The Gun is my Brother

by Matt Chisholm

  Her heart was pounding loudly as she peeked inside the big, dilapidated barn. After standing at the door awhile she made herself look among the bales of hay and finally in the loft, expecting to hear a man’s voice at any moment, but hearing nothing. If she had, she was sure she’d have fainted.

  After about ten minutes, she satisfied herself that the place did not hide a gunman. What had Wragg called him? Both names beginning with an S … Sam Spur?

  As she came out of the barn she was nearly startled crazy when a voice said, ‘What you doin’, Ma?’

  She turned to find herself looking into her daughter’s thin, serious face.

  ‘Don’t you ever do that again,’ she said, her voice sharp with anger.

  ‘Shucks, Ma, I didn’t mean to scare you. Jest you look awful funny snoopin’ around there. Watcha lost, huh?’

  Mrs. Overell felt a bit of a fool when she replied, ‘I thought that man might have come in here to hide.’

  ‘The outlaw?’ The young-old face tightened with excitement. ‘Gee, you think he might really come here? You think that, Ma?’

  ‘He might. He’s wounded. He’d crawl in anywhere he could find. I remember…’

  But she didn’t say what she remembered. Not to the child. Will crawling to the front of the house on hands and knees with blood on him, almost out of his mind with pain, not wanting her to know and to suffer with him, but hurt so bad that he couldn’t stop himself coming to her. She’d seen men die before, but she’d never seen one go the way he had, worried only for her and the child, not complaining of his own suffering. She remembered, too, the last thing he had said. And now the parson had been shot. That part of the story was ended. She wondered if there was another chapter to be added. This man Spur. ...

  The child was watching her.

  ‘Go back into the house, child. Boil the water.’

  She should have been suspicious the way Janey went away without a word, but her mind was occupied. She went back into the house and didn’t notice the child was not there. It wasn’t till she’d cooked up breakfast that she heard the shrill cries coming from down towards the river.

  ‘Ma … Ma…’

  Going to the door, she saw Janey running through the cottonwoods, thin legs flying, hair streaming out behind, the expression on her face almost frantic.

  Anxiety touched the woman.

  ‘I found him ... I found the man … the outlaw, Ma.’

  Mrs. Overell was alarmed that someone might hear. She put her finger to her lips and said a loud, ‘Ssshh,’ but Janey was too excited to notice and went on shrieking her urgent message.

  The woman ran towards her, calling ‘Hush up, girl, hush up.’ At last the girl caught sight of her face and gesticulations and ran into her arms.

  ‘Where?’ the woman demanded.

  ‘Down by the creek.’

  ‘Did he see you?’

  ‘He didn’t see nothin’—he’s dead.’

  A chill fell on Mrs. Overell.

  She said, ‘Go in the house.’ She pushed the girl in the direction of the house and started with hurrying feet towards the creek, tremulous of what she would find there.

  The sun was up now over the timber and she could see a thread of smoke rising lazily from a house in the town about a quarter-mile away. Furtively, she searched the trees that lay between her place and the town, frightened somehow that she might be seen.

  When she got down into the mud of the creek, she could see nothing, so she went thrusting her way through the willows, hesitant to go on, but with no thought of stopping her search. Somehow, she owed this to Will.

  She got through the willows and under the bluff before she was startled by the sight of a pair of boots lying half in the water.

  The man was on his face, head cradled on his arms in the mud. If he had been badly wounded, he must have drowned himself in the tacky stuff, she considered. She went towards him slowly, appalled by the terrible stillness of the form. After minutes of indecision, she took a hold of him by one shoulder and heaved him over on to his back.

  The gaunt, screwed-up face of a man who had died as he had lived—in pain.

  She had not been able to miss the bullet wound in the back, the whole of the body and clothes from waist to ankles seemed to have been saturated with blood. The man had been bled white or so it seemed from the ashen hue of his face.

