by Taylor Brown
“Let me help,” said Callum.
She shook her head at him.
“What about the horse?” he asked.
“He’ll be fine.”
Callum looked back toward the cabin. The understory was too dense to see anything. Beyond that the sun was just breaking the jagged line of the far-off ridges, igniting the hills like a west-moving fire. The bag of bones sat on the grass next to him, the bottom soaked with ground dew. He got closer to Ava and squatted down beside her and gently took the shovel from her hand. She let him. He tore into the earth with steady strokes, switching hands when one arm got tired. Ava squatted there beside him, watching, her breath captive, as if they were about to break through to a new world of some kind.
Some men said if you dug deep enough, you’d reach hell. Others said China. Callum thought of what hell might be like. He thought of a big dark place, like a great cavern, where the damned carried on whatever pursuits pleased them. Whatever outrages. Mobs of them down there, with long knives and sharp teeth. Men not very different from the Colonel’s, perhaps.
The shovel struck rock. Callum challenged it, gently at first, then harder, quicker, scraping as if against some tomb in the earth. No use. The shovel made thin white streaks against the rock.
Ava touched his shoulder.
“It’s deep enough.”
Callum stopped himself. It was. He took up the coat and unrolled it. He slid the remains into their new home, endeavoring to position the various body parts into some semblance of anatomical correctness. It was the least he could do. They shoveled the earth back over the grave with their hands, careful to cover the body fully so that no gaps or vents could compromise the dead man’s peace—or theirs.
Done, they found the sun upon them, the pasture flooded gold. The two of them followed the trail back to the cabin, solemn-faced and unspeaking. Callum carried his coat over one shoulder. He would shake out the bone dust and brave the wearing of it later, with a little more distance between him and the hole in the ground.
Ava led, the heels of her tall man’s boots skidding on the wet rocks. The path terminated at the rear of the cabin. Callum saw the pile of junk where she’d found the shovel. He was just going to sift the pile for other items that could come in handy when he saw Ava round the front corner of the cabin and freeze. The shovel sparked on a stone beside her foot. She turned toward him, a silent scream distorting her face.
Chapter 5
The horse was gone, stolen. Too loyal to run off, too brave to flee. They were high in the mountains now with the cold coming, and they had no food, no water, no rifle, no matches—nothing. Everything gone, and the wind seemed colder, the rocks harder. The world meaner. They looked together at the cabin, the punctured walls, which whistled faintly when the wind blew. To stay would be to invite murder, a question only of specifics, of date and time. Callum put the coat back on, bone dust and all. They started walking.
Day and night they walked, their boots crackling on the leaves dead-curled on the path. A cold came out of the north, cruel and untimely. Twice they tried to stop and light a fire by striking the shovel against the right kind of stone. Once at dusk, once at midnight. Both times the right stone escaped them. No spark. They kept on, hardly talking, not bitter, knowing that any such sentiment was a luxury for the warm and well fed. Callum thought to take Ava’s hand, but she had both of them hoveled deeply under her quilt for warmth. One hour, in weakness and cold, they huddled together amid the gnarled roots of some tree, close-clutched and hoping to warm.
Ava spoke up.
“What was their name again?”
“Who?”
“These relations of yours, on the coast.”
“Gosling.”
“How come they didn’t send you over to them, when your parents died?”
Callum looked a little sideways at her. “Church don’t pay for something like that. Doubt they’d even of tried anyhow, her husband being a Protestant. They put you with who’ll take you.”
“Oh,” said Ava.
“Really they just want to get the children out the workhouse.”
“Was it bad in there?”
Callum looked out through the trees and nodded. “People got to calling it casan na marbh—pathway of death—so many people didn’t come out. Everybody crammed in close, worked to the bone, doing their unmentionables in the same tub. They did feed you twice a day. Stirabout and milk. Some potatoes. Problem was disease. Runs wild in those places. Each morning they wheeled out the dead in these special carts they had. There were pits for them out back. They had to cover the bodies all in lime, to help the smell.”
