Grimacing from pain at the scratches down his arms, over his shoulders, and across his back, Gardner jerked several thorns loose from his clothes. “I hope those women know they’ve hooked up with a crazy man.”
“All they care about is getting to Tombstone. Now if you want any supper, you’d better get moving.”
Gardner looked around for the boot heel, which had landed several feet away.
“With all your money, it’ll be easier to buy some new boots—if you think you’ll live long enough to need them.”
“Do you really think any judge is going to hang me?”
“I’m counting on it.”
Gardner glared at Zeke, hate luminous in his eyes, but he got to his feet without further comment.
Once in camp, Zeke seated the prisoners in a row, bound their feet, then tied the four of them together. “Now you can have your coffee. If you behave yourselves, I’ll leave your wrists untied until it’s time to go to bed.”
“I can’t sleep tied up,” Gardner said.
“Then you can keep watch for wild animals,” Zeke said. “We get wood rats and kangaroo rats at night looking for crumbs, but watch out for raccoons and coyotes. They’ll try to get into the saddlebags or carry them off.”
“I’m not looking out for anything,” Gardner snapped.
“You’d better hurry with his coffee,” Zeke said to Josie. “He’s definitely out of sorts.”
“If you’d ever been tied up like I am, you’d know why.”
Before he knew what he was doing, Zeke had Gardner by the throat. “You can’t begin to know what it’s like to really be out of sorts. I was worked from dawn until dark, beaten when I was too weak from hunger and exhaustion to stand on my feet, then chained up at night and forced to sleep in my own filth. And that was after the liberation of the slaves.”
Gardner had turned blue and was making gobbling noises. Disgusted with himself for losing control, Zeke tossed Gardner from him, then thrust his rifle in Josie’s hands. “Keep an eye on them.”
Then he stalked out of camp into the comfort of the enveloping darkness.
It seemed to Josie that Zeke had been gone for hours. Everybody had finished eating, and Hawk had taken the prisoners for their last trip into the bushes for the night. She and Suzette had washed and put away the cups and bowls. A single pot containing Zeke’s supper remained on the glowing embers of the fire. Josie had added water three times to keep the stew from burning. For the last several minutes, Hawk and Suzette had talked quietly, so intent on each other, Josie was sure they’d forgotten her presence. Finally unable to stand the suspense any longer, she asked Hawk, “When is Zeke coming back?”
“He said he’d whistle when he was ready for me to relieve him,” Hawk answered.
“Aren’t you worried?”
“No.”
She couldn’t understand the relationship between the two men. Zeke said they were closer than brothers, practically like twins, yet they never seemed to worry about each other. No woman could stand seeing her sister or best friend as upset as Zeke had been and not try to do something about it. He had to feel abandoned. She marched over to the wagon and pulled out a bowl and a spoon. “I’m taking his supper to him.”
“He’s not hungry,” Hawk said.
“How do you know?” she asked, unable to contain her impatience. “You haven’t set eyes on him in more than two hours.”
“I saw all I needed to see.”
She took the pot of stew off the fire. “Well, I haven’t seen all I need to see.”
She turned away, irritated by Hawk’s look of sympathy. How could he possibly think she needed sympathy? Zeke was the one who’d been forced to remember a horrendous time in his life. He was the one who had to feel that no one understood, cared, or could be bothered to share his pain. It was impossible for anyone to have endured what he had endured and not be permanently scarred by it.
She picked her way through the barrier of dense, tangled growth. Less than a hundred feet from the river, the cottonwoods and willows abruptly gave way to scattered mesquite and ironwood interspersed with cactus and barely enough grass to supply the horses and mules for the night. Moonlight reflecting off the tawny rocks and dun-colored soil enabled her to see the livestock, but not Zeke. She knew he must be close by. He wouldn’t leave the mares unattended.
“Zeke.”
