The Eden Hunter (21 page)

 

BOTH XAVIER AND Israel frowned but said nothing when they saw him coming to join them. He settled in the bow with Garçon, and they pulled away from the island. Garçon asked if it really was true that he could shoot, and when he nodded the General handed him one of the heavy muskets lying at their feet. Kau brought the flintlock to his shoulder but could not reach the trigger. Garçon told him that it was a Brown Bess, smoothbored and inaccurate—but also much more powerful and quicker to reload than their longrifles. A soldier’s weapon. Garçon patted him on the ribs. “Shoot it from your hip if the time comes. Then start reloading for the rest of us.” The General then gave him a leather-bound box. Inside, wooden dividers held rows of paper tubes. “Have you ever used these before?” he asked.

Kau shook his head. “What they?”

Garçon lifted the nearest Bess and explained that each paper cartridge contained powder and a single lead ball. “Now watch.” He bit the end from a cartridge, then primed the musket’s flashpan with a quick splash of powder and closed the frizzen. “You try,” he said.

Kau took up a musket and a cartridge and did the same. The rowboat rocked and he spilled some powder but not too much.

“Perfect,” said Garçon. “Now for the rest of it.” Garçon removed the ramrod from the underside of the Bess, then forced the torn cartridge down the length of the barrel. Kau copied him and Garçon smiled. “Perfect,” he said again. A gull flew past them and screamed.

 

HE LOADED THE final Bess, then rubbed a wet hand on his neck to cool himself. He had moved to the stern with Israel, and the three muskets and the three longrifles were all arranged at their feet. Xavier faced them as he rowed, and Garçon remained in the bow, watching the Americans.

Mullet were feeding in great dimpled schools where the brown water of the river melded with the green water of the slack-tide bay, and when the crowded rowboat pushed in among them they scattered in eruptions of white froth. Israel pointed and told him he had just missed seeing a far-off tarpon dance on its tail. “It was something,” he said. “Believe you me.”

 

KAU SAT WITH his elbows on his knees. They were well into the bay—maybe two hundred yards from the American ships—when a skiff
was lowered from one of the gunboats. Garçon ordered Xavier to stop with his rowing, then called to Israel. “How long?” he asked.

Israel gathered a handful of dead cypress needles from the floor of the rowboat and sprinkled them overboard, testing the tide. There was a slight chop to the water now, and the needles began a slow inch back toward the river. Israel squinted, watching them, then looked up at Garçon and spoke. “It’s begun,” he said.

Garçon told Xavier and Israel to take up their longrifles, and then he trained Israel’s spyglass on the approaching skiff. He laughed and said that an ugly man was staring right back at him with a spyglass of his own. “Listen very close for my orders,” he told them.

Kau shielded his eyes with both hands and the sailors in the skiff began to come into better focus. All five wore blue and white uniforms and varnished black hats. A man stood at the bow, his arms folded, mirroring the posture of Garçon. On his side was a sword, and he had the cragged features of a carved statue. Garçon spoke. “That man would be the one to kill first,” he said.

 

THE AMERICANS PULLED to within seventy-five, then fifty yards. A beige pelican fell from the sky, slamming into the water between them. Two of the Americans were now kneeling with their muskets, and Kau saw the officer say something to his men. The officer spoke again and this time his words carried. “Steady,” he said. He then raised his voice and called out to Garçon: “Announce yourself.”

Garçon did not respond and so the American brought his hands to his mouth and called out again. “I am an officer of the United States Navy,” he said. “Announce yourself.”

The skiff sat facing them, its oars splayed out high like the wings of a colossal courting bird. The sky had settled into a deep blue, the morning haze gone, burned off by the big yellow sun. Kau let his hand come to rest on a musket, and there was a metallic click, the sound of either Xavier or Israel full-cocking his longrifle.

At last Garçon answered the officer. “I take no orders from Americans,” he said, “as this is not America.”

The officer nodded to a pair of big-backed sailors who had remained at the oars. The sailors leaned forward and two of the oars came down quickly. They began to spin the skiff clockwise, turning it broadside to the rowboat. Sailors lined the rails of the distant ships, and there came a low noise like the music that lives in a seashell. The sailors had begun to cheer. Garçon crouched down at the bow. “Fire,” he ordered.

