How the Stars did Fall (3 page)

“Alright,” Faraday said. “Help me with the children. Are any of them yours?”

“No, I am barren. Both of us are.”

Together they visited each of the other rooms and freed the children and Faraday told them to go down to the kitchen and eat and drink. And he told them they were free and they all looked up at him as if he were speaking in tongues.

“They do not understand,” the woman said. “They were never taught any language and no one spoke to them, so they could not learn by listening.”

“By God,” Faraday said.

The children communicated with each other through grunts and gestures. They were divided in four groups corresponding to the different rooms they resided in, the variations in their manner like the dialects of different tribes, related but separate, the gulf wide enough that the child of one group could only barely communicate with one from another group. But when Faraday made signs with his hands indicating that he had food and intended to feed them, all of the children understood and followed him.

He looked over their feast for a time and then he turned to leave.

“Do not leave us,” the woman said. “The other ones will come and when they find the master dead they will kill us all.”

“I can’t help you any more than I have. Have you knowledge of any craft or trade? If I were you, I would flee this place to a city and there find a living with whatever talent God bestowed upon you.”

The woman fell into sobbing then, perhaps realizing that to survive she would have to leave the children behind to fend for themselves.

Now Faraday went back outside and found that Daniel and the two horses were no longer parked in front of the house. The tracks on the ground showed the way by which he had left, the four lines made by the carts unmistakable on the dirt road. This new development shocked Faraday, almost causing him not to notice a pair of black men passing in front of the house, down the same road, pushing wheelbarrows filled with grain.

“Hey!” Faraday called out to them.

The black men continued on without even looking back. Faraday set out towards them but stopped. Instead of trying to keep up with the men, he drew his revolver and fired a round at the sky. This made the slaves stop and crouch in terror and then Faraday was upon them, revolver still pointed at them.

“You Tuttle slaves?”

The black men looked one at the other in bewilderment.

“No hablamos inglés,” one of them said.

“No English? Okay. Dónde encontro uno caballo? Necessito caballo.” Faraday pantomimed the riding of a horse.

“Sí, caballo. En la villa.” The black man pointed far in the distance to a cluster of buildings just barely visible on the horizon.

“Gracias,” Faraday said.

That cluster of buildings turned out to be nothing but a bunch of old huts where the slaves lived and at that time of day it was almost entirely deserted save for a few slaves, men and women, coming and going on some errand or another. These slaves, catching sight of Faraday, stared at him as if he were not human like them but an aberration from some other plane or world. As soon as he found the stable, Faraday broke out into a run and, finding an open window into the space, discovered there were no horses there. But he did find another building, this one better preserved than the slave huts. It had a chimney and from it issued a steady stream of smoke, and it had a porch and tied to the beams were three horses, their heads dipping into a trough that had been left in front of them.

These horses were saddled and Faraday came up to them at a run, certain that they must belong to Tuttle’s men. Three guards, three horses. Faraday picked out the larger and stronger of the three and began to untie its reins from the wooden beams when he heard a door open and a drunken man stumble forward, a rifle slung over his shoulder. Faraday crouched, his back against the trough. Then the man came and stood over the trough and unzipped his pants and pissed into the trough. The horses neighed at him.

“Settle down, ye crowbaits,” he said and placed his hand over the head of one of the horse’s. “I’m almost done.”

The piss seemed to never end. Faraday felt a few droplets graze his arm and he pulled back, compressing his body against the trough as much as he could. He would wait it out and then leave, he thought. No one would see him.

“What in God’s name?” the drunkard said as the stream of urine finally came to an end. “Jeremiah, come out here.”

“What you hollering about?” Jeremiah said.
 

Now Faraday looked back the way he had come and saw the same thing those men were seeing. Two slave girls stood some eighty paces from the cabin, large twine baskets filled with oranges in their hands. They stood staring directly at the cabin. Directly at Faraday.

