by Taylor Brown
“Ava,” he whispered.
She turned to look at him, her face smooth and white, her eyes dark and strong. Her pupils, steel-specked as always, went wide a moment. Dark-welled, as if to take in more of what she saw. Her hand hovered on the inside of his leg, where it had stopped. Callum opened his mouth to say the thing in his chest. His heart beat, beat, beat. Ava suddenly pulled her hand away and stood.
“Don’t just sit there,” she said. “You’re like to catch your death.” She started back into the cabin. “I was warming a blanket for you by the stove.”
Callum stood from the tub, alone, his innards warm despite the gooseflesh that bound him, his belly hot. He slicked the water off him with the flats of his hands—this arm and that, front of leg, back of leg—trying not to wet the dressing. He looked again to the sky, his feet pressed against each other for warmth, his head tottering a little atop its perch. The liquor roared in his temples. The stars were quivering, the once-mapped arcature of night undone, made liquid, star fates scattered so wildly he could make of them what he would. His heart swelled toward them, uncaged.
A moment later he turned to old Lachlan, both of him.
“Thank you,” he said.
The old man leaned forward in his rocker, speaking in a forced hush.
“Don’t thank me, damn ye. Get!” He jabbed his thumb toward the cabin door. “Fore ye catch ye death.” His eyes were smiling.
Callum hopped out of the tub and skittered naked across the yard, sliding wet-heeled into the dark depth of the cabin. He could see little at first save the open door of the stove, the split hickory red-warm as his warmest vision of hearth fire. He stood shivering before the flames, clutching himself. Then a heavy blanket enveloped his shoulders, Ava beside him, and he realized she was within his swaddling blanket, not without, her body thin-shifted and warm. She pressed against him, and he felt his cold hide begin to warm, go supple, melding to her contours, her heat, even as another part of him grew hard.
Lachlan yelled in at them from outside.
“Spare blankets in the trunk next to the cupboard,” he said. “Don’t mind me. I ain’t slept horizontal since ’49.”
Callum looked at Ava.
“Want me to get another blanket?”
“No,” she said. “Don’t.”
Chapter 8
He woke into perfect darkness. Then, slowly, the shapes of the world began to limn themselves out of the void: a stove, a cupboard, a slanted table. He thought the dark of slumber would adjust his vision to the absence of light, to better it, but the case seemed different, as if his eyes had been looking someplace else. The world of his dreams, perhaps, unremembered save for the omnipresence of fire.
The rhombic shape of the front door rose into his vision, rising dawn-pale as from murky water, and a strange song whittled into his hearing. A sound like the death rattle of a stricken animal. It was the old man sleeping, he realized, sounding like he could die at any breath. It was a good man who could remain so cheery, so big-hearted, despite such handings-out.
The boy looked down at himself: naked save his underclothes and bandaged leg. Ava’s arm was slung across his waist. It seemed dangerous, haphazard—a thing she’d never do awake. Outside the door, the world was taking shape out of the high-country mist. Blued timbers sprung of the fugitive reality of dawn, ghostlike, perfect hidings for ambushing men. He looked down at her arm again, the thinly fleshed sinew, the crescents of her nails moonlike and clean. How they remained that way despite their journeying was a mystery far more unfathomable than trinities or conceptions or sundry other such holies of old.
He didn’t want to move but had to—the night’s whiskey wanted out. He slid himself from under her arm—carefully, carefully—and stood beside the bed. She looked softer somehow, unhardened, the girl she was. The reality of the world for a moment at bay. She lay on her side, her dark hair scattered across her pillow, her shoulders, her mouth. Only her nose and eyes and forehead were bared to him. He bent toward the latter, his lips an inch above her temple. He made to transgress that final margin, in daylight a mile’s breadth, his lips softened stealthlike, his young joints quiet in their bending, when a sudden sound of crackling glass ripped him away and out the door. He landed both-footed in the dirt yard, crouched, looking for a gun to go with his underpants.
No one.
He looked to the horse. The horse looked at him, his loose lips chewing sideways on what grazings he’d found on the edge of the old man’s yard, his front hooves planted on the perimeter of broken glass—the sound of false alarm.
