The Road to Reckoning (18 page)

‘Thank you, Mister Stands,’ I called to the back of his neck.

He threw me a look from his shoulder. ‘Don’t. I will be in this for the monies now. Your promised fee from your man Colt. I will need a stake to get to Cherry Hill. I have nothing left.’

It was morning when we got back to our little copse of trees. The fire pit was still smoking, our boiler above it, our beds still on the ground. It was like I had only just stepped out from another room, my hat and coat on the ground as if I had vanished out of them by a witch’s spell. The only sound was the patter of the rain on the leaves and the only real sight was the steam coming off Henry Stands’s dead horse.

I looked at the beast’s hide, which was black and blue and red, a large piece of him gone from his leg and flank.

I stepped into the circle almost in wonder. I had not expected to ever see anything again so the trees and the white sky were all as if first seen, the morning painting the world anew. But the dead scene was discomposing.

‘What happened to your horse, Mister Stands?’

He stood beside it, his head angled in a study. ‘Pack your things,’ he said. ‘I will take the rigging and load them to your horse.’

‘But how did he …?’

Henry spun on me. ‘You want to know?’ He did not yell but his voice was curt. ‘You want to know how he died?’

I set to the fire and the boiler to keep myself low from Henry Stands’s scowl. Tea would make the air better. I looked about our sparse camp and Henry stood over me and told of his night.

‘Good for you that you ran,’ he said. ‘I could not have helped you.’

‘What happened?’

He walked around the fire pit in the footsteps crushed in the grass, and as he spoke I could see the tale written in the scarred ground and ending in his dead black stud.

‘They fired on me when you broke but that did not matter. I know good shots that could not shoot themselves in the head in the dark over a fire. Cowards never make good shots. That is how battles are won.’

He stooped to pick up a long rod of steel, and with a start I saw it was the barrel of his wind-rifle. He looked along the length of it.

‘They ran after you, or ran as I came at them. Then I went for the horse, for my rifle. Them other two commenced to firing with their guns but just as wild.’ He brought the barrel to me.

‘They must have shot the gun on my saddle. Hit the reservoir of air. I only know there was an explosion that knocked me cold. And this is the scene I awoke in.’ He nodded to the horse now being sniffed at by Jude Brown. ‘That’s what done for the horse.’

I remembered the fit of uproar I had heard behind as I sprinted. Not Hell clawing at me. It was the rupture of Henry Stands’s magnificent rifle, the compressed air exploding through a wild shot.

‘The gun was old. Past its prime. That was an iron tank.’ He set the barrel down. ‘You must reckon that even iron must get old.’

I still could not look at him straight. I reached for the tinder box with the striker and char cloth. The kindling was wet but with the cloth and coal I would work on starting. It would keep me busy.

‘It would have been quite a display. Enough to kill the horse. They must have thought the devil of it, thought me killed and gone after the others. Took the time to take my belt and guns. We have the ax and food at least.’

‘What are we to do, Mister Stands?’ And as I said it I began to dread that perhaps there was no longer a ‘we’ to consider.

He squatted at the fire. ‘You will have my wool hat and make this fire and tea. I will get some powder to help and I will cut some steak from the horse.’

‘I meant about the road … about them.’

He tipped back his hat. ‘Well, they have stolen from me. I will say they do not have long to live.’

I looked into the fire pit and struck a flame at last and then my tears came again. I pulled out the wooden gun from behind my back and threw it to the ashes for kindling.

My words spat at it.

‘That is the only dry wood we have.’ I wiped my eyes. ‘It should burn! It has given only bad luck!’

Henry reached in and plucked it from the ashes. ‘Hold now. You have gone through a lot with that toy. You might regret burning it yet.’

‘I hate it!’

‘Well, now, maybe
I
have been through a lot with that toy and do not want it burned.’

‘Your wind-rifle is gone! You had that in the war! You said it was older than you and I have destroyed it and killed your horse to boot! I have lost you all your guns and knives!’

I shot up, hid my filling eyes and brushed blowflies from the air that were getting fond of the horse and testing us for life.

