by Diane Munier
“Safe,” I panted.
“In the barn,” she said. I dismounted fast, on the run. He was in there, the door wide and there was no back up in me. For I was the choice he made.
My horse barreled from the barn first, him on his mount next. I jumped out of the way of the first and as he passed me he shot and the ground spit near me. He tried to kick out, but I grabbed on and I was swinging up high, then ripping him down. His gun flew from his hand as we fell hard. I did not stop. I beat his face, and he fought back. I sprang back then, got on my feet and kicked his liver into his throat. He was nothing against me. Wanting money didn’t come close to having a family been in peril.
I saw William, standing behind, his gun drawn. It stopped me. I don’t know why for I was going for kill. He walked to this one and looked down. “Lives,” he said standing on what showed as a broken arm.
The bastard howled and over this William said, “They killed Michael. Looks like he died slow.” He rolled that arm under his boot and I could not fault him, even as this one thought about doing more than yelling.
I cursed low, and felt the stab of loss. I’d grown up round him, been through a hundred scrapes, pulled him out of a few, but he always, always stood true. He come through the war for this?
I felt her watching. I looked back.
She stood in the door.
I stepped to him, this one, this killer. I held my gun straight on him and cocked it loud. She couldn’t take this from me. I wanted to kill him, see his brains splatter, I did. I took a deep breath. Didn’t she know I could do it? Be terrible? Kill just as filthy as them? Didn’t she want to see what her man could do…her man…who hadn’t even been there…who’d left her on her own…to die?
“He’s the last,” I yelled to her, though I did not turn to look.
“Let William take him,” she said loud.
I did turn now. We stared at each other for a beat.
“You can say yes…or you can say no. That’s how strong you are,” she said.
How strong?
Who was that other…Iris. I heard her then, “…you brought death here,” she said when I killed in her yard.
I looked back at this one on the ground. “My wife…says mercy. Up to me…I would kill you, shoot your every limb. Then in the gut so you could die slow like that man you killed…Michael.” Just saying his name…, “but…you get to hang now. You get to swing while your feet kick and the breath chokes out of you and you can’t gasp that noose is so tight.”
Noose. Iris said noose. Chained. To Addie. My…Addie.
“You shot through my door…my wife and baby…,” I was grinding my words. Oh God, the rage about knocked me off my feet, “but you get to hang now.” I kept my gun trained on him. If I killed him…she would see who I was. Who I really was. And death would come again. She would forgive me. But she would know me. Every story…she’d see it now…. And Johnny….
William said, “Your call.” He wouldn’t stand in my way.
She thought there was a choice. A yes or no. If I didn’t kill him, what? What choice for a man…just a man…just a….
“No trial for us,” I said to William, answering my own question right off. “She ain’t in it. I ain’t in it. This is on them…and you. You’re the law. You killed them. He’s your dumb ox for the slaughter. He hangs for Michael.”
William nodded.
I lowered my gun. There was another way. I lived for them. Just them.
She stood on the porch holding Janey. I walked quick to her. I pulled her to me, my arms around. I held her to me, and she breathed then. “Those others are all dead? You’re sure?” she said.
“Yes. It’s over.” I had to pull away. I needed to touch her, but it upset me too much, too feel her, to know how close we came…. Not the lover yet. Not yet. This one in my yard. Johnny gone.
She came after me, and kept her arm on me, and I stood there, my back to her but her touch…she tethered me like Iris said. She held me in the light. And I looked at our door. It was the symbol now. It told the story. It’s what I knew about the quiet. Trouble always ready to spring. It came in and got us.
William was bent, tying that one, broken arm and all. I turned to her and led her and the baby in the house so she wouldn’t see.
“He shot. I shot. He ran for the barn. Then you came,” she said to me, shaking now, our arms around each other.
I nodded. “You did good,” I said. But I couldn’t talk much. I had killed that one in the road. “They came for our money. They killed Michael,” I said, and such sorrow and such anger.
