by Ray Cluley
Grady shifted but couldn’t get ready for it. This would be the messy bit.
“Sounded like a bear trap going off,” Tom said.
Right now. Blood, most likely.
“Henry’s pullin’ his pants up, yankin’ his belt, but that woman comes right back to push him again, you believe that? He keeps her off with a shove of his own ’n’ puts his hand to the grip of his pistol after. I didn’t like that, didn’t like any of it, but I’m still dancing around with one foot tangled up.
“The big man, all fur ’n’ muscle ’n’ hangin’ hair, he comes over and I think he’ll be like before, you know, calm her down some. He puts his basket down and he looks like he’s makin’ to restrain his squaw cause he puts a hand on her chest to keep her back and he puts another out for Henry. Like he’s keepin’ them separate. But he shoves Henry hard. Henry backs up a few steps and the well gets him behind the knees and over he goes, topples right in. Gone.”
Grady couldn’t swallow his drink for a moment. When he did, it choked a single cough from him. Tom didn’t notice.
“We don’t hear nothin’ at first when he falls. He’s surprised like us, most likely, and don’t scream or nothin’. There’s just a sound that’s thud and splash.
“We all start yellin’. My foot’s finally free but I’m hoppin’ round a minute. James dismounts with that flashy kick he has ’n’ runs over, Packard right there with him. Cody just turns a tight circle on the spot ’n’ says, ‘Hey’. Just that. ‘Hey.’.
“The Injun fella, though, he ignores everythin’ but his wife. Holds her face real gentle with both his big hands, checkin’ her. Her cheek’s already swellin’ and her eye’s closin’ up. He grunts ’n’ kisses her forehead.
“By then James is there with his gun at the Injun’s face but looking at the well. He glances down, then back at the Injun, then down the well again. He calls, “Henry!” but if there’s a reply we don’t hear it. Maybe because I’m shouting at everyone to shut up and calm the hell down.
“James yells, ‘Henry, you down there? I can’t see nothin’ but dark’ and I think, of course he’s down there. Packard’s yellin’ for Henry as well. He’s got his gun on the woman. The only people makin’ noise is us. Even the young’ns standin’ there are quiet, though the girl’s got some tears.”
Tom stopped and took a ragged breath. He grabbed for the bottle of whiskey but knocked it down. Grady scooped it up quick before anything could spill.
“Only thing that tastes right,” Tom said.
Grady agreed. When he thought about it later he realized they weren’t talking about it the same way.
“James and Packard got nothin’ from the well. Injun fella looks down at James like there’s no gun between them. I’m reachin’ for ’em, thinkin’ I don’t know what, when for no reason I can gather other than he’s nervous or somethin’, James shoots the Injun square in the face.”
Grady wasn’t surprised, and yet . . . well, he’d hoped different.
Tom nodded as if agreeing with something and wiped at his neck. “A splash of somethin’ made a thick noise on my coat and it was on my neck and in my hair. And we’re all just starin’. The only noise comes from Cody. This time he’s sayin’ ‘Hold on, hold on’ like he needs a minute.
“The Injun, he turns back to his squaw with a hole where his eye used to be, a flap of cheek hangin’ down all blistered. He don’t seem to know it. Where he’s stood, James gets the full effect of that face and whatever he sees up close is enough to make him scared. And James, he lashes out at times like that. So that’s what he does.”
Grady said, “Christ.” Muttered it to clasped hands as he listened, like a prayer.
“Now the wife’s screamin’. Forever, seems like. James is beatin’ her man who’s on his knees now, only still up because of the way James is holdin’ ’im, hittin’ ’im, scared at what he’s done ’n’ what he’s doin’ ’n’ but doin’ it anyway. Packard’s yellin’ at the woman to quiet, just quiet, for God’s sake quiet.”
“And you?”
“Had my gun on James.” He looked shamed to say so. “Didn’t know ’til I was puttin’ it away.”
