The black swan (14 page)

"You would say something like that. I declare, Tom Pierson, I'm about ready to give up on you. It's time you thought of the future. Planting season is nigh on us, and seems like you might think about giving Adam a hand with our field."

Planting was such an ordinary thing, so much a part of the permanence of life, that it seemed alien to Tom. He watched her. She was used to talking now without expecting any replies from him. It gave him a grim sense of power to know how easily he'd taught Zoe to expect nothing in return for her efforts. In some small part it made up for the painful lessons he'd had about his powerlessness to control his own life.

She talked with brittle cheerfulness about the time for this and the time for that. But she talked of time to a man for whom time meant nothing, for whom time had lost all meaning.

Throughout January and February Tom healed slowly. He knew that the days passed only because at the beginning of each Zoe came into his room, pulling open the draperies to reveal the light hidden behind them. He counted that action of hers seventy-eight times before Mammy came in Zoe's place one morning. She stood at the foot of his bed like a glowering black cliff.

"Git .out o' dat bed, Mistah Tom. You been lyin' 'bout long's Ah kin stan' it."

He stared at her in disbelief, until she placed her gar-

gantuan hands on her broad hips. There was respect in his voice when he talked to her, and some amusement.

"I'm still weak an' sore as can be. Let me think about it, work up to it slowlike. I'll get up tomorra." He smiled tentatively at her.

"You gwine git up, Mistah Tom, or Ah is gwine git you up mahseff."

Tom got up. Every morning thereafter he got up.

As the days passed, the heat climbed, and the humidity became more dense until it pressed down with a weight and urgency of its own. Tom had hours each day to remember. At the end of his rambling thoughts back into his youth with his two friends was the day at the bayou house when they had killed Ullah. His smoldering ill humor fluttered into a flaming consciousness of what Ross and Edmund had done to him. The more he thought about it, fueling his resentment and hatred, the more it seemed impossible for him to remain in the placid security of Zoe's care. He would have to do something about them.

Tom dressed every day now, testing his strength and determination with each venture out of the house. He walked a little farther each day, remained up a little longer, fought off the quick fatigue that assailed him at every turn. He grew more careless about allowing himself to be seen.

Zoe rejoiced in his attempts to recover. He was another face at the dinner table, a new source of conversation, a return to ordinary things. But incomprehensible to her gentle mind was the idea of a hurt anger so deep that its only cure was to hurt in return.

Mammy simply watched the signs of returning health. Other than the condition of his body, she knew little about Tom. To Mammy, a clear day and tolerable health were sufficient to make life rewarding.

Adam alone guessed that Tom's aimless recuperative wanderings had a purpose. Seeing such single-minded hatred work on one he cared for finally gave Adam an insight into the self-destructive powers of hatred, Tom had lost the quiet merriment that had always been so much a part of him. Adam had sat in Tom's room, a patient exile during the months of illness and sorrow, awaiting the day when Tom's spirit would -overcome the evils men had wreaked against him. With a sense of dread, Adam now wondered if that day would ever come.

On a hot, sultry day in late spring, Tom asked Zoe if he could use her lightweight buggy.

"You planning to go visiting, Tom? I'm so glad. It's time you saw some new faces."

"I've got business that should be tended," he said grimly, his eyes fixed on the wall behind Zoe's shoulder.

"Well, you know you're welcome to the buggy, Tom." She tried not to look at him as he painfully shrugged into his frock coat. His arms still troubled him, particularly when the weather was damp and hot as it had been lately. "I'll have Adam hitch up for you."

"I'll do it myself."

Adam was cleaning the barn. Fork in hand, he called to Tom from the loft, and jumped down, landing lightly on the hard-packed floor beside him. "Where you going today? You're taking the buggy?"

Tom cursed his luck. It wouldn't be easy to get away from the boy's watchful eyes. "Tend to your chores, an' I'll tend to mine," he said, and started to harness the horse.

Adam was not ready to give up. Tom grabbed the buggy hitch, angrily pulling it into place. He was sick to death of the hurt expression on Adam's face, but the boy called it on himself. He wouldn't let go of things as they once had been. He glared at the offending presence. "You peeve me, boy. Now get on with yourself an' let me be."

"I can't, Tom. You're gonna do something stupid. I know it."

