by John Larison
“Come, Jesse.”
I followed her to the rear of her wagon and to the cauldron that had held their supper. I was so close I could smell the old sweat under her arms. She held the pistol in one hand and with utmost care lifted the lid of the cauldron and set it aside without a clink. She handed me a bowl and spooned out the still-steaming grub and whispered, “Quick now. My husband will wake the next watch soon and return to me.”
The stew was warm in my mouth and its taste and her kindness released something bound up inside me, and all at once I was shaking, though I wasn’t sure why. “Sorry, ma’am, for waking you and all.”
“I will feed you, child, but then you must go.”
One of her children stirred and for a long moment she held a finger to her lips. Only once she was sure the child was back asleep did she speak again. “You’re without folks then, Jesse?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Where is it you intend to go?”
“Pearlsville, ma’am. I seek to rejoin my brother there.”
“Good, so you have family then.”
“I do. That fiddle you seen tonight, that was my pa’s and I already lost him once.”
“Finish the stew,” she said with sternness. “Then go. I cannot help you with your fiddle. There’s no allowing you to go prowling through our wagons. These men shoot first. You should know that.”
“Your voice, ma’am. It’s so kind and learned.”
She looked on me now for a long moment, her arms crossed about her chest. “It was the strangest thing, Jesse. I laid there exhausted, every muscle worn weary, and yet sleep would not arrive on this night. I could feel you out there watching us. Jesse, do we know each other from elsewhere?”
“No, ma’am.”
She took the empty bowl from my hands. “We’ve never met before? Not once? I used to be a schoolteacher in Ohio. Maybe you’ve passed through Ohio?”
My belly was stuffed with potatoes and meat. The warmth spread through my arms and down my legs. “I’m sure of it, ma’am. I would remember you.”
“You must never come near us again, do you understand? Never. Not on this trail, not three weeks farther along, not this winter. To see us again would only bring trouble upon you. Do you understand? Your pa would not want you hurt for the sake of his fiddle, I promise you that.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She looked on the pistol in her hand. It looked like Pa’s Colt. “I believe this belongs to you. My husband gave it to me this evening and told me to keep it near in case of attack. But I don’t want a short gun near my children, we talk daily of the accidents that have claimed so many children along these trails. You’ll see my husband loaded the empty cylinders from his own supply of powder and lead. You might check them. He is not skilled around firearms.” She withheld the Colt. “But if I give this to you, you must promise to ride far from here. You must promise never to do wrong with this weapon. My husband will not agree with my returning it to you.”
“Ma’am, I’m without resources. I may starve or worse if not for that pistol.”
“I know. Do you swear to me what I ask?”
“Ma’am, I have no wrong intentions. I swear, and I would do so with my hand laid open upon the Good Book if you desire. I am honest and bare before you.”
“There is something familiar or peculiar about you,” she said. “What is your full name, Jesse?”
I understood that I couldn’t say Harney, not without her thinking of my brother’s crimes and linking me to them. What choice did I have but to lie? “Jesse Montclair, ma’am. That’s my name.”
* * *
—
Come full morning we broke free of the valley for obvious reason and followed the high ridge. It was a grassy spine with rims of rock and we made good enough time along it. The view was its own distraction. My eye followed the hawks on the wing, and I imagined what the world must look like from their height.
We camped that night along a high meadow bordered in aspen. We picked a spot among some rocks that would offer cover in case of attack. I advised Ingrid to stay close.
The spruce nearby held a chattery population of red squirrels and I set about gathering some for supper. I wasn’t keen on spending one of my shots on so small a meal, so I threw stones instead of lead. When the rocks failed I tried building a deadfall but the critters wouldn’t come close.
It was getting on toward dark and my stomach was singing its lament.
Overhead two squirrels hollered at me and then chased each other to a new branch, where they sat again to holler some more. I drew the Colt. It come from the holster like silk.
To fire a round would be to announce my location to any soul in the valley. Still, I took aim and aced the bigger of the two squirrels and he flipped end over end to the earth. The shot echoed back from the basin wall and then a half beat later from the far side of the valley.
I built a fire and skinned him with my knife and ate his meat before he was full cooked. Squirrel ain’t nothing but a rat of the branches and they taste like it. I cracked the bones for their marrow and sucked dry the stems.
After, I leaned back and licked my fingers and felt inclined to offer thanks for this recent turn of good fortune, the Colt and the mother from Ohio. It was a high feeling, to feel grateful for something again. I tried to hold it, always the child bottling smoke.
* * *
—
What happened next is the part I wasn’t going to tell you. It’s the part I don’t touch. Even in my own mind. It’s the only piece I don’t pick up from time to time and turn over and consider and reconsider and put back just where it belongs. This part built the vault within me and then climbed inside and slammed shut the door.
You should know I ain’t confessing on account I fear my Maker. Ain’t nothing that could happen to me that I don’t rightly deserve. But I know what I done that night can’t die with me.
