Bled Dry

by Lou Cadle

  She shook her head. “No, not to anyone else.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  That stopped her. “You mean someone else who died that night might have been fired on by one of us?”

  “Sure, or on the other side. Hell, Joan shot herself accidentally. It happens. I’m not saying you shouldn’t feel bad, but you’re not the first…first soldier to do it or feel bad over it.”

  “He had been in jail for weeks. And you should have seen those jails. Disgusting, and they were packed in there like hens in a commercial farm, sitting in their own shit like them too, and yet he came out of that with kindness and decency and—” She started sobbing again. “I killed him.”

  “Oh, my child,” he said, and he pulled her in and hugged her again, patting her back.

  When she got her breath again, she told him everything she knew about Roy. That he was married, she thought. That he found the canned food and instead of keeping it for himself, he told her about it. And about the shooting itself, how he didn’t respond to the pass-signal and she’d assumed he was an enemy. “The worst thing,” she said, “the very worst thing of all, and I can’t get it out of my head, is that he said if he had a daughter one day, he’d want her to grow up like me.” She wanted to cry again at that, but she was out of tears.

  “Of course he would. Anyone would. You’re an amazing young woman.”

  She shook her head hard at those words. “I’m awful,” she managed to get out.

  “No, just human,” he said.

  She kept shaking her head. But eventually, the urge to cry stopped. She felt like she could spend every second the whole rest of her life crying in remorse and it’d still never start to make up for it, or show a fraction of how sorry she was it had happened. “That’s some kind of sick irony or something,” she said. “‘I’d be proud to have you as a daughter,’ and then not an hour later, I put two bullets in his back.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “It’s not okay!”

  “And no one knows?”

  “No. And that’s not okay either.”

  “Now I know,” Pilar said.

  “That’s a start. But I should tell everyone. Everyone here, and whoever is in charge of Payson. I’m willing to take my punishment, if that’s jail or execution.” She didn’t want to die, she didn’t, not now. But it would be the end of her guilt. “And most of all, I should tell his wife, and his kid, if he has one.”

  “Sierra, honey, what good would that do?”

  “Good? There’s nothing good that can come of this. But it’s the right thing, the honorable thing.”

  “No, it’s not the right thing. What purpose would it serve if you told his widow?”

  She cringed at that word.

  “She might feel worse, thinking he’d died for no reason. Right now, she thinks he was a hero of the liberation of Payson. That might be a comfort. Even if it’d make you feel better to tell her, would it make her feel better?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “And what if the Payson people resented it? They’re really angry, I imagine, and a lot of who they’re angry at are dead or gone. They could take all that anger and turn it on you.”

  “I’ve thought of that. Or not about turning it on me. I guess if they tore me into pieces in the Walmart parking lot, or lynched me, that’d be no better than I deserved. But I’m afraid they’ll punish you too. You, and Arch, and Kelly, and Curt, and Dev. None of you screwed up down there. It was me. Only me.”

  “I don’t know so much about screwing up, but yes, the accident was at your hands.”

  “Is there any way to keep them to only punishing me? To convince them to leave you all out of it?”

  “Not that I can see,” he said. “The only way out I can see not to risk retaliation is to not tell them. Not tell anyone else.”

  “Not even Kelly or Arch?”

  “No, not even Kelly or Arch.”

  “It seems wrong.”

  “You kept it a secret from everyone for two weeks. I think you can keep it a secret from everyone but me for longer.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I do. I totally know. Got me? Don’t mention it to anyone else. At least until the November first visit down there. Let yourself get some distance before you decide. Let Payson get some distance and start to heal. You can talk to me about it, any time, any place. I’ll drop everything if you need me for this.”

  “Are you sure that’s what I should do?”

  “I’m sure. Promise you’ll come to me if it overwhelms you. Or if you feel hopeless. Or if you feel like telling someone else.”

  “Okay.”

