The Eden Hunter (23 page)

“How you mean?”

“They are only waiting for the soldiers to get into position across from our fort before they sail up.” Xavier was slurring his words slightly, and Kau realized that he had been drinking. His eyes were glassy and red. “They are expecting to provoke us. And when they do—”

“I understand.” Kau bit a clear corner of fat from his pork-steak. He swallowed and then spoke again. “Makes sense.”

“
Sí
.”

“They gonna win.”

Xavier looked at him. “We have a strong fort.”

“It won’t matter none.”

“Why do you say this?”

Kau ducked into the tent and began to search through his saddlebags. Only one of Benjamin’s sling-stones remained. He went back outside and tossed the smooth stone over the fire. Xavier caught it with both hands.

“What?” said Xavier.

Kau moved the flat of his hand through the air. “Study on that,” he said. “See what a river do to a rock over time?”

 

THAT NIGHT HE saw one of the Choctaws come galloping through the open gate on a lathered horse. Again Garçon gathered his men. Activity upriver. The American soldiers were finally on the move, and from the northeast came a mixed-blood chief named
McIntosh and a hundred and fifty Lower Creeks. Soon this would be a siege. The last wagonloads of firewood were collected and the gate secured. No one was to leave without the permission of the General.

Kau watched as they prepared to more properly torture Daniels. Xavier told him that the soldiers were demanding it—as they had convinced themselves that this boy had fired the shot that killed the pigeonkeeper, a man most of them had never even seen. And that none of the other soldiers had been there with Israel on the water that day was not important. They wanted revenge and Garçon promised them that they would have it. He ordered the execution of the prisoner that same night and there was ceremony to it. The boy feared fire and so fire was chosen.

A bonfire was built and a vat of black tar set to bubbling. The soldiers cheered as Daniels was taken in chains from the small stockade attached to the barracks. The boy saw the fire and began to sob. Because most of the soldiers had been slaves, Daniels was treated as a slave. His hands were tied to the pine flagstaff, and Garçon whipped him bloody. Shifting to protect his shredded back, Daniels would be beaten across the side and sometimes the face. Twenty lashes from the whip and the boy fainted. The Choctaws were waiting nearby, and at last Garçon called for them.

Kau had heard that they were experts in torture, these renegade Choctaws. The boy was given over to them, and the warriors sat with him for a while, treated his wounds even. Once Daniels was strong enough to stand they brought him closer to the fire. He was stripped naked and his penis cut off, thrown into the coals to
blacken, shrivel, and burn. They were painting the blistering sailor with tar when Kau finally walked away.

 

BEAH HAD REFUSED to watch the slow killing of Daniels and he found her in her tent, staring at a flickering candle. He sat beside her on the camp bed and told her that soon he would be leaving again. “But I’m wantin you to come with me,” he said. “I think I’ve found a place for us. An island.”

She leaned toward him and her loose dress rode low across her chest. He looked down into the black space between her large breasts as she kissed the side of his face. He waited for her to speak but she said nothing.

“I believe we could be safe there,” he said.

“No,” she told him. “I don wanna go with you no more.”

“Why not?”

She pulled away from him. “What all you know about me? I mean you know anythin about where I come from? How I done got here?”

“How would I know any of that?”

“People talk.”

“You talk.”

“Not jus me.”

He shrugged. “You speakin English, I always figured you come from Georgia.”

“Well, you right.” She picked a ball of brown lint from the flat of her dress. “But you ain’t never heard nothin more, that so?”

“I ain’t heard nothin at all about you.”

And so she told him, told him how she had been working in the house of a plantation near Augusta, how she had a husband and five children living there, a mother and a father. There was a trader she came to know and trust, a freed slave who sold venison in the market. He was the one who had told her about the British and their negro fort, and this had been a curse. The fort had haunted her, dominated her dreams and distracted her days—until finally one morning she filled a basket with all the house silver and went running to the market.

