Riders of Judgment

by Frederick Manfred

  With a slow pendulant motion Rory leaned across the table. Her lips curled back, chalkish teeth showing. “You boys should have got rid of him years ago. And I know this much, by Grab, if you boys don’t fix him soon now, he’s going to kill you off one by one. All three of you.”

  “Rory, you ain’t suggestin’ we up and shoot him down in cold blood, are ye?”

  “Yes.”

  :“The law won’t let us. In fact, the law probably won’t even arrest him with just that initial to go on.”

  “Yet you know it was him there in the hills,” Rory said.

  “Wal, yes, I guess we do. Just the same, you got to catch a man making his move out in the open where everybody can see him make it.”

  “Ugh! You men.”

  “We Hammetts ain’t exactly in the habit of shootin’ a man in the back.”

  Rory continued bitter. “Yet you’ll let him shoot you in the back.”

  “Oh, Rory.”

  “Just you watch. That Hunt’ll shoot all of you in the back yet.

  One by one.”

  Cain grunted.“I’ll watch, all right. You can bet your sweet life on that.”

  Rory looked down. Her swollen lips and swollen eye pouches sagged. “Yes, I guess I might as well get used to it. Yes, all my menfolks dead.”

  “Now, Rory, we’ll hold the thought.”

  “Yes. Like he killed Gramp. Like he killed our dads.”

  “We’ll hold the thought.”

  “All in the back.”

  Cain drank the last of his coffee. “Oh, shut up about that now. Got any more Arbuckle?”

  Rory got up and poured him some. “Dale. Harry. Joey. Let alone this one when he comes.”

  Cain dropped a spurt of canned milk into his coffee. He stirred it. He watched the yellow-brown fluid swirling. “One thing bothers me. Been puzzling on it a whole week. Why those strangling sons-of-bitches didn’t go for Harry. Why, they never even looked his way this time. As if he warn’t around.” Cain shook his head.“Guess I’ll have to turn that over to my brownie back here.” Cain tapped the back of his head. “He usually tells me what’s what when I give him some problem to work on.”

  Rory looked up from her coffee. “It’s about time you wondered about that.”

  “Oh, come now.” Cain blinked. “Another funny thing was how they got past Timberline. The best sighter in the country.”

  “Yes, and it’s about time you wondered about him too.”

  “Come now. Harry and Tim are all right when it comes to that.”

  “Can you tell me where Harry is right now?”

  “Wal, no.”

  “Antelope. Whooping and yelling and having a high old time.”

  “Wal? Ain’t that his right? He’s got to have some fun some time.”

  “He told Dale yesterday afternoon he was going into town to sleep on a regular goose-hair piller for a couple of nights.” Rory had to smile in spite of herself.

  “Wal, why not? Blanket pillows get oncommon hard after a time.”

  “You don’t think nothing of it then that he’s contrary one day and friendly the next? And in between times full of the devil?”

  “No.” A smile cracked across his hard face. “Whooping and yelling. I mind me of the time he led his horse Star into Butcherknife Bain’s saloon and give him a bottle of wine. Sheriff Sine finally had to tell him that pullin’ up the town to look at its roots hardly helped the town’s growth much.”

  “Don’t it scare you the way he can get so terrible drunk sometimes?”

  “Not atall.”

  Rory tolled her blond head. “So terrible terrible drunk. Like that time at Red Jackson’s shindig. Me and Dale’d just been married a year then, remember? You boys finally had to put him to bed.”

  Cain nodded. He remembered. “You know what Harry said when he come to that time?”

  “No.”

  “Wal, he come to looking Mrs. Jackson’s commode mirror in the eye. He said it was the first he knowed he had a twin brother.”

  “Cain, I tell you, he scares me with them awful drunks of his.”

  “Wal, it probably only means his brownie ain’t happy.”

  “I could tell you some things, Cain.”

  “Wal, maybe we all could.”

  “Cain, I’d be careful of him even if he is your brother.” She placed a work-reddened hand over his stub hand, warmly. “Cain.”

  Cain let the hand rest on his a moment; then, quietly, eyes closing against a thought, withdrew his hand.

