The Road to Reckoning (9 page)

I thought about my mother and father. I am sure they were happy in marriage and a preacher may tell me that they were now happy together. But they seemed very far away to me then. I would change subject.

‘What plans do you have for me?’

His dinner finished, he rubbed his hands together and sifted the crumbs and grease from his whiskers. ‘Fetch my atlas from my bags.’

I went to his horse, who eyed me with a snort. Jude Brown was loved up to him and no longer paid particular attention to me. I suppose that younger animals may see a patriarch in one older than themselves as puppies do to dogs, family or not.

I opened the leather bag as the tail swished at me and I whisted him still. I did not locate the Tanner’s atlas at first, forgetting how small it was, and so moved out the leather notebook thinking it might have shifted between. I opened it with no intention. I opened it and had my judgment changed.

There, on cartridge paper after cartridge paper, were drawings of birds! Black-and-white and colored etchings of dozens of birds! Special detail paid to their heads and beaks, for sometimes that was all there was, and even a white spot of light shaded carefully on their eyes. All of them looking up or to each other, some half-finished where they had flown too soon, their feet imagined, some singing silently.

The charcoal and pencil should have been crude with the fat fingers that must have struggled on them, but they were as delicate as the figurines one finds on blue porcelain. They sat in no trees nor indeed with any landscape. That was not important, clearly, for their likeness. I did not know what the importance was, and I turned openmouthed when his voice growled behind me.

‘What are you about in my business?’

‘I was looking for the atlas.’

He plucked the book gently from me. ‘You have yet to find it.’

I was dumb. His face was sullen. I had been discovered in someone else’s bed. I could only say the truth as it came to me.

‘I like your drawings.’

‘Are you mocking me, boy?’

‘No, sir.’

He leafed through the pages and the anger dissipated from his features like water from a lock. ‘How do you like them? You think me foolish minded?’

‘No, sir. They are very good. But I do not know them.’ I stuck a finger on a page and gulped. ‘What is this one?’

He squinted for a moment and spoke quietly. ‘That is a bluestocking. An avocet. He will see you before you will see him.’

I ran with my success. ‘And his neighbor?’

‘That is a chickadee. Do you not go outside?’

‘I do not know birds.’

He slapped the book shut and put it back. He was mad. I had seen a naked side of him. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘You should know something about them. You may think them God’s decoration.’ He rummaged for his map. ‘But for fact there is naught so mean as birds.’ He tightened his belongings away from my eyes.

‘Birds will fight all day. Kill each other’s young for a nest and eat them. There are empty nests each year. All the world is their enemy. Especially each other. I seen three pigeons take down a red hawk once. They whirled him round until he drowned in the air.’ He pulled me away to the log house, with the map in his hand. ‘They are worse than men.’

We sat down again and he spread the map on his knee. I was loath to talk. There was a bad silence emanating from Henry Stands’s form. I had not meant to do him wrong and I did not think he should be shamed for having a liking for something beautiful. I felt bad for him and myself. I had ruined the first good morning. My shooting lesson long gone.

I think he thought that I now felt less on him when I would have told any man that I did not think he cared a stick for any of my thoughts.

I shuffled my feet at his as he studied the map with difficulty and found myself holding out the folded spectacles again.

‘What’s this?’

‘For your reading,’ I mumbled, sorry as I could, my head down.

He took them and checked once that no-one saw and put them on. ‘Much obliged.’

I scuffed my shoes in the dust. ‘You can keep them. If you want.’

‘No, that’s fine.’ He did not look up.

‘They are worth four dollars anywhere. They will pay for me to no longer be your deadhead.’ I turned so he would not see my red face. ‘You may draw even better with them.’

I walked back to Jude Brown and went around him. I made that I was tightening the straps for the blanket so Henry Stands would not see me cry, my head behind my horse.

I heard him coming and I wiped my face on my coat and made more noise with the straps. He went up on his stud and looked down at me. He had put away the spectacles.

