Long Hunt (9781101559208) (31 page)

A broad, ruddy face, an ugly bulge extending down from forehead and across one eye . . . How could she ever have told her brother that Loafhead was not real? She had to face the fact that he had been right in his fearful belief in the ogre, and she had been wrong.

But was he an ogre? So far he had defended and rescued her. And was this misshapen man really Loafhead at all? Might he be someone else with a similar deformity?

Maggie dared not speak to him. The very idea was too daunting. So she merely held on, and let him hold on to her, and was carried along the woodland trails in the driving rain, lightning glaring every few moments, sometimes far, sometimes close.

At length the man's trot slowed as he became fatigued, and Maggie suspected he was looking for a place to stop. Soon they reached a little clearing with a half-faced camp, and he ducked into the slant-roofed shelter and deposited her on the ground. Then he sat down beside her, panting for breath. His form was so tall and muscle-bulked that he nearly filled the little shelter alone. She drew her legs up close to herself, wrapped her arms around her bent knees, and scooted as far away from him as the shelter would allow.

Finally he turned to look at her, and by the glare of lightning she got her first fully clear look at his face. Her shock must have been visible, because when he realized she was looking at him, wide-eyed, he put his hand over the misshapen lump marring his face and turned away. “Don't look,” he said in a voice she could only later describe to herself as
muddy
.

“Sir?” she heard herself ask, curiosity overcoming caution. “Are you Loafhead?”

He turned back to her, his only visible eye squinting in a frown. “I know nothing of ‘Loafhead,' ” he said. “I am Tom. I am Tom Crale.” He looked away again. “I am ugly.”

“Are you going to hurt me, sir?”

“No. I will not hurt you. I took you away from the bad men. Did they hurt you?”

She felt bashful suddenly, and now it was her turn to break away her gaze. “No. No . . . but they would have hurt me if I hadn't run, and if you hadn't stopped me from being caught again.”

“They were bad. Very bad men. They do bad things to young ones.”

Maggie began to realize how great a horror she had escaped. However disconcerting and, indeed, ugly Tom Crale was, he did not horrify her like the memory of the two men in the stinking cabin she had fled.

“Who is Loafhead?” Crale asked.

It was awkward, hearing that question. How to answer?

“There is an old story, from across the ocean, about a . . . a dweller in a forest who eats the heads of children who do bad things. He has a face that is . . .” She looked at him and pointed briefly at his deformity. He winced.

“No. I am not Loafhead,” he reaffirmed, forcefully. “I am a
man
, Tom Crale. I don't do . . . what you said, eating the heads of children.”

“I don't think there really is a Loafhead,” Maggie said. “It's that you made me think of him, and I was already afraid, and my little brother believes that one time he saw—”

Crale rose and stepped out of the shelter, seemingly unwilling to hear more. The rain had stopped, though it looked likely to be merely a lull, not a full cessation.

Maggie felt a wave of guilt. She had insulted and hurt the man who had rescued her, and it seemed the worst thing she could ever have done.

He never left her view. For long minutes Tom Crale wandered in the woods before the half-faced shelter, but never did he let himself go out of sight.

Maggie had the impression he was watching her, but despite his horrific appearance and endless vigilance, she did not feel his attention was threatening, as had been the attentions of the other two men. Rather, she was sure that Tom Crale was guarding her rather than attempting to possess and control her. There was nothing amiss in his interest in her.

At length he returned to the shelter, his sensitivity over her indelicate “Loafhead” question seemingly abated. “What is your name, little girl?” he asked her.

“Maggie Harkin. But I'm not a little girl. I'm nigh grown up now. I live in Jonesborough. Do you know Jonesborough?” She realized she was speaking to him in the same tone she might use with a smaller child, and asked herself why she was doing that. Crale seemed odd, sensitive, injured . . . but he had given no evidence of mental slowness. The slight slur she heard in his words seemed to her to have a physical basis, perhaps a misshaping of the human mechanical instruments of speech, related, maybe, to the same malady that had distorted his head and face.

“I know Jonesborough,” he replied. “I have been there. In secret.”

“Did you carry a man there in the night recently? A man who had been hanged?”

Crale looked at her with surprise. “Yes. I found him hanging but took him down. He was still living, so I carried him to the town so he could be helped.” Crale paused. “Did he live?”

“The last I was aware of, he was still alive,” she said. The timing of her abduction had kept her from being aware of the murder of Gilly. “Do you know who hanged him, Mr. Crale?”

“No.”

“Could it have been the same men who tried to hurt me?”

“Don't know.”

“Who were the men who tried to hurt me, Mr. Crale? Do you know them?”

“Only Sam. The fat man. He is Sam Crotty. He is like me . . . an alone man. Hidden man.”

“But I think he is a bad man . . . and I think you are not a bad man. So he's not like you
that
way.”

Crale nodded. “He is a bad man. He has hurt others. Girls, like you. Young. He hurt them with the help of the man I saved you from. I don't know that man's name.”

Maggie was pleased that Crale was becoming more talkative and open. There was much about this curious woodland figure she wanted to know. Where had he come from? What was his life? Why was he . . . the way he was?

Perhaps she could learn some of those answers. But instinct told her she needed to be patient and not over-inquisitive.

 

Fain stared silently at the pigmented image on the cavern wall that Titus's torchlight revealed. Titus had discovered it during his hunt for cast-off wood back in the cavern, and it was this that he had fetched his father to see.

