In the Rogue Blood (2 page)

Eleven years passed. The only book in the house was a Bible left behind by the Reverend Gaines. The mother used it as a primer to teach the children to read and letter while they were still quite young and she saw to it that they kept those skills in practice. Daddyjack instructed the brothers in the ways of using tools from the time they were big enough to heft a hatchet. As soon as they were of a size to lift and aim a long gun he taught them to shoot his Kentucky flintlock named Roselips and the two caplock Hawkens he’d taken off the Klasson brothers. Both of the Hawkens had octagon barrels and double-set triggers and stained maple stocks with oval cheekpieces. One was a halfstock .54 caliber and the other a massive fullstock .66 caliber piece that weighed over fourteen pounds and which the brothers were thrilled to learn could blast a ball through a
double plank of oak at two hundred yards. He taught them to measure out a charge quickly by pouring enough black powder to cover a rifle ball in the palm of their hand. They laughed at each other when the big gun’s recoil knocked them down. From their earliest years they were strong and rangy. Working an axe gave them long muscles like ropes. John was the taller, Edward the quicker, and both had wrists like pickhandle heads. Like their father they naturally inclined to violence and made easy practice of it. They regularly bloodied each other in fistfights sparked by sheer exuberance while Daddyjack looked on and lauded every punch landed. He taught them the proper way to drive a knee to the balls, how to apply an elbow to the teeth and a backfist to the throat. How to gouge out an eyeball. How to break a nose with a head butt and stomp on an instep and uncouple a knee with a kick.

When they began accompanying him into town to get supplies they discovered the yet greater joy of fighting somebody besides each other and before long even bigger and older boys trod lightly in their presence. One Saturday in town a sixteen-year-old tough fresh from North Carolina got into it with John in an alley. The other boy had the advantages of thirty pounds and three years in age and thumped John steadily in the first few minutes while the surrounding crowd of spectating boys cried out for blood. Then John’s persistent counterattacks began to tell. When he butted the other boy in the face and broke his nose the fellow’s eyes flooded with tearful panic and he pulled a claspknife and cut John across the chin. Edward jumped on him from behind and pulled him down and wrested the blade from him and slashed the boy’s fending arms and hands while John stove his ribs with one kick after another and the other boys yelled “Kill him! Kill him!” They might have done so if a big-shouldered storekeeper hadn’t come out wielding a shovel and sent the lot of them scattering. That night Daddyjack stitched up John’s chin and the next day showed them how to defend against a knife and how to fight with one.

“There’s always plenty a reason to fight in this world,” Daddyjack told them. “For damn sure to defend yourself and your own. Truth is, you can fight for any reason ye fancy. But heed me now: Whatever you fight about, be willin to die over it. That’s the trick of it, boys. If you’re ready to die and the other fellow’s not, you’ll whip his ass sure every time.”

“What if the other fella’s ready to die as you, Daddyjack?” John asked.

“Well now,” he said, showing his teeth, “that’s when the fur does fly and the fight gets interestin.”

The brothers grinned right back at him.

Through those eleven years Jack Little remained ignorant of his wife’s wanton past, but then one afternoon he was in the farrier’s shop repairing a grindstone mount when a passing drummer who was having his horse newly shod asked of the small assembly if any of them knew whatever had become of the little redheaded whore.

“You boys know the one, from back about ten year ago when I was last around here. She was hardly moren a baby chick but she used to do it in the woods and charged but half-a-dollar. Sweet thing would settle for two bits if twas all you had. Had the nicest titties and roundest little rump this side of New Orleans. What in thunder
was
her name?”

The men cast nervous glances to the rear of the shop where Jack Little had been overseeing the smith’s apprentice in straightening the grindstone’s axle and was now staring at the back of the drummer’s head. The smitty tried to warn the drummer with his eyes but the man was stroking his thin imperial and looking at his feet in an effort to recall the girl’s name. “Ah, yes,” he said, “Lily. Foolcrazy darlin Lil. Why, that girl had a way of—”

Jack Little was on him in a bound, clubbing him in the neck with the heel of his fist, punching him to the floor, kicking him in the face and ribs and crotch and he would have killed him sure if a handful of men had not wrestled him out of there and held him fast while the drummer was carried off to an inn where he would recover sufficiently over the next few days to manage the reins of his team and leave town forever. When the men let go of Jack Little he glared at them all but none would meet his eyes nor speak a word. He heaved the grindstone onto the wagon and giddapped the mule for home.