  They sat a while in silence. They sipped coffee. Time tocked away. The fire in the hearth spat; sagged; rustled. Gram’s breathing came to them with the sound of someone pumping stiff old bellows. The soil roof overhead moved under the November cold.

  All at once Rory began to talk a blue streak about a dream she’d had. “It was so strange. I was trying to cross the Bitterness. The river was rising. On my side all around the land was low and I saw that if I didn’t hurry and get across I’d drown.” Her sad face slowly brightened, became almost a young girl’s again. “On the other side was a high red bank with green grass and green trees. Like it was a park kind of. Birds singing. Pretty birds, not magpies. Fiddle music calling from somewhere. A kind of a paradise almost.” Her dark blue eyes lightened and sparkled. Right before Cain’s eyes dullness seemed to wash out of her blond hair. “Well, I saw I couldn’t walk across like a Jesus. Like Peter my faith was weak. I knew I’d sink and drown. So I knew I had to get a boat from somewhere.“

  Mention of the boat made Cain slowly stiffen in his chair.

  “I looked all up and down the river. Then I spotted one. A hollowed-out log like you and your brother Harry once made when we was kids. I saw it tied to a tree up the river a ways. I went up to it and looked it over. To my surprise I found it lined with fur. Beaver fur. Even the seat was covered with it. Soft, like velvet.”

  Cain’s smoke-blue eyes widened until the whites showed like onion rings.

  “Well, I got in and started paddling across to where all the shindig music was. Then the next thing I knew there was a man. He looked like someone I knew real well. He took the paddle out of my hands. He smiled gentlelike and started paddling me over. Then there was a flash like lightning in my head and I jerked awake.”

  “ ’Tain’t possible!” Cain exploded.

  Rory frowned. “What do you mean ’tain’t possible?”

  “Why! I had the very same dream myself the other night. To the leaf almost.”

  Rory sat up. “What!” She ran a hand around and over her swollen belly.

  “Hell’s fire and little fishes, Rory! If that ain’t the darnedest thing I ever heard of.”

  “You—dreamt—that—too?”

  “Last Thursday night.”

  “Why! that’s when I had mine!”

  “The night after the attack.”

  “Well, I never.”

  They stared at each other. Her eyes became milky with inner thought. His eyes closed over secretively.

  “Funny,” he said.

  “Funny,” she said.

  After a moment he let his lips crinkle at the corners. “There was one thing different though in my dream.”

  “Oh?”

  “In my dream I warn’t the woman.”

  “Oh.” She laughed, short.

  “But I did see the woman standing beside the river, awondering if she dared to go across it or not. I felt sorry for her, so I—”

  She broke in. “Oh, now I understand! It was you, you who called my attention to the hollowed-out boat. It was you who took the paddle from me and smiled gentlelike and then paddled me over to the green park. You.”

  “Why, yes, it was.”

  They stared at each other.

  Then they began to study to themselves some, he with his eyes down, she with her eyes to one side.

  Part Three

  Rosemary

  Rory was picking up one of Dale’s cigarette butts in her frost- killed garden, and was stooped
over, when the first pain seized her. It came from behind the child-weight and seemed to hold the weight a moment and then slowly tickled away.

  “That darn Dale,” she said. “Still throws them butts of his in the petunias when he knows they’ll kill Gram’s angleworms. He’s hardly better than our sheepherder with his tobacco cuds.”

  She straightened up and dropped the burnt butt into the pocket of her gingham apron. “I’ve told him a thousand times if I’ve told him once, that when it rains, or when the snow melts in the spring, the juice from the tobacco soaks into the ground and discourages the angleworms.” Her dulled-over eyes focused on a row of limp frost-killed petunias. “And if there’s one thing this river-bottom dirt needs it’s angleworms. Loosen it up. Give it air holes so it can breathe.”

  She passed both hands around and over the low huge bulge in her belly. “But he never thinks of my flowers, let alone my vegetables. It’s all sheep with him. All sheep.” She felt life stir. It was like a kick from a bed partner in sleep.

  “Guess I better call him up from the sheep shed.”

