Chapter 26
Images swam before Ben’s muddled mind. He saw Father Tillman smiling at him, calling him up to the front of the church to read the next passage in the Bible. “Ben has been doing an excellent job reading lately,” the priest said proudly.
Then there was Sister Matthews, frowning as she sat with Ben on the rim of the valley.
They looked down at the orphanage and the church as though they themselves were God, contemplating what He’d created.
“You’re a good boy, Ben. You could do anything you want to.
Why go fight in a war that isn’t yours?”
Elliot rode hard and fast on a horse, the wind streaming through his dark hair. “You just wait, Ben old boy! We’re gonna be rich! Richer than you’ve ever imagined! And we’ll never be hungry again!”
The scenes flashed by, every one of them too bright, every one of them moving too fast. The voices echoed and faded, swirling into each other. The images mixed, memories turning into nightmares.
Elliot became one of the boys at the orphanage, lost and hungry without his daddy. Father Tillman’s humble robes changed to the long duster and brimmed hat of an outlaw, and he stalked through a town with his rifle strapped to his back and a look of fury on his face.
Sister Matthews pointed her finger at him, screaming incoherently as her face thinned and hollowed until she was nothing more than a skull in a habit.
Pain washed the images away for a moment, pure anguish sweeping his body until it had consumed his life.
Then Hattie appeared. Her lips were puckered thoughtfully, and she carried Father Tillman’s rifle over one shoulder. After a moment, she swung the rifle down and aimed it at Ben’s stomach, poking the barrel straight into his war wound.
“Life is too hard, Ben. Why should we have to suffer all the time?”
Before she could pull the trigger and end it all, something cold smacked his face. Ben gasped as the frigid water dripped down his chin. He opened his eyes to find that the true nightmare was waiting for him as he woke up.
“Ben!” Cutter’s face was so close that Ben could see the brown stains on his teeth. “You’re awake! Good! That means you’ll be around for all the fun.”
His whole body was awash with agony. Ben hurt from the roots of his hair to his ankles. There was no flesh left, only bruises.
He had to get away from Cutter. More importantly, he had to find Hattie. They didn’t know she was traveling with Ben. In his bleary and confused mind, that was one fact he held onto tightly.
Ben tried to get his feet underneath him so he could run.
The world wasn’t working correctly. His feet weren’t touching the ground at all.
His arms were raised above his head, and he couldn’t get them down.
Slowly, Ben came to understand that he was hung from his wrists with his boots just inches from the floor.
Cutter laughed as he watched Ben struggle.
“What’s the matter? Aren’t you feeling good?
I suppose it might be because you hit the doorframe on the way into this little barn.
Or it might be the way I dragged you down the porch steps by your hair.
All purely an accident, of course.” He threw his head back and laughed.
“Where are we?” Ben asked. The half-door that led out the back of one of the stalls and into a pasture hung open, creaking on its hinges and letting a cold breeze bite his face.
“You’re hanging from your hands with a bullet in your back, practically looking death in the eye, and you want to know where you are?” Cutter slapped his knees and stood up, taking a few steps away from Ben.
“Yes,” Ben insisted. He really only cared where Hattie was, but he’d have to make sense of his own situation first. Were they still at the inn? Had Cutter brought them someplace else?
“Well, fine. I’ve got a moment.” Cutter strode over to a small table. A canvas bag sat on it, and he opened it up. “This is just a little barn behind Mama’s inn. Bo and I used to play here when we were boys.”
He lifted a knife from the bag and whisked off the sheath. The curved blade gleamed even in the dim, dusty light that came through the windows. Cutter set it on the table.
“This was where we got our start, you could say,” Cutter went on. “We used to catch grasshoppers out in the field. Then we’d nail them to the posts and see how long it took for them to stop twitching. You know how to use a hammer, don’t you?”
A hollow formed in the center of Ben’s pain. He’d killed another man. He’d told Hattie he was a killer, and he’d been right. It was his blow that’d dropped Bo to the ground. Even in the split second Ben had to assess the situation, he knew that Bo would never get up again.
Most of the deaths he’d caused were ones he could never know about. The men who died on the front lines, surprised by an attack that came about from the messages Ben carried through the states, would never know his name or his face. Nor would he ever know theirs, and yet they haunted him.
