Make Me No Grave

by Hayley Stone

  “I was friends with Abraham Lincoln, back in the day.”

  “The president?”

  “You know another one?”

  “S’ppose not.”

  Yep. Things. None I could recall, of course, as I attempted to make my way back to my room, greased by the whiskey. I moved hand-over-hand, slowly feeling my way along the wall while the floor wavered beneath me, sliding all over itself like melted butter. I kept expecting to slip and fall, but my steps held, one after the other. My torso felt buoyed by nothing, but I knew my legs were there, puzzled by the movement, but doing their job.

  Atta boy, Nathan. Don’t let her see what a lightweight you are.

  I raised a hand to one of my ears, instinctively defending against my father’s criticism. But then, losing my balance, I quickly scrambled for the wall again.

  No. Wasn’t my father’s voice in my head. It was mine.

  But the words were his. The sentiment, his. In all the years living with the man, surviving all those beatings, all that pointless misery, thinking myself better, determined to be kinder, some part of his nature had still broken off inside me. Like the head of a pick lodged into a mountain’s flesh, the miner left holding just the handle. I felt it in there, in my chest.

  A dark, ugly knot.

  I thought I could forgive him. Lord as my witness, I thought I had. Him and my ex-wife both. My religion commanded me to forgive them, and I agreed that made the most sense, being that Nathaniel Richardson had long since gone to his reward, whatever that turned out to be, and Lilah—Lilah was gone in all the ways that mattered. Still. I held fast to that knot, pulling at its threads every now and again with a thought, making it tighter and tighter and—permanent. Anchoring me to a past I kept trying to be free of.

  All the warmth and cheap comfort of whiskey couldn’t make me forget that small, thorny place in my heart. Maybe I didn’t want it to. Didn’t let it. If anything, the whiskey just reminded me it was still there.

  Maybe Guillory and I weren’t so different, after all. Neither of us seemed to be able to let go of the people who hurt us.

  How about that.

  Dimly, I became aware of Almena’s hand on my elbow. Helping me inch along. Nice of her. And just like that, I rolled off the topic of my father and back into the present. It was hard to concentrate. My mind had the consistency of sludge, and my thoughts mostly bubbled up at random.

  “What?” I turned toward Almena, missing what she’d said.

  “I asked if you wanted to go upstairs,” she repeated.

  I started laughing. Not a mild chuckle, either, but raucous, side-splitting laughter. I pitched forward with tears squeezing out of my eyes, only avoiding the floor thanks to Almena’s intervention. She bent underneath me, literally shouldering my weight before she could get her hands up. Her palms flattened against my chest and pushed to keep me upright. I finally managed to sling my arm around the stair banister.

  “Mind letting me in on the joke?” Almena asked, smiling uncertainly. I waved her off, trying to catch my breath. “What in hell is so funny?”

  “I—don’t—I don’t know!” For some reason, this made me wheeze harder. I couldn’t seem to stop. My throat began to hurt from laughing so much. “It’s just—”

  “What?”

  “You and me. And—this. Do I want to go upstairs?” I mimicked the sound of her voice. Knuckled away tears from the corners of my eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  “Maybe we should just put you on the couch for now.”

  I sobered some by the time we reached the sitting room. In terms of humor, anyway. A dreary calm settled on me, slowly easing the smile from my face. I sank down onto the sofa, relieved to be closer to the ground. Wouldn’t hurt so much if I passed out from here.

  “Stand up,” Almena ordered.

  I gave her a helpless look.

  “Come on. Up.” She gestured impatiently.

  Once back on my feet, Almena’s hands went to my holster. I clamped down on her wrists before her fingers had completely undone the front of my belt.

  “Don’t get excited. I’m just removing your gun so you’ll be more comfortable.” She had a point, but I held fast, reluctant to trust her. Or reluctant to let her go. I rolled my thumb along the side of her hand, barely aware I was doing it. She stared up at me, her eyes mysterious and thoughtful.

