by John Larison
He cut two lines in parallel on my cheek and then stood and wiped the knife on his pants. “There we is,” he said. “Just like back home when we catch a thief.”
I sat up and watched them go and got hold of my breathing and checked the wound with my fingertips. Ingrid come to me and put her lips to my forehead. It was only because of the tall man that I still had her and the saddle upon her back. He had called to stop the crowd of them from making off with her. They had taken just about everything else. The blood was upon my shirt and pants and still coming. I rolled to all fours and then stood.
When erect I saw the soldiers watching from their camp. Some turned away at my attention.
* * *
—
Ingrid led me to the doctor.
He was an Englishman and his own apothecary. The sign on his frontage read:
Freedom from What Ails
Doctor Massy at Your Service
STRICT CONFIDENCE AND AFFORDABLE RATES
Doctor Massy was young for a man of medicine. He wasn’t dressed like the old doctor back home or any doctor I seen after. He wore a felt hat, and about his neck was draped a white scarf of silk. There wasn’t even no sun marks on his face. I could’ve seen him five days’ ride up a river and known in a breath he was physician or taxman.
Doctor Massy took me into the back room and asked first about payment. There was a queer smoke hovering about that back room. I figured it to be of some foreign tobacco. “The consultation is one part and the medicine is another. The healing is free, and the direct result of the first two. Therefore, I would recommend a prompt payment so as begin with the recovery straightaway.”
“I done just got beat and robbed, sir. I ain’t got nothing but my hands. I can work for your services.”
He lifted an empty pipe to his lips, and just as soon pointed it at me. “I remain wealthy in labors owed. I could build a czar’s castle upon a craggy cliff if all the labors due came paid.” He pulled back the curtain on the window and saw Ingrid at the hitching post. His pipe ticked his teeth. “I admit I don’t frequent the auctions, though I’d wager that little pony would not garner two bits if she were the only horse to survive the rapture.”
“She ain’t for trade.”
“And why would she be? You only grip your chest like there’s a bullet lurking within. Look at you. Unable to draw even the shallowest of breath without a quiver. And all this blood upon your face.”
“I’m broke, Doc, two ways.”
“Ah!” He raised his pipe. “A witty cowhand then. Tell me you’re a poet as well?”
“You mock.”
“Don’t pout, dear boy. Beat and robbed, you say?”
“Yessir.”
“And cut rather severely.” He set his pipe aside. “One does not enter the field of medicine for the profit contained therein.” From a box he withdrew a new pipe, this one carved to look like some manner of serpent. Only its bowl was brass and too small for even a pinch of tobacco. He blew a puff of air through the thing and then drew a seashell from a shelf. I had never before seen a shell and so I didn’t think to notice the black paste within its center until the doctor spooned some and set it upon that brass bowl.
He pushed the pipe to me. “Here. You better take the first. Once I begin, there is no telling.”
“Have we arrived at some manner of bargain?”
“Don’t stall, dear boy. At this very moment I careen toward boredom, and with it, a lack of the sharing spirit.”
I took the queer pipe in my hand. “Will I feel better? Is this the treatment?”
“Ah, the worthiest question and one without an answer. Yet tell me this magic vapor isn’t already helping you improve, just knowing it exists? Now posthaste, good man.”
The pain in my side had brought on a fever sweat and I would’ve tried moose dung if he’d advised it. I put my lips to the strange pipe and drew in the hot breath of that flame. The smoke come out as brown and gray. I felt it coming now. My forehead was melting over my eyes. My heartbeat drummed in the near distance, growing ever louder.
The doctor took one for himself and then another and then two more for good measure. He saw me watching and stopped midway through yet another to say, “Fear not. I have only established a precedent.” The word grabbed his attention and he said it again to himself as the smoke left his teeth. “Precedent.” He drew more from the pipe. “What the American mind fears most.”
My breathing rose within my ears like a thousand whispers, and my pain was just where it always was but now that seemed a hundred miles from here in a place too small to affect a god like me. I remember knowing sudden-like that this was how Pa must’ve felt each time he swallowed his medicine. If I could be this free-riding smoke, why go anywheres else?
The doctor was speaking but I could hear no words over the thousand whispers. On the counter was a flute of black syrup.
* * *
—
I don’t recall leaving the doctor’s storefront but I do recall waking in the morning to slicing pain. Ingrid and me had taken our rest in the lee in a revivalist’s tent, and now the sun was up and my rib cracked new with each breath.
We discovered the travelers was already gone and with them Pa’s fiddle and his Colt and the deed to our family land. Their fires smoldered and their tracks led onto the muddy road where they was swallowed by a hundred others going all directions.
I had to make a choice about which trail this company took. They had carried implements for wheat harvest, so I wagered them to be of the High Plains. The drought had dried their lakes as it had ours, and families of the plains was headed deeper west to find where the clouds dumped their water. I had encountered their kind already. But two trails headed general west.
