by Georgina Gentry - Iron Knife's Family 01 - Cheyenne Captive
“You got a cigar, Jake?” The captain broke abruptly into Jake’s memories.
Jake felt around in the fur vest. “Just my regulars, Cap’n.” He stuck one between his lips and offered one to the officer across the girl’s unconscious form.
“Forget it, then,” Baker growled as he shifted in his saddle and waved his hand away. “Those stogies stink almost as much as you do! Christ! Don’t you ever take a bath?”
Jake didn’t answer. He knew his smell annoyed the more civilized, which delighted him. He never noticed it himself. As he lit up with a match from his little silver match safe, he remembered suddenly why he didn’t like Captain Baker. The kid from New York, except for the accent, reminded him of that uppity St. Clair boy who owned the plantation near the Dallinger’s tumble-down cabin on the edge of the Okefenokee swamp....
Jake glanced at the port wine stain between his fingers as he held the cigar. Yep, he thought. It seemed like every Dallinger had killed somebody in his lifetime. Pa said Great-Great Grandpappy had started it all by killing his brother and the mark had been passed down through the bloodline ever since.
In fact, that’s how the family ended up in Georgia in the first place, Great-Great Grandpappy was in that first shipload of convicts that were among the first settlers of the state. They were all supposed to be debtors, of course, but some thieves and murderers had gotten into the bunch, figuring life in the new wilderness was better than the gallows. The English used to settle a lot of new colonies with convicts, Jake recalled.
Great-Great Grandpappy had got himself a woman on that ship, a serving wench who had stolen a duke’s purse. The Crown thought most of those convicts would die, but they didn’t. The outlaws and scum had retreated back into the remote hills and swamps and there they lived, generation after generation, inbreeding with their own relatives. They scraped a bare living out of the earth, hunted and trapped a little, robbed and stole, and sometimes made and sold whiskey.
Jake’s ma had been a pretty little thing, he remembered, hardly more than a barefoot child when Pa had raped her and then abducted her because she carried his son. Maybe she was a trifle dim-witted from so much intermarriage in her family, but Jake had loved her like he’d loved no other but Texanna. If Ma had been real smart, she never would have gotten mixed up with young St. Clair while she was cleaning at the big plantation house to make a little extra money. . . .
Them damned uppity St. Clairs! If he’d said it once, he’d said it a thousand times! Jake ground his teeth together as he rode along with the girl in his arms. The St. Clairs always called Pa’s family “poor white trash.” But the night they’d needed someone with a reputation for handling a whip, they’d sent for young Jake. Old Mister St. Clair himself requested Jake to come bring his whip to the thousand-acre cotton plantation and make an example of a runaway slave.
Even now, he could remember it all vividly, the crowd of white men gathered by torchlight under the big live oaks with the Spanish moss trailing like ghostly fingers. The St. Clairs herded the slaves out to watch so they would pass the word to all the other plantations about what happened when an uppity black tried to stir up insurrection.
Gawd Almighty! he thought. That big slave was bloody already and had been chewed pretty bad by the tracking hounds. But he was still defiant and fought the men as they dragged him out and hung him up by his hands in front of the barn with his feet barely touching the ground.
“This the only one?” Jake drawled, uncoiling his big whip. He was right proud to be asked to do a man’s job in front of all the white plantation owners and overseers in the area. All the money he’d make this past year from hunting and trapping had gone into paying for that silver-handled whip and he was pleased for a chance to show it off.
Old Mister St. Clair ran his hand through his white hair. “This is the only one left,” he drawled, his voice as slow as the rhythmic cicada insects in the trees. “Dogs killed one of the others and two of them was lost in the Okefenokee as we chased them. You know how the quicksand in that swamp is!”
Young Mister St. Clair, not much older than Jake himself and just back from school in New Orleans, leaned against a wagon wheel and watched. Jake relished the idea of showing off in front of the young dandy. Junior was such a snotty sonovobitch, Jake thought, mostly never botherin’ to speak to the poor whites whose cabins clustered on the edges of his vast holdings.
