The Long Trail (The McCabes Book 1)

by Brad Dennison

  “Because, it’s just not your time. You still have so much to do.”

  He felt tears welling. “But I can’t lose you again. It’s just not fair.”

  “Nothing’s fair in life, my love.”

  “Then, why is all this happening? Why are you here now?”

  “Because,” she reached with a hand to the side of his face. “I have a message for you, and it had to be delivered personally.”

  “What message?”

  “It’s okay to live, Johnny. I died, younger than most, and you’ve been living with so much guilt because you weren’t able to keep that from happening.”

  “I should have protected you. I should have kept you safe.”

  Her face glowed with a smile. “You did everything humanly possible to protect me. But to live is to take risks.”

  “But..,” he looked away, sucking in a lungfull of air. It was suddenly hard to breathe. He felt a lump welling in his throat, and his vision was swimming with sudden tears.

  “I know, Johnny. You’ve been with living with a terrible guilt. The gunman was aiming for you, because of the reward that was on you and your brothers from years ago. But he hit me instead.”

  “That bullet was meant for me.”

  “No, my love.” With her hand still on his face, she gently turned his head until their eyes again met. “It was meant for me.”

  His brows knit again with puzzlement. “How..?”

  “It was my time. It wasn’t your time. It’s as simple as that. When it’s not our time to go, not all the bullets or all illness in the world can take us. But when it is our time, nothing can prevent it.”

  “I don’t know..,” he found this confusing. He wanted to believe what she was saying, yet...,

  A voice spoke from behind him. A deep baritone that sounded as old as time itself. “John-nee.”

  He knew it instantly. He turned to find himself staring into eyes that seemed to reflect an almost bottomless pool of wisdom. The face was weathered and lined, the nose bent like a hawk’s. The man’s hair was white like a newly fallen snow. He wore a buckskin shirt and trousers made of the same. The Shoshone shaman.

  Johnny found himself smiling. “My old teacher.”

  “Let yourself believe, my son. Too often we try too hard not to believe what we, at the core of our spirit, already know. We are born knowing, and then spend a lifetime forgetting and then trying to re-learn. Or turning away from what we knew and trying to convince ourselves that what our eyes see and our ears hear is all there is.”

  Lura stepped around to stand beside the shaman, facing Johnny. “It’s time you started letting yourself live. Instead of grieving my early death, celebrate our love every day, in the way you live. And let yourself love. Life is too short to deny yourself love. Another may come along, and denying her will not in any way protect me, or belittle what we have.”

  “I don’t want anyone else. I want you.”

  “And you still have me, in your heart. You always will. I will always be here, waiting for you, for when it’s your time. But until then, let yourself live life to its fullest, as it was meant to be lived. Let yourself love. We all have enough love to give to more than one. You’re still a young man, with many years ahead of you.”

  “But my son,” the shaman said with a smile, placing a hand on Johnny’s shoulder much as Johnny had with Josh a few days earlier, “try a little harder to stay out of the way of bullets.”

  Johnny burst out laughing. Lura was, too. Johnny found his stomach hurting as the laughter rocked him – tears flowed again and he couldn’t stop them, but they were no longer tears of grief. He felt like all the years of pain that had settled deeply into his bones, the pain of believing he had not protected the woman he loved, and she had caught a death intended for him, seemed to drain away with the laughter, like a sponge being squeezed.

  He struggled for a few gasping breaths, and finally straightened to find his wife and the old shaman still there.

  The old man had a deep smile. “Live your life, my son. And when it is indeed your time one day, we will meet again.”

  And the Shoshone turned, and stepped away into a wall of mist Johnny had somehow not even noticed until that very moment.

  Lura again brought her hand to Johnny’s face. He hadn’t thought about it in a long time, but that was a trait of hers and she would do many times in a day.

  She said, “I have to go too, my love.”

  Johnny nodded. “I figured as much.”

  “Do one thing for me?” she asked, glancing to Ginny, who was still sleeping in the chair by the bed. “Tell her and the children that I love them?”

  He nodded. “I’ll do that.”

