The Bells of El Diablo (5 page)

James looked back at Moss and Cletus, both of whom regarded Willie as though he were a caged bobcat. “You two got somethin’ you wanna say?” James asked them tightly.

They slid their moody eyes to him.

Moss said, “Shit, Lieutenant, that’s a Union officer there. Whoever he may have been once, that’s who he is now.”

James straightened slowly, uncoiling like a rising panther. His mild expression framed by his long, wet dark brown hair belied the fury that burned behind his cobalt eyes. He no longer had his knife, and he was glad he didn’t. He was making a conscious effort to not wrap his right hand around the grips of the Griswold & Gunnison brass-framed pistol wedged behind his cracked leather belt, just over his belly where it was easy to get to. The mud and weather had claimed his leather holster many months ago.

“Get the hell out of my sight, you son of a bitch.” His voice was like low, distant thunder.

Moss, still on his haunches beside Cletus, stared up at him darkly. An exasperated sneer etched itself on Moss’s long face framed in bushy muttonchop whiskers, and he gestured toward Willie. “Come on, Lieutenant—look at the uniform…”

“That’s my brother in that uniform, you son of a bitch!” James’s voice rocketed around inside the cave. “Get the hell out of my sight now, and stay there—you hear? Or so help me, I’ll pop a ball through your ugly head, Moss!”

The threat was like a slap. Both Moss and Cletus stared up at their lieutenant, hang-jawed, wary as treed
coons. They blinked. And then Cletus stumbled back a little as he rose, bracing himself on the cave’s far wall. Then he cursed, wheeled, and stumbled on out of the cave. Cletus regarded the young lieutenant a moment longer, then glanced at Crosseye, who betrayed nothing on his haggard, cross-eyed face, then went the way of Moss.

“Can’t blame them, Jimmy,” Crosseye said. “Been a long fight. They didn’t know Willie like we did.”

James dropped back down on his knees beside his brother. “Just keep ’em away from me, Crosseye.”

“I’ll do that, Jimmy.” Crosseye straightened, his eyes serious, doleful. “You need anything?”

James shrugged. “I don’t know what to do for him.”

“Probably nothin’ you can do, Jimmy. Just sit with him.” Crosseye gave a fateful chuff, then turned and ambled on out of the cave.

James regarded Willie for a long time, and then he turned and leaned his back against the wall beside him. He raised his elbow to his knee and stared into the fire, silently praying for Willie’s recovery, hanging on his brother’s every breath.

He sat there with Willie for a long time, mopping Willie’s head frequently with a neckerchief that he wetted from his canteen, keeping the fire going. After maybe two hours of silence save for the flames’ crackling and Willie’s ragged, shallow breathing, the young Union officer said suddenly, with startling clarity, as though he’d been awake all along, “James? Do me a favor, will you, brother?”

James had been stirring the fire with a pine branch.
Now he laid the branch on the flames and scuttled back over to his brother. “What is it, Willie?”

The younger Dunn reached inside his bloody tunic and pulled out a gold-chased watch with a chain of linked gold Confederate coins. He held it in his open palm atop his thigh, occasional pain spasms causing the hand and the watch to twitch slightly.

“Find Vienna for me,” Willie said.

James shook his head. “Willie, I got no idea what became of her or her family—”

“Denver City,” Willie said. “Her daddy sent her there, to family, to keep her away from the war. I got a letter from her a couple years ago. I want you to give her this watch.”

Vienna McAllister had been Willie’s betrothed before the war had broken out. She’d been born into a wealthy plantation family four miles from Seven Oaks, and she and Willie had been sparking since nearly the day they’d both started walking.

Willie flipped open the gold-finished lid, extended the watch weakly toward his brother. James took it, read the inscription in flowery cursive writing on the inside of the lid. “To my son, Thomas, with love from his father—William Thomas Dunn, 1863.”

James felt his jaw drop as he looked at his brother.

“Bought it in Richmond. Had it engraved special.”

James shook his head uncomprehendingly. “
Son?
”

“Didn’t tell no one back home, but that night when I rode out of Seven Oaks for the last time, after that argument with you and Pa about the war, I rode over to Rose Hill. Vienna snuck out of the house to meet me,
and we had Preacher Lawton marry us.” Willie stared at the watch before lifting his bleary gaze to his brother and adding, “Was only proper I marry the girl. Besides, hell, I loved her.”

James thought that over for a time, then nodded in understanding. “How…do you know…?”

