Whiskey When We're Dry

by John Larison

  “Who goes?” Mason asked.

  Noah swung up on Blackie. He looked at me. He was asking if I wanted in.

  I tipped my hat.

  “Good,” he said. “A family affair then.”

  * * *

  —

  Eight of us thundered through the canyon and into the morning light and come to full speed and it was my brother and Annette on either side of me, and we rode on point with our eyes squinted into the wind. Our hats was on low and we leaned into our speed and the earth shook under us and behind a great wall of dust rose that had nowhere to blow on that still morn.

  When we cut from the plateau and down into the pines, the road grew steep. The animals knew the steps and I remember thinking how quiet it all was down there. How not a bird lifted from its roost, and not a deer broke for cover. The road turned into the canyon and the rocks pinched in tight and in that moment it was Blister up front, and then Annette and me and Noah behind. The others had fallen back as we rode the fastest horses. I was looking at his back when Blister crumpled.

  I heard not the shots but the sound of bullets ripping air and smacking flesh. The bay I was riding careened and I was swiped from her back by a limb.

  Time and distance and past and future, all the currents of a moment lived, condensed into that gulch. I am four decades from there now but I have never left its confines. To be ambushed is to be ruined for quiet moments. To be dry-gulched is to forever dwell one step from fury.

  When I rose there was a shortage of sound but belches of fire and gun smoke and tree limbs falling and dirt bursting and bark flying, all of it slower than the rules of earth. Annette was behind her dying horse firing on the rocks above and I drew both pistols and busted rounds at the flashes of muzzles and I must’ve been hollering because Annette and Noah saw me there and took their chance to fall back. That’s when it happened, as he stood to run.

  I saw it. The arm that held his pistol folded at a new joint below the elbow and the gun fell to the earth. Noah paid the wound no mind. He seized the pistol in his left hand and busted off rounds as he ran. Blood was pouring from him but there wasn’t no time for nothing but getting to cover.

  We caught our breath with our backs to stone and then Noah come up firing with his left and I come up firing with both and Annette took careful aim and the three of us bucked off lead and I broke open a man’s face from across the gully and then I saw the man I was about to kill stumble as Annette’s bullet center punched his chest. Lead splattered all about us and yet we returned that ore in such volume that Dizzy’s boys dove for cover.

  Noah sank behind the rock and yelled to time our reloading so they couldn’t rush us. But he only had one hand and it was his left and so his casings was slow to find their places. When my pistols went dry I reloaded his first and then mine.

  I come up hot now and I fired with both hands and still lead kicked chips from the rocks about us. Youn was on the ridge by then, behind the ambush, and I saw him laying waste to those bastards with his Winchester. Carlos was with him and this fight was going our way. The devils was turning to run.

  By then Noah was too weak to stand. He give up firing his pistol.

  A last few was behind us now and Noah called it and I spun and winged the first one and then Annette stood to fire. That’s when she took her hit.

  I heard the whack of lead and I heard the air come out her throat. I finished my cylinders into the man who done it.

  She sank to the earth as Carlos hollered down from the ridge. They was done for. The day was ours.

  Annette’s eyes looked up into mine. I ripped at her jacket and there it was. The bullet had tore through her guts.

  * * *

  —

  Still it ain’t easy for me to tell it.

  She was panting and begging for water. She took hold of my sleeve and drew me close. “Water.”

  I couldn’t look at her, Annette gasping, and yet where else could I look?

  My brother was poking at the splintered bone, trying to put it back in his skin. The blood was running from him too fast and his face was going gray. He said, “It don’t work no more.”

  Brass glittered in the dirt. Scuff marks where horses bucked and ran. Limbs still laden with green needles splayed upon the earth. Smoke lingering in apparitions. Youn firing point-blank into a crawling man. Echo, echo, echo.

  Good ol’ Blister, his eyes open to me. Blood bubbling from his mouth, and he ain’t gagging.

  Blackie stumbling by without regard for the trail, her breathing ragged and wet, her own internals tripping her feet. She stops and wavers, and then falls sidelong and rolls down the ravine and stops against a tree kicking and sucking for air through all that blood.

  At my feet Annette is begging for water.

  * * *

  —

  It was Pa’s voice that woke me.

  Noah was white as death. Blood rushing out with the beat of his heart. He panted, “It don’t work . . .”

  I cut a cord of leather from my holster and fed it around Noah’s shot arm above the wound. I did this as Pa described it done in the war. I done it without past or future, only the words of Pa and the matter-of-fact destruction of human flesh that finds itself in the path of lead. A stick went between the leather and the arm and I twisted it tight. The blood pouring from my brother’s flesh slowed to a drip.

