The Outcasts Page 5

She frowned and flopped away from him again, lying on her side. He pressed himself against her back, palming one breast. “Lucy,” he said, the nickname that was his alone to use. “You know I’ll never leave you. I’ll never abandon you, but you shouldn’t question me. Do your job. Write to me of your progress, and, when the time is right, I’ll come for you.” He expelled air into her ear mirthfully. “Then, when I introduce you to my mother, I can truthfully say that my wife has been a teacher, not a whore.”

  “I thought you liked the whore.”

  She could feel his lips curling against her shoulder. “Oh, make no mistake. I like the whore just fine. One might even say I like the whore better than anything.” He rose up on one elbow, looking down at her. “The whore neither spins nor sews, but neither is she idle. She is not deceitful in her chosen enterprise; she is not puffed up. She is what she seems to be. Purely the embodiment of both commerce and discourse, pressed and distilled to a place no bigger than a sparrow’s nest.” He stroked her hair and slipped his fingers between her thighs. “Why, the only difference between you and our family deacon is the fob watch…”

  Now, a movement next to her as she stood on the barge pulled her thoughts back to the river, and she saw a man standing close by in a startling orange-and-brown-plaid suit, the tight-fitting coat long to his knees. He removed his hat, nodding to her awkwardly, his hair nearly as orange as his jacket. She suppressed a smile, imagining his tailor convincing the man that the mirroring colors of the cloth were complimentary to his person as well as fashionable.

  He pointed to the riverbank and said, “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

  She followed his gaze and saw a large persimmon tree, the ripened fruit like scarlet globes of Italian wedding glass, perfect and seemingly untouched by birds.

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s beautiful.” She looked at his white, spotted profile and pale hands and realized he was closer to a boy than a man. “I’ve only ever tasted one, and it was near heaven.”

  He looked at her for a moment and then began to unbutton and remove his coat. “Shall I swim over and get you one?”

  She laughed, shaking her head no, but to her amazement, he smiled more broadly and began to remove his stiff collar and shirt as well. He drew laughs and shouts from the men above, which brought the women out of the cabin, looking to see what the excitement was about. Lucinda held her hands over her mouth in disbelief that he could be so foolish—perhaps he truly was a lunatic.

  He began pulling off his boots with some difficulty, and she then realized that he had been drinking, most likely fed whiskey by one of the other men. The women squealed in protest, and, while the men shouted encouragement, Lucinda fell helpless with laughter watching the boy stripping down to his undergarments and preparing to crawl over the railing.

  The captain shouted a warning at them from the steering house and climbed down the ladder holding a rifle. He grabbed a handful of the boy’s undershirt and quickly hauled him back off the rail and onto the deck. The captain whistled shrilly, and his dog, a black spaniel, leaped into the water and began swimming towards the shore.

  The captain turned to the boy and said, “Watch and learn.”

  The dog had not swum ten yards before the water under the reeds started to boil, and the logs that had rested against the bank, bobbing gently with the current, began to move purposefully toward the center of the river. The captain whistled again and the dog turned and began paddling back to the barge.

  The once-featureless logs resolved themselves into leviathans with churning legs and tails, three of them swimming rapidly to where the dog, his narrow-snouted head showing above the glassy surface of the river, was treading water in a way that seemed to Lucinda too languid for safety.

  The passengers, men and women, came to stand at the railing to watch the dog’s progress, the near-naked boy forgotten. The alligators had closed the gap between themselves and the dog by a good twenty feet when the captain took aim with his rifle and fired. The bullet struck the first gator in the broad space between the eyes. The impact of the bullet on the skull made a sound like a mallet against a watermelon, and the creature sank without a struggle.

  The ship’s fireman, his face and arms blackened from stoking the engine’s furnace, joined the group, and he swung open the boarding gate and hunkered down, readying himself to pull up the dog once he breasted the hull.

  The remaining two gators had closed the distance farther and Lucinda quickly calculated the amount of time left before the precise meeting of the surging bodies. The dog had, at most, only a few minutes. All eyes were on the captain, who stood poised with the stock of the rifle against his shoulder.

