by Zack Parsons
“In my greed I long for all the beauty of the world and for it to belong to me.” She had to tell him it was done. He was taking it too far, and with the baby soon to come, she could not—
There was a knock at the door, and Nel said, “Mrs. Groves?”
Annie’s heart felt as though it would explode. She quickly replaced the letter in the bundle and closed it back into the box with the red ribbon trailing out. She pushed the box under the bed just as the door opened. She clasped her hands together as if in prayer. It was a cruel way to deceive but all that came to her in the moment.
“Would you—oh, ma’am, I am sorry, I did not realize you was attending the Lord.” The midwife ducked her head and retreated back through the door.
“I am finished,” Annie said, and she got to her feet.
“I heard you stir and was come to ask if you would like a bath. The kettle is already on the stove.”
“That would be nice.”
“I’ll fetch the tub and get it poured. You come have some tea I made.”
Annie luxuriated in the bath. She leaned the back of her long neck against the rim of the tub and allowed her copper-blond hair to spill down nearly to the floor. A diminishing drip-drip of water pattered against the old blanket spread beneath.
Even on a good day her ankles and feet were swollen and tender. Her back hurt. Her breasts piled uncomfortably atop the taut cannonball of her belly. In the heat of the day she became terribly sweaty, and at night she found it difficult to sleep. Any chance to be off her feet was a welcome comfort. A hot bath was a particular luxury.
She floated in the warm water, and the salt of her aches dissolved. Her skin glistened. She was as tan as a cowhand on her arms and legs. She touched herself and wondered what it might feel like to have a man other than Warren hold her. She had never met one so strong and handsome as her husband, and yet, she did desire more from life than the simple happiness he gave her.
The baby kicked. She laughed as if she’d been caught in her thoughts. This one was strong. At night Warren laid a hand on her belly and felt it pushing. He was sure it was the son he had been after since their wedding.
Annie tested the dovetailed curve of the tub with her feet. She pressed against the metal, and it flexed.
She knew better than Warren. The first and second time she had known it was a boy. She’d birthed two sons to the coffin. Strangled like calicos by her womb. This time was different. She could feel the girl.
Nel was at the door again. The old midwife had seen her through two unhappy births and had been hired on to help with the third. Pat Cole’s wife, Libby, warned that the woman was an ill omen, but Annie valued Nel’s competent manner over any superstition.
“Do ya need more water?” asked Nel. She held a copper kettle in one hand and a terry towel in the other. “We don’t want you too hot, or it might cook the baby.”
“Just a bit,” said Annie, and though the woman had seen more of her than even Warren, she covered herself with her arm.
Nel began to pour steaming water into the tub, raising the level of the milky liquid nearly to the tops of Annie’s bent knees. Annie hissed as plumes of hot water caressed her legs.
“We want you clean for that birthing.” Nel tottered away from the tub and peered through the slatted window. “You know I midwifed for Mrs. Farris, oh, about two years back, an’ the baby just fell on out in the bath. No labor, nothing. Just squirted on out.”
“There is a picture,” said Annie, and she laughed. “I saw a piglet let out of a bag at Schroeder’s once. I’d imagine it was something like that, was it?”
“Goodness, no,” Nel said. “Mrs. Farris stayed as big as house for, oh, on about two years now, I’d reckon.”
The two women shared a laugh at the thought, and Nel left Annie alone to soak.
The morning was dimming to gray. Rain-heavy clouds gathered to the east were moving swiftly toward the house and were already in the way of the sun. Looked to be a summer storm come early. She watched the clouds drifting closer and closer.
Annie used to love the rain, but where Warren had built their house, it caused nothing but problems. Storm drainage from Spark collected mine tailings and left its residue in their horse pasture. After particularly heavy rains it could make a stinking lake that lasted days and killed off the grazing.
She was startled by flying shadows passing the windows. Hooves beat the dusty road, and Annie could see the shadows to be men riding down from the mountain. There were a number of them. Ringo, their black and white cow dog, came barking out from the barn to challenge the riders.
