“That’s crazy talk,” Buck said. “We can patch things up. All you have to do is punish those boys.”
“So you keep saying. But it’s not that simple. I’m the head of my clan. I have to do what’s best for the Harkeys, and what’s best for the Harkeys might not be what’s best for you Shannons.”
“What are you saying?”
“That my clan comes first. It always comes first. I do whatever it takes to protect them even if it means doing something I might not like to do, something I wouldn’t do if it wasn’t forced on me. Take now, for instance. You show up on my doorstep and demand I punish the boys who did your girl wrong. Deep down I agree with you. They did do wrong and they should be punished. Hell, if it was a Harkey girl who got raped by a bunch of Shannon, I’d want their peckers cut off.”
“Then we see eye to eye,” Buck said.
Ezriah sighed. “No, we don’t. You’re not listening. I can’t punish a Harkey. I can’t hurt a member of my own clan. I sure as hell can’t hurt my own grandsons. I’m sorry but that’s how it is.”
“But you said you want to settle this.”
“I do.”
Granger placed his hands on the table, palms up, and moved them back and forth, then looked down at his legs and moved them, too.
“What on earth are you doing?” Fox asked.
“I feel funny,” Granger replied. “My arms and legs are tingly and my stomach is trying to crawl up my throat.”
“That’s strange,” Buck said. “I’m feeling peculiar myself.” He took another sip of coffee. “Even my mouth is tingling.”
“Maybe you are coming down with something,” Ezriah said. He scratched his chest and slid his hand under his shirt, still scratching.
“I feel fine,” Fox said. He glanced at Buck, and at the cup in Buck’s hand, and then at Granger, and at the cup on the table in front of him, and said, “Son of a bitch.”
“Too bad you didn’t drink some, too,” Ezriah said. He brought his hand out from under his shirt. In it was a Cloveland House pocket revolver in .41 caliber. He cocked it and pointed it at Fox.
“What this?” Buck said in alarm.
Ezriah shot Fox. The slug cored Fox’s forehead and snapped his head back. He tried to speak, but all that came out was a grunt. A red drop trickled down his brow as he slowly folded and his body slid off the chair to the floor. He twitched a few times and was still.
Both Buck and Granger went to reach for their rifles. Both raised their hands a few inches and then looked at their arms in dismay and disbelief.
“What the hell is happening?” Buck said. “I can’t hardly move.”
“Me, either.”
Ezriah Harkey held the smoking pistol level. “It’s the poison. Pretty soon you won’t be able to move at all.”
Buck and Granger said together, “Poison?”
“Woman’s doing,” Ezriah said, with a jerk of his thumb at his wife. “She’s good with potions and herbs and”—he grinned a wicked grin—“poisons.”
“That wasn’t brown sugar she put in our coffee,” Buck said.
“It was not.”
“And that’s why the coffee tasted bitter.”
“It was.” Ezriah sighed. “If you don’t mind my saying, you boys sure are dumb. Your pa would never have let himself be taken this away. When he came to visit me that time, he wouldn’t drink nor eat. Truce or no truce, he knew better. I’m surprised you don’t take after him more.”
Buck again tried to lift his arms, and couldn’t. He tried to stand but stayed on the chair. The tingling had spread from his limbs to his belly and was slowly creeping up his chest. “This can’t be.”
“It is.”
Granger strained mightily. His face grew red and the veins in his neck stood out and he rose several inches, swayed, and abruptly sat back down so hard his chair nearly fell over. “You bastard. You miserable yellow bastard.”
“Here, now,” Ezriah said. “Yellow has nothing to do with it. I ain’t no coward. I could have just shot you. This way is less messy, and I have a few things I want to say before we get to it.”
“Oh God,” Buck said.
“What Woman used on you is toad poison. She collects it herself. Everything in you freezes up so your muscles won’t work. Pretty soon you won’t be able to talk. But you’ll still be alive. You’ll see and hear.”
“Goddamn you,” Granger snarled.
