Kathleen Kent - The Outcasts

“No woman, I told you!”

“One last question.” Dr. Tom brought the scalpel to Crenshaw’s face and lightly etched a matching line down the other side of his face. Crenshaw flinched and the wound trickled blood. “Were you in Frost Town when McGill killed those children?”

Crenshaw nodded once and Dr. Tom looked at Nate and said, “Hang him.”

Crenshaw twisted hard at the ropes. The straining dislodged the linen packing in his jaw, opening the wound to bleed again. “You said you wouldn’t hang me.”

Dr. Tom stood up. “I’m not. He is.” He walked to Crenshaw’s horse and removed the length of rope from the saddle. He put his hand on Nate’s shoulder. “The only sin here is in hesitation.”

“Oh, goddamn!” Crenshaw yelled. “My own goddamn rope!”

“Go on, Nate,” Dr. Tom said. “This is part of the life you chose. If you falter, just think of those dead children.” Dr. Tom handed Nate the rope. “You’re not in this alone.”

Nate turned his back to the prisoner and, after several tries, managed to pitch the coiled end of the rope over a branch. Fashioning a noose took longer than expected and he soon realized he should have made the noose first. Before he could position the grulla mare under it, he had to listen to ten minutes of bargaining and threatening from the prisoner. He thought of gagging Crenshaw again, his nerves frayed to breaking by the begging, but decided that tolerating the man’s last pleading words was the price he paid for killing him. It took both Nate and Dr. Tom to wrestle the noose around Crenshaw’s neck and reseat him in his saddle.

Nate thumped the horse and she bolted forward, but Crenshaw dropped awkwardly, desperately squeezing the saddle with both legs. He died badly, kicking and wheezing, scissoring his legs in the air. Nate would have helped him with the drop, but he was afraid of having his jaw broken by flailing feet.

Dr. Tom had his back to Crenshaw, repacking his medical kit, but Nate watched the hanging man dying by measures and wondered how he would tell his wife about it. Describing a hanging, in the general sense, wouldn’t be so difficult to convey in a letter. If a man commits himself to service and rides away from his home and family carrying a rope and a gun, he has to expect to use them.

But this hanging couldn’t be considered in the general sense, not while he was standing so close to the man’s purpling face and bulging eyes, not while he was the one who had fashioned the rope. He understood, watching Crenshaw’s purposeful kicks turn to spasmodic jerking, that he had come to a place farther from his family than could be measured in miles. In the few years of his marriage, he had withheld nothing from his wife. But come time for the next letter to her, that would change.

As soon as Crenshaw had quit moving, Nate quietly approached the mare, still wild-eyed and spooked, and settled her only after his own hands had stopped shaking. Then he mounted his horse and turned southward again, leading the mare and following after Dr. Tom, towards Middle Bayou.

On the evening of Bill’s arrival, Lucinda took him to the clearing and pointed to the island.

“There,” she said. “The gold is there, somewhere on that island. Bedford says that it’s a large cache of coins.” She thought for a moment of telling him about the German, his remains snagged somewhere in the water, decomposing slowly, hopefully still submerged. But then she would have to tell him about Mrs. Landry’s stolen money in the tapestry bag. He would not be pleased by the risk she had taken.

She watched Bill’s face eagerly, looking for signs of approval, waiting for him to slip his arms around her, to palm her hair back from her forehead, to kiss her. But his brow furrowed in concentration, his gaze taking in the thick choke of hanging vines, the floating debris that might or might not be fallen logs. He lit a small cigar and stood looking at the island for a time.

Finally he pursed his lips and said, “I have a man coming in a few days with mules for the gold.” He breathed out, exhaling smoke. “My surveying partner.” He turned his head and smiled at her: a lifting of the upper lip, revealing straight, unbroken teeth.

His beard, along with the spectacles and the smoke swirling around his chin, worked to mask his features, and she understood the ruse. But it veiled the subtler expressions playing across his face as well, and it seemed for that brief instant that he retreated from her even as she stood next to him.

“Bedford has proposed marriage,” she told him. “There is an engagement party in two days.”

He smiled again and dropped the cigar, then crushed it out with one boot heel. He cupped one hand behind her neck, pressing her lips to his, and placed the other hand between her legs. “Well, then,” he whispered. “I have a gift for the bride.”

Bill had been welcomed readily into the Grant home. Soon the settlers began calling on their schoolteacher’s handsome brother, the men gathering on the porch to speak with him, attentive to his experience as a surveyor and engineer during the war, the women putting forth their eligible daughters with introductions, to Lucinda’s mind, as subtle as cattle being offered at auction. But his hours spent with Bedford at the supper table or out walking aimlessly in the fields—always accompanied by a whiskey bottle—dragged Lucinda into a deep and continual anxiety that Bedford would recognize him. Bill assured her that Bedford had been drunk on his ear in Harrisburg where he’d shown the gold coin, and that he’d keep the old man drunk until he left again. But at times Lucinda could see Bedford regarding Bill with puzzled concentration, a momentary confusion that Jane was quick to observe. Her wariness towards Lucinda—and now towards the newly arrived “brother” occupying her home and constantly feeding liquor to her father—had turned to outright hostility.

Bill had told her, though, that he was tired of waiting, that he had come “to grease the wheels.”

The engagement party was held in the Wallers’ home, the sitting room filled uncomfortably with invited settlers eager to congratulate Bedford and Lucinda but also there to see with their own eyes the transplanted remnants of old plantation finery. Most of the men, standing or sitting stiffly with their wives, were casting guarded, avaricious glances in May’s direction, their overly long hair manfully tamed with what looked to be axle grease. The women, in pieced-together dresses and shawls, struggled to gracefully hold Sephronia’s delicate cups and saucers, tiny embossed fruit forks, and slender-stemmed glasses with callused hands that had most recently held buckets, plow handles, or hoes.

Robert McKenzie, the one-armed neighbor that May had wondered about kissing, stood with his back against the green-and-maroon wallpaper of the Wallers’ sitting room stealing looks at Jane Grant. He was dressed in a dark suit, his left sleeve pinned neatly to his shoulder, and was indeed handsome, Lucinda thought, in a sickroom, wasting sort of way.

Jane sat at the Wallers’ ornate parlor piano, her back to the room, playing something appropriately energetic, although, Lucinda knew, her expression was dour. Lucinda sat next to her, facing the guests, her eyes shifting back and forth like a shuttlecock between the spectacled man newly introduced as Lucinda’s brother, Bill Carter, and May. They stood together talking, the top of May’s head coming only as high as his collarbone, her upturned face at times rising to meet his as she stood on tiptoe to better hear what he had to say. Bill rested one elbow on the mantelpiece and smiled, his head cocked to one side as May chattered on. He’s watching her, Lucinda thought, as a carnival barker would consider a rube, with both amusement and cunning. He ran the tip of his tongue slowly over his lips and then traced the wetness on his mouth with the pad of his thumb, causing May to blush. Only once did his eyes drift to Lucinda’s, where they lingered briefly.