She put that arm around me more and held me tight. “My brave…brave man,” she whispered.
My hands spread on her. She was the fierce one, I knew her, the iron thing in her. She was the soldier much as me. Johnny knew. We all knew.
After a minute, I sat on the chair and pulled her and Janey onto my lap where I could get my arms all the way around them. I hadn’t been able to let myself feel it, but I did then. “If he’d a hurt you…hurt Jane...,” I said, my voice broken.
“He didn’t,” she said. “But you…are you hurt?”
I was banged up, but it was nothing. It was less then nothing. William let me do it. He knew I’d need it, and it was mine to decide. I gathered them to me, even with the blood on me, on my hands. Addie put her arm around me and kissed me. They were my sunlit bowers.
Gaylin rode up while we were catching the horses. He took news of Michael hard. He wanted to punish the one who lived. But he saw reason in taking him in. While we tied the bodies over their saddles I asked him about Tulley. I wanted no more trouble. No more.
“There’s no worry from him,” he said. “She wasn’t under anything legal or binding. He might a been mad when she ran off, but he’s probably got him another by now. She won’t be like my Rosie though.”
Lord, God, I’d never figure him when it came to that woman. He would ride with William to the cabin. They would gather Michael’s body and bring it to town with the others. There was no family still in these parts, but many he knew, many he rode with, the Twenty-Seventh and they would care. I asked him to stay with Addie and I would go, but he insisted he would do this last thing for our friend.
“Get to Greenup might want to stay. Our money comes in the morning if these outlaws told it fair.”
“Mayhap I will. They’re never going to believe one man took them all,” he said.
“That’s for William and Jimmy to work out,” I said. “Reckon I’ll see you there in the morning.”
That night, she did not cut our hair and I did not tell the stories. But Johnny and me did hammer out a new door and put it in place. Then he and his mother did take Janey between them and lie abed. I wanted them in one place. One stronghold I would guard with my life.
I sat on the porch, before that new door, my Enfield on my lap. I could sleep anytime if I was spent. But knowing the danger they had been in…under me…it kept my mind lit, it kept my eyes wide. I watched and listened, but it went beyond this dark earth. I was looking up. I was looking for him.
All my life I’d been told he knew my thoughts, that he plowed my mind like we plowed the earth. That he pulled my thoughts like I pulled up weeds or potatoes, and he took a look, and he judged me harsh if they weren’t the thoughts he’d tried to plant.
And I never knew what he wanted. He didn’t want me. I didn’t want him. So it was a stand off.
But tonight…I didn’t take him on those terms. I wiped the slate. I knew what I knew and I said, listen in.
I would never break the chain I had with her. I knew what I was here to do…and I had pledged to do it day Johnny come for me in the field.
This was my piece of earth. I intended to inherit it and draw them to me one day…and one day…and one day…for life. For the rest of it…I would serve.
And come the day, I’d lay me down for good and go back into this sweet earth, come that day I wanted them to know…I loved them.
This was my Promis
ed Land. My lambs upon it…my life.
When he shot…she stood. It should have been me, but all I could do was give her better weapons than Richard had. I saw the edges of me.
Well, I wanted to kill that son of a bitch. I wanted to break my kind of justice into his flesh and bones.
But she had pulled something from me. I had to use law. Big law, not my own. But I was left now…just left. I was a door maker. But that wasn’t enough.
I couldn’t spare her. I couldn’t figure every thing. I had spread myself. I’d armed her and gone for the boy. I was trying to herd. Trying to get them corralled so I could protect them. And I’d been tricked. And love, love was spreading me thin. Love was making me…smaller and smaller. Love was such a risk, and they bore the brunt.
I was never going to be enough. So I looked at Him, I looked at God, for this was the closest I would come in this life, I looked up at the back-side of his floor, and I said it soft, but I said it with sand. “Help me.”
