Chapter 47: summer 1781

A week later after seeing what the roaming bands of Tories had done along Stony Creek and meeting with the Reverend Mr. Craig at what was left of his mill on Flat Rock Creek, I turned back toward Richmond, disgusted with myself and with human nature. Tarleton and his men had trampled crops, burned homes and barns, dumped animal bodies into wells, left young men's rotting corpses dangling from trees and young women lying violated and distraught.

James Craig seemed more angry about being forced to slaughter and roast his pigs for Tarleton's band than about the fact that they had burned his mill. He, and most of the others I talked with, was very unhappy with the Virginia government and the Continental Congress, with me and everyone else whom he blamed for the catastrophes besetting the countryside. He did not care about the revolution; he wanted peace and security.

All I could do was apologize. In a week of hunting, I had not even caught sight of one Tory ranger as I set out toward the sunrise that morning. It promised to be another long, hot day. A curl of smoke off to the left of the rude road caught my attention about an hour later, and I urged my mare to do a bit more than walk in that direction. I topped a rise with the smell of burned flesh in my nose and saw a small farm in the process of being looted and destroyed.

A man's body lay sprawled in the farm yard with a flock of chickens pecking and flapping near it. At the penfold, two women were tied to the railings, their skirts thrown up over their bodies and one of them was very obviously being raped by a man who was holding her at the hips and ramming into her backside. His musket leaned against the fence and his breeches were around his knees. The barn was already ablaze, and as I watched another dragoon came trotting from the house, pulling along a light-haired boy or ten or so and carrying a wad of clothes.

I could not figure out how many of them were at work down there until I noticed that a half-dozen saddled horses were tied to the back porch railing. I dismounted, primed both my rifle and musket, pulled an old pistol from my saddle bag and loaded that, too. By the time I was ready, the man who had been horsing the woman on the fence was buttoning his breeches and watching his compatriot force the boy to take off his small clothes.

I ran down the hill toward the two of them, assuming they would be so busy with their nasty business they would not notice me trampling through the high grass. As I rounded the corn crib, they had bent the naked boy over a fence rail and his captor was spitting on his hand and anointing his swelling member, obviously getting ready to bugger the sobbing child. One of the women was crying and yelling "Don't, don't" at him.

I was only ten paces off and there were four men somewhere I had not spotted, so I set down my rifle and ran up the grassy track, bayonet leveled. I lowered my shoulder and knocked the first man to the ground and then drove my blade into the soldier with his cock in his hand, smashing through his ribs and lifting him off his feet. I yanked my blade free as he fell and turned to see the first man starting to stand. I stuck him at the base of his neck before he could yell and drove him back to the ground. I put my foot on his face, pulled out my blade and then ripped open his chest almost tearing out his heart.

I cut the crying boy free with Magda's knife and then turned to take care of the women. The first man I had stuck was crawling away, dripping blood and moaning. I turned him over with my foot, and he raised his hands toward me and cried, "Please." I tore open his belly, spilling coils of his glistening guts in the lane. Both the women had watched me kill the two Tories, wide eyed. I noticed that the younger one had blood running down her legs as I cut them free. She looked to be twelve or so, just half grown.

"Where are the others?" I asked the three of them as the boy clung to the woman and the girl vomited into the weeds.

The older woman, I assumed the mother of the younger two, said, "In the house with my older daughter. They already killed my man."

"One's in the outhouse, I think," the boy said as he pulled on his shirt. He pointed toward the small, whitewashed necessary.

I grabbed my rifle and trotted to stand by the faded shack. When the soldier emerged, looking down and buttoning his waist, I put my hand over his mouth and pulled him behind the outhouse, yanked his head back and cut his throat before he could make a sound, ducking back from the spray of blood and then kicking his limp body aside. Magda's knife was a wonderful weapon as Mercy had told me. I had almost decapitated the man.

A trooper came out the back door of the story-and-a-half house, stretching, his foreflap still open and his limp member drooping. He looked down the lane and saw the bodies and the three people standing and waiting. Then he looked right at me so I had no choice. I raised the musket and shot him in the back as he turned and yelled something to those inside. He fell off the porch, kicking and screaming, pawing at his chest.

I set the musket aside and raised my rifle just as another raider emerged with a weapon in his hands. I think I got him in the right eye. His head jerked back; he dropped the musket, threw up his arms, twisted around and fell on his face after spraying the doorpost with blood. I put the rifle down, grabbed my musket with its bloody bayonet and ran for the house, ignoring the thrashing man and kicking aside the body in the doorway.

