“Get some wet chewing tobacco on it, Mr. Landry,” Son shouted up at the guard on horseback.
“Il est mort,” Landry said.
“No, he ain’t. My uncle back in Tennessee got hit in the face with a copperhead, and we bled him and kept tobacco juice on it, and it sucked that poison right out of there.”
The guard motioned to two trusties with his quirt, and they unlocked the bolt on the head of the chain and slid it through the ring on the boy’s ankle. The gashes in his throat were turning blue, and his eyes were dilated and shot with blood.
“La-bas,” Landry said.
The trusties carried the boy between them back on the sandy flat and laid him at the edge of the canebrake. Son waited for something else to happen, but it didn’t. The other men were taken off the chain, the trusties went to unloading the mules, and Emile Landry looked first at his pocket watch, then squinted upward at the sun with his small, round face.
“Ain’t you going to try to save him?” It wasn’t even a direct question, just a simple statement of incredulity.
The guard walked his horse back into the shade, removed his short stovepipe hat, wiped his hand along the sunburned line of his brow, then pinched the hat down on his cannonball head again.
“I’ll suck it out myself, Mr. Landry.”
“Shut up, Son,” Hugh said quietly behind him.
The men filed past the mules and picked up their axes and saws and went to work on the cypress trees along the bayou’s bank. In the dappled light of the canebrake Son could see a white foam forming at the corners of the boy’s mouth.
“You murdering sonofabitch,” he said.
He heard the horse quirt suck through the air behind him, and in the edge of his vision he saw Alcide Landry’s livid face just as the weighted handle ripped across his ear and sent him sprawling in the sand. He rose to his knees, his mind roaring with light and sound, the blood already running down into his striped jumper, and then Alcide Landry’s boot came up so hard between his buttocks that he thought he was going to urinate.
They chained his hands around a tree for the rest of the day, and gave him a single cup of water while the others ate lunch. The boy died alone that afternoon. Son looked over at him in the growing shadows, at the flies buzzing around his eyes and caked mouth, and for a moment he thought he saw his own face on the boy’s.
That night at the camp he knelt over the log, his filthy cotton breeches pulled down to his knees, while Emile Landry whipped the quirt across the white skin fifteen times. Then the trusties carried him trembling to the dog box.
It was a soft, lilac evening when they opened the lid and walked him to his bunk. He couldn’t straighten his legs, and his knees caved each time he tried to set his full weight down. The late sun was a red flame through the mauve-colored trees across the river. When they dropped him on his bunk and bolted the pen door behind him, he thought he heard the rumble of dry thunder beyond the horizon.
It was raining softly when he awoke in the morning and the wind from the river blew the mist inside the pen. He knew it was Sunday because it was already past the time when the work gangs should have been deep into the marsh. He straightened his back against the hard boards of the bunk and felt the pain of the dog box slip along his spine and make his groin go weak.
“He really laid the quirt on you, didn’t he?” Hugh said.
“He warms to his work.”
“You look like they baked you in a skillet. Drink some of this coffee and stretch out your stomach. The worst thing in that box is not having no water in you. You get so damn thirsty in there you drink what little they give you all at once, and then piss it out in your pants. When you try to space out your sips, you watch it steam away in the heat. They know how to make a man work against himself. I heared the French got a prison island off South America somewhere that’s so bad nobody believes it till they get there.”
Son drank his coffee slowly and sucked on the boiled beans at the bottom of the cup.
“I got a treat for you. Take a chew of this,” Hugh said, and handed him a dark twist of tobacco. “That ought to make you right again. I take care of you, don’t I?”
“Where’d you get it?”
“Last night a whiskey trader come upriver to see the Landrys and they all got drunk and had a big time shooting at an alligator out on a sandbar. Before the trader left I called him over to the pen and gave him a mouth harp for the tobacco and two cups of whiskey that liked to fried my hair. When I woke up this morning I thought I had broken glass inside me. I never thought whiskey could be that bad. That trader must put dead animals in his still or something.”
“You ain’t got a mouth harp.”
“Well, it wasn’t mine but the fellow who owned it couldn’t play it worth a shit, anyway.”
“Hugh, you better stop getting people mad at you in here.”
“What are they going to do? Kick me out of here and send me back to New Orleans?”
Son couldn’t help laughing, although the movement sent a shudder of pain down his back again.
“Today we’re going to wash our clothes and bathe in the river and take an afternoon nap like gentlemen,” Hugh said. “Tomorrow your body won’t have no memory of that box. But this time you listen to me. You don’t go up against them people again when they got it all on their side. What you done was plumb stupid. Landry wanted that boy to die. Every one of us he don’t have to feed means money in his purse to spend on whores in New Orleans.”
“You don’t let a man die like that.”
“Where do you think you are? The regular rules don’t have nothing to do with this place. I ain’t even going to talk with you about it anymore. You don’t learn nothing even when it hits you alongside the head.”
There was a crack of lightning across the sky, and the rain began to fall harder, dimpling the wide sweep of the Mississippi. A trusty ran from the log house toward their pen with a set of wrist manacles in his hands, the three-foot loop of chain swinging against his body, his head bent against the rain. He unbolted the door and stepped inside the pen, the water sluicing off his straw hat. He coughed up phlegm and spit it on the floor.
“All right, Allison and Holland outside,” he said.
“What the hell for?” Hugh said.
“There’s a mule stuck in the mudbank a half-mile downriver. You’re going to pull him out.”
“Who says we got to do it?” Hugh said.
“Landry wants two men, and he didn’t say nothing about taking a vote.”
“Holland just come out of the dog box,” Hugh said.
“And I just had to empty out the slop jars after they was drinking all night. Things is tough everywhere these days.”
Hugh bit a chew off his tobacco twist, put the rest inside his jumper, and stood up from his bunk.
“Where’d you get that?” the trusty said.
“I took it away from a trusty that wanted to make my day a little harder.”
“You give me what you got there and you can sleep this morning.”
“You know why you’re a trusty? It’s because you like toting for them and cleaning their slop jars and jumping around like a monkey on a wire. They could turn you loose and you’d find somebody just like them. They understand your kind real good.”
“You know what’s going to happen to you, Allison? You’re going to grow old in here. You’re going to forget when you come in or how many years you spent here, and you’ll start pissing on yourself at night and putting your food in your beard and asking people when they’re going to let you out.”
Hugh leaned toward the bars and spit a stream of tobacco juice into the rain.
“Maybe I ought to tell you something to make your day more interesting,” he said. “A couple of them trusties you bunk with was with me and Wiley Harpe and Sam Mason on the Natchez Trace. They owe me a lot of favors, number one being I never told about a whole family they tomahawked to death up in Tennessee. Now, you think about that awhile, pigshit.”