I remember I was dreaming of butterflies. Of a great big bowl of turkey gravy and all about me orange and black butterflies on the wing. I was dreaming so deep I nearly missed Ingrid’s snort of warning.
I woke to hear hooves moving through the aspen. I called and at the sound of my voice the animal broke into a trot.
I gave chase by sound alone, still half in dream, the leaves about my face the wings of butterflies. When I cleared the aspens I saw what I believed to be a man swing up on Ingrid’s bare back, and I understood. Ingrid was being rustled from me.
I tried hollering but it didn’t do no good. They was twenty yards away in the crisp moonlight. The Colt was already in my hand.
Whistling didn’t work neither. A rider don’t never teach his horse the truth, that all control is hers.
They was past thirty yards now and gaining speed. I was losing my Ingrid, and then I would be alone.
I heard no burst but the echoes returned, and I was surprised at what I done. I was relieved too, even in that moment before the echoes finished returning, relieved to own an instrument divine enough to reset right.
* * *
—
The thunder of Ingrid’s feet upon the earth. She was running my way and I was still flash-blind. The Colt had barked fire into the night. She found me and bowled me over, she was so happy. She nibbled at my cheeks, and I took hold of her neck and she lifted me to my feet. We put our noses together.
I swung up on her back and we walked across that dark meadow to see the bastard laid out.
Even now I struggle against it.
In the moonlight I saw it was a boy I killed. He was lying facedown. I could tell he was a boy right off just from his size and dress. I could tell he was dead too. My bullet done hard damage to his head.
I bent down beside him. He was an Indian, maybe fourteen or sixteen, one of the few hundred that summer refusing to move to a smaller reservation on land foreign to his people. He smelled of smoke
and grease and wet soil. There too was the warm iron smell of blood.
How could I be older than a rustler?
Ingrid and me walked back to camp in darkness. We loaded what little we had, and sat a time, pondering the event over and over, and then walked back to the body while the dawn was arriving. I recall praying it had all been a dream.
The body was still there. It hadn’t moved. Somehow that felt queer, that it’d been there this hour, unmoving.
I remember a potent urge to roll him over. Ain’t sure why, but it was there like you feel the urge to help an old woman who has stumbled. The body was stiffening by then.
His eyes wasn’t there no more on account the bullet broke apart his face and so he could not look on me.
He wore elk skin with white and blue beads sown in. His feet wore a white woman’s boots, toes showing through a gap of one and rawhide for the lace of the other. One of his arms was snapped from the fall and I could see where the bone poked at the sleeve.
He done this to himself. I was trying to believe that. He done this when he decided to steal from me.
Ain’t sure how I didn’t see it sooner. Eventual I come to notice something wasn’t right about his chest. I poked his rib with the barrel of the pistol on account I was afraid to touch him.
This boy had nubs. This boy was in fact a girl.
* * *
—
In my tellings of these events I have all but once left out the girl. When I told Noah I left out the girl. When I told the court. I always leave out the girl.
If I don’t fire the Colt maybe I die alone in those mountains without a horse, I don’t know. So why do I leave out the girl?
In truth it was smallness that moved me to fire on her, not fear. I didn’t think about the chances of my survival without Ingrid or about my rights to my animal or any such justified notions. I only cringed to be reduced, and I pulled the trigger, and I felt relief at the sound of my hit.
Say I don’t shoot. Say I follow Ingrid’s tracks and keep on them even if it takes me all summer. What’s to say I don’t find them in some canyon with peaceful intentions? Maybe I enter with my arms held high and she asks me to join her in a supper of venison and camas. Maybe together we confess all we survived and all we done to survive, and maybe we decide to join together and survive as one.
Us riding Ingrid together across them mountains, me forgetting my brother and her forgetting her people and both of us riding for the safety of some far-off valley where girls can’t be seen by other eyes.
Always, I leave the girl out.
* * *
—
I was drowning after, the struggle of a body at the river’s surface. I gasped for the story I had believed all these miles. Same as when I was a girl and used to breathe the stories Noah told of Ma. The made-up ones with the real ones.
I was a Harney, dammit, and my destiny was to find my brother and bring him home and thereby save our family land. The journey would be fraught with struggle, and to manifest my destiny I’d have to put on the strong armor and persevere no matter the hardship.
So that’s the coffin the girl had to fit in. That’s all she could ever be, a hardship on my journey. She wasn’t a girl who dreamed of a land with chest-high grass where bison still followed the spring. She was an adversary hell-bent on taking what was intended for me.
What kind of girl comes in the night to steal a horse from a lone traveler? What manner of father sends his daughter to thieve? This was their fault. Indians did not value life as they should, as the Lord intends life to be valued. They was beneath the Lord’s lessons—they could never make good on all His gifts.
I drew my knife across my cheek in parallel to the lines the man with the Remington had sliced. The blood ran but I did not wipe it clean.
Instead I drew the flute of syrup from my pocket and pulled the cork and swallowed a mouthful. It wasn’t pain I wanted free of.
In the days that followed I drank that syrup instead of foraging food. I drank as I swallowed air. I drank until the only fact that remained was my westward motion.
