—Back up to this little poplar, Inman said. He took the lead rope off the horse and with it tied the preacher by his neck to the tree. Inman took the loose end of rope and drew it over the preacher’s shoulder and tied his wrists tight behind him.
—Stand here real quiet and we’ll all live through this, Inman said.
He lifted the girl from the horse and adjusted her in his arms to a good balance for carrying. An arm under her waist, another under her soft thigh backs. Her dark head rested on his shoulder and her hair swept across his arm like a breath as he walked. She gave a little moan, like one briefly troubled in regular sleep by a passing dream. She was such a helpless thing, lying there without even consciousness as defense. Exposed to every danger and guarded only by the rare goodwill of the random world. I ought yet to kill that shitpoke preacher, Inman thought.
He carried her to the house and set her down in a patch of tansy by the stoop. He went onto the porch and looked in a window to a dim room. A fire burned low on the hearth, and an old woman slept on a pallet by the fire. She had lived so long as to have achieved a state of near transparency, her skin the color of parchment, as if, were Inman to snatch her up and hold her in front of the fire, he could read a paper through her. Her mouth was open, snoring. The little bit of light left in the hearth lit up the fact that she had but two pair of teeth remaining. One pair in front on top, the other in front on bottom. The effect was harelike.
Inman tried the door and found it unlatched. He opened it and stuck his head in. He said Hey in a middling voice. The old woman snored on. He clapped his hands twice, but she still did not stir. Safe enough, he decided and walked on in. By the fire was a plate with half a round of corn bread and two pieces of fried pork. Inman took the food and put it in his haversack. There was an empty bedstead at the end of the room away from the fire. The girl’s bed, he reckoned. He went to it and threw the covers back and then stepped outside and stood looking at the dark-headed girl. In her pale dress she was just a swatch of light on the black ground.
He lifted her and carried her inside and put her into the bed. He pulled off her shoes and covered her to her chin. Then he thought again and drew the covers down and turned her on her side, for he remembered that a boy of his regiment had passed out drunk on his back and would have smothered in his own spew had someone not taken note and kicked him over. This way she would live to wake in the morning with a pounding head, wondering how she came to be back in her own bed when the last she could remember was sporting in a hayloft with the preacher.
At that moment, the logs in the fireplace fell from the irons with a crash, shifting into a more favorable relation, and the fire brightened up. The girl’s eyes opened and she turned her head and stared straight at Inman. Her face was white in the firelight, her hair a turmoil. She seemed terrified. Confused. Her mouth opened as if to scream, but no sound came out. Inman leaned over and reached out his hand to her and touched her brow and brushed back the hair where it curled at the temples.
—What’s your name? he said.
—Laura, the woman said.
—Listen to me, Laura, he said. That preacher does not speak for God. No man does. Go back to sleep and wake up in the morning with me just a strong dream urging you to put him behind you. He means you no good. Set your mind on it.
He touched her eyes with the tips of two fingers as he had seen people do to the dead to close their lids against bad visions. She gentled down under his hand, settling back into sleep.
Inman left her and walked back out to where the preacher stood tied to the tree. At that moment the notion that he should take out his knife and cut the man up had much to recommend it, but instead Inman prowled in his knapsack and took out his pen and ink and paper. He found a place where moonlight came down through the trees. In its blue beam he wrote out the story in brief, putting little headwork and no fine touches to it, merely pressing down what he had learned of the near killing into a paragraph. When he was done he skewered the paper onto a tree branch at head level just beyond the preacher’s reach.
The preacher watched him, and when he realized Inman’s intent he grew agitated and thrashed about as much as he could while fettered by the neck. He kicked at Inman with his feet, for he guessed at what he had written.
He tried to grunt and squeal through the handkerchief wired to his mouth.
—Testify? Is that what you want? Inman said.
—Ah! the preacher said.
