Sweetwater

by Lisa Henry

  “Hell,” he said at last, pulling his shirt off. “Not like I planned it this way. Just . . .” He shrugged.

  “Just what?”

  “I don’t know.” Matt shook a blanket out over his cot and climbed underneath it. “It’s not nothing, that’s all. It’s something.”

  Grady could hear the ache in the word; he could hear Matt’s helplessness to articulate what he felt. Grady felt something similar swelling in his own chest, his thoughts flying across the high country, back to South Pass City. Back to Elijah Carter and those eyes that begged Grady to uncover all his secrets.

  The next herd they thinned belonged to Garrick, a rancher who lived fifteen miles outside of Ham’s Fork. A man who’d given them jobs before. Stealing from him left a sour taste in Grady’s throat. Dale’s too, by the look on his face as they herded the cattle away.

  Twenty-two head of cattle. Yearlings. Unbranded. Garrick had left it too late to bring them down to his yards to brand. Selling them to Dawson was a waste. If they’d had their own land, they could have branded the cattle and begun to build up their own herd.

  “Fuck,” Matt said, wiping his face with his bandanna. “It’d be just my luck to hang for stealing twenty-two head of fucking cattle! There ain’t gonna be a ranch, is there?”

  “Shut the hell up,” Cody snapped. “You’re supposed to be riding drag.”

  “I’m always riding drag,” Matt said. “Maybe it’s your turn to ride fucking drag!”

  “I’ll ride drag awhile,” Grady said. He reined in his horse and let the cattle pass. Tugged his bandanna up to keep the dust out of his mouth and nose. He leaned on his saddle horn and watched Matt turn to the left flank of the herd. Dale was riding point, and Cody had taken the right flank.

  Matt was right. It’d be just their luck to hang for this.

  Every trip to South Pass City increased the odds a little more.

  Grady checked that there were no cattle behind him and took up his position behind the stragglers.

  Still, maybe there was more waiting in South Pass City than a noose.

  Those were odds Grady was willing to take.

  The numbness didn’t fade over the next few days. Elijah told himself that was all right. It was a sort of strength, and probably the only thing that would keep him from screaming and wailing while they laid Dr. Carter in the earth. It was all right to be distracted by the small things: cleaning his boots, getting the knot in his necktie just right, walking to the graveyard without stumbling.

  He didn’t speak at Dr. Carter’s funeral. There was an assumption, he supposed, that he couldn’t speak. Elijah didn’t fight it. Hard enough speaking without slurring, mumbling, or sounding simple. Impossible today, when he almost choked on every dusty breath. So he stood silently at the graveside, holding his hat in his hands and staring at the toes of his boots. Just the same as he did every other time people sang hymns and read passages from the Bible, except this time, Dr. Carter wasn’t standing beside him. Elijah watched as Mr. Jorgensen shoveled clumps of dirt onto the lid of the coffin. The clumps broke apart when they hit the pine and scattered, and Elijah wondered if it sounded anything like rain.

  Numb. He was numb, but that numbness was failing him.

  As the coffin was slowly covered in dirt, Elijah lifted his gaze to see the wagon train climbing west through the hills toward the South Pass. Elijah wanted to chase it, to catch it, to leave everything behind and go into the unknown. The undiscovered country.

  Elijah hurt all over. His chest was tight. His lungs couldn’t get enough air. His eyes stung, and his throat ached. He had never been so scared in his life. Not even when he was a kid.

  “Can you hear me, son? Can you tell me your name?” Warm hands on his shoulders holding him down as he struggled, twisting his head back and forth to get the water out. Except it wasn’t water, and it wouldn’t shift. He couldn’t hear right, and where was Mama? But the man kept holding him, his eyes shining with sympathy. “It’s all right now. You’re all right.”

  That first time he’d lost everything, Dr. Carter had helped him through. This time, he was alone.

  Most of the residents of South Pass City came to the funeral, hiking up the hill to the graveyard in their Sunday best even on a Wednesday afternoon. Dr. Carter was a well-liked man, and his profession was a respected one. A town felt the loss of a doctor.