  “Promise.” He grabbed both her arms and held on hard.

  “I promise, I promise!” she said. “Your grip is good. Your ribs must be better.”

  “They are, thanks to your help. I can’t make it without you, sweetheart. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I kinda like you too.”

  He laughed, but it was a pained sound. “I’m glad to hear it. If you love me, you won’t do anything more about this without talking it over with me first.”

  “I feel like a coward for hiding it.”

  He rolled his eyes. “If there is one quality you do not possess in any amount, it’s cowardice, moral or otherwise.”

  Sierra cast around inside herself. Her body felt better, as if she’d purged some poison. Her mind, which had been spinning since that night, was spinning slower. But she didn’t feel anything she could call “good.” She still felt like a murderer, and like she should be punished. She didn’t much like herself—that was the main thing.

  But maybe, she believed for the first time since it had happened, she might one day learn to hate herself less.

  Chapter 24

  This is your chance to be brave again. Be brave by keeping us all safe.

  It was something her father had said to her last night when she’d had another bad moment about keeping her secret from everyone else, feeling again like a coward shirking her responsibility. He really didn’t want her to tell. And part of her didn’t want to tell either.

  She worried it was a terrible part of her.

  The chickens were all sitting on their eggs. They had four hens brooding now. She and Pilar had built another two brood boxes, as they’d never needed four before. This morning, she’d taken out two eggs that had failed to develop, the quitters.

  She was sitting on the back deck with a bushel basket of the earliest corn, readying it for lunch, thinking about what her father had said last night.

  Keep talking to me. I’ll do anything you need to help you. And please, look around you. Look at the hens, the sky, the towering pines. This is your world, full of beauty, and you are a part of it too, connected to all this life. That rifle, it doesn’t define you. That’s not what you’re connected to. That one moment isn’t who you are. You’re flesh and blood and everything you love, everyone you love and everyone who loves you.

  No one should love her. Certainly not Dev after she shut him down. Okay, her father, yeah. He almost had to love her. She pushed aside the dark thought and tried to think of the moment, like her father told her to, right now, the pleasant cool air, and the weight of the corn in her lap.

  The silk of the ears of corn stuck to her fingers, fresh and full of sweetness.

  “Looks like good corn,” Curt said.

  She looked up to find him watching her from the bottom of the steps. “Come on up. You on watch?”

  “Just finished my last sweep. It’s quiet out there. Hope it stays that way for a while.”

  “I can’t agree more. Kick those husks out of the way and have a seat.”

  “Thank you.” He took the chair next to her.

  “Want a drink? Some raw corn?”

  “I’ll pass on both, except for a taste of a kernel.”

  She handed him the ear she was working on.

  He pulled out a knife and neatly popped off a kernel, then guided it t
o his mouth on his knife blade. “Good,” he said. “I’d help you do this, but my hands are filthy.”

  “You have your own garden to tend to. It’s sort of soothing, actually, sitting here and picking off the silk.”

  “You have your water boiling yet?”

  “Should I?”

  “Not if you’re not ready to eat. But corn is better if you get the water boiling, then pick it, clean it and toss it right in. It’s sweetest of all if you do it that way.”

  “I’m sure it’ll be fine. We’re having tomatoes and corn and baked potatoes. No meat tonight. Would you like to stay for supper anyway?”

  “No. But I would like to say something.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “I’m glad you’re feeling better.”

  She dropped her gaze and focused on the corn. When he didn’t add anything for several seconds, she said, “I didn’t know it showed.”

  “It did to me. You were upset when you came back from Payson, and it got worse for several days, and now you’re on the mend. Not mended 100%, but on the mend, I think.”

  “It’s a relief to hear I am,” she said, finishing pulling the last few bits of silk off. She tossed the cleaned ear in their big cook pot, sitting by her feet, full of cool well water.

  “Looks like not a single bug got to these,” he said.

