and then, pair by pair, some of the others. The captain ordered the lights turned down, blackness receding into blackness, the mood of the deck graying out, rhythm, for a time, overcoming hate.
Chapter Fifteen
TED’S FLESH SHRANK back against his bones like cooked meat. He was lying in the half- light on what felt like a wood floor. An old woman was pressing a bandage on the top of his head and he smelled the cooking on her, the coal oil, and the sweat. It occurred to him that he might have been unconscious for days.
A man appeared above him. “He’s coming around,” the unshaved face said.
“Leave him be.”
“He can hear me.” Ralph Skadlock bent down. “Hey, son of a bitch. You shot my dog in the hip. I ought to tie a sash weight around your neck and throw your ass in the river.”
Ted was astounded by the pain in his head, back, and hands. He raised his left and found it to be a throbbing thing crusted in blood. Blinking, he tried to remember the reason for all this hurting. “Where’s my little girl?” His voice sounded as if it were coming from under the floor, and his vision began to fail again.
“Listen,” only a voice close to his ear said, “I’m going to bring you to the damn train. If we ever see you again, I’ll cut you like a October hog. You understand me?”
His sight brightened, and he looked at the beaded-board wall, at the cloudy windows. He could hear the rasp of wasps in the room. Next to him was some type of copper device and a burner, a still. Outlaws. He was among outlaws. “Where’s Lily?”
“Come back here again and I’ll fix you good.” Ralph Skadlock looked up at the old woman. “You know, they’d never find him back in here.”
“How many times I got to tell you, we got to send him out. Otherwise somebody might come lookin’ for him.”
Ted parted his lips to say something, then even his ears failed, and he passed out.
WHEN NEXT he opened his eyes, he was on the freight platform of a tiny board-and-batten railroad station out in the woods next to a single set of buckled tracks running through broom sedge. He turned his head to study the gray wood and found sitting next to him a man of about twenty wearing a straw hat and overalls.
The man folded up a piece of paper and stuffed it back into the opening of Ted’s shirt. “Hey, I come up a few minutes ago to catch the local and here you be with a note stuck in your shirt.”
Ted opened his mouth but nothing came out. On the second try he said, “I hurt.”
The man held up a forefinger and bobbed it. “Judging from the sight of you I reckon that’s a fact. This here note is to the Fault agent to put you on the baggage coach for the Memphis hospital. Says you got money in your wallet.”
“Fault agent.” Ted thought it a mystical phrase.
“He ain’t here yet. This station’s called Fault. His name’s Toliver and he don’t come to work but two hours a day, morning train and afternoon.”
“Which one is this?”
The man looked around as if to verify this for himself. “Afternoon.” He nodded. “What happened to you anyways, get stomped by a bull?”
“Some people named Skadlock-”
Suddenly, the young man stood up as though he realized he was near grave contagion. “Well, my granny used to say if you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas, but I believe you been lyin’ with the alligators.”
“Where am I?”
“Fault, Louisiana. Used to be called No Gun Switch, except they took out the switch five years ago.”
Raising his head a bit, Ted glimpsed only a poorly graveled lane crossing the tracks. “Can you get me some water?”
“I’m sorry, old son, ain’t none around here.” He pulled out a nickel silver watch, fobless, from his yellow pants. “Toliver’ll be here in a minute.”
Shortly, a Model T’s aspirate spitting sounded at the edge of Ted’s hearing. The station agent appeared in an open pasture adjacent to the one-room station. The middle-aged agent, bald, wearing thick glasses, got out and stepped up on the platform, standing over Ted and looking him over. “You get blowed up in the sawmill?”
The younger man leaned against the wall. “I think he’s about dried up. Can you fetch him a cup of water?”
“I brought a pail in the Ford, and there’s a dipper you can get him.” The agent pulled his switch key and removed an outsized brass padlock from the door. “You going to a hospital down the line, are you?”
“I feel terrible.” Ted wanted to say more, but felt as if a brood sow were lying across his chest.
The telegraph sounder began to clack in its box, and the agent went in to listen and to open his key and answer.
The younger man came up with a dipper of water and raised Ted’s head.
The agent came out. “Number forty-three’s on time and we’ll see engine smoke in a minute.” He bent down and tied a freight tag around Ted’s left ankle. “Sidney, what happened to him to black his eyes and mash his hand like that?”
“He tangled with some Skadlocks, he said.”
“He did? Who brought him out of their territory?”
“He was laid out when I got here.”
The agent read the note stuffed halfway in his shirt and pulled out Ted’s wallet, removing several small bills. “They want you sent north.” Half a mile away, the locomotive began blowing its out-of-tune whistle, and through the woods the men could hear the arrhythmic cough of a badly regulated engine. The agent got his flag, held it aloft, and the train pulled in, its two wooden coaches squalling to a stop on the flaking rails. An overweight clerk wearing a vest threw open the sliding door to the baggage coach, handed off six rocking chairs, two spools of barbed wire, ten sacks of feed, and a wooden box with the illustration of a clock on its side.
“You got a patient,” the agent said.
“Aw,” the clerk said, turning to pull down the coach’s stretcher, a stout wood-frame apparatus with short legs. The three men lifted Ted onto it and then into the baggage coach, laying him down in a clear area against a side wall.
The young man in the straw hat crouched next to him. “You need some more water, feller?”
Ted opened his eyes, glad to be inside anything, but said nothing.
The whistle hollered and the clerk slid the door closed. The train moved perhaps fifteen miles an hour, and he took pleasure in moving toward a better place where dogs didn’t crush and tear your fingers or men beat on you with the flat of a shovel as they would a snake. The train moved in a shuddering, unsteady motion with the sound of much loose metal in rattling distress. The baggage clerk got down on his knees and put his hand on Ted’s forehead, then gave him a drink of ice water, which went down like a blessing.
“Oh, thank you,” he rasped.
“You need something, you let me know.”
“All right.”
“Eventually we’ll get up to the main line at Harriston, where we meet the northbound train. You’ll get on their baggage car.”
“All right.” The rail was unmaintained and the joints hammered his back when a wheel passed over them.
“I hate to see you down among the cinders and husks there,” the baggage clerk said. He had pulled up a deck chair and was sitting near his head. “I hear you run into some bad folks.”
“The Skadlocks.” His head cleared for a moment and he looked up at the man, who was somehow motionless
