Shortly the walker came around the bend. He went hatless and wore a long grey coat with flapping skirts and carried a lumpish leather knapsack and a walking staff as tall as he was. He strode along, head down, marking his pace with the staff like some mendicant friar from days of yore. As the man drew nearer, it became plain that his face was cut and marked by bruises fading to yellow and green. A split lip was part healed with a dark scab so that he looked like a harelip. Tufts of patchy blond fuzz grew from his white scalp, which was marked here and there by long scabs. So fine was he through the stomach that the top of his britches lapped over like great pleats and was tied with a length of rope. When the walker lifted his blue eyes from looking down at the road beneath his feet, Inman saw immediately that, underneath all the damage, it was the preacher.
Inman raised up from behind the log and said, Hey there.
The preacher stopped and stared. Good God, he said. Just the man I was looking for.
Inman pulled out his knife and held it point down, his arm relaxed. He said, You come to me looking for vengeance, I won’t even waste a cartridge. I’ll lay you open right here.
—Oh, no. I mean to thank you. You saved me from mortal sin.
—You walked all this way just in hope of saying that?
—No, I’m traveling. A pilgrim like yourself. Though maybe I speak too soon, for all who wander are not pilgrims. At any rate, where are you headed?
Inman looked the preacher over. What happened to your face? he said.
—When I was found as you left me, and when the note was read, a number of the men of the congregation, led by our Deacon Johnston, stripped me and gave me a fair beating. They threw my clothes in the river and cut my hair off with their knives, I think in bafflement over some part of the story of Samson and Delilah. Then they refused even to give me an hour to draw my things together. They held me from behind, and the woman I was to marry came and spit at me and thanked the Almighty that she was not to become a Veasey. I had nothing but my two hands to cover my prides with, and I was told to get out of town or they would hang me naked from the church steeple. It was just as well. I couldn’t have lived on there anyway.
—Yes, I imagine not, Inman said. What about the other woman?
—Oh, Laura Foster, Veasey said. They hauled her out to tell what she knew, but she could still hardly put two thoughts together. When it becomes clear what state of motherhood she is in, she will be churched for a time. A year, say. And then she’ll be but a subject of gossip. In two or three years more she’ll take for husband some old bachelor willing to raise a bastard just as long as a fine-looking woman comes with the deal. She’ll wind up all the better for our relations, and for me having set my mind on putting both her and my betrothed behind me.
—It is still a cloudy matter to me if I did the right thing, letting you live, Inman said.
Without a further word he sheathed his knife and returned to the roadway and made to continue his journey. But the preacher fell in beside him.
—Since you appear to be going west, I’ll just walk on with you if you don’t mind, he said.
—Thing is, I do, Inman said, thinking it better to go alone than with a fool for comrade.
He made a motion as if to backhand the preacher, but the man did not run or fight or even try to raise his staff to parry. Rather, he hunched his shoulders to take the blow like a cowed dog, and so Inman pulled up and did not strike. He reasoned that lacking the will to drive the man off, he’d just walk on and see what came about.
Veasey drifted along at Inman’s elbow, talking seamlessly. He worked under the notion that he had acquired a cohort. His ambition seemed to be to disburden himself of every feature of his prior life by passing it along to Inman. Every misstep he had made—and it was clear he’d made plenty—he sought to share. He was a sorry preacher; that much was apparent even to him.
—I displayed a great poorness at every feature of the job but the pulpitism, he admitted. But there I shined. I’ve saved more souls than there are fingers to your hands and toes to your feet. But I’ve foresworn it now and I’m going to the Texes and start fresh.
—Many are.
—There’s a place in Judges where it talks about a time when there was no rule in Israel and every man just did what was right in his own eyes. I’ve heard the same of the Texes. It’s a land of freedom.
—That’s the tale that’s told of it, Inman said. What do you aim to do there, farmer?
