“Don’t worry,” Cane broke in. “I’ll watch out for ye.”
Cob scratched his head and tried to think. A sudden urge to sleep came over him, and he fought to suppress another yawn. Oh, how he wanted to just lie down and forget about everything, wake up in the morning and go chop some more brush. Why couldn’t things stay the same? He had always done whatever was required of him, never once questioning or complaining, but nobody had ever asked him to give up his soul before. Why, there probably wasn’t a second went by that the ol’ Devil didn’t make Bloody Bill regret what he’d done. Still, what choice did he have? He couldn’t imagine a life without his brothers any more than he could imagine being his own man. They had never been apart, not for a single night. And that wasn’t the only thing troubling him; now that they’d had their big feed, all that was left to eat was the rat that ran around in the shack at night, and he’d be a hard one to catch. Cob rubbed his hands roughly over his face. “Shoot, I got no idy what to do,” he finally said.
“Stick with us,” Cane said, and after a moment’s hesitation, Cob agreed with a nod of his head, though it was obvious his heart wasn’t in it.
“Okay, at least we got that shit out of the way,” Chimney said, taking another hit off the bottle.
“But why Farleigh?” Cob said. “They some bad people in that town. Don’t you remember what they did the last time we went through there?”
“Sure, I do,” Cane said. “I reckon I remember everything about that goddamn place.” The year before, when they were looking for work, a man gutting a turtle under a railroad trestle had told them about a farmer named Tardweller on the other side of Farleigh who might be hiring. It was a Sunday and they were on their way to talk to him. Just a hundred yards or so before the rutted clay road turned into a smooth graveled street, they passed a corpse hanging from an elm tree, a white man with a piece of cardboard pinned to his bloody long johns that said RAPEST. Some citizens loitering around a fountain in the square, admiring someone’s new automobile, told them to keep moving when Pearl asked if they might get a sup of water. He commenced to preaching to them about charity and the life in the world to come and the heavenly table, and somebody in the crowd bounced a rock off his forehead. By the time they made it out of there, even the women gathered in front of the brick church were hurling stones at them.
“That was a sight, wasn’t it?” Chimney said. “The way they’d clipped that ol’ boy’s pecker off?”
“I ain’t a-killin’ nobody, though,” said Cob.
“You won’t have to,” Cane assured him. “If there’s any trouble, me and Chimney will take care of it. I promise ye.”
14