She was breathing still, but barely, and it was a sucking chest wound. He had never seen anyone live with a sucking chest wound.
Lucas Henry had laid her on the couch in the examining room. There was nothing he could do but stand here and drink, and watch her die.
Her boy sat on the floor in the corner, his knees drawn up beneath his chin. Every so often his head would jerk and his mouth would open, but no words would come out. Lucas thought Rachel's son was probably trying to beg him to save her, and so he was glad the words were stuck in the boy's craw.
He brought the bottle of Rose Bud up to his mouth and drank deep. He heard footsteps crossing the parlor. He turned, unsteady on his feet. "Cain?" he said.
But it wasn't Johnny Cain, come to weep over the body of the wife he had slain. It was Miss Marilee of the Red House. She had herself all decked out in black taffeta, her idea of the respectable, respectful matron out to do a good deed, he supposed.
"I've come to help you lay her out," she said, her mouth solemn. She even had tears in her eyes, although Lucas couldn't imagine what they were for. As far as he was aware, she didn't know the woman.
"She isn't dead yet," he said.
She stared at him, her eyes wide, her forehead wrinkling a little. "Then why aren't you doing something to help her?" she asked.
He sighed. "Because she has a forty-four-caliber bullet lodged next to her left pulmonary artery, the bullet having first ruptured the lung, which has brought about pneumothorax, or air in the pleural cavity, complicated by valvular emphysema. Does that answer your question, Miss Marilee?"
He brought the bottle of Rose Bud up to his mouth with one hand, while the other lowered the sheet, exposing the wound. It pulsed blood and air with her weakening heart- beat, and Doctor Lucas Henry went on, deliberately cruel, wanting to punish her since he couldn't punish himself enough. "Or maybe you'll understand this better: she's dying, and I haven't the skill or the knowledge to prevent it from happening."
Marilee leaned over for a look, her black taffeta skirts rustling. "Can't you get the bullet out?"
"No." He pushed out a breath thick with the reek of whiskey. "It would take a miracle. And she'd likely die in the end, anyway."
Her eyes met his, and a hard, calculating look came over her face. "I think you're scared to try, Lucas Henry. You're scared because you know you'd have to put down that bottle to do it."
"Ah, Miss Marilee, sweet Marilee." He curled his lip and tried to put a cutting edge on his tongue, but he could hear the quaver in his voice. "I'm beginning to think your sweetness is more like spun sugar—all air."
Her chin went up a notch. "I can be real nice when I want to be, and mean when I have to be. But one thing I ain't ever been is a coward."
He stared at her. He started to bring the bottle back up to his mouth, then let it fall. His hand, his whole arm, trembled badly. He could feel each separate breath as a shock to his chest.
He knew he couldn't do it. He thought maybe if he hadn't pickled his brain and palsied his hands with the booze for so many years, he might have done it. But now, it was too late—years too late.
And, besides, a man couldn't really be redeemed for all that he had done by a single act, could he?
"All right, damn you," he said. He looked around the room, terrified to begin. He had never set out to perform a miracle before. Miracles were for fools who believed.
His gaze fell on Rachel's son, who sat huddled in the corner, a look of hope on his face. "Get the boy out of here," Lucas snapped.
He tilted back his head and drank from the bottle of Rose Bud, drank long and deep, searching for that whiskey-induced edge between belief in his own worth, his own capabilities, and the knowledge, deep in his guts, that there was nothing there to believe in.
Marilee coaxed the boy to his feet and gently led him to the door. Lucas stopped her with a hand on her arm. "Take this with you, too," he said, and held out what was left of the Rose Bud. But then he couldn't let it go.
The sweat was running cold on his trembling flesh. He could smell himself and the whiskey. He gripped the bottle so tightly his whole body shook with the effort. "Maybe we should pray for that miracle," he said, his voice breaking over the last word. "Well, Miss Marilee of the Red House, do you think God'll listen to the prayers of a drunk and a chippy?"
She gave him the sweetest smile he'd ever seen. "I always figured God listens to the prayers of sinners first, Luc. We're the ones who need His help the most."
