by John Larison
I looked off into the dark timber. I recalled my flask of whiskey and offered the last pull to Charles.
* * *
—
We rode through the gap and into our valley just as the dawn turned the cliffs orange. The antelope lifted their heads but did not break.
Annette and me was on ahead so we could talk in private tones. I asked her, “Did I need to kill those men? Now I ain’t sure.”
She turned a piece of grass in her teeth. “I like how you done it. Quick as flight. I’m always the one who sends the first lead. I ain’t used to being surprised by a shot. I enjoyed the sensation.”
“It’s his fault for pulling that revolver, right?”
“Oh, for sure,” Annette said. “His fault for being ass dumb and riding so close, but those ain’t no points worth making. Got to admit it was fun though, right? I like riding with you.”
“Killing ain’t fun,” I said.
“Just got to do right is all.”
“I think I wanted to impress you.”
“Well, good job then.”
We rode for some minutes in quietude. The birds was coming awake. Annette said, “But I mean it. I like riding with you, Jess. You and me could go a long way together.”
* * *
—
As we entered the Rock I said, “Annette. There’s something I got to tell you.”
Hardly any sleep in two days and the action was gone now from my blood. The tired hit me all at once. She was looking at me. “Yeah? Don’t tell me you’s married.”
I couldn’t help but laugh.
She smiled on me. “Go on. What got you all twisted up?”
But I didn’t get the chance to tell her. Noah was there waiting on us. No doubt the lookout had seen us coming and called to him. I should’ve told her sooner. I meant to tell her on the climb up the mountain. But killing has a manner of taking up all the room in a mind.
Noah stepped out from a fold in the canyon and Enterprise bucked at the sight. He wore his pistols and his hat on low. We couldn’t yet see the meadow and the houses. He wanted us alone.
Annette said, “Got her done, but had to stash the supplies in the valley. Dizzy ain’t left the pines. Though he got three less men than he did yesterday.”
Noah didn’t take his eyes from me.
Annette grew weary of the silence. She shifted.
“It worked out,” I said to my brother. “Don’t look on me like that.”
Noah’s eyes was narrow and cold. I never saw those eyes in his head when he was a boy. There was a well of hate deep in my brother and I had found it.
“Hold now,” Annette said. She frowned on me. “You said he was game for a run to town.”
“I mean . . . Well, I didn’t say those words, in precision.”
Her brow flickered. “You played me?”
“No, I mean . . .” But that was exactly what I done.
She cursed and heeled her horse from me.
“Annette.”
“I thought we was in this together!” she shouted. “I thought it was you and me, no bullshit. I thought you was the type to stick your side!”
I don’t know what I thought would happen. I guess I reckoned we’d laugh it off like we done laughed off so much.
She galloped from me and into the meadow.
“You’re a fool,” Noah said to me. “Hardheaded as Pa.” He nodded at Charles. “And who the hell is this?”
Charles walked forward and stopped before my brother. Behind him, the reins still in Charles’s hand, Enterprise lipped at blades of grass. Charles said, “Mister Harney.”
Noah offered his hand but he looked to me when he said, “No blindfold or nothing?”
“This is Charles, the Governor’s former butler. Will’s father.”
* * *
—
I brought Charles to Constance’s door and rapped. She was slow to respond. When she opened the door, I saw she hadn’t yet brushed her hair or changed from her nightclothes. At the sight of Charles, the boiled egg she was holding hit the floor.
I don’t know what was between her and Charles before, but now she embraced him about the neck and wept. His arms lived by old rules and kept their place at his sides, but only for so long. Those arms could not hold out against all they mourned.
* * *
—
Noah stomped clean his boots at the door. He hung his hat on its hook and his jacket on another. He left his pistols on. He looked on me. It was just us in his house. I had followed him in. I wanted to set things right.
He put a cigarette to his lips and dragged a match across the table. “He that dippeth his hand with me in the dish, the same shall betray me.” The flame touched the cigarette and the smoke left his nose.
I took his tobacco pouch from the table. “Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own?”
“You miss the point,” he said. “You undercut me. All the boys know. Around here, I ain’t nobody’s brother.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It is a miracle alone that you made the trip there and back without getting killed, or worse, leading the army to our gates. You ain’t learned the lesson in this. I can tell from your face. You just feeling sorry for your self.”
“I ain’t.”
“Neither of you ever trusted me.”
“I trust you.”
“No, you don’t. Pa didn’t neither.”
I looked to my feet.
“How’d you leave the bodies?”
“We drug ’em down into the brush. Won’t find ’em until the magpies do.”
Noah took off his guns and stared long at them in their holsters before hanging them on the hook. His hand hung there.
* * *
—
Jane got on supper that night. She asked for my help preparing it, and I was glad for a task to keep my hands busy. Noah left and stayed gone. I knew he was with Annette.
Jane was quieter than I’d ever seen her and I kept my eyes to our tasks.
I put the biscuits to bake and then set the table for five.