‘I think that woman has taken a fancy to me, which is time to go. I aim to make Berwick before sundown. You better go to her stoop for a leg up. Or take my hand now.’ He held it down to me and I did not mind that he saw my mottled face. I took his fist and he swung me up. He looked about. ‘I think that there are too many Bibles around these parts for men like us.’

We both waved our hats at the mother and her brood, and we went off east again.

We made Berwick before dark. This was a canal town proficient in lumber and coal and you will recall that I stayed here when my adventure held promise.

It was welcome to see. I feel for those canal towns now. The railroad took from them their importance and we lost the pleasure of being pulled by six stout horses along a towpath. People pleasure-cruised in those days and Berwick was right popular for it. You took a picnic and a day and went through mountains and shared food at the locks with settlers. The canals made friends of strangers. Then the railroad came and people got in a right big hurry. What was at first a means to get the anthracite and wood into New Jersey became a passenger service. I will never understand why folks wanted the smell and the jarring back of the railroad over the tranquillity and beauty of the canals. People do not know when they have it good. I will show you a man who works on the river and a man who works on the rail and we will see who smiles more and lives longest.

Now we would have to cross the Susquehanna, which had been our partner. Into Luzerne and Nescopeck just across. The Delaware gap was a couple of days away now and the water reminded that I was near to home. But this was a proper town and though good and religious it was a town with story buildings, and Henry Stands was a man and I was worried that a saloon or coffeehouse confectionary would be his order. As I said before, they were still making reparation to the bridge, so it would be a punt across to Nescopeck and our road, but that would be in the morning. I spoke out that my father and I had slept here in a good hotel but mister Stands did not respond. He pulled up and looked about.

‘I do not like to socialize,’ he said. ‘This place has changed a lot in two years. They most as like have a rule about camping. But I’m not one to pay for lodging. Yet we cannot ride through without a raft.’ He wheeled his horse and studied the good folks. ‘Lot of proper hats and suits. Too many Bibles. I am a Proverbs man only.’

I guessed he was wary of this society. Although he would not like New York, I am sure he had more kinship with the gangs of the Bowery and its points than he would care to admit.

‘We could stay at the hostler,’ I suggested. I was relieved that he would not seek company and drink. I had come to suspect that beyond the birds of his study, who could not converse, Henry Stands disliked the clamor of men. I knew blindly that this was not in fear of them. His father’s name was Fear, he had told. I reckon that was as far as its meaning went to him.

‘Aye, that might do.’ He let me lead the way.

The hostler was a drunken man in apron and stained shirt. His only mark of decency was a well-groomed mustache. He shrank at the large body of Henry Stands and was meek in his presence.

You must take in that Henry Stands cut an imposing manner: he was the ‘full-team,’ as people say.

There were the guns that always hovered about his wrists from his waist and poked out of opened holsters and that he rested on as he waited for a returned word. I imagined he kept this posture be you judge or street hawker. There was the greatcoat and cavalry leggings and old hat that reeked of a life already past yours. He entered every room and space with a check around like he owned it and did not care if you were there. He carried his horse behind, a black war-horse, bred from Spanish, that befitted the man, and the hostler gave us a cent rate to sleep there, and Henry Stands’s stance made clear that he was doing him a favor by sparing him. I was squire to his knight and no-one questioned my presence. I was man by his proxy and tried to carry my own bearing as if I had inherited his power.

‘We’ll fire out the back for our meal,’ he told the hostler, and there was no question otherwise. ‘I will not pay for your water and will not charge you for watching your horses.’ He joked but the hostler thanked him instead of laughing and made himself scarce.

Plenty of water was welcome; we filled the horses and our canteens and boiled tea and sofkee without a care to wasting.

We sat on hay-bales in the dark in the hostler’s yard and Henry Stands poured a circle of water around the fire for safety and seemed gentler when he replaced his old hat for his wool cap. The tea shrank and changed to rum and I began to find it sweet. I had sneaked gin and did not care for it but rum I found was like liquorice and sugar, if you took it careful, and it did not burn like whiskey. We talked about my road. Henry Stands suggested that at Stroud we would split. It was a town with law and marshals but out of Columbia, being Monroe, but they would spread word back on my behalf. Danville would be interested in Thomas Heywood, the good Chet Baker my witness. A stage road could take me the rest of the way and mister Stands could continue on to Cherry Hill. I said that I had no money for a stage.

