The Outcasts Page 6

  “I don’t know.” Nate pointed to the southwest where he had seen movement and gave the glasses to Dr. Tom.

  Deerling pulled his horse back to the lip of the ridge. “Tom?”

  “Hold on. Not sure yet.”

  Nate could see the tiny spray of dust expanding, and a moving band of animals cleared the trees, following a dry creek bed.

  “Wild horses?” Nate asked.

  After a moment, Dr. Tom said, “Comanche raiders.” He lowered the glasses and handed them to Deerling, who looked for a brief while, and then dismounted.

  Nate recalled that only a few years back, Deerling and Goddard had been a part of the skirmish at Dove Creek. Two ranger companies, along with a few hundred Confederate troops, were outgunned and outmaneuvered by seven hundred Kickapoo Indians. That the Kickapoo had been mistaken for fighting Comanche or Kiowa and had been seeking only to escape the ravages of a civil war did not lessen the surviving rangers’ desire to kill any Indian, regardless of his origin. The remnants of the tribe were chased into Mexico; often they were shot in the back, or, as some of the rangers referred to it, the “northward side.” Dr. Tom had told Nate he never cared for that tactic or the expression—“unbefitting,” he called it, a shameful comedown for those in service.

  Deerling said to Nate, “Follow me down to the ledge, and bring my Winchester along with your Henry. Tom, keep watch here.” Deerling yanked the Whitworth from its case on the mule and they began quickly sidestepping down the hill off the main road.

  Once he’d gained the ledge, Nate flattened himself next to Deerling, who used the glasses to watch the approaching horses. They were still more than a half a mile distant, traveling north, but Nate could make out four men on horseback driving the herd of about twenty horses at a fast walk. The outcropping where the two men lay was in shadow, but the valley was now torched with clear light.

  Deerling said, “They’ll switch course to the runoff.” He passed the glasses to Nate, who watched the herd soon being driven to the creek.

  As the horses waded into the water, their heads bent to drink, Deerling asked, “What do you make it?”

  “Between a hundred, hundred fifty yards from the base road.”

  “And we’re two hundred yards up?”

  “Maybe less.”

  Deerling removed his hat and carefully raised himself to a one-kneed position, then sighted down the side scope of the Whitworth. He adjusted it and gave Nate the rifle to shoulder. “In a minute, one of those bucks is likely to cross the stream to our side. Take a look.”

  One of the riders broke off from the group and splashed through the stream, scanning the rise. Through the scope, Nate could clearly see the pearl-white buttons on the man’s shirt. After a moment, the rider turned his horse around and sat loose in the saddle, his back to the cliff.

  “I don’t have a fork for the barrel,” Deerling said. “So you’ll have to hold firm for the kick.”

  Nate pulled his eye away from the scope and peered sharply at Deerling.

  “You only get one shot, so make it count.”

  “They don’t see us, there’s no cause to shoot.”

  Deerling sat back on his haunches and stabbed a finger toward the herd. “All of those horses are branded. When you joined the force, it should have been explained to you that a horse thief is a man just waiting to be dead. Now take the shot.”

  “Christ Almighty. They’re not a danger to us—”

  Deerling put his face close to Nate’s. “I’m not telling you again. When that gun goes off, and he goes down, the rest will scatter with the horses. You miss, and they’re likely to regroup and kill us on our descent. Fire the weapon.”

  Nate sighted down the scope and watched as the rider kicked his horse forward and the three men on the far side of the stream began waving the herd into motion again. His finger slipped inside the trigger guard and curled around the trigger, but an instinct as strong as breathing made him pause.

  The rider had crossed the stream, and Nate lowered the gun. “I’m not shooting a man in the back, horse thief or no.”

  Deerling pulled the Whitworth from Nate’s hands. “You just failed your first test.” He stood up, and with the rifle shouldered and carefully aimed, he whistled through his teeth, as if he were calling in a field hand. The rider yanked the reins, wheeling the horse about, and Deerling fired. Following the shattering boom of the Whitworth, the man was thrown backwards into the water, a red mist scattering where his head had been moments before. Several rifle shots from Dr. Tom were discharged from the summit above them, the bullets tearing clods out of the streambed.

