“Jesus, Marshall, is this a joke?”
Marshall moved toward Dunlop with one enormous step that amazed Gabriel with its suddenness. His hand swung up in a motion overtly threatening, but it was neither a punch nor a slap, just an indication that either could be pulled down from the heavens faster than a lightning strike. Dunlop fell silent, and Marshall completed the motion gently, closing his eyes and bringing his hand up to his own forehead and kneading it. “All things done will be undone, Dunlop. Never question that. But all things in their time.” He opened his eyes and spoke with a tension just restrained, a tension totally at odds with his words and thereby more sinister. “Now is not the time. Now is the time for Mexican whores at McKutcheon’s. Your horse is saddled—now mount up if you’re coming.” He turned away and walked off toward his horse.
Dunlop looked at Rollins, who returned the stare. Finally Rollins cursed and gathered up his things to go. Dallas thought the plan over for a second, then yanked on his horse’s reins, making the creature spin in a circle, saying, “Let’s get us some whores, then.” The Scot hesitated longer, walking to his horse only after all the others had mounted. He was on in one fluid motion, and once saddled, he regained his composure.
“What about the boys?” he asked.
Marshall studied the boys as if they’d been rendered visible only by Dunlop’s question. His gaze was hard and serious for a moment, this question challenging him more than any thus far in the morning. “Damned if I didn’t forget about them two. That is a bit of a pickle, ain’t it?” He looked at Caleb when he said this, but Caleb looked off, as if the answer were already settled in his mind and needed no further thought.
As his tone was friendly, James stepped forward and shared with the man some measure of his confusion over the sudden turn of events: their being let go and all, the accusations of theft and other such nonsense. He was confused to the core, though he didn’t doubt a wrong was being done and hoped that Marshall would include them in whatever venture he was next to attend to.
Marshall heard him out, head cocked to the side. When the boy had exhausted his words, Marshall spat out his cigarette and said, “Like I said, some pickle.” He dug around in his saddlebags and came up with a small object, a coin. He held it between his forefinger and thumb, aimed it at Gabriel, and flipped it out toward him in a high arc, the coin spinning over and over and catching the sun on one side and then the other and coming to rest on Gabriel’s palm. “There you go. That’s more than a month’s wages for your troubles. As for future work and the destiny of your lives, well . . . You all are probably better off quit of me, if I do say so myself. Wish you boys the best.” He touched his hat and spun his horse and rode away, kicking up dust, followed close behind by Caleb and Rollins and Dallas.
Dunlop’s horse pawed the ground, spurred to motion by the other horses’ departure. Dunlop calmed it and lingered with the boys. “Oh, this is so daft. It was a joke almost, those horses . . . Look, I don’t know what you’ll decide now. Could head straight back home if you wanted. It’s an easy path to follow, near dead north. But if you’re not ready to quit just yet, walk east here along the river. Just follow it. You’ll be at McKutcheon’s in two days’ time if you’re fast. Three at most. You might pick up some work there. Hell, we’ll be there ourselves, probably.” He looked after the horsemen. They were fast receding. He remembered something, turned round, and checked the bag he kept dangling from one of his rear saddle strings. He handed James a couple of strips of jerky. “I’m sorry, lads. I’d ride with you if I could, but I’ve got to make Marshall see some sense. Keep your wits about you. You two will be fine.” With that, he clucked his horse into motion and was off behind the others.
The two boys watched the men ride into the distance till they blended into the landscape and were lost. Gabriel again felt the earth flex around him. He dropped to one knee and studied the horizon, the ground beneath him, then the horizon again, as if one could give some meaning to the other. He saw his plan for the future slipping away. As his mind sought to hold on to it, he suddenly felt that he’d never had a true notion of his future as a cowboy. He could find no substance to it. It was all like a dream, a treacherous dream that had brought him so far from home and vanished with the passing of riders over the curve of the earth, leaving a world all too real.
“You get the feeling we’re in a heap of shit?” James asked.
