In the Rogue Blood (3 page)

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.

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 dock 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.

His first time had been the year before when he and John were hunting up along the Escambia and came upon a pair of women scooping mussels from the glassy river shallows and towing a dugout behind them on a bowline. The older was the mother of the younger and offered her daughter’s sex in exchange for the deer carcass they were carrying home on a shoulder pole. The brothers were quick to strike the bargain even though the girl was a softbrain with an drifting stare and a wet vacant smile. She was younger than their sister and her breasts were still only buds and she lay inert on the weedy bank while the brothers took their turns on her. They then gave their attention over to the woman who shied away and said no, not unless they added to the bargain. She had a thin white scar along one side of her face but was striking nonetheless and had full breasts under her worn wet shirt. Edward was about to offer his knife but John said they wouldn’t break her neck, how was that for adding to the bargain? The woman looked from one brother to the other and then told the girl to go sit in the dugout. She lay down on the grass and pulled up her skirts and John fell to her. After Edward had his turn they loaded the deer in the dugout and watched the women pole the boat around the riverbend and then slapped each other on the shoulder and laughed.

He went back out on the street with the sweetpowder taste of the redhead’s skin on his lips and her perfume on his hands and he was feeling very much a man of the world. He would have bought himself a cigar if he’d had any money left. He continued to search for Maggie until the evening vermilion sun glanced redly off the roof tiles and eased behind the palms and then the streets were in deep shadow and the first sidewalk lamps were being fired. He returned to the mules and found John already there and looking glum because he’d found no sign of their sister either. Edward told him about the whorehouse and the passel of pretties who worked there but John scowled and said they had come to find Maggie and not to look for a good time. Edward had anyway been cheated at a
price of three dollars, John told him. Edward asked how he knew that and John said, “Hell, I guess everbody knows that but you.” John did not in fact know any such thing but he was angry because they had not found their sister and was in no mood to hear about Edward’s good time in a cathouse. Edward did not press the matter but the idea that he had been cheated was enraging.

They decided to eat supper before renewing the search and went into the tavern and ordered two platters of fried oysters, a loaf of bread, and a bucket of beer. After they’d cleaned their plates John ordered another bucket and when they finished it he suggested they try a taste of something with more bite and Edward said why not and they called for a round of whiskey. They raised glasses to each other and tossed the drinks down in a gulp. It was their first taste of spirits other than the vile stuff they sometimes bought from a downriver swamp rat named Douglas Scratchley and they expelled their breath slowly and grinned at each other. Edward said, “Well now, I guess I know why Daddyjack likes
this
so much.”

At the mention of Daddyjack, John’s mood darkened again. “He run her off, I’ll wager. I wouldn’t be surprised if she got to talkin smart at him and he hit her. She wouldn’t of stood for it if he did.”

Edward shrugged and said he wouldn’t mind if John treated them to another drink. John said he didn’t have enough money left to buy them even a smell of good whiskey. “If you hadn’t gone and got yourself cheated in that damn cathouse we’d right now have the means for another.”

The reminder rekindled Edward’s anger. “Did that picaroon truly cheat me?”

John allowed that he truly had. Edward said he’d be damned if he would stand for it and got to his feet so abruptly his chair teetered and nearly overturned. “I guess I’ll just go see that son of a bitch.” John said he guessed he’d go with him.

In the central square a different brass band was playing by torchlight for a large appreciative crowd and the sidewalks still teemed with roisterers of every stripe. The air felt heavy and cool. When they got to the brothel the place was doing livelier business than it had been doing that afternoon. A queue of patrons extended out onto the front walk, and through the open door Edward saw a different man now taking the patrons’ money and directing every man in turn up the stairway each time someone else came back down.

He stopped a man coming out the door and asked him what the rate was. The man smiled and said, “Two dollars, son, same as always.” He asked how much time with the girl that bought and the man laughed and winked at the grinning onlookers. “Why, just as much time as you need to empty your breech, boy, so long as you don’t make a damn courtship of it.”

“What’re ye thinkin to do, lad,” a man in the line called out, “sit and take tea with the lass, maybe, before ye get on with it?” Loud guffaws down the line.

Edward asked the first man if he knew a fellow with a checkered vest and chin whiskers and a gold front tooth and the man said, “Walton? He went to get some eats while I was still in line. He’ll be back by and by.”

The brothers went down the street and crossed over and came back without attracting attention and took up positions near the mouth of an alleyway and kept a lookout in both directions. They hadn’t been waiting ten minutes before they spotted the checkered vest heading toward them on their side of the street. John ambled to the edge of the sidewalk and spat into the street and busied himself brushing off his shirtfront. Just as Walton was about to cross over, Edward said, “Mister Walton, can I have a word with you, sir?”

When Walton paused to fix suspiciously on Edward in the dim light John grabbed him from behind in a tight bear hug and yanked him into the shadowed alleyway and Edward leaped forward and snatched the pistol from the whoreman’s waistband. Walton bucked and spun and lost his hat and crashed through broken crates and empty barrels, cursing and trying to shake John loose but John held to him like a hog dog. Edward grabbed Walton by the shirtfront and hit him in the face with the pistol barrel four fast times and Walton’s knees gave way and John let him fall and Edward joined him in kicking the whoreman in the head. The men across the street were all looking now and one of them yelled “Hey! What the devil there!” Edward quickly went through Walton’s pockets and dug out a handful of money. As some of the men started toward them the brothers raced away down the alley and around the corner and into the crowd milling in the square.

At the bar of the tavern they learned they had twenty-one dollars and they agreed it was sufficient compensation for the whoreman having cheated Edward. The barkeeper said, “What you boys do, strike it rich?” and laughed. Edward bought a bottle of bourbon and the brothers went
out and mounted their mules and casually rode through the crowded square, not hupping the animals to a trot even when they spotted a handful of roughs from the cathouse shoving their way through the packed sidewalk. The men were studying faces and looking in the door of every public house they passed. Edward eased Walton’s pistol out of his belt and cocked it and held it close against his belly as the mule made its unhurried way through the clamorous street but none of the roughs caught sight of them and a minute later they were back on the north road for home.