  The dog was within a few feet of the boat, the gators perhaps the same distance behind, when the captain finally discharged the rifle, striking the closest creature midback. The wound, at first as white and dense as a man’s thigh, soon bubbled blood like a fountain, and the gator’s companion, without hesitation, turned and began to tear at the exposed flesh.

  The dog swam abreast of the deck, and the fireman reached down, grabbed the long, wet fur with both hands, plucked the animal out of the water, and put him on the deck. The dog shook himself mightily and went to lie down, unperturbed by the events, in the shadow of the passenger cabin.

  The men, and a few women, continued to watch as the remaining alligator ferried the carcass across to the far side of the river.

  The boy had collapsed onto the deck, and the captain leaned over him and said, “Here ends the lesson.” The captain climbed back up to the steering cabin, and the boy gathered up his clothes and was helped inside by two of the older women.

  Lucinda watched the dead gator float for a moment in the shallows and then saw it pulled under, with barely a resulting ripple, the persimmon tree on higher ground yet glorious and unmolested.

  By midafternoon, the last of the passengers had stepped off onto the landing at Lynchburg, and she was alone, apart from the captain and fireman, for the last leg of the journey to Morgan’s Point at the true beginning of Galveston Bay. From there, she would be met by a cart sent to fetch her overland to Middle Bayou.

  After the boat docked at the old Confederate pier, the captain handed her off the barge, along with her bag, and she stood in the shade of some abandoned barracks for a while, watching the road for an approaching rig. There was not another being in sight across the grasslands to the west and the marshlands extending far to the south.

  Bored with waiting, she walked onto the pier and looked out across the greater bay. A cooling breeze whipped at her skirts, and she watched the sky haze over with mackerel clouds tinged pink with a late sun. A coral snake, disturbed by her footsteps on the wooden planks, swam into the deeper channel, and she wondered what form of gnawing, rending, stinging death would claim her if she were to jump into the water.

  The clapper in the old kitchen bell stirred with the breeze, a resonant sound that put Lucinda in mind of a ship’s bell. She allowed herself to imagine a water voyage across the Gulf to Galveston, and then on to New Orleans, away from the grinding dirt and dust of beggared towns. Soon, he had promised her, they could go wherever they liked.

  She heard the sound of a horse approaching and turned to watch a buckboard carriage with two occupants, both female, pull up the long, flat road to the barracks. She had expected her employer, a planter named Euphrastus Waller, to meet her. But when the carriage drew to a stop next to her, the driver was an unremarkable young woman with light hair and eyes, no older than seventeen. The younger girl sitting behind her, with arms draped around the driver’s neck, smiled, and Lucinda caught her breath. Through Kansas City and Abilene, she had seen women of wealth and status stand heel to heel with high-dollar whores, but she had never seen a more beautiful girl. If a virgin—and undoubtedly she was—this girl could earn more than a thousand dollars in a night over one bloodstained sheet.

  “Are you Miss Carter?” the older girl asked.

  Lucinda nodded. “I was expecting Mr. Wa
ller to come for me.”

  “This is his carriage. I’m Jane Grant. And this python about my neck is my sister, May.”

  The girl unclasped her arms and sat back against the rear bench. “Mr. Waller is certainly not with us.” She laughed and patted the place beside her, saying, “Come sit here.”

  “No, May. Miss Carter is sitting next to me.” Jane motioned for Lucinda to put her bag in the cart and climb onto the front bench.

  No sooner had Lucinda settled herself when she felt May’s arms wrap tightly around her own neck. Jane waved her sister away and gave the reins a shake. “It’s nothing, Miss Carter. Her mind is often elsewhere.”

  They rode in silence, shielding their eyes against the sun flattening itself on the western grasslands. The shadow of the cart followed behind them like a run of tar flowing into the general darkness of twilight. They stopped only once, when a feral pig, massive and tusked like an elephant, rushed onto the road. Its glistening snout, open-holed and almost obscene in its suppleness, tested the wind, but it was too weak-eyed to make a charge, and soon it waded into the tall brush on the other side.

