by Taylor Brown
“Wonder what future people will think,” said Ava. “Finding all this. The trees gone, all these irons dug up from the ground. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.”
“Nobody’s like to forget this,” said Callum. “Not soon, I reckon.”
“I don’t know,” said Ava. “You’d be surprised what people’ll forget.”
Callum looked at the loop-bent irons, imagining what people who didn’t know better might think. How they might think them the shackles of forgotten giants, or the letters of a lost language. The ruinations perhaps of an angry god, bending a once-straight world to his will.
Ava turned her meat over the fire.
“They squeezed their fun out of it, you can tell.”
Callum nodded. You could see they’d tried all sorts of shapes, testing their creativity. Mainly a single bend or loop, but there were a few triangles. Trees coiled as if by iron snakes. A couple of M’s or W’s—someone’s initials, no doubt. And there, down the line, a crude pentagram leaning against a tree.
“Reminds me of the Colonel, almost.”
A kind of growl in Ava’s throat. “What fun he had?”
Callum nodded. “You know, he was a tenor before the war. Like in a choir or something. And he could mimic a baby wailing like nobody else. We’d come up on a encampment, and he’d let out a cry, just out beyond the line where a single sentry could hear. It was perfect, just like a baby left all alone in the woods. He’d perfected it. Of course the sentry’d hear and come investigate. The Colonel’d cut his throat, then leave him there to be found come morning. He’d come back to camp just beaming after. So proud of himself. He was having the best time. He might do it two or three nights in a row, and each night the other sentries would stay closer to camp. Scared. Before long they were too close to warn of a force come riding through in the night.”
Ava shook her head, as if to get the thought out.
“Bastard,” she said.
They stared at the meat awhile, letting the smell waft up and around them. Callum’s mouth was wet now, a hot spring bubbling up. After a minute, Ava pulled her steak from the fire and eyed it good.
“Not quite there, but I don’t think I can wait.”
“I ain’t,” said Callum, biting into his.
Ava watched him, a grin trembling across her mouth.
“How is it?”
Callum didn’t bother to swallow first.
“Heaven,” he said.
The steaks were unbelievably tender, like something for dessert. They ate them with their hands, tearing them with their teeth, and put more on the spits. They had two cuts apiece, then three, the red meal smeared across their lips. They smiled at each other, over this greatest of feasts, like wild things from the woods. Callum felt the fat and muscle warming his gut, like it might really replenish his thin-worn flesh, his beat-up spirit.
He got up and walked to the horse and retrieved the jar Lachlan had given them, unopened since the mountain storm, and brought it to the fire. Ava raised an eyebrow at him. He unscrewed the cap and took a big slug. He handed the jar to Ava and she did the same, her sip almost dainty in comparison. Callum felt one corner of his mouth turn up.
“Don’t want to start him too early, huh?”
“Or her. Rather not birth me a little tosspot.”
“I don’t guess you got to worry too much. One thing I’ll say for the Colonel: I never seen him drunk.”
Ava exhaled through her teeth, handing him the jar.
“Little blessings,” she said.
“He was a Irishman, now then you might have to worry.”
She grinned, watching him have another slug. “It seems so. Was your daddy a big drinker?”
Callum handed her the jar, beginning to feel himself swoon on the meat and mash.
“I heard he had a taste for the poteen, that pot liquor they made, but he was never mean or nothing that I recall.”
She handed back the jar. “I thought you didn’t remember him.”
“There’s a couple things I do.”
“Like what?”
Callum squinted one eye, holding the jar against his chest.
“His jaw. Scratchy and square and red, like a brick. I remember rubbing my face against it.”
Ava nodded. “My daddy wore a beard, and when I was a little girl I used to sit in his lap evenings while he read and try and braid his chin whiskers. Thinking back, I can’t believe he’d let me.”
Callum leaned back, rubbing his nearly vacant chin.
“Tell you what. When this here beard comes in full, you can braid it anytime you like.”
A wicked light came into her eyes.
