Red Sky in Morning (23 page)

Faller swung his body back around in the bath and he stared hard at the man and smiled. That depends, he said. Have you the courtesy of a light?

The man rattled a box of matches and tossed them to him in the tub and Faller caught them mid-air. Don’t get em wet, the man said. Ain’t nothing more annoying than wet matches.

Faller opened the box without taking his eyes off the man and he scored a match and held the flame to his pipe. He let the match burn out slowly against finger and thumb and put it back in the box, threw them back at the stranger. He leaned back putting his hands on the side of the tub.

And you are?

Who might I be? You go upsetting folk in Philadelphia and you’re sure to run into me.

Can I talk to the people who sent you?

You’re talking to me.

Faller stared at the man. You working with that other party?

Only ever work for myself.

The man stepped forward and Faller recognized him as the slob he saw by the fire slurping beans. He cursed himself under his breath as he saw the man was now clean-shaven, those slumping shoulders fixed straight and his gun trained right on him.

You had time for a shave, he said.

No point in being unprofessional.

I suppose now you want me to put on my clothes and travel back with you to Philadelphia?

That ain’t gonna be necessary, the man said.

Faller kept staring, sucked deep on his pipe, the smoke burling downwards to plume heat in his lungs, and he held it inside him in contemplation. He blew it back out, a steady stream thickening in the direction of the other man. Each devours the other, he said. That’s the way it is don’t you think?

I guess so.

He leaned down and put the smoking pipe on the slatted ground and he took a rag and a bar of yellow soap and he oiled the rag and took to washing. He ran the cloth lengthways down the reaches of his arms and he washed underneath his armpits and he scrubbed the slab of his great chest and then he oiled his face and rinsed it. When he was done he tucked his knees towards him and cleaned his legs and he reached forward and washed his feet. He folded the rag and put it on the ground and he leaned back in the bath.

I’ve come to notice that whatever calculations we make in life are destroyed by accidents or agencies beyond our control. Don’t you think that’s true?

The man didn’t answer.

You really do have to think about that. All this nonsense about destiny being our own. How parochial. Every man, every nation, thinks they have control over a world that throws them about like a high wind. I’ll tell you, there’s always an agency more powerful than your own. Think about that. The terrible beauty of it. How it lies there unseen waiting for you. Every fate, every life, every story swallowed by forces greater. Mine now a part of yours. Yours a part of someone or something else’s when the time comes. So on, ad infinitum. That’s all there is to it.

Faller began to lean forward, hunched his shoulders.

The man let the words hang in the air and silence walled between them and then the man spoke. Yer a pretty strange fella to be in the kind of business that yer in. But you know I spend a lot of time on my own thinking betwixt me and the saddle and I ain’t come up with much but I did come up with this—the difference between man and beast is we’re able to imagine the future and they’re not. But what makes us no better than em is we cain’t predict it. That’s there where the problem lies. And just in case yer wondering, you can run for your gun, but this flintlock here fires in triplicate.

Faller looked up at the man, fixed his eyes on him and smiled. Yes indeed.

He put his hands on the side of the tub and stood slowly his immense frame upon it, slabs of water sluicing off the white flanks of his flesh and he stood there smiling and naked, the orbs of his eyes huge upon the man, began to climb slowly out of the tub, the gunman taking a step back, I warned you now, not another step further, Faller continuing with his eyes fixed upon the man, stepping out of the bath like something colossal that moved outside the confines of measured time, a primeval heaving, wetly, slowly, and then he was upon his gun.

S
HE HEARD THE SHOTS
—one-two—and she waited and heard three and she put down her broom and traveled light-footed to the door, peered through a small crack into the gloom. She saw the man out back and watched his movement, the way he dragged backbent the body of a man that looked too heavy, his hands yanked into armpits that socketed loosened limbs, a mass being heaved against the idle intentions of dead weight. The friction of dragging feet and the man came to a stop at the chicken wire fence. The man dropped the body to the ground and he went to a fence post and kicked it loose and he lifted it out of the ground. He disinterred two more posts until the earth was hollowed like a mouth untoothed and she saw the man bend down again and seize the body under the arms. He dragged it further and then he stopped and he began to roll the corpse, resplendent in its selenic and soaking nakedness, towards the torpid pigs.

