“Damn you, woman!” Usher bellowed.
She saw his arm swinging toward her, his balled fist at the end of it like a blur, and unflinchingly met it with the side of her face, staring up at him with a smile on her lips. Her head lolled crazily to the side. Usher swung at her again, backhanding her across the other cheek. Still she looked up at him with real triumph lighting those cloudy blue eyes of hers.
Usher glared at her, his eyes wide with disgust, starting to pummel her again.
Gritta glanced over at the wounded man gripping his bloody arm, dark fluid oozing between his fingers where he held himself. Then she looked back at Usher and spat her tormentor’s bloody flesh right into Usher’s face.
His left hand swiped the bloody gore from one eye, some of it trickling down into the black mustache and beard, his face twisting into something of unmitigated terror. Usher struck her with an open palm, again and again and again until she sensed the bile burning the back of her throat.
Coughing it back, choking down on her own vomit, Gritta was powerless to move against the hold they had on her as she convulsed on the hot, stinging fluid trapping her lungs. She felt herself slipping away.
Blessed, blessed death—come take the one who is ready.
“You got that wrist now?”
“Yessir.”
“Simes!”
“Colonel?”
“You and Hampton take George outside.”
“Sir?”
“Take the nigger outside and tie him to that cottonwood by the fire.”
“Tie him—”
“Yes, by damn! George will be punished for this.”
“Colonel—I’m terrible sorry for—”
“Get the nigger out of here!
The commotion quieted somewhat after that, allowing Gritta to turn her head, to roll it slightly to the side and spit out the blood from the wounded man, spit out her own blood from the tongue she had cut on her teeth, spewing free the sour, stinging bile trapped at the back of her throat where it had gagged her.
Convulsing for a moment, Gritta knew she was going to die as Usher dragged her head back so she would have to stare directly into his face, her chin clamped painfully in the palm of his hand.
She winced as his other hand brushed some of her hair out of her eyes, his fingers then tracing down the side of her cheek, where she flinched with pain, sensing, that her flesh was already puffing in hot protest to the beating. In the end his fingers stopped at her throat, where they slowly, agonizingly tightened.
She had no will to fight him. As her eyes rolled back in her head she thought she saw other faces behind his. But they only watched in fascination as Usher tightened his grip all the more. No one held her now. Her arms felt light and free: she could grab his hand, pull it away from her throat if she had wanted. But Gritta did not try to stop him. She wanted him to kill her.
Though she could not speak with her lips, her eyes told him what to do. In silent triumph they roared out at Usher.
“Kill me! Yes go ahead and kill me!”
The warmth trickled from the corners of her eyes as he released his crushing grip on her windpipe. Gritta’s body betrayed her, savagely drawing in that first hungry draught of air.
“Don’t — you — ever — try — something — like — this — again,” he said each word singly, menacingly, almost at a whisper so that she felt stung by the hot breath of each syllable flung against her face.
Usher leaned back from her, drawing out one of his long-barreled pistols, and placed the muzzle against her temple.
“This would be too damned easy, woman.”
He drew the hammer back, his face working around those glowing eyes, contorting as it twisted one way, then another, before a sinister smile finally eased the contours of the face above hers. Usher slowly dragged the pistol’s muzzle down her swollen cheek, down the bruised flesh of her neck, circling one breast, then tracing its way down to her groin. He jammed the muzzle hard against her pubic bone.
Again she betrayed herself, and tears flowed with the pain he caused her, working the pistol barrel inside her.
“Here. This is where you hate me most, isn’t it?”
She only stared, silently weeping, beginning to hurt across every inch of her body. Shame hurt her most of all.
He slapped her again, hard enough that she felt the flesh of her cheek tear against her teeth. Still, she forced herself to stare up at the taunting, smiling face hovering in the heat above hers. Usher drove a fist into her cheek again, then pressed the pistol barrel deeper into the most private part of her—where he had defiled her time and again across the eternity she had suffered with him.
“You’d like me to kill you—wouldn’t you, woman?”
He released the hammer slowly, then cocked it again, over and over as he rubbed his crotch luridly with a left hand, then suddenly turned to the others in the tent.
“Tie her to the bed. Tight. I don’t want her getting loose while I’m outside seeing to the nigger.”
Usher wheeled about, ramming the pistol back in its holster at the front of his hip, and tore through the tent flaps.
“Wagon master!”
“Colonel?”
“Bring me your whip!”
As two men began lashing her to the rough-hewn posts of the prairie bed, she heard George begin to whim per, begging Usher to stay his hand. In the utter stillness of that morning George begged for his master to grant him mercy—
Then came the first crack and the Negro’s shrill cry. Almost inhuman. Like the soul-grating screams of the women Usher’s men used up before they were killed.
Again and again the whip snarled against flesh, until George’s cries softened into the blubbering whimpers of an infant, sobbing incoherently.
“Pull him down!” Usher ordered beyond the tent flaps. “Throw him in one of the wagons and let’s be moving—I want to put forty miles behind us today—put this piece of country far behind me!”
Gritta listened as the men who had tied her stood at the flaps, holding them aside and staring out.
“He opened that nigger up like a gutted hog,” one of them whispered.
“Never’d want him to take a whip to me, not that one.”
Her sundered wrist was bound with a thick strip of her dressing gown, around which they had looped the rope. Her scalp burned where the hair had been torn loose, her eyes grown as puffy as her lips, the blood’s ooze slowing.
Gritta cried bitter, slow tears, cursing herself as she listened to George’s blubbering fading in the distance as they dragged him down, hauling him off to a wagon.
She cursed the voice that had driven her to this. Not that she regretted the pain she had brought upon herself. Instead, the woman cursed herself for the selfishness that had brought such evil down upon the Negro.
She vowed when she next tried to kill herself that she would not put another living soul in the path of Jubilee Usher’s wrath.
18
SHAD FELT SORRY for the young soldiers that Monday morning as the column was breaking camp. The day before had been the Fourth of July—and because of it Carr had kept a tight rein on his troops. He ordered all guns kept silent, with no wastage of ammunition. It hadn’t been much of an Independence Day, most grumbled that