“She had the baby in Denver City. Or she would have by now. I never did receive word. We’d chosen the name the same night we was married. The McAllisters’ firstborn has always been boys. Ours is most likely a boy, too. Thomas….”

James just stared at his brother, digesting it all. When he had done so, he felt as though his heart had been torn in two by a Union cavalry saber. He felt a great weight settle on his shoulders, and tears began to wash down his cheeks as though a spigot had been turned on. His gut churned, his lungs spasmed as he bawled until he dropped forward onto his hands, sobbing openly, his thick hair hanging down over his face.

“You’re a helluva fighter, James,” his brother said. “Always was. Despite our differences about the war, I’m proud of you.”

James looked at Willie, felt a roiling rage rising up around his aching heart. “Really, Willie? You’re proud of me?” Then the sobs turned to laughter—a wild, bizarre, half-mad laughter. “You’re proud of me—are ye, little brother?” He continued to laugh and sob at the same time. Christ, he’d killed him, and Willie was proud of him!

How could he not have realized what a better man Willie was than he?

“Wish we’d had you on our side, James.” Willie
grabbed his brother’s arm and squeezed, wheezing, “Find Vienna and my boy, James. Give little Thomas my watch, so’s he has something to know me by. And tell—”

His voice pinched off. James looked at him. Willie was gasping, leaning his head back against the cave wall. All the color had leached out of his face, and his cheeks were hollow. His lone eye was flat, as though an inner lid were closing down over it.

“Willie!” James took his brother’s face in his hands, and squeezed. “Please don’t, Willie!”

Willie placed his own hands on his brother’s wrists. He gritted his teeth. “Don’t blame yourself, brother. Just find my wife…my son…give ’im that watch. And all’s forgiven.”

A faint smile lifted Willie’s mouth corners. The light left his eye. His fingers slackened on James’s wrists, and then his hands fell down like rocks at his sides.

“
Willie!
” James screamed.

Willie gave one last rasping exhale, and then he sat unmoving against the cave wall, staring unseeingly out of his single eye at his brother.

James spent the night in the cave, holding Willie in his arms. He let the fire go out and merely stared into the black velvet of the far wall, neither asleep nor awake but existing in a no-man’s-land between both worlds, shuddering from time to time when he remembered shoving his razor-edged plow-blade knife into his brother’s chest.

He’d looked into that lone blue eye, the same blue as his own eyes, and realized what he’d done.

When the soft gray light of dawn shone beyond the cave opening, touching the sky above the dark pines, James eased his brother down to the cave floor. He felt oddly numb, but clear. Somewhere over the course of the long night, he’d decided that the war was over for him. He was going to follow Willie’s bidding and deliver the watch to Vienna. He rose and walked out to where the other men were milling, eating a meager breakfast of dried chicken, some pecans they’d gleaned from an orchard, and hardtack washed down with water. They hadn’t had any coffee for months.

Jackie, Cletus, and Moss all stopped talking when they saw James emerge from the cave’s black mouth. James glanced at Moss. “Sorry about last night. I was out of line, Moss.”

“You ain’t got nothin’ to be sorry about, Lieutenant. I was the one out of line. I am sorry about your brother.”

Crosseye was down by the horses and the twelve-pounder field piece they’d acquired from a battlefield along which the dead had been stacked like cordwood, cleaning out a hoof with a stick. When he saw James walk out away from the other men, he released the horse’s hoof and ambled over to him, flicking the stick across his thigh clad in torn gray wool. Around his neck he wore a fancy Lefaucheux pin-fire revolver that he’d taken off the body of a dead Union general, wearing the fancy piece for a trophy as well as a formidable weapon, though the ammo was hard to find in the South.

“You boys go on back to the outfit,” James said. “I’m gonna be takin’ Willie home.”

Crosseye stared at him, blinked. The others muttered
amongst themselves. “That’s desertion, Jimmy,” Crosseye whispered, unable to say the taboo word aloud.

James looked his old friend and mentor in the eye. “Willie deserves to be buried at Seven Oaks, and that’s where I’m gonna take him.”

“You comin’ back, Lieutenant?” Jackie Baker asked from the rock he was sitting on, chewing a chunk of stale hardtack, crumbs dribbling into his sandy spade beard.

“No,” James said. He’d made his decision. When he’d buried Willie at Seven Oaks, he was heading west to find Vienna, to give her Willie’s watch.

Crosseye said, “I’ll ride with you, Jimmy.”

