Stand there, Will, we got to lean on you. We got no strength to live for ourselves.
He swallowed back his angry tears.
Rosanne came out on the porch when Rhodes drove into the yard. He wanted to yell at her. No, Rosanne, this ain’t Will. There ain’t no living sense in you running out to meet this truck, because it ain’t Will, it’s just me, Rosanne.
“Where is Cousin Tom?” Rhodes said.
Rosanne came across the yard. She shaded her eyes against the metallic sun. She had one hand caught in her apron.
She smiled at him, and despite himself Rhodes felt the anger melt under her soft smile.
“Tom is out somewhere with Ab Taylor,” Rosanne said. “Won’t you come in, Rhodes, and set?”
“Will sent me for you,” Rhodes said. “Ma is taken bad ill, and Will has some work he just has to get done, and he wondered if it would inconvenience you too much to come set with her until he could take some yearlings into town.”
Rosanne patted at her hair, straightened her apron. “Why, you know I’m pleased to come,” she said.
Will was standing on the front porch of the big house when they got there. He came down the steps. Rosanne got out of the truck before Rhodes could open his door and she ran across the bare yard to Will.
She didn’t touch him, but her gaze touched him, caressed him. She said, “Will? Is she all right?”
His eyes were on her cheeks. “Go in to her, will you?” he said.
Rhodes had started by Will, but Will caught his arm. “I got another errand for you, boy,” Will said. “Rosanne and Grandpa will stay with your Ma. She’ll be all right until you can get back.”
Rhodes glanced toward the house. “What you want me to do, Will?”
“Your Ma seems in pretty bad pain, son. I think it’s best if you go in town and ask Dr. Beckwell to come out here right now.”
“All right, Will.” Rhodes started toward the truck, paused. He spoke over his shoulder. “Will you stay with her — until we get back?”
“She’ll be all right, boy. I’m going down to the pen and put rope halters on each of them yearlings. That way we can lead them up the ramp into the pick-up a lot faster. We — we got to get that money in the bank, boy, or I’m in more trouble than I can handle.”
“Sure, Will, I see that.”
“You won’t need to help me when you get back, son. You’ll be upset about your Ma. You stay here at the house. I’ll get the truck and carry them yearlings in to town. If I can’t be there — she’ll want you with her.”
“You need me, Will.”
“She needs you too, son. Do like I say.”
Dr. Beckwell was in his office. There were three patients waiting to see him. He talked to them in his reception room. Two he asked to wait for him, and the other he dismissed with a prescription.
Dr. Beckwell’s Chevrolet outran Rhodes’ pick-up truck back to the farm. Rhodes began to feel better. Dr. Beckwell was a middle-aged, stout man and he made you feel better knowing he was on your side — even against the malignant cancer they’d been fighting in his mother all these years.
Some of the emptiness left him and his breathing was easier. He drove the pick-up to the head of the lane that led to the corral. He blew the horn and Will waved to him. There was a truck parked on the road near the corral and two men were out there with Will. Rhodes was glad Will had some help. He left the truck and started running across the field toward the house.
He was across the barnyard and starting up the backsteps when he heard the blast of the shotgun. It came from down in the fields, down at the pens. The earth shook, vibrating with the sound of the shotgun, and through Rhodes’ mind raced the memory of Cousin Tom shooting at the fence posts from his front porch and the way the whole cabin had shook.
He stopped there on the stoop and stared back across the fields. He could see the corral but he could not see the men.
Grandpa ran out of the kitchen.
“What in God’s fires was that?” Grandpa said. “Sounded like a shotgun.”
“From down in the fields,” Rhodes said. His mouth felt numb. He felt the way he had when he’d had a tooth anesthetized in a dentist’s office last year.
Rosanne came out the back door.
She said, “Will?”
“He’s down there,” Grandpa said. “He’s down there in the fields.”
Rosanne nodded. She touched at her throat with her fingertips. She went slowly down the steps and started across the yard.
