Sweet Song (12 page)

He waited. Still. The shad, after first swimming off when the burlap penetrated the surface of the river, were back now, and curious. One of them poked around at the front of the sack, one time touching its nose to a crossed twig. But Leon waited. Fish are fast.

The mosquitoes tortured his face with activity, except where he blew with each exhale over the front of his face. He squinted to keep his eyes safe. A breeze rolling blessedly down over the embankment renewed his faith every time it came, providing the needed break in insect activity.

The rocks hurt the bones in his hand as well as his knees, and he shook. He would have to move soon, or fall, face first into the shallows.

The fish were curious. Two others had joined in the exploration of the mouth of the burlap.

Leon barely heard Bob come up next to him. He did not see him, for at the moment his eyes were closed, one wrinkled edge crushing a mosquito that had stepped too close to the corner of Leon’s right eye.

As Leon opened his eyes back to a narrow squint, he saw Bob’s torn and scarred boots next to him. Suddenly a long stick came down with the smooth and directed motion of a spear. Two shad were forced, nose first, into the sack, recognizing, too late, that it was already moving toward them. Leon pulled his arm from the water, which caused him to pitch forward. Bob grabbed the sack at the mouth to retrieve it. Leon released the sack to recover from his fall.

“Slip-slam, bam, we got ‘em.”

Once he sat back onto the ground, Leon rubbed his hand, then his knees. He wiped sweat from his face and could feel the poison-filled bumps from mosquito bites under his fingertips. He splashed river water over his face.

“We a team,” Bob told him.

The sack pumped like a heart at the bottom end as the two shad fought for breath.

“We done it!” Bob held the sack up so the others could see. Jesse, Cracker-Jack, Big Josh, and Buddy all stared, their bright, toothy smiles flashing in the sunlight.

The eagle screeched in approval, a congratulatory acceptance of life. Then, it dived into the river pulling out its own meal.

That afternoon, Leon and Bob made several more catches, their teamwork satisfactory three times out of ten.

Buddy and Big Josh tried their hand at netting fish by using Big Josh’s shirt, the arm sleeves tied into knots that would be difficult to untie later and would result in Big Josh getting bitten so often by mosquitoes in love with his naked skin that he’d be itching for days to come, forcing blood from his own scratches to ooze through his shirt. Still, their efforts were rewarded with several large shad and a pike almost as long and skinny as one of Leon’s arms.

Jesse caught two fish, one shad and one trout using Bob’s bent pin and a June bug he’d found under a rock. Buddy had no luck with his pin, and after a short while of frustrated attempts, put his stick-pole down and went to collect wood for a fire.

Fourteen fish later, the men spent time talking and laughing in a circle on the ground. Buddy made the fire he’d collected wood for and Jesse got out the pots and pans – all of them – and filled them with edible fish parts. Jesse scooped water from the river, sent Bob and Leon to look for mushrooms and blackberries – Leon on the learning end of the mushroom picking – and boiled the water.

Optimism and joy spread as they worked together.

Sunset brought back into visibility a light haze that must have been transparent during the brightest part of the day. Or perhaps the humidity in the air was already on the rise as the sun dropped and the air cooled. The foothills blurred, but the color of sunlight as it dipped closer to the horizon burst with the colors of a rainbow, first purple, then deep indigo on down to oranges, yellows, and reds. At one point, even light green, as unusual as it was for the sky to be, stood brilliant, backlit by the sun through clouds.

They were a noisy bunch while they were happy, telling stories as they cooked and ate.

Perhaps it was the lowering of the sun, the filling of their stomachs, or only that they ran out of happy stories, but as darkness
approached a depressing and sorrowful tone came over their conversations.

“The war kilt my brothers and most of me cousins. Right aside me,” Jesse said. “I seed a hole the size of my thumb push into he forehead, then blood flow out matchin’ his heart beat. I remember thinkin’ he was scared ‘cause of how fast the pulsin’ blood pushed out.” Jesse shook his head as if he were trying to shake the memory out of himself. “The loudness of war make you deaf to music. You ears juss ring like the after-sound of a church bell, but war ain’t no church except that it send more people to heaven.”

