by Alan Lemay
Tobe said, “I bet you got plenty scalps in your saddle bags!”
“Not one!”
“He just stomp’ ’em in the dirt,” Mart explained, and was surprised to see Amos’ eyes widen in a flash of anger.
“Come morning,” Amos said to Mart, wrenching clear of the subject, “I want you borry the buckboard, and run it over to my place. The boys will show you which team. Round up such clothes of mine, or yours, as got overlooked.”
That “my place” didn’t sound just right to Mart. It had always been “Henry’s place” or “my brother’s place” every time Amos had ever spoken of it before.
“Load up any food stores that wasn’t stole or spoilt. Especially any unbust presarves. And any tools you see. Fetch ’em here. And if any my horses have come in, feed grain on the tail gate, so’s they foller you back.” There was that “my” again. “My horses” this time. Amos had owned exactly one horse, and it was dead.
“What about—” Mart had started to ask what he must do about Debbie’s horses. Debbie, not Amos, was heir to the Edwards’ livestock if she lived. “Nothing,” he finished.
When they had eaten, Aaron Mathison and Amos got their heads together again in the far end of the room. Their long conference partly involved tally books, but Mart couldn’t hear what was said. Laurie took her sewing basket to a kind of settle that flanked the wood range, and told Mart by a movement of her eyes that she meant him to sit beside her.
“If you’re going over—over home,” she said in a near whisper, “maybe I ought to tell you about— something. There’s something over there.... I don’t know if you’ll understand.” She floundered and lost her way.
He said flatly, “You talking about that story, the place is haunted?”
She stared at him.
He told her about the rider they had come on one night, packing up toward the Nations on business unknown. This man had spoken of heading into what he called the “old Edwards place,” thinking to bed down for the night in the deserted house. Only, as he came near he saw lights moving around inside. Not like the place was lived in and lighted up. More like a single candle, carried around from room to room. The fellow got the hell out of there, Mart finished, and excuse him, he hadn’t meant to say hell.
“What did Amos say?”
“He went in one of his black fits.”
“Martie,” Laurie said, “you might as well know what he saw. You’ll find the burnt-out candle anyway.”
“What candle?”
“Well... you see... it was coming on Christmas Eve. And I had the strongest feeling you were coming home. You know how hard you can know something that isn’t so?”
“I sure do,” Mart said.
“So... I rode over there, and laid a fire in the stove, and dusted up. And I—you’re going to laugh at me, Martie.”
“No, I ain’t.”
“Well, I—I made a couple of great gawky bush-holly wreaths, and cluttered up the back windows with them. And I left a cake on the table. A kind of cake—it got pretty well crumbed riding over. But I reckoned you could see it was meant for a cake. You might as well fetch home the plate.”
“I’ll remember.”
“And I set a candle in a window. It was a whopper—I bet it burned three-four days. That’s what your owl-hoot friend saw. I see no doubt of it.”
“Oh,” said Mart. It was all he could think of to say.
“Later I felt foolish; tried to get over there, and cover my tracks. But Pa locked up my saddle. He didn’t like me out so long worrying Ma.”
“Well, I should hope!”
“You’d better burn those silly wreaths. Before Amos sees ’em, and goes in a ‘black fit.’ ”
“It wasn’t silly,” Mart said.
“Just you burn ’em. And don’t forget the plate. Ma thinks Tobe busted it and ate the cake.”
“It beats me,” Mart said honestly. “How come anybody ever to take such trouble. I never see such a thing.”
“I guess I was just playing house. Pretty childish. I see that now. But—I just love that old house. I can’t bear to think of it all dark and lonely over there.”
It came to him that she wanted the old house to be their house to make bright and alive again. This was the best day he had ever had in his life, he supposed, what with the promising way it was ending. So now, of course, it had to be spoiled.
Two rooms opened off the end of the kitchen opposite the dog-trot, the larger being a big wintry storeroom. The other, in the corner nearest the stove, was a cubbyhole with an arrow-slit window and a buffalo rug. This was called the grandmother room, because it was meant for somebody old, or sick, who needed to be kept warm. Nowadays it had a couple of rawhide-strung bunks for putting up visitors without heating the bunk house where the seasonal hands were housed.
When the family had retired across the dog-trot, Amos and Mart dragged out a wooden tub for a couple of long-postponed baths. They washed what meager change of clothes they had, and hung the stuff on a line back of the stove to dry overnight. Their baggy long-handled underwear and footless socks seemed indecent, hung out in a room where Laurie lived, but they couldn’t help it.
“What kind of letter you get?” Mart asked. The average saddle tramp never got a letter in his life.
Amos shook out a pair of wet drawers, with big holes worn on the insides of the thigh, and hung them where they dripped into the woodbin. “Personal kind,” he grunted, finally.
“Serves me right, too. Don’t know why I never learn.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing.”
“I been fixing to tell you,” Amos began.
“That ain’t needful.”
“What ain’t?”
“I know that letter ain’t none of my business. Because nothing is. I just set on other people’s horses. To see they foller along.”
“I wasn’t studying on no letter. Will you leave a man speak? I say I made a deal with old Mathison.”