Grady was struck by a memory of Tom: four of them fumbling for a gun at Kathy’s, Tom the only one with wits enough to draw clear and clean. There’d been a stupid fight over cards—cards!—and Tom took turns aiming at each of those dumb enough to think a game worth killing over. Drinks were exchanged instead of bullets and Tom got something extra from Kathy, on the house. He’d remind him of that later, when this hellish business was done. Try to put a smile where there was nothing but woe.
“James steps back, blood to the elbow, and the Injun falls down. I can’t say face down no more on account he’s not got one. The woman rips at her own hair. Two whole handfuls come away. She throws it down ’n’ jumps on James before any of us can see. She’s still screamin’ or screamin’ again, I’m not sure any more.
“Packard’s quicker than me. He gets her round the neck but he can’t get her more than a pace back ’n’ forth. She’s fightin’, clawin’ his face like a banshee.”
Harpy, Grady wanted to say. That would be the usual comparison. But screamin’ ’n’ all, he supposed banshee would do.
“Packard says, ‘Get them damn kids away,’ so that’s what I do. Took ’em into the trees. They don’t resist none. They’re confused ’n’ cryin’, both of ’em, cryin’. I’m sayin’ things but I don’t know what or if they even understand me but I keep sayin’ it anyways. I do that for a long time.”
Tom nodded to himself, tracing his thumb back and forth over the rim of his cup. Stayed that way a while.
“What happened while you were gone?” Grady needed an answer but he didn’t much want one.
Tom shrugged. “Don’t know. Don’t want to know. All three were bloody when they came back for me and it weren’t their blood. Theirs had drained away, making them proper pale-faces.” He snorted. It weren’t nothing like a laugh but was probably meant to be.
“We said we wouldn’t tell. Not ever. But here I am, tellin’ it to you.”
Grady nodded. He’d heard plenty of bad stories. Probably would for the rest of his days. This one, though, weren’t done.
“What about the children?”
“Brought them back here to the holdin’ pen.”
Something about that didn’t sit right, though. It was like wearing a new gun belt—it fit ’n’ all, and it held your guns, but until you broke it in it felt all wrong.
Tom picked up on some of that. “I put them with an old squaw who had more blankets than friends. She was happy to take them. Very happy. She didn’t ask about parents.”
Better, thought Grady. You’re breakin’ it in some. But that’s still not all of it.
S
Grady eased back into his chair, the old wood bending and creaking around him. “You want me to report this?”
Tom shook his head.
“I could go to Frazier instead of—”
“No.”
“Well shit, Tom, what did you go ’n’ tell me a story like that for? I have to do something.”
Murder was murder, be it full-blood, half-blood, Chinaman, whatever. And two murders was two murders, and three was three, which was what it sounded like.
Tom looked away from the empty yard and met Grady’s eyes for the first time in a long while. “I ain’t done yet.”
It didn’t seem like he was going to be, neither, for a little while. Grady waited. He listened to the night. Heard its music and thought of dead men.
“We got back,” Tom said, “and when we did we swore our secret and went to our bunks. We sold Henry’s horse ’n’ gear over the river, told people he’d gone to town after a week in the peaks. None of us spent the money.” That seemed important to Tom, so Grady nodded.
&
nbsp; “That night I dreamt of where Henry really went. Saw him fall. Saw the Injun lose his face. Cody ’n’ James ’n’ Packard dreamt the same but they didn’t tell me nothin’.”
“You’ll have dreams like that a while now,” Grady warned him. He had plenty like it himself.
“Every night,” Tom agreed. “And worse.”
“Worse?”
“The water. It’s got blood in it.”
Grady said nothing. He looked down into his cup.
“It’s true,” Tom said. “I can’t have nothin’ but milk or liquor else I taste it in there.”
“What about the others? What about Cody?”