Tom dismissed Adam with a brusque motion of his hand. Adam's eyes remained fixed on the gun Tom had strapped around his hips. Unlike most men of his day, Tom seldom wore a gun unless he intended to put it to use.

"You're going after those men, aren't you?"

"That's my business," Tom said.

"I won't let you go alone."

"Like hell you won't! When'd you get appointed my guardian? I told you before, boy, I don't want you meddlin' in my life. Get out of my way, Adam, I'm not foolin' you." He climbed into the driver's seat and took the reins. He raised the buggy whip, glaring at Adam warningly. ^ "You'd hit me with that?" Adam asked quietly.

"Damned right I would. Seems you don't understand talk. You'll understand this, I'll wager."

Adam stepped back. "Then go! Get yourself killed!

This time I won't be there. I don't give a damn. Not any more!"

Stone-faced, Tom brought the whip down on the horse's flank. Harness and hitch groaned and clicked with sudden motion as the buggy sped down the front drive and turned toward New Orleans.

Minutes later Adam was astride his own horse, cutting through woods and across fields to keep pace with Tom unseen.

At the outskirts of New Orleans, Tom slowed his horse. He told himself it was just to take in the view, not because his arms ached and his backbone felt like putty. Over the city hung telltale black clouds of smoke. From it emanated the odors of burning tar and death.

Now he remembered seeing headlines about the epidemic in the True Delta. New Orleans would be but a shell, the wealthier people having abandoned their city homes for the protection of their country estates. He wondered how long the fever had been raging and if there were any chance he could find Edmund and Ross still here. It was an impossibly slim hope that Edmund would be in the city. At the first sign of danger Edmund would have made haste to Gray Oaks, a safe twenty-five miles east of New Orleans. But Ross might have stayed.

He brought the buggy whip down once more, bringing the horse to a smart trot. He passed the cemetery, the gravestones still starkly brilliant from their annual All Saints' Day whitewashing. In blasphemous contrast were the corpses of those who had already succumbed, stacked like so much firewood inside the confines of the otherwise neatly tended cemetery. With unspeakable haste the gravediggers clawed trenches into the earth. Forty thousand would fall prey to the yellow fever this time. Eleven thousand of them would be buried. Staring white stones would glow white in the night, eyeless reminders standing sentinel to the dark scars of the trenches into which all were indiscriminately thrust: black and white. Catholic and Protestant, Jew and Gentile.

Tom shuddered. The city was gone. In its place were the medieval trappings of siege: the sounds of the hawkers silenced, the grogships closed. In their place were the cries of the dying as they stumbled to be nearer the burning

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barrels of tar set up at every street coroer in the slim hope that the smoke would clear the air of disease.

It was a descent into purgatory. The sounds and smell and sight of death were everywhere. People staggered their last steps to fall on the streets. Banquettes held their bodies, the gutters ran with their bloody vomit. Packs of starved dogs roamed, feeding in voracious delight on the dead who lay untended where they fell. Negroes moaned and chanted, their eyes rolling in fear, their hands clasped in awe-filled prayer that they be spared this Day of Judgment.

Adam, following Tom at a distance, had never seen such carnage. He imagined it was what war was like. At least, it seemed much like what Voltaire described in Candide, and that was Adam's only basis for comparison. His stomach was queasy, and after the first shocked, revolted stares at the tangle of bodies and rampaging dogs, he couldn't look. Breath held against the stench of rotting flesh, he stared rigidly at the back of Tom's buggy.

This was the worst Tom had ever remembered seeing New Orleans. Yellow fever was common enough. They were plagued with it yearly. There had been epidemics in '48 and '49, but nothing like this. This was the day of the carrion. He was hard pressed to keep his mind on Ross, He turned the horse down the street where Ross kept his sumptuous bache, or lodgings.

On him there was a pall of weary disgust. He glanced at Ross's door and saw a black crepe hanging. He pounded frantically for admittance. At once he experienced horror at death and a sense of being cheated of his own revenge.

Gazella, Ross's housekeepeer, opened the door a crack. Her face was shiny with oily perspiration. "You doan wanna come in heah, Mastah Tom. We's all sick, an' Mastah Ross—" she stumbled over his name, lowering her voice so it could barely be heard—"he daid, Mastah Tom."