Mart was silent and waited.
“I got to be pushing on,” Amos said, picking his words. Passing out information seemed to hurt Amos worse every day he lived. “I won’t be around. So Mathison is going to run my cattle with his own. Being’s I can’t see to it myself.”
“What’s he get, the increase?”
“Why?”
“No reason. Seemed the natural thing to ask, that’s all. I don’t give a God damn what you do with your stock.”
“Mathison come out all right,” Amos said.
“When do we start?”
“You ain’t coming.”
Mart thought that over. “It seems to me,” he began. His voice sounded thin and distant to himself. He started over too loudly. “It seems to me—”
“What you hollering for?”
“—we started out to look for Debbie,” Mart finished.
“I’m still looking for her.”
“That’s good. Because so am I.”
“I just told you—by God, will you listen?” It was Amos’ voice raised this time. “I’m leaving you here!”
“No, you ain’t.”
“What?” Amos stared in disbelief.
“You ain’t telling me where I stay!”
“You got to live, ain’t you? Mathison’s going to leave you stay on. Help out with the work what you can, and you’ll know where your grub’s coming from.”
“I been shooting our grub,” Mart said stubbornly. “If I can shoot for two, I can shoot for one.”
“That still takes ca-tridges. And a horse.”
Mart felt his guts drop from under his heart. All his life he had been virtually surrounded by horses; to ride one, you only had to catch it. Only times he had ever thought whether he owned one or not was when some fine fast animal, like one of Brad’s, had made him wish it was his. But Amos was right. Nothing in the world is so helpless as a prairie man afoot.
“I set out looking for Debbie,” he said. “I aim to keep on.”
“Why?”
“Debbie’s my brother’s young’n,” Amos said. “She’s my flesh and blood—not yours. Better you leave these things to the people concerned with ’em, boy. Debbie’s no kin to you at all.”
“I—I always felt like she was my kin.”
“Well, she ain’t.”
“Our—I mean, her—her folks took me in off the ground. I’d be dead but for them. They even—”
“That don’t make ’em any kin.”
“All right. I ain’t got no kin. Never said I had. I’m going to keep on looking, that’s all.”
“How?”
Mart didn’t answer that. He couldn’t answer it. He had his saddle and his gun, because Henry had given him those; but the loads in the gun were Amos’, he supposed. Mart realized now that a man can be free as a wolf, yet unable to do what he wants at all.
They went on to bed in silence. Amos spoke out of the dark. “You don’t give a man a chance to tell you nothing,” he complained. “I want you to know something, Mart—”
“Yeah—you want me to know I got no kin. You told me already. Now shut your God damned head!”
One thing about being in the saddle all day, and every day, you don’t get a chance to worry as much as other men do once you lie down at night. You fret, and you fret, and you try to think your way through—for about a minute and a half. Then you go to sleep.
Chapter Thirteen
Mart woke up in the blackness before the winter dawn. He pulled on his pants, and started up the fire in the wood range before he finished dressing. As he took down his ragged laundry from behind the stove, he was of a mind to leave Amos’ stuff hanging there, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to it. He made a bundle of Amos’ things, and tossed it into their room. By the time he had wolfed a chunk of bread and some leavings of cold meat, Tobe and Abner were up.
“I got to fetch that stuff Amos wants,” he said, “from over—over at his house. You want to show me what team?”
“Better wait while we hot up some breakfast, hadn’t you?”
“I et already.”
They didn’t question it. “Take them little fat bays, there, in the nigh corral—the one with the shelter shed.”
“I want you take notice of what a pretty match they be,” said Tobe with shining pride. “We call ’em Sis and Bud. And pull? They’ll outlug teams twice their heft.”
“Sis is about the only filly we ever did bust around here,” Abner said. “But they balanced so nice, we just couldn’t pass her by. Oh, she might cow-kick a little—”
“A little? She hung Ab on the top bar so clean he just lay there flappin’.”
“Feller doesn’t mind a bust in the pants from Sis, once he knows her.”
“I won’t leave nothing happen to ’em,” Mart promised.
He took the team shelled corn, and brushed them down while they fed. He limbered the frosty straps of the harness with his gloved hands, and managed to be hooked and out of there before Amos was up.
Even from a distance the Edwards place looked strangely barren. Hard to think why, at first, until you remembered that the house now stood alone, without its barn, sheds, and haystacks. The snow hid the black char and the ash of the burned stuff, as if it never had been. Up on the hill, where Martha, and Henry, and the boys were, the snow had covered even the crosses he had carved.
Up close, as Mart neared the back gallery, the effect of desolation was even worse. You wouldn’t think much could happen to a sturdy house like that in just a few months, but it already looked as if it had been unlived in for a hundred years. Snow was drifted on the porch, and slanted deep against the door itself, unbroken by any tracks. In the dust-glazed windows Laurie’s wreaths were ghostly against empty black.
When he had forced the door free of the iced sill, he found a still cold inside, more chilling in its way than the searing wind of the prairie. A thin high music that went on forever in the empty house was the keening of the wind in the chimneys. Almost everything he remembered was repaired and in place, but a gray film of dust lay evenly, in spite of Laurie’s Christmas dusting. Her cake plate was crum-bless, centering a pattern of innumerable pocket-mouse tracks in the dust upon the table.
