Every morning before sunrise we hiked out to the levee in the chill morning drizzle, one long heavy flatwagon rumbling ahead of us, the other one trailing behind, each drawn by a brace of mules and jarring over the corduroy road that led through this corner of the misty swamp and out to the river. The guards rode the wagons and watched us front and back. The first time we crested the levee at dawn and looked across the rivermist to the faraway opposite bank with its dark growth of reeds and brush and trees, somebody said, “There it is yonder, boys—the free world.” I couldn’t get enough of looking at it as we followed the levee road another mile or so to the bend where the biggest clusters of driftwood had built up.
The rain finally ceased but the clouds didn’t break and the days continued without color, but at least the mosquitoes were still scant. We pulled flotsam from the river the day long—fence posts and portions of sheds, logs and saplings and entire trees uprooted from upstream. We trimmed the trees on the bank before lugging them up the levee. Every day we’d load the best cuts on the wagons to take back to camp for next winter’s firewood. The rest we flung in piles on the other side of the road.
The smaller trees were easy enough to trim and drag up the levee, but we had to section the bigger ones with axes before we could get them up the slope, and even then it sometimes took several of us muscling together to haul up some of the biggest sections. Some portions were still so heavy we had to use the mules to pull them up. To make things even tougher, the slope was slick from all the recent rain, and sometimes a man slipped and went sliding back down to the bank, his load of wood tumbling with him. In the first week two men broke an arm and another an ankle. One guy went all the way off the bank and into the river and got his shirt snagged on a submerged root. We could see his terrified face a half-foot below the surface as we struggled to free him but he drowned before we got him loose.
We’d been at it a week when the rain started falling again. It didn’t come down hard enough to raise the river any higher but it fell steadily and cold for most of every day. Debris kept coming downstream and the footing on the slope got even trickier. We ate our noon meals in the rain, lining up at the mess truck for tin plates of beans and rice and then crowding under the big oaks on a stretch of high ground where it wasn’t so muddy. But the rain ran through the trees and down into our plates and made cold weak soup of our meal.
One late afternoon a pair of gun bosses named Harlins and Ogg pointed out six of us and said to come with them. We climbed aboard a flatwagon and the teamster trusty hupped the mules into motion. Red Garrison was in our party and asked where we were going but the guards ignored him. Garrison made a mocking face they couldn’t see, and a pair of his hardcase buddies named Yates and Witliff grinned at it. The other two cons—old Dupree and a young guy named Chano, a Mexican mute who understood English—paid him no more mind than I did.
We’d gone about half a mile when we began to hear a terrible shrieking up ahead. There was no pause to it, and as we drew closer, Witliff said, “Them’s mules.” I’d been told Witliff was at Angola for burning down his ex- wife’s house while she and her new husband were in it. They’d both survived but the story was they would’ve been better off if they hadn’t.
The teamster, Wakefield, said mules was what it was. He said he and Musial, the other driver, were on their way back from delivering a load of wood to camp and were turning onto the levee road when Musial took his wagon a little too wide and the shoulder gave way. The wagon went over on its side and slid down the levee, dragging the mules with it, then slammed into the muddy bottom of the slope and overturned completely. The mules were tangled up in the harness and screaming with the pain of God knew how many broken legs. Wakefield had gone down and found that Musial was still breathing, but he was unconscious and his legs were pinned under the wagon. There’d been nothing he could do but come get help.
“I don’t know if six’ll be enough to shove that heavy sonofabitch thing off him,” Wakefield said.
When we got to where the wagon had gone off the road, the screaming of the mules was the worst sound I’d ever heard. They were trying to get up, but even if they hadn’t been twisted up in the traces, they never could’ve stood on those legs that were showing broken bone through bloody hide. Musial was on his back with his eyes closed, his legs under the capsized wagon.
“Christ’s sake, man,” Garrison said. “Put them jugheads out of their misery.”
“Shut up, Red,” the Harlins guard said. He was already cocking his carbine and taking aim. He shot one of the mules in the head and the animal went into a greater frenzy of lunging and shrieking.
“Shit,” Harlins said.
If the guards back at the riverbend heard the gunfire they wouldn’t have thought anything of it—the gun bosses were always shooting snakes or crows or at turtles in the river or hawks flying overhead.
Harlins levered another round and shot the mule again and it jerked and bellowed and both of the animals were even more panicked now and thrashing with their broken legs like they were insane.
“Christ’s
Then Ogg shot the mule and it fell still.
“About time,” Garrison said.
“I told you shut your damn mouth,” Harlins said. He shot the other mule and didn’t kill it either. The veins stood out on his forehead. Then he and Ogg fired at the same time and the mule slumped dead and the following silence was a relief.
“I guess we know whose bullet did the job,” Garrison said.
Harlins jabbed him in the face with the carbine butt and Garrison went backpedaling off the end of the wagon.
Harlins chambered a round and leveled the carbine at him from the hip. Yates half-raised his hands and the rest of us hustled to the other side of the wagon.
“All right, Connie—all right now,” Ogg said to Harlins the way you’d talk to a growling dog. “You shut up that redhead good. Let’s see to the teamster now, all right?”
Harlins eased down the hammer of the carbine and said, “Asses off,” and we all got down from the wagon. Garrison was back on his feet and trying to stem the blood running from his broken nose. He glared at Harlins, who didn’t even look at him.
We scrabbled down the levee and checked Musial. He was still alive and still unconscious. But the wagon was lying at an angle that wouldn’t allow for using the mules and ropes to drag it off him from up on the road without crushing him under it. And even if we could get the mules down to the bank without either one breaking a leg, we weren’t sure they could make it back up the muddy slope again. There was nothing to do but unhitch the dead animals and try heaving together. But the wagon was so heavy and so fast in the mud that we could barely budge it, never mind lift it enough for Wakefield to pull Musial out from under.
“We could use you up here,” Garrison said to Wakefield. His voice had gone deeply nasal and his eyes were bloodshot and already showing dark rings. He licked at the blood still oozing from his swollen nose.
“Do it,” Ogg told Wakefield. “I’ll grab onto Musial.”
Wakefield set himself with the rest of us along the wagonside and Ogg handed his carbine to Harlins and squatted down and took hold of Musial under the arms.
“All right,” Garrison said.
This time we raised the thing a little but still not enough for Ogg to pull him out. Musial groaned without opening his eyes.
