The Eden Hunter (10 page)

 

KAU STAYED WITH Benjamin in the tree until the crowd was gone, and once they were alone he spoke with him for the first time about leaving Yellowhammer. To be free again he would need the help of the boy. There was no other way that he saw. Three weeks later they found the dead cypress that had blown down near the river. They returned with an axe, then began making the cuts for the dugout.

 

WITH THE HONEY came strength. Miles of sunset to sunrise walking. Hot days of restless sleep followed by long warm nights afoot, letting the stars guide him further east into Florida.

Yet sometimes he still wandered. Early one morning the pinelands dropped down into a dry floodplain, and instead of concealing himself until nightfall he followed a clear river south to a place where it vanished into the earth. This was something he had never seen before. He looped around the pool and then crossed over a jagged heap of limestone. The rocks were splattered with batshit, and in a gap between boulders he discovered the entrance to a cave. He had been walking for many hours and he was tired. Here was shelter yet still he hesitated before entering this next hole in the earth. He wondered whether somehow this had become his lot—to venture from cave to cave forever. A hunted lifetime of hiding and emerging.

He gathered wood for a fire. At the cave opening an ancient circle of stones surrounded a bed of fine gray ash. He removed the tinderbox from a saddlebag, and soon he had a small flame dancing within the blackened rocks. Wood hissed and cracked as he ate a wide strip of venison drizzled with the last of his honey.

 

AFTER HE HAD finished eating he lit the end of a length of resin-rich fatwood that he had cut from a pine stump, and then he smothered the fire and crept deeper into the cave.

The walls of the cave glowed yellow in the flickering torchlight. He came upon a rimstone pool alive with salamanders and realized that he was tunneling between the forest above and an aquifer below. Overhead he could see where the gnarled roots of a magnolia had broken through a thin ceiling of rock. The ceiling dipped lower, and he grabbed hold of one of the roots. It felt alive in his hands, seemed almost to throb and to struggle.

He waded across the shallow pool and crawfish nipped at his feet. Here the cave descended with the sinking river, and soon the ceiling disappeared from view altogether. The cave opened wider still and led him into a cavern. Round layers of stone rose up from the floor like great piles of wax. The fatwood torch was threatening to burn out and he worried that he would be thrown into darkness, lose his way. He turned back and was again approaching the rimstone pool when he stumbled over the petrified bones of cave-dwellers blanketed by the dust. His flame trembled as he searched for some clue as to the identity of these broken skeletons. They seemed a small people. Small like him, small like the boy. He riffled through the bones but finally the torch went black. He had not found anything more. No tools. No weapons. No art. These are like the remains of some long-dead animal, he thought. A creature that leaves this world owning nothing at all.

 

HE SPENT TWO days and two nights resting within the hollow core of that natural bridge. He had masked the entrance to the cave with
moss-draped branches, and he sat watching as occasional travelers moved across the land. East to west and west to east.

Only once was he himself spotted. An Indian woman looked through his wall of branches and surprised him lying on his horse blanket beside the cold fire. She hurried away, and he took up his knife and his bone club, stood waiting for her men to attack.

But the fight never came. He thought of his mother and of his wife Janeti. He remembered them both begging that he not go to Opoku. Had he listened then all might be different now. He looked out over the empty forest and pondered that special wisdom of women, their understanding that some things were more valuable than the pride of their men.

 

BY THE THIRD day he was without venison and honey both. There were small alligators in the river, creatures he remembered from his long-ago trek from Pensacola to Yellowhammer. He lured one into the shallows with a stone-struck cave bat, then dove forward and seized it in his hands. With his knife he skinned out the still-twitching tail, and he saw that the flesh was as rosy and firm as that of the crocodiles that swam in African waters. He captured another and then another, and that night when he could risk the smoke he cured meat until his saddlebags were once again full and he was ready to leave the cave, ready to keep searching for some safe place that was even more like his lost home.

