by Taylor Brown
Come nightfall they feared what they couldn’t see. The crack of broken wood, the rustle of dead leaves gained weight and force, striking through Callum like a blade to the bone. It was like the fleshy hide that bound him was worn too thin, and the whole world had gone sharp-edged on him, sight and sound. On his bad side, he could hear only faint mufflings, too easily shaped or misshaped by his imagination into something sinister. He knew Swinney would know which ear had been blown bloody and unhearing, and so might the other men know and attack from that angle.
What kept them going was the nearing of the city, the army of bluecoats into which they might slip unmolested, their pursuers daunted. They crossed the state line and redoubled their pace. They rode day and night, stopping no more than an hour or two at a time. Just long enough for the horse to feed, for them to shovel crumbs into their mouths. The meat was gone, the hardtack nearly. Ava started taking turns at the reins while Callum slumped behind her, asleep.
Gradually they found themselves pushing ahead of the coming winter, the turning of season. It was different here. There were leaves yet unfallen on the trees, blood-colored and gold over green-brown fields that held grazing livestock like some kind of heaven. They thought of poaching a hog or cow but why stop—so near was refuge, the city of Atlanta. It had to be close. Better to push past hunger, hard-riding beyond regard for anything save the ribbed engine of flesh that carried them. This they maintained at all costs, feeding Reiver the best they could, whispering words of encouragement into his tall ears. There was good grass and shrubs for him, and even as they rode he would extend his neck and snatch hanging leaves and standing brush to eat. Callum loosened the cinch whenever he could to avoid sores, and he checked the horse’s hooves each day for thrush or cankers, for sand cracks or bruises or puncture wounds of any kind. Reiver would lift his feet for inspection, obedient as any soldier, before they rode on.
One night, they sat on the bank of a stream that crossed a meadow, staking Reiver to graze. Ava lay back against the earth, her hands folded across her belly.
“That story you told before—have you ever been?”
“To Atlanta?” He lay beside her, shoulder to shoulder, his hat against his chest, and looked up at the stars. “No, I just heard stories. We were mostly in the mountains. The Carolinas, Tennessee.”
“Did you ever think of running away, making for the coast yourself?”
Callum rubbed his thumb along the brim of the hat, looking up.
“I can’t say I really did, much as I should of. Not then. I don’t know—bad as the Colonel’s men were, I reckon it’d been a long time since I felt I belonged someplace.”
She nodded. “I used to think I belonged in that valley. Couldn’t really imagine myself anyplace else. But when the letters quit coming from Daddy and Jessup, it was like the light went out. I got to feeling closed in, the walls of the house and the hills past that. Feeling this darkness scratching at the door, skittering cross the roof.” She paused. “I was starting to think of hurting myself.”
Callum rolled onto his side, propping his head on his hand.
“Then we turned up, done it for you.”
She nodded, squinting at the stars. “Sometimes I worry I didn’t fight him hard enough. Like maybe I deserved what I got.”
Callum turned fully onto his stomach.
“Look at me,” he said. “Nobody deserves that. Nobody. Only one got what he deserved was the Colonel, and a long time coming at that.”
She rolled up onto one elbow, brushing the hair from his brow. Her face was close to his.
“Roll back over,” she whispered. She nestled her head into his shoulder, her leg on his thigh, her hand over his heart like a pledge. “You think they got coffee in Atlanta, not just the chicory stuff?”
Her knee was touching his groin now; he could feel himself engorging. He licked his lips.
“Girl, they just might, and sugar, too. Butter to fatten you up—”
There was a crack from the woods, as of a stepped-upon limb, and they bolted upright. Before they knew it they were on the horse, in flight, the creek left far behind.
Soon they began chancing the clay roads under cover of darkness. These crisscrossed the hills, red-beaten by day, empty by night save the odd mule cart or ranging head of cattle. There were no low-hanging branches to snag or slow them, no potholes to break a horse’s leg like the crack of ax-felled timber. Few creatures but the raccoons and nighthawks to bear witness to their passage, and scarce evidence even of these, as if some curfew had been imposed on man and beast alike.