She pried the bottle out of his rigid fingers, and he let her have it.
Great columns of black smoke rolled over the burning prairie grass. Flames leapt along the buttes and ridges, flinging sheets of lurid red light, flinging cinders, sparks, and ashes up against the bruised sky. The wind was blowing from the north. It had driven the fire down the mountain and across the cattle rangelands of the Circle H.
The big house was a pile of black, smoldering ruins when Quinten Hunter rode up to it. Even the bullet-riddled signboard had burned to the ground. Strangely, the long line of stately cottonwoods still stood.
It was beneath the cottonwoods that he found his father's wife.
She must have saved the horses, at least she had saved one for herself. Quinten got off his own horse and went to stand beside her. She didn't look at him. She looked at the ruins of the house where she had lived with her cattleman husband for sixteen years, and she said nothing.
Quinten's eye, where his eye used to be, throbbed with a fierce pain, as if he were being stabbed there over and over with an awl. He seemed to be unbalanced by it, by only seeing half, so that he couldn't walk very straight, and as he came up to her, he stumbled, bumping into her. For the length of a heartbeat he caught his arm around her waist to steady himself. She smelled of smoke, and soot dusted her pale face.
She pulled away from him and took a step back.
"He's dead," Quinten said to her, to his father's wife. "Johnny Cain killed him."
She stood still, facing him, for a very long time, and then he saw tears well in her eyes and spill over onto her cheeks, leaving streaks in the soot.
"Why?" Quinten said.
Her mouth curled just a little. "Oh, you foolish, foolish boy. I loved him. Do you think I would have done it, done any of it, if I hadn't loved him?"
She turned abruptly away from him and mounted her horse. Her skirt rode up around her knees, revealing black lisle stockings and button shoes. She didn't look at all like herself, straddling that horse like a boy. He thought how he had never really known the first thing about her, and now he was never going to.
He looked up into her face, so beautiful, so cold, and shining wet with an incomprehensible grief. "Where are you going?" he said.
He didn't think she would answer, but she did. "I don't know."
"Are you ever coming back?"
"Perhaps."
Quinten watched her ride away. He watched until she disappeared from his sight, and a body could see for a long time in Montana, even a one-eyed body. He knew she would never return, but he thought that it would be many years before he stopped waiting.
Rachel's son walked through Miawa City, searching for Johnny Cain.
A sooty black cloud had swallowed up the sun. It made Benjo think of the story his grandfather often told during the preaching, about a time of earthquakes and famines and fearful sights and great signs from heaven, and then Jesus with His fiery angels would come again, and no one would ever die after that.
A part of him knew the black cloud came from the fire on the sheep mountain, but another part of him, the part that was a heavy ache in his chest where his heart was, wanted to believe the darkness was one of those great signs from heaven, that Jesus was coming to help Doc Henry make the miracle.
Benjo's brogans stirred up puffs of dust as he walked toward the livery. The road was deserted and it made him feel scared, scared of being alone forever. He found Johnny Cain beside the barn, sitting in the dirt with his back pressed up hard a
gainst the wall that was papered with wanted posters.
Benjo wanted to shout, but he couldn't. His tongue was tangled up so bad, he didn't think it was ever coming loose again. Words, a torrent of words blocked his throat, choking him.
He made a lot of noise, walking, because Cain had his Colt in his hand and he was jumpy. But Cain didn't seem to hear or see him.
As Benjo watched, he brought the gun up to his mouth, he rubbed the barrel back and forth, back and forth, over his mouth. He put the muzzle in his mouth and closed his teeth around it.
And he smiled.
Benjo opened his own mouth, but nothing would come out. He couldn't even scream. He thought he would strangle over his own breath.
He took the last few stumbling steps at a hard run and threw himself at Cain's arm, his fingers wrapping tight around the wrist of the man's gun hand. The blow jarred the gun out of Cain's mouth, but he still held the barrel pointed at his face.
The man's eyes stared back at Benjo, and the strong muscles of his wrist flexed and tightened beneath Benjo's fingers, as he brought the gun barrel slowly, slowly back into his mouth.