A
FTER TWO DAYS of careful night travel through a forest of pine and mixed hardwoods he came to a swollen and muddy river. A river wider than any he had seen since Africa. Glistening black logs floated past him like the lost toys of children, and he realized that in this land of sandy creeks and sluggish bayous here, finally, was a master river—a river that gathered many others and would at some distant point pour itself into a green sea. On a brown-sand beach he stopped and looked east out over the water. To cross a river such as this was perhaps to put the whole of one tragic life behind him.

 

HE FOLLOWED THE river south to where the current eased into a slight bend, pushing against a series of high bluffs on the far bank. That afternoon he ate the final scraps of his alligator meat, and then he fashioned a crude raft of vine-lashed driftwood. He set off just
before sunset, at a time when it was still bright enough for him to make his way safely.

The river took quick hold of the small raft and he let himself be dragged along with it, binding his hands in the cut vine so as not to lose his grip. The water was cool and thick and he kicked his legs, taking aim for a spot downstream where a narrow ravine divided the bluffs. After several hundred yards of drift he hit his mark perfectly. The raft slid onto the sand shore and he rose up, dripping.

There was a wide groove in the beach where a clear creek spilled down through the ravine and into the brown river. He knelt to drink. The creek water was very good, and he filled his canteen before gathering the rest of his things from the raft. Out in the river an enormous garfish rolled in a pocket between currents. Kau pushed the empty raft free and then stood watching as it was swept away spinning.

He was climbing the steep riverbank when he heard a voice ordering him to stay right where he was, don’t you move none. A woman in a torn yellow dress was looking down on him from atop the riverbank, and she had a musket leveled at his chest. He reached for his bone club but the woman hissed at him. “Told you not to move none,” she said.

“Please.”

The woman frowned and stepped closer. “You fall out the sky?” she asked.

He said nothing. In the softening light he could see that she had white-blonde hair and cornflower eyes. Her dirt-streaked skin was sunburnt, her lips split.

“I could kill you if I wanted. You’d admit that?”

“Yessum.”

“Lord Jesus, what have you done to your teeth?” She jabbed at the air with the musket. “You trying to be a demon of some sort?”

“Ma’am?”

“Get on out the mud.”

He climbed up from the riverbank.

“I don’t want to shoot you,” said the woman. “But before I put this musket down you have to promise me you’ll remember this kindness, spare me like I spared you.”

“I got no call to be hurtin you.”

“Not what I asked.”

“I promise not to hurt you none.”

“You got a thick tongue.” The woman lowered her musket, and he saw now that it was rusted useless. “Fetch your things,” she told him. “I know you’re hungry.” She began walking away, but he stayed where he was. She turned and looked back at him. “Come on,” she said. “I have supper enough.”

Finally he slung the canteen around his neck and lifted the saddlebags. She led him away from the river, down a worn path that ran alongside the babbling creek and into the ravine. He closed the distance between them and considered whether he should take his knife to her back, smash her skull with the bone club. The redsticks, he admitted, already would have killed her twice over.

Still, he kept his word. He was not a redstick. He had tried that life and was through with it.

They entered a dense green pocket forest of magnolia and oak. The walls of the ravine rose at least a hundred feet on either side, and the air cooled as they moved deeper into the forest. She took him through a laurel thicket alive with the rustlings of ribbon snakes and the cracklings of cicadas. Softshell turtles bolted for dark creek-holes; mink tracks lined the bank. The humid air was sweet with the tea-smell of rotting leaves, and then from somewhere ahead came the faint scent of wood smoke.

The woman lived at the blind end of the ravine, in a small stone hut built against the side of a rocky cliff. The roof of the hut was thatched with palmetto fronds woven through twisted lengths of willow, and at the base of the cliff the pure water of the creek bubbled up from the earth. They stopped here and she looked down at his breechcloth. “Ain’t you got no real clothes?” she asked. “You gone Indian?”

“Nome.”

“Need any?”

“Nome.”