They were hard upon a road that wound among homesteads all hill-settled and black-windowed with sleep when Callum first glimpsed a strange glow in the night sky. Sunrise, he thought. But no, it couldn’t be. It was the wrong hour, from the wrong direction. He looked to the stars. They were obscured in a scud of low-hanging cloud. He looked back at Ava. Asleep.
The tiniest fear began to simmer in his gut, like some reflection of the fired sky. He couldn’t say why. Before long his eyes were burning. He didn’t know what was wrong with him. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. It was stopped up, runny, the mucus dark.
Ava stirred. She sniffed.
“You smell that?”
“Smell what?”
“Something burning.”
The road swung upward before them to crest the highest hill of the night, and crest it they did, boy and girl and horse, the three of them struck suddenly rigid in the road as before them a firestorm raged upon the city of their hope. A hundred fires, a thousand. Every last thing ablaze save a single mountain of bald stone upon which great mirrored flames reeled and surged, the city below it thrust heavenward in snarling fury, in leaping spires and spits of flame, a fortress raised up in terrible light. Glowing cinders raced into the sky, the remnants of homes and markets, depots and factories, and the fires jumped easily from place to place, hungry to feed, the flames building upon one another in ever greater ramparts.
This once-great railway terminus, its iron rails radiating outward to the great cities of the South—it was like a heart destroyed, ground black beneath the flames. Smoke poured from the wreckage, so much darker than the surrounding night, churning in great towers against the sky, monuments raised as if to the wrong kind of god. Now and again the smoke pulsed, as a thundercloud would, swallowing up explosions of powder stores and munitions, and rockets tore across the night like panicked messages. Flames scrawled wildly through the outer streets, climbing whole buildings in an instant, shooting out of windows and doors, and the avenues were full of burning wagons, caught fire before they could escape.
They were miles distant, the riders, and they could almost hear the roar.
Callum slipped off the horse and walked to the edge of the road and sat. He stared, disbelieving, for a long time. He could hardly breathe, like the fire had sucked the air from the night. This was beyond hell, beyond any biblical image of torment. This was real, and it was happening as if it happened just for them.
Something broke loose inside him, came screaming through his clenched teeth. He grasped fistfuls of hair and twisted and yanked, screaming bulb-eyed, blood-faced, until all of the air had been retched out of him. His lungs empty, his vision starry. His head between his knees.
When he looked up, Ava was sitting beside him, watching the city burn. She was calm, her face like porcelain, hard and smooth. The far-off flames licked the risen contours of cheek and bone, vanished in those gaunt hollows long-carved by the world she’d known. After a while she reached over, not looking, and took his hand.
“The coast,” she said. “We got to keep moving.”
Callum nodded. He took a deep breath and stood. Ava, too. He turned and looked to the descent of the road behind them. He was afraid to look too long, like he might invite things he did not want to see. They got back on the horse, and Callum settled himself as far toward the rear of the saddle as he could, as near to Ava. He clucked and Reiver started them down the road. No
w and again through the night they caught sight of the distant inferno, and that bright city, however flame-ridden and damned, seemed only to darken the lonesome outlands before them.
* * *
The two boys appeared barefoot from the woods with a pair of hounds on rope leashes. The dogs were harnessed by an intricate series of knots and slipknots, and the slack of the ropes was spooled around the boys’ chests and shoulders. They stood straight-backed and rigid before the slave hunter’s smoke horse. They were his sons.
“Where’s the rest of them?” he asked, frowning at the two dogs.
“Yonder,” said one of the boys, throwing his arm behind him. There was a log house with V-notched corner timbers, and before this a dog kennel with expensive wire fencing. “Inside.”
The riders nudged their horses forward, the slave hunter leading. He rode up to the very edge of the kennel and looked a long time at the dead hounds it housed, the streaks and scrapes and pools of blood gone dark. He looked at the exploded skulls, the black blood of punctured guts, the spilled intestines and shot-scattered brains. He looked a long time to where one of them, Star, had dragged herself gut-shot to a corner to die.
