The Winter Family (5 page)

Sevenkiller kicked his pony. It lifted its head and broke into a brisk canter, its hooves beating a quick rhythm on the road.

He cut the woman off. She screamed when she saw him and threw her hands up in the air.

“Mercy, sir! Oh please have mercy on me!”

“What happened here?” Sevenkiller said. “Where are the other slaves?”

“They run off to join you, sir,” the woman said. “When they heard you was coming.”

Sevenkiller laughed. “I’m not with the Union,” he said. “I took this jacket off a dead Yankee.”

The woman was understandably taken aback by this. But she came to grips with it quickly enough, and said, “Oh sir! Then you got to go help Master Johnson! Freddy came back with an ax! He’s going to kill my master!”

The woman sobbed.

“You’ve got to help him, sir!”

Sevenkiller neatly steered his pony around the woman and gave it another kick. Once again it leapt forward and cantered the last few yards to the porch, where Sevenkiller pulled up and slid off. His feet hit the ground without a sound.

The house was lit with oil lamps in defiance of the darkness outside. Someone very big was moving around, knocking things over, sounding like a panicked bull.

Sevenkiller drew an enormous Colt Walker revolver from inside his jacket; it was over a foot long and weighed almost five pounds. Then he slipped through the front door, which had been kicked in and was hanging on its hinges.

Muddy footprints, of large bare feet, tracked through the foyer, past the staircase to the second floor, and into the living room. That door had also been opened and warm air was leaking out.

A tremendously fat black man sat in an armchair with a small hatchet planted in his forehead. Rolls of flesh hung loosely from his neck and arms, as if his body had surrendered to gravity when the animating force left him. Blood was everywhere. The other furniture in the room had been overturned and smashed.

A man’s leg poked through the door to the dining room.

Sevenkiller went over quietly, crouched low to the ground.

The leg belonged to a sturdy, ancient man with a shock of white hair, thick lips, big teeth, angry eyebrows. His head had been smashed and his eyes were starting out of his head. Dark red lines ringed his neck.

“Hmm, hmm, ho,” Sevenkiller whispered.

The dining room table had been shoved across the room. It was made of solid wood and weighed three hundred pounds if it weighed an ounce, but it looked to have been almost tossed aside. The chairs were scattered as if someone had lifted the room and shaken it.

The noise was coming from the next room, the kitchen. Sevenkiller crept in that direction, his leather moccasins silent on the floor, the revolver pointed in the air, a look of strange delight on his face.

A huge black man was washing himself in the kitchen, using a large pot of water. Vegetables and a chicken were laid out on the counter, ready to be cooked, but the man had ignored them in favor of his bath.

Sevenkiller briefly admired the escaped slave, for he was a tremendous specimen: young and beardless and handsome with short, messily cropped hair. Something about the way that he moved and washed himself indicated a natural intelligence.

He was dignified, Sevenkiller decided. That was it. It might be strange to call an illiterate slave dignified, when he was shoeless and dressed in rags and covered in his master’s blood and washing himself out of a soup pot. But so he was.

The slave’s back was covered with scars; as a slave himself, Sevenkiller knew well that such marks were the price of dignity.

Sevenkiller raised his revolver and took a step forward with one moccasined foot, and it was only the sound of a stray piece of china splintering beneath his heel that saved Fred Johnson’s life.

Johnson did not turn; he merely heaved the iron pot behind him with all his strength. Sevenkiller pulled the trigger, but the bullet hit the pot and ricocheted through a window. The pot slammed into Sevenkiller, knocking him over, soaking him with water and sending the gun flying.

Fred Johnson was on him instantly, pinning him to the ground.
In one hand he held a heavy meat cleaver and with the other he pressed Sevenkiller’s face into the floor.

“Hee hee hee!” Sevenkiller cried.

One of his little crazy eyes, the gray one, was carefully fixed on the cleaver. When it descended with monstrous speed toward his neck, Sevenkiller twisted his hips and brought one of his legs up so that it wrapped around the arm holding his face. The blade missed and sank deeply into the wood. It cut off six inches of Sevenkiller’s hair, and the wind of its passing was cool on the side of his head.

No more laughing. Sevenkiller worked on isolating the arm, which was big and strong as a healthy tree, so that his legs were wrapped around it near the shoulder and his pelvis was positioned next to Johnson’s elbow.