After Jesse fell silent, Buddy said that he lost a brother, too. “But I weren’t there to see it.”

“You don’ know much about loss like that, do you?” Cracker-Jack said to Leon.

Bob gave Cracker-Jack a cold, hard stare. “His pappy shot.”

“Shot fer runnin’. And we don know why exactly,” Cracker-Jack said.

“Maybe we don want to know,” Jesse said.

Bob poked at the fire and sparks burst into the air. “Maybe it not our business.”

“We been travelin’ together, don’t that make it our business?” Cracker-Jack said.

Leon kept quiet and eventually Big Josh spoke up. “We ain’t been honest neither.”

Cracker-Jack shot him a mean look and the others paused long enough for Leon to realize he didn’t know them as well as he had thought. Leon ignored them, staring into the fire as though he hadn’t heard Big Josh. Leon’s heartbeat quickened. He heard something rustle a short distance away in the woods. His burlap was drying near where he hid his book, knife, and revolver. He adjusted his legs, which were getting sore from being in the same position for a long time.

Big Josh stood up and kicked stones and dirt onto the fire making it spit sparks into the darkness.

“Sit down Josh,” Jesse said.

“I kilt that man and you all knows it. We liein’ all the time. We liein’ to ourselves, makin’ up stories of lifes we wanted, not the ones we got.” Big Josh peered down at Leon. “Boy, we all runnin’.”

“That’s it!” Cracker Jack stood up too, now, and the restlessness of the others became an active and wild animal rummaging through their camp.

“I not stoppin’,” Big Josh said.

“Damn-dip god-dammity,” Bob said under his breath.

“I hated that man. He treat me bad and when his head under that wagon hub, I kick it off the post. I seed his ears squirt blood and one eye push out and land in the dirt. I run and not stop ‘til I run into these crim’nals.”

“Criminals?” Cracker-Jack yelled.

“Don’t never hate a man, boy, ‘cause sure enough you kill him. Big Josh finished speaking, then nodded toward Cracker-Jack who had never finished his assault.

Cracker-Jack waited for Josh to sit, then glanced around. “I kilt seven men.”

Leon slid back from the fire. He glanced to judge how close he sat from the revolver.

“But they all soldiers.” Cracker-Jack pounded his own chest. “I kilt them cause they kilt my family. It was right I kilt them.”

Big Josh continued to stare at the man.

Cracker-Jack spit. “I so filled wit noise and anger and fear.” He closed his eyes. When he spoke again he whispered. “I start loadin’ and shootin’ at anybody I sees.” He lowered his head and walked from camp into the darkness.

Bob poked Leon with a toe and when Leon jumped, Bob whispered, “He shoot he own son.” After a moment, Bob said, “You know, boy, what you try to hide is always there. It never go away. Sooner or later it boil up and make a blister everyone can see.”

Leon felt his face flush and his eyes fill with tears. He clenched his teeth and sat still. The killing talk brought unwanted memories of his escape. The men scared him. He had crossed the river. His life was supposed to change.

Leon wished to be free of his own memories without letting go of the emotion. He knew how to make love to the emotion while
forgetting the memory. So, in a low voice at first, Leon sang an old song he had heard and cast to memory:
Home Sweet Home
. The sadness of the song gripped his heart, but freed his mind.

The others joined in. Their voices, together, were loud, melodious, clear. Leon imagined that they all let go of their memories as they sang. He imagined that the bad in the world could be changed to good as wood changed to fire and warmth. He imagined nothing but memory ashes would be left by morning. And, then he stopped imagining anything at all and let his heart open to the sadness in the song, someone else’s pain. He felt, but no longer connected the emotion to his memories. There were only the song-writer’s memories now. And the emotion.

