He scanned the path for signs of recent traffic, the prints of little shoes or the imprint of a lady’s bootheel. But the trail was full of the prints of all in the village who did not have wells and used the creek for their domestic water. He could not tell the fresh tracks from the old. The apple was a good sign, but still he could not hear the din of children. Over the soft murmur of the creek, he should have been able to track them with his ears alone. He fed the apple to the horse, who chomped it greedily, then he led it at a quicker pace to the creek.
They came down the hillside to where the road terminated at the water, at the bend where the creek turned east to wend its way down the last of Vinings Mountain to the Chattahoochee at Pace’s Ferry. The mare dropped her head to the creek and began to drink noisily. Canby saw that in the shaded eddies of the creek, under the patches of granite that jutted out from the woods, scrims of ice had formed at the edges of the water.
He thought he heard something like a cry come from over the little falls that terminated his line of vision upstream, the sound muffled by the other sounds of falling water and the horse’s drinking. Quickly, he moved alongside the stream to the waterfall’s base, then started upward, clutching at the mountain laurels for purchase on the steep slope. He could feel icy spray from the falls on his face as he climbed.
At the top of the incline he peered out from the laurel leaves across the broad pool that formed at the head of the waterfall. He saw no children, but as he looked upstream he saw Billingsley, shirtless and streaming water, sitting on one of the boulders at the creek’s edge. Julia was draped across his lap, her hair hanging lank and her clothes clinging to her. Her head was thrown back, limp, and cradled in the crook of Billingsley’s left arm. Billingsley reached around to his hip and drew a knife from his belt and pressed it to Julia’s wan brow. A skinning knife, Canby thought, as he ripped the Bulldog from its holster. Meant for animals.
He fired and saw a chip of rock leap from one of the boulders behind them. Billingsley looked up at the sound of the shot. Canby had his thumb on the hammer of the pistol and was drawing it back to cock it when Billingsley dove into the creek with Julia still in his arms. They disappeared beneath the surface of the pool.
Canby holstered the Bulldog and pulled himself over the crest of the incline. He leaped to the nearest boulder, then the next, making his way as quickly as he could to the head of the pool where they’d gone under. He slipped and fell on one of the moss-covered rocks and brought himself up, cursing, and saw Billingsley pulling himself out of the creek on the far bank, his back dripping water and his pants in tatters, ribbons of the black fabric dangling like drooped feathers over his calves. Canby’s hand was rising toward the Bulldog when he caught a trace of movement in the pool.
It was her skirts, billowing in the currents out from her body where she hung in the deepest water, suspended just above the rocks at the bottom of the pool. He saw that the stream was spinning her slowly, drawing her in drifting arcs closer to the falls. He cried out and leaped from the laurels into the water, firing at Billingsley as he dropped.
He hoped that his shot had not gone wild but as the breath taking cold of the water reached his chest and he heard the second report from the Bulldog just before his head went under he knew that he was hoping against certainty. He dove and reached for Julia and saw the pistol sink to rest on the creek bed as he gathered her into his arms. He slipped an arm around her neck, his elbow coming up under her jaw, and kicked for the surface.
When they broke back into the cold November air Canby saw that Billingsley still stood on the opposite bank, watching them, half concealed behind the trunk of a sycamore. As he pulled Julia across the creek Canby tried to retrieve the pocket revolver from his boot. The motion was awkward and each time he stopped kicking and reached downward, his and Julia’s heads sank beneath the water’s surface. He saw that Billingsley had begun to smile at his struggle—his indecision, his helpless anger. Billingsley reached out an arm, fingers splayed, as though in delectation of what he was witnessing.
Once Canby could feel the rocks beneath his feet he ducked under the water, one hand pushing Julia’s jaw above the surface and the other drawing the pistol from his boot. He surfaced, leveled the pistol at Billingsley, and pulled the trigger. The hammer fell with a dull click. Billingsley’s lips stretched wide, opening on the mouth full of broken teeth in a leering smile, then he disappeared into the leaves of laurel.
