The Road to Reckoning (17 page)

‘It is too kind and too much.’ I smiled. ‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Well, if them politic men will teach anything it is that we must learn to cook for ourselves. They will not provide, yet we must pay for their own tables. How did that happen?’

He sprang up and went to his stove, stirring and cursing above it. He gave me another sorrowful look.

‘I did not mean to frighten about the Indians. You sleep now. I will watch us.’

I assured him that I was fine and bigger within than I looked and he nodded and stirred his stew harder.

I moved the half tun to the wall. To my right was the stiff blanket over the adit, keeping back the night. In front was mister Gore’s shelves and chattels, his implements swaying from the scaffold he had made under the tall roof. He had knives and hatchets, spoons and pots hanging off lanyards drilled through their handles all swinging above my head. He was well provisioned for ten, let alone one.

Pulling the blanket around, I reached for the wooden gun and drew it to my chest and smelled its oil. I aimed my feet toward the curtain and drew my knees up. I was sure that I would be too uncomfortable and aware of those stalking me to sleep. I closed my eyes for the first time since the hostler’s place. But I did sleep.

And I awoke in the dark to the ring of steel and iron.

My eyes shot open over the blanket across my nose. Left and right I scanned the room from the blanket’s shield. I could feel my pupils widening and the nerves of my eyes moving and waking my brain, my heart in my throat.

Just the wind!
My brain laughed and mocked.

See?
it said.
It rattles the old man’s pots and knives. No-one is coming, boy!
But I raised and looked about regardless. I was becoming preternaturally aware, as men do when they are stalked.

The window of the stove showed just a ribbon of red, weak above the coals. The isinglass shutters of the lantern, sat on a barrel, showed pinpricks of life and sketched out the cave.

Mister Gore had gone to his cot and there were round lumps all around him that must have been his pets.

I heard the rain next. Still there. Still shrouding me from those that hunted. A long night. Good. Daylight, I am sure, would show me like a diamond. And then the night not so good, as my wakefulness brought on a full bladder.

I tried to settle down with it, wait for the dawn, but that never does work, and the further you are away from the head the less it does.

I sat up to think on it. I could go outside the curtain, in the rain. No. I stood and reached for the shuttered lantern.

I would go down the mine to the other curtain. I was sure mister Gore relieved himself as such on occasion.

I took the lantern from the barrel and crept down to the mine proper, not wanting to wake my benefactor. If I would go far enough beyond the curtain, I was sure the natural damp and cold would not mind my water.

Gore’s cats’ eyes followed the lantern; even those asleep cocked one green reflected glance. The curtain was heavy; these things were weighted and made to hold back fire, as I said, but I managed it as quietly as I could.

There was a great stifled air at me. The lamp was before my face and I dared open one of the shutters, which jumped at the draft and illuminated enormously. I would find a wall, put the lamp down, and be at my appointed business and back to sleep before I was dry against my leg.

Creeping down the slope, I held the lamp above and my right arm out to feel for the wall. I imagined the hundreds of men who had been here before me, and as if in instinct of them I swung the lamp to seek their torches set into the walls. And there they were. Cold. Just as empty and without work as the men that set them.

I could smell the wood and the coal-fire of thirty years all around. That smell is ingrained even now and even with all your gas and good anthracite you can recall the black in your nostrils and under the hair of your skin. It takes only one fire and back you come again. The caveman wearing fur. But I just needed to unhitch my britches.

I sidled to the right, put the lantern to the ground, and held my hand out to check I was not about to wet something important to mister Gore or hit a ledge that would spray back at me.

My hands touched on things that were cold. You get to know that touch as you grow older. I have stood in churches with it in front of me and touched its brow on that long day when I buried my sons.

These things jiggled and rattled as my hands roamed and I drew back. There is nothing as lucid as putting your hand among human bones. The revulsion cold-burns your fingertips and you feel guilty somehow.

My foot touched the lantern and I needed to pick it up to see, I had to pick it up. I had paid my red cent to enter the tent, to see the grotesque, as you have, as we drink our labeled whiskey together, as you asked me for a story.

