Edward Lee - The Black Train

“Now lick it! ”

Her sex pressed down over his mouth. Gast would have me killed, Cutton suspected. Other men had whispered of this woman’s delights but was it worth it? Cutton gave her succor until she spasmed. Her white thighs quivered against his cheeks…

“That was lovely,” she sighed and rolled over. “The perfect way to begin.”

At least Cutton liked the sound of that.

“The bed, now,” she said.

The bed stank, but Cutton wasn’t a delicate man. She lay beside him, running her hands up and down the white body, fingertips twisting dark nipples. “I apologize about the odor. I’ll have to get Jessa to replace the mattress again.”

Again. Cutton guessed she’d had many men on this bed, most of them dirty from the field, and some of the slaves, too—he’d heard—right off the line. But what else did she say? A name.

Jessa?

The maid! Cutton realized. “What, uh, what about the maid? What if she hears us? What if she comes in?”

“The maid does what I say.”

“And your children. You didn’t even lock the door. They could walk in any sec—”

“They’re asleep, like all decent people at this hour.” She smiled at the implication.

Cutton was generally a man of good judgment; this was his employer’s wife, he should not be here, he should’ve walked away when he’d met her on the street. And if word got out? Gast’d have me buried alive, he felt sure. Couple men who worked for Gast had disappeared shortly after rumors, and several of the slaves had been executed in the field, for the same allegations…

Her gentle accent lifted. “Now, are you going to fuck me, or will I be forced to find someone else?”

Those words were all it took to erase Cutton’s good judgment as if it had never existed…

Two hours later, he lay exhausted. She kept her arms and legs wrapped around him, his member limp now but still in her.

Her horniness didn’t abate even after all Cutton had given her; she’d broken out in a prickly heat, her cheeks blushed along with her belly and the soft skin below her throat.

In a parched mewl, she giggled, “You’re quite the man, sir.”

Quite the DEAD man if’n I don’t get out’a here, he thought. But his lust had been sated—his reason returned. “I gotta get my ass out’a here, Mrs. Gast.” He began to push off but her arms and legs tightened back around him. She wasn’t letting him go, wasn’t letting him pull out.

“Not just yet,” she whispered. One more thing remained for him to do.

Next morning, Cutton watched two strong-armers decapitate one of the nigrahs in the field. That was the first thing he saw when he dismounted his horse.

They’re killin’ another one…

Cutton hadn’t heard anything about it.

Bean and cotton fields lined either side of the several miles of track they’d already lain; Cutton understood that the beans were that newfangled one from the Orient, something called soya. The female slaves worked the field, while the men drove the spikes. It was a strange sight now…

Total silence stretched out over the sunlit morn. The hundred or so slaves who lined the trackway seemed to stand at attention, akin to a military formation, along with Gast’s white foremen and other hires.

“That’s a good clean cut,” Morris said from the field. The strong-armer who’d done the work had used an adze, a chopping tool like an ax but perpendicularbladed. Standing beside Morris, he held the Negro’s severed head for all—especially the slaves—to see.

Morris shouted out, “As yawl know, ’round here this is what happens to nigrahs who commit crimes. Yawl have been guaranteed your freedom once this railroad’s finished, so’s ya need to think real hard before you do somethin’ stupid. This slave here molested a white woman who shall remain nameless”—Morris grabbed the head and looked at it—“and this is the price he pays. Mr. Gast is a fair and generous man, but we don’t tolerate insubordination or crime. This poor, stupid slave will never be a free man, but you all most certainly will if ya work hard, stay in line, and keep your hands off what they ought not be touchin’.”

Wide white eyes blazed in fear from the long row of black faces along the track line. Other strong-armers stood back, holding repeater pistols and blunderbuss shotguns that could drop a row of men with one squeeze of the trigger.

Shit, Cutton thought. The slave they’d executed was one he knew—called Meti. Gast let all the slaves take African names. They were well clothed, well fed, and well housed, and with the promise of freedom when the final rail was spiked in Maxon, they all listened well. Meti had been one of the strongest spike-drivers of them all. It was bad to lose a good worker. He’d been stripped of his valuable working clothes and boots. Now he’d been reduced to a headless, naked body.

Poor bastard should’a kept it in his pants. Probably raped one’a the town girls.

But when Cutton peered farther down the line, he thought Shit! again. Perched atop the familiar white steed was Mr. Gast, spectating. Gast nodded to Morris when eye contact was made.

“Bring up the sledges!” he ordered. “Yawl know the drill.”

Four assigned slaves stepped forward with twenty-pound sledgehammers.

“I’m sorry you fellas have to do this to one of your own—that’s the way it is. But it ain’t just a lesson to yawl, it’s a lesson to white men, too. We’se doin’ serious work for our country buildin’ this railroad. The Yankees got close to thirty thousand miles of train track but the South ain’t got but nine. Mr. Gast’s railroad is important for the future. We all have to keep our minds on the task.” Morris paused, perhaps only for effect. “Pound him.”

The sledgehammers rose and fell, landing great sickening thuds. The headless body was pummeled, and in a minute it was crushed, every bone in the dead man’s body fractured.

“Axes!” Morris ordered.

Four more slaves stepped up, just as grim-faced as the first. In unison their axes blurred down in scarlet arcs, like a diabolical camshaft. In moments the pulverized body was chopped up into pulp.

“Shovels and hoes!”

The finality now. The slaves hoed the pulp into the soil.

Morris bellowed, “We’re stronger by losin’ this one, and now his useless criminal body will finally do some good, by fertilizin’ this good land which puts food in our bellies! Mr. Gast just done got back from a long trip to Virginia to bring us more rail and ties, so let’s make him proud, and lay a quarter mile plus! Right, men?”

The hundred slaves snapped out of their gloom and cheered.

“Remember, your freedom’s at the end of this track! Right?”

More cheers, more rallying.

“Now take twenty! Then we’re back to work!”

Cutton remained speechless as the ritual ended: the two strong-armers in the field placed Meti’s severed head on a high stake and sunk it in the ground.

Good Jesus…

Morris came down to the track line. “Hey, Cutton. Sorry, I didn’t know you were the squeamish type.” He pronounced the word “type” as “tap.” “But you shouldn’t’ve bailed last night. I dropped five in the whore-mother’s hand’n she forgot all about what I done to that little mulatto girl. And she got me two more girls! I had me plenty of fun.”

Cutton tried to banish the image. “Meti was a fine worker, Morris. What exactly he do? Force himself on a town girl?”

Morris bit off some tobacco. “Between you’n me?”

“Sure.”

“Gave Mrs. Gast’s ass a squeeze, he did.”

Cutton’s gut shimmied. If they cut off his head and tilled his corpse into the field for grabbin’ her ass…what would they do to me?