Chapter 20: Nina

The shots were from up the hill in front of me and somewhere off to the left, two of them. I kicked my horse and moved that way while a part of my mind suggested hesitation and care as well as minding my own business. The first things a saw when I broke out of the treeline was a a small farm house, a good sized knot of horses, a man holding some of them and obviously guarding the others. His back was to me and he wore a militia uniform. He was a Tory.

I counted six well-groomed mounts at the fence gate, and then I saw some muskets stacked on the porch and the body of a man sprawled in the small home's doorway. Even from a distance I could see he had been shot at least twice, blood ran from his head as well as from under his torso. Screams came from the house, women's screams. One sounded particularly young. I dismounted fast and tied my horse to a sapling.

My rifle was loaded so I primed it, pressed my shoulder against a tree, drew down on the horse holder and shot him from about sixty or seventy yards, an easy shot with that weapon. The hit staggered him, and he fell to his knees and then to his back. I grabbed my musket and ran for the house.

A uniformed man with his jacket in his hand came through the front door just as I got to the gate, saw me and froze. I dropped to one knee and shot him. He tumbled down the steps of the rude, story-and-a-half dwelling with a big hole in his belly, spilling off his hat, kicking and clawing the dirt. Four to go my mind said as I set aside my musket and drew my big bayonet and ran, blood pounding in my ears, leaping to the porch. I do not know why I was not afraid, stupidity maybe. The woman's screams more likely.

I stepped over the body in the doorway, noting that the dead man had grizzled hair, and entered the shady home, expecting to find older people than I did. A soldier was turning from a naked child he had been buggering at the edge of a table, her legs dangling. I grabbed his arm and threw him out the door, slashing at him as I did, feeling the blade bite. The child fell to her knees before me, sobbing, looking very small and very frightened. On the other side of the room, a man had disentangled himself from the woman on the floor with her skirts thrown back and came roaring at me with his waistband and foreflap all undone, stumbled over a chair while he grabbed at his britches and got my knife right through his throat, side to side. Blood sprayed over my right arm and onto my legs as he gurgled and died, arms outstretched, flopping to the floor.

"In the back, please," the woman cried, pulling down her dress as the naked child scrambled past the bleeding body crying, "Mama."

I wiped my blade on the dead man at my bloody feet, took a deep breath and hurried into the other room. Two men, one with his britches down about his knees, were trying to rape a young blonde girl who lay across the double bed, squirming and kicking for all she was worth. I drove my blade through the young, bearded man holding her arms and turned in time to see the would-be rapist trip over his clothes as he reached for his belt and bayonet. I pushed him to the wall, kicked him in the groin, hacked at him as he fell and saw blood spurt, glanced at the girl on the bed, noted her beauty despite her disheveled state and my riled condition and hurried back through the house at the woman's call, stepped again over the man in the front door and found the soldier I had pulled off the child out in the yard, holding his bleeding arm and heading toward the horses. I grabbed up one of the muskets leaning on the porch railing, checked the priming and shot him in the back, spinning him off his feet and tearing his spine in half.

The woman came to stand beside me, breathing heavily, grabbing my arm. "The one in the back room," she said. "He's got Nina."

I put down the musket, looked at her for a moment, seeing utter anguish and mature beauty behind the bruised face and tangled hair, and ran back to the bedroom to find the man I had kicked in the belly standing with the golden-haired girl in his grip, a spike bayonet at her throat and a lot of blood on his shoulder and dripping from his chin. I cursed myself for not checking on him after I thought I had cut his neck open.

"Get away, y'bastard," the man cried, wild-eyed. "I'll kill her."

I sheathed my blade and raised my hands, holding the girl's eyes, her blue eyes, her unblinking eyes. She was afraid but strangely calm despite the fact that this would-be rapist was holding her by one breast with a bloody, clawed hand. She was also startlingly beautiful.

"Get over there," the man said, voice shaking, blood dripping from his arm. He gestured with his bayonet, and the girl grimaced, elbowed him and twisted away, leaving him with a piece of her homespun dress as she screamed and ran past me, her hair flowing behind her like a cascade. The furious man lunged, and I grabbed his wrist, took his bayonet from his blood-slippery hand and drove it through the middle of his chest, pinning him back to the log wall while he held my arm and yelled in horror. Slack-faced, he slid down to the floor, pulling the spike loose as he did, and sat spraddle-legged in his gore, coughing blood into his lap.

The woman came to stand at my side, mouth pursed, with the young child beside her, her face buried in the mother's skirt, her mother's hand keeping it there. We looked at the bodies sprawled awkwardly in the bedroom. Blood flow seemed to have stopped, but the floor was nearly covered.

"They came for Nina," she said softly. "One of them knew her, from church meetings I think; that boy there." She pointed to the lean body bent double on its knees in a huge, dark puddle. "They came to rape her, all of them. Had it planned." She let out a deep breath, a sigh.

"I hurt, Mama," the child whined and her mother patted her back. I guessed she was nine or so, slight and skinny-legged, tow-headed like the other two women, and now wearing a shapeless, butternut dress that almost reached her feet.