In the far corner, a young, almost hairless man with his britches down around his ankles was pushing himself up from a large, blood-stained bed where a naked young woman lay sprawled, one knee up, her arm over her face. When he saw me he raised his hands in surrender. I looked at the torn and bleeding girl on the bed. I saw bite marks on her small, white breast, and her face, belly and thighs were blood smeared. She was still saying, "No, no, no," over and over when I led her attacker outside after he pulled up his britches.

It took the man two hours to dig a big enough pit on the edge of a fallow field and then haul the bodies to it.

"He ain't dead," he told me, his voice shaking as he dragged out the soldier who had been moaning and crying almost the whole time, his shrunken privates still exposed.

"Throw him in," I said.

"Ain't you gonna kill him?" the young man asked, looking sick. I wondered if he had ever shaved.

"He'll die, can't have much blood left. Look at the trail he left. Throw him in." The body flopped limply into the pit, still twitching.

By the time the five bodies lay tangled together in the shallow hole, one still moving a bit, the family's mother and her three children had gotten cleaned up some and stood by the fence watching.

"What should I do with this one?" I asked them, poking him with my gory bayonet.

"I'm a Quaker," the woman said. "Don't believe in killing."

"I'll kill him," the older girl said, pushing her blonde hair back and showing a toothy face that made me believe should would. She still had a bloody smear on her cheek.

'No," her mother said, "you won't." She held her arm.

"Let me," cried the boy. "I'll shoot him. I ain't no Quaker."

"Come," the mother said, "let's go back to the house." Then she turned toward me. "Vengeance is the Lord's," she said. The younger girl just stared at me, saying nothing, looking frightened.

"Cover 'em up," I said to the man. "She don' want me to kill you so I wont."

"But he ain't dead," the man said, looking into the hole.

"Shovel that dirt in there." I told him and he did. Stamping down the clay when he finished.

"You raped a lot of girls?" I asked him after he put the shovel down.

"A few," he said, trying to look brave, puffing out his skinny chest.

"How many?"

"Didn't count."

"You done your last," I told him. "I want you to go back and find Tarleton and tell him that I am coming to get him, and when I do, I am going to feed him his ballocks, one at a time."

The man nodded, wide-eyed. "Please," he said. "Don't." He looked at Magda's thin, filleting knife and then at my smile and turned to run. I let him get ten or twelve strides away before I shot between his feet. He tumbled to the earth and tried to crawl, blood staining one of his boots. I grabbed him by the neck of his shirt and pulled him up, smashing him back against the split-rail fence.

"I've done this before an' you best not jump around, " I told him as I ripped his britches open. " I'd rather had that girl do it, but..." I grabbed his scrotum and squeezed hard. He screamed, and I cut his testicles off and handed them to him. He threw them aside and dropped to his knees. I lifted his head and slit his nose. "Go on," I told him. "Tell Tarleton."

"Did you kill him?" the mother asked me after I had dug a grave for her husband, and we had buried him decently. She had cleaned up the body and wrapped it in a clean linen sheet.

I shook my head. "He might druther I had," I told her.

"What'd you do?" the boy asked.

"Gelded him," I said. I looked around the dinner table at all four of them. The younger girl made a face, but her brother smiled. The older girl said, "Thank you," and her mother nodded.

'Think they'll be back?" the woman said.

"No, mostly they seem to keep moving. Like a flock of locusts," I said.

"Can you stay a day or two?" the woman asked, looking worried. "Just to be sure."

"Of course," I said. "Be glad to." Captain Foster was used to me showing up late. Besides I had almost nothing to report, and these people could use some help to get back on their feet.

We worked together all day, restoring the pig pen and the chicken house, saving what we could from the ashes of the barn where a roasted cow still lay at day's end, white ribs poking through the carcass. By noon, all four of us were sweaty and paused to drink some water and sit in the shade.

"Fine water," I said, pouring the last of the bucketful on my head.

"Never goes dry," the older girl said. Her name was Amy and her sister was Hilda. The boy was James, called for his dead father. The woman had not given me her Christian name and the children all called her "ma."

"You had trouble before?" I asked her.

She shook her head. "The war was just a rumor. I think several boys went off some years back. And a few more recently, to both sides I suppose."

"Was your husband a Quaker?" I asked.

She shook her head. "No," she said, "just me. We met up in Philadelphia. He had been a seaman. His family was from Baden."

The name Philadelphia sent a shiver along my spine. I guess the one thing I had in common with this family was rape since I had not figured out what else to call what happened to me in that big town.

We worked until it got just too hot, and we quit while the woman and her younger children rested and then fixed some food. I sat with Amy under a chestnut tree and watched the clouds build up over the hills.

"How old are you?" I asked the girl, mostly just to have something to say. She was a tall, slim youngster, very quick and smooth in her movements, like a young colt. I admired her brown legs and long, bare toes.