"He can't be dead!" Tom pushed the door open against Gazella. "Let me see!"

"He sho' is, Mastah Tom. He done pass ovah yestiddy. Ah tried, but ain't nobody can save him when de Lawd caU."

Tom bounded up the stairs two at a time. At the top he grabbed for the newel-post. His head was swimming, his

eyesight darkened as his heart pounded in reluctant fury. He stood for a moment, waiting for his legs to change once more from water to muscle.

Ross Bennett lay on the bed just as he had the moment he died. No one had touched him. His body was twisted grotesquely. His hair was matted on his forehead above his staring eyes. His mouth hung open in a permanent unanswered plea. He had not died easily. Until this moment Tom had thought of the killing but not of the awesome finality of death.

Before he knew what had happened to him, he was on his knees in weak fatigue, crying with the mindless heartbreak of a small child.

Adam watched Tom enter the house. What if he barged in, only to find Tom pleasantly sharing a drink with a friend? What if . . . ? At first he heard nothing. A stillness like an abandonnrent of spirit rested over the house. Then he heard a woman's high-pitched whining and Tom's broken sobs. He walked up the stairs, gagging at the lingering odor of illness and death. Tom was huddled on the floor by a man's bed, his fist slowly and monotonously beating against the side rail.

"Tom . . ." Hesitantly he walked over to him.

"He's dead. Dead!"

"I'm sorry, Tom. Who was he? Was he a good friend of yours?" Adam asked. He caught his lower lip between his teeth and reached out, putting his hand on Tom's shoulder.

Tom's laughter was choked by tears. "Friend," he repeated.

Adam stood up. He pressed the man's eyes closed, forced straight the bent limbs that without warning had ceased their writhing. Then he pulled the rumpled, soiled sheet over him.

"You his servant?" Adam asked Gazella, suddenly angry that the man had been left untended.

"Yassuh."

"Then do something for him."

"What Ah gwine be doin'?" Gazella recoiled at the thought of touching her master. In his life Ross had been proud to have been given the designation of slave breaker, saved in most instances for overseers. In death Gazella could only imagine he'd be more demon than he had been

in life. He*d get her, his icy fingers rising up from the sheets, taking her and squeezing the life out of her. She glanced at Adam, her head shaking in frantic negation, then turned and ran from the room, her feet beating a wildly clumsy tattoo on the staircase.

"She ran off," Adam said, amazed.

"Let her."

"But ... what about him?"

"Let him rot." Tom's face was gray with fatigue and the horrible emptiness that flooded through him. He'd had a bellyful of death. It was everywhere. He wanted to run from it, but his legs were going to take him nowhere. He could barely stand.

Adam grabbed his arm to support him. "Tom— **

"I'm just a little light-headed. Be all right in a minute."

Adam steered him toward a chair. Tom sank into it, his head lolling back. His light beard stood out dark against the pallor of his face. "Let him rot" His voice was no stronger than a whisper. "That much satisfaction I'll get for what he did to her."

"This is the man with the Boar's head?"

Tom shook his head slowly.

•*Who, then?"

Tom opened his mouth, but made no sound. Weakly he gestured with his hand. Adam looked at the form on the bed. He had been one of the others. A Goat, a Raccoon, a Snake, an Alligator, a Bear. Did it really matter which? They had all been things, creatures with animal heads. This had been a man. He could hate and kill the Boar's head. He could not kill the man.

"Let me help you home, Tom."

Adam tied his horse to the back of the buggy. He drove with Tom barely conscious at his side back through the corpse-strewn streets. The lamentations of the grieving and fearful raised inside him a cleansing dread, quenching his own bloodthirsty desires for revenge. Revenge might be sweet, but its sweetness was that of rot, and its aftermath was pure gall.

After they had returned from New Orleans, Adam began to think perhaps everything would be all right again. Sometime. Hope was revived, and with it Adam's spirit. Though he and Tom were not enjoying the once

easy affection between them, they had talked, and that helped. The trip to New Orleans had taught them. the futility of revenge.

But had the man with the Boar's head learned that? Adam feared not. His conversation weeks ago with Ben still came to mind. That man had tried once to kill Tom. He was still looking for him. K he found Tom again, he might kill others as well.