Callum rolled his eyes. His leg throbbed from the action, and he felt a fool.
He turned back toward the house, pivoting quickly on the heel of his good leg. Too quickly—when he tried to stop, the world just kept whirling sideways on him, dizzied and unchecked. Something rattled sickeningly through the interior of his skull, like a dislodged marble. He reached out his arms for anchor, staggering to the tub just in time to eject his stomach’s meager oddments into the filmy water. After that, just dry heavings, thick spit filming his lower lip and chin.
The old man opened one eye at him.
“My likker don’t give no hangovers.”
Callum convulsed drily toward the shallow well of vomit. He could feel blood vessels sparkling red under his eyes. He straightened, finally, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Like hell it don’t.”
“Well, I don’t give no money-back guarantees, ha. Drinks good while ye keep it down, though, don’t it?”
“I don’t remember,” said Callum. The taste was so terrible in his mouth, he thought he might be sick a second time.
“Ha, ye remember,” said the old man. “It ain’t no popskull. Keeps ye memory intact. That’s the truth, be it detriment to some.”
Ava came onto the porch barefooted, half-dressed, the shift she wore light enough against her body to swell Callum’s throat like one of those red-chested birds, his voice trapped.
“Morning,” she said.
Callum nodded and turned to attend to the horse, unspeakable reactions wrenching his body. He tried to focus. Before his bath the night previous, he had hobbled the horse narrow-hooved at the front legs to keep him in check. This out of habit, the horse so trustworthy that he might’ve left him untethered to graze. But the horse didn’t seem to mind either way. Callum had been stealing horses a long time and he’d never encountered one quite like this. Not even the cremello. It was so strong and good. Not submissive. Rather, the will he imposed on the animal seemed so within its capabilities, it had no grounds for complaint, such was the scale of its power.
He approached the horse to unhobble him, his spine sharp-boned toward Ava and the old man, and the horse eyed the front of him, his slight engorgement, with a dark and knowing eye. Callum realized that the horse had been so good to them, and he so much the opposite, the horse thief who seldom even called the animal by its name.
“Reiver,” he said, patting him between the eyes.
The horse lifted his head away, as though he had no use for such.
Callum bent down and untied the rope that spanned the muscled black legs. Loosed, the horse made a trotting circle of the yard, high-stepping as if to loosen his unbounded legs. Afterward he bent again to graze for the ride to come, however long. Callum looked toward the cabin. Ava and the old man were watching.
“Some horse,” said the old man.
Callum said nothing, just watched the horse like it was his own. Maybe it was. Maybe deserved to be. He leveled the hard flat of his hand against his face, swiping free flecks of vomit and saliva, baring his own teeth with the hard pull of his hand. Then he looked around the yard, the trees silent and still in the mist.
“I reckon we better be getting on,” he said.
Ava nodded and began moving around, getting things ready.
Callum tucked one of the horse’s front legs between his knees. He was checking the tender-creased frog for embedded flecks o
r shards when he heard the crunch of glass behind him. He swung around, unarmed, and caught the explosion of pink mist even before the resounding thunder of the ten-gauge. He snaked the repeater from the scabbard and leveled the barrel at the trailhead, expecting the full assault of the Colonel’s men.
Nothing came. He listened a long minute: silence.
Then the old man: “Nother goddamn likker poacher,” he said. “I seen him on the road three days ago, posing as a drover.”
The body had been blown fully backward into the trees, out of sight, sliding down the steep and rocky trail like a sack of feed. A large-bore shotgun lay on the broken glass, everything spattered brightly.
“You sure?”
“Course I’m sure. Think I can’t tell a stranger?”
Callum stood wide-eyed and naked save his underclothes, the rifle hanging limply from his hand. Ava had retreated inside the cabin. Her head poked out from the edge of the door.
Callum looked at Lachlan.
“You want me to go see he’s dead?”
The old man shook his head, sad.
“No. That double-aught ort to done it.” He let down the unfired hammer with a trembling thumb. “Just leave him be. Powerful disencouraging to like-minders.”
Callum wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, his eyes wide.
“I reckon,” he said.
