American Nocturne Read online

  A twinge of pride passed over him as he straightened to see six riders come into view. Blurry, mere blends of moving color, but he was sure there were six of them. His eyes were strong. Always had been. When asked, he attributed this to not reading by candlelight, but the truth was he only read when necessary. Everyone he had ever known to read for pleasure wore spectacles of some sort. He was thankful to have avoided such a nuisance. Not that he was much for reading, anyway. But he was always quick to show those who questioned him that he could do it. Had learned the alphabet, learned to write several dozen words properly. Probably a hundred, all told. His eldest daughter had taught him. After the war.

  The figures sharpened in their relief, and he saw there were not six horsemen, but four. The pride drained out and concern, mixed with mild trepidation, filled its place. A smaller number was no comfort, a lesson absorbed from the harsh instruction of life. He allowed that other lives may have taught differently – lives of men who’d fought on a battlefield, maybe – but in his experience, the larger the number, the smaller the threat. Besides, four horsemen were a bad omen. Everyone knew there were four horsemen of the Apocalypse. And there were usually four horsemen in a patrol toward the end, when the confederacy was in its last days and the only men left to ride were the sadistic outcasts, men living in the scornful wake of those who had bravely gone to war, men with something to prove to themselves, and to everyone with skin darker than theirs. And, at the end, always in fours.

  No. He shook away the thought, brought himself back to the present, tried to focus on the here and now, on the world he lived in, not the world that was. He was in Texas, a freedman, no longer a slave in Alabama. Mr Lincoln had freed him – him and the rest of those like him. He had once attended a gathering where some smarty Negro in a bowler hat and fancy suit coat tried to say that Congress had freed the slaves, not Mr Lincoln; but that slicker had clearly never worn shackles, never felt the bite of the whip. Only one man ever did anything for people like him, at least as far as he could remember, and he was not going to let some flannel-mouthed snoot pretend otherwise.

  The details of the riders’ appearance became more noticeable as they drew closer. He tried to place a finger on what was so menacing about them, whether it was the violent angle of their bodies or the militant way they gripped their reins, or the large white hats atop each of their heads. But he soon saw it was none of those things. It was the fact they had shadows for faces, shadows that seemed darker than anything he had ever seen. Or not seen.

  And he allowed that maybe it was the direction from which they rode that was spooking him. His mind resisted that one. Those stories caused tingles to grope him in ways he didn’t like.

  As they closed the distance, kicking up whirls of dirt and dust and grass behind them, the texture and shape of the shadows showed them to be not shadows at all, but masks. Black hoods beneath white felt brims. He thought of the patrols again, though he was not certain why. Those men had never worn masks, never had a need to hide who they were. Maybe it was the way he recalled them riding onto the plantation, barging in like angry landlords. Wielding rifles and whips, looking for niggers learning from books, eating in the main house, having visitors, holding church. He remembered being scared numb by how the owner was powerless to stop them, scared long after they had come and gone.

  Mr Morgan may not have always been the nicest man in the world, but he was not a cruel man, nor an unfair man. And he was the man. The patrols were made up of mostly poor whites, always stealing, peddling stuff off the roadways they took from freed blacks accused of harboring runaways or violating curfew. Ezekiel Adams knew that if the man of the estate, a white man of breeding who owned two dozen slaves and a thousand acres, if that man was helpless in the face of a patrol, then slavery had created a force of nature that threatened everything in its path with mindless destruction. Like a funnel cloud or a tempest. Forces of nature could not be pleaded with, could not be persuaded. They were unmoved by invocations of Jesus or Satan. And Ezekiel remembered fearing that more than slavery itself. Fearing that more than death, even.

  Evil was not in the blood, his mother used to tell him. It was passed through the tongue. It’s what came out of a man’s mouth that spread to others. White or black, evil was learned, and could be unlearned. She used to say that once it got in the blood, once it didn’t need to be learned anymore, that’s when mankind would feel God’s wrath. At times, Ezekiel wasn’t so sure it wasn’t already in the blood of some, that maybe Him not doing anything about it was the wrath she meant.

