—There’s the sort of thing you missed, Inman said. You sorry?
Inman spread his bedding and slept, and in the morning they ate carvings off the fish again for breakfast. They roasted up extra chunks to carry along for dinner, but still, when they broke camp, there was more fish left than had been eaten. Three crows waited in the top of a hickory tree.
Late in the afternoon of the following day, clouds gathered up and a wind blew and rain fell hard and steady with no sign of stopping. They walked on into it looking for shelter, Veasey all the while rubbing at the back of his neck and complaining of a piercing headache, a result of Inman having clubbed him to his knees with a wagon hub earlier in the day.
They had gone into a deserted-looking country store to buy food, and no sooner had they walked through the door than Veasey pulled his Colt’s and told the shopkeep to empty his till. Inman had taken the first heavy thing that fell to hand—the hub that sat on a shelf by the door—and struck Veasey down. The Colt’s went clattering across the wood floor and fetched up against a sack of meal. Veasey knelt on the brink of a swoon, but was taken with a fit of coughing and became thus restored to mindfulness. The shopkeep looked at Veasey and then at Inman and raised an eyebrow and said, The hell?
Inman had quickly made his apologies, picked up the pistol, and grabbed Veasey by the coat collar, lifting him as by a handle. Inman half dragged him out to the stoop and then sat him down on the steps and went back in the store to buy goods. In the interval, though, the man had taken out a shotgun and was squatted behind his counter with it, covering the door.
—Get going, he had said. I’ve not got thirty cents in silver money here, but I’m killing whoever comes for it.
Inman had held his hands out, palms up.
—He’s but a fool, he had said, backing up.
Now, as they walked through the rain, Veasey whined and wished to halt and squat in the drizzle under a pine tree. But Inman, wrapped in his groundsheet, walked on, looking for a likely barn. They found none, but later met a stout old slave woman coming down the road. She had fashioned an enormous rain bonnet in some complicated manner from big flopping catalpa leaves. She went as dry as under an umbrella. Immediately seeing what their state was—a pair of outliers—she told them that lodging lay ahead, run by a man who cared not a whit for the war and would ask no questions.
About a mile on, they found the place, a kind of grim roadside inn and stable. A way station where coaches changed horses and travelers found shelter. The main building was a shambling tavern with a low shed-roofed ell running from the back. It was painted the color of rust and sat under two vast oak trees. Drovers and their hogs and cattle and geese overnighted there in the days before the war when the turnpikes running to the railhead stock markets were thick with animals. But those times were like a lost paradise, and the sprawly corrals around the place now stood near empty and growing over in ragweed.
Inman and Veasey went to the door and tried it and found it latched, though they could hear voices inside. They knocked and an eye appeared at a crack between boards. The latch lifted and they walked in and found themselves in a dank hole, windowless, with but a fireplace for light and a strong reek of wet clothes and dirty hair. Their eyes were not adjusted to the dark as they moved into the room, but the preacher walked ahead, a grin fixed on his face like he was entering known territory and expected to meet friends. He soon stumbled over an old man sitting on a low stool and knocked him onto the floor. The man on the floor said, They damn, and there were sympathetic mutterings from the dark figures sitting at tables about the room. Inman grabbed Veasey by the shoulder and pulled him around behind him. He righted the overturned chair and helped the old man to his feet.
They walked on into the room and found seats, and when their sight cleared they saw that a recent chimney fire had burnt holes in one end of the roof. The breaches had yet to be patched, and rain fell in all around the hearth about as thick as it did outside so that the wet guests could not profitably stand by the fire to warm and dry themselves. The fireplace was vast, stretching across most of the end of the room and leading one to imagine great blazes of yesteryear. What fire was in it now, though, you could have covered with a saddlecloth.
In a minute a black whore as big as a big man came in from a back room. She carried a bottle in one hand. In the other, five shot glasses. Her thick fingers down in them. Inman could see the red handle of a straight razor thrust into the tangle of hair above her right ear. She wore a leather apron about her stout waist, and her butternut dress was cut low and partially unbuttoned to display a vast bosom. When she passed before the little fire, every man in the room turned his head to see the outline of her splendid thighs through the thin dress. The dress skirt fell short of full coverage, and so her hard-muscled calves were on complete display. She went barefooted, her feet muddy. Her skin was black as a stove lid and she was fine looking, at least to any man for whom such grand scale had appeal. She paced about the room, pouring drinks, and then came to Inman’s table. She set down two glasses and filled them and then pulled up a chair and sat, legs open, skirt hiked. On her inner thigh, Inman could see a pale knife scar running from her knee upward to disappear into the shadow of her bunched skirts.
—Gents, she said, eyeing them to see where advantage might be found. She grinned. Straight white teeth, blue gums. The preacher drained his glass and thrust it out to her, his eyes resting on the cranny between her breasts. She topped up his glass and said, What’s your name, honey?
—Veasey, he said. Solomon Veasey. He drank off his second glass of liquor without taking his eyes from the mighty cleft of her chest. He appeared to be trembling, so hard had the feeling of rut fallen upon him.