Drawing back his lash, Jake reveled in being the center of attention. The only time he got noticed at home was when Pa got drunk on homemade moonshine and beat him up. He could remember even now how good it felt to be the center of the drama with the men gathered around, urging him on in the ghostly torchlight. He could almost smell the sweet, decaying scent of the nearby swamp and feel the bite of small mosquitoes humming on the humid air.
The big black screamed as Jake’s lash cut a scarlet ribbon across his gleaming ebony back.
“Hit ’em harder, Jake!”
“Lookit the muscles in that white boy’s arm!”
“Wouldn’t y’all hate to have him use that whip on you?”
Young Jake gloried in the approval of the men as he went to work on the black with a flourish. The men shouted approval as he swung his whip and someone brought out a jug and passed it around the circle. The punishment took on a festival atmosphere. Probably most of them were pretty drunk within a few minutes, he remembered now as he rode toward Fort Smith with the unconscious girl in his arms. Leastways, that’s all he could figure for letting him whip that slave to death. He’d expected to be stopped after a few minutes because big, strong bucks like that one were worth a thousand dollars or more down in the cane fields of Louisiana. Down there in the swamps, they’d soon take the fight out of that black.
But no one stopped him from whipping the huge slave. After the first few blows, the runaway hung unconscious from his wrists and Jake stepped back while someone threw a bucket of water on the man to bring him around.
Old Mister St. Clair nodded approvingly as the slave stirred and moaned, water dripping from him. “Ain’t no use in punishin’ a nigger if he can’t feel it and know he’s bein’ whipped!”
The whiskey jug went around again and Jake himself took a few swigs with the encouragement of old Mister St. Clair who was stumbling drunk by now. Jake felt like a real man tonight and he knew his whole future lay in the way he was handling the whip. By tomorrow, half the county would know what had happened here tonight. In another month, the story would have spread over a wide section of Georgia. He might be offered jobs as overseer on several plantations with a nice cabin of his own and maybe a pretty little mulatto housemaid to warm his bed any time he ordered her to.
But tonight, it was already enough to be the center of attention with men he admired complimenting and encouraging him. He’d never used his whip on a human being before, not that anyone really considered blacks human. Otherwise, the good Lord wouldn’t put them in circumstances to be driven and worked like animals. That damned government up in Washington had passed a law a few years before against importing new slaves from Africa. Of course, there was still a market for them so it was worth the risk to get the extra money for running the blockades. Since the most experienced seamen came from New England, quite a few Yankee fortunes were built on “Black-birding” profits. Why, Jake had heard there was some family with a Dutch name that had made almost a million dollars running the blockades before they became respectable.
Young Jake whipped the slave for two solid hours until his arm was almost too tired to lift the whip. Even throwing water on the black didn’t bring him around anymore. The man’s back was such a bloody map of lash marks that Jake couldn’t see each new one he added to the pattern. Old Mister St. Clair finally stepped forward and jerked the slave’s head up off his chest by his woolly hair. “You can quit whippin’, Jake.” He laughed. “Ain’t no use punishin’ a dead man! I believe you already taught him all the lessons he’s ever gonna learn!”
Jake remembered now how the
white men guffawed and slapped their knees at the good joke and how the slaves had rolled their eyes in terror as the body was taken down.
He hadn’t realized how exciting and arousing it was to hurt someone and make blood run. No wonder his pa always knocked his ma around when he made love to her. Like a pair of cats fightin’ and lovin’ at the same time, he thought.
“Here, Jake, these is for you.” Old Mister St. Clair leaned over the dead body with his penknife and cut something off, handed it to the other. “You deserve this little trophy and, after all, this nigger don’t need his balls no more!”
The crowd roared with laughter as Jake examined the prize along with the gold coins the man handed him. It was the black man’s scrotum. Jake had had the skin tanned as a souvenir and still carried it. Absently, as he rode toward Fort Smith, he reached up to touch the little black coin pouch. Sometimes, he was uneasy about it, for a preacher had told him once each man carried the seeds of his own destruction, whatever that meant. But he never felt uneasy enough about it to throw the coin pouch away. Jake had the slave’s woman the same night he accepted the black’s manhood.