“You were in there with your family, or after?”
Callum scratched his nose with the back of his hand. “Both,” he said. “Went in with my mother and sister. I think it was typhus that got them.”
“You don’t know?”
“They were in a different block.”
“And your father?”
“Hanged for a Fenian in ’53. I don’t hardly remember him.”
“Fenian?”
“A rouser. A Irish Republican. One of them that rose up against the British.”
“Catholic?”
Callum nodded.
Ava’s hand tightened on his arm.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Callum shrugged and spat between his boots. “Wasn’t you that killed him.”
Day and night again. Once they heard horses and cleared from the path. They watched from the trees as a ragtag line of blue-coated cavalry riders passed them, heading north. They were shoddy-clothed and slumped in their saddles, their once-gold shoulder braids and trouser stripes moldered a sickly green. They pulled a string of riderless horses behind them, fitted with empty saddles.
Later, for decency, Callum took a narrow game trail into the woods. He was unbuttoning himself when he saw something on a rock near his foot: a smear. He followed the trail over a small rise and found an empty camp. Piled were the carcasses of two deer—one buck, one doe—both neatly knife-gutted, nothing but castoffs. In a second spot lay two men. They were wearing blue cavalryman’s trousers but no gloves or boots or shirts. They’d been shot in the torso, the wounds ragged and erupted as if by scavenging knifepoint. He left them where they lay and returned to his spot by the blood-painted rock. He finished his intended business. Back in the road he could see faint markings where the bodies had been dragged. He said nothing to Ava. He didn’t want to worry her.
That night, a few bivouac fires held small and flickering vigils on the far-off hills behind them. Fires like those the Colonel’s men might make, or others like them. A riot of shots erupted once in the distance. The many-ridged echoes thwarted any estimation of their origin, what direction or distance or altitude. Several sporadic pops followed, men or horses finished off.
They walked through more days and nights, just how many becoming muddled. Callum’s cold had worsened, his head distended with pressure, his upper lip mustachioed with snot. His thoughts were slow. His once-steady stride turned to shuffling. Ava’s, too. Climbing hurt them in the lungs and thighs, descending in the joints and feet. Their stomachs had curled into angry knots. They zagged down the path before them, unmindful of things beyond their imaginings of biscuits and stew newly cooked. Now and then Callum felt eyes upon them, inhuman. He thought he saw the double-orbed gold of the lion’s eyes once—perhaps the trick of an exhausted mind. Sometime later there were closer shots, two or three. Ahead of them maybe.
When scared enough, Callum pulled the Walker from his pants and held it low against his leg, the overlarge heft dropping his shoulder, the barrel hanging past his knee. Slivers of moonlight toyed at the edges of his vision, wraithlike and taunting. They had buried a man, and he felt some good in that, but there were too many unburied to worry his mind. Those he’d killed, those he might still have to. But slowly, slowly, those thoughts began to bleed out of his mind as if from a long-open wound, and he was empty, depleted.
&nb
sp; “You smell that?”
A whisper from Ava, in the deep time of night. Callum sniffed, and even despite his congested nose, he could smell it: a cookfire.
Meat.
Ava looked at him, he at her. Their jaws tingling, their mouths wet.
When the smell grew strong, they left the path and circled a long way around, navigating by their noses. Ava was not as quiet as he was, but quiet enough. He glanced back with big eyes whenever she stepped on a stick or rustled a bush, and pretty soon she grew more aware of her own silence and the making of it. Callum found a narrow creek sluiced from higher up the mountain. Fallen leaves speckled its banks like wafer-thin coinage, bright in darkness. He had them walk its banks because the leaves were all wet and made little protest under their boots.
