A forgotten evil, p.5
A Forgotten Evil, page 5
“Just work, that’s all. I’ll head north, you south. We’ll meet back here tonight.”
“You think we ought to separate, Caleb?”
Finishing his coffee, Caleb tossed the dregs into the fire and waited for them to hiss away. “It won’t do no good to follow each other around all day, will it?”
He put his cup away and snugged his hat down over his ears. When Joshua stepped out of the woods, his shirttail hung out from the back of his coat, and there was snow on the seat of his pants.
“Lordy,” he said, buckling his pants, “squatting in a snowbank is a bitter task, ain’t it?”
“There’s fescue running up that draw where the wind blew off the snow, Joshua. Why don’t you graze out Ben and Sophie for a couple hours, and then take them down to the river for water. Soon as we get some money coming in, we’ll buy a sack of crimped oats. Until then, they’ll just have to make do.”
“Jeez, Caleb, why do I have to be the one stays with the mules?”
“ ’Cause I’m smarter and more apt to find work amongst civilized folks, that’s why,” Caleb said. “I’ll see you come dark, Joshua.”
Even in the cold, the streets spilled with people, their endless chatter, their shrill laughter and incessant commotion, like blue jays and bull snakes in a tree, Caleb thought.
By noon he’d stopped at a half dozen places, met with naught but indifferent shrugs and grunts of maligned shopkeepers, and his nerves were fairly well set to edge.
Realizing that he was weak with hunger, he lifted a green apple at the market and squeezed himself between the limestone walls of two buildings to escape the cold and take a moment’s peace. From the ledge above, pigeons watched with beaded eyes, warbling and dancing in protest at his intrusion. Pitching his spent core at them, he headed out for a final sweep down the riverfront.
So close to the river was the Beer Bucket Inn that the waterline still marked the slat door from the last spring flood. Pushing it open, Caleb waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. The smell of tobacco and urine hung in the darkness, and a fiddle squawked off-key from somewhere in the depths. Rows of pine slab tables stretched the length of the enormous room. Kerosene lanterns, with smoked and oily chimneys, flickered like fading sentinels in a storm. The bartender leaned forward, a dirty towel draped over his shoulder.
“What will it be?” he said, without looking up.
“I’m needing work,” Caleb said.
Peering up through heavy brows, he took the towel from his shoulder and wiped the bar in a mindless circle.
“You ain’t buying beer?”
“I’m a good hand at hard work, Mister.”
“Ever tend bar?”
“No, sir.”
“Good,” he said, straightening up, “ ’cause I don’t want some poke in here thinking to get my job.”
“No, sir. I wouldn’t be thinking that.”
“It’s beer we sell in here, kid, buckets of it, like the sign says. Come sundown, every river rat in Kentucky comes in for his swill and whatever else he can find or steal. I need boys to carry them buckets of beer and keep shut in the process. You up to that?”
Looking about the room, Caleb nodded.
“Yes, sir, I can fell a tree in seven swings, so I reckon I could carry buckets all right.”
“I ain’t never hired no gimp before.”
“It ain’t much of a gimp, sir, and don’t slow me down in the least.”
“Well, it’s night work, and ain’t for the faint of heart. They that come ain’t church deacons looking for the gates of heaven. It’s twenty-five cents at the end of the day, and any breakage is yours. Supper’s at midnight, if the crowd’s died down. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it ain’t. Mind your own business. Mind it to a fault. Trouble breaks out, which it’s apt to do, Jude breaks the bones around here and don’t want no interference from sissy boys come down out of the hills, hear?”
“Yes, sir. I ain’t looking for nothing like that.”
“Then that’s good,” he said, pushing up the corners of his mustache. “You come back here at six o’clock.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll be here.”
“And wash off some of that river stink in the meantime.”
Caleb exited into the sunlight and covered his eyes against the glare as he calculated its position. There was no time to go back to the wagon to tell Joshua of his luck. He’d just have to wait.