  “If you want to do it yourself, then by all means.” She stepped back, escaping my loose grip with ease. Wouldn’t keep her somewhere she didn’t want to be. “But one way or another, that holster needs to come off.”

  “All right,” I agreed simply, and she came back.

  Her fingers, sure and strong, made quick work of the belt. Then she set it down together with my gun on one of the end tables near the couch where it would be within my reach, should I have need of it in the night. She must’ve known I’d appreciate that. Sure had me pegged, but then I’d made no secret of my beliefs or behavior. I owned only a partial and incomplete picture of who Almena was, though. The images on her dresser floated back to me.

  “Is it true?” I asked when her back was turned to me.

  “Is what true?”

  “That you knew Lincoln?” Something surfaced in the muddy run of my thoughts. “Wait a minute. Is he the decent man you let die?”

  “That’d be a bold claim.”

  “Found some pictures on your desk. There was a, a letter inside one of them. Letter you wrote.”

  She swung around, thrusting a finger towards me. “You had no right to go snooping through my things.”

  “You’re right. I shouldn’t’ve done.”

  Almena snorted. “I can see why you didn’t become a lawyer.” She was still breathing a little faster than usual, but I believed I’d dodged a storm. That gave me the confidence to ask my next question.

  “Did you succeed in helping track down… what’s his name? Booth? Were you there at the Garrett farm when he was killed?”

  “John Wilkes Booth isn’t dead.”

  She said this like I should’ve known it.

  I squinted. “Come again?”

  “Remember why I said I came to Asher? Looking for a dead man?”

  “You were looking for—John Wilkes Booth? The John Wilkes Booth?”

  “Yes.”

  I gave her another cautious look. “Did you… find him?”

  “Don’t patronize me, Marshal. I’m not crazy. I have it on good authority he’s still alive. Moved out West, I don’t know where. Yet. That’s why I was in Asher. My cousin wrote to me, said she’d overheard some talk there from one of the men who claimed he’d run with Booth after Virginia, first south to North Carolina, then out here to Kansas. As it turned out, the man was just some ex-Confederate deep in his cups. But I know I’m not wrong about this. I know Booth’s out here somewhere.”

  My head ached, making it even more difficult to think straight, and I sat down to avoid a feeling of spinning. “What makes you so sure?”

  “Three hours.”

  “What?”

  She sat down next to me, strangely enthusiastic. “The reports say he was shot in the neck and it took him three hours to die. Three hours in which someone like me could have saved him. Besides that, the only people to identify the body were members of Booth’s family. You don’t think they had mighty good reason to lie?”

  I held up my hand, indicating she should slow down. “Wait. Someone like you? You mean, there are others who can do… whatever it is you do?”

  “A few. Less since the war ended.”

  “Since the war ended?”

  “I know you’re drunk, but if you’re just going to repeat everything I say, this is going to be a long and irritating conversation for both of us.”

  “I’m trying to understand…”

  She shot to her feet and began pacing the room. Her boots clomped angrily against the floor. “They killed themselves, all right? You want the grisly details? You want to know how I found one after the war, starved and half out of his min
d? Some former Greyback still wearing his dead brothers’ wounds, who didn’t know what the fuck to do with himself now that his side had lost. I found him one morning weeks later, hanging from a rafter in the barn. Because he knew, he knew I would save him, if I could. That I would’ve—I would have stopped him. This was the only way. His body healed too damn quickly for anything else short of putting a rifle in his mouth, and that would’ve been messy, inconsiderate. Maybe you’d like to hear how it took me half an hour to cut him down because the saw teeth had rusted and couldn’t get through the rope. Go ahead, try to understand that. Because I sure as hell don’t. I don’t understand any of it.”

  “I’m sorry,” I answered in a small voice. “I didn’t know.”

  Tears slid from her eyes. I could tell it surprised her because she made a startled noise before wicking the tears away from her cheeks. “How could you? It doesn’t matter now. He’s dead. He wasn’t the only bruiser to find peace at the end of a rope or a barrel, but he was one of the few I knew personally.”

