Soul of a Crow (3 page)

“You blinked first,” he murmured, teasing me further.

“I did not,” I retorted in a whisper.

“What in
tarnation
is taking you-all so long? We got dinner cooking!” Malcolm informed impatiently, still directly outside our tent and no more than five feet from us.

“Goddamn, boy, leave them two alone,” Boyd ordered, and I smiled to hear the customary note of affectionate irritation in his tone as he addressed his younger brother.

Hungry as I was, I was not yet ready to be pulled from my preoccupation with Sawyer; I traced my fingertips in a beloved path along his handsome face, touching his cheekbones, sunburned to a deep golden-brown, his jaws and chin, my thumbs caressing the lines of his eyebrows in passing, the shape of his sensual mouth. He shivered, catching my hands into his much larger ones and kissing each palm.

“You did blink first,” he whispered, and I was unable to keep from smiling at him.

“Lorie,” he murmured. Studying my eyes, he told me without words,
I am so happy to be here with you, like this
.

It is a gift
, I thought in return, and knew that he heard; it had been that way between us from the first.

“I got a surprise!” Malcolm insisted, still nearby, and I could not help but giggle; Sawyer grinned, tenderly kissing the side of my neck, stroking lightly with his tongue, as I shivered and indulged in being sheltered against him for one last, sweet second.

“I wish to see you eat well,” he said firmly, drawing us to our feet; standing, my nose was at a level with the center of his chest. He donned his dry muslin shirt, tucking it into his trousers and buttoning his suspenders into place with the easy motions of one not at all concerned with a fastidious dressing routine. He slipped the suspender straps over his shoulders and then swept back his thick hair, holding a leather thong he'd grabbed from the ground between his teeth, before retying it deftly into place around his hair. He knew I had been unable to eat much of late; my ribs were more prominent than they had been at the beginning of June.

“I will,” I assured him, and he stroked my face, bestowing a final kiss before ducking outside. Sawyer was thoughtful to a fault, allowing me as much privacy as he could manage when we shared a space scarcely large enough for two adults, so careful to give me the chance to recover from what I had been through in Missouri; until I was fully healed and we were properly joined in marriage, he would not seek anything physical beyond kissing me and holding me close as we slept, this I knew well. It did not, however, alter for so much as an instant the intensity of awareness between us that existed from the first days we had known one another.

Outside, Malcolm immediately claimed his attention; a smile tugged at my heart as I buttoned into a skirt and then knelt to root out my comb.

“Sawyer,” the boy said. There was a note of reprimand in his tone and I listened with interest as my fingers flew, re-braiding my hair. Malcolm went on, as though addressing a naughty child, “You ain't got your boots on, an' you's always harping on me for it.”

I imagined Sawyer ruffling Malcolm's shaggy dark hair. He replied calmly, “That's the truth. My socks haven't finished drying, that's all. Though I do appreciate your concern.”

“Where's Lorie-Lorie?” Malcolm all but demanded, referring to me by his usual nickname. Each of them had a particular way of addressing me; Boyd called me ‘Lorie-girl,' and to Sawyer I was ‘Lorie-love' or
mo mhuirnín milis
, one of the Irish endearments he favored. My heart swelled with love for them, all three.

“I'll be out directly,” I called.

“Well, hurry!” Malcolm ordered. “I ain't had a chance to show you—”

“Hold your tongue, boy,” Boyd interrupted him to chastise. “Mama, God rest her sweet soul, would strap your thoughtless hide for talkin' to a lady that way.”

“Aw, Lorie knows I ain't but excited to see her,” Malcolm said. He came close to the tent and attempted to rap on the canvas the way he would have a wooden door, imploring, “Ain't that so?”

Fully dressed and hair braided, I emerged into the evening light and Malcolm caught me in an exuberant hug. I smoothed Malcolm's shaggy hair, regarding him with deep fondness. He was tanned as brown as a batch of walnut-dye, his dark, long-lashed eyes merry. Freckles walked all along his nose and cheekbones, and he was in rather desperate need of a creek bath.

“It's so,” I confirmed. “What did you want to show me?”

“Lookee,” Malcolm enthused, tugging me towards the embers over which the iron grate was propped, and where two rabbits, in addition to two prairie hens, crackled deliciously. He pointed to the ground near the shallow fire pit Boyd dug last night, where five speckled eggs were lined in a row, smooth and pretty as rocks plucked from the river bottom.

