Peregrine Fontana awoke belly up in the canebrake. His wrists tied behind his back and bound to his ankles with what felt like wire fencing. All that remained of his dream was the sound of earth and the stone tablet, green with moss. His headstone maybe. Or someone else’s. First, there were fields of these stones, each of them shimmering like the face of a river, and then there was just this chalky one, and it looked like a Dr. Crepeau’s Lemon Lozenge.
Peregrine’s tongue was swollen, his lips salty, coppery with blood. His head, especially behind his eyes, throbbed, and it burned where he’d been struck. He remembered the two men now, how they walked into his camp and wondered could they join him for coffee. One wore a gassy-smelling poultice on his cheek, held there with a belt of blue flannel, He remembered how they made him kneel. How the one raised the butt of his Springfield rifle and brought it down on Peregrine’s skull.
They must have kicked him around some, which would explain the ache in the small of Peregrine’s back. Peregrine shut his eyes and featured the open wound at the peak of his skull, his moist brain exposed and twitching. He breathed. His nose, at least, wasn’t broken. He caught the vinegary scent of the scorpion that he knew must be nearby, might even be that tickle on his neck.
The soldier with the toothache, the petulant one, told the soldier from Massachusetts how, no, it didn’t look to him like no arsonist’s dawn. “I’ve seen that kind of pink afore,” he said. “That’s the pink your vitals get when they squirt out your body.” Peregrine tried to lift his head but could not see the color of the sky. He thought about his little family, wondered would he see them again. Not likely. He shut his eyes and looked at Velma, the boys’ mama, her wide back bent over the fire pit. He saw Twyla, his other wife, just a girl really, boiling rootstock, singing to herself, that song about Mister, here’s your mule. Funny, he couldn’t imagine his boys right now. Must be off checking bird snares in the cottonwoods.
The soldier from Massachusetts, Private Amos Everett Peabody, tossed a possum bone into the dying fire. He stood, wiped his hands on the hips of his trousers, and walked toward Peregrine. “We appreciate your hospitality, Pelican.”
“Peregrine.”
“Everything we have, we owe to you.” Private Peabody bent down to take a look at Peregrine’s head. “You want to have that looked at. ‘Cept you won’t have time to. Would’ve killed most men, I suspect.” Private Peabody got hold of Peregrine’s left leg and hollered to his friend. “Give me a hand here, Cal.” The two Union soldiers slid their captive on his belly to the crest of the bluff above Bayou Maçon. Private Peabody rolled Peregrine onto his side. The sky was rosy, Peregrine saw, like the blush of Twyla’s breast.
“Butternut bark,” Peregrine said.
“How’s that, friend?”
“For your tooth. That poultice you wore last night won’t help. You need to boil some butternut bark and rinse the tooth with the warm broth.”
Cal tested his tender cheek with his finger and winced. “You some kind of tooth dentist, are you?”
“Nuh-uh.”
“Then shut your damn trap.”
“Take it easy, Cal,“ Private Peabody said.
“I hate airified people,” Cal said. He looked down at Peregrine. “Think they’re so clever.”
“You could try it,” Private Peabody said. “Better than stuffing a leech inside your mouth.”
Cal hunkered down beside Peregrine and smiled out the side of his mouth. Peregrine cold smell the abscessed tooth. Cal appeared wheyfaced and scurfy.
“Are you ascared, Pelican?”
“Ain’t my name.”
“You’re bad scared, I bet.”
“Why you doing this to me?”
Cal smiled up at Private Peabody. Then he laughed. “Oh, just acause,” he said. Cal stood and drew his Colt from its holster.
“Ain’t no harm done,” Peregrine said.
Private Peabody laughed at that. He kicked dirt on the embers of the fire. “We all done some harm, Pelican.”
“Ain’t even my war.”
“You’re part of it now,” Cal said. He pointed his pistol at Peregrine’s jaw.
“We’re all of us sinners, Pelican,” Private Peabody said. “Take Cal here. Used to be he was this sweet little volunteer from Vermillion County, Illinois, who was sick a bit with nostalgia. But since that toothache come on him, he’s been a vicious son of a bitch. Yes, sir. Sliced up three Confederates we came across along the Brushy Bayou. The first two never woke up, and the third wished he hadn’t.”
“He couldn’t scream or nothing what with all that business sliding out his throat,” Cal said. He stood, holstered his pistol, and stretched out his cramped left leg. “I’d say he looked bewildered.”