Kau was first. He threw up the Bess and pulled the trigger. A yellow blaze appeared on the side of the turning skiff, then Xavier and Israel lifted their longrifles and fired as well. Both men missed. Kau passed Garçon’s longrifle forward to him and then handed loaded muskets to Xavier and Israel. A dull cloud of powder smoke hung over the rocking rowboat. Garçon shot and another chip appeared in the wood of the skiff. The Americans had come around complete, and they responded with their own volley. Kau heard the musket balls crack past, and then the smoke from the skiff lifted to mingle with the smoke from the rowboat. Israel pointed at a streak of red on his black and wrinkled neck. “That one there tasted me,” he said.

Xavier fired his own musket and then began heaving on the oars. Their rowboat sat low in the water, but the tide had made its switch and was slowly drawing them back to the river and the island. The sailors looking on from the closest of the gunboats had quit cheering, and Kau saw them running to man their cannons. The skiff was retreating to the fleet, and Israel and a stern-riding sailor traded parting shots but without effect.

Kau passed Israel one of the spare muskets, exchanging it for his spent one, and then he bit the end off a cartridge and set about reloading. Xavier was watching them as he rowed. He was openmouthed and breathing in gasps. Kau saw a flame lick and then white smoke puffed from the nearest gunboat. A cannonball passed high over the Americans in the skiff, but then it splashed down far behind the rowboat. The skiff was a hundred yards off now. Israel fired again and Garçon shouted that maybe this time he saw a sailor slump.

And then Xavier screamed out in Spanish. Kau looked up from the Bess he was loading and saw that Israel lay dead, his forehead smashed by a musket ball. The back of his skull was missing, and his blood was spreading across the bottom of the rowboat. Kau turned away and saw Garçon sitting at the bow, quiet.

Xavier continued rowing them back toward the island, until finally they were well beyond the range of the both the skiff and the gunboats—but even as they fled the firing from the near gunboat persisted, only now Kau realized that its cannons had been aimed away from the retreating rowboat. For reasons known only to the Americans they were instead shelling the empty coast, firing incomprehensibly into the continent. He watched cannonball
after cannonball punish the green coastline as the tide carried the rowboat north.

 

THEY CIRCLED BEHIND the island before they beached—a ruse meant to fool the Americans into thinking that they had fled even farther up the river—and later, after the rowboat had been washed clean and emptied, Kau helped Xavier dig a grave behind Israel’s shack while Garçon and the two Choctaws watched. They did not dig very long before they hit water, and so it was decided that the grave would have to be shallow.

Xavier fashioned a cross cut from raft wood, and after the hole was dug Garçon placed the pigeonkeeper’s Bible in his stiff hands and a blanket was wrapped around him. The body was maneuvered into the grave, and then they covered Israel with dirt, more scraps of raftwood to discourage scavengers. When they were finished Xavier hammered his cross down into the ground.

They both stepped back so that Garçon could say words. With the Bible buried Garçon could only preach from memory. The General began to speak of a man walking alone through the valley of the shadow of death, and Kau let his mind drift. He remembered another story—Samuel’s favorite story—the story of a bad man who returned to his home and became good. Kau realized then that he was living the opposite sort of life. Here he was, a good man stolen from his home and turned bad. A tiny cursed child-killer fated to traipse alone witnessing evil after evil after evil until at last his own time came to suffer, like Israel, some remote and terrible death. This was not a life worth living.

As he watched Israel be put to rest he recognized the mistake he had made in refusing Beah. She had offered him a way to save not just her life, but his own life as well. Garçon finished with his preaching and Kau went to him. “I believe I gotta go back,” he said. “I believe I gotta go back and fetch Beah.”

A
T FIRST GARÇON hesitated, but in the end he agreed to let him take Beah away from the fort before the battle came. Kau nodded and then went off with Xavier to spend the day watching the American ships. He washed Israel’s blood from his osnaburgs and then sat naked in the sun while they dried.

Xavier had listened to the conversation with Garçon and seemed troubled. Several times he asked about Beah, but Kau would not discuss her. In truth he was afraid that if he did speak of her some spell would be broken—that not Garçon but he himself would change his mind, that he would make for St. Vincent without her, abandoning her to die in the fort with the others.

