Bernard Cornwell - Rebel

‘Lost your way, boy?’ This unprepossessing creature now challenged Starbuck. Truslow was carrying an antique flintlock musket that had a depressingly blackened muzzle pointing unwaveringly at Starbuck’s head.

‘I’m looking for Mister Thomas Truslow,’ Starbuck said.

‘I’m Truslow.’ The gun muzzle did not waver, nor did the oddly light eyes. When all was said and done, Starbuck decided, it was those eyes that seared him most. You could clean up this brute, trim his beard, scrub his face and dress him in a churchgoing suit, and still those wild eyes would radiate the chilling message that Thomas Truslow had nothing to lose.

‘I’ve brought you a letter from Washington Faulconer.’

‘Faulconer!’ The name was expressed as a joyless burst of laughter. ‘Wants me for a soldier, is that it?’

‘He does, Mister Truslow, yes.’ Starbuck was making an effort to keep his voice neutral and not betray the fear engendered by those eyes and by the threat of violence that came off Truslow as thick as the smoke from a green bonfire. It seemed that at any second a trembling mechanism could give way in the dark brain behind those pale eyes to unleash a pulverizing bout of destructiveness. It was a menace that seemed horribly close to madness, and very far from the reasoned world of Yale and Boston and Washington Faulconer’s gracious house.

‘Took his time in sending for me, didn’t he?’ Truslow asked suspiciously.

‘He’s been in Richmond. But he did send someone called Ethan Ridley to see you last week.’

The mention of Ridley’s name made Truslow strike like a starving snake. He reached up with his left hand, grabbed Starbuck’s coat, and pulled down so that Starbuck was leaning precariously out of his saddle. He could smell the rank tobacco on Truslow’s breath, and see the scraps of food caught in the wiry, black bristles of his beard. The mad eyes glared into Starbuck’s face. ‘Ridley was here?’

‘I understand he visited you, yes.’ Starbuck was struggling to be courteous and even dignified, though he was remembering how his father had once tried to preach to some half-drunken immigrant longshoremen working on the quays of Boston Harbor and how even the impressive Reverend Elial had struggled to maintain his composure in the face of their maniacal coarseness. Breeding and education, Starbuck reflected, were poor things with which to confront raw nature. ‘He says you were not here.’

Truslow abruptly let go of Starbuck’s coat, at the same time making a growling noise that was half-threat and half-puzzlement. ‘I wasn’t here,’ he said, but distantly, as if trying to make sense of some new and important information, ‘but no one told me how he was here either. Come on, boy.’

Starbuck pulled his coat straight and surreptitiously loosened the big Savage revolver in its holster. ‘As I said, Mister Truslow, I have a letter for you from Colonel Faulconer …’

‘Colonel is he, now?’ Truslow laughed. He had stumped ahead of Starbuck, forcing the Northerner to follow him into a wide clearing that was evidently the Truslow homestead. Bedraggled vegetables grew in long rows, there was a small orchard, its trees a glory of white blossom, while the house itself was a one-story log cabin surmounted by a stout stone chimney from which a wisp of smoke trickled. The cabin was ramshackle and surrounded by untidy stacks of timber, broken carts, sawhorses and barrels. A brindled dog, seeing Starbuck, lunged furiously at the end of its chain, scattering a flock of terrified chickens that had been scratching in the dirt. ‘Get off your horse, boy,’ Truslow snapped at Starbuck.

‘I don’t want to detain you, Mister Truslow. I have Mister Faulconer’s letter here.’ Starbuck reached inside his coat.

‘I said get off that damned horse!’ Truslow snapped the command so fiercely that even the dog, which had seemed wilder than its own master, suddenly whimpered itself into silence and skulked back to the shade of the broken porch. ‘I’ve got work for you, boy,’ Truslow added.

‘Work?’ Starbuck slid out of the saddle, wondering just what kind of hell he had come to.

Truslow snatched the horse’s reins and tied them to a post. ‘I was expecting Roper,’ he said in impenetrable explanation, ‘but till he comes, you’ll have to do. Over there, boy.’ He pointed at a deep pit which lay just beyond one of the piles of broken carts. It was a saw pit, maybe eight feet deep and straddled by a tree trunk in which a massive great double-handed ripsaw was embedded.

‘Jump down, boy! You’ll be bottom man,’ Truslow snapped.

‘Mister Truslow!’ Starbuck tried to stem the madness with an appeal to reason.

‘Jump, boy!’ That tone of voice would have made the devil snap to attention, and Starbuck did take an involuntary step toward the pit’s edge, but then his innate stubbornness took command.

‘I’m not here to work.’

Truslow grinned. ‘You’ve got a gun, boy, you’d better be prepared to use it.’

‘I’m here to give you this letter.’ Starbuck took the envelope from an inside pocket.

‘You could kill a buffalo with that pistol, boy. You want to use it on me? Or you want to work for me?’

‘I want you to read this letter …’

‘Work or fight, boy.’ Truslow stepped closer to Starbuck. ‘I don’t give a sack of shit which one you want, but I ain’t waiting all day for you to make up your mind on it either.’

There was a time for fighting, Starbuck thought, and a time for deciding he would be bottom man in a saw pit. He jumped, landing in a slurry of mud, sawdust and woodchips.

‘Take your coat off, boy, and that hog pistol with it.’

‘Mister Truslow!’ Starbuck made one last effort to retain a shred of control over this encounter. ‘Would you just read this letter?’

‘Listen, boy, your letter’s just words, and words never filled a belly yet. Your fancy Colonel is asking me for a favor, and you’ll have to work to earn him his answer. You understand me? If Washington Faulconer himself had come I’d have him down that pit, so leave off your whining, get off your coat, take hold of that handle, and give me some work.’

So Starbuck left off his whining, took off his coat, took hold of the handle and gave him some work.

It seemed to Starbuck that he was mired in a pit beneath a cackling and vengeful demon. The great pit saw, singing through the trunk, was repeatedly rammed down at him in a shower of sawdust and chips that stung Starbuck’s eyes and clogged his mouth and nostrils, yet each time he took a hand off the saw to try and cuff his face, Truslow would bellow a reproof. ‘What’s the matter, boy? Gone soft on me? Work!’

The pit was straddled by a pinewood trunk that, judging by its size, had to be older than the Republic. Truslow had grudgingly informed Starbuck that he was cutting the trunk into planks which he had promised to deliver for a new floor being laid at the general store at Hankey’s Ford. ‘This and two other trunks should manage it,’ Truslow announced before they were even halfway through the first cut, by which time Starbuck’s muscles were already aching like fire and his hands were smarting.

‘Pull, boy, pull!’ Truslow shouted. ‘I can’t keep the cut straight if you’re lollygagging!’ The saw blade was nine feet long and supposed to be powered equally by the top and bottom men, though Thomas Truslow, perched on top of the trunk in his nailed boots, was doing by far the greater amount of work. Starbuck tried to keep up. He gathered that his role was to pull down hard, for it was the downstroke that provided most of the cutting force, and if he tried to push up too hard he risked buckling the saw, so it was better to let Truslow yank the great steel blade up from the pit, but though that upward motion gave Starbuck a half second of blessed relief, it immediately led to the crucial, brutal downstroke. Sweat was pouring off Starbuck.