Sary's Gold

by Sharon Shipley

  Still gabbling in Serrano, the hag held a tiny chamois shirt and fist-sized moccasins to her own scrawny chest.

  Sary supposed she was grinning, but it was difficult to tell.

  Souring her face, the hag withdrew delicate infant finery from behind her back. “Handi. No good!” She spat. “Like smoke!”

  Sary giggled as the hag’s face showed through the thin garments Handi had sent.

  Sary stirred in the night. Tiny beaded moccasins lay by her pillow, while the hag sat nearby in the dark.

  ****

  Handi wandered through a jungle of a nursery, carrying a kerosene lamp, revealing ghost shapes that sprang to life before her haggard, yearning face—a claustrophobic evil of furniture and toys—a gaudy hobbyhorse with large plume tail and glittery eyes, an ugly cradle suffocating in yards of tulle and rosettes. Handi touched things, stroked them, and opened a chiffarobe to even more overweening baby finery.

  ****

  Sary sweated, biting her lip, holding the Derringer under the hag’s jaw. Yanked from her grateful dreamlike state, Sary now saw the hag for what she really was, Delacorte’s jailer and spy, for all her worth and comfort.

  Then Ev’ret and Sary’s boy was there, robustly squalling.

  The hag removed the hefty baby before Sary could stop her—even if she wanted to. Did she? Till now the child—infant—baby—she didn’t know what to call it—the wretched thing was a phantom child, a “never-never.” God’s bitter jest. Not real. A thing that Julian lusted after.

  Then Sary glimpsed dark ringlets and furiously kicking legs. In fact, the squalling thing was a tempest of thrusting fists and toes punching the air with boisterous kicks.

  She looked off.

  I can’t love it!

  Can’t even look at it.

  Oh! Wait! Its foot! Round pink toes, like peas…or pearls on a string. A tiny coral heel shaped like a ball-peen hammer…

  The hag walked away with it and, in place of vanishing into the night as Sary supposed, wiped it clean.

  What is it? Sary lifted up, then dropped back, studying her nails as if unconcerned. If it’s a girl…?

  Sary shuddered—her mind unable to avert from Ev’ret.

  A brawny, lumpy, dull-witted, potato-faced girl? Uhgggh.

  Then, the hag held out the huge curly-headed boy, so ugly he was cute. He looked at Sary with slightly cross-eyed wonder. Sary averted her eyes, revulsion stitched across her face.

  The hag walked off.

  The baby howled.

  Sary glanced sideways. Hardened her heart. Better not. It’s better off with the hag—or Handi.

  No.

  Yes. Even Julian. God blast the Devil.

  Handi will look after it.

  Handi and her French Pox?

  The doves with the odd scabs and grimy nails?

  The baby howled lustily in reproach. Maybe once. I will just look at him, and then bury the whole episode in a graveyard of memories, well apart from sweet thought of Jonathan.

  “No. Wait! Wait! Let me see it. Him.” With a crooked smile, Sary held out her arms.

  “A fine healthy boy!”

  Sary jumped. The hag backed as Delacorte, jubilant, blocked the flap. “Jules! Jules!” he crowed. “You should see your son!” He ignored Sary, who sat, flushed, in classic pose, arms made muscular and supple by the mine reaching determinedly for the squalling boy.

  “Give him to me. Me!” Sary demanded. The hag slanted eyes at Julian.

  Julian nodded and cupped the baby’s head as the infant waved potato-sized fists. He smirked. “Bare your bosoms, Swinford—for my grandson.”

  The hag edged close behind Sary while Julian focused hungrily on the curly head and broad button nose poking beyond rounded cheeks.

  Sary stared bullets. “Leave…and I might!” Clutching the boy, Sary waved the Derringer between them.

  He backed, furious. “I’ve seen that play-toy before! Handi has a lot to answer for. I can wait!”

  At the doorway, he barked, “And he’s called Jude! Jude Alexander Delacorte!”

  Chapter 21

  Somehow the name stuck.

  Sary was indifferent. The child had a satisfying weight. That was all she told herself. She had no milk. The cow would have to do. Yet Ev’ret faded like a rapidly receding nightmare as Sary, Jude strapped to her chest, strode about camp righting things, chopping branches, stacking them—strengthening—during which the hag yet kept her blackbird eyes peering from a nest of wrinkles—and in truth Sary needed her. She concocted miracles of herb-rabbit stew and other nourishment her body craved more than before.

