Long Hunt (9781101559208) (3 page)

J
ohn Crockett proved to have been right about Greeneville. Though the town was officially three years old, it was yet early in its transformation from empty land to village.

Despite the rolling terrain on which the town lay, it was lined out in gridlike fashion, with relatively straight streets and squarely shaped lots.

Potts waved and nodded to those working on structures going up in the little town, which was situated where it was because of a rich spring rising near its main avenue. Potts took his horse to the spring, and man and beast enjoyed a refreshing drink. Then they progressed up through the northern side of town, through the dusk and toward the place Crockett had urged Potts to visit.

Potts found Dixon's quickly and easily. A cabin had been started, built none too squarely and with uneven, round-notched logs, and rising only to the height of a man's chest. The upper part of the structure was mere sailcloth, stretched up and across a central ridge pole running from the front to the back, giving the building a decent but flimsy imitation of a peaked roof. Half cabin, half tent.

Potts found a place to sit in the back corner; there he could quietly observe the grubby humanity in the place and ponder his options for passing the night. As darkness thickened, torches were lighted, some burning so close to the tent cloth that Potts worried the place might suddenly flare up. He eyed the front exit and made plans to bolt should it become necessary.

A big, ugly brute of a fellow clad in badly stained, heavy trousers came stumbling across the splintery puncheon floor and looked stupidly down at Potts. “Whatcha drinking?”

“Don't fancy anything to drink, sir,” Potts said, wondering if this might be the Dixon whose name was attached to this obviously short-term enterprise. From the look of the place, Potts guessed that the proprietor probably carried a packhorse load of liquor from new town to new town, throwing up temporary log-and-canvas taverns on unclaimed lots and vending liquor to the locals, then moving on when things began to be more settled.

“Gotta drink to stay here,” the ogre said.

Potts stood and faced the man, who was a handbreadth shorter than he was, but much thicker. “Then I suppose I'll move on,” he said in a cordial tone. “Know any place a man can find a place to sleep for a night?”

The man pointed a finger that wavered in any and all directions. “Go see Katherine Parr up yonder way. Two mile. Only cabin south of the road. She'll bed you down.” The man, suddenly friendly, chuckled and winked. “Aye, she'll bed you down, no two ways 'bout it! You know what I'm talking about, young man! You be sure to tell her Dixon steered you there and would favor having some business steered back to him in turn.”

“I'm just looking for sleep. That's all,” Potts said. “I reckon you might be thinking I'm looking for something that I ain't, Mr. Dixon.”

“No drink, no women . . . bah!” The man lost his smile and waved his hand toward the door in a contemptuous gesture of dismissal. Potts wasn't the kind of patron he needed.

Potts had turned to head out when suddenly a figure filled the doorway and made him stop. A voice with the kind of piercing edge that could be heard half a mile away suddenly burst forth: “Sin is a reproach to the God of heaven and earth, and shall be driven forth before him like dried and husky leaves before a divine wind! And
no
drunkard, so says the holy word, shall inherit the kingdom of God!” The declaration was given in a distinctly British accent.

Groans and drunken protests rumbled through the place, and Dixon stepped toward the newcomer, who was shadowed by two stoutly built men of mixed Indian and white blood, seemingly bodyguards. They glared menacingly at Dixon as he neared.

“Bledsoe!” Dixon bellowed. “You think the Lord would want to find you here in this den of sinfulness?”

“Dixon, you rank and randy son of a libertine and his unwashed whore, the Lord calls me to bring the good news even to such as you, and even in such places as this pit of hell you call a tavern!”

Dixon fixed a scornful glare on his face. “Well, you Bible-spouting pox, the Lord calls
me
to deliver good strong drink to his thirsty children! And I heed that call. Why you in here, anyway?”

