Through Darkest America

He kept count. No one came to see him for eight days. It was peculiar, he thought, but that scared him more than anything. No one was hurting him, or bothering him at all. But every night he figured they’d come for him in the morning. He couldn’t forget what they’d done to Pardo.

Every day was worse than the one before, until finally it was hard to keep from banging his fists against the door or tearing at the heavy bars on his window.

No! He decided. That’s what they wanted him to do and he wouldn’t give them the pleasure. Only it was a lot easier to say it than do it. To really keep the fear inside.

 Finally, he even stopped looking out the window. Nothing out there belonged to him anymore. There was only the room. It had a gray, dread finality about it. Like he had come there to stay.

He almost cried openly when the skinny man came to see him. Whatever happened was better than waiting for it. Even if they killed him, or did something terrible to him, it would be over sometime. He’d know.

He tried not to show the man his fears, but he knew, all right. Why, that’s why they’d left him here—so he could get good and scared! The thought made him angry and the anger made him feel a lot better. They could only get to him if he let them, he decided.

 Only, that wasn’t so, and he knew it. All you had to do was remember Pardo.

Lewis waited three days after his first visit. Just long enough, Howie decided, to let him worry a little.

This time he wanted to talk about Pardo himself: what he was like, what he did, what he said about this and that. He asked Howie where he’d come across Pardo and how he’d gotten mixed up with him. Howie told him, figuring there was no reason not to. He told about getting caught by Klu and Jigger, but didn’t mention Old Chattanooga or the river.

“And before that,” asked Lewis, casually enough to bring Howie fully alert, “what in the world was you doin’ out wandering around in the wilderness?”

Careful, Howie told himself. Careful now…

“I ran away from home.”

“I see,” said Lewis. “And whereabouts was that?” He shook his head and showed his palms to Howie. “It don’t matter, if you don’t want to say.”

“No, it’s okay,” said Howie. “It’s down south. On a farm. Only I didn’t want to be no farmer.”

Lewis grinned sympathetically. “Don’t much blame you. Where down south? Near a town or anything?”

Howie tried to think of some of the places Aimie had mentioned, but couldn’t. “There wasn’t much of anything around there. ’Cept Harlie. It’s a little ol’ place. Maybe ’bout a hundred people.”

“Harlie.”

“Uhuh.”

“And your folks is farmers.”

“They raise a little stock, too.”

“And their name is… what? I don’t think you ever said.”

Howie felt the knot tighten up in his belly. Did they know? The soldiers had known about him at the river, when he’d first joined the meat herd with Pardo. But that was way back east, right after it happened. Did Lewis know about him? Was he just pretending that he didn’t? Bluevale was a long way off. But a story like that, what he’d done to Jacob…

It was a moment he’d dreaded for a long time. He had put it carefully aside, in the back of his head somewhere, hoping maybe it wouldn’t come. Now, he silently cursed himself for growing careless and using his real name in Roundtree. He’d thought the world was a lot bigger than it was—that a man could just disappear if he was halfway across the whole country. It came to him, suddenly, that if Lewis already knew who he was, his first name would be enough to hang him. He wouldn’t even need the rest!

“It’s Kover,” he-said, remembering a neighbor near Papa’s farm. “My father’s name is Joseph, and my mother’s is Kate.”

“No brothers or sisters,” said Lewis.

“Just me,” Howie said evenly.

Lewis made a note, and if his expression changed at all, Howie didn’t catch it. He allowed himself a small breath of relief.

The questions went back to Pardo. What had Howie done for Pardo in Roundtree? Exactly how had they put the gun shipment together for the Rebels? Lewis had him name the places in Roundtree where the weapons had been put together. He had a list in his hand and checked things off on it, but Howie had no way of knowing whether anything was really on it.

“You helped load up the guns, then,” Lewis asked, “the night before you took off with Hacker to meet the Rebels?”

“Yes. Everyone did, just about.”

“You helped put ’em on the pack horses.”

“Uhuh.”

“There was… what? About twelve loads. Twelve horses?”

“Sure, there was twelve.” Now what was he asking a thing like that for? Howie wondered. He’d know how many horses there were. His troopers had taken them when they got Pardo.

“I suppose Pardo guarded them horses real careful,” said Lewis. “I mean, once they was all loaded and everything. That was right valuable cargo.”

“Well, sure he did.”

“Was you part of that?”

“What? Guarding the guns? Yeah, I took a watch.” “You recall who else did?”

Howie tried to remember who had pulled guard that night, and Lewis took it all down. Then he picked up his stool, told Howie he’d been real helpful, and that maybe they’d be talking again.

For a long time, Howie sat where Lewis had left him, looking at the bare walls and the barred window and the locked door. He thought about the things Lewis had asked him. Most of it was like the man said—stuff everybody already knew, that wasn’t important to anybody. Only, Howie sensed that it had stopped being unimportant right near the end. When they’d started talking about the guns. And why, he wondered, was that? The Loyalists already had everything they wanted: Pardo, the weapons, and a whole troop of Rebels besides. Why did they want to know damn near everything about something that was over and done with?

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Whatever else his room might lack, it offered a good view of the city. The building he was in was five floors high, higher than he’d ever been before in a town. And there were several others nearby, just as tall. He knew they had to be left over from the War, which made them hundreds of years old. No one could build things like that anymore. They’d been patched and mortared all over. There was no building he could see that didn’t have half a dozen different kinds of bricks and stones checkered up its sides, but they were still standing.

Clearly, the people out here didn’t have any fears about living in the old places, like they did back east. But then, this city wasn’t anything like the ruins of Chattanooga, either.

The more Howie watched, the more he learned. No one had told him anything, but it was easy to see something was going on outside. The work on the city walls continued night and day. There were more laborers on hand than ever—laying stone, carrying big baskets of mortar, and hauling great carts of rock to the wall. It was two floors high in most places already. From the way colors in the rock changed, you could see there had been a smaller wall there all along, but the army clearly wasn’t satisfied with that. They wanted it higher and they wanted it fast.

It seemed like more soldiers swarmed into the city every hour. They swelled the streets and finally overflowed outside the walls, their campfires ringing the city. There was a constant flow of farmers and merchants through the big wooden gates. The farmers hauled wagons loaded with grain and vegetables, their wives and children bouncing along atop the cargo.

You didn’t have to know a lot about armies to figure what was going on. Sooner or later, the war was coming