Canby stretched Julia out facedown on the bank on the flattest spot he could find. He turned her head to one side, laying it gently against a rock, and began to push and knead her back between the shoulder blades.
After some time he saw that creek water had begun to flow from her mouth with each push against her back but her chest was not rising with breath. He felt his own breath quicken and he pushed harder, shivering. When he saw that no more of the water would come out of her mouth he gathered her in his arms and rose with her dripping form clutched tight to his chest.
“Is he gone, mister?”
Canby turned and saw a girl of perhaps nine or ten standing at the edge of the trees. She stood wringing her hands and her eyes cut from him to Julia and to the laurels on the far side of the creek.
“Yes.”
She looked behind her and children began to emerge, singly and in pairs, from the sycamores. Most were younger than she was, and nearly all of them were crying quietly. “Miss Julia brought us up here to see the ice and that man came out of the woods,” the girl said. “Is she going to be all right?”
“Yes. We just need to get her warm.” Canby nodded to two of the bigger boys, who had stepped up close to look at Julia. “You boys go along up to the schoolhouse and get the stove stoked up high,” he said.
The boys looked to the wooded slope that led to the School Road and shook their heads simultaneously.
“All right, then,” Canby said, “we’ll go together.”
“Was that the devil, mister?” the taller boy asked.
Canby was walking, hugging Julia close. He glanced at the boy as they all started toward the schoolhouse. “Yes,” he said. “It was.”
THEY’D LAID HER out on the pine floorboards beside the stove, a grammar book under her head, two of the girls chafing her hands and feet while Canby stuffed the woodstove to its capacity and watched, shivering, until the iron began to glow gray-orange from the full load of wood. Canby had stretched his jacket across the top of the stove and now that it had begun to steam he laid it over Julia’s midsection. He took one of her hands and rubbed it.
He had dispatched the oldest of the girls to Julia’s house for blankets and a change of her clothes and sent a group of the boys, emboldened once they’d reached the village limits, to fetch Solomon Pace from his ferry with the request that he bring with him whatever firearms he could muster. Now as he knelt and worked on Julia’s arm he reckoned the time since he had pulled her from the creek and gauged it against the coolness of her flesh. He looked at the girls, working steadily though their eyes brimmed with tears, and hung his head.
“Girls,” he said after a moment, “you can go on home now.”
The younger girl sobbed, a barking sound coming out of her little chest. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and said, more a statement than a question, “Is Miss Julia going to wake up?”
The lie was bitter on Canby’s tongue. “Yes. We’ll just let her sleep awhile yet.”
He watched until they had shut the schoolhouse door behind them, then turned to look at Julia again. She was pale but still beautiful and looked indeed to be sleeping, more in repose than in death.
“I’m not fit to speak your eulogy,” he said. Then, after a time, “I should go with you.”
He leaned down and kissed the blue lips for how long he did not know, until he heard the sound of footsteps on the porch boards out front. The door opened quietly and Solomon Pace leaned through the frame. When he saw Julia laid out on the floor he lowered his gray head.
“
Tell me it ain’t so,” Pace said.
Canby shook his head.
“Who was it? Them boys told me a wild story.”
“Robert Billingsley.”
“I thought he was dead.”
“That’s the going opinion. But he’s not.”
“Good God.”
Pace stepped into the room. He had a bundle of quilts under one arm and held a Marlin repeating rifle in his other hand. He leaned the rifle against a desk and began to shake out a quilt, gently. He handed one corner of it to Canby and together they drew it over Julia’s still form.
Pace hitched up the legs of his overalls and squatted on his haunches. “Haven’t been in here since I was a chap,” he said. After a moment of strained silence, he began to recite the Lord’s Prayer. Canby joined him for the last lines of it. They sat in silence then for several minutes, until Canby rose and shouldered his way into his jacket.
“Guess you have business in town to attend to.”