—Oh, hardly. I lack aptitude for grubbing in the dirt. As for suitable career, I’m undecided. Short of a clear calling, I might just go and claim me a piece of land the size of a county and run cattle on it until I have me a herd big enough so that you could walk all day across the backs of them without ever putting a foot to ground, Veasey said.
—What are you figuring to use to buy your first bull and cow with?
—This right here.
Veasey pulled from under his coat skirts a great long Colt’s Army revolver, which he had appropriated on his way out of town.
—I might train myself to be a pistolero of some note, he said.
—Where did that come from? Inman said.
—Old Johnston’s wife knew what had happened and took pity on me. She saw me lurking in the bushes and called out to me to come to the window, and while she went in the bedroom to get me this sorry costume I’m wearing, I espied this pistol on the kitchen table. I reached in through the window and took it and pitched it off in the grass, and then when I was dressed, I picked it up and took it on with me.
He sounded pleased with himself as a boy who had pilfered a cooling pie from a sill.
—That’s how the pistoleer idea came to me, he continued. These things give you notions unsought.
He held the Colt’s before him, looking into it as if he expected to see his future in the sheen of its cylinder.
That afternoon’s march was one of great luck in foraging, for Inman and Veasey had not traveled far when they came upon an abandoned house set back in a grove of oaks. The doors stood open and the windows were broken out and the yard was grown up in mullein and burdock and Indian tobacco. All around the house were beehives. Some in gums made from sections of the hollow trunks of black-gum trees, holes augered in them and oriented with the points of the compass. Others in straw skeps, grey as old thatch and starting to soften up and cave in at the crowns. Despite neglect, though, bees worked thick in the sunshine, coming and going.
—If we were to rob one of those gums it would be some good eating, Veasey said.
—Go to it, Inman said.
—I take a bee sting hard, Veasey said. I swell up. It wouldn’t do for me to get in amongst them.
—But you’d eat the honey if I went to get it, is what you’re saying?
—A dish of honey would hit the spot and would give us strength for the road.
Inman could not argue with that point, so he rolled down his shirtsleeves and tucked his pant cuffs into his boots and wrapped his head in his coat, leaving but a fold to sight through. He walked to a gum and slid the roof off and dug out handfuls of honey and comb into his pot until it was heaped over and running down the sides. He moved slowly and deliberately and was stung little.
He and Veasey sat on the edge of the porch, the pot between them, and ate the honey by the spoonful. It was black as coffee, having come from every sort of flower, and it was full of bees’ wings and had toughened up from not being robbed in some time. It was nothing if compared to the clear honey from chestnut blossoms that his father had collected from wild bees by lining them to their tree hives as they flew through the woods. But still, Inman and Veasey ate it like it was good. When the honey was nearly gone, Inman lifted out a chunk of the comb and bit off a piece.
—You eating even the comb? Veasey said, a note of disapproval in his voice.
—You say that like there was a rooster in the pot, Inman said. He chewed at the waxy plug.
—It’s just that it looks like it would stopper a man up
.
—It’s good for you. A tonic, Inman said. He took another bite and reached out a piece to Veasey, who ate it without relish.
—I’m still hungry, Veasey said, after the pot was empty.
—That’s it unless you can scare up something for us to shoot, Inman said. And we need to be walking, not hunting. This kind of traveling puts a curb on your appetites.
—There’s some say that’s the way to contentment, get to where there’s nothing you crave, where you’ve lost your appetites. Which is lunacy, Veasey said. Contentment is largely a matter of talking yourself into believing that God will not strike you too hard for leaning in the direction of your hungers. There’s few I’ve seen who benefit from believing that on the Day of Judgment, moon turns to blood. I know I don’t wish to give that belief too much credit.
Inman jumped from the porch and set out. They traveled at a fair pace for another hour until the road became but a path that climbed a rolling ridge and then followed the fall of a little twisty stream for a while. The water ran down the hill in a series of white riffles broken now and then by quiet bends and little pools where the land terraced or curved, so that if one were not too careful about the particulars it might be taken for a mountain stream. The damp cove too had the smell of the mountains to Inman’s nose. The fragance of galax and rotted leaves, damp dirt. He ventured to say as much.
