Sweetwater

by Lisa Henry

  Crane groaned. “Please what, Elijah?”

  Elijah choked back a sob. “Please hit me again, sir.”

  “You are a fucking godsend, kid,” Crane said, and Elijah screamed and jerked as he brought the strap down again.

  In the morning, Elijah hurt all over. Dr. Carter felt his forehead and declared him unfit for Sunday prayers at the Spicers’ cabin. Elijah forced himself out of bed before too much longer. The last thing he needed was Dr. Carter examining him properly. By the time the men came to play faro, he was up and about, making their coffee as usual and trying not to let Dr. Carter see how stiffly he moved.

  “It’s not much to look at,” Dr. Carter said, dealing the cards out. “The McCreedy boys are full of talk about getting a stamp mill, but they’re still working with an arrastra. They actually had the audacity to ask me to buy one, if you can believe it! I told them, ‘Gentlemen, my usual currency is chickens. I’ve got no more in my pockets than you.’”

  “Adavale,” George Scully said. “South, isn’t it?”

  “About ten miles,” Dr. Carter said. “Just a bit past Burnt Ranch. If you ask me, it’ll be abandoned in a few months. They’re barking at a knot, those boys. Bert wants to head back east, Joseph wants to go west before winter closes the Pass, and Francis is still kidding himself thinking they’ll strike it rich.”

  Or maybe, Elijah thought, he didn’t want to leave his brother buried alone.

  Mr. Spicer tapped his fingers on his Bible.

  Mr. Cleaver lit a cigar. “Well, I tell you, gold doesn’t last forever.”

  “It’s lasted so far,” Mr. Sherlock said.

  Elijah slipped outside. He began to pull the weeds from the vegetable garden, though it would have been easier just to let the chickens in there. They must have thought so too, staring beadily at him from the other side of the fence and ruffling their feathers.

  “You make do with your weeds, and I’ll make do with mine,” he told them.

  It was hot work, but he didn’t mind it. He preferred it to working at the shop, where Mr. Dawson was always yelling at him. And Mrs. Dawson too. She couldn’t abide laziness, she told him all the time, and usually followed it up with a clip around the ear. Elijah didn’t care much. The whole town thought he was simple. He’d learned real early how to take a hit. He’d learned how to take a dive into the dirt, as well, without hurting too much and without crying. Every day until he was ten, he’d come home from the schoolhouse with scrapes and bruises, and then Dr. Carter didn’t make him go back.

  “What can they teach you there, that I can’t teach you at home, hmm?”

  It wasn’t the same, Elijah knew. Dr. Carter loved him and cared for him, and Elijah would only ever disappoint him. He was no substitute for the family that Dr. Carter had buried. You’ve given me everything, Elijah wanted to tell him sometimes, and I’m nothing. He wasn’t even a drop in the well of Dr. Carter’s loss. Couldn’t be. He’d known he was undeserving long before Harlan Crane.

  “Laboring on the Lord’s Day, Elijah?”

  Elijah looked up, startled, to see Dr. Carter standing behind him.

  “Laboring on the Lord’s Day?” he asked again. “Don’t let Thomas catch you.”

  Elijah returned the smile, flushed with the heat. Thomas Spicer was a religious man, but he was no firebrand. “Just pulling some weeds, sir.”

  “Well, I’m sure the Lord will forgive you.”

  There were bigger sins on Elijah’s shoulders than this. His slate would be so full now that he doubted weeding on a Sunday would even make the list.

  “At least I ain’t gambling.”

  Dr. Carter laughed.

  Elijah twisted a stringy weed around his fingers, testing the resistance as he tugged. It came free in a shower of dirt. Killing a living thing, just like he did for Dawson. Did the Lord forgive that? Did He forgive everything? Mr. Spicer said that you had to ask for forgiveness, but maybe Elijah didn’t want to ask for it. Maybe he liked his sins too much. No, not liked. Needed. There was something about the pain, something about the humiliation, and everything about the way that Crane looked at him instead of through him.

  It wasn’t all bad, the hurt and the humiliation. It made his blood pump faster and his nerves spike. It made him fight not to fight it. It made him feel as alive as any thunderstorm ever had.

