Rides a Stranger

by Bill Brooks

  Chapter Twenty-One

  From the diary of Maize Walker…

  October 1, 1885.

  Whether I am in love or not with Jim Glass is yet to be known. My heart says one thing, my mind another. He is the closest to any man I’ve ever known to rousing in me long slumbering feelings. With him, I’d have children and they’d be beautiful and bright. But practically speaking, he is a man I suspect who disdains any thought of settlement. He told me as much.

  We swam like fishes. We made love in the water and later in my bed and now it is too soon over. His eyes look to the distance. He is as eager to go wherever it is he is bound as a racehorse is anxious to start the race.

  October 2, 1885.

  Spence gone to town and not back yet. Unusual. Woke this morning with Jim’s side of the bed yet warm. Watched him dress. His flesh pale except for his face, neck, hands, and wrists. Struck me as strange how, till I asked him, he never spoke my name. Then when he did, it sounded wonderful coming from his mouth. I do my best not to let him know how great an effect he has over me. I think he knows anyway.

  He volunteered to go look for Spence and bring him home. Am worried about my brother. I am relieved Jim is going. I trust he will return with Spence in tow.

  Spent the day in and out of the garden, Jim helped me with the weeding. We hoe in the pumpkin patch together. I tell him about Grandpa, the Indians. It feels natural enough—like two souls long together.

  Jim says if Spence is not back by nightfall he will go look for him in the morning.

  Outside I hear the sound of ax against wood. It sounds like my heart being split apart.

  Jim chooses to sleep on the kitchen floor. Already my bed feels empty without him.

  She sits propped up in bed, the shadows and wavering lamp’s light dancing over the page as she writes. How, she wonders, did she allow herself to hope when long ago she’d given up all such hope? Is it worse to hope than not? Her breasts feel heavy, swollen from the wanting of his touch. She is restless without knowing why—a vague feeling that has plagued her all day.

  It is time to stop writing.

  She lays down her pen and stoppers the small bottle of ink and closes the diary and sets it under her pillow then turns down the wick until darkness fills the room. She closes her eyes then opens them again, staring into the blackness, then rises and goes out to where he lies near the kitchen stove on a pallet and lies down beside him, her back to his front and reaches around and takes his arm and drapes it over her. And at last she is at peace.

  October 3, 1885.

  Jim came home with Spence looking like he’d been dragged through the chaparral, all cut & bloody with his ankle hurt. One dog dead, one also hurt. Spence claims he can’t remember how he got in such a condition. I wanted to say, “You lay down with whores and drink their whiskey, there is no telling the outcome.” But instead did the best I could to repair him.

  Jim expresses concern there may come trouble from Clancy and his boys after nightfall. Says we should all be ready. A world full of land and we have to fight over a small patch of it.

  I ache to run off with Jim.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Dusk brought with it the anticipated rain. Tom sat at the table with his hand resting on a pillow Maize had gotten him. Spence with his foot propped on a chair, the toes purple. The dog lay in the corner, its head between its paws, eyebrows twitching whenever one of them moved or said anything. Maize fretted about getting us all supper, saying that we should eat and moving back and forth between stove and table. I stood at the window until it got too dark to see beyond the curtain of falling rain.

  “I’m going to go outside for a while,” I said.

  I took my hat and rifle and went out and stood under the bit of overhang there at the front door—a small sheet of corrugated tin nailed to the top of two poles just there in front of the door. The rain hammered the tin like small stones. Lightning shook through the bruised sky. The darkness and rain obliterated everything between the flashes of lightning. “Maybe they wouldn’t come in this weather,” Tom had said earlier, just as it started to rain.

  I could see the destruction they’d leave behind. Four of us dead, the place burnt to a pile of smoldering gray ash that the wind would eventually carry away. In short enough time there would be nothing left to mark our having existed.

  Maize came out in a little while.

  “You hungry, Jim? Come on in and eat.”

  “I better keep watch,” I said.

  She looked into the uneasy darkness. The rain was gathering in puddles near our feet and it looked and sounded at times like the water was boiling up from the ground.

  “You think Clancy and his men will come in this?”

  “I don’t guess the rain will stop them if they’re looking for a fight. It wouldn’t me.”

  I saw the look on her face when I said that, the interior light of the house falling softly on her cheeks.

  “I can shoot a gun, Jim. I’m a better shot than Spence.”

  “That’s good to know,” I said. “You might just have to practice your skill.”

  She stood close to me and I could smell her washed hair.

  “Maybe it’s just as well they come,” she said. “Maybe we can end the conflict between us one way or the other. It would be better in a way than just waiting all the time for them to come. I am surprised that Clancy didn’t kill Spence.”

  “He wanted to put the last bit of fear in him,” I said. “Sometimes there are worse things you can do to a man than killing him.”

  “Well, if they come tonight he might be sorry he let Spence live.”

  “You prepared for that? Is he?” I said. “To take lives?”

  “It has to end sooner or later.”

  “I think I’m going over and wait under that tool shed,” I said. “It might be better if we can catch them in a cross fire if they come.”