The huge emptiness of the desert swallowed the sound of her voice. Not even the sounds of the horses cropping grass could erase the feeling that she was alone in the night. The canopy of stars taunted her with their tiny pinpricks of light. Even the moon seemed cold and unwelcoming. She shivered, unsure whether it was from cold or apprehension. She felt stupid standing there, a pot of rapidly cooling stew in one hand and a bowl and spoon in the other.
“Zeke, where are you? I’ve brought your supper.”
Silence. Stillness. Emptiness. She was starting to feel embarrassed, like she was standing there naked for the whole world to see. If he didn’t want her around, the least he could do was tell her so. She turned in a complete circle without seeing him. She was about to go back to camp when she saw a shadow unfold from the larger shadow of a boulder.
“I’m not hungry.”
She didn’t recognize his voice. It was a pale, listless imitation of the vibrant man she had come to know. He walked toward her with slow, deliberate steps, like a man going to his own execution. His attitude surprised her; it frightened her, too.
“You need to eat.” She tried to sound optimistic, even cheerful. “I didn’t break down and cook just to feed horse thieves.” Even in the moonlight, it was hard to see his expression, hard to tell what he was thinking, what he was really feeling. He was close now. She could feel the energy pouring from him, could almost feel his presence touching her. She nearly sighed with relief. He’d lost none of his strength, none of the vibrant energy that made him seem so alive.
“I’m glad you brought a bowl.” He made a feeble attempt to smile. “Isabelle would wake out of a dead sleep if I so much as ate a spoonful from the pot.”
She would have to meet Isabelle someday. It was hard to believe that anyone could have had such a powerful influence on this man.
“Is there someplace we can sit without getting thorns in our bottoms?”
Zeke pointed toward the spot where he’d been sitting in the shadow of the boulder. “I can watch the horses from there.”
Josie followed him, not knowing what to do, much less what to say. When they reached the rocks, she set the bowl down, poured the stew into it, and handed it to Zeke. “I didn’t bring any coffee.” Why was she apologizing? She’d already done more for him than she’d done for any man since her father.
“That’s okay. I can always get a drink out of the river.”
He tasted the stew. “It’s really good.” She suspected he would say that, no matter what it tasted like, but he ate with gusto. She lost her appetite when she was unhappy. Most of the women she knew did, too, but not the men. They could be in the middle of a life-altering tragedy and they’d still want their three meals a day.
She sat in silence while he ate. She didn’t move except to serve up the rest of the stew when he’d finished the first bowl. She tried to concentrate on the sounds of the night—the horses, the murmur of the river, the rustling of small creatures among dry leaves—but she heard only the sound of Zeke chewing and swallowing. She tried to survey the sights of the night—the looming black shapes of cactus, boulders, the horses, even the towering cottonwoods that lined the bank of the river—but all she could see was the outline of Zeke’s powerful body as he sat next to her, the movement of his mouth and jaw as he chewed his food.
He finished and placed the spoon in the bowl. Then the hand holding the bowl sank to his lap, and he remained motionless for several minutes. “Thank you,” he said. “It was kind of you to bring me my supper.”
His response was polite, reserved, completely unlike the Zeke she’d come to know, the man she’d come to believe w
as impervious to hurt of any kind. They hadn’t always had a good relationship, but it upset her to see him so obviously wounded.
“It must have been really bad.” She didn’t know whether she should bring up what he’d said, but it stood between them like a barrier and she was tired of barriers.
“Even after Jake and Isabelle adopted me and I knew I was safe, I still had nightmares.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
But she could tell he did. No matter how painful, no matter how the memories haunted him, the past was part of who he was. Just as her past would forever bedevil her.
“It’s all in the past,” Zeke said. “It’s not important anymore.”
“It’s important because it happened to you. And nothing important is ever all in the past.”