Gabriel said that was exactly the feeling he had. He couldn’t have put it better himself.
ALL THAT DAY THE BOYS FOLLOWED THE RIVERBANK through a landscape of brittle gray grass with patches of soil lying bare to the southern sun. It had taken little under an hour to decide their course. They had first talked through the events of the morning several times, disagreeing about the reality of it, the reasons why, and the results, as if they could argue the facts and so change them. They considered the return route to the north, all those miles on foot, through the Indian territory, past those impoverished homesteads, and on to what? To questions and accusations and the naming of crimes Gabriel could see no way to deny. He had shoved the coin in his pocket and wondered aloud how far it was to this McKutcheon’s. James had needed no further prompting. He figured Pinkerd would near skin him alive for running off, and he didn’t favor that. So the two had set to walking.
Although they sighted not a single person that day, they rarely felt truly alone. Longhorns roamed the country in loose herds, seemingly wild. They surveyed the boys with disinterested eyes and kept up a constant movement with their short strides. The only sign of human contact upon them was the brands most of them wore across their hides, scorched acronyms for ranches Gabriel now felt he might never lay his eyes on.
James kept up a nearly constant stream of words: complaints about the state of his feet, descriptions of the warm spots already burning at his toes, questions about the wisdom of their decision, and grumblings about Marshall’s fickle nature. Gabriel tried to shut James out. He thought back to the chilly days of March. It was almost shocking to acknowledge the passing of weeks into months, spring into summer. Despite his wishes to the contrary, a portion of his life was slipping by in these western lands. Time did not conform to the whims of humans. It went on, as impartial and unending as the land around them, as callous as Marshall and Caleb and Rollins, men who would abandon them when the tides of their own fortunes changed.
That night they sheltered in a water-carved wash in the riverbank. They divided the jerky evenly and tore into it, washing it down with river water and discovering that this served only to stir their appetites further. Afterward, they sat huddled together like the primitive predecessors of humankind, at the mercy of the night and the creatures that roamed it. It was a strangely active evening, alive with insect calls and bird life, the scurrying of rodents. The river rippled by them, not with a clear sound but more as the indication of an almost silent motion, like an enormous reptile slithering past.
James complained of blisters and condemned walking as a foul invention. He talked about the East, about the hardships there and the troubles, as if he needed to remind himself of the things that had pushed him into this wash. He tried to find joy in these memories but could not. His tale of childhood pranks along the banks of the Chattahoochee River ended in the sighting of a dead body, a former human, bloated, decaying, and swirling gently in the water. He shook the tale off and started again, telling once more of his journey west and the things he saw along the way and the wild excitement that had moved him along. But this tale derailed when he remembered a man he’d met, on a Mississippi riverboat. The man was on his way to Nebraska with his family, but he had not escaped the South unharmed. While still on his home turf, he’d been accosted by whites angry at his pretensions, whites who hated so hard they couldn’t stand to be deprived of the target for their hatred and were growing frantic lest too many blacks quit the territory. They asked him was he heading west, and when he answered yes, they beat him soundly and took him up into the hinterlands of that count
ry and sawed off his hands with a bucksaw. They told him he was free to go west if he wanted, but the hands that had picked so many bushels of cotton were gonna stay right where they were conceived, in the grand old South.
“Can you believe that?”
“Yeah.”
“I know, but . . . Why would you ever even think of doing that to a person? Just why even think it up? People do some unholy crazy mischief, that’s the truth of it.”
Gabriel didn’t dispute it.
James shook his head; whether at people in general or at himself was not clear. “Why can’t I tell a proper story that don’t end in somebody dead or maimed?” He posed the question to the night and listened as it went on in its chorus, at no point answering him or even aware that it had been questioned. “You got any stories, Gabe?”
Gabriel said he didn’t. He knew only his own life, and none of that deserved retelling. He closed his eyes and told the other boy to do the same. “Let’s just go to sleep. Talking ain’t gonna help none.”
