In the Rogue Blood (4 page)

“We should of stayed and looked some more,” John said. Darkness had given way to a hard blue dawnlight. They had ridden through the night and were deep in the pines, off the Escambia trace and well north of Pensacola and no longer concerned that they might have trackers behind them. “She might of been there. That many people, she could of been in there amongst them and we never saw.”

“She wasn’t there,” Edward said. “She’d been there we would of seen her. Listenin to the music, dancin, you know her. I’d say we looked that crowd up and down pretty good. Anyhow, we’d of stayed and we’d of sure had dealins with them boys from the cathouse.”

“I aint afraid of them.”

“Didn’t say you were and I aint either.”

“Then what do they matter?”

Neither said anything for a minute, then John said: “Could be she wasn’t outside. Could be she was inside somewhere. Workin maybe.”

“Doin what? I was in that cathouse, Johnny, I saw the kind of girls they have. She couldn’t of worked in one of them houses if she wanted, not till she gets bigger grown.”

“A lot you know about it,” John said, his face tight. “Been to one damn whorehouse in your life for ten minutes. I’ll have you know some of them places have girls younger than her. Anyhow, I didn’t mean she was bein no whore. It’s other sort of work she can do.”

“Hell, it wasn’t nobody but whores and barkeeps workin yesterday in all that celebratin. The plain and simple of it is she wasn’t there.”

“Then where in the hell
is
she?”

“Somewhere west, probly. Mobile maybe.”

John spat hard and said nothing more for a while. Then he said: “Daddyjack sees that bottle he’ll sure thank you for it and drink it all himself.”

Edward pulled the whiskey out of the croker sack and admired its color against the light. “Believe you’re right,” he said and uncorked the bottle and took a swallow and passed it over to his brother. They paced their drinks so that the bottle lasted them most of the remaining ride. They didn’t take the last drop of it until they were within ten miles of the homestead and they asked each other if they seemed drunk and told each other not so anybody’d notice and both of them laughed.

They smelled the smoke before they covered the last mile of the trace through the heavy trees and came out into the clearing and into the acrid haze lingering over the blackened remains of the house. Only the rock chimney and part of the back wall were still upright in the ashes. The stable stood untouched but the pigpen was open and the pigs were gone. The brothers slid down from the mules and stepped carefully through the ruins and kicked at the larger chunks of black-crisped wood. They studied the ashes closely and came on the stockless and warped remains of the Kentucky rifle and the smaller Hawken but found no trace of bodies. They looked at each other and John’s face was pale and strained but Edward felt only a strange excitement he couldn’t define. The slight whiskey buzz in his head had given way to an excited curiosity and a feeling that his life had already been altered more profoundly than he knew.

“Sons.”

Her voice was behind them and they turned to see their mother standing at the edge of the woods. John breathed “Damn” at the sight of her. Her face was bruised and one eye swollen purple and her hair was in disarray and the upper part of her dress was ripped. She spread her arms wide as if to receive them to her bosom and the torn dress parted to reveal one pale breast and its darkly scarred and twisted nipple.

“He
killed
her,” she said. Her eyes were whitely wide and seemed fixed on some horror in her mind. “He lay with her, yes, yes he did! He fouled his own
daughter
. He
lay
with her I say! And she told him she would tell, she said she would tell her brothers—tell
you
—and so he
killed
her and
sank her in the creek for the gators and the gars to eat all up. He did! He
did!
”

Edward said, “What the
hell
, woman!” He was certain she was gone utterly mad. But John’s eyes were as wide and anguished as the woman’s and his fists quivered at his sides and Edward thought the look of him more frightful than the woman’s crazy words.

She slowly came forward with her arms out to them, speaking fast and breathlessly. “He
told
me so. After you went off. Told me and laughed and beat me and said he would kill me too and say I tried to murder him in his sleep. Tied me to the bed and beat me. Cut his ownself so he could show you how I tried to kill him. But I got loose. I run out and hid in the woods and waited and waited for you and he set the house afire and he tromped around in the woods huntin me and he … oh Jesus.”

Her gaze had gone to something behind them and her arms closed tightly over her breasts. They turned and saw Daddyjack limping out of the woods from the other side of the clearing and coming on with the big Hawken in his hand. The crotch of his trousers was stained red and he wasn’t looking at the brothers but only at the woman as he came now at a gimping trot and cursing her loudly for a hellish whore. The woman whimpered and began backstepping stiffly toward the trees. Daddyjack stopped short and threw up the Hawken and fired. The ball passed between the woman’s legs and belled back the skirt of her dress and pulled her down.

