Chapter 15
Abe gave them a full hour gone down the north road after the Hendersons, and then he went up toward town himself on foot in the last failing of the light, the hour when a man walking draws the least eye, when the day’s work has been laid down and the evening’s hasn’t yet been taken up and the street belongs to no one in particular and notices no one in particular crossing it.
He didn’t go to Nash’s house. The house had the wife in it, and a stranger calling at the front door twice inside two days was the sort of thing a wife mentions to a husband over the supper table, idle.
And a thing like that, mentioned idle, was how a careful man first caught the scent of you.
He went instead toward what was left of the stable.
It was a black wreck of a thing now in the dusk, the heavy timbers fallen in upon themselves and still ticking and settling with the heat held in them, a thin gray ribbon of smoke standing straight up off the ruin of it into the dead and windless air.
The smell of it carried a long way, charred wood and something sharper under it, scorched metal, the gun oil cooked off the ruined rifles.
A boy had been set to watch the embers, fourteen or so, bored past bearing with the duty, flinging pebbles into the deep ash to watch them throw up their little puffs.
He didn’t so much as turn his head as Abe passed by on the far side of the road in the gathering dark, only one more shape going somewhere in the dusk, a workman bound home to his supper.
What Abe was after lay past the stable and the field beyond it. The deep timber that stood north of the field, and the man dug into the ground in the heart of it.
He came at the woods wide, the way he’d come at them the first time, the way he came at most things, swinging well east off the road and into the brush and then working north along the ragged outer edge of the tree line with the last of the gray light at his back and his own long shadow thrown out ahead.
The dogs had been through here since morning, and recently.
He could read the whole of where they’d gone in the failing light, the churned-up ground and the brush broken at dog height and the scuff of boot heels among the paw marks, the places a dog had cast about in a circle and the places it had run straight.
Four animals, he made it, and maybe six men working them, in a search pattern that told him whoever set the pattern and ran the dogs along it knew his business and had run a search before.
And the pattern told him a second thing, better than the first. It broke off at the edge of the deep timber and turned back. They had gone in among the big trees and come out the far side of it empty, and had gone on home to their suppers with nothing.
Good. That meant the hole had held under them. That meant Samson was still in the ground where Abe had left him.
He found it in the very last of the light, and he found it the same way he’d found it the first time, not by the thing itself but by the wrongness laid over the thing.
A patch of the forest floor that lay a half inch too even, too composed, the fallen leaves on it settled in a pattern that no wind that ever blew had laid them in.
He went down on his haunches a good twenty feet off from it and held still and listened with his whole body, and after a while it came to him, faint, up through the made ground.
The small particular sounds a man makes when he’s working hard to make no sound at all and not quite managing it.
The shift of a body’s weight on packed bedding. A held breath let slowly out.
He didn’t draw his gun this time. That had been the error the first time, the gun drawn, and he’d carried the look on the man’s face away with him and didn’t care to put it there again.
“Jennings,” he said. Low, pitched down into the ground.
Everything beneath the door stopped at once.
“It’s the man from this morning. The one over your hole with the gun.
I’m alone, nobody’s behind me, and the dogs have gone home for the night, you’ll have heard them go.
” He kept his voice level and pitched to carry no further than the made ground and the man under it.
“I’m going to lift your door now, slow. Don’t do a thing in the next few seconds that the both of us will have to be sorry for after. ”
A long silence ran out under the leaves. Then it came, muffled, up through the earth, a voice gone to gravel and dust from disuse and from breathing close air in the dark.
“Lift it slow, then, like you say. And you keep both your hands out where what light there’s left can find them.”
Abe worked his fingers in under the lip of the lid and raised it up.
It was good work, the door, better than a hunted man living in a grave had any business making.
A frame of bent willow withes with a hide stretched taut across it and the sod and the leaf and the small branches built up over the hide so it lay flush and false with the floor of the woods.
It came up quiet on a hinge of folded leather.
