The Scribe (27 page)

“I have come today to look upon these buildings where once we had battlefields. I delight more to look upon them than to look upon the scenes enacted here sixteen years ago. I say that every noble man and kindly woman over this broad land takes as much interest in your prosperity and in this exposition as do those in this presence, and that we are now in a position to say, every one of us, great and small, thank God we are American citizens.”

Sherman lifted his hat to the audience. The crowd stood silent, apparently uncertain whether applause was yet in order. By the standards of southern oratory, what Sherman had said barely qualified as a preamble. Henry Grady cleared his throat and said loudly, “Perhaps, General, you could say a few words about the Atlanta campaign?”

Sherman looked down at him. After a moment, he nodded and turned back to the crowd.

“It was a shame that a city so fair as Atlanta stood in the way of victory and Union. And perhaps even more of a shame that Joe Johnston's defenses were so entrenched and extensive. But as I had seen at Vicksburg, the best hope for breaking those defenses was a feint to draw him out.”

“A feint,” Canby said aloud before he could catch himself. Sherman turned to look at him.

“Yes, Canby,” he said, “a divertive movement. Classic warfare, taught to each and all of us at West Point. You draw your enemy's attention to one part of the arena—a conspicuous movement, but a small one. Then you strike at his heart with the greater part of your force.”

Sherman turned back to the crowd and resumed talking, but Canby could make no sense of his words. A dark face loomed close in Canby's vision and he felt himself being guided back into the tailor's shop. The face pressed him down into a chair and he realized after a moment that it was Underwood.

“Catch your breath, Mister Canby,” he said.

“God, Underwood. That's it.”

“That's what?”

“That's what this,” Canby said, waving an arm, “what all this, is. A feint. Billingsley won't be here, especially not in daylight. One look at him in the shape he's in would raise the alarm. John Drew may be here, but Billingsley surely isn't.”

Underwood looked at him, confused. “You think he's not with John Drew?”

“He knows where to cut me where I'll bleed the most. Christ, I need to be in Vinings.”

T
HE SCHOOLHOUSE
was empty. Canby scanned the room for sign of struggle, his eyes roving over the desks, the chalkboard, the floor. No blood slung across the pine planks, nothing overturned. The children's tablets and books were neatly stacked on the desks or tucked into the shelves beneath them. He heard a settling in the woodstove and crossed the room to it and drew open its door. It was banked high against the early cold, the half-consumed wood lengths spaced evenly as Angus had taught him, had taught Julia and the other scholars, every winter morning. He shut the door and latched it, looked around the room once more. Everything in order except that the children, and Julia, were gone.

Out front, he untied the mare's reins from the porch post and put a foot in the stirrup. The horse shied away from him and he saw the foam around the bit and realized he had nearly ridden her down. Leading the horse by the reins, he started down the School Road to Stillhouse Creek, patting her neck. He looked up the peeled-bark white trunks of the sycamores that grew on this part of the mountain and saw that the gray sky above was beginning to clear. He could just make out the peak of the mountain through the thinning clouds. Then he heard the creek and felt the mare step up her pace at the sound of water.

At the edge of the woods the horse ducked its head toward something on the ground. Canby bent and picked it up. An apple mostly eaten and tossed aside. He studied the bite marks on it and saw that they were small, the size of a child's mouth. The parts of the fruit that were left were not yet browning.

He scanned the path for signs of recent traffic, the prints of little shoes or the imprint of a lady's bootheel. But the trail was full of the prints of all in the village who did not have wells and used the creek for their domestic water. He could not tell the fresh tracks from the old. The apple was a good sign, but still he could not hear the din of children. Over the soft murmur of the creek, he should have been able to track them with his ears alone. He fed the apple to the horse, who chomped it greedily, then he led it at a quicker pace to the creek.

They came down the hillside to where the road terminated at the water, at the bend where the creek turned east to wend its way down the last of Vinings Mountain to the Chattahoochee at Pace's Ferry. The mare dropped her head to the creek and began to drink noisily. Canby saw that in the shaded eddies of the creek, under the patches of granite that jutted out from the woods, scrims of ice had formed at the edges of the water.

