by John Larison
“So what’s that?”
“Least four left, and Dizzy.”
We smoked until our throats went dry and still we smoked more. Not a man would return to the Rock. I believe they too was afraid of Annette’s suffering, for it was a reminder of how small was our own.
I threw a cigarette to the earth. “Let’s ride. Let’s ride through them and destroy them and set this right once and for all.”
I did not have to persuade.
What we did that night will offend you. I do not seek to justify our actions, I do not seek to provoke your forgiveness. What we done is for us to bear.
“How could you kill as you have?”
The same logic lies dormant within all fairy tales and histories, it is as fundamental as our origins, as urgent as our breaths. And yet I will confess the choice was ours.
The choice is always ours.
* * *
—
Ingrid would not allow me near, so covered in blood. I saddled another I did not know.
We rode out into the dusk and past the smoldering funeral fire. Thirteen agents come to see the waters prevail. We did not speak. We rode through the silver moonlight. We rode into the warmth of the pines and past their bodies still strewn about the rocks and then down along the small creek that chilled the air. We rode and our horses panted smoke. We rode in fury so as to dodge our grief. We was His anointed few, His agents of righteousness, His deliverers of balance.
From the darkness come a glimmer and our horses picked up speed. Dizzy’s saloon cast its light upon the needles and the boys ran a tornado about the building. The party within was blind with liquor. There was a piano and the sound of glass breaking. I suspect there was fifteen or eighteen souls inside, all them guilty to the logic of our grieving.
Youn gave his horse the heels and the two of them went up the stairs in a bound and through the front doors and the mayhem became general. The pounding of feet and the crackle of bones and the pops of twin pistols. Women shrieked and men pushed through the door. The boys was ready for them and laid them out upon the steps.
A man went through a window and broke for the safety of the darkness and I rode him down and shot him in the back. I did not see him hit the earth but turned back for more.
Youn’s horse leapt from the deck and landed on the earth and shook as if he was wet from a river crossing.
Jeremiah come around from the back of the building with a man held stiff at pistol point. There was a ragged and gushing tear along the man’s brow, but he was lucid and holding his arms over his head and begging for mercy, begging his innocence. Jeremiah kicked him and the man tumbled forward into the dirt.
Jeremiah took him by the hair and said, “Tell us where!”
“I don’t know where Dizzy is. I don’t. I swear it! Please.”
Jeremiah hollered, “I lobby we show this fool the rope.”
Mason said, “I second the motion,” and offered a section of hemp and he and Jeremiah went about tying the man’s feet with it, one end to each ankle.
“What is you doing to me?” the man cried. “I wasn’t there. I swear it!”
Jeremiah nodded to me and I saw what he was after and I tossed him the throwing rope I had around my horn. This one he tied to the man’s arms, one end to each wrist.
Now the man understood and he began wailing with a desperation that should’ve troubled us if it wasn’t exactly the antidote we’d come for.
One rope went around Youn’s saddle horn. The other rope went around Mason’s. They rode opposite directions. The man lay on the ground as the earth quivered with hooves and then he rose up but for a moment before crashing back to the earth, now without arms. He was dragged by Youn feetfirst around that building and out of sight and then back around the other side and he come by us like a rabbit flushed from a thicket and the boys opened up on him accordingly. I heard bullets swatting flesh and punching earth and then Youn took a corner too fast and what had been good sport became less. The man went sidelong into a tree and his head split like a melon.
I insisted the boys coil the ropes so as not to waste the materials and then I followed them through the flesh and pools toward the bar. We held one another for balance so as not to fall among the carnage. Mason poured us shots. A body shifted on the floor and eight bullets made it still again. We finished a bottle and started another. We raised our glasses to the friends not with us. We refilled and looked upon one another.
“Let’s bring her a bottle,” Jeremiah said.
“Let’s bring her two.”
We carried all we could from the bar and found still more bottles in crates in back and these we put in feed bags and strapped to our saddles. The bottles clanked and rattled and the boys tested their laughter. The whiskey was its own promise.
When we was done we stood and Carlos held a lantern over our efforts. He didn’t say a word of disagreement when I took it from him. I heaved it against the wall of Dizzy’s building. Fiery oil splattered over the wood.
The flames rose up and into the pines, and when we rode on it was this light that shown our path.
* * *
—
Come morning the sun was high and the sage was alive with the calls of birds. I was dizzy and my tongue was so swollen I couldn’t swallow right. A lizard lingered on a rock three feet away, he did not believe I could see him.
We had stoked up the funeral pyre and drank the whiskey in its light.
The mess of them lay about slumbering, curled and still clinging to their bottles. I looked on them for some time. It occurred to me then that if I died today, they would deliver war to my killer. If I was dragged off by wolves, they would slaughter those wolves one by one to recover me. We had together done what we done, together and without dissent. We was a republic unto ourselves. So long as we was together, the Lord dwelled no farther away than the nearest patriot.