  Once Sary alerted, seeing the hag nip into the forest, but was disappointed beyond bearing on her reappearance with yet more herbs and spring greens. Yet Sary’s body ached for the iron the tender greens were rich in, and so grew stronger.

  When a week old, Jude developed a cough, his little chest heaving with effort. Sary sat poker-faced as the hag pounded herbs with rabbit fat, smeared his chest, wrapped him in heated flannel, and stuck a skillet of coals under his crude bassinet. Soon, Jude sweated and his chest eased.

  One night, though, was all it took.

  ****

  Jude cried and cried as a steady rain pattered outside. Sary slept on. Her gun, kept out of habit, slipped to the earthen floor. With sturdy little fists, Jude squirmed from her side. The hag removed him. Sary murmured and snored on.

  ****

  Down at Delacorte’s Saloon, it was a full, earsplitting melee, still early by rioters’ standards but made doubly beguiling by the rain icing outside walls.

  The only grim face was Julian’s and that of a poker player slouched as low as his chips. Julian brooded over the desultory game, watching the door and drinking heavily. He was snarling at the loser when, abruptly, the saloon mob parted like the Dead Sea and the hag’s drenched figure paced through their midst with an oilskin poncho-wrapped bundle. She placed Jude before Julian, atop the pile of chips.

  Whores crowded. Handi hobbled over. Ratchet, a dyspeptic onlooker, slugged back a whiskey as Delacorte clutched Jude in rough yellow hands and revolved with a look of triumph over the lustily howling baby for all to see. Never taking his eyes off Jude, he motioned to the barkeep and nodded to the hag clawing his sleeve, piercing him with adamantine eyes. If, for an instant, Julian gazed perplexed over Jude’s broad features, the look melted in puddles of adoration.

  “Give her something!” He barked at the barkeep.

  “What?”

  Julian swatted Handi and the hag aside. “Anything. That old horse of yours.”

  The hag shuffled to the barkeep, keeping her beady gaze steady. “Brandy. Cognac. Good cognac. And horse.”

  The barkeep grimaced and reached under the bar.

  Ratchet slipped out unnoticed.

  Chapter 22

  Rain slashed outside Sary’s sapling hut slackened to a fine drizzle. Inside, Sary started awake to a dead fire, groping for infant Jude. The pallet was empty beside her. His comforting milky warmth was gone. A moccasin lay abandoned on the dirt floor. She raced out, half-naked, into the rain that plastered her in a quicksilver skin.

  Returning, Sary stooped, then pressed the tiny moccasin to her chest, rooted as a tall pine, her wet face a war of fear, outrage, and strange relief. She knew well where the hag had taken him, and she thought on the baby out there—cold, wet, without shelter.

  Sary galvanized, gritting through clenched jaws, “No, she won’t!” She had no idea what shortcuts the hag might have taken, but she knew where she would end up.

  She bolted stew left in the pot, stuffed her mouth with flatbread. Strapped on layers of clothes, threw a scrap of oiled poncho over all, and lastly tucked the moccasin into her shirt before running out into rain. The poncho immediately sailed off like a black wing.

  Sary ran to Seb’s grave, where she finger-clawed saddlebags from a muddy trench, then the oilcloth-wrapped guns and bullwhip, dragging them all, along with her small trunk, onto the travo
is. She tossed in Seb’s old shotgun, securing them. There. Ready as she would ever be.

  Where’s that damnable cow! She could see nothing in the drenching rain. She called to the bovine sheltering deep in pines—or, Lord knows, blundered off for her long-forgotten home—and felt sorry for the beast.

  Sary jammed the travois poles deep under her armpits and strained toward the knoll. Rain still plastered her with a second skin, but her will was hot and blood heated her veins with fury and a sketchy plan. “Now…move!”

  Sary scowled back at the travois. The sled stuck, then lurched over a root, slamming her Achilles. She slipped—the travois thumped her back, throwing her full length onto the mud. Sary cursed, got to her knees, her front slathered in muck, and hitched the poles more firmly, to labor on slippery leaves up the knoll, prophetically muttering, “Thank the sweet Lord. All down hill from here…”

  Sary studied the landscape toward Big Bear as the crow flew, heaved the travois over the lip, and slid in front of it. Gripping the pole handles, she braced down-slope, trying for steady and slow, but the travois slithered faster—faster. She had to race, feet sliding sideways, ramming into and thudding over jagged rocks, until her face was close to the ground and she was hanging from the poles. She braced and righted herself before the travois ran over her, then started off again.