“No.”

“You’re gonna need hel—”

“Deserters are shot on sight, Crosseye.” Any soldier found away from his company without furlough papers was considered a deserter.

“That’s what I’m worried about, Jimmy.”

“Don’t worry about me. You worry about gettin’ these boys back to General Forrest’s company. He’ll likely have a new assignment for you. If the war’s still goin’ on after I’ve buried Willie, I’ll be back.” He lied about that last; he was only trying to placate his old friend.

Crosseye cursed, doffed his hat, and slapped it against his thigh. “Ah, hell, Jimmy—it wasn’t your fault!”

James walked down and picked up a saddle blanket piled with Coker’s tack under an oiled tarpaulin, and carried it back into the cave. He wrapped Willie in the blanket and sat there for a time while the others rustled around outside, saddling their horses. They weren’t saying anything, as though they were all too shocked
for words at the news of James Dunn’s intention to desert. If anyone had told him just yesterday that he’d soon join the ranks of the much-maligned deserters who had helped to decimate the Confederate army, he’d have shot the man.

“We’ll be goin’ now, Jimmy,” Crosseye said, astraddle his gray mule just beyond the cave. A fine drizzle was falling out of a sky the color of dirty white curtains, ticking off his hat. The mule shook its head, rattling its bit in its teeth. Billy Krieg’s horse stood behind him, its bridle reins in Crosseye’s gloved left hand.

Crosseye waited as though for James to tell him he’d be joining them after all, but then he said, “I’m leavin’ you a hoss for Willie, takin’ Billy’s.” He touched stiff fingers to his hat, turned the mule, and rode off along with the others, Moss pulling the wheeled field piece by a lead line.

When they were gone, leaving James alone with his dead brother wrapped in the horse blanket, James left the cave and tramped down the slope to where his own horse stood with Lawrence Coker’s copper-bottom bay. James’s mount was a steeldust gelding that he’d taken off a Yankee farm several months ago, when his previous horse had been killed by a Vandenburgh volley gun in a skirmish in eastern Mississippi. He saddled the steeldust and Lawrence’s bay and then led both up to the cave. He felt heavy and numb, barely aware of the stablike pain in his chest, only vaguely aware of the rain ticking down on his battered, low-crowned campaign kepi.

With rope from his saddlebags, he tied the blanket around Willie’s body, which was already beginning to stiffen, and tied it so that his arms were close against his
sides. A memory erupted in his brain, and he saw a laughing Willie, ten or eleven years old, as James and their now-deceased older brother, Frank, wrapped the youngest of the Dunn brothers up in a quilt and threw him into the pond behind Seven Oaks Manor, one warm spring afternoon, when the redbuds were in full bloom.

They were pretending that Willie was a worthless pup, and, like a worthless pup, would be wrapped up and drowned. But Willie swam like a toad. He got out of the quilt and came splashing back to shore, throwing mud balls until their mother and two Negro maids came running out of the house, down the long, brick-paved path to the pond. Each had been armed with a wooden spoon, and they gave James and Frank a tanning for ruining a perfectly good quilt and “nearly drowning your poor youngest brother.”

Only, the maids had been laughing, especially the young, sparkly-eyed Eulia, whom James had once caught with her bloomers down around her ankles in the woodshed, with a bare-assed Frank pumping hard between her spread, chocolate-colored knees.

James pulled the blanket down from his brother’s face.

“Willie,” he whispered, running his fingers over the half-open lid, feeling the light caress of the young man’s lashes across his war-calloused fingertips. “Damn it all, Willie.”

But the eye would not stay closed. The lid was a papery light blue. His cheeks and forehead were the color of porcelain. Lips a thin, lilac line beneath his shaggy blond mustache that all but hid them. The patch looked barbaric on what appeared the face of a bearded boy-child.

James wondered what had happened to the other eye. Probably shrapnel or a bayonet wound. Maybe a knife. It did not surprise James that Willie might have been wounded in hand-to-hand combat. Doubtless, his opponent had fared worse. Willie had been the most artistic and sensitive of the Dunn brothers. He’d been given to poetry and the piano—Chopin had been his favorite composer—and romancing the young ladies of neighboring plantations. He’d also tried countless times to convince their father, Alexander Axelrod Dunn, considered a “benevolent” slave owner, to give his thirty-odd slaves their freedom. Willie had believed that no man, whatever color his skin might be, should ever be enslaved by another.