Part 8 (1/2)

The preacher watched him, and when he realized Inman's intent he grew agitated and thrashed about as much as he could while fettered by the neck. He kicked at Inman with his feet, for he guessed at what he had written.

He tried to grunt and squeal through the handkerchief wired to his mouth.

-Testify? Is that what you want? Inman said.

-Ah! the preacher said.

Inman drew out the pistol and set it to the preacher's ear. He pulled back the hammer and flipped down the little lever that directed the firing pin to the lower shotgun barrel. You speak one word above a whisper and you'll be lacking a head, Inman said. He untwisted the wire. The preacher spit out the handkerchief.

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-You've ruined my life, he said.

-Don't lay that off on me, Inman said. I wanted no part in this. But I don't want to have to wonder whether in a night or two you'll be back out in that black gorge with her slung over your horse again, Inman said.

-Then shoot me. Just shoot me here and leave me hanging.

-Don't think there's no charm in that offer.

-G.o.d d.a.m.n you to h.e.l.l for what you're doing to me.

Inman took the wet handkerchief from the ground and forced it into the preacher's mouth and rewired it and strode out. As he walked away he heard fading grunts and moans. Wordless hexes and curses.

Inman walked hard the remainder of the night to put s.p.a.ce between himself and that nameless place.

When the morning at last lit up at his back like a yellow abscess, he had worked himself into rolling country and he felt worn down to nothing. He had no idea where he was nor did he know that he had accomplished but twelve miles in that long night of walking, for it felt like a hundred.

He stopped and went into the woods and made a bed of ground litter. With his back against a tree he sat and ate the wedge of corn bread and the fatty pork he had taken from the woman's house. For much of the morning he lay on the ground and slept.

Then he found himself awake, gazing at the blue sky through the pine boughs. He took out his pistol and wiped it with a rag and checked its loads and kept it in his hand for company. What he had come to possess was a LeMat's. And the model Inman held was not one of the early and inferior Belgian models but was stamped Birmingham along the barrel. He had picked it up off the ground and stuck it in his belt right before he took his wound outside Petersburg, and he had managed to hang on to it all through the mess of the field hospital and the train ride south to the capital in the boxcar filled with wounded. It was an oddly configured weapon, somewhat overlarge and of curious proportion, but it was the fiercest sidearm in existence. Its cylinder was big as a fist and held nine .40-caliber rounds. But the dominant feature of it and the thing that marked a strange new direction in pistol style was this: the cylinder turned around a shotgun barrel, a crude and fat thing under the main barrel. Intended as a desperate last chance in close quarters, it fired a single load, either buckshot or a slug so big it would be like shooting leaden duck eggs at your foes. In the hand, despite its size, the LeMat's felt balanced and solid and as of-a-piece as an ingot, and there was a certain amount of serenity a.s.sociated with simply holding the stout pistol and thinking what it could do in your service.

Inman rubbed at its cylinder and barrel and thought about the fight in the town and the river crossing and the preacher and how he might have done things differently in each case. He wished not to be smirched with the mess of other people. A part of him wanted to hide in the woods far from any road. Be like an owl, move only at dark. Or a ghost. Another part yearned to wear the big pistol openly on his hip and to travel by day under a black flag, respecting all who let him be, fighting all who would seek to fight him, letting rage be his guide against anything that ran counter to his will.

Before the war he had never been much of a one for strife. But once enlisted, fighting had come easy to him. He had decided it was like any other thing, a gift. Like a man who could whittle birds out of wood. Or one who could pick tunes from a banjo. Or a preacher with the gift of words. You had little to do with it yourself. It was more a matter of how your nerves were strung toward quickness of hand and a steady head so that you did not become witless and vague in battle, your judgment clouded in all kinds of ways, fatal and otherwise. That and having the size to prevail in the close stuff, when it came down to a clench.

