March (21 page)

When they had disappeared into the ragged scallop of cypress woods, Jesse grasped my hand and started after them, keeping to the corn rows. He had a trash-cutters’ knife slung across his back. “If we can just keep sight of them till nightfall,” he said as we advanced at a brisk jog, “then maybe when they’s sleeping we just might git a chance to cut loose some of them.” It was a better plan than any I had, and so we followed them into the trees.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A Good Kind Man

The next hours passed in a blur of effort. The ill-fitting boots flayed my feet. Since we kept to the dense scrub, the whipping branches tore at my thin blouse and raked the skin beneath it. Within hours, I was dizzy from lack of food and parched for water, but still we pressed on. Jesse moved forward, apparently insensible to pain or fatigue, and I blundered behind him. The only thing that saved me was that the guerrillas could not drive their captives beyond the pace of the slowest, and even though we came close enough at times to hear the coarse taunts and threats with which they urged on their captives, occasionally they were obliged to halt. We took care to pull up well short of them, and during each brief intermission I lay gasping in the leaf mold, willing myself to stay conscious, to find the resources to continue. When we came in reach of a slow stream, I buried my head in the silty water and drank, even though the chances of the water being wholesome was negligible.

I don’t think I was ever as eager to see a sunset as I was that day. The guerrillas halted their march in a clearing, and we stayed back at first, burrowed under a fern bank, holding our breath as one of them passed within a few yards of us, scouting for firewood. Jesse pressed his mouth close to my ear, and whispered: “I set two bigjars of shine by the stoop of my cabin, right where the rebs could easy find it. I’s praying they got it.”

An hour passed, then two. The noise from the camp waxed, and it seemed the guerrillas had indeed found Jesse’s moonshine, or else come ready provisioned with their own. Under the cover of the loud voices and darkness, we crept forward to where we could see the guerrillas’ dispositions. They had the Negroes bound hand and foot now, all but Zannah, whom they had set to tending the cook fire. They knew she would not attempt escape while her child was captive. Jimse was roped, like the others. They had tied them in threes and fours and bound each group to a tree.

Ethan they had not bound, because he would never run anywhere again. I could not think why they were troubling to bring him on this march when the easier course would have been to kill him outright. They had taken him from the horse and propped him against a fallen log. I could not tell if he was conscious or not, but after a while I saw Zannah take a ladle of some kind of broth to him. Cradling his head, she tried to spoon the liquid into his mouth, but I couldn’t see whether she had any success or not. As I watched, I saw one of Zeke’s sons, a tall lean youth of about nineteen or twenty, amble over to where she squatted and say something to her. She turned her face away and spat in the dirt. The youth drew out his saber and pressed the point of it against her cheek, then he reached down, grasped her by the hair, and pulled her to her feet. Jimse cried out, but May, the Negro woman tied up alongside him, awkwardly pulled him toward her, using hands that were bound at the wrist, and turned his face into her bosom so that he couldn’t see his mother struggling or hear the inhuman sounds she uttered.

The youth pushed Zannah out toward the picket line and stopped for a word with his brother, who was on watch with one of the gaunt white soldiers who had disposed of Ptolemy. “Save some for me, Cato!” his brother said jovially, handing him a lantern. The white soldier made a lewd gesture. “Wish I could teach mine to rise up for charcoal-colored sluts.” I did not hear Cato’s reply as he passed his brother and drove Zannah on into the the woods. The lantern bobbed and wove through the trees and out of sight on the opposite side of the clearing. I felt Jesse, tense, breathing hard beside me. “We have to help her!” I whispered. He shook his head. “Raise a ruckus now and we’s all done for,” he hissed. “Zannah and that little one of hers as well.” But I had already stood by through a murder; I could not lie in the dark and do nothing while that girl was violated. Using my knees and elbows, I began to ease myself back, away from our vantage point in a tangle of fallen branches. Jesse divined my intention. His great arm shot out and pinned me to the ground. “I mean it, marse,” he hissed. “If you wants to help her, stay quiet now. If we mess this business, she gonna be sold on someplace where she gonna be in for a lot more’n one night like this.”

“So what are we to do?” I hissed in reply.

“Wait,” he said. “Wait and let the shine do half the work for us. I put a little something in there that ain’t corn likker.”

Laughter and raised voices came from the camp. The talk was all about money: how much would the Texas traders pay, the next day, for this Negro and that one? This was the usual, coarse banter: the likening of human beings to livestock. One of the men was making a crude joke when he stopped midsentence and cursed, pressing a hand into his belly. He blundered off into the woods, bent almost double. The other men laughed and jeered at him, and called out that he had “let a stink worse than a skunk.”

