by John Larison
I only ever saw Pa miss a gander once. Noah wasn’t no good with that Sharps though. He missed most every shot. Pa said Noah was too excitable. “Distance shooting is for the quiet man,” he said. “Your brother tells too many stories to be good with a rifle.”
Noah and his stories. He could twist yarn around a flea. A thousand men have that skill. My brother was the only one I ever met who could make a doubter believe.
* * *
—
Once when he was thirteen and me eight we was sitting under the eave. His boots was upon the rail as Pa’s would’ve been, except Noah was slouching to make his legs reach. He looked awful uncomfortable. But he went on and on about the gunfighter he would be someday, turning over a thread of grass in his teeth like it was a smoking piece.
“And that’s when I bust in with my pistol and shout ‘Wooha!’ and fire a round into the ceiling just to show I am for hot. Nixing Noah, I’ll nix you faster than a half-broke mule!”
“Faster than a half-broke mule” was something we’d heard Pa say. Don’t reckon neither of us had ever seen a half-broke mule.
“What you looking off at, sister? Don’t you hear my story of cunning and gunfightery?”
“Course I do. You talk loud as hog at breakfast.” I knew plenty about hogs at breakfast.
He sat straight and let his feet hit the ground. “Did I ever tell you about Ma and the wicked owl?”
I looked him sideways. “This for real?”
“Course it is.” His smile said otherwise.
I will admit I relished the made-up Ma stories. The real ones I cradled in my hands until I found the proper place for safekeeping. Each one was the earth’s last egg and so demanded full attention and a raw heart. But the made-up stories was just wide-out fun. I could dwell in them with her, without fear of losing something.
“A storm come on during the night,” Noah began, “and winds was cutting through the house and stirring the coals. The air smelled of old fire. Ma woke at that smell. Ma had the nose of a panther.”
“Was you in their bed?”
“Shh, I’ll tell it.” He went on to say how Ma had left the cabin in the dark and he had followed with the pistol, to keep her safe. Pistols was in most the stories he told.
“What’d she smell like?” I asked.
“Smell? What’s smell got to do with it?”
“Be more particular in your telling if’n you don’t want my questions.”
“Mint. Mint and honey. Now shush and listen.” He told of how together they saw an enormous owl with black eyes. “It had fangs like a wolf and it shrieked so loud we put palms to our ears. I busted off a round to scare it.”
Most of my brother’s made-up stories went like this. Somewhere along the telling he rose from the kid to the hero.
“Fangs? I don’t like this story. It gives me goose pimples.”
“It ain’t a story. It’s history.” Noah spat like Pa when buying time. He took off his hat and wiped the sweat from his brow. The sun was sliding south and had found us now where we sat. “This owl left behind a skull. Deep scratches lined the eye sockets from the bird’s huge old claws.”
“That ain’t true. Ain’t no owl carrying no skulls.”
His eyes settled on mine with high drama. “Honest. A human skull.”
Bones was always something I avoided. Even cattle bones. My young mind didn’t know no better and so believed they was hers.
My brother knew how I felt about bones. He was always joshing me as big brothers is wont to do.
“You didn’t find no human skull.”
“Put a wager on it.”
“Where’s this skull then?”
He pointed at the sage. “Yonder.”
“Then let’s go see it.”
He laughed. “Bones don’t last in this country. Silly girl. You act grown, but you still young of mind.”
“If it’s true, we’ll find some part of it. Skulls don’t just disappear entire. Like them wolf teeth you found last autumn, no bones attached.” I stood. “Unless you’s joshing.”
All at once he was on his way, and I was trying to keep up. “I never josh,” he called over his shoulder.
We spent some minutes toeing around in the brush of that draw. It was just one of many on the hillside, nothing particular about it. Antelope pellets at the bottom. Coyote scat stuffed full of mouse bones. Little yellow flowers and flakes of obsidian.
“This country eats bones.”
“Wasn’t no owl with fangs,” I said as we walked back to the house.