He didn’t respond, just set the bowl down, got up, and walked a few steps away. When he stopped with his back to her, she could see the tension cause his shoulders to rise until the muscles fanning out from his neck formed a ridge. His head rolled back until he was looking at the heavens. It was like watching him wrestle with himself; she wondered which side of him would win. She longed to know what was hurting him so much, but she knew she had to wait for him to speak.
“I was sold as a baby.” He didn’t turn around, just spoke into the emptiness of the night. “I never knew my mother or father. I don’t know if I have brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, or cousins. I simply existed alone in the universe.”
She found it impossible to conceive of the loneliness of such a life. Even when things were at their worst for her, she knew who she was, where she came from, knew her mother loved her. She had roots that helped to ground her.
“My owner said she bought me because I was a handsome baby. She brought me up in the house because she wanted me where she could watch me all the time. That didn’t mean she treated me any better than the other slaves. She just wanted to watch me. It made all the other slaves jealous. They thought I was getting something they weren’t. They were right, but I’d have traded places with any boy who had to bed down on a hard floor in a cold cabin at night. At least I could have slept through the night without being awakened by nightmares of what could happen—of what did happen.”
A chill of apprehension raced down Josie’s spine. Could he be talking about what she was thinking? Did women do the same thing to boys that men did to girls?
“She made me sleep in a small room in the attic of the big house. Some nights I’d wake up to find her staring at me. In the beginning she never did or said anything, just stood there with this strange smile on her face.”
“When I got older, she used to run her hands over my arms and chest. Even my legs. She would tell me how proud she was of the muscles I was developing, how handsome I looked, what a nice-looking man I would become someday. Then she’d tell me about the work she planned to give me so I could grow bigger and stronger. Some days I was so tired I could hardly eat my supper, but she’d make me sit at the table until I finished every mouthful. She said I needed to eat to grow big and strong.”
Zeke bent down and picked up a rock, which he tossed from one hand to the other. Suddenly he reared back and threw it as hard as he could. She heard it rip through the leaves of the trees bordering the river. He bent down and picked up another rock, but a moment later he dropped it. He turned, walked back, and picked up the pot and bowl. “I’ll wash these.”
“I’ll go with you.” She knew there was more to his story. He wasn’t ready to talk about it yet, but he needed to get it all out now. “What about the horses?”
“Dusky Lady is better than any watchdog. She’ll let me know if anything is around.”
Josie followed in his wake until they reached a narrow sandy patch of riverbank. Zeke worked in silence with quick efficiency. She’d hardly knelt down beside him before he handed her the pot and bowl, both scrubbed clean with sand and rinsed with water that sparkled beneath the shafts of moonlight filtering through the trees.
“You should go back,” he said.
“Not yet.”
He paused. Was he testing her, questioning in his mind whether she was strong enough to hear the rest of what had happened to him? She had known for most of her life that she had to be strong for herself, but this was the first time she wanted to be strong for anyone since her mother. It was a mystery to her how a man could be so strong he could overcome anything that happened to him, yet could still need the strength of a woman.
They walked back side by side.
When they cleared the trees, Zeke walked over to a pinto mare. She raised her head when he approached and moved away. He stood still and held out his hand. She hesitated, her large brown eyes watching him closely before she took slow steps toward him. She pushed her head against his chest, and he wrapped his arm around her neck and buried his face in her mane. It shocked Josie to realize she was jealous of the mare, that she wished she were the one giving Zeke comfort, the one offering him the consolation of her warmth, her presence. She tried to tell herself she was a fool, but it didn’t work this time. Here was a man who’d taken on the burden of making sure she got to Tombstone even though it endangered his goal of getting his mares safely to his ranch. In addition, he’d risked his life to rescue her from Gardner. Of course, she wanted to give him something in return. But how did you offer comfort to a man who wouldn’t accept it?
“Are you going to tell me what happened after that?”
He didn’t move from the mare, who kept nuzzling him. “I don’t want to.”
“You need to.”
