Rides a Stranger

by Bill Brooks

  “Does it haunt you much, the men you killed?”

  “Some. Not all the time, not every night, but now and then. Sometimes I look at a field of wildflowers and it reminds me, or sometimes, like now, sitting in the dark I’ll think I hear voices out there. But not all the time, not as much as I once did.”

  “I prayed over a lot of those young men in their last hour,” he said. “The newly wounded always cried out for their mothers, the really bad ones cried out for God. I don’t know that either could or did assuage them their misery.”

  We ate the pieces of rabbit, cutting it up and sharing it and licking the grease off our fingers and washing it down with fresh boiled Arbuckle and there was something about it—sharing a meal like that with a man like Tom Twist, two of us different as night and day it seemed to me.

  “How old were you?” I said.

  “Twenty,” he said. It surprised me because he didn’t look that old now except for the pure white hair. “What about you?”

  “Nineteen,” I said. “Hasty to get there before it was over. Went the winter of ’sixty-three, afraid I’d miss it all. Then once I got through the winter of nearly freezing to death and setting around most of it, and marching in the spring mud and got into my first foray, I couldn’t wait for it to be over.”

  “I watched a lot of it with the generals,” he said. “I’d go onto the field of battle afterward and do what I could to bring spiritual comfort. What they really needed were good surgeons and miracles, not my words, most of them.”

  “Was that when you started to doubt?” I said.

  “No, I believed all the more because of what I saw. When I’d see the look that came into some of their eyes there at the very end, that look of peace just before they gave out, I knew it had to be something they saw, some sort of light, some of them said. Some spoke as though they were holding a conversation, but there wasn’t anyone there but me. I remember one boy…” He shook his head sadly. “He was talking to somebody named James, saying, ‘James, I’ll be right there. Just wait there for me, James.’ I looked ’round thinking somebody was there by the tent but there wasn’t a soul. The boy nodded like whoever he was talking to was telling him something and he said, ‘Okay, I’ll do her then I’ll come over there.’ Then he closed his eyes and died. It happened more than once like that.”

  Somewhere off in the distance we heard a gunshot—too far to be concerned about, too close to ignore completely.

  “I heard similar stories,” I said.

  “It was after that I lost my faith,” he said. “After my wife.”

  I knew what he meant.

  He took the little silver frame out again and looked at his dead wife’s face for a long time then put it back in his pocket.

  “I guess if you believe in those things,” I said, “then you have to believe she’s in a good place.”

  “It’s what I’d like to believe and half the time I do. It’s the other half the time it eats at me, my doubt does.”

  We lay down by the little fire knowing it would die before morning because we’d found the camp spot late and by the time we shot the rabbit and gathered some dried ocotillo wood it had grown very dark in the canyon. We didn’t have enough fuel to sustain it but it didn’t matter.

  “Listen,” I said. He lay still and I wasn’t sure he hadn’t already fallen off to sleep. “Any time you want to pull stakes it’s all right with me. Nobody expects you to risk more than what you have already…”

  He didn’t say anything. I shut up. Speechifying in the dark wasn’t my strong suit. I watched as the sliver of moon slipped beyond the ridge and the night sky looked like it was shotgunned through with stars.

  I could smell the sweat and old hair oil of my hat as it lay low over my face. It seemed like I was so far away from everything and everything was far away from me. I saw a field of skulls when I closed my eyes and heard the moans of men long dead in the silence of my own thoughts. I saw the shattered woods ripped apart by cannon shot, smelled the burning flesh left after the woods caught fire, the flames ravishing those wounded who could not lift themselves to escape it. I saw a young officer speaking with a courier, his handsome face suddenly without its lower jaw, the white of his upper teeth pulsating in a bloody maw, his tongue lolling freely before he slumped off his horse into a heap.

  I saw men standing in a ragged line in front of a camp whore’s tent, their loneliness and lust tugging at them even though they knew the price they’d pay was two dollars and a visit to the physician’s tent afterward.

