by Faith Hunter
But she couldn’t have passed it up, and that was the truth of it. The sea’s heart had been blue and green as the Caribbean, and grey as the light striking across the water and under the clouds when a storm breaks mid-morning, and hot as a red sky at night, and immortal as the waves.
“I knew that if I took it...”
“She’d love you?” Grace interrupted.
Mary tried to keep the exasperation from her voice. “No-one who’s had their heart stolen can love. I knew that if I took it I could be always close by her, and live near as long as her, and it seemed worth it.” She sighed. “It was a fool’s choice, I guess. Didn’t work out so well.”
“I suppose,” Grace said awkwardly. “But... Will you still help me? Until tomorrow’s all I need.”
Abishag Mary looked up into the younger woman’s eyes, the steady sea-grey of them, and nodded.
The night had gone full dark and the moon had risen by the time Mary saw the men coming. Grace identified Hutchins by the tails of his coat. There were four others with him, and two were carrying small packs. That worried Mary more than guns.
Grace was inside with her rifle, watching through the small holes they’d gouged between the chinked logs. The windows gave a better view, but anyone could aim for shutters. Mary slipped out, got up on the far side of the roof, and fired.
Then there were three other men with Hutchins.
Tomorrow, Mary thought, meant half a dozen hours until dawn at least, and then however long until the man Grace was pinning her hopes on arrived. She’d have sworn they had no chance, except Hutchins was here and that seemed desperate. She’d have thought he could have buttonholed the surveyor back in town.
The men were shooting, and she ducked behind the roof, reloading and wishing for better light. She could hear them coming around to either side; the six-shot pistol of the man she’d shot at dusk would have been of some use now, but Grace had nothing to load it with.
Mary picked the best-lit of the men she could see and fired. She couldn’t tell if she’d hit him or if he’d merely dived for cover. She slid down from the roof, sea-water splashing out from her boots as she landed, and ran staggering toward a man rounding the end of the cabin. He fired as Mary barrelled into him, knocking him over more with her speed than with the saber. She stabbed downward and kept running. Grace was firing, and someone was screaming commands. Mary rounded the corner of the cabin to see one of the men had dropped a pack by the door, saw a coiling fuse, smelled gunpowder—
She snatched it up, throwing it away from the cabin as the fuse burnt down, and felt herself lifted in a roar.
Everything was a mist of wet fragments and dirt and splinters. The ground was soaking into mud underneath her, and Mary smelled rot and salt and all manner of putrid things, but she saw smouldering light and dragged herself toward the cabin. Its wall was embers and splinters, crawling with smoke. She couldn’t see putting it out near quick enough, but—
She felt a clock, chiming.
The creeping embers froze on the cabin wall, and the moonlight grew brighter. Grace came to the cabin’s tattered doorway, and a silhouette waited at the doorsill. It was darkness neatly cut into the shape of a man, and the eye that she could see glinted with a lodestone light.
Abishag Mary knew it for the one who’d shown her the way west.
She’d thought of tomorrow as the next day’s dawn, but for a thing that held to measurements and lines, that could map the quadrants of the sea and cut a path from the heart of the sea to the brown and gold plains of New Mexico, tomorrow came at midnight.
She understood why Hutchins hadn’t waited in town.
The thing—the surveyor—didn’t have the sextant any longer; he held a brass circle and bar in his hand, with little stiff arms pointing up from each end of the bar. But his left eye still gleamed with the Polestar, and when Abishag Mary looked to the sky, she saw only darkness at the lynchpin of the night, and felt the world tilt around her until she looked back to him instead.
“I am arrived,” he said calmly, and looked at the doorway where Grace O’Regan stood.
She curtseyed.
He smiled, and the embers crawling on her cabin winked out.
Hutchins showed more mettle than Mary would have guessed and came forward with a nervous smile. “Sir,” he began, bowing slightly. “I hope that you will settle the matter of the claim on this land. As a representative of the railroad, set out and driven along your measured lines...”
“I see a homestead.” The surveyor’s voice was sharper than Mary’s saber. “Belonging to the woman who petitioned for my attention.”
