The Outcasts (16 page)

The gag was replaced and pulled tighter, exposing more of Crenshaw’s teeth. Dr. Tom slipped from the box a pair of pliers with a rounded head. In one practiced move he fastened it onto a tooth, and with his other hand he grabbed Crenshaw’s hair.

“I’ve also been known to practice dentistry.” Nate heard a cracking sound as Dr. Tom forcefully twisted the tooth key and pulled the tooth along with the living root from the bone. Crenshaw opened his jaws wider and screamed against the gag. He continued screaming and thrashing for a long time while blood pooled and ran from his mouth.

Dr. Tom took his time removing a piece of linen bandage from the box and soaking it with some of the laudanum from his flask. He carefully packed it into the cavity made by the missing tooth and waited for Crenshaw to quiet down.

After a while, Dr. Tom tapped him on the forehead to get his attention. “I give you my word that I won’t hang you. But I also give you my word that if you don’t tell me what I need to know, I will carve every protuberance from your face.” He pulled out a larger scalpel and held it eye level with the prisoner. “Starting with your nose.” He ran the scalpel in a light-handed stroke down one side of Crenshaw’s face, and a thin line of scarlet appeared.

The prisoner began to shake his head from side to side, tears seeping from his eyes. Dr. Tom removed the gag.

Crenshaw said, “They went to a settlement to the south called Middle Bayou.”

“What for?”

“Some farmer found gold. McGill went to get it.”

“Why didn’t they take you?”

Crenshaw just looked at him. Dr. Tom smiled tightly. “You were supposed to be watching for us to ride over with the ferryman. Was there a woman traveling with them?”

“No.”

Dr. Tom prodded the prisoner with his boot. “You sure about that?”

“No woman, I told you!”

“One last question.” Dr. Tom brought the scalpel to Crenshaw’s face and lightly etched a matching line down the other side of his face. Crenshaw flinched and the wound trickled blood. “Were you in Frost Town when McGill killed those children?”

Crenshaw nodded once and Dr. Tom looked at Nate and said, “Hang him.”

Crenshaw twisted hard at the ropes. The straining dislodged the linen packing in his jaw, opening the wound to bleed again. “You said you wouldn’t hang me.”

Dr. Tom stood up. “I’m not. He is.” He walked to Crenshaw’s horse and removed the length of rope from the saddle. He put his hand on Nate’s shoulder. “The only sin here is in hesitation.”

“Oh, goddamn!” Crenshaw yelled. “My own goddamn rope!”

“Go on, Nate,” Dr. Tom said. “This is part of the life you chose. If you falter, just think of those dead children.” Dr. Tom handed Nate the rope. “You’re not in this alone.”

Nate turned his back to the prisoner and, after several tries, managed to pitch the coiled end of the rope over a branch. Fashioning a noose took longer than expected and he soon realized he should have made the noose first. Before he could position the grulla mare under it, he had to listen to ten minutes of bargaining and threatening from the prisoner. He thought of gagging Crenshaw again, his nerves frayed to breaking by the begging, but decided that tolerating the man’s last pleading words was the price he paid for killing him. It took both Nate and Dr. Tom to wrestle the noose around Crenshaw’s neck and reseat him in his saddle.

Nate thumped the horse and she bolted forward, but Crenshaw dropped awkwardly, desperately squeezing the saddle with both legs. He died badly, kicking and wheezing, scissoring his legs in the air. Nate would have helped him with the drop, but he was afraid of having his jaw broken by flailing feet.

Dr. Tom had his back to Crenshaw, repacking his medical kit, but Nate watched the hanging man dying by measures and wondered how he would tell his wife about it. Describing a hanging, in the general sense, wouldn’t be so difficult to convey in a letter. If a man commits himself to service and rides away from his home and family carrying a rope and a gun, he has to expect to use them.

But this hanging couldn’t be considered in the general sense, not while he was standing so close to the man’s purpling face and bulging eyes, not while he was the one who had fashioned the rope. He understood, watching Crenshaw’s purposeful kicks turn to spasmodic jerking, that he had come to a place farther from his family than could be measured in miles. In the few years of his marriage, he had withheld nothing from his wife. But come time for the next letter to her, that would change.