  She moved slowly toward the house. Her dark blue skirt hung low in back, almost dragging the ground. The ground felt rock- hard to the foot.

  It was still early in morning. A slow cold wind swept through the barren cottonwoods lining the Shaken Grass and the Bitterness. It chased tumbleweeds across the narrow point. The sky was overcast with gray hurrying clouds, bulging low like ruptured bowels. The mountains to the west were hidden in them.

  Her glum eyes ran. Her red nose dripped. “We’ll never have a garden here if we don’t keep them angleworms going. Gram’s carrying them in a pail of dirt all the way from Siouxland will be wasted.”

  Hand to knee, she climbed the log stoop and entered the brown cabin. The place was doggy with the old-hair smell of buffalo robes and bear rugs. She picked up the poker from the hearth and went back to the front door and reached out to hit a string of horseshoes dangling on a wire. The homemade gong bangled loud on the yard. When Dale didn’t show right away, she hit the gong again, harder. Once more the jumping iron horseshoes bangled loud, this time setting up discordant echoes between the cabin and the sheds.

  Dale’s long head and neck, hatted, popped out of the door of the sheep shed. His face gaunted toward her in question.

  Another inner quickening and then a knotting up of muscle behind the burden worked her belly. She gripped the door jamb, tight, until it passed. The pain seemed to have sharpened some.

  Dale held his head down to one side to hear the better. He seemed to think she’d already called; that he hadn’t caught it.

  “Come up,” she called. “Hurry.”

  “Hah?”

  “Come up!”

  “Be right with you.” His head withdrew; the shed door closed.

  She put the poker back by the hearth. She threw a couple of cottonwood logs on the fire. She wound the clock on the mantel. She noted Dale had been careless with the Winchester shells again—left a couple out where the boy could find them. She filled the black range with chopped wood and set on a kettle of water.

  She longed for a bone to chew. She loved chewing a bone close, sucking off all the delicate tastes, tonguing out the soft marrow.

  When alone she often sat working and gnawing over a soupbone. It was her one secretive delight, something she kept even from Dale and the boy Joey.

  Next she dug out an old sack full of leftover clothes. She chose an old white shirt of Dale’s and ripped it into neat strips and folded them neatly and carried them into the half-dark bedroom.

  Another inner quickening closed like a fist just behind the child-burden. It held her, deep, almost fierce. It had the feel of someone squeezing chyme, a half-digested ball of green-black grass, out of a cow’s intestines, fist by pressing fist.

  “Ahh!” she cried, clutching her tuberant belly with one hand while grabbing the corner of their hide-spring bed with the other. “Ahhh! It’s coming fast this time.”

  The front door opened. Boot heels clicked on the puncheon floor in the other room. “Rory?”

  “Ahhh,” she whispered.

  “Rory? Where be ye, woman?”

  “Inhere.”

  The boot heels entered the bedroom. “What’s my long-haired partner up to now?”

  She half-turned to him. “Dale, I’m afraid it’s …”

  “Rory, my love.” Dale took off his big hat and set it on a chair.

  “What ails ye, woman?” His wild dark hair slid across his high narrow forehead.

  “Help me on bed.”

  “Sure, my love.” He wrapped his long hard arms around her, his hands catching her tenderly, even delicately, under her distended paps. She suffered the smell of sheep on him. She let herself be hoisted onto the bed. She suffered the sound of creaking hide spring.

  She said, “It’s like my whole bottom’s fell out.” She felt a smile tickle at a lip corner; felt it pass away. She spread her legs. “I’m so wide.” She drew her skirt to her knees.

  In the half-dark bedroom Dale’s eyes became big hollows. He suddenly seemed to have trouble looking at her.

  She sighed. “Good thing I sent Joey to Cain yesterday. With Gram.”

  Dale shivered. “It’s on the way then?”

  “Yes. And this time it feels like it’s going to come quick. Not like last time with Joey, when I fought three whole days and nights.”

  Dale’s face slowly whitened over. He stood stiff. With a rough hand he combed back his wild hair.

  “Dale? What’s the matter? Having a baby ain’t as bad as all that.”

  He started for the door.

  She roused. She said sharply, “Here! Where you going?”

