Chapter 13
Marielle had the beans warming and the last of the cornbread in the skillet, and David sat at the table where he’d settled when the two of them came in off the road, both of them with an ear half cocked toward the door.
When Abe came in she knew before he’d got a word out that something had landed on him in the hours they’d been apart.
It was in the way he came through the door. A man carrying a thing comes through a door differently than a man who isn’t.
She looked at Abe and waited.
He pulled out a chair and sat and hung his hat on the back of it at his shoulder and looked at the grain of the table a moment in the way he had, the way of a man laying his cards in order in his hand before he plays the first of them.
“We felt it before we heard it,” David said, and pushed the coffeepot across toward the empty cup. “Come up through the floorboards at first light like the ground turning over. I thought the world was ending.”
“Half the county thought the same,” Marielle said. She looked at Abe. “That was you.”
Abe looked up and met her eye. “That was me. Nash’s stable.” He took the cup David had poured him. “I wanted to see who came when it went, and how they came. Nash came. The sheriff. Three deputies. And nobody else at all.”
“Nobody off the river,” she said.
“Not one man off the river.”
She turned back to the stove and gave the beans a slow turn and chewed on that.
The men down at the crossing would have heard the blast as plain as she had.
Sound ran flat and far in this country, and farther after rain, and the stable sat close enough to the heart of town that the shock of it would have rolled down to the bank with plenty left in it to be felt.
They had heard it, and they had stayed put where they were, or pulled back away from it—either one a choice, and the choice was the same choice both ways. They would not be seen running to answer for what happened on Nash’s ground.
And there was a whole arrangement between Nash and Flores folded up tight inside that one refusal, the shape of who answered to whom and who could afford to be seen doing what.
“The sheriff stopped me,” Abe said. “On the main street, going up. Stood out in the road and put himself in front of me.”
“Briggs,” she said, without turning. “He stops anybody he doesn’t know on sight. It’s the most of what the office amounts to, with him.”
“He let me know they don’t care for strangers here. Or foreigners. Drew the line between the two of them and put me on the wrong side of both.”
“He said that to you. Out loud.”
“In about those words.” Abe looked down at his hands flat on the table. “Said it like he was reading me a town ordinance off a wall. A rule rather than a feeling.”
“With Briggs it’s the both at once, and no daylight between them.
” She pulled the skillet off the heat and turned the cornbread out onto the board and started cutting it.
“He’s been Nash’s dog since Nash’s own father was still above the ground and holding the leash.
He does what he’s told and he’s never once in his life troubled himself to wonder whether he ought to be told it. ”
She carried the board and the pot of beans to the table and set them down and sat. “And the house. Did you get in to see the man himself.”
“His wife came to the door. He was out.” Abe took a piece of the cornbread and turned it in his fingers and didn’t eat it. “Said he’d be back inside an hour or two. I told her I’d wait on the road, and then I went round the side and had my look at the stable instead of waiting.”
“Charlotte,” Marielle said. “Charlotte Nash.”
“She didn’t strike me as a woman who knows the half of what her husband’s about.
Or one who’d tell it if she did.” He set the cornbread down.
“The padlock on the side door of that stable was new. Better than the one on the front doors. The kind of lock a man hangs when it’s what’s behind the door he’s minding, and not what people think is behind it. ”
“And you got the smell of what was in it.” She watched his face. “Before you blew it to pieces.”
He looked at her. “You knew what was in it.”
“I knew there was a thing in that stable that wasn’t horses.
I’ve known it the better part of a year.
” She poured the coffee around, a cup to him and a cup to David and the last for herself.
“I couldn’t prove the first thing about it, and I couldn’t get one soul with the authority to force the doors to so much as walk past it and look, not without going through Nash to do it, and going through Nash meant telling Nash I’d been looking. So I sat on it. A year, I sat on it.”
“Well, there’s nothing left in it to look at now,” David said, not unkindly. “He took care of that.”
“No.” She set the pot down on the trivet. “But now Nash knows somebody looked. That’s a thing he didn’t know yesterday.” She turned to Abe. “And he’ll want to know who looked, and want it bad. Briggs already has your face. He’ll have given it to Nash before that fire was cold.”