  For miles, Lucinda looked about for cabin light or campfires, but there was nothing man-made beyond the pale road she saw stretching ahead between the horse’s ears.

  Chapter 6

  Deerling sat with a map spread out in front of him, positioned so that Nate and Dr. Tom could see the planned route. They ate supper while they studied it, finishing the last of the food packed by the boardinghouse woman in St. Gall. They had set up camp in the abandoned stone buildings of Fort Lancaster, and they were spent, having made fifty miles in three hard days, riding through country of steep mesas and hardscrabble depressions, crossing the mostly dry riverbed of the Pecos without incident. Barring accident or injury, they would be in Austin in a few weeks. From there to Houston was another one hundred and sixty miles.

  Deerling pointed over the map. “We’ll pass through Forts McKavett and Mason, right through the heart of Edwards Plateau.”

  “With full Comanche presence up this corridor until we get due east of Mason,” Dr. Tom said, sweeping his finger south to north. He turned to Nate. “You ready for this?”

  Nate grinned; Dr. Tom had seen such a look of eagerness in boys looking to put a hammer to a percussion cap. “I imagine so.”

  They sat for a while in the quiet, enjoying the last of the cornbread, which they dipped into their coffee. It seemed to Nate that Deerling was more at his ease, or perhaps only less guarded, after the Sunday in St. Gall. They had spent the entire morning at the immigrant church, housed in a large tent set with an odd assortment of chairs provided by the parishioners. An older settler standing at the front suggested to Deerling in broken English that he leave his guns outside. Deerling ignored the old man and found a place in the front row, where he sat with his arms crossed, as if preparing for an argument.

  Soon after the preacher began his sermon, a group of large, kite-eared boys began to laugh and talk loudly.

  Dr. Tom leaned towards Nate and whispered, “Hellfire’s comin’.”

  Deerling stood up, passed in front of the preacher, who faltered in his sermon, and calmly walked to the row of chairs where the youths sat. He pulled one of the Colts from his belt and tapped the boy nearest to him none too gently over the head with the butt end. In the shocked silence of the tent, Deerling walked back to the pulpit, coming to stand behind the sermon giver. The ranger directed the shaken preacher, “Go on ahead with your lesson. Just think of me as the angel Gabriel.”

  From that Sunday forward, Deerling had appeared as close to cheerful as Nate had yet seen him.

  The food was soon swept away, and the weapons were brought out for inspection.

  Deerling gestured to the Dance revolver and Henry rifle that Nate was cleaning and said, “You’re going to need to get more firepower than that.”

  “I will when I can pay for it.” After a pause he asked, “You think we’ll see any play?”

  Dr. Tom shrugged. “We don’t want to linger here any more than we need to. What’s the farthest distance you’ve ever gotten out of that Henry?”

  “A few hundred feet, maybe more.”

  “Or maybe less.” Dr. Tom laughed.

  Deerling looked at Nate for a moment as though deciding something; then he got up, walked to his bedroll, and reached for a long leather case. Nate had seen the case strapped to the mule and guessed it was a rifle but had not yet seen what kind.

  Out of the case, Deerling pulled a Whitworth and handed it to Nate.

  Dr. Tom said, “Well, this is a kiss-and-make-up. He don’t even let me hold that rifle.”

  Nate had never seen a Whitworth rifle, much less held one. A few Confederate sharpshooters had used them to great effect, but they were rare, and a one-shot deal in a hard engagement. Of all the weapons spread out before him—including two navy Colts, a Smith and Wesson top-break pistol, two Walker Dragoons, and two Winchester rifles—the Whitworth was worth the most, more than all of them put together.

  “It’s light,” Nate said, surprised.

  Deerling nodded. “I’ve got only six bullets left for it.”

  Nate sighted down the barrel, swept it in a slow arc from window to door. He then passed it back to Deerling. “Where’d you come by it?”

  “I negotiated heavily for it.”

  Dr. Tom slapped the table. “He liberated it from some old reprobate perched on a gully firing at the Henderson town sheriff a quarter mile away. That rifle shoots twice that distance without breakin’ wind.”