M
IDNIGHT WAS LONG PAST
when the horseman ghosted into the camp. The animal noiseless as if it knew the needs of its rider who dismounted in the dark by a spidery tree. He slipped like shadow about the place till he found them in two pairs sleeping, saw the indigo whites of their habits, and he nursed them awake and told them with a growl to shush. Your work here is done, he said, and he made them get up and made his intentions clear with the rib-prodding barreled steel of his gun.

T
HE MEN AWOKE
in the gloom of dawn, each man glad he was still physical. They sat blurred at the firepit and they were low on supplies and the whiskey was near all gone and they looked at what was left and some of them pitched into it. The rest scratched about or huddled in groups and looked expectant towards the mouth of the valley for sign of Duffy though each one knew in the reaches of his being the contractor would not come back. No one wanted to say it but they as good as did when it was discovered the nuns had quit too. They took the news like men inured to surprise and sat back down with what they were doing, which was not much at all.

They stood idle or sat about gambling but their hearts were not in it, for each man secretly was wondering if he too would get sick and then one of them stood and nodded towards the mouth of the valley. There’s a man coming on a horse, he said. They turned and watched the rider approach, a cloud of dust hoofed behind the animal. The horseman wore a neckerchief over his face and his hat over his eyes and they saw the horse was dragging something. The rider neared the swale where the shanty sat and he pulled up short at the perimeter. They watched him unhitch a rope and throw it to the ground and he turned and rode away. The men stood up and walked over to where he had stopped and they saw he had left a body. It lay face down in the dirt noosed about the neck and Chalky turned it over with his toe. The man’s complexion was scratched raw and teeth were broken and gums were bleeding and they saw it was the body of Maurice. Beneath the blood his lips were gray and his eyelids brown and his extremities dark with his own fecal matter. The men stood stunned and the blacksmith wandered slowly over and he looked at the body. He sighed, rubbing his moustache with the back of his hand, and walked away and he returned nursing an old mule and cart. He loaded the body upon it and Coyle watched him and walked over. What in the hell? he said.

Again the blacksmith sighed. There’s people about who’d like you lot to keep to your own, he said. That’s just the way it is. And he turned and led the mule away.

C
OYLE WENT TO THE SICK
tent and tended to The Cutter, noticed how the man had weakened. His body strung out and his eyes far-flung like the eyes of a man watching from someplace remote, his breath a mere supplement to his being. He looked at the other sick men shrunken and dry like wizened wood sea-shored and then The Cutter turned to him and whispered. Coyle leaned in to hear.

Talk to me, The Cutter said.

Tell ye what?

Anything.

Coyle looked at him puzzled and then he spoke.

I remember something of a dream from the night. Been thinking about it all day. It was so real it was like I was there you know? Like I took a piece of it with me.

The Cutter looked at him. Where were you? he said.

Coyle smiled. It was a morning bursting bright so it was and I was in the forest, the axe in my hand and the wood all coined thickly about me. And in the dream I knew I had come home.

The Cutter whispered again, his voice near inaudible. My pocket.

Coyle leaned over him and reached a hand into the man’s pocket and took a hold of something his fingers recognized immediately for what it was by touch alone and he took it out. The ribbon.

The Cutter whispered. On the road. Never got time.

Coyle just staring at it and then his fist closed around it.

Go on, The Cutter said. Go home.

Coyle opened his fist and folded the ribbon and put it in his pocket and he took a hold of The Cutter’s hand and he squeezed it tightly. Ye bollox ye.