“Can I sit in your lap while I do it?”
“Girl, there’s another thing you can do anytime.”
Afterward they rose, sated, into the smoky twilight of the noon hour, a man-made dusk yet haunted by the soundless echo of screaming iron, roaring flame, the step and fall of marching boots. Callum knew the power that had wrought such damage upon the land was enemy to the power that pursued them, and so he tried to take some small comfort in the ruin all around them. However much he could. He walked back toward the horse, his blood thick and roaring. He boosted Ava onto the horse and helped himself into the saddle.
The horse moved out along the ruined railroad. Callum knew they should keep to the trees, but the smoking sun was upon their shoulders and necks, the fired rail ties radiant in the cold like a pathway made warm especially for them. The horse stepped carefully between the heat-bent rails, the cold grass crackling underneath his hooves. His angular shoulders flexed and relaxed, flexed and relaxed. The movement was uniform, soothing. Callum’s eyes grew heavy, so heavy. He could not go to sleep. Should not. His head dipped. He caught himself and lifted his chin. Again. Again.
He let himself float upon his perch above the ground, lulled toward the dark and womblike beckon of sleep, distant, a seeming reprieve from the meanness of the outer world. He felt Ava slowly reach her arms around him, as if in embrace. She took up the reins, riding them toward a path into the sheltering pines, out of the open.
* * *
Callum dreamed. He dreamed of riding horseback through hills snow-laden and naked, no cover save a handful of leafless trees upthrust from the ground like the crippled hands of supplicants. Arrested, perhaps, in the final throes of some clawed-after resurrection. The sun was dark as a hole stoved in the white and featureless sky, and cold, an inverse of the self it lent to the world of men. A freezing wind skirled across the land, whipping powder in wind-torn tracings off the sharp slopes, stinging Callum’s face with nettles of ice. He went to raise a scarf over his mouth and nose but found nothing on him, no clothes, his body naked to the pale flesh, the sharpened bone.
There was something on the horizon behind him. A blot, black as india ink, but alive, moving. He watched it bleed down the crest of a distant slope in the dark-flowering blush of something spilled. He watched it gather quivering and lakelike in the bottomland a single moment, only to burst suddenly forth in a shape wild and amorphous upon the hills, black-surging, emerging as it approached into a running of wolves. Beasts begotten of a single point and singular still, their eyes like carved marbles of ice with black stavings of sight by which to track him. The furred rush of them dropped into and out of sight as they tore across the hills toward him, leaving no prints he could see in their wake.
He turned and whipped the horse for speed, surmounting the nearest slope, dropping suddenly into a valley littered with the burned-out wreckage of machines. Strange machines wrought of iron and brass, none recognizable, all trailing long streaks of soot as though someone had tried to slog them to a place upon the barren expanse he didn’t know where. He shot past them upon the dense-packed snow and glanced over his shoulder. He saw the hoofprints of the horse pooling ink-dark behind them. He realized the beast was melting away underneath him, giving out its black liquid of being with every step, the hounding wolves seeming to rise and multiply upon the dead-pool
ed remnants.
When the legs of the horse had given fully away, the belly struck the ground. The legless chassis of horseflesh rolled screaming underneath him, and he was flung forward across the snow. Then up and running, the wolves right upon him, and on the far side of the next-nearest snowdrift lay a huge and sunken hole like the mouth of a mine shaft drilled vertical to the core of the world. He stood upon the edge of the abyss and looked back toward the wolves, which were not wolves now but men on horseback wearing the flayed and gutless hides of wolves. As they came down upon him so hungry, so vicious, he knew if he stood his ground at the edge they would be taken with him into the well of darkness from which the twisted black hands had clawed so long to rise. The wolves crested the nearest snowdrift high and dark and mighty and the dream ended.
* * *
Callum woke. Ava’s arms were encircling his small waist. She was holding the reins. Straight shafts of pine stood close upon every side of them, the forest hazed by ragged traces of smoke. Slants of late sun struck here or there through the overhang of branches.