The longer Fain looked, the more he was sure the well-rendered face was who he took it to be. The details all matched, from the yellow hair to the clearly visible streak of gray in the lower portion of the iris of the left eye. Someone had painted this image, using pigments derived or compounded from nature, with meticulous precision and detail.

“Is that her, Pap?”

“I suspect so, Titus. Almost has to be.”

“That was my thinking, too. You reckon she put this picture up here herself?”

Fain paused, mulling something over. “Son, you ever heard reference made to the ‘cavern man'?”

“I ain't sure.”

“Well, the story has it that he's somebody who puts pictures like this on rocks and such, mostly in caves, like this. I don't know if it's somebody doing it that made the legend come about, or whether the legend is there and every now and then somebody goes and does something such as this picture here, just to make the legend seem real.”

“Why would somebody bother to do that? Don't make sense to me.”

“Who can say what makes people do what they do, son? All I can say for sure about this picture is a couple of things. First off, whoever did this cared a lot about it and took a lot of time to make it look just right, and two, this picture surely does look to be an image of Eben Bedsoe's daughter. Who else could it be? There wouldn't be two women in the same wilderness with such an unusual features as marked eyes, 'specially two marked in just the same way. Has to be her!”

“But we still ain't found the real woman.”

“No. But this here picture gives me some hope that there's a real woman to be found. Hold your torch up closer there . . . see? That coloring is right fresh. That ain't an old picture. Somebody done that not all that long back.”

“Pap, you said folks talk about a ‘cavern man' who does this kind of thing. I ain't never heard of the ‘cavern man,' but I have heard somebody talk of a man who maybe does something like this. Somebody I knowed in the Cumberland Settlements who had come from Watauga told me about him. I believe he said his name is Tom Crale. Reckon Tom Crale and the cavern man could be one and the same?” Titus paused and looked intently at his father. “Pap? You all right?”

“Let's don't talk more about this now,” Fain said. “We've got our wood now. Let's get us a cook fire going and get dried out, and get us up a bit of supper. And we need to feed the horses.”

“Pap? You know this Crale fellow?”

“Later, son. Let's talk about it all sometime later.”

T
om Crale had returned to the shelter and now sat as before, staring out from it into the woods. The storm had stopped for a time, then returned in milder form with a steady rain that poured through the crude roof of the half-faced camp shelter in several places. Maggie had managed to find a dry corner in which to shelter herself, but Crale sat unheeding of the two streams of water that poured down on his head and shoulders from the leaky, sloping roof.

“What do you do?” she asked him, because he had begun to show some evidence of willingness to talk about himself. “Are you a hunter? A trapper?”

“I do what I must do to live. I live among the animals. I am more like them than I am like people, I think.”

“Are you around people much?”

“Some. Mostly I watch them. That's what I do. I watch.”

“What do you mean?”

“I go to the towns sometimes, or to the forts, and even the towns of the Cherokee, and I watch. Without being seen. I see how people live, the things they do, the places they go, the things they try to hide from other people. And I hear the words they say to each other. The songs they sing when they are alone. That is what I do. I watch. And I listen.”

“Do you not talk to the people?”

He shook his head. “I cannot be among people.”

“Because of . . .”

He waved his hand in front of his face and lumped brow. “Because of this. I scare them. They think I am a devil, I believe, the way they run if they see me.”

“That makes me sad, Tom Crale.”

“Yes, Maggie Harkin. Me, too.”

“Tom, do you think the man who was chasing me is dead? When you hit him, do you think it was enough to—”

“He is dead. He will hurt you no more.”

“I should go home. My mother and brother will be worried for me.”

“I will take you home.”

“Do you have a family, Tom Crale?”

“There are those to whom I am kin. I seldom see them. Some of them fear me just like others do. Even though many Crale men have had . . . this.” Another wave toward his face. “It is called the Crale lump. Mine is the worst, I think. The ugliest there has been.”

“Have you had it all your life?”

“Since I was a boy. It has grown as I have grown.”

“Oh. Do all the Crale men have such . . . lumps?”

“Not all. Some who have had them have been father to boys who grew to be old men and never had the Crale lump. But their sons or grandsons had them. There have been brothers born, one with the lump, the other without.”

“So perhaps one day you might have a son without the Crale lump.”

He looked at her oddly. “I will never have a son,” he said. “Because I will never have a wife. I am too ugly.”

“Have you ever tried to find a wife?” Maggie was astonished at her own daring questions, yet noticed that he seemed eager to talk. She doubted he got the opportunity to converse with another person often.

“In all my life, I have known only three women willing to talk to me as if I am a man, not a beast. One is named Sadie, and she roams about, living here and there, like I do. The other is Deborah. She has lived in different places, and she has a husband, but not really a husband. His name is Corey and she has taken his name like a wife. But they are not truly married. Deborah has been kinder even than Sadie has to me. Deborah tells me I am”—His voice cracked—“beautiful. Because of what is inside. Because I am kind. That is what she says.”

“Where is Deborah?”

“She is rich. She has gold. A mine in the mountains, across on the eastern side, that only she and Polly know the way to. She lives there now, guarding her gold.”

“Who is Polly?”

“She is the third kind woman. An old woman whose husband was named McCoy Atley and is dead. She may be dead, too, now. I have wanted to see her, but I have let it go too long without going to her. She is a good woman, kind to me. She lives in a cabin in the Doe River country. I have taken her food many times. My cousin John Crale takes her food as well. I hope he has been able to do so these past weeks, when I have been neglectful of her.”