III
When we arrived in Pearlsville I was starved and in no mood for honest labor. I bet a boastful man outside a saloon he couldn’t shoot his empty liquor bottle from ten paces and guessed right and so made a dollar. That I put up against another man, his pistol verses mine with four targets at fifty paces. I said four because that’s how many balls I had remaining. He went one for four while I erased all. With the proceeds I bought myself supper and new powder and lead for the Colt and then went looking for another game.
After I exhausted one saloon I rode to the next and began again. I found no shortage of men with a predilection for gambling and an unfounded confidence in their own abilities with a sidearm.
Pearlsville had plenty of saloons. But soon enough word got around and no one would bet against the kid with the slashes on his face.
In three days’ effort I had twenty-six dollars. This sum was more than I had personally made accumulatively in my life, yet I wasn’t buoyed none by the success. One patron had missed when I had hit and he called me a son of a bitch, an insult I took to heart. Maybe I was looking for a beating. I cracked him on the bottom of the chin with the butt end of my pistol. It caught him in surprise and his eyes dazed and I watched as he fell stiff to the ground. His friends was on me then and I took a blow to the back and a knee to the same damn rib before the barkeep’s pistol ended the thing.
* * *
—
Pearlsville was the biggest city I ever saw. It was where the gold and timber and beef that drained from them mountains met the straight current of the Union Pacific. The railroad had spawned wealthy businessmen with employment to offer, which done brought workingmen with their families, falling to this after their dreams of homesteading had worn thin. Now there was great swaths of shacks and lean-tos across the city, vast patterns of browns and grays with tendrils of smoke rising from rusty pipes. There was women hanging laundry on lines strung over the dusty streets, kids running between the legs of stallions, shouts in languages I never knew existed. There was Indians dressed like whites, blacks dressed like Indians, Mexicans every which way, even Frenchmen.
These was folks who didn’t grow their own crops or raise their own beef cattle. Not even a heifer for curds. Everyone of them, far as I was concerned, had locked themselves into some queer manner of prison.
I couldn’t stop looking at the rich people. I’d never seen rich people before. Pearlsville had ladies with two-foot feathers blooming from their hats who rode sidesaddle and dodged the sun with umbrellas perched like sails. There was rich men whose watches dangled from chains of gold and whose boots shined like they repelled dust. The rich didn’t hurry nowhere. They strolled and then stepped into polished coaches. When they rolled down the street, haggard mothers shuttled their children to the sides.
I saw mothers sitting on steps working laundry and smoking. Mothers pulling their kids from wrestling matches. Mothers with swelling bellies and sweat-stained dresses.
There was Orientals too. Lots of them in their confines on the outskirts of the city. They wore sky-blue gowns and a tight little braid from where some men go bald. They wouldn’t never look at me straight. Their eyes didn’t seem to move from the earth before their next step. I never saw an Oriental woman, just the men. Folks claimed they stored their women and children underground for safekeeping.
* * *
—
The sheriff’s door was locked. Noah’s likeness was in ten places on that wall, the same poster. No missing it. His corpse was worth ten thousand to them now. I tore the posters down and crumpled them in a ball and set that mess in the dirt and touched a match to it. It burned up and was gone from this earth in but seconds. That’s what I wanted to happen to me when I died. I didn’t want to be left out. I wanted to be sent into nothing on a plume of smoke.<
br />
I turned around to see a group of lawmen coming up the far side of the porch. There was the sheriff with white hair, dressed in the apparel of a businessman. His badge gleamed and a new Remington was on his hip. He held a ring of keys in his hand. Behind him come three younger deputies, halfway between my age and his. They was big men, clean shaven, and dressed as cattlemen. One still wore his spurs. Their badges was over their hearts. I thought this queer, that a man so frequent the attention of gunfire would offer the advantage of a bull’s-eye.
The deputy with spurs looked on me but did not alter the content of his pronouncements to the sheriff. I was a shrew on the ground who had caught his eye but not his attention. The sheriff pointed at the near-empty wall and said, “I don’t know why we bother putting up them posters.”
They walked inside and shut the door behind them.
I pushed open that door for myself. They was taking seats at four desks in the room.
“Let me guess,” the sheriff said. “A bounty hunter.”
“You seen others?” I asked.
“You’re the fourth come through that door today. The first we just found dead in a shitter across town.” He nodded to one of the deputies and the man shuffled through some papers on his desk, rose, and handed me a sheet of paper with printed words on it. The sheriff said, “This here is the paper we give him.”
I looked the note over and saw that it was the latest news on Noah’s movements. He had last been seen here in Pearlsville the month previous. But since then he was blamed for the robberies of three shipments and the killings of eight men two counties east.
When I looked up their eyes was on me. The deputy with spurs said, “I’m sure you can find someone to help you make sense of it.”
I looked him square and said, “I can read.” His gaze narrowed and he spat and I learned how quick a soul can make an enemy of a lawman. “It says here the Governor has raised a militia to war against Harney.”