World Made by Hand

Thirty-two

In the morning, the sky had been swept clean again and, of course, the heat was rising. I had kept the bandana on my hand overnight and, when I took it off before breakfast, was astonished to see that a florid pink spot on my palm was all that remained of the blister. A new layer of skin had seemingly grown over the spot.

Minor joined us from the stable for a breakfast of fresh eggs, smoked fish, and corn bread downstairs, again paid for in silver coin. The animals were rested, watered, and ready, he said. He had straw in his hair from bedding down in the stable, but he didn’t complain about his duties.

I showed Minor my hand and asked him how it was possible that such an injury could actually heal overnight.

“Solomon’s seal has powers,” he said. “But you add a little Jesus juice to the mix and that puts her in overdrive, so to say.”

It wasn’t an explanation that squared with my understanding of how reality worked. But I couldn’t argue with the results either.

“I’m grateful to you,” I said.

We decided over our meal to devote the early hours of the day to shopping for wholesale goods and necessities along Commercial Row. New Faith needed everything from salt in quantity to candlewicks. I wanted to find machine-made paper and good steel pen nibs for the town so we could resume recording things again in a coherent way, medical supplies for Jerry Copeland, and whatever else I could scrounge up. We didn’t have a whole lot of cargo space in the donkey cart. After that, we’d break into two groups and search the wharves for the Elizabeth. If we found her, perhaps we could bring more goods back to Union Grove. But that remained to be seen.

When we turned out onto the street, the first thing we saw was the figure of a large man seated in the dirt, slumped against a rain barrel across the way with a hog rooting in his lap. The figure was inert. As we came closer, we could see a vivid red and gray mess of stuff that looked like sausage links in his lap, where the pig was rooting. Seth sent the animal off squealing with a blow across the hams with the flat of his sword.

“He’s dead,” Elam said. “Why, I’ll be dog.”

“What?” Joseph said.

“This is that same drover we took that jenny off of. Lookit.”

Elam took a kerchief rag out of his pocket and used it to hold the dead man’s head up at the chin for us all to see. The face was distorted in death, and the whites of his still-open eyes were shot through with blood as if he had suffered a severe blow to his head. But it apparently was indeed the same man we’d quarreled with at the Waterford bridge.

“I believe you’re right,” Seth said. “That’d be the one.”

“Did you kill him, Minor?” Joseph said.

“I didn’t do nothing,” Minor said. “Sumbitch probably fell out drunk and cracked his durn head.”

I stooped down. The stench he gave offwas impressive up close. Around the ragged edge of his dirty shirt, above the gross wound to his abdomen, you could see a pattern of small round holes, like shotgun pellets would make. I did not point it out, but I don’t think the others failed to notice either. I remembered that gunshotlike blast of thunder the night before and imagined this nameless wretch reeling out the stable door and collapsing where he now sat, to die in the rain, with a pig in his guts.

“I judge that this poor soul is beyond our assistance,” Minor said, “and if I linger here, I’m liable to lose my breakfast.”

“I suppose we can leave him for the constable,” Joseph said.

“If they got any law here,” Elam said.

“Anyway, it ain’t our business,” Minor said.

And so we went about our business, but not before Joseph invoked Matthew 5:13: “Ye are the salt of the earth,” he said, “but ifthe salt have lost his savor, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden underfoot of men.”