Haints Stay

by Colin Winnette

  At the time, Brooke found it curious that, having had no interest in pursuing them after those first few days, and certainly giving no real thought after that to finding the man and killing him, he had simply stumbled onto the man and into killing him and it was entirely likely his wife would soon hear about it, however many miles away she was and however little she cared to think on Brooke this late in life.

  There was no logic to life and no road that could take you straight to elsewhere. Living was all winding around and doubling back. He was walking alongside his old tracks now, watching the stream grow broad and deep again. The red rocks where the wagon sat were even visible far, far off in the distance. He had no idea how long he had been walking, how many days, how many miles, but knew he was better off now than he had been at the halfway point. He could try to follow the wagon’s trail back to the town, at the very least. Maybe the innkeeper would take pity on him. Or had she been setting them up from the very beginning ? Had the whole thing been an ambush ? How was he to know ? How was he to even begin to guess ? The stream seemed of an entirely different color than before. Or maybe it didn’t. He could not be sure. He tasted it and it tasted like water, but that was no help in determining if the water had somehow changed or if this was in fact the same stream.

  They had killed a boy once, but Brooke had not wanted to. Children are stubborn and it is rare that someone else’s child will listen to you without being instructed to do so by a guardian. Boys were worse than girls in this regard, and if a young boy got it into his head that you were double-dealing him or treating him poorly, there was no other way of getting around it than to be forceful or to be saved from force by the appearance of the boy’s parent. One such boy had caught Brooke and Sugar sleeping on his father’s property and had chosen to take the extreme route in addressing the offense. Rifle to collar, he demanded they explain themselves, which they would not be particularly good at doing, in such a position. Firstly, they did not like being threatened. No one did. Secondly, their story was not exactly one to put a frightened boy at ease. They were out to kill someone. Someone who lived in this area and owned a considerable portion of the land. Someone who had a son and a sick wife and a slow-witted brother. Someone whose son was rumored to be a bit of a handful.

  The killer was going from house to house then. Entering, and then shortly after, firing. He was steadily approaching the inn. Martha moved Mary and Bird to the back of the building, into a back bedroom with a large vanity. She opened the vanity, removed the dresses and suits, as well as the bulk of the cobwebs and dust, and instructed them to get in and not to come out, no matter what they heard.

  “There are spiders,” said Mary.

  Martha positioned them beside one another and clipped the vanity shut. She considered turning its front to face the wall, but she hadn’t the strength to budge it. She went back to the front room where the innkeeper’s body sat slumped. She checked the window and saw nothing. She heard a gunshot, faintly, but did not flinch. She covered the open-eyed gaze of the innkeeper with a bit of lace from the back of the couch. She did not know the name for it or its actual use.

  She positioned herself behind the couch and trained the gun at the door. She sat a moment. Listened. She could hear only her heart pulsing in her neck. After a moment of silence it occurred to her that there was no way he wasn’t anticipating a gun trained on at least one of these doors he was kicking open. Without a doubt, he would enter prepared for the obvious position she’d taken, and their exchange would be only a matter of speed and accuracy, neither of which did she care to match with someone who’d long been in this line of work.

  She examined the room for a better position or plan. The room was only slightly furnished. Two couches facing one another at either side of an empty fireplace. A body leaned against that fireplace, with a bit of lace over its gaze. Across from the body was a low desk with thin legs. It would offer no protection. Behind the desk was a row of small cubbies. They looked something like mail slots but each had been filled with small trinkets, porcelain figurines, and tiny stones or dusty gems.

  She heard movement, Mary and the boy shifting in the vanity, banging their elbows and whispering to one another. She heard the vanity’s wooden base creak beneath their weight. More gunfire. It was single-sided fire. One or two or three measured shots and then silence. The killer was eliminating the townspeople, one by one. She entered the bedroom in which the vanity was stored and examined the other possible hiding places. There was a closet that would not do. There was space under the bed that would not do. There was the vanity, which was full. And there was a window.

  She heard Bird and Mary go silent as she climbed atop the desk.

  “Do not step out and do not speak,” she said to the vanity.

  “Martha ?” said Mary’s voice.

  But she did not reply.

  She exited through the window.

  In the alley behind the building the town seemed almost peaceful. The dirt there had been smoothed by the wind. Only a few scattered footprints and bits of trash decorated the path. There was a foul smell, but that was to be expected.

