In the Rogue Blood Read online

  Edward and John were slopping the pigs when he drove the wagon into the stable and came out with a coil of rope and a rawhide quirt and dropped them at the base of an oak and stalked into the house, his face dark with rage. A moment later they heard their sister scream and he came out dragging their mother by the hair with one hand and fending off ten-year-old Maggie with the other. The woman was struggling like a roped cat and the girl kept trying to bite the hand that gripped her mother’s hair and Daddyjack swatted her off her feet. He dragged the woman to the tree and held her down with a knee on her chest and tied her wrists together with one end of the rope. The girl went at him again swinging both fists and he backhanded her once more and John rushed in and pinioned her in his arms and pulled her away and she was screaming, “Let her be! Let her be! Let her be!”

  He lobbed the free end of the rope over a branch and caught it and jerked up the slack and then hoisted the woman a good two feet off the ground by her bound hands and made fast the end of the rope around the tree trunk. She kept trying to kick him as he grabbed her dress by the neckline and ripped it open and yanked it off her arms and tugged it down over her hips and off her legs, stripping her naked. She was turning slowly at the end of the rope as he snatched up the quirt and began whipping her with hard fast strokes.

  She yelped with each strike of the quirt as it cut into her back and breasts and belly. She was quickly striped and streaked with blood from teats to thighs. John looked stricken but kept his tight hold on the girl and she was crying and screeching, “Stop it! Stop it!” And though Edward too was horrified, he felt something else at the same time, something attached to the horror and yet apart from it, something his twelve-year-old heart could not have named but which thrilled him to the bone even as his throat tightened with shame.

  Daddyjack beat her for less than a minute and then flung away the quirt and embraced her about the hips and pressed his face between her breasts, sobbing and mixing his tears with her blood. Then he eased her down and untied her hands and massaged the circulation back into them and brushed the sweated hair out of her eyes as she lay still and watched him without word. He told Edward to fetch a cloth and a bucket of water and when he brought them Daddyjack helped the woman to her feet and gently swabbed the blood and dirt off her back and buttocks. Each time he touched a laceration she bit her lip and tears spilled down her face.

  “Give me it,” the daughter said, holding her hand out for the cloth, and Daddyjack let her finish the cleaning as he supported the woman upright. The daughter made a thorough job of it, mopping even the blood that had trickled into her mother’s patch of private hair. The worst wound was at the left nipple which the quirt tip had torn loose and the only whimper the woman let was when the daughter dabbed the blood from it with the cloth.

  Dadddyjack then cradled her up in his arms and carried her into the house and set her gently on the bed and covered her lower privates with a blanket. He had the girl bring him a threaded needle and ordered the boys to stop looking upon their mother’s nakedness and they reluctantly left the room. He gave the woman a folded cloth to bite on and then sewed the nipple back in place as best he could while the daughter held the lantern close for him. The boys listened intently at the door but never once heard her cry out. It was a successful but clumsy surgery and the woman would bear the ugly scar to her death. When Daddyjack was done she looked bloodless pale but her eyes were red as fires and she watched him looking on as the daughter gingerly applied grease to her wounds.

  Once the woman had been tended, Daddyjack took the girl outside and led her and the boys to the creekbank and sat them down and explained that he’d whipped their mother because she had been a whore. “She dishonored me as much as herself,” Daddyjack told them, “and lied to me about it. Dishonored you too, all of you, since you got to live with the fact of being born of a woman who whored. What I did to her she’s had comin for a long time.”

  “You ain’t God!” Maggie abruptly shouted, startling Edward and John who looked at her like she might have lost her mind.

  Daddyjack pinned her with a glare. “Missy,” he said, “you ain’t never goin to be near big enough nor old enough to talk that way to me. I won’t shy from stretchin you on that tree if you don’t show proper respect.” The girl defiantly met his hard look as John sidled over and put a hand on her shoulder and she held her tongue. In recent months John had assumed an attitude of guardianship toward their sister that Edward found somewhat puzzling because Maggie had never given the least sign of wanting or appreciating anybody’s protection.

