Bittersweet

by Nevada Barr

  “You want company, Sarah?” Mac’s gravel voice was as strong and sure as ever, and she smiled to hear it.

  “I’d like that, Mac.” And she went to take his arm.

  The sun had long since set, and the sky was patched with stars where the wind had torn through the clouds. Twice, Coby had offered to go look for Sarah’s brother, but she had insisted he stay by the fire.

  At half past seven, Sarah served the dinner she’d kept warm on the back of the stove, and they sat down at the table without David. The biscuits had grown hard on the warming shelf, and the men sopped them around in their hash. Their chomping took the place of dinner conversation. Sarah was distracted and spoke little; even Mac failed to hold her attention. She started at every sound and ate almost nothing. Matthew had been fed earlier and now moped at the hearth, shoving his books about, pretending to study. Every few minutes he’d run to the door, insisting he’d heard Karl or horses or Moss Face scratching to be let in. Sarah gave up trying to get him to concentrate on his lessons; she didn’t even bother to make him do his supper chores, but cleared the table and washed the dishes by herself.

  At nine o’clock, Coby reached for his coat. “I’m going after him, Sarah. It’s been too long now.”

  “No!” she snapped, and Coby looked at her sharply.

  “What’s eating you, Sarah? If David’s hurt himself, your stewing won’t do him no good. Let me go after him, I ain’t afraid of the dark.”

  “No,” she replied. “You are not to go after him, not if you want to work here. Take your coat off.”

  “I’ll be going out to the tackroom,” he said stiffly, and left, slamming the door behind him.

  It was after ten when Matthew was put to bed. Being up so late made him peevish, and he whined to be allowed to stay up another hour and sulked and fussed until he knocked over his washwater and broke the pitcher. Sarah spanked him and put him to bed with a dirty face.

  David returned just before midnight. He let himself in the front door without his customary banging. One of his eyes was blacked—a purple, puffy mark the size of a thumbprint near the bridge of his nose. Manny came in with him; his hackles were up and he stayed close on his master’s heels. Liam and Beaner were at a game of checkers. Mac dozed by the fire and Sarah, her darning needles and yarn in her lap, picked through a bag of socks on the floor. She saw David first and rose to go to him, but his look stopped her before she was halfway across the room.

  “What in hell happened to you?” Liam grunted.

  David went to the bar, pulled an unopened bottle of rye whiskey from the shelf, and uncorked it. The glugging of the whiskey into the glass was loud in the quiet room. When the glass was full he turned and faced his sister. For a long minute he regarded her, his eyes unreadable, the line of his mouth hidden in the wild red beard. He jerked the glass high, slopping liquor over the floor. Sarah’s hands flew to her face like frightened birds, and her fingers pecked nervously at her lip.

  “To the bride.” He sneered, threw back his head, drank the whiskey down, and hurled the glass the length of the long dining room. It sailed by Sarah’s cheek to break into fragments on the stone of the chimney.

  David grabbed another glass, slopped it full, made the same toast, drank it off, and sent it smashing into the fire. The rye was making his eyes water and flooding his face with color.

  “Just a damn minute,” Liam began as David reached for a third glass.

  “Stay out of this,” David growled. “You stay the hell out of this.” He poured himself another, but turned his back on them and nursed it in silence.

  “David…” Sarah took several tentative steps toward him.

  “You stay the goddamn hell away from me!” he exploded. Sarah clamped her hand over her mouth and ran from the room. David tossed off the last of his drink and slammed his fist into the wall with a sudden violence.

  “The son of a bitch, he is crazy,” Beaner whispered.

  “Leave him be,” Mac said. “Davie’s a mean drunk if you bother him. Leave him be and he won’t hurt nobody. You go on now, turn in. I’ll stay with him.”

  One-handed, David was pouring himself another whiskey. His right hand lay on the bar, already beginning to swell. Over the knuckles of his little and ring fingers, the flesh was rounded, smooth, discolored.

  “Better let me take a look at that hand,” Liam said.

  “Stay the hell away.”

  “Go on,” Mac urged. The driver and the swamper sidled past David and went upstairs.