Tom Tanner
Chapter Seventeen
Nearing Thanksgiving, a holiday we’d only started to celebrate separate from harvest since Lincoln had declared it, some changes got settled in the family. Beside all the marrying, Cousin pushed a golden plunger and got Seth a late admission to seminary in St. Louis. Add to that, he and his new wife had offered to board Seth as well.
That meant Cousin had rushed in the hero yet again and I was swallowing it down for I was no fool. Didn’t mean I didn’t gag a little, but I saw the good, I saw it.
Yes, Cousin and Lavinia had married, as I said they would. I had not much education, but I had me an eye for folks’ intentions and if ever a fella had troops stashed over the hill just in case…well he had Lavinia.
And Gaylin and Rosie lived in the room back of Ma and Pa’s, the one just emptied by Seth. Well, Ma had a daughter to replace Allie. She had me as addled as Gaylin did came to that woman. She wasn’t a bad one to have around, lively as a hive of bees, but I could not forget her roots, it wasn’t in me to go dumb. I had seen a side of her and I was stuck with it. But I had forgotten my Ma, the one who took all in, the one. It was no different with Rosie. As infuriating as it could be that none of us got to be too grand…it was a fact we were all a little grand. So there it was.
Addie had told me just that morning she had the monthly again. It was sorrow and relief. Last thing we needed was another to keep alive all we had going on. But I couldn’t wait, for that would be my crowning achievement in this world, to have a child I’d planted myself in my Addie. No disrespect to my other two. Lord knows if it was them alone, what more could a man ever ask for. But this other thing, planting my seed and watching it grow and come to harvest…it was a holy notion and that’s all.
I was not a religious man, not by any stretch. But I did talk regular to God now, and he seemed big enough to take it, least ways he had not yet struck me down. And it helped, though I don’t know why, but it did help to think there was something bigger out there than me and my foul temper. And whatever I had to do to tap it…well that was a small thing in comparison to the relief it somehow brought. For I had a very full plate and people I loved counting on me. It both inspired and terrified, much as I never felt so…whole.
I’ve walked off many a line…I’ve eyed them out, kept them true, my boots setting the course, my arms meeting the cost. But this line, this line on this day…joy.
Johnny, Gaylin and I marked it off. I was talking fast, faster than they could keep up sometimes. I didn’t know my words could advance without recoil, but I had thought so long and hard. My first plan had been changed, altered. It had grown the way live things did, a simple idea, a no, a yes, a yes, a yes, then we had a run-away situation.
Bricks were coming. They might be buried in snow over the winter, but the roads would be solid enough to haul them at least. Jacob had opened a brickyard outside of Greenup, and none too soon. I was the first order. Come spring I would start to build the walls of my cellar, that’s once I got it dug. And then I’d build the foundation for my house.
Now here’s the thing, this house we had now was but a hiccup on the side of what I planned to build. My bulwark. The monument of my love. For her.
We had argued it out, her and me, those brown eyes…damn they could hold. My hero’s money, for that is what she called it, that money did one thing, some of hers would do the other. Well, she gave me the speech. It was all ours, she said. All ours. She had earned hers on one battlefield, me on another.
Ours now. Ours. I had not heard one word rammed home so much since the word “Union,” in the war and “Jesus,” at the church.
Think of what we could do, she said, the freedom we could have, she said, to build the house as you see fit, if, she said, you would just give over, just pick this burr and let us be…free of your prejudice. Of your suspicion. Of your bullheaded principles. Of your cantankerous attitude.
So for a month we was back and forth on it. Then the glow wore off the sparring, and we weren’t laughing, and we weren’t trying to out clever the other. Weapons got drawn and we were fixing to duel, seemed like.
She called me a mule’s behind. I called her the head then, the braying part. She threw a vase, and we didn’t have but the one, and then I said we will not be throwing things and I finished just in time to duck before that jar of pickles barely cleared my head.
“I love those pickles,” I said, for they were Ma’s, and this was not honor, not nearly.
