Soul Catcher (5 page)

scars along his shin and the permanent ache imbedded there and know that, like the old wound itself, she had been something real, something that had happened. Something he'd had and then lost. At such times he would feel the familiar ache rise up in his chest and seem to squeeze the very life out of him like an iron fist.

One night they had camped along a ridge overlooking a frozen lake. The night was cold and clear, with a sharp wind howling down from the north and raking the flesh like nettles, and in the dark the lake seemed almost to glow, to give off its own eerie illumination. Cain was reading, and he kept having to switch hands, keeping the free one warm in his pocket.

"What you reading there, Mr. Cain?" asked Little Strofe, who sat close by, huddled beneath a blanket.

Cain always brought along something to read wherever he went, packed away in his saddlebags for an evening's diversion. This book, his favorite, a dog-eared, broken-spined edition of Milton he'd received as a present from his schoolmaster, the ancient Mr. Beauregard, who'd studied classics at Harvard and had fought with Old Hickory at the battle of New Orleans. Milton was Beauregard's favorite poet, and he'd fostered in Cain a similar appreciation. Cain had found the character of Satan endlessly fascinating. Sometimes when he hunted alone, Satan's was the only voice Cain would hear for days. He reminded Cain of a southerner: both honorable and petty, vainglorious and doomed from the start, yet too proud and foolish to know when he was beaten. He put Cain in mind of the stubborn, proud men at the Alamo, those heroes every southern boy had read about and dreamed one day of emulating--Bowie and Travis and Crockett.

"It's a long poem by a blind fellow," Cain explained.

"How'd he writ it if'n he was b-blind?" Little Strofe asked.

"He had somebody take down the words."

Little Strofe chewed on this notion for a moment. "I ain't n-never learned me to read a lick. What's he say in there?"

"It's a story about Satan's rebellion against God."

"Do tell? And who won the thing?" the man asked straight- faced.

Cain smiled, though not with condescension. "I guess the outcome is still in doubt."

"C-could I hear a smidgin?"

Cain read a few lines, the part where Satan addresses the synod of hell:

.

Long is the way

And hard, that out of Hell leads up to Light;

Our prison strong, this huge convex of Fire,

Outrageous to devour, immures us round.

.

"What'all do them fancy words mean?" Little Strofe asked.

"They're plotting revenge on God. They're going to use Man to get back at him."

"You mean like with the s-serpent and all a that?"

"That's right."

Little Strofe rubbed his chin in thought. He was both a religious and a superstitious man, often mixing the two together into a compost of cautionary wisdom. When he wasn't praying, he was worrying about bad omens and ill-favored signs. If they passed a red-haired woman in the road first thing in the morning, it meant they were certain to have bad luck later that day. Or if a man was plowing in a field, they were not to come within his shadow lest a horse come up lame, or if they heard a cat sneeze thrice, which they had once in front of a feed store, it meant that someone was to get the ague (while no one came down with the ague, his brother's bowel problems did indeed worsen).

"The evil one been using us to d-do mischief ever since the Garden, Mr. Cain."

"That's when we're not doing it all by ourselves."

"They's some truth to that way of thinking, too. Good night, Mr. Cain."

"Good night, Mr. Strofe."

The man mumbled some prayers, then curled up between his dogs, as he did most nights, and pulled his blanket over the three of them. In a moment he was sound asleep, snoring along with his dogs. Cain envied the man's stonelike simplicity, his dreams probably no more complex than those of Skunk and Louella. Cain's bad leg ached, as it always did from the cold. From an inside pocket of his coat he took out his silver flask, opened it, and had a pull at the sweet- tasting laudanum. The liquid did its magic, fanning out through his frozen limbs like a warm summer breeze. The flask had been an odd present from his father on his twenty-first birthday. Mr. Cain, a stern and disciplined man, had sharply disapproved of his eldest son's debauched and shiftless life, but equally he held that all southern boys should know how to hold their liquor as a matter of honor and a sign of manhood. Dented from a fragment of grapeshot in the war, it had etched along its side the words Augustus Claudius Cain, This 14th of May, Eighteen Hundred and Forty-two.

His father, a farmer of only modest means by Virginia plantation standards, had raised tobacco and corn, horses and cattle and hogs. At any one time he owned only about a dozen slaves. All were field hands except for Lila, and a man named Handy Joe, who chopped wood, toted supplies back from town, and occasionally got Mr. Cain's horse or wagon ready for him. If success was measured by the number of acres and slaves a man owned--and in the South it most decidedly was--Mr. Cain, though he'd worked doggedly all his life, had managed only a partial attainment of his goals. He didn't have a large enough farm to have need of an overseer, so he supervised his slaves directly, often working in the fields shoulder to shoulder with them as well as his two sons. This permitted him to know his slaves in ways that most other planters didn't. He never asked them to do anything that he himself wouldn't; he was a reasonable and fair master, progressive even in his thinking, though he could be firm when the situation called for it, believing that, with Negroes as with children, sparing the rod would spoil the child. In farmers' magazines such as the Southern Cultivator and De Bow's Review, which he perused religiously, Mr. Cain read articles on "The Judicious Management of Negroes," or "Developing Labor through Effective Breeding Techniques," or "Reducing Runaways through the Reasonable Application of Punishments and Rewards." In his reading, he came across, and fully subscribed to, such terms as drapetomania, which explained why otherwise contented slaves would suddenly up and run without the least cause, or dysaesthesia aethiopica, which accounted for why the African race was prone to rascality and any number of other mental deficiencies beyond their control. Everyone in Nottoway Chase said that Mr. Cain was a model of slave ownership.

