In the Rogue Blood Read online

  “Well, it aint like to let up anytime soon,” John said, scanning the heavy sky and then looking down the street to westward. “Last I heard, Texas was still yonderway. Sooner we get goin again the sooner we be there.”

  “I aint leavin without that mule,” Edward said.

  John looked at him.

  “Well I aint. I aint lettin no thievin smitty have that mule for twenty dollars. I don’t care she signed a paper on it.”

  “Well hell, bubba, when you decide this?”

  “In there just now.” Edward was looking toward a side street and John followed his gaze and recognized the street as leading to the stable where they’d seen the Foots mule. He looked at Edward and said, “That stablebuck looks a rough ole boy.”

  “He cheated her of that mule and I aim to get it back. And he don’t scare me none.”

  “Didn’t say he did and he don’t me neither,” John said. He looked down the street again. “You want that mule, I say let’s get it.”

  Edward regarded the overcast sky. “Be full dark soon. Best wait till then.” He caught John’s look at the tavern door. “I aint scared a him but probly better we don’t front him half-drunk, either.”

  John shrugged and nodded. They’d wrapped their firearms in their blankets to protect them from the rain and now uncovered them and checked the locks to make sure they were still dry and then wrapped the guns again. They sat on the porch with their backs against the wall and waited for nightfall and when it came they got up and trudged down the thickmudded street.

  The rain had again slackened to a drizzle amid continuing growls of thunder but the clouds were yet thick and roily and riding low. Sporadic lightning shimmered the street with blue light and black shadows. The wind was stronger now and shook water off the trees in heavy splattering sheets. They could hear the river’s swollen rush. The smell of raw clay was strong on the air. The buildings along the main street were closed and dark but for the taverns and pleasure parlors whose windows showed wavering lamplight and resounded with music and laughter. A pair of horsemen draped with slickers went sploshing past, joking loudly about Mobile’s sporting ladies.

  They rounded the corner and saw a cast of pale yellow light in the livery and eased up to the door and looked inside. The stableman sat in his rocker sipping from a jug and addressing the bulldog lying at his feet with its chin on its paws. They stepped inside and the dog flexed to its feet with its back roached and fangs bared, growling low.

  The stableman set the jug on the floor and rose from his chair and John leveled the Hawken at him from the hip and the man stood fast and looked mournful. Edward took a coiled rope off a stall gate and tossed it to him and told him to tie the dog short to a post. The man did it and then Edward ordered him to hand over the key to the desk drawer and sit back down in the rocker. He bound the man snug to the chair with a length of rope while the bulldog snarled and slobbered and strained against its short leash but did not bark. John fashioned a rope hackamore for the mule and slipped it on the animal while Edward went to the desk and opened the drawer and found the bill of sale and folded it and put it in his pocket.

  “We could take any of these mounts we want,” Edward told the stableman, “but we aint here to steal from you, only to take what’s rightly ours. You paid twenty dollars for old Foots, but it was cheatin money cause you know good and well this mule’s worth more, so it’s only fittin you lose what you paid.”

  As John began cutting a wide strip off a burlap bag the stableman said, “You thievin me, boys, no matter how you shine the light on it. You gone have the law on you. You sure you want that?”

  “How you gonna prove to the law you even had a mule stole?” Edward said. He patted his pocket. “Where’s your damn paper on it?”

  “You ever decide you want to make us a fair offer on it,” John said, “you come see us in Pensacola.” He winked at Edward over the stableman’s head. “That’s our home and that’s where we headed.”

  John rolled the burlap strip and gagged the man with it. Edward stepped outside to make sure the going was clear and then John blew out the lantern and the brothers doubled up on the Foots mule and rode down the street and out of Mobile in the falling rain.

