Текст книги "Paradise Sky"

Автор книги: Joe R. Lansdale

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

Getting off the horse blanket I had laid out, I got the saddle and the bridle and such that was needed and dressed Jesse up. I led him outside. It was a still night, and the air was sharp. The moon was laying gold light over everything, smooth as butter being spread with a knife. It was odd the world could look so pretty and the air taste so clean and my pa was lying buried under a tree.

I walked Jesse out to the oak, where I said my good-byes to Pa. Mama was buried in a colored cemetery. I thought about visiting her grave but come to the thought that she and Pa was dead and that didn’t matter none. Mama told me once she wanted a better life for me and thought being free would give me a shot. She said, “You get the chance, you got to take it.”

I also remembered her lying sick, dying, touching her hand to my cheek, saying, “Willie, you’re our hope. You got to go on and make something of yourself. You got greatness in you.”

Well, I didn’t know if that was true, but I know Mama believed it, and I wanted to. It was better to follow the dream she wished for me than to try and visit her grave. One had a future, the other just might not.

I started thinking on those stories I had heard about the colored army and made up my mind their outposts would be my destination, which was no short hop and a jump but way out in West Texas. I led Jesse to the draw, then guided him down into it. Once we was there I mounted, and Jesse splashed through the water, on to where that marshland was. We eventually come out on the draw and took the road alongside the marsh for a stretch. We passed where me and Ruggert had our tangle. Even with Jesse plodding like he was dragging a plow, we made a good many miles. The marsh was covered with a mist thick enough it looked like a cloud had fallen out of the sky. We rode through that cloud, the dampness of the mist clamping to us like a wet cloth.

Eventually the sun burned off the mist, and we left the road and wandered between the trees. The ground was mighty clean under them trees until we got close to the river, and then the brambles started to grow.

I had bagged some grain for Jesse, and when it was good and light I stopped and let him eat some of it right out of the bag. Not so much that when he took a drink of water he’d founder. What drinking water we had was what I had put in an old whiskey jug in the barn and tied over the saddle with a cord. And there was the Sabine River, which we was about to cross. That was all-right water for a horse, but I drank from it once when I was out fishing and got the runs so bad I thought I’d be in the outhouse the rest of my life.

The Sabine wasn’t wide, but it was deep there, and Jesse had to swim it. The water was sluggish, but a couple of turtles was showing out and making good time. I watched their snaky heads as they drifted down the river and under the shadows of the overhanging trees along the bank. A fat perch swam by, and he was colorful enough and the light was bright enough so I could see him good, and just the sight of him made me hungry again.

There was a few times when I thought Jesse might tucker out, but he stayed with it, and we got to the other side. I slid down off Jesse, grabbed a handful of the rich, stinking mud from the riverbank, and slapped it on my head wound, which had opened up and was bleeding heavily. I packed some of the muck on Jesse’s bullet graze, and then I walked him until I thought he had blown well enough for me to ride. We continued then, steady as the ticking of a clock, heading out west.

2

My journey out west didn’t get much farther than the middle of East Texas on that day, and by that time I was so hungry I could almost see buttered cornbread crawling on the ground. I fed Jesse again and chewed some of his dried corn myself. It wasn’t even close to satisfying. I couldn’t figure what Jesse saw in it. It wasn’t a thought with a lot of sense behind it, but by that time I didn’t have a lot of sense. I was still sticking to the places where I was less likely to be seen, but I was so tuckered out from the events of the day before, and from sleeping only a short time, I knew only that I was following the sun. Right then, had Ruggert come up on me I would have been done for. I was covered in ticks and chiggers and itched all over, including my privates, and I knew if I stopped I might not get going again.

That’s when the woods began to thin, and I come to a place that had been cleared, though there were still stumps scattered throughout the clearing. I could see some vegetables growing beyond that on some well-plowed land, maybe twenty acres or so. On the other side of the field was a comfy-looking house and a barn and some wood fencing, a feedlot and such. It all looked well cared for, which was a thing I could appreciate. I figured I could also appreciate eating something from the garden.