And he'd instilled in his sons, Cain and his younger brother TJ, four guiding principles regarding the nature of the South's "peculiar institution," as well as the nature of being a southerner. These principles were, his father had insisted, part of an irrefutable natural order of things, one that had to be obeyed unstintingly if there was not to be general chaos. The first principle derived from the simple fact that one should always respect one's property: that it was necessary to care for and protect it, to never misuse it, as it will someday be called upon to care for and protect you. Whether it was greasing a wagon's axle before going on a trip, or cleaning and oiling a gun after using it, or feeding a valuable draft horse nothing but the best alfalfa and oats, and never pushing it beyond its God-given capacity, respecting one's property was a fundamental truth.

Once when Cain was a boy, he'd ridden a roan gelding hard through the hills and woods behind their farm and put the horse away when it was still blowing and sweaty; his father gave him a severe whipping with a leather strop to make an impression on the young boy--it did, and Cain never abused a horse that way again. The same was true with one's slaves. Mr. Cain treated his Negroes with the same respect and the same reasoned self-interest--with care and good sense, with a utilitarian eye toward the benefits derived from them, and with the full knowledge of what each had cost him on the auction block, how much he had invested in each in terms of food and clothing, doctoring and training.

The second principle was that a Negro was in many ways like a child, and a willful child at that, and it was the moral duty of the white man not only to reap the benefits of his labor but also to look after and guide him, to amend his wayward tendencies with a firm hand, as one would a stubborn hunting dog or a horse that tended to nip, or even a son that was headstrong and badly behaved. Mr. Cain fed his slaves a full five pounds of rice or potatoes a week and two pounds of bacon, when most planters only provided four and one of each, respectively. Moreover, he clothed them and took care of all their needs with a liberality that was almost unheard of; he provided extra food and clothing at Christmas and allowed them to attend church on Sunday or to marry and have families, which, with one exception, he never broke up; he treated them with the consideration and benevolence due their station in life. In return he asked of them only their hard work, their loyalty, their unquestioned obedience. No more, no less, than he'd ask of a mule or, for that matter, a son.

The third principle his father had taught Cain about slavery, which derived naturally from the first two and which every slave owner taught his child, was that he, Cain, was born white, and was, therefore, fundamentally different from the Negro, that his very whiteness not only set him apart from and above them--morally, intellectually, physically--but that it also linked him in a blood bond with every other white man, especially every other southern white man. Whites and Negroes, Mr. Cain believed, were created by the Almighty to be separate, and that was what made miscegenation such a crime against nature. Cain had grown up not so much believing in slavery, as he did accepting its existence, as one would accept the sun's rising in the east or women giving birth to babies or a dog chasing a rabbit. It was all part, as his father often said, of "the natural order of things." He didn't believe, as the hypocritical abolitionists put it, in amalgamation, the mixing of the races, which he considered an abomination of that natural order God had intended. Cain accepted, too, that the Negro was fundamentally different from himself. He looked different. He smelled different. He certainly behaved differently. He thought in ways that were as fundamentally different from those of the white man, as a hunting dog's mind worked differently from that of, say, a squirrel or a deer. It was, to him, an abundantly clear fact of life.

Although Cain had decided early on that he wasn't cut out for the life of a farmer and thus would have no personal need for slaves himself, he agreed with those who felt that no Yankee, no court up north, no politician or abolitionist or amalgamationist, was going to tell a southerner how to live his life or what to do with his property. Like nearly all his fellow Virginians, he looked upon their peculiar institution as one would a troublesome relative; it was his by virtue of blood and birth, tradition and natural bonds, and, like the fact or not, if anyone attacked kin, you came to their rescue. Though he himself had never owned a slave and never would, if it ever came to a question of taking up arms to protect their right to it--as many had said it eventually would--he knew full well what side he would be fighting for.

And that led, of course, as all things did, to what Mr. Cain preached was the most important principle of all, the one that every child below the Mason-Dixon line was raised to accept and revere, that became part of their very fiber, that grew into their religion--the southern notion of honor. It was with Cain's father, as with many such men, a thing distorted and self-serving, molded around their own needs and failings and views of how the world should be governed. For instance, to his father, having a mistress had nothing whatsoever to do with the question of honor or the notion of white womanhood, a thing sacred and to be protected. Despite his shortcomings, his father believed in honor and taught Cain that it was to a southerner what cold, hard cash was to a Yankee. They would defend it at all costs, including laying down their lives if it called for that.

* * *

They rode through rain and snow and hail, through fog banks so thick they couldn't see ten feet in front of them, through forests that grew more tangled and desolate and intractable with each passing mile north. They slogged through spring thaws and slipped on icy trails. Sometimes the path they were on just seemed to end in the middle of the woods or in an ascent too steep for the horses, and then they'd have to double back and try another route. During it all, Little Strofe kept up a constant banter. Now and then his brother might say, "Would you just shut the deuce up and ride, Brother?" There was game aplenty for the taking, deer and turkey, pheasant and grouse, rabbit and squirrel and possum, and the streams were filled with trout and salmon. Sometimes Strofe would take his shotgun and shoot them some quail or partridge. On one occasion as they were fording a river, they spotted an odd creature feeding in the shallows