The Eden Hunter (15 page)

“Go on,” she said. “Test them out.”

He gripped a crutch in either hand, then tucked the linen-wrapped rests snug under his arms. She put a hand on his shoulder as he eased clear of the bed. He wobbled across the infirmary and she clapped for him.

“Good,” she said. “Now you think you ready to see the General?”

He nodded and she flew forward in a rush. He struggled to escape as she began to wrestle the nightshirt off him, but she kept on until finally he gave up and was naked. She threw the nightshirt aside and laughed.

“What you think? You think I ain’t seen all of you yet?” She smiled at him. “You doin good enough down there.”

She handed over the clothes that Pelayo’s twin daughters had given him. They had been washed and smelled of lye. He put on the osnaburgs and then looked around the infirmary. “Where’s the rest of it?” he asked.

“Rest of what?”

“My saddlebags. My knife. My belt.”

“And your ugly red club?”

“All of it.”

“Questions for the General, I spose.”

He looked at her. “Am I his prisoner?”

Beah opened the thick door and its iron hinges squeaked. “Could be, ” she said. “But you sure ain’t one of mine.”

 

FOR THE FIRST time he ventured outside of the infirmary. It was early morning and except for a sprinkling of negro soldiers in red-coats the fort still seemed empty. He stood with Beah and blinked in the sunlight.

The timber walls of the fort were a doubled layer of pine logs, ten-foot pickets with their ends sharpened into points that were glossy with wept sap. In the eastern corners earthen embankments formed diamond-shaped bastions that rose up fifteen, twenty feet and were crowned with cannons. A hidden sentry whistled down at them from the nearest bastion and Beah giggled.

“Fool,” she said.

She began walking west toward the river and he followed after her on his crutches. They passed stables and a stone well—a long cabin she told him served as the barracks for the bachelor soldiers, those men with neither farms nor families. Near the center of the fort an eight-sided earthwork surrounded a low log building. “That be the powder house,” said Beah.

They walked on. Closer to the river a large canvas tent abutted the south wall, and a young soldier was guarding its entrance. In the morning sun his dark skin shined the same color as the barrel of the musket he was holding.

Beah approached and the soldier put up a hand. “
Buenos días, Señor Xavier
,” said Beah. “Please no shoot us.” She laughed. “This here Kau.”

The soldier Xavier studied him for a moment and then went into the tent. There came the murmur of conversation, and finally Kau heard the calm, clear voice of Garçon. “Send the man in,” he said.

Xavier emerged from the tent and motioned for Kau to enter. “Go on now,” said Beah. “And don be tellin him what all we talked about neither.” She laughed again when she said this, laughed like she really did not care either way, and then rubbed at the top of his head. He slid out from under her hand and she walked off, still chuckling.

The flap of the tent was tied open and he maneuvered himself inside. Garçon stood behind a wooden table, hatless but in uniform. The tent smelled like dried roses. Garçon took the crutches and then helped him into a shaky chair. There was a pitcher of water on the table, that and the bleached-out skulls of what looked to be a bear
and a panther. Garçon sat down across from him and smiled. “You are feeling better, I hope?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

Garçon nodded and without the tricorn his pirate braids fell down across his face. He parted them with his hands, then tucked the long strands behind his ears. “Xavier tells me that your name is Kau?”

“Yes.”

“Did they give you a slave name?”

“Adam.”

Garçon leaned closer. “Adam?”

“Yes.”

Garçon touched his own front teeth, then pointed at him. “So you were indeed born in Africa, Kau?”

“I was. Yes.”

“And how long since you ran off?”

“The moon be what now?”

“Two nights ago it was new.”

“It summer then?”

“Yes.”

Kau tapped at his fingers. “Then I left about eleven weeks back.” A horsefly was trapped in the tent. He watched it pause then go restless, pause then go restless. “I was a long while with them chickens.”

“You know your numbers.”

“Some. Enough for countin at leas.”

“Where are you coming from?”

“Mississippi.”

“And that red bone of yours?”

“Gifted to me.”

“By?”

“Indians. Redsticks.”

