Then I heard the low murmur of voices from the porch. Saw movement. Claire’s profile leaned forward, her black silhouette framed in the yellow light of the window. There was no mistaking it for anyone else’s. From the other side of the window leaned another face, a man’s. They met and kissed, a long kiss and a passionate one from what I could tell. Their faces parted, and her hand reached to his face and guided it back again. My stomach clenched. And my hands. I longed to step to the porch and shout my outrage and thrash someone. But the humiliating role of the betrayed suitor was not one I relished playing.
Without another thought I put spurs to the horse and sped off north at a feverish pace. We went for miles and miles. That tall horse stretching out long in its gallop. It was like riding in a dream, hurling through a dark world at a rate more akin to winged flight than riding horseback. We passed through dense flats of turkey oak and slash pine and yaupon, through open barrens of wire grass and saw grass, until finally, in a place where wax myrtle thickets hemmed in the road to left and right, the horse slowed and walked, blowing hard, head down.
I had no clear idea where I was. I had not kept up with the turnings of the roads or even the fine points of the compass bearing we had been following. Generally north was all I knew, for we had not plunged into either the Ashley or the Cooper and drowned. In the scant light of a partial moon, the sweated chestnut gelding looked black as ebony, and as glossy. Other than act fully the wildman and set a course west to lose myself for life in the trackless territories of Texas, there was little to do but turn and head home. As I fixed to do so, however, I saw that ahead of me the sky was lighted up yellow over the wax myrtles as by a bonfire. Other features of creation seemed as inflamed as I was. The fire provided, I reasoned, an interim direction.
I made toward its light, and in a turn or two of the road came upon a church afire. Its roof and steeple were ablaze, but the body of the building was yet untouched. I left the horse and walked to the church and entered the door and walked down the aisle. I took the ring pouch from my pocket and placed it on the altar and then stood there in the smoke and the garish light. Pieces of roof began falling about me flaming. I am the groom waiting at the altar; I will burn myself down, I thought.
Just then a man burst through the doors. His clothes were twisted on him and he carried a quart liquor bottle with but an inch left glowing amber at the bottom. He said, What are you doing here? Get out.
Pride, I guess, made me say, I happened by. I came in to see if I could be of help.
—Well, get out, he said.
I left the church with him, and we determined to try to save it, though he was drunk and I was half out of my mind. From a creek nearby, we carried what water we could in his liquor bottle. We’d squat by the creek waiting for the bottle to glug full through its narrow neck and then together we would walk to the church and throw the water on the fire a quart at a time, not so much in hope of putting it out as to be able to say, if asked, that we tried. When dawn came, the man and I stood with sooty faces looking at a round black circle on the land.
—Well, that’s that. Everything’s burned but the hinges and the doorknobs, the man said.
—Yes, I said.
—We did what we could.
—Without a doubt.
—There’s not a man that could lay blame on us for lack of effort.
—No. Not a man, I said
He shook the last drops of water out of his liquor bottle onto the singed grass at the edge of the fire ring and put it in his coat pocket and walked on up the road. I went to the horse and mounted and rode back into Charleston.
A week later I booked passage on a ship bound for England, and for the next year I did little but roam about examining old churches and old paintings. When I returned, I found that your mother had married the man I had seen her with on the porch. He was a Frenchman, an associate of her father’s, a broker of wines. She had gone with him to live in France. It was like a door closed.
I had always been drawn to matters of the spirit, and so I withdrew from my duties in the family business and went into ministry with both resignation and glee. I have never for a moment regretted that decision.
Nineteen years passed, and one spring day I discovered that Claire had returned from France alone. Her husband had died. It had been a childless marriage, and not entirely a pleasant one if gossip was to be believed. Bitter, in fact. The little Frenchman had lived up to my most selfish dreams.
Within days of hearing this news I returned to the warehouse on the Cooper and met again with Dechutes. He was now an old man, great of waist and flabby at the jowls, and I had a widow’s peak and had grown grey at the temples. The look he gave me would serve perfectly as illustration of the word supercilious. He said, How might I help you? in a tone that some previous time might have led to seconds and pistols.
I said, We are going to go at this thing again, and this time I intend to see that it sticks.
That autumn, your mother and I married, and for two years I was as happy as a man can be. And I think I made her happy as well. Her previous husband, the little Frenchman, had been unsatisfactory in every regard. He blamed her for the lack of children and grew sour and harsh. I made it my business to reimburse her for every slight, every meanness.
The months when we knew you were to come seemed a strange blessing for a pair such as we were: old and marred by the past. When Claire died in childbirth, I could not hardly think that God would be so short with us. I could do little for weeks. Kind neighbors found a wet nurse for you and I took to my bed. When I rose again, it was with the determination that my life was now at your service.
When her father’s story was done, Ada had stood and walked behind his chair and stroked his hair back from his brow and kissed him on the crown of his head. She knew not what to say. She was so taken aback by this tale of her creation. She could not at that moment easily frame herself anew, not as some staid erratum but as the product of passion extended against great odds.