He remembered something about that homemade table. Underneath it, an inch or so below the top, a random structural member made a little hidden shelf. Once when he and Laurie had been five or six, the Mathisons had come over for a taffy pull. He showed Laurie the secret shelf under the table, and they stored away some little square-cut pieces of taffy there. Afterward, one piece of taffy seemed to be stuck down; he wore out his fingers for months trying to break it loose. Years later he found out that the stubbornly stuck taffy was really the ironhead of a lag screw that you couldn’t see where it was, but only feel with your fingers.
He found some winter clothes he sure could use, including some heavy socks Martha and Lucy had knitted for him. Nothing that had belonged to Martha and the girls was in the closets. He supposed some shut trunks standing around held what ever of their stuff the Comanches had left. He went to a little chest that had been Debbie’s, with some idea of taking something of hers with him, as if for company; but he stopped himself before he opened the chest. I got these hands she used to hang onto, he told himself. I don’t need nothing more. Except to find her.
He was in no hurry to get back. He wanted to miss supper at the Mathisons for fear he would lash out at Amos in front of the others; so, taking his time about everything he did, he managed to fool away most of the day.
A red glow from the embers in the stove was the only light in the Mathison house as he put away the good little team, but a lamp went up in the kitchen before he went in. Laurie was waiting up, and she was put out with him.
“Who gave you the right to lag out till all hours, scaring the range stock?”
“Amos and me always night on the prairie,” he reminded her. “It’s where we live.”
“Not when I’m waiting up for you.” She was wrapped twice around in a trade-blanket robe cinched up with a leather belt. Only the little high collar of her flannel nightgown showed, and a bit of blue-veined instep between her moccasins and the hem. Actually she had no more clothes than he had ever seen her wear in her life; there was no reason for the rig to seem as intimate as it somehow did.
He mumbled, “Didn’t go to make work,” and went to throw his rag-pickings in the grandmother room.
Amos was not in his bunk; his saddle and everything he had was gone.
“Amos rode on,” Laurie said unnecessarily.
“Didn’t he leave no word for me?”
“Any word,” she corrected him. She shook down the grate and dropped fresh wood in the firebox. “He just said, tell you he had to get on.” She pushed him gently backward against a bench, so that he sat down. “I mended your stuff,” she said. “Such as could be saved.”
He thought of the saddle-worn holes in the thighs of his other drawers. “Goddle mightly,” he whispered.
“Don’t know what your purpose is,” she said, “getting so red in the face. I have brothers, haven’t I?”
“I know, but—”
“I’m a woman, Martie.” He had supposed that was the very point. “We wash and mend your dirty old stuff for you all our lives. When you’re little, we even wash you. How a man can make out to get bashful in front of a woman, I’ll never know.”
He couldn’t make any sense out of it. “You talk like a feller might just as leave run around stark nekkid.”
“Wouldn’t bother me. I wouldn’t try it in front of Pa, was I you, so long as you’re staying on.” She went to the stove to fix his supper.
“I’m not staying, Laurie. I got to catch up with Amos.”
She turned to see if he meant it. “Pa was counting on you. He’s running your cattle now, you know, along with his own—”
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“Amos’ cattle.”
“He let both winter riders go, thinking you and Amos would be back. Of course, riders aren’t too hard to come by. Charlie MacCorry put in for a job.”
“MacCorry’s a good fast hand,” was all he said.
“I don’t know what you think you can do about finding Debbie that Amos can’t do.” She turned to face him solemnly, her eyes very dark in the uneven light. “He’ll find her now, Mart. Please believe me. I know.”
He waited, but she went back to the skillet without explanation. So now he took a chance and told her the truth. “That’s what scares me, Laurie.”
“If you’re thinking of the property,” she said, “the land, the cattle—”
“It isn’t that,” he told her. “No, no. It isn’t that.”
“I know Debbie’s the heir. And Amos has never had anything in his life. But if you think he’d let harm come to one hair of that child’s head on account of all that, then I know you’re a fool.”
He shook his head. “It’s his black fits,” he said; and wondered how he could make a mortal danger sound so idiotic.
“What?”
“Laurie, I swear to you, I’ve seen all the fires of hell come up in his eyes, when he so much as thinks about getting a Comanche in his rifle sights. You haven’t seen him like I’ve seen him. I’ve known him to take his knife …” He let that drop. He didn’t want to tell Laurie some of the things he had seen Amos do. “Lord knows I hate Comanches. I hate ’em like I never knew a man could hate nothin’. But you slam into a bunch of ’em, and kill some—you know what happens to any little white captives they got hold of, then? They get their brains knocked out. It’s happened over and over again.”
He felt she didn’t take any stock in what he was saying. He tried again, speaking earnestly to her back. “Amos is a man can go crazy wild. It might come on him when it was the worst thing could be. What I counted on, I hoped I’d be there to stop him, if such thing come.”
She said faintly, “You’d have to kill him.”
He let that go without answer. “Let’s have it now. Where’s he gone, where you’re so sure he’ll find her?”