Heaven and Hell (93 page)

Whimpering again, not quite crying, Gus tottered up. Bent seized him and pulled him against his legs, turning him at the same time. He put his free hand under Gus's chin and straightened his head with a wrench, so Charles and his son were face to face.

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"After him, and after you," Bent said, "the next will be the family of Hazard's brother, in California. I'll exterminate the lot of you before I'm done. Think of that, dear Charles."

Gently, caressingly, he drew the razor over Gus's right cheek. Gus screamed. A thread of blood unwound itself on the pale flesh.

"Think of that while the executioner carries out the general's order."

Magic Magee said, "Shit," which stupefied Gray Owl, because the soldier had an inordinately clean vocabulary for someone in his profession. Magee jumped up from beneath the pecan tree with the big branch over Vermilion Creek. "I don't care about his orders, something's wrong."

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Gray Owl started to call him back again. Magee was striding fast.

Gray Owl hesitated only a moment before hurrying after him.

Tears rolled from Gus's eyes and diluted the blood on his cheek.

Charles was consumed with a rage like sickness. He pulled his hands apart between his knees. The rope burned the backs of his wrists. Suddenly the left hand slid a little, slippery. He was bleeding. He pulled his left hand toward him but the largest part, just below the knuckles, held fast against the rope and wouldn't slip through. No use. No use.

Magee laid one hand on the corral rail. The chestnut and the mules smelled him and tossed their heads. "Now, now," he said, "don't take on. I'm friendly."

He slid between two of the rails. The chestnut neighed. "Don't do that," Magee said, wanting to shoot the blasted horse. He nodded sharply to Gray Owl, who clutched his rifle and padded out of sight, going to the front door. Magee had told him to wait until he called him in. Charles had to be inside. He wasn't in the combination stable and henhouse, or in the abandoned trader's wagon.

Magee didn't know what he'd find just inside the corral door but he hoped the door didn't open directly to the main room. He was sweating as if it were August. Just as he reached for the latch string, a fat raccoon shot around the back corner and ran right up and poised by the
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door.

"Scat," Magee whispered. He kicked the air. The tame raccoon wouldn't budge. He wanted in, probably for food. He'd give Magee away.

Baffled, Magee held still about fifteen seconds. Then, clearly, he heard a small boy cry out. With a glum face he drew his knife. "I'm sorry, mister." He swooped down and killed the raccoon with one stroke.

Gus bled from the cut on his cheek. Charles wished the boy would faint, but he hadn't.

Bent's head was blessedly free of pain and those queer hurtful lights. The general's orders were just and right, and the executioner's duties were a joy. He couldn't prolong it much longer, though. The cutting, right in front of the boy's straining, terrified, mad-eyed father, had given him a huge painful erection.

He laid the razor on Gus's throat.

Charles saw the blued muzzle push out between the door frame and the red blanket. He'd heard nothing from that part of the house, not 590 ' HEAVEN AND HELL

a sound. Loudly, Magee said, "Mr. Bent! You better turn around and see this gun."

There was a slow, tortured moment when Charles knew Bent would cut Gus's throat. Instead, like a soldier, he obeyed the commanding voice. He turned. Magee stepped from behind the blanket.

Charles hurled himself out of the chair and flung Gus down. Bent bellowed, realizing his error. Charles leaped away, stumbled over his son and fell. Green Grass Woman jumped at Bent and began to claw and pummel him. Magee aimed but she was in his line of fire. Bent shoved her and lashed downward with the razor, laying open her skirt and slashing her thigh. She cried out. A second push toppled her. Bent went for Charles, the razor shining.

Magee shot him. The bullet struck the back of his left thigh. He spiraled down and flopped with his hand flung out. Charles rolled over, his wrists still tied. He reached, pulled the razor from Bent's hand and threw it. Magee shouted something. A rectangle of light fell over Charles and his son. Gray Owl crouched in the door with his rifle.

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"Want me to finish him?" Magee asked. Bent stared, realizing he was unarmed, caught.

"Not in front of the boy. Cut me loose."

Magee freed Charles with his knife, which was bloodstained. Charles knelt, trembling.

