Long Hunt (9781101559208) (22 page)

“It's just an old legend, Michael. You're old enough you should be able to tell a legend from a true story, even if I tease you with it. You're a little fool.”

“Bible says if you call somebody a fool, you're in danger of hellfire!”

“Bible also says you ought to tell the truth. And it's the truth that you're a fool, and I'm telling it.”

“I ain't a fool. Old Mr. Crawley tells me I'm one of the smartest young men he's known.”

“Yes, and then he tells you another Loafhead tale and you run off believing it, and he laughs at you behind your back.”

“No, he don't.”

“Yes, he does!”

“You're lying. You're a no-good liar!”

“Well, you're a bed-pisser, and that's
sure
no lie. And everybody in town knows it and laughs at you for that, too.”

Michael's rage, hot inside his chest, threatened to erupt in tears and shouts. He determined not to let that happen, not to let Maggie get the best of him.

“I ain't talking to you no more,” he said. “I'm going to go down and talk to Mr. Crawley, and just ask him straight out if Loafhead is real. Because I can tell you, sister, that whether there's a Loafhead or not, I did see somebody who sure looked like him carrying that hurt fellow into town. Big old ugly knot on his head, all bulging out . . . You'd have said it was Loafhead, too, if you'd seen him.”

“Well, I didn't see him because I wasn't up roaming around because I'd peed on myself in my sleep. I don't do that. I'm not a pissy baby like you are.”

“I had got up so I could go to the outhouse. That's when I saw him going down the street.”

“Loafhead, you mean.”

“Whoever it was. A big man with a lump on his brow.”

“Then you peed on yourself from being scared.”

“Well . . . yes.”

Maggie shook her head and sighed loudly. “That's no better than peeing your bed,” she said. “Maybe it's worse. Pissy baby! Pissy baby!”

“Don't you say that!” he shouted in her face.

She backed away. “Your breath smells bad,
pissy baby
.”

“I'm going to knock your teeth out one of these days, Maggie. I swear I will! And if there really is a Loafhead, I'll send him to get
you
! I will! I'll really do it, Maggie!”

“And after that what will you do? Piss your pants again, pissy baby?” She laughed scornfully and marched away from him.

 

The breeze was up and pleasantly cool as Michael strode down the street toward the silversmithy of Ben Crawley. Walking hard and fast helped Michael burn out some of the fury he felt toward his sister. He wished she wasn't able to make him so mad. That anger gave her control over him.

The little shop housing Crawley's smithy stood on the right side of the street near the base of a hill on the edge of town. Michael turned down a little alley and circled around to the rear doorway, knowing it would be open because Crawley loved a good breeze. That back door was Michael's usual portal into the smithy, where he enjoyed studying the fifty or more hammers of various sizes and shapes that hung on Crawley's rear wall, above the smithy bench where he did his work.

Not that Crawley did much of that anymore. When he had lived in Virginia, on the edge of Williamsburg, he had been a busy man, some of his work making its way to the cabinets and tables of the governor's palace. Wealthy buyers frequented his premises. He'd done well for himself there, but worn himself out, too. When he'd come west over the mountains, he'd been happy to leave hard work behind and to content himself with sitting in his mostly idle shop and talking with the citizens who came by to enjoy the music of his accent. On rare occasions he would work, if he felt like it, or if there was a job to be done. In an area where most people had little money and modest possessions, a silversmith's services were not much in demand.

Michael slipped through the rear door at just the right moment. Crawley was talking with someone in the front area, which was separated from the work area by a tall, solid-backed shelf displaying some of Crawley's best work. Michael sneaked to the corner of the shelf and peeked around into the front of the shop. There was Crawley in his usual chair, side toward Michael, and before him a stranger who had been pointed out to Michael, by his mother, as the famous hunter-explorer people sometimes called Edohi, but whose true name was Crawford Fain.

He had caught the men in midconversation. Crawley was saying, “I am astonished to learn that so famous an American as you, Mr. Fain, come not merely from a different land, but also the same land of my own origin, and the same region of that land. Skellenwood Forest is the soil where my roots first planted themselves.”