“That’s what pain can do to a reasonable boy, Pelican,” Private Peabody said. “Cal’s only sixteen, you know.”
“Speaking of pain, Private, do you think you could bring yourself to unjoin my hands?”
“I told Cal he pulled that catgut too tight.” Private Peabody unsheathed his bayonet, slipped it onto the muzzle of his Springfield. “Sorry, Pelican, but just think, the pain won’t last terrible long. Not like a toothache.”
“You fixing to kill me, are you?”
Private Peabody shook his head. “Depends on what you mean by ‘kill.’ Cal and me, we’re your fate, Pelican. There’s no escaping fate, is there? What we aim to do directly is heft you onto that raft there. Don’t figure we’ll kill you. No sport in that. More likely, we’ll watch you die.”
“How come you didn’t kill me last night? How come you waited?”
“That’s just the way fate is, Pelican.” Private Peabody fit a piece of tobacco into his cheek, spit. “Okay, Cal, give me a hand here.”
As the soldiers dragged him down the bank and on top their raft, Peregrine kept his mind off the earth scouring his face by considering just what his sin might be. Not sloth or envy. Greed then? Not greed. Surely not pride. And not gluttony. Peregrine could not recall having done any nasty thing to hurt a person. His were the ways of a solitary man. Never shouted at his children. Never pilfered a man’s traps. Never whupped nobody. Maybe then his sin was something he hadn’t done. That’s it, he thought. Uncover regret, find your sin.
“What you smiling for, Pelican?” Private Peabody said.
“Wondering about what you said, about us all being sinners.”
“And just in time to make your peace,” Cal said. Then he laughed. Cal held a seven-foot pole he’d cut from a honey locust. He used it to push the raft away from shore.
Private Peabody sat on the raft behind Peregrine. He said, “So what did you discover about sin, Pelican?”
“Sin is heartache.”
“Well, you ain’t no preacher, that’s a fact.” Private Peabody turned to Cal who was testing depth with his pole. “You’re right, you know. They all get speculative in the end.”
Peregrine said, “What’s your sin, Private?”
“Me? I guess I’d say joining the Massachusetts Volunteers.” He sat quietly a moment. “Depravity. That’s my sin. Well, depravity and bad decisions. Course I didn’t decide to become a madman. Just happened. Back in Worcester, I was a schoolteacher. Believe that? And now here I am, a dead man. This whole war’s a one-way trip to hell. I’ll never go home again. I haven’t got the energy to walk another thousand miles.”
“What’s your regiment?”
“Me and Cal are jayhawkers these days.”
Cal said, “Okay, rebel, now it’s your turn. Tell us your sin.”
“I wanted to be a happy man. But I never was.”
“That’s ignorant talk, Pelican. Unhappiness ain’t no sin. It’s a condition,” Private Peabody said.
Peregrine listened to the lap of water against the raft. He heard the sharp, descending “kew” of a green heron. “I think every man wants to be happy,” he said.
“So what’s happiness then?” Private Peabody said.
Peregrine didn’t know and said so. Said he probably wouldn’t know it if it kicked him in the aitchbone.
“Maybe happiness is being alive,” Private Peabody said. He looked at Cal. “Without pain. In which case, Pelican, you are a moderately happy man right now.”
“Must be more than that.”
“Why’s that?” Private Peabody said.
Cal said, “You scared of dying, Pelican?”
Peregrine said not right now he wasn’t, and he was surprised at that. Figured he might be. He was more afraid of thinking about dying than of doing it.
“Well then,” Cal said, “we wouldn’t want you thinking too much now, would we? You about to expire, Pelican.”
“I don’t think so.”
“How’s that?” Cal said.
“There’s something lives on after us.”
“And what would that something be?” Private Peabody wanted to know.
Peregrine shook his head. “I don’t know. Just something about us that won’t die.”
Cal, at least, seemed to understand. He drew his pole from the black water, leveled it with both hands, and poked its muddy tip between Peregrine’s shoulder blades. “The only part of you going to live on is your taste in some alligator’s mouth,” he said and nudged Peregrine off the raft.