Garçon shook his head. “You must have had a great deal of good fortune on this journey of yours—before you met my farmers, at least.”

“I spose.”

“Can you shoot a musket?”

“A little, but not really.”

“So were you coming to enlist?”

“Enlist?”

“To fight.”

“I don understand what you askin me.”

Garçon made pistols with his fingers. “This is a fort.”

Kau nodded.

“And here you are with us.”

“I was jus passin by. Floatin the river.”

“To where though?”

“Don know for sure.”

“Then it was good you were captured.”

“Good?”

“Indians eventually would have killed you or sold you. That or made you one of them.” Garçon stood and began to stalk the trapped horsefly around the tent. It flew high into the ceiling and he gave up. “They typically do not abide wanderers,” he said.

“I ain’t had no real trouble with Indians.”

Garçon collected the crutches and handed them to him. “Come along with me,” he said. “Please.”

Kau followed him outside and they walked past the pine flagstaff to the river. A grassy hillock formed the west wall of the fort, and along its crest a row of cannons sat pointing out over the water. Garçon waited for him and together they climbed to the top. They stood among the big black cannons, and Kau looked down at the brown coil of river.

“Would you ever believe,” said Garçon, “that two weeks ago there were three thousand Indians camped across the way?”

The fort was situated on the push side of a slow and easy bend, and the river was about a hundred yards wide from east bank to west bank, maybe more. Kau squinted but saw nothing. He tried to imagine the Indians but could not; all he saw was green forest.

“What kind?”

“Seminoles. Some of what is left of your redsticks.”

“They jus gone?”

Garçon spun around and Kau turned with him. The rising sun had cleared the pines behind the fort and now sat throbbing like an egg yolk through a curtain of haze. Garçon pointed toward it. “East and then south,” he said. “They are running. Even some of my own men have fled with them.”

“From what?”

“The Americans will be coming for us. They all know that.”

“And you?”

“Sure. I know it, too.”

“When?”

“Soon, I think. Very soon.”

Kau was silent as he considered all of this. He had already tried his hand at making war and had failed. He had no desire to fight anymore. As he stared out across that river at the unbroken forest he somehow felt certain that he was close to what he was seeking—too close to risk dying in the defense of another man’s fort. He asked if he was free to leave once his ankle had healed and saw Garçon smile. “Yes, of course,” said the General. “I do not keep slaves, Kau.”

 

HE WAS GIVEN a small tent of his own in a quiet section of the fort, near the earthwork that protected the powder magazine. Someone had laid his few belongings out on the camp bed for him—his saddlebags and his bone club, his knife and his belt—and he cinched the belt around the waistband of his pants, situating the knife sheath off his right hip. His canteen had been filled for him; he unscrewed the cap and took a long drink.

There was a table and a chair in the tent. He sat down and opened the saddlebags, saw the sling and the tinderbox, an assortment of sling-stones and arrowheads. For the first time in many days he allowed his mind to linger on the dead boy. The canteen had been Benjamin’s, a gift from one of the soldiers at the fort near Yellowhammer. Kau took another sip, letting the water fill his mouth before he swallowed. His throat felt much better now, and to be able to speak again took his thoughts to another silence broken.

A bitter winter night, seven moons after he had arrived from the Pensacola slave docks. Benjamin was six years old, and the inn was empty save the father and son. Kau was in the slave cabin eating a scrap-bone stew with Samuel when they heard it—the sound of a table turning over, dishes breaking. Samuel rose from his chair and he followed. They went outside, barefoot in the frost, and pressed their foreheads to the cold glass of the window.

The innkeeper was blind drunk on clear corn whisky, and Benjamin lay collapsed. He was bruised and bleeding. “Oh, my,” said Samuel. “Oh, my.” The old man moved to the porch, but Kau stayed at the window. A belt was being taken to the cut boy when Samuel knocked at the door. The innkeeper hollered something that Kau could not make out and Samuel entered, his felt hat folded over in his hands. Samuel spoke and the innkeeper came at him, hitting him across the face with the belt. Benjamin yelled but Samuel waved him quiet. The boy went racing out the back door as the slave took his beating for him. The belt rose and fell and rose and fell until at last the innkeeper was exhausted and Samuel allowed to leave. He stumbled past Kau without looking at him; blood was trickling from the corner of his eye.