As soon as Crenshaw had quit moving, Nate quietly approached the mare, still wild-eyed and spooked, and settled her only after his own hands had stopped shaking. Then he mounted his horse and turned southward again, leading the mare and following after Dr. Tom, towards Middle Bayou.

O
n the evening of Bill’s arrival, Lucinda took him to the clearing and pointed to the island.

“There,” she said. “The gold is there, somewhere on that island. Bedford says that it’s a large cache of coins.” She thought for a moment of telling him about the German, his remains snagged somewhere in the water, decomposing slowly, hopefully still submerged. But then she would have to tell him about Mrs. Landry’s stolen money in the tapestry bag. He would not be pleased by the risk she had taken.

She watched Bill’s face eagerly, looking for signs of approval, waiting for him to slip his arms around her, to palm her hair back from her forehead, to kiss her. But his brow furrowed in concentration, his gaze taking in the thick choke of hanging vines, the floating debris that might or might not be fallen logs. He lit a small cigar and stood looking at the island for a time.

Finally he pursed his lips and said, “I have a man coming in a few days with mules for the gold.” He breathed out, exhaling smoke. “My surveying partner.” He turned his head and smiled at her: a lifting of the upper lip, revealing straight, unbroken teeth.

His beard, along with the spectacles and the smoke swirling around his chin, worked to mask his features, and she understood the ruse. But it veiled the subtler expressions playing across his face as well, and it seemed for that brief instant that he retreated from her even as she stood next to him.

“Bedford has proposed marriage,” she told him. “There is an engagement party in two days.”

He smiled again and dropped the cigar, then crushed it out with one boot heel. He cupped one hand behind her neck, pressing her lips to his, and placed the other hand between her legs. “Well, then,” he whispered. “I have a gift for the bride.”

Bill had been welcomed readily into the Grant home. Soon the settlers began calling on their schoolteacher’s handsome brother, the men gathering on the porch to speak with him, attentive to his experience as a surveyor and engineer during the war, the women putting forth their eligible daughters with introductions, to Lucinda’s mind, as subtle as cattle being offered at auction. But his hours spent with Bedford at the supper table or out walking aimlessly in the fields—always accompanied by a whiskey bottle—dragged Lucinda into a deep and continual anxiety that Bedford would recognize him. Bill assured her that Bedford had been drunk on his ear in Harrisburg where he’d shown the gold coin, and that he’d keep the old man drunk until he left again. But at times Lucinda could see Bedford regarding Bill with puzzled concentration, a momentary confusion that Jane was quick to observe. Her wariness towards Lucinda—and now towards the newly arrived “brother” occupying her home and constantly feeding liquor to her father—had turned to outright hostility.

Bill had told her, though, that he was tired of waiting, that he had come “to grease the wheels.”

The engagement party was held in the Wallers’ home, the sitting room filled uncomfortably with invited settlers eager to congratulate Bedford and Lucinda but also there to see with their own eyes the transplanted remnants of old plantation finery. Most of the men, standing or sitting stiffly with their wives, were casting guarded, avaricious glances in May’s direction, their overly long hair manfully tamed with what looked to be axle grease. The women, in pieced-together dresses and shawls, struggled to gracefully hold Sephronia’s delicate cups and saucers, tiny embossed fruit forks, and slender-stemmed glasses with callused hands that had most recently held buckets, plow handles, or hoes.

Robert McKenzie, the one-armed neighbor that May had wondered about kissing, stood with his back against the green-and-maroon wallpaper of the Wallers’ sitting room stealing looks at Jane Grant. He was dressed in a dark suit, his left sleeve pinned neatly to his shoulder, and was indeed handsome, Lucinda thought, in a sickroom, wasting sort of way.

Jane sat at the Wallers’ ornate parlor piano, her back to the room, playing something appropriately energetic, although, Lucinda knew, her expression was dour. Lucinda sat next to her, facing the guests, her eyes shifting back and forth like a shuttlecock between the spectacled man newly introduced as Lucinda’s brother, Bill Carter, and May. They stood together talking, the top of May’s head coming only as high as his collarbone, her upturned face at times rising to meet his as she stood on tiptoe to better hear what he had to say. Bill rested one elbow on the mantelpiece and smiled, his head cocked to one side as May chattered on.
He’s watching her,
Lucinda thought,
as a carnival barker would consider a rube, with both amusement and cunning.
He ran the tip of his tongue slowly over his lips and then traced the wetness on his mouth with the pad of his thumb, causing May to blush. Only once did his eyes drift to Lucinda’s, where they lingered briefly.

