Mister Slaughter (19 page)

There was no response from Tom, who went back to his eating as if nothing had been said.

"I saw evidence of a horse in the barn," Greathouse said in between sips of the cider. The pistol lay beside his bowl, aimed in Slaughter's direction. "My team will appreciate the oats, for sure. But what happened to your horse?"

"We had to sell her," Burton offered. "Tom rode her to Belvedere just last week, to trade for some things we needed. Candles, salt, sugar. Those things."

"And how far is Belvedere, then?"

"Oh . . . twelve miles, I suppose."

"Fourteen," said the boy, without looking up.

Greathouse paused with the cup at his lips. "You're not going to tell me you rode a horse to this Belvedere place and walked back here fourteen miles carrying a sackful of supplies, are you?"

Tom shrugged. The silent answer was
All right, I won't
.

"A stout-hearted lad!" Slaughter raised his cup. "This world needs more of them!"

"Reverend Burton told me how you lost your parents," Matthew ventured. The boy seemingly paid him no attention. "I lost mine in much the same way. Don't you have any other family?"

Tom said nothing. He was finishing his stew, but kept a bit of rabbit to hand down to James. Then he spoke, as if the question were of no consequence: "A grandpa in Aberdeen. That's all."

"Hail to the Scots!" Slaughter said.

"I can take care of m'self." Tom lifted his gaze to spear Matthew with it, and then he drank down some more of his cider to put an end to this line of conversation.

Thunder spoke above the cabin. Rain slashed at the shutters. James, unperturbed by the roar of nature, sat down next to Tom's foot and scratched at a flea.

"Greathouse." Slaughter had reached the bottom of his bowl. He licked juice from his fingers. "I don't know that name, but I swear you're familiar. Were you ever a circus performer?"

"No. Were you?"

"Oh, absolutely. In my youth I was an acrobat. Quite accomplished if I might say so. I had a female partner, and together we jumped through hoops of fire. Have you ever seen a circus?" The last question was presented to Tom, whose only answer was to reach down and rub his dog's back.

"I regret your situation here," said Greathouse to the reverend. "Can we do anything to help?"

"No. I just thank God the suffering is over." Burton rubbed his right temple, as if at the pain of memory. "They were such good people. So hopeful. And we were doing so well, for awhile. New Unity started as an apple orchard. There are fertile fields between here and the river, you see. More and more people came in, and then the fever struck. It was a terrible thing, sir. Terrible, to see all those people suffering, and begging over dying loved ones for the mercy of God, and yet . . . all I could do was pray. A doctor was brought from Belvedere, and he did all he could but . . . what could be done, against such an enemy? The doctor himself fell ill, and perished. Then . . . my wife." He put his frail hand against his forehead. The thunder boomed again, off to the east. "My wife of fifty-two years, my lovely bride. Coughed herself to death, and squeezed my hand at the last, and I whispered,
Wait for me, Abigail, please wait for me
. But there were so many others in torment. I couldn't think only of myself, and my loss. I had to be strong, for the others. The young children who died, the mothers who watched their infants go pale and more and more unto deathly white. The strapping young men, with such great dreams, and the women who had come here with them to build a life. And there they lie, in the graves. Peaceful now, I hope. But oh, sirs, they endured so much."

A silence fell, but for the sounds of the fire and the rain.

Quite suddenly, Tyranthus Slaughter began to laugh.

"Shut your mouth!" Greathouse, his cheeks aflame, grabbed hold of the prisoner's beard and twisted it.

Slaughter kept laughing, as tears of either mirth or pain glittered in his eyes.

"Shut it, I said!" Greathouse shouted. James was up on four feet, starting a low gut-growl, but Tom put his hand down on the back of the dog's neck to hold him steady.

"Pardon me! Pardon me!" Slaughter tried to swallow his laughter and began to cough, so violently that Greathouse released him. Matthew didn't know what to think. The madman's wagon had lost its wheels. "Pardon me!" Slaughter repeated, as he wiped his eyes and his nose and drew in a long ragged breath of air. "It just . . . it just strikes me . . . as so funny . . . so
ridiculous
 . . . that none of you . . . have a goddamned
idea
of—" And on the final four words his eyes cleared, his voice tightened and he reached up to rub his raw chin beneath the patchwork beard. "What real suffering is."

