Fallen Land: A Novel

by Taylor Brown

  Callum nodded. “Pretty good.” He grinned. “For a girl.”

  The block of hardtack was like a rock when it struck him on the nose.

  * * *

  The afternoon sky darkened like a threat. Before long, rain was falling slantwise and cold. The day seemed many hours ahead of itself, dusking already, a surreal and unchanging grayness of light. They pulled their coats around themselves as tightly as they could. Callum tried to give Ava the slouch hat to keep the rain from seeping cold into the crevasse of her spine, sliding down the ridges of her slim-muscled back. She wouldn’t take it.

  They’d been on an old wagon road since noon, descending, parallel ruts through rock and dirt. Within the first hour, runnels of fallen rain flowed through the wheel grooves. These grew to torrents by late afternoon, dark-running, and the horse walked the elevated ground between them like a causeway. Finally the water overran its channels, flooding, and the road itself began to slough forward, downward, a single mass of sludge that swamped the animal’s hooves to the fetlocks. Reiver high-stepped and shook his head and snorted.

  Callum rode slumped in the saddle. Wet, cold. The sky crashed above them, thunder and the echo of thunder sounding through the valleys. The naked mangling of branches above them whirled and clattered, raftering the storm like the antlers of crazed beasts.

  He looked back at Ava.

  “You cold?”

  She smiled, her face stretching with effort.

  “In my head I got a fire roaring red in the stove. I got a bearskin blanket over my chest, my feet in a pot of hot water.”

  “Just you, huh? Hogging all the heat?”

  “I might could let you in, if you want.”

  “Shit,” said Callum, “and leave my steaming tub?”

  “I got you out of one before, didn’t I?”

  Callum couldn’t argue with that.

  They came upon a stream crossing before dark. The streambed was shallow-cut from soft ground. No high banks, no aeon-smoothed river stone. But the water ran high now and swift. Leaves and debris cascaded in the current, twirling in the eddies and crashing against crag rock and deadfall that littered the banks. There had been a primitive lashing of saplings to corduroy the crossing for wagons, and these were wrecked and scattered against a wind-felled tree that lay several yards downstream.

  Callum sat the horse before the edge. He leaned forward over the stream and saw the reflection of himself whipped and harried in the current, his edges torn away like lickings of flame. He became aware of his heart accelerating, some undercurrent reacting to the slender rips of flood.

  “What is it?” asked Ava.

  Callum shook his head.

  “Nothing,” he told her, telling himself the stream was shallow, the horse strong. He urged them forward into the current. The horse went under to the belly. The stream foamed at their boots. A vision struck him of the horse’s footing being ripped from beneath him, the three of them carried away. That fallen tree trapping them under, crammed and drowned. But the horse shouldered the current unfazed, propelling his head forward and back, forward and back. They reached the far side, Callum’s hands white-knuckling the reins. Ava pulled her hands from his coat pockets and touched his fists until they relaxed. They rode on.

  They broke onto a vast rolling meadow just after sundown, the rain unabated. They decided to push for the trees on the far side. A jag of lightning fissured the sky. Their surroundings were exposed, stark white. Huge hunks of white-lit stone rose half-buried from the earth, then darkness. Callum wondered how they’d gotten there, those stones. They were too big for man. Only giants could have strewn them. Some monstrous antecedents, perhaps, warring over a long-forgotten insult or dispute.

  They dismounted in a stand of trees. Callum loosened the saddle’s girth straps and set the horse to graze. They huddled together, shaking. They wet what meager hardtack they saw fit to apportion themselves and choked down the white mush. They refilled the beef bladder from a streak of rainwater coming down from a leaf.

  Ava went off a little ways for nature’s sake. She was gone longer than normal, it seemed. Her wet-blown hair clung clawlike to her face when she returned from the trees.

  “What is it?” asked Callum.

  “Nothing,” she said, sitting beside him. “I got some spotting is all.”

  “Blood?”

  She nodded.

  “Is that normal, with a baby and all?”

  “Some is, I think.”

  “Was it more than some?”