“The three of you are going to disappear. I’ll bury the bodies where no one will ever find them and take your horses off a ways and strip them and shoot them and leave them for the scavengers to eat. If the sheriff or any of your kin come around asking if you showed up, I’ll say I never saw you.”
“Not this way,” Buck said.
“It’s the only way,” Ezriah said. “Your wife and pa might suspect but they won’t have proof and without proof your pa won’t break the truce. Life will go on as it was.”
“Please.”
“Don’t beg. It’s not manly.” Ezriah let down the hammer of his pocket pistol and slipped it under his shirt. “I reckon I won’t need this.” He turned to his wife. “Fetch me the ax handle from out of the shed. The one that broke. It makes a good club.”
Woman chuckled and went out.
Buck found it increasingly hard to talk. The tingling had risen to his throat. “Please, mister. I have a wife and family.”
“I have my clan.”
Growling like a wild beast, Granger attempted to heave to his feet. Instead, his legs gave out and he and his chair crashed to the floor.
“You’re wasting yourself,” Ezriah told him. He rose and came around the table. Sliding his hands under Buck’s arms, he lifted and eased Buck to the floor next to Granger. “Any last words?”
“You won’t get away with this,” Buck said. Panic filled him. He willed his arms and legs to move but they wouldn’t.
“Dumb to the last,” Ezriah responded. He walked to the counter and filled a glass with water from a pitcher and leaned against the counter and drank. “You might want to make your peace with your Maker.”
Woman returned carrying the ax handle. She brought it over and gave it to Ezriah. “I want to watch.”
“It will be a sight.” Ezriah hefted the ax handle and went and stood over Buck. “Can you still talk?”
Buck lay motionless save for his eyes, which grew wide with fear.
“Reckon not.” Ezriah raised the ax handle and brought it down with all his force on Buck Shannon’s mouth. Teeth crunched and blood splattered and Buck made mewing sounds. “I told you,” Ezriah said, not without a trace of pity. “My clan comes first.” He swung again and again and again.
8
A week passed. On the seventh evening Jed Shannon sat down to supper with Erna, Chace, and Cassie. Scarlet was still in bed. She’d wanted to join them, but Erna told her it would be a while yet before she was permitted to be up and about.
Cassie gave thanks.
Erna helped herself to a slice of corn pone and handed the bread to her son. “Pass this around.”
“It’s been too long,” Jed said. “They should have been here yesterday at the latest.”
“They’ll show,” Erna said. “My Buck knows what he’s doing. He wouldn’t let anything happen.”
Jed pursed his lips. He heaped hog and hominy on his plate and stabbed a piece of pork with his fork. “Buck was wrong not to want me along. I should have been with them.”
“Please,” Erna said. “Let’s not bring it up at the table. After, if you insist. But let us eat in peace.”
“Whatever you want.”
Cassie could tell her grandpa would rather talk about it; he only gave in to be polite. She wanted to talk about it, too. She was worried near to sick over her pa and uncles. The past few nights she’d hardly slept. She tossed and turned and when she did doze, she had bad dreams that woke her. She looked at her brother. Chace was as calm as you please, quietly eating, his face showing no more emotion than a wall. She ha
d asked him earlier how he was sleeping and he had replied, “Just fine.”
In addition to the hog and hominy and corn pone, there was succotash. Cassie ladled some out and ate, with no real appetite. She was glad when everyone was done. She sat back and waited for her grandfather to say something but it was her brother who broke the silence.
“I’m going after Pa.”
Erna was refilling her glass with milk. She stopped pouring and said, “No, you are not.”
“You don’t have a say,” Chace said.
“I beg your pardon? I’m your mother. I do so have a say. We’ll wait two or three days and if they haven’t shown we’ll go to the sheriff.”
“Wonderful,” Jed said.
“Something the matter?”
“You know as well as I do, Erna, that Sheriff Wyler has been in office so long, the only thing that matters to him is staying in office. He won’t do anything to rustle Harkey feathers. Not when half the voters in the county are Harkeys.”