  One of the few, seemed to me, who knew exactly the sort of things Almena had gone through during the war. Perhaps the last man who could honestly empathize with Almena, and he’d strung himself up in her barn. Hell.

  “What was his name?” I asked her.

  “What?”

  “The name of this man. If you don’t mind me asking.”

  She folded her arms across her chest, trying to look tough. It didn’t work. “What’s it matter to you?”

  “Dead should be remembered. Good, bad, or in between. A person deserves that much. Sometimes it’s hard being the only one who bears that burden.”

  “Jim,” she answered after a moment. “James Ealer. He was from Virginia.”

  We spoke a short time about James Ealer, and then about others she’d known during the war. I learned Almena had befriended several men from the Colored Troops, who upon learning she was actually a woman, kept her secret out of friendship and gratitude for her help in rescuing their fellow men who had been taken prisoner following an engagement near Richmond. When I asked about her moniker during the war, she confirmed she had served under the name Alvin, or “Al,” Guillory, just as Jed had claimed, but to hear her tell it, before entering the employ of the president, she spent most of the war as a glorified medic, not a ruthless killer. The nickname came after the war, when people like me started trying to make out Almena’s history through the smoke of hearsay and rumor.

  I asked the occasional question to keep Almena talking, but mostly I listened, watching the way her face changed when she spoke about the people she’d fought alongside and cared about. The tension went away from her mouth, and her eyes slowly brightened; her memories still moved her. I got the feeling she didn’t discuss them often with anyone, and I felt honored, then guilty. If Almena knew I was still planning on arresting her, I doubted she’d be so open to sharing.

  It was only when I started to nod off—not for want of interest, mind, but medicated by the whiskey—that Almena turned quiet. She lifted my legs onto the sofa as I slouched into the cushions. The old fabric smelled faintly of cigar smoke and strong coffee. The latter conjured memories of the open range, and an Arbuckle’s blend to wash the dust from my mouth after a long hard day. When I closed my eyes, I could almost imagine myself somewhere else, halfway to normal.

  I heard Almena leave.

  A minute later, she came back.

  Something wooden clanked against the floor beside my temporary bed. I opened one eye and saw it was the bucket from before, now empty.

  “Here,” Almena said. “I have a feeling you’ll want this come morning.”

  I made a noise of mild agreement and gave her a small salute.

  “All right. Then I guess, good night, Marshal.”

  “Hey,” I said, as the sound of her footsteps started going away again. “Actually, I’ve one more question before you go.”

  Her silence as good as gave me permission to ask. I sat up on my elbows.

  “You told me why you went to Asher in the first place, but you never said why you stayed long enough for me to catch up to you. If you had long enough to change into that dress, those gloves… pretty as they were, makes me think you had long enough to get away. And that’s not even touching on what you can do with your hands. I mean, your skin. I mean”—I sighed, struggling to find the right words—“you know what I mean.” Damn whiskey.

  Almena leaned against the door frame. Even as bleary-eyed as I was, I noticed her smile cut with anguish. “I honestly thought he’d come. I know it sounds stupid, but Lloyd—Bratt, he knew where I was going. Before we split at Ellsworth—on account of you, I might add—I told him. I said, I’m going to Asher to hunt down a lead. If you don’t hear from me in a day, it means I’ve found trouble. I’ll need you. And he promised he’d come. Come hell or high waters. Those were his words.”

  She glanced down briefly, her mouth twisting. When she finally looked back at me, her expression was unguarded, hopeful and devastated at the same time. “Have you ever wanted so badly to believe in someone, Apostle? That you were willing to overlook all their faults just so it’d work? So you could be happy, if only for a little while?”

  “Yes,” I said without reservation.

  “Doesn’t everyone deserve that chance?” I heard the question she was really asking. Don’t I deserve to be happy?

