The Eden Hunter (11 page)

“And your companion?”

The lieutenant still had his pale body pressed against the door, listening. Elvy glanced over and he shook his head. “No,” she said again. “Him neither.”

The preacher nodded and reached into the pocket of his patched coat. He pulled out his hand and she saw that he was holding a fistful of half dollars. She watched as he counted the coins with crooked fingers, clicking them down across the flat of his other hand. Once he had them all stacked in three equal piles he looked up. “Nine dollars,” he said.

“That it is. Lot of money for a beggar.”

“And it’s yours to have,” he told her. “So long as you both can make me one promise.”

“Well?”

“Promise me that you will never ever pray.” The preacher held the coins out to her. “Simple.”

“Have you lost your senses?”

“Perhaps.”

“What kind of preacher are you?”

“Does it matter?”

Elvy looked over at the lieutenant and he shrugged. “All right, mister.” She reached her hand out through the Judas viewer. “I promise you.”

The preacher smiled. “And your friend?”

“He promises.”

“I need to hear him say it.”

She grabbed a handful of the lieutenant’s bare flesh and he spoke. “I promise that I will never pray,” he said, rushing the words.

The preacher raised a wispy eyebrow. “An Englishman?”

“Still none of your concern. Now pay me.”

“Very well.” He let her take the coins from his outstretched hand, then made for the path that led back to the federal road.

Elvy watched him go and felt a small measure of sorrow for taking advantage of what only could be a lunatic. She called out after him. “Head on up to my place,” she said. “Tell the girls I promised you a room till morning. They’ll leave you be.”

The preacher had retreated down the path and into the night. She could no longer see him, but suddenly she heard his voice speak out to her in the dark. “I’ll manage,” he said, and then it was quiet again.

Nine dollars. Elvy split the coins with the lieutenant—even sewed the buttons back onto his uniform—and in light of their bizarre windfall she came to see herself as fated to a lifetime of happiness with this war-wounded man. Their relationship became something more than it had been, and one week after the visit from the crazed preacher the lieutenant dropped to a knee on the dirt floor of her cabin. “Marry me,” he begged. “Marry me, Elvy Callaway.”

“Of course,” she replied.

The lieutenant then told her of a British fort downriver—across the border in Spanish Florida—and promised that if she helped him reach that place they would one day sail together to England. “Your next home will be a castle,” he promised her. “A castle with silver and servants and silk.” The lieutenant held her and she fell asleep trying to conjure up what an English countryside might look like. In the morning she awoke in a brilliant mood and went down
to the wharf, taking into her confidence a milky-breathed riverman she had twice turned away from her cabin. For an hour in the boat-house plus nine dollars exact he furnished her with a canoe and supplies.

The journey south with the lieutenant was the great adventure of Elvy’s life. They traveled at night, the only moment of real danger coming as they eased past the bonfires of the Choctaw mercenaries stationed at the final American outpost on the river. At last they reached the point where the Chattahoochee gathered the Flint and became the Apalachicola. “Florida,” said the lieutenant, and the two lovers gave a great sigh of relief and accomplishment.

 

ELVY BROKE FROM her story and he saw that she was crying. “That was nineteen months ago,” she said.

“So he gone?”

“I killed him.”

“Killed him?”

“Cut his veins while he slept.”

He sat watching and as she began to explain herself it registered, the animal wildness in those blue eyes. She wiped her nose and told him how the lovers had stopped at this same valley. She had been collecting water while her fiancé gathered roots and herbs and berries in the pocket forest. The lieutenant had happened upon the abandoned stone hut and called out to her. It was late in the afternoon and so they decided to make their camp. That night while the lieutenant slept beside her she had a dream—a dream in which all she had begun to suspect during their long cold hours
on the river was revealed to her as truth. In this dream she was alone and in hell, burning. There was the sound of a man laughing, and as her skin melted away she saw him—the preacher at the door. She awoke holding a knife and covered in warm blood. The one-handed lieutenant was dead, his stumped wrist sliced open at its base.

