The Eden Hunter (28 page)

“What do you know of him?” McIntosh leaned forward. “Men will live or die based upon what you say to me today.”

“I would agree,” said Garçon.

There was a pause and again Kau could hear quiet crying from behind the curtain.

McIntosh stood. “What is your decision?”

Garçon rose up himself. He walked behind Kau and let his hands rest down on his shoulders. “Tell your American masters this, White Warrior.”

“Yes?”

“Tell them that this is a British fort occupied by British subjects. Tell them that our presence here on Spanish soil is of no concern to
anyone but King George and King Ferdinand. Tell them that they have allowed for the invasion of a sovereign nation.”

McIntosh laughed. “And yet you are no more a Spaniard than you are a British general.”

“You call yourself an American general, do you not?”

“I do indeed.”

“And yet your mother was an Indian whore.”

McIntosh’s face pinkened. He took a step toward Garçon but then turned to leave. “I will see you again very soon,” he said.

“Wait,” said Garçon. “You have already forgotten what you came for.” He spoke quickly in Spanish, and Kau watched as the curtain rippled and then parted. A child in a white dress moved forward, a dark young girl with red and swollen eyes. She was balancing a human skull on a flat velvet pillow, and she placed the pillow on the table and then left as she came. The skull had been boiled clean and bleached, and Garçon tapped at the scraped bone and smiled. “So,” he said to McIntosh, “do you think that maybe this might be your Edward?”

The parley ended with the appearance of the skull, and Kau thought that McIntosh seemed more saddened than angered. McIntosh told Garçon that the Americans’ prisoners would receive no better, but Garçon only nodded and said, “I should hope not, White Warrior.”

Garçon then went to Kau and took his hands into his own. “I am very sorry for you,” he said, and Kau felt a piece of cool metal press against his palm as Garçon spoke to him. “But I could not keep on saving you forever, my strange, strange friend.”

 

THE CROWD OUTSIDE was still gathered, and the cranberry coats of the men made their wives and sons and daughters look faded in contrast. An illusion: uniformed soldiers moving among phantoms draped in spent fabrics, apparitions shrouded in shabby gray clothes like he himself wore.

The witnesses split into silent halves as the three chiefs led him toward the gate. He saw a dozen of the renegade Choctaws. Pelayo and Elisenda. Marcela and Ramona. The twins watched him move past, and they seemed unsure of whether he was still favored by Garçon. One girl sneered at him as the other girl cowered.

Juaneta. He saw her last. She stood closest to the gate and was again wearing her green dress. She bit her lower lip as he went by, and in that moment she was his dead wife Janeti. This did something to him, and inside he felt a tearing, a breaking. At their last supper together Garçon had spoken to him and Xavier on the subject of love, claiming that he had studied on it. “You see,” he had lectured, “there is really no such thing. A white man lusted after someone and invented the idea of love. It helped to justify the fool he had become.”

But it was from Samuel that Kau had heard the word first—the old man explaining his feelings for his own Lord Jesus. Later, Benjamin would say he loved his dead mother without ever having met her. Of all Kau had learned in this second world that word was one of the few things that made sense to him. A word that tried to explain how a man could look at a girl and see a grown woman—Janeti—the wife taken from him so long ago. And perhaps it also helped explain why he knew he would never forget his last glimpse of Xavier or Samuel or Beah. The face of the dying boy. His
daughter Tufu begging him to dance for her. His infant son Abeki smiling up at him. Love. What other unnamed forces might exist? Forces that once defined by words would wrap themselves around his mind and change the way he saw all else thereafter?

 

THE CHIEFS CROSSED over the bridge of the fort and then signaled to the braves hidden in the pinewoods. The three soldiers they had been guarding appeared, and the released men raced over the cutover—running, running, running—swinging wide around the chiefs as they passed, their eyes big and white, the dry ash erupting beneath their boots.