  “Get Gram of course.”

  “Oh, no, you don’t. Not her. I don’t want her again.”

  “Lord, Rory, ye want help, don’t ee?”

  “Sure I want help. But not hers. She almost lost the baby and me both last time. She’s too old to be of much help.”

  “But you got to have someone. There ain’t no doctor. Less’n you want me to quick ride to Antelope for one.”

  “It’s too late for that.” The big fist behind the child closed and squeezed again. “Ahhh,” she hoarsed, low. “Ahhh.”

  Dale jumped. Again he started for the door.

  Hardly able to see him for the pain, yet out of her need, she cried, “Dale! Don’t you dare leave me! It’ll be here in a … Dale!”

  Dale’s gaunted throat worked. “But I just got to get you someone, Rory. I can’t let you suffer alone.”

  The fist let go of its grip and she came back, clear. “Listen. There ain’t time.” She gasped for breath. “Listen. Light the lamp. It’s so dark and cloudy out.”

  “Oh.” Dale jumped to do it. Trembling, he had to scratch three matches before one took hold on the wick under the raised glass chimney. Slowly orange light diffused through the bedroom. It gave some color to Dale’s cheeks. It lighted up the browns in the black bear rug on the floor. It helped the light coming in through the single window high over the bed.

  She lay panting. She suffered it. She said, “It’s almost here, Dale, dear. There’ll be no time to get help. Will you get the hot water and some soap? This second one … And over there is some clean strips I made.’’

  He lashed around at her. “But ye can’t have it alone, woman? I won’t let ye.”

  She tried to smile. “My good husband. Of course I won’t have it alone.”

  “You don’t mean for me to help ye, do you, for godsakes?”

  “Yes.”

  He almost broke up. When vision came back to his eyes, he made for the door a third time.

  And once more she had to rouse herself out of birthing slumber. “Here! Where you going?”

  “Get help.”

  “Come back here!”

  He covered his face with his arms. “If you mean for me to help you, I can’t.”

  She sat up, first on one elbow, then on the other. “What? And you b
rag how you’ve helped ten thousand ewes at lambing time? How you’ve got a vet’s thin arm?”

  “I’ll try and face up to most anything, Rory. You know that.

  I’ve done real good with most things. But oh, God, not this … my own wife.”

  Her eyes hardened. Her mouth squared. Her face became haggard with rage. Summoning up all she was, she swung her legs over the edge of the bed and got to her feet. Straddling more than walking, she staggered toward the door, pushed past him, and went to the mantel. She took down the Winchester. She picked up the couple of shells she’d earlier noticed Dale had carelessly left on the mantel. She snapped the shells into the carbine; levered one into the chamber.

  Dale heard the snicks and peered around at her from the bedroom door, mouth agawk. “Hey! Woman! What the hell’s fire you up to?”

  She aimed it from the hip. “You long-legged cowardly Hammett, get over to the stove there and pour that hot water in a basin. And then take it into the bedroom with you. You ran out on me the last time, leaving me in Gram’s hands, who hardly knew what she was doing any more. But not this time. You’re going to help me whether you want to or not.”

  “But Rosemary, my girl, a man can’t help his own woman!”

  “You’ve always lumped me in with your ewes. Well now, darn you, you’re going to help me like I really was a ewe.”

  “But Rory—”

  “You ain’t my man any more. Between us that’s done. You’re a stranger to me now. Like a doctor might be. And if you don’t help me like a doc might, by the Lord, Dale Hammett, I’ll shoot you down like a dog.”

  “Rosemary woman—”

  “Shut up. And don’t you Rosemary me any more. After you’ve helped me with this child, you’ll never touch me again. Never. I’ll be damned first before I’ll be the loving wife to a coward. Never.” She harsed up a great breath. “You damn men think this country is too tough on the women. Not at all. It’s you men that can’t stand up to it.” She almost snarled it. “I let you take up with me again after Joey was born. Because maybe Joey wasn’t your’n and you didn’t owe me the help. But this one I know is your’n and by the Lord you’re going to help me have it.”

  “What! ’Because maybe Joey wasn’t …’ My God!”