  Deerling carefully returned the rifle to its case, and Nate thought he looked pleased by the memory. Deerling added, “Maybe I’ll let you fire it sometime. We get to Austin, we’ll draw pay and see about you getting another rifle.”

  Nate nodded his genuine thanks and he sat comfortably for another hour in the shadows cast by the oil lamps listening to commentary, mostly by Dr. Tom, about the distances yet to be traveled, the streams and rivers and wide-gaping arroyos to be crossed. About how the land would change, from sand and rock to hills of black soil and prairie, the bands of colors changing with the ground from the damnation red and purple of the desert to endless shades of yellow and green of grasslands.

  Having little hardware or tack to clean, Nate crawled into his bedroll and left the two rangers to finish their business. When he woke, it was to the milky, diffused light of dawn. Through sleep-gummed eyes, he became aware of a figure standing next to his bedroll.

  Deerling said, “We’ve got to leave now. Tom’s out readying the horses.”

  Nate drew his head back like a tortoise, rubbing his face and squinting to better see. Deerling hunkered down next to him and held out, between the fingers of one hand, a large-bore rifle shell. He had Nate’s full attention as he balanced the shell upright on the ground next to Nate’s head, the faint smell of almonds wafting over the tang of the lead casing.

  He told Nate, “Let’s hope you never have to use it.”

  The tone of Deerling’s voice was as flat as a capstone to a building, but the image of Maynard’s stiffening body filled Nate’s mind. Within minutes, he was dressed, and after grabbing up his bedroll, he followed Deerling out the door, the big bite dropped into his pack.

  They filled their canteens at the runoff of Live Oak Creek and rode east, towards the ascent of Government Road, which wound its way up a steep hill to the plains beyond. Deerling led the mule, but after a few hundred feet, the creature balked at the incline, and Dr. Tom had to take a prod to his bunching hindquarters to edge him up to the summit.

  At the halfway mark, Dr. Tom directed Nate to stop and rest his horse on a flattened stony shelf that jutted out a few feet from the mesa wall. He pointed to the striations of rock, reddish bands on ashen gray, revealing to Nate that the whole of the valley had at one time been a vast inland sea with creatures of shell, more than any man could count, that swam through it. He gestured to a swath of black cutting through the rock face and said, “The gravey
ard of this whole world pressed to the size of a lady’s ribbon. If you know the history of rocks, you know the history of the world.” He spurred his horse back to the ascending road; loose pebbles were kicked out behind him like stinging missiles.

  Nate held back a bit before giving rein, wondering what Deerling thought of Dr. Tom’s theorizing on ancient seas, theories that might fall outside of the biblical word. “Are you really a doctor?” he called up the path.

  “Oh, that’s been George’s doing, in the main. I went to medical school in Baltimore for a term. It wasn’t for me, though. I left and came down here, and he got to calling me Dr. Tom. A year spent with medical men, and their potions and devices, and I’ve done my best since to stay away from the whole lot of ’em. I get shot, I’d just as soon visit the local baker than the surgeon.” He looked briefly over his shoulder at Nate. “I did, however, keep my medical kit. Never know when someone will need a good wrist saw.”

  Once they reached the apex of the road, they sat for a few minutes looking down at the valley spread out before them. Dr. Tom took field glasses from his saddlebag and scanned the entire broad expanse in a sweeping motion of his head. He offered them to Nate, who took them and looked down at the stone buildings of the fort.

  Dr. Tom said, “It didn’t look so small coming from the western approach, did it?”

  Nate agreed, took one last pass with the glasses across the southern basin, and saw a puff of dust wafting upwards. Traveling animal, he thought, coyote or wolf. The early sun had not yet thrown light fully onto the valley floor, and he couldn’t see a defined silhouette at such a distance. He waited a moment more, aware of Dr. Tom’s hand outstretched to take back the glasses.

  Deerling’s horse shifted. “Come on, Nate.”

  Several more dust funnels appeared, like small tornadoes forming in reverse, and he thought he saw dark shapes moving through a distant stand of oak. He brought both hands up to the glasses to steady the view.

  “What is it?” Dr. Tom asked.