Soul Catcher (4 page)

Strofe boys, when they called each other anything other than "hey" or "you," usually just referred to the other as "Brother." "Brother, don't eat all them beans." The two often argued, scrapping like a pair of tomcats whose tails had been tied together.

The younger brother had a bad stutter, which was made worse when he was nervous. He was here primarily because of his skills as a cook as well as on account of the dogs. They minded no one but him, and even then they were headstrong. When they'd take off after a scent, Little Strofe would call them and sooner or later they'd come slinking back, tails tucked between their legs, though sometimes he'd let them "have theirselves a little fun," as he put it. Louella was docile and normally obedient, but Skunk had his own mind and would take off for long periods, sometimes all day. Now and then Little Strofe would have to discipline him. "You c-come when I c-call you, y'hear," he'd yell, grabbing him by the loose flesh beneath his jaw and roughly shaking him. But it was obvious that he loved his dogs. He would pet them and fawn over them, talking to them as if they were people, sharing his meal with them, even sleeping with them at night.

While the brothers were employed full-time on Eberly's plantation, Preacher, Cain learned, hired out his services as a kind of independent contractor. From the first he'd laid eyes on him back in the saloon in Richmond, Cain had taken an immediate and strong dislike to the man--and when it came to people, he had an intuition as unerring as a dog's. And during the long journey north, his instincts hadn't proved wrong either. Cain had seen his share of churlish miscreants in the slave-catching vocation, one which drew them like maggots to a festering wound, but this Preacher was one of the most cross-grained, ill-favored, cantankerous fellows he'd ever had the displeasure of meeting. A rough-edged haw-buck from up in the western hills of Virginia, Preacher was coarse and foul-mouthed, illiterate as a stump, with a smell to him like a bitch dog in heat. He had a pallid complexion, long, greasy blond hair that fell in his face, a space between his front teeth, and eyes black and deep-set under pale brows, a look in them as spiteful as those of a stepped-on cottonmouth. Preacher could not lay claim to an ounce of fat or softness anywhere on his person; his narrow face was fashioned by sharp angles and held together by skin and gristle and pure malice. Cain could not even approximate his age. He looked old and boyish at once, as if his face couldn't decide what it wanted to be, and when he smiled his malignant gat-toothed smile it almost looked as if something inside him had been grievously wounded by the mere doing of it.

The other thing of note about him: along the side of his jaw and neck ran a port wine stain in the shape of a hand, which gave one to believe it was the bloody print of some demon midwife who'd assisted in pulling him into a world he was reluctant to enter and which was equally reluctant to claim him. When he grew agitated, the birthmark seemed to glow, as if on fire. They called him Preacher, though there was nothing preacherly about him, and Cain could only surmise it was owing to the fact that he dressed all in black, with a flat-topped riding hat and a long black duster that came down to his ankles. Besides the bowie knife strapped to his leg, which he referred to as his Arkansas toothpick, he carried in his belt an ancient North flintlock .69 caliber pistol, a formidable thing that would put a hole in a person the size of a young girl's fist.

The feeling Cain harbored for Preacher appeared to be mutual. From the start, the man seemed dead set against him. He was always second-guessing Cain's decisions. If Cain said they should stop for the night, Preacher would insist they had a good half hour of light left in which to ride. On the other hand, if Cain said they should push on, Preacher would grumble that they were flat-out tired and he was riding them too damn hard. If Cain suggested they take one road, Preacher, who'd never been out of Virginia in his life, would advocate another. "That way looks a might untraveled," he would say. If Cain suggested avoiding a certain city where there were known to be abolitionists or vigilance committees, Preacher would say Cain was just being finicky. At night, when Cain preferred his own company and would be reading his Milton, Preacher would glare at him with his snake eyes. More than once Cain had overheard him say he considered it "a thang womanish for a growed man to be readin' po'tree." And when Cain tried to ignore him, the other would purposely make noises, talk loud or fart or make fun of something Little Strofe had said, all with the aim of trying to distract Cain, or draw his attention--Cain could never tell which. The two had had words on several occasions, nearly coming to blows once over who had drunk the last of the coffee. Cain knew--just as surely as he knew it would rain when his bad leg ached--that there would be trouble with Preacher before this was all over.

When they crossed the Mason-Dixon line not far from a small town called Gettysburg, Cain halted, waiting for the others to catch up.

"We're in the North now, boys," he explained to them.

"So?" Preacher replied.

"We'll need to be careful. In this line of work, if you're not careful you could wind up dead real quick."

"Maybe you're a'scart of these yellow-bellied Yankees, Cain. But I ain't," the blond-haired man continued.

"It's not a bloody matter of being scared," he snapped at the other. "I'm just saying we need to watch our step."

"We got the law on our side," Preacher said. "Got us a warrant for them two darkies."

"Law makes no difference. Up here, they don't give a rat's ass about what the law says on runaways. From now on there'll be people that won't look kindly on our being here."

"If'n they want trouble, they'll get a bellyful of it," he said, touching his pistol.

"I won't risk my neck because you're a damn fool."

"Who you callin' a fool?"

"You heard me," Cain said.

Preacher stared coolly at him. Then he let out a laugh. "They can kiss my corn cracker ass for all I care," he taunted as he spurred his horse on and pushed past Cain into the North.

In eastern Pennsylvania, they came across the scarred, humpbacked hills where they saw huge mounds of coal and entire mountainsides clear-cut and oozing a black sludge. As they rode past a group of filthy miners trudging back after a day's work in the mines, Preacher called out, "Hell, they's blacker'n niggers."

Several of the men stopped. They carried shovels and picks.

"Who you calling niggers?" said one with a heavy German accent.

"Let's go, Preacher," Strofe said.

