Beautiful Dreamer (7 page)

I guess I fell asleep, because the next thing I knew it were light and he was walking in through the doorway. He didn't see me at first. He looked real scary and walked as if he was trying to hold hisself together. Then he just stops and looks at me and I looked back and I knew that whatever I did, he weren't going to kill me, mostly because he didn't look as if he could, but also because if he got smashed up like that for my daddy, why was he going to do bad to me? So I just looked back at him and after a bit he walked on through and out the back. I could see how there was an outhouse out there and I guessed he was gone to that. Then I realized that I needed to go as well, but I just sat there because there was no way I could go out while he was there.

After a bit, he came back in. He asked me who I was, but I couldn't answer. I didn't have no voice to answer and I just looked back at him until all of a sudden he half-turns around and hits the ground as if he wants to come on out the other side. Whatever they'd done to him had broken something inside. I looked at him and thought maybe I should be on my way. Anyone find me in there and him on the ground, a gun to hand, and I would be dead enough. But I figured this were the man who had tried to save my daddy and I couldn't leave him lying there.

I tried to lift him, but he were too heavy. He were making a strange noise as well, so that I was afraid again that he might be going to die. I went in the other room and found some cloth to cover him. Then, when I heard him begin to stir, I found a cup in the sink and dipped it in a pail. The water smelt of the earth.

Later, he got hisself up, though I don't know how, and went through in the other room. He hadn't been there but a second than he fell down so that I had to pull him into bed. I had to drag him, putting my hands under him. He groaned and made strange noises and I could hardly look at his chest where it was all burnt and swole up. I had to climb up on the bed, all smeared with red and black from his blood. Then I pulled until I fell over backwards, but I got him up there and then moved him about. The storm was still on outside and it seemed that the roof would lift up. There were no light to see by except the lightning that made everything milk white and then all dark again.

He woke at last and stared at me like he wanted to kill me, except he could hardly move. I went out and catched a rabbit. I found where they was and just sit there with a rock. There was no time for no snare so I waited and was lucky with the first throw. I twisted its neck and then tied some line around it and took it inside. There was no way he could do anything. He was half asleep and half just rambling. He kept talking to me but there was no way I could say nothing to him. My voice had gone and though it frightened me, I guess, more than anything, there was nothing I could do.

I had never been near no white man before, leastways not this close. His skin weren't white but grey, where it weren't red and purple from where it was swole up. There was a smell. It were part burnt skin and part something else. I skinned the rabbit and found a potato and carrot, mouldy and rubbery, but cooking would get rid of that. I had ate plenty of mouldy vegetables and they never did me no harm.

I fed him some because he didn't seem to have no strength. And I wondered again what I was doing here. I had done better to have done what my daddy said. And maybe they didn't care nothing about me. I guess it was him they was mad at. But here I was and I didn't want to go on out there, not while the storm was on.

If things hadn't happened the way they did, I guess I would have waited a day or some and then took off where I should have gone in the first place. But the men come. He were off in the outhouse while I sat in the kitchen. The sun were up and I was thinking it were about time for me to be going. I saw him come out and start on back. Then he just stopped as though he had been shot. He stopped and looked across somewhere I couldn't see. So I went in the other room and looked out the window. And there were two of the men that did what they did to my daddy. They were standing there with they rifles and I figured they had come for me and that the white man would hand me over. But I seen what they done and weren't no way I was going to let that happen. I had seen his gun. And I had seen where he kept his shells. So I went back in the kitchen and picked out a couple of shells. I guess my hand was shaking and I had trouble getting them in, though I had shot some before. My uncle had had a gun before he lost it in trading at the store. I knew how the shells went in. Even so, with my hands shaking it were difficult. At last they were in and I closed up the gun.

I could see from the way he was looking that they were circling round. I didn't know where to go and what I were going to do. I figured I'd just stand there and, when they came for me, fire the gun before they fired theirs. Then I heard what they was saying. They cut across the doorway, talking to the man, to my man who I had fed on rabbit stew, and they didn't look behind them because they were fixed directly on him. And I realized then that they were going to kill him like they killed my daddy. And when they had killed him, they would kill me, so I moved to the doorway not knowing what I was meant to do.

When they started in to rush him, it were just like they'd done to my daddy and I guess it was as if I had the chance all over again to save him or at least to get those that had hanged and then shot him. I brought the gun up right away and fired. The one I was pointing at seemed to fly forward. The man, my man, saw me right off. His eye slid right past the other man and took in where I was standing and that I had his gun. Then the other man swung around toward me and I fired so that he dropped down to the ground as well. I had never shot at no one before and them dropping down like that seemed like a dream. If I had had another shell, I don't know that I wouldn't have shot the other man and finished it all right there, but I didn't and he came across to me and took the gun out of my hand. He walked right on past and never said a thing. Then, a moment later, he come out again and went over to one of them on the ground and shot him. He had been moaning some. I guess he shot him like you would a wounded bird. Either way, he shot him. Then he turns around and says how we would have to get out of there or they would catch us, them others, or the law. And I saw where that was right and how there was nothing to do now but get away from there, though where we could go I couldn't think. With the law on us, it didn't seem to me there was anywhere we could go. They would get us for sure and kill us both. Just a few hours since I were weeding the garden. Now I was dead for sure and I had killed two men, one if you didn't count the one he shot, because I guess he were still alive. But the thing that cut right through me and that I couldn't let go of was that my daddy was dead and I had done nothing to stop it. But I guess that meant nothing to the man who grabbed ahold of my arm and told me to get out of there with him. Which is how come I was running through the woods and into the ice-cold stream with a white man who looked like the Devil hisself.

