Mankillers

Buck had no difficulty finding her grave. Her tall, stately tombstone was a kilter. Beside it a subsiding mound was crisscrossed with budding brambles. Only a crude wooden plank with a name and dates scratched inelegantly upon it marked his father’s final resting place. No grand monument. No loving verses or biblical references to eternal life beyond this fragile bar. Buck shook his head. Raleigh Buchanan Thomson had died six months ago. There’d been no one left to order him a tombstone. A detail to attend to later.

He stood over his mother’s grave. “You wouldn’t like the world as it is now, Mother. You left us too soon, but it’s better that you did. I’m afraid you wouldn’t think very highly of me either. I’ll do my best to make amends, if ever I can figure out how. I don’t regret the lives I’ve taken, only the ones I let slip away. As for the others, the ones I mutilated . . . I don’t know what I could have done differently, but I don’t want to do it anymore, ever.”

At last, reluctantly, he turned to his father’s grave. “I never intended to come back, Poppa. And now I wish I hadn’t. I would’ve liked to carry with me the memory of Jasmine as it was, with all its proud vanity and fatal flaws, rather than the blackened ruin it’s become. Like the South itself, Poppa. Proud vanity. Fatal flaws. A blackened ruin. We’ll rise above the ashes. Someday. But it’ll never be the same. We’ll never be the same. I won’t. ”

The lump in his throat burned.

“I’m leaving again, Father, this time for good, now that there’s nothing to come back to. And no one.” His nostrils clogged. He snuffled to clear them. “I failed, Poppa. I was supposed to protect my little brother, and I failed. Clay’s dead. The Cause is dead. Slavery’s dead. Jasmine is no more. It’s all gone, Father.”

Tears coursing down Buck’s face. He made no attempt to brush them away.

“You thought I didn’t love Jasmine, but I did. We just saw it differently, I guess. You saw it the way you thought it had to be, the way it should be. I saw it the way it could have been. Without slavery. Without people being beaten and scarred.” He wiped his cheeks. “It doesn’t matter now. That’s all in the past. You’re gone. Jasmine’s gone, and in a few minutes I’ll be gone too.”

From his coat pocket he removed the plume that had been on Clay’s cavalry hat. The yellow had faded. The blood stains had deepened to a dull brown.

“I have the watch you gave to Clay. If you don’t mind I’m going to keep it. After all it’s not a personal possession as much as a family heirloom. I have a lock of his hair too. The golden boy with the golden hair. A memento of the son who had what you called a reckless exuberance for life. But I’ll leave you this ornament, this last symbol of the boy you sent off to war. I think he might have become a man you could have been proud of, had he lived.”

Again Buck wiped his wet cheeks.

“I forgive you, Poppa, for whatever there is in my power to forgive. I hope before you died, you granted me pardon too for my many offenses.”

He knelt and wedged the damaged tussock into the ground up against the marker, where it might receive some protection from the wind and rain. “That’s all that’s left now, Poppa.” He rose, shook his head and bit his lips. “That’s all that’s left of the world we knew. A wooden board and the broken plumage of a lost cause. May you both rest in peace.”

He nearly ran out of the churchyard, untied Gypsy and sprang into the saddle. He cantered away from the place of his youth, trying to outrun its ghosts.

#

The return journey from Jasmine to Columbia afforded Buck another tour of the detritus of war—fallow fields that had once been rich with cotton, heaps of soot and cinder where proud mansions had stood, more modest piles of ash where slave quarters had clustered. The lower quarter of Richland County might one day recover, Buck ruminated, but that day was far off.

Everything and everyone he’d once held dear was gone. His brother, his father and mother, the plantation that had been his world—they were all faded memories. Only one old black woman, newly up from slavery remained, caring for an abandoned white child. There was nothing and nobody else left to hold Buck Thomson to this place. He renewed his vow to never return.

Summoning to mind what Emma had told him about Saul Snead, he began to appreciate the level of evil that had warped his son. Sadistic beatings that maimed bodies also twisted minds, and like Sherman’s neckties, the straight and narrow, once bent, could never be made functional again. Rufus Snead, the red-headed mankiller, was beyond compassion and pity. His one redeeming feature had been an attempt to protect his sister. But she was dead, and Rufus had abandoned her child. Was that when he became a mankiller? It didn’t matter. Like any rabid dog, the only cure for his malady was a bullet, delivered quickly and painlessly. Buck Thomson, surgeon and expert with firearms, was the man to perform this final amputation of a diseased member from the body social.

Reaching Weston’s Creek, he halted to let Gypsy drink. As he leaned forward to stroke the steed’s neck, the sharp report of a rifle shot from his right was met almost simultaneously with the ricochet of a bullet whining off a granite rock on his left.

Instantly Buck kicked the startled gelding into a full gallop. Thoughts and images tumbled through his mind, all seemingly at once. He wasn’t sure exactly where the bullet had come from, other than the trees to his right. The woods lining both sides of the creek were dense. He needed to pinpoint the shooter’s position, but he didn’t have time. He was a sitting target, fatally vulnerable where he was. Vaulting over a fallen tree as Clay might have done, he tore through a line of thickets onto an open field and glanced behind him. No one was following.

Suppose there was more than one sniper. Suppose another sharpshooter was positioned along his obvious route of escape. There was no cover here. He kicked Gypsy into a faster gallop, and the faithful steed gave him his all.

Only when they reco

Who’d shot at him and why? Was it a random act of violence brought on by these troubled times, or had he been personally targeted for robbery and perhaps death? Was the sniper another diabolical opportunist, or—

His mind skittered to a halt, while Gypsy continued to dance forward, head high, breathing heavily.

My God, I’ve been a dolt!

Finally, what seemed like isolated, unrelated facts and events began to fit together to form a coherent picture.

His brother Clay had been a womanizer who’d dallied with Sally Mae, Saul Snead’s young daughter. She got pregnant and died in childbirth. Saul’s son, Rufus, swore vengeance against the man who’d taken advantage of her. Clay was later killed, apparently the random target of a redheaded sniper, whom Buck had since been able to identify as Rufus Snead.

Lord, it didn’t take a genius to figure out Clay had been the baby’s father. Why else would an old black woman be raising a little white boy by herself in times that were more precarious than ever slavery had been—except as an act of love and dedication toward the family that had been the focus of her entire life, and the young white man she’d helped raise?

That was the private family matter Clay had wanted to tell Buck about at Sayler’s Creek.

Snead’s finding Lieutenant Clay Thomson in the waning days of the war may have been purely by chance, but Buck was convinced now that his brother’s death hadn’t been the random act of a crazed mankiller. He’d been a carefully and deliberately chosen target for vengeance by the uncle of Clay’s son. A chilling thought struck him.