"They went after me and Becky here just out of meanness, something to do while they waited their turn at the girl. That other one there was the leader." She gestured at the seated body whose white britches were blood spattered and now turning dark red at the waist.

We walked back into the front room where another bloody body lay twisted on the floor, neck wound gaping. I had already forgotten how I killed him but then I saw his bare buttocks and remembered what he had been doing. The woman shuddered as she walked past him, and I touched her back.

"That's my husband, was my husband," she said quietly, pointing to the grey-haired body lying across the sill, arms outstretched, still oozing blood, "their father. He tried to protect us." She likely was not half the dead man's age, closer to mine. His lined and weather-beaten face bore a white stubble.

The young blonde stood on the narrow porch, holding her torn dress to her chest, breathing hard, her face tear stained. She looked up at me. "Thank you," she said softly. She was a first-class beauty, fair skinned and well developed, lean and tall, the kind that men dream about and moon over, the kind they picture when they use their hands to relieve themselves, desirable was the best word for her. She was prettier than the girl in Philadelphia, and much healthier, clearer eyed, fresher, more than just pretty. She stirred my blood.

"She's too beautiful, amazing how calm she is," I said quietly to her mother.

"I know," the woman said, kneeling beside her husband's body, touching his blood-matted hair.

"We'll bury him," I said. "You get him ready."

She nodded.

With Nina's help, I got the six bodies piled into a leaning, disused shed well away from the house, dragging them there one at a time. I stripped them of anything valuable or useful, giving the money to the girl, who helped without looking at the dead men, and piling the ammunition near the front steps. I poured all the lamp oil the family had and a crock of grease they had been saving as well as two horns of gunpowder and some old barn lumber on the bodies and set fire to the straw-filled, weed-covered, bone-dry shed, a place that had probably been a tobacco barn long ago.

The abandoned structure was some distance off so the sickening smell did not bother us as Nina and I dug her father's grave. Occasionally the wind shifted and we would pause to glance at each other as the smell of charring flesh reached us. I knew the bodies would still be there when the fire burned out, but assumed the shed roof would collapse on them and make them harder to find, surely unidentifiable. I had a hard time not looking at the girl as she worked, bending over with her torn dress and thin shift gapping open to invite my gaze. It is hard to dig when your rigid member is well down your leg and your filthy mind is elsewhere. The ground was hard and rich with roots and rocks.

By sundown we had buried the small family's husband and father, shed some tears and sat on the porch to share food and cider. Nina's torn dress kept flapping open, distracting me with a view of her high, linen-covered breasts. I know her mother saw me looking.

"Now what?" I asked the woman. Nina, she had told me, was fifteen, Becky ten, and the dead man had a first, larger and much older family somewhere out in the Ohio Country or Tennessee.

"Think we'll go live with my brother till this trouble's over," she said. "He's got a big place. Tisn't far. It'll be safer."

"We can stay right here, Maw," Nina said, sticking out her fine chin.

"Not with your father gone," she said. "Can't work it alone."

"I can plow, mules and me, Becky can weed," Nina insisted. The child nodded.

"Won't make you ugly," her mother said.

"Ain't my fault," said the girl, sniffing and looking away from both of us, folding her arms across her chest.

"It's a curse," said the woman. "Her beauty."

We had cleaned up the house as best we could, scrubbing the pine floors with sand and nettles, rubbing them with rags, but the smell of blood and death as well as the dark stains remained. In the distance the collapsed shed occasionally glowed and now and then put up a bit of smoke and few embers in the breeze which was still, thankfully, away from us.

"You girls get to bed," Mrs. W-- said, and they trooped off hand in hand, sad-eyed, nodding to me and kissing their mother.

"Can you stay, help us move?" the woman asked, exhaling and sitting beside me.

"Day or two," I said, feeling the need to get back and report as well as the desire to stay near three such fine-looking females and trying to ignore my always-present carnal desires, aroused by the nubile girl's beauty as well as the oddly-confined fight.

"I'd appreciate it."

"Is Becky all right?" I took her offered hand and held it.

"I think so. Just scared, a bit sore, but mainly frightened. What an awful thing to do to a child. At least they didn't get to Nina this time."

"This time?"

"Bunch caught her out in the field, six or seven months back. Dragged her down to the creek and did awful things to her. She lost a tooth, bled off and on for a week. First time Becky's been attacked." She did not say if she had been assaulted before, and I did not ask. She was a handsome and seemingly stoic woman, and her hand was hard with work calluses.

"Surprised he didn't rape her. I've seen younger girls abused, even cut open so men could use them." Foul images flickered behind my eyes, ones I had hoped were buried deep.

"Terrible what men will do, then blame it on the war. Man that took Nina's maidenhead was a young soldier, a rebel like you, promised to marry her, cozened her and she let him, thought she was in love. We know his family. He used her and left, laughing she said. Left her in a tavern five miles off. That was more'n two years ago. She was thirteen." The woman's face showed her anger and disgust; she withdrew her hand from mine.

I nodded. War was an excuse for some men to act like animals, cowardly animals. I felt no regrets about the lives I had taken that day. Some images stirred in my mind, but no regrets.