Soul of a Crow Page 3

  I imagined Sawyer ruffling Malcolm’s shaggy dark hair. He replied calmly, “That’s the truth. My socks haven’t finished drying, that’s all. Though I do appreciate your concern.”

  “Where’s Lorie-Lorie?” Malcolm all but demanded, referring to me by his usual nickname. Each of them had a particular way of addressing me; Boyd called me ‘Lorie-girl,’ and to Sawyer I was ‘Lorie-love’ or mo mhuirnín milis, one of the Irish endearments he favored. My heart swelled with love for them, all three.

  “I’ll be out directly,” I called.

  “Well, hurry!” Malcolm ordered. “I ain’t had a chance to show you—”

  “Hold your tongue, boy,” Boyd interrupted him to chastise. “Mama, God rest her sweet soul, would strap your thoughtless hide for talkin’ to a lady that way.”

  “Aw, Lorie knows I ain’t but excited to see her,” Malcolm said. He came close to the tent and attempted to rap on the canvas the way he would have a wooden door, imploring, “Ain’t that so?”

  Fully dressed and hair braided, I emerged into the evening light and Malcolm caught me in an exuberant hug. I smoothed Malcolm’s shaggy hair, regarding him with deep fondness. He was tanned as brown as a batch of walnut-dye, his dark, long-lashed eyes merry. Freckles walked all along his nose and cheekbones, and he was in rather desperate need of a creek bath.

  “It’s so,” I confirmed. “What did you want to show me?”

  “Lookee,” Malcolm enthused, tugging me towards the embers over which the iron grate was propped, and where two rabbits, in addition to two prairie hens, crackled deliciously. He pointed to the ground near the shallow fire pit Boyd dug last night, where five speckled eggs were lined in a row, smooth and pretty as rocks plucked from the river bottom.

  “Eggs!” I exclaimed in joy, already imagining the cheerful sizzle of them cracked into our pan.

  “Nest was yonder,” Malcolm said, indicating westward; the open plains stretched as far as an eye could see in every direction around our camp, though I knew that Keokuk, Iowa waited just to the north. It would be the first we had seen of a town in some weeks, and as much as I wished to avoid most all contact with strangers, I was hopeful for the presence of a preacher.

  “It’s been a piece since we’s had eggs,” Boyd said, from his seat on the ground, where he contentedly drew on a tobacco roll. Though Boyd was much taller and far more solidly built than Malcolm, they resembled each other to a marked degree, the two of them nearly the last of their family left alive.

  Before the War, the Carters had densely populated the Bledsoe holler, in Cumberland County; Boyd and Malcolm’s family had numbered six, not including aunts, uncles, cousins, and other shirttail relatives; they farmed the eastern edge of the holler, while Sawyer’s family resided just across, to the west. Sawyer and Boyd were of an age, both twenty-four, and had been raised as closely as any brothers. In the crisp late-autumn of 1862, they joined the Army of Tennessee under General Joseph Wheeler, in the company of four additional brothers, Ethan and Jeremiah Davis, and Beaumont and Grafton Carter—of the six of them, only Sawyer and Boyd returned to Tennessee alive. Boyd and Malcolm were the sole remaining members left to pass on the Carter name; likewise, Sawyer was the last Davis.

  Boyd used a sharpened stick to poke at the meat, declaring, “Any moment now. Good work, Lorie-girl. It’s right satisfying to eat what you done shot, ’specially for the first time,” and I grinned at his compliment.

  “The practice has proven helpful,” I said.

  Sawyer took his customary position to Boyd’s right, sitting on a split log with one foot braced against an adjacent piece of wood. His feet were bare and dirt-smudged, as were the hems of his trousers; he held a tin cup of steaming coffee. He reached his free hand to me, angling a knee for me to sit upon. Once settled, I appropriated the cup for a sip.

  “You twos are hoping for a preacher in the next town,” Boyd noted, reading my thoughts. He winked at Sawyer and me, adding, “Get you two hitched up proper-like. Aw, shit, Davis, what I wouldn’t give for a wedding celebration like in the old days.” His dark eyebrows lifted in amusement at what he could clearly discern as my skepticism at this remark. He hurried to explain, “Lorie-girl, once upon a time, back home, a wedding was a cause for celebration the likes of no other on the ridge. Daddy would tap a whiskey barrel, Mama would dress in her finest an’ make sure the lot of us was likewise spit-shined. Damn. Me an’ Sawyer, here, an’ the boys”—and I understood he meant their brothers—“would suffer through the ceremony, castin’ our eyes about for the prettiest girls in the church, so’s we could try an’ talk to them later. You remember the night that Grayson Pike an’ Orla Main hitched up?”

