Soul of a Crow (38 page)

“Come along,” he murmured into the thick stillness, as though his presence had been anticipated. His voice emerged slowly, but he spoke with confidence—he would not be contradicted.

I did not respond, though there was no hope of remaining hidden for long; he knew I was here.

Zeb advanced and began working the key upon the lock of the barred door to the cell. Like a prey animal, I hunkered in the corner with sweat gliding into my eyes, and observed. He would not be carrying his Henry—it was undesirable in this sort of close-quarters situation. Instead he would have a pistol, and sure enough, there was the shape of the shorter barrel, trained in my direction. The door swung inward and he took one step closer.

“Step to, Johnny,” he said.

Leap
.

The thought had not fully formed before I followed it, lunging at him with a roar, seeking to grip the nose of the piece and disable his ability to place a bullet. He sidestepped faster than someone of his girth should have been able, striking with his free hand, and the downward blow of his fist caught the edge of my jaw. The shock of it sang through my entire frame, but I was focused with deadly purpose and my aim proved true, closing around the barrel and redirecting its threat. He grunted and thrust all of his weight forward upon me, taking us to the dirt floor of the cell.

I heard furious breathing, mine and his, as we grappled. He struck my face repeatedly, rendering me nearly stupefied, though I felt little pain. My world had narrowed to a slim corridor of resolve—that of keeping control of his primary weapon. The pistol was pinned uselessly beneath my torso and Zeb wrapped his left hand about my face, his thumb groping obscenely towards my eye, as though seeking entry into the socket. I grunted with the effort of battling him, shifting as best I could to knee his exposed side with all of my strength, and he wheezed, releasing his grip on my skull and turning in attempt to contain my lower half.

“Son of a…
bitch
,” he uttered, as I continued my assault, intending to bust apart his ribs as I would have kindling. He lurched to the side in an attempt to trap my legs, not releasing his hold on the pistol. It discharged, whether by his action or mine, I did not know, and I felt the audible
whoosh
of the bullet as it sailed past my ear, lodging in the far wall with a thud. A red haze descended over my vision, my ears muffled as though with cotton batting, as they had been so often in battle. I was accustomed to this feeling, and let it envelop me, wrestling for control of the upper hand.

Zeb was formidable, and I could sense he was the stronger of us. He bore down upon me, striking with a hard-knuckled fist, bent on my subjugation. I felt and tasted blood, coppery and slick, and was forced to relinquish one hand from its feverish grip on the barrel, catching at Zeb's wrist in an upward swing. A growling issued from him, primal and inhuman, and before I could hope to dodge, blood and sweat trickling into my eyes, he butted his forehead viciously against mine. With this blow I reeled inescapably backwards, white-hot stars colliding across my vision.

I had a vague sense of movement, and then the pistol was discharged again. A poker, fresh from the fire, jabbed into my left arm. No more than half-conscious, I suddenly observed my daddy, his frame cast in a vermilion halo by the blaze of his forge, as I had seen it a thousand times in my youth, his familiar mustached face with no trace of a shadow upon it as he worked the bellows and stoked the fire, heating an iron bar to a yellow-white glow so that it was malleable for shaping into a proper horseshoe. Sparks flew from the cinders therein and Daddy used his tongs to lift forth the metal, an inanimate object brought to life in the flames, which issued a painful, groaning hiss.

I rolled to my uninjured side but could not escape Zeb. He holstered his piece and then bent, grunting with effort, and hooked his shoulder beneath my armpit, hauling me up as the burning agony bit deeper, and I groaned again. He hefted me, impossible a task as it may seem, and stumbled forward, out into the darkness of the street. No one had been roused by the gunfire. Or perhaps no one was choosing to investigate. Two horses waited, and he let me drop over the unsaddled of the two, face down and draping; before my consciousness fled, Zeb had efficiently cinched together my wrists and ankles beneath the horse's belly. Breathing hard, he mounted his own and summarily led us from town.

- 27 -

I fell from
the bed before I was fully awake, inadvertently dragging half the quilt behind me, propelled by the urgency of the nightmare. Blindly, I crawled across the space that separated me from the door. I heard panicked gasps and realized I was the one issuing them. I floundered, hunkering upon all fours on the wooden floorboards, disoriented, cloaked still in unreality—only seconds ago I had been half-naked on the street in St. Louis. I swore I could smell the acrid scent of a blazing fire, one intending to consume all in its ravenous path. Soot seemed to be in my nostrils.

“Rebecca!” I begged, startling her awake.

She sat at once, and whispered urgently, “What is it, Lorie? Are you hurt?”

I stumbled to my feet, heart thrashing with tremendous and powerful fear. Its presence overrode all else in my body but did not yet have a direct object. I only knew that something was terribly wrong.

What is it, what is it…

The window
, I realized.