It had turned off hot by this time. I tied Jesse to a tree, took the gun out of the bag, laid the bag on the ground with the gun on top of it, and crawled out to the garden. I plucked about half a dozen maters off the vines—big, fat ones—then edged my way to the corn and took down about a dozen stalks, some of them bearing several ears of corn. I felt bad for doing it, plundering a person’s crops, but I was at the point where I had to eat or pass out.

Creeping back to where Jesse was tied, I gave him the cornstalks I had pulled and ate the fresh corn. I would have adored to plunge them big, juicy ears into some boiling water with some salt. I ate the maters, or at least four of them. By that time I was full. I gave all that was left to Jesse.

We waited there during the hot of the day. I slept on the pine needles, hoping Jesse wouldn’t step on me. I slept with my hand on the old pistol.

It was cool dark when I woke up. Jesse was standing with his head held low. I got my bag and put my gun in it, led Jesse along the edge of the crops until we got to the end, and began to mosey toward the barn and corral.

The moon was thinner this night, but still good enough to walk by. I could even see an old bull snake slithering over the ground pretty as you please. I felt low enough right then to crawl with him.

I got to the corral. There was some horses there. The barn was open to it, and the horses could go in and out as they pleased.

I took off Jesse’s saddle and bridle and let him loose in the corral. I took Pa’s watch out of the bag and laid it on a fence post. Right then that watch felt heavy as an anvil to me. That watch and Jesse was all I had left of him. Still, he wouldn’t have wanted me to take a horse without payment, even if Jesse and that watch wasn’t worth any one of those fine cayuses in the corral.

I petted Jesse, being sick about leaving him, but figuring whoever owned this nice place would take better care of him than I could. I wanted to leave a note about his plowing virtues and how his nature was and all, but I didn’t have a pencil or paper.

I picked up Jesse’s bridle and reins, dodged through the fence, and started easing up on the horses. I had the pistol in the bag and had tied it on my belt. The horse I chose was a big black one. I tried to calm it, but it kept moving away from me, and it was starting to snort.

I was cooing to it like a dove and was within a foot of laying hands on it when it raised up quick and kicked out with its front legs, knocked me winding. I wasn’t hurt, but it was a close call. I was trying to get up when a big man wearing a droopy hat come out of the shadows, leaned over me, showed me a big hole in the end of a pistol. Even in the moonlight, I could tell he was wearing patched Confederate pants tucked into his tall boots.

“You might want to be still,” he said, “so I don’t have to shoot you.”

He lifted from his bent-over position, and the way the moonlight laid on him I could see his face clear enough under the brim of his hat. It was a rough old face, sharp and ragged, like farm equipment. Part of that raggedness was the tangled whiskers he wore.

“I wasn’t gonna steal nothing,” I said.

“No?” he said. “You could have fooled me.”

“I was leaving a horse and a watch in trade,” I said.

“You was, was you?” He looked about, settled on Jesse. “That bag of bones there was any older it could be the Trojan horse.”

I didn’t know what the Trojan horse was, but I figured it was old.

“I left a watch, too,” I said.

“You did, did you?”

“I did,” I said, and wanted to get up bad, because I had fallen in a big pile of horse shit. Not only was it wet and coming through my shirt, it also smelled something vicious.

“How’s that watch tick?” he asked.

I made a ticking noise with my mouth.

“No, not that,” he said. “Does it work good?”

“Works fine, though the glass is a mite scratched from coins and such in Pa’s pocket.”

“But you can still see the hands well enough?”

“If your eyes are good.”

“Thing is, though, I already got a pocket watch.” After a few moments of studying on me, he said, “I ought to jerk a knot in your dick, son, out here messing in my horse pen.”

“I’m kind of desperate,” I said.