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In the middle of the afternoon, Inman left his pine bower and tried to cover some distance. After only an hour, though, he found himself nearly bogged down with fatigue. Every step a great effort. Up ahead he saw a pair of figures stopped in the road by a ford, but even from a distance it was clear they were slaves and so he did not even bother slipping off into the woods to hide but kept on walking. One man was trying to drive a red hog that had stopped to roll in the mud. The other carried an armload of bean poles. The drover kicked the hog to no effect, and then he took a pole from the load and struck and prodded the hog until it reluctantly struggled to its feet and waddled along. The men tipped their hats to Inman as they pa.s.sed and said, Day, Ma.r.s.e.

Inman was so weak feeling he wished momentarily that he were a big red hog and could just lie down and wallow until somebody took a bean pole to him. But he shucked off his boots and waded the ford, and then on the far bank he turned from the road and followed the river downstream, thinking to find a hidden place to cook a spa.r.s.e meal of corn mush. But the wind s.h.i.+fted, and it carried the scent of real cooking from somewhere farther downriver.

He followed the smell of meat in the air, snuffing his nose and blinking his eyes with his head c.o.c.ked up like a bear. He soon arrived at a camp in a bend of the river: a wagon, a number of horses, pyramidal tents of grey canvas standing among a grove of birch trees. Inman squatted in the brush and watched the folks go about their campcraft. They were a jumble of people wearing about every tinge of skin there is. Inman guessed them to be as outlaw and Ishmaelite as himself. Show folk, outliers, a tribe of Irish gypsy horse traders all thrown in together. The horses were hobbled all around, and they grazed in the long gra.s.s under the trees. The stock varied from magnificent to near dead. Backlit by the gold light of afternoon, though, they all looked beautiful to Inman, the grace in the deep curve of their down-turned necks, the frail cannon bones so evident through the thin skin above their fetlocks. Inman guessed the traders were hiding them out. So many horses had been killed in the fighting that they were becoming scarce. Prices had swelled beyond belief, but the army had men out rounding up horses, paying nearly nothing for them. A part of Inman wished he had the money to buy a big long-strided gelding. Mount up and canter off and end his life as a footman. But he had not that much money and, too, it is hard to be stealthy when accompanied by a horse. It's a big thing to hide, and uncooperative. So Inman let that dream pa.s.s.

Thinking he might find some feeling of kins.h.i.+p with the outcasts, Inman entered the camp holding his empty hands out to his sides. The gypsies took him in with apparent generosity, though he knew they would steal the boots off his feet if they could find advantage to do so. They had an iron pot of dark stew going over a small fire-rabbit, squirrel, a stolen chicken, various pilfered vegetables, chiefly cabbage. Chunks of pumpkin drizzled in mola.s.ses roasted over coals in a Dutch oven. A woman in a bright skirt of cloth sc.r.a.ps pieced together like a quilt spobned him up food onto his tin plate and went about frying corn fritters in a pan of lard. The batter popped like distant battle fire when she spooned the grease.

Inman propped against a tree and ate, looking about him at the riffle of water on stones in the river, the yellow leaves of an early turning birch trembling bright in the stir of air, the light falling in beams through the smoke of campfires. A man sitting on a log scratched out jigs and reels from a cigar-box fiddle. Children played in the shallow water at the river's edge. Other gypsies worked at the horses. A boy brushed an old mare with a corncob dipped in a bucket of potash and soot to cover her grey hair, and then took a rat-tail file and worked on her teeth. She shed years right before Inman's eyes. A woman snubbed a big bay up to a birch trunk and then twitched it and poured lamp oil on the frog of its hoof and lit fire to it to curb a tendency to lameness. All through the herd, spavins and bots and heaves to be treated or disguised.

Inman had dealt with gypsies before and thought them possessed of a fine honesty in their predatory relations.h.i.+p to the rest of mankind, their bald admission of constantly seeking an opening. But they were benign-seeming in this quiet bend of the river. It was no concern of theirs how the war concluded. Whichever side won, people would still need horses. The contest was no more to them 2004-3-6.

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than a temporary hindrance to business.

Inman stayed with the gypsies through the remainder of the day. He took a dip from the stewpot whenever he became hungry. He slept some and listened to the fiddler and watched a woman telling fortunes by reading the pattern of leaves in a cup of herb tea, but he declined her offer to tell his own future for he figured he already had all the discouragement he needed.