"I killed her, partner," Cain said, and his voice was gentle, almost sweet. "I killed her."
Benjo shook his head hard, and tears splattered from his eyes. The words were piling and swelling in his chest, pushing against his skin and rib bones, crushing his heart
"Fuuuuhhh!" he shouted. "Fuh—fuh—fuh... father!"
He let go of Cain's wrist and grabbed for the gun, knocking the barrel up into the sky. The gun fired, and the crack of the shot echoed in the hot, thick air.
Benjo wrenched the gun free from Cain's hand, and he flung it away from them with the same hard, violent motion he used to hurl his sling. They watched together as the gun flew, end over end, far, impossibly far, in a wide, high arc across the dark, ash-filled sky, over the willow brakes and chokecherry trees, to land with a splash and a silver spray of water in Miawa Creek.
And Johnny Cain screamed.
He stopped the ragged noise of it with his hands, pressing his hands hard against the bones of his face, his breath coming in tearing sobs. Benjo wrapped bis arms around the man's shuddering back, and he held him. He closed his eyes and imagined opening his mouth, he imagined the words pouring out of his mouth, slowly, easily, like water from the spout of a pitcher.
"D-Doc Henry... He's g-going to muh—muh—make a muh—muh—muh..."
Miracle.
Doctor Lucas Henry walked into his parlor, wiping his hands on a huck towel, and looked up to find Johnny Cain standing at his open door with Rachel's son at his side.
The man's and the boy's hands were gripped together in a single fist. It was hard to tell who was holding on to whom. The boy's face was pale, his eyes wide and dark. But the man looked as though he'd passed through to the other side of hell, to a place where the sun had burned to ash, and he had been left screaming in the darkness.
Cain said, "The boy told me she's not dead yet. That you were trying to save her."
Lucas shrugged. "I've managed to remove the bullet, and to repair some of the damage. But I can't lay claim to saving her yet. She has to survive the surgery. And the risk of pneumonia later is considerable."
Lucas knew his words were callous, but he was too tired to care. When he lifted the bullet out of Rachel's lung and saw the faint tremor of a pulse in her neck, he had felt more powerful than God. Now, though, all he wanted was another slug of whiskey.
And here was Johnny Cain, man-killer, wife-killer, standing in the doorway, holding himself still, as though he feared if he so much as breathed he would shatter.
"I've put her in my own bed for now," Lucas said. "You can go on in to her... and if you have it in you somewhere, you might try praying."
"I don't know how."
"You could always begin by getting down on your knees." It was the boy, though, who moved, pulling the man after him.
They walked hand in hand up to the bed. Cain stood, looking down on her. "Rachel," he said, her name a torn whisper.
He dropped abruptly onto his knees beside the bed. He wrapped one arm around the waist of Rachel's son. The other hand stretched out and gripped the sheet that lay across her breast. His back bowed and his head came down, pressing into her dark red hair that lay like a spill of wine over the pillow.
Lucas leaned against the jamb of his open front door, a half-empty bottle of Rose Bud dangling from his hand, and looked down the deserted road. An acrid haze smeared the horizon and the sky above was murky. Toward the south, where the Circle H spread lay, a big boil of a black cloud was rising and spreading.
He heard the rustle of black taffeta, smelled honeysuckle toilet water. Miss Marilee of the Red House.
She came up to stand beside him. "That Johnny Cain, he sure does love his woman. It's gonna go real hard on him if she dies, after what he done."
"'Two loves I have, of comfort and despair,'" Lucas drawled. He slanted a look at her, lifting his eyebrows in deliberate mockery. "That's Shakespeare, Miss Marilee."
She lifted her shoulders in a pretty little shrug that set her crop of short curls to bouncing. He saw that she had Rachel's blood on her cuffs, and a streak of it on her neck, like the mark of a kiss.
"I don't know about that, Luc. But I know there's all sorts of love. Deep and shallow, pure and naughty. Blessed and cursed. But the best love, I reckon, is the kind that comes back at you from the person you give it to, bright and blindin' like the sun bouncin' off a mirror."
