Soul Catcher

Soul Catcher

Michael White

*

Part One

I have just received your line by Mr. Deny and commit to his and your care and to all wise Providence the precious Charge that has been for a few short days sheltered beneath my humble roof, from the foul soul catcher of our detestable South. Oh may the God of the oppressed speed this interesting refugee from our southern prison-house to a land where slavery is not known.

LETTER FROM WILLIAM M. CLARKE TO GERRIT SMITH, OCTOBER 25, 1839

I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.

JOHN BROWN, ON THE WAY TO HIS EXECUTION

Chapter 1.

Cain had been awakened by the frenzied whinnying of a horse below his window in the street. Still half asleep, his head throbbing and barley soaked, he recalled the dream he'd had of the place called Buena Vista. The brave, foolish Mexicans throwing wave upon wave against the left flank of the American line, the slaughter coming so easily it made him sick at heart. Later, when the sheer size of Santa Anna's charge had overrun the American position and captured the wounded left behind, Cain, his leg shattered, lay helplessly among them. He remembered the cries of his comrades as the enemy had gone from soldier to soldier with a bayonet, silencing them with "Recuerde Agua Nueva." After that, as night crept in over the high desert and the stars flashed like sparks from a grindstone, there was the stillness of what he felt had to be the approach of death. And finally, opening his eyes upon the mestiza girl hovering over him, her dark head aglow in morning sunlight, his first thought was that she was some otherworldly creature come to usher him to Hades. Now in bed, staring up at the stained ceiling of his room, the thought of that girl, the silken feel of her skin, the playful glint of her black eyes, caused an ache such as he had not felt for years to rise up in his chest like a wave of seawater slamming into him. He sat up, barely able to catch his breath. Cain, he heard her whisper to him. Cain.

It was then that a loud knock erupted against his door.

"Go away," he called. He figured it was Antoinette, the elderly madam of the house, coming to inform him he'd have to vacate the room for paying customers.

The knock came again, more insistent this time, the side of a large fist hammering the wood in anger.

"The devil take you," Cain called out, looking for something to heave at the noise. "If you don't--"

But suddenly the door flew open and two men burst in. They were both armed, and Cain's thoughts ran immediately to the possibility that he was about to be robbed. One of the two intruders was of considerable size, tall and heavy limbed, thick through the belly, with a bushy beard and small iron-colored eyes like a pig's. He wore farmer's clothing, a floppy brimmed hat and muddied boots, and he brought with him into the room the acrid smell of the barnyard. He carried a Shaffer single-barrel shotgun in one big paw, and while he didn't actually aim the thing at Cain, he kept it at the ready. The other intruder was older and slight of build, a dignified-looking man of the southern planter class, not tall so much as a man whose erect bearing and good breeding gave the impression of size. He was well dressed in a brown riding coat, knee-length boots burnished to a high shine, and black leather gloves. He had the sharp features of a red-tailed hawk and cold, blue-gray eyes that fixed Cain where he lay with an imperious gaze. On his hip, he carried a sidearm, a pearl-handled, small-caliber pocket revolver, a pretty weapon of the sort that riverboat gamblers kept in their coat pockets and women carried in their purses. The two made an unlikely pair of robbers, but you could never tell in this part of the city. Cain glanced around, searching for his own weapon. It lay across the room on the bureau, above which hung a cracked mirror. Damn, he thought.

"What in the hell you think you're doing?" Cain cried.

It was the old man who spoke up. "I've come for money," he said.

Cain laughed at that. "If you've a notion to rob me, mister, you're up a creek without a paddle."

The well-dressed man offered a patronizing smile to this comment. There was, Cain felt, something familiar about that gesture, about his mouth and the haughty way he looked at Cain, though he couldn't place him. Certainly, he'd seen his ilk before.

"I've come only for what you owe me." When Cain furrowed his brow in bewilderment, the man added, "You don't remember me, do you?"

"Should I?"

"Last Saturday night," the man explained, removing his gloves one finger at a time. When his gloves were off, he unconsciously rubbed the palm of his left hand, where a knotted scar snaked across it from little finger to thumb. It was the sort of wound that would have been made had he grabbed hold of a knife blade in self-defense. "At the Morgan Brothers."

Cain still drew a blank. There had been so many such evenings of gambling and drinking of late, that like the others, this one formed a grayish blank in his mind, as if burned away with a branding iron.

"My aces beat your queens," the man offered.

Only then did it come back to Cain how he knew the man. He never forgot a hand, especially a losing one. It had been in one of the back rooms of the Morgan Brothers, a well-known gambling establishment in Richmond. He fumbled around in his thoughts and then the name appeared with the aces: Eberly. A wealthy tobacco planter with a reputation for losing a thousand dollars on a single hand, as if it were so much paper. The card game, attended by mostly wealthy merchants and plantation owners, should have been much too rich for Cain's blood. But he'd been drinking heavily and he felt he could part them from some of their money, and when he'd seen the three ladies turn up in his hand like a rainbow after a string of bad weather, he'd felt lucky, and he wasn't going to let such an opportunity slip through his fingers. So he'd cast reason to the wind and stayed in the hand much longer than sense should have allowed or means should have permitted. All the while, he recalled this Eberly sitting back staring over his cards at him with that cool, hard glare and that smile that stuck in his craw like bad corn liquor. The son of a bitch's just bluffing, Cain kept telling himself. He felt he knew when someone wasn't holding anything. It was only after he'd seen the three aces spread out over the table and glanced up to that smile of Eberly's that he realized just how wrong he'd been.