The broken tip of a knife blade, no bigger than a small coin. As the soldiers went by Kau lifted his tied hands to his face and slipped it into his mouth. The cold metal warmed on his tongue as he followed McIntosh forward. They were halfway across the cutover when the braves began whooping from the pines. McIntosh stopped, and Kau turned with him. The British jack was being lowered inside the fort, and one of the lesser chiefs spoke to the others in Creek. “Look,” he said. “That man is a coward after all.”

But then the jack was raised for the third time that day, and fastened above it now was a new flag, a red flag more crimson than the coats of the soldiers even. The pigeons were released to circle—by Garçon himself, Kau knew—and then the soldiers watching from the bastions began to cheer and shake their flintlocks. On the high flagstaff behind them the flag of no surrender hung limp in the dead summer sky, smothering the nation banner that was suspended beneath it.

M
CINTOSH AND THE ten braves led Kau back toward the section of pinewoods where the Lower Creeks were camped. The two lesser chiefs had already left to tell Clinch what had happened at the fort, and Kau now pictured the deadly news moving like a stone skipped down the river—a rock traveling from Garçon to McIntosh to Clinch to Loomis.

 

IT WAS DARK when the lesser chiefs finally returned from across the river, but from the stump where he was made to sit Kau could not hear the substance of their report. Regardless, he knew there was a fair chance that he would be ordered tortured or even executed. He sucked on the blade hidden in his mouth and watched.

 

HE WAS WRONG. Although some of the young braves taunted him, his captors did not appear eager to abuse him, and—for the moment, at least—any orders to that effect were ignored. The fate of the watering party seemed to mean very little to these Lower Creeks, and so for a prisoner they treated him well enough—better, he was certain, than the Americans were now treating Xavier.

McIntosh retired to his bedroll hidden somewhere in the wiregrass, and Kau saw one of the lesser chiefs select three young braves to serve as his guards. They initiated a rotation—two sleeping while the third kept watch, a single fierce and serious boy who would occasionally strike at the air with his war-club as if challenging him to run. Kau closed his eyes and hoped that somehow while he slept he would know not to swallow Garçon’s blade, cut the inside of his throat, choke on his own blood.

 

AT DAWN HE was brought only a tin mug of water for his breakfast. He spit the blade into his palm and found that it fit perfectly there, that even with his hand open flat the sharp bit of metal remained in place. He drank the warm water down, and soon McIntosh moved them all to within sight of the fort.

 

A LONG TETHER connected his tied hands to the trunk of a young pine growing near the edge of the cutover. The waiting Indians stretched out along the tree line, and he juggled the blade throughout the morning—from his palm to his mouth and then back again, from his left hand to his right. A magician in his movements as he watched the dark fort.

 

AT SOLAR NOON a pair of gray cranes landed in the blackened cutover between the forest and the fort. The birds began to scratch for field mice, and Kau saw that McIntosh was looking at them as well. A pair of braves spoke to the chief and he nodded.

The two braves crept from the pines to the field edge and took aim with longrifles. On some whispered count between them they fired and the cranes toppled. The shot birds began flapping and clouds of ash were sent rising into the hot air. From the bastions of the fort came the sound of soldiers laughing, and then one fired at a crippled crane but missed. McIntosh cut Kau loose from the pine and told him to stand. “Get them,” he said.

At first Kau gave no response, but then he decided there was no longer any advantage to silence. Because of Garçon they now knew that he could speak, that he could understand. “For what?” he asked.

McIntosh pointed toward the cranes. “Go,” he said. “Now.”

Kau stepped out into the field, his tied hands clasped in front of him. He saw the soldiers in the bastions level their muskets, but they did not fire. He moved forward and McIntosh called out to him. “Run,” he said, “and you will be shot down as well.”

And so he walked slowly across the cutover until he had reached the fallen birds. The cranes seemed almost as long as he was. He slipped Garçon’s blade into his mouth and stood over them. Their sleek heads were white at the cheeks and crowned rust red at the forehead. One was alive and the other was dead.