“Briggs has a face,” Abe said. “He hasn’t got a name to hang on it, nor a reason for it being in his town. I gave the wife a name when she asked it. It wasn’t the name that’s on the federal paper, and it’s a common enough one that it’ll lead nobody anywhere.”
Her mother came in then from the back porch and stood a moment in the doorway between the rooms, taking in the three of them gathered at the table over the coffee and the beans.
She was steadier on her feet this morning than she’d been in some days, which Marielle had learned to read for the grim thing it was, that the night before had gone bad enough that the body had finally refused to take any more and shut the wanting of it down for a spell.
Her mother looked at Abe, and then at the food set out on the table, and her face did its small careful arithmetic.
“Something’s happened,” she said.
“Sit down, Mama. Eat a little something first.”
Her mother came to the table and sat and took the bowl Marielle filled for her and ate one slow spoonful of the beans and set the spoon down on the rim of the bowl and folded her hands and looked at Abe across the table.
“You’ll tell me,” she said. “Not around me. I’ve had enough of men telling things around me in my own kitchen.”
“I went up to Nash’s place this morning,” Abe said, and he said it to her direct, square in the eye, which Marielle marked and was grateful for the way she’d been grateful for it the night before.
There were men, most men, who talked over her mother’s head as though the drink had carried off her hearing and her wits along with her steadiness, and this one didn’t, hadn’t once.
“His stable’s gone. He’d been keeping it full of rifles and cartridges and a quantity of powder, and I lit a fuse and burned the whole of it to the ground a little after sunup.”
Her mother held his eyes a long moment, taking the measure of the thing.
“My husband knew about that stable,” she said.
The table went still around the words.
“He spoke of it the once. Eight months, it would have been, before he was gone. Maybe a little more.”
She took the spoon back up but didn’t use it, only held it.
“Said Nash was keeping things in that stable he’d no business keeping, and that he was looking quietly into the why of it.
He never raised it again to me after that one time.
I took it that he’d looked and found nothing he could use, and let it lie.
Emmett let a great many things lie that he couldn’t get a clean hold on.
It was the patience the work had taught him. ”
“Did he say what he meant to do about it?” Abe said. “If he found the hold he was after?”
“Emmett didn’t say beforehand what he meant to do.
It wasn’t his way to. He’d tell you what he’d done once it was done and not a day sooner, and not always then.
” She ate a little of the beans, slow. “But whatever he turned up about that stable, he turned it up close enough to the end of him that I have never once in two years been able to believe the two things were strangers to each other. A man looks into a thing, and then a man is gone. You don’t have to be a Ranger to do that sum. ”
Marielle looked from her mother to Abe and felt the cold of it settle.
“He walked up the road to that dinner,” she said. “Whatever he’d found out about the stable, whatever he had on Nash, he carried it up that road with him in his head that evening. And Nash told the whole town the next morning he never arrived to hear it.”
“Which leaves it two ways,” Abe said, “and only two. Either Nash had him dealt with on the road, before ever he reached the gate, the way the boy’s account would have it.
Or your father reached the house, and Nash had him dealt with there, over the supper or after it, and the never-arrived was a thing Nash put about to keep the road clear and the trail cold. The dinner being the means of it, in that telling. Not just the place he was bound for.”
“The men who sat at that dinner.” David spoke up from his end of the table. He’d been quiet through the meal, eating steadily and listening harder than he ate. “Any of them ever say how Emmett seemed that evening? When he got there, if he got there. Before he left here, even.”
He looked at Marielle. “A man walking into a trap and a man walking into a supper, they don’t carry themselves the same. Somebody might have seen the difference without knowing they saw it.”
Marielle looked at him, and then away, at the window. “He came out onto the porch to me before he left,” she said. “I was reading. He stood at the rail a while.”
She stopped, and the porch came up in front of her whole, the lamp and the moths and the shape of him against the dark.
“He was himself. Easy. Not a man walking into anything he was afraid of. He told me Nash would do his posturing, and he’d sit and listen to it and nod and come home, and that I shouldn’t wait up but that he’d tell me about it in the morning. ”