Before long Cracker-Jack came back into the circle, his voice adding to the others as though he too was now pouring out the fires of his mind, reducing his memories to ashes.

T
hroughout the night, Leon woke to alternate dreams, first of being brutally murdered by the roamers, then of being abandoned in the wilderness. By morning, he set to reality the fact that the roamers were using him. If he were not useful, they would leave him while he slept through the night. Worse yet, now that he knew they had lied, they might slit his throat once his usefulness dissolved through their eyes.

Breakfast was prepared in relative quiet. The tone was somber, which belied the true sorrow they must have felt. They were vagabonds, criminals. Old men with horrible memories and even more horrible pasts. They were unreliable companions.

Anger lifted into the air and appeared to be aimed at Leon. They acted as though it had been his fault that they dragged out discarded memories, that he now knew the truth about them: that they were sad old men who had killed and stole and cheated, that their lives were nothing to be proud of.

Cracker-Jack ordered Leon around all morning, calling him White Boy and, in a sarcastic voice, Big Man.

Leon obeyed in silence, folding bedrolls, dispersing the fire’s embers, fetching water in a pan for them all to sip from. With no fish left from the night before and nothing for breakfast, hunger fed the present anger and restlessness.

“Today, White Boy, you best get us enough bread. Don’t go runnin’ scared.” Cracker-Jack motioned for them to get going. Leon scrambled to shoulder his pack and follow them in silence. He couldn’t look any of them in the eye without feeling fear rise into his throat.

Already the sky sucked fog from the ground. Moisture from the field and the woods both contributed to the haze in the air. Mosquitoes and deer flies lifted up with the sun, as though being borne from the heat.

Bob leaned close to Leon. “Bet dat hat keeps you head from burnin’ in this sun.”

“You like this hat?”

“Do.”

Leon took the hat into his hands and held it. He leaned as though he were going to hand the hat over to the old man, but his memory of Big Leon reminded him of his attachment to its giver and made him hold to it. He placed it back on his head and said, “Me too.”

Bob spit on the ground between Leon’s legs and looked him in the eye. “You die, that’s my hat.”

Leon swallowed and fell back to take up the rear.

That day they walked away from the river. The terrain rose steadily, sometimes so steep they had to crawl up and over a ridge to a flat area. It was difficult for Bob especially, but for all of them except Leon.

Jesse refused Leon’s help. “Big Man helpin’ the old coloreds?”

Cracker-Jack called out to him, “Damn mule.”

“Boney white slave,” Buddy said.

The day wore on and Leon climbed ahead, then helped them over a ridge or waited for them to catch up, complaints or not. He rested under pines humming tunes he’d made up long ago, or heard others hum. Martha. Leon didn’t feel comfortable leaving the river.

There was little rest for the others. At one point, they stopped to strip the thin bark from a black birch tree and stuff it into their mouths like tobacco chaws.

“Look,” Leon said, once he reached a clearing at the top of a hill and turned around to wait for the others. The valley lay below them, the Susquahanna’s West Branch sparkling in the sunlight, the dark woods soaking up that same sun. Small puffs of fog rose from black patches in the woods as the heat pulled moisture from the rotting vegetation on the forest floor.

As they all looked at the distance they’d come, at the magnificent valley below, Jesse turned to continue on and pointed in another direction. “Smoke,” he said. “Somebody burnin’ stumps.”

Leon knew that he would feed them that night or be abandoned, or killed, by morning. He would do what needed to be done.

As they descended into the valley, Cracker-Jack forged ahead of the group to evaluate how they would assault the farmhouse.

The valley was narrow, but long even though the hills appeared to slope at the South end, and Leon suspected another creek running perpendicular to the slope. A yellow field spread to their left and North. Corn stood tall on the southern side in long stands going from west to east. They could steal corn, Leon thought, forget asking for food.

Jesse crept up behind Leon and whispered, “That field corn. Tastes empty and gives you the shits.”