In the Rogue Blood Read online

  He jumped up yelling and beating at his smoking coat with both hands and so frighted his horse it pulled free of its loose tether and bolted away into the dark. He finally thought to take off the coat and beat it on the ground to extinguish it. A large charred patch on its left flap was burned through in spots about the size of silver dollars. His shirt had burned too and he was blistered at midchest. He scraped frost from a willow branch with the edge of his hand and pressed it to the burn and flinched and muttered curses the while.

  He put the coat back on and buttoned it to the neck and turned up the collar and put on the slicker and wrapped a bandanna round his head so that it covered his ears. Then pulled his hat low and picked up his rifle and set out in search of the horse. He gave up after an hour of calling into the freezing nightwind. He’d lost all feeling in fingers and nose. He went back to the fire and built it up again and kept a careful distance from the windtossed flames and popping sparks. After warming his hands and feet somewhat he again wrapped himself in the blanket and slept fitfully the short rest of the night. When he awoke just before dawn the wind had abated and the horse stood at the campfire embers with its head lowered to the last of their heat.

  The sun of the following days was dull and tepid, the cold air sharp but fairly still. He passed fields where isolate Negroes or meager families of them walked astoop and picked the scattered remains in cotton fields long since picked nearly bare. He spied no game, fed on green tomatoes he found growing alongside an abandoned and roofless shack, a small turtle he shot off a creekside log. The main road lay west-northwest through the pinelands, skirting vast swamps to the south and winding about large and small bodies of water rimmed with high reeds. One late forenoon he hove within sight of a small farm where a family was at work slaughtering hogs. He reined his horse toward the farm and hallooed the folk and was invited to come ahead and rest himself and take dinner with them.

  They ate at a roughhewn outdoor table set near a blazing firepit, gorging on fried ham and chitlins, roast ears of corn, huge slabs of sweet potato pie. The patriarch was a broad baggy-eyed man named Ansel Welch who had sired four surviving sons with his first wife before she died of brain fever. Three of those boys had since come of age and moved off and started their own families and only seventeen-year-old Benson was still with him. His second wife was twenty-one years his junior. She was quiet and thin and weathered beyond her thirty-three years but hard muscle stood on her arms. She’d been sixteen when they wed and had borne him seven children, only four of whom were yet alive—two more sons and the only two daughters Ansel Welch had ever fathered. He was vastly proud that he had a grandson sixteen years of age as well as a daughter not yet two, and that his wife’s belly now bulged with a child due at the end of winter. The elder daughter was called Sharon. She was just turned sixteen and Edward’s heart quickened at the sight of her. She was tall and lean and well-breasted. Her freckled cheekbones went rosy under his gaze but she met his eyes boldly.

  On learning that Edward was bound for Nacogdoches the farmer claimed he was a friend of Sam Houston. “I’m damn proud to say I know the man. He done more than anybody to make Texas a republic the last ten years and I figure he’ll easy be elected governor or leastways a senator now the Texians are finally joined the Union. Course now, they sayin the damned Mexicans don’t like it a bit, seein as they aint never quit believin Texas still belongs to them. They say it’s lots of war talk in Mexico and Washington both, lots of it.”

  A little over thirty years ago, the farmer said, he and Sam Houston had fought together under Andy Jackson at the battle of Horseshoe Bend. “I was twenty-three-year old and part of Andy’s militia and Sam was a youngster lieutenant in the regular army outfit that joined us for the fight against the renegade Creeks. Red Sticks. Meanest red niggers east of the Mississippi. Just six months previous they murdered five hundred white folk at Fort Mims. Defiled them in ways I can’t say in front of my wife and girls, but I mean to tell ye, we were hankerin after them devils bad. I know for a fact it was a thousand of them at Horseshoe Bend cause after it was over Andy had us cut the nose off ever dead Injun and count them out in a pile. We tried to feed them noses to the dogs but the curs just turned away and wouldnt eat of that Injun meat, not even that we roasted. We anyhow made the south of Alabama safe for Christian folk is what we did.”