  At Boyd’s question Sawyer snorted a laugh and affirmed, “I could hardly forget.”

  Malcolm knelt near Sawyer and me, stirring at the fire with a long stick as Boyd’s eyes took on a storytelling shine I knew well. Studying the horizon, gazing into the past, Boyd said, “Sawyer an’ me was sixteen or so, an’ fortunate enough to sneak a bottle of Daddy’s apple-pie around the far side of the barn. The August moon was full as a fresh-scrubbed face, pouring light upon us near bright as day, an’ the two of us was drunk as skunks.”

  Sawyer grinned at the memory of their past misbehavior. I watched him with pleasure, still holding the warm tin cup of coffee, letting its steam bathe over my nose. He traced a line between my shoulder blades with his knuckles as he said, “I could hardly see for the headache I had the next day.”

  Boyd agreed, “Same for me, old friend,” before continuing the story. “Next thing we knew here come Ethan, all outta breath an’ wanting t’tell us something. We figured it was to boast about how he’d been kissing on Helen Sue Gottlender –”

  Malcolm interrupted Boyd to interject, with an air of all-knowing, “Ethan was always a-kissing on girls. An’ talking about it, which Daddy said a gentleman wasn’t never s’posed to do.”

  Sawyer and Boyd laughed heartily at this, while I listened in fascination.

  Ethan had been Sawyer’s younger brother, a twin to Jeremiah; Ethan and Jere had been born on the same day and were later killed within the same quarter-hour, both shot to death on the rocky ground at the battle of Murfreesboro, early in 1863, over five years ago. Sawyer carried their lifeless bodies from the field and brought them home to Suttonville, wrapped in blankets in the back of a flatbed wagon. The pain of this picture beat at the edges of my mind; I was grateful to hear the way Sawyer was still able to laugh at a memory of his brother in life, before the War ripped Ethan from existence.

  “That he was,” Boyd agreed, with relish. “Eth was a true ladies’ man. An’ ladies loved him right back. This one, too,” he teased of Sawyer. Boyd winked companionably at me and continued, “But here come Eth, swearing that he’d spied two people…” Boyd twisted up his face in pure good humor, before finishing with a tone of deliberate delicacy, “Enjoying each other’s company a very great deal, out in the holler.”

  “Meanin’ what?” Malcolm demanded.

  Though his eyebrows registered amusement, Boyd chose to ignore this question and said, “So, of course Sawyer an’ me followed him out there, the two of us hanging onto each other like a pair of drunkards so’s we didn’t fall, an’ low an’ behold, Ethan was telling the truth, as there was Gus an’ his sweet little wife, Grace…”

  Boyd was referring to Angus and the woman with whom he’d been happily wed, long before the War created dust of their former lives. I was heartened to think there was a time when Angus had been so youthful and brazen that he had dared to make love to his wife out-of-doors, perhaps inspired by the romance of a summer wedding held on the night of a full moon.

  “We ought to have been ashamed of ourselves,” Sawyer said, sighing a little, with both good-natured humor at the memory and the ache of loss that would never be fully absent from any of us, now that Angus was gone.

  “But we hid in the trees like the young scoundrels we was, an’ watched them twos, thinkin’ we was getting a
few lessons,” Boyd laughed. “Shit, we deserved our hides strapped raw. Never told Gus about that, though I think he mighta found a bit of humor in it, I truly do.”

  “He would have,” Sawyer agreed, and I rested my head upon him; he smoothed the base of his palm gently down my back, caressing me.

  “Angus was happy with Grace,” I murmured, and I knew this for certain. The thought of Angus, whose deep-gray eyes held such kindness, who had been willing to make me his wife to give our child a name, tangled around my heart with an aching guilt. Before Angus realized that he’d known my father in the War, he paid for my services at Ginny’s whorehouse—by the next morning, having fled Ginny’s and St. Louis in the company of Angus, Sawyer, Boyd and Malcolm, it was too late. In the backlash of resultant shock at what I had finally done—abandoning the misery of my existence as a prostitute—I neglected to remember to cleanse my insides with the usual butter mixture, which contained potash and subsequently aided in the prevention of unwanted pregnancy.