  The tingling returned. The direction from which they rode was not good, and he was having a hard time not thinking about it.

  Ezekiel said a small prayer beneath his breath to bless the soul of Mr Lincoln once more as the horsemen crested the nearest ridge and came within shouting distance. He was determined to maintain some dignity, what his mother used to call a free man’s bearing, weighing in his mind that he had every reason to think these men were here to kill him, yet no reason in particular. But a sensation creeping around like he’d swallowed a worm, told him he was not going to be killed. It told him the danger wasn’t to him. Not at this moment. Try as he might, he could find no relief in the feeling.

  The riders came to a stop a dozen yards before they reached him, forming a tight uneven line. They stood that way for an uncomfortable series of moments, appraising him through tiny rips in the black cloths covering their faces, the heads of their horses bobbing and snorting intermittently, before each abruptly reined their animal, half of them to the left, half to the right, as if acting on a silent command. It was then that Ezekiel saw, with a more subdued but still tangible flush of pride, that he had been right. A fifth rider strode through the gap on a black quarter horse, his right hand behind him, leading a fully saddled appaloosa. Once clear of the others, the rider made a tight arc with his horse, moving his trailing arm out wide around him, bringing the appaloosa to a stop between himself and Ezekiel.

  Ezekiel reached up and snagged the reins out of the air as the rider tossed them toward him.

  The rider had his mount continue circling until he was facing Ezekiel again. The man on the horse said nothing. The only sounds were the huffs of the horses, the occasional clop of a hoof. Even the birds grew quiet. The relative silence seemed unnatural. It hung around Ezekiel’s ears like a weight.

  “This here’s Mr Campbell’s horse,” Ezekiel said, pretending suddenly to notice the brand. The tingling grew to where he felt a trembling in his limbs. He laid his shovel down across the post he was planning to reset and pointed back in the direction they had come. “If you were looking to return it, his spread is over yonder.”

  None of them replied. Ezekiel knew what he had said was pointless, knew the men understood exactly whose horse they had just passed off, just like he’d known whose horse it was as soon as he’d laid eyes on it. And since there was nothing else in that direction for too many miles to count, he even knew they had just come from Bill Campbell’s ranch. But he preferred not to acknowledge any of those things. Knowing wasn’t always a good thing. Problem was, not knowing always seemed to be worse. And what he didn’t know was exactly what it was these men wanted of him.

  Fixing a length of fence was not a crime. The law had been supporting fencers for years now. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard of violence breaking out over such a thing, even if every week it seemed another section of his was being torn down. Surely no one, not even that mean and greedy Bill Campbell, was going to send men in masks to stop a man from repairing his own fence on his own land, even a black man. It had to be something else.

  The rumors stirred in his thoughts, demanding to be acknowledged, and he did his best to push them aside. Not thinking of something wasn’t so hard, you just had to think of something else. But the cold tickle in his neck and spine that accompanied some thoughts wouldn’t go away so easily.

  He took in a breath. The breeze had died down, and he inhaled the gritty scents
of upturned earth and wet horseflesh.

  “Were you men lookin’ for water?” he asked, because he felt he needed to ask something. “A place to water your horses, maybe?”

  The men said nothing. Ezekiel passed his eyes over each of them, looking for a clue to what they wanted. They were all dressed more or less identically. Each wore a long tan coat and a blue shirt. Each wore brown cotton trousers and brown boots. Each wore a holster on his belt with a sidearm, the leather tied securely to his thigh, protruding along his bent leg through the gap of his open coat. Each wore similar black gloves. And, of course, each wore the black hood beneath an immaculate white hat. The only point of deviation in their uniform seemed to be their bandanas. Each had a different color. The one who had approached him boasted a white one, folded over and forming a curved, sagging triangle around his neck.

  Ezekiel didn’t know what they wanted, but he did have an idea of what they wanted him to do. A saddled horse with no rider, reins thrown to him – it didn’t take an educated mind to figure it out.

  But that didn’t mean he was eager to do it.