At the river’s edge, he cleaned himself as best he could in the cold water, digging the dried manure with a stick from the shank of his shoes and combing back his hair with his fingers. He took refuge from the wind behind a cotton bale, holding his face to the warmth of the sun, and closed his eyes to wait for six o’clock.
When he opened the door at the Beer Bucket Inn, it was as if the whole of the riverfront was waiting there. The lanterns were turned high, their greasy and close smell hanging in the air. Men drank and waited for the buckets of beer, foam drying in their beards. Women drooped about their necks, laughing, shrill and uncertain of their welcome, their great breasts ebbing from the tops of their filthy dresses.
From up front, a fiddler scratched out a dirge, a blind fiddler with milky eyes that rolled ungoverned and useless in their sockets. His knee bounced to the aimless beat, and rings of sweat gathered under his arms.
There was little room to walk among the tables as Caleb made his way to the bar. Catching the saloonkeeper’s attention, he leaned over the glasses so that he might be heard.
“I’m here, sir, to work.”
The saloonkeeper retrieved two buckets from under the bar.
“Fill these at the pump there, boy. It’s a quarter a bucket, and bring back the empties for refilling. You keep that beer coming and that money to home.”
“Yes, sir.”
“It’s a sad day when someone cheats the Beer Bucket, boy. You see that man yonder? Well, that’s Jude, and Jude don’t care what he hurts, so long as the wait’s short. You understand what I’m saying?”
An immense figure was perched on a three-legged stool at the far end of the bar, his huge hands opened in his lap, inert cannons waiting for some horrific spark. Pig bristle vaulted from his balding head, and gristle gathered in rolls at the base of his neck. Scanning the crowd, he searched for the slightest signs of distress, a cougar at prey, taut and centered and irrevocable. The eyes saw but motion, focused and remorseless in their intent. Thick lips were pursed and drawn down, as if sewn and gathered by rawhide, and covered the black stumps in his mouth. Powerful shoulders sloped from somewhere high on his neck, from somewhere under the small ears buried under folds of skin. A leather belt was buckled about his waist, its band soiled from sweat and rub. Even in the yellow of the lamplight, his skin was white, as white as eggshell, from the darkness of his work and the shame of his soul.
“Yes, sir,” Caleb said, taking his buckets and stepping into the pump line with the other boys.
So as the night passed, he worked, his shoes slick with spittle and foam, his arms aching, his fingers tender and bursting from wet. No sooner would he arrive with his beer than yet another would cry out “Boy, boy!” or bang his pipe against an empty bucket. Women, smelling of sour and babies, taunted him as he passed, slipping their hands up his leg as he leaned over a table or bent for a bucket, slapping their buttocks, laughing, strident and coarse as the calluses on their hands, pinching red welts on the backs of his arms.
When a sailor’s chair slid back, and his voice rose, Jude moved from his perch like a great white bear, eyes trained, and the sailor fell silent, turning back to his beer with resignation.
By midnight, Caleb’s legs trembled, and there was a fire in his ankle. He dreaded the thought of collapse and death beneath the raucous crowd and prayed that they would soon leave. But they did not leave, except in a slow and painful dribble as the night passed. Not until two in the morning did the last man stumble out the door.
Like starved prisoners, the bucket boys lined up along the wall, delivering up their coins to the barkeep, save the single quarter earned. Jude watched on from the end of the bar, lord of discipline and all things evil.
After a meal of cheese and stale bread, Caleb was done at last, and he stepped out into a cold and still fog. More certain of his sense of direction than his knowledge of streets, he struck due west, missing the path the first time around, backtracking, missing it again in the heavy fog. Finding it at last, he worked his way down, picking his way through the vapor. Steamboats blew their whistles from the river, obscure and shrouded in the night, and he followed their sound.
The camp was dark, the fire long since extinguished by mist and neglect. Caleb undressed, his foot throbbing, and slipped under the cold and damp covers. From across the way, Joshua stirred. “Caleb?”
“Yes.”
“You find work?”
“It’s work, all right, Joshua. You?”
“No.”
“You try?”
“Down at the docks. They told me that coloreds work for half the pay and twice as hard. Told me to move on, or they’d send me to the bottom of the Ohio.”
