Long Hunt (9781101559208) (17 page)

Abner glared at his brother, as best a cross-eyed man can glare. “I should have known there was no point in coming to you. You care about nothing but your own precious college . . . which I have yet to see any true sign of.”

“I'm fresh returned from Virginia with a supply of books that will create the finest library west of the Alleghenies,” Eben said. “As well as—” He cut off suddenly.

“Go on, brother. Finish what you were saying. ‘As well as . . .' As what? I think we both know. I heard about your journey and what took you to Virginia. Much more than books. You received money. Donations. And yet you look at your own stricken brother and refuse to help him.”

“Donations for use of the college, Abner. Not for my personal use. Certainly not for yours.”

Abner again forced himself to settle and calm. He said, “Eben, I had hoped to find you in a more charitable and Christian frame of mind. It hasn't proven the case. Clearly you are not going to help me willingly.”

“I am not. God forbid I should ever do so.”

“If no willing help, then unwilling it will have to be.” Abner reached behind himself and pulled out the pistol he had tucked into the waist of his trousers earlier. He clicked the lock to half-cock and leveled it at Eben.

“Has it come to this, Abner?” Eben asked. “Are you now to rob me like a common thief?”

“Yes, Eben,” said Abner. “It has come to this. Are you going to be reasonable and give me what I demand?”

“I am your brother,” Eben said. “You won't shoot me.”

But he did.

 

It was James White who heard the shot and rushed to the cabin where Eben Bledsoe resided. He found the clergyman sorely wounded but still alive, and fetched a young Cherokee boy, the son of the woman who served as a cook at the fort. The boy was sent on the fastest available horse to Fort Edohi, where he fetched Dr. Houser and brought him as quickly as possible back to White's.

When morning came, Eben Bledsoe still lived, but his condition was precarious. Houser sent the Cherokee messenger boy back to Fort Edohi to tell his wife what had happened, that her husband would remain at White's for a day or two, until he knew that Eben Bledsoe would survive.

When Mary Deveraux saw the Cherokee boy ride into the stockade, she screamed and hid herself, sobbing, and would not be consoled until the boy was gone.

As Eben regained some of his strength, White and Houser questioned him closely regarding who had wounded him, and what the motive had been. Eben declared that he had been robbed by a nocturnal intruder, but said he had not known the man, whom he described in a whole-cloth falsehood as about thirty years of age, stocky, and bearded.

Houser asked, “I provided care for a man matching that description. Was he by chance missing a portion of one leg?”

Eben Bledsoe, seeing a chance to fully divert any suspicion that might be turned toward his brother—for as much as he loathed Abner, for the sake of family blood he did not wish to see him hanged as a thief—lied once more and said that indeed the man had been possessed of only one leg, and it was out of pity for him that Eben had allowed him to enter his quarters.

“You were robbed, then, by a man I am almost sure was the infamous highwayman Jeremiah Littleton,” Houser told him.

“Yes,” said Bledsoe. “I am quite sure that was the man.”

 

“I am pleased to see that you have found each other,” said Dill Talbott to the group of travelers when they reached Crockett Spring. “I had hoped that such a thing would happen when I saw young Titus here off on your trail, Edohi. But it is a big and broad country up beyond the Gap, and I had no real confidence you would meet.”

“A big and broad country, yes, but the road through it is narrow,” said Fain. “We encountered one another on the trail, and a pleasant surprise it was. Now we are going together to Jonesborough, where we have heard that Deborah Bledsoe, or Deborah Corey, if they are one and the same, may be.”

“She is a far-ranging woman, then,” said Dill. “Why would she follow so odd a pattern?”

“I suppose we'll find out when we locate her.”

 

“I need you to do something for me,” Fain said to Potts when the group departed for Jonesborough. “I promised Bledsoe I would send him word of our progress all along, by messenger, and he provided money to cover that cost. I want to pay you to take a letter to him for me. We don't know much, but what we know, I want him to know.”

“You don't need to pay me for it,” Potts said. “I'll make the trip for no cost to you.”

“You
will
take payment. Bledsoe provided money to cover messenger cost, and we will use it. You are the messenger, so it is you who are paid.”

Potts argued no further. The letter was already complete, having been constructed by Fain at spare moments as they traveled. Potts tucked it beneath his hunting shirt, said his farewells, and made promise to rejoin the others as soon as his errand was run and he could reach them.

Then he rode southwest toward White's Fort while the others headed east toward Jonesborough.

SEVERAL DAYS LATER
Jonesborough, State of Franklin

 

 

I
n all her happy girlhood in North Carolina, Constance Harkin had never had a moment of ambition to become a widowed mother of three, operating a lodging house on a dangerous frontier. Her intent had been merely to grow up and marry a man as fine as her father had been, and live a happy life raising a family in some village or town where life was stable and safe.

Life had taken unplanned turns. She had found the husband she had hoped for, and John Harkin proved as good a man as she'd dreamed: hardworking and able, a lawyer of cleverness and skill, and a fine father. John's only flaw had been poor health. Ailments of the lungs plagued him all his foreshortened days, particularly in winter and the moist days of spring. Despite Constance's rapt attention, insistence on his frequent examination by good physicians, and endless prayers for his healing, the man aged before his time and his lungs became ever weaker and more prone to illness. His refusal to give up his single vice of pipe-smoking did nothing to help him, in Constance's opinion, but she had always held herself back from haranguing him about it. Her mother had advised her that “a man must be left to be a man,” and she had tried to follow that guidance.