*   *   *

He moved on forwards. The path was narrow and he could see it wasn't used by much more than fishermen. He kept to the side at first, thinking that maybe those following, as following he was sure they would be, might not notice. Then he thought of the dogs and walked in the middle. No good dog can be fooled for long and the woods were full of the best. There were those who would sooner lose their kin than lose their dog, knowing that good dogs are rare and people keep spilling out if you just do the right thing. Every now and then he looked behind to see if the boy was keeping up, but he had come to believe that he was tough enough. Not many would do what he had done, none as far as he knew, knowing none of that kind.

He knew the railroad was ahead but not how far, and he hadn't begun to think what he might do when he reached it. He had never ridden the rails himself, never stirred more than a few miles from where he had been born, not imagining that any place else was any better and perhaps not any worse neither. When his wife had spoken of Birmingham or New Orleans, she wasn't speaking of places she knew but of other places where perhaps things was different. But unless different was better, why would anyone travel to them? Besides, he had told her, what was there for him to do in such a place? Here, at least, there was work from time to time. Here was familiar and there is something to be said for familiar places. So they settled for what they had got only to discover that they didn't have anything at all. The Bible says it, he had been told by the preacher at her funeral. God gives to them that have and takes from those that haven't even that which they have. And that had seemed about right to him, not in the sense that that was the way things ought to be but in the sense that that was the way he had always found them to be, not expecting different, either. Except, he guessed, that in marrying he had forgotten for a while, thought that things might be changed, knowing deep down, as it seemed to him now, that they never could be and never would.

After a while, the path disappeared as if whoever followed it simply turned around or dove into the river and he wondered whether he might not do the same. But this was all secondary growth, not too difficult to get through, so that he thought to keep on yet awhile.

Then he stopped. He had heard something, or felt something.

‘You hear that?'

They both stood listening. The boy looked around him as if looking could help him hear, which of course it can.

‘Hear that?'

The boy looked at him and shook his head.

It had been a long way off and indistinct, but it was a sound he knew, a sound he was used to hearing in the distance.

‘Dogs,' he said.

The boy's eyes widened.

‘Doesn't mean they after us. Seems too soon to me. The woods are full of dogs. Some let out on their own to do mischief, others hunting things down. We come aways. It too soon for them to be after us.'

Even so, he shifted the gun into his other hand and set off between the trees, by no means as clear in his mind as he had appeared to the boy. The sound of the dogs was what he had been waiting for.

The sun was low in the sky now and shadows had begun to link the trees together in a tangle of darkness. He went still faster, almost breaking into a run.

‘Keep up!' he shouted over his shoulder, not bothering to look around, knowing that the boy would be there, had no choice but to be there any more than he did. And as he ran, so the pain began to seep back into him again, his shirt rubbing against his chest, his hand alive, throbbing where he had to use it to carry the gun, switching it from the other hand when it was too much to bear. Then he stopped and, though he tried not to, sank to his knees. He had thought he was better, but no one recovers from that, assuming them to have suffered it, by simply walking away, running away from it. He wasn't just running from the dogs and maybe the men who were with them, but from everything that had happened and that was now spelled out on his body, and not just in the letter burnt in his flesh by those who wanted his flesh to shout out to the world what they would make him if not what he was. It was spelled out in what it had taken from him, beyond his pride. He was weak. Only the day before, it had been an effort to move from one room to another. Now he had swum and run and walked and run and he knew suddenly, and without any possibility of denial, that he could not walk another step.

The boy stood beside him, waiting for him to rise, and he struggled to do so, but his legs simply gave way and he fell sideways. Though the day was ending, the air was still liquid. The heat took whatever energy he had left and he lay down flat, letting his arms drop by his side.

‘Listen,' he whispered, so that the boy had to lean forward, resting a hand by his head and pressing his ear to his lips. ‘Listen for the dogs.'

The boy did as he was told, standing still and trying to sort out the noise of a dog from the other noises that created the music of the woods. But he could hear nothing beyond the everything. He knelt by the man again and shook his head. The man nodded and passed out where he lay, as though the news gave him permission, his head settling in last year's leaves.

When he woke, the moon was high and silver and the woods were transformed. He felt cold and alone. For a second, he could no more remember where he was than he could his own name. It was as if he were reborn and expected to make himself up as he went along. He turned his head, stiff from lying in a single position. He could just make out the boy, squatting on his haunches still, as if he were sleeping that way, as perhaps they did, he knowing nothing of their ways. Up above, through a gap in the trees, he could see a swathe of stars sprinkled like pepper. The moon was a sliver, a fingernail, but its light was a kind of grace spread over the world. It reminded him of a picture he had seen in the church: shepherds on a hill, dark, picked out against a glow of white. Then he recalled where he was and listened, listened for the dogs, but beyond the croaking frogs and rasping crickets could hear nothing. Still he listened, his body tense, but there was nothing that said pursuit, that said men and guns and rope and fire.

‘Boy,' he said, softly, though why softly he could not have said, except perhaps not to change the noise of the woods so that others might detect the change.

The boy stayed where he was.

‘Boy.'

Still the boy stayed where he was until, at last, he picked up a stick and walked across to him. He did not crouch down again, but stood there a second and then cleared the soil with his foot, brushing aside the leaves and smoothing the soil. Then he took the stick and wrote. The soil was dark on top but light underneath and as he wrote so the letters stood out white in the moonlight. He wrote his name with the stick, having been ‘boy' for long enough, perhaps. He wrote slowly and the man watched the letters appear one by one: ‘James.'

‘So,' said the man, ‘your name's Jim.'