“If Miguel says you did, you did.”
“Stop right there, you old fart. Don’t make me take you in, too,” Moon said.
“Like to bully old men and women, do you?”
Moon had his hand on his pistol, but I knew he wasn’t going to draw. He never had that much guts. I fumbled my Smith out of its holster and he threw up one arm to block the blow I aimed at his head. He cried out when the pistol cracked him across the forearm, and I made another swing and felt the pistol barrel connect with his cheekbone. He fell like I’d stoned him, but tried to get up on one knee. I hit him over the top of the head, driving him down on his belly. My breath was coming in ragged gasps, or I might have hit him again.
Their horses were acting up again, and I slapped the deputy’s horse across the nose with my hat before he could pull on me. I don’t know if he was going to, but I was outnumbered and not taking any chances. The real truth was, I was mad and didn’t give a damn.
I should have killed them both, but one of the first things to go with old age is your wind; I was too shaky to hit anything with my pistol.
“Get this sack of guts out of here,” I said. “I ever see you on this place again and I’ll bury the both of you.”
The deputy had almost fallen off his horse, but he had righted himself. I covered him with my pistol and kicked Moon in the seat of the pants. “That’s my daughter-in-law there. She or her father tells me you’ve been around here again, and I’ll hunt you down. Hear me?”
The deputy held Moon’s horse while Moon struggled into his saddle. He could barely hold his head up. I had hit him hard that last time. Served him right.
“You old . . .” Moon started to cuss me, but I let off a round into the sky and their horses turned tail and ran for town.
I holstered my pistol and leaned over with my hands on my knees. The mad was leaving me and I felt old and tuckered out. Miguel had got up and was standing by me, watching those sorry excuses for lawmen run their horses down the road.
“You make trouble for yourself,” Miguel said.
“Moon Lowe never was worth a squirt of horse piss,” I said and then remembered Carmelita was standing in the doorway. “Pardon me, Carmelita. I forgot you were standing there.”
“That’s all right,” she said, and she was smiling at me and at those lawmen racing away.
Her smiling at me like that was the first really good feeling I had in a long time. Tired or not, it felt like giving Moon a whipping had taken ten years off me. It was probably going to cause me trouble, but it was worth it.
Chapter Forty-nine
Juanita was calling me to supper, but I wanted to sit a little longer and my chair on the porch felt good. I could see some of my cattle grazing in the pasture closest to the house. Good cattle—years of picking the best and grubbing and sweating and slaving away to build the ranch. Call me a proud old fool, but I was going to leave a mark in the world. People would remember that I did what I said I was going to do.
None of them understood that. Not Gunn, not Hamish, not Joseph. There were things I wished I could go back and tell them, but that might not have done any good. You can’t put some things to words. If they couldn’t sit with me on that porch seeing it all and understand, then there was nothing I could say to explain it. I wasn’t perfect, but I did my best. Kept moving and trying.
“Come inside,” Juanita called from inside the house.
I could smell the good meal on the table, but what I was looking at pleased me more. A cow bawled out there somewhere, and for a second it put me back thirty years or more. I could hear more cattle bawling and smell the dust rolling up beneath a trail herd, and me worried sick that there wouldn’t be a market up in Kansas for them and not knowing what I was going to do to feed those boys or take care of them with their mother dead and us without a dime to try anything else. Worried and excited at the same time, and loving it all. Knowing I belonged and that I was building something special. That’s all I ever wanted—not money so much as building something special.
That sun was like a bonfire on the horizon and like it was fighting to keep from sinking. Sometimes you see a sunset or a certain way the clouds look it’s so special you want someone there to show it to. And sometimes you’re content to keep it to yourself.
I remembered another such sunset when Gunn was lying in one of those jacales on a buffalo robe with his arm stump infected and me not knowing if he was going to live or die. Sitting and waiting and hoping. Hamish and Joseph scared and too shook up to talk unless I forced them to. José was gone to Mexico to try and hire his friends and there was nobody but me and the boys.
I closed my eyes and I could see the sun through my eyelids like an orange blanket and feel the warmth of that color hitting me in the face. And then I was sitting in the door of the jacal again, listening to Gunn babble in his fever when I saw Indians in the distance, a line of them passing between us and the sun, the squaws’ peeled travois poles sticking up above the horses’ backs like white bones. I thought those Indians had come to kill me for what I’d done and take my boys with them. But the warriors only sat their horses and watched the jacal until dark, and then they rode on. I sat up all night and listened and waited for them to come back.
Did you know that most of the Plains Indians had only one word for anyone outside their tribe? “Enemy.” And if you translated their words for themselves it usually meant something like “the people.” Savages, yes, a hundred years behind civilization, but they had that right. Your tribe was what mattered. Family. You looked after your own and those with a name. Your name. Dollarhyde.
That’s what happens when you live too long. You spend more time in the past, until you can’t tell which is which. I shook off the old memories and put my hands on the arms of my chair, intending to get up before Juanita started scolding me. The skin on the backs of my hands was liver spotted and paper-thin and there were red little bruises and tears that I couldn’t remember doing. Where did the years go?
