by James Wade
He shook his head and excused himself from the table.
“Father,” Charlotte called after him, and he turned and lifted his brow in response. “We will stay here tonight, if that’s alright by you.”
The priest brought his hands together and gave a half bow.
“Thank you, my child.”
They slept stretched out along old pews to stay off the cold floor. The wind howled through the cracks in the adobe walls where they met the slumping roof. Randall imagined his feather bed and the warmth of the stove and the smell of bacon and coffee in the mornings. The strange meat sat heavy in his belly and he heard Tad’s snoring and the child’s whimpering and at some point in the night Charlotte rose and went outside with her rifle. He was asleep before she came back in.
In the morning Randall felt a hand on his shoulder and he startled awake and Charlotte was before him with her finger to her lips. He sat up and she motioned for him to follow her. They walked out into the dawn and stood in the street and Randall wiped the sleep from his eyes. Once he’d done so, Charlotte pointed to the roof of the church and Randall turned to see.
The rope was made of horsehair and ran nearly twenty feet in length. It had been doubled back on itself and tied to a bosal like the ones Randall had seen his grandfather use to train young horses. It was looped and knotted around the base of the iron cross at the church’s highest point and from it the priest swung and turned in a slow rotation a few feet above the doorway.
The two of them stood in the street and did not speak for a long while. The sun came on and its light shone brightly against the building and the span of the rope became engulfed in it and all but disappeared so that the body of the priest seemed to be suspended in air by some dark magic.
* * *
They stood—Tad, Charlotte, and Randall—outside the church. Charlotte had cut the body down and Randall dug a grave. He’d said a few words and quoted from the book of Matthew and that was the end of it and now there was nothing left but to push forward and so they would but different than they’d arrived.
“I don’t like this one damn bit,” Tad said, incredulous, looking at the boy as he stood in his typical silence near their horses. “That is one unnerving child.”
“Well, we can’t just leave him here,” Randall said.
“Okay, then put him up on a horse and slap its ass,” Tad argued.
“There aren’t any more horses.”
“If there ain’t no horses, how the hell is he supposed to ride with us?”
Randall and Charlotte glanced at the child who was standing with his ear against the red-orange stallion.
“Oh, no. Oh, hell no,” Tad said.
“He could be your friend,” Randall said.
“He’s too strange to have friends,” Tad answered back.
“Them horses seem to like him alright,” Charlotte said. “I ain’t never known a horse to be wrong about nobody. Even Pumpkin took a liking to him.”
“No, he ain’t neither,” Tad snapped. “Pumpkin does what I say.”
“Pumpkin,” the boy called from across the street and pointed to Tad’s animal.
Tad rolled his eyes and scoffed.
“Well, hell.”
11
We rode east and the desert rose up into mountains, though not as tall as the last, and we saw rams and mule deer on the rocks and I used my father’s rifle to kill a rabbit for supper but there was little meat on it to be had. The sun was not as hot and in the mountain pass the winds came at night and we kept a fire going until morning and rode on without breakfast.
The grade was steep out of the mountains and the path narrow. We walked the horses along the cliffs and down into the valley and the air was cool here, but the water was still scarce. We led the horses along a dry creek and Shelby shot at a diamondback and missed and the horses breathed heavy even without riders.
The creek bed found a larger stream with something left to give and we drank from the shallow water, horses and men.
Shelby practiced drawing the pistol from his pocket and the valley echoed his curses as the gun tumbled from his hand. I sat near the water and watched birds dart in and out of the scrub brush and thought about my mother and if there was a Heaven. I remembered my baptism and could feel the preacher’s hands on my shoulders as I shivered and Shelby telling me it would be the only way to see our mother once she passed, and the water was warm compared to the air.
I thought again of the boy and wondered how long my sins stayed clean and took stock of the stream and knew it wasn’t deep enough to save me. Shelby said he was going off to dig a hole and I nodded and looked again at the water. The current was small and weak like a newborn, and I was a child once and my father a lawman and my mother not sick.
The bushes rustled behind me and it wasn’t birds or Shelby, and the girl who emerged was scared and beautiful and staring at the horses. Her eyes found mine and they were dark and wild. She looked again at the horses, and I shook my head slow. She started after them and so did I and I was faster. I wrapped my arms around her and we kicked up dust and she yanked free and got in a good blow to my ear before I grabbed her again. The horses shied away from us, and I threw her to the ground and she kept at it from on her back. I pinned her arms and she kicked at me and screamed so I mounted her at the waist and we sat there. She had olive skin and black hair and I figured her for a Mexican or an Indian and her lips were dry and cracked. The sleeves of her white blouse had been ripped off and I could see the lean muscle in her arms as she struggled against my weight. She wore men’s pants and they were held up with what looked like a tie string from a gunnysack.
“I ain’t gonna hurt you,” I told her and I asked if she spoke English, and she just laid there staring up at me and her face was sharp, both bone and brow.
“I ain’t gonna hurt you,” I said again, “but them are our horses. You can’t take our horses. You understand? Comprende?”