That evening they all met together in the shack. At dawn Garçon would leave with the Choctaws in their canoe; Kau and
Xavier were to remain behind for now. Garçon pointed in the direction of the ships. “When they come,” he ordered, “then you come.” Kau frowned at this, but Garçon only handed him Israel’s longrifle and powder kit. “Do this for me,” he said. “Do this for me and I will keep her safe for you.”

 

THE ISLAND WAS theirs alone now, and one would sleep while the other sat on the beach and stared at the ships. Every six hours they would switch out with the tide change. One man waking the other and passing him the spyglass.

 

IT WAS THE morning following the departure of Garçon. The warm night peeled back like some dark hide, and the land and sea were revealed. He trained the spyglass on the fleet and saw activity aboard one of the gunboats. The sailors were preparing a skiff. He hurried down the dirt path to the shack. The pendulum clock showed five o’clock, and he woke Xavier. “They comin,” he said.

Xavier went with him to the beach, then took a turn at the spyglass and described what he saw. The skiff held a number of wooden barrels. Xavier lowered the spyglass and spoke. “
Sí
,” he said. “They need water, I think.”

 

THE ROWBOAT WAS still beached at the north end of the island, and it had been loaded with their effects since the day of Garçon’s departure. Kau stood by the water and waited for Xavier to release the pigeons. Finally Xavier came running through the green palmettos,
and Kau looked up at the sky, watching as the entire flock left the island for the fort.

He had thought of bringing along the bow stave, but there was no real point in that. He had his knife and a longrifle. What purpose would an unstrung and arrowless bow stave serve in the world of war and metal to which he was returning? No, he decided, let it wait for me here in the smokehouse.

 

HE SAT IN the bow as Xavier worked to keep the island between them and the American skiff, blocking the rowboat from the view of the approaching sailors. The tide was coming in, and so the current pushed them north. Kau had the spyglass, and he leveled it on the upriver spot where the marsh surrendered to trees. Cardinals were flitting back and forth through the cypress and the long moss, a bright red male chasing after a bright red male while a fawn female watched.

 

XAVIER PULLED THEM into the shelter of the flooded cypress just as the skiff appeared around the side of Israel’s island. The skiff’s sail was raised, the Americans taking advantage of the steady breeze blowing in from the bay. He helped Xavier conceal the rowboat far back onto the shore, and then they unloaded their things.

 

THEY WERE WATCHING the Americans glide slowly closer when Kau looked up and saw an Indian—a dark Choctaw, shiny with sweat—sitting astride the high branch of a cypress. The warrior was staring
down at them. He pointed north. “Go,” he said in English. “The General waits.”

 

THEY TOOK THE horse path that ran along the river. He was thinking of the Choctaw. That had been him—the one who had visited Kau in the night, the one who stole his bone club and then left it as a gift for a dead man. After a while Kau spoke. “That Indian in the tree,” he said. “It was him.”

Xavier stopped and looked at him. “Him?”

“The Choctaw.”

“From your tent, you mean?”

“Yes.”

Just then Kau heard a slapping sound from back down the muddy trail. He turned with Xavier, and they saw the Choctaw approaching at a run. The Indian had a tomahawk in his hand and was almost upon them. Xavier leapt to one side of the trail and Kau to the other, but the Choctaw raced past them and kept on.

 

SOON THE HORSE path bent with the river, and they arrived at the first of the negro farms. Kau saw Garçon standing by the edge of a lush cornfield, surrounded by forty or fifty men. There were six Choctaws mixed in with the soldiers, and though the sentinel Choctaw was nowhere in sight, he must have reported that Kau and Xavier were coming. No one seemed surprised to see them, and when Xavier waved to Garçon from the horse path the General only smiled and said, Join us.

 

KAU WAITED WITH the others in the rows of corn that ran alongside the riverbank, and it was at least an hour before the skiff appeared. Garçon ordered everyone to keep hidden. The current was beating back the tide and the Americans had lowered their sail. Four men struggled at the oars; a fifth sat at the bow. On the west bank—directly across from the cornfield—a creek spilled into the brown river. The skiff turned and then made for it.