  He brandished a hand on which the two fingers next the pinky were but stubs. “It’s some of us paid a price for it. Arrows hissin through the air thick as bats lettin out of a cave at dusk and one a them took both these fingers neat as you please. Didn’t hardly bleed much. I was luckiern Sam. He took a arrow in the balls and they just poured blood. But he got somebody to yank it out and doctorfy him and he went right back to the fightin. Got hisself shot all to hell. He was so bad off we laid him out with the dead to be buried next day but damn if he still wasn’t breathin in the morning. Old Hickory hisself had a look at him and couldn’t believe he was still alive. Bedamn if that hardbarked sumbuck didn’t pull through and end up President of Texas.”

  When dinner was done the family went back to work. Edward had been taught the ways of hog killing by Daddyjack, and Welch accepted his offer to lend a hand. While the two younger boys busied themselves washing out hog guts to be used for sausage casing, Edward and the Benson boy threw slops in a trough and when the pigs lined up to feed at it Welch stepped up behind each one in turn and struck it square between the eyes with the flat of an ax, dropping each pig dead with one expert swing. Edward slashed the felled pigs’ throats with the bowie to bleed them and the blood gushed out and made red mud of the ground. Benson jabbed strong sharp-pointed sticks through the pigs’ heel strings and they dragged the animals by these sticks to big tubs of water seething over fires set in holes so that the tub rims were about even with the ground. They shoved the pigs into the tubs and scalded them till the hides could easily be scraped clean of all bristle. Then they hung the carcasses from a tree branch by the heels and gutted them. They washed each carcass out good and scraped it of fat and butchered it and hung the hams and middlings in the smokehouse. The mother and elder daughter would fry most of the fat into crisp cracklins to be mixed with compone and what they didn’t fry they would render into lard or boil into soap.

  At the end of the day the men’s clothes were stiff with gore and the chilly air was ripe with pig blood. They washed up at the creek and Benson traded Edward a clean pair of pants and shirt for his bloody ones. They were a fair fit but for being a tad short at the wrists and ankles. They supped on pork ribs and baked yams and corn and the Sharon girl’s peach cobbler. Every time Edward and the girl looked each other’s way she flushed and he felt heat in his own face. Her eyes were green and bright with mischief. The mother caught their looks and scowled darkly and the girl gave back a tight-lipped look of defiance. The farmer seemed entirely oblivious to all the ocular byplay. Edward deftly avoided the mother’s scolding stares by ducking his head to his cobbler and coffee. He wondered at the girl’s boldness and tried to imagine what she looked like without her clothes.

  The temperature had dropped with the sun and the night was near freezing. Welch offered to have his wife lay out a pallet for him on the floor next the fireplace but Edward declined with the explanation that he would be riding out well before first light and did not want to disturb the house with his stirrings. The farmer remonstrated mildly and the woman packed a bundle of food for him to take. Welch escorted him out to the barn with lantern in hand and stood by while Edward made a comfortable bed of straw next to the stall that held his horse.

  “When you get acrost the Sabine into Texas,” he advised Edward, “keep to the northwest trace. It’ll carry you direct to a spur of the Nacogdoches Road.”

  Edward thanked him for his hospitality and the farmer thanked him for his help. They bid one another goodnight and farewell and Welch left the lantern with him and headed back to the house.

  In his dream he saw himself shivering in his sleep in a vast and rocky wastelan
d under a sunless sky red as blood. Beside him lay the skeletal remains of a horse and in his sleep he could hear the cold wind whistling through the pale ribcradle. And now the whistling came from Daddyjack who hove up from behind a low sandrise and came shuffling toward him with tattered clothes aflutter and eyesocket gaping and blackrimmed with blood. Edward now woke inside the dream and watched his cadaverous father’s advance and shivered as much with fear as with the cold. Daddyjack squatted beside him and showed a yellow grin. He smelled powerfully of horseshit. His single eye roved over Edward’s face like some fierce animal pacing in a cage Then he replaced his hat and stood up and walked off whistling into the emptiness and sank from sight into the next depression.

  He was truly awake now and heard the wind whistling in the cracks of the walls. A bright narrow strip of moonlight showed where the barn door was open slightly and the lower end of that strip was dark where somebody stood.