  “You’re a good boy, Elijah.” Dr. Carter smiled.

  He stared up at him, unsure what to say. There was a denial just wanting to burst out, but he couldn’t let it.

  “Come inside and have a drink of water. You must be parched.”

  He ducked his head. “In a minute I will, sir.”

  Dr. Carter went back inside.

  Elijah stared at the weeds.

  It wasn’t really God’s forgiveness he was chasing; it was Dr. Carter’s. Except asking for it would mean confessing everything, and he couldn’t do that. He told himself he didn’t want to break Dr. Carter’s heart, but it was more selfish than that. He didn’t want to be cast out. Just the fear of it should have been enough to banish thoughts of Harlan Crane, but it wasn’t.

  Elijah closed his eyes.

  Why the hell wasn’t it?

  He rose, his muscles aching from kneeling so long. He brushed the dirt from the knees of his trousers and went to wash his hands, careful to dig the grime out from under his nails. Dr. Carter was a stickler for that. The small chunks came apart in the water, dissolving into nothing. He could see clouds reflected in the tub, thin drawn-out wisps chasing each other across the brilliant blue sky. If there was any wind at all today, it was up there. On the ground, it was hot and still, not even a breath to raise the dust. Sweat slid down the back of his neck into his shirt.

  He lifted his face to the sky and watched a hawk wheel across the blue. He stretched out his arms.

  He’d give anything, probably, to feel as free as that. To look down on South Pass City and all the people in it, tiny as bugs. The cabins and saloons, the shops and the breweries, the hotels and the banks. To rise so high that the hills of the Wind River Range themselves would shrink into insignificance and swallow South Pass City whole.

  For a second, he could almost feel it, and then it was gone.

  Elijah dropped his hands to his sides, ignoring the pain in his shoulders, and headed back into the cabin.

  It wasn’t just the McCreedy boys barking at a knot.

  On Monday evening, Elijah stood in line at the general store behind some of the families from the wagon train. A pair of small boys clung to their mama’s skirts, crying out for attention. Had Elijah ever done the same? If he had, he didn’t remember. He didn’t remember his mother’s face at all, or his father’s. He remembered there was a baby that cried, and a sister, maybe two: little girls with fine, flyaway hair the same color as spider’s silk. He thought of them as little but couldn’t say now if they’d been older or younger than him. One of each, maybe. That’s how he placed them in his dreams of the West. An older sister with a baby of her own on her hip now, and a younger one with her hair still in a braid down her back.

  Elijah had coupons in his pocket for a pack of handkerchiefs, if there were any in stock. He’d cut them carefully from the yellow label on Arbuckles’ Ariosa Coffee, until he had enough saved up. When he finally got to the front of the line, he laid the coupons on the counter. Mrs. Casper scooped them up and went into the back room for a moment. When she returned, she slid a thin packet toward him.

  “No eggs for me today?” she asked him, pulling her mouth into strange shapes the way she always did when she spoke to him.

  “No, ma’am,” he said slowly. “Our chickens ain’t laying much this week.”

  He could have told her it was the heat, that the chickens were listless and out of sorts, and that he’d put Condy’s powder in their water to see if that improved them, but he never spoke more than he had to. He put the handkerchiefs into his jacket pocket, paid for his packets of coffee, salt, and cornmeal, and headed out to the street again.

/>   It was dusk. Summer days were long in South Pass City.

  Elijah slipped his shopping into his bag, careful not to squash the sausages he’d bought at work, and headed for home. His stomach was already growling, but it wouldn’t take very long to fry the sausages, as long as the stove hadn’t burned out during the day.

  He passed the livery stable, the blacksmith’s, and turned off before the new Exchange Bank. Not too many years ago there had been nothing but grass and dirt where there were now bustling streets. Mr. Cleaver might have worried that the boom was already over, and Harlan Crane thought that it was, but South Pass City was still growing. Elijah headed up the hill toward home, stopping once to turn around and discover if he could see the Empire. He could just make out the tip of the roof in the distance; the Exchange Bank hid it from view. On the outskirts of town, he could see smoke rising from campfires—the wagon train.