  Annette’s lips was cracked and bleeding and she gripped my hand and barked, “Water. Please. Water.” It is true, her belly bubbled with red and green and the air about her smelled like upchuck and worse. She drew me to her lips. “Water. Water. Water.”

  That voice. It was not hers at all but the howl of the animal that dies within each of us.

  * * *

  —

  It took three men to lift Annette from the earth and deliver her to the wagon. They had heard the ambush from the Rock and come at once.

  Annette fought me when I tried to move her and yet with every breath she begged.

  Noah walked, a man on each side. He was too dizzy to balance. His hand was now gray and black below the wound and swung of its own accord and he muttered nonsense. He looked everywhere but at his right arm.

  * * *

  —

  I joined them in the wagon. It bounced upon the earth and their flesh went fluid. The longest ride. Days and weeks and years in that wagon to go two miles.

  Noah’s arm was all but lost. Two inches different and the bullet would’ve missed clean. Two inches at fifty yards is half a hair’s difference at the muzzle.

  If Annette hadn’t stood to fire might the bullet have missed?

  If Noah had been whole, might he have killed the one who hit Annette?

  If I had practiced more, might I have saved us all?

  If we hadn’t gone to town.

  These be the trails unrode, the very ones that will haunt me till I join them in the dirt.

  * * *

  —

  Later the newspapermen asked over and over what made me a killer. I had no words for them.

  To kill does not make a person a killer. A killer is born from a womb of shame. A killer believes he is worthless. A killer believes only killing can return worth.

  * * *

  —

  We rolled on in the morning light, the wagon rocking over the uneven ground and their bodies sloshing side to side and their blood tracking the grains of wood and all of it my doing. The same morning but it is a thousand years forward and behind.

  Before us the sage sea extended to the foot of the Rock, still a hundred miles distant.

  “Hurry!” a voice like mine cried. But hurry where?

  * * *

  —

  Hands like mine put a coat under Noah’s head. Hands like mine propped up his knees. A hand like mine wiped the fever sweat from his brow.

  * * *

&n
bsp; —

  Annette whimpers. I promise water but still she whimpers.

  Her lips taste like ash.

  Hurry to the water.

  * * *

  —

  Still we rumble on, that ride that never ends. On and on we ride to a future that has come and gone and comes again, born anew in its ceaseless passing. We ride broken and hurt and shamed, and we turn our eyes toward the horizon, to the Other that dwells beyond.

  All of this is their fault. For it cannot be our fault. It cannot be His doing.

  * * *

  —

  I remember Noah’s eyes unblinking. The clouds reflected in them. He is mumbling.

  “She’s before the fire working on the quilt and I lay my ear to her belly, and listen and there’s a great universe inside, and so many ways it can go, so why does it always go the same? I’m wore out, I’m wore out from forgetting. I forget her all my life. Her face is gone, no one remembers her face now.

  “I’m so damn tired. She holds her hand over my ear, so warm, she sings to me, even right now I am that music from outside and inside and I feel her hand going cold. Stop the baby from crying! Pa. Pa? Make Ma right again. Pa, you gotta fix her. It is so cold here, Ma, sing me a song. Momma. Don’t stop singing, Momma.”

  * * *

  —

  Jane will meet us in the sage. She will come running with cloth torn into strips that blow out behind like festivities. I’ll take her hand as we roll by and she will swing up into the bed. She will gasp. She will draw a breath of resolve. Jane will sit between them and hold their cheeks in her palms and begin to sing.

  Hush and bye,

  don’t you cry,

  go to sleep my little babies.

  When you wake,

  we’ll have cake

  and all the pretty little horses.

  * * *

  —

  It is the children I remember upon our return. They stood along the wall of the Rock with their backs pressed to it as if to keep a monster from sneaking up behind. Some wept, others stared in vivid knowing.

  * * *

  —

  Men took up shoulders and legs and we unloaded them. They both was shivering with the fever that comes from hard wounds. Charles held Noah around the chest and another got his feet and they hurried sideways. “Get that door!” Charles shouted.

  Annette was carried into her house and passed from the sunlight into the shade for the final time.

  I could not bear to carry either of them. I sank to my knees. My lips muttering the primal memory of prayer.

  * * *

  —

  “Get help!” someone hollered.

  I was standing inside my brother’s house.

  Jane was barking orders. Charles took my shoulder. “Fetch a saw. Do it now.” I was glad for the task, for I did not have to choose.

  They laid him out upon the bed and tied down his feet and good arm. He was dazed and too worn for words. Charles had his white sleeves folded up and was washing his hands in a pot of scalding water. “Set the saw on the table. Candles. As many as you can find.”

  Noah come to at the sight of the saw and felt his legs tied down and knew then what was under way. He roared for us to stop and leave him. He roared like a bear and thrashed until his good wrist bleed from the rope. “Spite you!”

  Charles did not dawdle. He readied his tools.

