by Aaron Gwyn
She thought immediately of Robert. She turned and saw him toddling up to see what was happening, and she shooed him back.
Sam stood there, watching the men on their horses.
“Evening,” said the Irishman.
Sam told him good evening.
“I’m Felix McClusky.”
“I remember you,” Sam said.
“And you know Mr. Ponton.”
She glanced at the man on the Welsh pony, and a tingling sensation went up the back of her neck.
Sam said, “How are you, Joel?”
Joel Ponton nodded hello. He still hadn’t looked up.
McClusky sat there taking everything in. He turned to Ponton.
“Tell him,” he said.
Ponton cleared his throat, glanced at Sam.
“I don’t think I can represent you,” he said.
Sam said, “Change your mind?”
“I just don’t think I can manage it.”
“What’d they threaten you with?”
“Didn’t threaten me,” the man said sheepishly, but he was looking at the ground.
“What’d they pay you?” Sam said.
Ponton didn’t say anything. She thought she saw his cheeks darken.
“Some men,” said McClusky, “are leery to take a losing side, you see.”
Yes, she saw how it was very clearly. Of course, this dead-eyed man had been involved in their difficulties. Of course.
Sam didn’t seem surprised either. His shoulders were bunched up and that vein was standing out on his neck. She was aware like never before how the world in which she moved and mothered rested on those shoulders, how, if those shoulders collapsed, her world would tilt and slide into extinction.
She took a step forward.
If I can touch him, she thought, everything will be all right.
McClusky seemed to be enjoying himself. His good eye left Sam and fell on her. That pupil was so strange, like something had exploded in it.
“Well,” he said, “this man’s given you his answer.”
“Seems like,” Sam said.
“You let me know if you need anything else,” McClusky told him. He lifted a hand and touched the brim of his hat.
He’s brassy, she thought. You have got to give him that.
Sam stood there watching. Then something caught his attention, and he glanced down to his feet.
It was Robert. The boy was sitting on the ground beside him, legs crossed, playing quietly in the dirt. He had one of the little horses Duncan carved for him. How long had he been there? She didn’t see how he’d gotten past her. She was reaching for him, when McClusky said something she didn’t catch—one of the words sounded like lark or dark—and she could tell by the way the man was leering it had been some quip about her son. She was glad she hadn’t heard.
But Sam seemed to’ve heard just fine.
“What’s that?” he said, and the amused expression vanished from McClusky’s face.
She hissed Sam’s name, but that savage scent was in the air and he was already moving toward McClusky’s horse. The sorrel took a step backward, bogging its head, but Sam was quicker. He brought his boot up and kicked the horse in the jaw.
The sorrel bucked, then bucked again. McClusky lost his seat and went sliding sideways, striking the earth with a hard, heavy sound. He rolled onto his back and lay wheezing, his good eye startled wide.
His horse took off trotting across the yard, tossing its head. Ponton was saying, “Mr. Fisk! Mr. Fisk!” his own mount starting to sidle.
Sam stepped up and stood over McClusky, then straddling him, sat down on his chest. He grabbed hold of the man and struck him with the heel of his hand. Once, twice, a third time. It didn’t look like he was hitting him very hard, but McClusky’s nose was already bleeding.
“Sam,” she said, “that’s enough,” and then she was behind him, pulling at his shirt.
He let go of McClusky and the man collapsed. Sam stood and took several steps back, holding up his hands.
It should’ve felt good, their tormentor lying on his back, but she knew McClusky would recruit other men to his cause, folks he could goad, or bribe, or bully. Like she told Sam they’d just keep coming and coming.
And so, when Ponton managed to rouse McClusky and get him mounted back on his horse, it didn’t surprise her that the man’s face showed neither rage nor embarrassment. His nose ran bloody, and his hat was missing, but the corners of his mouth were twisted into a smile.
* * *
That night, they argued about Lammons a final time.
“That Irishman,” she said. “He was with those men who tried to recruit you for Mexico. And aren’t they the ones who rode with Mister Lammons?”
“A lot of men rode with Duncan,” he told her. “I rode with him too.”
“And you don’t think it’s awfully suspicious that they follow at each other’s heels? Lammons and this McClusky?”
“Duncan left the Rangers,” he said. “And he’s the one who warned us about all this in the first place.”
They went back and forth, but it was no use. He wouldn’t listen to a bad word about Lammons and she wouldn’t air her true suspicions and be accused of jealousy.
She woke at first light and lay for several minutes, watching Sam as he slept. There was still something of the boy in his features; that he hadn’t lost. She wondered if he ever would.
She went to the fireplace, stirred the coals into bright flames, put a few kindlers on the fire and waited for them to catch. Robert was asleep on his pallet. She sat on her heels, watching the yellow light flicker across his face, sawing shadows back and forth. Lammons hadn’t come the previous night, so he’d most certainly be here this morning. She was anxious for him to arrive. She’d already roasted coffee beans in the pan, tied them up in buckskin and beaten them to powder with her cooking stone, enough for several kettles. She took the bucket from the nail and went outside.