I caught a glint of sunlight on something down by the bunkhouse, and strained to see what it was. Who in the hell was down there? Maybe Gunn was back. It was about time. We had work to do, and that baby of his wasn’t going to wait much longer to enter the world.
Something shoved me back in my chair. I felt funny—so light I didn’t weigh anything. I tried to push up again but my boot heels slipped out from under me and my legs wouldn’t work. Juanita was screaming. She never got that mad when I was late for supper. I started to answer her, but I couldn’t speak. There was something wet all over the front of my shirt. Blood. Well, it wasn’t the way I had expected it. Never is.
I tried and won’t be judged for it. Never quit and gave it my best. If...
PART IV
GUNN
Chapter Fifty
“When did you get back?” Hamish knocked the snow from his hat as best he could before he entered the room.
“Last night. I was going to come see you earlier today, but I’m kind of under the weather.”
Hamish glanced around the room. He didn’t say anything about it, but I knew what he was thinking. I had put in real windows before I left for Wyoming, but little spurts of snow were blowing in through the cracks and gaps between the window frame and the picket-and-mud wall. Melting snow had run down the hot stovepipe and turned the packed-dirt floor under the stove into a small mud hole. I watched the water slowly soaking through and working its way across the rug under our feet. Hamish wouldn’t have his family live in such a place, only his no-gumption brother.
“What happened to your leg?” he asked.
I shifted my casted leg on the stool in front of me and rearranged my blanket to cover it. “Horse fell on me.”
“Why didn’t you send word to me? I could have picked you up instead of Carmelita having to travel in this.”
“Figured you were out campaigning.”
“I lost the election.”
“What have you done about Papa?”
“We
buried him. I think half the cowboys and ranchers in Texas showed up for the funeral. The governor even gave a speech about him. I would have wired you, but nobody knew where you were.”
“What about Moon Lowe?”
“We can’t prove he did it.”
Carmelita went behind the curtain that divided our sleeping quarters from the rest of the one-room jacal. She acted like she was going to check on Pancho, but I knew she would be listening behind the curtain.
“Carmelita said that Papa was shot the day after he pistol-whipped Moon,” I said.
“True, but that still doesn’t prove anything.” Hamish looked tired. “Motive perhaps, but circumstantial at best. No court is going to convict him without more evidence, especially since he’s the sheriff.”
“I could care less about the court.”
“Moon has got an alibi.”
“I suppose it’s his father.”
“No, some woman over at Petrolia says he was with her that evening.”
Another one of the coughing spells overtook me, and I doubled over and covered my mouth.
“You’re sick.”
“Just a cough.”
“He walked here in the middle of the night,” Carmelita said through the curtain.
“You walked all the way from Destiny in the middle of a snowstorm with a cast on your leg?”
“Rode in on the night freight run, and the livery wouldn’t open up to rent me a horse. It’s only six or seven miles, and I figured a stretch of the legs wouldn’t hurt me.”
“You could have got a hotel, instead of once again trying to prove how pigheaded and obstinate you can be.”
“You and those big words.”
“I don’t know why I trouble with you.”
Carmelita joined us again and picked up a damp cloth and dabbed my forehead with it. “Tiene muy calor. Tiene fiebre.” You’re burning up.
“What did she say?” Hamish asked.
“She said I don’t have a fever.”
“Your face is as red as a beet.”
“This chair is too close to the stove.”
“If you go after Moon you’re going to end up back in prison. You two are about to have a baby, and you’ve got that little boy back there in his bed to think about.”
I had to fight through another round of coughing. My lungs rattled and my voice was raspy when I could finally speak again. “Papa’s shot off his porch and that’s all you can think of?”
“I’ve talked to the Rangers. They’re checking into things.”
“This ain’t none of their business. It’s family business.”
“I’m going to get a doctor.”
“Carmelita’s taking care of me.” The quack sawbones up in Wyoming had almost killed me trying to set my leg, and I’d had my fill of doctors.
I knew without looking that Carmelita was standing behind me and shaking her head. Hamish put his coat and hat on and started out the door, and Carmelita’s fingers dug into my shoulder when I tried to get up to stop him.
Chapter Fifty-one
The snow got worse and it kept the doctor from making it out to the house for two days. He diagnosed me with pneumonia when he finally did get there. I was feeling too poorly to argue when they decided to move me up to the big house. Juanita wanted me to move my family in with her anyway, claiming that she needed the company and the house was too big for her to take care of alone. I knew a plot when I saw one. Juanita had been taking care of that house alone for years, but Carmelita took her side, for our soon-to-be family of four wasn’t going to fit well in our jacal down in Poquito.
I lay in the bed for days, my lungs so full of phlegm and fluid it felt like I had a rock on my chest. And I had fitful, crazy dreams.