  5

  They rode steadily through the night and most of the next day, taking turns sleeping one behind the other, pushing westward, putting distance between themselves and Mobile. The rain fell and fell. They were sodden to their bones. At first light they began scanning the murky landscape behind them for signs of pursuers. The sagging sky looked made of clay. On the trail along the bottoms the water was to the mule’s belly. They kept a sharp eye for moccasins. The only sounds were of the mule’s huffing breath and splooshing forward progress, the rain pattering the trees and dimpling the water. A dead pig drifted past, its upturned eye dull as stone, and then a dozen white chickens, bloated and giving off feathers to the breeze. When a catfish as big as a boy broke the surface alongside them the mule frighted and Edward was unseated and nearly kicked in the head and he swallowed mouthfuls of muddy water as he struggled to his feet while John got the animal steadied again.

  Late that afternoon the rain abated but the sky remained leaden. As the mule slogged through water to its knees they spotted something large bobbing beside a canefield some thirty yards ahead and close to the road. It looked to be a heavy cut of timber but as they drew near they saw it was an empty coffin. Within the next half-mile they came upon four more and all of them empty. The air assumed the odor of rot. Now the road curved around a wide cypress stand and they saw more than a dozen coffins afloat where a graveyard had flooded and the rising groundwater had forced the coffins up out of the softened saturated earth. Most of the coffins were lidless and empty and some were hardly more than a few rotted boards still clung together on a rusted nail. Cadavers in various states of decomposition carried on the slow current of the flood. Most were the color of the earth itself and some were snagged on shrubbery and in the cane and those with upturned faces showed empty black eyeholes and rotted yellow grins against the gloomy sky.

  Now they saw two men in black slickers on a nearby rise applying a prising bar to a coffin and the lid screeched and came asunder and one of the men bent over the box and cried out, “Luck!” He dropped to his knees and lifted a moldered hand into view and pulled a ring from its finger and rinsed it in the water and held it up for the other man to see. But the other had caught sight of the brothers and now unslung his rifle and pulled off the rag he’d wrapped around the breech to keep it dry and he held the weapon pointed at them from his hip.

  The brothers passed slowly within thirty feet of them and Edward jerked on the hackamore to pull the curious mule’s eyes away from the graverobbers. John held the cocked Hawken propped across his thighs with his finger on the trigger. The men were bonefaced and grizzled and there was nothing in their darkeyed aspect save hard wariness. No one spoke and John kept his eyes on them until he was turned around almost completely on the back of the mule. The graverobbers watched them in turn until the brothers went around the next bend and out of sight.

  6

  They camped that evening in a small clearing on a stretch of high ground thick with shrubbery and hardwoods and flanked by a swift creek running high on its steep banks. Edward hacked branches off a water oak and sliced off the wet bark and used the inner wood to kindle a fire while John went to the creek and shot a large snapping turtle for their supper. They cut steaks out of it and roasted them on sharpened greensticks propped against the firestones. They built up the flames and took off their boots and set them close beside the fire and then stripped naked and hung their clothes and blankets on frames fashioned of willow branches around the fire to dry while they ate. When their pants and shirts were dry they put them on and rolled up in their damp blankets and went to sleep.

  Edward dreamed that he was back in the cabin in Florida and sitting across the table from Daddyjack who was hatless and wildhaired and stared at him with one sad eye and a sock
et gaping empty and hung with streaks of dried bloody gore. He did not seem angry so much as curious and somewhat puzzled. Edward’s heart was pounding. He told Daddyjack he was sorry, he truly was, but he’d had to protect his brother. “That’s good,” Daddyjack said, “I aint chiding you for it, brothers ought always to look out for each other.” Then he made a face and shook his head and Edward did not understand and asked what he meant and Daddyjack shook his head again. He turned in his chair and looked out the window into the darkness beyond and Edward saw the ragged red-black hole in the back of his head where the pistol ball had come through. Daddyjack pointed out into the dark and said, “The bitch knows.” And then his mother was at the window and looking in at them and smiling exactly as she had the last time he’d seen her.

