Paradise Sky

My next thought was to wonder what she would do with them now, as them bags was big and heavy with them critters, but it was then that I seen an old white woman, pale as the moon, with a bo

I let them go on a piece before I stepped out in the road and followed. I walked along by the buildings so I was in shadow and was surprised to see a match flare. My pistol found its way into my hand.

There in the light, as surprised to eyeball me as I was him, was that man I had seen our first day in Deadwood, the one with the scalped head, burned face, and the stick he used for support. The way he glared at me went into me like an arrow.

We stood there staring at one another so long you would have thought we was long-lost cousins giving each other the once-over, then he stepped back in the shadows, and the match went out. Reason he had fired it was to light a cigar he had tucked in his pie hole. It glowed with a round red light at the tip. He turned away from me, and I heard him clumping away down the alley on his crutch, which he had now in place of the stick.

I put my pistol away, gathered myself, and tried to catch up with the women and the rats. I followed them until they went up a skid of a road that came to a shack built on a hill. There wasn’t no stairs to it, just that mud-slick path. They drove the mule up and onto a firmer lay of land in front of the shack. There was a big barrel out there, and pretty soon they was lifting the bags off together, toting them to the barrel, and one at a time lowering them in. They let the bags settle in the barrel a while, and when they pulled them out I seen water slosh over the sides. They was about the job of drowning what rats the old woman hadn’t beat to death with a stick.

When they was on the third bag, which was fuller than the others and causing them to struggle a bit to lift it to the lip of the barrel, the younger woman looked down the hill and seen me. She studied me for a moment, half smiled, and waved me up.

I trudged up quickly. When I was within a yard of her, the young woman said, “You watching pretty close. You got a reason?”

I loved her voice. It was clear and as sweet-sounding as the flute she played.

“Curious,” I said.

“Well,” said the old woman. “I’ll tell you this much. It’s the flute.”

“Like in that story,” I said, it being another one of the many I had read when I was with Mr. Loving.

“Pied Piper,” said the old white woman.

The girl giggled a little.

“You’re pulling my leg,” I said.

“All right, the truth,” the old woman said. “It’s a mixture we got that we rub inside the bags. It will pull a rat to it the way a hound will come to a pork chop. That’s all you get, though. The mixture is ours, and it wouldn’t be prudent to share it.”

“I do like the flute, though,” I said.

“We like to think it helps matters,” said the old white woman. She gave me an examination up and down, said, “You going to watch, or you going to help? Or is all of chivalry dead?”

“I’ll help,” I said. I lifted the last bag into the barrel of water, and admit freely my skin crawled a little when them vermin squeaked their last right before going under.

“Now, you ain’t going to get no money,” said the old woman.

“That’s all right,” I said. “I’m just lending a hand.”

I was looking over that young woman. She took my breath away. She was a fine mixture of races, with dusky skin and black hair that managed to be thick and smooth at the same time. She had fine, full lips and a slightly wide nose, and her eyes were like wet, shiny holes in the sky—at least that’s how they looked with only the moonlight to shine them up. She wore a long dress that I figured was blue, though that was guesswork in the moon shadows, and the way she moved was light as an Apache, and it was then that I thought maybe she was part Indian as well, the way her forehead was, the way her eyes was spaced. She was everything that was fine and beautiful in anybody, far as I was concerned, and I won’t lie or exaggerate one inch when I say the sight of her made me feel as if I might swoon. In that moment, like in all those romantic novels that Mr. Loving made fun of, for me it was love at first sight.

“You going to look at that girl or you going to finish with these rats?” said the old woman.

Finishing meant pulling that bag of dead vermin out of the barrel, stacking it back on the sled with the others.

“Come morning we’ll weigh them up,” said the girl. “I see you again, I’ll buy you a stick of pe

“My name is Nat Love. And I wouldn’t mind a bite of peppermint.”

“Well, my name is Win Fi

“Formerly of the Fi

“They burned the place down where we lived,” said Win.

“You mean the Yankees?” I said.

“That would be them,” Madame Fi

“I have taken the name of the Fi

“Course not. Lincoln freed the slaves,” I said.

“There’s no dearer person to me than Madame Fi

This led to small talk about the rat-drowning barrel, and finally some other kinds of talk, where I gave them a bit of a rundown about myself, leaving out some of the less flattering points, like having to run off over seeing a white woman’s butt. Also, I didn’t mention I was a deserter, but I did say I had been in the army. It was really more than I should have said, I guess, but something about the two led me to talk. They talked, too. We got on the war for a while, and I said something or another about Lincoln, and that got the old lady stirred.

“And a good thing it was he freed the slaves,” she said. “It was a bad thing all around, that business, and I always said so. Not like it mattered to anyone about my opinion, though. Not when there was cotton to be brought in and my family wanted to sit on the veranda and watch it picked. When the war was over, it was just me and this little girl, her mother having died and her father being my own husband.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Madame Fi

“My mother was a slave that was part Cherokee,” said Win. “She was bought from Cherokee slavers.”

“She was comely,” said Madame Fi

When I was finished tightening the bags down, Madame said, “You can go now.”

“Okay,” I said, but I didn’t move and just kept looking at Win. I think Win was amused by me, mostly, and kept giving me a going-over in the ma

“I said you can go now, Ears,” Madame said.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and I started down the hill, but paused and looked back up. I said, “Miss Win Fi

She smiled, and the moonlight lay on her teeth and made them shine. “Our paths could cross,” she said.