“Are you, now?” he said.

We settled in this position for a while, as if we was posing for a painting, then this fella looks at the sky, says, “You needed to come from the other side, by the barn, climb over the corral, chase the horse into the barn, where you couldn’t be seen. A horse, if he’s in the barn, isn’t so excited about being bothered or about someone trying to separate him from the others. Less likely to make noise.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said. I thought it best to be polite and let him keep the lead.

“Well, it’s a minor horse-stealing detail, but I figured if horse thieving was to be your career, you might want a few pointers.”

“Have you been at that kind of work?” I asked.

“I have, but it was in the war, so we considered it all right to steal a horse.”

“I’m in kind of a war, so I reckon I was seeing it the same way.”

“Were you, now?”

I was propped on my elbows, trying to get a read on the fellow, wondering if I could leap up and dart through the corral slats and make a run for it. But something about the way he held that pistol like it was one of his fingers led me to staying still.

“Tell you what,” he said, after what seemed time enough for daylight to be on the rise. “Why don’t you tell me why you was stealing my horse.”

“You want to hear all that?” I said.

“Asked, didn’t I?”

I considered some lies but decided I wasn’t up to it. I told it like it happened, making sure to mention the first horse I had stolen I had let go and that it was probably already back at the livery doing whatever it was horses liked to do there in the middle of the night.

“That is quite a story,” he said when I finished.

“It’s the truth.”

“Is it, now?”

“True as I can tell it,” I said, which after I said it pained me a little, because it sounded like I had told a lie and dressed it up as the truth.

“You swear it’s true?”

“I swear by it.”

“Did you get along with your mama?” he asked.

“Right well. Got along good with my pa, too. And I like grits and ain’t got no hatred for turnip greens if they’re seasoned right.”

“That pa of yours got burned up?” he said. “That’s the one you liked?”

“He’s the only one I had.”

“I had two daddies,” he said. “One that made me, and the one that raised me. I didn’t get along all that well with either one of them. Well, I don’t know how I’d have gotten along with the one that made me, on account of I never got the chance to find out. Him running off the way he did put a crimp in our relationship.”

“I can see that,” I said.

“You get those ears from your ma or your pa?”

“My pa,” I said.

“That’s a relief. If it was your ma, she was going to spend a lot of time wearing a head scarf. A man can deal with ears like that. All right. Get up.”

He gun-pointed me up to the house, took me around to the back of it, and had me take off my horse-shit-covered shirt and pants and toss away my shoes. He marched me inside the house naked. I was starting to fear the plans this fellow had might be worse than Ruggert’s.

Turned out he had some of his old clothes for me. I put them on like he asked. I had to cuff up the bottoms of the pants slightly; the shirt hung loose on me. I was a young man, but six-two tall, so you can figure the size of my captor. I reckoned him having two inches on me in height and about ten inches across. His shoulders was wide enough he had to turn a little sideways when we come through the door, and his chest looked like a barrel had been stuffed under his shirt. He had a bit of a paunch, but you couldn’t really call him a fat man.

The house itself was good-sized. You could have put our old house into it three, maybe four times, and had a room for Jesse and at least a half dozen chickens and a visiting mule. There was other rooms off the one I was standing in. There was some rugs on the wall, which seemed like an odd place for rugs. There was a bit of a smoky smell in the room, and that was because the stove was leaking wood smoke, the damper not working just right. There was also in the air the smell of something good cooking. It made my stomach knot up like a hangman’s rope.

I wasn’t sure what was going on, but I noticed he put the pistol into its holster and hung his hat on a peg by the door. I took a good look at him now. My guess was when he was young he might have been handsome, but that face he was wearing now looked as if it had been whipped raw, left out in the rain, and sun-dried.

“You ate lately?” he asked.

“No, sir,” I said.

“Let’s fix that first. Got nothing but cornbread, but I got some good molasses to dip it in.”

