The Redcoat

I was feeding on a boy of perhaps twenty when he woke.

This happens more than you might expect. The living are resilient; they do not always stay where you leave them. The thing that ought to keep them still while you take what you need sometimes falters. I had been careless. It was the winter of 1779, and we had been raiding British encampments for several years by then, and I had grown casual with the work.

The boy was a British soldier of the ordinary kind. He had not enlisted out of conviction but because the army paid in coin and he had been hungry, and he was not particularly bad or good, just young and cold and asleep in a tent on the edge of a Connecticut encampment when I came through the canvas.

He woke. And then, in one of those moments that separate the merely alarming from the truly memorable, he found his rifle.

He shot me in the chest.

I have been cut with a cutlass. I have been run through completely, which I do not recommend. I have been beaten and thrown and fallen from considerable heights in the course of a long career. I had not been shot before.

The experience is clarifying. I will say that much for it.

What came after the clarification was not something I am proud of, precisely, or ashamed of either. It was simply what happened. I tore the boy apart. It took perhaps four seconds, which is less time than it takes to describe it. The camp was still waking up when Sings found me standing in the remains of the tent, listening to the distant shouting of men who had heard the rifle and were coming to find the cause of it.

She looked at me.

I looked at what I had done.

I have made larger messes since. I have made them with more deliberateness, which is perhaps the honest word for what efficiency becomes when you have practiced it long enough.

I tell you this because I believe you should understand what you are dealing with, when you deal with me. Not the Elder of Tucson. Not the property holder and the civic presence and the woman who will nod graciously at your arguments before having you managed. What came out of that tent in 1779.

I am not a cautionary tale. I am the caution.

We were through the tree line and gone before the British soldiers reached the tent. Sings said nothing about what she had seen. She had known since 1697 what she had made; she was not surprised by the confirmation.

That was also, I think, a kind of love.