Kau watched as she began to shake. Fish soup splashed from her bowl down onto her bare feet. “Now do you see?” she asked him.

“See what?”

She dabbed her wet eye with the hem of her filthy dress. “Never mind.”

“You really don recall killin him?”

“I don’t.”

“Then maybe it weren’t you.”

She was staring at a heap of rocks piled beside the hut, and he realized that suspended in the dirt beneath those stones were the bones of her lieutenant. She tilted her head back and spoke to the stars. “May the Lord and God forgive me,” she said.

Kau set his own soup down on the ground by his feet. “Why you sayin all this?”

“My God,” she said. “You still don’t see what we did that night?”

He shook his head.

“The preacher,” she said.

“What of him?”

“I believe we met the Devil that day.”

“The Devil?”

“Think now, heathen. Who else would have tempted us so?” She punched at her neck with a fist. “I woke up that morning and just knew I was damned.”

“But why stay here?”

“To repent. To beg for the Lord’s forgiveness.”

“Forever?”

“I suspect.”

“How come you ain’t been killed youself?”

She laughed. “By?”

“Indians?”

Elvy waved a limp hand. “I see them now and again,” she said. “They look down at me from atop the cliffs, throw pebbles for sport. Nothing too fearful.”

“Someone be comin for you one day. You must know that.”

“So let them come.” Elvy sighed and then spread out her arms. “I imagine this is only the first of many hells I will suffer.”

 

FOR A LONG time they sat in silence beside the fire. Elvy fixed him a mug of wild tea and asked that he drink, promising that it would give him strength. He thanked her and she stared at him. Her own tin mug was up against her lips, and so when she spoke her words made a light echo. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you,” she said quietly.

“Yessum?”

“How goes the war?”

“The war with the British?”

“Yes.”

“Done ended.”

“Ended? When?”

“A year ago. At leas a year ago.”

“Who won?”

“Americans say they won. But I also heard some sayin ain’t neither side.”

Elvy rubbed at the side of her head as he sipped his drink. The tea was bitter and hot with the lingering taste of some root or herb he could not quite place. Finally she told him that she was going into her hut for the night, but then soon after she called for him.

Kau pushed aside the blanket covering the entrance to her hut and saw that she had changed into a cotton nightgown.

“All right,” she said. “Now get on in here.”

“Nome. I’ll jus make a place for myself outside.”

Of course he was thinking of the killed Englishman, and he watched as she lifted a walking stick that was leaning against the wall, then hurled it at his chest. She missed and the stick went sailing past him like a spear. “Then leave,” she said.

He moved away and pulled his horse blanket from the roof of the hut. The night was warm but with a breeze. He followed the path along the creek to the river, and in a fern grove he stumbled upon a long canoe half covered in leaves. He flipped the canoe over and a bedded boar possum scurried off through the emerald ferns. Daddy longlegs came spilling out of the hull so that for a moment the canoe itself somehow seemed alive. He watched them leave in a great twitching wave, then go marching silently across the forest floor on their hair-thin legs.

When the canoe had emptied he collected the two paddles he had discovered hidden beneath it and stepped inside. He could hear the water music of the nearby creek, and he lay on his back, listening. High above him, this second full moon of the spring was the color of bone. It had been a month since he had left Yellowhammer, killed the boy. He could make out the moon’s mountains and craters and oceans, the open-mouthed laughing man Benjamin had once taught him to see, a man who would keep on watching him no matter where he was taken, ran to or hid.

 

HE AWOKE TO movement in the forest and sat up holding his knife. Elvy was walking the trail in her nightgown. She came alongside the canoe, then looked down at him and smiled. The moon was framed atop her head like a balanced ball, and he waved at her with the knife. “You go away,” he said.