Clint, the father who watched his family get murdered, had looked directly into Ben’s eyes as he prepared for revenge. Ben had been faster, but there had been no witnesses in the middle of that desert. Nobody was left to make Ben pay for what he’d done. Nobody had seen him but God.
Now, though, it had finally caught up with him. He’d killed a man right in front of his brother. The Kincaids were some of the worst that humanity had to offer, but it was from Cutter that Ben would finally get the punishment he deserved.
It was so terrible and so ironic that Ben hardly knew how to handle it. It made him want to laugh. What had Ben been fighting for? What had any of the soldiers been fighting for? The right to go on killing each other after the war was over?
And who would care once he was dead?
He went back to the orphanage in his mind, a place he lived even when his body couldn’t be there. Ben would get what he deserved, but what about the children at St. Thomas? Would they make it through the winter, or would they starve to death when Ben didn’t return?
Worse, what if Cutter returned in his stead? What if the awful man decided it was worth a couple days’ ride to go back to the valley and torture everyone at the orphanage as payment for what Ben had done.
He no longer wanted to laugh. He wanted to weep, but he couldn’t tell if the dampness on his face was from tears or blood.
Cutter lifted another knife from the bag, oblivious to the torture Ben was putting himself through. “Once we got old enough, we started hunting.
We’d bring our trophies back here. It was a good place to skin them and gut them. Sometimes we’d cut their heads off and put them up on the wall, but then Mama started complaining about all the flies.” He laughed, ending with a little sigh of wistfulness.
Ben pulled gently at the ropes around his wrists, testing the knots. A long and excruciating death might be exactly what he deserved, but his instincts fought against it anyway. He clawed at the rope, but it was bound tight.
The remnants of old horse stalls lined the side of the barn behind him. He’d have to swing back and forth several times until he got close, and even then, Ben didn’t think he’d have the strength to brace himself on a stall gate while he untied his hands.
And of course, Cutter wasn’t going to let him do that.
Cutter lifted the next item from his bag. It was made of iron and looked like a pair of pliers, but the ends were broad and flat. Anything that got caught in its metal jaws would be held tight.
“When I got a little older, I got a job with a butcher over in Prescott,” Cutter told him. “I was probably about your age, but I thought I knew everything. Kind of like you. On the very first day, he taught me how to butcher a pig. I knew I was going to like it there.”
Cutter carried the pliers as he walked over to Ben.
“Do you know what these are for? When you’ve gutted a pig, you use these to grab the skin.
Then you pull it away, peel it nice and slow.
There’s this sound the skin makes when it separates from the muscles, this quiet tearing.
I like that sound. I wonder if your body will make it. ”
He smacked the pliers against his hand and went back to the bag. “The thing was, the pigs were already dead. That made them easy to work on. You’re about half-dead, Ben, but I’m not going to kill you. I’m going to take you apart, piece by piece.”
A strange calm came over Ben. It was a peace he shouldn’t be feeling while Cutter told him about all that he was going to do, but he was resigned.
There would be no way to convince Cutter that he shouldn’t do this.
There was no way for him to escape. He was truly going to die, and he could do nothing about it.
“Oh, yes,” Cutter promised. “Nice and slow. That’s the way to do it. I wonder how long you’ll live before all the blood drains out of you and soaks into the dirt? I’ve killed a lot of men, but this time I get to do it my way.”
“Then just do it,” Ben urged him.
That only made Cutter laugh again. His dark eyes shimmered.
“Don’t rush me, now! I’ve learned how to find pleasure in my life no matter what I’m doing.
I’ll sleep soundly tonight whether I leave you hanging here or if I cut you up and put your pieces in all four corners of this barn, but I’m still the one running the show. And first, we’ve got to talk about Bo.”
The next knife Cutter retrieved had a strange tip on the blade.
It was bent backwards and sharpened so that there was a short cutting surface on the backside of the knife.
“This one is for when I gut you,” he told Ben.
“Just one little cut is all it takes. Then I can stick this part under your skin and just pull it down, opening you right on up!”
Ben closed his eyes and prayed. It was a habit he’d gotten out of since he’d joined the army, even though men had prayed all around him on the battlefield and in their tents. He begged God for forgiveness and understanding.