Anger and rotgut, burning bad holes in my lungs, made each breath hurt. I slung my farm tools into the wagon. Seeing my expression, even Mandy was alarmed. “Mister Watson,” she cautioned, raising her hands almost in prayer, “we have each other and we have our children. We will make a clean start somewhere else.”
“Clean start!” I turned my back on her. “How many do I have to make?” But remembering how often she’d been patient, and seeing anew the honest goodness in her face, I took my dear wife in my arms. “You don’t have to go with me, Mandy,” I whispered. “Oh, I do, dearest, I do.” She hurried off to pack provisions and our few possessions.
I rode over to my sister’s house to settle my account with Billy Collins, who had brought this banishment down upon my head by running to the sheriff. He knew I would be coming, too, because his horse was gone. Minnie ran out, fell to her knees. Clutching little Julian, she begged her good, kind brother to have mercy and not harm a little family which loved him dearly and hoped and prayed for his safe journey and deliverance wherever he might go.
“So long as he goes far enough and never comes back.” I pushed past her and sat down on the porch in Billy’s rocker to await her husband.
Darkness seeped in from the woods. Hunched in the cold, I suffered a kind of rigor mortis of the spirit. Billy would not be coming home, not with Job hobbled out there by the road. Maybe his wife had begged him to hide and maybe I was relieved I would not have to take revenge-I was too weary. I only knew that I was destitute as ever, still looking for a place where I might prosper.
I rose and went in to Minnie where she was sniveling amongst the crockery; she snatched her baby Julian from the floor as if fearing I might step on him. I told her to tell my friend Will Cox that he could have my cabin, being the one man I could trust to give it back. Knowing we might never meet again and feeling doomed, I took my frightened sister in my arms and gave her a gentle hug, even kissed her brow-the first time ever. Bursting into tears, she hugged me back and kissed me, too, got my face all wet and sticky with the baby’s clabber, which she had been eating up for her own poor supper.
Minnie’s breath was sour from her frightened hours. “Oh Edgar, please don’t harm my Billy. You are a good man, deep in your heart, and we won’t forget you.”
“Don’t,” I growled, “because I aim to be back.”
I rode on home. Dismounting at a little distance, I circled in through the silent pines, making no sound on the needle ground, eye peeled for any trap. Mandy had the wagon packed and I backed the big roan into the traces, hitching the gray filly to the back of the wagon while she piled the children in under our blankets. Sliding the loaded shotgun under the seat, I climbed up and snapped the reins-Gid ’yap!-and Job the Younger kicked the wagon boards a lick that rang off through the trees. I talked him down into a good fast-farting trot.
Pale-faced Sonborn sat up straight, peering back along the ghostly lanes. As if awakened from a bad dream, he cried, “Where are we going?” Mandy hushed him. My wife looked drawn and fearful, which she was. The poor thing thought she was leaving her life behind her, which she was. She thought that armed men might come after us-quite likely, too-and that our children might be harmed. But never once did she complain, nor ease her nerves by fraying mine with foolish questions. “Miss Jane S. Dyal from Deland,” as she had bravely dubbed herself when we first met, was a very good young woman who forgave her husband, though she knew he had named that pretty filly for his own lost love and was dead broke and on the run with no known destination.
Under the moon, the hooves thumped soft as heartbeats on the white clay track, which flowed like a silver creek through the black pines. So quiet was our passing that surely an owl heard little Carrie’s pretty sighs or Elijah Edward’s greedy suckling at the breast. A solitary light still burned when we passed Herlong’s, where the dogs were barking; the silhouette darkening that window was righteous Dan Herlong who had blackened my name with his tales from South Carolina. I’ll be back, I promised when the figure vanished and the light was snuffed. Had Herlong heard the wagon wheels? Had he sensed something out there in the dark that frightened him?
At the road I turned the wagon north, taking the night roads north and west under frozen stars which shone on the unknown land where we were going.