‘Don’t mess with the Woodpecker God,’ I said to myself.
‘Wow!’ said Took, who was up and watching from the canoe. The curtain of flames marched off toward the east, crowning trees, lapping at their trunks.
‘Let’s go home,’ I said.
We found the trail at the same time the Huastecas found us.
They were to our left, the fire was to the right in a blazing arc a couple of kilometers long. The air was filled with escaping birds. The woods glinted with animal eyes, stopping and bounding away.
The Huastecas yelled. We saw them by the light of the flames. They saw us the same way. There were a dozen of them half a kilometer away.
‘Can you breathe smoke?’ I asked Took-His-Time.
‘Maybe.’
We ran for the fire, met deer coming out the other way. Before we even got close, smoke and hot air seared our lungs. An arrow flew by, its feathers bursting into flames as it ricocheted from a burning limb.
‘They won’t follow us in here,’ I said.
Took slowed, jumped some embers, slipped, fell into a smoking bush. The air was filled with cinders; burning leaves coaled into my cheeks as I bent over him.
Now there was froth on the blood from his wound. I took out the morphine injector, put it into his arm, and punched.
He went to sleep.
I pushed a few more strips of cloth into the wound, picked him up and put him over my shoulders in a fireman’s carry. I walked with my burden through the ragged towers of flame that closed us in on every side.
Trees groaned and fell, spouting sparks, throwing fiery branches onto others. A smoking owl flew by. A raccoon ran into a hedge of fire. Smoke curled up from underfoot.
The world was orange, red, smoky. Feathers on the woodpecker costume began to singe and curl. I stepped on something live; I think it bit me. I staggered into cul-de-sacs of heat and fire, and back out again.
I walked until the bottom of the costume floated up around my waist.
I was surprised to find myself in water.
I carried Took for a long, long time. I was numb now, my lungs were burned, my legs had lost all feeling. I couldn’t feel anything under them either. I slogged on through the water.
All the animals were there. Every bit of high ground was filled with eyes reflecting the fires, from the ground up to the tops of small trees.
Snakes and alligators swam by in the red-gold glare, bumping into my legs, backing off and going around. Something huge blotted out the light from the fire on one side, then was gone before I could see what it was.
The deeper I went into the swamp, the stranger it became. The glow was from both sides now. The fire had ringed or crossed the bayou somehow. Mist sprang up. I could no longer see the water, just a moving curtain two meters high in front of me. Overhead, the stars were obscured by roiling patches of smoke.
It got cold in spite of the fire. My teeth began to chatter. I was so tired I was trying to nod off as I walked. Things flitted in and out of my vision. I would jerk fully awake and they would be gone.
There was a third smudge of light ahead; when the mists cleared for a few seconds I could see a blood-red moon with a bite out of it hanging in the east, like a half-closed rabbit’s eye.
I was carrying Took now between cypress knees and stumps, thick and close-growing. The mists closed in again. I knew I was okay as I walked toward the glow that was the moonrise.
I entered shallower water. Took was an iron weight across my back. I moved him, shifting him only a few centimeters. I was too tired to put him down and try again.
‘Isn’t he heavy?’ asked a voice, long and low and booming through the mists.
‘He’s not heavy,’ I said, ‘he’s my brother.’
The moon was gone. There was a shadow before me on the water, black and long.
I looked up. A gigantic cypress tree stood before me. It had a limb halfway up that grew straight out from the trunk.
I looked down again, quick as I could. There was something on the limb, something half as big as the tree, something that blotted out the moonlight and threw the shadow over me and half the clearing.
‘Who are you to wear the raiment of a god?’ asked the voice. ‘You do not believe!’
My mouth wouldn’t work.
‘WHO ARE YOU?’ it asked again. The long crested shadow before me turned, as if its great eye were scrutinizing me.
‘I believe now,’ I said. ‘I believe in this!’
‘You have burned my woods!’ it said, its voice edging upward. ‘The lightning can burn my woods. Whole nations of men can burn my woods. One man cannot burn my forests!’
The shadow moved menacingly. I jumped backwards. Took whimpered.
‘No more,’ I said. ‘Never again.’
The shadow moved left and right as if surveying the damage all around.
‘I didn’t mean to burn your forests,’ I said. ‘I’m bringing Took-His-Time home. I’m bringing the raiment back to the temple. I’ll never touch it again as long as I live.’
‘Easy for you to say,’ said the dooming voice. It was quiet a moment.
‘Tell them all,’ it began, and its voice had changed, ‘tell them all a great judgment has come on them, and that I can’t help them any more.
‘All the gods are going tonight. We will not be back. Tell them they are on their own, tell them …’ And here the voice changed again, became a little less godlike, ‘tell them Hamboon Bokulla was right, he and the others. Tell them Death is God now; he is alive, he is walking. Tell them, Yazoo, that I wish them well.’
The great shadow lifted from the water. The moon came back. The sound of flapping wings, huge, close, grew lower, farther away to the west, was gone.
I heard its cry from far off, once, twice, sounding like ‘Good god, good god.’
‘Good God!’ I yelled. ‘Good God!’
The sun was coming up. The fire was dying all around. I pulled Took from my left shoulder to change him to the other.
He was dead.
Bessie XIII
They were losing the battle.
Even with the highway crews and their machinery, the water crept up the dam.
The state water people would neither close the gates upstream nor open those down. Rivers were out of their banks for miles, farms were being covered and lost. The Crimstead house across the way was swallowed up – the state police had come the day before to help them evacuate.
Crowds had come to watch since the governor had paid his visit. LaTouche was charging them a dime apiece to watch. Two state troopers had been sent to keep them up on the bluff, out of the mound sites.
Perch had caught a bad cold. They had made him go back to the Dixie Hotel. Their own work crews were reinforcing the dam. The highway crew was leaving; they were needed to save lives, keep bridges intact.
‘Just two more days,’ said Jameson. ‘Maybe we can find out in two more days.’ He looked up at the rain. ‘We’ll have both mounds down to the ground by then. It’s too damn wet to do anything right!’
None of them, Thompson included, had had more than a few hours’ sleep for the last two days.
Kincaid and Jameson had removed the conical mound, then started on the platform. All the grave goods were in two tents now. Broken pottery, pipes, weapons, the breastplate and head decoration of beaten copper, unidentifiable rusted things, more cartridges, shells, beaten gold ornaments were in the sorting tent.
The second was full of skeletons, the first they’d exposed from the platform mound, one of the horses, the upright chief’s skeleton. Some of the skulls, exhibiting exit wounds, were in there among them.
The weather had turned the others to powder as they were uncovered.
The cook tent now covered the platform mound. Kincaid’s tent, and one other, were over the horse mound.