  “Are ye woke?” the Sharon girl whispered.

  The door opened wider and she slipped inside and shut it behind her. In the weak light admitted by the single small window on the far wall he could make out her shadowy form. He heard her stamp her feet against the cold.

  “I brung you a blanket,” she said softly. “It’s so cold.”

  He sat up and took a box of matches from his jacket and broke one off the block and struck it against the stall post. In the sudden sulfurous flare of blue-yellow light he saw a steaming pile of horse droppings at the edge of the stall and then saw her standing just inside the door with the cowl of her cloak pulled over her head. She was hugging a folded blanket to her chest and in the glow of the matchfire her eyes widened and she hissed, “No light!” and he snuffed the lucifer between his fingers.

  For a moment there was only the sound of their breathing. His heart thumped in his throat. Her boldness at once alarmed and excited him. He heard her feet moving through the straw and the blanket she brought fell open with a soft sound. She spread it over his own blanket that yet covered his legs. He felt her weight settle beside him and her seated silhouette was clearer now but he could not distinguish her features.

  “Hardly nobody ever comes by here,” she said, her voice so low he could barely make out her words. She appeared to remove the cloak and now was doing something with the front of her dress. “The world’s way out yonder and I aint never gonna see a bit of it nor get to know anybody much in it. I know I aint. Momma was the age I am now when she married and I don’t reckon she saw much before she said ‘I do,’ but I know for a fact she aint seen much but a day’s work ever since.” She seemed to shrug and her form became somehow paler and he suddenly realized she had made herself naked to the waist. She stood now and fumbled with the dress bunched at her hips.

  She continued in her whispered plaint as she undressed but he wasn’t listening. He was thinking of tales he’d heard in the Pearl River timbercamp about how fathers looking to marry off a daughter sometimes arranged for just such a situation as this. As soon as the unsuspecting fellow and the sweet thing got their clothes off, the father would barge in with a shotgun and give the jughead no choice but to marry the girl or get his useless brains blown out. But even if this one wasn’t up to any such trick, her father might wake anyway to find her absent from her bed in the dark of the night and the first place he’d look for her would surely be in the barn where the passing stranger lay. And he’d as likely come with a gun and not be of a mind to offer him any choice at all. But he remembered too Daddyjack’s adage that life’s truest pleasures were full of risk and that’s what made them special. Watching her vague silhouette step out of the dress and drape it over a stall rail, he reached out and pulled his rifle closer and then slipped his hand under his saddle that he was using for a pillow and withdrew his pistol and bowie and set them readier to hand.

  She knelt beside him and he could sense she was shivering and could smell her warm nakedness on the cold air. He reached out and touched her hair. She brought her hand up to his and squeezed it. His other hand went to her breast and she gasped and flinched at his cold fingers and brought them to her mouth and exhaled forcefully on them several times and then placed them back on her breast and whispered, “That’s some better.” The nipple against his thumb was thick and erect. His night vision had sharpened now and he could vaguely distinguish the freckles on her pale breasts. He stood and quickly shed his pants and they scrambled under the blankets and smothered their yelps and giggles as they laid cold touches to each other. Soon enough their hands were well warmed and they groped and probed and lapped at one another with lickerish delight.

  And then they were coupled and rocking together in the most ancient of human rhythms—but still he kept an ear cocked for the approach of Farmer Welch’s paternal wrath. His pleasure was the greater for the danger of possible discovery, though he knew now she was up to no trick. She was but a pretty girl aching with loneliness, feeling her youth and beauty wasting in this backwood as far removed from the city life she pined for as from the moon, distant beyond reckoning from the sights and music and streetlights and throngs of exciting strangers she imagined to bepopulate the metropolis. He suddenly envisioned his sister Maggie slouched on the porch rocker in Florida with her eyes closed and her heels hooked over the railing and him and his brother sitting on the lower steps and looking up the exposed backs of her legs to her white cotton drawers. He was shocked to feel himself harden the more at the memory and he thrust with even greater urgency into the gasping girl.