  “He was,” Sawyer agreed softly. He well understood the painful thoughts that circled my mind as crows would a carcass. He added, comforting me with his words, “Before the War, Gus was happy as a man could be, I well remember. He and Grace were married for many a good year before he left home as a soldier.”

  “But what was they doin’ out in the holler?” Malcolm pressed, still caught up in this portion of the tale.

  “Ask me again when you’s a piece older,” Boyd told him.

  Malcolm turned his inquisitive eyes to Sawyer, sensing he would receive no satisfactory answer from his brother. Dark eyebrows knitted, the boy speculated with certainty, “It’s got to do with why you an’ Lorie’s in such a hurry to find a preacher, don’t it?”

  Before either of us could respond, the boy went on, “You seem wed already, anyhow.” His coffee-brown eyes twinkled, moving between Sawyer and me. “An’ you already share a tent, so why does it –”

  “Kid, I know it isn’t the proper order of things, as two people should first be wed. But Lorie and I dearly love each other, and besides, I cannot sleep unless she is tucked near to me,” Sawyer interrupted to quietly explain, and, as they were prone to of late, tears blurred my vision at the sweetness of his words.

  “I know, I know, I was just sayin’,” Malcolm insisted. Attuned as he was to my feelings, the expression in the boy’s eyes instantly became one of concern and he insisted gently, “No cryin’ no more, Lorie-Lorie.”

  At these words Sawyer’s left arm came immediately around me, joining the right. Malcolm reached and politely took the tin cup from my grasp, depositing it on the ground, then wrapped about me from the front, and I was effectively cradled between him and Sawyer. It had not been long ago that I thought them gone from me forever, and I heaved with a sob I could not contain. I caught Malcolm’s elbows, clinging tightly to him, and the two of them held me between them. Even Boyd, who normally pretended to shun such displays of affection, gamely moved behind Malcolm and bear-hugged all of us; though tears streaked my face, their tender, combined comfort effectively kept full-fledged weeping at bay. I could not imagine facing another day without the three of them.

  Yet because of me, we were all without Angus.

  “It’s all right, Lorie-Lorie,” Malcolm soothed as he stood straight. He patted my cheeks and said, “We won’t let you go again.”

  Boyd echoed this sentiment in his usual gruff fashion, saying, “Damn right.”

  I scrubbed away the wetness on my cheeks and then clutched Sawyer’s strong forearms, still locked about me.

  “Thank you,” I tried to say, but it emerged as a hoarse whisper.

  Our horses were grazing to the west, their hides still damp from the earlier violent rainfall; my eyes sought Whistler first, the beautiful red-and-cream calico mare, Sawyer’s horse who loved him dearly and was equally loved in return, by both of us. She had tirelessly carried Sawyer over the prairie to me, across the endless miles; I knew if not for Whistler, I would currently be lying in the ground alongside Angus and the grave marker for our child, in a freshly-dug hole and with rocks piled over my body, one of thousands left forever behind on the trails.

  You fought back. You wouldn’t let Sam kill you without a fight. Sam is dead now. Jack and Dixon are dead.

  A shudder trembled over me before I could quell, with tremendous effort, the thought of those three men sprawled in the camp in which I had been a prisoner, one with his eye punctured out. My fist clenched in a spasm of remembrance, as though I still clutched the stone arrowhead.

  “Lorie-Lorie, let’s fry up these here eggs,” Malcolm said, neatly collecting them into his palms, drawing me from the dark swamp of my thoughts.

  “Let’s,” I agreed, glad for the distraction.

  We ate around the fire as the sun slowly sank, sitting in our usual places just as we would have at a household table, balancing plates on our knees, disregarding forks. The evening light was splendid as it spilled over us, so windless in the wake of the storm that the leaves of the cottonwoods near our camp remained silent, not whispering with their usual companionable rustle. The stillness created the sense that words spoken miles from our position could perhaps be discerned.

  The muted coo of mourning doves, so common to fine evenings, met our ears, along with the warbling trill of a red-winged blackbird; in the distance, a crow rasped its rusty call. The birdsong blended with the ever-present, low-pitched buzz of insects amid the prairie grasses, enormous dragonflies that darted erratically through the air, tiny yellow butterflies whose flight patterns were slow and gentle by contrast; a shiny-green locust a good two inches long startled me as it sprang with heart-stopping suddenness upon the edge of my skirt, much to Malcolm’s delight.

