Soul Catcher (6 page)

near the far bank; it was enormous, taller than a horse, big snouted, with antlers as wide across as a man's outstretched arms.

"The hell's that, Mr. Cain?" Little Strofe cried. "Ain't never seen such a sizable deer."

"That's a moose," Cain explained to him.

"Is it a thing to be et?"

"I suppose it's edible," Cain told him.

So with that, Little Strofe dismounted his mule. From the buckskin scabbard, he removed his Boyer over-and-under flintlock rifle and took careful aim. That night they had fresh meat for dinner. Little Strofe, who handled most of the cooking duties, fashioned the moose meat into a stew with dumplings on top. It was a welcome change from the usual fare of fried corn pone and dried beef and salted herring. He wasn't a half-bad cook, and he had a nose for finding delectable things that popped up along the trail, like wild carrots and leeks and basil, fiddleheads and thyme. Once he located a nest of partridge eggs, another time a rabbit he'd snared in a leg trap. He made mint and sassafras tea, and on one occasion he sneaked into a farmer's field and pilfered a handful of potatoes left over from the previous year's harvest, and that night he made potato pancakes. On another occasion, Cain got out some string and a hook he kept in his saddlebags, and they caught themselves a mess of brook trout, which Little Strofe fried up in lard that night. Now and then they had a treat of venison or wild turkey roasted over a spit on the fire, but mostly it was the monotonous diet of soldiers, corn pone and dried fish, salt pork and jerked beef.

Save for the growing tension between Cain and Preacher, the journey north had been fairly uneventful. Each evening around the fire, Strofe would get out his maps and he and Cain would look them over, deciding on the best route. For the most part they steered clear of the cities and only ventured into a town when it was absolutely necessary. Negroes in general, and runaways in particular, Cain knew, had a sixth sense when it came to spotting a slave catcher. It was as if they carried a peculiar and strong scent about them that only Negroes could detect. Cain had experienced that before. Despite such precautions, they'd nearly run into trouble in Albany, New York.

Strofe's horse had thrown a shoe and they'd had to stop at a livery in the town. While waiting for the horse to be shod, they'd headed over to a tavern to get something to eat. Someone must have spotted them and passed the word, for when they returned a small but vocal crowd of Negroes as well as some whites had gathered in the street outside the livery. Some of them carried pitchforks and cudgels, a few even had fowling pieces. They started to call things out.

"We don't want your kind around here," someone yelled.

"G'yon and git, soul catchers," cried a Negro man. Soul catcher. That's what blacks called men like them. Cain had heard the term many times before. It was as if to them, as bad as it was to have their bodies brought back to bondage, it was a thing far worse that their very souls were being snatched from them.

"We'd b-bess skedaddle," Little Strofe said to the others.

"They got the wrong sow by the ear," Preacher said, starting to reach for his big pistol. "They's so all fired up for a fight, I say we give it to 'em."

"Don't," Cain warned, putting his hand on Preacher's forearm.

Besides being outnumbered, if things escalated to violence now, they might as well turn around and head home. Word would spread faster than a wildfire about slave catchers being on the hunt, and every Negro from New York City to the Canadian border would be on the lookout. Still, as they made their way through the crowd to their horses, Cain clutched the blackjack he kept in his back pocket. He'd made it himself, a sheaf of heavy leather filled with buckshot. It struck against anything solid such as bone to devastating effect, and it had often come in handy while fighting a frenzied runaway. The four quickly saddled their mounts and rode out of town without incident. Cain led them south for a while, trying to mask their real intent, but then doubled back and circled around the town and continued north.

Chapter 3.

After several more days' ride they finally reached Keene, New York, a small village in a notch between two high mountains, not forty miles from the Canadian border. There they stopped at an inn, the first time Cain wouldn't be sleeping on open ground in the nearly three weeks they'd been traveling. The innkeeper was a frail, scaly-headed man with yellow cat eyes.

