TRAGEDY OF BLOOD

a novel by Gary Canup

Chapter 2

When two weeks later Tamora Groth blearily opened her eyes, sweeping away with sluggish lashes a dream of a golden vale where she had been with Arbus again, and drearily beheld the dull gray light of dawn seeping through the cracks in her barred shutters, she released a groan and rolled onto her side, to put her back to the window, and reclosed her eyes. She wanted to return to her dream. How luxurious it would be to drift back into slumber and revisit that marvelous golden vale. There she would not have to face another seemingly interminable day of work and grief. There she would not have to break her back cooking, and preserving, and cleaning, and laundering, and milking the cows and feeding the chickens and slopping the hogs, and washing and spinning and winding and knitting and weaving and dyeing wool, and grinding corn into meal, and making clothing and blankets and sugar and candles and soap and helping the men with the planting when needed. No, back in that enchanted vale she could laze about all day in a bed of poppies beneath the spreading boughs of an exotic shade tree, letting servants attend her, nibbling figs from a silver salver and sipping nectar from a golden goblet, and best of all, watching a seven-year-old Arbus chase a butterfly through the sunlit meadow, his laughter as bright as the day, and never again having to step back into this miserable existence where women were nothing but breeders and workers and mourners and there was never any time for anything else.

But she knew that she could not go back to sleep — her duties forbade such a luxury, even if she were physically capable of drifting off again — and with a weary sigh of resignation she tossed back the cover and swung her bare feet to the cool wooden floor, sat there on the edge of her feather bed in her rumpled nightgown that slumped over one bare shoulder, and cast her heavy-lidded eyes about the small, drab, sparsely furnished bedroom: over the candle stub on the nightstand; the unpainted chest of drawers; the cracked mirror on the wooden stand; her mournful eyes settling at last on her faded brown dress of linsey-woolsey which hung on a peg in the door. Beyond that door lay an existence of hardship and toil no longer relieved by the joys of company with Arbus. She missed her eldest son more than she could bear. She did not know how she would ever get over her loss.

Only with great effort did the woman get out of bed. She pulled off her gown and dropped it on the lumpy mattress and stood naked before the cracked mirror. She was a strong, sturdy, still handsome woman of forty-three, her figure, voluptuous in her youth, now possessing a certain masculine broadness across the back together with the overall toughness that comes from a lifetime of hard work, from years and years of plowing fields and chopping wood and hauling heavy buckets of water out of the well. She managed to get into her dress but neglected so much as to brush her wild tangled mane of dark-brown hair, which, given her life of hardship and grief, contained surprisingly few strands of gray.

She left her bedroom and proceeded down the narrow dismal hallway to awaken her last two surviving sons. She knocked on their door, and Dimmy and Myron stirred lazily beneath comfortable blankets. She continued down the hallway into the main room where she unbarred and opened the shutters upon a view of the fog-enshrouded wilderness that surrounded her homestead, fog curling slowly among the crosses of the cemetery, including that which stood at the head of Arbus's cold earthen bed.

She set herself to the wearying task of preparing breakfast. She stuffed a few pieces of wood into the fireplace and added kindling, which she lit with dull sparks produced by striking a piece of steel against a lump of flint. With lard she greased the skillet and placed it over the fire. From a wooden storage bin she removed a chunk of smoke-cured ham and carved off several slices and laid them in the skillet. She cracked a number of eggs into the skillet beside the slices of ham.

While the ham sizzled and the eggs bubbled and sputtered in the grease of the skillet, Tamora, perhaps inevitably, lifted her mournful eyes to the hand-carved figurine that decorated the center of the mantelpiece. Arbus had made it for her. Dear sweet Arbus had carved out of a chunk of black walnut this beautiful figure of a rearing stallion. She fondly caressed its smooth contours. The exquisite detail and delicacy of the piece stood as ample testimony to his gifted nature. Tamora had had high hopes and lofty plans for Arbus. An intelligent, talented, thoughtful young man, he had been the only one of her sons with the potential to amount to anything. Any young woman would have been proud to have called him her husband, and she had always believed that, had he not been a Groth and therefore despised throughout the valley, the handsome young man could have had his pick of any girl in the mountains.