Why did she think she knew enough about any man to know what he needed? She’d done her best to avoid having anything to do with men. Their wants and needs didn’t concern her. She didn’t care. But that wasn’t true with Zeke. It might not concern her, but she did care.
“She was delighted with my physical growth.” Zeke spoke into the mare’s mane. “She even kept a chart of how much I grew each year, how much weight I gained, the size of my chest. She did the same thing with the horses she raised. I started to feel like a prized piece of livestock. The other slaves said she was raising me to sell, that planters on the Mississippi delta would pay up to two thousand dollars for a healthy adult male slave.”
He straightened up, patted the mare’s neck, then walked toward a sorrel. The mare trotted away from him and started to graze again after she’d gone about thirty yards. When Zeke approached her a second time, she didn’t run, just kept grazing while his hand rested on her withers.
“Things got worse when my voice dropped and I started to grow a beard. She made me go to bed without any clothes. Even when it got so cold I shivered, she’d run her hands all over me. If I begged her to stop, she’d get angry and beat me. She wouldn’t stop until I’d made a mess of myself. Then she’d pretend to be angry, tell me I was a wicked boy, and order me to wash myself under the pump behind the house. I don’t know what she’d have done if the war hadn’t started. When Union soldiers landed in Texas, she sold me to some farmers. I never saw her again.”
Zeke turned to face Josie for the first time since he’d started his recital. She supposed it was too difficult for him to look at her when telling of things that must have scarred his young soul, but she would never look down on him, never blame him for what had happened, because she knew it wasn’t his fault any more than what had happened to her had been her fault. But it had been worse for him, because he’d been a child. She’d been old enough to defend herself. She stepped forward and took his hand. “Tell me about the farmers.”
He hesitated briefly before his fingers closed around her hand. She could feel some of the tension leave him, heard him exhale. Had he been holding that breath, waiting to see how she would react to what he’d said?
“They didn’t care about anything but getting as much work out of me as possible. They adopted boys without families, then treated them like slaves. They worked us until we were too exhausted to move, fed us little
better than their pigs, and chained us up at night. After one boy died, another boy, Buck, ran away. If he hadn’t come back for me after Isabelle found him, I’d probably be dead.”
“I’d like to meet Isabelle someday,” Josie said.
Zeke chuckled, and Josie felt herself begin to relax. “Everybody loves Isabelle, but if you don’t watch out, she’ll run right over you.”
“Then why do you love her so much?”
“Because her love is so fierce, you can’t help loving her, even when she’s trying to talk you into doing something you don’t want to do.”
“Does she do that a lot?”
“Sure. Isabelle thinks she knows what’s best for everybody.”
“Does she?”
“Not everybody has the courage to reach for the best. Sometimes, second best is all a person can handle.”
That was one of the most enigmatic statements Josie had ever heard, but she couldn’t escape the suspicion that Isabelle would have said that she—Josie—had settled for second best. She didn’t like the feeling, but her conscience wouldn’t let her ignore it.
“It’s time for you to go to bed,” Zeke said. “You have four extra mouths to feed tomorrow.”
“If it wasn’t too much trouble, I’d make them cook their own breakfast.”
“It’s only three more days. We should reach Benson by then.”
She should have been pleased as well as relieved, but a vague sense of dissatisfaction wouldn’t go away. As much as she’d complained about Zeke, she’d found she enjoyed being treated as a person rather than a body and a face. She had become accustomed to men’s adulation, had managed to convince herself she wanted it because it meant she would be successful, but she had stepped out of the role with unexpected ease. Still more unanticipated was her reluctance to take it up again. Even cooking breakfast didn’t seem too high a price for the freedom from being stared at, grabbed at, hollered at, even having money waved at her. She liked what she did, but she nearly always came off stage with a bad taste in her mouth.
“You should check on jobs in Benson,” Zeke said. “Tombstone won’t last much longer. Everything is moving south to Bisbee.”
The Mavericks Page 18