I studied on him to figure if he was serious. He seemed to be. I said, “That would be just fine, if you can spare the grub.”

“It’s you and me or the ants get it.”

Now, he had lied to me a bit. There was certainly some cornbread and molasses, but it was fresh baked, and he had a big pot of pinto beans to go with it, seasoned with onion, bacon, salt, and a right smart bit of hot garden peppers.

He had me sit down and served me like he was working for me. It made me nervous. I hadn’t never had no white person do anything like that for me. He heaped beans on my plate, brought out a big jar of molasses with a ladle in it, then he brought me a cup and poured some coffee.

He fixed his own plate then, sat down at the other end, and eyeballed me. I said, “Thank you, sir, for not shooting me and for feeding me.”

“Well, I can still shoot you after you eat.”

That stopped a spoonful of beans midway to my mouth.

“Nah,” he said, showing me he had a nice set of teeth. “I’m just joshing with you. So you got old Sam Ruggert after you?” He of course knew about this, as I had laid it all out to him honestly while lying in horse shit in the corral.

“Yes, sir,” I said, and by this time I was a little bold, knifing up some butter and putting it on my cornbread, heaping spoonfuls of sugar into my coffee, touching it off with milk from a pitcher. “You know him, sir?”

“Me and him went to the war together. I used to be a preacher in the church we attended.”

“Preacher?” I said.

“Before the war. It was an easy living. They paid you for it, and you could empty the collection plates every Sunday. It’s a delightful racket. It don’t seem right to me now that I’ve quit being religious. I have come to think that if your job is to spread the message and get paid for it, then you don’t believe it. And I got tired of having to figure out how to explain the Bible saying one thing in one place and another in another place. Mostly you just preached around it—picked out the things that sounded good and ignored the rest. Finally I decided I’d be a Christian without all that Christ nonsense.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I just try and do right because it’s right, and I don’t need no other reason. Goodness for goodness’ sake. Which is not to say that if you mess with me I won’t shoot your goddamn balls off.”

It wasn’t a smart question to ask, but I was itching to ask nonetheless. “Before the war, did you have slaves?”

“Four, and they were hard workers. Then one day, while I was still a preacher, I came across the stories about slaves in Egypt again, and about how they were freed by Moses and ran off, and he parted the waters, and all manner of shit that’s just too hard to believe. But it got me thinking. Here I am talking about them poor Hebrew slaves, and tearing up as I preached on it like I was there with them, and I got me four slaves at home. There was what I like to call a goddamn conflict. How’s them beans?”

“Fine, sir.”

“Good. You see, I had me one older slave that was always telling me how close we was, how he was glad I fed and housed him and such, and when the War between the States come, I sold them other three and kept him. I left him to take care of the property while I was away fighting, thinking we’d have those Yankees whipped in six months. Well, we didn’t. When I finally come limping back here, the whole place was run-down, and Chase, which is what I called the old colored man, had run off and made his way up north, taking some of my goods with him. I thought right then he didn’t love me nearly so much as he said, and I thought, too: why should he? My wife, who was alive for another year before the pox got her, said she couldn’t believe he’d do that after all we’d done for him. He even took a big shit in the middle of the floor. Right there.”

He pointed out the scene of the crime, which wasn’t too far from the table.

“Slipped in here and done that before he left so my wife would find it.”

I studied where he was pointing.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “That’s been years ago, and it’s been cleaned up some time now.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“It doesn’t sound like much, but that thing right there, him doing that, running off, got me thinking maybe a colored slave wasn’t so different from a Hebrew slave, and I give in to another way of thinking. After I did I could never preach again. I was ruined for it. I had always used the sermon about Ham, who saw his father, Noah, naked and how Noah cursed Ham’s son for it. Cursed him because his father had seen his balls. Not Ham himself, but his son—Canaan—and all his descendants. Made them black, is how I was taught, and doomed to slavery for that ball watching. It made sense to me then, cause I hadn’t never thought on it. After the war I did consider it. I didn’t go around trying to spy me some men’s balls, but I’ve seen a few, which is a thing that will happen if you’re in the army or in a Yankee prison camp, like I was. Seeing them balls and them seeing mine didn’t make me want to curse no one with slavery for generations. It was bullshit, and I seen that clear as a sunny day.”