“You petitioned—” Hutchins looked at Grace O’Regan, and stepped back.
The surveyor set the brass thing in his hand aside to rest on the air. He pulled a sheet of white vellum from his jacket, and shook it out with a sound like a dead bird landing in the grass. Mary pulled herself to her knees as he ran a long narrow fingertip across it, and she saw letters blossom under his touch.
“Grace O’Regan, nee Bailey, born in Boston and landed in New Mexico, by writ of my hand, the homestead land grant provisionally extended to Jack O’Regan is yours. Jeremiah Isaac Hutchins, bear witness.”
“Sir, I—” The surveyor turned to look at Hutchins, who went white as a drowned man. Mary imagined she might’ve looked the same, once, if she’d ever though to argue with the sea. “Yes, sir, I bear witness.”
“The hell is going on?” one of the men standing by Mary said quietly. He was holding his arm; she thought he might be the man she’d run into, coming off the roof. She staggered up to her feet.
The surveyor was explaining to Hutchins that, having come there in person, it would be considered a personal slight if the land deed granted to Grace O’Regan was not respected.
“Your captain lost,” Mary said.
“Your boss won?”
“She’s not my boss.” Mary watched as Grace took the vellum, the deed sending back its own white light under the moon.
“It’s mine?” Grace said, gazing up at the surveyor’s, and Mary’s stomach pitched to see Grace’s young face so close to the Polestar, her eyes still alight as a grim sea.
“It’s yours,” the surveyor confirmed, and smiled, and then he touched his brass land-sextant, folded himself up like one of his own deeds, and vanished into the night air.
“I’m drunk,” the man standing next to Mary decided. “I’m drunk and I’m going home. Hutchins, sir, we leaving?”
“Just a minute,” Grace said, her mouth hard. “Hutchins, I want to sell.”
Mary’s stomach went from a sharp yaw to an utter drop.
“Now you want to sell?” Hutchins looked like he’d eaten bad cheese. “I offered you a fair price in spring, and you said—”
“You offered me nothing. Now you’ll offer me a fair price, or you’ll try to run me off my land and answer to him.”
“You sniveling whey-faced little—”
“You’re standing on my land,” Grace said sharply, and Hutchins shut up.
“Grace,” Mary said. It came out thin as her bird’s voice when they’d starved, before she’d wrung his neck and plucked him. “Grace, you wanted this land. You said that if you had claim to it—”
“Then at least I’d have something,” Grace said. “And I do. The railroad lives by maps and grades, by all the lines drawn over the land and the surveyor’s sufferance. Hutchins won’t shortchange me, and they’d have a fair ways to go to find someone who’d dare. The land they want is worth enough to pay passage home, and have my own house in Boston besides. Nothing grand, but I won’t be beholden to the pity of my sisters.” She looked at Mary, and surprise crossed her face. “You thought I meant to stay? No, to hell with that. But I won’t leave you stranded here. I can book you passage east, or south if you want to go down to the coast. I don’t know what ships cost. I don’t think I can buy you one.”
“I wasn’t thinking to go back.”
Grace looked puzzled, then
shrugged and turned back to Hutchins. “I’ll see you in town tomorrow,” she said. “We’ll meet at the land office, and then send a wire. You speak for the railroad; you can arrange to have me paid some now, and have the rest waiting. I want a stagecoach ticket to Santa Fe...”
Mary closed her eyes as Hutchins and Grace walked off, discussing details.
The man next to Mary coughed, and then offered her a cigarette.
~*~
“Are you sure you wouldn’t like a ticket east?” Grace said. She was looking at Mary with a sort of interested courtesy. That was all it had ever been, Mary guessed, with maybe a little fear thrown in. People looked like they cared about you if they thought they needed you. Couldn’t help it.
Grace’s eyes were still dark and grey as a sea getting ready to storm. It was only that Mary had forgotten for a while, in the gold and brown land, how cold that sea could be. Cold enough to crush the air from your lungs if you fell into it, and stop your heart besides.
