Sacrifice – Chapter 6

Prologue — 6. Discoveries

They kept tally of the gold they had garnered, measuring it with exaggerated care at the end of each day to split as they had agreed, and with their tallies marked the rise of their fortunes. Jim called his stash a “pensionbox,” and often when the evenings settled and their work for the day closed would wax large on the grand things he would accomplish when he had retired. How he would head straight to the city and be a regular high roller there, and show the city folk the meaning of a time, and break the restaurants for the feasts he would command and make the good whiskey flow like a river. How the girls everywhere from the slums to downtown would run at the sound of his name and shower him with praise and adoration. How he would shave his beard and leave his mustache and slick back his hair and get him a dapper suit and tie and be the talk of the town from then on out. “Yep, the high life till I die, boys,” he would say, his legs stretching out along the ground before the fire, he reclining against a large flat stone there and his broad hands behind his head. He seemed complacent already in that vain and glutted future. And Frog would stutter through his own hopes as well, unsure and changeable though they seemed — now mansions and fine dress and women, now a bar of his own and a gambling hall, now land on land and a farm with Holstein cows (he was strangely insistent about the breed) tended by dozens of hired hands, while he would sit on the veranda of his country home sipping fine bourbon of an evening. But Horace alone would hold his tongue and gaze out at the bleak landscape and the inhuman woods, as though he had yet to meditate the possibilities or weigh them out alongside the burden of his gold.

“What about you, Horace?” Frog finally asked him once. “What’re you aimin’ to do with your stash?”

“Purchase myself some new possibles,” he replied.

Jim guffawed. “New possibles, hell! You could git yerself new possibles ten times over with the gold you got right now, partner—and good ones, at that.”

“I reckon I could.”

“For starters, maybe a new horse, more like it!”

Horace smiled and shook his head. “Nah. I’m too fond of old Laretta.”

“Well, then, what? Surely you got some bigger notion.”

“I don’t know that I do.”

“What? You aim to jes’ ride around these here hills luggin’ your gold with yeh?”

“Maybe I’ll donate it to you two beggars. Help you buy a new pair of boots.”

Jim laughed and spat into the fire. “Like hell you will! Well, you don’t wanna tell us, that’s fine. Keep your own damn counsel, as usual!”

Horace paused. “I’ve been too long on the road, gentlemen. I don’t know that I can recall any other life.”

“’taint ne’er too late to recall things, friend.”

“Perhaps not.”

Jim scratched his beard. “You know what you need, Horace? You need a good woman. I ain’t talkin’ whores, now. Whores is a dime a dozen. I mean a real wife-woman. Hell, I ain’t one for settlin’ down, particularly, but even I might get hitched one day, if the right sweetheart comes alone. ‘A good wife is as good for the belly as she is for the boots,’ as my pappy used to say. I reckon that’s what you could use there, Horace. A woman, jes’ a real fine woman, to set you straight. Help you settle down, you know?”

“I already had a woman, once, back out East.”

Jim started up slightly, a sudden interest lit in his eyes. “Well, did you, now!”

“I did. We were engaged.”

“What was her name?”

“Bridget Ellis.”

“Ain’t that a purty name! How was she? Purty girl?”

“Yes, very…” said Horace softly. “And gentle. Bright. She loved to laugh.”

“Sounds like a regular plum! Well? And what come of it?”

“It didn’t take.”

“Hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“I rode out on her one day.”

“What now?”

“One day, I gathered up my belongings and I left town.”

“Now, what in the world you go and do that for, Horace?” asked Frog, ogling.

“I guess I figured that the hoping’s better than the having.”

Jim blinked and looked at him. “You mean to say you jes’ up and struck West?”

“Well… it wasn’t quite like that. I tarried out East a while, traveling from town to town. About half a year all told, I guess. I found odd jobs here and there, and just kept moving.”

“And then?”

Horace shrugged. “I happened to meet her brother one day in Concord. We got to arguing about her, and our conversation took a nasty turn. He was irate. I tried to calm him, but he only grew angrier. Well, I know how to hold my own in a fight. I left him in the street with a broken nose, I think, and maybe worse. I didn’t wait around to find out.”

“I don’t get it. That’s why you come out West? Busted a feller’s nose?”

“That was the event that set me off, yes.”

“They set the law on you? Or what, were you worried they’d come after you, whole damn clan, or somethin’, feud-like?”

“No.”

“I mean, if I up and ran e’ery time I punched a man, I’d’ve had to clear out of the country long since…”

“It wasn’t the fight.”

“Then jes’ what the dickens was it?”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“Well? Frog’n me, we got time. Don’t we, Frog? Or what, Horace, you got somewhere you need to be?”

