In the Rogue Blood

I
n the summer of 1845 Edward Little was sixteen years old and restless in his blood. He knelt beside a tree stump next to the stable and carved intently upon it in the first gray light of day. He had often sat on this stump and watched the sun lower into the trees and wondered how great the distance from where he sat to where the day was still high noon. His family fled to this blackwater wildland just east of the Perdido and nearly two days’ ride north of Pensacola in the fall of ’42 when Daddyjack hied them out of the Georgia uplands following a barndance fracas that left a man dead and occasioned the local constable to initiate inquiry. The killed man was named Tom Rainey. He was a childhood acquaintance of Edward’s mother and made bold to ask her for a turn on the dance-floor. She shook her head as much in warning as in refusal, but before
he could turn away, there was Daddyjack before him redeyed with drink and much offended by Rainey’s familiarity toward his wife. Hard words abruptly gave way to grappling and folk jumped clear as a table overturned and then Rainey was staring down in wide-eyed wonder at the knife haft jutting from his breastbone and tight in Daddyjack’s grip. Edward was thirteen and had seen men die under felled trees and from a mulekick to the head and in wildeyed fever in their bunks, but this was his first witness to mankilling and his blood jumped at the swift and utter finality of its decree and at the resolute set of Daddyjack’s face as he gave the blade a hard twist before yanking it free. Rainey staggered and his face sagged as he gaped at the scarlet bloom on his shirtfront and then his eyes rolled up white and he dropped dead. Daddyjack got the family out of there fast as people fell away from the door. The boy was dry-mouthed and nearly breathless with the sense of having just seen something of himself, something at once dreadful and exhilarating and ascendant and not to be denied, some fierce region of his own being that awaited him like a badland horizon red as Hell.

Their covered wagon had lurched along toward Florida on narrow muddy traces that wound through deep pine forests and traversed marsh prairies and skirted shadowy swamplands where the moss hung heavy and the evening haze flared with will-o’-the-wisp. Daddyjack’s horse trailed on a lead rope and their two dogs trotted alongside. At the infrequent crossroads there was sometimes an inn where Daddyjack would rein up the team and step inside to sample a cup of the local distillate while Edward and his brother John watered the animals and listened to the conversations of passing travelers. More than one group of pilgrims they met was headed for the Republic of Texas. The emigrants had all been told the place beggared description and they spoke as if they’d already seen it with their own eyes—the towering pinewoods and fertile bottomlands, the long curving seacoast and rolling green hills, the vast plains that ranged for countless miles out to the western mountains. They’d been assured a man could make a good life for himself in Texas if he but had the grit to stand up to the Mexican army and the roving bands of red savages. It was anyhow sure to become a state before long, Mexican objections be damned. Daddyjack overheard a bunch of them one time and as he
hupped the mules back onto the southern track he shook his head and muttered about fools who thought they could get away from themselves in Texas or any other damned place.

One drizzly afternoon on the drive to Florida, when Edward and his brother and sister were sitting with their mother in the back of the wagon as Daddyjack drove the mule team through the blowing mist with water running from his hatbrim, she whispered to them that Jack Little was a murderous man never to be admired and much less trusted. They were the first words she had uttered in over a year and for a moment Edward was not certain if she had actually spoken or he had somehow heard the thoughts inside her head. “That man will eat you up,” she hissed. “All you. If you don’t kill him first.”

The girl nodded with tightlipped accord and stared fiercely at her brothers. The brothers exchanged uncertain looks. Daddyjack’s voice rasped into the wagon: “I’d rather go on not hearin your mouth a-tall than have to hear such crazywoman talk.”

She said nothing more that night or for the next three years, but the fervor in her eyes did look to Edward like the gleam of lunacy.

Their mother was a fairskinned supple beauty with sharp features, but neither Daddyjack nor the children knew—not the woman herself knew—that her roiled green eyes and darkly auburn hair were inherited from a murderous brute who begat her atop a thirteen-year-old girl as the rest of his bandit party whooped over the flaming wagons on a cold South Georgia afternoon and the girl’s family lay about in twisted slaughter. The childmother never recovered from the ordeal’s visitation of madness and she spoke not another word for the brief rest of her life. She wandered in the scrub for days before a tinker came upon her and carried her in his wagon to the next town on his route where she was housed by a grocer and his wife until they realized she was with child and passed her on to the grocer’s spinster sisters. A few weeks after the birth of her daughter she hanged herself from a rafter in her room. Her suicide was the favored conversational topic among the locals for some time but the gossipry soon made even the details of her death as uncertain as all else about her. In time all tales told of her were but fancies.