“I’ll settle for a mule,” Mary said. Grace O’Regan had bought her new clothes, and heeled boots, with a jingling spray of spurs. She’d kept her hat, and her pistol and saber. An odd mix, although she was deep enough in the landlocked southwest that people only thought odd and had no nevermind of what it meant to be a pirate.
“Well, as it suits you,” O’Regan said. She offered her hand, and Mary took it after a moment’s hesitation.
Nothing had been promised, after all. She’d only hoped.
And then O’Regan boarded the stagecoach, and Mary set on her way. She had no particular place to go, and so she headed out of the town and down the trail, and deeper into the golden idea of the West.
Blood Tellings
Wendy N. Wagner
“Boy, I need your help.” Sheriff Toomey took a seat on the boulder beside me and wrapped his arms around his knees. The wind stirred the winter-dried bunchgrass stems so they hissed and rattled all around us, the voice of Granddaddy Rattlesnake looking for all his kin what got killed during the harvest. Out by the lake, Deer Maiden looked up from her browse and nodded at me. I knew the sheriff didn’t see the half-deer, half-woman spirit. He just sat staring out at the lake, his face gone gray, and unhappiness seeping out his pores like some strange sweat.
I bent a grass stem between my fingers, wondering why it had to be now. My fourteenth birthday weren’t for yet another four months, and I was a long way from being man enough for what was coming. I caught Deer Maiden’s eye, and she smiled, the light that surrounded her flaring up reassuring-like, and then pushed back the brown old cattails with her slim hands. The spirit waded out into the water until her horns disappeared beneath its green surface. Spirits always leave when I most want their help. Ma says that’s just their way.
I tightened the grass stem around my pointer finger until the fingertip went purple with pent-up blood. Weren’t no way to take the blood out of my mind or my eyes, though. My blood had set my seeing and feeling apart. My ma’s blood, her granny’s blood, a long line of folk what talk with spirits. I sighed.
“This about Paul Tucker, sir?”
The sheriff looked surprised and more than a little awed. I didn’t want to give him the wrong idea. My kin talk to spirits. We ain’t fortune-tellers.
“I heard my folks talking about it when they thought I was in the outhouse,” I said. “Reckon that’s why my pa’s gone off to Davenport. Maybe getting some men together.”
Sheriff Toomey swallowed, hard, like he had a crab apple stuck in his throat. “They want to hang him, Will. And I can’t blame them. What happened in that house...” he shook his head. “Dear God, what a nightmare.”
I nodded, not wanting to ask for details, but knowing with sick certainty that I’d see it for myself soon enough. This morning I’d stood on the porch listening to my parents, not moving even after the ugly story came to an end. I’d heard them like the rattle of the bunchgrass in the wind: spirits telling me my boyhood was done.
Going inside, I passed Pa putting on his good coat, wearing his Stetson instead of his usual knit cap. He patted me on the shoulder, his face tired and the lines set deep. Inside, Ma was kneading bread dough on the counter, her eyes red.
“You hear all that?” she asked.
I nodded. Neither of us spoke, and I could hear the hiss and rattle of the grasses and sagebrush, like the wind was pacing, anxious. Louder than that, we heard the creak of our front gate as Pa rode out.
Ma looked up from her dough. “The blood will tell, William Fergal. And yours is saying you’re ready for this work. I’ve been waiting for this day with a heavy heart.”
“I know, Ma.” I’d been waiting for this moment, too, ever since the day I realized nobody else talked to glowing horned women with deer legs or kept playing with their puppy after its body had been buried.
“You’d best wait outside for it. Whatever’s coming to you, it’ll find you faster in the open air.”
“Yes, Mama.” I hadn’t called her “mama” in years, but she didn’t seem to mind it none, especially when I put my arms around her and buried my face in her warm, bread-smelling neck.
And so I walked out of my boyhood and came to sit on the lake shore with only the company of Deer Maiden and a few shy pygmy rabbits. I was looking at a new life I knew I didn’t want—but the powers in me were stronger than my will.