Though it was deep into a moonless night, a sort of glow backlit the oiled canvas covering, tinting it the shade of whiskey in a clear bottle. I blinked, absorbing this sight, and it was then that an unmistakable Rebel yell rolled across the night. At the incongruity of the sound in this time and place, my spine went rigid, each individual hair upon my nape standing straight. There was a brief, tense pause, and then another, simultaneously piercing and mocking. The person issuing the yell was no more than a quarter mile away.

“What in the
goddamn hell?
”

I heard Boyd utter this, and the thundering of his footsteps. I hesitated not a second, running barefoot through the small living space made dim and red by the banked fire in the woodstove; Boyd leaped the last three rungs of the loft ladder to reach the floor. Tilson was already up, strapping on his gun belt, hurrying into his boots.

“You Rebel
sons-a-bitches!
” came a low-pitched howl, Zeb's voice, profanely joyous at uttering these words. It continued, “Come out, come out…
wherever you are!
”

“Stay away from the window!” Tilson commanded sharply, moving to the closed door, rifle in hand and directed at the ceiling beams.

“Boy! You stay put!” Boyd ordered Malcolm, an arm outstretched to prevent disobedience of this issuance, as it was clear the boy intended to follow his brother and Tilson. Boyd grabbed his repeating rifle from where he had propped it near the door, moving to Tilson's side.

“
Boyd
,” Malcolm protested, his eyes intense, and in the fire's glow he looked less like a boy than I had yet witnessed, as though his adult self was unexpectedly granted this moment to peer briefly outward.

“Do not go out there,” Rebecca pleaded, looking desperately between Boyd and her uncle. Cort and Nathaniel cuddled close, peering from the loft like possums in a tree.

“Where you grayback boys hidin'? Y'all ain't cowards, are yous?” Zeb yelled from outside, affecting a taunting and rancorous drawl.

“He is a
dead man
,” Boyd muttered, with unqualified resolve. “He will not see the sunrise, I swear this.”

“He
wants
for you to come out there, do not you see?” Rebecca said, and I saw the tears in her eyes despite the dimness of the room.

Using her given name for the first time, Boyd ordered adamantly, “Rebecca, take them an' stay away from the door, an' the windows, no matter what.” He called up to Cort and Nathaniel, “Boys, I need for you to come down here, an' stay by your mama,” and they clambered down the ladder as he bade, without question, moving to Rebecca's open arms.

“Boyd,” she implored, desperately, when it seemed apparent he could not heed her words, that he would surely be forced to venture outside.

“Bastard's around back,” Tilson said, clearly calculating options. “Best I can figure he's positioned in the stand of oaks, yonder. Damnation. We must figure it's Zeb and Yancy, both. Goddamn. Do they think we're about to come running out?”

“You want me to ride for the marshal?” Malcolm asked. “I can make me a run for the corral.”

No sooner had he uttered these words when Zeb bellowed, “He's a right pretty sight! You ain't gonna come see?”

And hearing that question, I knew.

“What the hell?” Boyd growled, advancing to the window, though it faced the front yard and offered no explanation for Zeb's words. “What's he about?”

I evaded Boyd and opened the door, racing into the night before the thought fully formed, even as Boyd roared at me to stop. But I was compelled by a force outside of myself as I flew around the edge of the house.

And then I saw.

Never before in my life had time so hideously folded over upon itself. The only way my mind could comprehend what it beheld was to deny all truth, to disbelieve all senses, and therefore continue existing. A scream rang in my skull. I heeded nothing in my path as I ran—far too slowly, as though mired in viscous mud—ran and ran, but I could not get there in time. As if I already knew it was too late.

Rifle in hand, Boyd pursued and overtook me, and though I did not hear the shot, I saw its impact strike him down. I loved Boyd as deeply as any blood kin, but I could not stop for him, not now, mindless and deranged but for one purpose. I fell, skittering to my knees, gasping and sobbing, raking at the flames as if I had any hope of dousing them with no water source. Burning chunks of wood tumbled to my skirt and I felt nothing. All of the pain, wrenching and destroying me, was internal, centered in my heart.

A crude, low-lying wooden pyre had been constructed beyond the house, far enough that the man building it could go unnoticed in the dark, but with every intention of letting those in the house see the blaze, once lit. It was very near the spot I had hugged Whistler, just earlier this evening. The pyre was burning now, and Sawyer had been draped atop, on his back; I could see the perfectly-formed arch of his pale throat in the scarlet glow—his hands were blackened. The ends of his hair were afire. In that moment, I was certain he was dead.

But I climbed that blaze.

It began to collapse beneath me, spreading over a greater surface area, and I lunged, getting my arms around his waist and using the combined force of my heft and momentum to deliver us from the fire. Sawyer was weighted as lead, but I rolled with him, finding the strength to maneuver us out of direct flame and to bare ground; the motion kicked up showering bursts of sparks from the pyre. In the midst of this hell I worked feverishly, beating out the last of the flames upon him. Still I could hear nothing; my sight had narrowed to a slim tunnel of frantic need, sharply focused, my fingertips seeking evidence of life.