Later in the afternoon he watched a dark-haired woman walk among the horses and put a bridle on a dun mare. She was young and wore a man's sweater over a long black skirt and was about as pretty as women get to be. Something in the darkness of her hair or the way she moved or the thinness of her fingers reminded him momentarily of Ada. He sat and stared as she caught up the hems of her long skirt and petticoat and clenched them in her teeth before mounting astride the mare. Her white legs were exposed to the thigh. She rode down the riverbank and crossed at a place deep enough that in the middle the horse lost its footing and swam a stroke or two. It struggled climbing up the far bank, working hard with its haunches. Water streamed off its back and sides and the woman was wet to the hips. She leaned forward for balance with her face almost resting on the horse's neck. Her hair fell against its black mane so that you could not tell one from the other. When they reached level ground she put her heels to the mare's sides and they galloped away through the open woods. It was to Inman a stirring sight, a happy vision that he was grateful to have been granted.

On toward dusk some little gypsy boys whittled gigs from river-birch limbs and went to a backwater and gigged frogs until they had a basketful. They cut their legs off and strung them on sticks to roast over a fire of hickory coals. While the frog meat was cooking, a man came to Inman with a bottle of Moet he claimed he had taken in trade. The man was not entirely sure what it was that he had, but he knew he wished to sell it for top dollar. So Inman counted out some money and composed himself a plate of supper from the frog legs and part of the wine. He found the two not ill sorted, but when he was done they did not make a real dinner for someone as hungry as he was.

He wandered about the camp looking for other food and eventually made his way to the wagon of show folk. A medicine show. A white man came from where he sat near their tent and talked to Inman and queried him as to his business. The man was thin and tall and had some age on him, for the skin under his eyes was pale and pouched and he wore blacking in his hair. He seemed to run the place. Inman asked if he could buy a meal, and the man said he reckoned so, but that they would not eat until much later for they had to practice their act while there was yet light. Inman was welcome to sit and watch.

In a minute the dark-haired woman he had seen earlier came out of the tent. Inman could not take his eyes off her. He studied her bearing beside the man, trying to guess the forces running between them.

He first guessed them to be married and then he guessed not. The two set up a backstop and the woman stood against it and the man threw knives at her so that the blades just missed her and fetched up s.h.i.+vering in the boards. That seemed to Inman plenty to draw a crowd, but they had as well a big grey-bearded Ethiopian who had a regal bearing and dressed in purple robes and was portrayed to have been in his youth the king of Africa. He played a banjolike thing and could just about make a dead man dance, though his instrument was made of but a gourd and had just one string. As well, the troupe included a little menagerie of Indians of several makes, a Seminole from Florida, a Creek, a Cherokee from Echota, and a Yema.s.see woman. Their part in shows was to tell jokes and beat drums and dance and chant. The wagon they traveled in was loaded with fancy little colored bottles of medicine, each with its special disease to cure: cancer, consumption, neuralgia, malaria, cachexia, stroke, fit, and seizure.

After dark, they asked Inman to join them for dinner, and they all sat on the ground by the fire and ate great b.l.o.o.d.y beefsteaks and potatoes pan fried in bacon drippings and wild greens dressed with what drippings the potatoes had not soaked up. The Ethiopian and the Indians joined in the meal as if they were all of a color and equals. They took their turns speaking, and permission to talk was 2004-3-6.

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neither sought nor given.

When done, they went and squatted by the water, each scouring his own plate in river sand. Then the white man threw sticks on the coals of the cook fire, building it up with no eye toward thrift of wood until flame stood shoulder high. The show folk pa.s.sed a bottle around and sat telling Inman stories of their endless travels. The road, they said, was a place apart, a country of its own ruled by no government but natural law, and its one characteristic was freedom. Their stories were of being broke and of sudden windfalls. Card games and horse auctions and the wonderful prevalence of the witless. Various tight spots with the law, disasters narrowly averted, fools bested in trade, wis.e.m.e.n met on the road and their often contradictory wisdom. Towns.h.i.+ps of gullibility and of particular viciousness. They reminded each other of certain camp places and of meals eaten in them, and they reached consensus that the finest of all was a place some years in the past where a river of considerable size poured directly from the base of a rock face, and they likewise agreed that they had never eaten better fried chicken than they had cooked in the shadow of that cliff.