“Well, you’ll try again tomorrow.”
“Caleb?”
“What?”
“Did you bring food?”
“We’ll buy flour and lard in the morning, Joshua.”
“Night, Caleb.”
“Night.”
Mist gathered in Caleb’s hair and clung to his eyebrows as he tried to sleep. Ben stomped his hoof beyond the trees, a discreet welcome back. And as Caleb drifted into sleep, he thought of home, and of Baud, riding tall and true and black through the woods. He thought of his father and the sound of his voice, the fulsome blows of his axe settling like pools inside his chest. He thought of the girl standing on the deck, and the fleur-de-lis about her neck, the wash of her breasts as she leaned from the rail.
By the time he awoke the following morning, his foot had swollen to twice its girth and throbbed with each beat of his heart. The quarter he’d earned bought a small sack of flour, lard, a quarter pound of coffee, and a half dozen chicken necks. After making biscuits, Caleb dredged the necks in flour and put them to fry in the Dutch oven. They shined the bones clean and sucked the marrow from their centers, like coyotes at a kill.
There was no money left for oats for the mules, so that afternoon, while Caleb slept in the wash, Joshua grazed them out on the fescue. It was to become a ritual that filled the following days. Each evening, Caleb rose from his bed like a corpse from the grave and made his way to the Beer Bucket Inn. Each night, he brought back his money, which was then spent to buy food and supplies for yet another day in the camp, and each day, his ankle worsened from the hours and the burden of the buckets.
“We’re getting nowhere,” Joshua complained, “no closer to Leavenworth, no closer to nothing, except the dead of winter and our own bleached bones.”
Throwing his coffee into the fire, Caleb stood, his face flushed.
“This ain’t no marriage, Joshua. You don’t like it here, just move on to where you favor.”
Joshua turned his back, crossed his arms, and walked to the edge of the camp. After some time, he said, “I’ll go to the docks again today, but the whole thing’s useless, and those blame mules are mighty poor company, I tell you.”
That night, Caleb trudged to the Beer Bucket Inn, his foot stiffened from the cold and the hours on his feet. It was Friday night again and a hard shift ahead, the populace dead-bent, as usual, on drinking Louisville dry.
Standing at the bar, Caleb waited for his buckets.
“That gimp of yours ain’t getting no better,” the barkeep said. “Now, I ain’t a man to push, but you’re moving slower every night. You got to hold your own around here, boy, or I’ll find someone what will. That’s just the way of the world.”
“The swelling was better on rising this morning,” Caleb said, “and better every day, far as I know.”
“See to it you earn your pay,” he said, turning back to his bar.
By dark, the Beer Bucket Inn was awash with customers, the fiddler with his unmerciful tune, the women with their chaffed elbows and prickly legs, their breaths of onion and eggs. As the night wore on, Caleb labored under the buckets, the smell of swill, of mold and hops, and he tried not to think of his foot afire in the confines of his boot.
By midnight, the crowd showed little sign of lessening. When they broke into a song of “Rye Whiskey,” clapping at their own absurdity, Caleb’s stomach knotted with weariness.
Jude watched on at the end of the bar, alert for movement or change, for any shift of posture or turn of voice. Like a viper, no emotion registered in those eyes, black lagoons in the whiteness of his face, no uncertainty or distraction in the singularity of his mission.
The night grew late, the beer flowed, an inebriate and stinking river, and the crowd danced for no tomorrow, bellies fuming and fermenting with brew, the empty laughter, the swagger, the talk a crescendo, a stew of tasteless and banal commerce.
It was the sound of the man’s voice, discordant and pitched with anger, that caused the fiddler to fall silent, his murky eyes rolling into the darkness of his lids. Moving to the end of the bar, Caleb set his buckets down, sensing danger, thick and suffocating in the crowded room. Jude stood, his face the white of a shark’s belly, the serpentine slit of his eyes, the smallest lift at the corner of his mouth.
The man was young, his face flushed with anger, and he rolled his sleeves tight over his biceps as he glared at the man across the table. With cocked hat, he looked about. There was sweat on the furrow of his lip and in the thin of his beard.