James did agree to try sleep, although he doubted he’d sleep a wink until his feet quit aching and he got some decent food in his belly and could stop worrying about rattlers and had a proper roof over his head, for that matter.
He so spoke, but his breathing had calmed into slumber ten minutes later, and it was Gabriel who lay awake. He reclined there in the darkness, listening to the world and thinking of his mother, touched anew by the shame of the distance between them. He watched her at the daily chores that she went to with such devotion, such joy, and eventually realized that when he thought of her, it was always at the homestead. He no longer imagined her back in the East, in city clothes or at work in the funeral parlor or entertaining guests in their home. When he tried to place her back there now, all he saw was the melancholy face of a woman walking in a dream of life. He saw eyes shadowed by resignation, motions tired from morning till night, a woman who smiled without smiling, laughed without laughter. He drifted into sleep on the verge of a realization that his waking mind had yet to accept.
Gabriel awoke with James shaking him and staring wide-eyed and fearful into his face. “Listen. You hear that?”
It took Gabriel a second to sort out the sounds, but only a second. A pack of coyotes had gathered on the bank above them. They were no more than a few feet away but were out of sight above the embankment. The boys could hear their breathing and sense the light touch of their paws on the earth. The coyotes sniffed and snarled and called to each other, their cries a shrill cacophony without structure.
Into this came another creature. It moved with greater bulk, with slower steps, pressing more weight into the ground. Around it the smaller canines scurried and whined. The images Gabriel conjured of this beast sent his blood scorching through his veins: some demon dog, an enormous deity of fur and fangs, with a snout so long as to be primeval, the saws of its teeth like hungry demons in their own right. This creature had a greater voice as well, one that it lifted to the night like the deep and painful music of all that is carnivorous. It rang in Gabriel’s head as if it were the meaning of sound and the embodiment of life, and for a moment there was no more to life or death than the howl from that unseen creature. When it finally faded, an answering call came back across the night.
James grabbed Gabriel’s arm again. Both boys trembled, and neither could have moved if he had wanted to. So they remained, awaiting death and afraid to believe their ears as the calls faded and became a distant chorus. Gabriel listened. James’s teeth chattered. The river moved past them in liquid silence, occasionally gurgling as a rip hit the surface. They were alone once more. Gabriel’s heartbeat seemed the loudest thing on the prairie that evening, save for the howl of whatever creature had stood above them. Neither boy spoke, but both prayed for the morning, when they could get up and walk again.
THE MOTHER STRUGGLED EACH DAY with the question of when to be silent and when to speak. She knew that the uncle’s intentions were good and that in this place boys must become men very quickly. But she never liked the way her youngest son looked carrying a gun. She watched him walk across the fields and found something wrong in it, something foreign. She knew that he was different from other men, softer on the inside, kinder, better. That’s why it seemed so strange that he carried a rifle dangling at his side, or that he came home with the dead shells of rabbits and prairie dogs slung over his shoulder. She couldn’t help thinking that he was play-acting. This wasn’t him. He was someone different. He was the boy who had once found a baby bird and fed it milky bread with a toothpick and slept with it in a box beside his pillow and cried for days when it gave up its life. That was her second son, so how could that boy be the one she saw before her now?
She asked, and yet she knew the answer. It was the goodness in him, his need to do right and work hard and take upon his shoulders the burdens he could. She loved him for this, much more than she ever told him. And because of this she feared what this life would make of him. She thought how cruel it was for a mother to give part of herself to these boys, how cruel for them to become men just like other men, to leave and disappear and so map the world.
But of these things she didn’t speak. She took the carcasses from him and thanked him for his gifts. She set the creatures down on the board, slit them just so with her long knife, and peeled off their hides. She tended the fire, gutted the animals, and stripped the meat from the bones, seasoned the flesh and sewed it into thick cornmeal pies. As she did all this, she prayed. She asked that her oldest son hear her and know the love she felt for him. She asked God to protect him. She challenged him to do better with this son than he had with the boy’s father. Let him live. Bring him home. Leave him a boy a little longer. Take him not unto thee, for although thy love is infinite, mine is a mother’s. Mine is a mother’s love, without judgment, without end.