  “No,” she said. “It’s just I couldn’t tell at first in the dark.”

  “But you’d tell me if it was.”

  “I would.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise,” she said.

  They clawed out a bare spot on the ground and put down a bedding of leaves and buried themselves as tightly entwined as they could, the coming hours promising to be storm-ridden and cold beyond any previous imaginings of misery. They lay a long time, listening to the rain patter down through the trees, their breath smoking in the dark.

  “I was afraid,” said Callum.

  “What?”

  “Earlier today, crossing that stream. I was afraid.”

  “I noticed before. It’s okay. Everybody’s afraid of something.”

  He shook his head. “It ain’t. It’s the reason we’re in all this. The reason I fell in with the Colonel’s troop.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “After Swinney took me in, I could of stayed on at his shack without him, hunting for what washed ashore from the wrecks. But I was afraid of being out on the water again. After what happened. He didn’t want me to come, but I did.”

  “Callum, you hadn’t been with the Colonel’s troop, who knows what that first son of a bitch would of done to me.”

  “But look what happened anyhow.”

  “That ain’t your fault, Callum. None of it is.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It ain’t. You didn’t know what would lead to what. There’s people in the world claiming to have the second sight, and maybe they do, but you aren’t one of them.” She touched his arm. “Besides, it brought you to me.”

  Callum felt a pang in his belly, warm.

  “You think stuff happens for a reason like that?”

  “I don’t know. I think you can find a reason sometimes if you’re willing to.”

  “You look like a pretty good reason.”

  She wiggled closer to him, smiling. “Tell me a story,” she said.

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know. About the future. Let’s see if maybe you do have the second sight.”

  “Hell.”

  “Come on, I seen you ruminating. I want a story.”

  “Well,” he said. “Just for you.”

  He thought he had no story to tell, but he was wrong. He began to tell her of a boy and girl and horse—orphans all—racing through a bad land, and of the city that would save them, so warm and safe, and of the coast after that. The words came in a low lullaby voice he hardly knew he had, strung together almost without thought, and he knew for the first time how fathers at bedside told stories of their own invention, devised even as the story unfolded, and how easy for folk- or fairy tales to pattern the words, to lend them power and weight. He spoke of sunlight and hearth fire, swept streets and new-risen bread, of Irish-born soldiers of the North who might recognize his family name or exploits, welcoming them with whiskey and hurrahs. All these images bright-lit and fictive, a world apart from the cold ground that clutched them.

  * * *

  Dawn broke over the sawtoothed ridges to the east, the sky a featureless gray. Bursts of wind tore across the open meadow, rendered in waves of white mist-rain that cut through their coats and gloves. Mud caked them from head to foot. Their fingers were stiff, their hands palsied as they readied the saddle for the day’s ride. Callum was tightening the girth straps when Ava yanked his coat sleeve and pointed back the way they’d c
ome. A rider on a dun horse had emerged from the trailhead behind them, the one that gave on to the meadow. The horse’s breath steamed in the cold air, and he was dark-painted with mud. The rider raised a set of brass binoculars with one hand. His other held a long gun propped on his knee. A scout. He lowered the binoculars and started to shoulder the rifle.

  Callum pulled Ava behind Reiver’s barrel-like chest and drew the rifle from the saddle scabbard. He dropped prone, half-hidden by a nearby tree, and leveled the rifle on the rider.

  “You can hit him from here?”

  “Nuh-uh,” said Callum, sighting. “But I can show him I’ll damn well try.”

  A fire-filled puff from the other man’s weapon, and Callum fired, too. The shots clapped across the open field, crisscrossing. Callum heard the incoming ball crack into the bark high above him. His own shot gave no effect he could see, but the scout thought better of his tactic and disappeared into the trees. He’d be riding hard to alert the main force.

  Ava was already up. Callum boosted her onto the horse and slung himself into the saddle. He whipped them into a gallop toward the parallel tracks of the wagon road, his heart manic, his hat brim folded back on itself with speed. Soon the road dropped out of the meadow, into the dark channel of trees. Here Reiver sank into a black mire, slogging and snorting in what muck the storm had made of the road. Some minutes later, Ava turned herself around on the huge haunches, riding backward.