“Get on back to work,” Jeremiah yelled at the girls. “Goddamn foolish girls. Get on back.” The man had begun his descent of the porch when Faraday, left no other choice, got up and fired at him. The first bullet hit Jeremiah in the shoulder. The second went into one of his rib cages. The other man, drunk as he was, had managed to aim his rifle at Faraday but his shot was errant, hitting the nearest horse twice. It shrieked as it collapsed, the beast’s weight bending the beam on which it was tied, nearly breaking it. Now the other horses entered into a frenzy and tried to run away, pulling at their reins, and this force was enough to snap the beam like a twig. The loss of that single column was enough to destabilize the whole structure of the porch, the awning cracking off the rest of the cabin, falling and just missing the drunkard by a hair as he jumped over the steps and off the porch.

Holding on to the reins of the largest horse, Faraday tried to calm it down and mount it, but its fury proved uncontrollable and Faraday soon lost his grip on the reins. By now the drunkard had reloaded his rifle and aimed it at Faraday from a prone position. The shot caught Faraday in the thigh just as he found cover behind the fallen awning. He fought through the pain and, knowing the drunkard would have to reload before he could fire again, came out of cover and unloaded his revolver’s last three shots into the man, killing him.

By now a small crowd of black slaves had come together to watch the altercation. Most of them were women, but from behind them came a man bearing a machete. He inspected the bodies and, finding the men dead, put aside his machete and stood over Faraday like some ebony colossus, his skin slick with sweat.

“I need help,” Faraday said. “Can any of you dress a wound?”

If the slave understood he gave no sign. Instead he lifted Faraday off the ground and carried him away, into one of the slave huts. Then he had one of the slave women come in with a bucket of water and some rags and she ripped Faraday’s pants up around the wound and wiped it.

“You have to get the bullet out,” Faraday said.

The woman also did not appear to understand. She continued wiping and when she was satisfied she took the rags and dressed the wound, tying the pieces together tight as she could manage to stop the bleeding. Then the black man urged Faraday up from the bed with gestures and pointed outside, where another slave had calmed one of the horses down and given it water and hay.

“Thank you,” Faraday said. “Thank you.”

He mounted up, wincing as he did so, for the wound stung badly, and he looked up at the sky. The sun had begun to descend in the west and Faraday rode hard in that direction. He remembered that there was a town near the Tuttle estate, on the coastline, and he needed a doctor with some urgency. He knew abandoning his brother’s trail would make it almost impossible to find Daniel later but the wound had left him with no choice but to postpone his quest for the moment. While the horse negotiated the terrain, Faraday thought about his brother. Before bringing the idea of robbing Tuttle to Daniel, Faraday had considered the possibility that Daniel could take the gold for himself. But he had dismissed this risk as one worth taking if it meant freeing his family from debt. Now there he was, wounded and on the doorstep of death, with nothing to show for it. He tried to think about what his best course of action would be once he was healed, but the pain clouded his thinking, and he decided to put off all thought of the future and concentrate on saving himself. The sun burned hot and steady above him and Faraday thirsted for water and thanked God for his hat and the small shadow it carved out for him in that hot and inhospitable land.

Chapter Four

The hours passed and Faraday’s injured thigh gave him no respite, the throbbing pain increasing, the sharp ache coinciding with the gait of the horse as it carried on past the flat fields surrounding Tuttle’s estate and entered into the rocky terrain of the coast, passing by clusters of trees like immobile families, their foliage verdant and lush. Faraday stopped the horse when he saw a few shrubs bearing little red berries. These he approached with relish, and he plucked them one by one and ate them. He found a shallow stream of darkened water, probably the contaminated effluvium of some mountain mining operation, and drank from that stream, and once he had his fill he led the horse over by the reins and guided its head to the same water. The sun now shone with less fierceness and each step forward diminished it further, until the sky took on a gray countenance and the land leveled off and a new wind blew in from the sea.

