A forgotten evil, p.2
A Forgotten Evil, page 2
“Whoa, boy. There’s the good ole boy,” he said again, stretching for the belly band.
At what point he appreciated its weight, he couldn’t be certain, so absorbed was he on the task at hand, but there it was, the size of a man’s forearm and as warm as fresh milk on the back of his neck.
“Yeow!” he screamed, jerking his head up into Ben’s belly. Ben vaulted back and onto Caleb’s bum toe.
“You son of a bitch!” he yelled in disbelief, the pain in his toe now exquisite beneath Ben’s hoof.
Ben watched on with wide eyes, his ardor retreating under Caleb’s rude behavior.
Freed at last, Caleb lay against the stable wall, foot in hand, rocking with agony and with a decided notion to club Ben senseless with the broken scoop.
But logic, and Ben’s contriteness at the prospect of a beating, won out, and so it was that Caleb worked out the week, his poor toe crushed and throbbing at the end of his boot. Still, by week’s end, he’d met his quota, his wagon filled with walnut, his foot now numbed into submission.
That Saturday morning, he rose, his breath visible in the cold morning air, and rubbed the stiffness from his hands. He dressed in his cleanest clothes, dancing from one foot to the other. He combed his hair in the small mirror that hung on the back of the cabin door. It was, as usual, an impossible task, his hair straight and black and unruly to the finish.
Giving up, he tossed the comb onto the bed and examined his face in the mirror. Perhaps it was not such a bad face, weathered from the sun, and with the rough-hewn angle of his father’s nose, but then it was a man’s nose, devoid of daintiness and pretension. And on his chest were the first signs of hair, sure evidence of impending change. What a girl might think, he did not know, but to him, such meager evidence of manliness was unconvincing, and he turned from the mirror.
After his close encounter with the beating, even Ben cooperated with harnessing, and by the time the sun had set the river ablaze, Caleb was on his way to the dock with his load of wood. It would be the Belle of Louisville at nine o’clock, her great stacks smoking, her red wheel slapping from around the bend.
She was his favorite, and the busiest of all on the Ohio. Folks of all natures packed her decks, most from Cincinnati on their way to Louisville, others south to the Mississippi and parts unknown. There were businessmen, and gamblers, and soldiers, sometimes whole families with their trunks and kids, with everything they owned on their way to a new life. There were colored folks, too, most scared, some angry, but all searching with newfound freedom. Best of all, on occasion, there would be a lady smelling of perfume, or leaning from the rail, or flashing the white of her ankle against the green waters of the Ohio.
It took him longer to stack out now, having to move each piece of wood himself as many as three times as he unloaded from the wagon, but by the time the whistle rose into the morning quiet, he was finished and waiting atop his cord of walnut. This was his favorite moment, because now his job was done. It would be the deckhands who would load his wood, who would carry his bounty into the steamer’s belly, and the captain himself who would count out his pay.
As the Belle swung to shore, the great paddle stopped, reversing against the current to slow the steamer’s speed. The whistle blew again, its sound piercing Caleb’s chest and setting his heart to pounding. Within moments, the Belle was tied off and the gangway secured.
Above him, the deck churned with soldiers, the blue of their uniforms, their bawdy laughter, the smell of their pipes as they smoked away the morning. These were men of adventure, of experience and knowledge and remote to the world in which Caleb lived. Where they were going and where they had been Caleb could not know, but he knew his own place, and in the scheme of things, it was small enough indeed.
The first hand off was a white man, young, like Caleb himself, but tall and thin and with dangling arms. A red bandanna was tied about his head. There was a swagger to his step and a look of mischief in his eye. Following him were a half dozen colored men, stripped to their waists against the boiler’s heat.
Sticking out his hand, he said, “Howdy. Name’s Joshua Hart. Captain says he wants hardwood or none at all.”
Climbing down from the wagon, Caleb pushed back his hat like his father always did and shook Joshua’s hand.