‘You did not do that,’ he said. ‘And if not for the destruction of the gun I might have been dead now and not have come for you.’

‘And what of that? That man was going to
eat
me!’

Henry was brushing the ashes from the gun. ‘Whist! There are lots of men like that in wilder places. Every trail has talk of foresters and mountain men doing the same. I know of ghouls who get arrested and jailed for that madness and fifteen years later set about the same as soon as they can.’ He was not rubbing the ashes off the pistol but now more into it.

‘Well, now,’ he said, and put his hand to the boiler for the cold tea. He rubbed the mush of tea from the boiler along the barrel and cylinder of the gun and then held it in his fist by its grip and squinted at it to the sun with a long arm.

‘What do you think that looks like?’

The gun was dappled black now. I wiped my eyes and looked at it with the same squint as he.

‘It looks like iron,’ I said.

‘I reckon if you were in a darkened room … that looks like a real thing to me. Real enough.’

‘Mister Stands?’

He got up and sought his broken barrel.

‘Take this.’ He put it in my hand. ‘Tuck it over your arm.’

I rested it in the crook of my body.

‘Hold it like business.’

I swung it to him, two-handed, and he rubbed his whiskers.

‘That’ll do.’

I let the barrel hang by my side. ‘Mister Stands? You cannot consider going up against them with a wooden gun and a piece of one?’

‘Make the tea,’ he said. ‘And don’t be asking me doubts.’ He looked upon the wooden art of Sam Colt with new eyes.

‘You should know by now, son, that the world began when I was born.’

Henry Stands walked us out of there, leading me on Jude Brown’s back. We were still on a walking trail but Henry told me that we were between Stoddartsville and White Haven and he was keeping a count on the creeks we crossed and that before nightfall we would reach the Lehigh.

‘You must’ve come something of this way?’ he roared back at me. ‘One would remember crossing the Lehigh. It is a place to see.’

‘I … we came in at Stroud. We must have crossed it at a dull set. We went through Conyngham? Then to Berwick. It was five days. There was no wet country like this.’ And that was true. Even the ground seemed alive although Henry informed me that this was but the edge of the Shades of Death. There were dead pools and dead trees but these were being pushed back by the young live ones of spring. But I was glad that it was open enough. You could see a man coming yesterday, as mister Stands would say.

‘Your father must’ve went straight along the latitude. Guessing he had to with that wagon of yours.’

It did me no good to be reminded of my mother’s wagon. Surely boys should have better peace than this? I thought I would never sleep again or know a day when my heart was not fluttering. And now Henry Stands would get us killed for his pride. I was too young to know about pride, only of its sinful attribute. I did not attach it to honor and I reckon that God made pride a sin to stop men like Henry Stands coming through his gates and showing him his throne for a stool and kicking him from it. Hell must have been full of proud men, and the Devil used them for his jailers as Napoleon had done for his penal colonies, which were for the hardest unforgiving men.

‘But who will look after them?’ his marshals asked.

‘Worse men,’ the answer.

Henry Stands stopped and stood rigid, and Jude Brown snorted for grain but all Henry did was pass up the reins to me and walk away without a word.

I looked up, afraid as ever when Henry Stands became less than natural, and watched him tread as if the whole ground were bear trapped, and then I saw what he was walking to.

He reached to one of his drawings spiked on a twig, a white bird with a gold hat. I should know better than that but the appreciation of birds is a singular thing to men much as I imagine hats are to women.

Henry held it out in his hands and then moved on. I kicked Jude to follow and I saw that there was another farther on. Henry plucked it carefully from its branch as if it were alive. Even I could see this was a redheaded woodpecker.

He folded these into his coat, and me and Jude were at his shoulder by that time. I began to hear the river ahead and the path opened up and it was me who saw the nest with the blue-brown body atop.

I called him to it and Henry took a knee.

‘It is a rails’ nest,’ he said. ‘Breeding early.’ He laid the bird aside and sifted through the mess to pick out my father’s bullets. ‘This has been put here. Shot and carried. Rails will nest in the sedges and cattail.’ He looked behind. ‘Probably from where we’ve come.’ He stood. ‘She could have come from Mexico to get here to this.’