‘Presbyterians will care for you. You must understand that I must be about my business.’ He sucked on his spoon. ‘From Stroud you can get to the Delaware gap. That is where you came in, is it not? Canals and proper roads to take you home.’

‘I understand that you wish to abandon me. That is fair enough. So far we have been travelers along the same road, that is all.’

‘That it is.’ He gave the spoon to me.

‘And it has not been my wish to burden you.’

‘You have not.’

I began to well up again but fortunately it started to rain, a full rain, and we concentrated on that and moved ourselves to the barn to look out from the door, the spoon back in the boiler, and it rattled with the fall.

I did not want to leave him or have him leave me. I wanted to be home and safe. I did not see that possibility without him and if I were a man as I am now I may have known the right words to say. As it was he watched the rain falling and pooling in the yard and said nothing. I grasped at straws. Thin words that I hoped would stick.

‘I would not be able to pay you unless we reach Paterson.’

‘Never mind.’

I had to raise my voice above the rain, which was drumming the barn. ‘Mister Colt will pay for my father’s orders. Near seventy-five dollars. I will have no further business with him. You could have it all.’

‘That is all right. You will need it.’

This was without hope. If Henry Stands did not want coin, I had nothing. I was a boy so why not be a boy instead of whatever I was pretending to be? I had a right to cry. There was no-one to admonish me anymore. I was the dirty clothes on my back and a horse and a wooden gun.

‘Why do you not
help
me?’ I rubbed away my tears, hateful for myself, but damn if I could not stop. I was worse than the rain. ‘
Why
do you not understand? I am afraid! I do not know where I am! I only want to go home and I want you to take me there … and I will pay … my aunt might like you … I do what I am told … I am trying to be good for you, yet you …’

I turned away. I would rub Jude Brown until I stopped crying. Henry Stands did not warrant my shame.

He kept his back to me. There were several horses in the barn and they steamed now as the damp air came in. They all eyed me solemnly and then enviously as I stroked Jude Brown and felt the knots in his muscles. I was sniffling down my face but did not mind. I had the time for it now and had delayed it too long. It felt good and I still do not understand why that was so. Sometimes you just have to cry and sleep better for it.

Henry Stands’s head went below his shoulders. He took his half bottle of rum from his coat pocket and drank and watched the rain. He swigged and paid me no mind and watched our fire drown. After a time, when Jude Brown’s eyes began to droop with my strokes, Henry Stands spoke out into the night, not turning to me.

‘Thomas Heywood, you said?’

‘Yes.’ I stopped my strokes and my tears.

‘Thomas Heywood. Did Chet know that or did you?’

‘Both. There was a meeting at mister Baker’s the day before.’ I coughed out my next words. ‘With my father.’

He drank long and took off his cap to wipe his brow. The rain made his hair quite thin and I now noticed he was gray.

‘So this thief and murderer knows your name?’

I had not thought on this. I can still feel the coldness on my skin. The flesh at my wrists pimples as I write.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He would.’

‘Then he would mostly like to correct the error of letting you go. I suppose he has sobered up and thought on it. As I would have done.’ He came back into the barn. ‘That changes some things.’

‘What things?’

‘Well, he may have assumed you are back to home. He may be setting to clear his writs. Milton would not be a place for him now. He may run west. That is what I would do. But Chet said he is a workingman, such as that is nowadays, so being an outlaw may not be his chosen. He will most likely sell your father’s guns for a month of drink. But there is a trail. There is you, for one. You will report the crime. You will report the murder. But only if you are alive.’

‘You think he may be after me?’

‘That is an assumption. I would care that you do not judge me on my next line.’

He fixed me with his stare and rested on his hip as I had seen Thomas Heywood do.