  Caleb Sherlock’s old yellow dog came out to meet him as he walked, and he scratched his ears for a while. The dog snuffled at his bag.

  “Get your own,” Elijah told him and sent him home with a slap on the rump.

  At the edges of the sky, faint stars were appearing in the blue.

  His stomach rumbled again, and he walked the rest of the way quickly.

  He stepped up onto the porch and wiped the soles of his boots on the mat, then pushed the door open.

  It was dark inside the cabin.

  He put his bag down. “Are you home?”

  It took a moment for his eyes to adjust.

  Dr. Carter had fallen asleep at the table before, his books open in front of him, the unattended candlewick drowned in its own wax. For a moment, he thought it had happened again. He smiled before he realized, before he saw. A shining, fat, black slick that clung like a leech to the soft gray hairs behind Dr. Carter’s ear. But it wasn’t a leech.

  A bullet hole, leaking blood.

  Elijah made a noise, or thought he did. Must have—it hurt his throat.

  He put a hand on Dr. Carter’s shoulder. Shook him.

  His hand came away wet. In the gloom, black, but he knew the smell of blood.

  He didn’t cry out again. He didn’t scream. He was too numb for that. Too suddenly, shockingly numb. The tears that wet his face seemed to have fallen without conscious thought, while his mind scrambled to find something else to fix on. Anything else, apart from this.

  Dr. Carter was cold. No rigor mortis yet, but beyond all care.

  Beyond all care, Dr. Carter had always said, instead of beyond all help. He’d told Elijah once that he hoped it gave some comfort.

  Elijah mouthed the words to the room, but they didn’t comfort him at all.

  It was more than a day’s travel between McCord’s cabin and Ham’s Fork.

  The weather had cleared up, at least. There was no rain today and barely any clouds. They made a decent pace and rode into Ham’s Fork around the middle of the day.

  Just a street, really. A few shops and houses. A cluster of sheds and outbuildings behind them. Chickens and dogs flicking up dust with their claws.

  They rode to the livery stable.

  Bannister wasn’t in yet, but the kid who worked under him knew their faces well enough. He welcomed them with a gap-toothed grin and helped unload the horses. Then they headed out into the sunlit yard.

  There was no feeling in the world as good as washing off the dust from the trail, even if it was just under the pump in the yard of the livery stable, with damp hay and horseshit underfoot. Grady still felt cleaner than he had in days. He rubbed his jaw, the stubble rasping, and told himself he’d shave in the morning. For now, a wash down under the pump and clean clothes were the nearest thing to Heaven there was.

  Matt vanished in the early afternoon, only returning to the livery stable when it was time to head up to the house for dinner.

  Martha, the boys’ sister and Grady’s cousin, lived with the Bannisters, as well. She was twenty-two now, and it was a mystery to Grady why she didn’t have a husband of her own. There’d been some interest from a fellow down in Granger, but for some reason it hadn’t happened. Maybe it was as simple as Martha not liking him enough, or not enough to leave her home and live with strangers for his sake. Or maybe, and Grady worried this was the case, the man had caught word of how the Mullins boys made their living.

  Still, if Martha begrudged them that, she gave no sign as she set their places at the long table in the dining room.

  Bannister sat at the head of the table, with his wife on his left side and his sister, Dale’s wife, on his right. Dale was seated beside her, the buffer between the Bannister and the Mullins families.

  Grady picked at a hangnail while Bannister said grace, then they got down to eating.

  “Cody says you had no trouble,” Martha said in a low voice.

  “Not this time,” Grady said.

  She looked pleased.

  Grady studied the tiny little holes in the edge of the fancy tablecloth. He remembered Martha working on it last winter. Broderie anglaise, she’d explained as she’d punched out the holes with the point of her scissors. Then she’d spent so many hours a night working on embroidering around the edges that the needle dug ridges into the pads of her thumb and forefinger. Grady had always thought it was the sort of thing Martha should have put away for married life, not used on the Bannisters’ table, not even on a Sunday.