Charles and Constance joined us, and Jane was her old self, aglow in the company. She told the story of meeting Noah. She told stories about him helping children. She explained to Charles how Noah was a hero to all these people in the Rock. What she said was all true enough. But it was only part of the truth, and the part that might sway Charles toward favoring Noah Harney.
Noah took his turn, telling of his brothers and sisters here among the Rock, talking of the downtrodden across this country. The money that beats them like a hammer. The money built on the suffering of working folk, money to fill gilded pockets in the East.
My brother stubbed his smoke. He said, “We’ll get your revenge, Mr. Marshall.”
Charles scoffed. “Revenge is your word, Harney.”
Noah sat back in his chair.
There was no doubting the straight-backed Charles. He sat before the most famous gunfighter to ever ride and didn’t downturn his eyes. He put his hand over Constance’s. “Vengeance belongs to the Lord.
“No, this is all about spectacle for you, Harney. You are not so different from the Governor. You speak of good and evil, and so does he. You speak of Heaven and loyalty, and so does he. You speak of brothers and sisters as he speaks of his constituency. Like him, you spin the world so you may be its savior.”
“Whoa, now,” my brother said. “You out of line.”
Charles raised a finger. “Whose line?”
My brother pushed aside his plate. He leaned over his elbows. He smiled and said in that voice that had always swayed folks, “Listen. I could use a man with your knowledge of the Governor.”
“‘Use a man!’ We come from Portugal, my pe
ople, by way of Virginia. Seven generations we have tended the political class. My grandfather’s father was once graced by the pope. I myself was in the room as wealthy men formed armies to war against their Yankee countrymen. You are but a cattleman’s son. You witness one breath of life in one destitute state and believe yourself to understand the forces of history and your place among them. I am miles above your uses for me, Harney.”
Noah swallowed. Jane put her hand on his arm.
Charles looked at Constance now. “I barely kept my baby fed after the armies razed the estate. I knew what was happening in the free states of the West. They would fill with black men set free, and we would have our new place. Our place. Yet I flinched, I admit it. I wrote a letter to the Governor, for I knew his name from the desk I served. I wrote him not for the salary, but because what substance was mine, outside the esteem expressed by strangers for the man I served? I was a man who could not name himself. But my boy knew God. My boy saw in himself what God sees. That is why they killed him. My son knew his God-given name. But, Mr. Noah Harney, it is you who will be remembered as the hero outlaw.”
Constance had begun to weep. Charles put his arm about her and she leaned her head upon his shoulder.
“No, Harney. It is not revenge that interests me. That man stole my son. I, on the other hand, have pledged myself to his daughter. This is not about your uses for me. This is about the children who come after. This is about the world we build for them, for they are our saviors.”
* * *
—
I was on Annette’s stoop turning it all over when I finally heard boots approaching. It was late enough most of the folks had turned in, their lanterns blown out. Nobody had lit a fire that night. Nobody played music.
But the boots didn’t belong to Annette. Noah sat beside me and from there we looked up on that slice of stars between the roof and the Rock.
He said, “You figure that is the same sky we looked on as kids?”
“Ain’t considered it. I got enough to figure down here.”
“How can these stars not hold your mind? Look at them up there, so far off and watching us. Every one is like the sparkle in an eye.”
“I reckon I don’t believe they watch us at all, brother. I reckon they don’t watch nothing. If they do, they don’t see us way down here on this tiny speck of dirt and wind.”
He passed me the smoke he’d just rolled and then commenced rolling another. When it was done, he put it to his lips and sparked a match and I leaned in and he lit them both. “There’s something I want to tell you. I should’ve told you sooner.”
“Well, don’t make me ask.”
“It’s good news. The best kind maybe. See, Constance ain’t the only one with child.”
Her shift in shape and color. The fatigue about her eyes. Jane was growing my kin.
I punched him in the shoulder. I shoved him near off the bench. “You gonna be a pa?”
He looked on his rollie. “You done smashed my smoke.”
“Hell with your smoke. You gonna be a pa! This ain’t no josh, is it? I’ll kill you my own self if you joshing.”
“I ain’t joshing. Still trying to wrap my head about the fact. Being a pa, well, that’s some heavy business.”
I looked on him there and all I ever dreamed for us was at once refigured. I couldn’t see his face for the lack of light but I was seeing it now anyhow, seeing what his child would look like, my niece or nephew. I punched him again. “We got to celebrate! Too bad you ain’t drinking. If’n there’s ever been the moment for whiskey . . .”
“Calm down,” he said. “Don’t go making a ruckus. Things still ain’t right between you and me.”
I looked around for Annette on account I wanted to tell the news. What would she say? “We got to tell Annette!”
Noah cleared his throat. He spat. “She didn’t tell you because I asked her not to.”
“Annette already knows?”
“I wanted to tell you myself is why.”
At once I decided not to let this fact fester. Jane was growing my kin, and that was goddamn sterling. What did it matter that Annette knew before me? That she hadn’t told me?
“It’s queer, I’ll tell you.” He relit his cigarette. “The thing moves about inside her. I can feel it against my hand and such. It keeps her up at night now. She’s a good two months ahead of Constance. Maybe you’ve noticed the bulge.”