Suddenly and silently, Jesse was on his haunches, unslinging the great knife bound to his back. “You stay put, marse. This one’s mine. You get the next one.” He passed like a shadow over the ground, making no sound, despite his great bulk. Minutes passed. I strained my ears in his direction, but I could hear nothing over the raucous camp talk and the loud wood noises-the metallic thrumming of the crickets and the deep grinding of the bullfrogs.

Within a few minutes, he was back, his big knife blood-coated. He had the guerrilla’s rifle, his pistol, and his saber. He handed the latter two to me. My hands shook as I took them. I had come here hoping to free people, but I was a chaplain, not a killer. The saber I could use: I would cut bonds with it. I handed the pistol back to him in the dark. I saw the whites of his eyes regarding me, and imagined the look signaled his contempt. But the moment was not prolonged, for another man had blundered off into the bushes, groaning and cursing his bellyache.

Jesse stalked after him, and again came back within minutes, bearing weapons. “We ain’t gonna have too many chances like this,” he whispered. “By ’n’ by someone gonna notice no one comin’ back from they’s shits. They gonna miss ’em, and there gonna be a big to-do till they finds them, and then a bigger one.”

But for the moment, at least, it seemed that the noisy revelry had most of the men well distracted. The talk had turned to Canning, and what he might prove to be worth. “It’ll have to be a good piece to make it worth hauling his sorry self.” It became clear, presently, that the major had somehow formed the crackpot notion that Canning was the scion of a wealthy Northern family. Their plan was to ransom his life.

It seemed that Canning, who had regained consciousness, also was listening to the conversation. “You’ve made a big mistake, gentlemen,” he rasped. The others hushed each other and fell quiet, struggling to hear what he had to say. “You think I’d be down here in this filthy swamp, risking my life and working like a serf if I came from money? All I’ve got up north are creditors. Nobody there gives a good goddamn about my life.”

I wished I were close enough to Canning to clap a hand over his mouth. He might as well be confessing to a capital crime, so effectively was he making out his death warrant.

“What if he’s telling the truth?” one of the men asked the major. “Why’re we troubling to drag him along with us? Seems we should shoot him now and be done with it, then when we get done selling the niggers we can have us a little furlough.”

The major stood and stepped toward Canning. He ran a hand over his stubble. “Are you speaking the truth? Or is this just another Yankee lie?” He took out his pistol. “Speak, or I’m going to commence auctioning off the pleasure of shooting you.”

Canning’s head, caked with dried blood, was turned away from the firelight. I couldn’t read his expression.

“I don’t lie.”

“Then I’m afraid that good soldier over there is right; we’re just too pressed by events to be carrying you along with us.” He cocked his pistol.

And that was when I leapt up, this time evading Jesse’s grip and ignoring his hissed curse. I dropped the saber in the leaf litter and crashed out of the scrub.

“Wait!” I cried, stumbling into the clearing. “He
is
lying! He has a fiancée! She’ll pay for his life.”

“March!” cried Canning, his voice carrying a mixture of pain and astonishment. The guerrillas, who’d survived for months in the woods by dint of their swift reaction, were on their feet, rifles ready, even in their inebriated state. Two of them had me in a firm lock before I finished speaking.

“So, Mr. March, you decided to join our party after all,” the major said. “What an unexpected surprise!” He gestured, and the men who held me thrust me forward.

“Tell them, Ethan! Tell them the name of the girl in the ambrotype. Tell them, for pity’s sake, and live!”

“Pity?” he laughed, and it turned into a cough. “I doubt they know what that means.” He shifted painfully to relieve the pressure on his shattered knees. “But I can tell them her name. It is Marguerite Jamison, and you’ll find it on a headstone in the Elgin cemetery. She died a year ago last May. Consumption. Just six weeks before we were to be married.” He turned his head and looked at the major. “Shoot me, damn you, and get done with it. You’ve made me a cripple and a bankrupt and not a soul on God’s good earth gives a damn if I live or die.” He started sobbing.

The major scratched his head with the pistol butt and turned to the men holding me. “Tie this one up,” he said. “I believe I’ll consider what to do with the pair of them in the morning.”

They lashed me tightly to a tree near Canning, at a little distance from the Negroes. One of these, I did not see who, flung me a heel of cornbread, and I used my bound wrists to push it into my mouth. I hadn’t eaten all day, and the scrap of bread just served to awaken my raging appetite. Across the clearing, Jimse was crying out for his mother. May crooned to him in a soothing voice, and told him to hush now; she’d be back directly. The child fretted for a while, but he was exhausted, and soon whimpered himself to sleep in May’s lap.

Ethan moaned. One of the guards kicked dirt in his direction and said, “Shut up.”

