Chapter 7
They rode until the sun was an hour from the hills and the heat had dropped from brutal to merely uncomfortable.
The brush country gave way to slightly more open ground and ahead of them a line of cottonwoods stood along a low bank, their tops moving in whatever small current of air ran above the flat calm below.
David had been quiet since the flat. Not the silence of a shaken man, Abe had decided, but the silence of a man doing sums, working through what had happened and what it meant and what the arithmetic came out to.
The horse walked and their shadows went long to the east.
“Why did you do that?” David said.
“You were going to ask me eventually.”
“I’m asking now.”
Abe watched the cottonwoods. “Where are you from?”
“Texas. Bexar County originally. I’ve moved around.”
“You have family here?”
“Some.” A pause. “Why does that matter?”
“It doesn’t. I was curious.” Abe shifted in the saddle. “I came from a town in Russia. You don’t need to know where exactly. What you need to know is what happened there.” He watched a hawk work a thermal above the cottonwoods, circling without effort. “There was a thing called a pogrom.
“It means roughly, to wreak havoc. It was what the neighbors did to the Jewish neighborhoods every few years when something needed blaming on someone. They burned the houses. Destroyed the shops. Killed who they killed. The authorities either helped or found somewhere else to be.” He paused.
“It wasn’t legal. It wasn’t illegal either, the way it worked out. It was simply permitted.”
David said nothing.
“I came here on a boat in 1881,” Abe said. “I stood on the deck for most of the crossing because the below-deck air wasn’t worth breathing, and I looked at the water and thought about what I was leaving and what I was coming to. I had a picture of it in my head. America.”
He watched the hawk turn one more time and then drop below the tree line. “The picture was not entirely accurate. But it was better than the thing I’d left.”
“And then you ride into Texas,” David said.
“And then I ride into Texas and see four men about to hang someone for the crime of keeping company with a woman who wasn’t told she wasn’t supposed to.” He paused. “I know that sight. I have a name for it in three languages. I wasn’t going to ride past it.”
The cottonwoods were close now. The horse picked up its pace slightly, smelling the water.
“Most men would have,” David said.
“Most men haven’t seen what I’ve seen.” He let the horse carry them down to the creek bank and stop at the water’s edge and drink. “Most men get to choose whether something is their business. I stopped having that option a long time ago.”
David was quiet for a moment. The creek ran clear over flat limestone, shallow and steady.
“Thank you,” David said.
“You’re welcome.”
“I mean it.”
“I know you mean it.” Abe watched the horse drink. “Do you know the way to Colinas Rojas?”
“Know it well. I worked a cattle drive last fall that went through the county.” He paused. “I wondered where you were headed.”
“Does that change anything?”
“No.” Another pause. “It’s a day and a half south by southwest. Maybe two days depending on how you go.”
“We’ll figure the route in the morning. We’ll camp here tonight.” Abe looked at the cottonwoods flanking the creek, the way they opened up thirty yards upstream to a flat sandy stretch back off the bank. “Up there. Off the open ground.”
They made camp in the shelter of the trees, back far enough that the firelight wouldn’t carry to the flat.
Abe kept the fire small, the kind that gave heat and let you cook without announcing itself to the landscape.
He had beans and dried beef and a small tin of lard and he put it all together in the pan and it made something that qualified as supper if you didn’t hold supper to a high standard.
David ate two full portions and didn’t apologize for it. Abe respected that.
The coffee was better than the food. It usually was when the food wasn’t much. He poured two cups and they sat on opposite sides of the low fire and the cottonwoods moved above them and the creek talked to itself in the dark.
“Do you know where your name comes from?” Abe asked.
David looked at him across the fire with the frank assessment of a man deciding whether a question was worth answering honestly. “My mother named me,” he said. “She had reasons she didn’t always explain.”
“Your mother named you after a king.”
“I’ve never heard that.”
“Not many people have, where you come from.” Abe set his cup on the ground beside him.
“His name was David. He started out keeping sheep on a hillside in a country called Judea. Youngest of eight brothers, nobody’s idea of anything important.
When a prophet came to choose one of those brothers for something that would change the course of things, the father didn’t even bother calling David in from the field. ”
David was watching him now.
“The prophet looked at the seven brothers who were brought out,” Abe said.
“Big men, most of them. Impressive. The prophet looked at the first one and thought, this must be the one, and God said no. And the second and God said no. One after another through all seven and no each time. The prophet was confused. He asked God what he was looking for. And God said, I don’t see what you see.
You look at the face, the height, the breadth of the shoulders. I look at what’s underneath all that.”
The fire shifted, a log settling, and the light changed between them.
“Then they brought David in from the field,” Abe said. “This boy with sheep smell on him and dirt on his hands, youngest and least, and God said that’s the one.”
“Why him?”
“The book doesn’t give a simple answer. He was brave, certainly.
He killed a giant that an army was too frightened to fight.
Walked out to meet it with a sling and five smooth stones from a river, while the soldiers watched from the hill.
” Abe picked up his coffee. “The giant laughed at him. Right up until the stone hit him between the eyes.”
David had his arms on his knees and was leaning toward the fire with the focused attention of a person hearing something they hadn’t heard before but recognized.
“He became a great king,” Abe said. “Built a city. Won wars that had no business being won. Wrote songs. Hundreds of songs.” He paused.
“He also made terrible mistakes. Wanted things he had no right to want and took them. Got people killed who shouldn’t have been. The book doesn’t skip any of that.”
“Most stories about great men skip the bad parts,” David said.
“This one doesn’t. That’s part of why I think it’s true.” Abe drank his coffee. “He was a real man. With a real man’s capacity for both things.”
David looked at the fire for a while. The cottonwood leaves above them turned and showed their pale undersides.
“Your people know this story,” he said. It wasn’t quite a question.