  I saw myself riding away on a dreary afternoon, my hunger for war sated.

  Morning came without event. I went one direction to gather fuel for the fire so we could eat a hot breakfast, Tom went another. The sun lit his end of the canyon and I heard a shout. He came back holding his forearm.

  “Snake,” he said. “Big one. I should have looked where I was reaching.”

  He rolled up his sleeve and there on the muscled flesh two drops of blood he swiped away revealed two small prick marks.

  “We need to bleed it,” I said.

  “Go ahead.” He sat down, his face a little flushed. “Stupid me.”

  He handed me his Barlow knife and I opened a blade. No way to clean it but wipe it on my shirt, I took his arm and cut an X over each of the fang marks and squeezed what I could, his blood thick and reluctant.

  I took off my kerchief and tied it off tight just above his elbow.

  “You think you got most of it?”

  I didn’t know. “How big you figure it was?”

  “Big,” he said.

  “If it gets to your heart it could be bad,” I said.

  “All the ways I’ve thought about dying, this was never one of them.”

  “I’ll saddle our horses and we’ll see if we can’t find somebody to help.”

  He nodded and stayed sitting.

  I saddled the horses and gathered our gear and we were on the move in quick time. It was wild country and we’d not yet passed a single dwelling nor saw a single trace down which a ranch might stand. We rode along at a good pace knowing that he had less than a fifty-fifty chance if we didn’t find someone who could help.

  An hour passed, then two. We had to rest the horses and I checked his arm and it was already swollen to twice its normal size and his fingers were fat as sausages and I said, “Does it hurt much?”

  “Like you can’t believe,” he said, putting a brave face on it.

  We rode on and still nothing but brown hills and dry riverbeds and red canyons, prickly pear and blue sky.

  I saw he was having trouble staying in the saddle, swaying from side to side, his face no longer so brave; the pain etched deeply in it now, his eyes closed against it.

  I rode alongside him.

  “My heart’s beating like a drum,” he said. His face was damp with sweat.

  Finally around noon we spotted a house that sat south of the tracks a half mile and made for it.

  It was made of mud and stone. There were chickens in the yard and a pen of sheep. Two dogs came out barking, both of them black with white cow dogs, their bellies low to the ground. A man was grinding an ax blade on a stone wheel and looked up when the dogs began barking. He stopped turning the wheel and stood up holding the ax. A woman who was bent at the waist in a field of pumpkins also stood and looked in our direction.

  The man reached for a rifle he had leaning against the grinding wheel.

  I raised an open hand as we rode up, holding the reins of Tom’s and my horse in the other. Tom was barely hanging on, lying low over his saddle horn.

  “My friend’s been bitten by a big rattler,” I called soon as I stopped our horses. “He needs help.”

  The man looked at us suspiciously then set his ax down but held onto his rifle.

  “Maize,” he called, and the woman stepped out of the pumpkins and walked to where we were.

  I dismounted and helped Tom out of the saddle. The man looked at his arm, said, “Jesus!” Then,
“Bring him inside.”

  The woman held the door for us and the man pointed toward a cot in the corner of the front room. Besides the cot, there was a kitchen stove with three burner plates, a table, two chairs, cupboards, and a dry sink.

  Tom groaned when I eased him down.

  “When’d he get bit?” the man said, looking closer at Tom’s arm.

  “This morning.”

  The man stood and went to the cupboard and got a long thin-bladed knife and a bottle of liquor and came and pulled a chair up close to the bed.

  “I’m going to cut your arm, mister” he said to Tom. Then to me, “You two help hold him.”

  The woman moved to the head of the bed and placed her hands on Tom’s shoulders and bore down and I held his other arm as the man drew two long slits with his knife down the length of Tom’s forearm. The blood rushed out and the man pulled the cork on the bottle with his teeth and spilled the whiskey into the cuts. Tom jerked like he’d been shot.

  “Get me some bandages, Maize,” the man said. She left and then returned with several strips of muslin.