It was cold and clear. The sky in the east was the color of slate, stars still hanging in the west. She followed the path down to the stream and knelt on the bank filling the bucket, listening to the water running, plashing over the rocks. She was trying to remember how much sugar was left in the loaf. She’d been putting it in everything lately: their coffee and corncakes, their bacon and bread.
She could feel the weight of the past several weeks slipping from her. It was the time of morning that did it. Your thoughts were so clean and sharp. You could take an idea and turn it in your mind, hard and bright as a jewel.
You’ve never seen a jewel, she thought.
Some day.
She lifted the bucket. It was a little heavy, so she tipped some of the water out, then started back up the path.
She was walking through the cedars when she saw a dark form pass in the distance, backlit by the eastern sky.
Coyote, she thought, and here came another.
She reached the edge of the clearing and one more went trotting past.
But they weren’t coyotes; they were horses. The hair stood up on the back of her neck. She could just make out the front of the cabin, firelight flickering in the windows.
“Sam,” she said, then drew a breath and called his name.
Her voice sounded small and shrill in the air. It died away and everything went quiet.
Maybe they weren’t horses, she thought.
Then a rider passed between her and the cabin, not fifty feet away. She dropped to a crouch and the water sloshed onto the ground. Her heart was kicking inside her chest. She couldn’t see the rider very well, but she didn’t need to see him to know who it was. She glanced over as another horseman rounded the far corner of the house.
How many were there?
She squatted there and counted three of them.
She counted four.<
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Birds had begun to chirp from the branches. The stars were fading. She was going to have to find a way around the riders, but they were between her and the cabin. She wondered if she could crawl past them, and then Sam stepped out the door and a gunshot boomed from somewhere in the woods.
Sam retreated inside. A few breathless moments passed. Then he came back out.
He won’t know where I am, she thought, and then she was standing, but that didn’t seem like the right thing to do, and she had the powerful sense that the horizon had tilted, and she couldn’t quite keep her balance.
Sam was hunkered at one side of the door. She thought he had a pistol in hand, but she wasn’t sure. One of the riders was moving toward him. Sam extended his arm and a flame burst from the tip of it. She saw him for half a second in the flash of his gun: hair wild, his eyes like black slits. The rider kept on coming, though his horse had slowed to a walk. The man fired a pistol of his own, but Sam side-stepped the horse, shoving the barrel of his weapon into the rider’s ribs as he passed.
The shot lifted the man from the saddle. Or perhaps the horse had simply bucked. Sam fired three more times; it sounded like someone hammering a nail. Then she couldn’t see the rider anymore and the horse was on the ground, screaming and kicking in the dirt.
The air smelled like pine trees and pitch. Sam had disappeared inside a cloud of gun smoke. The horse raised a screen of dust, but there was no wind to disperse it. The smoke slid lazily, bolstering the sensation she had that the world was listing to one side. She thought if she could just see Sam, it would right itself instantly.
Her thoughts were interrupted by another gunshot. She saw a man standing beside his horse with his feet planted; the pistol he’d just fired had issued an enormous plume of smoke. He began to fumble for the powder flask hanging around his neck and then a shot came from the drifting screen that obscured Samuel, sound and flash, like lightning inside a cloud bank. The man reloading his gun doubled over as if he’d been punched in the stomach, then turned and began to run.
Then everything was quiet several moments. A rider was dismounting a steel-colored horse out by the tree line. He had a rifle in hand. He was eighty, ninety feet away, but she could see him quite clearly—it was the Spaniard who’d visited them in the spring, trying to recruit Sam for their company. He went to his knee and she heard him cock the hammer, the sharp click of it like a branch snapping in the quiet air. She wondered if she’d feel the ball he’d send through her body. Maybe she wouldn’t feel anything at all.
The rifle cracked, but the man hadn’t been aiming at her. He knelt there, reloading. She glanced back to the front of the house where she’d last seen Sam. The dust rose and the smoke went gliding across the ground.
Then she saw him: Sam down on his hands and knees. Her breath caught in her throat. She felt the horizon tilt even farther, and now everything started to slide: the smoke, the dust, the reefs of rusted clouds.
And then that apron-faced sorrel. She didn’t even hear the hoof beats; the horse seemed to hover. The Irishman with the milky-eye slid out of the saddle, slid across to Sam, a cocked pistol already in hand.
Sam, for his part, wasn’t sliding at all. He just stayed there on his hands and knees like he was deciding whether to be an animal or a man. Blood dripped out of his shirt. McClusky lifted the pistol and put it to Samuel’s head.
The world tilted over all the way. Sam raised his head and looked at her. Or she thought he was looking at her. Maybe he was looking into the barrel of the gun. His blue eyes were very bright. There was a loud boom and they flashed even brighter, two blue suns in the muzzle’s flare.
DUNCAN LAMMONS
—TEXAS, 1847—
I had an anxious feeling in my belly when I started out that morning, and it got no better as I went along. I remember riding along the trail, glancing out through the cedar trees and seeing a pecan hiding back there in the brush, crawling with honey bees. I’d been coursing bees since I was just a boy, and had taken plenty of hives by myself, but I was almost forty that year and such tasks were above my bend. You really needed two or three folks to do it proper, and even then, it was an all-day affair: hacking down the tree, puncturing the comb, collecting the honey in a cased deer hide. A single skin would hold nearly two hundred pounds.
