by Judith Pella
“Always take time to sight your target . . .” his uncle’s words echoed in his benumbed mind.
Why hadn’t he asked his uncle what to do if you were blind?
The enemy’s weapon should be loaded by now. He’d be taking aim. Micah raised his pistol, not aiming, not thinking, allowing pure instinct to guide him. He fired. He felt like an animal attacking an enemy, acting and reacting instinctively. What would the animal do now that all his options were used up? Micah groped around for the other weapons, all the while waiting for that final fatal shot, the one that would at last end his miserable life. But nothing came. He heard no more shots. He lifted himself up. Through the blur of his vision he saw that the last bandit was sprawled over the carcass of the dead horse. Were they all dead, then?
Micah sat there for some time, too spent to feel even relief. He just sat listening to himself breathe, amazed that he was breathing. Then he heard the sound of stirring. He vaguely realized it must be the unconscious bandit finally coming to. A sudden fear, a kind of dread, washed over Micah. He knew he wasn’t afraid of dying. But what was it?
“¡Madre de Dios!” exclaimed the bandit as he struggled to his knees and surveyed the battlefield. He then focused wild eyes upon Micah, as if he were looking upon evil incarnate.
Only then was Micah fully aware of the scene surrounding him. A dead horse. Five bodies. Blood. Death. And there must still be more death. He knew then that this was the cause of his dread. He would have to kill yet again. But his body seemed to be functioning completely apart from his appalled mind. In a flash, before he had even given conscious impetus to the action, Micah had the other pistol in his hand. There was a single split second when the thought flickered on the edge of Micah’s mind that he didn’t have to kill this man. The bandit was reaching for his pistol, but there could not be time for him to draw it. Yet it all transpired in the space of a single heartbeat—the stray thought and Micah’s trigger finger twitching faster than his mental ability to grasp the thought. His gun blasted, and the last bandit fell.
Suddenly Micah’s hand began trembling so badly that the gun fell to the ground. His stomach roiled and heaved, and before he could even turn his head aside, he vomited all over himself. His legs had turned to mush, and he could not stand. He sat and stared, but everywhere he looked there were bodies.
What had he done?
The sound of galloping horses thundered through the afternoon air, heavy with the silence of death. Within five minutes Micah was surrounded by his friends.
“You all right?” Tom asked with concern. It seemed a silly question to Micah. He was alive. There were six dead men. How could he be all right?
“You done well, Micah,” Hays said.
Micah stared at him, uncomprehending. “They’re all dead,” he said. He tried to force himself to stand, but the ground seemed to be buckling underneath him, and he had to stay put. He looked at Tom. “They . . . are . . . dead. . . .”
“You did what you had to do,” Tom said, as he kneeled next to Micah and made an attempt to tend his wounds.
“What shooting!” exclaimed Bert Long. “How many weapons did you have?”
Micah gaped at the unabashed awe in the man’s voice. Then his stomach betrayed him again. This time he turned aside and emptied its contents onto the dirt. But his insides kept heaving.
“This ain’t the first time you’ve killed, Micah,” Tom said. “What’s wrong, boy?” His eyes carefully scanned Micah’s body again, looking for hidden wounds.
“N-nothing,”h Micah rasped, his voice as thin and empty as his stomach.
Micah remembered the first time he killed a man. San Jacinto. He hadn’t been sick at all. He’d been fourteen and had not felt even a twinge. He’d joined the slaughter with relish. Now he was a man who had been in many battles, killed many times. What was happening to him?
“H-help me up, Tom,” he said. He saw Tom and Hays exchange worried looks. “I gotta get out of here!”
“Soon as we find that mule of yours.”
Micah struggled on his own to gain his feet. Tom, apparently seeing the futility of trying to get him to stay put, gave him a hand. His knees were shaky, but he willed himself to be steady.
“Let me take your horse, Tom.”
“We’ll all be heading back together soon enough,” Tom argued.