“Caleb Justin,” he said. “She’s walnut for the most part and hard as rock. There’s a full cord, some to boot. Won’t take but a stick from here to Louisville.”
“That a fact?” Joshua said, motioning for the men to load her up.
“Cut every one myself, so I ought to know.”
“You cut all the shade trees, too?”
“No, sir. One’s right over there.”
“There’s a slack bushing on the paddle wheel, and I ain’t standing out here in the sun all day while they check it.”
As Joshua made his way toward the shade, Caleb followed behind. Feeling the need to pick up the silence, he said, “I don’t have much time for shade since my pa died.”
“That bushing’s got to be packed, as I see it,” Joshua said, leaning against the tree trunk.
Sitting down, Caleb pulled up his legs and propped his elbows on his knees. “Guess you know a lot about running the river?”
“Don’t take a genius to see when a bushing’s slack, does it?”
“Suppose not,” Caleb said, “though I ain’t never seen one myself.”
Slipping off his bandanna, Joshua dabbed at his brow.
“Whew, boy, does this shade feel good. I ain’t been out that boiler room since hell was born.” Leaning over, he picked a grass stem and stuck it in the corner of his mouth. “Been eating hog slop, too, no better than them colored boys. Don’t seem right, do it?”
“Where you from?” Caleb asked.
“Cincinnati,” he said.
“Why, that’s just upriver. I near walked to Cincinnati myself cutting wood.”
Sticking the piece of grass between his teeth, Joshua shrugged.
“See them soldiers up there?”
“I see them,” Caleb said.
“See that little son of a bitch with the walrus mustache and walking stick?”
“So?”
“Well, that’s General Phil Sheridan on his way to Fort Leavenworth.”
“You don’t say?”
“That’s right, General Sheridan himself, this here nation’s biggest hero. He’s been up to Somerset parading around for all to see what a mean son of a bitch looks like what comes back from the war.”
Caleb shaded his eyes and looked him over.
“Don’t look like no hero, does he, not that I’ve ever seen a hero.”
“Well, heroes always look that way,” Joshua said. “But he’s a mean son of a bitch and no man’s friend. Just ask any one of them soldiers up there, and they’ll tell you the same. Some say he’s going to clean up the West just like he cleaned up the South, by killing everything what moves and burning the rest. When Sheridan’s done, there won’t be a Indian left west of the Ohio. That’s what they say.”
Caleb checked on his wood. It hadn’t taken long for that many hands to move what had taken him a week to cut.
“How is it you know so much about Sheridan?” he asked.
“Because that’s where I’m going, too, all the way to Fort Leavenworth to join up with the Seventh Cavalry.”
“No you ain’t.”
“That’s right,” he said, spitting out the piece of grass. “I run off, didn’t I. Got a job on the Belle and been eating smoke and sweating like a pig all the way from Cincinnati, but it’s a Indian fighter and a hero I’m going to be, you just wait and see, a mean son of a bitch just like ole Sheridan up there, providing I don’t die of heat stroke or get poisoned on carp.”
“It’s a fair way to Fort Leavenworth, I’ll bet?”
Joshua took hold of a limb overhead and let his body droop as he watched the last of the wood go up the gangplank.
“A fair way they say, though I ain’t never been.” He looked down between his arms. “You say your pa’s dead?”
“Felled under a tree,” Caleb said, looking away. “Same tree near took off my own foot.”
“Thought you idled a little when you walked, like a winged duck.”
“Some maybe.”
“Damn shame about your pa.”
“Wish he was here,” Caleb said, “but wishing never cut no wood.”
“Leaves a man shorthanded, when his pa dies like that?”
“I manage.”
“Guess your ma helps out where she can?”
“My ma died of the fever.”
“Well then,” he said, “it’s brothers and sisters what keeps you afloat?”
“Cut, clean, and haul myself, me and those ignorant mules over there.”
“Make enough to get by?”
“Providing the weather holds, but then there’s deer, opossum in a pinch.”