He thought he heard something like a cry come from over the little falls that terminated his line of vision upstream, the sound muffled by the other sounds of falling water and the horse's drinking. Quickly, he moved alongside the stream to the waterfall's base, then started upward, clutching at the mountain laurels for purchase on the steep slope. He could feel icy spray from the falls on his face as he climbed.

At the top of the incline he peered out from the laurel leaves across the broad pool that formed at the head of the waterfall. He saw no children, but as he looked upstream he saw Billingsley, shirtless and streaming water, sitting on one of the boulders at the creek's edge. Julia was draped across his lap, her hair hanging lank and her clothes clinging to her. Her head
was thrown back, limp, and cradled in the crook of Billingsley's left arm. Billingsley reached around to his hip and drew a knife from his belt and pressed it to Julia's wan brow. A skinning knife, Canby thought, as he ripped the Bulldog from its holster. Meant for animals.

He fired and saw a chip of rock leap from one of the boulders behind them. Billingsley looked up at the sound of the shot. Canby had his thumb on the hammer of the pistol and was drawing it back to cock it when Billingsley dove into the creek with Julia still in his arms. They disappeared beneath the surface of the pool.

Canby holstered the Bulldog and pulled himself over the crest of the incline. He leaped to the nearest boulder, then the next, making his way as quickly as he could to the head of the pool where they'd gone under. He slipped and fell on one of the moss-covered rocks and brought himself up, cursing, and saw Billingsley pulling himself out of the creek on the far bank, his back dripping water and his pants in tatters, ribbons of the black fabric dangling like drooped feathers over his calves. Canby's hand was rising toward the Bulldog when he caught a trace of movement in the pool.

It was her skirts, billowing in the currents out from her body where she hung in the deepest water, suspended just above the rocks at the bottom of the pool. He saw that the stream was spinning her slowly, drawing her in drifting arcs closer to the falls. He cried out and leaped from the laurels into the water, firing at Billingsley as he dropped.

He hoped that his shot had not gone wild but as the breath
taking cold of the water reached his chest and he heard the second report from the Bulldog just before his head went under he knew that he was hoping against certainty. He dove and reached for Julia and saw the pistol sink to rest on the creek bed as he gathered her into his arms. He slipped an arm around her neck, his elbow coming up under her jaw, and kicked for the surface.

When they broke back into the cold November air Canby saw that Billingsley still stood on the opposite bank, watching them, half concealed behind the trunk of a sycamore. As he pulled Julia across the creek Canby tried to retrieve the pocket revolver from his boot. The motion was awkward and each time he stopped kicking and reached downward, his and Julia's heads sank beneath the water's surface. He saw that Billingsley had begun to smile at his struggle—his indecision, his helpless anger. Billingsley reached out an arm, fingers splayed, as though in delectation of what he was witnessing.

Once Canby could feel the rocks beneath his feet he ducked under the water, one hand pushing Julia's jaw above the surface and the other drawing the pistol from his boot. He surfaced, leveled the pistol at Billingsley, and pulled the trigger. The hammer fell with a dull click. Billingsley's lips stretched wide, opening on the mouth full of broken teeth in a leering smile, then he disappeared into the leaves of laurel.

Canby stretched Julia out facedown on the bank on the flattest spot he could find. He turned her head to one side, laying it gently against a rock, and began to push and knead her back between the shoulder blades.

After some time he saw that creek water had begun to flow from her mouth with each push against her back but her chest was not rising with breath. He felt his own breath quicken and he pushed harder, shivering. When he saw that no more of the water would come out of her mouth he gathered her in his arms and rose with her dripping form clutched tight to his chest.

“Is he gone, mister?”

Canby turned and saw a girl of perhaps nine or ten standing at the edge of the trees. She stood wringing her hands and her eyes cut from him to Julia and to the laurels on the far side of the creek.

“Yes.”

She looked behind her and children began to emerge, singly and in pairs, from the sycamores. Most were younger than she was, and nearly all of them were crying quietly. “Miss Julia brought us up here to see the ice and that man came out of the woods,” the girl said. “Is she going to be all right?”