John had somehow persuaded himself that what his health needed was a move out of the Carolina Piedmont country across the mountains to the backcountry where, as he put it, life was “new and fresh and healthy.” It made no sense to Constance, who had heard of the heat and humidity of the backcountry summers, but a man must be left to be a man, and she had faithfully followed him to the new town of Jonesborough. There, John had established a law office, one of the first in town, and built his family a snug home, and beside it, a conjoining sturdy two-story log inn with four bedrooms, each with its own fireplace built by the best mason John Harkin could find. For a time it seemed the sheer exuberance of achievement and change did good things for his health, for he thrived and brightened in a way that cheered his wife to no end, and filled her with hope for their future in this town.

Then came the first frost of autumn and the first snow of winter, and John Harkin had declined with astonishing rapidity. By spring he was dead and Connie Harkin was running the inn alone and using the little law office building as a spinning house from which she sold a bit of fabric to make extra money.

She visited his grave daily for the first two months, then found that activity depressed her with no corresponding benefit coming in compensation. She began to talk to John not by his grave, but in her mind and sometimes in audible whispers when she was alone. Over time she began to feel a sense of his presence. Not that she believed in ghosts, merely in continued survival beyond the grave of the sort she had been taught in church. She believed John heard what she said to him and sometimes was allowed by the hosts of heaven to intervene and help her in mysterious ways. Usually simply in giving her an unaccountable sense of companionship and strength, as he had done in life.

For the children, it was difficult. Yet they managed fairly well. Only the eldest, twelve-year-old daughter Maggie, had passed the age of ten. Youth meant adaptability. It seemed to Constance that the youngest, six-year-old James, had adapted to his father's absence better than his older brother, middle child Michael, ten. Michael carried with him an eternal, brooding restlessness and a propensity for nightmares that sometimes broke his mother's heart and filled her with worry.

Maggie tried to manage such things, having appointed herself her father's replacement in shaping and disciplining her brothers. The only problem, from Constance's motherly point of view, was that Maggie followed some of her father's poorly chosen styles of son-raising, using intimidation and fear to prod the boys in the direction they should go. Constance disavowed such an approach, common as it was in her society, but John, and now Maggie after him, had never shied from it. In particular John had established a pattern of using phantom bogeymen to frighten and thereby control the boys. Maggie did the same, and while it appeared to have little effect upon her brother James, Michael was much affected, to the point that Constance secretly blamed some of his nightmares and frequent bed-wetting on the influence of his late father and storytelling older sister.

And there was the further complication in the form of old Benjamin Crawley, a charmingly British silversmith who had moved to the town after the end of the war, joining his son in the former Colonies. That son had worn a British military red coat during the conflict, but had deserted his army, drawn by the notion of life in a new country with seemingly unlimited prospects and room for growth. The son had lived only a year after his father joined him in America, then had been killed by a highwayman.

Though the senior Crawley was old and these days merely tinkered at his silversmithing, he was a popular and entertaining figure in Jonesborough, particularly for children. Gentle and protective toward the young, the old man delighted in sharing with them tales from his native England. Legends of kings and knights and dragons and mysterious dark forests where lived strange people, some of whom perhaps were not people at all. Crawley had the mind of a scholar and of what would one day be called a folklorist. He loved the old tales, and to him, a tale was not a tale unless it was often told.

There was one oft-told tale of Crawley's that impacted nighttime life in the household of Constance Harkin: the tale of Skellenwood Forest lurker Loafhead. Loafhead, a misshapen figure with a great lump of bone and flesh on his forehead. Loafhead, the frightening figure who emerged from England's Skellenwood whenever children were disobedient, or defiant, or ill-behaved, or, most of all, when they wetted their beds at night. Loafhead the punisher, invoked by parents and grandparents—or in the case of Jonesborough's Harkin household, by a sister seeking to control and dominate her little brother. Loafhead the bane of bed-wetting children such as Michael Harkin.

Constance Harkin had firmly commanded her daughter to say nothing more of Loafhead to her brother, and Maggie had promised more than once to obey. But she had not, and Constance knew better than to expect it. The story was simply too compelling, and gave Maggie such a strong hold over her brother's mind, that she was not strong enough to resist. And besides, Michael continually asked to be told of Loafhead, drawn to the story as children often are drawn to that which terrifies them.

“You wet yourself in your bed tonight, and Loafhead will come through that window, that one right there, and tear off your head for a bread loaf,” Maggie told Michael night after night. “You feel like you need to make water, you'd best get up and go out to the outhouse, unless you want your head to be Loafhead's bread and your brains his butter.”

“But if I go outside—that's where he is,” Michael would protest.

“He don't hurt boys who use the outhouse . . . usually,” Maggie said, customizing the folklore to fit her own manipulative purposes. “He takes the heads only of boys who wet their beds. Like you do. What's wrong with you, Michael? Will you wet your bed until you're a grown man?”

Michael went to sleep almost every night with his sister's chiding in his ears, tears in his eyes, and Loafhead in his mind. He went to sleep waiting for the seemingly inevitable awakening with the chill of dampness on his body, and his heart full of dreadful anticipation of the shutter rattling open to give entrance to Loafhead, he who ate the heads of bed-wetting boys like loaves of bread.

Loafhead never came, and frequently Maggie received morning scoldings from her mother for keeping alive old Mr. Crawley's terrifying folk story, but for Michael the fear remained very real. Loafhead was to him as solid and alive as the old gum tree in the backyard of the inn, or the feral cats that prowled the night outside his shuttered window, and whose sounds made him certain that it was Loafhead he was hearing. Loafhead, who was moving around in the dark out there, solid and alive and hungry.

Also alive was Michael's shame over his nocturnal inability to control a basic function of his own body. It was a secret humiliation, one he struggled hard to keep from the handful of other children of the town. But he knew that it wasn't really a secret. They knew.

Maggie had told them.

Sometimes he wondered why Loafhead was so concerned about punishing bed-wetting boys. Would it not be better if he turned his wrath on cruel and humiliating sisters?

That would be fine by Michael Harkin.