I got down and came to his side. The shattered eggshells and their small occupants and lifeless mother did not bother me unduly but the engine of their demise was everything.

‘Why do this, Mister Stands? If they thought us dead …’

‘They did not find you,’ he said. ‘I am the one that is dead. It is possible that this is just their spree.’

Children, was my thought. The wanton acts of low minds. ‘They are going east, still.’

‘For you.’ This said as a fact. Henry moved to the stones of the river and scrambled across the rocks for something. He came up with his leather book. He walked back leafing through it.

‘Is it badly damaged, Mister Stands?’ I said as kindly as I could.

‘It is fine.’ He put it in its bag.

‘Why would they take it?’

‘These are men that like to take. Like to take things that others hold. I heard a teamster once took a barrel of cement, which set on the way home. He left it on the road and on the way back in the morning did he not find that some other had picked it up? They will take bolts from wagons that are no use to anyone. They will take the sod off a man’s grave.’

He bid me walk the horse over the creek, which had little trickling falls right and left of us. Mister Stands told me that this was a Lehigh creek and that as it went up it had grand waterfalls and trails that were the finest in the land and had been tamed by the coal merchants into canals to carry heat to Philadelphia and New Jersey.

‘When you have more time you should get out of New York and come back here. See the falls.’

‘Can we not see them now?’ I was willing to delay.

He laughed loud, something I had never heard, and Jude Brown’s ears raised along with mine.

‘That is for you and your girl, son!’ he said, and pulled Jude Brown more than let him walk.

Henry Stands’s Tanner’s atlas was modern enough to show that we were passing through Monroe county, but to most this was still Northampton and Pike borders, and thus the law in Stroud would have to determine just where the crimes against us had been committed. What the map did not show was the Pocono range we would have to go through to get to Stroud, and the only sure road would be the Wilkes-Barre turnpike if we were not to add another day to our task, but mister Stands decided we should cross the country to avoid the toll. East was our passage, Henry Stands insisted. Keep to it and we would hit Stroud, skirt the mountains and we would sleep the better for it, one more day sleeping and eating in wilderness.

‘It is ironic that I can now no longer afford to work. I cannot get to Cherry Hill without a horse.’

I offered thinly from behind, ‘You could have Jude Brown. I would owe you that much.’ My mother would expect such a sacrifice.

‘He is a walking horse.’ Henry snorted. I took this as dismissive.

‘My only path is to take you to your man in Jersey, get his coin, and purchase anew.’

This pleased me for I still had incertitude that Henry Stands might study his error in escorting me and clear off. I knew when I first saw him that monies would be the way to fashion Henry Stands. I only wished that it had not come to this realization.

There was the impression that we were to abstain from dinner, Henry Stands determined to get out of the beech and maple, and I was disapproving. I had not eaten since supper last and had only tea this morning. Henry Stands’s indignation at losing his guns had obviously fueled him beyond food, and walking had obstinated him further. I, however, had almost lost my life to a ghoul and I would dishonor him by enjoying life. Besides, I was a boy and getting a headache from my hunger and that was surely why my hands were shaking also.

Jude Brown had the saddlebags along with the high-back saddle, so privately I snaked my hand backward into the bag for the poke of dodgers.

I bent awkwardly and spilled out of the saddle instead. I hit the ground on my back. I was fortunate not to find rock but I had the breath blown from my lungs.

Henry Stands loomed over me. He was still at first and my instinct was to smile, then he yanked me up by all of me and my skin to his face.

‘What are you doing!’ he bellowed.

He flung me back to the ground.

‘Can you not be good and able for one day!’ These were not questions.

He turned away with a hung back and led Jude Brown off with a snap.

I sat up and guessed I was walking from this point, Jude Brown empty of rider. I stayed behind out of both their shadows that I did not deserve.

I measured what we both carried now, Henry Stands and I. But he had done nothing. It was the boy who had ruined everything. The middling wheat ruining this year and the next. I thought on my aunt’s plan to place me in that fellow Fellenberg’s institution, where the rich boys and the poor boys learned their futures. I put my hands in my pockets as I walked.