* * *
—
We rode fast and for the first time since leaving home I rode without a gun. I did not enjoy the sensation. Just short of noon we overtook wagons that was not familiar to my eyes. It was a clan of Irish and I spoke to them from the high seat of my saddle. They was brothers, just the pair without women, and they had not seen the party I was after. They had a single scattergun between them. The older of the two looked upon me and said, “’Tis a hungry land. Don’t ye fear the reds?”
“Should I?”
“They off the reservation. And you’re about carrying no weapon. Maybe you don’t place much value on your pebbles?”
“That’s what the reds do,” the little brother confirmed. “They cut off your pebbles and hang you by them from the nearest tree.”
The older brother squinted. “How could they cut the pebbles from your body and still hang you by them?”
The younger one thought this through. He got eager with a new idea. “They hang you by your pole. You know . . .” For clarity he took meaty hold of his groin.
“Then you’s safe,” the big brother said of the little. To me, he added, “He ain’t long enough to tie no knots with.”
* * *
—
Ingrid and me turned back late that day. We rode while the moon was high and then broke for the night in a lush park where Ingrid could graze. The pain was on me fierce then and I could not lay on my back or on either side but for the point of an arrow going in with each breath. The wounds on my cheek took turns burning and itching.
I drew out the flute of syrup I’d stolen from the doctor’s supply. I shook it. I hadn’t never stolen anything in all my life, but I’d stolen this without a thought. I drew the cork and smelled the contents.
All those nights I poured for Pa, and some of them, after he fell into deep slumber, I rose and poured a little for myself too.
Now I put the flute away without a taste. I was afraid of its freedom.
* * *
—
By afternoon of the next day I come to decide I had chosen another wrong trail. I still hadn’t see
n the company of travelers, and now the day was fading and what hope was there of ever recovering Pa’s things?
We took a break near the creek. It was a low moment. I give in to the tears for a time at the weight of all I lost. Pa would never forgive me.
His voice come to me there by the creek, as it had years before when he found me crying. Quit that blubbering. It don’t get nothing done.
I passed my sleeve over my eyes. I locked my jaw. If only I had the fiddle. I would’ve traded five Colts for that fiddle.
As is wont to happen when the sun leaves the valley floor, the wind reversed to blow down the creek. In it I caught a whiff of wood smoke.
A group was ahead of us on the trail and not that far along. I dusted myself off. I muttered, “Please,” and wondered who I was talking to.
I tied Ingrid to a spruce. She took this treatment personal.
“Ain’t risking you a second time, girl.”
I found their camp on the edge of a great meadow that continued up the ridge to the mountain’s rocky top. I took a hide on the edge of the forest. They was unloading from the day’s travel. Even from this distance I could see this was indeed the company I was after.
I walked out the woods and hollered and showed my hands so they would know I meant no harm. At the sight of me, there come some ruckus from the camp. The tall man was holding a crate, his eyes overtop and on me.
I just barely made out, “Ain’t that the buck we done kicked on?”
“Lookie here!” another shouted. “The trick shooter come back for seconds!”
The tall man handed off the crate he was holding. He set his gloves upon it and come walking out from their camp toward my approach. The others watched. Behind them the children was hiding in the lee of their biggest, a boy with a man’s hat on. The women kept at the work.
“I come for my family’s things,” I called as the tall man neared.
He spat a worn plug at the grass between us. There was still that kindness in his eyes. I was right to have seen it the first time.
“I admit I done you wrong. Ain’t right to wager what you can’t cover. I ain’t here to argue nothing about that other than to say I deserved to get beat. And I done learned a lesson in it.”
He took a fresh plug.
“I won’t argue the pistols. Seems only fair you keep them, seeing as I used them in my attempt to cheat you. But the Sharps, see, my pa carried that in the war and now he’s dead and gone. It ain’t only a rifle to me, understand, and I didn’t use it against you in no way. Also the fiddle and the deed to our family land. That’s what I come for. You ain’t got no claim to them things.”
He spat. “You got some brine walking out here telling me the way it ought to be.”
“It ain’t brine, sir. I serve my kin is all.”
He cracked his neck with a fist to his chin. “You realize we could beat you again and this time there ain’t a witness for ten miles. Ain’t a reason to stop. Hell, we could stake you out in this here meadow and let the coyotes chew you apart.”
I didn’t buy his bluff. He was a farming man and what he cared about was his company getting to whatever valley held their hopes. Still I wasn’t of a mind to test my theory.
“Give me my rifle and such and I’ll be off and you won’t never see me again.”
“Now why would I do that?”
“On account you know it’s right, sir.”
“Is that so?” He laughed. He turned to the others and hollered, “Go get us a rope.”
“What kind of rope you want, Boss?” one of the men called.
“What do you mean what kind of rope? Get me the dragging kind.” The tall man shook his head. To me he said, “I’ll tell you what, next time I ain’t building me a company by calling on strangers. Next time it’s my kin and the neighbors of my kin, and no blasted fools from Missoura. You know Missoura? Refuge of idiots, I’ll tell you what.”
