The Stories of Richard Bausch

by Richard Bausch

  I should explain this last, since it figures pretty prominently in what happened that autumn I turned twenty-one: One day late in the previous winter a short, squat old bird who called himself the Right Reverend Bagley rode into the valley on the back of a donkey and within a week’s time was a regular sight on Sunday, preaching from the upstairs gallery of the saloon. What happened was, he walked into Grafton’s, ordered a whiskey and drank it down, then turned and looked at the place: five or six cowhands, the cattle baron’s old henchmen, and a whore that Grafton had brought back with him from the East that summer. (Nobody was really with anybody; it was early evening. The sun hadn’t dropped below the mountains yet.) Anyway, Bagley turned at the bar and looked everybody over, and then he announced in a friendly but firm tone that he considered himself a man of the gospel, and it was his opinion that this town was in high need of some serious saviorizing. I wasn’t there, but I understand that Grafton, from behind the bar, asked him what he meant, and that Bagley began to explain in terms that fairly mesmerized everyone in the place. (It is true that the whore went back East around this time, but nobody had the courage—or the meanness—to ask Grafton whether or not there was a connection.)

  But as I was saying, the town wasn’t much, and it wasn’t going to be much. By now everybody had pretty well accepted this. We were going on with our lives, the children were growing up and leaving, and even some of the older ones, the original homesteaders who had stood and risked themselves for all of it alongside Joe Starrett, who had withstood the pressure of the cattlemen, had found reasons to move on. It’s simple enough to say why: the winters were long and harsh; the ground, as I said, was stingy; there were better things beyond the valley (we had heard, for instance, that in San Francisco people were riding electric cars to the tops of buildings; Grafton claimed to have seen one in an exhibit in New York).

  I was restless. It was just Mother and me in the cabin, and we weren’t getting along too well. She’d gone a little crazy with Joe Starrett’s death; she wasn’t even fifty yet, but she looked at least fifteen years older than that. In the evenings she wanted me with her, and I wanted to be at Grafton’s. Most of the men in the valley were spending their evenings there. We did a lot of heavy drinking back in those days. A lot of people stayed drunk most of the time during the week. Nobody felt very good in the mornings. And on Sundays we’d go aching and sick back to Grafton’s, the place of our sinful pastimes, to hear old Bagley preach. Mother, too. The smell of that place on a Sunday—the mixture of perfume and sweat and whiskey, and the deep effluvium of the spittoons, was enough to make your breathing stop at the bottom of your throat.

  Life was getting harder all the time, and we were not particularly deserving of anything different, and we knew it.

  Sometimes the only thing to talk about was the gunfight, though I’m willing to admit that I had contributed to this; I was, after all, the sole witness, and I did discover over the years that I liked to talk about it. It was history, I thought. A story—my story. I could see everything that I remembered with all the clarity of daytime sight, and I believed it. The principal actors, through my telling, were fixed forever in the town’s lore—if you could call it lore. Three of them were still buried on the hill outside town, including Wilson, the gunfighter who was so fast on the draw and who was shot in the blazing battle at Grafton’s by the quiet stranger who had ridden into our valley and changed it forever.

