The Book of Lost Friends(46)

It’s far over yon, wherever those men are headed. Seems like mile after mile we go. My legs get weak, and the tree trunks swirl round my eyes, shadows and sun, leaves and bent crooked branches. A cypress knee catches my toe, and I fall hard into the fringe of a slough. I roll onto my back and lay there looking up at the sky, watching the pieces of blue peek through like Mama’s homespun cloth, fresh dyed from the indigo fields.

I lay there waiting for whatever’s to come.

Far off, the wagon axle sings out its rhythm. Squeek, click-click, squeek, click-click, squee…

The men’s talk drifts back, loud and rowdy now. They been in the whiskey barrel, maybe.

I curl close to the cypress tree, hide all the bare flesh I can from the mosquitos and the blood flies, close my eyes and let their sounds drift off.

I don’t know if I sleep or only fade awhile, but I feel nothing. Worry over nothing.

A touch on my face pulls me from the quiet peace. My eyes burn, sticky and dry when I try to pull them open. The tree shadows have gone long and stretchy with the afternoon sun.

The touch comes again, feathery soft like a kiss. Is it Jesus come to fetch me away? Might be I drowned in the river after all. But the touch stinks of mud and rotted meat.

Something’s trying to make a meal out of me! It jumps sidewards as I swat at it, and when I look, there’s the old rawboned red tick dog from before. He lowers his half-bare head and watches me with careful brown eyes, ducks his tail against his butt, but wags the tip twixt his back knees like he’s hoping I’ll toss him some fatback to eat. We stay there, careful about each other for a while before he moves past and laps up rainwater that’s caught in the scoop of the cypress knees. I pull myself to it and do the same. That dog and me drink side by side at the same dish.

The water seeps through my body, wakes my arms and feet and mind. The dog sits down and watches, careful. He don’t seem in a hurry to go. Must be he’s close to home.

“Where’d you come from?” I whisper. “Your place near here?”

I shift to get my legs under me, and the dog shies back. “All right,” I whisper. He’s about as sad and sorry a hound as I ever saw, scratches, swole-up places, and bare spots all over his body. “You go on home now. Show me where that is.”

I get to my feet, and he skitters off and I trek along behind, following his weave through the woods. He don’t care to use the road, so we cross it and go down a game trail. The sweet-burn smell of a smokehouse pools the back of my mouth. Dog takes me right to it, at the rear end of a homeplace that’s been hollowed out of the woods on high ground. Little slabwood house and barn, smokehouse and outhouse. The chimneys are sticks and mud, like the ones in the old cabins on the Quarter, back in Goswood Grove. Everything on this place leans one way or the other, the bayou eating it up a little at a time. A pirogue sits against the wall of the cabin, with all manner of traps for animals and beaver. The leftovers of a deer carcass hang in a tree, flies gathered so thick they climb on each other to get what they’re after.

Place is still as the grave. I crouch behind a wood stack high and wide as the cabin, watch and listen while the dog goes on into the yard and sniffs round and digs hisself a hole to lay down in the cool. A horse snorts and stirs a ruckus, kicking the barn’s log wall and knocking loose a shower of chink and dirt. A mule brays. The sound travels so loud it sets birds to flying, but the cabin stays still.

I creep round to the barn, peek in. The wagon’s parked in the aisle. Ginger and Juneau Jane’s gray stand together in a stall, the old mule in the next one. Sweat and lather covers all three. They been carrying on with each other, saying who’s boss. Blood drips from the gray’s leg, where he’s kicked the rails. I move in a little more, so’s I can see the back of the wagon. A whiskey barrel and the trunks are gone.

A few steps more and I spot them big boxes with the brass corners, dumped on the floor of the barn, but they’re open, empty inside, when I creep close and check. The smell’s as bad as the sight. The stink of stomachs that’ve wretched up their food and bodies that’ve soiled theirselves makes me cover my nose, but at least it ain’t the smell of death. I take some comfort in that, even if it’s small comfort. Don’t want to think what it means if Missy and Juneau Jane been carried into that cabin. Don’t know what I can do about it, if they have.

I study on the barn, wish there’d be a rifle left there, but on the walls it’s just harness hanging, still wet from the morning’s work, also a half dozen old Confederate bridles, the round brasses on the browband marked with CSA. There’s Jeff Davis saddles, too, piled together over the top of empty barrels, Confederate canteens and a kerosene lantern, plus Lucifers in a brass box to strike the fire with.

I dig up a piece of oilcloth that’s half-buried in the hay, lay it out on the floor, and go to gathering. Lucifers, a canteen, a tin cup, a piece of broke-off candle, and meat from the smokehouse. I fill a canteen from the rain barrel, sling it over my shoulder and find a hank of rope to tie the oilcloth into a poke. The dog comes round, and I toss him some of the meat, and we don’t bother each other. He follows when I carry the poke off to the woods and put it in the branch of a tree where I can grab it if I need to get away in a hurry.

The dog and me squat together in the brush, then, while I look at that cabin and try to think what to do next. Go for the horses, I guess. Then worry about the rest.