  As the pitch steepened and pine needles leapt into focus, she knew the sled was close to running her down once more. She was fast losing control. At the last second, Sary rolled aside, and the whole affair rocketed past, casting her precious things aside as it went. She heard the muted crash as the travois splintered on rocks somewhere far below. She squinted, brushing rain from her face, but couldn’t see. “Damnation!”

  Slithering on down the near vertical hill on her fanny, tumbling over rocks and pine needles like ball bearings, she gathered the spilled load as she found it.

  At the unexpected squelching, thudding sound of hoof beats, she squinted through the drizzle—she must be close to a trail. Then the unlikely figure of Ratchet galloped by, low over his horse, seen through a blowing curtain of rain like a quicksilver ghost.

  His only destination must be her camp—and her. This can’t be good. Never mind—keep going. He will be disappointed. Nothing is back there, for good or ill.

  Sary tumbled, rolling and bouncing, lugging her precious saddlebags, the whip, and the shotgun, any which way. She kicked and shoved the hefty saddlebags in her slippery slide, greased by mud, until a boulder approached too fast to roll away from—propelled into it, hard, she skidded over the top and bounced, slammed into trees, and ended on a knoll with things sliding after—and far, far below the lights of Big Bear glimmered in the distance.

  Chapter 23

  Sary, oddly energized by the cold and her long slippery ride down, blood heated with rage and purpose, had blinders on, narrowing her vision to one goal: the gleam of Delacorte’s saloon at one end of the town. Shivering, Sary limped in, torn, scraped, bruised, cleansed by intermittent gully-washers and hidden by the night. She halted, heaving, still dragging the saddlebags tumbled down the mountain with her. Fortunately, she was near the stable end, and spying the Delacorte Stables sign whupping in the wind, a grim Sary limped toward it.

  ****

  Inside, Sary leaned against dry wood, breathing in the redolence of hay, horses, and relative warmth. A lone lantern flickered near wide doors fronting the main street. As she went stall-to-stall, all was quiet except the snuffling of horses. In a corner, a small chestnut mount whickered hello.

  “Whoaaah, whoa. Look good, poor old feller. Just needed a speck of oats, didn’t you?” she whispered, patting her old horse’s newly supple flanks. “Don’t we all?” She rested against its side, girding for what was to come, then moved before she regained her sanity.

  Slinging saddlebags, Sary buckled a saddle tight, jamming in her poor half-broken weapons. The stock on Seb’s shotgun had a crack. Oh, well, it’d have to do.

  As she led the horse, Sary froze, spying the stable hand hunkered under a blanket, gently snoring. He stirred, muzzy, wriggled deeper into sleep. Sary eased past, stealing her own horse. Gripping the shotgun, bullwhip over a shoulder, Sary yanked a jacket from a hook.

  Then, mounted tall, she openly rode down Big Bear’s main street.

  ****

  Smoke layered Delacorte’s like a ’Frisco smog. Whores’ gowns pierced the smudge—air curdled with festering brawls, discordant chatter, a raucous piano, hoarse laughter, and the inebriated belting of popular tunes.

  In the midst, Julian still reveled, smoking a celebratory cigar while the doves preened and sashayed in the carnival atmosphere. In better light, one sported a mouth sore, another bad skin—a clapped-out bunch with dirty hems, necks, and spotty clothes—Handi and her ever-present French Pox crowd hanging onto Julian and cooing at infant Jude, who glowered back like a small hanging judge.

  Cutting above the din, Jude squalled—a living ante kicking a pile of chips as soiled doves quarreled and fussed over him.

  Julian, a kid with a new toy, roared, “Looka this kid!”

  A man thrust a dripping cigar to Jude’s mouth. “Here, kid.” Cigar Man horse-laughed. “Suck on this.”

  Julian guffawed.

  A pimply girl swatted Cigar Man, hauling Jude off in a tug-of-war with another dove, whining, “Give ’im to me! You always git to hold ’im. Handi! Make her give ’im to me!”

  Cigar Man pinched Pimply Girl. She squawked, but let go.

  A gambler growled, “Put a shot in its titty bottle. That’ll shut the ugly little bastard up.”