Inman drew out the pistol and set it to the preacher’s ear. He pulled back the hammer and flipped down the little lever that directed the firing pin to the lower shotgun barrel. You speak one word above a whisper and you’ll be lacking a head, Inman said. He untwisted the wire. The preacher spit out the handkerchief.
—You’ve ruined my life, he said.
—Don’t lay that off on me, Inman said. I wanted no part in this. But I don’t want to have to wonder whether in a night or two you’ll be back out in that black gorge with her slung over your horse again, Inman said.
—Then shoot me. Just shoot me here and leave me hanging.
—Don’t think there’s no charm in that offer.
—God damn you to hell for what you’re doing to me.
Inman took the wet handkerchief from the ground and forced it into the preacher’s mouth and rewired it and strode out. As he walked away he heard fading grunts and moans. Wordless hexes and curses.
Inman walked hard the remainder of the night to put space between himself and that nameless place. When the morning at last lit up at his back like a yellow abscess, he had worked himself into rolling country and he felt worn down to nothing. He had no idea where he was nor did he know that he had accomplished but twelve miles in that long night of walking, for it felt like a hundred.
He stopped and went into the woods and made a bed of ground litter. With his back against a tree he sat and ate the wedge of corn bread and the fatty pork he had taken from the woman’s house. For much of the morning he lay on the ground and slept.
Then he found himself awake, gazing at the blue sky through the pine boughs. He took out his pistol and wiped it with a rag and checked its loads and kept it in his hand for company. What he had come to possess was a LeMat’s. And the model Inman held was not one of the early and inferior Belgian models but was stamped Birmingham along the barrel. He had picked it up off the ground and stuck it in his belt right before he took his wound outside Petersburg, and he had managed to hang on to it all through the mess of the field hospital and the train ride south to the capital in the boxcar filled with wounded. It was an oddly configured weapon, somewhat overlarge and of curious proportion, but it was the fiercest sidearm in existence. Its cylinder was big as a fist and held nine .40-caliber rounds. But the dominant feature of it and the thing that marked a strange new direction in pistol style was this: the cylinder turned around a shotgun barrel, a crude and fat thing under the main barrel. Intended as a desperate last chance in close quarters, it fired a single load, either buckshot or a slug so big it would be like shooting leaden duck eggs at your foes. In the hand, despite its size, the LeMat’s felt balanced and solid and as of-a-piece as an ingot, and there was a certain amount of serenity associated with simply holding the stout pistol and thinking what it could do in your service.
Inman rubbed at its cylinder and barrel and thought about the fight in the town and the river crossing and the preacher and how he might have done things differently in each case. He wished not to be smirched with the mess of other people. A part of him wanted to hide in the woods far from any road. Be like an owl, move only at dark. Or a ghost. Another part yearned to wear the big pistol openly on his hip and to travel by day under a black flag, respecting all who let him be, fighting all who would seek to fight him, letting rage be his guide against anything that ran counter to his will.
Before the war he had never been much of a one for strife. But once enlisted, fighting had come easy to him. He had decided it was like any other thing, a gift. Like a man
who could whittle birds out of wood. Or one who could pick tunes from a banjo. Or a preacher with the gift of words. You had little to do with it yourself. It was more a matter of how your nerves were strung toward quickness of hand and a steady head so that you did not become witless and vague in battle, your judgment clouded in all kinds of ways, fatal and otherwise. That and having the size to prevail in the close stuff, when it came down to a clench.
In the middle of the afternoon, Inman left his pine bower and tried to cover some distance. After only an hour, though, he found himself nearly bogged down with fatigue. Every step a great effort. Up ahead he saw a pair of figures stopped in the road by a ford, but even from a distance it was clear they were slaves and so he did not even bother slipping off into the woods to hide but kept on walking. One man was trying to drive a red hog that had stopped to roll in the mud. The other carried an armload of bean poles. The drover kicked the hog to no effect, and then he took a pole from the load and struck and prodded the hog until it reluctantly struggled to its feet and waddled along. The men tipped their hats to Inman as they passed and said, Day, Marse.