She was about to stand and go to him, but she felt Bedford’s hand on her shoulder and she stiffened. He bent down and whispered something unintelligible into her ear, his breath sour from drink. In a few days’ time, two whiskey bottles had been emptied.

She reached up, patted Bedford’s hand, and then slipped it from her shoulder. She stood and made her way to the opposite side of the room.

“Mr. McKenzie,” she said. It shook the one-armed man from his reverie and he blushed, then formally offered his congratulations. She thanked him and asked to refill his glass with punch. She took the glass and promptly handed it to May, instructing her to be polite and return a filled drink to the veteran standing all alone.

Bill leaned forward, looking into his own glass as though he could read the complicated swirls of the liquid inside, and, bringing his mouth closer to Lucinda’s ear, said, “What a festive wake.”

She smiled uneasily and settled her gaze on the stuffed owl on the mantelpiece, the bird with the staring amber eyes, and thought it an apt totem for the gathering in the room. All of them preserved, stiff and formal, arrayed in their downtrodden best, staring at everyone else with curiosity or with covetousness, but all with eyes seeking to root out the hidden things.

Bill set the glass on the mantelpiece next to the owl and said to her, “Make your excuses and meet me outside.”

He nodded brusquely to Sephronia Waller, who was moving through the press of bodies towards him, her weighted, hooped skirt catching and dragging on the legs of the guests around her like a fisherman’s net. But he slipped past her without speaking and walked out the door.

In a few minutes Lucinda followed Bill onto the porch and stood watching him smoking a cigar, the smoke curling into the wind away from his slender fingers, and she fought an impulse to cover his other hand resting on the railing with her own.

He stubbed out the live ashes on the railing and pitched the butt into the yard. “The trick will be getting him to point out the exact spot,” he said. “I don’t want to be digging up the entire island. Especially in the dark.”

“It’s going to take more time.”

“Sister, we don’t have more time. Tomorrow night is the night.”

“And if he won’t tell me?”

“Then he’ll have to tell
me
, which will not be as pleasant.” He turned, putting his back to the railing, and looked through the parlor windows.

Lucinda saw his expression change and she turned as well to face the house. May stood in the parlor looking outward, her lips parted expectantly, her eyes fixed on Bill.

“I think May should come with us.” His smile broadened.

An alarm like the ringing of the fire bell coursed through her and she turned to face the field again. “Why?”

“I think she may be of use.”

She drew a breath, and then another. “That was not the plan.”

“Plans change.”

Carefully, keeping her face turned from the windows, she walked stiffly down the stairs, her bones as brittle as a bird’s, and moved away from the house and into the fields fronting Red Bluff Road. All of the black and perilous spaces that had ever been visited upon her—the abandonment in a madhouse, the years of sinking into uncontrollable fits, the wasteland of half-remembered and loathsome couplings—stretched out before and behind and above her, like a great dark canopy.

Of course there had been other women. There would always be women, bodies used for convenience when she wasn’t around. But Bill had chosen her as a partner for her intelligence, for her ability to mold herself capably to any situation, and for her seeming lack of remorse. He had also chosen her because she fed his need to gaze into a person’s eyes and see, from a safe remove, Death knocking on the other side. He had promised that he would never leave her, would never desert her.

But now there was a threat she had not anticipated. May was also dissatisfied, restless, and physically without peer. And—Lucinda knew this with a deep, instinctive certainty—May would not hesitate to leave her former teacher behind if it served her own interests.

She felt Bill walking up behind her, and heard the striking of a match to light another cigar. She told him, “She can’t come with us.”

“Can’t? Lucy, don’t be tiresome. By tomorrow morning, if the old man hasn’t told you exactly where the gold is, you are to leave with the girl for Galveston. Once I tell him you have his daughter, he’ll be willing.”

“What makes you think she’ll come with me?”