  “I blame naught but my own foolishness for marryin her,” Daddyjack said. “I thought because she was so young and her uncle who raised her was a preacher she couldn’t be but pure. That was damnfool thinkin and I admit it, but just the same, that son of a bitch ought have told me she’d been a whore, and he ought not have lied about her being orphaned by the cholera, which I finally come to get the truth of from people who knew it, people from down in the lowland where she was born. Come to find out she was born tainted. Her momma was a crazywoman who murdered her husband and then drowned herself when your momma was just a babygirl. That’s right—that’s just exactly what they told me. I never did let on to your momma that I knew. Figured it didn’t much matter. Figured just because her momma was crazy didn’t mean she had to be.”

  He paused to spit and to study the sky a moment.

  “Now I know it does matter,” he said. “I believe your momma like as not has some of the same craziness her own momma had. I’m tellin you so you’ll know for a fact she ain’t a right woman. I reckon it’s something in the blood. It’s what made her be a whore and then lie to me about it and taint my honor and yours too.” He fixed Maggie with another look. “You ought to pray Jesus she ain’t passed that bad blood to you as well, missy, though it’s startin to look to me like she surely did.”

  Maggie flushed and looked away.

  “She’s still your momma, though,” he told them, “and she’s still my wife and that’s a fact and nothin’ll change it. Ye can pity her if you’ve a mind to, since she caint help what she is anymoren a rabid dog can do other than it does, but I say ye be wise never to believe a word from her mouth.”

  5

  He did not raise his hand to her again for the rest of the time they lived in Georgia, though every now and then he’d plunge into a drinking binge of two or three days during which he glowered at her a good deal while muttering to himself. For her part she refused to speak. During the following year she said not a word to anyone, although she carried on with her obligations as always, including her conjugal duties to Daddyjack. She communicated with the brothers through gestures and facial expressions, commanding their attention with a clap of her hands and directing them to their chores with a jut of her chin or a pointed finger, putting an end to their horseplay in the house with a hard-flung sopping washrag and a stern gaze. At first Edward was amused by her dedicated muteness but he soon tired of it and he sometimes wanted to shake her and demand she quit the silliness. He thought she might be every bit as crazy as Daddyjack had said.

  Maggie required neither gestures nor broad looks to understand their mother. She seemed able to read her eyes, to know her thoughts without the need of speech. John was fascinated by the uncanny bond between the women. He remarked upon it to Daddyjack one day when they were hewing oak. Daddyjack said he had noticed it himself but was not impressed. “It’s lots of crazywomen old and young can shine with each other like that,” he said, “especially if they of the same blood. Like mother like daughter is what they say, and I believe it’s a true fact.”

  If Daddyjack was bothered by his wife’s refusal to speak he did not let it show except sometimes late at night when Edward was awakened by the heaving and panting of their couplings and the ripe sweetsour scent of sex filled the small house. Daddyjack’s voice would be low and rough in the darkness, exhorting her: “Tell me, woman! Tell me how much you like it! Tell me, damn you!” His mother woul
d moan softly and the bed would toss even more convulsively and moments later Daddyjack would issue an explosive breath and collapse upon her and they would lie there gasping loudly in the dark for a few moments before pulling apart into their separate silences.

  Throughout their marriage Daddyjack and Lilith had regularly attended the Saturday night barn dances held all about the county, but after the whipping she would dance no more. Daddyjack said he was damned if they’d quit going to the shindigs just because she refused to kick up her heels. He continued to hitch up the team every Saturday evening and drive the family to the dances. He told his wife that as far as he was concerned she could sit on a bench against the back wall till her ass grew roots but he was going to have himself a time, by Jesus. And he always did, dancing with girls who’d heard the story of the Klassons from the time they were children and were both terrified and thrilled to be whirling in his arms as their fathers and brothers watched after them anxiously and hoped Jack Little would turn to someone else’s womenfolk for the next dance. His own daughter was now approaching an age and fairness of face and figure to draw attention, and she did love to dance, but it was clear to every man and boy in the place that her daddy kept a sharp eye on her even as he danced on the other side of the room and few were the young fellows brave enough to risk his ire by asking Maggie for a turn on the floor more than once of a Saturday night. Then came the night Rainey asked Lilith to dance and Daddyjack put a knife in his chest. Then came Florida.