Potts put the pieces together quickly. The newcomer was obviously a preacher, and Dixon had called him Bledsoe. That narrowed the field as to who this righteous warrior probably was: one of two Bledsoe brothers, both of them well-known clergymen in this western country, but of decidedly different styles and religious traditions. Both Bledsoes were making names for themselves on the new frontier, one as an educated Presbyterian cleric devoted to the spread of classic Christian institutional learning in an academic environment, the other a much more roughly hewn, self-educated devotee of the kind of fiery revivalism associated with camp and brush arbor meetings. One brother an “old light churchman,” the other a “new light man.”

There was little doubt in Potts's mind that this was the latter Bledsoe, the new light revivalist, who had just come in. Potts struggled to remember his name. Abner, he thought. Yes, Abner Bledsoe. And his brother, the academic—his name was Eben Bledsoe.

“I want you out of this place,” Dixon commanded Abner.

Abner Bledsoe's crimson face twisted into a snarl and for a few seconds he looked very dangerous. His bodyguards stepped up, but he abruptly waved them back, seeming to think better of escalating the confrontation to a physical level.

“Dixon, I'll leave you and your den of perdition happily if I may but tell your patrons here of a great meeting soon to happen that can provide a pathway to a better life for them . . . and for you, too, if you'll have it.”

Dixon huffed and snorted, then said, “Well and good, preacher, have your say. No preaching, though! Just announce your meeting and be gone. Ain't going to help you none. My people here ain't your churchgoing type.”

Bledsoe stepped over to a bench that sat against a wall and climbed onto it. “Friends!” he said in a voice meant to pierce the thickest alcoholic murk, “there will be”—he paused, counting on his fingers—“four days hence from this night, a great outpouring of the power of God in the broad meadow nearby Edohi Station. I shall preach the word of truth to all who come, and shall also share the story of Molly Reese, late of the city of London, whose life was given back to her through the power and mercy of God after she fell victim to one who misused her sorely, leaving her with the very tongue cut out of her head! And hear this, friends: Molly Reese herself will be there, in the flesh, so that you may better understand her tale!”

A drunk man hollered, “Going to be mighty hard for her to tell that tale with no tongue in her head!” Several laughed.

Bledsoe pointed at the man. “True enough, sir! You shall hear her story from
my
lips,
my
tongue, reading from the narrative written by Molly herself, recounting her sufferings, her rescue, and ultimate salvation through the power of our Lord! And you shall see her with your own eyes!”

“I done read all that Molly Reese jabber on a broadside over in Charleston,” said a man whom few would have identified, by appearance, as a likely literate. “No reason to hear you spew it all over again!”

Indeed, the story of London-born Molly Reese was widely known and had been published frequently on broadsides and in newspapers both British and American. Preachers often recounted paraphrased versions of the Molly Reese saga from pulpits, particularly on the American frontier, where tales of redemption and apparent supernatural intervention were popular. There was even an ongoing stage dramatization of the bloody tale in Boston, a play much discussed for its remarkably believable and graphic depiction of the gore involved in severing a human tongue. “How did they
do
that?” was the question most frequently asked, post-performance, by those who attended the play.

Potts personally had heard Molly Reese's story on three occasions, all proclaimed from pulpits. At mention of her name by the loud preacher, the details of her grim adventure began to spill through his mind.

Those of a religious bent almost invariably saw the experiences of Molly Reese as evidence of the power of divine intervention to save those in distress and danger. Some found in her story specific evidence of protective angelic activity. Less spiritual souls simply believed the woman was just unusually lucky.

There had been little enough evidence of luck in the early life of Molly Reese, beyond the fortunate accident of familial affluence. Raised in a landed family, Molly was brought up without benefit of her mother, who had died during Molly's birth. It was said that her father harbored some related resentment toward Molly, while others believed the man simply to be especially perverse and cruel.

In any case, at around a decade of age, Molly began to fall victim to mistreatment and abuse by her father, who drank heavily. Initially his treatment of her was simple meanness, striking her with his fists at the slightest provocations or hitting her with such objects as fireplace pokers, kitchen implements, and the like. As the girl grew, though, his abuse achieved a darker, depraved aspect, and Molly became the victim of treatment her own narrative euphemistically called “invasions of the most harsh and lewd variety.” Yet the more he misused the girl, the more her father seemed to despise her.