“It comes from our book. The Christians have it too, but it started with us, about two thousand years before Christ was a consideration.” Abe refilled his cup from the pot at the fire’s edge. “You said you’d heard pieces of it.”
“The giant,” David said. “I knew about the giant. A preacher told it when I was small. He made it sound like a lesson about faith.”
“It is that,” Abe said. “It’s also a story about a boy who everyone overlooked doing something that everyone who was supposed to do it couldn’t manage.” He looked at David. “I thought you might find it relevant.”
Something crossed David’s face, a complicated movement that wasn’t quite amusement. He looked back at the fire.
The fire had settled lower and the dark pressed in closer around the edges of the grove. David picked up a stick from the ground and turned it in his fingers without purpose.
“How did you end up doing this kind of work?” he said. “The tracking.”
Abe looked at the coals. “Fell into it, mostly. I came off the boat in New York in the spring of 1881. Forty dollars and a single bag and a facility with languages that turned out to be more useful than anything else I’d brought.”
“How many languages.”
“Russian. Yiddish. German well enough to work in. English I taught myself from a book I found in a market stall when I was nineteen.” He drank his coffee.
“A book of translated American speeches. Political ones, mostly. The English in it was formal and somewhat elevated. I spent two years unlearning parts of it and replacing them with what people actually said.”
David almost smiled at that. “Is that why you talk the way you talk?”
“Partly.” Abe set his cup down. “I worked my way west from New York. Various things. I was in Missouri when the tracking work found me. A newspaper editor whose wife had run off with another man. He needed someone to find where they’d gone. He paid me in room and board while I worked it out.”
“Did you find them?”
“I did.”
“And then.”
“And then the county marshal heard about it and had work of his own, and that work paid in actual money, and I discovered the skill translated reliably from one job to the next.” He watched the fire for a moment.
“I’m patient. I can read terrain. I don’t get emotional about the work.
Those three things together are rarer than you’d think. ”
David nodded slowly. He was quiet for a moment, turning the stick.
“Where were you before Arkansas?” he said.
“Texas the first time. San Antonio. Then the border towns. Matamoros for a stretch.” He paused. “That’s where this particular job started, more or less. Though I didn’t know it at the time.”
David looked at him. He didn’t ask the follow-up, just left the space open, which Abe noted. A man who knew how to leave space was a man who’d learned something about how conversations worked.
“I was looking for someone,” Abe said. “Still am. The Arkansas piece was one thread of it.” He left it there. It was enough.
David looked back at the fire. He set the stick down.
“That woman,” Abe said after a while. “The Connelly woman.”
David didn’t look up.
“I don’t want to talk about her.”
Abe waited.
“You don’t owe me anything for what happened back there,” David said. “I appreciate what you did. That doesn’t mean you get the rest of it.”
“I’m not trying to collect.”
“All the same.”
“Alright.”
David glanced at him then. A short look, evaluating. Whatever he saw in Abe’s face seemed to be what he’d hoped to see, because his shoulders dropped a fraction and he put the stick down.
“Thank you,” David said. “For not pushing.”
“There’s no point in pushing. You’ll talk when you talk or you won’t.”
“I won’t.”
“That’s the third option,” Abe said. “It’s allowed.”
David almost smiled at that. He drank some of his coffee instead.
The fire had gone down to coals and the dark had come fully in around the edges of the cottonwood grove. Somewhere across the flat a coyote started up, two quick notes and a long descending one, and then nothing. The creek kept its steady conversation.
“Get some sleep,” Abe said. “We’ll ride early.”
David spread his bedroll and pulled his boots off and lay back and within a few minutes his breathing evened out and slowed. He was young enough to sleep like that, fast and complete, the body simply taking what it needed. Abe had been that way once.
He laid out his own bedroll and set his boots where his hand would find them and put his gun belt alongside and lay back and looked up at the cottonwood branches moving against the stars.
Sleep didn’t come. It did this sometimes, withheld itself for reasons that weren’t clear and couldn’t be negotiated with.
He lay still and kept his breathing slow and let his mind go where it went, which tonight it went back the way he’d come, not through Arkansas and Missouri and the particular geography of the work, but further, all the way back across the water to the town he’d grown up in.
The smell of it in winter, snow and pine smoke and his mother’s bread on Friday mornings.
The sound of the prayers through the synagogue wall when he’d been too young to sit still and had been sent outside.
The street he’d lived on, mud in spring and frozen solid in January, the same faces in the windows year after year.
One face in particular. He’d been twenty-two and she’d been twenty, and she had the particular kind of laugh that made whatever preceded it seem worth it, and she’d looked at him across the table at her uncle’s house with a directness that had caught him so off guard he’d knocked his water glass over, which had made her laugh, which had not helped matters.
He reached inside his shirt and found the locket by feel. Small and oval and worn smooth, the catch requiring a specific pressure to open. He pressed it and it gave and he held the open locket in his palm.
He couldn’t see anything in the dark. He never could, at night.
During the day the strand of hair was pale gold, almost colorless in strong light.
He’d cut it himself, the morning before he left, when she was still asleep, taking just enough.
She’d had enough to spare. The sprig of grass he’d tied it with had dried and gone brittle sometime in the first year and he was careful with it now.
He brought the locket up and put it to his nose and breathed in.
There was nothing left of the scent. He’d known that for years. He went on trying anyway, the way you kept reaching for something after you’d already established it wasn’t there, some residual instruction in the body that the mind hadn’t managed to override.
He closed the locket slowly and lay still holding it against his chest.
“Layla tov,” he said, barely above his breath. Good night. He closed his fingers around the locket. “Ahuvati.”
He lay still for a long time. The cottonwood leaves moved above him. The creek kept going. Eventually, without his deciding to, he slept.