  “Tell me what to do,” she said.

  “Get a rifle and put out the lights and stand here in the doorway. Give Spence a gun and set him by the window. Tom will know what to do, even if he has to shoot with his off hand. You hear or see anything coming, strike a match just inside the door so I can see it but they can’t. I’ll do the same.”

  “Jim…”

  I ducked out through the rain before she could say whatever it was she was thinking and made it across to the toolshed and stood in the door frame. The house was close enough I could see its shape even through the curtain of rain. Time would tell. The rain hammered down with fury at times, letting up, then coming hard again. The night sky vibrated with lightning, rumbled with thunder. The sound of the rain was a steady hiss like you’d imagine a roomful of demons would make.

  An hour passed, then two.

  Suddenly they were there, at the edge of the property. One minute it was just the rain and darkness, then a flash of light from the storm lit them: several men sitting horses near the house. I struck a match and snapped it out. I hoped Maize saw it.

  Between the lightning, you couldn’t see much of anything. I aimed the rifle at where I’d seen them. Then waited. As soon as the next flash came I fired, jacked lever and fired again. They cut loose soon as I fired my first round, and so did the others inside the house. I could hear glass breaking. I could see the flashes of their guns and I unloaded into them and when the rifle went empty I pulled my pistol and emptied it too. Then almost as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped, the sound of gunfire dying in the rain. It couldn’t have lasted more than a minute, two at the most—the whole fight.

  The storm marched off in the distance and with it the lightning. The rest was silence. I waited. All night we waited in silence. Then the rain quit just before dawn, leaving the first morning light to shimmer on the wet dark land.

  There were three dead men near the house. Two of them were facedown, their arms spread out and above their heads. The third man lay on his side facing away. I crossed to the house and went inside.

  Tom and Spence were t
here. A trail of blood led from the doorway to the cot they’d laid Maize on. Spence looked defeated.

  “They shot her, Jim,” Tom said, shaking his head.

  Her eyes were partially opened and I bent and touched her cool face and closed her lids. It was like touching two small smooth stones. The bullet had struck her through the breast, leaving a drying flower of blood on her clothes.

  Something heavier than anyone could describe was in the room with us. She looked like she’d simply gone to sleep. I took a blanket and pulled it over her. She looked cold and lonely and I wanted to lie beside her and hold her but it was way too late.

  “Maybe you could say something,” I said to Tom.

  He said, “Yes…if Spence would like me to.” He looked at Spence, who sat there with his head hanging down, his longish brown hair fallen over his face.

  “She wasn’t a churchgoer,” he mumbled. “Neither of us were. No time for God and godly things in this godless land. But I’d be grateful if you said something if you know how.”

  So Tom spoke softly as though he were confiding in a friend: “Lord, take this woman’s spirit into your bosom and let her there reside for all days eternal. In your kingdom she will be an angel, for she is now free of all her earthly bonds, all obligations, all regrets and pain and suffering. Amen.”

  Spence rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hands and looked up through his lank hair and said, “Those were nice words, Tom. I know she’d have liked them.”

  I rose and went outside because I didn’t want to have to look at Maize in death one more minute. One of her earthly bonds had been me, and I was still tied to her in a way that any man is tied to any woman he’s shared intimacy with. And that is not something so easily forgotten.

  I took in a deep breath and let it out again. And then walked over to the dead lying in the quickly drying mud, the sun risen now over the mountains, its heat gaining strength.

  One by one I turned them over and recognized the first two as being men I’d seen at Clancy’s. The third one, the one lying on his side, was Clancy himself. I knew before I turned him over, by the stubbed fingers on the hand that lay twisted back behind him. His mouth was agape as though the bullet had caught him by surprise. I hoped to hell it was Maize’s bullet that got him.

  Tom helped Spence hobble out and they stood there looking at the dead men.

  “Clancy,” I said, standing over the body.

  “Help me over there,” Spence said and leaned on Tom, and when they got to the body of Clancy, Spence spat on him and said, “You son of a bitch.”

  Tom and me just looked at each other. I understood Spence’s grief and anger, and maybe Tom did too.

  “I’ll dig the graves,” I said. “Is there any place special you want me to bury Maize?”

  “She liked that swim hole down yonder…” He pointed with his chin but I already knew where it was. “Somewhere down there would be nice.”

  I went down with a shovel and found a spot above where the swim rock was, where you could look down onto the water, and dug a good deep grave then went and got her body and carried it down and buried her as gently as I knew how. I patted the last shovelful of dirt down with my bare hands and smoothed it out and then sat down next to her, my shirt soaked with sweat.

  “You’ll get to look at your swimming place every day,” I said. “And, I’ll remember it and you long as I live.”

  The wind whispered to me and I wanted to believe it was her whispering farewell even if it wasn’t.

  “You gave me everything, including your life, and I’m sorry Maize Walker. I’m sorry as hell.”