His favorite.
“We took Polly and Sergeant into the woods when they come through. We couldn’t get ’em all. They say Sherman put out a order for all nigger dogs to be shot.”
Clayburn lifted one leg over the saddle, dropping off it without turning his back on the kennels. He took the leash ropes of the two surviving hounds, both in hand, and tied them around his saddle horn. Then he stood over the two boys. They did not flinch, waiting. He cuffed one on the cheek, then the other.
“You boys should’ve cleaned this up already,” he said. “You do it soon’s we’re gone.”
They nodded.
Clayburn nodded and held out his hand behind him, toward the riders, not looking at them. His fingers were open, his palm white.
“Mr. Swinney,” he said, “let’s see that scrap of coat.”
The fat man took a deep breath and looked around him at the other riders. Nothing but hard eyes, the kind that told him they’d rip those rags from his saddlebags themselves if he didn’t surrender them. He wiped the back of his hand across his beard and then rode forward, digging through his saddle for a scrap of the oversized coat the boy had been wearing on his sickbed, before the girl had made him another. The dogs quivered with desire, wet-mouthed, waiting to be loosed.
* * *
A cold sun broke through the trees, watery and pale. In the west, columns of smoke hovered wind-bent over the razed city, the ruin itself hidden somewhere beneath the close-pressed horizon of hills and fields. The odor of burning pine stung the air, acrid, and when the wind was right a pall of ash descended upon horse and riders and road. When this happened they rode with bolts of torn fabric covering their faces like highwaymen or bandits. They saw no one about. The slanted shacks and porch-wrapped houses were shut-doored, silent.
“You think it was a accident?” asked Callum.
“I don’t know,” said Ava. “I don’t know if I want to know.”
The trail had branched sometime in the night onto a narrow-tracked farm road, skirting east of the city. Black and russet cattle ranged in the fields to either side, sharp-boned and lean, their backs ash-dusted like a faint powdering of fresh fall. Callum found himself watching them huddle and graze. Found himself lusting for the slim red muscles, the white-marbled fat beneath their hides.
“We got to eat,” said Ava. She touched her belly as she said it, not knowing she did, and Callum didn’t know if it was the hunger or the baby that pained her, or both.
“I know it.”
Callum looked around for house or barn or man. Saw nothing. He rode them off the road into the rolling pastureland. The herd lowed as they passed, unalarmed. Callum rode to a far edge where a large cow and her calf stood near the trees. Both were the color of rust. He dismounted the horse and drew his pistol, then thought better of it.
“Borrow your knife?”
Ava nodded. She handed it to him from somewhere under her quilt.
He walked toward the cows, unfolding the small blade from the handle. He looked at the big one. He did not want to kill more than they could take. He looked at the smaller one, grazing close behind its mother. Its bright eyes welled with his reflection, and it became nervous. He started talking to it. Comforting it. Speaking in a low and soothing murmur. He got close enough to lay his free hand on the notch between the eyes. He rubbed it there. It looked up at him. He flicked the blade across the neck from underneath, laying open the artery. The calf screamed, and its mother, seeing, leapt backward with a long moan. But she could do nothing. The small heart continued to beat. It pumped in mindless cadence, machinelike, all that life spurting red-bright and rhythmic into the morning sun. The calf staggered and sank to the ground, then laid its head down as the spurts grew weaker and weaker, a fountain dwindling. Callum watched the white wisping of the calf’s breath diminish in the cold air. The once-bright eyes became glazed, unseeing.
He pulled the dead calf into the trees, and Ava rode the horse in behind him. He turned the animal onto its back, russet with a soft white belly. He drove the knife into the rear of the animal, between the legs.
“Not that hard!”
He turned, and she was already jumping off the horse.
“You can’t go that deep. You’re gonna pierce the rectum, spoil the meat.”
She crouched beside him and put her hand on his shoulder.