  Fully dressed, the covers pulled up around her chin, Sarah lay in bed, her eyes fixed on the door. In the hall, the pendulum clock struck. For three hours she’d lain awake, listening to glass breaking and furniture being overturned in the next room. Around one o’clock there had been a terrific crash, as if a chair had been hurled against the wall, and shortly afterwards her bedroom door was opened a crack. It was Matthew, awake and afraid, coming to crawl in with her.

  She turned to look at the small face on the pillow next to hers. “My son,” she whispered, and kissed his cheek tenderly.

  The familiar smack of the front door banging against the side of the house made her start, and Matthew stirred in his sleep. Sarah sang a lullaby softly. He didn’t awaken and she lay back, listening, but there was no more to hear.

  Near four o’clock, as the moon was setting, Sarah fell asleep. The sun was above the horizon and Matthew was gone from her side when she awoke. She slipped on her shoes and hurried from the room, her dress crumpled and her skirts askew.

  Mac and Coby were cleaning the main room. The air was warm with the smell of coffee. Matthew poked sticks into a growing fire while Liam and Beaner slurped their coffee and threw out bits of advice to Mac. Mac’s sight was so weak he’d confined himself to righting upended tables and chairs. There was a sizeable pile of broken glass swept up near the hearth. Coby, broom in hand, had worked his way down to the other end of the room. Sarah stopped in the doorway.

  Matthew caught sight of her. “Momma, Uncle David tore up the room and broke all the glasses.” He ran over from the fireplace to take her hand. “Looky,” he said, leading her to the far end of the bar. There was a dent in the wall the size of a horse’s hoof. “Mr. McMurphy said Uncle David did that with his hand and broke it all to hell.”

  “To pieces,” she corrected him. “Don’t swear, Matthew, I’ll give you a licking.”

  “Mr. McMurphy just said.”

  “Hush, honey. Why don’t you go bring in some kindling from the woodpile.”

  Coby looked up from his dustpan. “Looks like you better order some glasses before Liam takes off. I don’t think your brother missed a one.”

  “Where is he?” Sarah asked.

  “He took off around two, three o’clock this morning, Sarah,” Mac replied. “Said he was going to walk as far as he could and sleep till the coach came.”

  “Was he okay?”

  “His hand was mashed some. Swelled up three times its regular size. He was feeling no pain, but it’s going to hurt like hell when he comes to this morning. He’ll be all right. There’s nothing on this desert going to mess with your brother, the mood he was in. Mean enough to bite a snake.”

  Sarah laid a hand on the old man’s arm. “I’m glad you were here, Mac.”

  “What do you figure set him off like that?”

  “Somebody get the door for me,” Matthew called, banging on it with his foot. His arms were full of wood.

  Sarah opened the door for her son and picked up the trail of kindling sticks he left across the floor. “I don’t know, Mac. He used to get that way about Pa sometimes, when I was a girl.”

  The Fort Bidwell stage arrived shortly after noon. While Liam and Beaner traded gossip with Ross and Leroy, Mac wandered out across the road to lean on the paddock fence. His dim eyes were on the bright alkali flats and the blue shadows of the Fox Range beyond. A breeze came to him over the sage, and he quivered his nostrils like an old dog reading the news on the wind.

/>   “Hello, Mac. Sarah told me you’d come.”

  Mac jerked, his half-blind eyes peering into the darkness of the barn. He took a sharp breath, and for a moment his eyes seemed to light up from inside. “Miss Grelznik…”

  “It’s Karl Saunders, Mac.” Karl stepped partway into the light. His clothes were dust-streaked and the side of his face was scraped raw. He took Mac’s hand. The stumped fingers and knobby thumb had browned and twisted over the years into the likeness of a gnarled old root.

  “Karl…” the old man repeated, squinting into the light. “I thought…”

  “Karl Saunders.”

  Mac shook his head. “You get old, your mind plays tricks on you. Good to see you, Karl. You get that deer you went after?”

  “Never did, Mac.”

  “Missed a hell of a show here. I expect Sarah told you all about it.”

  “I haven’t talked with Sarah.”

  “David find you?”

  “He caught up with me a mile and a half from here. Those long legs of his really cover the ground.”

  “Something between you two set him off?”