"Apologize to the reverend!" Greathouse demanded, with such force the spittle foamed on his lips. "By God I'll smash your face in if you don't!" Already his fist was clenched and the blow about to be struck.

Slaughter stared at the upraised fist. He reached into his mouth with a forefinger and probed at an offending shred of rabbit stuck between upper teeth. "I shall apologize, sir," he said lightly, "if the company will hear
my
tale of suffering."

The fist was near being thrown. Matthew knew a bloody mess was about to erupt. "Don't do it," he cautioned, and Greathouse's enraged eyes ticked toward him. The cocked fist was slowly lowered.

"Let him speak," said Reverend Burton, his opaque gaze fixed on the space between Greathouse and the prisoner. "Go ahead, sir, but I ask you to refrain from taking our Lord's name in vain."

"Thank you. Might I have another cup of cider? Just to wet the old whistle?"

Burton nodded, and Tom did the pouring.

Slaughter took a long drink and swirled the liquid around in his mouth before he swallowed. Then he put the cup down before him and turned it between his fingers, with their jagged clawlike nails.

Thunder echoed in the distance. A second voice of the storm spoke, nearer still.

"There was a boy," said Slaughter. "A hardworking young English boy. Whose drunken mother had been murdered in a tavern brawl when he was not quite ten, and her blood spattered his legs, but that is neither here nor there. This upright young boy and his father went out upon the world, and as fate would have it both of them found positions in the mining fields of Swansea. Diggers, they were. Shovel-and-pick men. Handgrubbers, down in the earth. A father and son, blackened together inside and out, black grit in their teeth and in their eyes, and all the day the ringing music of the pit, hour upon hour, for that pretty little pence in their palms. Or rather, in the father's palm, for the boy did so wish that his father might become rich someday, and stride the world as an earl, or a duke. Someone who
mattered
, in the course of time. Someone he might be
proud
of. You see?"

No one answered. Slaughter lifted a finger. "Ah, that boy! Quite the worker, he was. He and his father, breaking rocks in that mine from sunup 'til sundown. Or was it from sundown 'til sunup? What is time, where there is only the light of the lanterns, and all seasons are damp and musty as the tomb? But then, gentlemen, came the hour of disaster!" He nodded, looking from one face to the other. "Disaster," he repeated, letting the word hiss. "A cracking noise, small as the sound of a rat biting a bone. Followed by a rumble that built to a roar, but by then the roof was falling. Thunder is no equal to such a noise, sirs. And afterward, the cries and moans of those trapped by the rock swell up in the dark, and echo in the chambers like a cathedral of the damned. Eleven diggers had gone down, to scoop out the last of a worn-out hole. Five were killed outright. Six left alive, in various states of life. One had a tinderbox and got it lit. Two unbroken lamps were found, and some candles in a dead man's sack. There the boy was, waiting for rescue, while his father lay a few feet away with both his legs crushed. And oh, how that man could caterwaul! It shamed the boy, really, to have to witness such indignity."

"When they stuffed a dead man's shirt into the father's mouth, they were at last able to hear help coming," Slaughter went on, as lightning streaked white beyond the shutters and thunder growled overhead. "They shouted to let the diggers know they were still alive. They had air, that was all right. And water, a flask or two. They could hold on, until the diggers got them up. And then—who can say when—there came another little crack of a rat bite and
boom
fell more rock and dust. A storm of it. A whirlwind. But they relit their lanterns, and held on. As the candles burned down. As the last of the beef sausage was eaten. Once more they heard the diggers coming. Coming closer, hour after hour. Or was it day after day? And then again,
boom
fell the rocks, and this time the man who'd lit his tinderbox fell dead, his brains burst out upon the black wall. Which left five living, if one includes the boy's father, who by now had suffered the agony that renders a human being . . . somewhat less than human."