“Eggs!” I exclaimed in joy, already imagining the cheerful sizzle of them cracked into our pan.

“Nest was yonder,” Malcolm said, indicating westward; the open plains stretched as far as an eye could see in every direction around our camp, though I knew that Keokuk, Iowa waited just to the north. It would be the first we had seen of a town in some weeks, and as much as I wished to avoid most all contact with strangers, I was hopeful for the presence of a preacher.

“It's been a piece since we's had eggs,” Boyd said, from his seat on the ground, where he contentedly drew on a tobacco roll. Though Boyd was much taller and far more solidly built than Malcolm, they resembled each other to a marked degree, the two of them nearly the last of their family left alive.

Before the War, the Carters had densely populated the Bledsoe holler, in Cumberland County; Boyd and Malcolm's family had numbered six, not including aunts, uncles, cousins, and other shirttail relatives; they farmed the eastern edge of the holler, while Sawyer's family resided just across, to the west. Sawyer and Boyd were of an age, both twenty-four, and had been raised as closely as any brothers. In the crisp late-autumn of 1862, they joined the Army of Tennessee under General Joseph Wheeler, in the company of four additional brothers, Ethan and Jeremiah Davis, and Beaumont and Grafton Carter—of the six of them, only Sawyer and Boyd returned to Tennessee alive. Boyd and Malcolm were the sole remaining members left to pass on the Carter name; likewise, Sawyer was the last Davis.

Boyd used a sharpened stick to poke at the meat, declaring, “Any moment now. Good work, Lorie-girl. It's right satisfying to eat what you done shot, 'specially for the first time,” and I grinned at his compliment.

“The practice has proven helpful,” I said.

Sawyer took his customary position to Boyd's right, sitting on a split log with one foot braced against an adjacent piece of wood. His feet were bare and dirt-smudged, as were the hems of his trousers; he held a tin cup of steaming coffee. He reached his free hand to me, angling a knee for me to sit upon. Once settled, I appropriated the cup for a sip.

“You twos are hoping for a preacher in the next town,” Boyd noted, reading my thoughts. He winked at Sawyer and me, adding, “Get you two hitched up proper-like. Aw, shit, Davis, what I wouldn't give for a wedding celebration like in the old days.” His dark eyebrows lifted in amusement at what he could clearly discern as my skepticism at this remark. He hurried to explain, “Lorie-girl, once upon a time, back home, a wedding was a cause for celebration the likes of no other on the ridge. Daddy would tap a whiskey barrel, Mama would dress in her finest an' make sure the lot of us was likewise spit-shined. Damn. Me an' Sawyer, here, an' the boys”—and I understood he meant their brothers—“would suffer through the ceremony, castin' our eyes about for the prettiest girls in the church, so's we could try an' talk to them later. You remember the night that Grayson Pike an' Orla Main hitched up?”

At Boyd's question Sawyer snorted a laugh and affirmed, “I could hardly forget.”

Malcolm knelt near Sawyer and me, stirring at the fire with a long stick as Boyd's eyes took on a storytelling shine I knew well. Studying the horizon, gazing into the past, Boyd said, “Sawyer an' me was sixteen or so, an' fortunate enough to sneak a bottle of Daddy's apple-pie around the far side of the barn. The August moon was full as a fresh-scrubbed face, pouring light upon us near bright as day, an' the two of us was drunk as skunks.”

Sawyer grinned at the memory of their past misbehavior. I watched him with pleasure, still holding the warm tin cup of coffee, letting its steam bathe over my nose. He traced a line between my shoulder blades with his knuckles as he said, “I could hardly see for the headache I had the next day.”

Boyd agreed, “Same for me, old friend,” before continuing the story. “Next thing we knew here come Ethan, all outta breath an' wanting t'tell us something. We figured it was to boast about how he'd been kissing on Helen Sue Gottlender –”

Malcolm interrupted Boyd to interject, with an air of all-knowing, “Ethan was
always
a-kissing on girls. An'
talking
about it, which Daddy said a gentleman wasn't never s'posed to do.”

Sawyer and Boyd laughed heartily at this, while I listened in fascination.

Ethan had been Sawyer's younger brother, a twin to Jeremiah; Ethan and Jere had been born on the same day and were later killed within the same quarter-hour, both shot to death on the rocky ground at the battle of Murfreesboro, early in 1863, over five years ago. Sawyer carried their lifeless bodies from the field and brought them home to Suttonville, wrapped in blankets in the back of a flatbed wagon. The pain of this picture beat at the edges of my mind; I was grateful to hear the way Sawyer was still able to laugh at a memory of his brother in life, before the War ripped Ethan from existence.

