by S. M. Hulse
Williams looked Wes in the eye again, and what Wes saw there wasn’t exactly the familiar malice but was still sharper than he’d expected. “Wesley,” he said, “did you ever think maybe that blade made the things you said to God more true, not less?”
Wes knew then he could do it. He could take his father’s revolver out of his coat pocket and he could aim it and let it loose its bullets to taste flesh for the first time. He would watch the blood bloom on this man’s chest and he would watch him fall, and then he would let the consequences come as they may. He could do it. He wanted to. “I came here because I thought talking to you would clear some things up,” Wes said, his voice low but even. “I don’t got to tell you what happened in there,” he jerked his head in the direction of the old prison, “so I also don’t got to tell you why I was sort of taken aback to hear you supposedly found Jesus and all. It’s been bothering me something fierce, wondering whether that was possible for you, of all people. What it means if you’re lying, and what it means if you ain’t. You and me, I guess in our own way we know each other pretty well. So I thought if I came today and talked to you, just the two of us like it was back then, I’d know for sure one way or another whether you really were a changed man or born-again or however you want to say it. That’s all I really wanted, to know for sure. But now I’m here and I’ve talked to you and I know I don’t like you and I wish more than anything you were still locked up, but I don’t know a whole lot more than that. All I got’s your word that you are what you say you are.”
Williams watched Wes steadily, but if there was something to see in those eyes, some truth there for him to read, Wes couldn’t find it. Slowly Williams’s gaze slid toward Wes’s coat pocket, and a downward twitch at the corner of his mouth gave Wes his first hint that Williams might know what waited for him there. “So,” Williams said, glancing back up at Wes’s face. “What are you going to do?”
Wes gave himself one moment more to imagine the satisfaction that would come with blood. Then he took a deep breath. Closed his eyes. And let the revolver slip from his wounded grip. “I’m going to believe you.”
Wes sent the truck hard down the gravel drive, the wipers scraping starbursts of melted snowflakes from the windshield. Trees reached for him as he steered sharply around the curves, branches grazing metal more than once. Then he was parked outside the house and Dennis was sitting on the porch steps, holding Rio’s lead in one hand. His head was bowed and the black horse’s muzzle rested almost in his hair. Wes got out of the truck and walked toward the porch. He was aware of moving too fast, and he forced himself to slow, loitered there below the first step. The horse flicked one ear toward him, but Dennis didn’t lift his head. After a minute Wes lowered himself onto the top step beside him. Kept his face out of the snow, but flakes dusted the toes of his boots.
“Arthur seems to think you might’ve done something stupid,” Dennis said finally.
“Yeah?” Wes took the revolver out of his pocket, set it carefully on the warp of the wooden boards between them. “What do you think?”
Dennis glanced at it, but his expression didn’t change. “I think there’s still six rounds in that gun.”
Wes’s hands stung with the cold, the burn of his skin joining with the ache of his joints, but he didn’t put them in his pockets. Hard to look at Dennis—not ready to meet his eyes—so he stared toward the river, squinting against the snow. It was falling harder now, the mountains ghosted outlines only.
“I got the vet coming in a couple hours,” Dennis said. “Rio can’t handle another winter and it wouldn’t be right to ask him to try.” He touched the revolver with the very tips of his fingers. “I had an idea I might do it myself, but it seems I don’t have it in me.”
Wes wanted to lay a comforting hand on Dennis, but he couldn’t say how the man would react. He ran his palm over Rio’s mane instead; the white flakes that had caught in the hairs melted beneath his touch and left glittering wet beads behind. “I could be there with you,” Wes offered. “When the vet comes. If you want.”
Dennis didn’t say Yes or Thanks or even Hell no, didn’t even seem to have heard. Wes thought it was good that he’d offered anyway.
They sat silent for a time. That winter quiet Wes knew so well had come down on the canyon. The noises of man—the trains, the interstate—were muted, and the sounds of the land, almost too subtle to hear—the descent of the snow, the journeying river, the breath of animals—had woven together in a gentle hush. Wes had come here without much thought. He knew there were things to say, about Williams and Claire and his fiddle and most of all about him and Dennis, the past and the future, but those words escaped him now, and that was all right. The silence would lift. It was early yet, a melt still ahead, warmer days before winter truly settled.
“I know I shouldn’t be so torn up over this,” Dennis said. He laid his palm on Rio’s face, gingerly, as though the horse might already be gone. Mirage. “Especially not after everything that’s happened. He’s just a horse,” he said. “An old horse. But . . .”
Wes looked out across the land. Mountains gone. White from heaven to earth. “Tell me,” he said.
And Dennis spoke, the words tumbling from his lips, each as fragile and hushed as a snowflake. They came unsteadily at first, then stronger, and they built upon each other, settling and burying what lay between father and son.
Wes listened.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing for their generous support during the writing of this book. Thanks also to the faculty, staff and graduate students whose time at the University of Oregon Creative Writing Program overlapped mine; I am especially appreciative of David Bradley, Laurie Lynn Drummond, Cai Emmons and Ehud Havazelet.
Many thanks to fiddlers Chip Cohen and Brian O’Donnell for teaching me to play many of the tunes that appear in these pages, and to farrier Michael Waldorf for letting me watch him shoe horses.
Thank you to Lorin Rees for being everything I could have hoped for in an agent, and to Nicole LaBombard for her careful reading and thoughtful feedback.
I am thankful to everyone at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for their enthusiasm and dedication. Special thanks to Jenna Johnson for her insightful suggestions and for being my guide through this process, to Nina Barnett for having all the answers, and to Larry Cooper for his sharp eye.
Finally, and most of all, I am immensely grateful to my parents for their unwavering love and support.
About the Author
S. M. HULSE received her MFA from the University of Oregon and was a fiction fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her stories have appeared in Willow Springs, Witness, and Salamander. A horsewoman and fiddler, she has spent time in Washington, Montana, Idaho, and Oregon. She lives in Spokane, Washington.
www.smhulse.com