Elvy pulled the nightgown off and threw it aside. She was still smiling when she turned and stepped into the shallow creek. He looked on as she knelt to dip a rag into the water. She washed her legs and then her stomach, bathing herself. He watched her and she called out to him. “Please,” she said. “Come and let me clean you once.” He gave no reply and she kept on. She ran the cut cloth over her chest, and water dripped down across her white breasts. He felt himself hardening. He unbuckled his belt. The breechcloth fell away and he stepped free of the beached canoe. He went to her and she grabbed him by his wrist. “Good,” she said. “Now hold still.” He stood there with the knife in his hand; cool water ran over and past his ankles as she scrubbed at his body with the rag. She was
taller by a half foot at least so that as she washed the dirt and sweat from his skin he felt more like her child than a man. He tossed his knife onto the creek bank, and she put her hands between his legs. Her fingernails were long and sharp, and he shivered as she pulled at him. He tried to slow her, but she refused and then dropped to her knees in the water. He closed his eyes and came quickly before opening them again. He looked down and she stayed there, her cheeks working steadily as she sucked him dry. He felt weak and so he pushed at her head. Finally she released him. She swallowed and then spoke. “Stay,” she said.

He splashed onto the bank, then watched as she lay back in the creek. Her body divided the current, and her long blonde hair flowed with the water. He found his knife and picked it up. A jagged part had now formed along the center of her scalp, and she seemed asleep, dead even.

Again she asked him to stay but instead he turned away from her. He was dragging the heavy canoe toward the river when she let loose a raw and devastated scream, a lonely shriek that silenced the cicadas.

H
E SPENT TWO nights and two days on the river after departing the valley of Elvy Callaway, and though he was without food he stayed to the river and pressed on, did not sleep and did not eat.

 

ON THE THIRD morning the east-bank forest finally thinned, and he saw green and gold fields of wheat and corn. He was very tired and very hungry and so he put to shore. A distant rooster crowed as he muscled the big canoe up onto the bank. He gathered his canteen and saddlebags, then made his way through a cornfield.

The rich lowlands soon gave way to poor sandy soil, and here the cornfield ended. A small cabin stood to the left of a sturdy post
oak, and there was a man hunched over beneath the tree. Kau lay flat in the boundary stalks of corn, watching as the negro took a file to a rusty plowshare. A pretty woman came out onto the porch and called to the man in Spanish, a language Kau recognized but did not speak. The man waved back at her, and then the woman walked barefoot across the dirt yard to a scrap-wood chickenhouse. She opened the door and two dozen clucking Dominickers came parading out.

The black-and-white hens were followed by a colossal rose-combed rooster. The hens scratched the dirt for insects and seed while the rooster stood with its head cocked to the morning sky, searching for hawks. The woman slipped into the chickenhouse, then came back out with an armful of brown eggs cradled against her stomach. The rooster charged after her, and the man stopped his steady filing to laugh.

“
Gallo bobo
,” said the woman to the rooster. It came at her again and she kicked the bird hard in the side with her foot. Barred feathers flew and the rooster shied off. “
¿No comprendes?
” she said.

The rooster gave a series of violent squawks but quit the fight, joining a group of hens clustered in a far corner of the yard. The farmer had stood and seemed to be jeering it. “
¡Nunca capitulas!
” he shouted.

The woman smiled and rocked her hips from side to side, and Kau thought he heard her say the tall man’s name—Pelayo, she called him. She pretended to throw an egg at her husband, and he pretended to duck.

“
¡No más, Elisenda!
” said the farmer Pelayo. He dropped the file and raised his hands up over his head. “
¡Capitulamos, Elisenda! ¡Capitulamos!
”

This woman Elisenda went back into the cabin, and Pelayo returned to the plowshare. Kau kept on with his spying. The sun rose higher and the day grew hot. Pelayo pulled his osnaburg shirt off, and Kau saw the whip scars of a runaway latticing the length of his back. Free negroes. The first he had seen since Africa. They live as farmers, he realized, farmers like the Kesa.

 

MIDDAY, TWIN GIRLS in simple cotton dresses—children eleven or twelve years old with boy-short hair—emerged from farther down the cornfield carrying a dead rabbit. They laid the rabbit on the porch of the cabin and went to Pelayo. He said something that Kau could not hear, then handed one of them the long, curved knife that he wore on his side.