"Have you heard of a place called Timbucto?" Cain asked the man.

"You mean, the nigger town? Half day's ride west," he said. "You folks hunting a runaway?"

Cain ignored him, asking instead, "How much for a room?"

"Two dollars a night. What's your business there?"

"Our business ain't none of yours," Strofe informed the man.

"I got no quarrel with that."

"Much obliged for the information," Cain said.

While the others stayed in the public room drinking, Cain headed up to his room, where he indulged liberally from his flask and lay reading by candlelight. When he was a boy, his mother used to read to him and his brother TJ, a novel of the Scottish moors, or some slender volume of Burns or Gray, or something from the Bible. She was partial to Proverbs, fond of saying things like "But the path of the just is as the shining light." Or "Even a child is known by his doings."

From her, Cain had acquired his fondness for reading, as well as his dreamy gray eyes, a taste for laudanum, and a certain melancholia, which made even the brightest of days look as if a partial eclipse were taking place.

An image of her came unbidden to him now. She had been a woman of ungainly comeliness: too tall and angular to be considered a beauty by traditional southern standards, her doelike eyes excessive for her narrow, bony face, a mouth too small to contain its pleasure, so she was given to presenting an awkward, toothy grin to the world. Still, as a boy Cain thought her the most beautiful woman alive. There was about her a delicate, almost ethereal loveliness, made all the more exquisite by her illness. Pale, with dark circles beneath those pretty gray eyes, eyes that always seemed to have an otherworldly gleam to them, a look that had its source both in the illness that sapped her body and in the laudanum that she consumed in ever-increasing quantities. And when she'd lean down to kiss Cain good night, she smelled of honeysuckle and burnt sugar, the sweet aura that floated around her from the medicine. Cain loved his mother with all the tenderness and affection and precocious sadness of a child whose parent has already died, for in his heart he knew that she would soon be gone. She was a woman oddly matched to her husband's stern and pragmatic temperament: she filled with the gossamer essence of poetry, he with the hard red dirt of a Virginia planter. When she was alive his father had been neither mean nor cruel to her, if one didn't count his long-standing dalliance with a woman in town, but he was with her, as he had been with everyone else, distant, removed in ways beyond physical proximity.

During her final illness Cain's father had been even more remote, as if preparing himself for her absence and not wanting to be hurt more than he had to. He'd moved out of their room and slept mostly in his study, where he spent long nights poring over his account books or reading Roman history. And so it fell to Cain to keep her company for hours on end, listening to her talk of her parents who had grown up on the rocky coast of the Hebrides, reading to her from Shakespeare's sonnets, bringing her a cup of tea laced with horehound that the house slave Lila had made for her weak lungs. He'd fetch her a glass into which she'd pour herself a drink from the bottle she kept hidden under the bed: Dr. Wilmer's cough cure, which was supposed to be, the bottle claimed, a restorative for "catarrh, inflammations of the lung, dyspepsia, and low back pain," but which was really only alcohol laced with a tincture of opium. Sometimes she would let him have a drink of it, too. It burned and tasted sweet at the same time, like a jagged piece of ice going down his throat, and afterward it would make him feel warm, his head floating, barely tethered to his neck. "Our secret, Augustus," she would say to him, and smile her toothy smile. He would sit by her bedside holding her thin hand as she coughed bloody sputum into a lace handkerchief. Occasionally she would ask that he get her scrimshaw brush and brush her hair. She had beautiful auburn hair, long and dark and glistening, and Cain loved brushing it (in her coffin, it was her hair that Cain had kept his eyes fastened on, for it seemed the one thing of her still alive and because of it she was not yet irrevocably lost to him). Sometimes, though, she would turn and stare at him. Whether feverish with her illness or under the effects of the laudanum, now and then she'd get a look in her pale eyes that scared the young boy. They shone fiercely, as if she were not so much seeing him but something beyond this world--angels or demons, he couldn't tell.

