Soul of a Crow (20 page)

“You will if I say,” Jack insisted, thrusting his chin my direction.

“That I will
not
,” I whispered, nearly choking on the bitterness of rage. I glared at Jack with unrelieved abhorrence.

“Perhaps, rather, you'd enjoy watching Davis hang this
very afternoon
. The gallows will accommodate another Reb bastard before the afternoon's washed away, I'd say,” Yancy said, and my gaze leaped at once to him.

I sensed he was bluffing and challenged, with no small amount of asperity, “You cannot hang a man without a conviction.”

Yancy glared blackly, as though encountering a specimen with which he was unfamiliar—and perhaps he truly was unused to a woman who contradicted his words; the sudden, odd glittering in his eyes suggested there was truth to this presumption. Still, he would not allow me to discompose him. He said levelly, “All I need is a wire from the circuit judge, which can be swiftly arranged. Or perhaps you would prefer witnessing what a bullet aimed
just so
will do to a man. Resisting arrest requires no conviction and achieves the intended result much more quickly, truth be told.”

I heard the crackling of the fire beneath me, as an animal rotating upon a spit. Metaphorically cornered, I whispered, “Why do you bear us such animosity?”

Yancy studied me in silence for the space of a heartbeat, finally muttering, “For a whore, you
are
somewhat perceptive.” He concluded, “You mean something to that Johnny Reb bastard, of this I am certain. Perhaps for even more than what's between your legs.” He angled Jack another look of scarcely-concealed contempt, and said, “I've a new plan, just conjured up. I'm doing you far more of a favor than you'd realize, Barrow.”

“How you figure?” Jack asked grimly.

“I know you aimed to bring this whore back to Missouri, but she's a danger to you. She'll speak out against you, her and Davis, both.” Yancy studied Jack as though attempting to impart upon the scrawny man a further sense of the situation; it was a monumentally worthless effort. Realizing this as well, Yancy released a frustrated breath through his nose and instead directed his next words at me, “You will accompany us. No words, no struggling, and we leave now. Let Davis wonder what became of his whore wife. Let him think you abandoned him for the next peckerwood that happened along. Marshal Quade'll be this way before dawn, I'd stake my goddamn claim. He can bring in your Reb husband and I'll watch him hang, regardless. Wondering all the while what happened to his little
wife
.” Yancy aimed his words as small darts, explaining with mocking humor in his voice, “It is an agony, not knowing. Questioning what actually became of someone. Davis won't know if you were killed…or if you left him to fuck another man…”

Blood flowed from my skull—I could feel its downward progression in my body. But then my heart was dealt a sudden fierce blow, leaving splinters like small pikes in its wake.

Lorie! Where are you?

Where are you?!

A rush of breath escaped before I could prevent any such weakness from emerging. I dug both fists into my stomach, working hard not to bend forward, as though to center and therefore contain the anguish.

Sawyer's voice, riddled with desperate concern, called to me in my mind. It took everything I had, hurt my very bones, to refrain from responding to him. Instantly I hardened my thoughts against any such wayward contact. If I called back he would know where to find me, and then Yancy would apprehend him.

And I would give my life to prevent that.

My lips were nearly too numb to form words as I whispered my inescapable assent, “I will come with you.”

- 14 -

The wide bridge,
which I had crossed into Iowa City only this morning, then choked with wagons and foot traffic, bore not a soul upon its wooden length now, complacent by contrast in the mellow afternoon light. I thought, absurdly, of Malcolm's lost penny, which had disappeared with scarcely a splash beneath the river's surface. I rode south this time, away from the town, looking desperately back as it receded into the distance. My thoughts were so tightly corralled that my temples ached with sharp pain, images striking me rapidly now. Sawyer was frantic—Malcolm had returned to them, as I could plainly sense; their combined agony served to stab through flesh and bone, plunging directly into my heart.