  6

  They made their homestead in the deep timber, well off the main trace, on Cowdevil Creek near its junction with the Perdido River. The shadowing forest towered around them. They cleared a tract and built a two-room cabin and a stable. Lilith and Maggie planted a vegetable garden in a clearing that caught sun for part of every day. The mosquitoes were unremitting and the summer humidity made warm gel of the air and alligators ate the dogs in the first few weeks. Yet game was plentiful and they never lacked for fresh venison or wild pig and the creek was thick with catfish and bream and snapping turtle. They often spotted black bear lurking at the edge of the surrounding woods and they sometimes heard a panther shriek close by in the night. Huge owls on the hunt swooped past the house in the late evenings with a rush of wings like maladict spirits. They kept the stable and the henhouse bolted tight after dark. They hewed timber and trimmed it and sledded it to the creek and rafted it to the river where a logging contractor showed up on a steamboat every six weeks or so to buy it and float it downriver to sell to the lumber companies.

  “It’s a good place we got here, boys,” Daddyjack said one evening when they all sat on the porch steps at sunset and he was mellow in his cups. Maggie sat in a chair with her feet up on the porch railing. “Ever man needs a place to call his own,” Daddyjack said. “You boys remember that. Without a place to call his own a man aint but a feather on the wind.”

  But his drinking had now become dipsomaniac and his demons more frequently slipped their chains. In his sporadic besotted rages over the next three years he would accuse their mother of having coupled with that Rainey fool like a common yardcat, with him among others, from the time she was hardly more than a child. “The whole county probly knew about it, by damn! All these years they were laughin at me, laughin at Jack Little, the fool who married the whore! Probly still laughin!”

  She endured his bitter tirades with a stonefaced silence that only stoked his fury, and, if he was drunk enough, he’d strike her. At such times John felt pulled between allegiance to Daddyjack and an impulse to protect their mother. But he could never bring himself to intervene. His sister would look at him with such accusation he felt cowardly. Edward warned him not to mix in their parents’ scraps and not to pay heed to Maggie, who was likely to be crazy as their mother.

  “Crazy’s got nothin to do with it,” John argued. “She’s our mother, dammit! He ought not to hit her!”

  “And she’s his wife,” Edward said. “It aint for us to push into it.”

  At times now Daddyjack denounced their mother for her girlhood whoring even when he was fully sober. The hate that passed between his parents had become so rank Edward believed he could smell it like rotted fruit.

  And yet they still mated. Not as often as before but more ferociously than ever, snarling like dogs over a bone, like they were set on drawing blood from each other. Edward knew John and Maggie heard them too, though they never spoke of it. His sister had lately become moody and increasingly reticent with her brothers and was even more closemouthed than usual following a night of their parents’ loud coupling. Her brooding troubled John but Edward simply shrugged at it, remembering Daddyjack’s admonition: “Like mother, like daughter.”

  One early morning they woke to find Maggie gone. She’d slipped out in the night and saddled Daddyjack’s horse and made off as quiet as a secret thought. Daddyjack admired her nerve even though she’d taken his horse. “Wasn’t the least bit of moon out last night,” he said. “And I heard a painter yowlin in the south wood just before I blew out the lamp. Girl might be loony as a coot but she got more grit than many a man I could name.”

  Then he saw the look on his wife’s face, saw she was pleased that the girl had absconded, and his good humor vanished and he cursed her for having raised a worthless thief of a daughter.

