Soul Catcher (22 page)

^{That night, Cain waited in an alley across from the small chapel. He saw Padre Juan, a stocky, bearded man with the ruddy complexion of a peasant, come out and welcome people to mass. The man seemed kindly, a caring minister of his flock--which only made Cain the more incensed. As Cain watched, he would remove from his pocket the medicine the army doctor had handed out in prison. He had begun to take it even when he felt no pain in his leg. Its absence now was a form of pain. When the last communicant left, Cain slipped in the chapel. Inside, it was dark except for the flickering light of candles up near the front. He found the priest kneeling before a statue of the Virgin, praying. He wore a long hooded cassock and his florid face was hidden in shadow. Cain crept up on him, stood listening for a moment. He recognized only a little of the Latin:
requiem, aeternam, Domine.
Then he moved quickly up behind the priest, took his head in his left hand and pulled it back against his own chest so the neck was drawn taut and exposed. He brought his knife around and in one movement slit the priest's throat from ear to ear. The dark blood spurted over Cain's sleeve and down onto the floor. The priest struggled for just a moment in Cain's arms, then he relaxed and accepted his death as a man must. Cain lay the priest gently down in front of the Virgin and left the chapel.}

^{He got on his horse and rode hard through the night, heading for the border. Killing the priest left him feeling neither good nor bad. It was just something he'd had to do and he'd done it, just as he'd killed men in the war. Another form of duty. Though he was headed in the direction of home, he knew he would never go there again. He knew that his former life was over, that it had died for him on the battlefield that day in Buena Vista, but that the one he was leaving now was over, too. He had no idea what his life would look like from then on, and right then he didn't particularly care. He was a man suddenly cut off from all the things that normally attached a person to his world. He felt weightless, but not in a good way, not in the way he had once wanted to be free. He felt almost as if he could float right up into the night, higher and higher into the black firmament, rising up until he was lost among the stars.}

^{When he ran out of the medicine he had by then come to depend on, he would stop at an apothecary's or a physician's house and buy a bottle of laudanum. As he put the bottle to his mouth, he recalled the way his mother smelled when she drank it, a thickly sweet odor. One night, as he rode along a lonely stretch of South Texas highway, he had taken so much that he started to see demons coming at him. They swooped and dove at him from the night sky. They cut his skin with their razor-sharp claws. They were joined by those other men he'd killed during the war and by the priest, too, Padre Juan, whose throat flapped open like the bloody gills of a fish out of water. Cain drew his Colt and fired on them, fired until the gun was empty, but still they came on. He found a hollowed-out tree and crawled into it. Before the night was over, he had actually considered taking his own life, of putting the gun in his mouth and joining the priest in hell or wherever he was. But he didn't.}

^{As he rode along the next morning, he thought of the girl, her smell and her touch and the way she smiled when she called him Cain. He knew in the cool light of day that it was somehow for the best that he had loved her, despite the terrible emptiness he felt with her loss.}

^*

^{PART TWO}

^{For by this cunning arrangement, the slaveholder, in cases not a few, sustains to his slaves the double relation of master and father.}

^{FREDERICK DOUGLASS,
NARRATIVE}

^{Chapter 8.}

^{T
hey reached the outskirts of Boston just after sunset. From a small rise of land south of the city, they looked out across a bay filled with more ships than they'd ever seen before--sloops and schooners, steamships and ketches, clipper ships and whalers. Even at this hour, ships were coming and going, being unloaded or loaded. In fact, the entire city buzzed with activity. Elegant coaches and cabriolets wound about its streets, wagons pulled by plodding draft horses carted goods to and from the wharves, and along the many bridges leading from the city people were taking an evening stroll. The city's lights were just coming on, gaslights shimmering like the small fires of an army the night before a battle. On a hill in the center of town, the golden dome of the statehouse dominated the skyline, glittering like a diamond.}

^{"Looky there," Little Strofe said, whistling. "Ain't n-never seen nothing so big."}

^{"And from what I hear tell, ever dang one a them's a ab'litionist, too," Preacher offered.}

^{Cain dismounted and removed from his pocket a piece of sugar and fed it to Hermes, who chewed on it noisily. When it was done, he nuzzled Cain's pockets for more, shoving him forcibly backward.}

^{"We have to worry about the vigilance committee," he explained to the others.}

^{"Vigilance what?" Strofe asked.}

^{"A group that hides fugitive slaves," Cain explained, adjusting the bit in the horse's mouth. "Every city up north of any size has one. They hear that a runaway has been taken into custody, they'll be out in force. Sic their lawyers on them. Get all the Negroes in town stirred up. And then you've kicked up a hornet's nest. They take one look at us and they'll know right quick what our business is."}

^{"I swear, you worry just like an old lady, Cain," Preacher said.}

^{Cain glanced over at the blond-haired man.}

^{"You ever heard of the Shadrach case, you ignorant son of a bitch."}

^{"Cain't say as I have."}

^{"It was in all the papers. Then again, that's assuming one can read," Cain said patronizingly. "You heard of Dred Scott, haven't you?"}