After a moment the doctor came out on the stoop. Rhodes stared at him. His mother was ill, and they all ran out here because they heard a gunshot. “Is there some trouble?” the doctor asked.
Rosanne did not look back. She went past the barn and started across the field.
Rhodes called, “Rosanne.”
Rosanne did not answer. She did not look back. She had not moved her hand from her throat. She began to move faster and after a moment she was running.
The others moved slowly across the yard, going past the barn and watching Rosanne run across the fields.
They saw Will then. He was walking behind Ab Taylor. Ab Taylor was staring ahead of him, walking with the long loose gait of an animated scarecrow.
Neither of them spoke. Will had a shotgun in his arms.
Rosanne cried, “Will.”
She ran faster toward them. The others hurried. Will and Ab were almost across the field when Rosanne got to them.
“Will,” Rosanne said. “Will, what’s the matter?”
“Tom,” Will said. His voice was flat. “I killed him.”
Rosanne did not speak. She stared at Will.
The doctor reached them and Grandpa was behind him. Will nodded at the doctor. Rhodes was staring at the shot gun. It was the one that Cousin Tom had been cleaning that day on his front porch.
“What happened, Will?” the doctor said.
“When I got down there,” Will said. “I saw Tom and Ab in the truck, and the truck was parked at the fence. They were having trouble starting the truck. I went to the corral and saw that three of my yearlings were missing.”
“He’s lying,” Ab said. “We stalled out there in the road.”
“I ran over there,” Will said. “I saw my three yearlings in the back of the truck.”
“His yearlings.” Ab Taylor laughed sarcastically. “He saw three calves in the truck. He started saying they were his.”
“They were Santa Gertrudis,” Will said. “Three. Three of my yearlings were missing. I threw the tailgate off the truck and let the calves out. I took them back to the pen. They followed me. We — Tom and I had a fight — I tried to take this gun away from him — and it — went off.”
“My God,” the doctor said. “I better get down there and see what I can do.”
“There ain’t no use,” Ab Taylor said. His voice was almost casual. “He’s daid. He’s good and daid. His belly is laid open.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
IT WAS late afternoon before the sheriff and his deputies agreed to let the undertaker remove Cousin Tom’s body from the corral.
For two hours Rhodes had leaned against the rails, watching the doctor make his examination of Cousin Tom and pronounce him dead “from buckshot wounds in the abdomen and lower chest.”
Rhodes shuddered. It was hard to believe that Cousin Tom was dead even looking at him sprawled in the damp black mud of the corral. Cousin Tom’s eyes were staring up at the tuft on a slash pine, and at the specks of clouds and at infinity beyond the clouds, but he wasn’t seeing any of it any more.
Cousin Tom had toppled backward, thrown to the ground by the pointblank impact of the twelve-gauge shotgun blast. One leg was twisted under him and his arms were flung upward. The doctor folded his arms across his chest before rigor mortis set in, but even then Cousin Tom looked as though he was going to bray with laughter again any minute.
Will stood there between two deputies and he did not speak until the sheriff asked for his statement.
When he talked, Rhodes could feel the misery and agony in Will’s voice. For all the rest of his life Rhodes was going to remember what it did to a man to kill another man — justification didn’t enter into it.
Will told them that he had come back to the corral from the house. He had seen Ab and Tom running toward the truck. He had heard that Ab and Tom were thieving from the other farmers in the back country, but it had not really occurred to him that Tom would steal from him. He even remembered that Grandpa had trailed a calf to Tom’s place a few days before, and had even reported that he’d seen human shoe prints, as though some man had been driving that calf.
“That’s right,” Grandpa interrupted. “That’s what I saw that day, and that’s what I told Will I saw.”
The sheriff shook his head at Grandpa, warning him to be quiet.
Will went on talking, the words corning haltingly. He had come close enough to see that three of the Santa Gertrudis calves were missing from the corral. Then he had seen the three calves in Ab Taylor’s truck. He had yelled at them, but they had pretended not to hear him. He supposed they would have driven away, but Ab must have flooded the engine or something, and almost ran the battery down trying to start it.