  Elijah only looked up a few times, but it was enough to make him wonder if every business in town was closed. Mr. and Mrs. Dawson were there, and Lovell. The Caspers from the general store and Mr. Scully, the draper. The rival newspapermen Mr. Cleaver and Mr. Morris stood on opposite sides of the grave. Mrs. Morris, the justice, stood beside her son, with Thaddeus Sherlock and most of the extended Sherlock family. There were even men from the Carissa mine and from the new Exchange Bank.

  Elijah had never seen anything like it, but at the same time, it wasn’t enough. The whole world should have stopped turning.

  He glanced up while Thomas Spicer spoke and saw Harlan Crane standing in the crowd, with big, hairy Walt and some of the whores from the Empire beside him. Not just South Pass’s most-respected citizens, then. Crane saw him watching, and Elijah dipped his head again.

  Afterward, Mrs. Sherlock, Thaddeus’s aunt, served tea and cake for the mourners at the Idaho House hotel. Elijah didn’t go. He didn’t want people’s sympathy. He didn’t know what to do with it or what expression he should wear on his face while they gave it. He went home instead, and Thaddeus Sherlock went with him. Elijah sat at the table and imagined he could still see Dr. Carter’s blood pooling there, even though it had been two days, and he’d scrubbed and scrubbed until he couldn’t hold the brush anymore. It didn’t matter that the table was the cleanest it had ever been. He would always see the blood.

  “I’m real sorry, Elijah. Doc was a good man.”

  Elijah stared at the table.

  Sherlock sighed. “Elijah. You need to look at me when I talk, understand?”

  He lifted his gaze. “Yes, sir.”

  Sherlock took the seat beside him and looked at the table for a while as well.

  Was he thinking of their Sunday faro games? The board and the cards were in their box on the bookshelf, where Dr. Carter had packed them away neatly last time.

  Sherlock shook his head at last. “Anyone giving him any trouble you know about?”

  “Francis McCreedy,” Elijah said. “Because of his brother.”

  “Yeah.” Sherlock scrubbed his knuckles over his beard. “Maybe, yeah.”

  “They asked him to buy a stamp mill, and he wouldn’t,” Elijah said. “Last Sunday, I heard him tell Mr. Scully. It was before you got here.”

  Sherlock’s face was grave. “Francis is a lot of things, but I don’t think he’s a killer.”

  “He wouldn’t buy them a stamp mill,” Elijah repeated.

  “I’ll look into it,” Sherlock said. He looked around the cabin. “You need anything?”

  Don’t ask me that.

  Elijah shook his head.

  He wanted Dr. Carter back. He wanted the last few days to never have happened. He wanted Francis McCreedy to die in agony and then burn in Hell for a fucking eternity.

  Elijah may have been a poor substitute for the family Dr. Carter had lost, but he’d tried to fill the hole their deaths had left. He’d tried to be good, and clever, and respectful, but even at his best, it was never really enough. Maybe the whole time Elijah had been wondering about his dream-self in the West, Dr. Carter had been imagining his wife’s hair slowly turning gray and his little girl growing up to become a woman. All of Elijah’s love couldn’t hope to compare with blood.

  “You can only play the cards you’re dealt,” Dr. Carter had said once, trying to teach Elijah faro.

  Elijah had gotten dealt a better hand than Dr. Carter had when fate had thrown them together.

  Sherlock tapped his fingers on the table. “How about you show me that claim to Adavale? Did Doc get it notarized?”

 
“I think so, sir.”

  Elijah stood and crossed over to Doc’s writing desk. The pigeonholes were full of notes in Dr. Carter’s spidery handwriting. Elijah lifted up the green ledger book and the black book full of patient notes. Dr. Carter’s journal lay underneath them. Sometimes Dr. Carter would flick back through the pages and read Elijah parts of it. Mostly it was about the weather, or about birds or wildlife Dr. Carter had seen on his travels, and sometimes interesting news or gossip from town. Elijah set it aside and looked for the title on the claim. A cursory inspection didn’t uncover it, so he checked through every compartment, then flicked through all of the books.

  “It’s not here.” Cold dread settled in his gut.

  Sherlock came and stood beside him, and together they went through the desk.

  “It was here last week,” Elijah said. “I saw it.”

  “Did Doc have a bank box?”

