In the Rogue Blood (6 page)

They rode steadily through the night and most of the next day, taking turns sleeping one behind the other, pushing westward, putting distance between themselves and Mobile. The rain fell and fell. They were sodden to their bones. At first light they began scanning the murky landscape behind them for signs of pursuers. The sagging sky looked made of clay. On the trail along the bottoms the water was to the mule’s belly. They kept a sharp eye for moccasins. The only sounds were of the mule’s huffing breath and splooshing forward progress, the rain pattering the trees and dimpling the water. A dead pig drifted past, its upturned eye dull as stone, and then a dozen white chickens, bloated and giving off feathers to the breeze. When a catfish as big as a boy broke the surface alongside them the mule frighted and Edward was unseated and nearly kicked in the head and he swallowed mouthfuls of muddy water as he struggled to his feet while John got the animal steadied again.

Late that afternoon the rain abated but the sky remained leaden. As the mule slogged through water to its knees they spotted something large bobbing beside a canefield some thirty yards ahead and close to the road. It looked to be a heavy cut of timber but as they drew near they saw it
was an empty coffin. Within the next half-mile they came upon four more and all of them empty. The air assumed the odor of rot. Now the road curved around a wide cypress stand and they saw more than a dozen coffins afloat where a graveyard had flooded and the rising groundwater had forced the coffins up out of the softened saturated earth. Most of the coffins were lidless and empty and some were hardly more than a few rotted boards still clung together on a rusted nail. Cadavers in various states of decomposition carried on the slow current of the flood. Most were the color of the earth itself and some were snagged on shrubbery and in the cane and those with upturned faces showed empty black eyeholes and rotted yellow grins against the gloomy sky.

Now they saw two men in black slickers on a nearby rise applying a prising bar to a coffin and the lid screeched and came asunder and one of the men bent over the box and cried out, “Luck!” He dropped to his knees and lifted a moldered hand into view and pulled a ring from its finger and rinsed it in the water and held it up for the other man to see. But the other had caught sight of the brothers and now unslung his rifle and pulled off the rag he’d wrapped around the breech to keep it dry and he held the weapon pointed at them from his hip.

The brothers passed slowly within thirty feet of them and Edward jerked on the hackamore to pull the curious mule’s eyes away from the graverobbers. John held the cocked Hawken propped across his thighs with his finger on the trigger. The men were bonefaced and grizzled and there was nothing in their darkeyed aspect save hard wariness. No one spoke and John kept his eyes on them until he was turned around almost completely on the back of the mule. The graverobbers watched them in turn until the brothers went around the next bend and out of sight.

They camped that evening in a small clearing on a stretch of high ground thick with shrubbery and hardwoods and flanked by a swift creek running high on its steep banks. Edward hacked branches off a water oak and sliced off the wet bark and used the inner wood to kindle a fire while John went to the creek and shot a large snapping turtle for their supper. They cut steaks out of it and roasted them on sharpened greensticks propped against the firestones. They built up the flames and took off their boots and set them close beside the fire and then stripped naked and hung
their clothes and blankets on frames fashioned of willow branches around the fire to dry while they ate. When their pants and shirts were dry they put them on and rolled up in their damp blankets and went to sleep.

Edward dreamed that he was back in the cabin in Florida and sitting across the table from Daddyjack who was hatless and wildhaired and stared at him with one sad eye and a socket gaping empty and hung with streaks of dried bloody gore. He did not seem angry so much as curious and somewhat puzzled. Edward’s heart was pounding. He told Daddyjack he was sorry, he truly was, but he’d had to protect his brother. “That’s good,” Daddyjack said, “I aint chiding you for it, brothers ought always to look out for each other.” Then he made a face and shook his head and Edward did not understand and asked what he meant and Daddyjack shook his head again. He turned in his chair and looked out the window into the darkness beyond and Edward saw the ragged red-black hole in the back of his head where the pistol ball had come through. Daddyjack pointed out into the dark and said, “The bitch knows.” And then his mother was at the window and looking in at them and smiling exactly as she had the last time he’d seen her.

He woke in darkness. His face was wet and a sprinkling rain ticked on the foliage. The vague quartermoon shone dimly through scudding violet clouds. The fire had burned down to a bed of bright embers and raised a ghostly smoke in the drizzle. There was a rustling of shrubbery and he distinctly heard someone say in a whispered rasp, “Here. Fire looks like.”

John whispered “Ward” in his ear and lightly touched his face. Edward nodded and rolled out of his blanket and put on his boots. They started toward the trees along the creekbank but they’d gone only a few feet when a rifle blasted from the trees behind them and Edward felt himself clubbed high and hard on the back and he staggered forward and fell crashing through saplings down the bank and into the high water of the rushing creek.