  Callum looked over his shoulder. “The hell you doing?”

  “I don’t intend to get shot in the back,” she said, locking her hands behind her around his waist.

  Callum did not know how far ahead that scout had been of the main party, how long it might take him to rejoin them—days or hours or minutes. Regardless, the bounty hunter had pushed the men closer than he’d expected.

  At the next forking of the road, he bore right, then rode until they reached the first creek crossing, wide but no more than knee-high. He led them into the current and turned them downstream for several paces, breaking low-hanging branches that crossed above them as if they’d been snagged while making for the other fork. Then he turned them upstream, west, no tracks on the stone-laden creekbed underneath the horse’s hooves. Reiver was careful on the smooth stones that quivered beneath the shallow current, fugitive shapes, but soon they struck a new trail heading south, hardly more than a footpath. Maybe an old Indian trail, maybe just one used by deer or wild hog. No matter. The path was single-file—slow going for a larger force.

  They rode this trail hard, crashing through dead limbs until an hour later it dropped them upon a wider trail. It was rockier than the old wagon road. They were descending from here on, the horse’s iron-shod hooves ringing out on the rock-covered road. Hours later they broke out of the woods onto a bluff that overlooked a black river. The water was high-running and foamy at the banks, the surface light-speckled with afternoon sun.

  There was no bridge or ferry, not here, and Callum cursed the fear in his belly. He reckoned their best chance of a crossing was back where the old wagon road hit the river. He didn’t know how far he’d diverted them from that road, only that time had been lost.

  Driven stock had trampled a grassy thoroughfare along the banks and bluffs, and at least they made good time riding downriver. An hour later, a flat-bottomed ferry appeared on the far bank. Callum dismounted and pressed his good ear to the wagon road: no sound, not yet. He climbed back in the saddle and watched the water, black-running like the midnight sea in which all those men had been sunk, drowned, their dying bubbles breaking on the surface all around him. He looked downriver. Maybe there was a bridge that way. But no. He had other fears to contend with now—he felt Ava’s body against his own—and more of a future to fight the past. He urged the horse to the river’s edge and hailed the ferryman, who waved and began crossing toward them, hauling on his guide ropes.

  Ava looked up the wagon road, then back at the ferry.

  “It ain’t the fastest thing I ever seen.”

  “No, ma’am. It’s surely not.”

  The ferryman was little more than a boy, twelve perhaps, his small frame swallowed in a handed-down gum blanket that made streaks of the fallen rain. Several feet from the bank he halted.

  “Ten bits to cross,” he said.

  Callum dismounted and dug into his pocket, his hand coming up with a crumpled fistful of notes—those he’d taken from the men at fireside.

  The boy’s eyes widened a moment, then squinted again, suspicious.

  “Them’s U.S. dollars, right?”

  Callum shrugged. “Mostly. I got both. You can have your pick.”

  The boy, satisfied, pulled the ferry into the bank.

  “My mama says them Confederate notes ain’t worth a shit in the woods,” he said. “Not these days.”

  Callum wasn’t listening. He stepped lightly onto the flat-bottomed vessel with one foot, as if he could measure its seaworthiness through the sole of his boot. The horse snorted behind him. Callum placed both feet onto the deck. The horse fairly nudged him aboard.

  The ferry boy was watching him with a troubled look. He spoke to Ava out the side of his mouth.

  “He ain’t some kinda dumb, is he?”

  Callum was standing at the centermost point of the deck, straight-backed, his feet close together. He was the maximum distance from the current foaming and eddying around each of the edges.

  The boy looked at him. “This here boat was built by my daddy’s daddy, so you don’t got nothing to worry about.”

  Callum didn’t seem to hear. The boy shrugged and turned to his ropes. Ava watched the riverbank behind them as the ferry pulled away, watching the place where riders on the wagon road would emerge. The boy was laboring hard, his breath loud and steady. He looked from Ava to Callum and back again as he worked the ropes.