Beah placed her hand on his knee. “What I’m tellin you is this—no, I can’t leave after all. But it be real good you turnin back to ask me.”

“I don see it,” he said.

“I left them all behind, understand? Wagoned out that same night hid under a pile of deer hides.” She tapped at his leg. “But you see you askin means at leas maybe you still got a soul worth savin.” She smiled at him. “You was a selfish one.”

He made to stand but she grabbed hold of his hand and pulled at him.

“Don pout,” she said.

“You was wantin me to take you and now you sayin no.” The tent had cooled with the night and felt something like a cave. “What gone changin?” he asked. “What of your own soul?”

“Thas the thing of it.” She lifted his hand to her mouth and kissed it. “I get now that I need to die here jus like you needed to risk comin back for me.”

He looked at her. “You sayin you ain’t scared?”

She stood and blew out the candle. It went dark and he heard her dress drop to the dirt. A moment later and she was in the bed and on him. She whispered in his ear and he felt smothered by her, buried. “You know I’m scared,” she said. “But I got my penance to suffer now.”

 

IN THE MORNING he found Garçon at the pigeonhouse, doting on his birds. Kau walked over to him, and from somewhere distant came the sharp crack of a man splitting wood. Garçon opened his hands and a pigeon went fluttering off.

Kau spoke: “I might be goin fore long. Is that all right?”

“What of Beah?”

“She stayin.”

Garçon shut the door of the pigeonhouse. “That does not surprise me,” he said.

Kau looked up and realized that the entire flock had been set free; a black ball of birds was circling the fort. “It does me.”

“But that changes nothing for you?”

“I spose it don.”

Garçon nodded and began walking back to his tent. Already the first of the released pigeons had dropped down exhausted onto the perch that marked the trap-entrance of its home. At twenty paces the General turned and spoke. “Then join me this evening for a meal,” he said. “Join me just one last time.”

 

HE SAT IN front of Beah’s tent and let his thoughts extend beyond the nurse. He felt that Garçon was probably in some part insane,
but still the man had taught him things. From studying on this general he had learned what it meant to look forward with one’s life and not back. He experimented with a vision of his own future. Beah had refused to go with him, but he began to ponder whether it might not be so impossible to leave with another sort of person. And in fact Beah had suggested that very same thing. When he pressed himself against her she had said, Go on and find youself someone greener than me. Someone without no real sin. Over and over she had said that, moaned that. Go on and find youself someone greener than me. Someone without no real sin.

There seemed to be women everywhere in the fort now. A pregnant pair hurried past to fill buckets from the well, and he watched them come and he watched them go. They were married no doubt, the wives of soldiers. That those two women—that all of them—would be widows or dead soon enough was meaningless now. The wives would remain with their doomed men and so instead he considered the younger ones, the girls too old to be children but not yet married, those still living in their fathers’ cabins. If he could have one of that class, just one, he could maybe start another family. Yes, they were horrified by him—he knew that well enough. They quivered when he looked at them, changed their course when they saw him coming. And then there was the fact that he was small, that he was a tiny man. Still, he decided that if the opportunity arose he would try to take one of those handsome daughters with him to that St. Vincent Island. Perhaps in time she would come to see that he had saved her, that he was not the dangerous little man she had thought him to be.

 

AT MIDDAY XAVIER sought him out in Beah’s tent. Kau was lying in her bed with a mug of water resting on his bare chest. Beah was gone, off to care for the kicked man in the infirmary. Xavier dragged a chair closer and sat. “I hear that she will not leave?”

“No.”

“We have no chance here.”

“Thas true.”

Kau drank his water down, and Xavier lifted a pitcher from the table and refilled the empty mug for him. It was very hot. “He would never allow me to go,” said Xavier.

“You gonna ask him?”

“No.”

“Then don. Jus run.” Kau set the mug on the table and then propped himself up on his elbows. “In a minute he’ll be dead and ain’t none of it will matter.”

“Do not talk like that.”

“Don wish it. It jus be.”