^{"Yeah, I heard a that nigger, all right."}

^{"Well, the Shadrach case was just about the biggest fugitive case before Scott. It happened right here in Boston," Cain explained. "A few years back, an owner's agent tracked a fugitive by the name of Shadrach Minkins to Boston. He had a warrant for the Negro and used a federal marshal to have him brought before a commissioner. They ordered him remanded to the custody of the owner's legal agent. But then the vigilance committee got wind of it and turned out a mob. They stormed the courthouse and surrounded him with a crowd of freed Negroes. Took him right out of the hands of the marshals and led him away to Canada. They never did get him back."}

^{"Any nigger fucks with me," Preacher said, looking over at Henry, who was seated on the mule to his right, "that'll be the last person he fucks with, yessirree."}

^{Cain loosened the cinch and removed the saddle. Hermes had developed a galling sore low on the withers where the saddle had been chafing, and he didn't want it to get infected.}

^{"We headin' into town tonight?" Strofe asked Cain.}

^{"I figure we'll make camp here and then ride in in the morning. One, maybe two of us."}

^{Preacher let out a derisive laugh. "And I reckon one a them'd be you, right, Cain?"}

^{"You heard a thing I just said? We go riding in there, all of us, they're going to know what we're up to, and we'll have hell to pay."}

^{"Well, maybe y'all ought to stay back and I'll head in. How do that suit you?"}

^{"He knows what he's doing, Preacher," said Strofe. "You don't."}

^{"Huh! He ain't proved it by me. Not by a long shot."}

^{"You're working for me, and you'll do what I say," Strofe warned.}

^{Preacher stared at Strofe for a moment. "Not tonight, boss man," Preacher said. "Tonight I don't work for nobody. See y'all later."}

^{"Where you off to?" Strofe asked.}

^{"Gone have me some fun."}

^{"Well, don't get in any trouble," Strofe warned.}

^{"Don't you worry about me. I can take care of myself."}

^{"And don't go shooting your mouth off to nobody. You heard what Cain said."}

^{"What I got in mind don't call for talkin'. Fixin' to get me some of that Yankee pussy," he said, laughing.}

^{He glanced at Cain, spat a greenish brown clump of tobacco juice at his feet, and wheeled his silvery roan sharply around. He took off down the hill at a wild gallop toward the city.}

^{"Ain't been nothing but trouble that one," Strofe lamented.}

^{While Little Strofe began a fire and set about making supper, Cain brought Hermes down to a small stream to drink. There he hobbled him, and while he was grazing on some grass, he curried him until his coat shone. Then he got some liniment from his saddlebags and rubbed it into the sore on his back.}

^{He didn't like having to go into Boston to search for the girl. He'd been here back in '50, right after the new Fugitive Slave Law had gone into effect. Part of the Great Compromise aimed at averting the approaching storm, the bloodbath everyone, except perhaps old Clay and Webster themselves, knew even then was inevitable. Cain had been after two runaway slaves that time, brothers who'd fled from Newport News, where they'd worked as caulkers in a shipyard. He'd tracked them here and found them easily enough, living down near the docks of the North End. But just before he had a chance to grab them, the Shadrach case happened. Every Negro in the city suddenly became jumpy, arming themselves with guns or knives, and looking over their shoulders for the hand of a slave catcher to snatch them back into bondage. And the vigilance committee was keeping a sharp eye out for suspicious southerners, putting up posters and ads in the newspapers aimed at warning escaped Negroes of the presence of southern agents in the city.}

^{It took him several weeks of spying on the two, biding his time, waiting for the right moment to act. Every time he was about to jump them and take them into custody, something would happen. The two would run into a group of acquaintances or they'd split up and go separate ways, or they'd turn into a busy thoroughfare and he'd have to give it up. During his stay in Boston, he lodged at the fashionable Tremont Hotel on Beacon, though he could hardly afford it on the three dollars a day he received for expenses. But he was able to supplement his income, as he often did, by gambling. Each night they had a friendly game of poker in a back room for some of the hotel's more wealthy clientele, and he talked himself into it. He acted the part of a well-to-do southern importer of silks from the Far East; he laughed congenially and talked knowingly about places like Peking and Siam as if he'd been there many times, all the while relieving the others of their money. Cain found several of the men to be dough-faced northerners, Yankees who sympathized with the South's position on slavery. One gray-bearded old man, a Captain Beardsley, would have supper with him in the hotel's dining room. He confessed to Cain that he'd captained an illegal slaver.}

^{"Ran slaves out of Cuba," he explained, puffing on a large Havana cigar. He gave Cain a box of them. "Right under the nose of the patrols. Had to grease a few hands, of course. What the hypocrites up here won't admit is that without cotton, the North wouldn't survive. And without slaves there wouldn't be cotton."}

^{Cain bided his time, watching the two fugitives. Then one night he followed the brothers home from a grog shop. He waited till they were in a narrow back alley in the North End, and then approached them speaking with a French accent. "
Pardonnez-moi, messieurs
," he exclaimed. They were wary at first of a white man, until he told them he'd just arrived in America from France and was lost; he said he would be most appreciative if they could help him find his way back to the Tremont Hotel, where he was staying. He even offered them each a cigar. The brothers began to relax as they gave him directions. It was then that he pulled a gun on them and said he had a warrant for their arrest, that if they tried anything he would shoot them dead. Before they knew it they found themselves in irons and headed south. Having learned his lesson from the Shadrach case, Cain bypassed the legal niceties of the new slave law and spirited them out of Boston under cover of darkness.}