Now the colored man took up his shotgun from the corner. Jest sleep on, he thought and closed the door behind him and turned the key in its lock and descended the stairs, stepping around boards that might creak, not looking at the dead man in the parlor or his widow drooling on the sideboard.
He went out into the alley and down the back of the doctor’s and let himself in through a window. In the office he struck a match and read the labels of the brown medicine bottles and selected this one and that. He moved through the house and peered into the main room where the doctor lay dead, his widow standing at the window staring out. She sensed him and turned. He caught her before she could scream and clamped a cloth rag over her mouth, her husband’s own chloroform fainting her instantly.
Outside he crept building to building wiring dynamite. He’d just finished and stood to stretch his back when he spied another lady in black walking along the livery barn wall with a bucket. She set it down and reached back in her hair and shadowed her face with a veil. Then she and her pail slipped in the livery door and a moment later the same door opened and another lady came out covering a yawn. She threw back her veil to the air.
Ike crept along the livery’s shadowed east wall. The barn had spaces between boards and it was through such a space that he saw the girl in the cell. Lanternlight yellowing the hay. The lady he’d seen go in was guarding her. The bucket was her stool.
He twisted his head to better see.
It was her.
O God here she was. He’d never seen her before, but he knew it was her. He turned his shoulders to the wall and leaned against it, sinking to his backside where he sat for a long minute. He looked up at the sky. He didn’t believe it. What you gone do next? he asked the stars. What ain’t you gone do?
He hurried back through the alley to the house and inside, past Mrs. Tate in her restless sleep, up the stairs into the room. Eugene hadn’t stirred. His belly rose and fell and the air seemed fouler from his dying. Ike set the medicine bottles along the table and selected one and another and mixed them and poured them into Eugene’s whiskey gourd. He sat in a chair in the corner thinking. Then stood and squeaked opened the chifforobe and gazed at the colors. A moment later, his arms full of clothes, Ike left the room.
When the key clicked in the lock Smonk opened his eyes. He rocked back and forth on the bed, gathering momentum, then rolled onto the floor. Ike was gone. He stood sucking air into the bloody scraps of his lungs. He reached for his glasses and gourd and unstoppered it and drank deeply.
Little morphine kick, he said, raising the licker. Brother Isaac, I thank ye.
He drank again and hung the gourd around his neck and took one of the bottles and stripped the sheet from the bed. He hefted his lucky detonator and grabbed the coil of wire. Downstairs Ike was gone, and Mrs. Tate had barely moved, just the hitch of her shoulders as she snored. She wore black, which made her tinier.
He set his wares down quietly and undid the gourd and drank again. He found the snake of wire Ike had left and twisted it to the wire he’d brought and hitched it up to the detonator. He disappeared down the hall and returned holding a broom and, behind the old woman, flapped out the bedsheet and within a moment had employed a trick he’d learned from Kansas City teamsters where you fasten your victim to his chair with a sheet, tightening the sheet by a broom handle affixed to the back. With nothing showing but her neck and head, he twisted the handle and stood behind her where she couldn’t see him and held her until she stopped convulsing.
I got some questions for ye, he said, blowing hot sulfur breath in her ear.
He thumbstruck a match and lit a candle on the sideboard by Justice Tate’s head.
The old lady wriggled in her cocoon and he tightened it a turn. She was trying to shake her head but his hand had her face. Behind her, he looked down her length, points of her feet at the bottom.
You won’t get away, he said. Especially if I have to strangulate ye. But if ye swar to be a good ole girl, I’ll let ye loose at the mouth. All right?
Rage in her roiling eyes and the electric rod of her body, but he held her as long as she could flex and presently she went limp and he loosened the broom.
Okay. There. He lifted his palm from her mouth and moved around into the candlelight. Red bars the shape of his fingers and thumb on her cheeks.
Who—her voice a jar of wet sand opened—Who are you?
He leaned his head closer and removed the hat and glasses, his good eye twinkling in the candlelight.
When she saw who it was her body spasmed anew.
What’s the matter? he asked, muffling her screams. Ain’t ye glad to see me?
Christian Deputy Loon, meanwhile, heard a horse fast approaching and, careful not to point, tried to flag down its rider who seemed to be naked, burnt to a crisp, caked in dusty blood and carrying a giant rifle. But the stranger passed in the moonlight, racing toward Old Texas. Deputy Loon sighed. He took off his right boot and scratched between his toes. He put the boot back on. He sat for what seemed an hour of time and eventually lay forward on his horse’s neck and entwined his fingers in its mane and closed his eyes and slept and dreamed of a town burning and a horde of women fleeing the flames and overtaking him on the horse, dragging him down, tearing him into pieces. Boy was he glad it was only a dream.
12 THE WAKE
EVAVANGELINE SAT UP. SUDDENLY THIS TALL NIGGER SHE’D NEVER seen before had appeared in the livery room and clamped a cloth to the guard’s nose before she could rise from her stool and sound the cowbell. He let her drop to the hay and peered through the bars. He brought up a long finger for silence and knelt and looked her so hard in the eye it made her fidget in her bonds. He rubbed his chin, like a gambler wondering what his discard should be, then lifted the key off its nail and unlocked the cage and cut her loose and handed her a bundle of clothing and underthings. Up close she could see his coiled white hair beneath his hat brim. The gray goatee. The lines of his face that would tell stories if a person could read such maps.
He nodded at the clothes and turned to give her privacy. She stretched and flexed and stripped from the shift they’d dressed her in and stood naked in the hay and held things up to discern them arm or leg then wormed her feet down the stockings and dress and fitted her fists down the sleeves. When she was finished he crooked his finger for her to follow. On her way out she unstuck the Mississippi Gambler from the wall and concealed it in her dress.
Outside, the widow-guards began to shoot at them but hit nowhere near Evavangeline as she followed the mysterious stranger over a rail fence into the crisp sugarcane leaves and after a time into the woods. The dress impeded her walking so she lagged back and used the knife to cut off the bottom half. Under it the stockings came near to her thigh. The skirt material was pretty and, still following the old nigger, she fashioned a headdress from the cloth. It was too hot to wear, so she left it collapsed over a stump like a bride weeping in the woods. Because the top half of the dress was cumbersome yet, she ripped off the sleeves at the shoulders and rolled them down her arms and left them strung along twigs of knuckled black oak like tunnels of spiderweb. When it was still hard to breathe she unfastened the top buttons of the blouse and then the bottom ones, noticing how the wires in the corset made her tits bigger. She pushed through a brake bush and into the nigger-man’s campsite where he sat smoking a pipe. Arms folded, wrapped in his coat despite the heat. He had a small fire with a pail of something bubbling over it, held aloft by a spit and sticks. But if he was surprised by her appearance it never showed on his face.
I miss the sound of a dog at night, Mrs. Tate said, bound by the bedsheet to her chair. He’d hung a shawl over her shoulders to conceal her confinement and they’d sat for half an hour without a word spoken between them. Once in a while Smonk would elicit a squeak of air from her by tightening the broom handle.