  “I will be seeing you, when your time comes. And then we can be together forever. Until then, always remember, I love you dearly. And even though I am gone, I am never really far away. I never have been.”

  She turned, and Johnny watched her step away and into the mist, but he found that he wasn’t crying. The pain he had lived with so continually, and had actually grown accustomed to, was no longer there. For the first time in years, he actually felt young. He realized he was smiling.

  Johnny suddenly realized he was no longer standing, but was lying in bed. His head was on his pillow. And he was still smiling.

  He took a deep breath, and winced with sudden pain. The two bullets. He had almost forgotten. And damn, they hurt. Yet, he felt so light, so free, so...young. The guilt, and the weariness that came with it, were indeed gone.

  He opened his eyes, and found himself staring at the rough hewn timbers of the ceiling in his bedroom. Ginny was sleeping gently in the chair beside the bed.

  He pulled one arm up to the covers. He was going to pull them down and climb out of bed. He felt wonderful. He felt alive. And yet, his arm felt like it was made of lead. He was as weak as a kitten. He was sticky with old perspiration. Fever, he figured. He had been wracked with infection from the wounds, and he had lost a lot of blood. He had seen a lot of men on various battlefields die of infection from less serious wounds.

  Good old Zack, he thought. The son-of-a-bitch must have used their old battlefield treatment. Dumping raw corn squeezings into the wound. Johnny had done the same to Zack once when Zack had caught an arrow head in his leg, before sealing the wound shut with a hot iron. The old army doctor stationed at the fort was amazed that not only did Zack live, but he kept his leg.

  Johnny glanced to the bedpost to find his guns hanging. Good. He didn’t like them far away.

  “Ginny,” he said, his voice not much more than a whisper despite his best effort.

  But she heard it, awaking with a start. Her mouth fell open, and her eyes widened.

  “John. You’re awake. Thank God!”

  He and Ginny never missed an opportunity to give each other hell, and he was not going to now. “Here I am, laying here dying, and you fall asleep.”

  “Thank God,” she said again, her eyes welling. “Granny Tate. I’ve got to get Granny Tate.”

  She rose from the chair, and hurried to the door. “Granny Tate!” she called out quickly. “Come quickly! He’s awake!”

  In the parlor, Dusty awoke with such a start at Aunt Ginny’s cry that he rolled from the sofa onto the floor. Josh sprang out of the chair and found his injured knee had stiffened considerably as he dozed, and it was all he could manage to hobble across the floor.

  Granny hurried into Johnny’s room, her cane tapping along as she moved, and looked down at Johnny, her nose wrinkling with a smile. “Glory be. Welcome back.”

  “Granny Tate,” Johnny said. “I hope I haven’t been much trouble.”

  She chuckled. “Not at all, child,” and she glanced to Ginny. “Like I said, child, sometimes you just don’t know.”

  Bree was suddenly at the doorway, squealing, “Daddy!”

  “I’m all right,” he managed to say, with a voice he found exasperatingly weak.

  Ginny said, “He’s going to be all right. Now, all of
you, off to bed. Leave him some room to breathe.”

  Bree had to drop a kiss onto her father’s cheek before she scurried back to her own bed. Josh and Dusty gave a final goodnight and then were gone, Josh saying, “We’ve got to go tell Zack.”

  “Now that things have calmed down a little in here,” Granny Tate said, “how are you feeling?”

  “Tired. My chest hurts when I breathe. But I feel alive. Really alive,” and he realized he was smiling again.

  Ginny looked at him curiously, but Granny simply said, “Is there anything you’d like?”

  “Yeah. I’d kill for a cup of coffee.”

  He was alive. He was going to live. Ginny was grateful, but now the game was on, once again. The game between them.

  “Coffee?” she said. “At a time like this? And do you want real coffee, do I dare ask, or that dreadful sludge you men call trail coffee?”

  “Don’t make me laugh, Ginny. It hurts too much.”

  With a smile, Ginny said, “I’ll go down and heat the water.”

  Johnny found himself yawning. “I may not be awake when you get back. I feel awfully tired all of a sudden.”

