by Bill Brooks
The young man’s lips curled into a smile at the thought.
“That’s a hard one to compete with all right,” I said.
“You wouldn’t want Jesus after you for stealing his woman.” The young man chortled. “I guess that would be about the damned biggest mistake a man could make.”
“I don’t know about that. I reckon if you believe in such things.”
“I once had to jump out a second-story window in Omaha because this lady’s husband came home early,” the young man said. “You’d’ve thought it was Jesus coming through the front door, hollering . . . ‘Ida, Ida Mae.’ I was a real rascal back then.”
I couldn’t help but smile, too. The young man couldn’t have been more than twenty-odd years old and talking about back then, as if he was fifty.
“I guess, if I have to do any more jumping out windows, it will have to be out the first floor window,” the young man continued. “I don’t see me climbing any stairs with a wood leg, or jumping, either. I better stick to widows and other single women from now on. Not these here.” He waved a hand in the direction of the nuns, tending patients out in the courtyard.
“I’m sure Jesus would appreciate you not going after His wives,” I said.
There was a thread of sadness in the young man’s jokes.
The light dimmed in the sky.
Then soon enough Lincoln Johnson came around, handed me a blue shirt and a pair of faded jeans, socks, and a pair of old rough boots with brass eyelets.
“They just some old clothes I figured would fit you,” he said. “Fellow who owned them was about your size.”
“You sure he won’t miss them?”
“He won’t miss ’em. His name was Jim Vitter. He died some time ago. We keep the clothes of them who die for folks who don’t. Keep their shoes, too.”
I didn’t say anything about knowing the ballad of Jim Vitter as I worked my way into his clothes, his shoes, but it felt in a way like maybe he was still looking for them—that the dead who go violently don’t find peace. At least I heard that once from a woman in Little Rock.
“Dead man’s clothes, huh?”
“Nobody’ll know but me and you.”
I dressed with the slowness of a hundred-year-old man, laced up the boots, and it winded me by the time I finished.
“Got a wagon outside,” the orderly said.
We went outside slowly and the big man helped me climb up into a spring wagon hitched to a big bay mule.
“It ain’t far where I live,” he said, taking up the seat next to me.
Maybe a mile is all we traveled before turning off at his place. A dirt lane led to a small clapboard house that looked freshly whitewashed and was perched on the lip of a cutbank below which a stream of water curled and flowed away, vanishing around a bend. A large dark woman came to stand in the doorjamb lit by a setting sun, a red polka dot bandanna tied around her hair. Her largeness seemed to match the size of Lincoln Johnson.
“Ambrosia, this here is Mister Royce Blood, the one I told you about that likes fried chicken so well.”
“Welcome to our home, Mister Blood.”
“Thank you kindly.”
There was an old scarred table set in the yard with blue chinaware, bowls of sweet potatoes, biscuits, cooked dandelions, a basket of fried chicken, a pot of coffee, and a pie with a cheesecloth laid over it. The smell of home-cooked food nearly caused me to faint.
We sat down and they clasped hands with mine. Then Mr. Johnson invoked a prayer, which I pretended to say but merely mumbled my words.
I was surprised how hungry I was, but then it didn’t take me long to realize afterward that I had overdone it. The food rebelled and I felt it trying to escape.
“I need to go to the privy,” I said when the first wave of nausea hit.
I tried my best to muffle my retching, not wanting the woman to feel bad about her cooking. It wasn’t her cooking; it was I just wasn’t ready for so much.
“God damn,” I muttered, disgusted with myself, swiping at the spittle.
I returned to the house.
“Got coffee and pie for you,” Ambrosia said sweetly, as if she did not know of my condition, or that I was a white man and pretty well godless. They were sweet people and I was grateful for their kindness.
I tried to nibble at the sweet potato pie and sip the coffee.
“It’s the best food I ate since . . .” I started to say “since I was married and happy,” but caught myself in time and fell silent. The bullets felt like they were still inside my chest, rattling around in my lungs.
“Best get you back to the infirmary or the sisters will think I stole you,” Lincoln Johnson said. I could see the concern in his eyes.
We rode back in the half dark of a moon-filled night. The mule pulling the wagon didn’t seem to need any guidance. It had walked this same road so many times it could walk it blind.
“Here, have you a taste of this,” Lincoln said, handing me a pint bottle he pulled from back of the seat under some burlap sacks.
“I figured you for a teetotaler,” I said, taking the bottle, pulling the cork, and letting the liquid fire spill down my throat.
“I keep it for snakebite,” he said. “And you sure enough look snake bit to me.”
I took another pull and handed it back to him, and watched him take a pull.
“You don’t look so snake bit, Mister Johnson,” I said.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said: “This is in case is I is bit on the way home.”
He halted the mule outside the infirmary wall and helped me down and through the gate.
“You be OK to get in by yourself?”
“Yes,” I said. “Thank Ambrosia for me again.”