He had seen the calves in the truck, and told them to wait until he got them out. Tom pulled the shotgun on him.
“But I thought Tom was bluffing,” Will said. “I always figured Tom for a bluff, a gutless wonder. I just didn’t pay him any mind. I put down the tail gate by myself, pulled the calves out and hefted them over the fence. All this time Tom was arguing with me that the calves belonged to him and Ab. I told him to shut up and get out of there. But he wouldn’t do it. Ab tried to call him off, but Tom followed me back to the corral. Then Ab came over, and Tom got pretty rough. I told him I was going to throw him off my land. He got to yelling that the land wasn’t even mine, that it was his family’s land, and that I’d married Lena for this farm. I had a belly full. I told him to get off. Well, he jerked up his gun and invited me to throw him off. I tried to take the gun away from him. I saw then that he was just drunk enough to be mean, because he kept trying to get his hand on that double-barrelled trigger. He meant business, and I got scared. About that time Ab picked up a lightered knot, and when I turned enough to watch Ab, Tom got his hand on the trigger. I lunged close, and tried to push that gun barrel away from me. I got it turned, and I was fighting to get Tom’s hand off that trigger. The gun went off. It deafened me for a moment and Tom went staggering back. I knew he was dead. I — knew he was dead without even looking at him.”
The sheriff said, “All right, Will. Thank you.” He turned to Ab Taylor who was in handcuffs by now. “Ab, I want to ask you at this time, do you own three Santa Gertrudis calves?”
“All I know is,” Ab said, “I had three calves in the back of my truck. Will there got pretty riled when he came over to the road — we were on the lane out there, Sheriff, both Tom and me.”
“Weren’t you in this field when Will Johnson first saw you?”
“I don’t know anything about that, Sheriff. Maybe one of us did come over in the field to look for some water. My truck was overheated. That’s why it stopped right there where it did. One of us might have been looking for some water.”
“But the calves were yours?”
“I had three calves in the back of my truck, sheriff.”
The sheriff said, “I see nine calves in Will Johnson’s corral right now, Ab. They look like they are all the same breed of Santa Gertrudis. Can you pick out the three calves that you say were yours — and belonged to you — and that were in the back of your truck when you stalled out there in the lane?”
Ab looked over the calves in the corral. There was little difference in the markings, weight or build of the nine Santa Gertrudis yearlings that Will had worked with so patiently for the past eleven months.
Ab wiped his hand across his mouth. “I don’t say I can pick out my three calves, right off. All I say is that I had my three calves in my truck.”
The sheriff wrote something in his pad. “Ab, here’s a man who has killed another man for cattle theft and for trespassing. Your part in this thing is serious, but not nearly as serious as his. I’m asking you at this time if you won’t save us all a lot of time and admit that you and Tom stole those three calves from this corral?”
Ab wiped his hand across his mouth. He looked at Will, at all the men along the rail fence of the corral. He shook his head. “I reckon I couldn’t do that, sheriff.”
The sheriff looked at Grandpa. “Mr. Wilkes, are you acquainted with the calves being raised by your son-in-law?”
“God fires right I am,” Grandpa said. “All nine of them yearlings belong to Will. I know it, and you know it, and every man jack standing around here knows it, and if you were half the man the peace officers were in my day you’d string this cattle-thieving, shine-running’ son of a bitch up to a pine tree right now.”
The sheriff laughed shortly. “What you mean is that you will swear all the calves in this corral belong to your son-in-law?”
“You’re damned wettin’ your pants right that’s what I mean. If I got to draw you pictures, that is. If you’ll take that bootlegger’s word against mine — ”
“Nobody’s taking anybody’s word against yours, Mr. Wilkes. I guess everybody in this county knows you.”
“Ought to. I spent all my life right in this county. Never got in any trouble — ” Grandpa laughed and slapped his leg. “None that I was ever caught in anyhow.”