They had been a long time in the smoky wood when they forded a slow-moving creek and broke upon a rolling field littered with leavings of a battle months old: crumbling earthworks and blasted trees and long trenches like mass graves. There were ammunition pouches, emptied, and dented canteens and haversacks forsaken by men fleeing or dead. A single weathered slouch hat, upturned and punctured, rolled in lazy circles when the wind nudged it.
Callum looked to the west and saw why a battle had once taken place here. The land rolled nearly unobstructed toward the city. The once-great cotton warehouses smoldered now amid the neat outlay of streets like so many great boxes of coal, and the hulking depots that lined the railroad yards had been scorched black, their windows gaping upon the wreckage before them. Skeletal remnants of storefronts flickered, fire-hollowed, and much of the city had simply collapsed, imploded, nothing save for piles of blackened timber and here or there a lone chimney, scorched. The air was strange and dusky, a red sun hanging over the scene like some savage ornament.
They stared upon it all for a long time. From the hilltop the previous night, the flames had been lurid, unearthly, the surface of a sun against cold space. Here, now, they saw there was truly nothing left for them in this city. No shelter, no army. A city charred and ash-ridden, to be reconstructed along some dim blueprints of memory or not at all.
From an outer quadrant of the city came a white flash and resounding boom. An ignited arsenal. There followed the staccato crack of other munitions, cartridges or packaged gunpowder, the city warring upon itself. They turned the horse and rode quickly along the edge of the battlefield, close to the trees, and gained a new trail, east, in the wake of new smoke. Callum watched it drift through the pines. If there were anything to daunt the men pursuing them, it was an army of their enemy willing to torch so mighty a city and blaze like-minded for the sea. This hope sung in his chest a moment, but then he looked back a last time at the city. He could almost hear the echo of heavy boots, the crunch of broken glass, the screams of a night ago. He turned away, the feeling of lightness lost.
They decided to bed down that night near a shallow river, more like a stream. Several white cravats of churned current were visible in the starless dark. The water and rocks were murmuring to one another as they always would, their talk ever-changing with rains fallen or unfallen, rocks lodged or dislodged in the drunken eddies and rips.
Ava began to gather up kindling for a fire. Callum looked around, the world hidden in such inky shadow, a fire beckoning to anyone in the night. Not least the riders hard upon them somewhere in the angular ridges and ravines of pine through which they’d come.
“You think we ought to risk it?” he said when she returned with an armload of tinder.
“I think we have to,” she said. “I think the cold’s coming again.”
Callum watched her words cloud as she spoke.
* * *
The morning cold lay frost-spoken upon the shadowed pine and river rock. They unwound their limbs from the weathering embrace in which they found themselves. The fire was nothing but embers, and Reiver was ready to move. As Callum went to relieve himself in the woods, the horse positioned himself in front of him.
“Just give me a minute,” said Callum.
They forded the shallow wash of the river and followed the same trail they’d struck from the battlefield. Within a half hour it curved and ended into a much wider road of reddish clay. The thoroughfare had been churned mightily by boots, hooves, wagon wheels—the passing of an army column. The clay of the road had frozen this way, a treacherous and unending range of miniature peaks, jagged and uncertain enough to thwart the horse. Instead they rode upon the shoulder, hugging themselves against the cold.
When the sun loomed higher, it illuminated a glittering sky, the cold smoke light-spangled by an infinite sum of flurried ice. They followed the road into a town, no other way to go, and found themselves surrounded by unpainted buildings, some just burned-out husks, and everywhere a whelm of stone-faced women and girls who looked at this curious pair of riders without seeing them. Some of the women stared out from broken windows, some from slanted stoops, one or two upon their bare and blackened knees in the cold, hands clasped. There were sundry items yanked willy-nilly into the streets. Thickly padded chairs and sofas ripped open by excavating saber. Bolts of calico and silk. A mahogany hutch overturned in the middle of the road, the sterling silverware thrown across the ground like the glittering spillage of a wounded machine.