Horace glanced from Jim to the fire to the darkness surrounding, and shifted on his stump and crossed his arms, though the fire was burning hot and held the chill far at bay. “It’s as though…” he began, pausing again. The other two men sat in silence, staring at him. “It’s as though you’re trying to walk into the future, but you have to trudge through the past, this great swamp around your legs that pulls you down constantly, and you have to keep fighting it to get anywhere at all… and it follows you, how it follows you! Why, just when you think you’re quit of it… there it is again. In the form of a voice, a face, a brother. You always have to fight it.”

“Funny idea. And so?”

Horace smiled and opened his hands before him. “See, there aren’t any swamps out West.”

Jim sat staring a moment, and then began to laugh, a long, hacking laugh that seemed to touch some debility in his lungs, so that by the end of it it wasn’t clear if he was laughing, or coughing, or both together. “That there ain’t,” he sputtered, still chuckling. “That there ain’t.”

So their conversations in the night, the jeweled stars shimmering eternally overhead and the dark earth extending eternally beneath and the three of them caught between the two as contingent, fleeting beings, wrought half of these eternities and half of some other instable and dreamlike stuff. And in their talk, they weaved about themselves the beginnings of something like comradery.

But then Jim caught Frog one day pocketing a sizeable gold nugget on the sly when the little man believed no one was looking, and they broke out into bickering, their voices expanding in the silence there and echoing from the hillsides as though the hillsides were mocking them in the cynicism of an age so immense that all mortal worries and scruples and even tragedies must seem paltry and vanishing by comparison. Jim grew wild and Frog’s eyes seemed to part all the more from one another and his face grew red as he sputtered and salivated, at first denying the crime, then all at once owning it, but insisting that he had earned this gold by the extra work he had been made to do, citing this or that task which had been allotted to him and which he in his bitter heart had been laying up against the final tally. Who knows but that they might have come to blows there, and the river have run that day in gold and crimson as it perhaps had done in elder days at the rise or decline of some prior and long-since-buried civilization, but Horace intervened and spoke to them in a voice that was for once exigent, and laid out before them the one solution which would be satisfying to each of them: namely, that they re-weigh all the gold they had already gained, and moreover that each of them would turn out his belongings, to be certain that no one of them had been robbing the others; and any irregularity which was found in the matter would be at once righted, nor another word spoken thereupon.

So it was done, and their prior findings were once more set upon the scales and found to match expectation. Then they began to dismantle their camp. Clothing was patted down and patches undone on it in case gold dust might have been sewn into them; logs and suspicious stones were overturned and tools sorted aside; bags and pouches were turned inside out, snuffboxes scoured, hats and boots carefully inspected. Whatever could be moved within that camp was shifted and displaced.

And a pile of golden pebbles was in this way discovered in a hollow beneath a heap of items on Frog’s side of the tent. He had been slowly accumulating it perhaps since the beginning. The other two proved honester men, if not cleverer in their hiding. Per their agreement, the plunder was restituted and divvied out amongst them and the danger to their progress seemed to have been averted, save in the sinister glances they would now give one another, the ways their eyes suspiciously followed every movement of the others’ hands from then on. Frog in particular was increasingly cut off from them, and became reticent, and would throw resentful glances at his companions.

This wedge slowly worked on them, and might have split them apart like pinewood; but change was already afoot. It came to them on a day of early spring snow, in which the heavens were low-hanging and oppressive and great wet snowflakes fled swiftly to the ground. That wind which had lately been howling and raging through the upland ravines had almost of a sudden sunk and dispersed, as if the earth, reaching the terminus of some furious ague, had ceased to breathe and would soon perish. The men squatted silently about the river, rolling their pans in their frozen rag-wrapped hands, like misplaced mendicants, their shoulders and knees and the brims and crowns of their hats topping slowly with strange white patterns, as though they had sat in that place for long years and pale lichens were growing upon them as upon stones. A perfect stillness reigned in the world, so that the sibylline slithering of the sand upon the tin pans augmented unnaturally and filled their hearts, no longer with that wonted thrill of anticipation of good to come, but rather with a sense of some impending doom that could no longer be avoided. They kept their gazes firmly upon the river and the pans and the mud, become squatting and amphibious creatures intent on nothing more it would seem than grubbing in the earth for who could say what fare to feed them, now and then prodding in the pans with clumsy gloved fingers to pluck out this or that glowing morsel.

It was Frog who saw them, perhaps defended from too narrow a perspective by his very deformity; for of a sudden he let out a shriek as though snakebit, and dropped his pan and leapt up and pointed to the hillside with a trembling finger. The others rose slowly and lifted the brims of their snow-bedecked hats and gazed up at the dark figure of the four riders that had materialized on the gray skyline, looming strangely large over them despite the distance, like the horsemen of the apocalypse.

You have just read a chapter of the serial novel SACRIFICE, by John Bruce Leonard. A new chapter will be published each week. Subscribe below to receive new chapters directly in your email.