Cloud's Rider

by C. J. Cherryh

  He thought—he thought he’d like to go to church tomorrow.

  He brought the beers back. Meanwhile Randy was trying to ignore a miner who’d sat down in the other seat and was asking questions.

  “My seat,” Carlo said. “My supper. My brother. ’Scuse me.” He quietly got possession of the seat, glared at the departing miner, and shoved a beer at Randy.

  “There.”

  Randy picked up the mug and took a gulp.

  “Go easy on that. I’m not carrying you.”

  “You should have bashed Rick.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not thirteen.”

  “I’m fourteen.”

  “Then act like it.”

  “Listen. You—”

  Another commotion started near the door, but it wasn’t Rick, it was Van Mackey, who was tolerably drunk, telling his son go home.

  Rick didn’t want to go.

  There was pushing and shoving.

  Carlo sipped his beer and had a spoonful of stew. The Mackey family argument was headed for the porch when the door opened and Danny Fisher came in.

  Danny paused for a look at the argument going out the door past him, and walked through the murmur of people who’d moved in with questions for a rider to answer.

  Like what about the horse, he was sure. Danny meanwhile spotted them, came to the bar and gathered up a beer, probably telling enough in the process to make him look like a fool with the bartender. He wished he had had sense enough to keep his mouth shut. God! he was a fool.

  Then Danny came toward them. Randy scrambled up and got an unused chair from another table, and Danny joined them, the object of every eye in the tavern, at least it felt that way.

  Danny had certainly said something to the bartender. Gossip had started there, heads together with the bartender, a buzz of conversation just out of range of hearing, the nearer tables preferring to stare and hunch down over their beers.

  “I heard—” Carlo began, “—about last night.”

  “We went out today,” Danny said, “with no better luck.”

  “I dreamed about the horse,” Randy said. “I heard it. I keep saying, if you’d just let me go—”

  “No,” Carlo said. “He’s still got a notion about being a rider.”

  Danny shook his head. “No. Not that horse. Take it from me, not that horse.”

  “I hear it.”

  “Him. If you heard him you’d know it’s him. He’s confused, he’s lost. And if you were going to be a rider—you wouldn’t want that horse. Believe me.”

  “I’m telling you—”

  “Listen to him,” Carlo said.

  “I don’t want to listen. I want somebody to listen to me.”

  “Randy,” Danny said, “when I was not too much older, I took up with Cloud. And we were fools together, down in the warm flat-lands, in a good season. We managed not to break our necks—close as it was. We managed not to get shot. I’m telling you—plain as I can say it—this horse is likely to get shot.”

  “You can’t!”

  “I’ve been trying not to. So’s Ridley. But there’s a limit to what he’ll let go on near this village. We can’t put this village in danger.”

  Randy was shaking. Literally shaking. He looked as if he’d cry. He had a gulp of beer instead.

  Danny reached out and put his hand on Randy’s shoulder. “Believe me. Randy. I’d do anything but shoot that horse. We’re up here because I didn’t want to shoot him. But that’s not saying anybody belongs with him. This horse isn’t for a kid. No way. A senior rider might be able to pull him out of his confusion, if he could get close enough, but I’m scared of him—I’ll tell you I’m scared of him, as far as putting Cloud at risk. I went out hunting him today, but I went with the camp-boss and his horse, and he wouldn’t show. We did some shooting. Might have scared him off.”

  “You said you can’t hear a horse over ten meters,” Carlo said. “That sure wasn’t the case on the road.”

  “Yeah, well. Most times. This is the exception.”

  “This horse? Or this time?”

  “Don’t want to talk here,” Danny said.

  “Yeah,” Carlo agreed. Randy had taken down too much of the beer and too little supper. “Eat, kid. Remember when you went hungry.”

  Randy began to pick at his food.

  “Eat it while you’ve got it,” Danny said. “There’s no game out there. Biggest damn vacancy you ever heard. Meat’s going to get real scarce and the flour’s going to rise come midwinter, what I hear.”

  “I want to live in the rider camp,” Randy said.

  “Randy,” Carlo said. He never called his brother by his given name. It got the kid’s attention. “Twelve. Hear me?”