An orange glow in the woods ahead. They huddled behind a massive section of rock that must have fallen in some prehistoric epoch. Deep-set in the ground, trees grown twisted around its bulk. He jacked the hammer back on his double-loaded pistol and whispered for Ava to stay put. He gave her his slouch hat. He couldn’t hazard the wide brim catching a branch or bramble. He told her to meet him at the road if she heard shots fired. She told him not to be a hero. He told her he didn’t aim to be.
He moved forward to reconnoiter the terrain ahead. The Colonel had ordered him to do so many times before, the whole company waiting hungrily for what tidings this small and silent boy might bring them from the darknesses beyond their ken, houses and barns and bivouacked men. What provisions or livestock? What bulwarks or defenders?
He followed the creek upward, but it soon kinked sideways along an upthrust of bare ridgeline, away from the source of the glow. He knelt at the bank and blacked his face with creek mud before taking to harder ground.
There could be pickets posted, men lying in wait for intruders. The fallen leaves could easily betray him, crackling like hearth fire under his boots. Still a good ways off, he began to toe himself leafless footprints before committing his full weight to each forward step. He could not sniff at his running nose. The snot ran freely onto his lips and chin. He ducked and twisted edgewise and contorted himself into strange positions to shape himself through the maze of gray and black branches. The leaves glimmered before him like tiny pennants. He moved slowly and with the patience of something not quite human, making no sound. His face was black, his hands, too, the bone-whiteness of the pistol grip hidden in his fist. He became the kind of thing he feared, mindless and hungry.
He saw the pond first, fire-mirrored, the source of the creek he’d followed. Beyond that the silhouettes of horses and men, black and one-dimensional against the flames of their fire. The fire was big and bright, licking the black sky with myriad tongues, shooting red-glowing cinders aloft like little rockets. He could make out three men and four horses. Something else, too, a dead animal of some species hanging by the hind legs from the overarching branch of a tree near the pond’s edge.
The men had camped a good way from the road, but anyone with that outsized a blaze must be armed well enough to greet the uninvited. Callum knew that, and he knew also that one of the horses was the black one, the Colonel’s, the physique evident even at such range.
He began to circle the pond toward them. He kept far enough from the water’s edge to remain hidden, close enough to keep watch. Whenever he did make a sound—any misstep at all—he would freeze in place, his good ear cocked, and wait for noise or movement, any sign he’d been heard. There was never any. No one knew what was haunting the edge of the woods.
He crouched behind a large-trunked tree as near to the men as he dared. Twenty paces. There were three of them: one man in a stovepipe hat with his back to him, one across and facing him, a third reclining off to the side in a plumed officer’s hat devoid of insignia. All of them sunken-cheeked, with heavy dark beards. He thought they might be the trio of riders who had passed them their first day, or maybe others nearly interchangeable with them, long-faced men who had been living hard in these mountains for some time.
They were watching a pot boil on the flames. The horses were restless and shifty save for the Colonel’s, nearest him. On the far side of the fire, he saw that it was a mountain lion hind-strung from the tree, its throat slashed, its forelegs reaching limply for the ground.
The reclining man sat up and pointed to the lion and said something, his words swallowed in the whoosh and crackle of the flames. The man closest to the lion stood up. He wore two pistols butt-forward and a twine-handled knife on the outside of his belt. He drew the knife and went to the animal. A section of the flesh had already been carved for meat and it seemed he was going to carve another. Instead, the man squinted and thumbed at the lion’s side until he found the place he wanted. He pulled out his thumb and dug in with the point of his knife, working the blade as a doctor would a scalpel, his tongue jammed into the corner of his mouth.
After a while he called back over his shoulder and the top-hatted man put down the saber he’d been sharpening and tossed him something. It gleamed metallic when the firelight struck it, a ramrod fitted with a worm puller. An extractor. It looked like two tiny snakes coiled around each other, the heads sharp-pointed for drilling. Many of the Colonel’s men carried such a one, a necessity for partisan warring where there were no hospital tents or aproned surgeons.