He slid the rifle back into its scabbard and gathered up his clothes, sticking his legs straight into his trousers and hopping to yank them to the waist. He buttoned the fly quickly but left the belt unbuckled. He opened the saddlebag nearest him and took out the brace of purloined pistols. They were navy sixes, .36-caliber, both loaded and capped. The men had dripped hot candlewax over each of the caps to seal them from rain or moisture. He threaded the holsters butt-forward on his belt, one a side. Then he ran the belt through the buckle and pulled it tight as the tightest punch hole.
He thought of the Walker. He felt surer with it at his side, but the chambers were all empty now and it would take too long to reload. He was not even sure he had the right-size shot, had not rifled that far through what he’d stolen from the men at the pond. He put on his long-sleeve undershirt, his regular shirt, his coat, his riding gauntlets. Ava came out of the cabin in her high boots and quilt.
“Well, I reckon we got to get on,” she said. “Don’t want to overstay our welcome.”
The old man had been watching the boy dress so quickly. Now he looked at her, hurt-eyed but knowing.
“Was a pleasure, Miss Ava.” He reached underneath his blanket. “A jar of the white stuff,” he said, handing it to her. “Ye just keep that young’un over there from overserving hisself,” he said, winking at her.
Ava took the jar from him and gave him a hug, then hurried across the yard to the horse. Callum boosted her onto Reiver’s back. He whipped himself into the saddle and walked the horse closer to the old man’s porch.
“I want to thank you for everything,” he said.
Old Lachlan held out a flat and sullied hand.
“No need,” he said. “Even a old son of a bitch like me ort to have him a moment now and again to give Old Peter a second thought.”
Callum tipped the brim of the slouch hat in parting, as he’d seen men do who wore such hats, and then he rode the horse around the side of the cabin and back onto the trail. He felt he’d marred the farewell somehow, not given himself over sufficiently to the task, but there was nothing to be done for it. Not now. They were surely never to see the old man again. Much as that should bear no weight on courtesy, it somehow did. The whiskey robber had shown them that they were not safe here—that they were foolish to feel anything but.
The day was early, the mist as yet unbothered, and only the nearest trees seemed fully real. The world beyond lay shrouded, ethereal. The path was rock-studded, slippery with green moss, and the horse’s iron-shod footing rang out in the stillness. They soon found themselves on a narrow spine of trail, the land dropping away steeply to one side. Callum realized they had eaten neither dinner nor breakfast, nor had they offered the old man any of the stolen hardtack or salted meat in their saddlebags.
“That old man,” he said, “we ought to given him something for what he done.”
“I know it,” said Ava. “But he wouldn’t of took it anyway.”
Callum nodded, knowing she was right. He felt bad about it, but there was nothing to be done. And he had bigger things to worry over. For he had underestimated the loyalty of the Colonel’s men, he realized. He had not thought they would pursue him this far. He knew of no bounty upon his head but that which they might have pooled together of their own meager resources. Apparently to hire a bounty hunter of some renown, notorious even, and notorious men did not come cheap. And Swinney in on it, too. The man who had been almost a father to him. Who had dragged him from the beach after the wreck and nursed him in his little thin-walled progger’s shack, set on a marshy plot crowded with spoils from his shoreline prowls, collecting the wash-up from the Cape Fear wrecks.
They had eaten shrimp from the big man’s nets, fried in flour and lard, and mullet he smoked and served for breakfast instead of bacon. They had gone to port once a month to sell Swinney’s latest trophies—compasses and officers’ trunks, barrel kegs and medicines in watertight ampoules. Anything that washed up upon the river’s banks or spits of beach. During the nights they could hear the booming of shore batteries, keeping them in business.
Come spring, though, old Swinney had other engagements. It was time for war again, and he had to head west to rejoin the Colonel’s troop. He told Callum he could stay there on his own, living in the little shack, but Callum did not want to spend a single minute in the little boat that took the old man on his errands of fish and spoil—the only way to survive. He did not want to be out on the water again. Not ever. But he was good in the saddle, he said, and he could handle a gun. He could ride with Swinney’s band. The old man didn’t like it, but when he left on his horse, equipped for war, the boy was behind him, jogging along. And soon enough, after they passed the first farm, the boy had a mount of his own.
