In the Rogue Blood (8 page)

They forded streams and creeks and rivers and made their way through forests so thick they were steeped in twilight at high noon. Eagles sailed from nests in the high pines and redhawks banked slowly over the meadowlands and tall blue herons stepped long-legged along the water shallows. Sharpbilled snakebirds stood on the banks and spread their wings to the afternoon sun. Owls regarded the brothers from bare-branch perches in the closing light of day. A scattering of wolves still roamed these woods and their aching howls carried through the trees. On some nights panthers screeched so near their camp Edward felt the hair rise on his arms. One misty morning they came upon a black bear sow teaching her two cubs to fish in a creek. The sow rose up growling and huge on her back legs with water pouring silver off her indigo fur and the horses
spooked and and the brothers had to fight the reins and then heeled their mounts galloping down the trail.

On a Sunday morning of soft yellow sunrays angling through the trees they witnessed a baptism in a misty creek behind a high-steepled white church. The initiate was a tall man of craggy visage and hair as white as his collarless shirt. As the faithful sang a hymn of joyful salvation he pinched his nose shut and was tipped backwards by a pair of burly men supporting him on either side and he was submerged entirely as the preacher intoned words of purification. When he was pulled back up, gasping and spluttering, a woman a few feet from the brothers leaned toward a friend at her side and said loud enough for Edward and John to hear, “I kindly pity them fish in the crick. They’re like to choke to death on the sins washed off
that
old rascal!” She caught sight of the brothers’ grins and blushed furiously for a moment before smiling back at them and turning away.

Here and there along the road they found the remains of abandoned wagons, most of them turned onto their side and picked-over to the axles and broken up for firewood. Occasionally they came upon the moldered carcass of a draft animal simmering with maggots. By the roadside one day they found a yawning trunk from which spilled a variety of clothing, including a pair of men’s coats of the same size so that Edward’s hung a little loosely on his frame but John’s fit almost as if it had been tailored for him. The trunk held also a few frilly pieces of women’s undergarments and a woman’s bent hairbrush. The brothers were roused by the feel of the thin cotton bloomers with the lace edges and red ribbon ties. They speculated wildly about its owner and how the trunk had come to be left trailside with such particularly private dainties exposed to the passing world. The underwear conjured a host of carnal notions and their night was restless with concupiscent yearning.

Next day they turned south on the Biloxi road and entered the town late in the afternoon and made inquiries at a livery. They were directed to the western skirt of town where there stood a fine large three-storied house shaded by live oaks and within view of a white stretch of Gulf beach. The trees were dripping with Spanish moss, the air hazy with amber sunlight.

The proprietress was a Mrs. Clark, a woman of middle years and aristocratic mien who welcomed the brothers graciously but informed them that armament was strictly forbidden in the house and told them they would have to leave their guns and knives with their outfits in care of
the stablemen. She permitted them to take a drink in the parlor while they looked over the girls and made their selection but then insisted they avail themselves of the bathtubs in the rear of the house before the girls could escort them upstairs. John grumbled that the place sure had a lot of rules but the brothers did as she asked.

They sported merrily in adjoining rooms until gentle rappings on the doors signaled an end to the entertainment or a call for additional payment if they wished to continue their lark. The brothers poked their hard pale torsos into the hallway and exchanged grins and said why not. John paid the floorwoman for another go and she provided fresh towels and they traded girls who ran past each other in the hall in giggling nakedness. Their lickerish roister lasted through the night. By dawn they had each had a turn with the same six girls and they limped down the stairs like battle casualties and hobbled out to the stable and carefully mounted up. They had spent all but their last three dollars and Edward used one of those for a bottle of bourbon to take with them. Every girl of the house stood out on the verandah with Mrs. Clark and blew kisses to them and called them champions and the brothers grinned proudly. Mrs. Clark told them of a house in Nacogdoches, Texas, under the proprietorship of her widowed sister, one Mrs. Flora Bannion, and recommended its services to them should they ever visit that lively town. As the brothers rode away the girls waved goodbye and called for them to come back soon.

That night they sat around their campfire and passed the bottle between them in silent contentment for a while. When the bottle was a third gone they began to talk wistfully about the wonderful time they’d had. When its level dropped below the halfway point they began to compare the various attributes of the different girls. They agreed that Jolene’s breasts were the best shaped and Sue Ellen’s nipples the longest and Belinda’s face the prettiest, that Rose May’s legs were the most beautiful and Cora’s belly for sure the most sweetly rounded and Marcie’s lips the most kissable and Belinda’s mouth the most talented. But when Edward said there was no question Sue Ellen had the best rump John disagreed and said anybody with a pair of eyes could see that the prettiest rear end in the place was Cora’s.

Edward said anybody who thought Cora had a prettier rear than Sue Ellen couldn’t tell a woman’s ass from a sack of yams. John said Edward might or might not know something about yams but he sure as hell didn’t know a thing about women’s asses and come to think of it he didn’t know all that much about teats either since it was plain as day that the
prettiest ones were Belinda’s. He’d only agreed about Jolene to be polite but he was damned if he cared to be polite to somebody so ignorant about women’s asses. Truth be told, John said, Belinda’s mouth wasn’t near so expert as Cora’s either.