“He might send one of his deputies.”
“Do you think the Harkeys will come right out and admit it if they’ve done my sons harm?” Jed said. “Hell, no. Ezriah ain’t stupid. He’ll hide the bodies so they won’t ever be found and act as innocent as a newborn.”
“You talk as if my Buck is already dead.”
“Odds are he is.”
“No. Him and me have been together nigh on thirty year. I would know if he was dead.”
“Hell,” Jed said.
“I’ll thank you not to cuss.” Erna turned to Chace. “We’re agreed, then, that you won’t go looking for your pa?”
“We are no such thing.” Chace pushed back his chair and stood. “I’m leaving at first light.” He went to the front door. His rifle was propped next to it, and he took hold of the barrel and went out and closed the door after him.
“The gall,” Erna said.
“I’ll go talk to him for you,” Jed offered.
A blazing orange sun hung on the cusp of creation. Cows grazed in the pasture while others rested and chewed their cud. In the hog pen the sow was nursing her brood and chickens pecked in the dust near the coop. A flock of pigeons winged in and landed on the barn.
Chace was making for the corral. He stopped when his grandfather called his name. “If she sent you to stop me, you’re wasting your breath.”
“Stop you?” Jed said, and laughed. “Tarnation, boy. Don’t you know me better than that? I’m going with you.”
“No,” Chace said, “you’re not.”
“I can if I want.”
“No.”
Chace continued on and Jed caught up and walked beside him.
“Now listen here, boy. Not only am I the head of this clan but I’m your grandpa. It’s bad enough your pa saw fit to go without me. I’ll be hornswoggled if my grandson will treat me with the same disrespect.”
“It’s not about you, Grandpa,” Chace said. “It’s about Pa. He ain’t coming back. If he was he’d’ve been here by now. You said so yourself.”
“That don’t give you call to go off and get yourself killed. You need me. I know the way, and unless you know the landmarks, you won’t find Ezriah’s place in a million years.”
“I was listening when you told Pa.” Chace opened the gate and went over to the blackest of the mules and patted its neck. It was fifteen hands high and had a white muzzle. “This here is Enoch. He’s mine.”
“After the Bible Enoch?”
“Ma named him. She’s fond of Bible names for our critters. The cow she likes most is Esther. She calls our rooster Beelzebub.” Chace rubbed Enoch and scratched under the mule’s jaw. “He’s as surefooted as can be.”
“Explain to me why you don’t want me along.”
“I can’t have witnesses. Not even you. I won’t have it come back to plague me later.”
“Won’t have what?” Jed asked. When Chace didn’t answer he asked it again, adding, “What exactly do you have in mind?”
“Pa handled this wrong.” Chace turned from Enoch. “He went to the Harkeys to talk when he should have gone with fifty Shannons at his back and strung up the ones who did Scarlet wrong. She’s still lying in bed with bruises all over her and her spirit crushed. She’ll never be the same girl she was.”
“Listen to you. You’d break the truce just like that?” Jed snapped his fingers.
Chace didn’t answer until they were out the gate and he had closed it. “There never should have been a truce in the first place.”
“It was my idea, you might recall.”
“A bad idea.” Chace motioned at the animals in the corral. “A mule is a mule and not a dog.”
“That makes no kind of sense.”
“Doesn’t it, Grandpa?” Chace said. “Then let me make it plain. A thing is what it is and not something else. A person is who they are and not somebody else.” His eyes lit with a fierce light. “And an enemy is an enemy and not a friend. You did our clan no favors when you and the head of their clan agreed to a truce. All you did was put off the day of reckoning.”
“Why, you ...” Jed caught himself. “You weren’t there, boy. You weren’t even born. Shannons were dying. Good men. Men I knew. Men I cared for. You didn’t have to comfort their grieving widows. You didn’t have to listen to their kids bawl. I did what I did to save lives.”
“You did what you did because you weren’t strong enough to do what really needed doing.”
“And what was that, you and your smart mouth?”
“To kill every Harkey there is.”