  As she looked at him, it came to her that there was something indecent about staring at his face the way she was, staring at this broken remnant that must bear no resemblance to the man who had walked, lived and ridden in the world yesterday in sunlight bright as it was today, this moment. There’d been times when he’d been a fearsome thing, a man feared, walked around carefully by other fighting-men. The finality of this man’s end chilled her.

  Involuntarily, she lifted his right hand out of the mud, saw the broken nails, the streaks of blood and mud on the flesh. Something in her wept.

  ‘Dear God,’ she said softly.

  She must bury him, say a few good words. Like Will had had said over him ... by the parson this man had killed. There was an irony in this that she didn’t miss.

  A faint sound like a sigh of wind came and for a moment she could not think of its origin, till, with a start of horror, she realized that it had come from the mouth of the man in the mud, the man whose dead hand she was holding.

  She dropped the hand and went to move hurriedly away from him, but the sound was repeated and sank to a groan.

  He’s alive, she thought. But it seemed fantastic.

  If life still lingered however meagerly she must do something quickly to help him. That would mean danger for her, perhaps for Janey. Certainly for this man Spur.

  She got down on her knees in the mud and laid her ear against his mouth. Her heart started pounding again when she heard that soft sigh of sound again.

  This time, she said out loud, ‘He’s alive!’ She knew a terrible, consuming gladness like she hadn’t known since Will had been killed. Every hope and shred of faith in her seemed to come into its own.

  Standing up, she thought hurriedly what she must do, eyeing the bank of the creek above her, then the other side of the water, frightened that someone might see her with the man lying at her feet.

  Could she move him on her own? He was thin, but he was a great height. And she must move him gently.

  Janey! She must fetch the child and she must help.

  Impulsively she turned to run through the willows, but Janey was standing not a dozen paces away from her, staring at the man.

  ‘You mean he ain’t dead a-tall?’ the child demanded.

  Breathless her mother said, ‘He’s alive. We must get him up to the house. You’ll have to help me carry him. Can you do that?’

  ‘Why not?’ Janey asked.

  ‘But he’s heavy.’

  ‘Buckboard,’ the child declared shrilly.

  That was it. Bring the buckboard to the bluff and put the man aboard there.

  ‘Quick,’ the woman said. ‘I’ll get the buckboard. You stand on the bluff and stay right there. Anybody comes along and you stop ’em going down here any price. Do anything, but keep them away from here.’

  The child laughed, loving it.

  ‘Sure,’ she cried, dancing a little in the mud so she went in up to her ankles and over. ‘Gee willikins, ain’t this some-thin’? Ain’t it just, Ma?’

  ‘This is mighty serious,’ her mother told her. ‘You don’t know how serious. We get ourselves caught doing this and there’ll be trouble for us—real trouble.’

  ‘Nobody’s gonna know,’ her daughter told her confidently.

  The woman patted her untidy straw hair and went, pushing her way through the willows with the girl trailing behind her.

  They grinned at each other a little, conspiratorially, when they got up on the bluff and Mrs. Overell went to the barn to get the horse and buckboard.

  The worst part was getting him up from the creek. Several times they had to stop and rest, s
everal terrible times the man seemed to have died on them. They became obsessed with the necessity of getting him into the house and then of bringing life back into him. They sweated and strained in the increasing heat of the sun, the woman’s nerves strained by the thought of their being discovered.

  However, they got him on to the buckboard and covered him with a blanket and the rest was pretty easy. They drove Old Paint clear up to the porch and then half-carried and half-dragged the man inside, got him into Mrs. Overell’s bedroom and stripped him mother-naked on the floor, laid out on a tarpaulin, and washed him clean. When he was dried, they heaved him on to the bed and wrapped him in blankets and put hot stones around him.

  The wounds had been no more than bound up because they still showed an inclination to bleed, but the woman knew that there was lead in him and it would have to be removed. She considered sending for old Doc Morgan, but when she remembered his position in the community and his religious sentiments, she gave up the idea and decided that she would have to do everything herself. But she wished Sarie were here, she was better at this sort of thing than she was.

