Free Cy in Chains by David L. Dudley Page A

from Prescott, who got in Billy’s face and tried to make him cry, but this time Billy kept still.
    Finally they got to the place—an open pine wood with lots of saw palmetto under the tall trees. A road would soon be built through there, and the brush had to be cleared out. Cain’s boys were moving fallen pine branches, taking down small trees, and chopping saw palmetto.
    Saw palmetto was nasty stuff. Its roots were so dense and iron hard that they seemed to dare anyone to tear them out of the ground. The leaves spread out from thick stems like large ladies’ fans. They got in your face as you worked, but the real problem was the stems, edged with needle-sharp teeth just the way a saw blade is, so even the hungriest animals avoided them. Unprotected by work gloves, the boys’ hands stayed raw from trying to root up the palmetto.
    They were unchained and put into groups. Cy was with Mouse, Jess, Billy, Ring, and West. Jess was boss.
    Stryker and Prescott handed out the tools, which were nearly worthless. The hoe and shovel edges were dull, and the blades didn’t fit the handles, which were always coming off. That got to Cy worse than anything else. All day long, Cain and his men complained that the work wasn’t going fast enough, but they wouldn’t come up with new, decent tools or pay to have these repaired.
    Jess’s group started where they had finished the day before, at the end of a cleared space about two wagons wide, cut right through the woods. The palmetto came up on either side of the boys like walls.
    If the living palmettos weren’t bad enough, their dead stems and leaves carpeting the ground were bad news, too. Most of the boys were wearing tattered boots, and a couple were barefoot. Cain had been promising replacements, what with cold weather coming on, but so far, he’d done nothing. So while their hands got cut up by the live stems, their feet got the same punishment from the dead ones. Even worse, snakes loved the dense underbrush. Any step might land you on a copperhead or a pygmy rattler.
    Prescott came up to Mouse. “Let me know if you find anything good today,” he said. “I reckon they’s lots of critters hiding in this brush.”
    â€œI gonna fix him one day,” Mouse said after Prescott went away. “He be lyin’ sleep under a tree, way he do, ugly mouth hangin’ open, and I cut his throat!”
    â€œShut up with that talk,” Cy warned. “That cracker hear you, we all gonna get it.”
    â€œCy right,” Jess said. “We can’t afford to be fightin’ each other. We’s all we got.”
    Which is why we all gonna end up dead
, Cy thought bitterly.
    â€œSon’bitch Prescott,” Mouse muttered.
    Cain shot his rifle, the signal for the workday to begin. Square in front of Cy was a palmetto as tall as his shoulders. He wanted to dig it out without having to grab any of the stems, but the mass of leaves kept him from getting close enough to dig. A machete was what he needed—cut the stems down to the ground and then attack the roots—but naturally Cain wasn’t going to hand out machetes.
    Cy pushed a big stem away so he could move in with his dull-edged shovel, and right away, its teeth raked across his palm. “God damn it!” he cried.
    â€œTakin’ the Lord name in vain ain’t gonna help you,” Jess said.
    â€œI can say what I want!”
    â€œJus’ be careful ’bout what you ask the Lord to damn. That some serious business.”
    Cy was sick of such preacher talk, but there was no point answering back.
    â€œLemme see it,” Jess said. “It deep?”
    â€œNaw. Just sting like hell.”
    Jess reached into his jacket pocket and came up with a strip of rag. “Here. Use this.”
    â€œWhere you get that?”
    â€œWest.”
    West looked their way, grinned, and went back to work. If anyone could lay his hands on anything