Edward and John were slopping the pigs when he drove the wagon into the stable and came out with a coil of rope and a rawhide quirt and dropped them at the base of an oak and stalked into the house, his face dark with rage. A moment later they heard their sister scream and he came out dragging their mother by the hair with one hand and fending off ten-year-old Maggie with the other. The woman was struggling like a roped cat and the girl kept trying to bite the hand that gripped her mother’s hair and Daddyjack swatted her off her feet. He dragged the woman to the tree and held her down with a knee on her chest and tied her wrists together with one end of the rope. The girl went at him again swinging both fists and he backhanded her once more and John rushed
in and pinioned her in his arms and pulled her away and she was screaming, “Let her be! Let her be! Let her be!”

He lobbed the free end of the rope over a branch and caught it and jerked up the slack and then hoisted the woman a good two feet off the ground by her bound hands and made fast the end of the rope around the tree trunk. She kept trying to kick him as he grabbed her dress by the neckline and ripped it open and yanked it off her arms and tugged it down over her hips and off her legs, stripping her naked. She was turning slowly at the end of the rope as he snatched up the quirt and began whipping her with hard fast strokes.

She yelped with each strike of the quirt as it cut into her back and breasts and belly. She was quickly striped and streaked with blood from teats to thighs. John looked stricken but kept his tight hold on the girl and she was crying and screeching, “Stop it! Stop it!” And though Edward too was horrified, he felt something else at the same time, something attached to the horror and yet apart from it, something his twelve-year-old heart could not have named but which thrilled him to the bone even as his throat tightened with shame.

Daddyjack beat her for less than a minute and then flung away the quirt and embraced her about the hips and pressed his face between her breasts, sobbing and mixing his tears with her blood. Then he eased her down and untied her hands and massaged the circulation back into them and brushed the sweated hair out of her eyes as she lay still and watched him without word. He told Edward to fetch a cloth and a bucket of water and when he brought them Daddyjack helped the woman to her feet and gently swabbed the blood and dirt off her back and buttocks. Each time he touched a laceration she bit her lip and tears spilled down her face.

“Give me it,” the daughter said, holding her hand out for the cloth, and Daddyjack let her finish the cleaning as he supported the woman upright. The daughter made a thorough job of it, mopping even the blood that had trickled into her mother’s patch of private hair. The worst wound was at the left nipple which the quirt tip had torn loose and the only whimper the woman let was when the daughter dabbed the blood from it with the cloth.

Dadddyjack then cradled her up in his arms and carried her into the house and set her gently on the bed and covered her lower privates with a blanket. He had the girl bring him a threaded needle and ordered the boys to stop looking upon their mother’s nakedness and they reluctantly left the room. He gave the woman a folded cloth to bite on and then
sewed the nipple back in place as best he could while the daughter held the lantern close for him. The boys listened intently at the door but never once heard her cry out. It was a successful but clumsy surgery and the woman would bear the ugly scar to her death. When Daddyjack was done she looked bloodless pale but her eyes were red as fires and she watched him looking on as the daughter gingerly applied grease to her wounds.

Once the woman had been tended, Daddyjack took the girl outside and led her and the boys to the creekbank and sat them down and explained that he’d whipped their mother because she had been a whore. “She dishonored me as much as herself,” Daddyjack told them, “and lied to me about it. Dishonored you too, all of you, since you got to live with the fact of being born of a woman who whored. What I did to her she’s had comin for a long time.”

“You ain’t God!” Maggie abruptly shouted, startling Edward and John who looked at her like she might have lost her mind.

Daddyjack pinned her with a glare. “Missy,” he said, “you ain’t never goin to be near big enough nor old enough to talk that way to me. I won’t shy from stretchin
you
on that tree if you don’t show proper respect.” The girl defiantly met his hard look as John sidled over and put a hand on her shoulder and she held her tongue. In recent months John had assumed an attitude of guardianship toward their sister that Edward found somewhat puzzling because Maggie had never given the least sign of wanting or appreciating anybody’s protection.