“Yes. We just need to get her warm.” Canby nodded to two of the bigger boys, who had stepped up close to look at Julia. “You boys go along up to the schoolhouse and get the stove stoked up high,” he said.

The boys looked to the wooded slope that led to the School Road and shook their heads simultaneously.

“All right, then,” Canby said, “we'll go together.”

“Was that the devil, mister?” the taller boy asked.

Canby was walking, hugging Julia close. He glanced at the boy as they all started toward the schoolhouse. “Yes,” he said. “It was.”

T
HEY
'
D LAID HER
out on the pine floorboards beside the stove, a grammar book under her head, two of the girls chafing her hands and feet while Canby stuffed the woodstove to its capacity and watched, shivering, until the iron began to glow gray-orange from the full load of wood. Canby had stretched his jacket across the top of the stove and now that it had begun to steam he laid it over Julia's midsection. He took one of her hands and rubbed it.

He had dispatched the oldest of the girls to Julia's house for blankets and a change of her clothes and sent a group of the boys, emboldened once they'd reached the village limits, to fetch Solomon Pace from his ferry with the request that he bring with him whatever firearms he could muster. Now as he knelt and worked on Julia's arm he reckoned the time since he had pulled her from the creek and gauged it against the coolness of her flesh. He looked at the girls, working steadily though their eyes brimmed with tears, and hung his head.

“Girls,” he said after a moment, “you can go on home now.”

The younger girl sobbed, a barking sound coming out of her little chest. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and said, more a statement than a question, “Is Miss Julia going to wake up?”

The lie was bitter on Canby's tongue. “Yes. We'll just let her sleep awhile yet.”

He watched until they had shut the schoolhouse door behind them, then turned to look at Julia again. She was pale but still beautiful and looked indeed to be sleeping, more in repose than in death.

“I'm not fit to speak your eulogy,” he said. Then, after a time, “I should go with you.”

He leaned down and kissed the blue lips for how long he did not know, until he heard the sound of footsteps on the porch boards out front. The door opened quietly and Solomon Pace leaned through the frame. When he saw Julia laid out on the floor he lowered his gray head.

“Tell me it ain't so,” Pace said.

Canby shook his head.

“Who was it? Them boys told me a wild story.”

“Robert Billingsley.”

“I thought he was dead.”

“That's the going opinion. But he's not.”

“Good God.”

Pace stepped into the room. He had a bundle of quilts under one arm and held a Marlin repeating rifle in his other hand. He leaned the rifle against a desk and began to shake out a quilt, gently. He handed one corner of it to Canby and together they drew it over Julia's still form.

Pace hitched up the legs of his overalls and squatted on his haunches. “Haven't been in here since I was a chap,” he said. After a moment of strained silence, he began to recite the Lord's Prayer. Canby joined him for the last lines of it. They sat in silence then for several minutes, until Canby rose and shouldered his way into his jacket.

“Guess you have business in town to attend to.”

Canby nodded as he buttoned up the jacket, looser now that his chest holster hung empty. He picked up the Marlin.

“I hope you catch that son of a bitch.”

“Not planning to catch him, Uncle Solomon. I aim for it to be pure murder.”

“Well, that Marlin will do the job. It's the best rifle for deer you'll find in Cobb County.”

“He's probably back into Fulton by now.”

“Where's your horse?”

“Gone. I suppose he took it.”

“Get yourself to the depot. Bet you can catch the five-eighteen if you hurry.”

Canby took a last look at the still form under the quilt and bade his farewell to Solomon Pace and started down the schoolhouse steps, hoping, though he knew better, that Julia might have heard his words to her before her spirit left.

No fit eulogy, he thought, as he walked westward toward the little depot, his heels dragging in the road. He wondered what lines Angus might have used for a meet farewell; perhaps Ecclesiastes, or maybe something more hopeful, from one of Paul's epistles. He knew Underwood would have cast a vote for Paul. Instead, Canby remembered a line of Emerson's: “The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.”