Water seared in through his mouth and nose and he gagged and felt himself being pulled along the bottom by the current and he could not get upright and was sure he was going to drown. He grabbed wildly and caught hold of a root and arrested his downstream tumble and found footing and at last managed to thrust his head out of the water and gulp down air. He grabbed a willow branch and pulled himself grunting up the bank and sprawled on his belly and choked and spewed a gush of creekwater and lay there gasping. The long muscle along the top of his shoulder ached deeply and he felt the warm flow of blood over his collarbone
but he could flex and rotate the arm and knew no bone was broken.

He lay still in the grass and listened, trying to mute his heavy breathing and tasting the acrid and muddy vomit in his mouth. It seemed to him he had heard another rifleshot while he was in the water but he wasn’t sure. Now he heard voices in the darkness farther up along the creekbank but could not make out the words. Now somebody was coming his way, pushing though the foliage with no concern for stealth. Edward slipped Daddyjack’s snaphandle knife out of his pocket and opened the blade with a flick of his wrist and crawled deeper into the shadow of a large bush and there crouched and breathed shallowly through his open mouth and watched the slightly lighter patch of sky above the bushtop and listened as the man drew closer.

When the man’s silhouette crossed the patch of sky Edward silently rose up behind him and clamped a swift arm hard around his head with a sureness that came to him as naturally as breathing. His arm stifled the man’s cry as he thrust the knife into his neck and twisted the blade and felt it scrape the neckbone and then he yanked it out and blood jetted hugely and spattered on the shrubbery and abruptly ebbed to a hot pulsing flow smelling of cut copper. It ran off the man’s neck and down his rainslicker and onto the front of Edward’s shirt. The man abruptly went slack and the dead weight of him was unlike any heft Edward had ever felt. He let the body fall. His heart banged against his ribs like a thing becrazed. The blood was warm on his chest and thick on his hands, the smell of it ripe on his face. He had to restrain the impulse to howl.

He was dizzy, weak in the legs. Sharp pain jolted through his neck all the way to his left shoulder. He put his fingers to the muscle joining neck and back and felt the wound. The rifleball had entered above the shoulder blade and exited just over the collarbone, which flared with white pain to the touch. Blood pulsed from the wound. His shirt was sopping.

A rifleshot sounded from the direction of the campsite and a man yelped in pain and Edward dropped to his haunches. A voice yelled, “Harlan, help me! I’m bad hurt!”

He sheathed his knife and sidled over in the darkness to the dead man who he dearly hoped was Harlan. He stripped the man of powder flask and shot pouch and took up the fallen rifle and made sure it was loaded and started making his way back toward the campsite. He moved through the brush in a careful lightfoot crouch, hearing his own breath and the dripping leaves, smelling blood and raw earth.

He was within a few yards of the clearing when the wounded man called for Harlan again. Then his voice went higher as he said, “Oh Jesus, son, don’t
kill
me. I wasn’t lookin to—” There came a soft thud and the man groaned deeply.

Edward stood up and peered over the bushes and into the clearing where their campfire still cast a dull orange glow. John was standing over a retching man in a black slicker who lay on his side with his hands at his crotch. On the far edge of the clearing lay a man in a yellow slicker in such awkward attitude as only the dead can assume.

Edward stepped out of the brush and John spun around white-eyed with the Hawken held like a club and he saw it was his brother and lowered the rifle and expelled a hard breath. “God
damn
, bubba!” he said. “I thought sure you’d been shot.” He quickly looked around and lowered his voice. “There’s anothern out there yet.”

“That’s so,” Edward said. “But he aint no trouble.”

“How come’s that? I didn’t hear no shot.”

“Snapknife don’t shoot.”

“
Snapknife?
Damn, son!” John’s face was alight with admiration and more—with a wild elation of a sort as old as Cain. “Hell, little brother,” he said, gesturing toward the yellow-slickered man, “we put down the lot, you and me! The lot! And them with the jump on us.”

Edward felt himself returning his brother’s grin. The man at John’s feet drew their attention with a low moan. “Hey now,” John said, “lookit here what we got.” He put his boot against the man’s shoulder and pushed him over onto his back and even in the weak light of the coalfire there was no mistaking the mutilated nose of the stableman from Mobile.

“Him and a coupla friends come all this way in the rain to shoot us for a damn mule that wasn’t rightly his to start with.” John grinned down at the stableman and said, “Your daddy oughta taught you to hunt some better.”

The stableman looked at Edward and raised a supplicant hand. “Please,” he whispered. Edward saw the dark stain over his belly where John had shot him and he knew the wound was mortal.

“What you want, hardcase?” John asked the stableman. “Another kick in the walnuts? You want me put you out you misery?” He raised the rifle to drive the buttplate through the man’s terrified face and Edward said, “Johnny don’t.”

John looked at him, rifle poised.

“It aint a need,” Edward said. “Not no more.” His wound spasmed sharply and he clutched at it and yawed.

John hurried to him. “Damn boy—you bleedin!”