• • •
By the time Ada’s story was done, full dark had almost fallen and a hazy moon stood above a bank of clouds to the east. The dark shape of a high bird passed across the face of the moon. Then another, and then more and more in fleet chords. Some night-flying race of grebe or snipe maybe, in passage south. The stars as yet were not out, but to the west two planets, bright beacons in the indigo sky, neared setting behind a trailing flange of Cold Mountain.
—The blue one, that brighter one, is Venus, Ada said, as she and Ruby turned up the road to Black Cove.
to live like a gamecock
Midday, Inman and Veasey came upon a new-sawn tree, a fair-sized hickory, felled parallel to the track they walked. Beside it lay a long crosscut saw, its blade oiled and entirely free of rust, all the intricate teeth of its cutting edge bright from recent sharpening.
—Lookee there, Veasey said. An abandoned saw. Somebody would give me a pretty penny for that.
He went to pick it up, and Inman said, The woodcutters have just gone to get their dinners. They’re shortly coming back to buck and split this hickory.
—I don’t know any such thing, other than there’s a saw by the road and I found it.
Veasey picked it up and balanced the length of it across his shoulder and walked on. At every step the wood handles at either end bounced and the big blade hummed and sproinged like the music of a Jew’s harp.
—I’ll sell this off to the first man we meet, he said.
—You seem mighty free and easy with the property of others. I’d like to have heard how you squared that up with gospel in your sermons, Inman said.
—Make no mistake about it, on the issue of property God is none too particular. His respect for it is not great, a prejudice He demonstrates at every turn. Note especially the way He uses fire and flood. Have you ever seen a pattern of justice in their application?
—No. Not that you’d notice.
—Exactly. All I can say is that a man who aims to model
himself on the Deity can’t put too much thinking into who a particular saw belongs to. Such things distract you from the grand view.
—The grand view? Inman said. He looked at the preacher’s scabby pate, the thin cut under his eye from the big whore, and the mark still there from the pistol stroke Inman had given him by the Deep River. You’re a one to be talking of the grand view with the whippings you’ve taken, he said. Every one of them just, at that.
—I’m not saying I didn’t need whipping, Veasey said. And many a better man has taken a worse one. But I don’t aim to take another lightly.
That thought turned Veasey’s mind to matters of defense, and he said, Let me see that mighty pistol of yours.
—No, Inman said.
—Come on. I won’t hurt it.
—No.
—All I was thinking was that it would be just the armature for a pistoleer.
—Too big and heavy, Inman said. You need a Navy pistol. A Colt’s or a Starr. It’s the right heft for drawing out fast.
—I’d at least like mine back.
—I plan to hold it until we part ways, Inman said.
—That might come unexpected, Veasey said. And then I’d be left weaponless.
—And the world a better place for it.
They presently walked under an enormous honey locust tree that leaned over the road. Lacking better victuals, they stooped and filled their pockets with its long rusty pods. They journeyed on, splitting the pods with their thumbnails and eating out the sweet white pulp by scraping it against their teeth. After a time, they spied a man standing off below the road, seemingly in deep contemplation over the scene before him, the chief feature of which was a great black bull, dead in the fork of a creek. The man saw them passing by and hailed them, asking if two such sports might come down from the road and give a hand. Inman climbed down. Veasey set his saw by the roadside and followed.
They stood beside the man and looked at the swollen bull, branch water lapping against its belly, flies in clouds about its mouth and ass. They all had their arms crossed, eyes downcast, the posture of workers faced with a job they don’t want to have to do.
The man was not precisely old, but he was working his way there. Thick through the barrel as virile males of most mammal species from ape to horse will get in their late maturity. He wore a hat, a black wool relic with a sugar-loaf crown. Though the day was not much cold, he had tied the broad brim down around his ears with a piece of sisal until it fit about his head like a bonnet. Great bushy burnsides furzed out to his jawbone, and he peered from under the brim’s shadow with dark eyes, the lids swollen and hooded as a raptor’s. He had a little round mouth that reminded Inman of the blowhole on an enormous snouted fish he had seen during a brief spell of fighting along the coast back near the war’s start.
Propped against a nearby tree was a single-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. The barrel looked to have been sawed off somewhat short to throw a pattern wider than was either common or practical. The job had been done with insufficient tools, for the muzzle was ragged and not entirely square to the barrel, as if cut on the bias.
—How do you aim to get it out? Veasey said.
The man paused before answering and formed pincers with thumb and forefinger and then went investigating under his pants for some minute creature troubling his groin. He pulled out his pincers and held them close to his eyes and seemed to crack something between his thick yellow nails. His hands were large and the skin of them had a chalky scurf to it.
The bull, he explained, had wandered off days earlier and died of some unknown disorder. The branch, he said, was their water source, and its normal neutral flavor had taken on a certain tart rankness that had sent him walking up its banks looking for the reason. He had a length of rope with him, and he reckoned they might all work together and snatch the bull from the water.
Inman regarded the man and Veasey. And then he looked at the humped mass of the bull. It would take at least a team of draft horses to drag that bull out, he judged.
—We could try to pull it, he said. But that’s a big bull. We might better think of some other way.