She looked up from her work, brow dripping, hands spattered with grease and flour. She exhaled deeply and called her men to dinner, each of them, especially the oldest son. She called him home, for he would always be welcome. She called him, although she feared her voice would not carry far enough for him to hear.
AROUND THREE THE NEXT AFTERNOON they came upon a homestead. It was a simple affair, the house situated close to the river and built mostly of sod, except for the facade, at the base of which a few stone slabs had been laid. The building could have contained no more than one room. There was only one visible window, a low roof, and a simple chimney pipe through which a feeble stream of smoke rose.
The two boys squatted and watched it from a distance of a hundred yards. James asked Gabriel what he thought. Should they ask the homesteaders for some food? Gabriel studied their fields, well-turned plots of crops already into a full and prosperous growth, plants he recognized as tomatoes, melons, potatoes, with one long rectangular field of corn. It seemed a farm intended more for subsistence than for any cash crops.
Gabriel was about to say something when a person appeared from inside—a young woman, followed shortly by a boy child, and just after that by a toddler. The woman’s hair was dark, long, and black. It trailed down her back in a thick braid. The toddler followed her on bandy legs, teetering with each step. The woman walked out into one of the fields with a basket, knelt, and worked for a few moments. When her basket was full, she went around to the back of the house, returning a moment later with the basket hanging empty in one hand.
Gabriel nudged his friend. “All right, let’s give it a try.” They walked forward shyly. James held his hat in his hands, and Gabriel set his feet softly on the earth.
As they drew nearer, the woman suddenly straightened and stared at them. The loose dress covering her was little more than a formless bag over her adolescent body, but it couldn’t hide the rotund shape of her belly. Gabriel tried to hail her with a wave, instinctively bowing his head as he did so, as if such were a greeting familiar to her people. It was not. She dropped her tools where she stood and went into the house, scooping up the toddler and hissing at the boy t
o follow. Although James called out to them, they’d disappeared inside within a few seconds.
The boys stood, watching the house and frowning. “Ain’t rightly hospitable around here, I guess,” James said.
The door to the house swung open again, fast and loud. The first thing to appear was neither woman nor child but the unmistakable profile of a rifle, a thing with barrels more enormous than any Gabriel had seen. Behind it walked a tall skeleton of a man dressed only in worn overalls. His slender arms and protruding collarbone glowed a ghostly white in the shadow of the doorway. He strode toward the boys like a corpse fresh from the grave and bent on retribution. His face was gaunt, his flesh a striated leathery substance that barely disguised the bones of his skull. His eyes, if he had any, were shaded under the cornice of his brows and hidden behind a curtain of limp and graying hair. If this impaired his vision any, it did not show in his actions. With his rifle pointed at the boys from twenty paces, he said, “State your business directly, or you’re two dead niggers.”
The boys exchanged glances, as if conferring on just what their business was. James ventured to answer. “Pardon, sir, we don’t mean no trespass. We’s just walking past your place, and . . .” He paused when the man brushed the hair out of his eyes and studied the boys more closely, squinting one eye shut in the process. “. . . Just wondering might we trouble you for—”
“No.”
“I mean . . .” James looked at Gabriel for help. “A bite to eat? That’s all.”
“I done said no. We don’t feed niggers here. Go on about your business or you’re dead, sure as Lincoln’s a dead son of a bitch. Deadest son of a bitch rotting in hell.” He stepped a little closer. “You think I’d feed a nigger? You come to the wrong man. Had my way, we’d send the whole horde of you back to the filth you slunk out of.” He thrust the rifle toward James’s groin. “I’d cut off your nutsacks with my own knife and make oysters, you scum-sucking sons a bitches in heat. Why would I feed you? Shit, I’d rather shoot you dead.”
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