  “Please, no! Please don’t,” my brother begged.

  “We must.” Charles put his hand to Noah’s shoulder. “I know of this business. The war landed upon us in Virginia and the estate became a hospital. Your arm must be lost if you are to be saved. Best we do it now before the pain sets in.”

  “There is no other choice?” Jane asked.

  Charles shook his head. “Death by fever is the other choice.”

  Jane took a breath for courage. “Be done with it then so that the worst may be behind us.” She laid beside my brother and helped him brace for what approached.

  Charles held his knife to the candles until the blade went red and then he put it to the flesh below the elbow and cut deep all the way around. The saw was made hot with flame. Then it was put to the bone. The resulting sound can be healed by no song.

  I talked to myself about what I was witnessing, as if one half of me was an elder sibling and the other was naive to the movements of this earth. I couldn’t have told you in that moment how his arm come to be damaged. There was no cause and no effect, no before or after. I was native to that breath and only that breath. I breathe it still.

  * * *

  —

  After, my brother lay motionless. He did not whimper or cry or pull at his restraints. He only drew breaths and looked straight into Jane’s face and recited Genesis from its first word.

  The arm was handed to me by the thumb. Charles nodded toward the door.

  “Give it to the ground. Can you do that?”

  * * *

  —

  I held my brother’s hand as the flesh turned dark. Already the blood was thickening. The horses fled from me as I walked near, Ingrid among them. Out through the Rock and to the sage, a living hand gone to heavy flesh. We never know what our hands weigh.

  I dug as deep as I could with a stone and set the arm into the hole and backfilled and rolled a boulder over top. It was Pa’s words I heard, Flesh deserves quiet rest. I piled more rocks until I was sure no scavenger could dig it up.

  All at once I felt my own pain. My shoulder throbbed and my hip pulsed for reasons I couldn’t remember. But none of the blood soaking my clothing was mine.

  I did find two places where lead had torn my jacket. How was it that lead could come that close and not rip my flesh?

  How could it be that lead had broke them and not me?

  “How could you kill as you have?” the newspapermen would ask later.

  “Because I was spared.”

  * * *

  —

  Annette was moaning and sobbing from her room. The door was open and Charles was with her.

  All about children cried. Mothers shoed them inside and shut the doors. There was no place to go in the Rock that was immune to her suffering.

  Charles emerged from Annette’s room and wiped the fluids from his hands with a cloth and approached until we stood an arm’s reach away. “The bullet missed the blood and so she will live sometime in this pain.”

  “She will live.”

  “She will breathe a day, maybe two. The water we give her drains from the hole in her back. The pain from these wounds is the worst kind. It comes from the center, not from the extremity, and there is no excluding it. There is no trick of mind to dodge it or potion to remove it.”

  Charles put his hand to my shoulder. I was wavering. Just this morning we was together and believing, Annette and me.

  “Go see her. Sit with her so she isn’t alone in her final hours. She asks for you.”

  I stood and stared at the black hole that was the doorway to her suffering. Drummond had touched his finger to the center of his forehead and made me promise.

  I am not proud. I was too shamed to bear her gaze.

  “How could you kill as you have?” the newspapermen asked.

  “To kill is easy.”

  * * *

  —

  The boys was outside piling wood as if human mouths drink wood.

  I joined them and we hacked and sawed and stood to watch dead wood fall. We worked with sweat and not words. We relished the slivers in our flesh, pain that we could amplify or extract at our own choosing.

  The strongest men lifted Blister and set him atop the fuel. He was wrapped in white cloth and his blood soaked through. The blood had already gone the color of dirt.

  Noah was the rightful one to preach upon this loss but he suffered his own tortures n
ow. I put my hands in my pockets and felt a book. It was Noah’s Bible and I’ve never been sure how it found its way to my pocket. Maybe I reached for it as Charles sawed free his arm.

  Now I lifted the book from my pocket and offered it around. No man would touch it. I was the only one among them who could read.

  I turned to a page I remembered and was thankful for the lines. I could read and thereby not have to form a thought of my own.

  The passage was not right but it was a passage and no man about that pyre questioned it. “Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat. Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.”

  Youn put a match to a ball of shavings and blew them hot and then placed the shavings among the kindling. He blew and others did too and the breeze took up the flames and then the wood began to crackle and pop and smoke rose up and blew east. It went from gray to black and we all stepped from the heat. We gathered where there was no smell, and then the wind ebbed and we walked in one mass to the other side. When the wind switched again, we gave up and backed away so as not to be haunted by the smell of dripping flesh.

  We still hoped not to be haunted.

  * * *

  —

  There wasn’t a bottle of whiskey among us and so we smoked cigarettes one after another.

  “Dizzy wasn’t among the dead.”

  “I only counted twelve.”