Her thoughts drifted back to the occasion of her fortieth birthday, three years ago. After her birthday supper, which her then thirteen-year-old daughter Julie had prepared for her, she had retired to her favorite chair to receive presents from her children. Her youngest, Alan, had given her a basket full of berries. Julie had given her a tablecloth that she had embroidered herself. Myron had presented her with a collection of pretty rocks that he had found down at the river, and Dimmy had given her a bouquet of flowers picked in the nearby woods. Arbus, her favorite, had given her nothing. She had done her best to disguise her bewilderment and hurt, and he had immediately excused himself and had gone to his room. She and Julie had done the dishes that night and then she had gone to bed trying to comprehend why Arbus had forgotten her. Unable to sleep, she had gotten up and, on her way to the main room for a cup of water, had noticed a pale glimmer of candlelight beneath his door. Maybe an hour later, returning to her room, she had noticed the candlelight again. Ordinarily she would have checked on him, to find out what, if anything, was wrong, but that night she had not been in a suitable frame of mind, and had simply gone back to bed. Another hour later, about to drift into a doze, she had heard her bedroom door come quietly open. She had been able to tell by the respectful way it was opened and softly closed again that her visitor was Arbus. Gently he had sat on the edge of her bed. "Ma?" he had whispered, tenderly tapping her shoulder with his fingertips. She had turned to look at him and had seen in the dim light of the candle stub he had brought that he was smiling wearily. "Happy birthday, Ma," he had said, and that was when he had presented her with the hand-carved stallion. He had been working on it diligently and lovingly for weeks, and had only just then finished it, a few minutes before midnight, a few ticks of the clock before her birthday was over. She had sat up with tears streaming down her face and she and Arbus had embraced.

And now he was dead. Callously executed. Throat slashed by a Nici knife. He who had filled the emptiness in her life with love and hope now filled a hole in the ground not two-hundred feet away.

Hearing the approach of Dimmy and Myron, she returned the beloved figurine to its central place on the mantelpiece and quickly wiped her eyes. Her other two sons — well, they were a different story. The less she thought about them the better it was for her peace of mind. She held out no hope whatsoever that Dimmy and Myron would ever marry. She could not imagine a girl who would want them. Now she would never have grandchildren, and with the deaths of her and her last two remaining sons, the Groth line would sink into extinction. And what was more, with Arbus no longer beside her, she no longer even cared.

The two bearlike boys came shambling into the main room, yawning, stretching, and lazily scratching their hairy bellies. Without a word of greeting to their ma they slouched into their chairs at the table and waited to be fed. Tamora scraped ham and eggs and cornbread into their plates and without so much as a grunt of gratitude they fell to devouring breakfast and guzzling milk.

She hung her apron on a peg and took her seat at the head of the table. She had no appetite herself. She merely nursed on a mug of coffee. Through sleep-deprived and grief-reddened eyes she watched her two sons with contempt. What a couple of bad hats they had turned out to be. Arbus's absence from the table left them completely unmoved. These boys were no consolation to her, no comfort at all in her time of grief.

The woman finally made up her mind about something.

"Yeh boys'll be happy to hear yeh ain't got to work in the fields today," she informed them.

They stopped feeding and gaped at her with mouths full of breakfast, gaped at each other, then gaped at their mother again.

"We ain't?" Dimmy said, with a slow incredulous resumption of chewing.

"No, yeh ain't."

He narrowed his eyes with suspicion. "How come? Usually yeh tell us we got to work harder."

"Yeah," Myron complained through his ham and eggs.

"Cause I want yeh boys to spy on the Nicis instead."

Their mouths dropped open even farther.

"Don't look so afeared, yeh ain't got to fight em or nothin like that. God knows yeh'd git yer hairy asses whupped. Jist spy on em, is all. Watch em from the woods. See if they tote guns, see if they move in groups. Sich like that. Check to see if they're lettin their guard down. Oh, fer God sakes, Dimmy, shet yer damn mouth! Yer half-chewed vittles ain't sich a purdy sight, yeh know."

Dimmy resumed chewing, thoughtfully now. Myron obliviously continued to feed; he was only eighteen and Dimmy was nineteen and he usually let his older brother handle matters like this.