  “Shit.”

  Carlo got up, went to the bar and got another round of beers. Brought them back and set them down.

  Danny gave him an odd look and didn’t say a thing. Randy, heart set on being a fool, didn’t say, No, I’ve had too many. Randy finished off the one when the second arrived.

  Carlo tried to hold himself back, because tonight he’d rather the beer than the stew, himself.

  “Buy you supper?” Carlo asked.

  “I’m having supper in the camp,” Danny said. “Maybe next week.”

  “Sure. But the beers are on the Mackeys.”

  “Thank ’em for me,” Danny said.

  “Sure,” Carlo said. He spooned down his stew and the part of Randy’s Randy didn’t eat. Had two pieces of bread. And by that time Randy was sotted.

  “You ought to beat Rick up,” Randy said, out of nowhere.

  “Yeah. Sure. Someday. Don’t push it. You’re not cute when you’re drunk and you’re getting there real fast.”

  “Am not.”

  “Yeah.” Carlo watched, and finished his beer, and had the notion with Danny never saying a thing that Danny wanted to talk to him in private before he left.

  And in not too long Carlo shoved back his chair, gathered up Randy by an arm and had Danny’s help on the other side. They got his coat and his hat on. And theirs.

  There might be a village rule against drunk kids. Nobody said anything and they walked Randy out into the chill air.

  Randy didn’t come around to sobriety. They walked him down the steps and across the intervening yard toward the junk pile and the tree.

  There Carlo stopped. “Let the kid sit,” he said, and he and Danny let Randy down to sit in the snow.

  “So what couldn’t you say inside?” Carlo asked.

  Danny drew a long breath. “That I had to tell Ridley about your sister.”

  “Damn!”

  “I think,” Danny said, “he’s all right. I think he’s all right about it. He knows we didn’t have much choice. Rider business and village business don’t cross from one side to the other. He’s worried— he’s worried about the horse coming for your sister. That’s the main thing. Have you seen her? Do you have any idea—whether there’s been any change?”

  “I can find out,” Carlo said. He didn’t want to know. He was supposed to go there tomorrow. After church. And he didn’t want to. Not after finding out the riders knew. He didn’t know if he could keep himself calm around her. “What’s he going to do about it?”

  “I don’t know yet. I think he understands we were out of choices. —Carlo, I—had to tell him the rest of it. About where you were. And why.”

  Supper went to ice on his stomach.

  “He won’t tell the marshal,” Danny said. “It’s just—if I’m going to ask Ridley’s help, I have to tell him the whole thing.”

  “Yeah,” Carlo said bitterly.

  “No one will know.”

  “The rider camp is no one? I don’t believe it. I’ve got a brother—”

  “Nothing will happen to him.”

  “Dammit. Dammit. I trusted you!”

  Danny was quiet for a moment. “He won’t go to the marshal with it. I don’t think he will.”

  “You don’t think. Danny—”

  “Or I’ll get you out of here. I promise you. I promise you.”

  He couldn’t organize his thoughts. He didn’t know what he thought, and two beers didn’t help. He wanted to sit down where he was. He wanted
not to think about it.

  “Yeah,” he said. He’d learned—adults didn’t take things for granted. Adults didn’t trust blindly. Adults didn’t expect other adults to keep extravagant promises.

  Danny walked away.

  Carlo gathered Randy up by an arm and got him moving. Maybe Randy’d heard enough of it for a thought or two to penetrate his brain. Maybe he hadn’t.

  He didn’t know himself what he’d just heard. He was mad. But he wished he had the sense not to be walking away from Danny. He wished he could go back and say, because he had no other friend, Let’s talk about this.

  But when he looked back, from the door to the forge, with Randy’s weight on his arm, Danny hadn’t hung around. Danny was a distant figure down the snowy street.

  * * *

  Chapter 14

  Ť ^ ť

  There were evergreen boughs on the altar, there were lamps burning with sweet-smelling oil, and after the social announcements from the various families, the preacher preached a sermon on the righteousness of God and His Mercy, and turned it into a kind of memorial for Tarmin.