Carmelita and Juanita fussed over me like two hens, until I felt fit enough to get up the seventh day. I heard Tiffany’s voice from the kitchen as I was coming down the stairs. I made a slow go of it with my crutch and I paused at the foot of the stairs to catch my wind. Tiffany was okay—a little too quick to point out how barbaric and backward we Texans were, but okay for all of that—but I didn’t relish having to socialize with her feeling like I did. I didn’t want to talk to anyone and I never minded being alone.
I noticed the photograph on a little table under the mirror on the wall at the end of the banister and picked it up. I had rarely been inside the big house since it was built, other than to take an occasional meal in the dining room with Papa. The bunkhouse was where I had my meals back when the ranch was in its prime, and I had batched and done my own cooking there until Carmelita and I were married.
So it was no wonder that I hadn’t noticed the photograph before. The tintype was faded, but I recognized it. It was the one taken by that crazy Swede in Abilene the first year we went up the trail.
I studied the three faces staring back at me—Hamish sitting in his chair, with Joseph and me standing to either side of him, so long ago that we almost looked like strangers. I looked so pale and thin, with my eyes two times too big for my face. And where had I got that silly buckskin jacket and sash around my waist? I remembered thinking that day what a full-grown man I was, but I saw nothing in that photograph but a scared kid trying to turn slightly away from the camera so that his missing arm wasn’t so plain to see.
Over time, I got used to my arm being gone, except for sometimes waking up at night and feeling it as if it were still there. I couldn’t remember the last time I had dreamed I still had my arm, but I never did get over people looking at my stump. Until I married Carmelita, I never took my shirt off in front of anyone, even all the whores I’d bedded over the years. I’d rather stand in the middle of a crowded street with my pants around my ankles than to reveal the scarred stump left where my arm used to be. I don’t know why it shames me so.
Nobody knows that, except for those few whores, who didn’t think anything of a randy cowboy being in too big of a hurry to take off his shirt. Half those cowboys didn’t even take off their boots. It wasn’t something I talked about. Hamish wanted to talk about everything, like it made it better or solved something. I don’t like people to see my scars.
The Swede photographer was better than I thought he was at the time. He’d exactly captured the way Joseph’s eyes looked—caught it so that it was like Joseph was staring right at me then. I put the picture facedown on the table and left it.
“Look what the Devil drug in,” Tiffany said. She was sitting at the kitchen table with their youngest on her lap. The girl was the spitting image of her, and a pretty little button. Papa used to say that you could see the good breeding in Tiffany at a glance, as if he could judge her like a horse or a cow.
“The prodigal son has returned, even if a little worse for the wear,” I said.
Carmelita pulled out a chair for me while Juanita took a plate of leftovers from the oven, which they must have saved for me. From the sunlight coming through the window it was noon or later.
“You look better,” Carmelita said.
I propped my crutch up against the table and took up a cup of coffee. Better, maybe, but I still didn’t have any appetite.
“You should eat,” Carmelita said.
Mexican women aren’t happy unless they see their men eating and they’ll fatten you like a veal calf in a crate if you aren’t careful. Carmelita’s belly was so big that she kept one hand under it to ease the discomfort, and her other hand braced against her lower back as she hovered over me. I wondered if it would be a boy or a girl.
“You haven’t had anything but a little broth or soup in days,” she added.
“I’m not hungry.” I was watching the two boys playing on the porch. I could see them through one of the windows. Carmelita’s boy—she got mad if I didn’t call him “our” boy, but I hadn’t got used to that—was shorter than Hamish’s son, but they were close to the age that Hamish and I were when we first came to the ranch.
I never met Carmelita’s first husband, but from what I can gather he was a no-good that b
eat on her some and ran off and left her when the boy was still an infant. Some border sheriff shot him for stealing horses, and that was the end of him.
The boy must have taken after Carmelita. He was a good kid, but I didn’t know what you said to a boy that age. Hamish seemed to have the knack for it and his children adored him, but I was at a loss. Carmelita wanted me to spend more time with Pancho. He wasn’t my own flesh and blood, but I was what he had. I thought maybe I would buy the kid a horse. A boy needs a horse.
The women tried to talk with me, but my mind was on other things. I finished my coffee and took up my crutch and went to the porch. The two boys almost knocked me over, chasing each other through the front door.
Papa’s chair was still there, looking no different than ever, except that it made me feel empty. I hadn’t felt so empty in a long time.
I noticed a dark spot on the porch boards that might have been a bloodstain. Somebody had tried to scrub it away, but it was still there. I looked down the hill and tried to imagine where the shooter had been.
I don’t know how long I stood there before I recognized that Juanita was in the doorway behind me. The coughing hit me again, and when I was through I had to sit in Papa’s chair. The cold air felt good on my bare toes sticking out of my cast. Never trust a half-broke horse on slippery ground. Story of my life—slippery ground and one wreck after another.
I thought Juanita might sit with me. She obviously had something on her mind, but she stayed leaning against the doorjamb. You wouldn’t have looked at her and guessed she was older than me. Prettiest woman I ever saw.
The silence between us felt as awkward as ever. I cleared my throat, but could think of nothing to say to her. How long had it been?
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