Horrible Harvest

“What now?” I asked.

“That lie won’t hold,” Tate said. “Not for long. If Mr. Stockton were truly to go on a raid, Douglas would have ridden with him. They pillage and plunder as a pair. Master Miller will figure something’s wrong as soon as he learns your brother has been left behind.”

“S’pose that’ll mean my times run dry.” I turned to head back to the lake.

“You will get yourself killed. Kenneth, too.”

“I ain’t rich with choices.”

“Nor am I.”

Just before stepping back onto the game trail, I turned to him and asked, “Meaning what?”

“You have rushed opportunity to my doorstep. The moment has arrived. It is upon me ahead of schedule, but war is about adapting to your enemy’s movements.”

“What’re you going on about?”

“I need to change my proximity to Master Miller’s throat so I can crush it before sunrise.”

“You’re his footman, ain’t you? You don’t need no playacting to get near him while he sleeps.”

“He does not sleep unguarded. He has sown his mind with spores of paranoia that eat away at his sanity. There’s not a spot in his head fertile enough for rational thought.”

“Gotta be honest with you. He ain’t exactly wrong to be paranoid in this here case.”

“That is the gift of distrust. It bears fruit if entertained long enough.”

“I’ll leave you with your plans – ”

“You are my plans.”

I didn’t respond.

“Master Miller is unbalanced. He does not like surprises. Those in his command have ceased giving him bad news or any news that veers from his instructions. They have him believing that this brigade of incompetent oafs has ravaged entire Yankee Divisions. He shows favor to those who tell him the loftiest lies that inflate his delusional sense of greatness.”

“Your plan?”

“I captured you. Working your way to his headquarters. You are an assassin. He is so great that he has inspired a mere footman to bring him victory.”

“Your plan is to deliver me to him as his assassin?”

“It is a surprise that will further muddle his already muddled mind. He will let his guard down, and I will be granted his favor – Briefly – Until his madness draws him into a cloud of suspicion, and he sequesters himself into deeper depths of insanity.”

“And what of me?”

“That is up to you. I offer you the cover of confusion. As you said, your options are limited. You either die tonight down by the lake in a futile attempt to take out a dozen or so men, or you die in service of murdering a man of great evil – a man who has brought hell into our – both yours and mine – beating hearts for far too long.”

I considered his proposal and give a pace back and forth at the foot of the game path. After a spit of time, I approached Tate and handed him the Navy Colt. “You’ll need to tie my hands – loose as drunkards ass – And it wouldn’t hurt things if I had me a bruise or two – ” Before I could get the eww out two, Tate clocked me across the cheek with the back of his hand.

“I have owed you that for far too many years.”

I rubbed the sting to me cheek and give the scar on Tate’s face a stare. “Reckon you have.”

Tate unknowingly let a smile spread across his face as he retrieved some twine housed in the hunting shed.

“Glad you enjoyed yourself.”

Shaking his head, Tate said, “I will not apologize for finding delight in striking a cracker. It portends the flood of blissful jubilation I will feel when I am watching my master struggle to breathe.” He loosely tied Augustus’s hands behind his back. “Careful not to fight against that knot prematurely. It will only hold so much strain.”

We decided to approach the house from the thick of the woods, steering clear of the well-worn path, so as not to come up on a member of Miller’s brigade along the way. The ruckus such a meeting would conjure up would sure enough draw attention to our position and be a whole other surprise we didn’t wanna deliver.

As the debris of the forest crumbled to dust under our footfalls, I could not help but ask, “You know of the letter?”

“I do.”

“You’ve read it?”

“As directed.”

“You were directed to read it?”

“To Master Miller. He spends many nights blind from drunkenness, and I am his eyes. He imbibed gallons of whisky on the night he first was in possession of your letter.”

“And yet you help me? Why? Surely, I am an abomination to you, as well.”

“Your abomination was delivered upon me long before reading your letter. I am far more disturbed by your race than your carnal requirements. In fact, I find you less abominable by your capacity to express affection for another. Besides, if you recall, I was leased in service to a sailing vessel for many years when I was young. I witnessed lustful acts between men more than I witnessed any other acts between men. I do not see the wrong in it or the right in it. I simply see the artless direction of your heart. You cannot control what causes it to pound with desire any more than you can decide what location it occupies in your chest.”

I snickered without thought. It come out angry.

“You are bothered by my statement?”

“Nah, sir. Truth is, I am bothered by my behavior. I can’t wrap my mind around your thinking on it. I’m all kinds of wrong for what I done. Don’t know why you can’t see that.”

“You cannot see what I see because you are made by this world. Your thoughts and beliefs have been shaped with disdain for nature. You have such disdain for it, you’ve lost all sense of what it truly is. It is not one thing or another. It is all things and all things more. Your self-worth is rooted in a rigid, ever stagnate definition of nature. That is not how the wild things grow. There is a biological purpose to desire, and it is not limited to the perpetuation of the species. It is the perpetuation of community. It is the tool to find comfort in the life we’ve been granted. It is the glow of eagerness we experience in the company of another. It is the investment of unruled emotions we cast upon someone without effort or concern.

“In your letter, I see you embrace and honor your place in the natural world. In this world in which you walk and were forged, I see you scorch to ash your commitment to whom nature meant you to be.”

“Ain’t you made by the same world?”

“No. I am owned by it. I know my state in it to be unnatural.”

The sky hovered above us. Absent were the sun and moon. The pinpoint gleam of stars pulsated ever so slightly in the now inky-black condition of the heavens that ruled over our trek through the wilderness. We plodded along through the thick underbrush until we reached the edge of the woods and took in the frame of the farmhouse that struggled to find shape in the darkness. Dozens of dancing lamplights dotted from within the belly of the house, and they hinted at the modest size of the building that Mr. Miller had chosen as his headquarters. It was not the sprawling palace to which he’d grown accustomed, and I come upon the thought that the self-appointed Brigadier General most likely considered its plainness as a great sacrifice he was forced to make for the South.

Before stepping onto the grassy stretch of yard leading to the kitchen entrance, Tate turned to me and said, “He is not the man you remember – Master Miller.”

“Understood.”

“Hear me on this. His cruelty has lost access to the diplomacy that kept it tethered to the darkest recesses of his mind. His lunacy is now what lights the way in almost everything he does.”

“I hear you, and I’m now more than a tad skeptical of your choice to bound my hands behind my back and then introduce me to him as his would-be assassin.”

Tate raised an eyebrow. “Your hands are only loosely bound, and I never claimed it was a good plan.”

“Yes, well, I am of the mind it ain’t nothing but ‘A’ plan at the moment, and I deeply regret not exploring other options.”

“You can thank your captain for our need to act rashly. Exploring other options would require time we don’t possess.” He stepped back and give me invitation to walk in front of him.