  “Between the fever and the blood you lost,” Granny said, “you’re going to need a lot of sleep. If you’re asleep when she gets back, we’ll keep the water hot for you.”

  “Oh, and Ginny?”

  She was already at the doorway, but she turned and said, “Yes?”

  “Lura says to tell you she loves you.”

  PART SIX

  THE LONG TRAIL

  THIRTY-TWO

  Three years earlier, Johnny and Ginny had been sitting before the hearth. The hour had been late, and Josh and Bree had long since gone upstairs to bed. John had one of his roaring fires going, and as usual, none of the lamps in the parlor were burning, so the room was illuminated only by the leaping, dancing firelight.

  Somehow, the conversation turned to death.

  “If I should go before you,” John said, sitting in his usual chair with his pipe in his hand, “I don’t want my body to lay in state for days while everyone and his brother comes to stare at it and say what a great man I was, even if they felt I was really a son-of-a-bitch. It’s always that way when someone dies. More than one man becomes a saint just by dying. Me, I’d rather be a son-of-a-bitch and get to live to ride through the mountains one more time.”

  Ginny had been sitting with a glass of wine, and she found herself laughing. “John, you kill me sometimes. So, what are we supposed to do with you? Just plop you in the ground without a proper send-off?”

  “I want a Shoshone funeral.”

  “And what, pray-tell, is that?”

  “A funeral pyre. A big one. You wrap the body in buffalo robes, along with some of the deceased’s most sacred possessions, then light a big fire.”

  “You’d probably still have those infernal guns around your hips.”

  John chuckled. “Probably.”

  Ginny wasn’t usually this glib, but she had followed her usual glass of wine at dinner with two more. “So, if you should drop dead tomorrow, what am I supposed to do? Send Joshua buffalo hunting so we can have some robes to wrap you in?”

  “I suppose blankets would do.”

  “Ah, a concession on your part. Minor, though it is. There’s no chance, I suppose, that we could get a bigger concession out of you, and have your consent just to be buried in the ground like everyone else?”

  “Not a chance.”

  “I was afraid of that.”

  Now, three years later, she was in a wooden upright chair by Johnny’s bed, watching while he sat, supported by two pillows, sipping chicken broth from a spoon. He was now shaven and freshly bathed, his hair tied back in a Shoshone tail, and he was wearing a long-handled union suit.

  “Not bad soup, Ginny,” he said between sips.

  He was balancing the bowl in his lap. She had wanted to hold it, but he had said he wasn’t a baby who needed to be spoon-fed, and he wouldn’t spill the soup. And he surely didn’t, as he took one spoonful after another.

  She said, “Remember a few years ago, that conversation we had one night by the fire about that Indian funeral you wanted?”

  “Came pretty damned close to getting it, didn’t I?”

  “I have to ask, how did you really expect us to pull that off? Did you really expect us to cart you all the way into the mountains, build a huge bonfire and throw you into the middle of it, and just stand there and watch you burn up? We’d be lucky if we didn’t start a forest fire.”

  Johnny chuckled. “I’m sure you all would have managed it.”

  She shook her head. They were sitting here, good-naturedly harassing each other as though he wasn’t just back from the brink of death.

  Three days had passed since he had first awakened from the fever she thought was going to claim him. She had gone downstairs to heat water for coffee, and when she returned to his room with a steaming cup of it, he was indeed asleep again. But he was sleeping peacefully, breathing deeply and evenly. His heart rate was still a little fast, but Granny figured it would be until he could build back the body fluids he had lost.

  Ginny brought the cup back to the kitchen, thinking she might see if one of the men wanted it, rather than simply dump it, but when she sat at the table, the tears overtook her. She buried her face in her hands and simply cried, her shoulder’s shaking as she drew shuddering breaths, and said over and over again, “Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Lord.”

  Granny returned home the following afternoon. “He’s out of the woods, now. I can go. I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon to check on him. But if anything happens, anything at all, send one of the boys to fetch me, and I’ll come a-running.”