“You actually seen my balls,” I said, referring to my changing clothes in front of him.

He recollected a little, then laughed. “I guess I have, though I didn’t lay considerable observation on them.”

“I could lay a curse on you,” I said, “and from now on all white men will be slaves.”

He really laughed then, so hard in fact I thought he was going to fall off his chair and roll on the floor. It wasn’t that funny, but I guess it was causing him to let something stove up inside of him out. Laughing was good for that.

When he got his mind and mouth in line again, he said, “You know, Noah must have had one ugly set to have been offended so bad to have them spied on. I mean, that’s something, isn’t it? You’ve peeped on my nut sack, so a whole generation and their generations gets cursed.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “Them must have been the ugliest nuts ever hung between a pair of legs.”

He grinned, and then his mind settled into something darker. The grin washed off his face like a stick-drawn line in the dirt washed away by fast water. “You know, my son went off in that war, too. Got killed the first day he was in a battle. He’s buried some sad place up in Virginia. He fought far away from me. Over in another part of the war—another theater, you might call it. Sometime after it happened, after I was out of the prison camp and home, a fellow that had been with him looked me up and gave me Tad’s pocket watch. He said it had stopped the moment he was shot and therefore was some kind of recognition from God of his death. Well, I had already come to that realization about Ham and Noah and Canaan, and had come to certain conclusions about slavery, but this clinched it. I’m thinking, my boy gets shot, and his watch stops, and that’s a sign from God? He couldn’t make that bullet miss or bring my boy home to me or bring him back from the dead, but he’d go to the trouble to stop a watch? How can they be sure his watch stopped at the exact moment of death in all the confusion of battle? Maybe it just stopped because he fell on it or some such. Before that moment, little signs like that meant something to me. A cloud shaped like an angel’s wings. A hawk flying overhead with a snake in its mouth.

“What happened to me when that fellow gave me that watch and went on his way was I gave the whole thing furious thought. God’s bucket from then on didn’t tote water. That bucket had a hole in it. I come to think on that watch some more, and it come to me that God wasn’t all loving. He was like a big watchmaker, and we were the innards of his watch, and this here earth we stand on is the watch’s slippery surface. Once God got the watch made, set it ticking, he sat back and said, ‘Well, good luck to you son of a bitches, cause I’m done.’ ”

I studied on his reasoning a bit, and damn if it didn’t make some sense to me, which scared me a little. If the big man was right, we was all on our own out here.

He looked at me just then, as if watching a bug crawl across my face, said, “Pie?”

“Excuse me, sir?”

“Want a piece of pie? I got an apple pie in the warmer, and it looked to me it might have turned out all right, though it’s slightly sunk in the middle.”

It did turn out all right, and we ate it up, the whole damn pie. Drank about a pot of coffee, then he took me out back and we walked to a field that lay beyond what I had seen before. It was cleared, except for a few stumps and a giant oak out there in the middle of it, and there were chairs under it. We sat in them. Above us was this big gap in the limbs, like a window between tree and sky. You could look up and see the stars real good. That’s what we did, him explaining to me that there was things called constellations, and positioned as we were in our chairs, we was looking right at one. He told me what it was, but the name of it has faded from my mind now. I didn’t really care about any of that right then, so maybe it never really stuck to me. I was full of food and felt worn to a nubbin, in spite of all that coffee. Somewhere along the way, between him chattering about this set of stars and another, my head tossed back and I closed my eyes and slipped off to sleep like I was gently sliding down a muddy slope into a field of soft, dry grass and darkness.