The Last Crossing (19 page)

“I finish the revolver quick for you,” clucks Hofstedder. “My son, Otto, comes soon. Otto makes the beautiful cartridge. Not one grain too much, not one grain too little. Just so,” Hofstedder says, pinching his thumb and forefinger together, grinning with the beauty of Otto’s workmanship. “This afternoon he delivers for you.”

Back in my room, armaments stowed, I try to nap, but I’m too stirred up. Every time I close my eyes, I see myself approaching the Gaunts’ camp, and Lucy standing by a wagon, hand shading her eyes to see who’s come calling. She’s likely to be curious about the saddled Morgan I’ll be leading. Mr. Straw, did some mishap befall your fellow traveller? No? Then why are you leading a horse?

It’s for you, Mrs. Stoveall. A lunatic is asking you to ride off with him.

A man gets to my age, there isn’t much he has to offer a younger woman but property and the promise of good treatment. If Lucy gave me the chance, I’d stick to her, loyal as a dog, see her safe. I hear myself promising it to the ceiling. “Custis Straw’ll hold to you, girl.”

Charm and dash I never could learn. You are born with those, the same as blue eyes or sound teeth. Not that some didn’t try to instruct me in them. Such as Mother’s friend, Mrs. Conkin, the two of us sitting together on a settee at a parlour dance back home in civilized Indiana, and she asks me why I’m not waltzing when there’s so fine a supply of pretty girls on hand. Nineteen and bashful, all I could do was shrug. “Custis,” she advised me, “a woman is attracted to a man who directs his heart to her. Genuine interest is all that is required.”

“I like women fine,” I remember saying to her, “but I get no return of it.”

She shed a motherly smile on me. “You like women, Custis. But you behave towards them just as you do towards the men you like. You must recognize the distinctions that separate the sexes. To do so is pleasing to a lady.”

I suppose what she meant was I oughtn’t talk to women as I did to men. Bluntly. I should bow, hand out compliments about their eyes, their hands, their hair. Dance attendance instead of trying to plumb their real and lasting qualities.

About four o’clock, Hofstedder’s son, Otto, delivers the Sharps. He’s a surprise. The boy’s cross-eyed. I don’t know about his future, a cross-eyed gunsmith isn’t likely to inspire confidence. One look at him and I decide to make a dry run with the cartridges he loaded. I collect my horse, Dan, at the livery and ride out of town to the big old boulder that sits like a cue ball on a billiard-table-level plain.

The rock’s the height of a man and round, a buffalo stone polished smooth as glass by thousands of cows and bulls who’ve been coming here to rub winter wool from their coats for hundreds of years. There’s a deep trench circling it made by the herds milling about to have their scratch. The bottom of it’s carpeted deep with hair, dust, and old, powdery dung.

I pace off three hundred yards from the stone and drive the iron shooting rest for the Sharps into the ground. I chamber a round, settle on my haunches, lay the heavy barrel in the V of the rest, and set the sight on the tang strap to three hundred yards. I’m all ready to fire when I realize I’ve forgot to bring something for a target.

I sit here, looking down the sights with the buttplate snug in my shoulder, smooth walnut stock cool on my cheek, sights resting on a boulder big as a barn door. This is no test. Even Aloysius could hit it. With the sun hot on my shoulders, the gun pressed into me, a memory springs into my mind, another afternoon years ago, our company on a knoll tangled up in a lackadaisical skirmish with Rebels below. They couldn’t shake us from the height, our position was too strong for them to risk an uphill charge, and we had no reason to go down, not with the Confederates secure behind a snake fence and a stone wall.

The only fly in the ointment was the federal mortar the Rebels had captured and turned against us. The injury the shells they lobbed at us was slight, we’d done our spade work, dug in, and all that was necessary was to keep our heads down. But we had a smooth-cheeked boy for a captain, some green slip who’d won a commission through political pull. Full of himself, he considered it cowardly to sit and wait things out. I could see him and the lieutenant with their heads together, a bad sign because the lieutenant would sooner kiss arse than eat breakfast. Then they called for me.

The captain didn’t know my name, and didn’t ask for it, just called me “Uncle,” the handle the young fellows had fastened on me because to them I was as old as Methusaleh. “Uncle,” he said, “Lieutenant Deschere tells me you’re a fine shot. I want you to make your way down that hill and pester their battery with sniper fire. They are making far too free with us.”

He was a stiff little prick, with a jut to his jaw and a court-martialling eye, so I did as I was ordered without argument. Got on my belly and wriggled down the slope, Spencer carbine strapped to my back. I snaked through whatever would give me cover, slithered through briars, cane, nettles, thinking that scrapes and scratches were better than the bite of Confederate bullets.

It took me half an hour to reach a brake close enough to the mortar. My tunic was torn to rags and so was I. Laying in the welcome shade, soaked in sweat and blood, gulping air like a wind-broken horse, I watched the men’s heads bobbing up and down behind the stone wall as they worked the mortar. Better still, my position showed me an officer in plain view, pacing back and forth behind that captured gun.

I took the field glass that the captain had given me and trained it on the Confederate. He looked even younger than the boy who had sent me down the hill. A child of the quality, his uniform bought by Father, no butternut grey for him but the finest tailoring, a yellow sash cinched about his waist, a planter’s hat with one side of the brim turned up and pinned, and with a pheasant cock feather waving like a banner. He had locks down to his shoulders, every bit as bright and yellow as his sash.

I counted the boy’s clockwork paces. He would stride five steps, do an about-face, stride five more, about-face again. Back and forth he went like a wolf in a cage. The jitters wouldn’t let him keep still. He was trying to burn it off marching.