There was a pulse pressing back against my fingertips, and sobs of relief splashed through the cavern of agony within me; sounds rushed back to beat at my ears—that of my labored breathing, furious shouting, rapid gunfire—and the taunting crackle of the fire no more than an arm's length from my left elbow. Wetness poured from my eyes and nose as I grasped Sawyer's face, bending close, the glow of the fire upon which he had been placed to die now offering light so that I could attempt to assess the damage to him. His clothing was in blackened tatters but had perhaps provided meager protection. My hands shook violently as I parted the ragged material of his shirt, in order to better see his wounded flesh.

And then Zeb was there.

He emerged from the darkness of the trees, scant yards away, and into the glow of the fire like a creature from the underworld, toting his Henry rifle. Crouched animal-like on the ground, and lit from beneath as Zeb was by the fire he had kindled into existence, the angle from which I viewed him created holes of his eye sockets. He seemed in that moment to possess no eyes, but instead deep black chasms, without end, mimicking nothing so much as his ancient hatred, an abyss across which there was no hope of rationale, or reason. His beard glinted ruby. His chest was massive as a steamboat's hull. He appeared to smile as I spread myself over Sawyer.

No
, I begged as he directed a cocked pistol at my right ear, though no sound emerged from between my lips. Before he could discharge a bullet, something caught his attention and he moved surprisingly quickly, as he had on the prairie, stepping to the side and bringing the Henry rifle into play, the smooth stock braced against his stomach.

“I'll kill her,” Zeb said, a statement no less true for its stilted delivery; he seemed to be breathing harder than normal.

“And then I will kill you,” Tilson said in return, almost conversationally. I did not dare to turn my head to see, but Tilson sounded close. Perhaps just on the opposite side of the collapsed pyre.

“You goddamn Rebs,” Zeb said. He advanced one pace closer and put the pistol to the top of my scalp, pressing hard with the cold and unyielding barrel. He kept the rifle on Tilson, and said slowly, “Goddamn you to hell. You burned my boys. Nothing left of them but black bones when I found them.”

“I didn't kill your sons, an' neither did this man,” Tilson said harshly. “No one here had a goddamn thing to do with that.”

“Burned them alive,” Zeb continued, as though Tilson had not spoken. “When I sleep, I hear them, screaming for me.”

“Who is with you?” Tilson demanded. “Where is Yancy?”

Zeb said, “He washed his hands of it. Said the judge might believe the whore after last night. He gave me the key to the jail and said to finish it, this night.”

“You take that pistol away from Lorie,” Tilson said, menace edging aside his composure, even if he did not intend for that.

“She kilt Jack,” Zeb said. “Shot him dead.”

I didn't dare to move a thing but my eyes, feeling Sawyer beneath me. His shirt was wet with blood. Twenty running paces away, where the long grass met the dirt of the yard, I saw Boyd stagger upright, stumble two steps, and then fall to his knees.

“Take that pistol away, an' I ain't gonna tell you again,” Tilson said.

“No,” said Zeb.

“You's as good as dead,” Tilson warned.

“I been dead since the War,” Zeb said, in the tone of one conversing with a dimwit.

“Holster that piece, you
fucking Federal bastard!
” Boyd shouted hoarsely, reeling to his feet again, aiming his .44. He stood half-hunched, the barrel weaving in his grip.

“No,” Zeb said, with an air of finality. A stick snapped in the pyre, sending a plume of red sparks.

And suddenly Malcolm was there, approaching quietly from behind, a repeater carried gracefully in the crook of his arms. In the fire's glow, and to my terror-dazed eyes, Malcolm appeared eldritch and otherworldly, his features cast in scarlet. He stopped ten paces away and said with admirable calm, “I got a bead dead center on your back, Mr. Crawford.”

Zeb's attention was momentarily distracted at the sound of this new voice; the pistol shifted slightly from its position of threat against my head, and that was all it took.

Tilson bellowed, “Lorie, get down!” and then he and Boyd fired repeatedly into Zeb.

The big man jerked, arms twitching, and dropped his heavy rifle with a thud. I had flattened myself to the ground at Tilson's order; the cracking report of gunfire seared the air above me.

“There's Yancy!” I heard Malcolm shout, his voice high-pitched with alarm.

Three things happened then, one directly after the other, and though I was in the very midst and witnessed each as it occurred, later I would recall the moment as something viewed through thick smoke, with its opaque haze, its capacity to blind and choke. The moment when the path of my life was forever after altered.

You must go on
, the blue-eyed woman had told me.

Zeb went heavily to his knees, bleeding from multiple gaping wounds; his eyes were painted a flat, mortal red. Malcolm executed a swift half-turn and raised the rifle with the fluid movements of a dancer, bringing it to his shoulder and taking aim, firing into someone riding away at a full gallop. And Zeb, dying, blood gushing over his bottom lip, hoisted the pistol he still clutched in his fist and committed the final act of his life by firing it into Sawyer's face.