* * *
Callum thought maybe if he could isolate Swinney, he could talk some reason into him, but how he could do that was beyond him. His immediate task was to get them the hell away, south, and worry about pleas of guilt or lack thereof when opportunity struck.
Down the long slope beside them ran a small stream. Glittering. A magic little ravine in the earth. He watched for silhouettes against the glitter, bushwhackers lying in wait. A white sun clocked along its arc into a bright blue sky; it gave little comfort. He worried that Lachlan could have been mistaken. The intruder a scout whose failure to return to camp might give them away.
Deadfalls of broken timber littered the forest to either side, but the trail was mainly clear of obstruction. They ducked under the low branches and squinted into the undergrowth, afraid.
That night they slept in a huge bowl of earth left in the wake of an uprooted blackjack oak. The tree lay some several feet away, dead, the gray-whorled mass of roots clutching the air. Some past winter’s ice storm the culprit, the weak soil overtaxed.
Feed gone, Callum loosened the saddle and hobbled the horse and set him to graze. He and Ava huddled beneath the wind that soughed through the cold forest like some lonesome song. They made no fire, the body of the dead whiskey poacher—or whoever he was—yet warm in their minds.
Callum’s leg no longer throbbed. The liquor was doing its work. Only the faintest red tracery haloed the wound now, no longer angry, and it was beginning to scab. He tried to pick at the nascent crust, but Ava stopped him. She cleaned and dressed the wound again. She felt his forehead. She said his fever had broke.
The next day they found themselves walled in by steep land on either side. This was the notch in the mountains they’d seen from the droving road. The pass. Trees grew sun-straight from the slanted ground to either side, and they rode with their eyes cocked up the slopes for men lying in ambu
scade. Highwaymen or irregulars or bounty hunters. Boulders and stones and scree fallen from either side littered the trail. The horse wended between these with high and careful steps. By noon they were descending the far side of the pass. They broke upon a green-grassed bald on which a handful of meatless and bone-ridden cattle stared dumbly at them. They galloped across the soft turf as fast as they dared, acutely aware of their exposure to the sparse stands of trees on every side.
No shots.
Callum’s fever had gone, but the image of the bounty hunter yet haunted his mind. Details he’d not previously remembered came forward to render the man in more complete a shape. He wore his right pistol with the butt facing backward instead of the cross draw preferred by cavalrymen. Like the Colonel, he wore a saber on his left hip, low-slung, and above that a second pistol in a shoulder rig, butt-forward. These tools, just visible, jutted from beneath an unbuttoned wrist-length cape that failed to broaden the look of his shoulders. His horse was smoke-colored, with a black mane. A big horse, tall as Reiver but not as stout. The man wore no hat; Callum remembered that. And he knew to fear a man who went hatless of his own volition, for it meant he was accustomed to tracking through dense woods and brush—tracking men like they were animals.
“That one-armer,” said Ava, as if she’d read his mind.
“What about him?”
“I dreamt of him last night.”
“Yeah?” said Callum. He didn’t like where this was headed.
“Uh-huh,” said Ava. “He told me he was a ghost.”
“Shit,” said Callum.
She shrugged.
“I told him where he ought to take himself then. Told him they had a nice warm place for him down there.”
“What’d he say?”
“He didn’t. Just kept huntin’ round for his arm, like he’d misplaced it.”
They continued to bed down fireless, using small sips of the old man’s liquor as a heat-promoting tonic. The liquid fire warmed their bellies, numbed their saddle sores, eased the awkward conjoining of limbs and blankets that kept them warm in the absence of fire. One time, after she’d fallen asleep, Callum ventured to place his ungloved hand on Ava’s belly. It was still flat. Would be for some time. Still he tried to detect, by touch, the life of the thing inside her. He’d heard of soothsayers reading an object this way, its portents and history. He pictured a creature like the one in the jar but smaller, small as a lima bean, and he allowed himself to envision a future in which it had grown into his life. A vision in which he stood drinking coffee in a set of Y-backed suspenders on the sunlit boards of a front porch, his own, husbanding a plot of land and fathering loves however sired.