  The pair of them boiled as much water as they could crowd on to the stove and she looked for Will’s old tools. She found them back of a bureau drawer, carefully wrapped as her husband had left them, clean and well-cared for. Which was just like Will. When she got them out it was as if he were here in the room telling her what she had to do. And somehow that gave her some courage to help her on her way.

  When she went to look at the man, his breathing was by no means normal, but it was not so shallow as it had been. Telling Janey to stay out of the room now and watch for the water coming to the boil, she made a second inspection of his wounds, being careful to keep as much of him covered as possible, and found that they were still bleeding a little. The one in the back of the left thigh looked angry and she knew she’d have trouble with it. The other, through the fleshy part of the back would be painful, but there was no lead there. Nothing more than two angry rips through the flesh. If he lived that would make him stiff for weeks.

  And he would live.

  She had made up her mind to that. As Will had said: If you made up your mind to something hard enough, it would be so.

  She looked at the man’s face, watching the near-dead stillness of it, not able to miss the toughness there even when he was nearly dead. But there was no cruelty. Gentleness she suspected. She had heard of him and the madness of some of the risks he had taken and knew that there was a stubborn pride in him too. But no sign of it showed now. She brushed the lank hair back from his forehead and the height of the dome of the skull seemed to accentuate his intelligence. She could be mistaken there—often she had looked at men and thought them intelligent—until they opened their mouths.

  Yes, she thought, I’ll save this man. Maybe he won’t thank me for it, but I’ll do it. And it’s not just for his sake. It’s for my own, too.

  When the water boiled, she cleaned the wound in the leg gently and washed the tools, letting the little girl help. She had to learn sometime and it might as well be now. The thin face was earnest, taking in every movement she made, making mental note of it. There was no need to show Janey anything twice. Learning from books was different.

  When she probed for the lead in the thigh, the pain penetrated Spur’s unconsciousness and brought him with a soft scream upright in the bed. Janey tried to hold him while her mother worked, but she wasn’t near strong enough, so they tied him to the bed and Mrs. Overell went ahead, white-faced and with her teeth tight together, not wanting to show weakness in front of the child.

  ‘You do it this way,’ she said, trying to make her voice calm and steady. ‘You see that bad stuff there—that all has to come away. Be quick like this. Cut clean. See—there’s the ball. It’s deep in the muscle and I’ll have to use the pincers.’

  The blood oozed steadily, soaking the blankets.

  The woman, sickened by it, wanted to close her eyes to it. The girl, full of wonder in her innocence, said, ‘Gee, lookut the blood, Ma. Just look at it.’

  The woman tried for the bullet with the pincers and succeeded only in driving it deeper into the cavity. Her face and hands seemed to be swollen with heat, slippery with sweat. She wiped her face on the back of her hands. Wiped her hands on a blanket and tried again.

  She tried five times to do it and failed. When she had started to weep in her helplessness and all Spur’s struggles had ceased, she got the twin pieces of metal on either side of the ball and pulled it from the bloody, pulsating mass of raw flesh.

  She was past feeling sick, now. She laid the lead down on a blanket and whispered, ‘The carbolic, girl. Hot water with carbolic in it. Not too strong or we’ll burn him and kill him with the shock.’

  ‘Ain’t he dead a’ready?’

  ‘Get on.’

  When she had cleaned the wound out with the disinfectant, she packed it with bear-fat, put herbs over that and bound the rest with clean rag. She hoped to God the bone hadn’t been affected. To immobilize the limb, she splinted it with an old broom haft.

  After that, with Janey’s untiring help, she dressed the back-wound, untied his hands and legs and rolled him on his side. That roused him into a fit of mumbled curses so foul that she drove the interested Janey from the room. After another minute, when she was pretty sure he wouldn’t do himself any mischief, she also fled.

  In her bureau she found clean sheets of Irish linen that she had brought with her from England given to her by her mother as a wedding present along with the information that sheets in new countries like America were made of nothing but cheap cotton. Sam Spur, she had decided, should sleep between cool sheets. She wondered at herself.