“It’s a whuppin’ I aim to give you,” he said, “for your dirty hands under the table.”
The woman at his side giggled, pushing her breasts at the crowd, basking in the sudden attention. “It ain’t nothing, Hatch,” she said, pulling at his arm. “He’s just feeling good, that’s all.”
By then Jude had reached the table, poised and silent from behind, a stalking cougar, invisible even to those in his midst. He never spoke or made a sound, the enormity of his presence and certainty of his cruelty turning the young man about. Sweat dripped from his brow and ran down his cheek, and a quiver jerked at the edge of his lip.
“Mind your business, monkey man,” he said to Jude, dread manifest in the crack of his voice and in the liquid that rushed his bowels.
Jude struck, not with passion or anger but with predatory instinct, the swift and irrevocable intent to kill. His huge hands clapped the ears of his prey, a thundering and sickening pop that stilled the drunken jeers. Blood trickled from the young man’s lobes, droplets the color of wine, and into the stubble of his beard. The woman’s screams fell unheard on his busted drums, and his eyes widened in disbelief at the white pain that surged through his brain.
Wounded and lost, he grabbed at Jude’s great neck, to strangle the evil that had befallen him, but even so, Jude delivered a staggering blow into his uplifted face. He dropped to his knees and slumped, his arms about Jude’s ankles, an invocation, a prayer for mercy. A brow dangled from its mooring, and an eye seeped, loosened and bloodied in its socket. Ivory slivers of cheekbone hung from the blood that gathered on his chin and coagulated in the corners of his mouth. The second blow silenced him, and he slid into the filth of the barroom floor.
The woman screamed again, a piercing scream, her arms trembling above her head. Jude shoved in her nose with the heel of his hand, and she, too, fell in silence. Looking neither this way nor that, Jude dragged them from the room by their arms, like deer slaughtered, a blood slick trailing from their feet.
Jude took up his place at the end of the bar, the blind fiddler sounded his bow, and the crowd drank once more, and laughed, and danced again into the night.
When Caleb got back to camp, Joshua was hunkered over the fire, a blanket pulled about his shoulders. The fire was well stoked and warm against the evening. He pulled up a stump, took off his boot, and rubbed at the swelling in his ankle. After considerable silence, he fished out the night’s earnings from his pocket.
“Joshua,” he said, handing him the quarter, “I ain’t going back to the Beer Bucket, not for no quarter or for a hundred quarters. In the morning, I’m going home. Woodcutting ain’t much of a living, I admit, especially what with no cabin left, but fighting Indians for Sheridan was just a dream, a boy’s dream, that’s all. You and me both knowed it all along.”
Firelight flickered across Joshua’s face, and the moon broke overhead, big as a melon now, with its ivory light flooding the Ohio valley.
Joshua fished something from his hatband and handed it to Caleb.
“What is it?” Caleb asked.
“Tickets to Kansas City,” he said, looking away, “for the price of a wagon, two old mules, and a wore-out pistol.”
Chapter 6
Fog from the Missouri hung over Fort Leavenworth like a gray shroud and muffled the trumpeter’s tattoo. As Caleb and Joshua made their way back to the gate, the barracks’ lights dimmed behind them, winking away one after the other in the quieting evening. Horses whickered from the stables, a hundred stalls, and the smell of hay and corn drifted in from the evening feed. A stone guardhouse rose into the fog across the compound, foreboding in its gravity and silence. The smell of smoke rose from dozens of chimneys and hung still and heavy in the air.
At the fort gate, the guard leaned from the lantern light.
“Where you boys headed?” he asked.
“They’re sending us on to Fort Riley,” Caleb said, holding up the chits for him to see, “two tickets to Junction City on the Kansas Pacific Railroad and meal tickets to boot.”
“It’s a posh life, ain’t it,” Joshua said, “tickets on Uncle Sam, three squares a day, and fine new uniforms awaiting?”
Shifting his rifle to the other shoulder, the guard pushed back his hat. Moisture gathered on the brim and in the thick of his mustache.