The baby kicked, and it hurt. The baby kicked again. There was another pain beneath the baby’s kicks, an ache that seemed to ebb and flow with her breathing. Annie got her feet beneath her in the tub and pushed herself up. She stood and reached for the towel.
Beyond the window slats the world was growing darker. The rain was beginning to beat against the metal roof of the barn. Ringo was barking madly with excitement.
Annie found the towel with her fingers and brought it to her dripping body. The baby kicked again. She could see Warren and Pat Cole and Turk. Other men she half recognized. Warren got down from his horse, dipped his shoulders and lowered his head, and began running toward the front door as the rain swept across the pasture and clattered up the shingles of the house.
She could hear the door opening. Feel the baby kick again. Warmth gushed between her thighs. She looked down at the soapy white water filling the tub. A red flower was spreading beneath her. The baby kicked. Fear pricked her brow and ran hot in her blood. Boots thumped on puncheon floor.
“Annie,” Warren said as he entered the room. “Got to—”
“It’s not supposed to be like that,” Annie said, and she looked from her husband down to the blood swirling in the bath. “It’s not supposed to ... I’m bleeding.”
He ran to her, caught her up in his arms, and lifted her easily out of the tub. She smelled the trail and something else, foul, clinging to him.
“What do I do?” he asked.
She did not know.
CHAPTER FOUR
They came down from the mountain and into the shimmering heat of the badlands. They pursued the choked meander of Green Creek, rode hard through morning, and kept the rain-darkened sky at their backs. Gideon piloted the muscular white mare called Sirocco, sure-footed over root and sage and beaten agave. Father’s old Crow Indian Robert Broken Horse rode ahead in the saddle of the cream gelding he favored for long journeys. The Indian was trail wise and steady. He pointed out falls and snake holes to Gideon so that he might avoid them.
It was midday when they passed the skeleton trusses of the rail bridge. Robert Broken Horse found a gentleness in the bank and rode down into the dry wash and among the boulders. The creek bed was stained to a high waterline by copper deposits, and the flaked verdigris collected in cracks and against stones half-buried in sun-split alluvium to lend the wash a queer, mossy appearance.
They sought the place where the men lay in wait. There were twenty or so of them. Rough men. Vaqueros and bandits and horse thieves. Men with ropes waiting for them wherever law found purchase. There were also the country boys, aflame in their youth, heads full of notions of disappearing in clouds of gun smoke rather than surviving to be preyed upon by time and toil.
Gideon noticed a third and even more distinct breed. Apaches. Mescalero renegades. Just tame enough to withhold murder for every white or Spanish they saw but fierce enough to kill for money. A mercenary band of the savages had been hired on.
There were four of these creatures, and they kept apart from the other men. They stood beside their painted ponies, high on the bank and as far from the rail bridge as possible.
Their flesh was like stained wood, and they layered over it the rough-stitched hides of animals. Their black hair was long and tied with beads and feathers and bones, and they wrapped their boots and lower legs in snake-bite botas. They carried knives as well as guns of a
caliber and fashion that resembled crude imitations of more honest weapons, though surely even the cleverest Apache possessed no means to manufacture rifles and pistols.
Their faces were terrible, and Gideon could not stand to look upon them long. They were devil idols carved from rock. To meet their black eyes was to open a door best left barred, but he could feel their gaze as spiders upon his neck, and he imagined they judged how he might appear when drained of blood and cut down to chops and brisket.
The other men rose slowly from the dust and gathered around the newcomers. Robert Broken Horse addressed them in Spanish and then English. Gideon climbed down from his horse and greeted the Yankee Eli McClelland, who had seen to the emplacement and fusing of the night before.
McClelland was huge and red-faced, his mustache drooping with sweat. McClelland’s barrel-body was stuffed into a Union coat so beaten, it looked gray everywhere but the damp beneath his arms and in a ring around his neck. He, like all men involved in this mob, had been told that Gideon’s name was Eustace Wiley. It was a name of pure fantasy and one that Gideon entertained might become famous after this day.
