Soul Catcher (11 page)

Cain noticed that Little Strofe was limping as he walked his mule up the snowy pass.

"How are you holding up?" he asked the man.

"My f-feets are near 'bouts f-froze solid, Mr. Cain," Little Strofe replied.

Cain had him mount Hermes, who was extremely sure-footed, and they continued on up the pass. In a small grove of tamaracks near the summit, they stopped and built a fire so Little Strofe could warm his feet. Cain removed from his saddlebags a pair of clean, dry socks and tossed them to Little Strofe.

"Much obliged, Mr. Cain," the man said.

They only stayed long enough to fill their bellies a little and warm themselves. It was getting on toward dark and Cain didn't want to get stuck on the mountain during the night. If it snowed up here they'd be in trouble, he knew. They had no experience in this sort of weather. So they pushed hard with what little light remained, and by dusk they had made it off the mountain and down into a wide, rolling valley. On the banks of the river, they decided to make camp for the night. They lit a lantern and Little Strofe began fixing supper, fried corn pone and dried beef and a pot of strong coffee. They ate in a stony silence, the dispute between Cain and Preacher from earlier that day still lingering in the air like a bad smell. Preacher took his plate and went off by himself to eat. Now and then he'd glare at Cain. Cain knew he would have to be careful from now on. If push came to shove, he couldn't count on the Strofe boys. They might not side with Preacher, but he also knew their loyalties were with Eberly, not him. He doubted Preacher would try anything until after they got the girl. But who knows? One thing was for certain: he'd have to watch his back.

After eating, Strofe got out his bottle of applejack, took a sip, offered it to Cain, who declined. Then Strofe tossed it over to Preacher, who took a long drink and wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve.

"This nigger gal," Preacher called to Strofe. "She must be somethin' real special."

Strofe shrugged. His stomach was bothering him again, and he sat there rubbing it, occasionally belching and farting.

"Heard tell she's a blue-eyed nigger," Preacher said. "Saw me a albino nigger once in a traveling show."

"That right?" Strofe commented.

"Yes, indeedy. All white. Even his hair. And his eyelashes was pink, like a hog's." He took another long drink, then a short one on top of that, as if to wash the first one down. "You 'spect Eberly's ridin' her?" he said to Strofe.

"If he be, tain't none of your concern," Strofe said.

"Just figurin' the old man's having him some dark meat on the side," Preacher joked. "Why else he putting up all this money to get one nigger gal back?"

"And what's it to you?"

"No skin off my ass," Preacher said with a shrug of his thin shoulders. "Just saying this one must be somethin' extry special is all."

"All's you got to fret about, Preacher, is catching 'em. That's if you want to get paid."

"If she's as fine as y'all make out, maybe I'll take me some in trade."

"Mr. Eberly don't want a hand laid on her," Strofe proclaimed sternly. "You hear me, Preacher?"

"Yeah, I hear you."

At that Strofe cursed suddenly, stood up, and rushed off into the woods to relieve himself. They could hear him making groaning sounds.

"Hell, the way I see it," Preacher continued, speaking to no one in particular, "what the old man don't know won't hurt him. Besides, if I was to put a young'un in the oven, he'd be gettin' back two loaves for the price of one."

He laughed at his own joke. Glancing over at Little Strofe, he said, "What about you? Wouldn't you be wantin' to g-get yourself a little dark p-pussy?"

Little Strofe blushed at this sort of talk. A religious fellow, he didn't like swearing or cussing of any kind, and talk of women like this turned his pale complexion pink and set him to a flurry of stammering.

"Hell, I bet you ain't never had you any pussy a'tall," Preacher teased. "Black, white, or yeller."

Instead, Little Strofe got up and went to see about his dogs.

"Why don't you leave him be?" Cain said to Preacher.

"Just funnin' with him is all. And besides, I don't got to answer to the likes of you."

Later, Little Strofe came over and sat down near Cain. He offered Cain a fid of tobacco. Cain, who didn't chew, took a bite anyway just to be friendly.

"That P-preacher's a mean'un," Little Strofe said.

Cain nodded in agreement.

They were silent for a time. Then Little Strofe said in an undertone, "She run before."

"Who? The Negress?"

"A-huh."

"When?"

"It was some time back. And we had to g-go chase after her. But it weren't nothing like this. She didn't even m-make it out of the county that time." He paused for a moment, then added, "That the time she cut him."

"Cut who?"

"Why, Mr. Eberly. Cut him p-purty good, too. She knows her way around a knife, that gal. Headstrong, she is. Hit's almost like she don't know she's a nigger."

"Where'd she cut him?"

"Got him in the hand. Near 'bout took off his thumb."

Cain remembered suddenly Eberly rubbing his palm, the raised scar he'd noticed. Then he recalled something the old man had told him--that she'd never been under the lash. "What did she receive as punishment?"

The man wagged his head. "Nothin'."

"She knifed her master and he didn't punish her?"

Glancing over his shoulder to see if anyone was listening, he explained, "She got Mr. Eberly wrapped around her little bitty finger."

"Why did she cut him?" Cain asked.

Little Strofe shrugged nervously. "'Tain't none of my business. I w-work for Mr. Eberly and he can do whate'er he wants. I'm gonna turn in, Mr. Cain. G-good night."

When he'd finished praying, he lay between his dogs. He stroked them and whispered to them, and in a moment he was snoring loudly, as oblivious to the world as his hounds.

Cain had no such luck with sleep. He took several sips from his flask to no avail. The leg continued to throb and he cursed the damned appendage and wondered if it would have been better had he lost it completely. At least then it wouldn't ache, though, of course, he'd known men from the war who'd lost legs and still felt pain in them. Ghost pain, they called it.