  “No, sir.” He never had anything worth putting in one, Elijah was sure of that. “It was here!”

  He was shouting, he knew, but Sherlock didn’t tell him to stop.

  Elijah pulled open the drawers and then checked the top of the lowboy beside the desk. Nothing.

  Fucking Francis McCreedy, and fucking gold, and fucking South Pass City.

  “It’s not here!” He pulled Dr. Carter’s wedding portrait out, and Hannah’s christening gown. There was no bracelet tucked away in the soft folds of the fabric. The bracelet of glass beads that Dr. Carter had bought for a girl with eyes like the sky. Gone as well.

  “Well, I wanted to buy her sapphires, but could only afford blue glass. She married me anyway.”

  That bracelet was more precious than any fucking claim on a piece of dirt. The girl Dr. Carter had loved had fastened that bracelet around her wrist and married him anyway. It was love and hope, dashed to pieces in South Pass City like everything else.

  Elijah should have died on the Trail with his family. Anything except get stuck in this fucking place, a simple deaf cunt who only cared about one person and then that was fucking ripped away from him as well. Elijah balled his fist and punched the wall, and it hurt so fucking much that he did it again.

  “It’s gone! The bracelet’s gone!”

  “Elijah!” Sherlock grabbed him by the shoulders and spun him around. “Settle down.”

  “It’s not here,” Elijah said, his voice breaking. “They killed him for a fucking piece of paper!”

  “I’m gonna find who did this, Elijah, and I’m gonna make sure they pay, you understand?” Sherlock’s gaze was intent. “You understand?”

  Elijah dropped his gaze. “Yes, sir.”

  “Look at me.”

  His face burned, but he obeyed. “I understand.”

  “Good.” Sherlock released him. “Don’t do anything stupid, Elijah. Don’t go taking things into your own hands, understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  That was a lie, probably, because if he saw Francis McCreedy in the street, he’d gut him like a pig. And he’d fucking love it. He’d carry the smell of McCreedy’s blood with him to the grave, the sight of his wet intestines spilling out in the dirt, and it would be worth it.

  “Okay,” Sherlock said, wearing a worried frown. “In the meantime, you look after yourself, you understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  And then Elijah was alone, nursing his busted knuckles and looking through Dr. Carter’s medical bag for something to clean them. Then the bottle of ether was in his hands, and the sweet, sickly scent of it was on his fingers. Elijah raised his hand to his nose and inhaled. Just a tiny sniff—he didn’t crack the bottle open—but it made him dizzy all the same.

  Would make him sleep. He could slip away quietly, offering no resistance, his body boneless.

  Elijah put the bottle back.

  He didn’t want that. Not tonight. Tonight he wanted to hurt some more.

  He cleaned his hand with carbolic acid, wincing at the sting, then put on his coat and headed for the Empire.

  It wasn’t even dusk, but the Empire was busy. Walt was working the door again and looked narrowly at Elijah as he walked in.

  Fuck him. Elijah didn’t need Walt’s permission to be here, not when he had Crane’s.

  Elijah entered the saloon and looked around. Strange but the place didn’t make him nervous today. The broiling in his gut wasn’t fear this time; it was biting need. He knew what he wanted, and he knew what he’d get.

  Harlan Crane was sitting alone at a table in the corner. Drinking, smoking, and watching. His expression didn’t change when he saw Elijah.

  Elijah crossed the room and sat down at the table and waited.

  “You look like a lost fucking puppy,” Crane said at last. He slid the bottle across the table and motioned for the bartender to bring another glass. “Drink.”

  This, Elijah understood more than cloying sympathy. Fucking welcomed it and didn’t care how much the liquor burned. He was sick of dragging the weight of his own misery around behind him like a dead limb. He wanted to drink until he couldn’t feel it anymore.

  He drank and drank again, and every time his heavy gaze dropped down, there was a full glass in front of him.

  Dusk softened into darkness, and one by one the lanterns hanging from the ceiling were lit. It got crowded. Elijah was jostled more than once by men moving around behind him, but he hardly noticed. Too drunk. Too fixated on Crane and the pain that was coming.

  “My father died when I was fourteen,” Crane said. “I hated that son of a bitch. But you, boy, you loved your pa.”