Fain nodded. “As did mine. And not merely the region, but within the forest itself. My father was the huntsman of Skellenwood, and our home was built within Skellen-dale Cavern.”

“Blast me! Within the same cave that was the legendary home of the fearsome Loafhead?”

On the other side of the shelf wall, Michael stifled a gasp. Keen-eared Fain glanced back that way, but persuaded himself he had heard nothing.

“The very cave,” he said.

Crawley laughed. “And did you ever encounter that ogre?”

“Knew him personally.”

Crawley laughed again. Michael bit his knuckle, trying to absorb what he was hearing.

“Whatever do you mean, Mr. Fain?” Crawley asked.

At that moment, Michael shifted position and his foot slid beneath his weight and bumped the base of the shelf. Fain came around the shelf.

“Hello, young man,” he said.

“Hello, sir.” Michael reddened at having been caught as an eavesdropper.

Crawley came around as well with slow and stiff old-man movements. “Michael? I didn't know you were there, lad. Do you know Mr. Fain?”

“I know who he is. Everybody in town's been talking about Edohi being here.”

“Why are you hiding like this?”

“I came in the back door and heard you speaking, and didn't want to interrupt.”

Crawley looked at Fain. “Well raised, this lad is. And his sister Maggie as well. I delight in their visits here to my smithy.”

“A pleasure to meet you, Michael,” Fain said.

Crawley brought his visitors back around to the front of the shop. Michael took his usual place in a corner, seated on a log section substituting for a stool. Crawley said, “Speaking of what you saw, it so happens that Mr. Fain and I were talking about something I have told you stories about before, Michael.”

Michael said, “Loafhead. I heard you talking.”

Crawley said to Fain, “The question of Loafhead's reality has been a concern to this young man. Am I right, Michael?”

The boy nodded abashedly.

“Michael,” Crawley said, “I have told you of being born in the climes of Loafhead's district . . . but I have learned that Mr. Fain here has done me one better. He lived within the very forest of Loafhead, Skellenwood. In a house built within that very huge cavern where the ogre was born and lived.”

Michael saw in his memory the figure with the distorted brow, moving down the dark Jonesborough street bearing the body of a senseless man. Overwhelmed, he had to ask: “Sir, Mr. Fain, is he real? Is he real? Loafhead?”

“There is more than one kind of ‘real,' young man. The kind of ‘real' that makes you afraid of Loafhead, the walking, living, breathing kind of real . . . he isn't that kind of real. Not anymore.”

“He is dead?”

“He died years ago.”

“How do you know?”

“I do know. Know it absolutely. You can trust me on that, son. I promise.”

“But he was alive once . . . He was real?”

“There was once one who some people called Loafhead. He was no ogre, just a man. A man who knew misfortune in his time and was forced to live mostly apart from other people.”

“Was there . . .” Michael cupped his hand over his eye and brow, imitating the deformity he had seen on the man on the midnight street. “Was there this?”

“There was. There from his birth. He covered it almost always beneath a cloth mask worn over his head.”

Crawley listened intently. These were things he had not heard before about the legend from his homeland.

“Loafhead died in his cave?”

“Not in his cave. He died here, in America. He came here aboard a ship. He lived in America for several years, and took to the woods just like he had done in his homeland.”

Crawley was silent, absorbing lore that to him was as new as it was to the boy. Crawley had known the tales of Loafhead for years, but none of them had spoken of his death or of a journey to America. Was Fain spinning tales of his own creation, or were there parts of this legend Crawley simply had missed?

“Mr. Fain, could there have been more than one Loafhead? Maybe another one living in America? Maybe still alive today?”

“To my knowledge, son, there was only one who was ever called by that name. He lived; he died. He was a human. Then he was a legend. The human passed; the legend went on. Loafhead is not real, not anymore. I can tell you that, son, with great assurance.”

L
ittleton leaned back on the bench and rested his shoulders against the wall of the newest incarnation of Ott Dixon's traveling makeshift tavern. With a grimace of effort and some pain, he hefted his peg leg up across his knee so the drunken woman near him could see it better.