I could not ease this pain, for them or myself, I could not offer reassurance, because Sawyer would know where to follow. Lumps of stone settled behind my breastbone, heavy as death, as I imagined Whistler's galloping hooves striking the earth as Sawyer rode her in pursuit, closing the hateful distance between us. The intensity of my yearning for this burned away all else, momentarily overpowering me, so my vision hazed and my palms grew slick, imperiling my hold on the reins of the dark pony with white blaze markings adorning his nose which they had procured for me to ride. I was placed strategically between the two men, Yancy in the lead, Jack a dozen paces to the rear.

“Keep up!” Yancy ordered, shifting his hips and taking his gelding into a canter as we cleared the bridge and came upon the open prairie south of town, which I so naïvely believed, only hours ago, I would never traverse again; at this moment I should have been northbound upon the wagon seat beside Sawyer, or Malcolm, while Boyd rode near, the four of us commenting on the beauty of the approaching evening, discussing the day's events in Iowa City. Sawyer's arm would be around me…holding me close to him…and all would be right in the world.

A high-pitched keening, the sound of a teakettle at full steam, of a person past all limits of endurance, rose from my soul. I saw Sawyer in the strange, wavering eye of my mind; despite the illogic of it, I knew this vision was real, a sensing within my abilities but beyond my control. He had Malcolm by the upper arms, yelling at the boy, demanding to know what had happened; Sawyer was wild with fear, his voice strained and frantic.

I could not bear this anguish, and yet I would. I must.

Malcolm's freckled face was miserable with tears as he choked out his fervent response,
I don't know where Lorie-Lorie is…Sawyer, I swear I don't know…

The tiny gray kitten remained draped over his shoulder.

Sawyer released his hold upon Malcolm and turned away in a panic, blind and desperate. All of this was my fault; there was no denying, as much as I wished otherwise. Jack had come for me, and none other, back in Missouri, at Ginny's wishes, creating a series of events that led to Gus's death—Gus had been doomed to ill luck from the moment he took me from Ginny's place. And now I had endangered them again, these men who wanted only to complete the journey to Minnesota, where we would have homesteaded—where Sawyer and I would have begun our family. I bent forward over the pony's sleek, shiny-dark head, resting my face against the scent of horseflesh, my sobs lost in the wind of our passage away from Iowa City, away from the life that I had been foolish enough to believe would be mine.

* * *

I sat in stiff silence at their fire, with no inkling what Yancy's plan for me entailed; I refused to ask. I would not have remained near them, I would have chosen to lie apart, to avoid all sight of their faces, but I was tethered like an animal, bound by a length of rope secured painfully about my ankles. To my right, Yancy unknotted a handkerchief and ate the sausage in a roll contained therein, with apparent relish, ignoring me completely. Jack intermittently sipped from a flask and gnawed a piece of jerky, gazing into the fire as though it contained a message he must decipher. Yancy allowed me water and a piece of hardtack, tossing it on my lap, into the hammock of my wilted skirt; it crumbled in my fingers. I ate it with all of the joy of someone consuming hot ashes, the crumbs bitter on my dry tongue.

Oddly, I did not overtly fear that either of them would attempt to force me into the act of sex; Jack was too nervous and jittery this night, and I further considered that despite numerous opportunities, he had never purchased my services at Ginny's. Though I felt Yancy's gaze rake over my breasts and hips a time or two, I sensed he was too businesslike to attempt to force himself upon a woman in his “custody”—even a former whore, certainly lesser in his eyes than a woman who had never been so employed. The knowledge that I would be safe from that sort of brutality did not in any way diminish my loathing of them, but it offered a shard of comfort, as did what I had spied earlier.

There was a knife in Yancy's right boot.

I noticed the tip of the protruding hilt as we rode hard miles south over the course of the long July evening. In addition to this weaponry he carried a .44 pistol, similar to Sawyer's Colt, and a repeating rifle in a saddle scabbard; Jack was similarly armed. I kept my eyes from the knife just now, unwittingly close to Yancy, the rope hobbling my ankles a bristly discomfort against the bare skin of my calves. This evening's ride had not chafed my flesh too badly, as I'd been able to tuck my skirt as meager protection; when I was Sam Rainey's prisoner, my wrists had been bound, even less attention paid to my state of wellbeing.