  “Pilar really has a green thumb. Did you plant a fall crop?”

  “I did, though smaller than the rest of yours.”

  “I guess none of us ever goes up your way to look.”

  “No reason to.”

  “And reasons not to. No one wants to disturb the hermit.” She managed a smile at him to show she meant nothing bad by it. “How did you know I was upset?”

  “Part of being a hermit,” he said.

  “That doesn’t make sense. A hermit isn’t around people. So he’d be confused by everything about people, right?”

  “Maybe ‘hermit’ is the wrong word. I’ve spent years on the outside of things. I don’t get invited into conversations much.”

  That worried her. “Should we be inviting you more?”

  “No, that’s not what I meant. This increase in friendly neighbor stuff since oil ran out is about as much social time as I can take, honestly. Present company excepted.”

  She wasn’t sure what that meant exactly, but she nodded as if she did. “So how does being on the outside make you able to read my mind?”

  “It’s not your mind I’m reading. It’s your body. How you hold yourself. If your shoulders sag. The length of your stride. Lines in your face—well, not yours, because you’re too young to have any lines to speak of. And where your eyes go.”

  “Where my eyes go?” she said. “Usually they stay right here in my face.”

  He smiled. “And that you’re willing to make a joke.”

  “It wasn’t much of a joke,” she said.

  “Still.” The chair creaked as he shifted on it. “When you’re on the outside, you hide, but you watch. People think they are choosing not to talk to you, but they’re talking. With every gesture, they’re talking loud and clear.”

  “Me too?”

  “You especially.”

  She hoped he hadn’t read a lot from her. But then again, she hoped he had. A part of her wanted to talk to him about killing Roy and how she felt about it. She thought he’d be a good listener. A wise listener, with something useful to say.

  But she’d promised Pilar she’d keep the secret.

  They sat in companionable silence for a bit longer, and then he said, “I’m not prying. I know you don’t want to talk now. But one day, you might. If you ever need to talk, you know where to find me.”

  “I do, and thank you.” She looked up from her work to give him a smile. It didn’t feel unnatural, like a lot of her smiles had recently.

  “I’ll be right there.”

  “You’re a good guy, Curt. Being friends with you is the best thing to come out of all this, you know that?”

  “So are you. A good person, I mean. You’re able to reach out, from whatever bad things you’re feeling—and I can tell you’re still feeling them—and be kind to me.”

  “Oh, that part’s easy,” she said.

  “Remember that about yourself,” he said, “that you can be kind when you’re hurting.” And he got up and left.

  She went back to the corn, thinking about Curt’s visit, and what he’d said about listening in other ways than words. Maybe those were better ways, she realized. Maybe you heard more from that stuff, from watching, than you did from a person’s mouth. People could lie. She was lying, lying through avoiding telling a truth. But he saw through that.

  Where was her father? Over at the Kershaws’ still, she supposed. She’d have food ready in less than an hour. She might have to run over there to get him while the water boiled.

  Her father wanted her to come to terms with what had happened in Payson and forgive herself, and he seemed to want it today. He loved her, and she understood that was why he wanted it.

  But Sierra knew it would be a long road from where she was to where he wanted her to be. Maybe years would be spent on that road. She doubted she’d ever be able to travel as far down it as he’d like. That night in Payson had changed her. All the killing had changed her. She didn’t know how exactly, not yet. And she didn’t know how much she’d be able to recapture the old Sierra.

  She would try though. She would really and truly try.

  Chapter 25

  Ten days later, Pilar was in the garden, hoeing, the same thing he’d been doing all Sierra’s life. Kelly was nominally on watch, walking through the woods from time to time, but they agreed that didn’t need to be the level of watch it once had been. Not with Payson on their side and the neighbors down the hill watching the road as well. A cross-country attack was more likely now, so a watch included a couple of circuits of their perimeter, nothing more.

