I found Dirck in the farthermost stall, face down in soiled hay, wearing the same ill-fitting clothes he’d been wearing when abducted. On close look it was not animal droppings but his own blood that had soiled the hay. I rolled him over to see his face and found it a total wound, a horrifying smear of blood, gash, and swelling. His eyes told me he was still alive, but not for long, I judged. I did not know how to help him, but my instinct was to clean his face, find his bleeding and stop it, just as I had aided John the Brawn in conserving what remained of his blood after a street fight.
Dirck gave me recognition with his eyes, then closed them. I thought he’d died but he hadn’t; and on he breathed. I lifted him, found he had no power to stand alone and that I was of insufficient strength to carry him. I ran to the door to call the carriage driver and found the low buzzard had driven off. I felt sure now that no one remained on the Plum place except myself and the bleeding Dirck. I spied a pump near the house, a bucket beside it. I filled the bucket, which leaked, and so ran with it to Dirck. I soaked my shirttail to wash the blood from his face, saw his lower lip was split open at the left corner, and his mouth full of partly clotted blood. I blotted and cleaned what I could, fearful of disturbing any clot, and Dirck made no move except to breathe. It appeared he’d been smashed in the face, so swollen was he. After the cleansing I could see his blood flow was mostly stanched, perhaps by time, or by the downward pressure of his wound onto the straw; and that gave rise to small hope in me. He was, nevertheless, all but dead, and would surely die with thoroughness if I did not find help. What I needed was a horse and wagon, and the Plum barn offered neither. I ran to the house, went ’round it to see what was behind, but found nothing. I peered in a window and saw the house had been emptied of furniture, and I began to understand not only how deeply the Plums had been involved in, but also how radically their lives had been changed by, the events set into motion by Dirck.
Beyond the outhouse I saw a shed that probably once held pigs, or possibly chickens, or both, and I went toward it with renewed trepidation, but also thinking I should run for help, find someone with a wagon. But run where? Find whom? The Plum house was near nothing and no one. Will Canaday’s house was miles away. Emmett Daugherty was perhaps a bit closer, but of that I was uncertain. Would either of them be home? How long would it take to run those miles? And what if. .?
The chicken-pig house door was open and I entered through it into a black dream, finding a man lying spread-eagled on the floor, a railroad spike driven into each of his hands, each of his feet. He was long dead and much of him was absent, but his red hair, his muttonchops, and his ear partially sliced or bitten away identified him to me as the man who had stolen Dirck’s ledgers from Will’s office. He had been stripped to below the waist, slit up the middle, and now a globular rat was eating his liver. When I came in, the rat scurried off, then paused near an exit hole to observe me, waiting for me to decide whether he should, or should not, be allowed to resume his gluttony.
I am impressed by the practicality of the human mind, even in times of terror. I do not join with those who see terror superseding all other emotions, for what I did at this moment was to cast my glance dutifully about the henhouse and discover a four-sided barrow with wheel and handles: a vehicle. Sent. I glanced anew at the sliced man to reassure myself it was he, to convince myself that he had indeed been crucified and split and was now rat-ridden, proving it to my incredulous eye so I would not later think I had merely imagined it. Then I lunged toward the barrow with sufficiently broad gesture to scare the rat into his exit hole, and I wheeled my vehicle out the door and toward the livid lump that Dirck Staats had become.
Dirck had not moved, but his eyes were open when I arrived.
“Can you move at all? Can you stand?”
He tried valiantly to sit up, but his pain had stupefied him, and he fell back. I heaped straw into the barrow as a cushion for him, then lifted him so he was sitting in the barrow’s center. His legs dangled and touched the ground, making it impossible to wheel him. I found a filthy tethering rope in one stall, wrapped it ’round Dirck’s ankles, and then pulled it taut and fastened it to the barrow’s handles, thus lifting his legs and pointing them straight ahead. I wrapped the rest of the rope around his arms and torso and secured that also to the handles, making him my somewhat upright prisoner. His head was bouncing up, down, and sideward, but that seemed to me irrelevant to his safe passage.
I wheeled him out of the barn and off Plum land, then went a mile at least before I saw another dwelling, high on a hillside. I left Dirck on the road, climbed the hill and knocked at the door. A bearded old man leaning on half a crutch answered.
“What is it, boy?”
“An injured man,” I said, “very badly hurt and bleeding. I have him tied up in that barrow down there. Could I borrow a horse or wagon, or could you take me to get help?”
“What kind of thing is that, tying up a sick man in a barrow?”
“It’s all there was, and I couldn’t carry him, or even lift him. Is there a doctor near here?”
“No doctor’d put a sick man in a barrow.”
“You don’t understand. I’m trying to help him. He’ll die if he doesn’t get help.”
“Whatever ails him, that barrow’ll make him worse. Who is he?”
“His name is Dirck Staats.”
“Never heard of him.”
“That doesn’t matter,” I said with maximum exasperation. “Can you help him?”
“Where’d you get him?”
“About a mile up the road. In a barn.”
“The Plums’?”
“It used to be their place but they’re all gone now.”
“Plums are gone? Where’d they go?”
“I don’t know. Can you please, please, help us?”
“I wouldn’t help a Plum if he was dyin’ on my doorstep.”
“He’s not a Plum!” I yelled. “His name is Dirck Staats! The Plums are the ones who hurt him!”
“Why’d they hurt him?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know!”
“I wouldn’t help a Plum if he was dyin’ in my barn. If a Plum got kicked by a horse right in front of me I’d let him lay. If a Plum was being pecked to death by woodpeckers I’d buy a ticket and watch.”
Then he closed the door on me.
I wheeled Dirck toward the main road, another half mile at least, some of it uphill and much of it through mud. I often had to go off the road into a field to get past the mud, and climbing crisscross on a hill, I almost lost Dirck overboard twice, his head bobbing like a dead chicken’s.
When I got to the highway I waved down two carriages, but they both kept on. A man carrying a sack of flour on his shoulder stopped to look at Dirck, then went on his way without a word. I sensed Dirck was giving forth an efflux of dread to all who came near him, and felt also that the Christian virtues of charity and compassion were little heeded by my neighbors.
At the next house I roused only a barking dog. At the next I found a feeble woman, useless to my cause except for her remark that I was near the West Troy Road, and so I knew I could find my way to Emmett Daugherty’s. Fixing on Emmett as my destination seemed superior to the futile beseeching of strangers, and so I pushed our barrow with renewed vigor, trying not to dwell on Dirck’s painful descent into hell. I grew impermeable to all glances, certain that any imagined court of mercy along the way would turn into a waste of Dirck’s diminishing time.