  The man reached in his shirt pocket and took out a twist of tobacco and bit off a good chunk and chewed and took a sip of the liquor and kept chewing with the liquor in his mouth till he had a good wad then compressed it to the bite marks and wrapped a strip of muslin to hold it into place, his fingers bloody from the work.

  Then he said to Tom, “Drink some of this,” and held the bottle to his mouth and Tom swallowed some of it down.

  “That’s about all I know how to do for him,” the man said. “Hoping the tobaccy will draw the poison out.” Tom’s eyes fluttered. “Maize, wench up some cold water and soak cloths and put them on his arm clear up to the shoulder. The cold will slow down his blood.” The woman left the house and came back in several minutes with a bucket of water and set about bathing Tom’s arm and shoulder.

  The man motioned me outside.

  “I din’t want to say it in there where he could hear me, but your friend’s going to die, mister.”

  “No he’s not,” I said.

  He shrugged.

  “Bad break,” he said. “Hard country. You want a taste of this?” He handed me the bottle. I took a pull and handed it back.

  “How far from here to Coffin Flats?” I said.

  He shrugged. “Another two days you keep at it steady. That where you’re from?”

  “It’s where I’m going.”

  He wore a thin coat. Dark-skinned. Could have had some Mexican or Indian in him; the woman too.

  “I thought when I first saw you two coming you were Clancy’s men.”

  “Who’s Clancy?”

  “A one-eyed son of a bitch,” he said.

  The sheep in the pen bleated plaintively, the dogs paced restlessly.

  “You want you can go on alone,” he said. “Maize and me will see to your friend, bury him when he’s passed.”

  “He’s not going to need burying,” I said.

  He took another pull off the bottle and offered it back to me but I declined and he punched the cork back into the neck with the heel of his hand and set it next to him where he squatted on his heels looking at his sheep.

  “I need to get them sheep up to Clancy’s Crossing and load them on the train and send them to market,” he said.

  “The same one-eyed son of a bitch, Clancy?” I said.

  “Yeah, he’s got the market on things round here. All but me and Maize. Wants to buy me out. I won’t sell. Hell, where would I go? Where would she?”

  “Your wife and you?”

  He shook his head.

  “Sister,” he said. “This place is all we got. My old man fought the Apaches for it and his old man fought them too and was killed by them. Thank God they’re all over in San Carlos and we don’t have to fight them no more.”

  The woman came out of the house and the man stood and I stood with him. It was the first I really paid any real attention to her. She was of an age most would consider spinster—plain but not bad looking.

  “He’s asleep,” she said, shaking her head. “I can’t tell if he’s any better or not.”

  “I got to get them sheep to Clancy’s Crossing,” the man said again.

  “I can help you get them there,” I said.

  “No, you stay on with your friend. I can get them there just fine.”

  “It’s no problem,” I said.

  “No, I got the dogs.”

  He looked at the woman.

  In a short while we watched him head off with his band of sheep, his two dogs working to keep them bunched and moving. He carried the rifle over his shoulder.

  “You hungry?” she said.

  “I could eat.”

  She fixed a pot of mutton stew with wild onions in it and we sat across from each other, her eyes lowered most of the time, which gave me a chance to observer her closer. She had a broad face with wide-set eyes. Her dark hair was parted in the middle and roped into braids that hung down to her breasts. Her nose was straight and her lips looked like they’d been finely carved, just right to fit the rest of her face. She had thick hands. She ate with a delicacy as if she were eating in the finest restaurant in a city. I’d seen women with large hats eating that same delicate way. When I finished she asked if I wanted another helping.

  “Thanks but no,” I said.

  “Big man like you should eat more,” she said in an almost motherly way.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  She cleaned up the dirty dishes and gathered everything on a sideboard at the sink. “I can dry those plates if you like,” I said when she came back from outside with a pail of water she filled a pan with.

  “It’s not necessary,” she said.

  “Are you and your brother always so independent you won’t accept no kind of help?”

  She smiled. “Okay,” she said. “The towel is right over there.”

