—Could you? she said.
—Yes.
—I believed you could or I’d never have asked.
He went to the bed and drew off the boots and climbed under the quilts fully clothed and lay under the covers flat on his back. The tick over the rope was filled with fresh straw and smelled dry and autumnal and sweet, and underlying that was the smell of the girl herself, like a stand of wet laurels after their blooms have fallen to the ground.
They both kept as still as if a charged and cocked shotgun rested there between them. And then in a few minutes Inman heard her crying great dry sobs.
—I’ll go if that would be better, he said.
—Hush.
She cried on awhile and then stopped and sat up and wiped her eyes on the quilt corner and began talking about her husband. She required of Inman only that he bear witness to her tale. Every time he went to speak she said, Hush. There was nothing about her story remarkable other than that it was her life. She told the manner in which she and John had met and fallen in love. The building of this cabin and her working like a man beside him, felling the trees and raising the dressed logs and chinking the gaps. The happy life they had planned in this lost place which to Inman seemed so unlikely of sustenance. The hardness of the past four years, John’s death, the shortness of food. The only bright spot was John’s brief furlough, a time of great happiness which produced the baby sleeping by the fire. Without her, Sara said, there’d be nothing holding me to earth.
The final thing she said was, That will be a good hog out there. It fed on chestnut mast mainly, and I brought it in from the woods and gave it corn for the past two weeks so the lard will render out clear. It’s so fat its eyes have about swole shut.
When she was done talking, she reached out and touched the scar at Inman’s collar line, first with just her fingertips and then with her whole palm. She rested her hand there a moment and then she took it away. She rolled over with her back to him and soon her breathing became deep and regular. He figured she had found some calm just in telling to another person what a lonely thin edge of life she occupied, where one hog could act as stopple to a demijohn of woes.
Worn as he was, Inman could not rest. While Sara slept he lay looking up, watching the light of the fire diminish on the underside of the roof as the logs burned away. A woman had not touched a hand to him with any degree of tenderness in so long that he had come to see himself as another kind of creature altogether from what he had been. It was his lot to bear the penalty of the unredeemed, that tenderness be forevermore denied him and that his life be marked down a dark mistake. And in his troubled mind and constant sorrow he did not even think it possible to reach a hand to Sara’s hip and pull her to him and hold her close till daylight.
What little sleep he did get was troubled by dreams that emanated from the quilt top. The beasts of it chased after him in a dark wood, and there was not place one for sanctuary no matter where he turned. All the world of that dark realm gathered dire and intent against lone him, and everything about it was grey and black, but for teeth and claws as white as the moon.
When Inman awoke it was to Sara shaking his shoulder and saying urgently, Get up and get out.
It was just grey dawn and the cabin was freezing cold and there was the faint sound of horses on the road leading up to the house.
—Get, Sara said. Whether it’s Home Guard or raiders, we’re both better off if you’re not here.
She ran to the back door and opened it. Inman jerked on the boots and took the LeMat’s from the mantel and rushed out. He went at a dead run to the line of trees and brush beyond the spring. He plunged in and then, hidden from sight, he worked his way around until he found a thick stand of twisted laurel situated to give him a view of the front of the house. He crawled up in the darkness pooled under the laurel and sighted through a fork in a trunk to hide his face. The ground was frozen to a crunchy grit under him.
He could see Sara run barefoot across the frosted ground in her nightgown to the hog pen. She dropped the poles of the pen gate from their stanchions and tried to coax the hog out, but it would not rise. She walked into the muddy pen and kicked at the hog, and her feet when she raised them were black with mud and hog shit where she had broken through the frozen crust to the muck. The hog rose and began to walk, but it was so immense and low slung that it could hardly step over the gate poles on the ground. It had just left the pen and begun to gain some momentum with Sara driving it toward the woods when there was a call from down at the road.
—Stop right there.
Blue jackets. Inman saw three of them on sorry horses. They dismounted and came through the front gate. Two of them carried Springfield rifles in the crooks of their left arms. The muzzles were aimed half at the ground but the men’s fingers were inside the trigger guards. The other man held a Navy revolver pointed up as if he aimed to shoot down a high bird, but his eyes were aimed straight at Sara.
The man with the pistol went to her and told her to sit on the ground and she did. The hog reclined on the ground beside her. The two with rifles climbed onto the porch and entered the house, one covering the other as he opened the door and stepped in. They were inside awhile and all that time the man with the pistol stood over Sara without looking at her or speaking to her. From the house came sounds of clash and breakage. When the two inside reappeared, one of them carried the baby by a fold in its swaddling as one would carry a satchel. It cried out and Sara half rose to go to it and the man with the pistol shoved her back to the frozen ground.
The three Federals convened in the yard, but Inman could not make out what they were saying over the sound of the baby and of Sara pleading with them to give her the child. He could hear their accents though, flat and quick as hammer blows, and they brought up in him the urge to strike back hard. He was, however, beyond reliable range for the LeMat’s, and even if he were not, he could think of no plan of attack that would result in anything but death for Sara and the baby and himself.