He put his spectacles on and from his saddlebags got out his tattered copy of Milton and tried reading. He took pleasure in the act and would usually read well into the night, whether he was back in his boardinghouse in Richmond or on the trail of a runaway. Where some, like his father, could be lulled to sleep by reviewing ledgers and account books, or others took comfort in perusing the Bible before bed, Cain had his Milton--or in a pinch, Dante or Homer or Shakespeare. He liked reading about men of grand visions, of bold imagination, even though he knew he was not one himself. The Bible had men of grand visions, it was true, but he didn't care for it particularly. Cain thought the book, especially the Old Testament, just so much empty bluster, less about God and morals and right ways of living, and more about vengeance and the killing of one's fellow man over the flimsiest of excuses.

* * *

Despite his mother's influence and his love of Milton, Cain was not a religious man, although as a boy he'd attended service every Sunday. Even after his mother's death his father made him and TJ go. Mr. Cain thought such customary duties good for a young boy's development, especially for one without the benefit of the softening effects of maternal influence. After all, they would someday be called upon to take themselves a wife and become responsible fathers and respected members of their communities, and such regular and dutiful patterns of behavior would be expected of them. Mr. Cain, a hardworking, driven man, was someone who extolled the virtues of order and routine and hard work. So rain or shine, he would hitch up the wagon to his best team of Morgans (he was not averse to parading what material success he had attained), and he'd instruct Lila, their Negro housekeeper, to get the boys looking presentable as the sons of a modestly successful Virginia planter ought to be when going to church. Lila would scrub their faces until they shone and see to it that their good clothes were clean, their coats brushed, their hair combed. "Ain't gone to church lookin' like a coupla ragamuffins," she'd tell them. Then the three of them would get in the wagon and ride the five miles to the Methodist Church in Nottoway Chase, a small town in the western piedmont of Virginia, within sight of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

On their way, they rode in silence past the cemetery where Cain's mother and younger brother who'd died in infancy were buried, never once stopping there. If the subject of their mother's grave chanced to come up, Mr. Cain would turn inward, grim-faced, his eyes filled with a fierce gleam Cain could never tell was sadness or anger. He'd pass on to church without a word. Yet his father never seemed a particularly religious man to Cain's way of thinking. Church was just something he did, the way he might walk his fields of an evening, surveying the progress of his crops or overseeing the hog-butchering, or the way he might attend the meeting of the International Union of Tobacco Growers in town. Or the way he'd taken a wife or fathered sons--something that was part of the business of life.

Besides, the weekly ride into town served a highly pragmatic function as well, for his father was, above all else, a pragmatic man who kept his eye on the main chance. While there, he would use the time profitably to buy feed or supplies or a new bridle, perhaps get the Richmond paper to see what prime-quality burley was expected to fetch in the fall, or pick up the new farming supply catalog he'd ordered from MacKenzie and Sons, direct from Glasgow, Scotland. Or once a month, with the same grim pragmatism, Cain's father would visit a certain buxom, blond woman who lived in Cowart's boardinghouse down near the railroad tracks. Cain had spied her once in the second-story window of Cowart's as they rode out of town. Their father would give Cain and his brother two bits each and tell them he'd meet them at a specified time over at the general store. Such an impulse of their father's for this woman was, Cain suspected, of the same species of emotion as that of a bull mounting a heifer, something to be acknowledged and rectified, so that he was then able to move on with the more important affairs of business.

Cain could remember his mother saying grace before meals and teaching him to offer up his prayers at bedtime or reading to him from the Bible. His father, though, had always considered "Sabbath" duties more than adequate religion, that saying prayers and grace and all that nonsense throughout the week was an excessive show, almost as bad as the damn Baptists. He thought their mother would make his boys soft with her continual praying and her reading of books. If his boys wanted to read anything at bedtime, he would give them a book on animal husbandry, which was, after all, their destined future.

Cain was the elder of two boys. His brother, Tiberius Julius, a name mercifully shortened to TJ, was two years his junior. There had been a third brother, Claudius Nero, who'd been carried off by a fever at six months, and his passing seemed the last nail in his mother's coffin. His father, whose only reading besides ledger books and husbandry journals was Roman history, had named his three boys after emperors, as if tempting the hand of fate toward greatness but perhaps merely bestowing on them greater prospects for failure. Mr. Cain was a taciturn and distant man, of narrow but certain vision and erect bearing, not hard-hearted so much as hardened by facts, someone who felt that emotions, at least the visible sort, were manifest signs of weakness in a man. A widower, he'd assumed as his job the sober one of dragging unwilling boys into the thorny realm of manhood, turning them into good farmers, loyal Virginians and southerners, fair masters, stolid husbands, and eventually, strict fathers themselves--more or less in that order. Cain being the eldest, it was naturally assumed he'd take over the farm when the time came. Yet it was TJ who was always more at home with the tools, not to mention the mind-set, of agrarian matters--more adept than Cain with plowshares and hayracks and scythes, more interested in talk of planting moons and the chance of rain, with the price of seed and tobacco and slaves. Even as a boy Cain had found all of that exceedingly tedious. On Sunday afternoons, when he was momentarily set free from chores, he especially loved to ride up to the top of a hill some miles behind his house, and there he'd sit under a big poplar tree and read a book he'd brought along, or just stare out over the hazy Blue Ridge to the west, wondering what lay beyond them. He'd always had a wanderlust in him, a sense of adventure that could hardly be bounded by the circumspect and mundane existence of a farmer.