Canby nodded as he buttoned up the jacket, looser now that his chest holster hung empty. He picked up the Marlin.
“I hope you catch that son of a bitch.”
“Not planning to catch him, Uncle Solomon. I aim for it to be pure murder.”
“Well, that Marlin will do the job. It’s the best rifle for deer you’ll find in Cobb County.”
“He’s probably back into Fulton by now.”
“Where’s your horse?”
“Gone. I suppose he took it.”
“Get yourself to the depot. Bet you can catch the five-eighteen if you hurry.”
Canby took a last look at the still form under the quilt and bade his farewell to Solomon Pace and started down the schoolhouse steps, hoping, though he knew better, that Julia might have heard his words to her before her spirit left.
No fit eulogy, he thought, as he walked westward toward the little depot, his heels dragging in the road. He wondered what lines Angus might have used for a meet farewell; perhaps Ecclesiastes, or maybe something more hopeful, from one of Paul’s epistles. He knew Underwood would have cast a vote for Paul. Instead, Canby remembered a line of Emerson’s: “The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.”
But he saw, as he walked toward the sun dipping behind the ridges to the west, that the usual humid haze of the southern air had been abated by the cold front passing through. The air fairly sparkled with clarity. Every crimson leaf still clinging to the branches of the trees was lit crystalline.
Saw that it was going to be a goddamned beautiful sunset.
AND SO HE found himself aboard the Western & Atlantic again, this time headed south.
They bore down, the tracks just perceptibly dropping in altitude beneath them with every mile as they descended into Atlanta, the long line of boxcars behind the engine pressing their weight forward with the dropping grade, pushing their speed. Canby looked out the cab’s window to his left and saw the darkness moving in as the sun withdrew, like a curtain drawn from east to west across the flattening land.
Canby was watching the slice of moon rise in the east when the engineer touched him on his shoulder. He pointed toward the orange and white glow of Atlanta ahead and Canby saw a horse and rider cutting swiftly through the fields that ringed the city’s outskirts, the rider’s shirtless back a splash of white on the dark plain. Canby gave the Marlin to the engineer and began to climb up the side of the locomotive. The engineer leaned out of the engine as Canby found a hold and started up.
“Where’s he heading, you reckon?”
“Just take it to the roundhouse. Don’t let up.”
“I can’t take it into the city running full-out like this.”
“Yes, you can. Stay on him.”
“You gone kill somebody, you know.”
“Yes,” Canby said, “I know.” He stretched himself out on the roof of the cab and rapped on the steel. The Marlin’s barrel came up and he took it and shucked the lever to chamber a round, then looked down the barrel and through the iron sights.
“Mind that stack,” the engineer shouted. “She gets hot.”
Canby did not answer him. Through the sights he saw that Billingsley was hunched close over the horse’s neck like an Indian rider. Steam poured from the horse’s nostrils into the cold night air. He snugged the butt of the Marlin against his shoulder and tried to relax his body against the shuddering of the train and squeezed the trigger.
Billingsley rose from his crouch and sat back in the saddle. He turned and looked over his shoulder at the train and then to the roof of its cab and stretched his lips into the leer Canby had seen at Stillhouse Creek, the white stumps of his cracked teeth just visible as the train closed the distance between them. Canby shucked the lever for another round and as he did Billingsley stood in the stirrups to his full height and raised an arm, fist shaking above it, into the night air.
Canby fired again and Billingsley twisted quickly in the saddle as though shoved by an invisible hand. Canby chambered a fresh round and sighted and saw that Billingsley had begun to pull the reins to his left, away from the railroad tracks. He saw that the horse’s eyes were walled and the bit pulled taut in her mouth was coated and dripping with froth. How the poor mare could be running at speed through this, the second of her day’s journeys, Canby could not imagine. Still, she ran at full sprint as though she believed her speed could outdistance herself from the creature clinging to her back.