The wounded crane lay still in the ash and the dirt, watching him with a wet and yellow eye. He kicked at the bird with his bare
foot, and suddenly it rose up on stilt legs like a crumpled puppet lifted and began to lope away, a broken wing dragging. The soldiers were laughing again; he could hear them as he gave chase. The panicked crane ran until it had reached the moat of the fort and then, trapped, it turned and waited for him.

Even more laughter from above. He came at the crane and it leapt high into the air and then fell. A toe raked down his chest, tearing his shirt and his skin. He staggered backwards and the crane advanced hissing, its long neck weaving as it pecked at him. The bird’s dark beak looked as sharp as a snapped buck tine.

And then there was a burst of feathers and the crane lay dead; a single shot had been fired. Kau looked across the moat and saw Garçon standing with the soldiers atop the near bastion, a smoking longrifle in his hands. McIntosh’s hundred and fifty Indians had stepped from the pines with their own flintlocks trained on the fort, but in the end they did not engage. Kau collected the dead cranes and walked back toward the tree line. Both birds seemed to be mature adults, but one was well larger than the other. A mating pair, he figured. Sweat had seeped into the cut on his chest, and he winced at the salt sting of it.

 

HE HAD BEEN tethered again to the same young pine and now sat watching as McIntosh and the two lesser chiefs decorated their turbans with the longest and most perfect plumes from the cranes. The braves took what remained, then set sections of the skinned breasts to roast over a bed of glowing embers. At the insistence of McIntosh he was given a portion of the crane for his supper.
He tore at the meat with his teeth, and it came off in shreds in his mouth. The taste was close to liver and he wondered if this, here, would be the last meal of his life.

 

IT WAS NEARLY dark when he finished eating, and he could hear the negro soldiers singing over the crickets and the cicadas, the trillings of toads. Above him he saw a large spider—speckled in oranges, browns and yellows like Indian corn—suspended between the low branches of the pine. Kau slapped the spider to the ground, then gathered up its web and spread his torn shirt open.

He sat with the balled web in his lap, picking it free of mosquitoes and gnats and moths. Once the web was mostly clean he pressed it carefully against his bleeding chest, arranging the spider-silk across the crane-cut to help clot the wound. A new collection of braves had come to guard him through the night. They built a watch-fire and were just as vigilant as the three who had served before them.

 

AT SOME LATE hour McIntosh appeared. The fort had gone quiet, but the forest was even louder now. Kau was slumped against the small pine, and when he pushed at the tree it would flex and then push back against him. McIntosh motioned to one of the braves, and the guard stirred his sleeping companions.

After the three braves were gone McIntosh knelt down before him. “What do you know of the fort?” he asked.

Kau saw the evicted spider emerge from the shadows beyond the light of the watch-fire, then creep carefully across the forest
floor, searching for another tree that it might claim for itself. “What you mean?” he asked.

“How many soldiers are there?”

“You saw.”

“A hundred?”

“Maybe.”

“And some Indians?”

“About thirty Choctaws.”

“No Seminoles? No Red Stick Creeks?”

“They all done left off already.”

“So then no more than a hundred negroes and those thirty Choctaws?”

Kau nodded. “For fighters. But they is women there, too. Children.”

“And what about cannon? Powder?”

“Looked to be plenty of both.”

“You deserted?”

“Deserted?”

“Left without asking.”

“I never joined up with them.”

“Hardly, dancer.”

McIntosh stood and placed a green log on the fire that sent sparks chasing sparks up through the trees to then die among the planets and stars. The wet wood hissed and Kau was reminded of the angry crane. McIntosh knelt back down but said nothing. After a while Kau wondered whether the chief had somehow fallen asleep in a crouch. The blade was hidden between the fingers of his right
hand, and Kau considered it. Suppose he cut himself loose and attacked this big kneeling man, could he kill him?

He glanced down at his tied hands and then up again. McIntosh was watching him now. The chief removed his blue turban, and without it he looked more like a white man than an Indian. McIntosh ran a finger across his teeth and then pointed at him. “Tell me something about where you are from,” he said. “Tell me about Africa.”

“What of it?”

“How long has it been since you were taken from there?”

“Five years. At leas five years.”