  As if sensing his reliance on the ambiguity, the rider with the white bandana abruptly turned his horse and paced it away. The others fell in line next to him. They stopped after a few yards and looked back, one by one, black hoods peering over broad shoulders.

  His ability to feign ignorance washed away. Ezekiel mounted the appaloosa and followed as the men spurred their animals to a gallop.

  They rode for a good spell before he saw anything. Ezekiel guessed fifteen minutes, but he was never much for measuring time. They crossed the open fields and passed between the thickets of oak and pine and sweet gum, over a gully and through a pasture. He did not know where they were going, but he feared he could guess. What he did know is they were on William Campbell’s land, passing William Campbell’s cattle as they grazed, and that made him extremely uncomfortable. William Campbell would probably shoot him if he caught Ezekiel trespassing like this, especially if he was caught riding Campbell’s horse. But he knew that if there was any shooting to be done today, these men around him would likely be the ones doing it, so that was not his concern.

  It was the stories he’d been hearing about Campbell the past few months, how the man had gone mad as a hatter after losing his wife and child to yellow fever. Crazy stories. Stories that made no sense. Stories he wanted to dismiss as bosh.

  Stories about a woman with skin darker than the bottom of his well, and eyes darker still. A woman who was brought to do the work of the devil.

  He stopped pretending there was any doubt as to the destination when he saw Campbell’s house. There were three figures near a large oak tree out in front of it, and another standing closer to the porch. One of them near the tree was on horseback. The others were standing beneath its canopy, one on each side of the trunk. Standing on something, it seemed. The one on the horse and the one near the porch each had a white hat and a shadow for a face, though Ezekiel allowed that he might be assuming that last part. Five other horses, saddled and bridled, looked hitched to a rail of fence as they grazed.

  They halved the distance before Ezekiel saw the noose, halved it again before he saw the man whose neck was in it was Bill Campbell. The man was blindfolded, rocking stiff-legged on a section of log that was too thin to hold its balance. By the angle of his arms, curving at the elbows and disappearing behind his back, Ezekiel assumed Campbell’s wrists were bound to the rear. Then he realized there were two nooses, the other on the far side of the tree around the neck of a tall, skinny negress in a ratty prairie dress and white pinafore. Her skin was blacker than charred wood. Ezekiel wanted badly to turn back, to burst off and keep riding, to be anywhere else but in this field with these men approaching that tree. But he knew that was like wishing a pair of deuces were a pair of queens. ‘Wish in one hand, crap in the other’ he remembered hearing a man who’d lost his legs in the war once say. ‘See which one fills up first.’

  The tree was drawing close now, and he began to worry about what plans – what difficulties – these men had in store for him. A lynching of a white man, that was not something a black man wanted to be around, not in Alabama or Texas or anywhere he could imagine. Ezekiel studied Campbell’s face as its details came into view. The man’s expression, jowly and ruddy, was pulled as tight in a grimace as the folds of flesh would allow. He was nervous, too. His face was slick, his hair shiny, and his shirt soaked, even in the cool breeze on such a mild day. For that, Ezekiel couldn’t blame him.

  The woman looked worried, but defiant. They hadn’t blindfolded her, and her saucery eyes, white loops around black centers, darted from hat to hat like she was taking names. She held her chin up, full pale lips puffed out, almost pursed. He could tell more than one tear had cut a trail down her face, because her dried ebony skin was a bit white and flaky in spots, except for where the long tails of moisture left their marks. She was sweating, too, like Campbell, her dress pressed flat from the dampness. But she seemed determined to keep herself proper. Dignified.

  Damn fool, Ezekiel thought. Even a colored woman dark as her stood a chance of escaping the rope if she just blubbered and begged and did things a woman was expected to do.

  But then he remembered the stories, and thought, maybe not.

  All the riders except the one with the white bandana gathered near the tree, next to the other members of the group. The April breeze was pushing toward them, rippling through their coats like a series of tiny waves as they turned sideways to it. They lined their horses in a row, perpendicular, facing both Ezekiel and the tree. An audience.