She jerked her face to the side and out of the brush came Shelby. Without a belt, his pants sagged around his thighs and he rested his hands on his hips.
“Well, hot damn, Caleb.”
He walked over to us and the girl’s eyes stayed on him and he looked down and laughed.
“Hot damn,” he repeated, shaking his head.
“She come out of the south,” I pointed to the bend in the stream. “Caught her trying to steal a horse.”
I followed her gaze to the knapsack tied to Shelby’s saddle, and his horse stomped and shook its head.
“You could’ve just asked for food,” I said, and Shelby shook his head and buckled his belt and walked to where our tussle, mine and the girl’s, had ended.
“Food, horses—don’t make no matter. A thief’s a thief, little brother.”
I stood up, slow, and the girl raised herself on one elbow and looked up at the two of us, her eyes squinted in the sun and I could see her shoulder had come clean out of the socket and her arm was hanging there like a dead branch.
“You want me to fix that shoulder?” I asked, and she looked down, as if just realizing she had a second arm, and then back up at me, curious.
“I ain’t no doctor, but I seen my daddy do it to himself a time or two. He did it to me once,” I said, and the girl looked confused.
“See, we used to have this little ol’ corral and we’d break horses when I was a boy and they’d throw us about a dozen times a day and we’d end up beat and bruised and every now and then—”
“Shut the hell up, Caleb,” Shelby said and then turned toward the girl. “Where you from? Ain’t no towns we’ve seen.”
The girl ignored him and Shelby spit and it landed near her boots and I saw they were also too large for her, like the pants.
“Have it your way,” he said. “Don’t really matter where you’re from noways. Only thing matters is who you run off from and how muc
h they gonna pay to get you back.”
The girl tried to scramble to her feet but Shelby’s boot found her ribs and she crumpled down again.
“You ain’t gotta kick her,” I said. “And how you know she run off from somewhere?”
“Well, why in the hell else would she be out here in the middle of nowhere good trying to relieve us of our food and horses? I imagine there’s some old Mexican husband out there looking for her. Pretty little thing like that, I can also reckon he’ll be willing to shell out a little re-ward money to the fellers who hand her over.”
“But we don’t know where she’s from.”
“That’s true enough. Guess she’ll just have to ride with us until someone comes a-huntin’ her. If nobody shows, we may be able to sell her to a whorehouse in San Antonio. Either way, she ought to be worth a little spending money.”
The dry, brittle catclaws rustled and cracked and the wind that came down to touch my face was hot. The girl stared at me and her eyes bore into my stomach and I felt the black sky crawling across the desert and it made me sick.
“Somebody looking for you?” I asked her, and she swiveled her head to each side as if she were surrounded by ghosts who warned her not to tell.
“She ain’t gonna talk. Probably don’t speak no English anyhow,” Shelby said. “Now get her hands tied and help her up on my horse.”
I didn’t move. We stared at each other, the girl and me, and I recognized her face as my own and we were, both of us, scared of the coming storm and I could see it in my dreams and sense it on the open plains but what I had only imagined she had actually touched. Touched it and felt its teeth and they were sharp enough to bleed the world.
The girl’s eyes went wide and thunder tore through my chest and I stepped back.
“Caleb, get her goddamned hands tied.”
She shook her head as I moved toward her and her lips were moving and I stopped, inches from her face.
“He’s coming,” she whispered. “He’s coming.”
“Caleb!”
I blinked hard and took a breath and reached for the girl and she tried again to run. I wrapped her up and held her, my arms around her chest, and I thought maybe she was crying but she wasn’t and instead she just kept saying it over and over: “He’s coming.”
“Hold still, and let me fix that arm,” I said into her ear as I took hold of her shoulder. I could feel the socket and the bone out of place. We both closed our eyes.
12
The child rode with his arms around Tad and his cheek pressed against the older boy’s back. The junipers followed the dry creek bed through the draw and the sounds and colors of life suggested the water nearby, but the mesquite that filled the sandy wash grew too thick and the riders turned the horses back out toward the desert to find a way around. They climbed to the halfway point of the south-facing ridge and saw the arroyo below and pointed to the trail leading down.
The rock shelf from the lonely ridge came down to meet the trees, which made for the riders a welcomed windbreak. They all—man, woman, and child—set about their routine and with the efficiency of those who’d been at such work over the course of many undertakings, as must be the case for any thing or things in life which are to ever be deemed routine in the first place.
At the finishing of the camp, Charlotte and the child walked with her horse toward the water, Tad sat and stared into the fire, and Randall found himself admiring his mount in a way he had not anticipated.