Xavier lifted his hand to quiet him. “Stop,” he said. Then, in a low voice: “I have already decided to join you.”

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

Kau spun sideways in the bed so that he was now sitting up and facing him. “I’m leavin tomorrow,” he said. “Come and meet me here after dark, after evbody done gone off to sleep.”

 

THAT AFTERNOON HE saw a girl in a long green dress. She was standing in one of the alleyways that ran between the tents, talking with
the twins Marcela and Ramona. She teased them and they teased her right back. He realized then that this was their kin, a pretty older sister he had somehow never seen. The twins spotted him, and when they warned their sister of his presence he heard them say a name—Juaneta. She was fine-featured and dark, saw him staring but did not look away. Of all the young women in the fort this Juaneta alone seemed not to fear him. He watched her finally slip into a tent with her sisters and remembered what Beah had said about finding himself a green girl. He wondered what should amaze him more—the green dress, or that he would happen upon someone with a name so similar to that of Janeti. Someone prettier than any woman he had seen since Africa.

 

THE FINAL MEAL he shared with the General was extravagant—a courtboullion, Garçon told him—thick steaks of bass poached in a red gravy of crushed tomatoes. The mulatto cook began to prepare their plates, but Garçon dismissed the man and called for Xavier.

Xavier was posted outside, and when he looked into the tent his head seemed to be cut off and floating against the white canvas. “Sir?” he asked.

“Help us with all of this,” said Garçon. “I think that maybe I am safe from rebellion for at least through supper.”

Xavier leaned his longrifle against the wall of the tent, then removed the round-hat he had found to replace the one that had been lost in the river. He sat with them at the table, and Kau saw that his hands were shaking slightly. “
Gracias
,” he said. “Thank you, sir.”

“As you likely know,” said Garçon, “our friend here will be leaving us soon.”

“Yes, sir. He has told me that.”

“Right.” Garçon filled a second glass with beer and passed it to Xavier. “And that is a shame, is it not?”

“It is. Yes, sir.”

Garçon lifted his glass and Xavier did the same. Kau realized that they were both looking at him, waiting for him to follow. He raised his glass of water and Garçon continued. “But he is with us now,” he said. “And so we drink to him while we still can.”

The three glasses clicked together. Another toast. “And to Israel,” said Garçon. “A man who laid down his life for us.” The glasses collided once again, and now the General was staring at Xavier. “There is simply no greater love,” he said.

 

HE SAT WAITING, and at some lost hour after sunset Juaneta finally emerged from her tent. She wore only a thin nightgown, and her feet were bare same as his. She walked across the fort, and he followed by the light of the high moon. She went behind the artillery bank, and he crept up to the top. The girl was crouched down below, urinating near a ditch that drained into the river. She finished and he approached, shuffling his feet so that she would hear him coming. She looked up and saw him. “
¡Quieto!
” she said.

He stopped halfway down the back of the artillery bank, then patted at his chest and spoke slowly. “My name is Kau,” he told her.

“What do you want?”

“You know English?”

“Go away.”

“Don be afraid of me.” She threw a clod of dried dirt at him as he said this. It hit his chest and exploded into dust. He wiped his shirt clean with the flat of his hand. “You that man Pelayo’s daughter?” he asked.

“I am.”

He pointed upriver toward the farm, the chickenhouse. “How come I never seen you?”

She did a quick twirl on her toe tip and her loose nightgown billowed high around her waist. “I was gone.”

“Gone where?”

“I live here.”

“At the fort?”

“At the fort,” she said.

“What you do here?”

She smiled. “
El General
,” she said, “he teaches me.” She climbed up the artillery bank until she stood in front of him. She was his height but she was also only thirteen, maybe twelve even. In another summer she would pass him and in three she would tower. Already she seemed to understand this. “I asked you what you want.”

“I—”

She laughed and then spoke before he could answer. “Oh, I know what you want.” She sat down in the wet grass. “I see how you are looking at me right now,
hombrito
.”