Veasey put his head back and sniffed. Smells like somebody’s ass, he said.
Inman did not even comment. He was tired, and his mind worked at random. His eyes kept to the bright thread of water before them. The path it had found to make its way to lower ground was as coiled as a hog’s bowel. He had learned enough of books to think that gravity in its ideal form was supposed to work in straight lines of force. But looking on the creek as it made its snaky way down the hill, he saw such notions to be just airy thoughts. The creek’s turnings marked how all that moves must shape itself to the maze of actual landscape, no matter what its preferences might be.
When it reached flat ground, the creek gentled and became a watercourse little better than a muddy ditch and displayed no further reference that Inman could find to a mountain stream. Veasey stopped and said, Well, look yonder.
There in the creek, which was deep but still narrow enough to step across with scarcely a hop, was a catfish that looked longer than a singletree for an ox team, though much greater in girth. In fact it was stout as a tub. It was ugly in the face with its tiny eyes and pale barbels run out from its mouth and wagging in the current. Its lower jaw was set back to make sucking up bottom trash easier, and its back was greeny black and gritty-looking. Though it was but a runt compared to what Inman had imagined in the depths of the muddy Cape Fear, it nevertheless looked plenty hefty and must have taken a woefully wrong turn somewhere to find itself here in water so narrow it could reverse its direction only if it had a hinge in its middle.
—He would be good eating, Veasey said.
—We lack tackle, Inman pointed out.
—I’d give anything for a pole and a line and a hook baited with a big wad of greasy wheat bread.
—Well, we don’t have it, Inman said, disgusted at such custom of flatland fishing. He had no more than moved a foot to walk on when the fish spooked at his shadow on the water and wallowed off upstream.
Veasey followed Inman as he walked away, but he kept turning back and looking up the creek. He made it clear he was sulking. Every hundred yards of progress they made he would say, That was a big fish.
When they had gone only about a half a mile, Veasey stopped and said, There’s nothing else but that I’ve got to have me that catfish. He turned and set into a jog trot up the trail. Inman followed at a walk. When Veasey got near to where the fish had been, he led them off into the woods and thrashed ahead, circling through them for some time so that when he came back to the water they were well upstream. Inman watched as Veasey began scouting into the woods for downed limbs and dragging them into the stream. He piled them up and jumped on them to pack them down. Eventually he had built a kind of weir, all prickly with limbs.
—What are you up to? Inman said.
—You just wait right here and watch, Veasey said.
Then he circled in the woods again and struck the creek downstream of where he figured the fish to be. He jumped in the creek and walked upstream, kicking the water as he went, and though he did not ever see the fish, he knew he must be driving it before him.
When Veasey neared the weir, Inman could finally see the catfish nosed against the branches trying to find a passage. Veasey pulled off his hat and threw it onto the creek bank. He waded to the fish and bent and dipped his upper half into the water to grapple it out. Fish and man came up thrashing, spilling water off in sheets. Veasey had the fish in a hug about its middle, his hands clenched at its white belly. It fought him with all it had. Its neckless head beat back against his, and the whiskers whipped about his face. Then it bent like a great strong bow, sprung straight, and shot from his arms back into the water.
Veasey stood wheezing for air. His face was marked with long red weals where he had been stung by the whiskers of the fish, and his arms were cut from the spined fins, but he bent and took it up out of the water again and wrestled it to another draw. He tried over and over but failed each time until he and the fish both could hardly move from exhaustion. Veasey climbed wearily from the stream and sat on the bank.
—Could you get down in there and try your hand at it? he asked Inman.
Inman reached to his hip and took out the LeMat’s and shot the catfish through the head. It thrashed for a minute and then lay still.
—They God, Veasey said.