Old Mister St. Clair grinned at him as young Jake wiped the blood off his whip and coiled it up.
“Jake, you ever had a woman?”
“Jest a couple of the little nigger gals I caught out in the cotton patch,” he said, smiling shamefacedly.
“Hell, boy!” the old man cackled. “After what you done tonight, you deserve a real grown woman! I’m gonna give you this dead buck’s gal for the night! She’s locked up down there in his cabin, one of the men will show you the way.” Mister St. Clair winked at him. “Just don’t put too many marks on her, we’re sellin’ her down the river tomorrow. She’s too wild for me or my boy, either!”
She was wild, all right, Jake remembered even now with relish. Not that anyone could hear her fighting and screaming because there was such a drunken brawl for the slave catchers going on up at the big plantation house. His ma had been called in to serve and clean up during the party. But he liked his own little party at the slave cabin better so Jake didn’t go up to the big house. He would never forget that girl, black as a voodoo night and wild as a swamp panther. He’d never had a full-grown woman before and she was beautiful and big-titted, carried herself like an ebony princess. He’d have bought her himself if he’d had that much money.
She’d fought him, but he was bigger and stronger than most full-grown men and somehow the fighting and blood made it twice as good. He’d taken her five times before dawn when the men came to take her away. She’d bit and clawed him and he’d hurt her back. Both of them had been smeared with blood and his manseed.
In the morning, the crowd was still drunk but they all gathered up to accompany old Mister St. Clair down to the river. They took along the slave’s body, too, in a wagon, so they could show it at all the plantations they passed and teach the blacks a lesson. Jake didn’t go, he was too tired, and he noticed young St. Clair wasn’t in the rowdy crowd, either, as they mounted up and accompanied the buckboard down the road. His pa rode up about then, coming to fetch Ma who was still up cleaning at the big house. Pa hadn’t been here last night, he had a batch of sour mash cooking that he’d had to stay home and watch. He looked like Jake, right down to the port wine stain mark.
He and Jake both walked up to the deserted big, white house and went around back like blacks and poor whites always did. But nobody answered their knock and the door stood wide open. When no one responded to their calls, they started looking through the big rooms for Jake’s ma, figuring she was cleaning somewhere in the house. They blundered into an upstairs bedroom and found her naked in bed with young St. Clair.
Even now, Jake remembered the fury and jealousy on Pa’s face as he faced the pair. “Junior St. Clair, I call you out!”
Young St. Clair threw back his head and laughed easily as he got out of bed and reached for his pants on a chair by the fireplace. “Why, you piece of poor white trash! You ought to know better than that! Only a real gentleman can call another gentleman out for a duel! Riffraff like you don’t duel! Anyway,” he gestured toward the pretty, confused woman in the bed, “she ain’t hurt none! Everybody in the county but you two know I been diddling her pretty regular when she comes up to clean. I’m tired of her anyways and I think she’s expecting so I’m already looking for a new gal! Just think, Dallinger, I may have added a little blue blood to upgrade your no-account, poor white trash family!”
Pa hit him then. He grabbed up a poker from beside the fireplace and hit the snooty, smirking face over and over until it was unrecognizable. Jake stood frozen in shock, knowing what would happen for killing an important planter like the St. Clair heir. Then he tried to grab Pa’s arm and stop him but it was already too late.
About that time, his pretty little dim-witted ma saw all the blood and began to scream.
“Shut up!” Pa shouted. “Shut up! You’ll bring all those men back here with that noise!”
But she didn’t stop screaming. Pa hit her to shut her up and her head snapped back. Her skull must have hit the sharp edge of the heavy wood bedstead. Jake lifted her, looked back at the blood on the bed, and then felt it on his hands. “Gawd Almighty, Pa, you’ve killed her! You’ve killed Ma!”