  John wanted to go in search of her right away. It was his guess she had gone to Pensacola, the nearest town of size. Daddyjack agreed. “It’s the surest place she’ll find a whorehouse to work in,” he said, and gave his wife a spiteful look. He stroked his mustaches in thought for a moment before deciding to let the brothers go after her. “I don’t care if she comes back or not, but I want that horse. You catch sight of it you fetch it home, hear?”

  A few minutes later they were mounted bareback on the bridled mules and ready to go. They each carried a small croker sack of food and a knife on his belt and each had three dollars in his pocket. “Don’t be long about it,” Daddyjack said. “If she’s there you ought find her right quick.”

  “What if she’s hid out, Daddyjack?” John said. “I guess it’s lots of places she could hide in a town.”

  “Don’t matter if she’s hid out or not,” Daddyjack said. “If she’s there you’ll find her. Blood always finds blood. If she went clear tother side of the damn world and you followed after you’d find her. Blood always finds blood. Now yall get goin.”

  All show of pleasure had fled their mother’s face. She hugged herself tightly and regarded the brothers with a darkly fretful look that John was oblivious to in his distraction over Maggie and that Edward pointedly ignored, reasoning that if she wanted to say something she could damn well open her mouth and do it. “Let’s go,” he said, hupping the mule forward with his heels.

  7

  Pensacola was loud with celebration on the sultry afternoon the brothers rode into town. It was America’s Independence Day and the first Fourth of July for Florida since gaining statehood four months earlier. A brass band blatted in the main square and boys dropped firecrackers from the red-tiled Spanish rooftops onto the sand streets below and laughed to see how they frighted the animals. The brick sidewalks were thronged with uniformed soldiers and swarthy sailors, toothy Negro dockhands, straw-hatted farmers, burly timberjacks and sawyers, finely outfitted gentlemen escorting ladies in frill dresses shading themselves with lacy parasols. Jugs flowed freely and yapping dogs raced through the crowd.

  “Whooee! They kickin they heels, aint they!” John said.

  Edward grinned back at him. “I’d say we picked the right day to be here, son.”

  On a high wooden platform a dark-suited man in white muttonchops orated about Florida’s glorious future while overhead fluttered the American flag and alongside it a flag striped in five bright colors emblazoned with the words “Let us alone.” A salt breeze blew off the bright harbor just a block beyond the square and rattled the palm fronds and the brothers hupped the mules to the foot of a long wooden pier. They dismounted and walked out onto the do
ck and stood looking at the cargo ships laying ready to receive lighters bearing lumber and cotton and naval stores. A flock of pelicans sailed past just a few feet over the water and a flurry of screeching seagulls hovered above the docks. When they first settled in Florida the brothers had sometimes smelled the sea when the wind came strong from the south but this was their first view of it. In contrast to the close and deepshadowed world of tall timber the vast blue expanse of ocean and sky made them lightheaded.

  They hitched the mules in front of a tavern on the corner of the square, agreed to meet back there at dusk, and split up to conduct their search, Edward in the side streets and John in the square. As Edward wended his way through the crowds he fixed closely on every blonde woman he spotted. Then he rounded a backstreet corner and heard “Hey, handsome!” and looked up to see a pair of pretty girls, a freckled redhead and a dusky mulatto, grinning down at him from a wrought-iron balcony. They were in bright white underclothes and the sight of their legs in tight pantalettes and their breasts bulging over the tops of their corsets nearly staggered him. “Get on up here, you rascally-looking thing, you!” the redhead called, and both girls laughed and beckoned him and the redhead squeezed her breasts and blew him a kiss.

  He went inside and a goateed man wearing a checkered vest and a pistol in his waistband told him he could have the girl of his choice for five dollars and he had a plentiful selection. He had a gold front tooth that glinted in the light. Edward said he didn’t have but three dollars and the man said all right then, since they weren’t too awful busy at the moment he could have a special rate of ten minutes for three dollars. Edward handed over his money and picked the redhead.