Chapter 17
The talk had run down between them somewhere back in the last of the light, and they were most of the way to the Hendersons’ now in the early dark, the bay and the gray picking their own way along the rutted road by starlight, when the wind shifted around out of the north and brought the first of it down to them.
Marielle smelled the smoke before she heard anything, a wrongness on the air that wasn’t a cookfire and wasn’t a brush burn, a smell with meat in it under the wood. She drew the bay up.
“You smell that?” she said.
David had already stopped the gray. He sat with his head turned and lifted, and Marielle did the same.
For a moment there was only the wind in the grass and the creak of saddle leather and her own pulse going up in her ears.
Then it reached them both at once, carried thin and broken on the same wind that carried the smoke.
Screaming. The flat crack of gunfire, a good deal of it, ragged and scattered the way gunfire goes when it’s a great many men firing at once and none of them in concert with any other.
And under all of it a low continuous roar that she knew in her body before she knew it in her mind and didn’t want to know either way, the sound a fire makes when it has got past being one fire and become a thing that feeds itself and reaches for more.
It was coming from town.
“That’s Colinas Rojas,” David said. “That’s the town.”
She had the bay turned and moving before she’d thought it through, the body deciding ahead of the mind the way it had learned to in two years, and David came up alongside on the gray. They put the horses to a hard run back down the road they’d just walked.
The town showed first as a low orange smear on the black northern sky, a false and ugly dawn in the wrong quarter of the night, and it grew and brightened with every stride the horses gave, resolving as they came on into separate fires, into the shapes of buildings standing black against their own burning.
Then they came up over the last rise above the town and she hauled the bay down to a plunging, blowing halt and looked at the thing laid out below her, and the bottom went out of her.
The town was burning. Not one building and not two and not a careless lamp gone over in a barn.
The whole of the main street was alight or going, the bakery where Huerta started his ovens at three in the morning and the hardware with its cracked upper pane and the feed store all throwing flame up into the dark, the roofs caving one into another as she watched, sending up towers of sparks that climbed and turned and went out high above.
The little frame schoolhouse was a sheet of fire.
The church at the far end of the street stood lit from within like a paper lantern, and as she watched its off-key bell tolled once, and again, not rung by any hand but swung by the heat working in the tower, a cracked dull voice tolling over the death of the town that had complained about its sound for six years and never fixed it.
And in the orange light between the burning buildings there were men on horseback, riding the street at an easy trot, in no hurry at all, and men and women on foot running, and the men on horseback were shooting the people on foot. She saw it happen.
She saw a man come out of a doorway with his arms up and a rider lean down almost gently and shoot him and ride on without breaking the trot, the way a man rides past a fence post.
She understood it all at once. Nuestra Tierra had come into the town. They were killing the people in it and burning it down over them, and they weren’t doing it in rage. They were doing it the way a man does a chore he means to finish before he sleeps.
They were covering their tracks. Whatever had broken loose in their plans, the stable gone to coals and the river crossing run dark and a stranger walking up to the mayor’s door with a false name, they had sat down somewhere and done the cold sum of it and arrived at the answer that the town itself had become a witness against them, and a witness was a thing you unmade.
So they were unmaking it, house by house, in the dark.
“God,” David said beside her, very low. “God almighty. There’s children down there.”
“I know it.”
“We have to—” He didn’t finish, because there was no end to the sentence that was a thing two people could do.
A man down in the street saw them on the rise.
She watched it happen as if from a great way off, watched him rein his horse around in the firelight and lift his arm to point, watched him call to two others who turned their mounts and came up off the main street and out toward the rise at a gallop, their pistols already out and already firing, the muzzle flashes blooming pale against the bigger orange behind them and the reports reaching her a beat late, flat and small under the roar of the burning.
A ball went past close enough that she felt the air of it move beside her cheek.
She got her rifle up out of the scabbard and threw it to her shoulder and fired down at the lead rider, and missed clean, the bay dancing and circling under her with the gunfire and the fire-smell in its nose and spoiling the shot before it left the barrel.
She worked the lever for another, fighting the horse with her knees, and David’s hand came across and closed over the rifle and took it out of her hands.
“Go,” he said. “To the Hendersons’. Go now.”
“David—”
“You can’t shoot off a spooked horse and you know it better than I do.
I can shoot off the ground.” He was already swinging down off the gray, the rifle coming up to his shoulder as his boots hit the dirt, sliding the gray around between her and the oncoming riders to make himself a wall of it.
“I’ll hold them off you and I’ll follow. Go, Marielle.”
“I’m not leaving you standing in this road.”
“You’re not leaving me. There’s a difference, and there’s no time to teach it to you.” He sighted down the barrel, calm, a man who’d done this work and knew it, and squeezed, and down the slope the lead rider’s horse went down screaming and threw its man hard into the brush.
David levered and found the next one. “I can buy you this road or I can stand here and die arguing with you over whether I’m allowed to. Those are the two things on offer. Pick which, but pick it this second, because every word you spend is a yard they get closer.”
She picked. It went against the whole grain of her, against everything two years of doing it all herself had made her, and she picked it anyway, because he was right and there was no time and a second dead body in the road would have bought nobody anything.
She wheeled the bay hard and put it down the back of the rise toward the Hendersons’ road.
The last look she had of him was over her shoulder, the shape of him planted in the road with the gray broadside behind him and the rifle going steady, spaced, unhurried, a shot and the work of the lever and a shot, a man who knew his trade picking his targets out of the firelit dark.
Then the rise came up between them and there was nothing but the road and the hammer of the bay’s run under her and her own breath tearing in her throat.