She would hug Augustus to her frail body and call him "My sweet boy." Once, he recalled her touching the middle of his chest. "I will always be right here. Will you remember that for me?"

He would. Always.

Her too-early death would stunt something in the boy that would never fully recover, his heart like an apple deformed and gnarled by a late frost. For his part, Cain's father refused even to utter his wife's name. The boy was never sure whether it was out of a dearth of love on his father's part, or rather, a surfeit of it, that her loss had caused him such pain that bringing up her memory only overwhelmed him with grief, even years later. He wouldn't display a single portrait or memento or keepsake of hers around the house. If either Cain or his brother TJ would bring their mother's name up in conversation, Mr. Cain would set his jaw as if he'd received a wood sliver in his flesh, and then get up and leave the room. The young Cain had once crept into his father's study and from his desk taken a small locket he knew was kept there. Inside was a miniature likeness of his mother, staring out at him with those dreamy gray eyes of hers.

* * *

The next day Cain woke lethargic from the laudanum, his head pounding the way it did after he'd had too much. They saddled up and rode out, arriving at the outskirts of Timbucto around midday. Though it was April now, a cold rain with bits of snow and ice fell all day, and low gray clouds hung just above the treetops, making it seem as if a huge piece of sky had broken off and fallen on them. They waited in the woods outside the village, hidden in a dense thicket of laurel. The cleared area of the Negro village was a half mile away, set on a high table of rocky land ringed by steep blue-gray mountains whose peaks were shrouded in clouds and snow. It wasn't really a village so much as just some shanties thrown haphazardly together in a futile attempt to fend off the weather. The fields they worked seemed to be some distance removed, while their houses were huddled cheek by jowl as a kind of defense, presumably against would-be attackers. Yet the place appeared to have neither rhyme nor reason behind its design; it seemed fashioned by a blind madman who didn't know which end of a hammer to use. The houses were not built level or plumb; the roofs pitched at arbitrary angles, some with snow on them still, and none faced in a southerly direction. Dark plumes of green-wood smoke wafted upward from rusty stovepipes. A couple of hastily assembled outbuildings leaned precariously in the wind. Pigs and chickens and guineas rooted around, while feral-looking dogs wandered freely about. The squalor was heightened by the fact that a number of dung piles had been placed right next to some of the front doors. The whole place looked inhospitable, cold and gray and foreboding, with its disheveled huts, and the gray skies and the dark mountains looming ominously in the distance. In the middle of the village, a bark-covered limb stuck out of the muddy ground at an angle, with a tattered red rag at the top flapping in the breeze. Cain supposed it was some sort of pennant to remind the former slaves of their freed status, but it seemed more a sign of bloody surrender than anything else.

"My pappy, may he rest in hell," Preacher offered, "said a darkie ain't got the sense of your average dog. Leastways a dog knows not to shit where it eats."

"It do look like hard land to farm," Little Strofe added.

"Fact is, without somebody behind him with a whip, your nigger's just plain lazy as a hog," said Preacher, spitting tobacco juice on the ground.

Like the Gist Settlement out in Ohio and Fort Mose down in Florida, Timbucto was a settlement where freed and runaway slaves were welcomed to come and live. A wealthy abolitionist named Gerrit Smith had provided the land to any Negro who wished to work it. The man had conceived of it as a place where they could make their own way, separate from whites but still here in America, unlike those that advocated a forced return to Liberia for all freed blacks. It was, Cain felt, a pathetic and wrongheaded attempt by white northerners who didn't know the first thing about the Negro temperament, an endeavor doomed to failure. He had to agree with Preacher on this point. Everyone knew your Negro was no more capable of living independently than, say, a four-year-old child. And he wondered why any black would choose this sort of life over that of being on an orderly, well-tended farm down south. It didn't make sense to him. Then again, if slaves were rational he'd be out of a job.