His father sagged a little, all the color draining from his face. “I never meant to hurt either of them,” he said tonelessly. “I only came to fetch her home. But Junior St. Clair said everyone knew, and he laughed! He laughed! If only she hadn’t screamed—”
“We can’t worry about what’s past, Pa!” Jake laid the nude, limp body back across the bed with a sigh. “We’ll have to get out of here before they come back from sellin’ that slave girl.”
“You? You don’t have to run, you didn’t do nothin’!”
Jake shook his head. “You think them men will believe that? They’ll be lookin’ for both of us, Pa! We got to get out of here!”
But the other still stood and looked in shock at the pretty, nude body. “I was crazy about her,” he whispered. “If only Junior St. Clair hadn’t laughed—”
Jake grabbed the man and shook him roughly. “Snap out of it, Pa! We can’t worry about none of that now! The St. Clairs is the richest, most powerful family in Georgia! Our lives ain’t worth spit if we don’t clear outa this whole state!”
“You’re right, son. We’d better each go a different direction so’s they will have a hard time trackin’ us! I’m gonna take my own chances in the swamp! I know it purty well and it’s hard for dogs to track a man through there!”
Jake remembered his own terror even now. “Gawd Almighty, Pa! You ain’t gonna try to make it across the Okefenokee! Iffen the quicksand don’t get you, the alligators and the water moccasin snakes will!”
“I don’t got much choice with the reward old St. Clair will be offerin’ for my hide! You head out west, boy, and if I make it, our paths will cross again sometime!”
Jake nodded, sensing he was seeing his father for the very last time.
Pa turned toward the bed and there were tears in his eyes. “Always remember, boy, a woman caused this! They’re all like that, lettin’ any man hump ’em that has a little gold or pretties to give’em. Remember, all women is whores at heart so just use ’em when you feel the urge and toss ‘em aside! And treat every man like he’s gonna cheat you or try to kill you ’cause most of ’em will. If you’ll remember all that, Jake, you’ll survive in this dog-eat-dog world!”
They’d separated then and Jake blinked back tears as he left the house, thinking of his ma. But he had no time for sadness as he fled for his life. With only his whip and the gold St. Clair had given him, he’d made a run for the wilderness and found himself a job as a drover with a bunch leading wagon trains to Texas.
Pa never made it across the swamp. Jake wasn’t out of the state yet when he heard folks talking about that poor white trash fellow who’d been lost in the trackless Okefenokee. It seemed St. Clair’s hounds lost track of him on
the edge of a deep, slimy pool of quicksand that seemed almost bottomless.
How many years ago had that happened? Twenty-eight? Thirty? He tried to figure as the girl in his arms moaned a little and brought him back to the present. He’d taken Pa’s advice and lived as ruthless and cunning as any predatory animal. He asked no quarter and gave none. And he treated all women like whores because in his heart he was sure they were. Only Texanna had made him think of marriage and in the end she was no better than the others. She’d turned him, a white man, down, while willingly spreading her legs for that savage chief.
The blond girl in his arms stirred a little and her long lashes flickered uncertainly. “Hey, Cap’n Baker,” Jake said. “The lady’s finally beginnin’ to come to!”
“About time! I was beginning to worry!” The captain rode over and peered down anxiously at the semi-conscious girl. “By the way, Dallinger, what about the reward money? What happened to the Indian girl?”
Jake took one last drag on the cigar and tossed it away. “Gray Dove?” He shrugged. “Who knows? Like I tole you before, it was smarter to trail her back to that camp than to trust her to bring the girl to us like she promised. Them Injuns might have decided to move the camp too fast or Gray Dove might have decided to double-cross us. Anyway, I figure I’m entitled to the reward money now.”
“You mean, we’re entitled to the reward money,” the captain said. “I figure I should get half.”
“Anything you say, sir.” Jake gritted his teeth, knowing better than to argue the point. They was all the same, he thought, all them high-class, uppity folks like the St. Clairs who wanted to make it miserable and stomp all over poor folks. “I would like to have one special horse outa that Injun pony herd.” He smiled humbly at the officer. “Iffen you don’t mind, sir, I’d be mighty obliged iffen you was to give me that strange-colored stallion.”