He squeezed the trigger and the horse shuddered and sidestepped. A burst of blood, slick-black against the dark hide, bloomed on her shoulder. Billingsley bent down over her neck again and pulled harder to the left, his heels kicking into her sides. The train was gaining ground on them. The moon was rising and it shone down on the plain, where patches of ice glinted silver in its light. Canby looked ahead as the train pulled nearly alongside horse and rider and saw that the northernmost of the city’s foundries was looming on the horizon, where it split the railroad tracks from the beginnings of Marietta Street.
Billingsley seemed to have seen it as well. As the horse veered farther from the tracks he flashed another of his broken smiles at Canby and Canby fired again and saw that blood was flowing down Billingsley’s side. The train had pulled ahead now and Canby sat up and turned to take his aim alongside, backward. He leaned against the engine’s stack, feeling the steam heat come through his jacket, burning, as he levered again and his shot went wild, the rifleman having lost count of the rounds he had left, and he fired again and saw another bloom of blood on the horse’s haunch and Billingsley’s fist rising into the air, and then as Canby raised the rifle his vision was truncated by the corrugated tin walls of the foundry and its loading docks, the dark tin hulk of it severing him from Marietta Street and his target, where Billingsley was now, he knew, making headway down the broad thoroughfare to the city’s center.
The engineer pulled down on the steam whistle to warn the city of the missile entering its limits and Canby howled with it, the rage and frustration that billowed forth from his windpipe shaking his rib cage. He pounded the roof of the cab with the butt of the rifle until he dented the steel. He looked again to his left and could see, periodically, in the yards that marked gaps between the houses that lined Marietta Street, glimpses of horse and rider making their own way south. In the moonlight and the flickering light of the street-corner lamps, both were glistening with free-running blood.
Then he was conscious of the pain in his back. He pulled himself away from the smokestack and felt the skin peeling away. He screamed again, his voice mingling with the shriek of the whistle. He leaned over, eyes smarting with tears, and pressed a fist to his forehead. The chill of the night air washed over his wounded back and when he trusted that he could stand again he tossed the Marlin into the cab, then, climbing down, followed it.
The engineer had one hand on the brake lever and the other hung on the strap that sounded the whistle as though he meant to pull it loose. If he had heard the rifle clatter to the floor he gave no sign
of it, his eyes were so intently fixed on the tracks ahead and on the pedestrians hustling off the tracks. But he cut his eyes away from the tracks when Canby bent to pick up the Marlin.
“Christ, mister! I warned you about that stack.”
Canby rose with the rifle in his arms, wavered, then straightened. “Any whiskey on this train?”
Without looking aside again, the engineer took his hand off the brake and fished it into the front of his overalls. He pulled out a flask and held it for Canby to take.
“You may as well drink it all. They’ll call me on the carpet in the morning, no doubt. Better it’s you who wakes up with fumes on his breath than me.”
Canby turned it up and gulped the whiskey like water. He took a breath and turned it up again, pulling on the flask until it was empty. He moved to drop the flask in the man’s back pocket, but the engineer shook his head.
“Keep the flask. I’ll get me another if I ever have another payday with the W&A. Can I slow it down now, captain?”
Canby looked out ahead. The gulch of the rail yard was ahead and beneath them. He could not see, but knew, that in a few blocks this single track would split into two, with two more splitting off those in turn, to make up all the siding lines that formed the yard before they whittled back down to the single set that entered the roundhouse from the north. There the trains could be turned, and repaired if need be, and spun around on the great wheeled machinery of the roundhouse either to go back in the direction from which they had come, or else turned onto the tracks running northeast and southwest, or southeast to Augusta or due west to Birmingham.
But all this, on the unlighted rails, he could not see. He saw instead the lighted grids of the city’s gaslights, brightest at the center, subdivided out and diminishing into darkness at the borders. Saw, too, a set of brighter, clearer lights that clustered in the few blocks around Calhoun and Kimball streets, where the superior electric light originated, then ran in a straight westward line out to Oglethorpe Park, glowing in a white aura above the exposition.
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