Inman was so weak feeling he wished momentarily that he were a big red hog and could just lie down and wallow until somebody took a bean pole to him. But he shucked off his boots and waded the ford, and then on the far bank he turned from the road and followed the river downstream, thinking to find a hidden place to cook a sparse meal of corn mush. But the wind shifted, and it carried the scent of real cooking from somewhere farther downriver.
He followed the smell of meat in the air, snuffing his nose and blinking his eyes with his head cocked up like a bear. He soon arrived at a camp in a bend of the river: a wagon, a number of horses, pyramidal tents of grey canvas standing among a grove of birch trees. Inman squatted in the brush and watched the folks go about their campcraft. They were a jumble of people wearing about every tinge of skin there is. Inman guessed them to be as outlaw and Ishmaelite as himself. Show folk, outliers, a tribe of Irish gypsy horse traders all thrown in together. The horses were hobbled all around, and they grazed in the long grass under the trees. The stock varied from magnificent to near dead. Backlit by the gold light of afternoon, though, they all looked beautiful to Inman, the grace in the deep curve of their downturned necks, the frail cannon bones so evident through the thin skin above their fetlocks. Inman guessed the traders were hiding them out. So many horses had been killed in the fighting that they were becoming scarce. Prices had swelled beyond belief, but the army had men out rounding up horses, paying nearly nothing for them. A part of Inman wished he had the money to buy a big long-strided gelding. Mount up and canter off and end his life as a footman. But he had not that much money and, too, it is hard to be stealthy when accompanied by a horse. It’s a big thing to hide, and uncooperative. So Inman let that dream pass.
Thinking he might find some feeling of kinship with the outcasts, Inman entered the camp holding his empty hands out to his sides. The gypsies took him in with apparent generosity, though he knew they would steal the boots off his feet if they could find advantage to do so. They had an iron pot of dark stew going over a small fire—rabbit, squirrel, a stolen chicken, various pilfered vegetables, chiefly cabbage. Chunks of pumpkin drizzled in molasses roasted over coals in a Dutch oven. A woman in a bright skirt of cloth scraps pieced together like a quilt spooned him up food onto his tin plate and went about frying corn fritters in a pan of lard. The batter popped like distant battle fire when she spooned the grease.
Inman propped against a tree and ate, looking about him at the riffle of water on stones in the river, the yellow leaves of an early turning birch trembling bright in the stir of air, the light falling in beams through the smoke of campfires. A man sitting on a log scratched out jigs and reels from a cigar-box fiddle. Children played in the shallow water at the river’s edge. Other gypsies worked at the horses. A boy brushed an old mare with a corncob dipped in a bucket of potash and soot to cover her grey hair, and then took a rat-tail file and worked on her teeth. She shed years right before Inman’s eyes. A woman snubbed a big bay up to a birch trunk and then twitched it and poured lamp oil on the frog of its hoof and lit fire to it to curb a tendency to lameness. All through the herd, spavins and bots and heaves to be treated or disguised.
Inman had dealt with gypsies before and thought them possessed of a fine honesty in their predatory relationship to the rest of mankind, their bald admission of constantly seeking an opening. But they were benign-seeming in this quiet bend of the river. It was no concern of theirs how the war concluded. Whichever side won, people would still need horses. The contest was no more to them than a temporary hindrance to business.
Inman stayed with the gypsies through the remainder of the day. He took a dip from the stewpot whenever he became hungry. He slept some and listened to the fiddler and watched a woman telling fortunes by reading the pattern of leaves in a cup of herb tea, but he declined her offer to tell his own future for he figured he already had all the discouragement he needed.
