by John Larison
I too looked at my brother, at all these faces glancing his way.
“This was Will’s idea,” Constance said. “This was all for . . .” She was quiet a long while. I let her dwell with it.
Constance continued, “Harney came to me about a year ago when I was in a piano lesson. He saw my carriage as it crossed town and said he couldn’t help himself. He had to meet me. Of course I was aghast at the sight of such a wanton criminal, but your brother just laid himself bare before me, no fear at all. He was unarmed and unguarded—he floated into the room. He gave me the name of a man in town to contact if I ever needed any help. I didn’t write until Father demanded my engagement. Jane wrote back, and the letters started coming by federal postage. She used the name of one of my tutors.”
Noah called our attentions and all the men put down their spoons and looked upon my brother in silence. It was the first time I saw him hold the mind of a crowd bigger than me. He owned that room outright.
“We must take this opportunity to say our thanks to the Lord Himself for helping the righteous cause on this night. We all come through like the sickle blade and them the grass, and we must take that as further evidence of our lordly destiny. We walk the holy path, gentlemen. You, me, the man beside you, we’re one creation, and we was created to deliver justice to the doorstep of the wicked. In this time of merriment, let us remember that just as the Lord willed this land to the plow, He too has willed it to the downtrodden. And he has chosen us, entrusted us, enshielded us to deliver it. Join me in gratitude. Join me in amen.”
The boys banged their fists once upon the table in unison and mumbled, “Amen.”
“And!” My brother had himself a big old smile now. “Join me in welcoming our new friends. This is Constance Pearl, she don’t need no introduction. Welcome, Miss Constance.”
The boys whistled.
“Enough of that.” Noah smiled at his crew. He pointed an arm at me. “And this guardsman? This is my little baby sister. She plays the part nice, don’t she? We got to get you some new clothes,” he boomed. “One of the boys catches you out the corner of his eye, he’s liable to shoot on instinct!”
After some laughs Noah blessed our meal, and then he reached for the salt and took up a heavy pinch and got to spreading. He reached for another pinch.
But Jane took the salt from him and set it out of reach. She said, “Pickling yourself. I swear, if it wasn’t for me your brother here wouldn’t be a damn mess of a man.”
Noah sighed in that familiar manner of Pa’s. I’d heard that sound directed at Noah a thousand times in my former life, and now I was hearing it again, and that set me right in a manner I hadn’t been set right in years. I put my fingers to his back just to touch him.
“Cursing ain’t ladylike,” he said to Jane.
“If the Lord didn’t want women swearing, He would not have given us the capacity. He intends us to name it as we see it, and, well, sometimes that requires using a gritty tongue. Annette swears all day and I never hear you correcting her.”
“Annette, is you a lady?”
Annette glared over her stew. She gripped the spoon like a trapper just come in from winter.
Noah said, “Besides, when have you ever seen me telling Annette what to do?”
Jane touched her fingers to my wrist. She was the sort to always match her words with a touch. “Now, Jess, tell me of your father.”
Noah looked on me, then back to his bowl. He could tell.
I stirred the heat from the stew. I searched for the right starting words. I had been telling my brother of Pa’s death since it happened, and yet now I couldn’t figure where to begin. “I put Pa to rest, brother.”
“Oh, no,” Jane said. Her hand covered her mouth.
Noah didn’t look up from his stew. “When?”
“Last autumn.”
“Last autumn.” He stirred his stew. He pushed it away. I’m guessing he was thinking of all he had done since last autumn and how all of it had been in a world without his pa.
The news spread through the barn and soon all fell silent to turn witness upon their leader. Noah noticed no silence. “How’d he go?”
“Right quick.”
“How?”
“Fell off Ol’ Sis. They was crossing some sharp rocks, off on the injun land.”
“Pa don’t fall off horses.”
Noah was correct on that score. “He didn’t when you knowed him.”
The voices was back in hushed volume. A spoon clanked in an empty bowl. I didn’t like to see my big brother unsure. I thought to change the subject. “My brother, the famous gunfighter. You don’t look famous. You look the same, just older and uglier.”
“Did Pa . . . Did he hear how fast I draw?”
Jane patted Noah’s hand. “Your brother is more than a gunfighter now. He has risen to his calling, a servant of the Lord.”
Noah didn’t look up.
“Baby? Say something.”
He looked to Jane. They held eyes a time. Then Noah said, “Just as He spread the waters of the Red Sea, the Lord spread our enemy and shepherded us through. We are but the implements of his His divine revolution.”
“Hallelujah!” Jane called. She squeezed my hand. “Doesn’t he have a way with language?”
Noah stood from the table and all conversations ceased and all eyes returned to him. “Praise the Lord that He kept my sister in safekeeping as she waded fire and brimstone to join our holy cause! He who harbors doubt, I dare he to look upon my sister now and see not the proof of our Lord’s favor! I dare the doubter to think of what we did tonight and still hold doubt in his heart! No, tonight He burned the doubt!
“The Lord parted those men and shielded our escape and here we sit in good spirit, but not yet in humble mind. Boys, join me now in kneeling at the feet of our Lord.” My brother got on his knees and then bent his face to the earth.