“Was too.”
“Was not.”
Noah saw it first. The door to the house was open. Not much, only a crack, but we had left it closed. Noah looked spooked now for real. “I give it a pull before we set off. I shut that door.”
“Should we hide?” Indians was still about in them days. We all heard the stories of raiding and butchery.
There was a commotion inside. Like what you’d expect from a red going through your belongings. “Let’s go!” I pulled on his sleeve.
I was surprised by Noah then. He didn’t move. I had believed the two of us would flee to the willows by the lake fast as fawns sent by their doe. But he just stood in the open. He didn’t move a step. He didn’t say a word. I thought him stupid for wanting to see this Indian up close.
But a little sister is her big brother’s animal. I didn’t leave him when it made sense to.
The commotion began again. Dishes was falling, glass breaking. Noah drew his knife and shouted like a Reb and pushed open that door.
The image of him standing before that black doorway is the image of my brother that comes first. It is what I saw when I read your letter and learned of his passing. My big brother standing before a dark too deep for light. All these years on, and still I am a little girl scared for her brother, scared for herself without him.
Our Indian turned out to be an owl, a real one. It swooped past Noah and my brother hit the earth and the bird lifted into the bright light of day without a whisper of wind through his feathers, pure smoke rising toward blue. Of course I believed it to be the owl from his story. How could I believe anything else?
After that I didn’t much ask if his stories was real or made up. Maybe I’d lost my belief in the difference.
Sometimes I wonder if he did too.
* * *
—
The lake was about as far as we would go. Noah and me spent many afternoons along that muddy shore. We was both drawn to water, as our mother had been. We shed our boots and he rolled up his pants and I tucked my dress bottom into my pockets, and we took spears to the weedline. The mud squeezed through our toes and gave off the smell of primal origins. We hunted the edge for the big trout that lurked there but never speared one. In time we grew bored with the hunt and sat on the shore and let the mud dry.
Whatever it is between a boy and his old man had already set to crumbling by then. Noah was quick to undercut Pa soon as the older was outside earshot. “Should be running sheep.” “Tell me one good reason for not fencing our lake?” “He just ain’t keen enough for ranching.” At supper they put their faces to the stews I made and didn’t look up until their bowls went dry. Honest, there was trouble between Noah and me too, on account I didn’t think he was giving Pa due respect. A girl alone out in that desert has got to pick sides, and I was the kind to pick her old man.
One morning we was waiting for Pa to wake up, he was spending more and more time in bed then, and Noah and me took our coffee to the eave and sat watching the dawn light walk down the western ridge. I pointed up at the strange pile of rocks on the summit that had a manner of holding our gaze whenever we looked yonder. “How big you reckon them is?”
Noah spat. He was buying his own tobacco by then. He was fifteen. “That stack of stones? That’s easy.” He held his han
d about chest high off the ground. “Yea big.”
I took in some coffee and thought on it. “Well, that would make the whole dang mountain big as our barn.”
He took down the remainder of his coffee and adjusted his plug like Pa would do, and then he put his boots on the rail. No slouching now. He wore a man’s boots. Hair grew from the corners of his lip. “God made big brothers older and smarter for a reason, sister.” He took to invoking God the winter before. Pa didn’t like it none. I think that’s why Noah done it. “It’s my duty to set you straight when you’s foolish. Maybe you and me take a ride up that ridge and gander those stones from beside them, then you’ll always remember that I’m right when I say I’m right.”
“You think he’s sick?” I said with a nod toward Pa inside.
Noah shrugged and looked to the bottom of his empty cup.
We went in to town once a season with the wagon and spent the night away, the three of us together. Always done it that way. But now Pa was going more often, couple times a month even. He took a liking to the syrup a dentist give him after pulling two bad teeth. That was the year before and now he hardly went a day without the stuff. It cost him plenty. Our herd was down to thirty-five head. He stayed in bed most mornings. Sometimes he didn’t get up until the sun cut silver blades through the slats.