Jed shook his head in amazement. “Listen to you. What do you know about killing, boy? What do you know about anything?” He paused. “Oh. I forgot the drunk in the hayloft.”
Chace stared at his grandfather. Finally he said, almost to himself, “I always suspected she told you.”
“She needed to tell someone and she sure as hell couldn’t tell your ma or your pa. So, yes, she came to me.”
“Why didn’t you go to the law?”
Jed’s lips became a thin slit and he clenched his fists. “Anyone but family said that to me, I’d pound them. That was an insult, boy. A pure-as-sin insult.”
“About the law?” Chace nodded. “Yes, I reckon it was. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said it.”
“And no, I never told them nor anyone else. Why would I? You did what was right. Benton was the town drunk. He was always getting into fights and making a nuisance of himself. He’d be rude to women on the street. It doesn’t surprise me a bit that he tricked your sister into climbing up into the hayloft or that he—” Jed stopped. “I only thank God you were there. I thank God you saved her before he could get her clothes off. Although I still don’t know how you could have done it. Benton was big. Bigger than me. And you were eleven.”
“He didn’t see me or hear me come up the ladder,” Chace said. “They were over by the loft door. He had her down and was doing things and she was trying to fight him, but like you say, he was big.”
“So how did you?” Jed asked.
“I snuck up behind him. He was on his knees and I hit him in the side of the neck. When he turned, I hit him in the throat. He fell onto his hands and was trying to get his breath. His head was next to the loft door. I pushed it open and ran behind him and shoved.” Chace stopped. “It wasn’t nearly as hard as I thought it would be. He went out that door like a greased pig down a chute. Never screamed or cursed or nothing. When I looked out, he was lying there in the street, his head bent so that I knew his neck was broke.”
“I’ll be damned.”
“I got Cassie down and we went out the back and on around. Then people were there. They took the body to the undertaker’s.”
“And the sheriff decided Benton was so drunk, he fell out and broke his own fool neck.” Jed was filled with wonderment. “You killed a man, and you were only eleven.”
“What does age have to do with it?”
“Nothing, I suppose.”
“It had to be
done. Just as this has to be done.” Chace turned and walked into the barn. He went to the table where they kept the tack and picked up a bridle and examined it.
Jed stayed with him. “None of that gives you the right to tell me I can’t go. I’m your grandfather, goddamn it, and you listen to me, I don’t listen to you.”
Chace put down the bridle. When he spoke he did so quietly, gently, without a trace of anger or resentment. “In this you do. If something happens to me, Ma and Cassie and Scarlet will need you. One of us has to stay and you’d be better at looking after them than I would, so it has to be you.”
“That’s why you don’t want me to go?”
“We have to think of them.”
“Damn,” Jed said. He placed his hands on the table and leaned on them. “I had you pegged wrong, boy. You’re older than your years.”
“Not really. I just do what needs doing and I try to do it smart.”
Jed looked at him. “They’ll be expecting someone to come.”
“They’ll expect a lot of Shannon men. They won’t expect what you and everyone else keeps calling a boy.”
“They might try to kill you.”
“Whether they do or they don’t, they have to answer for Pa and for Scarlet and for my uncles.”
“That they do,” Jed agreed, and sighed. “The feud will start up again, sure as shooting. The truce will be over for good and forever.”
“Good riddance.”
“Old Ezriah will be disappointed.”
“Old Ezriah won’t be around.”
“Him, too?”
“Him first.”
Jed studied Chace as if seeing him for the first time. “You are beyond your years. But you be careful. Ezriah isn’t like Benton. He won’t be drunk, and he’s clever as a fox. That you’re young won’t stop him from planting you.”
“My age will get me close,” Chace said.
“You could pick him off with that rifle of yours. I hear you’re as good a shot as Daniel Boone.”
“I want to look into his eyes when I do it.”
“You’re beginning to scare me, boy.”
Erna was drying dishes at the counter when they came back in. She draped the towel over her shoulder. “Did you talk sense into him?” she asked.
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