At the moment I sat quietly, damp with fearful sweat; the sour smell rose from my clothing and beat at my nose. So different was this fire than that to which I had grown so happily accustomed, the fire where I longed with my entire soul to be this night—tucked near Sawyer, listening with joy to Malcolm's chatter, and Boyd's jokes, the four of us watching the stars rise. Tonight the moon was waning, its face grim and cold. Pain wrenched my heart, leaving weakness in its wake, and aching despair, which would swallow me whole if I allowed it—and I could not allow it yet. Yancy's words plagued me—his calm assurance that another marshal would apprehend Sawyer sooner than later.

They are going to kill you, Lorie,
my mind intruded, whispering with a rattle as of dead leaves
. You must realize this. You are unable to prevent a thing.

I hardened my thoughts against what was surely the truth and instead entertained a picture in my mind of slipping to Yancy's side as he slept and sneaking the knife from his possession; a part of me realized that even imagining such a thing was a wasted endeavor, a study in the vain, but I clung to the thought regardless, pretending that perhaps I would be fortunate, that Yancy slept soundly. Clinging to this hope of escape assisted me in utilizing every dram of willpower in my possession to stop from reaching out to Sawyer. He, Boyd, and Malcolm remained in Iowa City, searching the town for any word, of this I was certain, and Sawyer's pain was equal only to my own. My heart had shrunk, wrinkled upon itself into a small, tight knot of self-preservation as I battled my deepest instinct, that of the desire to reach out to him in my mind; even still, his voice breached my defenses.

Lorie, where are you?

I know you hear me!

So plainly could I sense his tortured words, his anguish, that I brought both hands to my face, squeezing brutally against my temples, displacing the sounds, the images.

You cannot call out to him, Lorie. You cannot.

You cannot.

Think of the knife…

Think of cutting loose these bindings…

My gaze flickered to the blade, without my intending; Yancy removed it to slice a chunk of hard cheese, just earlier, and it lay now on the ground near his hip.

Look away—quickly—

Before I could obey my own order, Yancy invited, “Take it.” With effort, I kept my gaze lowered, angling it back to the fire; my heart thrust in fright. He said, low, “Go on,” the challenge in his voice laced with taunting. Jack looked our way with a certain amount of interest.

Yancy caught up the knife and held it directly beneath my nose, mere inches away, offering it hilt first, in a mockery of politeness. The contents of my stomach, meager though it was, curdled. The old scar on my face, where Sam Rainey's blade once sliced a jagged line, seemed to burn; only for a second, less than that, did I envision the lunacy of curling the proffered weapon into my grip and stabbing at whichever part of him I could manage to strike. Instead, I kept my eyes upon the flames. Yancy's face loomed to my right and I could not restrain a sharp gasp. The smell of my fear was more potent than ever. He touched the hilt to my cheek and I closed my eyes. He forced the handle inward until I could feel it making contact with the sides of my teeth; I sat unmoving, the firelight burning upon the backs of my eyelids with a nightmarish flicker.

“Take it,” he said again, his voice rough. “Take a stab at me, you pretty little
whore
, and see what happens.”

No
, I tried to say, but the word seemed stitched into the flesh of my throat.

The pressure was removed from my face, but I did not open my eyes. Just before Yancy continued speaking, I knew, somehow, the essence of what he was about to say. The memory of the night Sawyer and Boyd constructed wooden crosses for Angus and the child stirred within my mind; later, just before the dawn, Sawyer told me a story…

Yancy's spoke only inches from my face. I imagined how close he was leaning; I could smell his stale breath as he said, “Funny thing is, Corbin pulled that saber off a dead Reb soldier. Would have killed Davis with a Confederate blade if he'd leaned forward in the saddle just a cunt hair farther.”