Then he could hear that they were asking her about money, where she had it hidden. That’s their nourishment, Inman thought. Sara said what could only have been the truth, that all she had of worldly goods was the little they could see. They asked again and again and then they led her to the porch and Pistol held her hands behind her while one of the riflemen went to the horses and took straps that looked to be pieces of old plow line from a canvas saddlebag. Pistol tied her to a post with the straps and then just pointed a finger at the baby. One of the men unswaddled the baby and set it out on the frozen ground. Inman could hear the man with the pistol say, We have all day, and then he could hear Sara scream.
The men sat on the porch edge and dangled their feet and talked among themselves. They made cigarettes and smoked them to spittled nubs. The two underlings went to the horses and came back with sabers, and they went about the yard prodding into the cold ground hoping to hit treasure. They went about it for some time. The baby screaming and Sara pleading. Then the one with the pistol arose from his seat on the porch edge and walked to Sara and stuck the barrel of the pistol to the fork of her legs and said, You really don’t have shit, do you? The other two came and stood close by, watching.
Inman began moving back through the woods to put the house between him and the porch so that when he came at them he could at least shoot one as he came around the corner before they saw him. It was a poor plan, but it was all he had, given the open ground he had to cross to get at them. He had no thought other than that he and the woman and the baby would likely all be killed, but he could see no other way out of this.
Before he moved far, though, the men stepped away from Sara. Inman stopped and watched, hoping for some advantageous realignment of forces. Pistol went to his horse and got a length of rope and walked over to the hog and tied it on to its neck. One of the riflemen unhitched Sara from the post and the other went to the baby and hoisted it by an arm and thrust it out to her. They began chasing about the yard gathering up chickens. They ca
ught three hens and tied their legs with twine and hung them upside down behind their saddles.
Sara held the baby to her. When she saw Pistol leading the hog off she yelled out, That hog’s all I’ve got. You take it and you might as well knock both of us in the head and kill us now, for it will all come out the same. But the men mounted up and headed back down the road, Pistol leading the hog, which trotted along effortfully at the end of the rope. They turned a curve and were gone.
Inman ran down to the porch and looked up to Sara. He said, Warm your baby up and then build you a fire just as high as your head and put on a cauldron of water to boil. And then he jogged off down the road.
He trailed the Federals, sticking to the margins of the woods and wondering what it was he intended to do. All he could hope was that something would present itself.
They did not go long, about two or three miles, until they pulled off the road into a swale at the mouth to a ragged little cove. They went up it a ways and tied the hog to a locust sapling and set about building a fire close up to a rock ledge near a swift creek. Inman reckoned their aim was to camp there for the night and eat until they were full, even if that meant cutting the hams off the hog. Inman circled through the woods until he was above them at the top of the ledge. He hid in the rocks and watched them wring the necks of two of the chickens and pluck and gut them and put them on spits of green limbs above the fire.
They sat with their backs to the rock and watched the chickens cook. Inman could hear that they were talking of home and it came out that the two were from Philadelphia and the one with the pistol was from New York City. They spoke of how they missed home and how they wished they were there, and Inman wished they were there too, for he was not anxious to do what he was about to try to do.
He moved a fair way along the top of the ledge, going quiet and slow, until it declined into the common level of the ground. Near the edge of the rock outcropping he found a shallow cave and stuck his head in to find that it went only ten feet deep into the rock. It had long ago sheltered coon hunters or the like, for there was an old black fire ring at the mouth. The cave had also sheltered other men even earlier on. Their sign was scribbled on the walls of the cave, odd angular marks from some lost pattern of writing. None alive now could look on it and tell alpha from zed. Other marks depicted beasts long departed from this earth or never here, mere figment residents of brainpans long since empty as an old gourd.
Inman left the cave and kept circling the ledge until he could approach the encampment walking downhill along the stream through the gorge. Just out of eyesight of the men, he found a big hemlock with low-growing limbs, and he climbed up about ten feet into it and stood tall on the limb right up against the dark trunk like he had seen long-eared owls do when they’re laying up in the daytime and seeking to stay hid. Three times he gobbled out the call of a wild turkey and then he waited.
He could hear the men talking, but he could not tell what they were saying. In just a minute Pistol came easing along with the Navy revolver out in front of him. He walked right under the tree and stopped. Inman was looking down on his hat crown. Pistol stuck his revolver under his armpit and took the hat off and ran his hand through his hair. He was going bald at the back of his head. There was a white spot of scalp the size of a poker chip and Inman took aim at it.
He said, Hey.
Pistol looked up and Inman shot down on him at such an angle that he missed the bald spot. The bullet entered at the shoulder near the neck and erupted from the stomach in a bright outpouring that resembled violent vomiting. The man fell to the ground as if the bones in his legs had suddenly liquified. He tried to pull himself along the ground with his arms, but earth seemed to elude his grasp. He rolled and looked above him to see what make of predator had fallen on him with such weight. When their eyes met, Inman put two fingers to his hat brim in greeting, and then the man died in an attitude of deep confusion.
—Did you hit it? one of the riflemen called out from down the hill.