  “He didn’t say anything to you?”

  “No. Closemouthed as an old squaw.”

  “I don’t know what it was, then.”

  Mac nodded to himself and chewed thoughtfully on a splinter he’d levered off the fence rail with a fingernail. Karl studied the seamed face; darker spots, burned black by years in the weather, dotted the old man’s cheekbones like outsized freckles, snowy hair stood upright in the breeze. Karl smiled and dropped his hand gently on Mac’s shoulder. “It’s good to see you again, my old friend.”

  Mac shivered. “Your voice…somebody steppin’ on my grave, I guess. Something’s give me the willies this morning.”

  “Aayah!” Liam barked.

  “Guess I’d better get a move on, or the coach’ll leave without me.” He spit over the rail, carefully downwind. Karl walked with him to the mudwagon and saw him off.

  Karl didn’t return to the house, though Sarah motioned to him from the window. Instead he shouldered an ax and set to work.

  The dull fall of the ax, chopping out a regular rhythm, stopped. Karl dragged another log across the woodcutting rack, settled it snug with a kick, and the beat started again, hollow-sounding in the west wind. Sweat was running down the sides of his face, and his arms trembled. His coat was unbuttoned, his face raw with the cold. He’d been at it for several hours. He wiped the perspiration from his eyes, wincing as he brushed the salt sweat into the broken flesh on his cheekbone.

  The kitchen window opened with a screech. “Karl,” Sarah called. “You’ve been at that all afternoon and you were up all night. You’re being silly. Stop before you chop yourself.”

  Karl grunted and swung the ax. It bit deep and he couldn’t pull it free.

  “Answer me!” Nothing. Sarah banged the window shut.

  He rocked the ax back and forth, then planted his foot near the head and jerked. The handle pulled free of the head and Karl stumbled back into the small figure of Matthew Ebbitt. The boy stood square-shouldered, feet wide apart, ready to take on the world. Karl blinked at him, unseeing for a moment, then let the ax handle slide to the ground.

  “Momma was crying,” Matthew said accusingly. “Are you mad at her because she let Uncle David break the dishes?”

  Karl pulled his kerchief from his hip pocket and mopped his face. “No, son, I’m not mad.”

  “Momma said you won’t talk to her. She told me to come tell you she said you could tell me about Moss Face if you wanted to.”

  “Sarah said that? That I was to tell you about Moss Face?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  Karl leaned the ax against the wood stand and upended a chunk of wood to sit on. He folded the damp kerchief into a neat square and stared out across the desert so long that Matthew began to fidget. “Come here,” Karl said at last, and his stepson came to stand between his knees. Karl pulled him up on his lap and wrapped his coat around him. “Last night I thought I heard something,” he began, “out by the chicken coop. When I went out to see what it was, I saw Moss Face. He was with a pretty lady coyote. They ran out toward those mountains together.” He pointed south to the blue Fox Range. “He grew up, Matthew, and had to go back to the wild to raise a family. Maybe we’ll see him again, come spring. Or maybe we’ll see puppies and they will be Moss Face all over again.”

  Matthew buried his face against Karl’s shoulder, and Karl held him close.

  41

  MONTHS PASSED, A YEAR, THEN TWO. MATTHEW THRIVED AND GREW; on his tenth birthday he was five feet tall. “I’ll be taller than Uncle David,” he boasted. His Uncle had neither visited nor written since the night he’d gotten drunk and smashed every glass in the place. There was still a dent in the wall where he’d rammed his knuckles. Somebody had scratched DAVID TOLSTONADGE under it, and the date, with a pocket knife.

  The stages ran less frequently, and even with the decreased service, there were fewer passengers on each mudwagon. David’s predictions of railroad supremacy were fast coming true, but still no rails were being laid across the Smoke Creek or Black Rock Deserts. Freighters and, ever increasingly, cattle became the mainstay of the Saunderses’ business. They had increased the size of their herd and now ran two hundred and fifty head of cattle on the rangeland.

  Coby’s responsibilities grew with the cattle ranching, and though he had enough money saved to buy a rig and a team, he stayed on as the Saunderses’ foreman. Each spring he took the wagon into Standish and hired enough hands to help with the branding, and again in late summer, when the cattle were driven to the railroad to be sold.