They found Benjamin in the slave cabin, terror-curled on Samuel’s straw pallet. Samuel spread a spare blanket on the dirt floor, but Kau shook his head. He motioned toward his own pallet. “Les share it,” he said.

Samuel had only nodded at those first words of English from his silent friend, too beaten to even show surprise. “Thank you now, Adam,” he said in a low and tired voice. “Thank you now.”

 

KAU DRAGGED HIS chair to the entrance of the sweltering tent. A soldier—shirtless and pouring sweat—was standing atop the earthwork that surrounded the powder magazine. The young man was holding a cannonball and staring at him, and Kau held his gaze until at last the soldier looked away, leaving with his cannonball in the direction of the river. Kau saw him climb the artillery bank and set the cannonball down, then return to the powder magazine and emerge with another. Finishing with one the soldier would reappear with a next. One after the other until there was a high pyramid of cannonballs piled atop the distant artillery bank.

 

IN THE EARLY afternoon he heard a sentry blow a trumpet, and then he watched as the dozen bachelor soldiers left the barracks and hurried toward the river. Curious, he hobbled across the fort on his crutches, climbing the artillery bank to where the men had collected. There was something in the river, a big gray beast burrowing like a hippopotamus through far-off lily pads. “
¡Manatí!
” a soldier was shouting over and again.

The soldier Xavier appeared on the riverbank outside the fort, then began launching a canoe into the current. Garçon called out in Spanish, and a man with a longrifle laid himself flat against one of the cast-iron cannons on the artillery bank.

The beast continued with its grazing, and Kau saw Beah come shuffling over. She was breathing heavily from the climb up the steep artillery bank. She jiggled one of his crutches and panted. “How in the world you make it up here so easy?” she asked.

Xavier was halfway across the river when Garçon’s sharpshooter shot a hole in the pale head of the manatí. The men cheered but the sharpshooter cursed. He had missed the brain, it seemed. The manatí went to rolling as Xavier dug in with his paddle, closing the distance, and Kau could see blood in the foaming water. Xavier set down the paddle and bent low in the drifting canoe. He was close, an arm’s length from the dying manatí. He rose up holding a long wooden spear of some sort, then pumped his arm twice before driving the barbed point deep into the manatí’s side. Again the soldiers cheered.

The spear was connected to an empty barrel by a braided length of hemp. The manatí dove for deeper water, and the line disappeared coil by coil from the canoe into the river. Xavier dropped the barrel over the side and it went bobbing along.

Beah chuckled. “Jus like fishin,” she said.

It was not long before the manatí bled out and the barrel went still. Garçon sent some men to the riverbank with a brown ox, and a long rope was affixed to the barrel. They dragged the speared and jaw-shot creature up onto the bank like some giant water slug, and then Kau watched as they butchered the carcass, wasting nothing. Farmers’ wives and daughters came and went, filling wooden wash-tubs with intestine and bone, flat sheets of skin to be boiled and scraped and fried.

 

THAT NIGHT BEAH brought him to supper. Garçon had ordered much of the manatí roasted, and the English-speaking soldiers sat to one side of a blazing coal bed and the Spanish to another. Some of the negro soldiers had been slave-marked, and Kau saw shiny
cheeks branded with the initials of white men, ears notched in code like those of range stock. Between them all moved Xavier, translating the stories and jokes of one group for the other to enjoy. A soldier tossed the dregs of his rum onto the coals and there came a wet hiss.

Kau searched for Beah but she was gone now. He tried to set himself apart, but Garçon called him over and introduced him to the hungry men. “This is Kau,” he said, “and he knows more about where we come from than we ourselves do.” Xavier seemed to repeat this in Spanish, and then Garçon asked Kau to please show them all his teeth. When he complied one old soldier touched his forehead then his breast, his left shoulder then his right. The man pressed his thumb against his forefinger and kissed the nail. “
Madre de Dios
,” he said.