  The three remaining riders flagged the horses into a panicked run, and they raced north again up the valley, leaving the body in the shallow current. Deerling turned and began climbing towards the top of the road.

  Nate sat on the ledge watching the distant body floating in the stream. The riderless horse had stampeded away with the herd, and a turkey vulture circled in ever-tightening spirals in the warming updrafts. By the time he had gathered up the two rifles and started back up the mesa, the sun had come to shine on its western face and he didn’t know if the two rangers had waited for him or if he would breast the hill and find himself alone.

  Chapter 7

  The Waller family sat facing Lucinda as though they had been elaborately posed for a theatrical performance or daguerreotype. Euphrastus Waller was a large, somber man dressed in a dark woolen suit with a black silken tie drooping beneath his chin. His ample haunches looked to be uncomfortably planted in an ornate, tufted chair, and Lucinda suspected, from the way his coat stretched across his chest, that he was wearing a corset.

  His wife, Sephronia, sat to his left on a low bench. Her hair was in a tight knot at the nape of the neck, her scalp an unblemished white through the exactly centered part. Her dress was also of silk, although the hem was frayed, and she had voluminous petticoats under the skirts, the likes of which had not been seen since the fall of Atlanta. The daughter, Lavada, sat in an even lower chair to his right.

  Good God, Lucinda thought. The girl’s wearing gloves.

  Next to Lavada, close to a window, was the Wallers’ son, Elam. He sat motionless in a wheeled, cane-backed chair, his face towards the light, his half-open eyes focused on nothing. Lucinda must have looked overly long in his direction, as Lavada offered, “Brother has had a hard life.”

  “My son…” Euphrastus began. His voice trailed away and he cleared his throat.

  “Our son was wounded at the Battle of Vicksburg,” Sephronia said pointedly. “He has been in a decline.”

  “It was a siege,” Euphrastus corrected. He glanced briefly at his wife, and she blushed under his scrutiny and looked down at her hands.

  “Ah,” Lucinda said, focusing on the wall above their heads. It was a small parlor, but it had high ceilings, and the maroon-and-green-striped wallpaper gave the room extra height so that she felt a momentary sense of dizziness, as though the floor were falling away from her chair. To counter the effect, she moved her gaze to the mantel behind Euphrastus and saw perched there a stuffed and mounted owl with amber glass eyes.

  Euphrastus said, “I suppose that, as it was dark when you arrived last night, you will be eager to see the school.”

  Sephronia nodded, as if it were a startling, momentous observation. Lucinda was uncertain whether or not this was her cue to leave, so she nodded as well, and waited.

  He continued, “And to the subjects being taught?”

  “As I wrote in my letter,” Lucinda said, “reading and penmanship, mathematics, geography—”

  “From what map?” Euphrastus muttered.

  “And, of course, the natural sciences.”

  Sephronia’s head came up. “Miss Carter, are not all sciences natural?” She smiled at her own cleverness, and Lavada stifled a laugh behind one gloved hand.

  “And elocution, Miss Carter?” Lavada asked.

  She handed Lucinda a slender volume engraved with the title Th
e American Speaker. Lucinda opened the cover to the table of contents and read the first two entries: “Religion Never to Be Treated with Levity” and “The Folly of Misspending Time.”

  Euphrastus stood abruptly. “I think we should show Miss Carter where she will be teaching.”

  He led Lucinda down the front-porch steps and onto the path away from the house, and she could see what had been hidden in the dark: a whitewashed two-story house, hastily built, with the wash already peeling.

  Behind them, the two women pushed the wheeled chair down a ramp, Elam seemingly insensitive to the world around him.

  Euphrastus gestured to the north and the south of the path as they walked, naming the homesteads and farms. Behind them, to the west, ran Middle Bayou, with live oak and magnolia growing in abundance, and crape myrtles newly planted for color.

  He told her that he was growing cotton and planned to plant cane for a sugar mill.