Johnson was uselessly trying to pull the cleaver out of the floor, so he only realized what Sevenkiller was doing when Sevenkiller pried Johnson’s other arm straight and thrust his pelvis against the elbow, hyperextending it.

“No!” Johnson cried, flexing his biceps. So strong was his arm that Sevenkiller could not quite manage to break it even when he used the leverage of his entire body. Johnson rolled desperately, like a gator with its prey in its mouth, and it was all Sevenkiller could do to hang on. Eventually, as the floor and the ceiling changed places again and again, Sevenkiller saw the revolver and let go of the arm to snatch it.

Fred Johnson did not waste any time. As soon as he got his arm loose he sprang to his feet and spared only one wild and frightened look for Sevenkiller, his bright eyes as wide as saucers, before leaping out through the open window.

“Ah ha ha ha hee hee!” Sevenkiller laughed, staggering to his feet. The whole room seemed to be spinning. He looked out the window at Johnson’s retreating back and raised the revolver, thumbed the hammer, and let the percussion cap tumble out. Then he smoothly lowered the weapon, aimed, and shot.

There was a flat clicking noise as the weapon misfired.

Johnson disappeared into the trees.

Sevenkiller laughed again, so hard that he had to sit down. He looked at his weapon and saw that it was wet, and that only made him laugh harder.

“Ha ha ha ha ha! Ah, hee hee hee!”

He had a powerful feeling that he would soon die.

Sevenkiller left the house and mounted his horse. He visited a few more plantations on his way back to the inn. When he knocked, Stoga opened the front door. The innkeeper was asleep, but Bill Bread was awake, sitting and shivering at the table, his hands still tied together.

“Hidey,” Sevenkiller said.

He tossed his saber and revolver onto an empty chair and shrugged out of his blue jacket.

“I need a drink,” Sevenkiller said.

“We aren’t drinking,” Stoga said. “What did you see? Is it true? Have the slaves run off?”

Sevenkiller ignored him and took a cup off the counter and filled it with cider from the keg. He drank it down, then let out an exaggerated sigh and belched. He looked challengingly, not at Stoga but at Bill Bread. Bill never lifted his head, but the muscles around his jaw clenched. Sevenkiller tittered.

“What did you see, Navan?” Stoga asked.

“The slaves are all gone,” Sevenkiller said. “Word got out that the Yankee foragers were just a few miles to the west, with the whole army behind them. So all the slaves ran off. At the big plantation, Mister Johnson is dead, and the overseer. They were killed by a slave named Fred.”

“You only heard rumors?” Stoga said.

“Yes,” Sevenkiller said. “But I spoke to others who had seen them.”

“Hrmm,” Stoga said, the noise deep in his throat. “The innkeeper said there are no soldiers in this town. They all went to Macon. The only soldier here is a man named Captain Jackson. She said he was in the cavalry, but he was wounded near Atlanta. He just came back to town last week. His family has a farm and a distillery on the other side of the river.”

“Well?” Sevenkiller asked.

“Hrmm,” Stoga repeated, drumming his fingers on the table, his face concerned. “Well, let’s go see the captain tomorrow morning. It is on our way, in any case.”

They went upstairs and slept in a real bed for the first time in weeks. But first, Stoga tied Bill to the headboard. Bill slept, eventually, but his dreams were grasping, muddled, and dark.

For his part, the escaped Fred Johnson spent his first night as a free man sleeping under a tree. He’d blundered blindly through the dark woods, nettles and thorns tearing his clothes and poking his flesh, branches slapping into his face, the muddy earth sucking at his feet. It had not taken him long to realize that the little dark Indian had not followed him, but he had kept running anyway. To put more space between himself and the scene of the crime. The farther he went, the less real it seemed to him. Like a dream. He saw the overseer’s head absorb the ax that had been meant for Massa Johnson. He heard Bertha screaming. Saw the old white man’s eyes rolling with fury (no fear, not even at the end). But he couldn’t remember how he’d felt. Had he been angry? Satisfied? Happy? Now he only felt shaken.

Eventually he found a tall willow tree and slept between its massive roots, until he was awoken by the soft touch of fingers on his shoulder.