Peregrine entered the water without a riffle and sank face-first through the blurry syrup. Having no control over his descent, hog-tied as he was, Peregrine gave himself up to the influence of gravity. The bayou here was deeper than he had reckoned, and colder. What he noticed was how silent it was, as if his ears had been plugged with tallow. And so he drifted without sound, without taste or smell, and in that remarkable stillness, Peregrine, unencumbered with distractions, recalled being lifted onto the upholstered seat of a surrey. He was a boy, maybe five, six. He wore an ankle-length blue shirt and a cloth cap. The surrey lurched, and he held the seat. Out the corner of his eye, he caught a figure in black, a woman cradling a loaf of bread like a baby. She looked at Peregrine as he rode past her. And then she coughed. And then Peregrine’s face kissed the muck on the bed of the bayou. He arched his neck and began to rise, the long, airless ascension back to the light. He had not thought of that loaf of bread since the moment thirty-five years ago or more that he had seen it. Was that woman the mother he must have had? And who was the man who lifted him? And how was he able to hold his breath these minutes under water? And what else in his life has he forgotten to remember?
As Peregrine emerged from the water and gulped the air, he saw his malefactors on their raft and was glad they had not abandoned him, and he smiled to them, and saw over their heads the peachblow of the morning sky before he submerged. He thought of his family and what life had meant and wished he could have thought much harder than he had, and he wondered now if he would settle in that muddy sediment and ossify, and would some trapper, in, say, a hundred years, find his tooth in a layer of clay the way he had found that tiny fish pressed like a leaf into the gray rock. Butternut bark, he thought. Peregrine regretted that he had not always had some Cal around to taunt him, hurt him, drown him. With a Cal beside him, he would have taken his life solemnly, would not have slacked on important matters, would have remembered to remember, would know who the man was who sat beside him in the surrey and why were they hurrying off and to where.
Peregrine saw a brown bullhead just inches from his face, its head as large as a buttermilk biscuit, its greasy eyes unblinking, and he understood that he had seen the future right then, even as he continued his descent, even as he was overtaken by darkness. Peregrine swallowed the living water and knew for certain that he would never thirst again.
Velma Littlejohn watched the shorter one poke at the body with his bayonet. She waited in the cane for the two soldiers to pole their raft around the bend. She heard the one say to the other, “Thus is some goddam monkey show, ain’t it?” Heard the feisty one laugh. And then she fetched Peregrine’s body, waded breast-deep into the bayou, got hold of his drawers, and hauled him up to the bank. She untied his hands from his feet and rolled him over. She saw how he looked so much like a boy, how all the vigilance and rumination had been washed from his face. Then the stupidity of Peregrine’s eyes, eyes without light, made her angry. She pressed his lids closed. She harnessed the body with rope and slid it, as carefully as she could manage, through the brake to the campsite. She built a fire and waited for her boy Mangham to find her. As familiar as Velma was with the smells of death, this was new to her, this aroma of drowning. Typhus smells of rodents and straw, measles like turkey feathers when you just pluck them; malaria smells like the taste of gun metal. But drowning was like a . . . like a honey tree, the way it is just before a storm. Velma felt cold in her wet dress, cold as charity. She hoped her boy arrived before the bears did.
When Velma and Mangham got to the hut with the body, Velma sent her other boy, Bosco, into Delhi to the racket store for a nickel’s worth of charcoal, two sacks of King Bee chewing tobacco, and a bottle of sour mash. While his brother was gone, Mangham seized his opportunity and spoke with Twyla about his status as the older son by twenty minutes and so the inheritor of his daddy’s property, not that she, you understand, was property, just that well, it seemed only right that you and I, you know what I mean, Twyla, and so on. He swept Twyla off her feet, he kind of thought. Bosco talks to you, Twyla, you tell him you’re spoken for. But don’t tell Mama nothing just yet.
Velma washed the corpse and laid it on a bed of pine and cedar boughs. She rubbed the skin lightly with pine needles and sassafras leaves. She had Bosco beat the charcoal; to dust and then mix it with the tobacco. Seems like a waste of good dip, Bosco told her. Hand me the pelt, she said. Bosco gave her the beaver pelt, into the skin side of which she rubbed the ash and tobacco and then diapered the corpse with the furry breechcloth. You and your brother, you all go dig a grave by the bead tree yonder. Dig it deep, she said to Bosco. Velma opened the bottle of whiskey, had Twyla hold open the jaw, and poured the whiskey down what had been Peregrine’s gullet. He’ll keep another day or so, she said.