"Gus, it's Pa. I know I look terrible, but it's Pa. Pa," he repeated, with an extra puff to the P, as if that word alone could make the link.

The boy drew away, using his hands in the dirt to pull himself.

Some frightened witless animal peered from his eyes. Charles extended both arms, hands spread, as he'd done outside. "Pa."

Suddenly the tears broke, wracking the boy, great gulps and shudders.

He wailed and ran to Charles. Charles enfolded him and held him.

He held Gus a long time, until the tiny body stopped shuddering.

Green Grass Woman's gashed leg bled heavily. She had lost consciousness after she fell. Magee raised her skirt and inspected the wound.

As dispassionately as a physician, he wiped some blood from her thick pubic hair. "I used to doctor drunks in the saloon when they pulled stickers on each other. I can tie this off. Be painful for her to walk for a while, but I think she'll be all right."

From his pouch Gray Owl took some roots, which he crumbled and mixed with a few drops of creek water, working the material to a paste on a flat stone brought from outside. He searched the smaller room and found a piece of clean cloth. Magee was busy tying Bent's hands The Hanging Road 591

with part of the rope that had bound Charles. He was careful to brace Bent's arms behind his back and loop the rope with no possibility of slack. He wasn't gentle.

"How about his leg?" Charles asked.

"Grazed, that's all. I'd say leave it alone. Serve him right if the gangrene got it."

Gray Owl knelt beside the exhausted boy. His brown hands were gentle as he worked some of the gray-green paste into the cheek wound.

"He may be scarred, the way Cheyenne boys are scarred from the Sun Dance."

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"Sun Dance hooks go in the chest, not the face."

"Yes," the tracker said sadly. "There is nothing to be done. He will heal."

"Even if he heals he'll be scarred," Charles said.

He returned the Army Colt to his holster, bandaged his rope-burned wrist and went behind the bar. There he found another coil of rope. He slipped his left arm through and carried it on his shoulder. Bent stood by the door, his pant leg bloody. He blinked in the sunshine. He seemed docile.

Charles drank two swallows of the vile bar whiskey in hopes of staving off the shock that was an inevitable consequence of violence.

He walked over to Bent. It was all he could do to keep from putting the Colt to Bent's head and firing it.

"Magic, come along, will you? Keep the boy here, Gray Owl."

Bent cringed in the doorway. A lemon-colored butterfly flirted around his head and flew on. "Where am I going?"

The sun struck the gold filigree of Constance's earring and made it shine. Charles felt the impulse coming and couldn't stop it, or didn't want to stop it. He seized the earring and jerked downward. The post tore out most of Bent's earlobe. He howled and crashed against the door. Charles kicked his ass and drove him into the hot bright light.

The soft air did nothing to take the taste of dirt and bad whiskey and corruption from Charles's mouth. He had never felt the burned-out feeling so strongly. It tasted like sand and alum in his mouth. It hurt like salt and vinegar in a wound.

Palm over his bloody ear, Bent was abject. "Please--where?"

"You white trash," Magee said, imperial in his wrath. "You're going to hell."

"Where?"

Charles leaned close, to be sure Bent heard him. "Waterloo."

592 ' HEAVEN AND HELL

RAMPAGE OF

THE KUKLUX.

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A Night of Terror

on the Ashley.

The Mont Royal School

Destroyed a Second Time.

Two Are Dead.

President Grant Expresses

Outrage.

A Wounded Night-Raider

Unmasked.

Special from our

Charleston Correspondent

Madeline's journal

May, i86g. Buried Prudence Chajfee and Andy Sherman today.

They lie side by side, by my wish, and Jane's. I read the scripture, John 14. . . .

Fr. Lovewell has fled the district. No trace of the body of Des L. My feeling about him reduces to sadness rather than hate.

I am told he served in the Palmetto Rifles throughout the whole four years. Afterward he fought for causes more suspect. The preservation of slavery in different form. The supremacy of whites. The honor of a cruel and haughty family. Must men always be prey to evil ideas that cloak themselves in a seductive righteousness?

. . .