—Well, Solomon Veasey, she said, what do you have to say for yourself?
—Not much, he said.
—Fair enough. You don’t look like much neither, she said. But that don’t matter. What would you give to spend some time out back with Big Tildy?
—I’d give a lot, Veasey said. He was as earnest as a man can be.
—But have you got a lot to give is the question, she said.
—Oh, don’t you worry about that.
Tildy looked at Inman. You want to come along too? she said.
—You all go on ahead, Inman said.
Before they could leave, though, a man in a filthy leather jacket and jingly spurs came over from the other side of the room and put a hand on Tildy’s shoulder. He had a red wen at his temple and looked to be half drunk. Inman’s first impulse was to tally the man’s weaponry. A pistol at one hip, sheath knife at the other, a handmade thing like a blackjack hanging from a thong at his belt buckle. The man looked down at Tildy and said, Come over here, big’un. Some of us men want a word with you. He tugged at her shoulder.
—I got business here, she said.
The man looked at Veasey and grinned. He said, This little feller don’t have a say in it.
At that Veasey rose and drew his Colt’s from under his coat and went about bringing it to bear on the man’s belly. But so slow and so obvious was Veasey in making his move that, by the time his pistol barrel reached level, the man had drawn his own pistol. His arm was stretched to its limit and the muzzle sat a finger’s length from Veasey’s nose.
Veasey’s hand wavered uncertainly, and the barrel drooped so that if he had fired he would have but shot the man’s foot.
—Put that thing away, Inman said.
Both men cut their eyes in his direction, and when they did, Tildy reached and plucked Veasey’s pistol from his hand.
The man looked at Veasey and pursed his lips.
—You a shit-eating dog, he said to Tildy. Then to Veasey he said, She just saved your ass from getting killed, on account of if I shoot you unarmed the law will be on me.
Veasey said to no one in particular, I want my pistol back.
—Time to shut up, Inman said. He spoke to Veasey but did not take his eyes from the man with the wen.
—I’ll not do it, the man said.
Inman said nothing.
The man still held the pistol aimed at Veasey’s head and seemed not to see a way to bring their contest to a close.
—I expect I’ll have to give you a beating with it instead, he said, giving the pistol a little shake in Veasey’s face.
—Hey, Inman said.
The man looked, and now the LeMat’s was out, lying on its side on the table, Inman’s hand resting atop it.
With the forefinger of his free hand Inman signed for the man to step away.
The man stood a long time looking at the LeMat’s, and the longer he looked the more calm Inman became. Finally the man holstered his pistol and walked off, muttering as he traversed the room. He drew together his party and went out the door.
—Give me that, Inman said to Tildy. She reached him Veasey’s pistol, and he stuck it in his pant waist.
—You’re set on getting us both killed, Inman said to Veasey.
—Not likely, Veasey said. It was two on one.
—No, it wasn’t. Don’t look to me to back you.
—Well, you just did.
—All the same, don’t look to me. The next one I might let have you.
Veasey grinned and said, I reckon not. Then he and Tildy rose and left, his arm about what slight indentation she had for waist. Inman moved his chair back against a wall so that he could not be come at from behind. He raised his empty glass to a man in an apron who looked to be a barkeep.
—That’s a big fireplace, Inman said to the man when he came with the bottle.
—In the summer we whitewash it and put a bedstead in it. It’s the coolest place to sleep you’ve ever seen, the man said.
—Well, Inman said.
—You taking dinner?
—I will. I’ve been dining in the woods for some days now.
—Be ready in about two hours, the man said.
As the day wore out, a few other travelers came. A pair of old men on their way to sell a wagonload of produce at the nearby market town. A white-headed peddler pushing a barrow of skillets, spools of ribbon, tin cups, little bottles blown from brown glass containing laudanum and various tinctures of herbs in alcohol. A few other assorted wanderers. They all ganged up and talked and drank together at a long table. They spoke of the old droving days with great nostalgia. One man said, Oh, I’ve driv many a beeve through here. Another talked of a great flock of geese and ducks he had escorted down this way one time, and he said that every few days they had to dip the birds’ legs in hot tar and then in sand to keep them from wearing the webs off their feet. Every man had tales to tell.
Inman, though, perched alone through the late afternoon on a stool at the dry end of the room, sipping brown liquor that was claimed to be bourbon but lacked all the usual qualities of that drink other than the alcohol. He looked irritably into the pointless fire at the far end of the room. The others glanced at him frequently, a certain amount of worry in their looks. Their faces were mirrors in which Inman could see himself as they evidently did, as a man that might just shoot you.
Inman had paid five dollars Confederate to sleep in the hayloft and five more for supper, which, when it came, was a bowl not more than half full of a dark stew of rabbit and chicken with a wedge of corn bread. Even accounting for the worthlessness of the money, that was still high tariff.