They camped there that night. Veasey left the building and tending of the creekside fire to Inman, as well as all the cooking. He apparently knew to do nothing but talk and eat. When Inman cut the fish open, he found among the contents of its stomach the head to a ballpeen hammer and a bluebird that had been swallowed whole. He set them aside on a flat rock. He next peeled the skin off a part of the fish’s back and sides and whittled off fillets. Among the stores in Veasey’s packsack was a waxed paper parcel of lard. Inman melted it in the pan and rolled pieces of the fish in his own cornmeal and fried them up brown. As they ate, Veasey looked at the rock and speculated on the catfish’s diet.
—You reckon it swallowed that hammer entire a long time ago and then the juice in its stomach ate off the handle? he said.
—Might be, Inman said. I’ve heard stranger things.
But the bluebird was a puzzler. The only satisfactory way Inman could account for it was that a better class of fish, a wondrous trout, say, had risen from the water and taken the bluebird from a low limb of a creekside tree, and then that fine trout had immediately died and the catfish sucked it up whole from the bottom and digested it from the outside in, so all that was left was the bluebird.
They feasted on the fish through the evening, eating until all the meal and lard was gone. Then they just cut chunks of fish and skewered them on green sticks and roasted them bare over fire coals. Veasey talked on and on, and when he tired of relating his own history, he tried to draw out Inman’s story. Where his home might be. Where he was heading. Where he had been. But Veasey could get hardly a word in answer. Inman just sat cross-legged and looked into the fire.
—You’re about as bad off as Legion, I believe, Veasey finally said. And he told Inman the story of the man whose wounded spirit Jesus comforted. How Jesus found him naked, fleeing mankind, hiding in the wilderness, gnashing his teeth on tomb rocks, cutting himself with stones. Turned wild by some ill fortune. What few thoughts Legion had just rampant.
—Always, night and day, he was in the mountains and in the tombs, crying and wailing like a dog, Veasey said. And Jesus heard of him and went to him and straightened him right out quicker than a dose of salts running through you. Legion went home a new self.
Inman just sat, and so Veasey said, I know you’ve run off from the war. That makes us both
escapees.
—It doesn’t make us both anything together.
—I was not fit for service, Veasey said.
—A fool could see that.
—I mean a doctor said it. I’ve wondered if I missed much.
—Oh, you missed plenty, Inman said.
—Well, shit. I guessed as much.
—I’ll tell you a thing you missed. See how much use a sorry preacher would have been.
What he told Veasey was about the blowup at Petersburg. His regiment had been situated directly beside the South Carolina boys that got exploded by the Federal tunnelers. Inman was in the wattled trenches parching rye to make a pot of what they would call coffee when the ground heaved up along the lines to his right. A column of dirt and men rose into the air and then fell all around. Inman was showered with dirt. A piece of a man’s lower leg with the boot still on the foot landed right beside him. A man down the trench from Inman came running through and hollering, Hell has busted!
The men in the trenches to left and right of the hole fell back expecting an attack, but in a little while they realized that the Federals had rushed into the crater and then, amazed at what they had done, just huddled there, confused by that new landscape of pure force.
Right quick Haskell called up his éprouvette mortars and put them just beyond the lip of the crater and had them loaded with a scant ounce and a half of powder, since all they had to do was loft the shells fifty feet to where the Federals milled about like a pen of shoats waiting for the hammer between the eyes. The mortar fire blew many of them to pieces, and when that was done, Inman’s regiment led the attack into the crater, and the fighting inside was of a different order from any he had done before. It was war in its most antique form, as if hundreds of men were put into a cave, shoulder to shoulder, and told to kill each other. There was no room for firing and loading muskets, so they mainly used them as clubs. Inman saw one little drummer boy beating a man’s head in with an ammunition box. The Federals hardly even bothered to fight back. All underfoot were bodies and pieces of bodies, and so many men had come apart in the blowup and the shelling that the ground was slick and threw a terrible stink from their wet internalments. The raw dirt walls of the crater loomed all around with just a circle of sky above, as if this was all the world there was and fighting was all there was to it. They killed everybody that didn’t run away.