Soul Catcher (8 page)
"White bastard," the boy cursed, for which he received a second and harder blow.
This time the boy just gritted his teeth and stared hatefully back at the white man in front of him.
Preacher then tried to grab the Negro's ear, but the boy shook his head wildly, sensing what was coming. So the blond man turned to Little Strofe, who was squatting a few feet away, frying the eggs the boy had been carrying. "C'mere."
"Me?" asked Little Strofe.
"Yeah, you. C'mere and grab hold a this here nigger's head."
Little Strofe didn't move at first.
"Y'hear me?" Preacher cried. "Get your ass over here."
Little Strofe glanced at his brother, who sat there sipping from a bottle of applejack. Finally, he stood and walked over to Preacher.
"Hold him still," Preacher commanded.
Reluctantly, Little Strofe grabbed the boy's head with two hands.
Preacher took the boy's right earlobe and stretched it away from his head until the boy cried out.
"You know where they at, you'd better talk."
The boy's face was contorted in pain and in fear, but he didn't say anything. Then in one cat-quick motion, Preacher swung the bowie knife and severed the earlobe. Blood spurted out and the boy winced from the pain but somehow managed to remain silent. Preacher held the bloody piece of flesh up in front of the boy.
"See that, nigger. That there is only the first part of what you're gonna lose if'n you don't start talkin'."
The boy stared at him. There was fear in his eyes but something else, too. Something that Cain had had a glimpse of now and then in certain blacks, say, after an overseer's flogging, or when a man was humbled by a master in front of his woman: hatred certainly, but nothing quite so simple and unadulterated as that. Something commingled with fear and humiliation, given shape by bitterness and rage and desperation yet tempered by patience, and above all, held in check by a kind of stubborn, rocklike pride, this cool burning in the eyes like a fire enclosed in ice, waiting, biding its time, always ready to flare up and consume the thing it viewed. And he saw its complementary half in the eyes of whites, a thing that, when it surfaced, was hidden beneath a show of violence or a swaggering bluster or a contemptuous laugh, but was, at its very core, Cain suspected, a kind of fear. A fear that the docile, fawning slave would one day slough off his subservience and become a threat, something of unimaginable terror. He felt it in the impassioned voice of the minister back in his hometown of Nottoway Chase, Virginia, a Reverend Sammons, whose sermons spoke of the natural order God had intended, with whites in charge and slaves serving the role the Almighty had intended. He saw it in the disdainful spit of tobacco juice of the old men in Treacher's General Store in town, when they recollected the names of Gabriel Prosser or Denmark Vesey, rebellious slaves before Cain's time, or the slave Cain himself was alive to remember, the feared and detested Nat Turner, who'd led his uprising over in the eastern part of the state--those crazy niggers who'd had the audacity to turn that quiet anger outward into actual violence. He saw it sometimes even in his father's eyes when he'd flog a willful slave named Darius for running off yet again, a momentary hesitation--because of something he saw in the icy-hot glare of the slave.
With some Negroes, Cain knew, punishment or its threat would make them obedient, servile and malleable to the will of the master. With others it broke their spirit and reduced them to sniveling, worthless creatures, like a dog kicked too often. But with some, like this boy, violence had the opposite effect; it would embolden them, harden and strengthen their resolve, like a piece of iron tempered in a smithy's forge. They were the Negroes not cowed by all the chastisements, by the beatings and floggings their masters or overseers could serve up, who'd witnessed ears or noses cut off, brands burned onto living flesh, who'd seen slaves chained by the neck to a post for weeks, who'd seen others lynched from a tree, their carcasses left to rot in the August sun as a reminder to the rest, who'd had their wives or sisters, daughters or mothers, raped in front of them, or sold downriver--they were the ones impervious to violence, for whom it had not only not broken them but made them all the more resilient and stubborn, all the more convinced of the unwavering legitimacy of their hatred, a thing that burned brightly in them and sustained them like air. Cain had seen it in the eyes of slaves he had captured and was returning. In the evening while sitting chained to a tree, they might look out at him from behind the silent mask of black skin. He sometimes wondered what it was they were thinking--was it the fantasy of getting their hands on him while he slept, killing the buckra, the term they used among themselves for a white devil? He could remember Darius, his father's slave who, when he was being flogged, would cry out, as slaves often did during their punishment, "Do, massa. Do it hard, massa." It was almost as if he welcomed the pain, accepted it, brought it deep into his dark and inscrutable soul, cradled it there like some precious thing, which, of course, it was.
Cain didn't have the stomach for this business. He never resorted to torture to get information about a fugitive slave, preferring instead to use his cunning or his tracking ability. He prided himself that the profession hadn't turned him into a sadist, as it did to so many. He could kill a man if the situation required it, and had on several occasions, both black and white. He could bring a Negro back in irons to a harsh master and sleep soundly that night, because he'd only done his job. But cruelty for cruelty's sake was another thing altogether and he could not abide it. Some men relished it. Like this Preacher fellow. Still, this wasn't his concern. Let Strofe keep Preacher in line. That wasn't what Cain was being paid to do. His job was to bring back the girl.
The bloody hell with it, he thought. He stood up on his creaky leg and went over to his horse, untied him from the tree, and led him down to the stream. He reached into his coat pocket and gave Hermes a piece of sugar. The horse sucked it off his palm with his clever lips and set about masticating it with a wonderful intensity of pleasure, one dark eye locking conspiratorially on Cain, as if to say, We are not a part of all that, you and I. He gave him another piece and then stroked the thick, muscular neck, running his hand down the silky blaze. The horse's agile lips pulled at his pockets in search of more. "Last one, boy," Cain said, handing him another piece. He reflected on how much he cared for the animal, more perhaps than was naturally right, and how he was here, in some measure, precisely on account of his attachment to the horse. Another man might have let the thing go, gotten another mount. There were, he supposed, other horses to be had, even ones as fine as Hermes, though he had not laid eyes on one. Then again, another man would not have wagered him to begin with. You can't blame him for your own drunken foolishness, Cain told himself.