  Strange that Grady had worried that Martha was wasting her best years in Ham’s Fork when what the hell had he been doing? There was no ranch, and maybe there never would be. Grady was tired of waiting, anyhow. He wanted to move on. Didn’t want to end up hanged for stealing cattle. Didn’t want to keep making deals with men like Harlan Crane.

  He wanted something different. Something new.

  Maybe that’s why he’d followed Elijah from the Empire. Grady had seen him watching while Dale had exchanged words with Dawson and seen him again in the Empire. Seen the way that Crane had smiled while his hand disappeared under the table. Feeling Elijah up, Grady had realized, and he had turned his head away. Told himself again that it was none of his business.

  And wasn’t that a fucking lie?

  Drank enough that he’d convinced himself that he didn’t give a fuck what Elijah did.

  Another lie.

  It mattered. Jealousy had burned as bad as whiskey in his gut, and somewhere in that cheap booze Grady had found clarity: it fucking mattered. Whatever it was, whether it had a name or not, it mattered. Elijah mattered.

  Of course, clarity was worth shit then and there. Grady had half supposed it would vanish with the morning, but it hadn’t. It had been chance that he’d seen Elijah the next day, not design. Cody had staggered back to the hotel at some ungodly hour. He could hardly stand and was yelling about losing his hat. His favorite hat, as though he had more than one. Still, Cody was as full as a tick and liable to shout the hotel down and get them all thrown out into the street. The only thing that had shut him up and got him into bed had been Grady’s promise to go and fetch his hat in the morning.

  Then he’d snored like a damn bear the rest of the night.

  On his way back to the Empire, Grady had run into Elijah Carter, wreathed in the faint gray light of the predawn. Grady got the kid’s name out of him, even though he already knew it, and then fucked it all up by trying to ask if he was a fancy boy. Elijah had looked horrified, soon as he figured out what Grady was asking. But there’d been something else as well, coiled so tightly around the shame and fear that Grady hadn’t even recognized it at first: want.

  Whatever this was, Grady wasn’t the only one who felt it.

  He could have forced his hand, but he hadn’t. Something about Elijah had made him think of a wary animal, and Grady didn’t want to scare him off for good.

  He’d let Elijah walk away instead.

  In that moment, it had been enough that Elijah wanted him. In that moment and in this one. Grady liked to think that maybe Elijah was thinking of him too. That was more than Grady ha
d ever had with anyone. They’d hardly spoken, hardly touched, but there was something. It was fragile and ephemeral. It was fireflies. Grady wanted to catch it and hold it in a jar. He wanted to watch it glow. Fragile and ephemeral, but it was as real as anything else.

  “You’re a million miles away,” Martha teased.

  About a hundred and twenty miles, more like.

  “Sorry,” he said, forcing a smile.

  In the daylight, the remembered glow of fireflies seemed like a dream.

  Grady and Matt walked back to the livery stables together. Cody had stayed on at the house to play cards with Dale. In the cold, the stars were brighter. It was what Grady enjoyed most about this time of year. About the only thing, since it would be winter too soon, and he’d be stuck inside with Matt and Cody for weeks on end.

  Matt was humming as they walked along, some jaunty music-hall tune Grady recognized from the last time they’d been at the Empire.

  “You look real pleased with yourself,” he said.

  Matt flashed him a smile. “Happy to be back, I guess.”

  Grady hadn’t missed the glances Matt had shot toward Kate across the dining table. He sure as hell hoped that Bannister had. “Don’t get your hopes up.”

  “I won’t.” Matt looked suddenly furtive.

  “Shit,” Grady said. He lowered his voice. “You’ve done it?”

  “No!” Matt’s denial was too brittle to ring true. “Kate’s a God-fearing woman.”

  “Jesus. He finds out, and he’ll fucking kill you.”

  “I ain’t scared of him!”

  “What about what he’ll do to her? You scared of that?”

  Matt didn’t answer.

  Grady kicked a stone as they walked.

  Matt didn’t say another word until they were back at the stable, in the storeroom that doubled as their winter quarters. The storeroom was under the hayloft, which kept the worst of the cold out. Three stacked cots and folded blankets. Full of dust and motes, though.