  She could no longer sense the killer’s systematic approach. She spotted a small pile of crates at the far end of the alley, where it opened up onto the town. She kept low and approached the crates for cover. From behind them, she could see the empty street.

  The killer appeared then, on the porch of the building across from the inn. She did not know the building’s function. She aimed, but it was not a guaranteed shot. She was not terrible with a rifle, but she was not good with a rifle. The killer looked tired, as if he had not slept in days. He was limping, bent slightly at the waist. He looked ill and miserable, like an old dog she and John had once put down together. It was only a puppy. John could not bear to shoot it, so they had carried it in a sack out to the stream near their house and loaded the sack with rocks. The poor thing had not struggled in the slightest. It had even seemed to smile as they crowded the space between the sack and its fur with stones.

  She did not like killing things. And here she was, preparing to kill one more thing. Not that she felt conflicted about it. She just didn’t like the idea of it, resented that she would carry this weight with her for the rest of her days. It was not a sin, to protect herself against violence by putting an end to it — but the act would stay with her forever. Her mind would always have there to go, that memory to reflect on, and it would likely have a stronger pull than most of the others. Each death did not lessen the load of the previous. But you grew the muscles to better carry them. John used to have nightmares about the men he had killed. He rode with some general during a violent time in the territory. John had said the general’s name many times, as if Martha were to recognize it, but she did not recognize it and so it did not stick. John would wake up in the middle of the night sweating and crying like a child. She had not asked, but had assumed he’d done some unforgivable things.

  The killer was at the inn, finally. Martha had not raised her rifle, had not even thought to raise her rifle. She had not even registered his approach at first, but snapped into focus when he dumped the spent shells from his pistol and began to reload. They hit the ground like spilled coins. Somehow, the sound of those shells clicking against the dirt rang throughout the town louder than the muffled shots from within each home. It was the sound of him leaving those deaths behind. It was an unnatural sound. It was monstrous. There was a desperate look in his eyes, like a cornered dog. But there was a matter-of-factness to his movement, like a lost man, decidedly looping the same patch of desert land in the hopes that death will find him more quickly. She knew that face. She knew this man. She had been born to kill him.

  Just then, Mary appeared in the window from which Martha had exited. She was trying to open it, but could not lift the frame more than an inch or so. She knocked, softly. Martha shook her head. The killer stepped onto the porch. Mary tried again, to lift the window, but with no success. The boy was not with her.


  “Martha,” whispered Mary.

  Martha shook her head, waved her hand.

  “There are spiders,” said Mary.

  Martha waved her hand.

  The killer cracked the door and stepped into the inn and Mary vanished from the window.

  Martha tried to remember, had she shut the door to the bedroom ? She had when she had tried to set herself up in the front room. But after ? Before she exited through the window ? She could not remember.

  There were two windows that looked out onto the alley, the window she had exited from and a window between the alley and the front room. From her position, she would not have been visible from the front room, unless the killer were to press himself directly against the window and look down. From where she was, she had no real view into the inn through either window, and if she rose to one or the other she would expose herself to whomever stood in the room. She kept low and worked her way out from behind the crates and around to the front of the inn. The porch was raised slightly off the ground, but the space between the dirt and the building was not enough for her to squeeze through. A hero would have charged through the front door, but she did not know any heroes. She knew dead men, and the men who’d killed them, and the boy. The killer was inside the inn with Mary and the boy and Mary was out of the vanity. Martha needed to act fast and protect the child, but she was out of any sensible ideas and was starting to feel frozen there on the dirt, hunched beside the front porch. Thinking it through kept her from having to move. She heard no sounds of struggle, no real movement. Every second that passed without gunfire loaded the next with more and more potential. She was bound to break from the weight. She heard wood cracking and imagined the children were done for. She rose onto the porch, flinching at the sound of its creaking, and spotted through the window the image of the killer pulling floorboards up and setting them against the wall. She heard and saw him speaking but could not make out the words. She was perfectly still and silent as she could be. Her breathing seemed too loud and dangerous, so she held her breath. He did not look up. If he had, he would have seen her there on the porch, holding her rifle against her like a rope. Something had happened to her. Time had slowed and she’d lost her nerve. She was as still as a rock or a tree, or a gravestone. He was directing his pistol to the hole in the floor. He was talking and nodding as if to someone who was afraid of him. He shook his head. The door to the bedroom was closed. He reached into the hole and withdrew an infant, wrapped in a filthy blanket. The child was crying and he stood and held it against him. He lifted the blanket to examine its face. He turned and fired into the hole, then tucked his pistol into his belt and headed out the front door.