* * *
—
Susie was standing against the Rock. She was outside and alone and watching me, this little girl who Ingrid so favored.
“You shouldn’t be out here without a jacket.”
She said nothing. She didn’t look away from me.
“Is she alive?” I dared ask.
Susie said, “She wailed all night. She wailed for you. Now she has stopped.”
* * *
—
A deep silence smothered the Rock. Folks moved about but no voices stirred the stillness. Men stood together blowing steam from their coffee. Women shook their heads. They faced her house and did not turn their backs toward it, as if the structure contained a lion.
Inside the air smelled of sour meat and worse. Annette’s eyes opened and she said, “Water.” Nothing was left of her voice but a rasp. Her hair was wet with sweat and she shivered despite the blankets upon her. There was no color but shades of ash. It is a terrible business, dying the gut shot.
I ladled out a cup and brought it to her and held the back of her head as she sipped it. She sank back in exhaustion from the effort. I took up a chair beside her, the same chair that had held her bare, whole, perfect body only so few nights before.
“We cleaned them,” I said. “We left nobody.”
Her eyes half opened but could not settle on me.
“We burned them down for what they done to you.”
Her lips moved and I thought her trying to ask about the events. But when I leaned closer I heard her whisper, “Please don’t leave again.”
I took her hand in mine. I’m unsure if she noticed. Her hand was colder than Noah’s when I carried it into the wilderness. I kissed her hand. I kissed her brow. I laid my lips upon each eye. I so wished I could trade my breath for hers.
“Water.”
I gave her water, then some more. I could hear it dripping from the mattress to the stones underneath.
She panted.
“No wet . . . for our thirst.”
* * *
—
Her suffering followed a pattern as steady as the day. Cringing and seizing. Quick breaths and then none. Her brow furrowed and her eyes pinched shut and no air moved. And then the great release, air and settling and shaky breaths. She whimpered then, for water, for it to end. I thought again of Drummond’s finger at his brow.
During a calm her eyes opened. “Am I dead?”
“You live.”
Her hand fell to my pistol. “Please.”
I kissed her lips and the tears rushed from me, so much water when she had none. I stood all at once and put the barrel to her forehead. My hand shook and I could not steady it. I was point-blank and yet sure I’d miss.
She seized again, and it was the moment to give her the gift of an end.
But I am a coward. I lay down beside her. I put my arm about her. Her cheek was against my breast.
“Jess?”
“Yeah, darling.”
“Sing. Don’t stop.”
No words felt true. So I hummed as she shivered. I hummed Pa’s lament until the day faded and the shivering stopped.
I wish I could say there was beauty at her end. I considered just now spinning a yarn about the light coming through the slats and about a hum in the air that could only be the Lord’s own voice come to call His child home. But at the end there come only a savage gasp. Her eyes opened, and it was terror within them. Every muscle in her body seized against what she saw. She did not want to go wherever she was headed. She did not want to leave.
Her breath gurgled. I was sure only because of her eyes. As I looked into them. Their black went gray.
That is all.
* * *
—
The night we bathed, Annette put her lips to my marks. Hot water streamed from us and her lips lingered upon my scars. “Who made you perfect?”
* * *
—
I stayed with what remained. I stayed until Charles come to check. I stayed on account I could not bear to rise and speak the words and thereby make them true.
It was Jeremiah and Youn and Charles who drug the straw mattress and the soiled quilts from the room. Her body was still upon them. I took up the last corner and we lifted what remained and walked together through the canyon mouth and to the pile of wood that waited.
She looked small upon that pyre. A person is nothing without her body, yet her body is not the person. There is no divine in the dead.
I was the one who sparked the match and put it to tinder. All the boys had gathered. I did not offer a prayer or a speech. I did not settle the unease with words. I believed the unease was ours to bear.
The boys sent her off with strings. They played to her with fiddle and guitar and Jeremiah played her banjo with his eyes open to her flames. Their song twisted into the air and grew and did not let up even after their fingers bled.
It is what Annette would’ve wanted, a song that went on with no break, a song not fenced by words.
* * *
—
What to tell?
Noah emerged the following day. He come from his house wearing his hat and his jacket and the right sleeve was tucked into the pocket as if the hand was there keeping warm. He was weak in the knees and Jane held him for his balance. His face had yet to recover its color and he looked to have lost more than an arm.
All of us gathered before him. The children studied that sleeve. Parents stood in silence, eyes sneaking their glance.
We followed him on a slow pilgrimage up the trail and to the rim of the Rock, all of us, the children too. Jane did not want him walking so far, but he only raised his left and her objections fell away.
So Jane led us in “Go Tell It on the Mountain” and we walked at Noah’s pace. No one passed. No one took a step that he hadn’t already taken.