The man ignored him and tied on to the bull’s neck and they all took hold of the rope and heaved. The carcass moved not an inch.
—Levers, the man said. We can lever him out if we can find poles.
—We don’t have to find them; we can cut poles to suit, Veasey said. I’ve got a good saw, which you might want to buy off me when we’re done. He ran up the bank to get the crosscut. He was excited as a boy getting to do a job with men for the first time.
Inman thought the idea a poor one, and so he sat on a downed log and watched with amusement as the two men set to work with great and misplaced enthusiasm. They reminded him of army engineers and their minions setting to build a bridge or the like, their eagerness all out of proportion to the actual worth of the thing they were working at, and the end result would be a whole lot of effort on a job that generally struck Inman as better off left undone.
As Inman watched, Veasey and the man cut three stout poles. In short order they were up to their shanks in the water and had thrown big rocks in place to act as fulcrums. They worked in concert, trying to roll the bull over, but could get it to do little more than wiggle flabbily as they strained against the poles. Inman joined them, and this time it did move. Problem was, even with the pole ends pulled all the way down into the water, they could achieve only about a foot of lift. Then they would tire and let up on the poles, and the bull would fall back with a splash.
—I know, Veasey said. We can lever it up and then shove rocks under it with our feet to hold it. Then we lever it again from there with a higher fulcrum and add more rocks. We do it over and over and by and by we get it rolled.
Inman eyed the distance from the bull to dry ground.
—We roll it over once and it will still be in the water, he said.
—Roll it twice, then, Veasey said.
—That will get it to the bank, Inman said, but it will still rot and run into the water.
—Roll it thrice, Veasey said. He was consumed in all his parts by the wonder of the lever and the manly work of engineering.
Inman could picture them there until dark jacking up the bull and chocking it with rocks and jacking again. Hour upon hour of good walking time or good resting time passing away.
Inman went to the stream bank where Veasey had left the saw. He picked it up and returned to the bull and set the edge of the blade to its neck.
—Somebody get on the other end, he said.
Veasey looked sorely disappointed, but the man took the far handle, and in a few pulls they had the head off. Then, soon after, a section of chest with the forelegs attached. The next cut separated hindquarters from belly. It opened up with a great flush of organs and dark fluid and a release of gas. Veasey watched and then bent and vomited into the water. A spume of honey-locust pulp floated away downstream.
The man looked over and cackled as if a rare joke had been passed. Weak in the stomach, he said.
—He’s a pulpiteer, Inman said. This is some distance from his chosen work.
When they were done with the sawing, the branch was strewn with bull parts, which they soon dragged out and left far aground. Still the water ran red and it put Inman in mind of the creek at Sharpsburg.
—I’d not drink that water for a few days yet, Inman said.
—No, the man said. I reckon not.
The man and Inman rinsed their hands and forearms in the clear water upstream.
—Come eat supper with us, the man said. And we’ve a hayloft that’s good for sleeping.
—Only if you’ll take that saw off our hands, Inman said to the man.
—I expect two dollars federal. Fifty in state scrip, Veasey said, perking up.
—Take it on, Inman said. No fee.
The man picked up the saw and balanced the midpoint across his shoulder, and with his free hand he took up the marred shotgun. Inman and Veasey went with
him, walking on down the road, which followed the stream course. The man seemed lightened in his mood by having removed the bull from his drinking water, jocular in fact. They had not walked far when he stopped and put a finger to his nose and winked. He went to a big oak with a hollow in its trunk at about eye level. He ran his arm up in the hole and drew out a stoppered brown bottle.
—I’ve a number of these secreted around for when I might feel the need, he said.
They sat against the trunk of the tree and passed the bottle among them. The man said his name was Junior, and he set off on a tale of his young manhood, of his days traveling the cockfighting circuits. He told of one particular cock, a big dominicker that lived for nothing but to fight and tread hens. Of how it whipped everything thrown against it for months. Of epic struggles, spectacular victories in which the dominicker, looking to be facing certain defeat, would fly into the rafters of the barn the fight was held in and roost there until all the spectators jeered. Then, when the jeering reached its zenith, it would drop like a hammer on the opposing bird, leaving a bright pile of blood and feathers in the dirt.
Junior told also of how the women flung themselves at him in his travels with about the vigor of the dominicker falling on his foe. One in particular that came to his mind was a married woman whose husband had invited him to stay with them for a few days between fights. She set her sights on him, rubbing against him at every chance. One day when the husband was off plowing she had gone out to dip water from the well. When she bent over to catch the bucket, Junior said he came up behind her and threw her skirts over her back. The way he told it, she was drawerless under the skirts, and he said she tipped her hind end up and stood on her toes. He had her right there, bent over the pit of the well. It lasted about as long as it took her to wind up a bucket of water, he said. When he was done he went on down the road with his rooster under his arm. He led Inman and Veasey to believe that there had been a great number of such wonderful days in his earlier life. I had my nose in the butter many a time, he said.
Veasey thought this a fine story, for the liquor had run to his head, his stomach being empty. He whooped at its conclusion and jabbered on about how that was the life for a man.