"I had a love like that once, and I wound up killing her for it." The words shocked him coming out as they did, without thought or premeditation. They burned his throat as if they were fire, and they hurt him in the guts, tearing at all the old wounds that had been suppurating and putrefying for years.
He turned full around to face her, so that she could look into his eyes and know him for what he was. "And I do mean that literally, my dear. I am as much a wife-killer as Johnny Cain in there."
He watched her eyes go wide with hurt and shock, and he almost smiled, for he had at last gotten what he wanted. Or thought he wanted. But then, the years of drinking had taught him not to trust himself or his motives. He was always his own worst enemy.
He turned away from her and settled back against the door frame. His eyes focused on the flame-glazed clouds of smoke billowing on the horizon. "Now, I don't want you to get things all backwards in that pretty and empty little head of yours, Miss Marilee. I didn't become a drunk because I killed my wife, you understand. I killed my wife because I'm a drunk."
He lifted the bottle of Rose Bud and looked at the world through green glass and amber liquid, and then he drank from it, proving to her and to himself that he was as he claimed.
"She begged me to quit," he said, "and I told her I would, but I never really meant it, because a drunk can think of no worse fate than being deprived of his whiskey bottle. One night I came home—inebriated, of course—and found her packing her clothes in a trunk, leaving me just like she promised. We argued and I hit her and she fell down a flight of stairs and broke her neck. She wanted to save me and I knew it, and so I destroyed her before she could. Don't you think that must have been the way of it, sweet Marilee?"
She backed up a step and crossed her arms over her chest. A bright, painful light glittered in her eyes.
"I was cashiered from the cavalry and spent seven years in Leavenworth for what I'd done, and you would probably say that wasn't punishment enough, but you would be wrong." He smiled and he could feel the horror of that smile as it twisted over his face. He held the whiskey bottle up to her, tilting it so that it caught and refracted the sunlight in prisms of amber flame. "Because I have found a way to go to hell without dying."
She shook her head, hard enough to send a single teardrop splashing onto her cheek. "It don't change things, me knowin' what you did. Probably it ought to, but it don't.
I love you, Luc Henry, and it won't ever change things either if you can never find i
t in you to love me back."
Lucas closed his eyes, swallowing back a sigh. He didn't know how he could make her understand that his craving for whiskey was stronger than his need for someone's love. "You think you know what you're saying, but you don't. You think you'll be able to change me, but you can't. I might never break your lovely neck, but I will still end up hurting you."
She struck her breast with her fist, so hard he heard it. "Oh, don't you understand, Luc? Life is going to end up hurtin' me, so why not you?"
He stared at her. Her bosom lifted and swelled with her panting breaths, and a blush bloomed like hothouse roses in her cheeks. Her eyes, wet and wide, could shame the blue right out of heaven. She was sweet and pretty, and he thought she probably really did love him, in her way.
She opened her hand and let it fall, looking away from him. "I thought I'd go on up to the Red House and have myself a bath," she said, after the silence had stretched out too long. "But I'll come back later, if you want a little company."
"It's not Saturday."
She gave him a punch on the arm. "Oh, you! I never said nothin' about engagin' in any bed sport. There's always conversation. You ever done that with a woman, Doctor Henry—engage in a little conversation?"
He laughed, and felt his heart warm. But whiskey sometimes had the same effect on him, and he was past telling the difference.
She gave the place on his arm where she had just hit him a little rub. "I'll come back. I ain't nothin' if not persistent."
He watched her walk away, those modest skirts swaying with the chippy's swivel of her hips. Today, for the first time, he had noticed that beneath her dirt-poor ignorance and voluptuous body was an admirable amount of grit. It frightened him that she just went on loving him in spite of everything.
Lucas watched her until she turned down the road toward the Red House, then his attention was caught by the churning dust of a Plain man's wagon. The man pulled the wagon up on the edge of town and climbed out. He walked slowly toward Lucas, but he didn't come all the way up to the house.
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