When Pa did rise that morning he took down his coffee and lifted his bridle, which I done fixed for him the evening before. “Back soon,” he said. Then he stopped and turned to speak to his son. “Don’t leave your sister. Never know what scoundrels might be about. And patch that henhouse.”
We listened to his mare lope away.
Noah didn’t wait long enough for water to boil before he was reaching for Pa’s fiddle under the bed. “Don’t,” I said from my dishwashing. “That ain’t—”
“I won’t hurt it none,” he said. He had never before touched the box. It was the one thing we didn’t molest in Pa’s absence. That instrument held the power to make our father weep. “Besides, I aim to get good on it. Better than he ever was.” Noah was working on the keeper nails with his folding knife. “I hear a man can make a living playing music. Imagine that, a gunfighting musician.”
“Stop,” I said. “Pa would tell you to stop.”
Noah chuckled. “Why you always standing up for him?”
I dried my hands on the ratted apron. It was the same apron Ma wore. Pa had given it to her at their first Christmas, then to me on my previous birthday. He said I was ready for it. Now I took the apron off and folded it and set it upon the clean table. Then I drug Pa’s chair to the door and climbed up and lifted the Sharps from its rack.
“Give me that.” He seized the rifle from me. “You too little even to hold it proper. Girl don’t know the hammer from the trigger.”
“Pa’s got casings on the mantel.”
“I know that.” He parked the rifle over his shoulder like Pa would and said, “Fetch me one.”
After he took the rifle out into the morning I slid the fiddle back under the bed just as Pa would leave it, and then took up an extra casing for myself and followed my brother toward the lake.
That day we found the fowl gone, flown on already. Trout was breaking the glassy surface and sending rings in all directions. I so longed to angle one from them waters and put it a pan. I wanted to see its colors. I never did get to hold one of them trout.
I turned to check again for Pa. The horizon was clean. He’d been gone long enough to shoot the Colt without him hearing, but the Sharps was ten times that pistol.
Noah had the rifle over his shoulder, a hand on the barrel just like a man. He pointed to the trout and spat. He was feeling rich with that rifle, and dwelling in the pleasure. Wasn’t everyday a Harney felt rich.
“Best take a lay,” I told him. “You won’t hit the county shooting on the fly.”
“You be quiet. Don’t forget I’m your big brother and thereby boss of you.” He held the rifle to his shoulder but it was too much gun for him. He grew tired and let it down. He nodded at a spot of dirt. “Been figuring on this place as a shooting bench for some time.”
We went about looking for worthy targets. Soon enough I caught a flash of pewter on the far side. Then a coyote come out from the sage. In them days wolves and lions and bears was a regular sight and a coyote wasn’t nothing more special than a common tumbleweed. I pointed him out to Noah and Noah set to breathing hard. I could see the barrel moving with his chest. He was touching the rifle too firm and in too many places.
Pa didn’t grip the rifle, he folded his body into a platform the rifle could set upon. Before he shot he took a big breath and let it halfway go. He squeezed with the tip of his finger. He let the rifle do the work, was always surprised by the kick. One night he said to Noah and I didn’t forget, “Don’t shoot for the critter, shoot for a single barb of fur.”
When Noah missed I said, “My turn.”
“Shut that yap of yours, making my bullet stray.”
We listened to the blast still echoing back from the mountains.
For me it was the sound of dreaming. Most nights I went shooting. Sleep slowed it down. I could see the lead in the air, how it fell up through the sight’s line and then down through a second time on the way to the earth.
“Should’ve brought an extra casing,” he said.
I showed him the one in my hand.
“Give me that. Dog near on got away already.”
“Only ’cause you missed,” I said. “You got a turn and now I get a turn. Or I tell.”
“This ain’t no schoolhouse. We ain’t taking turns. I’ll—” I didn’t let him finish. I knew sooner or later he’d wrestle me and take the casing for his own self. I wasn’t no match for him body to body. So I give him a quick fist in the armpit to settle things now, and he set about whining and rubbing and I took the rifle as my own.