  We stood washing and drying and I liked how that felt. She stood about as tall as my shoulder.

  I checked on Tom when we finished the dishes and he was still asleep, but moaning some, and I couldn’t be sure but his arm didn’t look any worse than it did before and maybe some better. She made us coffee and we went outside to drink it and the sun glazed brightly beyond the distant mountains that looked so faded as to be clouds on the horizon.

  “You like living way out here?” I said.

  “No, not really,” she said. “But here is where we are.”

  I tried to guess why a woman would live so far out from anybody, not have herself a man, houseful of kids running around.

  “Always just been you and your brother?” I said.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Have you ever been married?”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “It would have had to have been some lonesome cowpoke, or some no account drummer—way out here; that’s about all you ever see this far from town. Why marry something you know you’re not going to stick to?”

  “You mind I ask about the trouble between your brother and Clancy?”

  She shrugged.

  “It’s pretty simple,” she said. “He wants to buy Spence and me out, resents we haven’t sold to him. Our place sets right in the middle of the rest of his holdings. He has to run his cattle around the long way. And besides, he hates sheep and those who keep them.”

  “Why not sell, since you don’t care for it all that much?”

  “I don’t, but Spence does.”

  “You never got the urge to strike out on your own?”

  “Just about every day. But I couldn’t leave Spence here to fend for himself.”

  The wind played with the dust by the empty pen.

  “What about you?” she said. “You got a woman kept off somewhere?”

  “No. If I had, I’d be with her.”

  She sipped her coffee, looking at me over the rim of her cup, something in her eyes telling me something, conveying something unspoken but something a man should know when
he sees it in a woman’s eyes.

  “He won’t be back till tomorrow afternoon,” she said. “He’ll get his sheep to the loading station then get a good drunk on, probably buy himself a woman and stay the night. Buy supplies in the morning and come home.”

  She looked off toward the direction he had gone with the sheep and dogs.

  “What about you, you ever go into town for fun?”

  “No kind of fun in Clancy’s Corners for a girl like me to have,” she said. “Unless it’s she enjoys wrassling with dirty shirt cowpokes who’d treat her like the morning flyer—all wanting to stand in line and get on board. I never had any urges to be the morning flyer.”

  “Anything that you do for fun?”

  “You asking me to show you?”

  “Maybe I am.”

  She turned and looked at the door of the house.

  “I’m not loose,” she said. “But I am damn lonely.”

  ”I know the feeling,” I said. “Seems a little foolish we both are when we wouldn’t have to be.”

  “Let me think on it some.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon taking care of the horses, lounging about, uncertain as to where things were headed, concerned about how Tom was making it, whether or not he’d live or I’d end up leaving him in this place. It felt like I knew him a lot longer than I had. I didn’t want to think about his dying before I got to know him better.

  She and I ate a supper of the same stew. She did not speak but simply looked at me, judging, weighing the possibilities in her mind. I was doing the same and we both knew it every time we looked at each other. We washed and dried the dishes after she got Tom to eat a little bit.

  “There’s a water hole not far from here,” she said. The sun was low over the mountains so all you could see was its light thrown up against the evening sky.

  “You ever bathe naked with a woman?” she said.

  “A time or two,” I said.

  “I’ve had in my mind some time now how I’d like to bathe naked with a man in the moonlight,” she said.

  We took some towels and a bar of soap and stepped out into the evening air, which was cool now but not intolerable. The sky with the sunlight drained out of it had turned a dark blue metal. I followed her down to the waterhole beyond sight of the house. It was a large flat pan of red rock where a stream ran in from higher up and drained away from the lower end, leaving a natural pool in the middle the water had worn into a bathtub over a thousand years or more. A full moon had risen and seemed so close we could just reach out and rub our hands over its surface. I watched her undress, dropping her clothes casually until she stood fully naked. Then she unbraided her hair and shook it free and half turning to me said, “You just going to stand there and watch?” Then she walked into the water up to her waist.