“Guess the boats could use all the wood a man could cut?” Joshua said, dropping his head between his arms.
“Wood don’t come easy.”
Joshua stuck his hands into his back pockets and looked down the river.
“I better be getting back to the boat to help get the steam up. Captain said come on board for your money.”
Caleb struggled to keep pace with Joshua’s long stride as he followed him up the gangplank. He stopped at the top to say good-bye, and that’s when he saw her, standing at the stern, her parasol twisting on her shoulder, the smell of her perfume like honeysuckle on a summer morning. About her neck was a fleur-de-lis, carved of rosewood, banded in gold, lying in splendor between the white mounds of her breasts. The black of her hair shimmered from the water’s reflection as she leaned over the railing to watch the men at work. Never in Caleb’s wildest dreams had he imagined that such beauty could exist.
“Fine-looking woman, ain’t she?” Joshua said.
Black smoke poured from the stack as the bushing was tested, the engine’s power evident in the green churn of water.
“She’s beautiful,” Caleb said.
“That’s Joan Monnet, daughter of a big-shot railroad man. They say she’s on her way to marry herself a lieutenant, and ain’t the likes for woodcutters to be gawking at.”
“Or boiler hands either, I’m thinking,” Caleb said.
“It’s a point, I suppose, though a poor one.”
“Good luck, Joshua. Ain’t every day I meet a hero in the making.”
“Same to you, Woodcutter,” he said with a wave of his hand.
After collecting his pay from the captain, Caleb made his way down the gangplank. He hesitated for a moment at the bottom to consider a last look up, but then she would not be there, that much he knew, such being the way of visions and dreams.
Chapter 3
That night, Caleb slept hard, dreaming of parasols, of yellow honeysuckle, of slack bushings and walnut wood. When something awakened him, he sat upright, gasping for air. So black was the night about him that his head whirled. He searched the darkness for the window, for the moon’s reflection, or for a single star.
A man alone knows the margins of solitude, and Caleb knew that he was no longer alone. Should he call out, order them away with bravado, or be silent, let them take what they wanted in the hope they would leave him unharmed? But if they were there to kill him, to take his pay or to slit his throat for flour and sugar, what then? Even now he had no notion where his father’s rifle was or even if it was loaded. Perhaps it was Baud, some trouble at home, or perhaps it was his imagination gone wild or a dream he couldn’t stop. He’d heard of such things, of men going mad in their isolation.
Slipping from bed, he found the wall with his hand and edged along it in the darkness. If he couldn’t see them, then they couldn’t see him, at least that was his hope, his single plan for escape. It was then that the moon slid from behind a cloud, its ivory light against the windowpane, and he froze, pushing himself into the shadows.
A glint of light refracted from the blade of his father’s axe, which leaned against the wall, there by the fireplace where it was kept. In his panic, he’d forgotten it altogether.
The handle was secure in his grip when the door creaked, and a sliver of moonlight fell across the floor. The figure cast a shadow, a murderer there to kill him in his sleep. With his heart stilled, Caleb raised the axe above his head and waited. There were few men better with an axe, and if he must, he would destroy this enemy. The shadow moved, then stopped, then moved again.
Certain now that he must attack with advantage, Caleb yelled, a war whoop, a scream of such passion that a chill raced down his own spine as he charged across the room, axe poised above his head.
The shadow, too, screamed, fear-struck at the lunatic thing descending from the night, and had it not been for the chair, Caleb’s plan would have been executed without flaw. Instead, a blinding pain shot up from his toe and set off lights behind his eyes.
“Yeow!” he screamed, falling to the floor, his axe skidding against the wall.
“Don’t kill me! Don’t kill me!” the voice cried out from the black.
Caleb searched out the axe. Bluffing, he said, “Put down your gun, or I’ll shoot you where you stand.”
“I ain’t standing,” the voice said, “and I ain’t got a gun.”
There was something in the voice that Caleb recognized. “Who are you?”
“I ain’t never been so lost,” the voice said, “and now I’m dead.”