“I blame naught but my own foolishness for marryin her,” Daddyjack said. “I thought because she was so young and her uncle who raised her was a preacher she couldn’t be but pure. That was damnfool thinkin and I admit it, but just the same, that son of a bitch ought have told me she’d been a whore, and he ought not have lied about her being orphaned by the cholera, which I finally come to get the truth of from people who knew it, people from down in the lowland where she was born. Come to find out she was born tainted. Her momma was a crazywoman who murdered her husband and then drowned herself when your momma was just a babygirl. That’s right—that’s just exactly what they told me. I never did let on to your momma that I knew. Figured it didn’t much matter. Figured just because
her
momma was crazy didn’t mean
she
had to be.”

He paused to spit and to study the sky a moment.

“Now I know it
does
matter,” he said. “I believe your momma like as not has some of the same craziness her own momma had. I’m tellin you
so you’ll know for a fact she ain’t a right woman. I reckon it’s something in the blood. It’s what made her be a whore and then lie to me about it and taint my honor and yours too.” He fixed Maggie with another look. “You ought to pray Jesus she ain’t passed that bad blood to you as well, missy, though it’s startin to look to me like she surely did.”

Maggie flushed and looked away.

“She’s still your momma, though,” he told them, “and she’s still my wife and that’s a fact and nothin’ll change it. Ye can pity her if you’ve a mind to, since she caint help what she is anymoren a rabid dog can do other than it does, but I say ye be wise never to believe a word from her mouth.”

He did not raise his hand to her again for the rest of the time they lived in Georgia, though every now and then he’d plunge into a drinking binge of two or three days during which he glowered at her a good deal while muttering to himself. For her part she refused to speak. During the following year she said not a word to anyone, although she carried on with her obligations as always, including her conjugal duties to Daddyjack. She communicated with the brothers through gestures and facial expressions, commanding their attention with a clap of her hands and directing them to their chores with a jut of her chin or a pointed finger, putting an end to their horseplay in the house with a hard-flung sopping washrag and a stern gaze. At first Edward was amused by her dedicated muteness but he soon tired of it and he sometimes wanted to shake her and demand she quit the silliness. He thought she might be every bit as crazy as Daddyjack had said.

Maggie required neither gestures nor broad looks to understand their mother. She seemed able to read her eyes, to know her thoughts without the need of speech. John was fascinated by the uncanny bond between the women. He remarked upon it to Daddyjack one day when they were hewing oak. Daddyjack said he had noticed it himself but was not impressed. “It’s lots of crazywomen old and young can shine with each other like that,” he said, “especially if they of the same blood. Like mother like daughter is what they say, and I believe it’s a true fact.”

If Daddyjack was bothered by his wife’s refusal to speak he did not let it show except sometimes late at night when Edward was awakened by
the heaving and panting of their couplings and the ripe sweetsour scent of sex filled the small house. Daddyjack’s voice would be low and rough in the darkness, exhorting her: “Tell me, woman! Tell me how much you like it!
Tell
me, damn you!” His mother would moan softly and the bed would toss even more convulsively and moments later Daddyjack would issue an explosive breath and collapse upon her and they would lie there gasping loudly in the dark for a few moments before pulling apart into their separate silences.

Throughout their marriage Daddyjack and Lilith had regularly attended the Saturday night barn dances held all about the county, but after the whipping she would dance no more. Daddyjack said he was damned if they’d quit going to the shindigs just because she refused to kick up her heels. He continued to hitch up the team every Saturday evening and drive the family to the dances. He told his wife that as far as he was concerned she could sit on a bench against the back wall till her ass grew roots but he was going to have himself a time, by Jesus. And he always did, dancing with girls who’d heard the story of the Klassons from the time they were children and were both terrified and thrilled to be whirling in his arms as their fathers and brothers watched after them anxiously and hoped Jack Little would turn to someone else’s womenfolk for the next dance. His own daughter was now approaching an age and fairness of face and figure to draw attention, and she did love to dance, but it was clear to every man and boy in the place that her daddy kept a sharp eye on her even as he danced on the other side of the room and few were the young fellows brave enough to risk his ire by asking Maggie for a turn on the floor more than once of a Saturday night. Then came the night Rainey asked Lilith to dance and Daddyjack put a knife in his chest. Then came Florida.