Micah leveled a look at his friend that he knew was filled with desperation. He didn’t know where the feeling was coming from. He did not understand any of it. All he knew was he had to get away from this place of blood and death. The men would want to do something about the bodies. But he could not stay.
“Tom!” Micah came as close to pleading as he ever had in his life.
Hays stepped forward. “Let him go, Tom. He just needs some time to himself.”
“Take my horse,” Tom said. “But take this as well.” He held out his revolver.
Micah recoiled from the weapon, shaking his head. “Don’t you see, Tom?”
“No, I don’t see at all!”
Dismally, Micah said, “Neither do I.”
He mounted Tom’s gray gelding and rode away. Just away. He had no place to go to.
CHAPTER
30
THE RAIN CAME AS IT only can on the Texas prairie, hard and heavy. The wind from the south drove the rain, mixed liberally with hail, into Micah’s face. Lightning flashed, ragged and blinding in the night sky, followed by cracks of ear-splitting thunder. Tom’s gray winced occasionally. Stew would have bolted and run for it by now.
Micah was soaked to the skin, all the blood and dirt and stomach contents washed away. But he still felt dirty. He’d killed six men. And was Jed truly avenged? Had any amount of killing ever given him peace about his uncle’s death? Would he have to keep killing forever and ever?
Would he never feel clean and at peace?
Through the rain and darkness, he saw a light ahead. He steered toward it. He wasn’t surprised by the light, though why he expected lamps to still be burning this late, he didn’t know. He only knew that an hour ago he had begun to veer toward the Maccallum ranch. In a way, his direction had been as involuntary as that last shot in the gun-fight had been. Some reflex had driven him to kill. Another reflex was driving him toward the exact opposite. The only thing Micah knew for certain was that just then he needed to find for himself, killer that he was, something completely pure and good. And Lucie was the only thing like that he’d ever known.
No one stirred at the ranch. The light he’d seen was coming from the bunkhouse. A dog barked. He rode toward the house, dismounted, and climbed the step to the porch. It took almost as much courage, or audacity, to raise his hand and knock on the door of the darkened house as it had to gun down six bandits.
For a few moments there was no response, then the light of a lantern shone through the front window.
“Who is it?” came Lucie’s voice.
Just that sound made his heart do such strange things. How he needed her!
“Me,” he said, foolishly thinking that she’d recognize his voice after more than a year. But his lips were trembling with cold and fear and such a longing ache that he could say no more.
He heard the metal latch being thrown back. Then the door opened, and there she was. Lucie. Real flesh and blood. Not a dream. His throat was too tight and dry to speak.
“Micah!” She was dressed in a long white nightgown with a wool shawl drawn closely around her. Her hair hung loose about her shoulders. He’d never seen it loose before. He wanted desperately to plunge his face into the mass of dark curls.
He tried to speak instead. “L-Lucie, I . . . I . . . I killed six banditos.” The words spilled out before he could stop them. He wanted comfort, but part of him must have wanted punishment as well.
Her hand went to her lips. “Joaquin!” she gasped.
“No.”
She sagged visibly with relief.
“Lucie,” called Reid Maccallum’s voice from the back of the house, “is some
thing wrong?”
“No, Papa.” Her eyes scanned Micah, pausing briefly where the buckskin of his jacket was rent and his wound gaped through. “It’s nothing, Papa. Go back to sleep.” She reached a hand toward Micah’s shoulder. Quietly, she said, “You’re hurt.”
“I had to see you.”
“Just a moment.” She turned back into the house, closing the door. In five minutes she returned, wearing a hooded cloak over her night-gown and carrying a basket. “Let’s go to the stable. I can’t see you in the house. Papa has such a hard time sleeping.”
He followed her, pausing only to take the gray’s reins and lead him also. “It’s Tom’s horse,” he mumbled. “Can’t let anything happen to it. I don’t have good luck with horses. I . . . I lost the buckskin in the war.”
In the stable Lucie lit a lantern while Micah put the gray in an empty stall that Lucie directed him to. As he unsaddled the horse, Lucie gave the animal some fresh straw.
