The dog was a poor slinking thing, but it could kill a helpless man. The boy saw the brute suddenly and his face remained blank, curiously patient, shining with sweat. I set an arrow and as the dog whirled at the slight noise to face me I sunk it in his yellow chest. He leaped and tried to bite his flank and died.
The boy watched me, puzzled, when I said: “I’ll get you the water.” He let me take his helmet. It was hard for him to drink, his shaky hands no help. He rolled his head away and said: “I a’n’t nothing to ransom — the old man ha’n’t got a pot, never had.” The effort of speech brought a stain of blood to his mouth.
“Will I lift you?”
He looked at the water, wanting it, and nodded. I felt the splash of the first rain-drops on my head. At the touch of my arm at his shoulder I saw it was too much for him. I spooned water in my hand, and he got down a little but lost it in a sharp cough. The arrow may have pierced his stomach. He said: “Shouldn’t’ve tried it.”
I took the rag from my head and tried to close up the long wound in his thigh. The rag was not long nor wide enough; trying to fasten it was a nightmare frustration. A bang and roll of near thunder almost covered what the soldier was saying: “Let it be. Be you Moha, that red thatch?”
They have an odd speech in Katskil. I had heard it at the inn, though not much in the last two years when the war jitters were building up. They drawl in a pinch-nose way, leave out half their rs and any syllable that doesn’t happen to suit them.
I told him: “I got no country.”
“Ayah? You be’n’t with us, I know ever’ damn fool bum in the b’talion including myself.”
“I’m alone. Running away.”
“I get it.” The rain came then in a sudden and ponderous rush, soaking us, hammering my back. I leaned over him; at least my shirt could keep the downpour from battering his face. “Ran away once myself — tried to, I mean.” He seemed to want to talk. “Pa caught me filling a sack, believe me I got no forrader. He wa’n’t for me going into the A’my neither, said it was all no consequence. You killed that yalla dog real neat.”
“Damn scavenger.”
“Jackalaws we call ’em down home. Handle a bow real good.”
“I been in the woods a lot.”
“Tell by the way you walk.” His voice was reaching me with difficulty through the roar of water around us. “Running away. That ’ere gray — your ballock-rag — that mean bond-servant? Does in my country.”
“Uhha.”
“Look, boy, don’t let it bug you. I want to tell you, don’t let ’em tromp you or tell you where to go. They spit in your eye you spit back, see?… Nice country hereabouts, might be good corn land. Our outfit laid up all the night in the woods — under stren’th, the damn fool brass, the way they do things, one comp’ny split off yesterday for another job — hell with it. Wanted to say, I was noticing what a pile of oaks you got around here. Means good corn land, ever’ time. Last night was a real foggy sumbitch, wa’n’t it?”
“I slept in a tree.”
“Do tell. Raining now, a’n’t it?” Both of us were drenched, the water bouncing a stream from a crease in his shirt where I couldn’t shelter him, and pelting on his legs. But he was really asking, not sure of the world, his eyes losing me, finding me again.
“It’s raining some,” I said. “Listen, I’m going to get you deeper in the woods where won’t nobody search, understand? Stay by while you heal up. Then you can come along.”
“Sure enough?” I think he was seeing it, as I was trying to — the journeying, friendship, new places. We’d go together; we’d have women, amusement, something always happening. Above all, the journeying.
I said: “We’d get along all right.”
“Sure. Sure we will.”
I never learned his name. His face smoothed out completely and I had to let him lie back on the earth.
11
I remember the rain. Not long after my friend was dead, it slackened to a dull beating on the earth. I could not hope to scratch a grave in the tree roots and wet clay. In any case I have never liked the thought of burying the dead, unless it might be done as they do in Penn, marking the place with nothing but a grapevine, and taking the wineharvest in later years with no sense of trespass or disrespect. If that can’t be, maybe burning is best. Does it matter? — all the world’s a graveyard, a procreants’ bed, and a cradle.
I slipped away from the road into the bushes, sure now that there’d be no pursuit by men and dogs. In the dripping woods, however, I still moved softly. I was guessing my northeast direction accurately, for I had been on my way more than an hour when, off to my right where it ought to be, I heard a racket of hoofs galloping on wet road-mud, swelling loud, dying away into little taps like the noise a child can make by flipping a stick along a picket fence. A dispatch rider, probably, bound for Skoar. After that I heard only the diminishing sober discourse of the rain.
I grew hungry, but wanted a fire for my hen — raw chicken is discouraging. The morning was spent by the time I located a good spot. An oak had blown over against a slope years before, its root cluster jutting out aslant and catching a gradual drift of leaves, thus creating a roof of sorts. From the pocket of earth where roots had once grown, rains had dug out a drainage gully. I grubbed under the surface of the forest floor and found tindery stuff to start a blaze in the shelter of that overhang. Soon the fire was comforting me while my hen browned on a green ash spit. I hung my shirt and loin-rag on an oak-root near the warmth, and squatted naked letting the harmless rain sluice off my back. For a while, except to keep track of my cooking hen, I can’t have been thinking at all. Rain lulls you out of alertness like someone talking on and on, explaining too much.
The men came quletly. I was aware of them only an instant before the thin one said: “Don’t pull that knife, Jackson. We don’t mean you no ha’m.” His voice was firm but weary, like his long face under a bloody dark green rag.
“Don’t be scared,” said the other man, a moon-faced giant. “Matter-fact I been called by the blessed Abraham not to do no hurt to no man, also—”
The thin man said: “Hold up the mill, will you, whiles I talk to the boy? Jackson, the dang thing of it is, we’d like a snip of that ’ere, bein’ stinkin’ hungry is all.”
He was about fifty, gray and quiet. The rag on his head gave the hollows under his smoky blue eyes a greenish tinge. Long grooves bracketed his mouth and nose. His dark green shirt lacked a section where his head bandage must have been torn out; a hunting knife at his belt very much like mine appeared to be his only weapon. His belt was broad like a sash, with fold-over parts that would be useful for carrying small things. His lean legs sticking out of a shabby green loin-rag were dark and bunchy as bundles of harness leather.
The other man also wore the wreck of a Katskil army uniform; some kind of belt and rope-soled sandals. He carried a sword in a sheath of brass, a worthless thing in the woods. Both had at their belts long and rather flat canteens made of bronze that would have held about a quart.
Stupid as you can get, I said: “Where you from?”
The thin man gave me a good smile, dry and friendly. “Points south, Jackson. Will you share the meat with a man that fit your country yesterday and got a hole in his head, and a big old Jo that looks fit to scare the children but don’t want to fight no more?”
“Kay,” I said. They weren’t crowding me; I almost wanted to share it. “Yesterday? Be’n’t you from that fight down the road by Skoar?”