“What I mean is, you just stole from the wrong high-yellow woman,” Hugh said. “You wouldn’t have got all that bad time if you’d taken it from some darky woman down in the market. You just ain’t supposed to mess with them gentlemen’s quadroons. That’s a rule they got down here.”
She lied because she left her purse in another white man’s home, he thought. The lawyer told me in the jail that you can make a liar of her in front of the court, that you can even suggest she’s not a white woman and hence is capable of receiving the insult, but you can never accuse the other gentleman, who is seated next to the cuckold, of lying at the same time, or otherwise they will make sure that you never reach the penitentiary. Don’t you understand that, Holland? It’s their strange conception of honor.
“You got to stop grieving on it, boy,” Hugh said. “You might not believe this now, but one day you’ll be out of here. It ain’t that way with me. I been in here twice before, and with all that time they give me for killing that fellow, I might get buried here. They’ll just dig a hole back in the swamp and drop me in it.”
“Hush up, Hugh.”
Hugh Allison’s skin was sunburned almost black, and his bleached hair was shot through with gray and hung over his head like a tangle of snakes. He had a dozen scars on his body from knife and pistol wounds, and there was a large raised welt above his collarbone where an arrowhead lay embedded under the skin. He was almost blind in one eye, and the pupil stared coldly out of his face like a black marble. He claimed to have been a member of the Harpe gang on the Natchez Trace years ago, and said that he was there when the posse sawed Micajah Harpe’s living head from his shoulders.
“You ought to listen to an older man,” he said. “There’s only one rule to living in here. You take your opportunities.”
“What are you saying?”
“You been in the dog box three times, each time for running when you didn’t have no chance of getting away. The next time they lock you in there they’re going to leave you until your brains melt and run out your ears.”
Son looked out through the bars of the pen at the mist rising off the river and the light swelling into the sky. The moon was still hardly visible in the dark blueness of the west.
“I can’t make ten years,” he said.
“You don’t listen, do you, boy? How do you think I lived all these years? There’s been many a man that tried to put me under — Indians, redcoats, high sheriffs, these Frenchy guards — and I always come out ahead of them. Because you learn to fight like an Indian. You shoot from behind a tree. You don’t fight the other man on his ground.”
“I want to sleep,” another man said from his bunk.
“Don’t that make sense to you?” Hugh said. His cold black eye was wide in the half-light. “One of these days you’ll get your chance. Maybe both of us will.”
“Did you ever try to run?”
“Hell, yes, I did, and I done it just like you. We was felling cypress about five miles north of here, and Landry let me go into the bushes to take a shit and I kept right on a-going. I didn’t make a quarter mile before they run me down. They put me in the dog box for three days. The hinges on the inside was so hot they scalded my hands. I don’t remember nothing after the second day. When they took me out my head and my knees was full of splinters.”
“Be quiet and let us sleep in the time we got left,” the man in the next bunk said.
“Bother me again and you’ll be sleeping with my fist upside your head,” Hugh said.
At the far end of the camp the door opened on the log building where the guards slept, and Son saw Emile Landry framed in the light from the lantern on the table inside. He wore soiled gray pantaloons tucked inside his boots, a split-tailed coat, and a short stovepipe hat; and in his hands he carried the horse quirt that was weighted in the handle with lead. His brother Alcide Landry stepped out of the log building behind him. They were ten years apart in age, but they could have been twins. Their torsos were unnaturally large for the rest of their bodies, the shoulders an axehandle wide, and they seemed to have no necks below their small cannonball heads. No one knew where they came from or what they had been before they became guards in the camp. Even the oldest prisoners said the Landrys had always been there. Occasionally, one of them would take the riverboat down to New Orleans, but otherwise they lived almost the same life as their prisoners.
Son watched the older one, Emile, walk to the iron bell that hung on the oak tree by the row of pens. He rang the clapper three times, then unbolted the pen where the trusties slept. The trusties filed out in their dirty, blue-striped uniforms and began stoking the glowing ash in the stone oven where all the camp food was cooked. They put one block of cornbread in each wooden bowl and poured molasses over it out of a crock that was swarming with flies.
Emile Landry opened the food slit to Son’s pen and let the trusty push in eight bowls and a single pan of water with a cup floating in it.
“Bayou Benoit today,” he said, and walked behind the trusty to the next pen. The low clouds on the horizon had turned to pools of fire.
“Oh shit, that’s where all that quicksand’s at,” a man said.
“It ain’t no worse than where we was yesterday,” another man said.
“You ain’t been up there. We cut that bayou three years ago. A whole chain got stuck in it. They was fighting in the water and tearing at willow branches, and by the time Landry come back with a mule and a rope, every one of them was drowned.
“Shut up,” Hugh said. “Them men got drowned because they was scared before they went in there.”
“And you ain’t?” the other prisoner said.
“Not of no Louisiana mud. Just of the dumb sonofabitch that might be on the chain next to me,” he said.
Emile Landry came back to the pen with the trusty and unbolted the door. The brass butt of his pistol hung out of his coat pocket.
“Man number one on the stump,” the trusty said.
One at a time they stepped out of the pen onto a sawed cypress stump, and the trusty ran the chain through the iron ring banded on their ankles as though he were threading fish on a stringer. The water barrels, the canvas sacks of smoked carp for lunch, and the axes and saws were loaded on the mules, while the men stood silently in the purple dawn. Then the trusties brought up the saddled horses for the guards, and the chains of men filed past the dog boxes, each man in step with the other, behind the switching tail of Emile Landry’s mare.
They crossed Bayou Benoit on the chain, the brown water swirling around their chests, and each man’s heart clicked inside him as he waited for the moment he could grab for one of the limbs and pull his weight out of the water. The convict in front of Son was an eighteen-year-old blond boy from Natchez, with thick white scars from the guard’s quirt up and down his spine. He grabbed onto a willow branch with both hands and lifted himself violently out of the water. A three-foot moccasin that had been coiled on the limb above exploded out of the shadows like a piece of black electricity, its white mouth open wide, and sank its teeth into the boy’s throat. He slapped at the writhing snake with his hands, his eyes bulging with shock and terror, and screamed, “Oh God, I am killed.”
Son caught the moccasin behind the head and squeezed until the jaws opened and the fangs came loose from the boy’s throat, then threw it downstream as far as he could. The boy fell backward into the water on his buttocks and his head went under as though he were resting for a moment, and Son had to grab him under the arms and pull him onto the mudbank.