  She allowed him to take her elbow as she stepped over a deep rut in the path, observing that he was mindless of the women struggling with the wheeled chair. She let his eyes linger over her naked fingers.

  Turning her face slightly to him, she curled her lips upwards and asked, “Is that what you did before coming to Middle Bayou?”

  “Yes. I had twelve hundred acres of cotton and tobacco in Mississippi. Before the war.”

  He stared off down the road, his eyes fixed and tormented-looking, his momentary silence testament to all he had lost. He released his grip on her elbow and pointed out the Grant farm in the distance. The main house was a small, misshapen affair but situated in a field of flat-leaved grasses that reflected sunlight off their wavering tips like an ocean of copper mirrors.

  Approaching Red Bluff Road, Lucinda saw the schoolhouse and was surprised. She had been prepared for a refitted barn or disused carpentry shed, but at the juncture of the Middle Bayou Road and Red Bluff was a new pine building, the boards still oozing sap. The women positioned Elam in the shade of a tree and followed Lucinda inside.

  There were only a few windows, and they all stood quiet for a moment, letting their eyes adjust to the darkened room.

  “The desk was brought from my own office,” Euphrastus said. Lucinda ran the pads of her fingers appreciatively over the carved surfaces, allowing one forefinger to slip lingeringly into a bit of scrollwork.

  Euphrastus, watching the movements of her hands, became short-winded and made a show of studying the view from one of the windows before sweeping his wife and daughter to the door. “We will accompany you tomorrow morning, Miss Carter, to introduce you to your pupils.”

  She watched them walking homeward for a while, standing at the same window Euphrastus had been looking through. This time, Euphrastus pushed the wheeled chair. Lucinda stretched her arms and pulled off her bonnet. She examined the readers and workbooks stacked precisely on the desk and counted thirteen sets of each.

  There were three rows of sturdy benches with long, unbroken planks in front of them, raised and tilted, for writing. She sat in the wooden chair behind Euphrastus’s desk and let her mind wander. Only a few weeks of this, she reminded herself, so it hardly matters what I stuff their heads with; she would teach the farmers’ offspring what she liked, and put laudanum in the water bucket for the troublemakers.

  She shifted her gaze and saw May in the open doorway. The girl wandered in and came to stand in front of the desk. She was wearing a dress of cornflower blue, the same startling color as her eyes. The dress was ten years out of fashion but capably reworked to fit her small frame.

  May picked up a reader and pretended to study it. “Do you want to know a secret?”

  Lucinda smiled. “Only one?”

  May slipped onto one of the benches and rested her elbows on the writing board. “My name is not really May.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s Jane.”

  Lucinda cocked her head. “Isn’t that your sister’s name?”

  “It is Jane. We’re both Janes.” May stage-whispered the last and, laughing, sprang from the bench, coming to alight on the desk in front of Lucinda. “My mother, who was the second Mrs. Grant, had her way and named me Jane also. It was the only name she said she’d ever wanted for her girl. Father couldn’t abide having two Janes under the same roof, though, and took to calling me May, the month I was born.”

  “And what does your mother call you?”

  “My mother calls me nothing. She is not with the living.” May slipped off the desk and Lucinda watched her progress about the room, examining and overturning every item, looking into each corner. Lucinda reminded herself to be cautious with this one.

  “The last time I saw my mother,” May went on, “I was four years old. She sat next to Father in a buggy headed to Little Rock. Father had told us that she was very ill and he was taking her for the doctor. She was wearing a bonnet, one with colored ribbons. He returned later that night, alone, my mother’s bonnet hanging by its ribbons from the struts. There’s a big river on the way to Little Rock, you see.”

  Lucinda did not see, but May suddenly said, “I hear Jane calling.” She darted for the door, but before leaving, she stopped and turned, smiling through bowed lips.

  Lucinda watched her hurtling down the road and off into the fields, her dress showing in blue, vibrating swaths through the tall grass.

  She stayed at the school until the supper hour and then left, latching the door, thinking she had forgotten to ask Euphrastus for the key. But there was no lock on the door—nothing but knowledge to steal—and, arranging her bonnet on her head, she walked down the road back to her room at the Wallers’. There had been biscuits and cornmeal for breakfast. She hoped there would be meat for dinner.