  “Aw, it ain’t but a hopper,” he cajoled, neatly catching the creature and dangling it near my hair.

  “But its feet are so sticky,” I said, shying away from the frantically-struggling insect. I had never sounded more like an older sister as I nagged, “Stop that!”

  “You two planning to join the boy an’ me in town, come morning?” Boyd asked. To Malcolm he added, “Leave off or Sawyer’ll strap your hide for tormenting his woman.”

  Sawyer laughed at this, while Malcolm immediately fired back, “Lorie’s my sister.”

  “I’d like to see the day either of you could strap Malcolm,” I said, and just as I spoke, the locust wriggled free and fell directly into the gaping collar of the boy’s shirt. He yelped and sprang to his feet, springing from bare foot to bare foot in what amounted to a wild jig as he attempted to dislodge it.

  He cried indignantly, “It’s sticking to me!”

  I said, with no small amount of satisfaction, “I told you.”

  - 2 -

  Deep in the night, I woke from a strange dream.

  Cold and unsettled, I blinked into absolute darkness; the moon had long since set, our lantern extinguished for the night hours. My hands were clenched into fists, as though poised to do battle, my heart erratic even as all evidence suggested that nothing was amiss, that indeed I lay safely within our tent.

  And yet a breath of icy apprehension lingered at my nape.

  It was only a dream, I thought, willing myself to believe this. You have been through an ordeal. It will take time to recover from the shadow cast in Missouri.

  I became suddenly aware that Sawyer was awake, sitting beside me with his face buried in both hands. My heart jolted and immediately I threaded my arms about his waist, pressing my cheek to his naked back. He grasped my forearms and a shudder trembled through him.

  “What is it, what’s wrong?” I demanded in a whisper.

  He whispered, “I’m sorry to wake you, I didn’t intend to.” His voice emerged low, and harsh with emotion, as he explained his distress, “I dreamed I couldn’t find you, I was riding hard and couldn’t find you.”

  I rose to my knees to bring him closer, cradling his head to my breasts. He wrapped both arms around my waist, and I stroked the hair back fro
m his temple, kissing him there. His skin was heated, damp and salty with sweat.

  “What if I hadn’t gotten there…you were in such danger…”

  “Sawyer,” I soothed, my heart splitting with concern and tenderness.

  His hands moved slowly over my back, fingers spread wide; he nodded and I could tell he was too choked to allow for response.

  “Let me get my legs around you,” I insisted, and he shifted to allow this, keeping me near as I resettled upon his lap, my thighs spreading to curve about his hips. I knew he was resolute in his decision that we would be wed before we fully joined, as he wished to follow the proper order of things according to his sensibilities. I knew he worried so about how I was healing, both physically and emotionally, and if I would even welcome any sort of carnal indulgence. Though in this moment, it was not about such things.

  “There,” I murmured with quiet satisfaction, holding him tightly.

  He curled his fingers into my hair, his cheek against my temple, until he had calmed. I kissed his jaw, letting my lips linger, imbibing the scent of him, until he exhaled a slow breath and softly kissed my shoulder. Taking us back to the bedding, he whispered, “I did not mean to wake you.”

  “You did not wake me, love. I dreamed of something that frightened me,” I admitted. “But I cannot exactly recall it.”

  “There is an odd sense in the air,” Sawyer whispered. “It seems a night fit for disturbing dreams. But only dreams, nothing more. It is all right, Lorie-love.”

  And held securely in his arms, I felt the essence of the nightmare retreating, the tension within me ebbing away. I allowed his words to comfort; within minutes, the sound of his breathing had evened, indicating sleep, and I pressed my face to him, wishing for the countless time that I could as easily will away all such darkness.

  Heaven knew I harbored my fair share. It seemed in some ways as though an entire lifetime had come and gone, whispering its fingertips fleetingly over my cheek to acknowledge its passage, in the last three years. I had been subsequently released from both of my old lives—the first, my idyllic childhood in eastern Tennessee, the youngest in a family of five, longing to be a boy so that I would be granted the daily privilege of working with horses alongside my father and two older brothers.