know?”
“You rarely have a rough word for these people, that is all.”
“I find their faith childish today. I lack patience for it when we are thus far behind in our own programme,” he said.
“I thought you were happy with our pace. I had no idea.” He angled the regal head in a dubious way to see Lewis better, and to register concern and doubt.
“How can I be happy with this pace when we are ten years late?” Lewis asked. “We are finished before we’ve begun!”
Moreover, the whole nation saw how tardy they were, and that the prize itself, left languishing thus long on the rocky Pacific coast, was of doubtful value by now. And though he was only midway through life’s journey, as the saying went, the chance in his hands to make up for it seemed blown apart, lost, which gave his heart a pain and relentless desperation.
Just then, cries went up, and the search party issued in a body from the woods, pulling Reed, the deserter, along by a rope wound ’round his wrists. They all looked sore and beat, but the hunters were grinning and not contrite at having ignored his orders to put Reed to death.
“O, for God’s sake!” he cried. “What is that man doing back?” For all knew about the order—it was all they talked about since its issue.
“Are you stupid?” he asked them, coming up. “Are you really so dull as this? You spare this criminal?”
The men made no answer but simply stood ’round with smiles and averted faces, like bad boys ashamed of their species.
“O! Tie him to a tree! Only do not make me look at him.”
And so Reed sat on the ground in hobbles just within the trees and looked at no one and said nothing, eating furiously of anything thrown near him, for all the day and late into evening. Finally, when he was all but hidden in the shadows, the firelight reaching only one part of his face, a single eye, Lewis came into the thicket to talk to him. Reed breathed rather hard and showed his ordeal in his sunken eye and cheek. He stank powerfully and gave off a heat and humidity and seemed to faintly steam and tremble in the night air.
“Ugh! You stink!” Lewis said, to which Reed made no sign, as if deaf or sleepwalking. “Come, let’s hear your reasons, man. I want to know them.”
“Don’ have none, Cap’n,” he said, though his jaw hadn’t actually seemed to move. His eyes were wide, surprised, as if unable to contain something they’d seen. He rocked slightly and even grunted, sotto voce.
“What is the trouble, Reed?”
“Ah’m sick and need ta shit!”
He was holding his hands tightly together, and seemed to have an object concealed.
“Reed, what do you have there?” he asked.
“Dunno what ’tis,” he said. “I foun’ it!”
“Let me have a look at it or I’ll keep you from the latrine,” Lewis said. Squinting, biting his lip, the man was suffering and not trusting him. Then he opened his hand and let the object roll down the little incline onto a patch of sand, where it stopped.
“What on earth?” he said. “Is it a ball? It appears to be a made thing.”
“Never seen nothin’ like it,” Reed gasped. “Foun’ it in a creek bottom!”
At first touch, its pebbled, desiccated, dimpled surface felt like bone. It had lain underwater for a positive age, it appeared, for its outside dented under thumbnail pressure, but sprang back when let go. Its curious chevron marking was of India ink, mostly worn away.
“Two hunnerd an’ eighty-eight,” Reed said. “I counted ’em.”
“It ’pears to have suffered a pox epidemic,” Lewis said, nodding. “May-be ’tis ivory. Sometimes ivory will develop such pits as these.”
“They was more,” Reed said. “I jest grabbed the one.”
“Could you find the spot again?” Lewis asked. My, but it had an uncanny feel, like nothing he’d put a hand to before.
“Might could,” Reed said, grimacing.
“I can have you shot for your crime, Reed,” he said.
Reed shook his head. “I don’ care, Cap’n, I surely don’.”
“What do you mean you don’t care? You want to live don’t you?”
“I don’ know,” he said, eyes tearing, getting a very long, hangdog face. “I might jest run off again. I might throw myself in the river and drown. I don’ think I want no more o’ this. Even if I do get to the Pacific, when I get back home, I won’ be nobody else but me and have to go right back to plowin’ or detasselin’. It makes you sore and sick jest thinkin’ of a twelve hour day in the sun, breakin’ your back, and for what? So you can make jest enough for next year’s seed! I tell ya, it ain’ worth it! I wish those boys’d shot me. I told ’em to go ahead and do it, but they wouldn’! This here’s hard work jest to get back someplace where more work’s waitin’! I jest a-soon you killed me, Cap’n.”
Reed chewed his way through this lengthy sermon like he was eating a cord-load of firewood.
“No, I’ve seen this, Private,” Lewis said. “This sorrow you purport to suffer is nothing but a fever, and I have a touch of it myself lately. And here is the cure! The guard will take you to the latrine, and then we shall see to you!”
Reed was led away, hobbling in his deer-hide shackles. With the air rather improved, Lewis sat examining the ball of bone. He tried it with his teeth and made a respectable gouge. It tasted of nothing, the river. He started up suddenly and called out for Sergeant Floyd and instead got Sergeant Pryor, as Floyd was on sick call with pain in the lower gut.
“Sergeant, I want a rather gorgeous beating for this man,” he said. “He is not only guilty but disaffected in spirit. I want him to forget his former self and the woman who gave him birth. Make it sudden and cruel and have it duly repeated until we achieve some measure of correction. D’you understand me?”
The sergeant saluted and rushed off, shouting out names and giving orders to take arms with green switches, nine to a man, or tamping rods, and a gauntlet was duly assembled, toward which Reed was herded and his ankle hobbles cut. In double line, the men stood jostling each other for room, and grinning at Reed and slapping switch bundles on the palm or a meaty thigh, and calling out to him in brute tones, in apt mockery of the Sirens calling sailors to join them below, for a frolic, and to be cut to ribbons amidst the coral. Driven by a kick to his posterior, Reed waded among them and greeted a hail of blows that almost turned him around. The blood sprang out from his skin and in amazement he discovered pain, and fled forward down the line and out, on his face in the grass. And was made to rise, whence it happened again, with more violence and a blow that all but broke his nose, the men applying blows of fatal force if done with a medium stick of kindling. Reed’s skin turned from red to black as the wounds gathered dirt and grime. He fell out the far end of the tunnel on one knee, and was picked up and tossed back in, and at last made sounds, and his eyes flew open wide as they could go, and he cried out with all the amazement of Caesar stabbed by Brutus, that any world no matter how dread could invent such agony. He lay panting on his face and was bodily raised up and turned about, the men now worked into a rather awful furor, their cheeks and eyes blazing like those of fiends, and their bodies slick with sweat and flecked with Reed’s blood and other filth. Reed, enraged but crying out in pain too, gave a bellow and rushed headlong in, and was met by four square walls of brutal punishment that had no other aim but to end his life, to batter the soul free of the body or else pound it deeper into hiding. He ended on his naked back on the bank of cocklebur and, unconscious, was examined by the sergeant, who pronounced it at last sufficient.
6. “…a double spoken man…”
On Saturday, Bill and