“That he was,” Boyd agreed, with relish. “Eth was a true ladies' man. An' ladies loved him right back. This one, too,” he teased of Sawyer. Boyd winked companionably at me and continued, “But here come Eth, swearing that he'd spied two people…” Boyd twisted up his face in pure good humor, before finishing with a tone of deliberate delicacy, “Enjoying each other's company a
very
great deal, out in the holler.”

“Meanin' what?” Malcolm demanded.

Though his eyebrows registered amusement, Boyd chose to ignore this question and said, “So, of course Sawyer an' me followed him out there, the two of us hanging onto each other like a pair of drunkards so's we didn't fall, an' low an' behold, Ethan was telling the truth, as there was Gus an' his sweet little wife, Grace…”

Boyd was referring to Angus and the woman with whom he'd been happily wed, long before the War created dust of their former lives. I was heartened to think there was a time when Angus had been so youthful and brazen that he had dared to make love to his wife out-of-doors, perhaps inspired by the romance of a summer wedding held on the night of a full moon.

“We ought to have been ashamed of ourselves,” Sawyer said, sighing a little, with both good-natured humor at the memory and the ache of loss that would never be fully absent from any of us, now that Angus was gone.

“But we hid in the trees like the young scoundrels we was, an' watched them twos, thinkin' we was getting a few lessons,” Boyd laughed. “Shit, we deserved our hides strapped raw. Never told Gus about that, though I think he mighta found a bit of humor in it, I truly do.”

“He would have,” Sawyer agreed, and I rested my head upon him; he smoothed the base of his palm gently down my back, caressing me.

“Angus was happy with Grace,” I murmured, and I knew this for certain. The thought of Angus, whose deep-gray eyes held such kindness, who had been willing to make me his wife to give our child a name, tangled around my heart with an aching guilt. Before Angus realized that he'd known my father in the War, he paid for my services at Ginny's whorehouse—by the next morning, having fled Ginny's and St. Louis in the company of Angus, Sawyer, Boyd and Malcolm, it was too late. In the backlash of resultant shock at what I had finally done—abandoning the misery of my existence as a prostitute—I neglected to remember to cleanse my insides with the usual butter mixture, which contained potash and subsequently aided in the prevention of unwanted pregnancy.

“He was,” Sawyer agreed softly. He well understood the painful thoughts that circled my mind as crows would a carcass. He added, comforting me with his words, “Before the War, Gus was happy as a man could be, I well remember. He and Grace were married for many a good year before he left home as a soldier.”

“But
what
was they doin' out in the holler?” Malcolm pressed, still caught up in this portion of the tale.

“Ask me again when you's a piece older,” Boyd told him.

Malcolm turned his inquisitive eyes to Sawyer, sensing he would receive no satisfactory answer from his brother. Dark eyebrows knitted, the boy speculated with certainty, “It's got to do with why you an' Lorie's in such a hurry to find a preacher, don't it?”

Before either of us could respond, the boy went on, “You seem wed already, anyhow.” His coffee-brown eyes twinkled, moving between Sawyer and me. “An' you already share a tent, so why does it –”

“Kid, I know it isn't the proper order of things, as two people should first be wed. But Lorie and I dearly love each other, and besides, I cannot sleep unless she is tucked near to me,” Sawyer interrupted to quietly explain, and, as they were prone to of late, tears blurred my vision at the sweetness of his words.

“I know, I know, I was just sayin',” Malcolm insisted. Attuned as he was to my feelings, the expression in the boy's eyes instantly became one of concern and he insisted gently, “No cryin' no more, Lorie-Lorie.”

At these words Sawyer's left arm came immediately around me, joining the right. Malcolm reached and politely took the tin cup from my grasp, depositing it on the ground, then wrapped about me from the front, and I was effectively cradled between him and Sawyer. It had not been long ago that I thought them gone from me forever, and I heaved with a sob I could not contain. I caught Malcolm's elbows, clinging tightly to him, and the two of them held me between them. Even Boyd, who normally pretended to shun such displays of affection, gamely moved behind Malcolm and bear-hugged all of us; though tears streaked my face, their tender, combined comfort effectively kept full-fledged weeping at bay. I could not imagine facing another day without the three of them.