  Chapter 8

  The weather had turned: the men rode the last ten miles to Austin in rains that were near horizontal. The storm had come in from the northwest, and the frigid rain ran in sluices down the collars of their oiled coats.

  When they got to the banks of the Colorado River, they saw that the bridge had been washed away and the ferry was gone, probably swept downriver. They watched the surging waters and the things chased along with the current—bits of wood and sacking, the upright hooves of some cloven animal—and then they turned around and made for an abandoned house they had seen a quarter of a mile back.

  They found it after a few pass-bys and saw that it had a lean-to shed on one side. But the shed was too small for the three horses and the mule, so they stripped the horses of tack, stored the supplies in the shed, and left the animals standing together, huddled and spring-footed, beneath the overhang of the porch.

  The house had not long been abandoned, and the roof was mostly intact, the floor with dry areas large enough to sleep on. The stove was old, but the wood from the bin was sufficiently dry to catch a small flame, and the men stripped down and shivered close to the frail warmth as they searched for dry shirts and long underwear. The steam rolled off their bare backs in wisps. “Like smoke off bacon,” Dr. Tom observed.

  Nate lit a lantern, and his boot caught the edge of a bottle, sending it rolling against one wall. He picked it up and saw it was a nearly empty bottle of Argyle Bitters. The label claimed the contents would carry away the bile, rendering the patient less distempered, and he wondered if it, or anything, could lessen the punishing silence from Deerling the past two weeks. The only human voice he had heard speaking directly to him was Dr. Tom’s.

  A few times, he had tried to write his wife about what had come to pass, but he couldn’t find the words to tell her. He had revealed to her long ago the sum total of his service during the war: the one summer spent in Arkansas, where he had arrived at sixteen as part of a mounted cavalry force from Texas. Where, within the space of a month, he had been officially dismounted, forced into infantry status along with thousands of other Texans, brought low with dysentery, and finally sent home with all the other men under sixteen or over forty.

  But there appeared to be no foothold by which to regain Deerling’s co
nfidence. The man seemed to discount and undermine him at every turn. It was more than just the silence, Deerling refusing to speak to him, as though Nate were a ghost haunting the campsite. There were the deliberate actions designed to unseat Nate’s nerve.

  Two days after the shooting at the creek, the men had been hunting for rabbit and quail, anything to supplement the constant rations of jerky. Each man had picked his own path away from the road, and Nate followed a trail into a rocky gully, where he spied a mottled gray rabbit settled on a large boulder. He took aim, but a rifle blast behind him made him flinch wildly and misfire. He jerked his head around in time to see Deerling at a distance behind him lowering his Winchester. The ranger moved past him, grabbed the dead rabbit by the hind legs, and returned to camp, all without a word.

  Nate was by turns angry and frustrated, and, worse, he was rendered indecisive. At another time, a man firing over his head like that would have earned that man a beating. Even Dr. Tom had grown more quiet and reflective as the days progressed, offering no comments or observations about the actions of his partner.

  Nate fed small pieces of wood into the badly smoking stove and they set about eating a cold supper of day-old cornbread and some canned peaches. With their clothes hanging on pegs to dry, they waited for the coffee to warm while listening to the rain turn to hail on the roof. There was an occasional buzzing from the wall behind the wood bin as well, as though the wind were shaking something loose in short, rapid bursts.

  Dr. Tom worked at the damper in the stove, and Nate saw a red, puckered crater in the skin on the underside of his arm.

  “That,” Dr. Tom said, following his gaze, “was gotten as a child. Pitched from the hay wagon. The baling hook trailing behind sliced into my arm and dragged me for what seemed miles. I almost drowned in the mud before my brother realized I had fallen off.” He smiled, then tilted the can of peaches to his mouth; peach juice dribbled down his chin. “Who says farming ain’t dangerous?” As he lowered the can and wiped his mouth, the buzzing sound came again, and the three of them listened for the source.