Then she said, “Now for you, Micah.” She took his hand and led him to a stool. “Sit and take off your jacket and shirt. I’ve got some medicine here and some bandages.” He sat and she kneeled on the hay-strewn floor at his feet.
He shrugged out of his jacket, then noticed the hole. “Look . . .” He fingered the tattered hole, stained with blood and gunpowder. “I . . . can’t have nothing fine,” he mumbled.
“Your shirt, Micah? So I can see your wound,” she prompted.
“I don’t care about that,” he said. “It doesn’t bother me.”
“The rain has probably cleaned it out pretty well, but it could fester. Let me have a look at it.”
Because he wanted only to hold her, to smell the fragrance of her hair, feel her lips on his, he obeyed her command. He couldn’t touch her. He shouldn’t touch her. He wouldn’t touch her.
Lucie still could hardly believe that after more than a year, Micah had turned up on her doorstep. Wet, disheveled, and obviously distraught, but there he was, the reality of her dreams. Forbidden dreams, but ones she could not prevent in sleep.
Unable to put her thoughts in a proper frame, she clung to the practical. “The wound is deep, but the lead did not penetrate.”
“It grazed me, is all.”
His voice was distracted, almost dull, yet there was an intensity in his eyes that made the cool of the blue seem almost on fire.
She poured a couple drops of liquid from a brown bottle onto a cloth, a concoction of balm of Gilead buds mixed with rum that Juana swore by for open wounds. Micah winced as she dabbed it on his shoulder. “The alcohol burns a little.”
A whole year and all she could talk about was his wound. No, there was much she wanted to say, but they had said Good-bye. Yet he had just told her he had to see her. What had he meant? More to the point, what had it meant when her heart had leaped upon seeing him and she had wanted only to throw herself into his arms?
“How long have you been back?” she asked as she placed a clean bandage on his wound.
“A couple of weeks.” His eyes briefly flickered toward her, then he jerked them away. He was afraid to look at her, yet there was yearning in his eyes. “I know I shouldn’t have come. We said Good-bye.”h
“Micah, what happened?” She, too, focused her eyes elsewhere, on her work. She wrapped the bandage under his arm and back over the wound. “You said you’ve been in a . . . a gunfight?”
He nodded, still staring somewhere over the top of her head. “Six banditos took me prisoner, but I got away.”
“You killed them all? By yourself?”
“It was them or me,” he said defensively.
“Oh, Micah!”
“I didn’t want to!”
She lifted her eyes, but still he looked away.
“Jed was executed in Mexico, you know that? He and sixteen others were shot down, and for what?” He shook his head, the muscles in his jaw and neck twitching violently.
“So you got your revenge.” She could not help the words.
Micah started to jump up, but she laid a restraining hand on his other shoulder so she could finish the bandage. He glanced down at her hand, and only then did she realize she was touching his bare chest. She jerked her hand away as if from a hot iron, and he jerked to his feet. He paced a few steps away from her, then turned. She could not read the expression on his face.
“It made me sick, and I don’t know why,” he said plaintively.
“You killed six men, Micah!” It seemed so obvious to her.
“I’ve killed before.”
“Vengeance wasn’t as sweet as you hoped it would be.”
“Lucie, I’m scared!”
She could tell he had never admitted such a thing before.
Rising, she went to him and took his hands into hers. They were rough, coarse hands, hands that had just taken six lives. Lethal hands, deadly hands. She brought them to her lips.
“Don’t be frightened,” she said as she kissed his palms. “Your reaction is a good thing. You are not a killer in your heart. Maybe at last your heart is trying to tell you that.”
“Being a ranger is the only life I have,” he said miserably. “If I can’t . . . use my gun, I don’t have nothing.”
“Micah, are you afraid because you might not be able to kill any more?”h She could not prevent the slight rancor in her tone. She dropped his hands.
“What else have I?”
“Micah!” she exclaimed in frustration. Then she turned her back to him and walked to a nearby stall. Looking over the top of the low wall, she saw the gray gelding munching placidly on hay. She felt Micah come up behind her and stop when he was so close she could feel the heat of his body nearly sear into her back.