After awhile Inman could attend to little but how beautiful the woman looked in the firelight, the way it lit up her hair and the fineness of her skin. And then at some point the white man said a strange thing. He said that someday the world might be ordered so that when a man uses the term slave it be only metaphoric.

Sometime deep in the night, Inman took his packsacks and went into the woods beyond camp and spread his bedding within earshot of the gypsy music and the sound of voices. He tried to sleep, but he just tossed about on the ground. He lit a candle stub and poured the remainder of the wine into his tin cup and took his Bartram scroll from his knapsack. He opened the book at random and read and reread the sentence that first fell under his eye. It concerned itself with an unnamed plant similar, as best he could tell, to a rhododendron: This shrub grows in copses or little groves, in open, high situations, where trees of large growth are but scatteringly planted; many simple stems arise together from a root or source erect, four, five and six feet high; their limbs or branches, which are produced towards the top of the stems, also stand nearly erect, lightly diverging from the main stems, which are furnished with moderately large ovate pointed intire leaves, of a pale or yellowish green colour; these leaves are of a firm, compact texture, both surfaces smooth and s.h.i.+ning, and stand nearly erect upon short petioles; the branches terminate with long, loose panicles or spikes of white flowers, whose segments are five, long and narrow.

Inman occupied himself pleasurably for quite some time with this long sentence. First he read it until each word rested in his head with a specific weight peculiar to itself, for if he did not, his attention just skittered over phrases so they left no marks. That accomplished, he fixed in his mind the setting, supplying all the missing details of a high open forest; the kinds of trees that would grow there, the birds that would frequent their limbs, the bracken that would grow under them. When he could hold that picture firm and clear, he began constructing the shrub in his mind, forming all its particulars until it arose in his thinking as vivid as he could make it, though it in no way matched any known plant and was in several features quite fantastic.

He blew out his candle and wrapped himself in his bedding and sipped at the last of his wine in preparation for sleep, but his mind turned on the dark-haired woman and on the woman named Laura and the softness of her thigh backs against his arms as he carried her. And then he thought of Ada and of Christmas four years ago, for there had been champagne then too. He leaned his head against the tree bark and took a long draught of the wine and remembered with some particularity the feel of Ada sitting on his lap in the stove corner.

It seemed like another life, another world. He remembered her weight on his legs. The softness of her, and yet the hard angularity of her bones underneath. She had leaned back and rested her head on his shoulder, and her hair smelled of lavender and of herself. Then she sat up and he put his hands to 2004-3-6.

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the points of her shoulders and felt the underlayment of muscle and the k.n.o.bby shoulder joints beneath the skin. He pulled her back to him and wanted to wrap his arms around her and hold her tight, but she blew out air through her pressed lips and stood and pulled at the wrinkles in the skirt of her dress and reached up to smooth back little rings of hair that had sprung loose at her temples. She turned and looked down at him. -Well, she had said. Well.

Inman had leaned forward, taken her hand and rubbed across its back with his thumb. The fine bones running to the wrist from the knuckles moved beneath the pressure like piano keys. Then he turned her hand over and smoothed back the ringers when she tried to draw them in and make a fist. He put his lips to her wrist where the slate-blue veins twined. Ada slowly drew her hand away and then stood looking down absently at its palm. -There's not tidings written on it. Not any we can read, Inman said. Ada had put her hand down and said, That was unexpected. Then she walked away.

When Inman finally let go the memory and slept, he dreamed a dream as bright as the real day. In it he lay, as he did in the ordinary world, in a forest of hardwoods, their boughs visibly tired from a summer of growing and just weeks away from the color and the fall. Mixed in among the trees were the shrubs he had imagined from his reading of Bartram. They were covered in great hallucinatory blossoms, pentangular in form. In the dream world, fine rain sifted down through the heavy leaves and moved along the ground in curtains so sheer that it did not even wet him through his clothes.