I watched as the boys sighed and rose from the table. They wanted only to enjoy their success, but they rose anyhow and did as my brother asked, and not a one of them voiced disagreement. Even the two wounded bent to the floor.
Jane rose and swept back her dress and knelt. She put her nose to the gritty wood. They all done just as my brother done.
Except Annette. She still sat in her chair finishing her bowl of stew. I expected my brother to lose his temper at this, but he did not. Yet when one of the youngest boys lifted his head from the ground my brother frowned at him, and the boy put his nose back to the floor.
I did the same and heard my brother’s prayer.
* * *
—
After supper, Youn, one of the Chinamen among the crew, lifted an instrument and tuned its strings. The rest of the men pushed aside their empty bowls and took up the instruments that had been awaiting them here in the barn. The room was at once alive with music.
Noah kissed Jane on the mouth. Jane stood and said, “Now where’s your guitar? You got to play for your sister.”
Jane found the box and set it on the table and cleared Noah’s bowl and spoon.
He took up the polished instrument and gave it a quick tune and then stood from the table. By then the room had come into harmonious song. It wasn’t the music I was used to hearing, short songs built on a pocket’s worth of words. Their song started as one thing and with each person who joined shifted out away from itself and rode about hills that no one had thought to see before and my brother’s eyes was shut and his fingers was leading the charge. Their music was a herd of mustangs, scores of feet but one dust and all blowing in the same direction.
* * *
—
Come first light the Governor’s buckskins was gone, led off by one of my brother’s boys. They had been replaced by dusky pintos and undersized bays. Unlike the buckskins, these was everyday mounts that nobody would remember, their brands mixed.
&nb
sp; The boys rode off in pairs, some before us and some after, the idea being that no posse could identify us by our number.
I saw my brother give the rancher a considerable bag of gold. He was a weathered man with a bent back and his jacket was missing half its buttons. The man shook Noah’s hand, then reached out to pat my brother on the shoulder. Someday his grandkids would tell their children of the time the family sheltered the great Noah Harney.
Noah, Jane, Annette, and me and Constance went together, them in a tarped-over wagon like any of the thousand others crossing the mountains that summer. Annette and Constance stayed under the tarp among a mess of hay and burlap sacks while Noah and Jane took to the driving seat. Me and Ingrid rode at the side. A shovel and pick tinged with the bumps, and water tins sloshed and collided. We did not hurry. We only rolled up that road like any other family of too late pioneers.
Noah wore a silly, round farmer’s hat and a woolen Lincoln beard that was fixed to his skin, and he smoked a corn pipe. I would not have known him as my brother had I seen him, so complete was his adoption of this farmer’s person. Jane wore a bonnet of a flower pattern and a dusty dress that covered every inch of skin to her neck and wrists. There was a basket on her lap with a cloth over top and inside was biscuits. Jane passed the treats around and said, “There now, children, we’s near onto Pa’s homestead.”
“This’ll be the last one,” Noah said in an accent that matched Jane’s. “I promise, Ma. This time they’ll be wheat and barley till the world’s edge. It’ll be a skip to the girls’ schoolhouse and there won’t be another hunter for a hundred miles. We’s doing it proper this time, my dearest woman.”
“Can we have neighbors?” Jane asked. “Please, Pa?”
“Only time will tell,” Noah sighed. “Yessiree. I got me a powerful feeling of goodness on this here score.”
Annette pulled back the flap. “You two talking like that puts me in a killing mood.”
“The sunrise,” my brother said in his own voice, “puts you in a killing mood.”
* * *
—
It wasn’t noon when we felt the rumble of horses coming up behind us and Noah looked to me and barked, “Off in them trees!”
Ingrid and me wasted not a moment doing what Noah ordered. We rode until we come to a cluster of young pine and there I dismounted and held her still. I was out of range of the pistol and my Winchester was back at the Governor’s.
The horses soon overtook the wagon and all come to a stop and I could see the green uniforms of the militiamen and the gray suits of two Pinkertons. I counted fifteen. The major was not among them. They spoke a time beside the wagon and then one of them dismounted. He proceeded to pull back the tarp and peek inside. He leaned far enough to shove a box and then stepped back. “Supplies,” he called to his boss.
One of the Pinkertons walked his horse to the rear of the wagon and leaned in for a look. He said, “What you got in there?”
I couldn’t tell what Noah said.
The Pinkerton drew a knife and cut the nearest burlap bag and drew a handful of beans and then tossed them aside. He walked back toward Noah and looked him square. They had some words and my heart beat so hard my head spun.
Finally the Pinkerton tipped his hat to Jane, and all of them spun their horses and rode off in a cloud of dust.
If Constance had shifted or the militiamen had jabbed a sword into the hay, I ain’t sure my brother would have lived through the encounter. I reckon all of us would’ve gone down in bullets then. The thought of how close we come in that moment gives me chills, even all these years later. But back then, high as I was on being with Noah again, I only looked to the sky and thanked this Lord who only had eyes for us.