At length Molly's father came to realize that his actions put him at great risk of exposure, because Molly was a highly intelligent and articulate girl. A whisper to a sympathetic domestic servant, a neighbor, a constable, or clergyman, and Molly could easily bring destructive public humiliation and punishment upon her sire. When Molly's father realized this, his molestations ceased for a time. Then came an inevitable renewal of his perverse passions, bolstered by the weakening effect of liquor on his moral character. Molly Reese was placed in her most dangerous circumstance yet, though she was too young to fully comprehend the depth of her danger.

There had been a time when John Reese had been a decent man and citizen, and even, in the earliest days of his daughter's life, an occasionally tender father. But alcohol did terrible things to the man, corrupting him body, soul, and mind. His thinking became irrational, his reasoning addled—so much so that he actually became able to believe, one night when he was drunker and more irrational even than usual, that rendering his daughter physically unable to speak would keep his sins hidden forever. He persuaded himself that he could protect his secrets without taking such an extreme step as murdering his own child, an action he had been pondering secretly. Ruined as it was by his drinking, his mind was actually able to fully accept the fallacious notion as not only sensible, but clever.

Thus came the horror that changed the life of Molly Reese forever. Alone one evening in the house with her father, she was caught by him in an upper hallway and dragged into his dark bedchamber, where he clouted her severely with a heavy brass candlestick and knocked her unconscious. He drew out a thin-bladed knife, pried open the senseless girl's mouth . . . and began cruel and bloody work.

It was only afterward, standing over his profusely bleeding daughter with her severed tongue in his hand, that he comprehended the flaw in his plan. He might have rendered it hard for Molly to betray him with spoken words, but the girl was able to read and write. A simple scrawled note passed to a constable or dropped in the charity box at a nearby church, and he would be as fully betrayed as if she'd shouted the truth about him from atop a cathedral. Furthermore, the way he had maimed his daughter could not go unnoticed, and would in itself rouse questions and investigation.

So he had failed. He had mutilated his daughter in a beastly act of cruelty, and still he was in danger.

So she had to die after all. He knew it then, and while he still possessed the will do to it, lowered himself beside her to put the knife to her throat. . . .

Then came the miracle, the divine intervention. Or so it was described in Molly's famous broadside narrative.

From out of the shadows in the room, a figure bolted forth, lean, lithe, and fast, and came upon John Reese with swift violence. Swinging a candlestick that was twin to the one with which Reese had pounded Molly's skull, the intruder, whoever and whatever he was, dropped John Reese like a sack of dirt and pummeled his head repeatedly.

And Molly, regaining partial consciousness, saw and heard it all, albeit in muddled fashion. The flash of the brass candlestick as it caught a reflected gleam from the simmering coals on the nearby grate, up and down, up and down . . . the thud and crush of metal pounding flesh and skull . . . the terrible hiss of John Reese's last breath of life . . .

Then it was done. John Reese was dead. Molly was mutilated but alive, filled with horror and pain as she discovered what had been done to her, having seen her severed tongue lying on the floor near her father's lifeless hand, an ugly thing she could not readily identify in the dim light. The mysterious one who had intervened to save her life knelt beside her, talking softly and gently, telling her he would take her away, and that her father could never follow or hurt her again. He was gone forever, and she was safe.

The young girl did not know the one who had saved her. And as she groped at her painful, bloodied mouth, she did not care. She cared only about what had been done to her. And the fact that her father could do no such terrible things to her again.

According to her famous narrative, Molly Reese's memory failed her at that point. The next thing she was aware of was being away from her home, the body of her father left behind and never seen by her again. Molly came to herself on a rough cot in a dark and dingy room, an unshaven and watery-eyed man leaning over her and wiping blood from her face. His breath smelled of strong rum. He had something like a cloth sack pulled over his head for some reason, but the front was at the moment rolled up so his face was visible from chin to brow.