"Yeh mean all we gotta do is watch em from the woods?" Dimmy said.

"That's all, then report back to me. Yeh reckon yeh can handle that?"

Dimmy continued to chew on the matter, deliberately irritating his ma. It sounded safe enough, he thought, and hell, it might even be fun, doing nothing but ogling that cute little Lavinia Nici all day. At last he shrugged. "Shore, why not? Beats workin in the fields, I reckon."

"Shore, beats workin in the fields, I reckon," Myron echoed stupidly, scooping the last few bits of egg into his mouth.

After breakfast they armed themselves with a knife and a hatchet apiece and set out on their mission of spying on the Nicis. Sipping coffee at the table, Tamora fell into a mournful muse. Her eyes wandered the room, lingering sadly upon every object that Arbus had ever touched: his chair at the table; the handle of the churn which he had used to turn cream into butter; the place on the floor where as a child he had sat and talked to her cheerily while she had worked at the spinning wheel before the sunny window; the woodbox he had dutifully kept full of firewood all his life; and finally, once again, the beautiful figurine on the mantelpiece.

A respectful rapping at the screen door intruded upon her thoughts. She looked over. It was Aaron Moore. The farmhand had come for his breakfast. Tamora rose from the table discreetly wiping her eyes; she wanted to appear strong and authoritative in his presence.

Aaron's appearance at the door that morning reminded her of the very first time she had ever seen him over a year ago, respectfully rapping and seeking work and asking as payment only cooked meals and a warm place to sleep in the barn. Despite her and Arbus's suspicion that he was, or at one time had been, a runaway slave, hiding out in these mountains, they had taken him on and had never regretted it, for Aaron Moore was a hard worker, a dependable source of help, and despite his menacing appearance, always a respectful gentleman.

"Come in, Aaron."

The black man's face registered surprise: he had never been invited into the house before. Almost timidly he opened the door and entered and closed the door behind him again. He stood about six foot four, weighed around two-hundred-and-thirty pounds, and a lifetime of menial labor had endowed him with an impressively muscular physique. Tamora did not know the age of this man — possibly even Aaron Moore himself did not know exactly how old he was — but he appeared to be around thirty-five.

"Here's yer breakfast, Aaron," she told him, handing him a plate on which she had heaped generous portions of ham and eggs and cornbread.

"Thank you, madam."

"After yeh et, I wonder if yeh'd run a errand fer me?"

"Of course, madam."

"I wonder if yeh'd go round this here holler and see what yeh can do bout gittin me some guns."

Aaron raised a caterpillarlike eyebrow.

"Would yeh do that fer me, Aaron?"

"Of course," he replied.

"Sich a journey could last a couple weeks, so take a mule and pack it with a tent and plenty a provisions. Buy the guns or barter fer em if necessary. Try to git em as cheap as possible, but pay what yeh got to to git em. We need them guns. Tell em we need em fer huntin and fer pertection agin wild animals."

"Won't they know what we actually need them for?"

"And what might that be, Aaron?"

"To get justice for Arbus, of course."

Tamora studied him. He was a smart one, all right — far smarter than her sons, although that wasn't saying much. She had no idea where he had come upon either his smarts or that highfalutin language of his, but once, when she had happened upon him in the barn, she had caught him sitting on a bale of hay reading a book, but he had acted as though she had caught him masturbating instead and had immediately hidden the book and sprung to his feet. Since illiteracy was virtually universal in these mountains, she wondered where a black man had acquired not only a book but also the ability to decipher it.

"I don't keer how yeh git them guns, Aaron, jist git em. Steal em if yeh got to. Go bout it real quiet, like. I don't want word gittin back to the Nicis what we're up to."

"Yes, madam. I'll leave right after I complete my work."

"Fergit bout yer work, Aaron. This here's a sight more important. I want yeh to leave right after yeh et. And return as soon as yeh got nuff guns to arm all four a us."

Aaron nodded in solemn agreement.