* * *
—
The road forked and then forked again and we was in some hellacious wilderness now. We took a narrow but deep-rutted path up a craggy canyon and left the water behind.
“For some months,” Noah said of his dodging the militia, “we kept in their dust. We only waited for them to move on and then took up residence around their old fire rings. A man never thinks to look behind him.”
“I heard tale of some of your tricks. You burned their supplies?”
He laughed. “We baited them into a maze of canyons where their wagons couldn’t go. In truth we was just bored. That was good fun. What I wouldn’t give to’ve seen the look on the major’s face when he learned the news. That man has a cruel face. I ain’t never trusted short men with hard eyes. There’s a lesson in that for you, sister.”
“When have you seen the major up close?”
“Oh, a half dozen times before last night. Twice as close as we is now on one occasion.”
“He told me he hadn’t seen you.”
Noah shrugged. “Men like the major ain’t no more complicated than a bear. If you see a bear in the pines and turn and run, he’ll give chase. If you charge him, that bear will eat you for supper. But let’s say you smile at that old bear and wave and then keep on your business, well, he’s likely to lumber off on his own. See, a man like the major only takes interest in threats and opportunities. Anything else don’t count.”
* * *
—
The terrain grew steeper and we rode now in single file up a rare-used switchback left over from the days of bison.
The horses panted and lather grew where leather met their flesh. Ingrid was swinging her head up and down in pace with her feet, and ahead the wagon creaked under the angled load.
Near the top, the gully narrowed to a pinch. There was fresh-broken rubble upon the trail. “This here is where we dynamited our way in. A big old rock was rolled to here by some long-ago peoples to forever seal this place from all that lay below. This is the only way in and out that don’t require rope ladders.”
From here we had a long view over the terrain we’d just now transcended. In all directions stood rocky crags. The wind sifted the pines. A pair of jays mimicked the call of an eagle. We didn’t stop to gander but kept on and soon broke over the top of the lip.
Before us was a great valley surrounded on all sides by sheer cliffs. The valley floor was a mix of green grass and sage mostly. Wasn’t a tree within sight and no place to hide for nothing bigger than a jackrabbit. A party of antelope broke into a sprint at the sight of us, their hooves kicking up dust. They ran a mile and then stopped to watch.
At the far end of the valley stood a great column of rock that towered hundreds of feet into the air. We set a course directly at it.
“But we ain’t just a band of outlaws no more,” Noah said. “The Lord has delivered a congregation this summer, and charged me with its safekeeping. We needed a place nobody would think to look and one we could defend against a superior force, and the Lord saw our needs and so offered us this forgotten temple of stone.”
The great rock was cracked and fissured and broken by the might of time. In the heat of the sun I saw design in them cracks and fissures, it was there before me clear as glass. I saw balconies, three tiers of them, one atop the other. I saw panes and batten. The whole rock looked to be growing as we neared, like a ship rising out the sea.
Our course bent around its flank and into the deep shade of its northeast end. Massive clefts lay about the sage where they come to rest after tumbling from the tower.
We rode around a corner to see a gap in the wall. This gap and its entrance was filled with crumbled rock that shattered under our hooves like glass and sent a clamorous warning up the trail. I saw then the boards set like railroad steel over the rock. The spacing was ideal for our narrow wagons. Noah called like Pa, “Yip ha,” and his team went rolling up into the canyon as they must’ve a hundred times before.
It was a short canyon. We went around one corner and then a whole meadow opened before us with well-grazed grass and a stand of aspen. There was a spring of water that gushed from a crack in the
rock and splattered into the pond dug out by the feet of animals. The cascade filled the hollow with music. A heifer looked on us from the pond’s edge and water streamed from her chin.
They called the place Lord’s Rock. It was a land between names when we was there. Nobody knew it as Calamity Tower until after.
I’ve heard the old Indians of the area considered it their most sacred place though their name for it was not recorded in time. Still their pictures was painted on the walls, some of them placed ten men off the ground so who knows how the reds put them there. Their offerings too was about the caves, pots, and bones and beads.
We was the last people to dwell there, on a spot of land so holy it drew believers for as long as believers have wandered this land.
I will admit that I felt the Lord’s presence just as soon as I entered that place. Here I was protected by walls of rock, a tower built of my brother’s knowing. For the first time since Pa’s passing, my mind wasn’t consumed with my next play. All I had to do was listen to my Noah, and believe.
* * *
—
There was houses, a whole mess of them, built of rock and mortar and shingles, each house built using the cliff as a back wall. I counted the houses and made it to eighteen when Noah smiled on me. “What do you think?”
Near the living quarters stood a stone and mortar fireplace as high as a man is tall. It opened toward the houses and would throw considerable heat against the rock. Beside it was a mass of pine timbers, stripped of their limbs and bark and each the length of a wagon and a half, just enough they could be tied in for the journey here and trusted not to flip out on their own accord. Near them was a pair of two-man saws and a heap of fresh wood dust set upon layers of grayed wood dust. Seats cut of pine trunks sat before the fireplace, and upon some was the burned-down wax of candles looking like biscuits to my hungry mind.