She rode hard. She didn’t let herself listen for the moment the rifle stopped. There would be a moment it stopped, so she made the not-listening a thing she did with her whole will, the way she’d made herself do hard things before.
She’d gone perhaps a half mile, the burning town falling away behind the rise and the night closing back in dark around her, when two riders came up out of the black of the road ahead and she had the rifle half up before she remembered David had it, had her hand going for the pistol instead, when one of them called her name.
Abe. On the tired horse he’d ridden out of the timber, and behind him on the gray that had carried David out of those same woods, Samson Jennings, hunched and swaying and roped at the wrists to the saddle horn, a ruined shape barely keeping his seat.
She hauled the bay down hard. “The town,” she got out, her voice come out wrong, too fast and too high.
“Nuestra Tierra’s in the town. They’re killing everyone in it, every soul, they’ve fired the whole of it, the church, the school, all of it.
David’s back on the rise. He took the rifle off me and made me run, there were three of them coming at least, more behind—”
She heard it climbing and clamped down on it, dragged it back to level the way her father had taught her to drag a thing back to level. “He made me leave him standing in the road.”
Abe’s face in the dark went still in the particular way she’d learned meant he was running a fast sum and not liking the answer it gave him.
He looked back the way she’d come, at the orange standing up over the rise and staining the low cloud above it, and something moved across him that she couldn’t read in the dark and hadn’t the time to try.
“Your leg,” she said. The trouser was black down one side with dried blood and there’d be fresh under the dried, she’d seen the way he sat the horse. “You’re torn up. You can’t go back into that on a—”
“The leg’s fine.” It plainly was not, but he said it flat and final, a door shut on the subject and locked. “Listen to me now. You go on to the ranch. You don’t stop and you don’t turn around and you don’t come back, whatever you hear. I’ll go back for David.”
“I can go back with you, two guns is better than—”
“You can get yourself to that ranch and stay alive, which is the one thing your father would want out of tonight and the one thing I want, and I’ll not have the both of you in that fire.
” He was already turning the tired horse, hauling the gray and the swaying man on it around with him, his voice not unkind but leaving no crack in it for her to get a finger into.
“If David’s holding that rise he’s holding it so you’ll get clear of here.
That’s the whole of why he’s standing in that road. Go to the ranch. Go now.”
She went. There was nothing left in it that wasn’t argument, and argument was the one thing that would spend the road David was buying with his body.
She put the bay back to a run and left the two of them on the road behind her and rode for the Hendersons’ with the town burning at her back and her whole chest gone to one long held breath she couldn’t find the bottom of.
The ranch house showed itself dark under the live oaks, no lamp in any window, the windmill turning its slow black turn against the fire-stained sky to the south.
No smoke off the chimney. No men in the yard, no strange horses, only the Hendersons’ own bunched and stamping and blowing in the corral, made nervous by the smell the wind kept bringing them.
Whatever had broken loose in town hadn’t come here. The plan to come here, to do the Hendersons quiet ahead of the burning, had broken apart with everything else in the chaos that took the town.
That was the thought she had, riding in. That they’d been spared by the very thing that was killing everyone else.
But the front door of the house stood open into the dark, square and black against the pale plaster, and that was wrong, because Tom Henderson was a man who shut his door, had been all his life, and there was nobody who’d leave that door standing open on the night air who meant the people inside any good.
She left the bay ground-tied and went up onto the porch with her hand on the pistol at her hip and her thumb on the hammer and went in.
She found them in the kitchen. She’d been in that kitchen a hundred Sundays of her childhood and she found them in it now.
Tom by the door to the back, fallen where he’d gone for the rifle that lay just past the reach of his out-flung hand, close, a foot short, a foot that was the whole distance between an old man and his gun.
Mae a few feet on, near the table where the coffee things still sat out from some last ordinary evening, the cups they’d have had after supper, the way they’d had them ten thousand evenings.
They’d both been shot, and it hadn’t been a thing that took long for either of them, and it had happened before whatever broke loose in town, hours before, by the cold of it and the dark of the blood.
Someone had come ahead of the burning. Someone had ridden out here in the daylight, or the early dark, and done the quiet part first, the careful part, the part Nash had said over the river should be done quiet because the Hendersons were known people, before ever the noise started in town.
She stood in the dark kitchen a long moment with her hand still on the pistol she had not drawn, and looked at the two old people lying on the floor of the room where Mae had set her to shelling peas and told her stories to teach her to read people without the child knowing she was being taught, and she did not cry.
There was no room in her yet for crying and her body knew it before her mind caught up to the knowing. The crying would come and there would be a place and an hour for it and this was neither.
She’d ridden out here a day too late. A single day.
They’d have gone in the morning, first light, the trunk with the good brass on it packed and the wagon loaded, the way Mae had set her course before Marielle was off the place.
One more morning was the whole of what they’d needed and the whole of what they hadn’t been given.
She found a blanket folded over the back of a chair, a quilt Mae had likely pieced herself across some long evening, and she shook it out and covered them with it, Mae first and then Tom, drawing it up over the soft gray hair and the weathered face.
She thought of the little stone out past the garden with the boy’s name on it, and the two stones beyond it, the brother and the father.
There would be no one now to keep the weeds off any of them, and she put that thought away too, with the crying, in the place where she was keeping the things there was no time for.
Then she went back out onto the porch into the smell of the burning town riding down on the wind, and she stood at the rail with the pistol still in her hand, and she watched the orange light pulse and dim and pulse again away to the south, and she waited to learn who came up the road to her out of it.