Slaughter paused to drink again from his cup, and licked his lips when he'd finished. "They waited. The diggers were coming. They had one lantern left, and a few candles. Hope remained. Even when the father drew his last breath, and his eyes grew cold and white and the life left him like a bitter mist . . . hope remained. And then someone—the old soldier with the gray beard, the one from Sheffield—said
Listen
. He said,
Listen, I don't hear them anymore
. Of course they all hollered and shouted until their lungs were raw, but the noise made more rubble fall and they were afraid to lose their lantern, and so they just sat and waited, in a little foul chamber that was filling up with the smell of the dead. They sat and waited, there in the earth, as the candles burned down one after the other and the waterflasks emptied and . . . oh yes . . . the hunger started gnawing their bellies. They became weaker, and weaker still. And finally someone said,
I think they've left us
.
Left us
, he said,
to rot
. And someone else went mad, and gibbered until he was hit over the head with a stone, and another wept in a corner and prayed to Jesus on his knees, but the boy vowed
I will not die, here in this hole
.
I will not be left to rot, thrown away like garbage for the worms.
"

"So," Slaughter said quietly, as the low red firelight played across his face, "the boy listened when one of the others said he was once aboard a ship that was becalmed for weeks, and after the food ran out and people began to die . . . you had to determine how much you wanted to live. You had to determine if you could take a blade and carve yourself a meal. And then that man looked at the corpse of the boy's father, and he held up a knife, and he said,
There's enough meat on the thighs to keep us going
.
We can drink from him, too. Don't let it be, that he suffered so much for nothing
."

"And when the knife went to work," Slaughter said, "the boy just sat and watched. He was hungry, you see, and perhaps by then half-mad himself, and the strangest,
strangest
thing . . . was that, when he ate the first strip of meat . . . when he put it between his teeth, and chewed out all the juice . . . he thought it was better than any dish he'd ever tasted in his life."

"My God," the reverend breathed.

"It is like pork," Slaughter continued, staring at nothing. "But sweeter. I've been told. I have heard it said—just
heard
, mind you—that a blindfolded man given a choice of a beef tenderloin, flank of horse and buttock of human being will invariably choose the buttock, it being so richly marbled with fat. And that in the human meat can be tasted the essence of food and drink consumed by that body in happier times. There are some, I hear, who if left to their own devices would become enslaved to the taste of human, and want nothing else. And that's not mentioning the internal organs, which supposedly have miraculous powers to regenerate the near-dead. Particularly the heart and the brain."

"Oh!" he said brightly. "To finish my story, sirs. When he finally crawled up out of the dark through a space only a desperate boy could have negotiated, and unfortunately but out of necessity left two of his fellow companions behind, he made his way in the course of time to the house of Samuel Dodson, who owned that particular mining company. Thereupon he put a knife to the throats of Master Dodson, his lovely wife and the three little Dodsons and polished them all off, after which the house was burned down around their heads. The end . . . yet just a beginning." He finished his cup of cider, held it aloft as a tribute to the hero of his tale, and when Greathouse knocked it from his hand to the floor and James started the pistol-shot barking again Slaughter looked at his oppressor with an expression of dismay.

"What, then?" Slaughter asked. "You don't like happy endings?"

Matthew had not eaten all of his stew; there remained a small fatty piece of brown meat at the bottom of the bowl. His stomach being rather queasy, he pushed the bowl away with a finger and sat very still, trying to decide if he was going to keep his food down or not.

"Not gonna eat that?" Tom asked, and when Matthew shook his head the boy reached across the table, took Matthew's bowl and placed it on the floor as an added treat for James.

"Thank you for your confession," said Reverend Burton in a raspy voice, his hands folded before him on the table. The knuckles had paled. "I regret your . . . troubles."

"Oh, who said it happened to
me?
I'm just relating a story I heard, from someone I knew a long time ago." Slaughter frowned. "Pastor, what kind of monster would I be if I ate my own father? Hm?"

"You're as mad as a three-legged billygoat," Greathouse told him, as the red slowly drained from his face. He rubbed his forehead, as if to dispel as best as he could the gory scene that Slaughter had painted, and then he turned his attention to Burton. "We appreciate your hospitality. If we can sleep in the barn tonight, we'll be on our way first thing in the morning."

"To Fort Laurens."

"Yes, sir."

"There's something you ought to know, then," Burton said, and Matthew leaned slightly forward because he'd heard something in the old man's voice that did not bode well. "Fort Laurens has been deserted for . . . oh . . . many years before New Unity began. A dispute with the Indians, more than thirty years ago, is what they say in Belvedere. A series of raids killed most of the inhabitants and destroyed the fort. Therefore . . . I don't quite understand why you two are taking a prisoner to Fort Laurens, when nothing's there but ruins."