The big Yankee shook Gideon’s hand vigorously and said, “Good to finally meet you, Mr. Wiley. Your Indian told me you were the strategist of our endeavor.”
Gideon smiled and nodded his thanks. He took out his gold pocket watch and inspected it.
“Should be upon us shortly,” said McClelland. “Everything is stuck in like cockle-burrs. They were a surly crew, but I put the fear of God into them, and we got it done. It’s a minute burn, give or take, to this one and five minutes to the other. I’ve laid in enough powder and should have—”
Gideon climbed atop the largest boulder he could find, and the men turned and regarded him with slight curiosity. He held his walking cane like a circus barker’s and spread his arms wide to encompass the vast reach of the New Mexico sky. The storm was behind him, long and dark, moving steadily east in search of bones to wash.
“Gentlemen, if I could command your attention for a moment,” Gideon said, and Robert Broken Horse translated into Spanish. “In scarce minutes a black train of the Pacific Southern Railroad will come steaming into the trap we have laid. My colleague and I have gone to heroic lengths to ensure our plan requires a minimum of violence. Our numbers and the suddenness of our attack will be sufficient to disarm crew and passengers. However, I have learned that a snake of a man has slithered aboard the train.”
Distant thunder rumbled and caromed from the western mountains.
“This snake comes from Memphis, dresses in cotton suits bought from a store in New York, and wears little glass spectacles. He parts his hair in the middle. He carries a red valise—a red bag—from which he will not be separated without violence. Therefore, I make an exception for him, and violence is my aim and desire, to not only harm but to kill this man, for he means to do as much to me.”
Gideon avoided coloring his description of Mr. Surebow with the full contempt he held for the man.
“This is very important. The man who kills him and hands over his bag will be rewarded with one hundred silver dollars.”
The white men murmured with excitement. Once Robert Broken Horse translated the offer into Spanish, the vaqueros whistled and jawed. Gideon allowed a moment of conversation and then beat the copper ferule of his cane against the platform of the boulder. His audience fell silent once more and tilted their dirt-smeared faces to him.
“My, um, my father,” Gideon began, but he was uncertain of this beginning, and so he fell silent once more. He looked from the expectant faces of his outlaws to the Apache Indians and beyond, to the snarls of mountains south and west.
Gideon detested acts without meaning as animalistic. For this undertaking to be successful, it was his vital duty to imbue these men with a higher purpose than riches. Difficult, for they seemed by the very act of ambushing the railroad to align themselves against Gideon’s concept of progress.
“We tear down mountains today.” Gideon gestured with his cane. A few men turned their heads to look at the mountains he indicated. “Look at them sitting sullen and untouchable. Arrogant. They pass the centuries with barely a mark. But their days are numbered, my friends. What is coming here has already arrived out east. The future belongs to us. Railroads and paved streets and gas to light your house at night. And the mountains, gravid with riches, are doomed. The natural world places no value on ore. Only man divines purpose. We dig it up and build, and from a meaningless collection of stones and wood we have, by labor and design, derived civilization.
“It is the law of man that most valuable of all is paper and coin,” said Gideon. “Men no longer require the natural order at all to decide worth. Then are we not visionaries to see that we can labor for long years for rewards and riches, or we can simply take it?”
He waited for a response, but the men only stared.
“Do not squander the riches you claim today on fleeting pleasures.” Gideon’s words were a chastisement to himself. “When each of us is dust, do you think our descendants will care or even remember the origin of their wealth? We determine the future on this day, without regard to nature or to the, um, the peculiar caprices of men in cotton suits. To hell with the sons of bitches from Memphis or New York. We make the world our own, we’ll tear down the mountains for their gold, and dare the fools to stop us.”
Robert Broken Horse finished his translation to Spanish. The vaqueros, outlaws, farm boys, and even the savage Apaches stared at Gideon as though he might grow horns. They said nothing, not even a whisper, and their expressions communicated little more.