"Yes, I recall it now," he said, getting up. He was wearing only a pair of drawers. Grabbing what clothes he could find strewn on the floor and tangled among the sheets, he quickly dressed. He didn't want to be in the vulnerable position of negotiating without his pants on, for now he figured he must have owed the man some money, and they would have to arrive at some reasonable schedule and terms for the repayment of the debt. But, of course, the old man would have to get in line behind the others to whom he owed money. He pulled on his trousers and his shirt, which smelled of stale whiskey and even staler sex. He wondered if there had been a woman last night and how much money Antoinette had fleeced him for her services. But try as he might, he couldn't remember, which he took as a blessing. Nor could he remember where he'd left his boots. They were an old but still serviceable pair, purchased during better times from McElheny and Sons, one of the best booteries in the city.

"I am presently, sir, somewhat short on readily available funds," he told the man as he searched the room for his boots. "But I soon expect to be in a position to make good on whatever debts I've incurred to you. Plus a fair rate of interest. You have my word as a gentleman."

"A gentleman?" Eberly scoffed, offering up that smile of his.

"Yes. As one gentleman to another," Cain shot back, annoyed at his tone.

Cain was, in fact, already in debt to half a dozen others because of his gambling. What he could now count among his worldly possessions were those few things in the room with him, some eleven dollars plus loose change on the dresser, his clothes, his gun and holster, a silver flask. There were a few more items at his room in the boardinghouse but nothing of real value. Not counting his saddle and saddlebags, and, of course, his horse, which he had stabled at Fogg's Livery over on Franklin, he was penniless.

Where are my damn boots, he cursed to himself, glancing around the room. He squatted down to look under the bed, his head throbbing, his right leg, the bad one, bellowing with pain. There, he came across a large pair of women's lacy underdrawers, an unemptied bedpan oozing a sour stench, and a bottle of Moody's Pain Elixir, a patented laudanum medicine. He picked up the bottle, hoping at least a sip remained, but sadly discovered it to be bone-dry. He also found one boot hidden behind the bedpan. Where its twin could be, he hadn't the faintest notion. He grabbed the boot and hobbled over to a cane- back chair near the window to pull it on. Fortunately, it was the boot for his left leg, the good one, so perhaps his luck hadn't completely abandoned him after all. If he had to kick someone, at least it would be with his booted good leg. Cain's gambler mind was already working the options, doing the best with the hand he was dealt, jumping ahead to the possibilities of the situation he found himself in.

"How much is it that I owe you?" Cain asked. He figured it might be fifty. Perhaps, if he had been really corned and had thrown caution completely to the wind, a hundred. Even drunk, he never went in the hole for more than that. It was one of his rules.

"I hold an IOU, with your signature, for three hundred dollars," said Eberly.

Three hundred! Cain thought. Good God!

"It is now past due," the old man said, "and I am here to collect."

Cain couldn't recall signing anything like that, though he didn't doubt the possibility that he had. He knew that, when in a certain state of inebriation and in the midst of a card game, it was quite likely that he'd signed an IOU, especially when he was holding a hand he felt he couldn't lose with or if he'd sensed that his fortunes were about to take a turn for the better. He'd made such a mistake before, in fact, many times. Just never for so much.

"As I have already mentioned," he explained to this Eberly, "you've caught me at a bad time, sir. But I will be more than happy to honor my debt fully in short order. We can shake on it if you'd like," Cain said, offering his hand as collateral to his word. Eberly just stared at the proffered hand, and Cain, after an awkward moment, let it drop to his side.

The son of a bitch, Cain thought angrily to himself.

Right then the whinnying noise out in the street commenced again, and Cain turned and glanced out the window. A man seated in a wagon filled with coal was flogging an old roan nag with a rawhide whip. The road was muddy and the wagon's wheels embedded in the muck, and it was obvious the load was far too much for the animal. The horse's back was flayed almost raw, yet the man continued to strike the poor creature. Cain couldn't stand to witness such treatment of a horse. He was fond of horses, felt they had more common sense and loyalty than most people he knew, and under different circumstances he would have called down to the man to desist, might even have rushed out into the street and confronted him. But he had his own concerns right now.

Antoinette's was in Shockoe Bottom, down near the waterfront, a rough, squalid section of Richmond composed of cheap doggeries and gaming houses, cockfighting pits and faro banks, and brothels like the one he was in. It being springtime, the roads were muddy and deeply rutted. Street vendors and fishwives were pushing carts and calling out their wares. The dead-fish-and-sewage stench of the river floated on the air of this fine, bright morning. Dowling's, a boardinghouse where he had lived on and off for the past two years, was just two streets over. Ships were anchored at the wharves, and small boats plied the James. To the west, past the canal, he saw a train crossing the Richmond and Dunville Railroad Bridge. Beyond that were the smokestacks of the Tredegar Iron Works, and farther out, in the middle of the river, Belle Isle. In front of Antoinette's, he spied a young Negro boy holding two horses.

"I have made it a rule not to conduct business on credit," Eberly said.

"I am only asking that you give me some time."

"I've already given you a week."

"But I am good for it, sir. Ask anyone in Richmond. They'll vouchsafe Augustus Cain's word."

"I have," the man said cynically. "That's why I am demanding payment now."