CHAPTER 9 #2
Beck had come to the bucket fire for water, nobody close, just the two of them and the coals and the iron resting hot in the bed of them.
Wyatt set down the vaccine gun and worked his bad leg out straight with both hands, grinning through the wince, and said, conversational as weather, “You can't look at me.”
Beck went still. “I'm looking at you.”
“You're looking at my chin. You been looking at my chin and my boots and the whole damn county since I got out of the truck.” Wyatt said it gentle. There was no edge on it anywhere, and that was the cruelty of it. “Beck. You know I don't blame you.”
“Don't.” It came out lower than he meant. “Wyatt, don't.”
“I forgave you on the way to the hospital.” Wyatt's voice didn't rise.
He picked a stem of grass out of the dirt and looked at it instead of Beck, giving him that mercy at least. “Ten years ago, in the dark, with my leg the way it was, before they ever cut into me.
I had a long drive to think on it and I used it.
You're the only one in this whole story who never signed off on it. Everybody else closed the book. You been carrying it around open like it still says something new.”
Beck looked at the fire. The heat came off the iron in a shimmer and somewhere behind him a calf bawled and the smoke rolled and he smelled it again, branding-iron smoke and singed hair, the smell of being marked, of belonging to a place by being burned into it, and he thought, Some marks don't take. Some of us run before the iron sets.
“You'd have left it on the bridge,” Beck said. “If it'd been you driving. You wouldn't have run.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. We'll never know, because it was you driving and me riding shotgun being a smartmouth about it.” Wyatt flicked the grass away.
“That's the thing nobody'll let me say. I was there, Beck.
It was wet and dark and you swerved right, away from the thing that'd have killed somebody worse, and the price came due on my leg instead of a coffin.
You hear me? My leg, not a box. I keep the leg. I'd keep it a hundred times.”
“Stop.” The word ground out of him.
“Take it.” Wyatt reached out and gripped Beck's wrist — the bad one, the pinned one, and didn't know it, and Beck didn't tell him. “Take the thing I'm handing you, you stubborn son of a gun. My arm's getting tired.”
And there it was, laid right out in the dirt between them, the one absolution in the whole world Beck wanted and the one he could not put his hand to.
Wyatt thought forgiveness was a gift, a thing you handed across a fire to a man who needed it, and you took it because you loved the man holding it out.
But Beck knew the truth of it the way you know cold water.
Forgiveness you don't deserve isn't a gift.
It's a debt. One more thing he's giving me that I'll never pay back, and the giving makes the owing worse. Every easy word out of Wyatt's mouth put Beck deeper in the hole. The grace was the punishment. There was no bottom to it.
He took his wrist back. Gentle, but he did it.
“I'm glad you came today,” Beck said, which was true, and was a coward's answer, and Wyatt's face said he'd caught the dodge in it.
Wyatt looked at him a long moment. The grin came back, but slower, and it didn't reach as far.
“Yeah,” he said. “Well. I'll be at the table. Birdie made beans.” He got the cane under him and rose in stages, and he was halfway up before Beck thought to put a hand out and Wyatt waved it off, not unkind, just a man who'd learned to stand his own way. “I got it. I always got it.”
He clapped Beck's shoulder on his way past and went toward the food on his slow swinging stride, and people lit up as he came, and Beck stood alone at the fire with the iron going cold in the coals and felt like the worst man in the county.
Across the pens, by the chutes, Laney had stopped working.
A vaccine gun hung forgotten in her hand and she was looking at him — at what was left of the two of them standing there in the smoke — and her face had gone very still.
Vet calm. The look she got when something hurt her or rearranged a thing she'd thought was nailed down. She didn't know the whole of it.
She couldn't. But she'd seen something in how he could not lift his eyes to his best friend, and the careful arithmetic was moving behind her green eyes — she logged it, the way she logged everything, filed it next to whatever she already believed about him, and it didn't quite fit the slot.
She looked away when he caught her. First, this time. That was new.
He didn't have time to wonder what it meant, because that was when the wrong truck came down the lane — too big, too clean, too fast.
---
It parked sideways across two other men's trucks like the lane belonged to it.
Dell Vance got out in pressed jeans and reflective sunglasses and a snap shirt without a speck of dust on it, and stood there a second letting everybody clock him, chin up, the way a man does when crowding a space is the only thing he knows how to do.
The branding work didn't stop, but it changed.
The easy noise of the morning pulled in on itself, the neighbors going quiet and busy, the way stock goes still when a coyote tops the rise.
Everybody at these pens knew Sterling Vance held Red Mesa's paper.
And here came the son, walking the ground uninvited on the one day the whole country had come to stand with the Calhouns.
He came straight for Beck. Of course he did.
“Branding day.” Dell said it like a man reading a quaint sign.
He hooked his thumbs in his belt and looked out over the pens, the smoke, the working crews.
“Hell of a turnout. All these good people taking a day off their own places to bleed your daddy's calves.” His grin spread wide and showed too much.
“Real neighborly. Be a shame if there wasn't going to be a Red Mesa next spring for them to brand for.”
“You lost, Dell?” Beck pulled his glove back on. He kept his voice flat and bored, the level tone you used on green stock that was looking for a reason to blow. “Vance ground's that way. The clean ground. You can tell it by how nobody's worked it.”
“Funny.” Dell took off the sunglasses, slow, hung them in his collar so Beck could see the gym-tan and the smug ruddy flush.
“I'm here being neighborly too. Came to deliver a message my daddy was too polite to drive over himself.” He looked at the iron in the fire, at the crescent-and-mesa brand glowing dull red in the coals, and something moved over his face that Beck didn't like, a kind of hunger.
“Pretty brand. Old. Be a shame to retire it. You know the water board takes a hard look at outfits that can't keep up their use. Use it or lose it. That's not me talking, that's the law. Daddy's just helping it along.”
“Get to the part where you leave,” Beck said.