After that it was fairly simple. Inman descended from the tree and retraced his steps, making a quick flanking movement back up and around the long rock outcropping so that this time he approached the camp coming up the creek. He stopped at a thicket of rhododendron and waited.
The two riflemen by the fire called out to the dead man over and over, and Inman discovered that his name had been Eben. The men eventually gave up calling and took up their Springfields and headed upstream to find him. Inman followed them, screened by trees, until they came upon Eben. They stood for a time at a distance from the partially disassembled body and talked over what they ought to do. In their voices it was clear that their true wish was to forget what lay before them and turn and go home. But they decided to do what Inman knew they would, go on upstream looking for the killer, which they could not imagine as having done other than fled.
Inman followed behind, stalking them up the cove. They moved along among the big tight-spaced trees near the creek bank, fearful of straying far from it lest they lose their way. They were city boys wary of woods and thoughtful in the face of the killing they assumed they were getting ready to do. This was to them a trackless wilderness, and they entered it with great timidity, yet to Inman they seemed like men walking up a thoroughfare. They made show of looking for sign of the killer’s passage, but anything short of a big deep footprint in mud was lost on them.
Inman drew nearer and nearer to them, and when he shot them with the LeMat’s, he was so near he might have reached out and touched them at their collars with his hand. The first one took a bullet near the point where his spine met his skull and the ball carried away most of his forehead on its path out. He fell, needless to say, in a heap. The other, Inman caught half turning, at about the armpit. Mortal damage was not done, much to Inman’s dismay. The man fell to his knees, gripping his rifle before him.
—If you’d stayed home this would not have come to pass, Inman said. The man tried to swing the long Springfield around to bear on Inman, but Inman shot out the man’s chest at such close range that the muzzle flash set his jacket breast on fire.
The Philadelphians had fallen not far above the cave, so Inman dragged them into it and sat them up together. He went back and got the Springfields and propped them against the wall beside the men, and then he walked down the gorge. Under the hemlock he found that the remaining hen had gotten free and had its head immersed in the broken open belly of Eben the New Yorker. It pecked at the colorful flesh pulp of his exploded guts.
Inman fished in the man’s pockets for cigarette makings and then squatted on the ground and watched the hen work. He rolled a cigarette and smoked it down and rubbed out the fire of it on a boot heel. He was reminded of a sacred song usually done counterpoint, but he hummed a little of it to himself and thought the words. They were these:
The fear of the grave is removed forever.
When I die I’ll live again.
My soul will rejoice by the crystal river.
When I die I’ll live again.
Hallelujah I’ll live again.
Inman decided to view what was before him in this context: next to the field in front of the sunken road at Fredericksburg or the accumulated mess at the bottom of the crater, this was near nothing. At either place he had probably killed any number of men more satisfactory in all their attributes than this Eben. Nevertheless, he figured this might be a story he would never tell.
He rose and grabbed the chicken by the feet and pulled it from out the New Yorker and took it over to the creek and sloshed it in the water until it was white again. He tied its feet with a piece of the Federals’ twine and set it on the ground. It twisted its head about and regarded the world through its black eyes with what struck Inman as a new level of interest and enthusiasm.
He dragged the New Yorker by his feet to the cave and sat him up inside with his companions. The cave was little enough that the men sat almost in a circle. They looked stunned and perplexed, and in their demeanor they seemed
like drunks about to play a hand of cards. From the expressions on their faces, death seemed to have settled in on them much like melancholy, a sinking of the spirits. Inman took a stick of charcoal from the old fire at the cave mouth and sketched on the cave wall depictions of Sara’s quilt beasts that had pursued him through the dream world of the night before. In all their angularity they reminded him of how frail the human body is against all that is sharp and hard. His pictures fit in like near kin with the antique scratchings already put there by Cherokee or whatever kind of person came before them.
Inman returned to the clearing and checked the horses and saw that they had army brands, which saddened him. He untacked them and made three trips to the cave, hauling the Federals’ gear to rest with them, all but for one haversack. Into it he placed the two cooked chickens. He led the horses up the cove far beyond the cave and then shot them in the heads. It was not a happy thing to do, but marked as they were there was no other way that would not threaten to fly back at him or Sara. At the camp again, he put the live chicken into the haversack with the cooked chickens and slung it over his shoulder. He untied the hog and pulled at its rope, and then he left that place behind him.
When he returned to the cabin, Sara had a strong fire going in the yard. Over it, a black cauldron of water boiled up a cloud of steam into the crisp air. She had washed his clothes and they were spread on bushes to dry. Inman tipped back his head to the sun and saw that it was yet morning though it did not seem possible to him that it could still be such.
They made an early lunch of the cooked chickens and set to work. Within two hours the hog—killed, scalded, and scraped of its hair—was hanging pale from a big tree limb by a gambrel stick run through the tendons of its hind feet. Its various organs and fluids steamed in tubs on the ground. The girl was working at a lard tub. She held up a sheet of caul fat and looked through it as if it were a lace shawl, and then she wadded it up and put it in the tub for rendering. Inman partitioned up the carcass with a hatchet. He chopped down on both sides of the spine until the hog fell into two sides of meat, which he then further divided along the joints into the natural categories of pork.