  Sierra had just gone through their supplies in the barn to see what they might be willing to trade next time they met with the other neighbors, Wes’s people, and she’d talk her selections over with Pilar later.

  Arch and Dev were up the hill with the box of jury-rigged grenades. They were going to blow up the road twenty miles from here to make approach from that direction harder.

  Arch had explained it at their last neighborhood trade and discussion meeting with Wes’s group. “I’m pretty sure we can remove all the asphalt. And if we can leave a ditch too wide to cross with a vehicle, all the better.” The representatives of the other neighborhood had agreed it was a good plan. Payson wasn’t consulted, but they’d be told on November first, the next trip down there.

  Any attack from now on would probably come from the woods. And they all felt that a battle in the woods gave them the advantage. The more they patrolled it, the better they knew it, each root that might trip them, each solid tree trunk, the trees that might be climbed.

  Arch had invited Sierra to come along for the demolition of the road, but she had passed on the project. Her shooting Roy still haunted her. There was enough gunfire in her memory; she wanted time off from the sound of explosions.

  Her only role in the demolition was to drive up and bring them back in another hour. Arch and Dev had each driven up an invader’s car, the two largest they had, and after they blew up the road, they planned to park the two cars crossways, blocking the road further. Then they’d destroy the cars’ ability to move again, removing parts and removing two of the tires from each. “It’ll take heavy equipment or a small army to get through,” Arch had said. In his usual pessimistic way, he had added, “If it’s a small army, we’re screwed anyway.”

  It still wouldn’t stop people walking in from that direction, as everyone knew, but maybe strangers would think twice when they saw the destruction of the road. Pilar had said, “You should shoot up the cars some before you leave. Make the message even clearer.”

  Arch had granted him a rare smile. “That’s the way, Crocker. You’
re getting in the swing of things.”

  And so the two Quinns were up there doing that. Until she had to go retrieve them, Sierra went to the Kershaws’ to check on Misha’s progress with training the dog. Joan and their newest neighbor, young Rod, were in their garden, Joan teaching him the difference between weeds and the new greens, just now coming up for the final growing season.

  Misha had been working at making the setter leave the chickens alone. Sierra found them around the front of the house, and asked Misha to demonstrate how she’d progressed. A few minutes later, she watched as Jasper got a little too excited about the chickens on the other side of the fence and lunged for them. Misha tugged on the leash and said, “Bad dog. No.”

  “Like you mean it,” Sierra called. She grabbed an empty fruit crate from by the garden fence, turned it over, and sat on it.

  “No, Jasper.” The girl wasn’t a natural disciplinarian. Not yet, anyway. Hard to say what the future would make of her. It had made something different of Sierra than she had planned on being, that was for sure.

  “When are the babies going to get born?” Misha said, growing bored with the chore and running over to Sierra. “The baby chickens, I mean.”

  “Oh gosh, I’m not sure about yours. And they hatch, not get born. Soon.”

  “Are there still ten eggs? Maybe we need to check again.”

  “We need to leave that poor hen alone. The eggs are fine. She’s safely inside her own box, so the other chickens won’t hurt the chicks when they hatch. Now we just need to wait.”

  “Can we candle one?”

  Sierra shook her head. “They won’t look like anything now. The eggs are stuffed with baby chick. All you’d see is dark.”

  “Not the lines?” She meant the blood vessels, which had fascinated her when Sierra had taught her how to candle.

  “Nope. Those are squished up against the chick. The whole egg is full to almost bursting. And soon it will, when the chick decides to peck its way out.”

  “Cross your heart?”

  “Cross my heart,” she said, and did so. Jasper came over and nosed at her and accepted a pat. Jasper had finally taken to the females on the road, but she was still leery of all the men, though she tolerated Pilar within a few feet, as long as he didn’t reach for her. Sierra wondered what had happened to the dog to make her like that. Something a long time ago? Something when her owners died or fled? Whatever it was, the dog wasn’t telling any tales.