  “You kids on the run or something?”

  Callum wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Say,” he said, “there any bridges over this river hereabouts?”

  The boy snorted. “Ain’t nobody needing a bridge over this river, not when they got ferries like this one.” The boy grunted through another pull. “Any bridges I ever heard of round these parts been burned or blowed to hell anyhow.”

  The ferry was moving toward midstream now. Slowly, slowly, with each pull of the rope. Callum, like Ava, took to watching the shore they’d left.

  “And what about the next nearest ferry? Where’s that at?”

  “This here is the onliest one for near on thirty mile upriver or down,” said the boy. He took one hand off the rope to pat the deck.

  Callum looked at Ava, she at him, a sad bridge between their eyes.

  The boy was still talking. “But anybody with any sense in ’em comes to this one anyhow. Specially the womenfolk. They’d much rather a cute littlun like me than them toothless sons of bitches you’re like to get anyplace else.”

  When they struck the far shore, Ava led Reiver off the deck. Callum lingered behind a moment. When the boy turned around, Callum was pointing his pistol at him. He gestured with the barrel for the boy to disembark ahead of him.

  The boy leaned and spat.

  “You got to be shittin’ me,” he said. He stared a long moment into the barrel of the gun, disbelieving. Then he looked up at Callum’s face. He dropped the rope and shuffled off of the boat. Callum followed. On dry ground, he told the boy to cut the guide ropes, setting the ferry adrift.

  “I ain’t got a knife,” said the boy.

  Callum, still holding the pistol on him, reached under his coat and handed the boy his bowie knife in the sheath. The boy took the implement. Unsheathed it. Hefted it in his hand a moment as if noting the craftsmanship. Then he turned and hurled the knife far out into the river.

  Callum watched the knife arc glittering through the air, end over end, its reflection tumbling across the surface until the two blades disappeared point-first into each other, a white burst of spray.

  The boy held
out the empty sheath as if to hand it back. “You think I’m cuttin’ loose the ferry my daddy’s daddy built, you got another think comin’.”

  Callum looked at the boy.

  “I was figuring you’d want to be the one to do it.”

  “Not goddamn likely.”

  “I’m sorry, son, but this is just the way it is.”

  “Son? You ain’t my goddamn daddy. He’s two year dead, and you’re hardly a day older’n me, you son of a bitch.” He lunged at Callum. Callum stepped forward and drove his forearm under the boy’s chin and thrust him over his outstretched leg, onto his back. The boy lay pinned and fighting, red-faced, tears streaking his face. Behind them, Ava had gotten out her folding knife. She sawed through the guide ropes. The ferry, sundered, began to swing toward midstream on its single radius of rope, pivoted by the far shore. Lost. The boy lay there, watching, the fight draining out of him.

  Callum unpinned him and stood. The boy sat up and watched from his knees, his fingers in his hair, fisting and yanking. His face was red and wet. He was silent.

  Callum dug into his pocket for the wad of bills. He started counting off notes, U.S. ones. He counted off a goodly sum and looked at Ava. She nodded. Callum folded the bills once over and placed them in front of the boy. The boy looked at them. Picked them up.

  “They got blood all over ’em.”

  Callum nodded. “Reckon they’ll spend anyhow.”

  The boy crushed the bills in his palm.

  Callum boosted Ava onto Reiver’s back, then mounted. They looked back at the boy. He was still facing the river, his fists balled small and powerless at his sides. Beyond him the northern shore, empty and far.

  Chapter 10

  Four days on wagon roads and horse trails. A cold wind, unrelenting, took the place of rain. Snow dusted their shoulders past dusk on two occasions, and they pushed harder and deeper into the nights, dropping down out of the mountains in darkness. They hardly stopped, hardly slept. Come morning the world would dawn white-haunted with mist, the trees emerging before them like shadows of what they were. Sound carried farther through the sparse wood at morning, eerily clear, and first light no longer afforded them solace or relief or anything save fear of exposure.