And now John was running at Daddyjack with his knife in his hand and howling and Edward ran after him calling for him to stop. Daddyjack watched them come and swung the Hawken by the stock neck and caught John on the shoulder with the barrel and knocked him to his hands and knees. His eyes were wild as he gripped the Hawken by the barrel with both hands and stepped up to John with the rifle raised high over his head like a club. Edward cried “NOOOOO!” and the pistol was in his outstretched hand and cocked and pointed and it cracked flatly in a small huff of smoke and the ball pierced Daddyjack’s left eye and exited behind his right ear in a bloody spray of brain and bone and he went sprawling onto his back with his arms flung wide and his teeth bared and his remaining eye wide and unbelieving.

The woman sat on the ground and stared at her sons as they gaped upon the body of Jack Little, her hands over her mouth, covering the smile so bright in her eyes.

They carried the body a half-mile into the timber and took turns digging a deep grave under a wide water oak overlooking the creek. The Hawken leaned against the tree trunk and its powderflask and ball pouch lay alongside. Edward searched Daddyjack’s pockets and found tobacco and a pipe and matches and a money pouch containing six dollars in paper currency and silver. And he found the razor-keen snaphandle knife with a tapered seven-inch blade that had killed Rainey up in Georgia those years ago. Scratched into the wide top part of the blade were the initials “H.B.” Edward folded the blade back into the haft and put the knife in his pocket.

The crotch of Daddyjack’s pants was sopped with thick dark blood but there was no rip in the cloth nor sign of a bullet hole and Edward’s curiosity would not be denied. He undid Daddyjack’s belt and began to tug down his pants.

“What are you
doin?
” John said. “Don’t do that!”

Edward tugged and grunted and got the pants past Daddyjack’s hips. His privates were wrapped in a bloodsoaked bandanna. Edward removed the covering and exposed a nearly severed phallus and a slashed scrotum from which one testicle was missing.

“Sweet Baby
Jesus
,” John said softly. Then said: “Damn it, pull up them britches! Oh, goddamn, pull em up!”

They gently eased the body into the grave and Edward dropped down in the hole and closed Daddyjack’s remaining eye and carefully placed his hat over his face and then climbed out and they shoveled the dirt over him. They worked without talking while a flock of crows squalled loudly in the high branches. When they got back to the ruins the sun was almost down to the treetops and their mother was gone with both mules.

They built a fire in front of the stable and got a hatful of eggs from the hen roost inside and boiled them for supper in a small blackened kettle they found in the ashes. Edward cleaned and loaded the Hawken. He recharged the pistol too but lacked a bullet of proper .44 caliber size and so packed it with a load of smooth gravel he’d scooped from the creekbank.

They were agreed to abandon the homestead. They neither one desired
to remain on this burnt piece of ground that held their father’s accusing bones and the likely possibility of visits from agents of the local order. Daddyjack had often gone to the nearest villages for supplies and a bit of conviviality in the taverns and was the sort people did not forget, the sort they would surely begin to ask after in his prolonged absence.

They sat before the fire and stared into the wavering flames and listened to the hoots and croakings and splashes and the sudden beatings of wings in the surrounding night. The sky was thinly overcast, the moonlight ghostly pale. A heavy mist off the creek drifted in through the trees and made a yellow haze around the fire.

“The son of a bitch,” John said.

Edward glanced at him but said nothing.

“Listen,” John said, “I know the woman’s truly bout half-crazy, but it aint real hard for me to believe some of what she said. It aint real hard to believe he got good and drunk and all hotted up and got him a notion about Maggie. He was always lookin at her legs when she’d put them up on the porch rail the way she used to. You know good and well he did.”

Edward said nothing but he recalled that all of them had watched Maggie’s legs when she put them up like that and they’d all grinned whenever they caught each other looking.

“But
kill
her? I cant hardly believe that! Sweet Jesus, his own
daughter
. Bad enough he’d … you know,
do
it to her. But he couldn’t of
killed
her.” He spat into the fire and turned his face away. “Could he done that, Ward, you reckon?”

Edward did not look at him. “I don’t know.”

“God damn it,” John said softly. And then after a while said: “That was a hellacious good shot.”

Edward looked at him. “I never even aimed. Goddamn luck is what it was.” He grimaced and spat viciously. “Shit!
Luck
don’t hardly seem a fit word for it.”

“Does to me,” John said. “Luckiest thing ever to me.” He paused and dug in the dirt before him with a stick. “You didn’t have no choice about it. You know that.”

Edward shrugged.

“It was him or me.”

Edward stared at the flames.

“He was fixin to bash out my brains.”

Edward spat into the fire and said, “I guess.”

“Guess all you want but he was. You hadn’t shot him it would of been me you buried yonder.”

His voice was strained and Edward glanced at him and saw that his face was unnaturally pale in the firelight. They watched the fire slowly burn down. The darkness gathered closer.