They sat up outside that evening by turns with the fire going, keeping a death-watch, seeing that animals didn’t get at the body. Velma wanted Peregrine buried properly at sunrise. Everyone could say their piece. They could pray. This was the night that Twyla conceived her husband’s son Mangham’s boy, the boy they would call Jupiter. At dawn, Velma built a fire and called the family to service. She stood over the body at the edge of its grave. “He was too true to falsify,” she said. “His kin were few, his friends were several. He had no past that he could remember, and we were his future.” She looked at each of the others. Bosco smiled. Mangham looked down at the toes he was wiggling. Twyla wept. “Mangham,” Velma said, “you’re the first-born. You say something now.”
“Good night, Daddy.”
At that moment a man in a lavender shirt, a frock coat, and derby stepped through the thicket and excused himself for barging in like this. He took off his hat and bowed to the mourners and to the deceased. He introduced himself. Ransom Troublefield, the clothes pole man of Avoyelles Parish. Been trying to avoid the Union soldiers is what brought him this far north. Be sure his head’s to the east, he told the boys. Then as Mangham and Bosco turned the corpse, shoveled dirt atop their daddy, Mr. Troublefield spoke what he hoped were comforting words.
There are some of them who have left a name
So that men declare their praise;
And there are some that have no memorial,
And have perished as though they had not lived,
And have become as though they had not been,
With their children after them.
Then Velma Littlejohn put her arms around Twyla’s shoulder and quoted the apostle John. She said, “He was a burning and a shining light; and ye were willing for a season to rejoice in his light.”
When the little service ended, and while the boys filled the grave and tamped the earth, and while Mr. Troublefield fashioned a cross from the cottonwood branches, Velma and Twyla boiled up the few ashpotatoes they had left and fried some cornmeal into pones, what Velma called her half-moon pies. And after they all had eaten, Mr. Troublefield filled a corncob pipe with hemp, and they smoked and lazed away the morning in a state of semi-desuetude.
In a while they were all laughing about the time Peregrine did this or that, like the day he tried to show the boys how to fascinate a cottonmouth and wound up with the viper attached to his nose. Thank God it was a baby. That’s the time Bosco went into Delhi for the Viafuga medicine that proved so hard for Peregrine to swallow. Nose swelled out like a persimmon. Or the time, Mangham said, that Peregrine lost the gander pull at the Franklin Parish Fair and screamed about how his goose was greased, and then he sulked about it for weeks.
Mangham lifted his head off the hammock. “I’d like to find the Yankees what done this to Daddy.”
“You all are trappers, ain’t you?” Mr. Troublefield said.
Bosco crawled out of the shade of the lean-to. He stood, stretched his hands over his head. He nodded to Mangham. “Damn fine trappers.”
“They headed south on the bayou,” Velma said.
“They’ll come to Kirby Smith’s boys that-a-way,” Mr. Troublefield said. “Me, myself, I think you’ll want to get to them first.”
“We’ll take the bear traps,” Twyla said.
When they discovered the raft, the Yankees had hidden, the Fontanas destroyed it. The pair of them must be off raiding plantation houses on the Tensas Road, they all figured. The Fontanas and Mr. Troublefield pitched camp, set the traps, and waited.
Later that evening, they explained to Privates Peabody and Dirkson that now they had two choices: they could use Peregrine’s old pelt knife to carve through each other’s legs or carve each their own, whatever, but have a tourniquet ready and try not to listen to the scrape of metal on bone, or they could use the two bullets they were going to be left, along with Private Peabody’s Starr revolver, use them in any fashion they saw fit. But, boys, you all need to stop moaning and get to it before the wolves catch your scent, and before you faint away from the pain. Fierce, ain’t it?
Velma explained, “We couldn’t allow Peregrine’s death to be senseless like it was. You can understand that, can’t you, gentlemen?”
Bosco said, “I’m sick of hearing you scream, you baby,” and kicked Private Dirkson in the small of his back.
Velma said, “That’s enough of that.”
“We should be going,” Twyla said.
“We take our leave, gents,” Mr. Troublefield said. He tipped his derby to the Yankee soldiers.
And so the Fontanas and their first disciple walked away from the clearing and followed a gator rut that led them to the bayou. That evening in camp, in the privacy of Peregrine’s tent, Velma Littlejohn went to Mr. Troublefield, thanked him, and lay down with him. And she knew him.