“I never saw a real peg leg before,” she said. “I've seen men with crutches and walking sticks and such, but never a wooden leg. She reached out toward it, hesitated, then touched it and drew her hand back as if fearful she had violated some limit of acceptability. “Is it hard to walk on it, Mr. Kirk?”

“Easier all the time,” Littleton said, his own voice slurred by the effects of rum. “The longer I wear it, the easier it gets. Pinches sometimes, though.”

“How did you lose that part of your leg?”

Littleton drew in a deep breath and put a cocky expression on his face. “Cut it off. Pulled out my knife and just sawed it right off.”

The woman gasped and put her hand to the base of her throat. “Oh my . . . oh . . . oh my!”

“Didn't have much choice about it,” Littleton went on. “I was trapped down in a hole in the ground. A sorry scoundrel had pushed me into it, and my foot and the bottom part of that leg were stuck in a crack in the rock, and already shattered up and ruined. Even if I'd been able to pull free, which I couldn't, I'd have lost the leg anyway. Somebody would have had to cut it off, or it would have mortified and rotted off. . . . Only thing I could do was cut myself free.”

“How could you endure such pain, Mr. Kirk?”

Littleton smiled at her. “You can call me Lyle. I can endure a lot. I'm a strong man.”

She smiled weakly. “You must be! You must be so very, very strong!” Then a long sigh, hidden poorly.

She asked, “Who pushed you into the hole in the ground?”

“Man name of Gilly. Worthless piece of rubbish . . . scrawny rat of a man. Outlaw and murderer. His intention was to murder me.”

“Men like that come to bad ends. That's what my papa used to tell me. Bad ends.”

Littleton wondered if her papa had ever warned her about the ends that could came to women who drank too much liquor and talked too freely to strangers. He hoped not. At the moment, he was looking for a woman without scruples, without inhibition, without morals or fear of consequences.

Littleton said, “Gilly will find his bad end, and bad it truly will be. I already have something in mind for him, me and old peg leg here.” He rapped the wooden leg with his knuckle.

“What are you going to do?”

“Something Gilly would never forget the rest of his life . . . though he won't have a ‘rest of his life' ahead of him at that point.”

“You've got to tell me!”

Littleton shrugged. “If I tell you, maybe there's a thing or two you could do in return for me. Kind of a thank-you.” It was as subtle as Littleton was capable of being.

Her expression rapidly transformed into one of smiling comprehension.

“My cabin is just up the hill from here,” she said.

Littleton chuckled, taking another swig of rum. “I don't even know your name,” he said.

“It's Rachel. But it don't matter what my name is.”

“I think I'm going to like you, Rachel.”

“Oh, Mr. Kirk, Lyle, I
know
you're going to like me! I'm going to make sure of it!”

“Then let me show you Gilly's ‘bad end,' ” Littleton said. He drew out his knife and pressed the tip of it beneath the metal band the smith had made him after the leg cracked and split at the roadside burial. The band held the split wooden leg in one piece. Littleton worked the band loose and slipped it off. Then, with the splintered section of the leg swinging off to the side almost as if on a hinge, he showed Rachel what he had in mind for Gilly, whenever he got his hands on him.

 

Littleton had never had much attention from women, except those willing to exchange feminine affections for money. Thus he was surprised when it began to appear that Rachel's willingness to be with him bore no financial motivation. She simply accepted his advances. He hardly knew what to think of it.

Once the iron band was back on the peg leg so that the prosthetic would function again as a single piece, Littleton left Dixon's with his female companion and followed her as fast as his handicap would allow as she took them up a trail through thick woods behind Dixon's tavern. Watching her move along in front of him, he noticed an oddity in her gait, a limp that revealed that she, too, was somewhat lame. Her right leg was slightly shorter than her left, giving her a decided stutter in her stride. Suddenly, Littleton's pride in himself for having attracted the affection of this woman lessened. Might she simply be paying attention to him because he and she were both cripples?