The circus curtain pulls away but the lurid paintings on the tent outside should be enough for imagination. The deformed and the twisted smiling through their misery with serpent’s eyes and filed teeth. Turn away with just the tent’s exterior. Do not pay to go within.

I swayed the lantern and it echoed back along a row of skulls. It still echoes back whenever I forget to light a lamp at twilight and must do so in the dark.

Their black eyes, perfect and pleading, mouths grinning and placid and welcoming me to join. I lowered the light to see cloth and bones. Piled here and there, loose like that, no order. A leg bone jammed in a perplexed mouth, gagging on the ludicrous.

I think I stepped back, my eyes accustomed. I could not know how many bodies, bits of bodies, maybe a dozen skulls and then those that were not quite skulls. I do not ever try to remember them.

As I said, I think I stepped back, but however it happened I felt a body behind and I whisked round and the lantern lit upward into Strother Gore’s grin. He had more teeth now and his eyes were black. He said nothing. He had a bludgeon raised and a claw set to grab my collar.

‘
Mister Stands!
’ I yelled, calling out for names I had forsaken, but it did some trick as Strother’s neck twisted behind him and I swung that lantern at his body and from my hand and ran down into the mine.

It was black and with my boots running I could not hear if I was being followed, but I had practice of being chased now, so I was bolder than most, I figured.

I scratched to a stop. Running down would be running to a wall. Up and out the only way. Up. Up past Strother Gore seeking me out, his spider-thin arms outstretched and sweeping for me, his catfish eyes hunting through the dark.

I ducked and went for the left wall but I hit the track and went down, winded. A secret blessing, for now I crawled quieter and when at the wall I got down flat and listened.

Nothing came but the draft over my head. Silence. But that was a lie. I just could not hear him creep.

I got up and crawled, good and quiet, but then I heard footsteps shuffling toward and I went down on my chest again.

Strother Gore was coming and giggling and kissing the air at the same time, calling me like one of his pets. He never used words. I guess that when it came down to his madness it was better for him not to. He would be human then.

I held my hand to my mouth and lay still. The only thing in my head was the stew that Strother had been boiling, and that bludgeon. He had knives and hatchets and all. That would have been the end of me. Maybe he did not like the bleeding, maybe it ruined things. I wished I could not think on it, and then I could not as I heard him close to me.

He skidded on the rough ground but he knew this place and I heard him step over the track, invisible as it was.

He moved past and I heard him scoop up some gravel and throw it in an arc. I heard the stones scattering off the walls. I figured him for something like a bat and that this was just another show that he had been in before. None of this was new to him. He was listening for the stones hitting me, listening for cloth instead of stone. He kissed his lips some more, then a grunt as he bent for more gravel.

My need now was to move, to cut for the curtain and the outside. No doubt I was faster than Strother Gore and he would not count that I, with all my tribulations, was becoming used to fear.

I began to rise as he moved on, but a small body brushed against me, a wet nose touched my cheek, and a tail went under my nose. I went down again.
Damn his cats!
Another one now found me out and writhed against my face. I elbowed them aside and they did what cats do and voiced their vexation or called to their food bearer.
What they must eat with this man! Them thinking of me for their bellies!

I heard Strother Gore turn with a hiss. A venomous sound that I will never forget and still hear when I am far from my porch and alone in my fields and a ruffed grouse flies away from my plow.

I scrambled up and ran hell for leather, as marauders say. There was no doubt nor danger that I could make the curtain before him, but I knew that I would have to pause to haul it aside. I heard a frustrated howl chasing me.

I made the black curtain and pulled at it but it resisted with the draft against it and tried to push me back for its master.

I went down and beat at it to bully through, then a slavering gasp on me, his hooks on my sides, giggling as he tickled for a grip, but I screamed and kicked back and went under that curtain like a greased shoat and he made a hoo-hoo sound.

Now I was in the cave, but his laugh behind and another brattice to fight through and then what? The night. The rain. The Devil behind me.