  A moment later he thought he heard something and abruptly ceased his rocking and braced himself on one hand and grabbed up the pistol with the other and listened intently even as he remained embedded in the girl. She listened with him and then clucked her tongue impatiently and whispered, “Aint nobody! They all them sleep like rocks.”

  “Then how come we whisperin?” he asked, smiling, feeling himself throbbing inside her. He heard the sound again and realized it was a shrub slapping softly on itself in a changed wind.

  She locked her hands behind his neck and pulled herself up so her mouth was at his ear and said, “Cause I guess you caint never know for absolute sure.” She giggled and stuck her tongue in his ear and worked her pelvis hard against him. He growled happily and fell to his rhythm again and ducked his face to her breasts.

  At the false dawn some time later she got up and began to dress, slapping Edward’s fondling hands from her as she did. Edward grinned in the dark and thought he must be crazy. Her daddy might yet come through those doors with a gun in his hand. Might yet shoot him dead. Unless of course he managed to shoot Welch first. The idea of being forced to shoot Welch slowed his gropings for a moment. He was for a fact violating the daughter of a man who’d done him kindness—and what father wouldn’t be obliged to do something about it if he knew? But now the girl was done with the buttons on her dress and gone to the door to open it slightly and put her eye to the gap, and he shrugged off his guilty musings and went to her.

  She turned to him and took his face in her hands and kissed him hard and deep, then broke the kiss and took his hands off her hips and held them tightly and smiled at him. “It aint no need to look like somebody’s choking you,” she said. “You aint beholden.”

  He opened his mouth without any idea of what he was about to say but she put her hand to his lips to shush him and then quickly kissed him again. “I’ll think on you, boy. Now go on, get gone.” And with that, she was out the door and vanished in the shadows.

  A few minutes later he led his saddled horse out of the barn and mounted up. He glanced toward the house and saw the dark windows and wondered if she was at one of them and watching him. He waved goodbye in case she was. The taste of her stayed on his tongue and the smell of her on his skin well into the next afternoon.

  3

  The days continued cold but mostly bright and windless, the nights sharp with frost and blasting with stars. He rode slowly, shawled in both his own blanket and the one the Sharon girl had brought to him in the barn
and which the mother would surely miss and then figure what became of it and how. He had several times wondered if the woman would let on to Welch, and if she did, if the farmer would hang the girl naked by the wrists from a tree limb and whip her bloody for a whore. The idea angered him sufficiently that he muttered curses and several times considered going back. But each impulse to rein about was followed by the question of what he would do then. Ask her to come with him? The notion was pure-dee loony. Come with him where? And do what? Start a farm? Spend the rest of his days grubbing in the dirt for a living? Her maybe going crazy someday? His daughter maybe taking to lay with passing strangers or to run off with his best horse? His sons maybe one day taking to raise hand to him? Maybe killing him? He spat. Better to burn in lonely hell. Whereupon he thought: You likely. And smiled wryly. And hupped the horse on.

  The country once more rose to timber. The trees drew closer together and stood higher and layers of pine needle softened the fall of the mare’s hooves. He’d long since finished the food the woman had given him. He had not eaten in nearly a day when on a high noon gray with mist he hove onto a rise overlooking a booming river. A short distance northward on the near bank a ferry swayed and tossed at moor on its pulley rope. A sagging cabin on short thick pilings stood close by the landing with smoke winding from its narrow chimney. Edward heeled the mare down the slope.

  A freshly painted wooden sign at the ferry landing read: TEXES FERRY 1 DOLLER. The ferryman sat whittling on the porch in a straightback chair tipped back against the wall. Beside him leaned a rusty Kentucky rifle. He was gaptoothed and near bald, shirtless and his longjohn top was grayish black with filth. Even from where he sat the horse at the bottom of the steps Edward could smell him. An odor even more rancid wafted from the house.

  “Got a possum stew on the pot,” the ferryman said. “If you of a mind for a bowl it’s two bits. Want a drink of shine it’s nother two bits. Want acrost the river it’s like the sign says, a dollar. In coin. Don’t take no scrip.”