Oh, she was sorry, but I was sorry. I don’t know why, just her being sorry always got me so filled with regret I became sorry for the things she did she shouldn’t. Then we fought about whom was sorrier, and who should be sorrier and for what. Exhausting.
So we worked out a damn compromise and here’s what that meant…I was gonna give up something…my willy most likely…and she would give up nearly nothing…and there in the middle as she would draw the middle, not me, there…we settled.
My money was buying the foundation, the bricks. Hers…just about everything else. She said it like this, I laid it down. And she would build upon. Well, I liked it. And I was tired of fighting her, I just wanted to build the damn house. And she wasn’t telling me nothing…of course it was ours, all ours, but I felt the need that she understood, and kept understanding. I was laying my pride, and it wasn’t easy, I was learning, I was loving. That was what I was belly-aching about. But it didn’t stop me, none of it did, and that was love. I also got great pleasure and growing admiration for how she could string words. I loved to hear her argue. She was pretty well brilliant. So being prejudiced and suspicious and bullheaded and cantankerous was all I had to hang on to for she had everything else including the ready money and it had come from Cousin and I don’t care what kind of bow she put on it.
Fierce lovemaking all through the negotiations, fierce. There was no explaining us. What it was…didn’t matter. I saw beauty in her ugliest moments, when her face was twisted before she threw the pickles, when her face was caught in that moment when I filled her. Beauty. She was infuriating and exhilarating by turns. I could be so mad at her…my God so streaking red…and then just nothing but love and fire.
So with the bricks ordered, there was wood. I had been to the sawmill. The trees would come from Pa’s property, and I picked the kinds…oak mostly, walnut too, a little maple, especially for the furniture me and Pa would build.
The cellar alone could hide a company of men. Course it would not go the whole size of the place, but it would be ample for putting up our bounty, and until the ground froze, I’d be digging and marking it out.
In the back corner, an indoor water closet. I had read of one that ran into an underground cesspool, and this idea so fascinated me, a man never spent so much time in thought about how the shit should run.
Johnny was so happy to think this home would rise out of the ground come spring and summer. We would be busy then for I must also have a barn.
I drew that kitchen out for my beauty. She added a couple of
ideas, but she did love my plans. But in her generous way she said, the barn first, and she was right, but I wanted it all at once. I had me brothers and good friends, and the money to hire the help. So they would build and we would grow and a man would think twice before he stepped upon such a place of prosperity without invitation for we would be hospitable or hostile, by turn, depending on what was encouraged.
Addie Tanner
Chapter Eighteen
“I will not obey…just blindly obey,” I said to Tom one afternoon when he told me I was being contrary just for the sake of it.
“Well, you said you would obey me when we took those vows,” he said, the handsomeness so strong in him it lured me from the subject at hand which was a strong disagreement of what it meant for a wife to refuse to obey her husband.
“I…wasn’t listening enough the day we married. I was looking at you. You came in like a spring storm…remember? And I only saw you…I barely heard. I will obey no man…just keep my mouth shut and…I am not a simple woman.”
“Now listen here,” he said, and I did not fear a thing he said. What I feared was ever losing him. What I feared was this love so strong it had no reason. “I meant my vows,” he said, “every word. Next I’ll be hearing you didn’t hear ‘honor’ ‘sickness,’ ‘unto death.’”
“You make me so blooming mad,” I said flinging my dishrag at him.
“Lass…Lass….” He gathered me to him, laughing. I was not the same since the pickles. Had they struck him…but I thought he would catch them. I thought he would. And yet, I had thrown wild and expected him to right my rowdy ways.
I told him I was going to see his mother.
“Why?” he said. It alarmed him.
“I…I need her,” I said.
I saw it then. His face. He thought he had failed me. And that was not the difficulty. For I was failing him.
“I need…a mother,” I said. For there was not another way to say it that would spare him and free me to get the help I knew I needed.
“My darling. Have you been…wanting a mother?”