  He stared down Julian’s pistol. Julian’s shaky finger twitched against the trigger. The gun blasted. The gambler bellowed, clutching an ear, matching Jude’s howls of infant outrage.

  Handi soothed Jude, who bawled protest ever louder. “There, there…” She possibly meant to take him, but drunken Julian still wanted to play.

  ****

  Outside, still mounted, Sary grimly watched the mad, reckless chaotic scene over the saloon doors, her eyes flashing on the squalling baby on the green table amid a pile of chips.

  The swing doors detonated and Sary—a cross between avenging angel and Valkyrie—crashed through with Seb’s whip looped about her shoulder, lashing, kicking, the horse stamping and pawing a ragged swath through the saloon, scattering gamblers, revelers and doves alike as Sary blasted the ceiling with Seb’s shotgun.

  The room was immobilized.

  A few doves tittered. Some ducked, shrieking, under tables. The drunks looked on, bemused. The gamblers were irritated. Julian appeared dazed at first, and then his gray face empurpled.

  Handi dully watched the barkeep fire a shotgun, missing Sary but hitting a soiled dove in the arm, adding to the confusion of milling people clapping, laughing, exhorting Sary to go on.

  Sary tried to fix on Jude, but it all was happening so fast, and the horse gyrated for a clear path through the mob, faces spinning, like a boat in a storm. Then the whole room exploded as Julian drunkenly drew his walrus of a pistol again. His hand rocked the poker table as the huge revolver cleared it.

  Jude tumbled with a cascade of chips down green baize.

  Handi snatched at him.

  Sary viewed the action as from the large end of the telescope. Noise faded to buzzing like bees, cotton wool in her ears. With one desperate motion, Sary urged her horse over a felled chair, scooped Jude from Handi’s shaky grasp, and twisted in the saddle as her horse gyrated to face Julian, snarling, “He may be a bastard, Delacorte! But he’s my bastard!”

  Sary bellowed it with all the denial, privation, and pain of the years behind it. “And you will never take him!”

  The room stilled as Sary, clutching Jude, jerked the agitated horse around, dug in heels, and spurred through the mob.

  Julian’s already ashen face paled further as Sary’s horse stumbled sideways and out the swing doors, scattering revelers aside. He thundered, “Wouldn’t bet on it, Sary Swinford.”


  Sary whiplashed a support post, dragging it as she galloped off, dimly aware of the satisfying crack and groan of the porch roof caving, blocking the exit, as she cantered into a softly drizzling night, leaving behind sounds of an angry, excited throng busting out saloon windows. Gripping Jude, Sary whip-butted out, kicking townspeople, spurring on as they ran alongside dragging at her reins. Julian struck a protesting old man out of the way and stiffly mounted his horse, and left Handi to hobble after with her soiled doves and most of the saloon.

  ****

  Ratchet, ignorant of the ruckus back at Big Bear, poked at Sary’s abandoned camp, basing his actions on the kind of hunch a calculating stink-stirrer could foment, his eyes narrowed and raking the listing hut, abandoned quilts, and crusted stew pot. He poked the dead fire. Outside, Ratchet scanned disturbed rock, drawn to it.

  Wiping his face beneath a dripping brim, he veered back. Something ain’t right. Something was there. Finally his gaze riveted on a big raw hole, and he stooped, plunging his hand in. Wonderingly Ratchet withdrew a fingertip-sized nugget in the drizzle-filled night, wiped his eyes, stepped back to better see, and trod on something spongy, next to the hole. He toed the dark, alien patch, then hunkered down to claw out rotting velvet.

  “Well, well, well.” Ratchet’s eyes gleamed as he scraped away cloth, withdrawing something hard and bone-white, dome-shaped, with hanks of black hair still clinging. Chuckling softly, he turned the skull this way and that. “Look a sight peaked, Jules. Even for you.”

  His laugh was long and braying, like that of a miner’s mule.

  Chapter 24

  Sary thrust Jude inside her shirt, chinning his head close. She’d lost the sling she’d made for him. But it was futile anyway, she thought. Of a sudden, she saw the scheme for what it was, born of fury and vindication. Already Jude’s silky curls were damp, yet his body, both solid weight and soft, was warm. But for how long? Have I, in my willfulness, killed him? But his breath came sibilant, brushing her neck, and soothing in the cool—not cold—night, a small blessing in the mountains, lulled by his heartbeat.