  Ezekiel examined the rope around Campbell’s neck. It was drawn tight up and over a branch, angling sharply to a stake in the ground near the foot of the horse closest to the tree. There was a squat mason jug next to it, like someone had been snorting homemade liquor. Or was planning to.

  The rider with the white bandana pulled a rolled-up piece of parchment from his saddlebag, maneuvered his horse near to hand it over. It was tied around the middle with a small piece of leather. Ezekiel reluctantly took it from him and the man stabbed a finger at it, as if to make sure Ezekiel couldn’t play dumb. Ezekiel unfastened the tie and unrolled the sheet, holding it with one hand on top and the other on the bottom.

  There were words written on it. Big, blocky letters. Some of them he recognized. Others he had to sound out, mouthing them slowly, piecing out the pronunciation. He lifted his head as he realized what it said. He looked at the tall rider with the white bandana, then at the other men lined up near the tree, then at Campbell. The wind was coming from his back, flapping the parchment in his hands.

  He studied the rope again, told himself this had to be some elaborate joke. This was not a hanging. Ezekiel had seen several hangings in his day. It was not that easy to hang a man. The rope and the branch both needed to be strong. And the rope had to be secure. He’d seen several men hit the ground running as a rope came undone or a tree branch snapped. This rope didn’t seem all that strong, and he doubted that stake in the ground would ever hold a grown man’s weight, even if the branch would.

  Ezekiel started to say something to the man with the white bandana, but the man drew his pistol and pointed it at him. Ezekiel got the message. He took a breath and raised the parchment. A sharp fume irritated his nose as the breeze ebbed. He wondered if it was the stench of fear. Then he wondered if it was his or Campbell’s.

  “William Campbell,” he said, his voice shaky. As he spoke the words, one of the riders trotted forward, circling Campbell, and removed the blindfold.

  Campbell blinked, angling his head down and squinting into the light. “Adams? Adams, is that you? What do you think you’re doing? Who the hell are these—”

  The rider with the white bandana turned the pistol toward Campbell and cocked it. Campbell’s face flushed, but he held his tongue. Ezekiel wondered for a moment if it was a flush of rage, if maybe the mere presence of a Negro placed a heavy thumb on the scale for anger,
balancing it out against fear.

  But then he saw how slack the man’s jaw had become, how the red had turned pale. The man’s heart was under a severe strain and was affecting the flow of his blood.

  “I’m sorry, Mr Campbell...”

  The door to the front of the house swung open; clattered against its stop. A man in another white hat, black hood and duster rumbled out. He was holding a long, hollow pole with a rope double-threaded through it into a loop. At the end of it flailed a boy in tattered trousers and a few strips of cloth hanging from his shoulders. The loop of the rope was around his neck. The boy hissed and snarled as he clutched at the pole.

  Right behind him, another hat and hood with a pole clomped out, this one leading a woman the same way. She made less noise than the boy, but her face, scratched and filthy, matched his ferocity, all bared teeth and wild eyes.

  Two other men followed, holstering their revolvers as they stepped onto the porch.

  Several of the horses nickered and backed away. Ezekiel felt himself almost slide off his saddle as one of his boots kicked out of a stirrup. His hand was trembling so badly he found it difficult to grip the horn.

  He swallowed dry, unable to find any wetness in his mouth. The men with the poles led the thrashing boy and woman to a clearing next to the tree. Ezekiel knew these people, or knew them well enough. Seen them in town, the woman at the general store, the boy every spring at the fair. Before the fever. He felt himself sway, like he was trying to balance on water. Either the stories he’d heard weren’t crazy, or he was.

  The man with the pole leading the boy stumbled as he reached the clearing, his boot heel catching something on the ground. He didn’t let go of the pole, but did let the rope slip and that was all it took. The boy pulled free and scrabbled in a mad rush toward the man closest to him, the one leading the woman. The child uttered a high-pitched growl, reminding Ezekiel of a bobcat as he lunged and clamped his jaws on the man’s arm. Ezekiel knew he’d never forget those eyes, burning with something unnatural, lit with the glow of a branding iron just removed from a flame.