“Let me see the knife.”
He handed it to her, watching as she cut delicately into the rear of the animal, opening a vent, and pulled out the tubelike organ.
“You got a string or something? We got to tie it off so it won’t leak.”
He got her a length of pigging string.
“Perfect,” she said.
Then she made a small incision at the base of the abdomen, sticking two fingers into the cavity to guide the blade up through the downy belly, toward the breastbone.
“You got to use your fingers,” she said. “Make sure you don’t puncture something you shouldn’t.”
She cut the membrane that lined the ribcage, the thin whitish one that held everything in place, and reached in among the organs, pulling out the heart, lungs, windpipe. Together they rolled the animal on its side. Out spilled viscera in coiled piles, and so much blood—a flood of it over the fallen leaves. It was bright as anything. Steaming.
She went for the backstraps first, those tender lengths on either side of the backbone. Callum unstrapped the bedroll and laid it open on the ground, piling in a bed of dry grass and leaves, and she laid the bloody cuts of meat in neat rows as they came free from the animal. She’d taken off her quilt and she was red to the elbows from the work. Finished, she rinsed herself from the beef bladder while Callum rolled up everything in the bedroll. He could feel the warmth of the meat, even through all that tight-rolled wool and grass, like there was something still alive in there.
“We best get a couple miles from here,” he said. “Make sure nobody runs up on us enjoying their stock.”
Ava nodded and took the roll, handing him the knife.
“You hold on to it.”
“Your knife?”
“Our knife.”
They mounted and rode back across the field and onto the road to find a place to avail themselves of their poached meal. They were on the road an hour longer, the sun’s ascent not yet noon-high, when spires of new-risen smoke appeared along the horizon before them, east of the city. As the day progressed, they watched these columns of smoke track eastward along the sky, as if locomotives were racing from the city on course for the sea, heralded by buzzards and crows.
“Ain’t looking like an accident now,” said Ava.
“Not by a long shot,” said Callum. “Only the army could do that.”
“What’s there to burn thataway?”
“Between here and Savannah, I don’t know. Looks like t
hey aren’t being real particular about it.”
“Least it’s not us they’re after.”
Callum leaned and spat. “We get in their way, I don’t reckon it’ll matter.”
The rough track they were riding grew sandy for several miles through a thick wood, pines grown dark and arrow-straight from a floor of cones and straw. They crossed creeks that ducked and twisted through the terrain, and the trees latticed the sky so close-clutched and crooked they could hardly see the smoke or sun. The earth they rode was red, rust red, and when the trees would clear and the land open, they could see the dry creeks and washes that scored the hills like wounds.
Toward noon the sky darkened, as if by storm, and they could hold out on the meal in the bedroll no longer. The track opened onto a channel cut treeless through the wood. A railway, or what was left of one. Massive stacks of torn-up rail ties were piled, smoldering, as far as they could see in both directions. Blue towers of smoke hung over them, and where the tracks curved out of sight, yet more smoke spiraled out of the trees.
They looked from the sky back to the ground. In the grass, once-straight iron rails lay scattered, newly demented into violent angles, acute and obtuse, as if by the hand of some race of men with such cruel strength to torque them. But the power, Callum saw, was one of mind: The angle-pivots were blacked with heat, like smithy’s work in the grass.
Ava tapped his shoulder and pointed across. Callum looked. There, on the far side of the tracks, a rail had been twisted around the trunk of a pine tree like an iron necktie, the wooden neck choked and scorched. Up and down the tree line he saw other rails tree-bent in like fashion, a whole piney wood manacled in iron. An entire railroad ripped up, ruined. The force it took, the sheer scale, dried up his mouth.
“Jesus,” he said.
They sat the horse a long time, listening at the edge of the trees: nothing. They rode out toward the nearest pile of cross-stacked wood. It was red-hearted with heat, the outer ties ash white. They dismounted the horse and unrolled the blanket. They pierced the rough-cut steaks with whittled sticks and squatted side by side. The red flesh hissed over the coals.