  He woke in darkness. His face was wet and a sprinkling rain ticked on the foliage. The vague quartermoon shone dimly through scudding violet clouds. The fire had burned down to a bed of bright embers and raised a ghostly smoke in the drizzle. There was a rustling of shrubbery and he distinctly heard someone say in a whispered rasp, “Here. Fire looks like.”

  John whispered “Ward” in his ear and lightly touched his face. Edward nodded and rolled out of his blanket and put on his boots. They started toward the trees along the creekbank but they’d gone only a few feet when a rifle blasted from the trees behind them and Edward felt himself clubbed high and hard on the back and he staggered forward and fell crashing through saplings down the bank and into the high water of the rushing creek.

  Water seared in through his mouth and nose and he gagged and felt himself being pulled along the bottom by the current and he could not get upright and was sure he was going to drown. He grabbed wildly and caught hold of a root and arrested his downstream tumble and found footing and at last managed to thrust his head out of the water and gulp down air. He grabbed a willow branch and pulled himself grunting up the bank and sprawled on his belly and choked and spewed a gush of creekwater and lay there gasping. The long muscle along the top of his shoulder ached deeply and he felt the warm flow of blood over his collarbone but he could flex and rotate the arm and knew no bone was broken.

  He lay still in the grass and listened, trying to mute his heavy breathing and tasting the acrid and muddy vomit in his mouth. It seemed to him he had heard another rifleshot while he was in the water but he wasn’t sure. Now he heard voices in the darkness farther up along the creekbank but could not make out the words. Now somebody was coming his way, pushing though the foliage with no concern for stealth. Edward slipped Daddyjack’s snaphandle knife out of his pocket and opened the blade with a flick of his wrist and crawled deeper into the shadow of a large bush and there crouched and breathed shallowly through his open mouth and watched the slightly lighter patch of sky above the bushtop and listened as the man drew closer.

  When the man’s silhouette crossed the patch of sky Edward silently rose up behind him and clamped a swift arm hard around his head with a sureness that came to him as naturally as breathing. His arm stifled the man’s cry as he thrust the knife into his neck and twisted the blade and felt it scrape the neckbone and then he yanked it out and blood jetted hugely and spattered on the shrubbery and abruptly ebbed to a hot pulsing flow smelling of cut copper. It ran off the man’s neck and down his rainslicker and onto the front of Edward’s shirt. The man abruptly went slack and the dead weight of him was unlike any heft Edward had ever felt. He let the body fall. His heart banged against his ribs like a thing becrazed. The blood was warm on his chest and thick on his hands, the smell of it ripe on his face. He had to restrain the impulse to howl.

  He was dizzy, weak in the legs. Sharp pain jolted through his neck all the way to his left shoulder. He put his fingers to the muscle joining neck and back and felt the wound. The rifleball had entered above the shoulder blade and exited just over the collarbone, which flared with white pain to the touch. Blood pulsed from the wound. His shirt was sopping.

  A rifleshot sounded from the direction of the campsite and a man yelped in pain and Edward dropped to his haunches. A voice yelled, “Harlan, help me! I’m bad hurt!”

  He sheathed his knife and sidled over in the darkness to the dead man who he dearly hoped was Harlan. He stripped the man of powder flask and shot pouch and took up the fallen rifle and made sure it was loaded and started making his way back toward the campsite. He moved through the brush in a careful lightfoot crouch, hearing his own breath and the dripping leaves, smelling blood and raw earth.

  He was within a few yards of the clearing when the wounded man called for Harlan again. Then his voice went higher as he said, “Oh Jesus, son, don’t kill me. I wasn’t lookin to—” There came a soft thud and the man groaned deeply.

  Edward stood up and peered over the bushes and into the clearing where their campfire still cast a dull orange glow. John was standing over a retching man in a black slicker who lay on his side with his hands at his crotch. On the far edge of the clearing lay a man in a yellow slicker in such awkward attitude as only the dead can assume.