Everything within me went still as a corpse, dreading what I was about to hear.

“Goddamn Reb dragged Corbin from horseback and stabbed him,” Yancy continued, low and yet somehow gaining momentum. “A half-dozen times, maybe more. I still recall that moment as though it was yesterday. It will be with me until the day I die. I served with Corbin in the Fifty-First. He was my elder brother, my
blood
, for Christ's sake. And Davis butchered him like a hog.”

I opened my eyes and the fire's light was too intense, as though my face was being forced into its heat. I squinted at the sudden brightness, my mind galloping as would a spooked horse, attempting to process Yancy's revelation. Sawyer had not a hope of realizing Yancy's personal stake in all of this; he had no way of knowing I was with Yancy now, or that Jack remained alive. Yancy's animosity at the Rawleys' homestead—he had recognized Whistler the instant he saw her in the corral, the very horse he had once attempted to steal—made sense now. Beyond the fire, where our three mounts were staked out for the night, the pony I had ridden all afternoon and into the evening gave a low, snorting whicker.

“Thief,” I said, without intending it, and could have bitten out my tongue.

“Come again?” Yancy responded in a hiss, crouched close to my side, the knife still backwards in his grasp. Neither he nor Jack had removed their hats, leaving their eyes in shadow while the lower halves of their faces were cast in scarlet by the flames.

“You are a lawman, and you were a soldier then,” I said, speaking around a husk. But I wanted him to know that his words did not have absolute power over me, and forced myself to look at him. The fire lit flames in his pupils. I whispered, “And yet you've stolen horses.”

“I've done no such thing.” He spoke through clenched teeth.

“You attempted to steal horses from the clearing outside Chattanooga, in the days after the Surrender,” I insisted; I was foolish to assume that anything I said would alter his point of view, make him question his culpability. Jack angled his body away from the fire to spat, and then fixed his eyes on my face. I maintained, “You came upon them in the dark of night and would have stolen their mounts. And when they resisted, you and your men attempted to kill them.”

“Listen to Lila paint a picture,” Jack said, hiccupping a laugh. He belched and laughed again, then drew a long pull from his flask.

Yancy's upper lip curled, as though unconsciously, but he regained control of his emotions, however tentative. Refusing to confirm or deny, he said, “Nothing changes the fact that your husband is a murdering wretch, and I aim to see him hang. I would have taken great pleasure in shooting him dead this very afternoon, as I told you, but I believe this will be more entertaining in the end. No more chance for suffering, once dead.”

“He killed them to save me,” I whispered, pleading now. My heart felt raw as a gaping wound. Nothing I said would be sufficient to persuade Yancy or Jack from their unanimous mindset. Sawyer was their enemy, flesh and blood, the three of them horribly connected by the undead past. By a War that refused to stay buried, that had perhaps never truly been put to rest at all. More than three years had passed, but surely decades from now the old hatreds would yet boil, requiring only the smallest provocation for ancient recriminations to flare, straightaway burning any good sense that had sprung up in the wake of the conflict.

Yancy studied me, unblinking, and I dared to hope—but then he dashed all such, confirming my initial inkling, that of wishing us only harm, as he said softly, “I hope he thinks you left him for another fella that came along.”

I whispered, “Sawyer would never believe that.”

Unmoved, Yancy returned the knife to its sheath in his boot, saying, “Don't be too certain of that.”

Jack belched again and muttered his agreement, “After all, whores'll be whores.”

* * *

The embers burned to a dull glow; I lay in bitter sleeplessness, wrists now bound in addition to my ankles. Jack snored lightly and I had just enough reach to tug the single blanket I had been given around my ears, in attempt to simultaneously muffle the sound and collect close my faint warmth. I fantasized briefly about crawling on my belly to Jack's side and winding the blanket about his face, assuming I possessed the physical strength to smother him before he could fight me away.