I steadied my carbine on a tree branch, laid the sights to the spot where the boy halted his parade to spin around and tramp back. I sat there for a long time, the grey breast of his tunic swinging into my sights and disappearing, arriving and departing over and over. I heard the mortar pounding on, and knew my captain was up there on the hill, cursing me for a tardy coward, but I couldn’t bring myself to pull the trigger on that boy. Not when he was frozen in my sights like a duck on a pond. At the least, he deserved the same chance as a game bird, to be shot on the wing.

I dealt him sporting odds, a shot to the temple while he was on the move. Down the line he came, taking long limber strides. I waited, counted his steps, the Spencer aimed to where his bouncing, jaunty hat would soon arrive. Leading a pheasant in flight; leading that brave, twitching cock feather on his hat. I counted to four, eased down on the trigger. It blew his hat off with the breath of Almighty God Himself.

I might as easy have missed, but I didn’t.

That planter’s hat’s been tumbling in my mind for ages now. It sails up at the oddest times, turning slow and heavy in the air. I’ve been waiting years for it to fall. It never does.

I put the Sharps by, jerk the rest out of the ground, walk it to the rock, thrust it in the sod. I leave my silk bowler hanging on it.

I pace off a hundred yards and I set my front sight to that black speck. I own a pair of old man’s eyes now, reading Scripture print is a trial, but at longer distances I see things clear as ever. I haven’t discharged a weapon in three years, but I hear the words my old musketry instructor whispered in my ear. “Mister, squeeze that trigger like your lady’s nipple. Just hard enough to get results, but not hard enough to make her jump.”

One deep breath, ease half of it from the lungs, coax the trigger. My St. Louis hat jolts and twitches. Cross-eyed Otto packs a true load. I slip another cartridge into the breech, cock the Sharps, draw a bead, fire, and the hat bucks again. Then I start to miss, the Sharps is too heavy a gun to hold steady without a rest. But I keep firing and reloading, determined to make that hat take flight. The barrel grows hot in my hand, too hot to load. Just like the rifles of the 6th Wisconsin did at South Mountain, the day McClellan, watching the men of the West hold back the Confederates, dubbed us the Iron Brigade.

I drop the Sharps. I’m light-headed, haven’t had a bite of grub today. The Remington revolver has come out of its holster and into my hand, and I’m advancing on the bowler. I hear myself counting steps just like I did that Confederate boy’s. I snap a shot off. I’m shaking, the pistol waving up and down on the end of my arm like a trainman’s flag. I break into a trot, a slow clumsy charge through all those years of battle, firing fast and wild. I’m back in the woods of the Wilderness with that other pistol in my hand. One bullet left in the cylinder when I stumble up to the bowler, shove the barrel of the revolver up under the riddled crown, and blow it to kingdom come.

I see it land.

J
erry Potts is the sensitive antennae of the caravan. He feels their way for them, heavily laden wagons creeping behind him, the slow, fumbling body of a cumbersome insect. From dawn to dusk they crawl past ravines and low prominences, inch over muddy river fords. After two days they gain British territory, steal past the southern flanks of the Cypress Hills, squirm round Old Man On His Back Hills, nosing their way towards the Whitemud River. There, last November, an itinerant prospector had found the body of the Reverend Obadiah Witherspoon. The only thing that identified the preacher was an engraved communion cup beside his corpse. “Presented to Reverend Witherspoon by a grateful congregation. Godspeed you in your work.” When the prospector had brought his news and the silver cup back to Fort Benton, word of it reached I. G. Baker. A sum of money had been forwarded to Baker two months before from a Mr. Henry Gaunt with instructions that he was to offer it to Mr. Simon Gaunt when he and the preacher arrived in Fort Benton. The money was to be surrendered on one condition. That Henry Gaunt’s son promise to buy passage back to England with it. The boy refused outright.

Following the discovery of Witherspoon’s corpse, Baker had felt obliged to apprise Henry Gaunt of the turn of events, to inform him that there had been some disaster in the wilds and that although the body of his son had not been found, everything pointed to his death. The message took three months to reach Sythe Grange.

Baker’s letter had set all this in motion: the delirious monotony of travel, the passage through heat and dust, swarms of flies and mosquitoes, the spine-jolting bumps of wagons crossing an ochre prairie under the indifferent regard of a vast sky.

By afternoon, sun-scalded eyes drop to the rumps of the teams, seeking relief from limitless distances. The weary horses plod on, hauling their strange cargo: cases of Madeira, claret, port, brandy, half-bottles of champagne wine; delicacies of the well-stocked English pantry: pickled walnuts, marmalade, fish pâté, dried figs, blocks of dark chocolate, potted meats; the gear of the sportsman: a collapsible bath, shooting sticks, Belgian shotguns, rifles of every calibre, boxing gloves, an English longbow, clothyard arrows. Wagon boxes wail under the burden, and their drivers, Grunewald and Barker, uneasily contemplate the crash if they should tip.

Covered in fine sallow dust, Madge Stoveall’s grieving sister, Lucy, follows the caravan, a wan, sickly ghost who refuses to ride.

LUCY
Three days trailing these tailgates and I’ve about walked out of Abner’s castoff boots. Big toe’s so blistered it looks like a chunk of boiled okra. Mr. Charles asks me nicely to take a seat in his wagon, but I just smile and shake my head no, which makes him peer back at me from under his straw hat, all befuddled. Howsoever kind he is, I need to punish and wear down my body so I can sleep dreamless when night falls.

The hidden hand is at work in me. The very night of little Madge’s funeral, singing that song for her, Sister’s voice rose up in my throat. Then old Granny Timmin’s blood started to rustle in my veins, day by day growing stronger, speaking from the marrow of my bones.