  I went up and loaded the dead men one by one onto the backs of the three horses—mine and Tom’s and Spence’s—and walked them all three a good distance out of sight of the house and dug one large grave. It took me a while but I finally got one dug. Maybe not deep enough to keep the coyotes and critters from catching the scent and digging them up eventually, but probably a better grave than the one they would have dug for us if the situation had been reversed.

  I dragged them and dropped them in and it was onerous work and I cursed them for their stupidity at having made it so I had to do this. When I finished, I went back to the house and tied off the horses and then went down to the swim hole. I stripped naked and plunged into the cool water and looked up through it at the sunlight filtering through its greenness. I felt as though I could simply stay down under it the rest of my life and did not surface until my lungs were burning for lack of air.

  I tried washing away the stink of death but it did not want to wash away completely. Tom was sitting on the warm rock when I surfaced.

  “I feel terrible about what’s happened,” he said after I climbed out and dried myself and began to dress.

  “So do I, but there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it. Everybody who is responsible for this is already dead.”

  “Bad karma,” he said, shaking his head. He sat with his legs drawn up, his forearms resting on his knees.

  “So you mentioned once before.”

  Dressed now, I sat down next to him and we stared at the water and not at Maize’s fresh dug grave.

  “Were you in love with her?” he said.

  I thought about it for a long moment.

  “No, I don’t believe I was. I liked her and maybe even loved her, but I wasn’t in love with her.”

  “She told me something while you went to look for Spence,” he said. “I am not sure I should even tell you, for it is not going to matter now. But I think it is the right thing I should say it.”

  I sat listening.

  “She said she was sure she was pregnant with your child. I just thought you should know what she was thinking, what she was feeling.”

  I listened to the silence of the water, the quietness of sky. I wanted to tell Tom it wasn’t possible for her to know such a thing with any certainty. But then a question pressed into my denial: What if? It was something I didn’t want to consider. It felt like I’d swallowed a stone. What happens to the dead? What happens to the person we were when the body dies? What happens to that thing inside us that causes us to love, to hope, to feel anguish that has nothing to do with the body?

  “We need to move on soon as possible,” I said. “If you still want to go, that is.”

  “I’ve given it some thought,” he said.

  “Well,” I said, standing and brushing off the seat of my jeans. “You don’t owe me anything, Tom. If anybody owes anybody it’s me that owes you.”

  “I guess nobody is indebted to anyone here, we’ve all paid our debts in full.”

  “I’m going to walk back up to the house.”

  I saw him stand and look off to where I’d dug Maize’s grave, the large rock I’d found for a headstone.

  “You picked a good place for her, Jim.”

  “I think so too.”

  He said, “I’ll walk back up to the house with you.”

  And the late afternoon light threw our shadows long across the rock, shadows that seemed to follow us sadly.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  We started early, Tom and me, the light without the sun in it shadowy and unkempt. Tom wore his arm in a homemade sling now and could close his hand about halfway. He still couldn’t grip one of his two guns. We rode steady for most of the day, the loose caliche shifting under the horses’ hooves. Riding toward the rising sun, a blaze of red lifted over the lip of the earth.

  We arrived in Coffin Flats the second evening.

  “I want to look in on Chalk Bronson,” I said. “But we ought to find you a doctor to take a look at your arm.”

  “You go ahead and I’ll go look for a physician,” he said.

  “We can meet up later at the Bison—that saloon yonder,” I said, pointing out the Bison Club.

  He nodded. “Might be a good place to ask where the doc is,” he said.

  “I’ll meet you there in half an hour.”

  I rode on down to Chalk’s place, dismounted and sla
pped the dirt out of my clothes best I could with my Stetson before knocking.

  His wife answered the door and looked at me for a long moment, then said, “Oh, it’s you. Come in.”

  Chalk was sitting at the table with a book open in the glow of a lamp. His hands were still bandaged, but the rest of him was looking normal again, the cuts on his face now like black marks someone had drawn there with a small paintbrush.

  He looked at me as though he expected to see Antonia.

  “What are you doing back here?” he said.

  “I wonder if we might have a private talk.”

  He looked at his wife.

  “Go ahead and say what you have to, Nora knows everything.”

  “Can I get you some coffee?” she said.

  “Yes, that would be nice.”

  I sat down across from him, the book’s pages falling back from where he had it opened.

  “It’s about all I can do these days, read,” he said. “Forgot how much I used to enjoy it.”

  His wife set a cup of coffee down in front of me. “You take sugar with it?” she asked.

  “No ma’am.”

  She took a seat next to Chalk. You could see how much she loved him.

  “We got off the train in Refugio,” I said. “The next morning the local law came and arrested us.” I saw the worry come into his face.

  “For what reason?”

  “Because the lawman there happens to be a cousin or some such to Johnny Waco.”

  Chalk nodded. “He telegraphed ahead.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about Antonia?”

  “They took her. Escorted her back to Waco’s. I think that’s where she is now, with him.”

  “So it all went for nothing?”

  “Yeah, pretty much.”

  “They just let you go?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” I said. “But not without a proper sendoff.”

  “Can you pour us something a little stronger than the coffee, love?” he said to her.