“Ethan,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.”

The night insects thrummed.

“I know.”

Through my torn smock I felt the roughness of the tree bark scraping against my back. I ached all over and was hot, and wished they had not tied me up so close to the fire. I could feel sweat dribbling down my neck, soaking what was left of my blouse. Another man, doubled up with cramp, headed for the woods, muttering that “the black bitch must’ve spit in the stew.”

I thought it could be only a brief time before someone noted the growing number of missing faces around the camp and set up a general alarm. I hoped Jesse had a plan for that moment. I surely did not.

Presently, a chorus of snoring-ragged, hoglike-commenced from those of the guerrillas who weren’t standing watch. Cato’s brother remained on guard duty, along with three others. He was slumped against a tree on the other side of the fire, and I watched him through the smoke. Once, he caught my eyes on him and glared back at me.

There was a white fog rising up from the moist ground. I was hot now, but when the fire waned, my sweat-soaked shirt would chill me through. I suppose I must have fallen into a kind of fretful doze-I was exhausted, and I could feel the familiar fever ache beginning in my joints. Whether I drifted for a minute or an hour I couldn’t rightly say. A branch cracked and fell in the fire, and I jerked back awake with a start. The fog had thickened. It moved above the ground like cold smoke. When it parted a little, I saw that a thin shard of red moon had risen and that Cato had taken his brother’s place on picket. I wrenched myself round as much as I could in my tight bindings, to see who remained awake, and the effort set up an aching in my head. The trees that edged the clearing seemed to be undulating. I closed my eyes, but then the whole world spun. I opened them and tried to fix on one still point. I could not concentrate. But I had to; there was something important I needed to do, to see... if only I could just remember what it was. That was it: count the men. I waited for the fog to shift and reveal more of the campsite. If only the trees would stop that nauseating movement ... One sentry had slumped down into a squat by his tree. His head rested on his knees and he might have been sleeping. I wanted to sleep. My head throbbed. I started to do an accounting, but the numbers jumbled. I tried to shut out the pain in my head and closed my eyes, struggling to string my thoughts together. Twenty of them at the setting out, two dead at Jesse’s hand for certain, maybe three or four. Dully, I began to wonder; if Jesse had somehow managed to waylay so many, picking them off singly, then that left only sixteen... and Cato’s brother also unaccounted for ...

Just then I felt the bonds around me go suddenly tighter and then slack. I did not move my head but from the comer of my eye I saw Zannah, a saber in her hand, moving to cut the ropes of the other captives. Addled as I was, I realized that the odds were still poor, even if Jesse had somehow managed to deal with all of the missing men. Fifteen armed and hardened soldiers remained. But if Jesse could get arms into the hands of our people...

The crack of a branch, breaking underfoot, reported like a gunshot. Cato swung round in the direction of the noise, but a ball found him first. A piece of his skull opened and flew out, and he pitched forward. What followed was a blur of noise and bodies, shots and screaming. I leapt up. My limbs felt like lead bars. I lurched toward the fire and grabbed up a burning branch. I spun around with it and a shower of sparks flung a swirl of brightness all around me. I couldn’t tell who was who in the thickening fog. I made for where Jimse had been tied, but he was gone. Zannah, of course, already had him. I saw her, crashing through the scrub, the boy clinging to her back, and May lumbering and panting in their wake. Then, through the mist, I saw a guerrilla drawing a bead on them: I tried to run, to put myself in between them, but before I had moved a step the soldier fired and May fell, face forward, her arms moving like a swimmer. The guerrilla was already biting the paper off another charge. I cannoned into him sideways, cracking the brand against skull. The weapon fell from his hand and he lunged at me. The two of us tumbled onto the ground. He twisted over on top of me. He raised a fist and landed a blow into my face. The cartilage in my nose ground against itself I tasted blood in the back of my throat. He snatched up a rock from the leaf litter. I saw it poised over my face and jerked my head to the side. Then his grip on the rock loosened and it fell from his hand, bouncing harmlessly off my chest. He was scrabbling at his neck. The point of a saber spiked through his clutching fingers. Cilla stood behind him, her mouth open in a thin howl. She had driven the sword through his neck. He slumped forward, kicking. I pushed him off and scrambled to my feet, grasping Cilla’s trembling hand and trying to drag her back toward the shelter of the trees. But she pulled hard against me, like a petulant child resisting a parent. She reached down and laid her small hand on the hilt of the saber. When it wouldn’t come free, she put a bare foot on the man’s shoulder and tugged. There was a scrape of metal on bone, and then a spurt of blood, and then another, and then an uninterrupted flow. I picked her up then, although my arms felt limp as string, and tried to run for the trees.