He spoke softly. “I knew when that last bandit fell today that it wasn’t gonna help cure my anger. Maybe that’s what made me sick. All the Mexicans I’ve killed over the years trying to heal the wounds from Goliad, and now with Jed, too—suddenly I saw no matter how many I killed, it wouldn’t help. It had never helped, but maybe I’d hoped there’d be a magic number that would finally clean my filthy soul. But there isn’t. The hate is there, the loss is there, the hurt is there, and nothing will stop it.”
“That’s not true, Micah. There is one thing that will stop it.”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
“But it’s God you are really afraid of. And so to avoid Him, you will let yourself continue to wallow in your hate and pain.”
He sighed, the puff of breath stirring the top of her head. “Yes, I think you may be right. But I won’t hear of God.”
She turned sharply, finding herself within an inch of him. She leveled her gaze at him, forcing him to return the look. “This isn’t about your uncle or Jed and their killers. It is about your father. Why don’t you kill him? He killed your mother, didn’t he?”
“He’s my father!”
“But you want to kill him, don’t you?”
“No!”
“Instead you kill Mexicans.”
“You are getting this all twisted up, Lucie.”
“Maybe I am.” She slipped past him. He had been way too close.
She couldn’t think straight. Her thoughts were all jumbled. Yet she knew all the hate in Micah stemmed from his father. She knew that was the key to everything. She sat on the stool. Maybe he wouldn’t get so close to her then.
“All I came here for was—”
“What did you come here for?” she shot back accusingly. “Did you want some kind of absolution for what you did?”
“I just needed . . .” He dropped down in front of her, taking her shoulders in his hands. “You are the only good thing in my life. I thought if I was with you, it might make me forget who and what I am. Lucie . . . please . . .”
She remembered how in the past she’d felt his desperate need for love. It was there now. He needed so to be loved. And she did love him, but though she could not deny it to herself, she must deny her feelings to him.
His hands were trembling as they gr
ipped her. She tried to ease from him, but he held her firm. Then his hands suddenly moved until he had pulled her fully into his arms. Plying her with kisses, he half carried, half dragged her to the floor, loosening her cape and casting it away.
“No, Micah!” She fought him, but he was heavy and too wrought to respond.
His kisses grew more and more intense, painfully intense.
“I need you so,” he murmured. “I need your love.”
“This isn’t love—”
“No more preaching. No more talk. Hold me, Lucie. Please!” But he wasn’t really asking, nor did he wait for a reply.
“Will you drag me down into that pit of hatred with you? Is that it?” She fought him even harder, especially as her own body began to betray her. How easily she could let herself succumb to him, for she loved him so. Yet she could not capitulate to her desires. It would hurt them both too deeply. Still, it was clear she couldn’t fight him except with words. “Admit it, Micah, I am only another Mexican you will hurt today.” She tried to spit the words out forcefully but could barely get them out because of his nearness.
“What? No! It’s not—” Suddenly he stopped what he was doing. He pulled away, a look of utter horror on his face.
She thought he might be sick again, as he said he had been after his gunfight when he viewed the death in its wake.
He lurched to his feet and, saying nothing, grabbed his wet jacket and shirt. Slipping into the shirt, he went to the stall and saddled the gray.
“Micah, it’s raining.” He had nearly forced himself upon her, yet still she cared. She knew he had not acted out of spite or malice or evil.
He led the gray from the stall. “I’m sorry, Lucie. You don’t have to worry about me bothering you ever again.”
He walked out, and through the open door she watched him mount and ride away, rain and wind pelting him, darkness swallowing him.
CHAPTER
31
THE PERSISTENT THREAT OF INVASION from Mexico continued to hang over Texas. Internal political problems in Mexico spared the republic from a major confrontation, but there was still raiding along the border, and Hays had to take seriously any rumors of danger. One such rumor arrived while he and several other rangers were sick with fever. With forces low, he sent only four to scout it out: Tom, Micah, and two new men, Baker and Lowe.