“Because you’re going to tell her I want her to.”

“And Jane?”

“Who?”

“The other sister.”

“I’m sure she’ll be useful as well.”

She turned to look at him. “She’ll fight you if her father’s threatened.”

He ran a finger down the side of her face. “I certainly hope so.”

She followed him back to the house and into the parlor, where Jane was at the piano playing “Oh, What a Comfort Is My Home.” Lucinda went to stand next to Bedford, a strained smile on her face, accepting congratulations from the neighbors as they began spilling from the house and onto the road for home. When May left, she threw a dazzling smile at Bill, and Lucinda felt panic filling her chest.

After dark, she met Bedford at the greenhouse and led him inside. She turned her face up to his to be kissed, closing her eyes tightly to his avid, straining expression, breathing shallowly against his exhalations of whiskey vapors.

After a time, she took his hand and, after kissing each finger, placed it over one breast, whispering into his ear, “Bedford, please confide in me. Tell me where the coins are hidden. If something were to happen to you, how can I take care of your family?”

He buried his face in her neck. “I can’t,” he mumbled.

She pulled away. “I’ve told you everything about myself. My life is an open book to you. But if you would hide this discovery from me…How can I trust you with the day-to-day, if you won’t reveal to me the more important things?”

He hung his head, looking wretched and guilt-stricken. “Lucinda, I wish to tell you…I want to tell you that…”

He stammered to silence and she kissed him again until he forgot his misery and resumed running his hands over the folds of her skirt. But to every question about the coins, he remained unresponsive. Another man driven to such frenzy would simply have forced her legs open and taken her. But he stopped his groping as soon as she pushed him away.

She leaned against a wall, closing her eyes, and she realized that Bedford was not going to give her the information she sought.

He sank down to a sitting position, his head in his hands. “You don’t understand,” he said.

She straightened her hair and clothing and brushed at her skirt. “You must trust me if I am to marry you. I’ll not ask you again.”

“I can’t tell you,” he said and looked at her pleadingly, but she walked from the greenhouse without saying good-bye and returned to her room at the Wallers’.

In the morning, she rose early and crept her way quietly to the barn, where she hid her tapestry bag packed with all of her things, as well as some food and water, in the buggy.

When everyone was seated at the table for breakfast, she asked Euphrastus if she could use the buggy for the day, knowing that he wouldn’t refuse her in front of his wife.

“I need it to go to Morgan’s Point,” she explained. She looked to Sephronia and smiled. “I’m meeting the ferry bringing my wedding dress from Houston.”

Lavada laughed, delighted. “I can come with you, Miss Carter.”

Lucinda ducked her head as though embarrassed. “Lavada, dear, I would be happy to take you. But Bedford will be accompanying me.”

Euphrastus looked at her suspiciously. “I didn’t know the ferry made passage on a Sunday.”

“Commerce never sleeps, Mr. Waller.” Lucinda smiled at each of them in turn, relieved she would never see any of them again. “I can harness the horse myself.”

She drove the buggy to the Grants’ house and waited for Bill to come out into the yard. When he looked at her questioningly, she shook her head.

“The old man’s still sleeping off his drink,” he said, frowning.

She nodded but kept her eyes averted, afraid of seeing the displeasure on his face. He rested one arm casually across the rear wheel and leaned under the canopy. “I can’t wait any longer, Lucy. May’s inside. Go talk to her.”

After a moment’s pause, she stepped from the buggy and walked across the yard and into the house. She called out May’s name, and Jane appeared in the hallway, her eyes swollen from crying. But seeing Lucinda, she turned angrily away and walked back into the kitchen. May appeared at the top of the stairs and Lucinda motioned her down. She took May by the hand and led her outside so the girl could see Bill waiting by the buggy.

She took hold of both of May’s hands, gave them a reassuring squeeze. “You do know that I care for you like a sister, don’t you?” The girl nodded, her eyes slipping past Lucinda’s shoulders to where Bill stood. “And Bill’s happiness means everything to me.” Lucinda’s back was to Bill but she could imagine the familiar expression of seduction on his face in that moment as he stared at May: the slow burn of his eyes, the contagion of a creeping smile. “May, look at me. Do you love my brother?”