  He came back that autumn, all those years later, and, as before, I was the first to see him coming, sitting atop that old paint of his, though of course it wasn’t the same horse. Couldn’t have been. Yet it was old. As a matter of harsh fact, it was, I would soon find out, a slightly swaybacked mare with a mild case of lung congestion. I was mending a fence out past the creek, standing there in the warm sun, muttering to myself, thinking about going to town for some whiskey, and I saw him far off, just a slow-moving speck at the foot of the mountains. Exactly like the first time. Except that I was older, and maybe half as curious. I had pretty much taken the attitude of the valley: I was reluctant to face anything new—suspicious of change, afraid of the unpredictable. I looked off at him as he approached and thought of the other time, that first time. I couldn’t see who it was, of course, and had no idea it would actually turn out to be him, and for a little aching moment I wanted it to be him—but as he was when I was seven; myself as I was then. The whole time back, and Joe Starrett chopping wood within my hearing, a steady man, good and strong, standing astride his own life, ready for anything. I stood there remembering this, some part of me yearning for it, and soon he was close enough to see. I could just make him out. Or rather, I could just make out the pearl-handled six-shooter. Stepping away from the fence, I waited for him, aching, and then quite suddenly I wanted to signal him to turn around, find another valley. I wasn’t even curious. I knew, before I could distinguish the changed shape of his body and the thickened features of his face, that he would be far different from my memory of him, and I recalled that he’d left us with the chance for some progress, the hope of concerning ourselves with the arts of peace. I thought of my meager town, the years of idleness in Grafton’s store. I wasn’t straight or tall, particularly. I was just a dirt farmer with no promise of much and no gentleness or good wishes anymore, plagued with a weakness for whiskey.

  Nothing could have prepared me for the sight of him.

  The shock of it took my breath away. His buckskins were frayed and torn, besmirched with little maplike continents of salt stains and sweat. He was huge around the middle—his gunbelt had been stretched to a small homemade hole he’d made in it so he could still wear it—and the flesh under his chin was swollen and heavy. His whole face seemed to have dropped and gathered around his jaws, and when he lifted his hat I saw the bald crown of his head through his blowing hair. Oh, he’d gone very badly to seed. “You wouldn’t be—” he began.

  “It’s me all right,” I said.

  He shifted a little in the saddle. “Well.”

  “You look like you’ve come a long way,” I said.

  He didn’t answer. For a moment, we simply stared at each other. Then he climbed laboriously down from the nag and stood there holding the reins.

  “Where does the time go,” he said, after what seemed a hopeless minute.

  Now I didn’t answer. I looked at his boots. The toes were worn away: it was all frayed, soiled cloth there. I felt for him. My heart went out to him. And yet as I looked at him I knew that more than anything, more than my oldest childhood dream and ambition, I didn’t want him there.

  “Is your father—” he hesitated, looked beyond me.

  “Buried over yonder,” I said.

  “And Marian?” He was holding his hat in his hands.

  “Look,” I said. “What did you come back for, anyway?”

  He put the hat back on. “Marian’s dead, too?”

  “I don’t think she’ll be glad to see you,” I said. “She’s settled into a kind of life.”

  He looked toward the mountains, and a little breeze crossed toward us from the creek. It rippled the water there and made shadows on it, then reached us, moved the hair over his ears. “I’m not here altogether out of love,” he said.

  I thought I’d heard a trace of irony in his voice. “Love?” I said. “Really?”

  “I mean love of the valley,” he told me.

  I didn’t say anything. He took a white handkerchief out of his shirt—it was surprisingly clean—and wiped the back of his neck with it, then folded it and put it back.

  “Can I stay here for a few days?” he asked.

  “Look,” I said. “It’s complicated.”

  “You don’t want me to stay even a little while?”

  I said nothing for a time. We were just looking at each other across the short distance between us. “You can come up to the cabin,” I told him. “But I need some time to prepare my mother for this. I don’t want—and you don’t want—to just be riding in on her.”

&nbs
p; “I understand,” he said.

  Mother had some time ago taken to sitting in the window of the cabin with my old breech-loading rifle across her lap. When she’d done baking the bread and tending the garden, when she’d finished milking the two cows and churning the butter, when the eggs were put up and the cabin was swept and clean and the clothes were all hanging on the line in the yard, she’d place herself by the window, gun cocked and ready to shoot. Maybe two years earlier, some poor, lost, starved, lone Comanche had wandered down from the north and stopped his horse at the edge of the creek, looking at us, his hands visored over his eyes. He was easily ninety years old, and when he turned to make his way west along the creek, on out of sight, Mother took my rifle off the wall, loaded it, and set herself up by the window.

  “Marian,” I said. “It was just an old brave looking for a good place to die.”