Toward the city square there was a grand piano set rakishly in the road, as if they had entered a world where people with fine English pianos chose to play them in the streets for all to hear. Callum reined in the horse alongside the instrument and looked into the brassy innards straight-strung beneath the propped hood.
“He played good, I’ll give him that.”
They looked toward the voice. A woman sat in a rocking chair on a nearby porch, knitting. She looked up at them.
“Who did?” Callum asked.
“That Pennsylvania boy that drug it out there with his friends. Played like some kind of a prodigy, you ask me.”
“What did he play?” asked Ava.
The woman shrugged. “Bach, Beethoven, Mozart. All the Germans he could play. Dutchman himself, by the sound of him.”
“So the army came through here?” asked Callum.
The woman had a length of sharp-pointed bone through the bun of her steely gray hair, same as the needles she knit with. She nodded. “You ever think,” she said, not looking at them, “you ever think how many songs will go unwritten because of this war, unsung? Paintings unpainted, discoveries unmade? You ever think of that?”
Callum and Ava looked at each other.
“Probably you haven’t,” she said. “You the ones would write them anyway. You or ones like you.”
She looked up at them from her knitting for the first time. Callum looked at her and was suddenly aware of the people around them in the gray light and cold, people at the corners of his vision. They were gape-mouthed, broken. Not this woman, though. She looked right into him.
“You seen any more of that army behind you?” she asked.
“No, ma’am.”
The woman nodded, satisfied, and put down her needles. She began unwinding the thick-wound ball of yarn. Callum and Ava watched her, somehow enthralled. Its diameter grew smaller and smaller. After a time a glint of gold peeked through the yarn, then another. When she was done, she held a gold timepiece in her hand, the subterfuge of yarn unspooled in her lap. Her mouth moved toward a smile but didn’t get quite that far, her bottom lip trumping her top, her eyes hooded toward what the watch hands were telling her. She watched them a long moment, as if deciding whether to forgive them for some lie they told her.
“You ain’t no thieves, are you?” she asked, her eyes so set on the pocket watch that Callum and Ava weren’t sure if it was them she was talking to or the watch
hands. In a moment she looked up at them, as if to resolve the question.
Callum and Ava looked at each other. Ava looked at her.
“No, ma’am,” she said. “Not if we can help it.”
The woman sucked at a tooth and looked squint-eyed in both directions, and then slipped the watch furtively into a pocket sewn in her dress.
“Everybody’s gonna have to be something they don’t want to after this,” she said, sweeping the square with her eyes. “You two best be getting on. Sit a animal like that round here long enough, people liable to get suspicious.”
They looked around and saw eyes upon the horse, sizing up the high legs and thick musculature for banknotes or food or maybe just some quick-triggered hope of escape.
Callum clucked and Reiver started to move forward, but Ava pulled at his shoulder and the horse stopped. Ava looked at the woman.
“We got some people after us, ma’am. A one-armed man and some others. Probably best you keep your distance they come riding through.”
The woman did not quit her knitting. “I’ll be right here,” she said.
“We don’t want you to have more trouble than you got here already.”
“I hate the Yankee much as the next one, love, but I lost me a husband and two boys already. This is what it takes to bring my last boy home, so be it.”
“I don’t think you under—”
“Don’t you go telling me what I know and don’t, girl. I’ll be right here, knitting this here scarf. Winter’s coming, and my boy’s like to be cold without one.”
Ava bit her lip, nodded, and tapped Callum’s leg. He clucked and the horse moved on along the road. At the intersection ahead they kept east, following in the tracks of the marching army. They looked back once, both together, and saw the old woman bent yet at her knitting. Her scarf.
Her hope.
* * *
That day they passed beneath the shadow of the great stone mountain that stood just east of the city. It rose bald from the land, like a giant lump of sugar, ungreened save the scantest patches of vegetation. The early snow had turned for a time to rain, and torrents bounded down channels long-cut in the granite dome, crashing and glittering under the thawing sun.