And below it, down in a space about the dimensions and the grim shape of a dug grave that some desperate hand had widened out at the bottom to take a living man, Samson Jennings sat with his back set against the raw earth wall and a pistol held up and leveled steady at Abe’s face.
Behind the pistol, his sunken eyes did the very same swift work Abe’s own eyes did on a man, reading the hands before anything else.
“You’re not Mexican,” Samson said. The voice scraped. “And you’re not one of Briggs’s, I’d know one of those. So who in the hell are you, mister? And what does a man who’s none of those want with me bad enough to come back to this hole for it twice in one day?”
“My name is Abe.” He stayed down on his haunches, his hands held open and out where the dying light could find them and read them harmless. “I came down out of Arkansas. I’ve been looking for you the better part of a year now, across four states.”
“Arkansas.” Something moved back behind the sunken eyes, some old fear waking. “Who out of Arkansas sends a man a year and four states after the likes of me?”
“The federal court does. There’s a paper on you, Samson Jennings, and the charge on the paper is treason, for what your family’s been doing in the moving of men and guns for the Nuestra Tierra people.
The running of them, up out of Mexico and into the southern states and back.
” He kept his eyes on the pistol and his hands where they were.
“Now, hear the rest of it before you do anything.
“I’m not here to kill you. I’m here to take you in alive, to stand and answer the charge in front of a court, and I’ll tell you a thing you’ve likely worked out for yourself already, sitting down in that hole.
Right now, this night, being taken in by me is the safest thing that can happen to you in this whole county.
The proof of which is that you haven’t yet put a ball through me, and a man as scared as you’ve got every right to be would have, if he didn’t already know I was the best news he’s had in two years. ”
Samson held the gun up on him a moment longer, the muzzle dead steady despite the wreck of the rest of him. And then, slow, like the doing of it cost him something dear, he let the hammer down under his thumb and dropped the muzzle off Abe’s face.
“An officer of the court,” he said, and he laughed, and there was nothing of humor anywhere in the sound of it, only a dry, cracked breaking. “A year and four states on my trail, to drag me back up to Arkansas in chains.”
He shook his shaggy head, and in the last light Abe could see plain how near the end of something the man was, the long hair gone lank and matted, the patchy beard, the clothes hung off a frame that had been eating too little and too bad for too long.
“Mister, if you can get me up out of this grave and onto the back of a horse with its head pointed north at Arkansas, I will thank you every mile of the road there and mean it more with each one. A clean, dry jail cell in Arkansas, with three walls a man didn’t dig himself and a door that opens.
From where I’ve been sitting that sounds like the very kingdom of heaven. ”
“How long have you been down in it?” Abe said. He didn’t crowd the man toward coming up. A creature too long in the dark had to be let toward the light at its own pace or it bolted, and he had a use for what the waiting might shake loose besides.
“I quit counting.” Samson’s hand went flat to the earth wall beside him, the gesture of a man who’d come to know a small space the way a blind man knows a room.
“There’s a root comes through the wall yonder. I’ve been watching it for daylight that comes down the crack of the door. It’s put out four leaves since I dug in. Make of that what you can. A long time. Long enough I dream about rooms. About a ceiling a man can stand up under.”
He wet his cracked lips. “Long enough I’ve talked to my brother in here so many nights I half believe he answers. You go a certain while without another living voice and your own starts keeping you company whether you ask it to or not.”
“Your brother.” Abe kept it even, kept his face the way it was in the last of the light, and was glad the light was nearly gone.
“Jeremiah.” The name came out of Samson soft, the way a man says the one name that’s holding him to the earth.
“Back in Arkansas. He’s the whole of why I’m down in a hole instead of run clear to Mexico two years gone.
They’ve got him. Long as I do what I’m told and stay where I’m put, he keeps breathing.
That’s the arrangement. A man can live in a grave a long time on an arrangement like that one. ”
He looked up at Abe out of the dark of the hole. “You’d not understand it. A man without people doesn’t. You’ve the look of a man without people. No offense in it, I can just tell. You move like a man with nobody left to lose.”