“When will it be born?”
“April, likely. Jane thinks anyhow. I ain’t sure nobody can predict such matters.”
“Ma’s birthday was—”
“That’s right,” he said. “Jane didn’t want folks to know. See, well, she has been with child before. She ain’t never carried one this far. It’s clear as day a God-given miracle.”
“This changes things, don’t it? I mean like we got to find us a spread and go by other names and . . . you got to quit this outlawing business.”
He chuckled. “You want me to quit. The Lord offers a miracle and you want me to quit Him because of it?”
“But you gonna be a pa. It’s time to put this fighting away and take up the holier path of fathering. Wasn’t you persuaded by Charles?”
“Charles is just in grief is all. He’ll come around. Everybody do. This war ain’t mine to end, Jess. It’s the Lord’s war, and this here hand is the implement of His divine will.” He stood and opened his hand and turned it over in the starlight.
“I’m damn happy for you, brother. I’m damn happy for us. But a child needs his pa to have his eyes focused on the earth. The heavens don’t need no tilling.”
“I want to start clean with you and me, sis. I don’t want you undercutting me no more. Times will grow hard this winter, no doubt, and we’ll need to be as solid as this Rock. The boys need to see that you have full faith in me. I can’t have you pulling the dirt from my dikes.”
He slid closer to me on the bench. This time our shoulders touched. “It’s a magical story, ain’t it? All that hardship and suffering and all them close calls was to deliver us here, to the beginning of our lives. We sat on the stoop at home, and now we sit on the stoop here, only we behold a new brightness, a new generation. Ain’t that right? Ain’t that all the proof you need?”
He laughed and put his whole arm about my shoulders and drew me close. “Whoever thought that you and me would end up so far from the lake. Huh? Think of all that’s come to pass that Pa couldn’t never have imagined. Think about all that will come in this child’s lifetime that we can’t even think to consider now! Ah, Jess. My son will be the one to welcome the dawn of peace in His garden. Peace, that is the next great invention! Peace is the destiny we manifest.”
He stood and walked out from the eave and tipped his head back toward the sky. My brother never was the type to sit still.
“Tomorrow,” he said, “we will ride to Dizzy’s saloon and bring an end to that hellhole, and tomorrow night we will celebrate proper. I’ll play Pa’s song, and it’ll be like he’s with us again. And we’ll bathe in our good fortune. We’ll do the Lord’s good work, and then we’ll relish in His good cheer. We will lay ourselves upon His mercy and thereby beckon our golden future.”
Peace in my life always come from the long view, the far-off mountains and the green valley, a humble lake at its bottom and the house Pa built beside it, a tendril of juniper smoke rising from the chimney. If I shut my eyes and thought hard I could hear the sound of willows and the wingbeats of doves. Noah would be Pa. We’d be a family, wherever it was we went.
“I’m with your child, brother. All I got is for your child.”
“That’s the spirit!” His smile was wide and bright as the moon. “You and me, together, for always.”
* * *
—
I finally found her where the edge of the Rock gave way to the canyon mouth. I saw her by the cherry of her smok
e. She sat there with her feet dangling over the edge.
I didn’t say nothing. I only sat beside her. She looked sidelong and then returned her gaze onto the starlit desert. She didn’t speak but she didn’t leave neither.
Far off in the dark yonder a wolf lit up. We both turned toward it. It howled three times and then fell silent.
“She’s the last one,” Annette whispered. “I hear her some nights and there ain’t never no answer. She is alone now in this skinny land. She was born too late.”
“I’m sorry, Annette. I mean it.”
“Up north the wolves howl all night.”
“Is that where you wish to go, north?”
“I don’t wish,” she said.
“Come with me,” I said. “Come sleep. Let me tend to you.”
“Nah,” she muttered. “You go. I ain’t leaving. I want to hear her when she howls. If she howls, somebody got to hear.”
So Annette and me spent our last night together without sleep and without whiskey, our boots dangling over thin air.
Together, we waited on that wolf to sing.
* * *
—
In the faint dawn when stars fade on the eastern edge, we tacked up and passed about boiled eggs and Noah refilled our cups from a tin brew of coffee. We checked our rifles and slipped them in their scabbards. We checked the cylinders on our sidearms and filled our pockets with shells. The morning was full of the sound of metal.
The boys was hungry for it, and they bolstered their courage with pushing and joshing. Annette and me stood off to the side with our coffees.
“You think this is a good decision?” I asked her. “To go after Dizzy?”
“Always a fresh start in some action.”
“Listen,” Noah said. “I know you all want in on this, but Annette and me talked and only eight of us is going, the rest will stay here.”
“No. Why?” Blister dared ask.
“Our enemies are about, and we cannot risk the people by leaving them unguarded. We’ll split our force, and I want those that remain to take up defensive positions. That means all bodies on top, and one man assigned the dynamite. If they charge, you blast it and don’t worry about us on the outside. We’ll fight them from behind.”