Back out in his gloomy little corner of the barn where he kept a pallet of straw and some personal articles and where he hid his books, sitting on a bale of hay eating his breakfast alone, as usual, Aaron Moore was nonetheless as excited as he had been since coming to work here. "All four of us," she had stated — she was including him within them! Finally she was beginning to see him as something more than a mere farmhand, as something more than a mere beast of burden that plowed her fields and that occupied her barn along with the other beasts. She was entrusting him with an important mission now! Here was his chance to impress her with his competence and loyalty. Here was his chance to win her gratitude and indebtedness and, yes, possibly even her love in return, for Aaron Moore was secretly and desperately in love with Tamora Groth and had been for nearly a year. Upon his arrival in this valley, hungry, dirty, but no longer pursued, he had watched her from the wilderness like an animal, admiring her womanly endowments. He had not had a woman for months and had originally taken work here with the intention of someday having his way with her, by force, if necessary. But slowly, as he had grown intimate with her plight, nobler feelings had awakened to make him ashamed of his original intentions. Her struggle against the Nicis had made her sympathetic in his eyes. And now he was so desperately and helplessly in love with her that he would do anything for her, anything at all, on the chance of winning her love in return. He would even become her lone ally in her private war against the Nicis, whom Aaron despised almost as fiercely as she did. The Nicis reminded him of the arrogant plantation-owning family who had enslaved and exploited him for most of his life and from whose brutality he had escaped two years ago. Here in the isolation and lawlessness of this mountain valley he would finally be free to use his God-given ingenuity to punish such a family as the Nicis and to inflict his vengeance upon them. All she had to do was ask. Yes, he would get her guns. He would not let her down.

After breakfast he packed her best mule with a tent, enough provisions to last a trek of two or more weeks, and sufficient salt, sugar and grain to barter for firearms if necessary. Into the milky-hued palm of his large hand she placed a small bag of coins, all the money she had in the world, and it touched him deeply that she was entrusting him with it. He pushed the bag of coins into his jacket pocket and put on his hat and led the mule off towards the wilderness.

With arms folded beneath her ample bosom, Tamora stood barefoot on the porch and watched him and the mule disappear in the woods. Perhaps she was taking too big of a chance, entrusting all her money and all those barter goods to a mere farmhand. Perhaps he would simply take the wealth for himself and she would never see him again. But for some reason she trusted him — trusted him far more anyway than she did her two incompetent sons. Besides, with Arbus gone, she had no one left to turn to, no one left to rely on. She certainly could not rely on her two stupid sons.

She went back into the main room where she cleared the table and washed the dishes. She took up the heavy slop bucket and lurched out the door and across the porch and down the steps and with her left arm extended as a counterbalance staggered off in the direction of the woodshed. It was time to slop the hogs. But first she had to feed the prisoner inside the woodshed.

On the ground before the barred woodshed door squatted a filthy wooden bowl encrusted with residue left over from last night's feeding and crawling with ants and other insects and she took up the bowl and banged it against the side of the shed to free it of bugs, probably awakening the prisoner inside, but she did not care, and she dropped the bowl to the ground and poured into it a portion of slop. Between the hard ground and the bottom of the door lay a gap of maybe four inches, which provided the only ventilation inside the shed, and with her bare dirty foot Tamora pushed the bowl underneath the door.

As she lurched off with the slop bucket in the direction of the hog pen her chin began to quiver, and she had little control over the tears of unhappiness that stained her cheeks. The Nicis would pay for what they had done to Arbus. That cold unfeeling son of a bitch Andrew Nici had taken from her the sweetest boy who had ever drawn breath. That bastard Andrew Nici, she would fix him, and she would fix all his evil brood. She would start with those two heartless butchers, Quint and Marty — especially Quint, whose knife had slit her dear son's throat. She would get Mark and Lucas and Lavinia and that old woman, too. She would save Andrew for last so that he could suffer the grief of seeing his entire family go before him. She yearned to make the old man suffer the way she was suffering now, weep the way she was weeping now. She no longer cared if they retaliated, she had nothing to live for now anyway, nothing even to get up for in the morning, except to avenge her Arbus. Without him, life was nothing. If it was the last thing she did she would get her revenge, she would find a way. She would make them know what it was to let a mother kneel in the dirt and beg for mercy in vain.