  Carlo liked the smells and the sights, and the church murals weren’t so fine as those in Tarmin, but they were amazing to his eyes—portraying creatures of the New World, which wouldn’t have pleased preacher Wales down in Tarmin, not by a long way.

  And the preacher really got to him when he started talking about the kids down in Tarmin. He had a lump in his throat and noted people in the seats down the row were using handkerchiefs. The preacher proceeded to the old business of how nobody ever knew the hour or the day they’d die, which was predictably grim, and then segued into an exhortation to enjoy the world—which was so sharp a left turn from the expected path of doom and gloom that Carlo tried to reconstruct in his mind exactly how the preacher had gotten where he had from the point where preacher Wales had always concluded the world was the source of evil.

  Enjoy life? He could get along with this preacher.

  Randy fidgeted. He always had fidgeted in church. Carlo nudged his ankle and Randy slouched. Randy always would do that, too. Neither of them had ever favored church—but it was a comfortable and comforting thing this morning, after so much was out of joint, to be sitting in the smells of winter Sundays and hearing a sermon just like every week. Reverend Quarles went on, in his quiet manner, talking about right actions and not cheating your neighbor— and redeeming the damned world with good living and right dealing. That was a new twist, and it ought to have made the Mackeys squirm, but probably not, Carlo thought. Most everybody could feel comfortable with Reverend Quarles. Even he could. He thought if things worked out, he could very easily get along with this church.

  The sermon didn’t conclude in hellfire. It meandered off into how there was a horse out there, but they had it on good information it wasn’t mad, or even particularly dangerous. Reverend Quarles praised the riders for going out to deal with it, praised the Lord that the world worked and the seasons happened on schedule, and segued somehow to the choir’s next social. There was, the preacher announced, a sign-up sheet for various projects in the foyer, and there followed more talk about a social and dinner the deacons were putting together in honor of some elder member’s seventieth birthday.

  Then the preacher got up again. “Carlo and Randy Goss,” he said. “Would you come up to the front, please? Praise the Lord for that loose bell that night. Praise the Lord He guided you through the dark of the storm, lost sheep brought to His blessed fold.”

  Carlo thought to himself that he’d just as soon the Lord had lightened the dark of the storm instead of guiding them through it, or at least dropped the wind a little or let them see that rider-shelter, but there were a lot of reasons, too, the Lord shouldn’t be too happy with him and didn’t owe him many favors. He stood up, taking Randy with him, and had a lot rather not stand up in front of the congregation, but he didn’t see any way out of it.

  Randy was no happier than he was. But they stood in front of the altar while (the most embarrassing moment of his life) the preacher laid hands on them, prayed over them, and then invited the whole village to come by and welcome them to the congregation and introduce themselves.

  “I don’t want to do this,” Randy said in anguish.

  Their clothes weren’t church clothes. They didn’t own any church clothes. They only had one change, and something was always sooty and something was always drying in the heat of the forge. What they had on was what was clean.

  And he wasn’t used to going to church dressed in work clothes. He was embarrassed. He thought Randy was going to die of embarrassment or bolt for the door—at that age when the whole world was looking at him constantly, anyway. But two old women were first in line, who called them heroic boys, and Randy shook hands and smiled—

  Kid ought to run for office, Carlo thought, dealing with the same elderly women. Once Randy got into the swing of handshaking and being congratulated, he seemed to have discovered he liked being a hero, and positively blossomed under that much attention—so did the Mackeys, who were over in the aisle being congratulated right along with them, Carlo caught that fact out of the corner of his eye. Van Mackey and Mary Hardesty had maneuvered up to the front seats right where the outflow of congregation was going to pass them, and there they were, shaking hands, grinning and just enjoying the moment.

  Sons of bitches, Carlo thought. For all the preacher’s talk about redeeming the world, he didn’t see Danny Fisher invited into the congregation. He didn’t see Danny Fisher being offered several new outfits by the owner of the general store, as had just happened, and he didn’t see Danny Fisher being told by the preacher that he was God’s chosen model of His mercy.

  But then, Danny didn’t expect to be, either, by what he guessed.