“If you feelin sorry for it,” John said, “well, I know you only did it cause of me.”

Edward blew a hard breath. “You aint got to say anymore about it.”

“I know I don’t. I just wanted to say
that
.”

“All right, you said it.”

“All right then.”

Edward well knew that what was done was done and would never be undone, not by any power on this earth. No matter how much his brother might set himself at fault and no matter how much they might talk of it and no matter what he might do in the rest of his life, none of it would ever change the fact that he’d fired the ball that blew the brains out of their daddy’s head. It was a truth as unchangeable as his blood and bones and there wasn’t a thing to be done about it, not now or ever.

He was feeling something else as well, something he couldn’t put name to. Something to do with the way their mother had looked at them as they carried off Daddyjack’s body.

After a while they went into the stable and bunched some of the straw into beds and took off their boots and lay down. Neither spoke for a time and then Edward said, “What I cant believe is he cut hisself like that. Not like that.”

“I believe he went crazy,” John said. “He was always sayin how momma and Maggie was crazy, but it could be he got craziern either a them ever was.”

“You’d have to be awful goddamn crazy to cut your ownself like that.”

“Could be he was.”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

They lay without speaking but neither fell asleep. John said: “I wonder where all she’s headed?”

Edward thought about that a minute. “Hell, I’d say.”

John leaned away from the straw and spat. “Well then,” he said, “I guess it’s a damn good chance we be seein her again, aint it?”

And now in the first gray light of dawn Edward carved intently with the snaphandle knife on the stump beside the stable. He finished just as the sky began to redden and John rose from a fitful night’s sleep. They rolled their blankets and tied them tightly and hung them across their backs like arrow quivers and they put the rest of the eggs in a croker sack. Armed with the Hawken and the pistol and their knives they set out for the western trace. John paused at the treeline and took a rearward look at the burnt house. But Edward did not look back. He was sixteen years old and restless in his blood and he had carved his farewell into the stump alongside the stable: “G.T.T.” Gone to Texas.

T
hey hiked upriver and reached the shallows on the following afternoon and there forded the Perdido into Alabama. They walked till sundown and made camp by a willowcreek. They built a fire and talked very little as they ate the last of the boiled eggs and then they rolled up in their blankets and slept. The next day they crossed the Tensaw on a lumber barge and another few miles farther west they paid ten cents each to cross the Mobile on a pulley ferry. Purple thunderheads towered to the south over the Gulf. The scent of the sea mingled with the smell of ripe black bottomland and coming rain. Seahawks circled in the high sky.

The ferryman was a garrulous graybeard with a pegleg and a jawful of chaw. The ropy muscles of his arms stood sharply as he worked the pulley rope and told of having lost the leg to a crocodile in the wilds of southern
Florida when he was down there in search of Spanish gold.

“Not a alligator, mind, I mean a goddamn
crocodile!
I was fordin a mangrove saltpool and never saw the sumbitch till it bit my shin right in two. Sounded just like a dog snappin a chickenbone, only lots louder and for damn sure no chicken ever let out a holler like I did. Ever bit of fifteen foot long and I never saw it till it had me. It’s lots of people don’t think it’s much difference twixt a gator and a crock. Hellfire, it’s only the same difference as twixt a bobcat and a painter is all the difference it is. Get yourself bit by a gator then go get bit by a crock and you’ll know the difference mighty goddamn quick.”

Edward said he had seen a gator kill and eat a redbone in less time than it takes to tell. “Dog was trottin along the bank and the next thing you knew it wasnt nothin there but a bull gator with a mouthful of bloody hide and a big grin of teeth.”

“Gator’s fast all right,” the old man said, showing his skewed and blackened teeth in what could have been either grin or grimace, “but crock’s faster and you’d care a whole lot less to get chewed on by one, I can by damn assure you of that.” He spat a brown streak of juice at a turtle sunning itself on a chunk of driftwood and missed it by a whisker-breadth and the turtle plopped into the blackwater and disappeared.

He asked where they were headed and when Edward said Texas the old man’s mouth turned down and he shook his head. “Aint nothin get me to go to no damn Texas. Ever Texan I ever met been craziern a beestung cat. All them Mexicaners they got there don’t make the place no likelier neither. And they’s Comanche everwhere you turn. They got ways to kill you the devil hisself aint thought of. No, thankee! You boys can have all my share a Texas and ye welcome to it.”

The ferry bumped against the western bank and the old man hopped off and made the bowline fast to a cottonwood trunk. The brothers slung their bedrolls over their shoulders and bid him farewell and hiked up onto the trace and headed south. The old man stood spitting chaw juice and watching them until they were out of sight round the bend.