The sheriff tossed a pebble, pulling me out of my own thoughts. “I’ve known Paul Tucker ten years, Will. He’s a good man. Loves his family. Not a mean bone in him.”
I worried the grass between my teeth.
“I know what you’re thinking. What everyone’s thinking—that this is about my Lura. Sure it is. When two horrible things happen in the same house, you’ve got to think there’s a connection.”
He sighed. “You don’t know what I’m talking about. Keep forgetting you were only a kid back then.” He looked sideways at me, rubbed the gray shadow of his day-old beard. “Shit. You’re still just a kid.”
“Ain’t nothing for it, is there?” I sounded tougher than I felt. My ma and pa’s conversation roiled at the back of my brain like a stockpot left on too hot a stove. I could already almost picture what it would be like at the Tuckers’ house. It made my stomach twist round itself.
I got to my feet. There weren’t no point sitting here thinking on it any longer. Sheriff Toomey looked up at me, surprise written all over his face.
“You sure, boy? You really sure?”
I felt tears prickle up against my bottom eyelids. It was one thing to help Pa with the cows and the hay harvest, or even castrate the steers. That kind of growing up wasn’t so bad. But looking at evil with only the spirits to help me—well, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, man or boy.
We followed the little trail along the creek’s edge. In spring, it’d gurgle and chortle with water spirits, full from snow pack and a few good rains. Now it was only a little greener than the gray land surrounding it. Gray land, gray brush, gray grass. Some people thought it gloomy, but I knew the different colors of gray. These were peaceful grays, warm, happy. Not like the gray under Sheriff Toomey’s eyes or in the lines I’d seen around Pa’s mouth.
Ma stood beside the side gate and opened it for us. Not even a chicken tried to step out. There was something in the air that warned creatures to stay home and huddle with their loved ones. But Sheriff Toomey and I couldn’t stay here inside that fence. We kept walking.
Ma already had my horse saddled, and when I pulled myself up onto Fionn’s back, she patted my knee. “I packed you a lunch.” She took a napkin-wrapped packet out of her apron pocket. “With a few necessities.”
I could smell the rosemary and sage tucked into the bundle. Necessities, all right. Powerful protection in those herbs.
She stroked Fionn’s white neck. “Keep my boy safe, Fionn MacCumhal.” The gelding tossed his head, his word of honor. He knew what she said. Animals always understood my mother.
She turned on Sheriff Toomey. “And you.” She narrowed her
eyes. With her black hair glinting in the sun, she looked hard and more than a little scary. “You listen to my boy. And keep your gun handy. Whatever spirit’s causing this trouble might not like the taste of hot lead.” She quirked a half-smile. “Though that’s a long shot.”
I smiled at her. I wished she could come with me, and knew she could not. Ma’s gift was with critters and plants, the magic of life. The creatures of death and the greater spirits were beyond her control. I was alone.
I twisted my fingers in Fionn’s silver mane and hoped I wouldn’t throw up.
~*~
The old Bluwalter house lay on the far side of town, a good six-mile ride. The sun stared straight down at us, but there weren’t no heat in its touch. Our shadows shrank under that glare, creeping under the horses’ hooves like they wanted to hide. To the east, the mountains pulled down clouds to warm their snowy tops.
“I reckon you ought to tell me what you know about the house.”
Sheriff Toomey startled in his saddle. “Oh.” He seemed to deflate on the sound, like my words confirmed a hunch he hadn’t really wanted to be true.
“Well,” he started, scratching under the brim of his hat. “That house was mine for all of two years before I sold it to Paul Tucker. I bought it from Lura’s pappy, Dan Bluwalter, when he decided he wanted to go live with his son over in Walla Walla. But it had another owner before him. That house is one of the oldest in this area, built by a man of the name of Kurt Schwartzkopf.” He gave me a nod. “A kraut,” he added, unnecessarily.
“He had all kinds of money when he came here, a widower from Germany, and he wanted to build a good house. But something happened—I heard his daughter got drug off by a bear, but that might just be talk—and he bought a house in Odessa.”