys here, lifting the leaves from the trees. Somewhere near was the great thrust of rock where the snow was said to fall upside down, rising up out of the gorge below. Where an Indian brave, heartbroken, had leapt into the wilderness, only to be blown back into the arms of his lover. It was known now as an especially bad place for partisan war, for brother against brother, and cutthroat guerrilla bands that rode through the hollers with torch and sword and rope. He and Ava continued on south through the mountains, wary of every grove and deadfall where men could hide.

  Before sundown after a long day on the trail, Callum started looking for
a place to stop. Ava woke up and looked around them, sleepy-eyed. Rock on one side, a sheer drop on the other.

  “I don’t see a way off this trail,” she said.

  “We just got to keep on riding,” said Callum. “We’ll find someplace.”

  They rode on. Night fell. Moonlight licked down through the dark fingerlings of the trees that tunneled their path, slinking like quicksilver along the ground. Ava leaned forward, her mouth right over his shoulder, her breath tickling his ear.

  “Know what they say about all this warring?” she whispered.

  “No,” said Callum. “Bet you’re gonna tell me, though.”

  “They say too many of the dead are going unburied, rotting aboveground.”

  Callum straightened in the saddle. He thought of the men unburied, the Colonel and the men he himself had shot. He snorted loudly through his runny nose, as if to sniff at the danger of the trail, the story being told.

  “That’s just how animals die,” he said. “Nobody to bury them.”

  “Exactly. Animals got nobody to do it. But we’re supposed to be different. We’re supposed to bury our dead. They say the spirits don’t get home easy if they ain’t buried. And pretty soon that could lead to real trouble. The land full of all these haunts, sorely displeased at the meager terms of their departure.”

  “Sounds awful vain to me. Seems like they should have themselves bigger issues to chew on, like being dead.”

  “People think the dead are somehow enlightened, but I don’t think so. I think they’re just like us: petty and mean-spirited mainly, a few of them pleasant. Then, being dead, they got nothing to do but get sour and moan. Try to get somebody to listen to their bitching.”

  Callum watched tree-broken fragments of moonlight glimmer like blades in the black woods alongside the trail.

  “This your idea of a joke, ’cause it ain’t funny.”

  “I’m serious,” said Ava, leaning well over his shoulder.