“She already knows.”
“I reckon so.”
“Might I ask you somethin’?”
“You’ve a right.”
“Why’d somebody want to shoot you so bad?”
“I don’t know.”
“Reckon maybe you should figure it out?”
“That is my aim.”
“I figure if whoever it was shot you finds out you ain’t killed, well, they might come ’round, trying to do it again.”
“I’ve thought of that.”
“Well, good night, Mister Blood.”
“Good night, Mister Johnson.”
I leaned against the gate until Lincoln Johnson had driven off, then retched again. The whiskey did not sit well with me, either, for the first time. Maybe it was a sign I didn’t need it any more. If something doesn’t want to stay with you, why should you stay with it?
I went inside and removed my clothes and stretched out on the nice clean bed and listened to other men groaning and snoring and smelled their sickness, and I knew I had to get out of that place soon.
Lincoln Johnson was right about whoever it was who shot me. I could wait for him to come find me—like the fellow who found that Vitter fellow—or I could go in search of the shooter and get him first.
Getting him before he got me seemed like the smart play.
Should have killed me, I thought. Should have killed me.
Chapter Fifteen
More days came and went as I knitted myself together—the wounds going from painful to itching to downright bothersome to forgetting they were there.
My mind was on the man who had shot me and what had happened to Sara. I grew determined to find out.
The summer season brought afternoon storms. The day would start out bright and clear and by early afternoon columns of white clouds would form over the mountains, turn slowly gray, then lower themselves over the land and spill rain before leaving again. The air would always be washed clean, but those storms didn’t do a thing to clean my mind.
Sister Margaret would often offer to read to me, but it was always something safe, about God’s love and redemption, and never again did she read anything to me from the darker parts of the Good Book.
I was watching a growing s
torm with lightning shaking through its mass as it approached the infirmary. The good sister was reading to me, but I was only half listening.
“Ask you something?” I said.
She lifted her gaze from the page.
“What made you choose this life?”
A soft smile played at the edges of her mouth.
“What makes any of us choose whatever life we choose?”
“Good question,” I said. “I couldn’t say. I reckon some of it has to do with circumstances . . . where we were born and who to . . . things like that.”
“Or, maybe,” she said, “God has a plan for each of us.”
“Then I sure wish he’d let me in on it, because it sure seems like a pretty lousy plan to me so far.”
She lowered her eyes to the Bible again, then lifted them back to me.
“God says our highest glory is to serve Him and in serving Him we serve others.”
“It’s a long way from where I’m at,” I said. “You ever have a beau?”
She smiled shyly.
“Yes, I did once.”
“And you chose this life over one with him?”
“He died. And with him, my romantic heart.”
“I know all about that,” I said.
“Sometimes I think the living have it worse than the dead. We’re left with the hungering heartbreak and they are in heaven, at peace. Do you believe in heaven, Mister Blood?”
“I can’t say I believe in any of it, Sister.”
“It’s all a matter of faith.”
“I know it is, but I only ever had that sort of faith in myself . . . and look where that got me. Hard to believe in anything I can’t see.”
“Perhaps some day you will find a reason to believe in Jesus Christ.”
“Read me some more, if you will.”
And so she did, reading from the book of Ecclesiastes. Her soft voice, soothing as a cool drink to a thirsting tongue, or maybe the words were quenching my thirsting heart.
I dozed and awoke to a thunderclap. Sister Margaret was no longer sitting there.
The first raindrops splattered on the stones of the courtyard’s paths, large and dark and round. Lincoln Johnson came and asked if I needed help getting inside. I told him no and rose stiffly, feeling the storm as much inside my bones as outside.
“I need a favor,” I said as we ducked in out of the rain.
“What would that be, Mister Blood?”
“I need you to carry me into the nearest town.”
“In this rain?”
“No, after the rain stops.”
“You need something from there, I can just get it for you next time.”
“Just need to get there is all.”
“It’s a bad place to get to.”
“I reckon it is, considering how I was greeted last time I went.”
“Yes, suh.”
Sister Margaret came into the darkened room later when the storm was in full force outside. You could hear the big raindrops pinging against the metal roof, hear them boiling up on the ground.
“Sam told me you want him to take you to Two Cents,” she said.
“That’s right. I think I’ve taken up enough of your time and some good bed space another will need more than me.”
“Is that really why you’re going?” she said.
“I need to find somebody, Sister.”
“The man who shot you?”
“Yes, but first I need to find a woman.”
She looked skeptical.
“I don’t mean in the way it sounds,” I said. “She was with me when I got shot and I think maybe she got shot, too.”
She shook her head.
“Whatever is your business is your business, Mister Blood. There’s no need to explain. But if you mean to take a life, then I’d pray that you’d reconsider.”
“You might do better saving your prayers for those who are going to want them, Sister.”
“God says we should forgive those who transgress against us.”