Randall knew naught of horses save that little which he read, which was mostly exaggerated accounts of deeds turned legend, and he placed such stories below him as the fantastical accounts of cowboys and booksellers. But as he numbered backward the days and the riding and there was Mara, still profound in her regality, he thought again of these tales and at least entertained the idea of their truthfulness. He spoke to Mara and her ears flicked and his voice he thought must be a novelty as little of it had been given to her, and he apologized for this and other things and ran his hand along her neck and felt the strength of her breathing. His hand moved down to her shoes and the stout Arabian lifted her foot back in the learned way and Randall was remiss it had not been he who taught her. The shoe was still intact, but even a man who knew nothing would name it overworn and he found the same of the other three and suddenly there was a great indebtedness on his heart and again he asked the horse’s forgiveness as if she were God Herself.
“You reckon that priest went to Heaven?” Tad asked, interrupting his admiration.
“It’s not my place to say,” Randall answered.
“You believe in God, Mr. Dawson?”
“I do. Don’t you, son?”
“I don’t rightly know. I guess so.”
Randall studied the boy as he poked at the fire and seemed to pay no mind to the heaviness of the subject or the future of his soul.
“Tad, have you been baptized?”
“I ain’t real sure. Daddy took me to a woman’s house and dunked me in her bathtub and said I was baptized, but he was drunk so I don’t know if that counts. I imagine he don’t know the right words to say, anyhow.”
The boy held his hand over the flame as long as he could, then jerked it back and shook it and appeared disappointed, as if in a competition with himself or the ghosts around him.
“Would you like me to baptize you?” Randall asked him.
“Did you baptize Harry?”
Randall smiled. “I sure did.”
“Let me think on it a spell.”
Randall nodded and they set for a time.
“What about Old Man Simpson?” Tad asked.
Randall shook his head, “Who is Old Man Simpson?”
“Old Man Simpson was this fella lived in a little cabin outside of Longpine. Daddy used to take me there and have me set with the old man’s granddaughter while he and her momma went off and did what there was to do. Daddy would call it playing cards, but I knew it wasn’t that. One time the little girl, I think her name was Mary, or Martha, she opened the door and we could see her momma down on her knees and—”
“Tad,” Randall cut him off.
“Right. Anyhow, Old Man Simpson was deaf and dumb, so he couldn’t hear nothing. Blind too, since birth, and he just set there in a rocker moving his lips while me and that little girl scooted a few playthings ’cross the floor.”
Randall waited for more, but Tad was back at his hand-burning game.
“I don’t follow.”
“Well,” the boy snatched his hand back and shook it. “If he can’t see the Bible, and he can’t hear no preacher, how’s Old Man Simpson gonna know about God and Heaven and the like?”
“Surely in such a case, the Lord would make an exception.”
“What’s an exception?”
“It means not following the rules, but only in certain situations.”
“So God gets to break His own rules?”
“Well, to an extent I guess that’s right,” Randall said, wondering if that was indeed correct.
“That don’t seem fair.”
“It isn’t about fair. It’s about faith—trusting in God and trusting He’ll do the right thing.”
“But sometimes He doesn’t.”
“He works in mysterious ways, but that doesn’t mean He’s wrong.”
Tad poked at the fire and again looked disappointed, and Randall could not be sure if it was his answer or the dying embers that had upset the boy, and long after their talk both of them, man and child, would think about what was said.
Charlotte returned with the young boy who went and sat next to Tad. The older boy rolled his eyes.
Randall stared at the woman and took in her beauty—the leanness of her arms and the sharp edges contouring her face.
“Something wrong?” she asked and Randall shook his head, embarrassed, and looked away.
<
br /> “So, uh, I was thinking,” Randall said, hoping to deflect the awkwardness, “Charlotte, you know Texas. These men are headed there. Where will they go?”
“Texas is a big place, Mr. Dawson,” she replied. “But if they don’t want no part of the Mexican fight that’s coming, I imagine they’ll cross all the way through New Mexico, come into Texas around Gaines or Andrews County. That’s the track I’d take, ’less we hear different.”
“And you know the land in these places?”
“I know it a little bit. My brother was killed in Shafter Lake. A bunch of white men stripped him naked and strung him up.”
“Good God.”
“If you say so.”
“Were you there?”
“I was,” she nodded. “Hiding like a coward. The next morning I ran off to Carlsbad. Never looked back.”
“I’m sorry to hear about your brother. But there was nothing you could have done.”
“Don’t speak, Mr. Dawson, on matters you don’t know a thing about.”
“My apologies.”
She waved him off.
“Aw, I just get touchy,” she said. “It’s a good thing you did, taking that boy. Child like that shouldn’t be alone in this world.”
“We couldn’t leave him,” Randall said, confused by the praise.
“Some would have. A lot even.”
“That’s awful. I can’t believe that to be the truth.”
“Well,” she said, “that’s what makes you a good man.”
Randall blushed.
“Y’all quit your dadgum courting,” Tad said, crossing his arms. “Ain’t neither one of you any good at it and I’m trying to get some shut-eye.”
“Pumpkin,” the child said, crossing his arms as well.
13
We rode east from the stream, nudging the horses out of the valley at a slow pace and the girl sat atop Shelby’s horse, him behind her, arms wrapped around her waist to handle the reins. I didn’t like it, seeing them like that, and I wasn’t sure why and I didn’t like that either.