Johnson jerked and thrashed, and stumbled quickly to his feet. His skin was slick with cold dew and his muscles were stiff and unresponsive. It was very early dawn, very dark.

“Whoa, easy.”

The young man, a boy really, who had touched him had taken a step back. He was tall and thin and the whitest man Johnson had ever seen, with skin like snow and hair like straw, and eyes of pure gold. In the dawn light the boy looked as if he were made of silver, or mist.

“I ain’t going to hurt you,” the boy said. A Spencer repeating rifle was slung across the boy’s shoulders. His hands were empty. He was wearing ragged overalls and worn boots. Johnson could tell by the boy’s accent that he was not from around here.

“Are you from the North?” Johnson asked.

“That’s right,” the boy said. “What you sleeping out here for? You run off?”

“Yessir,” Johnson said.

“Well, you can come back with me,” the boy said. “Our unit split
up, but most of us are staying at a big farmhouse not far from here. The Williams place. You know it?”

“Yessir,” Johnson said.

“There’s loads of run-off colored folk there, just waiting outside. Most of them are from the Johnson place.”

To this, Fred Johnson said nothing.

Eventually, the boy spoke again. “You’re the most busted-up Negro I’ve ever seen. Your back, I mean.”

After a pause, Johnson said, “That’s the life of a slave.”

“I seen plenty of slaves without a mark on them,” the boy said. “What’d you do to get beat up like that?”

“Run off,” Johnson said. “Plenty of times.”

“Well, you’re loose now,” the boy said.

“Yessir,” Johnson said, then added, “ain’t no one going to hit me no more.”

The boy smiled, very thin, very sour.

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” he said.

“No one’s gonna whip me now that I’m a free man,” Johnson said. His tone was a warning.

The boy did not reply. Instead, he turned around and unstrapped his overalls. Johnson felt as if the breath had been sucked from his body. The boy’s back was twisted and crisscrossed with a thousand scars, looping in and around one another like a pile of rope or a ball of rattlesnakes.

“Who did that to you?” Johnson asked.

“My daddy,” the boy said. “He was trying to beat the devil out of me. He never stopped till I ran away. So I suppose he never did get the devil all the way out. I reckon it’s the same way with you.”

Johnson could not think of anything to say.

The boy shrugged his way back into his clothing.

“My name is Winter,” he said. “Come on. Follow me.”

A few miles off, Quentin Ross was woken by the sound of the birds singing. For few minutes he lay in bed, smiling without opening his eyes. The birdsong was remarkable. It was impossible to predict
what the next note would be, but as soon as that note was sounded it seemed inevitable. As if the birds were singing according to a pattern that Quentin knew without knowing he knew it.

Finally he sat up and looked around the simple bedchamber, yawning. Then he walked to the kitchen, feeling as if nothing he was seeing could be quite real.

In the kitchen he picked up a copper teakettle, turning it around and around in his hands, smiling and looking at his reflection. For some reason he was convinced that if he turned it at just the right speed, at just the right angle, he would see something miraculous. And then it occurred to him that everything was miraculous, everything, and he started to chuckle; he couldn’t help himself.

A voice spoke.

“Lieutenant?”

Quentin tried to focus on the person standing at the back door.

“Are you all right, sir?” the voice said.

Quentin strained his eyes. It felt as if the person were very far away, even though he was standing right in front of him. His mind would not descend to the present moment, like a bird that kept circling in the sky.

“Are you all right, Lieutenant?”

Quentin rubbed his face and looked again. Aha! It was Duncan Empire.

“Never better,” Quentin said. “Never better.”

“You’re not hurt, sir?” Duncan asked.

“Of course not,” Quentin said. “Why do you ask?”

Duncan did not respond immediately. He seemed to be performing some sort of quiet calculation. Finally he spoke. “Well sir, you’re covered with blood.”

It took a moment for Quentin’s mind to understand what these words meant. Then he looked down and saw that he was completely naked and that, indeed, there was blood all over him. As if he had bathed in it.

“Oh my,” he said.

He looked up at Duncan as if for an explanation. Duncan didn’t move. Quentin put his hand to his mouth and thought. Then he started toward the door, heading for the pump out back. Then he
remembered he was naked and stopped and turned back for his clothes. Then he realized that he couldn’t put his clothes on, because they would get stained with blood. And so he turned back to Duncan, smiling warmly but emptily.