I thought I’d tell Sam about it, and maybe we’d rob the hive come spring, but my nerves were so bad, I forgot to mark the tree, and that should tell you a great deal.
I was fording the creek when I heard voices coming from up on the hill. It smelled like someone was making meat. Old Roger’s nostrils flared and I knew he could smell it too.
I cleared the crest of the hill and came down at a lope. Sam’s cabin was standing just as I’d left it, but there was a wagon backed up to the door, and half a dozen men were milling around the yard. I saw Moses Rousseau’s boy. I saw Sampson Connell. A horse lay on the ground just where you didn’t expect a horse to be, and it took me a few moments to realize the animal was dead.
Connell had seen me by this point. He glanced up at me, then he looked away. The other men stopped talking. They all stood real quiet.
I slowed up and trotted my horse into the yard. It was like I’d entered one of those dreams where you can imagine a thing and it will appear for you. I found myself wishing for Noah or Levi or Uncle Ike Casner—any of the old rangers who’d ridden with me. I turned to ask Sampson what was going on, but it was like I had a mouthful of leaves.
That’s when I saw the body. It was sprawled in the dirt and there were brains scattered in wet clumps across the grass. The body was faced away from me, but I knew who it was. I would’ve known him from the slope of his shoulders or the shape of his hands. I reached out to steady myself on the pommel.
You are just sleeping, I thought. You are just lying there.
I reined up beside the wagon. There were all kinds of tools in its bed: a bullet mold and a patch knife. A bone powder measure. A priming horn, a vent pick, a small horsehair brush. A fire-new adze and a wooden loading block. A buckskin bullet pouch. Pots and pans and pewter dishes. My eyes started to hurt; the sun seemed very bright.
Two men came walking out of the cabin. One carried Sam’s rifle and a powder keg, the other a rolled haversack and a government-issue canteen—I had one just like it.
The two men looked at me. Then they looked away.
I glanced over and saw Rufus Helmsley. I saw Paul Wilkinson. I wondered if all the fine citizens of Bastrop were present and my hands started to shake.
A third man was coming out of the cabin. He had Sam’s pistol tucked in his belt, the five-shot Colt I’d had given him the previous week. It was Felix McClusky. He squinted up at me with his good eye.
“Cap’n,” he said.
A noise came from my mouth, a sound like a starved animal.
And then Juan Juarez walked out of the cabin and stood behind the Irishman. The blood was whining in my ears.
I looked at McClusky and said, “What the hell did you do?”
It wasn’t real for me just yet. It felt like Sam could stand up and all of this would turn into something else.
McClusky said, “We were fired on, Cap’n. We just came here to talk to the man.”
“You son of a bitch,” I said.
“No need to curse me, now. Tom Joyce is laying over there cold as a wagon tire, and Dave Henry’s gut-shot and might die yet.”
“Where’s Cecelia?” I asked. “Where is the boy?”
“They are no concern of yours,” he said.
I considered drawing my pistol. I knew if I reached for it these men would blow me down, and that seemed a good deal preferable to this new life I’d stumbled into, which I knew wasn’t really a life anymore.
I thought I heard a child crying. Then I was sure I did. I slid from the saddle and started for the cabin’s door.
“Cap’n!” said McClu
sky, but I’d already stepped inside.
It looked like a storm had swept through: tables overturned, bedding scattered. Crockery smashed on the floor, a skillet smoldering in the fireplace.
Clothes were strewn all over; the corn shuck mattress stood against the wall.
And there in the middle of it all sat Robert, his eyes red and his nose running.
But unharmed, I thought. Unharmed.
Robert went quiet and the two of us stared at each other. I can recall the exact look of his cheeks, his skin the color of creamed coffee.
When I stepped back outside, I was carrying him on my hip. I’d already decided to shoot anyone who tried to stop me.
I went over to my horse, but I couldn’t mount up just yet. I turned and looked at each of the men in turn, naming them to myself: Jesse Rousseau, Rufus Helmsley, Samson Connell, Martin Sapp. Not a single one would meet my gaze.
Except for Juan and McClusky. Who just stood there, staring.
I was getting ready to question them about Cecelia, but I knew if I pushed the matter any further, neither me nor Robert would be going anywhere. I could leave my life in this place, or I could leave with Samuel’s son. It was one or the other, and I had to choose.
* * *
I rode out with Sam’s corpse bound to the horse like a bedroll and Robert bouncing in front of me on the saddle. The boy’s feet barely reached the top of the fenders, and I kept one arm around him, hugging him close.
That afternoon, I dug a grave on the prairie while Robert sat on the ground crying.
“Shhhhh,” I said, “hush now, son,” but he had every reason to carry on, and after a while, I was bawling too. I couldn’t look at Sam’s face, his blond hair matted with blood.
It is a sickness in this world, I thought. A sickness to destroy beautiful things.
When I had Sam in the earth, I filled the hole in and packed the dirt until it was level, walking back and forth, stomping it flat. I felt like a madman; I didn’t know how to feel.