  He saw Martha there, clutching her rifle. She did not raise it. He paused only a moment before directing his attention back to the screaming child, and then rushing down from the porch and toward the stable. Martha had the thought to shoot him in the back, but there was the child. Instead, she rushed into the inn and back to the bedroom, casting only a casual glance at the hole in the floor, the inside of which was too dark to determine much at the speed she was moving. Mary was not in the room. The vanity was shut. She opened it and found the boy hunched, alone, crying into the space between his knees. He had wet himself again, and the floor of the vanity.

  “Where is Mary ?”

  The boy did not speak.

  “Mary,” said Martha, into the room.

  There she was, under the bed. Her hands appeared first and then her face. She did not seem upset, but was glad instead for Martha’s return.

  “There were spiders in the closet,” she said.

  Martha scooped her up. She would have scooped the boy up too, but for the urine.

  “Stay here one more second,” she said to Mary.

  “I don’t want to go in the closet,” said Mary.

  “Just sit on the bed then,” said Martha.

  Martha set her hand on the back of the boy’s head. She told him it was okay and that they were safe. He seemed comforted.

  “I was scared,” he said, and she told him it was okay.

  She left them, the boy in the vanity and Mary on the bed, and returned to the hole in the floor of the front room. Inside, she was able to make out a man on his back. There was a bit of light from the room and the cracks in the floor and she could see that he was on his back and still. A dead man. He had on the clothes of a mobile man, a deputy or a rancher, not a retail man or a smith or an innkeeper. She could not see his face.

  “Is there anyone alive in this hole ?” she said.

  There was no reply.

  A horse thundered past the inn then and she spotted the killer on its back, vanishing toward the path that led to the woods. He was not hunched over or working the horse for speed, but was instead upright and gentle looking. She determined he was still carrying the child. It was hardly larger than a bowl, that child. She could not imagine what a man like that would want from something so small. She assumed it was the baby of a landowner or a political figure, and that he was holding the baby for ransom. But there was always the possibility that the man was evil incarnate and that the things he was determined to do with that baby would not reward imagining.

  “Mary,” said Martha. “Do you remember how to make a chicken ?”

  “Yes !” said Mary. “You pull out all the feathers and bake it in butter.”

  “Do you remember how to kill a chicken ?”

  She did not.

  “It is not hard,” said Martha.

  “Is it like killing a hog ?” said the boy. He stepped from the vanity.

  “We need to strip you,” said Martha, and she did just that. He resisted only slightly as she undressed him and set to the drawers for something to cover him with.

  “It is much like killing a hog,” said Martha. “It is easier, in fact.”

  “Are we going to kill and make a chicken ?” said Mary.

  “Two doors down,” explained Martha, “you will find a pen with chickens in it. You will find grain for those chickens and you will find horses and maybe a hog or two. I cannot guess at everything and I did not see everything. Here.”

  She handed a small dress and an old tattered button-down to the boy.

  “This is all that will hold to you,” she said.

  “We’ll need a knife to kill a hog,” said the boy, wiping his face and pulling on the clothes as Martha handed them over.

  “You will find a knife in the kitchen of the building across from us. That is where the stove is and the pots are. I spied the layout through the window. Everything you need is there.”

  The boy was dressed. Mary was excited for the chicken.

  “Are we safe ?” said Mary.

  “Yes,” said Martha.

  “Is it over ?” said the boy.

  “No,” said Martha. “When I’m gone you’ll have to kill and cook the chickens yourself. You will need to keep yourselves hidden and protected. Do you know how to fire a pistol ?”

  They did not.

  She showed them how to pull the hammer back, point, and told them to squeeze the trigger firmly.

  “It is not a difficult thing to do,” said Martha, “firing a gun. But you will find it difficult to hit your mark at first and I recommend you practice.”

  “Show us,” said Mary.

  “I am leaving,” said Martha.

  “Where are you going ?” said the boy.

  “After that man,” said Martha.

  “Why ?” asked the children.

  “Because he has taken a child and he was the man who killed your father, Mary.”

  “John was not my father.”

  “Yes, he was,” said Martha. “He raised you. He was a father to you. He made us a home. He was a good man who did not cross lines. He should be avenged.”

  “How do you know it was that man ?” said Mary.

  “I feel it,” said Martha.

  “Don’t go,” said the boy.