“I can’t say because Cody’s gone. I’ll get to that. James ’n’ Packard, they taste it.” He remembered James. “Tasted it. And we see them, too.”
“See who?”
Tom gave Grady a sideways look and took another drink.
“See who, Tom? Say it loud. Hear how damn foolish it sounds.”
“At the window sometimes, in the yard. Once,” Tom said in a quick whisper, “Packard woke to see the woman lookin’ down at him where he slept. She was standin’ on his bed. Her feet left muddy prints on his mattress.”
“Y’all talked about this?”
Tom nodded. “Cody gathered us up. Said he was seein’ the big man all over the stockade. Said he was going mad, wanted to let us know he was ridin’ out before he ruined it for the rest of us ’n’ said somethin’. Said he’d let folk down before and it near killed him and he weren’t doin’ it again. Packard, he saw the squaw. James didn’t give details but he said he saw both.”
“And you see them?”
“Behind every person I speak to. Standin’ there. Lookin’ at me.”
Grady checked around himself, slowly.
“You see them now, Tom?”
Tom turned away and stared out into the darkness of the stockade.
“No. I fixed it.”
“Well that’s good, Tom. That’s good.” Grady offered him something to smoke but Tom waved it away so Grady didn’t have one either.
“We went back to the place in the mountains. The four of us, drinkin’ whiskey for days because we couldn’t brew coffee without it havin’ the coppery taste of blood, no matter how strong we made it. When we got there it looked just as it did first time. Broken egg shells. Chickens scratchin’ around out back. Things were piled up and still there; tools ’n’ cookin’ gear and the like.
“It took a while to get courage enough to look down the well. When we did it was for nothin’ cause we couldn’t see. James suggested lowerin’ a light, but ‘What’s the point?’ I said. We was there to give the dead proper burial. Mighta been only me willin’ to say it, but no one argued. So we rigged a harness ’n’ down I went. It was my group and it was my idea and it was me who let things go so bad.”
Grady hadn’t been there so he couldn’t argue, but he thought Tom was probably taking more responsibility than was his. Sounded like there was plenty to go round.
“It stank in that well. You work a ranch or serve as long as we have and you get to know what death smells like, but this was different. This was bad; rank ’n wet and . . . bad. Like . . . Well, I don’t know what like. It was a rough well. A shelf of rock down there, too hard to shift, made a ledge next to what looked like a puddle but wasn’t. It was much deeper.”
He made a shape of it in the air with the drink he held.
“Henry was on this ledge, which explained the thud we’d heard. The other two, the Injuns, were at the watery bottom. They’d been weighted down, so I had to get wet to make sure they were there. I was worried they’d got out, see. And so were the others; Cody, anyways, cause he called, ‘They there?’, real anxious. Like they might not be.
“I said they were there and then I saw Henry’s fingers. They were bloody, and his nails were broken. I held the light up a bit ’n saw where he’d tried to claw his way out. And God Almighty, his son and all the rest of it, that shook me. I looked up at the others, three faces lookin’ down at me like I was in my own grave, and that shook me too, so I got the hell out.
“I said nothin’ about Henry. I didn’t tell them he only had a broken leg ’n a head wound like you’d get in a brawl. Didn’t tell them he prob’ly starved down there.”
Tom faced Grady. “Do you think if he’d known those two Injuns were down there with him he still would’ve starved?”
Grady was given plenty of time to answer the question but he chose not to. He wasn’t so sure Henry starved, not in that short time. Not with a belt and boots to eat.
“We got them all up ’n’ buried, anyhow. If the others saw Henry in pretty good shape, none of ’em said nothin’. We made simple graves, read a bit of God’s word, and came back here.”
S
“Here,” Grady echoed, doing away with the cups and passing the bottle. Tom kept it at his mouth for three swallows. He coughed a couple of times, handed it back.
“Quite some story,” Grady admitted, taking a pull of his own.
Tom held up his hand. “A bit more. Let me tell it all.”
“All right.”