We gathered among the defensive positions and flipped up our collars against the cold wind. Charles passed around tins of ash from the funeral fires and those of us who felt so moved took up a handful of each.
I had gathered this ash. I had been the one to parse charcoal from bone with the blade of a shovel. I reached in and took up Annette and held her over the edge.
Noah handed the Bible to Jane, who opened it to a certain page and placed it back in his hand. He looked at the text and pretended to read. His voice was too weak for its typical leaps and flourishes.
“‘They are before the throne of God, and serve Him day and night in His temple; and He that sitteth on the throne shall dwell among them. They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more, neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters, and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.’”
The wind that carried these words dispersed the ash over the waves of sage.
“We let them go,” Noah said. “We let them join their Maker and be taken back to their rightful origin. Home is not behind us. Home is not before us. Home is now as it will forever be, above us.”
At these words I gripped the ash tighter. I took my tobacco pouch, poured out its meager contents, and put the handful inside.
“We let them go,” he said, “because they deserve to be free of their earthly chains. They are due in Heaven with their Father. We let them rise.”
I placed the pouch inside my breast pocket.
* * *
—
In the stillness of the room we shared I took the tobacco pouch that held her ashes from my pocket. I remembered the water cascading down her chest, her eyes shut and the hot cloth laid upon her face. It was all so close and yet forever out of reach.
“Who made you perfect?”
I dipped my finger into the ash and put it to my tongue.
* * *
—
I sat alone upon the rim, the sky going from fire to water and to ice. I was looking for any sign of her.
The wolf howled twice near midnight, and I rose to my feet. She was across the night and I was here, and only her song could carry so far.
When it was time to wake the next watch, I stayed. I stayed with no thought of sleep. I was still on the rim when the sky warmed in the east. If she sang again I would be there to hear her.
* * *
—
The following morning there wasn’t no mistaking Mr. Travis’s voice. He was loading his children into their wagon. The bows was up and the tarpaulin pulled over. His wife was carrying a last basket to the bench seat.
Mr. Travis knocked upon Noah’s door, and Jane pulled it open. He took off his hat and held it in his hand. I watched this from the lee of Annette’s house. I could not hear their words but I knew all the same what Mr. Travis was saying. Then he replaced his hat and tipped it to Jane and walked back to his family. He helped his wife to her place and then come around and climbed up himself. He flicked the reins and they rolled through the meadow and into the canyon mouth and we did not see them again.
Susie stood with Ingrid in the pole barn. Together, they watched the people go.
* * *
—
The departure sparked a rush among the others. In every house was a discussion of leaving.
Had the Lord tested Noah or punished him? Could they be safe in the proximity of a man who may in truth be in conflict with the Lord? Noah needed to rise from his bed and speak to them. They awaited his confidence. All he needed to do was recite some soothing passage that would confirm their faith in him. For that is the nature of belief, its potency increases with the prevalence of doubt.
One more family left that day. Two left the day following. Noah did not even rise to watch them go. On the third day no one left and those who remained, thirty-two souls in total, seemed determined to stay the duration.
&nbs
p; * * *
—
Such discussions was alive among the boys too, but in their own way. They didn’t talk of leaving Noah, they talked of what they would do if on their own. No surprise most all the hypotheticals orbited some whorehouse and a limitless supply of booze.
The boys would never leave. They was fearsome warriors all of them, and no strangers to hardship. But to a man, they was more likely to charge headlong into certain death beside their leader than wander into safety alone but for their own mind.
Alone in her cabin, I built up a fire each night and washed myself. I spoke to her as if she was still in the room.
* * *
—
Constance took slow walks about the meadow. She and Charles had moved into the two-room house left by Mr. Travis. On her walks Constance pulled up her sleeves to allow the sun upon her flesh and she turned her face skyward and shut her eyes and I found myself unable to look elsewhere. She was proof of something in this world that I ain’t never found words to describe. She had put it best herself all them weeks before in the carriage. “I am a promise to them.” She was no promise to me then, but she was now. Only a promise of what?
I found her one afternoon with Enterprise in the aspens. She spoke to the animal and it listened.
When she saw me she stepped away from the horse but she did not leave. Enterprise flicked her tail.
Constance touched her fingers to the aspen bark. It peeled from the tree like paper. “These aspens are all one creature. Do you know that? The whole stand grows from one root. They say the roots extend a quarter mile in places, maybe more. Two stands on either side of a ridge can be the same tree. Roots seeking water.”
“You gonna leave?” I asked. “You and Charles? Thought you would by now.”
She passed her hand down a trunk. “Charles wants to leave. I do too, though with all these armies looking, where are we to go? I can’t allow Charles to be found leading me away. . . .” She rested her hand upon her stomach. “I felt her for the first time last night. It was only a flutter but I felt her.”