“I never read the Book, ma’am. If I’m to be judged, then let me be judged, but I know what I have to do and I aim to do it.”
Fret lined her kind features.
The crack of thunder rattled the earth beneath our feet. If it was God’s doing, there wasn’t anything a puny man like me was going to do to go against Him. But I wasn’t trying to go against Him; I just wanted to bring a little justice to those just as puny as me.
“We can give you a little money to help you on your way,” Sister Margaret said.
“Not necessary.”
“What do you plan to live on, locusts and honey like John the Baptist in the wilderness?”
“I’ve lived on less.”
“That I don’t doubt, Mister Blood.
Another thunderclap caused her to start. I was a little jumpy myself.
“Lie back and let me check your bandages before you go,” she said.
Her hands were tender, the fingers cool, ministering.
“This one is still leaking a bit,” she said.
“Plug it if you can.”
“You could still get an infection, something very serious.”
“I could die of old age, sitting around here.”
“You’re a restless man, aren’t you, Mister Blood?”
“Yes. Always was.”
“Quick to go and get yourself shot again.”
“Perhaps. But this time I plan on doing some shooting back.”
“May I ask if you were shot because of this woman you must go and find?”
“I can’t say why I was shot . . . maybe, but I doubt it. I think it was more likely the man I was looking for who robbed the stage and killed my friend. He didn’t want me to find him, so he found me first.”
“The world you live in sounds dangerous.”
“Not till most recent. After my wife and boy died, I crawled down in the bottom of a bottle and life wasn’t so bad down there. I did not trouble anybody and nobody troubled me. I didn’t ask for this, Sister, but now that it has come to visit me, I won’t turn away from it, either.”
She finished changing my stained bandage. The puckered wounds were brown and scabbed over and I didn’t even like looking at them because it made me angry every time I did.
“I . . .” she started to say, then stopped and turned away. I watched her go down the hall. Rain hammered overhead like boys with tiny hammers.
First thing I need is a gun, I thought. I had already picked out one in my mind.
Lincoln came in the late afternoon. The storm had passed on to the east. He set his tired eyes upon me like a frustrated father trying to teach his son a lesson but failing to do so.
“You ready?”
“Been ready.”
“I guess we can go then.”
I sat up, and, when I bent to tie those donated boots, it felt like something heavy and sharp shifted inside my chest. I had to grit my teeth against the pain in order to stand.
“Let’s go,” I said, sucking in air. But before we could get to Lincoln’s wagon outside the wall, Sister Margaret intervened.
“Here,” she said, handing me an envelope.
“What’s this?”
“Just a little something to sustain you until you can find your way.”
Inside the envelope there was money and a rosary.
“I’m not Catholic,” I said, holding the rosary in one hand.
“It doesn’t matter if you believe you’ve found God or not. He has found you.”
“I don’t mean to sound ungrateful,” I said. “But this won’t help me none.”
“It won’t hurt you none, either, Mister Blood,” she said in a teasing way, mocking my pattern of speech.
She pressed my fingers around the envelope.
“I’ll pay you back the money soon as I’m able,” I said.
“It’s not necessary. Perhaps you’ll come across another luckless and troubled soul someday you can help, and that will be payment enough.�
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“That how you see me, as a luckless and troubled soul?”
“You’re spirit surely is.”
I saw her for the first time not so much as the bride of Christ, but as a woman, gracious and lovely—the kind of woman any man could fall in love with—like my Ophelia.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Go with God.”
God probably would not want to go where I aim to go, I thought.
I got up into the wagon with some effort and took my place next to Lincoln Johnson. The air was still damp and heavy from the storm and the road was muddy, and Lincoln drove slowly so as not to weary his old mule.
“What you goin’ do when you get there . . . you not knowing who it was shot you?”
“Get a gun, first thing.”
“Might not even get that far if whoever it was sees you up and walking on the earth.”
“Might not.”
“A smart man would go the other way . . . away from that place.
“A smart man probably would.”
“You don’t seem like no fool.”
“I never was that smart when it came to certain things.”
Lincoln smiled, his teeth white as snow in a pile of coal. How does a man get such good teeth?
“They named that town wrong,” he said. “Should’ve named it Not A Dime’s Worth, for that’s all it is.”
“Maybe by the time I’m finished they’ll change the name.”
“You intendin’ on makin’ some changes?”
“Just a few.”
“You’re only one man, in case you ain’t noticed? And a half shot-up one at that.”
“Worst kind of man is one who don’t think he’s got anything more to lose, Mister Johnson.”
“That how you feel . . . like you got nothin’ more to lose?”
“Pretty much.”
“I’ll let you off at the place they sell guns. How will that be?”
“That will be aces.”
“All right then.”
And, as promised, he stopped his wagon in front of a small narrow store cobbled between a saloon and a barbershop with the words GUNS BOUGHT AND SOLD painted in crude lettering over the door.