Reaching the beach, the horse slowed, fatigue setting in. Faraday set its course to the north and it plodded on, kicking up sand with each stride. In the dim light of the evening, Faraday could still scan around him for signs of human habitation. One sign would have been everything to him at that point, for the pain had increased and he knew he could not keep riding in the dark. The horse would not want to and even if he could persuade it for a while it could end up walking into a ditch and breaking a leg. His eyes closed, Faraday listened to the steady lapping of the waves, like the constant ticks of a cosmic clock. He realized that he wanted to sleep. To let his consciousness check out for a time. To delay. He would deal with his leg and his traitorous brother later. And he did sleep, in short bursts, the length of which he could not easily measure. But every time he slept something jolted him awake. The movement of the horse, the pain. Eventually he awoke to complete darkness, the moon only a sliver above him, the crescent offering just enough light that he could tell where the sand ended and the ocean began.

Then it appeared to him. Five, maybe six, points of orange light some distance ahead, floating above the waters. This vision renewed Faraday’s energy and he tightened his grip on the reins and urged the horse to go faster, to ride towards the lights. The horse, as if sensing its master’s urgency, increased its pace. As he got closer, Faraday saw that the lights did not float but were carried. Men holding torches huddled together on a wharf like the remnant of some ancient tribe, watching as one among them pulled something out of the sea. Faraday rode all the way up to that wharf and got down from the horse and stood holding his leg, the rags covering his wound crimson and cold, the smell of iron hanging around him like a cloud, his brow slick with sweat, the pain coming and going, enough to make him think of nothing else. All of this Faraday endured as he stood waiting. Then the lights began to move again and the men walked the span of the wharf, one tall and portly man ahead of the group. That one had in his hands a rope and hanging from it was a most curious machine. It looked like a barrel, but holes had been carved out on the sides and there were wires wrapping around it like veins.

The men were boisterous and laughing, clapping each other on the backs, as if they had accomplished something of significance together at the end of that wharf. The portly man kept looking back at the others and was not the first to notice Faraday nearly bleeding out on the sand. One of the other men caught sight of him first.

“Doctor Tennyson,” the man said, speaking to the portly one. “There is an injured man ahead.”

Immediately, Tennyson handed the contraption to another and took hold of Faraday by the arm.

“Gentlemen, we must help this man,” he said.

“Let’s carry him inside. I’ve got an empty room,” one of the men said.

Together those two men carried Faraday about half a mile to an inn. The room was simple, fit for servants rather than guests. The doctor examined Faraday. He brought out a leather satchel and from it produced a forceps and a scalpel, and the innkeeper took a little pan from his kitchen and placed it down next to the bed. Faraday still lay there in a haze and he heard the men speaking as if from a great distance. And he waited for some kind of anesthetic, opium or otherwise, to come out of that bag, but none came. The doctor took the forceps and penetrated the wound and the pain was so great Faraday lost consciousness.

When he awoke the next day, his shirt was soaked through by his own sweat, and his leg still throbbed but the wound was covered with new and clean bandages. He got up and walked over to the door on one leg, opening the door, and a barrage of sunlight afflicted him. He put his hands up to shield his eyes until they could acclimate. It must have been midday. And with the light came sounds of conversation and the clacking of silverware. The inn was empty save for one circular table on which sat Tennyson and five or six other men Faraday did not recognize. Each man had in front of him a mug of beer and plates with sausage and bread and beans.

“Good morning, sir,” Tennyson said, greeting Faraday.

“Morning. I want to thank you, Doctor. For helping me. Name’s Faraday.” They shook hands.

“Tennyson’s my name. And I did what men of my calling ought to do. No more than that. This man is Corliss. He is the owner of this inn and the one who gave you a bed to sleep on.”

“Well, I thank you, too, sir. I’m afraid I have no banknotes or gold on me at the moment, but if you gentlemen give me a bill for your services then I would surely pay as soon as I am able.”

“Nonsense, man,” Corliss said. “Your gold is of no use here. Look inside the box.”

Just then Faraday noticed the strange contraption he had seen the night before was sitting in the center of the table, upright, the holes on its sides like open eyes. Faraday peeked inside one of the holes and saw glittering in the sunlight a pan holding little bits of shiny gold. Flakes as brilliant and pure as the day they were forged in the distant corners of the cosmos.