  He hoped Danny was still speaking to him.

  They had to stay through absolutely everybody coming by and shaking their hands, including some of the girls—the boys on their own weren’t so inclined. The younger girls—there were three—giggled. Two older ones showed better sense.

  After that, they could escape, except a last handshaking with preacher Quarles and an actually friendly embrace, out to the foyer to get their hats and coats.

  Then it was out to the street where the Mackeys were lying in wait. Mary Hardesty immediately took Carlo’s arm and beamed and prattled on and on how they were their own personal miracles.

  Amazing, Carlo thought, wishing he knew how to break that hold with some kind of grace. Truly amazing, the depth of godly enthusiasm the Mackeys found when the neighbors were watching.

  Totally oblivious, apparently, to the shading of lips with gloved hands, as certain village folk spotted the show and talked about it, Carlo could just imagine—the Mackeys not being universally believed as saints.

  But neighbors were neighbors. Two hundred permanent neighbors in a village, and you couldn’t afford open feuds with anybody. Even if you’d like to shoot them. You shook hands and you smiled.

  God, they could put off going to see Brionne until tomorrow. Today was full enough, public enough. People were paying attention to what they did, the whole village was paying attention to what they did, and he kept walking. They passed the doctor’s house and Randy kept walking beside him, not, thank God, reminding him in front of the Mackeys.

  They walked back to the end of town in the company they had to keep, sanctified, prayed over, written down in the church rolls, and gossiped about all the way, till the most of the traffic left in the general outflow from the church was miners and loggers on their way to The Evergreen for a pint of philosophy.

  Behind them, the church bell rang. Sometimes down in Tarmin after a snow-fall, when there were few sounds on the mountain but nature and when the wind was just exactly right, you could hear bells in the winter air. The bells of heaven, he’d thought when he was a little boy.

  He’d never known that sound had come from here.

  The year past was a bad dream, but this morning with the church bells ringing out through the village and echoing off the mounta
in, Darcy had put on one of her prettiest winter outfits—Mark had brought her the blue wool sweater from the store before she’d ever seen the shipment up from Tarmin that summer, that happy summer before Faye’s accident, and she’d hired Angie Wheeler to sew up a pair of gray wool slacks out of a book of patterns.

  She hadn’t had occasion to wear them until now. She scarcely went out except for groceries.

  Still, it was the sort of day to think about the condition of things. She wiped the year’s accumulation of dust off the bureau and swept the carpet. And it wasn’t as if she hadn’t been aware of the dust piling up and the passage of a spring and a summer and a fall—because she wasn’t crazy. She knew how much time had passed that the sweater had lain in a drawer. She knew Mark was dead. She knew Faye hadn’t waked from her drowned, chilled sleep. She’d cleaned the office herself of Mark’s blood and she hadn’t greatly blamed him for deserting her. Faye had just cost him too much, and she with the relationship they’d had, all revolving around Faye, couldn’t make that loss up.

  The dust just hadn’t mattered after that.

  But today she found herself thinking that the dust had gotten too thick on the downstairs table and remembering that it had had a nice sheen and a pretty grain.

  And once she’d done that, she saw the curtains, how dingy the white had become.

  She started around the office polishing the tables and Mark’s bookshelves.

  But straightened bookshelves had made her notice the rugs there needed sweeping.

  Then she took out Faye’s pretty things from the chest and bathed the girl and arranged her golden curls—they were so like Faye’s— and changed the sheets and dressed her in Faye’s fine lace-collared gown.

  Clean sheets meant putting on a washing, of course, which meant heating up the kitchen, and firing up the boiler for the washing machine, which she only did on Sunday afternoons, but there hadn’t been the volume of washing in the house in, oh, a long time.

  And those curtains were due a laundering.

  That took a good deal of time, and when the sun had gotten to the window in Faye’s room she made hot soup and arranged a napkin to protect Faye’s pretty gown, and ever so carefully fed the girl. The sun came through, bright and blinding, and made the white sheets into snowbanks and the girl’s hair into golden glass. Darcy fed her young patient, and the girl ate as she would eat if she was coaxed.