Well if the goddamn truth be told, Edward said, he didn’t agree with
any
of John’s choices and had only agreed because the Good Book said we ought be kindly toward the feebleminded and anybody who believed Cora had the prettiest ass of the bunch had to be as feebleminded as it was possible to be and still know how to breathe in and out.

John said Edward knew as much about the Good Book as he knew about women, which was absolutely nothing.

They persisted in this dialogue until the bottle was empty and their lines of reasoning were thoroughly entangled and they had trouble remembering which girls they thought superior in which respects. When they finally rolled up in their blankets Edward said he couldn’t understand it but he was feeling even ranker right this minute than he had the night before.

“Here my poor ole peter’s about skinned bloody and my balls feel like some mule stepped on them and
all
I can think about is being pressed up against a nekkid girl.”

John said he knew what he meant and wasn’t it a shame a man couldn’t store up the satisfaction he got from a good humping so he could have it handy to draw from in lonely times. “You know, the way a squirrel saves up nuts for the winter.”

Edward said that was about the looniest goddamn notion he had ever heard of and asked John how long he had been suffering from such mental affliction. John’s response was a loud wet snore. A moment later Edward too was asleep.

He dreamt of the girls in the Biloxi house. He saw himself now with Jolene, now with Marcie, now with Cora and Sue Ellen and Rose May all together and writhing happily on the bed. Suddenly his heart jumped at the sight of Daddyjack sitting on the side of the bed in his bloody pants and running his hands over the girls’ nakedness and grinning widely. The girls were laughing and one of them ran her thumb around the rim of his empty eyesocket and the others took turns fondling his crotch and blood seeped between their grasping fingers. Daddyjack grimaced and clutched at his mutilated privates and looked at Edward who was also feeling sharp pain between his legs. “Hurts like fury don’t it?” Daddyjack said. Edward awoke and loosened the crotch of his trousers which had been binding
his sore erection. He had dreamed of Daddyjack nearly every night since leaving Florida.

They occasionally came across pilgrim families on the trace and traded venison for coffee or cattail bread or ears of sweet corn. They bathed in rivers and washed their clothes and watched brown otters splashing in the water and chasing each other on the banks. They dozed naked in the sun while the clothes dried and the horses and the mule cropped contentedly in the long grass.

“I don’t know how come we didn’t start livin like this long before now,” Edward said drowsily at the fireside one evening as he lay on his side and stared into the flames.

“Cause we hadn’t kilt Daddyjack before now,” John said flatly without looking at him. He had been moody and closemouthed all evening and was sitting crosslegged and poking at the fire with a stick. His face was shadowed by his hat.

Neither of them said anything more that night, but for the first time Edward wondered if John too had dreams of Daddyjack, and he decided that yes, very likely he did.

They rode under bright sunwashed skies. They rode through oak groves hung nearly to the ground with green-gray tendrils of Spanish moss that looked like hair of the dead, the hair of great witches whose forest it might have been. They rode through fields of pale grass that brushed their horses’ bellies. For most of a day they rode through clouds of burgundy dragonflies which folk of the region called skeeterhawks and whose abrupt shifts in speed and direction seemed to violate all laws of nature and none did alight on them. Crows squalled from the high pines, mockingbirds shrilled from the brush. Fording a wide slow creek they caught the unmistakably malodorous scent of a cottonmouth, the smell so strong they knew it rose off an entire nest and the horses breathed it as well and riders and mounts all looked wildly about but saw no snakes and the
brothers hupped the horses splashing across the creek and up onto the other bank and away from that fearsome stink.

On yet another afternoon they dismounted at a creek to refill their canteens and had no sooner stepped down from the saddle than a huge boar came crashing out of the brake and charged at them. The frighted horses broke away and so startled was Edward that he lost his footing and went headlong into the creek as the boar came at him with its sharp tusks forward. The hog ran to the edge of the bank and veered around and spied John standing agape and went for him. John jumped up and grabbed an oak branch and hugged himself fast to it with arms and legs, the branch some seven feet above ground and perhaps half that distance above the snorting boar’s upturned tusks. Then Edward’s longrifle cracked and John heard the ball smack into the boar’s side. The hog staggered and turned and charged again at Edward who stood sopping in his clothes and now snatched up John’s rifle and aimed and fired and the ball struck the animal in the face and its front legs gave way and it tumbled to a heap at Edward’s feet and there shrieked and kicked wildly until Edward fired a pistol round directly between its ears and killed it.

John dropped to his feet from the branch and laughed. “Hoo! The look on your face when you seen that pig comin out the bushes! And the
splash!
” He threw his hands up wide to re-create the toss of water when Edward fell in the creek. His walk was staggered for all his hard laughter.