She shrugged. “Fine then,” she said. “Sit.” She pointed to a collection of stumps arranged around a crackling fire. Five stumps in all, as if he were simply the first of many guests to arrive. They sat beside each other, staring at the fire as night fell upon them. She asked him about his bone club, and he told her that he had found it in the forest. He could tell that she did not believe him.

“You livin here by youself, ma’am?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“No men?”

“No men, not no more.” She patted him on his knee. “We’re alone. Don’t you be afraid.”

A dented kettle dangled over the fire, suspended from a tripod of rusty iron rods. She filled two metal bowls with a pearl broth containing white chunks of fish meat. At last she introduced herself. “My name is Elvy,” she said. “Elvy Callaway.”

“I am Kau.”

“Cow like a milk cow?” She laughed and he saw that her teeth were somehow quite white. “You got a Christian name?”

He shook his head.

“Ever want one? I’m a wizard at naming things.”

“Nome.”

She smiled and handed him his bowl. “You lack the talent for conversation,” she said. “Have no gift for it at all.”

He took a cautious sip of the soup, then coughed as it burned at his throat. His horse blanket was wet from the river crossing, and she took it from him and laid it out to dry across the thatched roof of the hut. He thanked her and then, in the manner of some people too long in solitude, she grew anxious to talk. As they ate she began to tell him her story. The story of how she had come to exist alone in that dark valley.

“I am a witness for the Lord,” she told him.

 

ELVY CALLAWAY HAD also once lived along the federal road, though farther to the east than he himself had. Her home was near the Chattahoochee River crossing, the border between Georgia and the Mississippi Territory. She was the madam of a brothel house, and
her establishment had been quite famous. In a shy way Kau admitted that he had overheard more than a few tales of Elvy’s Den.

She nodded. “God have mercy on our sinning souls,” she said.

Though five women called the Den their home, Elvy herself was far and away the prettiest and healthiest of the lot. She dressed in Charleston finery befitting her station as a madam, and refused her own favors to all but the occasional wealthy traveler, a few officers from the nearby fort. For trysts with these select men she kept a small cabin hidden in the forest. Visits to Elvy were carefully arranged, and so great was her discretion that no customer could ever be certain of the identity of another.

Such was her life until a cold night in December 1814 when she was surprised in her cabin by a knock at the door. She was not alone. A young British lieutenant, gentleman prisoner of the Americans at Fort Mitchell, was spread out beneath her. The lieutenant had lost a hand to grapeshot in the defeat at Pensacola, and for this one evening with Elvy he had cut all of the silver buttons from his uniform.

Elvy went naked to the door, and when she flipped open the wrought-iron Judas viewer, she saw a shabby and hollow-cheeked man staring back at her with sad eyes. “Whoa now,” she said to him. “Who are you?”

The man sneezed into his sleeve and then spoke. “I’m a preacher, ma’am. A preacher in need of lodging for the night.”

“This ain’t no inn.”

“Have you really nothing, ma’am?”

“I have plenty,” she said. “Backtrack to that big cabin on the road. You can share a room all night with one of my girls if you show her enough coins.”

The preacher’s face went high pink. His frail body seemed to tremble. “You are the owner of that place?”

“I am indeed.”

At that the preacher slammed his fist against the thick door so hard that the one-handed lieutenant hurried to her side. “Is this man badgering you?” he whispered.

She touched his hand. “I’ll tend to him,” she said. “But thank you.” She was moved by the young officer’s concern, his willingness to reveal his presence. In truth she had thought him to be hiding under the bed.

The preacher had calmed himself. “Who is with you?” he asked.

“Mind your business,” she told him.

“I will pray for you both.”

He turned to leave but she would not allow him the final word. “We don’t need your prayers,” she said.

The preacher stopped and looked back at her. “Tell me,” he said, “tell me truthfully. Do you ever pray?”

There was something about the way the question was asked, something heartbreaking that drew her in. As a child she had been religious, but of course that was long ago. “No,” she allowed. “I don’t pray.”