  “I am going,” said Martha. “You will do as fine witho
ut me as you did with me.”

  “It’s not true,” said Mary.

  “What is a venge ?” said the boy.

  “Stay hidden,” said Martha, “and keep yourselves protected.”

  To this day, Brooke did not know why his brother returned when he did. He’d had no reason to. Their business was finished and they had not had much love for one another growing up, outside of the unavoidable amount that came with the need to know yourself a little better and have some camaraderie over the miseries of your particular childhood. It goes without saying that their father was a rough man. They had not known their mother. From Brooke’s earliest memory, Sugar had been a boy and their father had treated him as such. It was not until they were old enough to ride horses and kill snakes with traps that Brooke identified Sugar’s body as being different from his own. And it was only a short while later that he began to develop an urge toward those differences. They had a white room. A cluttered white room that was used for no particular purpose other than storage. It held the sunlight like a lamp. The windows sagged and spiders hung in the panes. Sugar was gentle then, but his father took that from them. Their father toughened both of the boys until they were mean and capable. To the best of Brooke’s knowledge, that man was Sugar’s first. Brooke had found them in that cluttered white room. Everything had some bit of the man’s blood on it. Every object in the room announced what the boy had done and that they were now alone and without a plan for how to proceed. There was a knife in Sugar’s hand and he was crying. His hand was as thickly covered as the blade it held. They buried their father where they buried men and women who wandered beyond their fence, just beneath the apple trees behind the house. It was a fertile yard. They had not cleaned the white room but had sealed it off and let it stand. Years passed. They knew how to farm. They knew how to trade. They made do. Most people did not ask about their father. He was not well liked. One man came asking, claiming the man owed him some money for a pony the boys did not know, and had heard nothing of. It seemed like a lie. A pony. What use would their father have for a single pony ? Men were always talking to them about ponies, as if it were the only thing boys knew or had any interest in. Sugar had gone wild at this point, and would scream until whatever it was that was setting him off changed in some way. Sugar set to screaming at the man who came asking about the money for the pony and Sugar moved the man down the hill and down the road with the screaming he did. The man protested and tried to stand strong but there was something wild and frightening about Sugar in that mood and it would have taken a very strong and confident person to stand against him. This man was too full of flinches. He did not come back after he was finally gone. One night, years into their life together on the farm, for no obvious reason, Sugar showed Brooke what their father had liked to do to him. They got along, the brothers. They worked in equal measure. Their days were not particularly difficult to get through. There was no purpose to any of what they were doing outside of getting it done and having enough to do it all again the next day. They lived like lizards. Or the way apples keep coming back and falling to the earth. They sat on the porch sometimes and drank grain alcohol and did not say much. When they did what their father had liked to do, Brooke sometimes worried that Sugar would kill him. He would vow never to do it again. But he always did it again, whenever the urge came — which was fairly regular — until the day the barn burned and they lost their house. They lost their minds a bit that night too. There was no way of knowing how the fire started. A lamp in the barn, maybe, and a cow or a fox or a gust of wind. It didn’t matter. It mattered that the house lit and the fire spread and it was dry and had been dry and everything had just been begging to burn. They took two horses and rode to town. There was no fire there. So they went back and brought some of it to town with them. Torches made out of tools from the barn. They were not good boys. They were on the cusp of becoming not good men. It was a small town and the people had not expected the kind of evil every man is capable of, if he has a partner and the right state of mind. They brought the town down around them as the fire had brought down their barn and their home and any claims they had to a legacy or permanence. People died, but Brooke did not know how many people. More than he could think to count, it was likely. They screamed and came spilling out of the buildings. One man was diligent enough with the well and bucket to keep the fire from spreading to his front porch for a time. There were houses scattered in the countryside that bled out from the edges of the town, but Brooke and Sugar did not bother with the glut. There had been no plan and they were not clinical in their state, so they finished the edges of what they’d started and left the town for the wilderness. They rode for several days before Sugar split. It had been at least two since they could last smell the smoke. Sugar made whatever kind of noise he wanted packing his bag and saddling his horse, but offered no farewell or any other proper acknowledgment of what was soon to pass between them. Still, there was no attempt to hide his actions or intent. Rather than rising to join him or chase after him or even demand that he explain himself, Brooke had simply watched his brother go and figured that was the end of it. When Sugar finally returned years later — much in the fashion that he had left — Brooke only noticed one discernible difference. Sugar didn’t scream anymore.