I caught my fingers testing the cuts on my cheek.
He said, “Now I suggest you get while you still got legs for getting. I’m sure Barrow would like to finish the job he started on your face.”
“But it ain’t right,” I said. “You know it ain’t right. How come you ain’t doing nothing to make it right?”
“You dim, kid?” the tall man asked. “You tried to take from me, so I done took from you. That’s the way of it. You ain’t one of mine, and I got to look out for mine. You’ll come to understand, you live long enough. If there’s rules, you done broke ’em when you come back here for seconds.”
He tipped back his hat. “Now go on, boy. You won’t find what you’re looking for, not in this meadow.”
The men was coming now, with ropes enough for a herd of mustangs. I saw the one with the Remington. His eyes was hungry on me.
“You don’t know me,” I said.
“I know you. I was you once. So hear me when I say get on, before my crew takes hold of you. They bored with travel and will relish punishing you. I ain’t willing to test my command of them here and now by ordering them off your body. You got me?” He pointed to the timber. “Get, boy. Get, or I’ll stop trying to help you.”
So I got. I turned and ran into the trees.
But I didn’t go far.
* * *
—
I watched from the other side of the creek as the evening come on. The water there was slow and I could hear the families chatter in the calm air. With the animals turned out, the men mostly sat. It was the mothers I watched, in their evening labors.
I was drawn to one in particular, the tall man’s wife. She wore a yellow bonnet and I could see from her laughter with the children that she was their favorite. They sat about her as she worked, and the oldest ran her errands without complaint. She was telling them a story I could not hear.
When the meal was ready and they ate, I sank back into the brush and stared up at the sky. There come the clink of spoons on tin and I saw the first star appear against the purple heavens. The earth still held the day’s heat. My stomach moaned. I hadn’t eaten in days and beetles and crickets was starting to look worth a taste.
I sat back up to see the woman in yellow staring my general direction. I held dead still. It wasn’t possible she had seen me, yet she was looking this way. She walked toward me a few steps, but then her husband called her back.
The cooking fires was now stoked up, and the people lounged about them. A couple played instruments but with no skill. A man and his son plucked at Pa’s fiddle, but they had even less talent than me. When they grew weary of it, they passed it along to others.
The woman in yellow was probably twice my age. She now wore a shawl for warmth. While the others reclined in the firelight, she was tending to her children, brushing their hair and readying them for sleep.
Maybe an hour passed, and twice during that time she looked up across the creek. She was the only one.
With darkness complete the tall man rose and gave his wife a kiss upon the brow, and I watched as he walked back into the meadow where he and I last spoke. His jacket was on against the cold and a rifle was in his hands. The first watch was his.
In time the others took lanterns to their wagons and they laid out under the tarpaulins stretched to the earth. Their shadows moved about the fabric in the lantern light. The whole world was dead dark but for the golden glow of those tarpaulins.
The woman in yellow was now in her sleeping place with her children. The light cast the shape of her Bible upon the tarpaulin, and I moved closer. Even at the creek’s edge I couldn’t make out her words, but I could hear the up and down of her voice and I could for a moment imagine the experience of falling asleep beside such a magnificent woman.
To know the Word by the voice of your mother, that has always been the path to salvation.
* * *
—
In time the lanterns
went out and the fires turned to smoldering, and there rose only the occasional mutterings of a sleeping child. It was then that I took my chance to cross the creek.
I had kept a keen eye on Pa’s fiddle and knew which wagon now held it. I hadn’t seen the bow, but I could replace the bow.
I used the moon shadows cast by the trees to conceal my approach, and I stepped as slow as I would if stalking a bedded antelope. All the while my blood swished through my ears and my breath was quick.
I don’t believe I made a sound as I moved ever closer to Pa’s fiddle. So how did she detect me then if not for the silent plea all children emanate in hope their mother will hear?
“Don’t move,” she whispered, and I nearly leapt from my boots. She was crouched on the edge of her sleeping children, a pistol in her hands. “Don’t you dare take a step.”
“I’m sorry,” I said without thought. I had steeled myself to fight if it came to that, but her voice cut through me and left me bare. “I don’t intend no harm, ma’am, I swear it.”
She rose in her white nightdress. She stood between me and her brood. She was barefoot in the summer grass. The moonlight glinted from the barrel. She was holding the pistol with two hands. “They said you would come. You or Indians. This is a thieving moon.”
“I ain’t here to thieve, ma’am.”
“Yet you risk life, for what?”
It occurred to me that she hadn’t yet sounded the alarm. I took off my hat so she might know my honesty. “I only come for my family’s things.”
“Shush,” she said. “Quieter or you’ll wake the children.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I thought you looked hungry in town. Have you eaten since then?”
“No, ma’am.”
She looked about, and then waved to me to come nearer. She held the pistol on my knees now. “What is your name?”
“Jesse.”