  “You let me worry about it, son.”

  Well, for a while that worked out all right, in fact; it kept her off me and my liquid pursuits down at Grafton’s. She could sit there and take potshots at squirrels in the brush all day if she wanted to, I thought. But in the last few months it had begun to feel dangerous approaching the cabin at certain hours of the day and night. You had to remember that she was there, and sometimes, coming home from Grafton’s, I’d had enough firewater to forget. I had her testimony that I had nearly got my head blown off more than once, and once she had indeed fired upon me.

  This had happened about a week before he came back into the valley, and I felt it then as a kind of evil premonition—I should say I believe I felt it that way, since I have the decades of hindsight now, and I do admit that the holocaust which was coming to us might provide anyone who survived it with a sense that all sorts of omens and portents preceded the event. In any case, the night Marian fired on me, I was ambling sleepily along, drunk, barely able to hold on to the pommel, and letting the horse take me home. We crossed the creek and headed up the path to the house. The shot nicked me above the elbow—a tiny cut of flesh that the bullet took out as it went singing off into the blackness behind me. The explosion, the stinging crease of the bullet just missing bone, and the shriek of my horse sent me flying into the water of the creek.

  “I got you, you damn savage Indian,” Marian yelled from the cabin.

  I lay there in the cold water and reflected that my mother had grown odd. “Hey!” I called, staying low, hearing her put another shell into the breech. “It’s me! It’s your son!”

  “I got a repeating rifle here,” she lied. She’d reloaded and was aiming again. I could actually hear it in her voice. “I don’t have any children on the place.”

  There is no sound as awful and startling as the sound of a bullet screaming off rock, when you know it is aimed earnestly at you.

  “Wait!” I yelled. “Goddammit, Marian, it’s me! For God’s sake, it’s your own family!”

  “Who?”

  “Your son,” I said. “And you’ve wounded me.”

  “I don’t care what he’s done,” she said and fired again. The bullet buzzed overhead like a terribly purposeful insect.

  “Remember how you didn’t want any more guns in the valley?” I shouted. “You remember that, Mother? Remember how much you hate them?”

  She said, “Who is that down there?”

  “It’s me,” I said. “Good Christ, I’m shot.”

  She fired again. This one hit the water behind me and went off skipping like a piece of slate somebody threw harder than a thing can be thrown. “Blaspheming marauders!” she yelled.

  “It’s me!” I screamed. “I’m sick. I’m coming from Grafton’s. I’m shot in the arm.”

  I heard her reload, and then there was a long silence.

  “Marian?” I said, keeping low. “Would you shoot your own son dead?”

  “How do I know it’s you?”

  “Well, who else would it be at this hour?”

  “You stay where you are until I come down and see, or I’ll blow your head off,” she said.

  So I stayed right where I was, in the cold running creek, until she got up the nerve to approach me with her lantern and her cocked rifle. Only then did she give in and tend to me, her only son, nearly killed, hurting with a wound she herself had inflicted.

  “You’ve been to Grafton’s drinking that whiskey,” she said, putting the lantern down.

  “You hate guns,” I told her. “Right?”

  “I’m not letting you sleep it off in the morning, either.”

  “Just don’t shoot at me,” I said.

  But she had already started up on something else. That was the way her mind had gone over the years, and you never knew quite how to take her.

  And so that day when he rode up, I told him to stay out of sight and went carefully back up to the cabin. “Mother,” I said. “Here I come.”

  “In here,” she said from the barn. She was churning butter, and she simply waited for me to get to the window and peer over the sill. I did so, the same way I almost always did now: carefully, like a man in the middle of a gunfight.

  “What?” she said. “What?”

  I had decided during my stealthy course up the path that my way of preparing her for his return would be to put her out of the way of it, if I could. Any way I could. She was sitting there in the middle of the straw-strewn floor with a floppy straw hat on her head as though the sun were beating down on her. Her hands looked so old, gripping the butter churn. “Mother,” I said. “The Reverend Bagley wants you to bring him some bread for Sunday’s communion.”