Grady was leaning forward in his chair, bottle hanging between his knees. He was looking at Tom who was looking at the past. His features were drawn and weary, his voice heavy.
“I saw the Injuns again as soon as we got back. Saw them playing with their children. All I could do was open my mouth ’n’ point. Cody, James, Packard, they all said they saw nothin’, ’n’ when I looked back they were right. Cody, though, he was lyin’. Saw ’em a few times after, too. Now he’s gone. Told someone in his bunkhouse he was off to the same place as Henry. They thought he meant town. I reckon he was bein’ more phil’sophical than that.”
“What do the others reckon?”
“Well James shot himself, didn’t he.”
Grady straightened up. He knew that, everyone knew that, and he’d been waiting for it near on an hour now, but he still dropped the whiskey and to hell with it, let it spill. “Shit.”
“Yeah.” Tom mimed a grim suicide, shot his face with his fingers. “Looked that way, anyway.”
“Packard?”
“Locked in his cabin. Right now, even as we sit here. Got furniture at the door ’n’ boards on his windows. Won’t come out. I told him I’d fixed it. He said if that was true, how come he’s lookin’ at the biggest scariest fuckin’ Injun he’s ever seen? Says the two of them are sittin’ with him, waitin’.”
“Waiting for what?”
Tom shrugged, like he was worn out. “Maybe it takes time. The fixin’. Maybe they’re waiting for what I gave ’em.”
Tom had told most of his story to the boards at their feet, but now he looked Grady in the eyes for what he had to say.
“I figured it out, see. They’re a family lot, these Injuns. You’ve seen it, sir. Not one of them wants to go west without the rest of ’em.”
An idea was fighting through the whiskey. “Oh Tom, what did you do?”
“I went to the old lady and said the parents wanted their kids back.” Tom was openly weeping now. “She didn’t like that, not once I’d given them her. They were already close, you see. A new family. You know how they are.”
“Tom . . .”
“I took them from her and I took them to the mountains. Took’m home. Gave them back. We never should have taken them in the first place. None of them. We shouldn’t be takin’ any of them. They were here first. We should give it all back.”
“Tom—”
“I made it quick, sir. And I buried them right next to their parents.”
He sobbed a while after that and Grady let him. When he fell into a fitful sleep in the chair on his porch, Grady let him do that, too.
S
In the morning, whe
n Tom woke, Grady asked him to tell the story again. He had Frazier with him.
Frazier was old but an imposing figure, neatly groomed but in a way that said he didn’t give a rat’s ass if he got dirty. He shrugged his shoulders in a casual gesture that put his coat over the star on his chest, doing his best to be friendly. His moustache was grey-through and thick. It softened his words a little. “It’s all right, son. You can tell me.”
Tom looked at Grady. Grady looked back. Tom nodded. “Let’s do it somewhere else,” he said to Frazier, getting up. “This man’s heard enough.”
I have, Grady thought. And ain’t no one can take it back.
Frazier put a hand to his hat, nodded with the gesture, and moved aside so Tom could step down from the porch.
“He’s been drinkin’ nothin’ but whiskey for days,” Grady said, “so give him time to straighten his story out. It’s got some mighty strange kinks in it.”
“Will do, Father.”
Frazier was the only one still called Grady that. He took off his hat and ran his hand through his hair. It wasn’t quite yet the same colour as his moustache, not entirely, so he grew it long. He put his hat back on and with another nod, this time for Grady, he followed Tom down across the yard.
Grady watched them leave. Frazier’s horse was drinking from a trough in the yard and something about that drew Tom’s attention.
Then it all went to hell.
Tom screamed and he backed away so fast he fell. He scrambled back to his feet quick but still stumbled some. Frazier’s horse reared up, stamping its forelegs in the air, whinnying loud and shrill. Frazier had both his guns drawn but he was pointing them at the trough. Whatever he saw there was enough to stagger him, too.