He dropped his rifle and eased Edward to the ground next to the coalfire and helped him off with his blood-sopped shirt and examined the wound as best he could in the weak amber light.

“I’m all right,” Edward said. “It just give me a smart is all.”

John confirmed that the round had passed cleanly through the muscle over the collarbone. He told Edward to stay put while he fetched water from the creek. Edward was holding tightly to the wound and staring into the orange coals when he was startled by the stableman’s loud groan.

Then the man’s last breath gurgled from his throat and faded into the night.

John washed out his wound with creek water and fashioned a tight bandage for it from the stableman’s shirt. They heard the whickering of the men’s horses and found the animals tethered back in the trees just off the trail and brought them to the creek to drink. In the Mobile men’s pockets they found two boxes of matches and a honed claspknife and less than five dollars. Among the dead men’s possibles they found bundles of smoked mullet and ears of roasted corn and they built up the fire again and sat beside it and ate.

After a time John said, “I never thought it’d feel, I don’t know … like
this
.”

Edward saw the high excitement still showing bright in his brother’s eyes.

John said, “Killin a man, I mean. I always thought, well, I don’t know anymore what I always thought…. But I never thought it’d feel so … so damn
right
.” He started to grin and then remembered who the first man was that his brother had killed and his grin fell away and he shifted his gaze.

Edward had himself been about to grin but just then thought of Daddyjack too. “I guess,” he said, “it depends on who the fella is.”

“Yeah. I guess.”

They ate in silence for a time and then John asked if he thought others would come looking for these three.

“Don’t believe any law will,” Edward said. “I don’t know who these other two are, but no-nose didn’t say nothin about either of them bein law. I figure he might of tried to get the law on us but it wasnt interested in nothin so small-account as a mule the feller didn’t have no papers on
anyway. Still, it might could be some kin’ll come lookin for em. We best be gettin on.”

The sky was dawning hard and gray as they stripped the Mobile men of their slickers and weapons, powder and shot. John took the stableman’s black slicker for his own. The man who was sprawled at the edge of the clearing showed a nearly perfectly round hole over his left eyebrow and when Edward turned him over to take off his yellow slicker he saw the larger exit wound in back of the skull. He thought it was a hell of a shot under the circumstances. Johnny always was the shooter.

He replaced his shirt with the man’s unbloodied one and then the brothers rinsed the slickers in the creek and put them on against the continuing drizzle. The yellowslickered man had been carrying a Spanish musket forged more than a century before. John examined it and snorted in disdain and flung it in the creek. The other two longarms were well-kept Kentuckys of .45 caliber with patch-and-ball boxes built into the stocks and complemented with nearly full powder flasks. One of the men had in addition carried a .54 pistol that John quickly claimed on the grounds that Edward already had a handgun and never mind that he lacked the .44 ammunition for it. They recharged the weapons and made ready to ride.

The best of the horses was a sorrel mare. The brothers flipped a coin for her and Edward won. He named the animal Janey in memory of a pretty girl he’d once met at a barn dance but never saw again. All the saddles of the party were worn and cracked. John mounted a sound but nervous bay and led the third horse, an aging dun, on a lead rope. Edward trailed the mule.

At midmorning the sun broke through the clouds for the first time in days. The high waters receded steadily and by early afternoon they were riding mostly through mud. John pistolshot a large rabbit and dressed it and they cooked it on a spit and ate half of it and saved the rest for later. John checked Edward’s wound and saw that it was still swelling and oozing blood. At sunset they camped under an enormous oak on high dry ground and ate the rest of the rabbit and watched the western treeline blazing as if afire.

Next morning Edward was in high fever. The engorged wound showed the color of spoiled meat and the skin was drawn tight. He could raise his left arm only with grimacing effort. “It’s nothin to do but burn it,” John said. “Should of done her yesterday.”

He built up the fire and set a rifle ramrod in it until the metal turned
bright red. Edward sat close by and positioned a stick between his teeth and gripped the belt over his belly tightly with both hands. Using the old bandage as a glove John picked up the glowing ramrod and said, “Bite down, bubba.” He pressed the tip of the rod into the rear opening of the wound. The flesh hissed and smoked and Edward shrilled through the stick crunching between his teeth and the tendons in his neck stood like wires. John then inserted the rod in the front of the wound and the hiss was not as loud and to compensate for cooling he this time left the iron in a little longer before withdrawing it. Edward exhaled a shuddering breath and slumped forward and the cracked stick fell from his mouth coated with bloody saliva. The sickly smell of roasted flesh was like grease on the air.

John wiped the cleaning rod on his trouser leg and said, “Reckon we ought do it once more just to be sure she’s done right?”

Edward looked up at his brother’s wicked grin and smiled weakly. “You sorry son of a bitch.”

“Takes one to know one, little brother,” John said. “Takes one to know one.”