“Who are you, and what are you doing in my cabin?”
“Oh, lordy, don’t shoot,” the voice answered.
Caleb, axe in hand, crawled over to the fireplace. With a match from the mantel jar he lit the lantern, holding it over his head. A man was curled on the floor, soaked to the skin, his hands covering his head.
“If it ain’t Joshua Hart,” Caleb said, “come back to rob me.”
Joshua looked up at him through wet hair. “Woodcutter?”
Setting the lantern down on the mantel, Caleb straightened the chair and sat down, laying his axe across his lap. Even now his toe throbbed like a bad tooth, and he rubbed at the pain crawling up his leg.
“Guess you come back to kill me, take my walnut money, and buy yourself a time in Louisville?”
Joshua pushed his hair back from his eyes and said, “You going to cut my head off, Caleb?”
“I ain’t decided yet.”
“I ain’t no thief, Caleb. I swear I ain’t.”
“What you call sneaking in my house, a visit? A invite to a box lunch or Sunday chicken dinner?”
Sitting up, Joshua rubbed at the weariness on his face. There was mud on his clothes, and one shoe was missing. A scratch ran the length of his cheek, and an eye was swollen into a dark slit.
“It ain’t that way at all, Caleb. I got throwed off the Belle and damn near drowned when the paddle wheel sucked me under. I ain’t never been so scared in my life, swimming in the dark, not knowing if I was going up or down.”
“Throwed off?”
“Like a cat in a tow sack,” he said, shaking against the cold. “Got in a poker game with them colored boys down in the boiler room. Guess they figured I was cheating, because first thing I know I’m spouting water and praying for shore. I been walking in these trees ever since, lost as I ever been lost, until I came upon this cabin. Didn’t look like no one lived here, so I just thought to come in, take a nap until morning, you know, figure out where I was and what to do next.”
“Never thought to knock, I suppose?”
“It ain’t much of a cabin, Caleb, you have to admit. No offense.”
Caleb set his axe aside and examined his bruised toe. Even in the dim light, he could see the damage was considerable.
“Still, a man ought knock or take the consequences, that’s what I say.”
Standing up, Joshua wrapped his arms about himself.
“You ain’t going to chop off my head, are you, Caleb?”
“Well, much as I’d like to, it’s a bloody affair, and the cleanup just ain’t worth it.”
Joshua’s gaze shifted to the door, then back toward Caleb. “You think maybe I could stay the night?”
“How am I to know you won’t murder me in my bed, come skulking up and run me through with a knife or a pitchfork?”
Rubbing his hands up and down his arms, Joshua shook his head.
“I swear I won’t, Caleb. You can chain me to that door if you want. I ain’t never murdered nobody in my life. I ain’t even cheated at poker.”
“Well, all right, but just for tonight. Wash up that river mud, though, because it’s a stink in this rude cabin of mine, and there’s some biscuits in the larder. Throw that blanket there on the floor for the night.”
When he’d finished washing up, Joshua took a biscuit and sat down on his blanket. After chewing a while, he said, “It’s a mighty hard biscuit, Caleb.”
“Well, I ain’t got the knack of biscuit making yet,” he said, pulling up his covers.
“Tastes like copper, too.”
“Goddang it, Joshua, you don’t like my cooking, just put it back.”
“Sorry, Caleb. I didn’t mean no offense.”
“Just go to sleep,” he said, turning over, “before I throw you back in the Ohio.”
Morning broke cold, with a sharp wind howling through every crack in the cabin, and there wasn’t any shortage of cracks, the chinking having long since loosened between the logs. Shivering, Caleb slipped on his britches and examined his stubbed toe. Wincing, he worked his foot into the boot and waited for the throbbing to subside. Maybe he ought to just cut it off and be done with it, given its sad history.
Joshua curled small and half frozen under his blanket, the stink of river mud emanating from his clothes. Even though Caleb was determined to be angry with Joshua’s intrusion, the prospect of having company about was exciting.