  Edward stepped out of the brush and John spun around white-eyed with the Hawken held like a club and he saw it was his brother and lowered the rifle and expelled a hard breath. “God damn, bubba!” he said. “I thought sure you’d been shot.” He quickly looked around and lowered his voice. “There’s anothern out there yet.”

  “That’s so,” Edward said. “But he aint no trouble.”

  “How come’s that? I didn’t hear no shot.”

  “Snapknife don’t shoot.”

  “Snapknife? Damn, son!” John’s face was alight with admiration and more—with a wild elation of a sort as old as Cain. “Hell, little brother,” he said, gesturing toward the yellow-slickered man, “we put down the lot, you and me! The lot! And them with the jump on us.”

  Edward felt himself returning his brother’s grin. The man at John’s feet drew their attention with a low moan. “Hey now,” John said, “lookit here what we got.” He put his boot against the man’s shoulder and pushed him over onto his back and even in the weak light of the coalfire there was no mistaking the mutilated nose of the stableman from Mobile.

  “Him and a coupla friends come all this way in the rain to shoot us for a damn mule that wasn’t rightly his to start with.” John grinned down at the stableman and said, “Your daddy oughta taught you to hunt some better.”

  The stableman looked at Edward and raised a supplicant hand. “Please,” he whispered. Edward saw the dark stain over his belly where John had shot him and he knew the wound was mortal.

  “What you want, hardcase?” John asked the stableman. “Another kick in the walnuts? You want me put you out you misery?” He raised the rifle to drive the buttplate through the man’s terrified face and Edward said, “Johnny don’t.”

  John looked at him, rifle poised.

  “It aint a need,” Edward said. “Not no more.” His wound spasmed sharply and he clutched at it and yawed.

  John hurried to him. “Damn boy—you bleedin!”

  He dropped his rifle and eased Edward to the ground next to the coalfire and helped him off with his blood-sopped shirt and examined the wound as best he could in the weak amber light.

  “I’m all right,” Edward said. “It just give me a smart is all.”

  John confirmed that the round had passed cleanly through the muscle over the collarbone. He told Edward to stay put while he fetched water from the creek. Edward was holding tightly to the wound and staring into the orange coals when he was startled by the stableman’s loud groan.

  Then the man’s last breath gurgled from his throat and faded into the night.

  John washed out his wound with creek water and fashioned a tight bandage for it from the stableman’s shirt. They heard the whickering of the men’s horses and found the animals tethered back in the trees just off the trail and brought them to the creek to drink. In the Mobile men’s pockets they found two boxes of matches and a honed claspknife and less than five dollars. Among the dead men’s p
ossibles they found bundles of smoked mullet and ears of roasted corn and they built up the fire again and sat beside it and ate.

  After a time John said, “I never thought it’d feel, I don’t know … like this.”

  Edward saw the high excitement still showing bright in his brother’s eyes.

  John said, “Killin a man, I mean. I always thought, well, I don’t know anymore what I always thought…. But I never thought it’d feel so … so damn right.” He started to grin and then remembered who the first man was that his brother had killed and his grin fell away and he shifted his gaze.

  Edward had himself been about to grin but just then thought of Daddyjack too. “I guess,” he said, “it depends on who the fella is.”

  “Yeah. I guess.”

  They ate in silence for a time and then John asked if he thought others would come looking for these three.

  “Don’t believe any law will,” Edward said. “I don’t know who these other two are, but no-nose didn’t say nothin about either of them bein law. I figure he might of tried to get the law on us but it wasnt interested in nothin so small-account as a mule the feller didn’t have no papers on anyway. Still, it might could be some kin’ll come lookin for em. We best be gettin on.”

  The sky was dawning hard and gray as they stripped the Mobile men of their slickers and weapons, powder and shot. John took the stableman’s black slicker for his own. The man who was sprawled at the edge of the clearing showed a nearly perfectly round hole over his left eyebrow and when Edward turned him over to take off his yellow slicker he saw the larger exit wound in back of the skull. He thought it was a hell of a shot under the circumstances. Johnny always was the shooter.