The sheriff looked at Rhodes. “Young fellow, will you swear that the cattle in this pen belong to your family?”
Rhodes took a deep breath. He felt the eyes of all the men on him. He nodded, trying to smile at Will.
“I know they are, Sheriff. Just — like I know that Will wouldn’t ever do anything — he don’t think is right.”
The sheriff smiled. “That there’s the way a boy ought to believe in his father, son. Even a step-father.”
• • •
It was after eight o’clock. Will came down the stairs from Lena’s bedroom. He looked in the living room. Grandpa was seated before the fire, and Rhodes was doing his home work. The house was silent. Will walked slowly down the hall to the kitchen.
He pushed open the door. Rosanne was sitting at the kitchen table, her face in her hands.
She heard him step into the room. Her body tensed slightly, she sat waiting, but she did not move or speak.
“Rosanne.”
She stiffened, did not look up. “Yes, Will.”
“I killed Tom.”
“Yes.”
“It ain’t as though I intentioned it. I didn’t. God’s my witness, I didn’t.”
“I know.”
“I had to kill him, Rosanne. Or he was going to kill me.”
“He was robbing you, Will. You don’t have to say all this to me. You don’t have to hurt yourself. Not any more.”
“I’m hurt inside, Rosanne. I never wanted to kill anybody. But looks like what I want don’t matter any more. I hurt people. Whatever I touch, I hurt people.”
“No, Will.”
“He was your husband. No matter what else I done to him, I — I got no justification for killing him.”
“Please, Will, don’t talk about it. You don’t have to. Tom was wrong. He was all the way wrong. The sheriff said so. Everybody said so.”
“Yes. But that’s why I want to talk to you, Rosanne. It ain’t always what people say about something that matters. I killed Tom — a long time ago. The night I saved his life, that was when I killed him…. He was unconscious, but he knew — somehow he guessed — about us. About you and me. That night, when we left the boy in the house and went out to the truck — in the night and in the cold because we thought we couldn’t stand it any more apart from each other. I — killed him that night.”
“Please, Will, don’t. Don’t torture yourself. I went with you — that night. The way I would any night, or any day. I loved you,
Will. I was crazy about you.”
“Yes. It seemed fine that night. We were all alive then. Tom was big and stout, a loud-mouthed fool. It was what he deserved. But not now. It all looks different now. I can look at it now and see it a way I never saw it before in all my life…. Poor Tom. It was driving him crazy-knowing that you loved me. And now he’s dead. And I killed him. First I took you from him. And then I killed him. God help me, Rosanne, I guess there never was anybody so evil and so covered with slime like I am.”
She got up from the table. She came to him, touched his arms, moving her hands up and down along them.
He remained rigid, staring at nothing above her dark head.
“Don’t, Will. Tom brought me here when I didn’t want to come. He married me when I never wanted to marry him. I was never his, but I was ever yours. Ever. From the first minute I was born up there in Alabama, I was yours. I never wanted no man — until you. I never knowed about wantin’, how fierce and hurtful it could be — not until I saw you. I’m sorry about Tom. Sittin’ here, it’s mighty easy to remember the good about him, the way he was so loud and so sure of himself, even that was just his way of making the world notice Tom Wilkes. But I never loved him. Even his dyin’ — it cain’t change that I never loved him — just like it cain’t change that I do love you, with every bit of me, Will.”
His hands touched her back and she trembled, shivering and pressing herself close against him.
“What’s to become of us, Will? Tell me. What’s to become of us?”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
ROSANNE had a big breakfast on the dining table when Rhodes came down the next morning before six.
Will was sitting at the table. He had finished his meal and was finishing off a cup of coffee.
“Sit down, boy, and eat,” he said.
“How’s Ma?”
“She had a bad night, boy.”
Rosanne gave him eggs and bacon. Rhodes took them and nodded to thank her. He was still looking at Will. “What did Doc Beckwell say?”
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