The infant was taken to raise by a childless Methodist minister named
Gaines and his sallow dispirited wife who were on their way to settle in the high country. The reverend christened her Lilith and told everyone she was his niece who had been orphaned by the cholera. She grew up a quiet observant girl who read the Bible and practiced her hand by copying passages from the Song of Solomon, which the reverend’s good wife was disturbed—and the reverend himself secretly piqued—to learn was her favorite portion of the Good Book. She had just turned twelve and offered no resistance when the preacher deflowered her one late evening as his consumptive spouse coughed away her life in an adjoining room. Six weeks later, on the night following his wife’s funeral, he lay with the girl again and wept even as he grunted with the labor of his lust. He told her it was the Lord’s own will that they commit their flesh one to the other and she smiled at his tears and said it was wonderful that the Lord willed such a pleasurable thing—and then laughed at his gaping astonishment at her brazenness. He took her to his bed nearly every night thereafter.

By the time she was fourteen she was pleasuring boys from every corner of the county in exchange for a bit of specie or at the least some general store gimcrack she fancied. She delighted in watching them fight over her. Her reputation began to draw passing drummers and tradesmen off the main road. The Reverend Gaines was the last to know. When he discovered he was no longer the sole recipient of the girl’s favors he was enraged by her perfidy and took to praying aloud every evening for the Lord to redeem her corrupt and bastard soul. He determined to see her married and gone as soon as some dupe might be found who would ask her hand.

And here came tall and burly and thickly mustached Jack Little, making known he was from Tennessee and a hewer by trade and in search of a wife. He said his father hailed from County Cork. The preacher invited him to supper and introduced him to his orphaned “niece.” Lilith was now fifteen and as eager to get free of the reverend and the whole damned state of Georgia as he was to be shed of her, and although nobody knew a single certain fact about Jack Little except that his accent had little in it of Tennessee and that he was hale and hankering to be wed, she perceived him as an opportune means for effecting her escape into the world.

They married three weeks after their introduction. Immediately following the ceremony the Reverend Gaines announced that he had sold his house and holdings to Jack Little and was returning to the itinerant life
of spreading the Blessed Word. Within the hour he was departed for places unknown. Jack Little gestured awkwardly toward the house and told his bride, “I wanted to surprise you.” Her wet-eyed speechlessness he took for joy. In fact she stood stunned by the world’s unending ironies and the cursed character of her luck. Her husband smiled at her evident happiness.

The moment Jack Little shut the bedroom door behind them on their wedding night she assumed her frailest face and her eyes brimmed as she told him she was heartsick and more ashamed than he could ever know because two summers ago she’d had an accident, had slipped and fallen astraddle the gunwale of a rowboat and sundered her maidenhead and thus robbed herself and him too of the dearest present a bride could give her husband. She wept into her hands. He gave her a narrow look but decided to make no matter of it. He’d been intimate with no women in his life but whores and needed to believe she was cut from finer cloth and so refused to entertain suspicions. In bed she responded with such fervor to his urgings that he counted himself lucky indeed to be wed to one so freshly young and uninhibitedly eager to pleasure her husband. He felt he might be in love.

He went to work at a timbercamp a few miles into the deepwoods. John was born in early winter and a year later came Edward. In the summer of the following year Lilith was in her sixth month with Margaret when a scowling pair of yellowbearded brothers named Klasson showed up in town carrying long rifles and inquiring after a man called Haywood Boggs. They claimed he was a bad actor who’d murdered their uncle four years earlier in western Kentucky and was now said to be living roundabouts. Their description of Boggs was discomfitingly familiar and somebody finally pointed them toward the logging trace that led to the timbercamp.

Three days later Jack Little drove a team into town with the stiffening bodies of the Klassons laid out on the wagonboards behind him. A crowd of townsmen including the constable gathered to behold the rawly dark rifleball hole over the glazed left eye of one corpse and the other’s battered and misshapen head set in a jelled pool of blood and brainstuff and swarming with fat blue flies. The camp foreman had come along on horseback to verify Jack Little’s story of what happened. The Klassons had appeared at the camp on the previous morning and dismounted with rifles in hand and hailed for a man named Boggs. When the foreman stepped forth and said there was no such fellow amongst them one of the
Klassons spotted Jack Little and threw up his rifle and fired and put a hole through the high crown of his hat. Woodcutters scattered for cover as the other man fired and missed too. Jack Little ran into the side shed where he kept his rifle charged and dry and grabbed it up and rushed back out and set himself and shot the first man dead as he was raising his gun to fire again. He ran to the second man who was almost finished reloading and cracked him across the face with the flat of his riflestock and knocked him down and then drove the buttplate into his skull a half-dozen crunching times to assure no further threat from him. The fray was done by the time the rest of the woodjacks came running in from the timber to see what the shooting was about.

He had never seen either man before in his life, Jack Little said, and he could offer no explanation for their attack. The constable scratched his chin and shrugged and for lack of warrant to do otherwise he ruled it a matter of self-defense. By right of the local law Jack Little had first claim to everything in the dead men’s outfits from horses to guns to saddlebag possibles. He kept the guns but sold the horses and the possibles for a tidy sum. And that was the end of it. In a tavern that evening everybody agreed that the Klassons had mistaken Jack Little for somebody else. “They surely did make a mistake,” one fellow said, speaking softly and looking about to make sure Jack Little wasn’t around before he added: “Even if they didn’t.” There was a chorus of ayes and laughter and much sage nodding of heads.

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