After supper, in the last of twilight, he stood at the stable door under a shake-shingled overhang at the back of the inn. He leaned against a hitching rail and watched the rain fall in heavy drops into the mud of the wagon yard and the road. It came on a cool northerly wind. Two lanterns hung from the rafters. Their light seemed diluted by the water and served little purpose other than to glint off puddles and to cast everything into gloomy contrast. All the highlights and points of things were picked out by the light. Rain dripped steadily off the overhang, and Inman thought of Longstreet’s comment at Fredericksburg: Federals falling as steady as rain dripping off an eave. In his mind Inman said, It was nothing like that, no similarity.
The wood of the way station was old, the grain raised, feeling powdery against his palm, even in the damp. In a corral across the mud road, two wet horses stood in the rain, heads down. Inside the stable, others more fortunate stood in stalls, but they were such horses as will snap at you when you pass by them, and Inman turned and watched as a claybank mare bit a collop of flesh as big as a walnut out of the upper arm of one of the old market-bound men passing through the hall on the way to his room.
After a time of standing and staring with unfocused eyes out into the darkening landscape, Inman decided just to go to bed and rise early and head on. He climbed the ladder into the loft and found that his roommate was already there. It was the white-headed peddler, the other travelers having paid for beds. The man had carried the various satchels and cases from his barrow up into the loft. Inman threw his own packs into a heap under the eaves. He lounged back into a pile of hay just outside the circle of yellow light from the oil lamp that the peddler had brought up from the inn. It hung by its bale from a long nail driven into a roof beam.
Inman watched as the man sat under the wavery light and removed his boots and socks. His feet were blistered at heel and toe in tight bloody bubbles of skin. From a leather case he took a fleam. The lantern light caught the bright steel of the keen instrument and it shone out against the darkness like a barb of dull gold. The man punched at his feet with it until he had opened up the blisters and let the pink fluid run out, pressing with his fingers. He put his boots back on and said, There. He wiped his fingers on his pants and stood and took hobbled steps back and forth across the loft, walking with great tenderness and care.
—There, he said again.
—You’ve been walking as hard as I have, Inman said.
—I reckon.
The man pulled out a watch from his coat pocket and looked at its face. He tapped it with a knuckle and held it to his ear.
—I’d have thought later, he said. It’s but six.
The peddler took the lamp down from its nail and set it on the floor and joined Inman in the haystack. They sat a minute in silence. The rain beat on the shakes over their heads and reminded them what fine things a tight roof and a stack of dry straw are. The yellow circle of lamplight served to make the vast loft more snug. All the space beyond its radius ended abruptly in blackness, as if the light had scribed the dimensions of a room close around them. They could hear below them the shift of horses in stalls, the outblow of their breath. The drowsy murmur of other people talking.
The peddler dug around in his case again and pulled out a big pewter flask. He unstoppered it and took a long drink. Then he held it out to Inman.
—This is store liquor from Tennessee, he said.
Inman took a pull and it was good, flavors of smoke and leather and other things brown and rich.
Outside, the rain gathered up and wind rose in the darkness and whistled in the shakes. Boards creaked. The light jumped and guttered in the draught. The night was storm-stridden for hours. They drank through boom and flash, sprawled in the straw, telling tales of exile and brute wandering.
Inman found that the man’s name was Odell, and by the lamplight Inman could see that he was far from old, though his hair was white as a goose. At most he was just a little farther along in the course of time than Inman.
—I’ve not had an easy life. Far from it, Odell said. And don’t let what I am now stand for what I always was. I was born rich. By rights I ought to be ready to come into a planter’s inheritance of cotton and indigo down in south Georgia. A fortune. It could be any time now, for my daddy’s old. He could already be dead for all I know, the old shitpike. It would all have been mine. Of land, too much to bother measuring in acres. The borders of it run ten miles across going one way and six going the other. That, and more niggers than you could find useful work for. All mine.
—Why aren’t you there? Inman said.
The answer to his question took much
of the evening, and when the lantern ran out of oil, the peddler talked out his gloomy tale of careless love into the dark. Odell had been a happy boy. Oldest son. Raised and educated to take over the plantation. The problem was, as a young man of twenty, he had fallen into unseemly love with one of the black housemaids, a slave named Lucinda. As he told it, he loved her far past the point of lunacy, for as everyone knew, just to have loved her at all was a mark of an unsound mind. She was, at the beginning, a woman of twenty-two, an octoroon. Skin not much darker than the color of a tanned deerhide, he said. She was a yellow rose.
To complicate the matter, Odell had not long been married to the daughter of the county’s other major planter. So good had been his prospects that he had had the choice of girls from far and near. The one he chose for wife was small and frail, given to spells of nervous fatigue, spent entire afternoons swooned on the fainting couch in the parlor. But she was beautiful in a transparent way, and he had wanted her above all others. After the wedding, though, once he got the heaps of crinolines off her, there seemed to be just about nothing left. She was so slight and wispish. He found little there to keep his mind from wandering.
The whole family lived in the big house—Odell, his new little wife, his parents, his brother, a sister. Odell’s duties were light, his father not yet having reached the point where he was ready to let go any of his powers. Not that his father possessed any great mastery of the skills of landownership, for his primary accomplishment in life was successfully affecting a taste for absinthe over whiskey ever since a visit to France as a young man.