  “He wasn’t my pa,” Elijah said, slurring. “He was better than my pa.”

  “You were lucky then.”

  “Don’t feel lucky.”

  Crane’s mouth twitched in a quick smile. “No, I guess you don’t.”

  A wall of noise—cheers, applause, whistles—hit Elijah. He twisted around to see that there was a man at the piano. Playing some popular song, since half the customers in the place were singing along. Was it music that set him apart? There was nothing that could be said that couldn’t be written, but music didn’t translate to Elijah. He’d seen how it could be uplifting—he’d watched the faces of people who sang hymns—and now bawdy songs. It seemed like it transported them together and left him standing alone in the dirt. Elijah would never catch music.

  He turned back to Crane, just as a woman sat down beside him. A whore. The buttons on her dress were undone, the fabric pulled apart to show her corset. Her breasts heaved as she sighed. “My name’s Lila.”

  Elijah looked at her face. She had brassy-red hair. Her pale eyes were ringed with kohl. There was a yellow-and-black bruise around her left eye, and her painted lips were swollen and split. Old injuries imperfectly covered with cheap cosmetics. She wasn’t young. She had crow’s-feet, and the skin under her chin sagged. She smelled of cigar smoke and musky perfume. She reached out and patted Elijah’s hand, for comfort he supposed, and he saw that her fingernails were chipped.

  “The doc was a good man. He always treated us girls like ladies.”

  He treated whores like ladies and foundlings like his own blood. Elijah didn’t know if that made Dr. Carter a good man, or just a man who, although he deserved better, had been resigned to cheap substitutions. He resisted the urge to pull his hand out from under hers.

  “He was a proper gentleman,” she said.

  Her breath smelled of liquor.

  “Hands off, Lila,” Crane told her. “He ain’t yours to touch.”

  “I was just offering the boy some sympathy,” she said and withdrew her hand. “That’s what folks do, Harlan.”

  “Elijah doesn’t need your sympathy,” Crane said. “Elijah needs another fucking drink.”

  It must have been true because Elijah almost laughed.

  “Go and earn your keep,” Crane told her, and Lila stood up and walked away. Crane leaned over the table. “She was always sweet on your pa when he came to see the girls were clean. Followed him around like a bitch i
n heat.”

  Elijah wrinkled his nose and tried not to imagine it.

  Crane laughed. “Yeah, she’s not much to look at, but she works hard. You steer clear of her, boy.”

  “Wasn’t,” Elijah said, “wasn’t going to . . .”

  “Well don’t,” Crane said. He lifted his glass to his mouth, tilted his head back, and drank. “You drink for free, boy. You don’t fuck for free.”

  Elijah raised his gaze from Crane’s lips to his eyes. “Never thought I did.”

  Crane regarded him silently.

  Crane was dangerous. Men like him were the reason that Dr. Carter had told Elijah to stay away from the cardrooms and the saloons. He could hear Dr. Carter’s voice in his head, that slow, patient voice that had warned of every hazard, and soothed after every stumble: “Oh, Elijah.”

  Elijah was done with gentleness.

  He looked around again. At the next table, Lila was sitting on a man’s lap, her lips pursed teasingly as his hand fumbled at her breasts. As Elijah watched, the man’s other hand disappeared under her skirts, and her thighs parted.

  At the table over from that, men played poker. A whore sashayed past them, flashing them a smile and making her petticoats dance.

  Should he have wanted that? He didn’t know. He looked back at Crane and at the dark promise in the man’s eyes.

  You’ll hurt me, and I’ll let you. I’ll like it. I’ll show you my belly, you’ll rip me apart, and I’ll want more. Always more.

  But I’ve got bite too. You just haven’t seen it yet.

  “Does Francis McCreedy ever drink here?”

  “The McCreedy boys drink at the Palace,” Crane said. “One of my cardrooms.”

  “Do they come to town often?”

  Crane narrowed his eyes. “Now why would you ask me a question like that, boy?”

  Elijah tipped the rest of his whiskey down his throat. “Just asking.”

  “Just asking,” Crane echoed. He leaned back in his chair. “Careful now, Elijah. Don’t go getting yourself in trouble on account of things you don’t understand.”