  “Who’s dead?”

  On top of everything else, of course, she’d begun to lose her hearing. I repeated myself, fairly shrieking it at her.

  “Bagley always wants that,” she said, looking away. “I take the bread over on Saturdays. This isn’t Saturday. You don’t need to yell.”

  “It’s a special request,” I said. “He needs it early this week.” If I could get her away from the cabin now, I could make some arrangements. I could find someplace else for our return visitor to stay. I could find out what he wanted, and then act on it in some way. But I wasn’t really thinking very clearly. Marian and old Bagley had been seeing each other for occasional Saturday and Sunday afternoon picnics, and some evenings, too. There could have been no communication between Bagley and me without Marian knowing about it. I stood there trying to think up some other pretext, confused by the necessity of explaining the ridiculous excuse for a pretext I had just used, and she came slowly to her feet, sighing, touching her back low, shaking her head, turning away from me.

  “Hitch the team up,” she said.

  It took a moment for me to realize that she’d actually believed me. “I can’t go with you,” I told her.

  “You don’t expect me to go by myself.” She wiped her hands on the front of her dress. “Go on. Hitch the team.”

  “All right,” I said. I knew there would be no arguing with her. She’d set herself to my lie, and once her mind was set you couldn’t alter or change it. Besides, I was leery of giving her too much time to ponder over things. I’d decided the best thing was to go along and deal with everything as it came. There was a chance I could get away after we got to town; I could hightail it back home and make some adjustment or some arrangement. “I have to tie off what I’m doing with the fence,” I told her. “You change, and I’ll be ready.”

  “You’re going to change?”

  “You change.”

  “You want me to change?”

  “You’ve got dirt all over the front of you.”

  She shook her head, lifted the dress a little to keep it out of the dust, and made her slow way across to the cabin. When she was inside, I tore over to the fence and found him sitting his horse, nodding, half dozing, his hat hanging from the pommel of his saddle, his sparse hair standing up in the wind. He looked a little pathetic.

  “Hey,” I said, a little louder than I had to, I admit.

  He tried to draw his pistol. The horse jumped
, stepped back, coughing. His hand missed the pearl handle, and then the horse was turning in a tight circle, stomping his hat where it had fallen, and he sat there holding on to the pommel, saying, “Whoa. Hold it. Damn. Whoa, will you?” When he got the horse calmed, I bent down and retrieved his hat.

  “Here,” I said. “Lord.”

  He slapped the hat against his thigh, sending off a small white puff of dust, then put it on. The horse turned again, so that now his back was to me.

  “For God’s sake,” I said. “Why don’t you get down off him?”

  “Damn spooky old paint,” he said, getting it turned. “Listen, boy, I’ve come a long way on him. I’ve slept on him and just let him wander where he wanted. I’ve been that hungry and that desperate.” The paint seemed to want to put him down as he spoke. I thought it might even begin to buck.

  “Look,” I said. “We need to talk. We don’t have a lot of time, either.”

  “I was hoping I could ride up to the cabin,” he said.

  I shook my head. “Out of the question.”

  “No?”

  “Not a chance,” I said.

  He got down. The paint coughed like an old sick man, stepped away from us, put its gray muzzle down in the saw grass by the edge of the water, and began to eat.

  “A little congestion,” he said.

  The paint coughed into the grass.

  “I can’t ride in?”

  “On that?”

  He looked down.

  “Look,” I said. “It would upset her. You might get your head shot off.” He stared at me. “Marian has a gun?”

  “Marian shoots before she asks questions these days,” I said.

  “What happened?” he wanted to know.

  “She got suspicious,” I said. “How do I know?” And I couldn’t keep the irritation out of my voice.

  He said nothing.

  “You can use the barn,” I told him. “But you have to wait until we leave, and you can’t let her see you. You’re just going to have to take my word for it.”