“That wasnt near as funny as the sight of you hoppin up on that tree limb, tell you that. I didn’t shoot that sumbitch you’da been up there all damn night, been there till you fell off and he’d of stuck you good then.” But Edward’s grin was weak. He knew he’d cut the more ridiculous figure. He knelt beside the boar and affected to study it intently until John drew closer, still laughing, and then Edward sprang up and caught him in a bear hug and lifted him off the ground and lumbered with him toward the creek. John saw what he had in mind and struggled fiercely to free himself but Edward managed to stagger to the bank with John tight in his embrace and he let a maniacal laugh as he lunged over the bank edge and they went tumbling into the water. They came up spluttering and grappling and now one of them would shove the other’s head underwater for a moment before the other slipped free and assumed the advantage and thus did they dunk each other a half-dozen times until they called the water wrestling match a draw and crawled up on the bank, coughing and cursing and laughing. Gasping for breath, John struggled to say, “But you
really
ought of seen … how you looked when—” and Edward
grabbed him in a headlock and they continued in their wrestling in the creekside grass until the sun was almost down to the trees and both of them were exhausted.

While John butchered the boar in the evening twilight Edward went in search of the horses and found them grazing in a pasture a quarter-mile farther along the trace. They roasted the pig on a spit and the haunches proved stringy but the backribs were tasty and the brothers gorged themselves to greasy satisfaction.

The next afternoon they came on a camp meeting in a wide meadow at the edge of the forest. There looked to be nearly three hundred people attending—men and women, children and oldsters—and the brothers had heard their raise of voices for nearly half-an-hour before the camp hove into view. The day was cloudless and sultry and they reined up behind the crowd and sat their horses in the shade of the trees and watched a preacher in farmer’s clothes declaim from an elevated plank pulpit set on the far side of the meadow. He patted at his face with a balled bandanna and his strained voice carried faintly but audibly at this distance. He was speaking of the countless blessings of the Christian Way, the rewards of the Life of Virtue, and his audience listened and nodded and punctuated his pauses with a chorus of “Amen.”

Now the preacher bade “God bless you” to the multitude and stepped down and was replaced by another minister, this one looking the part, dressed as he was in black suit and black string tie and a widebrimmed black hat under which black hair hung to his shoulders. For a long moment he stood looking out at the crowd without speaking, leaning on the podium as though he might leap over it and into the field of folk. In the midst of this sweltering summer day that had men mopping steadily at their brows and the ladies fanning themselves without pause, he seemed to stand cool and dry.

And now he began to address the brethren about the wages of sin, which were not only death but the everlasting tortures of hell, the horrifying punishments that were the destined lot of lost souls. He started out slowly and speaking so low that the brothers could barely make out his words at the rear of the crowd. But his voice rose as he warmed to his theme, rose and hardened and assumed the pounding stentorian tone of ordained authority. He spoke of roaring hellfire and sulfurous smoke and pains beyond imagination, beyond all nightmare. Spoke of horned and cloven-footed demons with thorned whips, demons whose aspects and essence defied all rational description and whose eternal delight it was to
evoke the rupturing screams of the damned. Demons whose laughter was of the Devil’s madhouse and mingled with the incessant wails of the condemned and rang without pause off Hell’s burning walls. He spoke of smells that made the rankest jakes and the odors of the rotting dead seem the stuff of flower gardens by comparison, of stenches beyond any foulness ever known to human breath. He conjured one horrifying vision after another and the crowd had early on begun to moan in terror and self-pity and now some among them were weeping openly and some sobbing in their visions of what lay for them beyond the grave if they did not now act to ensure their soul’s salvation. And now some among them began to howl and roll their eyes and shudder convulsively as the preacher’s terrifying proclamations carried across the meadow and even as John and Edward exchanged uncertain grins their horses began to stamp and shy as they sensed the growing fear and madness around them and the brothers were obliged to rein the animals tighter and speak soothingly into their ear. In another moment the mass of the faithful was taken with jerking convulsions and some fell to the ground and rolled about and all of them moaning and praying loudly to Jesus to save their damned souls. And still the preacher bellowed his perditions. The horses now so spooked they fought against the reins and themselves seemed to be afflicted with the same jerking convulsions of terrified ecstasy that engirt the crowd.

“Damn this!” John yelled at Edward. “Let’s go!”

They reined their mounts around and dug their heels into their flanks and the horses in a single motion rocked back on their haunches and shot forward as if their tails were afire. They didn’t slow from a gallop until they were two miles down the trace and even then the mounts preferred to pace at a nervous canter than settle to a walk.

John said he hadn’t ever seen anything like that before and wouldn’t care if he never did again. Edward shook the sweat out of his hat and said he wasn’t too taken with it either.

“Why you reckon they-all got afflicted like that?” John said.

Edward said he didn’t know. Then said: “Could be they just real hard believers.”

“Believers?” John said. “Believers a
what?
”

Edward shrugged and now his mount seemed easier about being reined down to a walk.

John slowed his horse and fell back alongside his brother. “What could somebody believe that’d make him do like they was doin?”

Edward looked at him and shrugged again. “I don’t know. What-all they been told, I guess.”

“
All
them people believe somethin just cause they been told it?”

“I can’t think a no other reason for it.”

“Well, damn if ever
I
want to believe
anything
that much.”

Edward grinned. “
I
believe we aint got too much worry on that account.”

They looked at each other a moment as if each was suddenly seeing something of himself in the other. And then they laughed and rode on.