I sprang for the curtain and, God help me, did I not spare a sight to look on that damned wooden gun sitting on the barrel. But the lustful breath behind pushed me on and I grabbed for the curtain as he prized on my boot and I was done. Lost.

I squealed and skipped against his grip. Skipping to save my life.

And the curtain swept aside.

And Henry Stands’s ghost stood before me!

The rain cut him and his long coat out from the night and ran off him, down the brim of his hat like the beaded veil on Chinese emperors in books. Those veils represent the stars. The stars where the emperor comes from.

Henry Stands looked at me and then at Strother Gore frozen at my heel. Henry was soaked through, his whiskers combed with the rain so his mouth took the pose of a mountain lion’s. He did only one thing as he held the curtain over his head and that was a boot to Strother Gore’s face, showing him how little he was, and that fiend flew back all the way to his oven with a squeal.

A hand came over me and hauled me out into the night. Henry Stands delayed only to look me over. He dropped me and held the curtain like holding back a cage door.

‘Go wait on the track,’ he said. ‘I will be along.’

I brushed the rain from my face. ‘How will I know it’ll be you?’

I do not know why I said those words.

He pulled his hat down against the rain. ‘It’ll be me,’ he said, and I went as I was told.

And Henry Stands went under the curtain.

I dodged under the rain, finding the path from where I had come, and on turning upward, even slipped on the same slate that had got me before. Not wanting to move farther, I sat and hid in a bush. I was wearing dead men’s clothes, my own left in the cave and, God forgive, if I did not hope that Henry Stands would return with them, that he would think of me regardless of his contentions, and then, assured that he would not return at all, I sat convinced that I was destined to die in the wild and no-one would know of me. I would not become a man, and yet I had made steps in the world that had killed many.

Footsteps came through the mud and I braced back into my bush like a startled possum. The coat appeared, the hat low across its face, the whole figure drowned and weary as if coming scooped out of a river.

Mister Stands!

I rolled forward and jumped up into his path. ‘Mister Stands!’ I cried.

He wiped his hands on his black coat and pushed my shoulder. The runoff from his hat fell into my eyes.

‘You didn’t eat that stew, boy?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I had a biscuit.’

He brushed past and put his hand behind and I reached out for it but it was not his hand he wished me to take. The wooden pistol filled my palm and I took it. I looked down at it, heavy in my hand. He stopped a pace away, his long back to me.

I looked back on the path, thought about my own clothes as the rain hit my neck. The rain was easing now as the moon was going down and the dawn was blue. But I was cold.

‘Mister Stands?’ I said. ‘I would get my clothes.’ He kept his back to me, took off his hat, and shook off its reservoir of rain.

‘Don’t,’ he said, putting his hat back. ‘You’ll dry soon. You have your hat and coat at the camp.’

‘The camp?’ I had almost forgotten. ‘But …’

‘You moved through the brush like a lame steer,’ he said. ‘I would be disappointed, son, if you thought me dead by that trash.’

‘They are dead?’ My voice exalted.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Wait and I will tell. We can make tea at least.’ He pushed aside branches to break our passage.

‘Follow me down.’

I was at Henry Stands’s back and he did not talk. As soon as we came to water he took off his coat and hat and rolled and knelt to wash. I noticed he had no weapons on him, no belt of leather pouches for even skinning knives, and for a moment I felt pity for Strother Gore.

‘Mister Stands?’ I was the first to voice. ‘I’m sorry I ran.’

He did not hear, perhaps for the creek, or at least he said nothing and shook on his coat and planted his hat and set to walking.

He waved me closer and I yelled at the sight of Jude Brown tethered loose to a bush. Damn if that horse did not dance a little on the stones at the sight of me, then he remembered his offish nature and went back to his chewing while I hugged his neck.

‘He helped find you.’ Henry Stands walked past us. ‘He could smell your stains.’

‘I’m glad you came, Mister Stands.’

‘I figured you’d go up,’ he said. ‘The rest was just your clumsy feet.’