H
E STRODE THROUGH
the dig, past the men sitting slumped and he gave them nothing of a farewell, told them nothing of his intentions, that he was going to escape the figure of death on his trail, that he was going to get home, that he had a wife and daughter to behold and he would do so, but as he walked up the red-r
ubbled
hill his thoughts began to weigh upon him and as he neared the top he had to sit on a jut of rock to think.

He thought of his wife broken on the bed and the early morning light of the cottage and the smallness of his child. No bigger almost than his hand, mucus filmed about her body and the eyes of her not yet opened. A beauty. The midwife spoke that he wasn’t to be allowed in but he took no heed and watched her take a knife to the cord on the child’s belly, cut it to give the child life independent, joy like light bursting to escape his body. He thought too of his father and when he was a child and the calm encouragement from the man to burrow an arm inside the animal, the grasp of shank and then a yank till life tunneled outwards towards him, life viscid and blue-gasping and his father breathing life into it with his own mouth and he stood there watching, his pride swelling.

He saw below him the valley torn raw while men sat like stones in loose circles and the thought then came upon him. I canny leave a dying man. Canny do it. And he looked at the sky as if he could learn something from it but what he saw had nothing to say and he took the ribbon out of his pocket and he looked at it, and he saw the face of his wee girl and he made a promise to himself, brought the ribbon to his lips, and he put it then in his pocket, stood up and began to walk back down.

Y
OUS BOYS, HE SAID
. There’s help needed here for these men. They can’t be left on their own. We got to get them out.

He watched his voice wash over them, the men wearing a look that spoke silent of their indifference and he turned and he picked up two pails. He went to the culvert spanning the stream beneath the fill and doused both till brimming. Each sick man who could drink he gave a sup of water to and with a cloth he dampened their heads. When he was done he walked to a barrow and he tipped the earth out of it and wheeled it back to the tent.

The sky so cloudless it seemed the lids of the earth were peeled for the sun to hammer the air. The men watched him struggle, the weight of The Cutter unbalancing him on his heels, and he dragged the invalid by the underarms. He got him to the barrow and he pitched him into it and began wheeling and wobbling towards them. He came abreast of them and stopped.

Don’t yous realize we’re done for if we stay here?

The men responded with blank dark faces, their mouths dumb and their eyes fixed awkward to someplace else.

There’s four more sick yesterday and that brings the number to near half the group, forgetting the eight now that passed. Load these boys up and we’ll go back to Duffy’s house and help get these boys fixed and get paid for ourselves because we’re not going to get our worth sitting here. You’re no good to nobody like this.

The men looked at Coyle and at The Cutter draped near-dead in the barrow.

One man stood and spoke. It was Thompson. The man’s right. But we should leave them ones here and go ourselves. We’ll only get a dose of it.

You can leave but yous will be no better than the others that did, Coyle said.

I ain’t said I was any better than anyone.

Chalky stood up stiff and leaned his gray old eyes on Thompson’s tight-lipped face and then turned and pointed down the site.

We can carry them in those.

He began walking with his arms sticking out like some kind of scarecrow and Coyle turned and went after him. Some of the men stood and others reluctantly followed. The men who stayed as they were watched sullen, some of them with their arms folded while others pretended not to be looking. They untied a dozing mule and marshaled a worn-out dappled horse and hitched them to a pair of carts and they ignored the wondering stare of the blacksmith. Coyle about-turned the mule and led it to the sick tent.

The men went inside and began to carry out the sick men. Their faces contorting out of fear and disgust but they lifted them up onto the trucks anyway and they shut their ears to the sound of the groaning. They were carrying one man when somebody said to put him down and they did so and leaned over him.

The man who spoke bent down and he rested the back of his hand upon the fellow’s mouth, lips like dry paper.

This one here’s dead boys.

They stood and looked at the body. His lips a bluey brown and they were drawn back over his gums leaving him in death with a crooked smile.

Somebody go an close his eyes.

The man on his haunches leaned forward and smothered them shut.