Later in the afternoon he watched a dark-haired woman walk among the horses and put a bridle on a dun mare. She was young and wore a man’s sweater over a long black skirt and was about as pretty as women get to be. Something in the darkness of her hair or the way she moved or the thinness of her fingers reminded him momentarily of Ada. He sat and stared as she caught up the hems of her long skirt and petticoat and clenched them in her teeth before mounting astride the mare. Her white legs were exposed to the thigh. She rode down the riverbank and crossed at a place deep enough that in the middle the horse lost its footing and swam a stroke or two. It struggled climbing up the far bank, working hard with its haunches. Water streamed off its back and sides and the woman was wet to the hips. She leaned forward for balance with her face almost resting on the horse’s neck. Her hair fell against its black mane so that you could not tell one from the other. When they reached level ground she put her heels to the mare’s sides and they galloped away through the open woods. It was to Inman a stirring sight, a happy vision that he was grateful to have been granted.
On toward dusk some little gypsy boys whittled gigs from river-birch limbs and went to a backwater and gigged frogs until they had a basketful. They cut their legs off and strung them on sticks to roast over a fire of hickory coals. While the frog meat was cooking, a man came to Inman with a bottle of Moët he claimed he had taken in trade. The man was not entirely sure what it was that he had, but he knew he wished to sell it for top dollar. So Inman counted out some money and composed himself a plate of supper from the frog legs and part of the wine. He found the two not ill sorted, but when he was done they did not make a real dinner for someone as hungry as he was.
He wandered about the camp looking for other food and eventually made his way to the wagon of show folk. A medicine show. A white man came from where he sat near their tent and talked to Inman and queried him as to his business. The man was thin and tall and had some age on him, for the skin under his eyes was pale and pouched and he wore blacking in his hair. He seemed to run the place. Inman asked if he could buy a meal, and the man said he reckoned so, but that they would not eat until much later for they had to practice their act while there was yet light. Inman was welcome to sit and watch.
In a minute the dark-haired woman he had seen earlier came out of the tent. Inman could not take his eyes off her. He studied her bearing beside the man, trying to guess the forces running between them. He first guessed them to be married and then he guessed not. The two set up a backstop and the woman stood against it and the man threw knives at her so that the blades just missed her and fetched up shivering in the boards. That seemed to Inman plenty to draw a crowd, but they had as well a big grey-bearded Ethiopian who had a regal bearing and dressed in purple robes and was portrayed to have been in his youth the king of Africa. He played a banjolike thing and could just about make a dead man dance, though his instrument was made of but a gourd and had just one string. As well, the troupe included a little
menagerie of Indians of several makes, a Seminole from Florida, a Creek, a Cherokee from Echota, and a Yemassee woman. Their part in shows was to tell jokes and beat drums and dance and chant. The wagon they traveled in was loaded with fancy little colored bottles of medicine, each with its special disease to cure: cancer, consumption, neuralgia, malaria, cachexia, stroke, fit, and seizure.
After dark, they asked Inman to join them for dinner, and they all sat on the ground by the fire and ate great bloody beefsteaks and potatoes pan fried in bacon drippings and wild greens dressed with what drippings the potatoes had not soaked up. The Ethiopian and the Indians joined in the meal as if they were all of a color and equals. They took their turns speaking, and permission to talk was neither sought nor given.
When done, they went and squatted by the water, each scouring his own plate in river sand. Then the white man threw sticks on the coals of the cook fire, building it up with no eye toward thrift of wood until flame stood shoulder high. The show folk passed a bottle around and sat telling Inman stories of their endless travels. The road, they said, was a place apart, a country of its own ruled by no government but natural law, and its one characteristic was freedom. Their stories were of being broke and of sudden windfalls. Card games and horse auctions and the wonderful prevalence of the witless. Various tight spots with the law, disasters narrowly averted, fools bested in trade, wisemen met on the road and their often contradictory wisdom. Townships of gullibility and of particular viciousness. They reminded each other of certain camp places and of meals eaten in them, and they reached consensus that the finest of all was a place some years in the past where a river of considerable size poured directly from the base of a rock face, and they likewise agreed that they had never eaten better fried chicken than they had cooked in the shadow of that cliff.