I caught a fist to the shoulder but I kept the Sharps. His punch sent lightning across my body, but it was less blow than the rifle was about to deliver.
“Waste of a cartridge,” he muttered.
I reloaded like I seen Pa do. By then the coyote was onto us. He ran to the top of the ridge above the lake, another two hundred yards on what was already a long shot. There between clumps of short sage he turned for a last look and I settled on a dark patch behind his shoulder. Except I elevated for the distance and shifted a touch for the wind. In truth I had no desire to kill him, coyote meat ain’t nothing worth skinning for. My only desire was for a target, and to hear that rifle’s voice echoing back, louder than mine could ever be.
When the rifle bucked Noah said, “You missed,” before I even recovered. It was the kick of a mule for a child. I thought I might be dying, but then my breath come back and my ears started singing. I wiped the water knocked out of my eyes and looked and saw nothing but light.
Noah was looking off at where the coyote had gone. “That bastard,” he said. “Bastard” was one of Pa’s words. He’d leveled it on the dentist when the man run low on the syrup.
I was rubbing at the welt forming on my shoulder from the recoil. The skin would go purple and then brown and then yellow before giving way to my dusty. I had Ma’s color, more than Noah.
We didn’t hear the horse until she was near on us. Pa had heard the first shot and assumed a raid. His Colt was drawn.
Noah took the Sharps for himself. He stood and held it at his side. That was my brother protecting me.
Pa’s jaw went hard at the sight of us by the lake. He charged nearer. He come off his mare before she stopped and flipped the Colt so he had it by the barrel. I saw the wilderness in his eyes then and knew what was coming. Noah must’ve known too. But he didn’t flee. He blocked the blow but it was little use. He fell to his knees and blood spilled from a split in his ear. That wound would never heal right and remained in evidence long as I knew him.
I underst
and now but at the time I didn’t. I only saw the cruelty of it. Hitting a boy with an open hand was one thing. Hitting him with a pistol butt was another thing entire. But see, Pa was trying to right his fear the only way he knew how.
He kicked away some paces. He cursed his mare for eating while saddled. She trotted off and turned to inspect her rider. She raised her tail and took a shit. Ol’ Sis was his mare’s name. Smartest horse that ever lived. She had her own manner of conversing.
Noah was wiping at his tears with one hand and pressing his bleeding head with the other.
Pa come back for us and at first I was unsure of his intentions.
He took down his hat and knelt beside us. He touched Noah’s ear and rubbed the blood between his fingers. “I . . . I ain’t this man.”
Noah turned from him.
Pa sat in the dirt with us. He wore a red beard in them days, the cheeks gone gray. He rubbed the soil between his hands and it carried off in the wind. “This life has a habit of reducing a man.”
I tried to speak but no words come. I was still red with anger at him for cutting down my big brother, and now I was madder yet to see him cutting down himself. I would’ve preferred he stay righteous and free and wrong.
“I lived a different life before I come here,” Pa said. “That ain’t no excuse but maybe someday you’ll understand. The bad things that happened to a man can get between him and his now.”
Noah watched Pa. I don’t reckon he felt nothing but heat.
Pa said, “Well, ain’t you going say nothing? Or you finally short on words?”
Noah spat and said, “The Lord sees what you’ve done.”
“I hope that’s so.” Pa stood from us and cleared his throat and spat. He offered Noah a hand to his feet, but Noah didn’t take it.
Pa put in a plug of tobacco. He looked in his pouch. He handed his pouch to his boy. After a time, Noah reached up and took it and put in a plug.
They both spat.
Pa’s eyes inspected the Sharps in his hand. “Well, did you hit something? Don’t look on me sidelong. I shouldn’t have struck you, but you sure as shit shouldn’t have gone and took this here rifle without my approvals. I figured you was getting took by reds.”