  My answer was the same. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I thought it’d be good for him—getting the opportunity to be the hero for once. Saving me instead of the other way around. But some men don’t have hero in them.” She pushed off the door, rubbing her neck where she refused to let her rope burns heal. “I was fooling myself, thinking I could change him. Thinking anyone could change.”

  “People do change.”

  “Before we got here, I searched for Lloyd. I was sure something must have happened to him. That he got held up somehow. That he was the one in trouble. Otherwise, why wouldn’t he come for me? But, this—”

  She indicated the ripped-up floorboards. I also noticed a few new holes in the walls that weren’t there before.

  “He gave me up for dead, Marshal. Didn’t even try.” Her voice cracked on the last word. One moment she looked to be fighting tears, the next she rolled her eyes, laughed, and threw her hands up in the air. “Hell! You did more to save my life than he did. But forget it. I don’t know why I’m even talking about this. It doesn’t matter.”

  I frowned. “Why do you say that? Why are you always so quick to dismiss the way you’re feeling?”

  “Because if it matters, it hurts. And I’m sick to death of hurting all the time.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. If she’d been standing closer, I might’ve taken her hand. She looked like a woman who needed to be comforted, who needed to know she wasn’t half as alone as she felt. But given our history, I probably wasn’t the right fella to make her feel any better. I stayed put, wisely or not.

  “Are we done now, Apostle?” she asked after an uncomfortable interlude of silence.

  “Nathan,” I murmured.

  “What?”

  “My name—real one, that is—it’s Nathan. Short for Nathaniel, after my old man. He was… a lousy husband to my mother. Lousy father to me. Drunk half the time, mean the rest. That’s whose name I was given at birth. That’s why when people started calling me Apostle, I didn’t bother correcting them. It was better than hearing them call me by my daddy’s name.” I smiled down at myself, at how stupid it sounded now that it was outside of my head.

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Probably ’cause I’m drunk,” I admitted with a woozy chuckle, “but also because you shared something with me. Seemed only fair I return the favor.” She kept on watching me, so I kept on talking. “You ain’t alone in having a past, Almena. Or in being hurt by the people you love. Happens. Happens to all of us. I’d hate to see you waste yourself on regret because you were too afraid to let yourself feel something ot
her than anger.”

  “Chatty even when drunk. I hope this isn’t the part where you try and bring me to God.”

  I settled back into the sofa. “Nope. I’ve said my piece. Now’s the part when I go to sleep. I’ll tell you about Jesus tomorrow, you want.”

  She went through the room and turned down the lamps, one by one. Darkness rushed in, taking the place of the light. I tucked my chin down into my chest and closed my eyes.

  “Good night, Nathan,” I heard Almena say, without mockery.

  “Night, Almena,” I replied, falling asleep to the sound of her footsteps retreating up the stairs.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The following morning Almena was back to herself, maybe improved. I heard her humming—humming!—while she stirred oatmeal over the stove, the picture of domesticity in a blue linen dress. Her long, brown hair was fixed neatly at the back of her head, similar to the way she’d worn it when she was younger.

  She smiled at me when I came in, though I must’ve looked a mess. She seemed lighter, somehow. Freer. When she asked me to make myself useful and look in the cupboard to see if we had brown sugar, I didn’t question the task. Maybe things would be different now. Maybe we’d crossed into a new place of understanding.

  We were only a couple bites into breakfast, each of us taking turns complaining about the stale oats, when I made the mistake of asking what would happen now, with us having no money to hire her old outfit.

  Took Almena all of two seconds to land on the idea of robbing a bank.

  On the one hand, I shouldn’t have been surprised. You go to the dentist and ask him about a pain in your mouth, of course the man’s going to say you need teeth pulled. My head started to pound again, and my stomach turned at her proposal, already unsettled by the previous night’s adventures. As predicted, I’d gotten mighty intimate with the bucket Almena had left me over the course of the morning.

  I managed to swallow my spoonful of oatmeal before saying, “I can’t believe I even need to say this, but I’m not going to help you rob a bank.”