  Maturity settled on Sarah like a handsome cloak. Her features, soft and vaguely undefined throughout her early twenties, firmed and took on substance. When she spoke, it was with the easy assurance of a woman who knew her job and did it well. She had taken on the task of raising pigs as well as chickens, and east of the barn, downwind of the house, she had built a pigsty.

  Early in the summer of 1885, Jerome Jannis rolled in from Standish. His cannonball head was grizzled and his barrel chest sloped off into a belly that pulled his shirttail out. For once his partner, Charley, was not coming behind, eating his dust. He hollered “Halloo!” to Sarah as he drove in. She was kneeling beside the pigpen, burlap sacking protecting her skirts and Karl’s oversized work gloves caricaturing her hands. She smiled, waved her hammer by way of reply, and returned to her fence-mending. The board nearest the ground had been rooted out from the post. As she pounded new nails in, all of her brood stomped and squealed on the other side of the fence, crowding each other to get near enough to poke their snouts between the boards. They liked her.

  “Where’s everybody got to?” Jerome hollered. “Got Karl’s winter wood here. Need a hand unloading it if I’m going to get to Fish Springs today.”

  “Coby and Matthew are out with the cattle.” Sarah stood and shook out her skirts. “There.” Beyond the spring, toward Reno, two black dots, barely discernible as horsemen, rode in the direction of the mountains. “Karl should be along directly. He’s around here somewhere. Karl!”

  Karl came out from behind the shed, a blacksmith’s leather apron tied over his clothes. He’d grown even leaner and browner over the years. “Hello, Jerome. We haven’t seen you in a dog’s age.” The men shook hands warmly. “Where’s Charley? I hardly recognized you all by yourself.”

  “Charley’s got a bad tooth. His face was swoll up like a pumpkin. That sawbones they got in Carson yanked it out for him, but he was still sicker’n a calf when I left. I done the Susanville, Standish, and back on my own.”

  Sarah made a hammock out of the gunnysack to carry her tools back to the shed. “Let me put these away and I’ll get you two something to eat before you tackle that load.”

  After lunch the men sat in the shade on the porch, letting their meal digest, the wagoner packing his pipe. The house was cool inside, and a breeze came in throu
gh the open windows. Sarah hummed as she cleared up the dishes. The window over the sink faced east, the sun was directly overhead, and the shadows were small. The desert stretched, stark and clean, under a sky of perfect blue. In the distance two hawks circled on an updraft, tiny black specks over the northern curve of the hills. She watched them slide effortlessly toward the sun until they’d grown so small she could no longer see them.

  Karl and Jerome came into sight around the corner of the house as she was starting on the flatwear. Jerome parked the wagon parallel to the fence, as close as he could get it. The back was piled high with cottonwood logs varying in length from eight to fifteen feet, the largest not much bigger around than a man’s thigh. The longer ones stuck out over the tail of the wagon. Both men climbed atop the pile and, one at either end, began heaving the logs over the fence. Puffs of dust shot up as they bounced on the hard dry earth. Karl counted as they worked: “One, two, heave…” and the logs swung off the wagon, hitting the new pile in a battering rhythm. In the kitchen, Sarah sang a little song softly to herself, trying to fit the tune to the pounding of the falling trunks. When the wagon was less than half-full, Karl jumped to the ground and stood behind, hefting the logs out of the wagon bed, then over the fence. He’d stopped counting, and the rhythm slowed, grew irregular, and Sarah sang to her own beat.

  It was hot, heavy work, and after a while Jerome stripped down to his undershirt and rolled the sleeves above the elbow. “Hold it a minute, let me get squared away here,” he said, and sat down on the wagon seat to tuck the undershirt back around the belly.

  Sweat streamed down Karl’s temples but he didn’t unbutton even his collar or take off the threadbare black woolen vest he always wore. He stood, hands on hips, looking out over the desert, catching his breath.

  “Looks like the boys will be in sooner than I thought.”

  Jerome followed Karl’s gaze. The two riders were still too far away to recognize. “The missus says Matthew’s riding with Coby.”