"Mother of God," Ingersoll said.
"Wasn't nothing of God about this one's mother," Ham said. He raised his right arm, aiming his shotgun at the door of the house, and closed one eye. "She was the one. Got damn it. When she heard us coming she must've up and left this one here and hid herself in the house."
Ingersoll considered the baby. It wore a gnarl of diaper and was impossible to name boy or girl. It was bald. Red from crying and he realized they'd been yelling above its noise.
"You better off," Ham told it. "Take a chance with the current elements. Maybe a gang of coyote'll take you in. Isn't that what happened to you, Ingersoll? Band of coyotes found you in the tundra and raised you as their own?"
Ham shoved the silver tray they'd taken from the looters into his saddlebag. A white man just over six feet tall with a red face and bright red hair he kept cut short, Ham wore muttonchops (also red) he called burnsides, and a belly nutria derby that he was slightly vain about and endeavored to keep clean. Ingersoll's hat was bigger and more practical, a black Stetson Dakota.
"Ain't no coyotes this far south," he said.
"Is too," Ham said. He kicked his leg to flap his boot sole down-the leather wet so long it'd rotted-and fitted his boot into his stirrup and swung onto his saddle.
"It's wild dogs a-plenty, Ham. But it ain't no coyotes."
Ingersoll was looking beyond the house, studying the inland sea of dried and drying mud where cotton plants had once been, the horizon unrelenting brown, flat and cracking like so much poorly thrown pottery. Twice he had seen arms of the dead reaching out of it.
The levees had ruptured back in April, and even here, twenty-five miles southeast of the Mounds Landing crevasse, the waves had surged six feet. Thunderous breakers of coffee-colored froth had flattened near every tree and building, then just wiped them all away, like something out of Revelation. Ingersoll recalled the buried road to Yazoo City, a bloated mare and in front of its muzzle a bloated Bible as if the horse were verifying the events of the end time when they befell him.
"Tell Junior goodbye," Ham said.
"What you mean?"
"I mean it's somebody'll come along sooner or later and get this damn baby's what I mean. We got to skedaddle." He looked over his shoulder at the basket, now swaying in the breeze. "What's that lullaby? 'When the bow breaks, the cradle will fall, and down will come baby, cradle and all.'"
"Ham-"
"C'mon," Ham said. "Let's get to New Orleans, spend some of this looter loot. I got me a mind for a foreign girl. Russian if we can find one. Get a steak and lay some pipe. Then buy me a new pair of boots."
"I can't leave no baby, Ham."
"Well we ain't bringing it, Ing."
The foul wind from the east moaned through the leaning mule barn.
"Adios, Junior," Ham said, and gigged his sorrel with his heels. "Vaya con dios."
Ingersoll stared down at the kicking baby like maybe he'd had a baby himself long ago. And a wife.
But he hadn't. He was twenty-seven years old. He had no living family anywhere. He'd never even touched a baby.
"Ah, hell," he said and looked at the pewter sky, which gave a chuckle of thunder.
Wild dogs following. Or coyotes if you asked Ham. Ingersoll rode a quarter mile behind his partner and figured the big man wouldn't hear the thing fussing in his arms. It smelled like piss and flung its fists out and kicked. As he rode it was the beating and kicking that impressed Ingersoll. Little dickens had some fight.
In an hour the baby had lulled to a hiccupping sleep and Ingersoll let the horse follow the deeply etched tracks Ham's sorrel was carving. Ingersoll had learned to trust Ham's lead after Ham had spotted and dispatched two of the saboteurs back in Marked Tree, Arkansas. Their next orders, sent via telegram by Coolidge's men, had brought them to the Old Moore plantation near Greenville, Mississippi, where they were told to monitor local Negroes, some growing seditious, planning to head north, put the lapping Mississippi far behind them. But the landowners-and the officials the landowners elected-couldn't allow the Negroes to leave. Who would pick the cotton then?
But the cotton hadn't mattered. They were perhaps a dozen miles from Mounds Landing, searching for runaway Negroes, when that levee had burst. As if from the sky they heard it, heard the terrible roar, like a twister first but then an earthquake, it seemed, coming from beneath the horses. "Go," Ham had yelled. They spurred their mounts to a gallop and within minutes the floodtide was upon them, washing trees and bodies past, brown water splashing over the horses' hooves first, then quickly over their withers to the riders' legs and then the horses were careening and swimming and the men fighting to stay on, the land gone behind them, there passing in the current a church steeple, there a wagon still hitched to a pair of kicking mules, there a schoolhouse desk.
Now Ingersoll's horse gave a lurch. He grasped the baby, which startled it awake, its arms flying outward, and set it to crying. The horse's back legs had sunk, stuck again. Ingersoll would have to dismount and wrench its hooves free. But what to do with the baby?
"Ham?"
He heard a horseshoe clip a rock behind him and lowered his head and shook it.
"I told you about that damn baby," Ham Johnson shouted at his back. "Look where your instincts are."
"It's my decision," Ingersoll called over his shoulder. "I'll ditch it first people we find."
Ham skidded to a stop beside Ingersoll's horse, wiggling its rump and straining its neck and rolling its eyes in panic. Ingersoll slid off, clutching the squalling baby. It was horribly red in the face and its tears left tracks in its coat of dust.
"I think it's hungry," Ingersoll said.
Ham leaned and spat. "So am I." He spurred his horse, which threw beads of mud on Ingersoll's neck as it trotted away.
Ingersoll looked before him, behind. His own feet were heavy with mud and he saw nothing to do but set his upended Stetson in the mud and place the wailing baby ass-first in its crown. When he saw it wouldn't topple out he stood behind the horse, talking to it, and grounded his feet and squatted and with both hands around the horse's fetlock yanked it free, the mud yielding with an anguished and greedy slurp.
It was a long afternoon that they traveled south across the bird-less crackled brown mudscape without ever arriving at its edge. At four it rained and woke the baby but they kept riding. They passed through the rain and through a spell of cool, the air dotted with mosquitoes, before it got hot again. Twice Ingersoll's horse jumped the bloated bodies of goats, his mount so weary and jaded it hardly broke stride. They crossed a patch where strange arcs and teeth of stone pressed through the mud that Ham said must have been a cemetery. As they rode, Ingersoll switched the baby from sore arm crook to sore arm crook, grateful that his horse had fidelity, hardly needed guiding at all.
As they pushed south, Ingersoll held his drinking pouch-he'd mixed sugar and water-for the baby to suck on. He'd also peered in its swaddle and seen its tiny knob, cleaned its backside with a rag dipped in puddle water, and rigged his kerchief to make a new diaper.
They dismounted at the top of a small hill with a swift swollen creek below, a butter churn bobbing against speckled rocks. Ham hobbled the horses, keeping them close and saddled. Ingersoll took off his Stetson and frowned at the rotten smudges on his fingers but lowered the baby in it anyway, extending its arms along the brim. Ham had arranged a few twigs and branches and soon had a fire sputtering, its pops and sparks and orbiting moths a fascination for the baby, who pointed a crooked finger.
They chewed beef jerky and drank water from their canteens and rolled out their bedrolls. Ham unstoppered his pouch of mescal and pushed out his feet like he did when he was fixing to elaborate. His boots, caked in mud, were twice their regular size. Ingersoll reached into his saddlebag and lifted out his taterbug mandolin, a bowl-backed beauty of maple and mahogany, now warped a few degrees because of the rain. They'd found it washed ashore in a hussar trunk that Ham opened by shooting off the lock. Ingersoll, by tuning it a step and a half below standard, could play all the blues keys on it.