  Before she left, she prescribed lots of water for him, as much as he could take. But don’t force it on him. She didn’t want any of it coming back up, because the strain could further injure the bullet wounds. If he wanted something hot, tea was what she thought he should have. No coffee, even though she knew he wouldn’t listen to her and would demand it, anyway. When he started feeling hungry, he was to have chicken and beef broth only at first.

  Johnny slept most of that first day, waking occasionally, and on the morning of the second day, he seemed stronger. Some of the usual resonance had returned to his voice, and his eyes no longer seemed to be sinking into his skull. He was still a ghostly pale, and she thought he seemed a little feverish again, but the improvement was noticeable. She helped get him bathed, though he surprisingly could handle most of the job himself, and got him dressed and shaved. That was when he said, “I’ve got to have a cup of coffee, Ginny.”

  What the hell, she thought. One wouldn’t kill him. He had already survived two bullets, so what harm would a cup of coffee do? She went downstairs and brewed some of that black mud he called coffee. With a little good-natured pleading, one cup led to another, but he himself stopped it at two.

  “Coffee makes you lose water,” he said, “and that’s not what we want right now. I need to build my fluids back.”

  Ginny was amazed at how this man took charge of his own recuperation. Almost like he was his own doctor, and she the nurse. She supposed she shouldn’t be surprised, because this was how he handled everything.

  Josh stood looking down through his bedroom window to the yard below. From his window he had a view of the barn, and if it had been daylight, he would been looking directly at the corral. At the moment, the yard was lost in almost pitch blackness, as the moon was covered by a rolling sea of clouds. Going to rain tomorrow, he thought. Yet, even though he couldn’t really see the yard, he did not have to. He knew every nook and cranny, every rock. Every strand of grass. This was his home.

  And as he stood in the window of his bedroom, he knew, after this night, he might never see his home again.

  The clock downstairs bonged twelve times. Midnight. Not generally the best time to be hitting the trail, but if you wanted to leave without being seen, it was perhaps the best time.

&nbs
p; He was fully dressed. A gray range shirt and tan pants. His Navy Colt was buckled about his hips. On his bed behind him were his bedroll, his saddle bags, and a Winchester.

  He didn’t want to leave. He felt a pang of sadness strike deep within him that he might never see this place again. But he was the son of Johnny McCabe. A job needed doing, and intended to see it got done.

  He draped his saddle bags over his shoulder, and tucked his bedroll under one arm. He snagged his hat from the peg it had been hanging on, and placed it on his head. He then snatched his rifle from the bed, and stepped out into the hallway, placing his feet down lightly so his bootsoles would make no sound on the wooden floorboards. He gently shut his door, and then made his way to the hallway.

  The house was quiet. Pa was gently sleeping in his room. The door to the guest room, which was now Dusty’s, was closed. As was Bree’s.

  He made it down the stairway, keeping to the edge of the stairs so the boards underfoot would not bow and creak too much. He held the rifle in his left hand, and with his right, he gripped the banister tightly. It wouldn’t do for his bad knee to give way, and cause him to stumble on the steps, and attract attention to himself.

  The door at the far wall of the large open room was shut. He hoped she was asleep. He didn’t want to talk to anyone. He knew they would just try to talk him out of what had to be done.

  The large room was dark, but he knew it like he knew the yard outside. Every nook and cranny. He walked past the sofa, and then toward the door. He opened it slowly, and only a couple of feet. He knew about the squealing hinge, and didn’t want it to awaken anyone. But he knew this house, and knew the hinge sounded when the door was open about three feet.

  With the door open only a couple of feet, he slid sideways out the door, and then gently shut it.

  A horse was waiting for him in the stable. Rabbit. Earlier in the evening, he had led Rabbit into a stall, and left him there. He was hoping neither Fred nor Dusty would notice, and neither seemed to.

  He struck a match and brought a lantern to life, but kept the light turned down so only a faint, gray light filled this corner of the stable. In the near darkness, he saddled Rabbit. He tied his saddle bags and bedroll to the back of his saddle, tucked the Winchester into the saddle boot, then he blew out the lantern and led Rabbit out into the darkened yard.