From the pommel he got the canteen. At the water's edge, he squatted with difficulty, his bad leg creaking with the effort. He filled his canteen, then took a long drink of the water. It was cold and sweet, tasting of autumn leaves and rotting wood and the deep stony secrets of the earth. The stream had slowed here to form a small pool perhaps twenty feet across. The fine rain barely wrinkled the water's skin. Looking down into it, he saw reflected the thick forms of trees, the tangle of naked branches overhead not yet budding out with the liberality of spring, and beyond, the gray vault of sky like a vast coffin lid. Angling his head a bit over the water, he caught sight of his own muted reflection. He had taken to avoiding looking into mirrors, as a man might who had long since stopped appreciating what he saw there. Beneath the broad-brimmed leather hat, he noted the wind- and-sun-scarred features, the angular jaw, which in others would have suggested strength of character but in Cain merely denoted a certain mulishness, the jagged scar over the brow where he'd been struck by a whiskey bottle during a fight, the full mouth turned sullenly downward at the corners. A still good-looking face taken all in all, but one which now had been aged well beyond its thirty-six years, with deep fault lines around the eyes that gave a certain tentativeness to his otherwise self-assured expression. And though he couldn't make them out in the dark mirror of water, the eyes were, he knew, the wistful, gray ones of his mother.
As he was musing on these things, Cain found himself staring down into the water at something that lay on the bottom a few feet away. A stick, dark along one side, with colorful markings along the other. One end was flattened and broad, a handle of sorts. It almost looked like a fancy walking stick that a person had fashioned from a piece of ironwood and then painted. He thought how he hadn't used a cane to get around, not since the old mestiza woman had made him that one from a piece of pinon. So he rolled back his coat sleeve and began reaching his hand into the frigid water to take hold of it. That's when the stick moved. He jerked his hand away just as the thing came suddenly to life and went slithering rapidly toward the far bank. He felt a silken movement in his chest and then a sudden emptiness, as if his soul had been yanked out of him by the snake and carried off.
* * *
When Cain returned to the camp, Preacher was still at it. Now, though, the gag was back in the boy's mouth and held in place by a piece of rope that circled his head and affixed him to the tree behind him. It was tied so tight that his mouth was drawn back into a frightful grimace.
"You gonna tell us where she at, or you want I should cut the whole gawddang thing off, boy?" Preacher threatened.
Squatting on his haunches like some demented gargoyle, Preacher looked back over his shoulder at Cain and grinned mischievously. His smile was thin and cruel, drawing the skin of his skeletal face hard over the sharp hill features. Preacher held what remained of the bloody ear in his left hand, pulling it tautly away from the Negro's skull so when he did finally draw the razor-sharp knife across it with his right hand, it would come neatly away in one stroke, as if he were filleting a trout. In the time Cain had known him, he had come to learn that Preacher was the sort of man who not only had an aptitude but a passion for inflicting pain. He often bragged about how wealthy planters back where he came from in Botetourt County would pay him two dollars to whip a disobedient slave or to part an ear from the head of a runaway, though he said he'd just as soon do it for nought. ("Ever see a no-earred nigger?" he'd offered as proof that cutting one ear off curbed their desire to run a second time.) Around the campfire once, he'd even related the story of how they'd lynched a nigger for not giving way on the sidewalk to a lady. "Shoulda seed how that darkie danced when he was aswangin' from that tree," he'd bragged.
In Cain's profession, he saw a good deal of this sort of cruelty. Saw it with certain masters or overseers, agents or traders, patty rollers or slave catchers. A kind of sadism born out of wielding power over another living thing, to do cruelty simply because you could, like a boy casually pulling the wings off a fly. It wasn't violence so much he objected to. Cain was on fairly intimate terms with it. He'd been called upon to kill men--four in peacetime and only God knows how many in the war--and often he'd had to hurt people or cause suffering, but on every single occasion it had been a necessity, something he'd no choice but to do. Not something he had taken pleasure in.
The boy's coat front was covered in blood, though Preacher had as yet cut only the lobe off one ear. In the light of the campfire, the blood shone dark, the color of claret wine. Nearby, the two dogs that belonged to Little Strofe lay tethered to a spindly birch. They were some mixed breed of hound, lean and long of ear, with tapered muzzles and coats a dappled brown. Wet and shivering against the cold mountain rain, the two looked on the scene with some odd expectancy in their glossy eyes, almost as if at any moment they'd be released and the boy would, too, and he'd run and they'd be called upon to hunt him down again. The excitement of the chase, a wonderful game of hide-and-seek--that's all this was to their canine brains.
Cain glanced over at Strofe, who sat on a log, eating eggs and corn pone. He wondered when the big man was going to put a stop to this, rein in Preacher's craziness. But Strofe didn't seem concerned. Since they'd started out, he'd been more or less in charge of the other two: directing them to water the horses or start a fire or shoot some game. Generally speaking, Preacher followed his orders, though with a surly, ill-tempered acquiescence, as if the notion were actually his own idea and he hadn't to obey anyone he didn't want to. Even as big as Strofe was and despite the fact that he was Eberly's overseer, and thus Preacher's boss, he sometimes appeared wary of confronting Preacher directly and giving him a command. If he had to tell the skinny blond man to do something or to stop doing something, he would tell him without making eye contact. Maybe say that Mr. Eberly wouldn't look favorably on such and such a thing.
"You save me some a them eggs, Strofe," Preacher called over. "I'm workin' up a considerable appetite."