The farther north they went, the more they found themselves climbing mountains whose summits were still covered with snow, as the temperature dropped and the vegetation changed. So, too, did the accents of the people they ran into, from the soft Maryland twang to the formal lilt of the Quakers to the impatient and brutal tongue of those New Jerseyites, and again to the clipped and nasally dialect of those Yankees north of the city of New York, pale, flinty-souled folk scored by icy winds and snow, who had the surly aspect of one woken up from sleep in the middle of the night. They entered finally the frigid far north woods where, it being early spring, the lakes and ponds were mostly still frozen over with ice the strange blue hue of a robin's egg. As they passed by one frozen mountain tarn in the Catskills, Little Strofe called to the others. "Looky there," he said, pointing at the ice. Perfectly intact and locked just below the surface was some sort of furry creature--dog or wolf or fox, they could not tell--eyes still open, its bared fangs inches from the surface seemingly about to yap, its forefeet seeming to scratch at the underside of the ice, as if still entertaining the notion of escape. Cain, a native Virginian, had been this far north only once in his life. When he was a boy he had accompanied his father on a steamship to Portland, Maine, to look at a new breed of cattle newly arrived from Scotland. But that was nothing like this ice-locked and frigid landscape.

"Them Yankees can have this cold," Preacher complained one time, blowing on his hands. "Freeze they damn balls off."

Little Strofe, who happened to be riding next to Cain, asked, "Y'ever see you such c-cold weather in springtime, Mr. Cain?"

"No, indeed, Mr. Strofe," he replied. Cain had developed a fondness for the stuttering, simple man.

"Why, up in the hills it weren't never like this, even in the hardest winter. 'M-member back in forty-two, Brother." He turned and called over his shoulder to Strofe. "That was some cold spell."

"Hit were forty we had the bad winter," Strofe replied.

"I reckon you're mistaken on that."

"How the hell would you know?" Strofe said. "You were still shittin' in your drawers."

Even Preacher laughed at this.

Each evening, after the long day's ride, after the horses were hobbled and brushed and fed, after supper was made and eaten, after all the pans and cups were cleaned, the fire banked for the night, the bedrolls laid out--after all this they'd sit around the campfire for a while before sleep finally overtook them. Bats would come out, flittering and gliding in the twilight sky like a child's mobile. A screech owl's quavering cry might erupt nearby or a catamount's snarl echo down through the mountains. They'd sit there, four men whose only connection was the hunting of human prey, each occupied by his own devices. Drinking from a bottle of applejack, the hulking Strofe would get out his maps and by the lantern's light plan how far they'd get the next day. Some nights Preacher would remove his deck of cards and play solitaire, or talk Strofe or his brother into a game of poker, for which they played for coppers or quids of tobacco. On those occasions that he was drunk, Preacher might jabber on about some tight-fisted farmer he used to work for back in Botetourt County or relate a story about how he'd cut up somebody bad in a tavern fight. But most nights he would sit there silently sharpening his big knife with a whetstone and then take to whittling a piece of wood with such single-minded concentration it almost seemed he'd fallen into a fugue state. Yet when he'd eventually come back from wherever it was he'd gone, and look up and catch Cain staring at him, he'd wink and offer a smile whose meaning Cain could no more fathom than he could the expression of the man in the moon.

Some nights Little Strofe would take out his Jew's harp and play something, a jig or reel, some tune from the hills. Sometimes he'd sing with a lilting voice "The Pretty Plowboy" or "The Girl I Left Behind Me" or "Lilly Dale," usually some sad lament of too-early death and the loss of a lover. When he sang, his stammer seemed almost to vanish and his voice turned fluid and smooth, as if greased by whale oil. It slipped out of his homely face like the sun breaking through a gray and overcast day. Cain, reading his copy of Milton by firelight and sipping from his flask filled with laudanum, would be distracted for a moment as Little Strofe conjured up visions of doomed love. Sometimes he'd even ask Little Strofe if he knew a particular tune, like "Bury Me Beneath the Willows." If the man wasn't familiar with the song--after all, he couldn't read a lick--Cain would usually just have to repeat a few verses or hum a little of it, and Little Strofe would pick it up right quick. Even Preacher seemed not immune to the beauty of the man's voice; he'd sit there, whittling a piece of wood or sharpening his knife, and his snake eyes would momentarily soften and take on a slightly confused, wistful look. If Cain didn't know better, he'd have said the words almost wounded him, made him long for something he had lost but couldn't remember what it was.

.

Bury me beneath the willows

Under the weeping willow tree

When she hears that I am sleeping

Maybe then she'll think of me.

.

At such moments, Cain would remove the spectacles from his nose and look up from his reading, letting himself be carried away by the words and rhythms of the song. Sometimes his mind would drift back to the war and the Indian girl he had loved. He pictured her, the playful gleam of her feral eyes as she came to him in the night, the earthy musk of her, the way his name slipped like honey from her mouth: Cain, she would say, seemingly fascinated by the sound, like a child with a new plaything. He remembered the beguiling warmth of her as she lay next to him on the ground of the shed, high among the desert mountains. Even naked, she was as natural and innocent as some wild untamed creature. He could still see her smooth, brown belly, her hard, sinewy arms, the small breasts rising and falling in the early-morning sunlight that came slanting through the mud-chinked holes in the wall. Her dark eyes searching his, her lips forming words that never materialized. Yet the two didn't need words; they spoke their own language, one of touch and taste and hearts, her skin scorching against his, the tang of her in his mouth salty and sweet at once. At times, he felt she'd been nothing more than a phantasm, a teasing mirage conjured up out of the heat and distance of that long- ago time and place, or perhaps, a mere by-product of his laudanum- clouded mind. But then he'd touch his shattered leg, feel the knotted