  When he was quieter she crept back into her bedroom and changed his bedding, taking away the blood-stained blankets for washing. She then packed him with more hot stones, knowing from experience that now the wounds had been seen to the danger period would come. She must watch for high fever from here on.

  No sooner had she completed the bed making when the knock came on the door. Needless to say, she was alarmed. Janey came out of the kitchen to ask, ‘Who’n hell kin that be?’

  Mrs. Overell was too agitated to correct her language. Hastily she stepped back into the bedroom and thrust the blankets under the bed, glanced hastily at her clothes to see whether any of the blood had gotten on to them, pushed her hair a couple of times with shaking hands and stepped back into the parlor-cum-hall.

  She thought she’d fall when she saw Wragg standing in the middle of the room, smiling benevolently at her. She tried to say something and couldn’t.

  Janey gaped from the kitchen door.

  ‘Pardon this intrusion, ma’am,’ Wragg said smiling, giving her the full benefit of his unworldly eyes.

  It was necessary for her to say something and part of her mind grappled with that problem; another part of it stayed with the fact that the bedroom door was open behind her and at any moment the wounded man might let out an almighty loud groan.

  ‘I was going to answer your knock, Mr. Wragg,’ she heard herself say pointedly.

  ‘Aw, forgive me,’ he said, holding his hat against his chest and bowing his head a little. ‘Matters are a mite urgent, Mrs. Overell, ma’am. A mite urgent.’

  The pompous, deadly little fool, she thought, and in that one moment hated him.

  ‘What is so urgent that makes you walk into my house unbid?’ she asked and saw by the expression on his face that he didn’t expect to be spoken to this way by anybody, particularly her.

  ‘Life and death,’ he said dramatically. ‘We’re still a-hunting this man Spur.’

  ‘Why come here?’ she wanted to know.

  ‘Found his tracks plain as day by the crick. We have reason to believe he come this way. I come up here myself to prevent . the unpleasantness that could … uh, uh … arise like from the hull passel of possemen … wa-al, I reckon you understand … huh?’

  ‘I don’t, I guess. Do you think he�
�s here?’

  ‘Could be. Could be he crep’ in here ‘n’s bin holding a gun on you. Wouldn’t put it past him. Nothing’s sacred to a man like that.’

  She straightened and said as cold as she could, ‘Nobody’s held a gun on me, Mr. Wragg.’

  He smiled shyly, looking past her into her bedroom. The bed was to the right of the door and she surmised that he could not even see the foot of the bed. She reached a hand behind her, found the door-handle at the second try and closed the door. As she did so, Spur groaned softly. Holding tight on to herself, she lowered her eyes to give the impression that she had closed the door through natural modesty.

  ‘I can tell you for sure,’ she said, ‘no man’s been here.’

  Mr. Wragg pouted coyly and said, looking at the roof, ‘A lady could be kind of soft-hearted about a thing like this.’

  ‘About a man who could kill a good man like the parson?’ she queried, hoping the irony didn’t show in her voice.

  ‘No tellin’.’

  The clear eyes were on her, guileless and fearful. . There was an embarrassed silence between them which was broken by Janey who piped, ‘How in heck could a man come around hyer ‘n’ neither maw nor me see him, huh? I ain’t seen no man, Mr. Wragg, sir.’

  They turned to stare at her and saw that her eyes were more guileless even than Mr. Wragg’s. The smoothness of the lie shook the woman, but she was grateful for it.

  ‘You didn’t see a man when you went to play by the crick, little lady?’ Wragg asked. ‘My, my, you must’ve been mighty close to seeing the notorious Sam Spur. Think on that now. When you was a woman growed you could’ve tol’ your children of it. That’d be somethin’. Your tracks go right along where he laid out like a man dead. That’s a fact.’ He cocked an eye at the child’s mother and could not have missed the paleness of her face. ‘You didn’t see the buckboard wheel marks on the bluff? Well, well.’

  He smiled and Mrs. Overell forced a smile to her stiff lips.