Thinking of D.L. again. In death he excites my curiosity in a way he could not when he threatened us. Like so many millions of others on both sides, he was changed and ultimately destroyed by The Hanging Road 593

the war. That kind of experience may be the central fact of our lives for a generation or better. Charleston people still discuss the way the war blighted Cooper. I know how Mexico wounded you,
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my dear husband. And how that unknown Yankee whose name you never knew cut short your precious life at Petersburg. Had it not been for Sumter, secession, Lee, and all the other great events and persons now being tinted with the false colors of romance, D.L. might not have been driven to fight his last doomed war at Mont Royal.

But as I have said before, pity is not without limit. I will have justice in the matter of the Klan. R. Gettys is still semi-unconscious in the hospital in Charleston, and the authorities move too slowly. One good friend said I could appeal to him for help at any time. Will travel to Columbia tom'w., taking a pistol for my companion. . . .

Nothing was left of Millwood or Sand Hills. All of Wade Hampton's land was gone in the wake of forced bankruptcy the previous December.

Rising taxes, shrinking crop income, investments worth forty cents on the dollar--it all culminated in a single tidal wave of disaster.

Over a million dollars in debt had driven him down.

Hampton and his wife, Mary, now lived in sharply reduced circumstances: a modest cottage on a scrap of land he'd managed to keep.

The Hamptons welcomed Madeline and insisted she stay the night on an improvised bed in the room the general used for an office.

Hampton's age showed, but he was still vigorous and ruddy. While Mary served tea, he left with his pole and creel. He came back in an hour with four bream for their supper. Mary set to work boning the fish and Hampton invited Madeline into the office. He cleared a place for his cup on the paper-strewn desk and in doing so had to move a handsome gold-stamped volume, which he showed to her.

"Proceedings of the Democratic National Convention in New York last July."

"I read that you were a delegate."

Without bitterness, he said, "The Republicans named it the reb convention. Bedford Forrest was a delegate. Peter Sweeney, the sachem of Tammany, too--very odd bedfellows, but that's the Democratic party for you."

"It's about General Forrest and his Klan that I've come to speak to you. I want the culprits punished."

"What have the authorities done?"

"Nothing so far. It's been over two weeks. If too much time goes
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594 * HEAVEN AND HELL

by, other things will take precedence and it will all be forgotten. I'll not have that. My teacher and the freedman at least deserve simple justice for a memorial."

"I concur. I'll tell you a fact about Forrest. He's ready to deny his connection with the Klan and order it to disband. It has gone too far even for him."

"No consolation to Andy's wife, or Prudence Chaffee's brothers and sisters."

"I understand your bitterness. Grant despises the Klan. Permit me to write him. I shall also ask General Lee to do so. We're on good terms. On behalf of all the investors in the little insurance company I organized in Atlanta, I asked him to assume the presidency. He declined.

He's happy presiding at the college up in Lexington. But we're friends, and his word will carry weight." She glimpsed his melancholy as he stroked his side-whiskers and mused, "Now and again there is some small benefit in being a war horse who came through it alive."

She noted the care with which he'd chosen the last word, leaving others--unhurt; unmarked--unspoken.

When Randall Gettys began to recognize his surroundings, Colonel Orpha C. Munro called on him. The hospital matron warned him that he couldn't stay long. With an acerbic smile he assured her that he could accomplish his mission quickly. "I am here at the request and on the authority of President Grant."

The matron unfolded a screen for privacy. Munro sat down beside the bed. Gettys resembled an intimidated child, the sheet tucked up to his pale chin and his pudgy fingers nervously playing with it. In the melee at Mont Royal he'd broken the right lens of his spectacles, which he'd had no chance to replace. He watched his visitor from behind a pattern of cracks radiating from the center of the lens.

With deceptive friendliness, Munro said, "It's my duty to inform you that the small hand press kept at your Dixie Store for printing your newspaper has been confiscated. You are no longer in the business of disseminating hatred, Mr. Gettys."

Gettys waited, certain there was worse to come.

"I would take a horsewhip to you if that were permissible. I'd do it despite your wound, because I find you and all your kind richly deserving of it. You're like the doomed Bourbons of France--kings too filled with arrogance to forget the past, and too stupid to learn from it."

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