The man inserted the ramrod into the wound and began to twist, screwing the wormlike threads of the extractor into the softer lead of the bullet. Finally he pulled the bullet free on the end of the extractor and held it to the flames for them to see, the conical shape warped by impact. Then he lifted the lid of the pot, revealing an ellipsis of molten lead. He detached the bullet and dropped it into the pool, then replaced the lid.
After that he started to sit, but one of the others threw him a tin cup long blacked by old campfires. He caught the cup and stepped back to the lion. He knelt and dipped the tin cup into the bucket and came up with a cupful of something. It had to be blood.
That made them old Indian fighters, Callum knew. Like the Colonel. Men who were well versed in killing. Who had come to adopt certain rituals of the culture they fought. Callum had been told of the practice at fireside one night by some of the Colonel’s men, liars and truth-sayers by turn. Whether the ritual was a true one among the Indians or just the white man’s morbid facsimile thereof, they claimed not to know. The Colonel had forbade any such practice, they said, but they also said he had been one of the thirstiest on the plains, believing that some simulacrum of the strength and spirit of a creature could be transmitted into the killer’s blood. The men of the company rumored among themselves within the boy’s hearing—for his hearing, perhaps—that among the red men such a practice was confined to the liver of the animal alone, blood-filled and raw, but the liver was a small organ and did not sate the appetites of the white men. So they had taken liberties, as was their wont.
The man stood up with the cup and returned to the fire. He handed the cup back to its owner, the reclining man in the plumed hat. Their leader, by the look of things. Meanwhile, the man nearest Callum picked up a brass picket mold for making bullets.
Callum thought about what to do. He thought of Ava, of her hunger-sharpened face. He thought of the seed of being she carried, a thing whose worthiness to live was not already blacked over by sin. Like these men, like him. And not least, he thought of his own hunger.
He could go up friendlylike and ask them for food. For the horse, the rifle, the matches. The things he and Ava would die without. The men might give him a scrap of something. They might shoot him. He could ask with his pistol instead, but they had too many horses, too many guns. He and Ava, they wouldn’t get far. And there was something else he could do. The other thing, that didn’t involve asking. But he had done enough of that already, and he didn’t want to do it again. Not ever. He decocked the pistol. He would have to take his chances.
He started forward, tucking away the gun, but stopped. The reclining man had sat up and was pointing to a nearby satchel. The
man with the bullet mold put it down and reached into the satchel with both hands and brought out a square-shaped glass jar. He handed it slowly to the leader with high and straight-armed carefulness, as if afraid of waking the thing inside.
The leader took the jar and held it toward the firelight and stared a long time into the time-warped glass, at the nearly translucent creature within. He twisted the jar slight degrees this way and that, as if calibrating some kind of instrument, and Callum suddenly wondered if he was trying to see the bone frame and organs of the creature shadow-formed against the fire, the truth of species within.
The man shrugged. He leaned far forward and set the jar on the fire grate next to the molten lead. There was a look of curiosity on his face. The other men watched, the three of them greedy-eyed for what would happen as the temperature rose. They were not watching the trees.
Callum sidestepped until the bulk of the horse blocked his view of the men and theirs of him. Then he came out of the woods, taking long, well-aimed strides toward the horse, leafless patch to leafless patch. The horse watched him and did nothing. He found himself just on the other side of the horse from the camp, his legs lined up behind the horse’s. He knew the men had ruined their night vision on the blaze.
“Not sure I understand the need for this, Giff.”
“Pay attention, you might learn something.”
“Such as what?”
“Such as what hell is like.”
Callum was moving toward them before he knew it, propelled. He came up behind the man with the stovepipe hat and pointed the pistol at the back of his head.
Click.
“Take him off the fire,” he said.
The man straightened, didn’t move.
“I ain’t the one that put him there.”
“Now,” said Callum.
Slowly, the man took the jar from the fire grate. He held it in his lap. Across the fire, the leader—this man Giff—watched the pistol quiver at the base of his comrade’s skull. He smiled.