Gideon wiped at the sweat of his brow with a black handkerchief. These base animals had no place for higher thoughts. A whore or a new saddle. A gun to wear on their hip. They conceived no greater tomorrow than a finer privy in which to shit.
A childish giggling emerged from the gathered men. Gideon searched their faces for the culprit, but most seemed to not care or to be as confused as he was. The giggling became a full-throated howl of mirth.
Men began to step aside and move away until the source of the laughter was revealed by subtraction to be a short, pock-faced Mexican. He was so fat, his shirt was poorly buttoned, and his arms bulged out at his cuffs. He stood next to another man Gideon recognized from print accounts as the bank robber John Vargas.
“Be quiet, you beast,” Gideon demanded.
The rebuke propelled the portly Mexican to further paroxysms of laughter. The vaqueros and other men around him muttered with annoyance. Only the outlaw John Vargas, languid with opium, stood beside the laughing Mexican untouched by his companion’s apparent madness.
There was another sound. A distant rumble, not loud, but felt in the legs.
“Smoke!” shouted Eli McClelland.
The rumble grew louder and seemed to crackle like fire. Gideon looked up the bank to where the Yankee stood atop a rock pile. The engineer lowered a spyglass from his eye and jumped down from the rocks. He stumbled and slid down the bank into the wash.
“Train is coming,” he said. “Light the number one fuse.”
Only after the Yankee struck a match and lit the first fuse was the source of the rumble revealed. It was not the storm or the approaching train, which was still many miles distant, but an ugly head of floodwater come thundering down from the mountains, frothing and thick with mud and branches and wagon bones.
The horses panicked and bolted in a dozen directions, clambering up the rocky banks and throwing shoes in their desperation to escape the water. It seemed to move slowly in a custard wave and yet was upon them almost the instant it was spotted. A few men had time to cry in alarm or scramble toward the bank before the flood washed over their shoes and up to their knees with great velocity. The rushing water toppled men over and carried the unlucky away down the flooded creek, possibly never to be seen alive again.
Gideon was near enough the bank to catch a rock with one hand as he was thrown down on his side. His head struck a s
harp corner of stone. Hot blood gushed into his hair and down his cheek. The blow nearly caused him to lose his hold and be dragged away by the churning mud.
Robert Broken Horse, who must have seen the water coming and escaped, dragged Gideon onto the rocks and laid him on his back. Gideon spit out a mouthful of bitter muck and cursed the pain and all of it.
The air was sharp with the smell of the burning fuse and the loamy stink of the floodwater. Men gasped and shouted and heaved their bodies out of the wash on either side of the swollen creek. Inverted to Gideon’s supine view, high upon the bank, the four taciturn Apaches stood, unmoved, beside their ponies.
Annie’s world was swimmy cold and blue at its edges. She felt sick and strange, and maybe her bones were shaking inside. Maybe her whole body was shaking inside.
Warren kept saying, he kept saying, “Rain is gonna stop soon.” Only it never did stop like he said. Only she could hear it still clatter-clatter against the roof and whoosh with wind against the panes of glass.
“Bleeding is normal,” Doc Carson said. “She opened up good, and I can feel the baby. If need be, I’ll use the tool.”
Warren said something so she couldn’t hear the doctor—that thing he did when he talked to Pat Cole about a shooting or a stabbing so she wouldn’t know. He didn’t even want to look at her. He was wearing his hat in the house.
Low voices, men talking. Men talk. Nel held Annie’s arm and whispered, “It will be fine. It will be fine.” Why was it so hard to make sense of things?
“No, it won’t be fine,” Annie said, but the words were crackers in her mouth, and all stuck to her lips and tongue.
“It ain’t fever,” Doc Carson said. “Don’t you worry, Sheriff. I’ll see to her. Might be night before she’s through.”
“No, please,” Annie said, only the words were strangled. It was never like this before. They thought it was, but it wasn’t like this before.
