Chapter 18
Abe took the gray’s lead rope and the man tied to its saddle with it and turned both horses back toward the burning town, and he made Samson come, because there was nowhere left in the dark country to leave a roped man where he’d be safe and where he’d be found again, and because Abe hadn’t the seconds to spare on untying him.
The bitten leg had gone from a hot grinding ache to a deep steady fire that ran the length of the bone from the calf clear up to the hip and flared white with every jolt of the horse beneath him.
He set the pain aside the way he set most things aside, down into the place at the back of himself where the body’s complaints went to wait their turn until there was time to hear them out—which tonight there was not.
It wasn’t lost on him whose hand was likely under the whole of this.
He had burned the stable. He had broken open their storehouse and run their crossing dark and stood on Nash’s own step with a borrowed name the same morning the smoke was still going up, and somewhere in the back rooms of that careful man’s mind, or Flores’s, or the two of them together over a table, the cold arithmetic had been worked, and the answer it gave was the answer he was riding toward now.
The town had seen too much and learned too much and the cheapest way to buy its silence was to burn it down with the people inside it still talking.
He hadn’t wanted this. He hadn’t foreseen it, not this, and a man could tell himself there was a real difference between a thing he had done with his own hands and a thing that had grown up out of a thing he’d done.
Abe knew from long acquaintance that the truth of it would not help him one particle when the bill came due.
He set that aside too, with the leg, into the same waiting place, and he knew already without looking close that the bill on this would be the longest one he’d carried, longer than the leg, longer than the years. It would keep.
It would all keep. He would owe it after, and pay it after, and there was no after yet, there was only the burning town and the one thing he could still do in it.
Right now there was David.
He came down off the rise into the near edge of the burning town with the gray and its roped passenger dragging on the lead behind him, into a wall of heat and rolling smoke and the stutter of gunfire gone sparse and scattered now, the worst of it spent, the killing mostly done and the fire carrying on under its own power with no further need of men to feed it.
The main street was a corridor of flame, the buildings he’d walked between that morning gone or going, and the light of it threw everything into a hellish flickering orange and black where nothing held still.
He found David in the middle of the dirt street, in the open, between the fallen ruin of the feed store and the fallen ruin of the hardware, on his back with his arms flung wide and the rifle lying near his open right hand where it had gone out of his grip when he stopped being able to hold it.
He’d been shot through the chest, more than once.
He hadn’t gone easy and he hadn’t gone fast, and Abe could read the whole of it in the dirt around him by the light of the fires, the scatter of spent brass thrown wide where the man had worked the lever and worked it and worked it, the churned ground, the dark trails where men he’d hit had crawled or been dragged off.
He had stood in that road and made them pay a long hard price for the stretch of it he’d bought, and he had not stopped paying it out himself until there was no more of him left to spend.
Abe sat the tired horse a moment in the heat and the falling ash and looked down at him.
Something in him that he generally kept banked low and covered went over all at once to a cold hard standing flame. He didn’t say anything. There was no one to say it to and nothing in saying it.
He swung down off the horse, and the bad leg folded under the landing and very nearly put him in the dirt and held at the last. He hauled Samson Jennings down off the gray by the ropes and stood him up and looked at him once, hard, full in the face by the firelight, and whatever Samson read there closed his mouth for him and bent his neck. He gave no trouble and made no sound.
Abe stooped, the leg screaming at the bend, and took up David’s rifle out of the dirt where it had fallen, because David wouldn’t have wanted it left lying in the street for one of these men to claim, and because a second long gun was a second long gun and the night wasn’t finished.
He worked the action and checked the loads in it by feel and found two left, and he kept it.
Then he went into the town.
He went building to building down the burning street and the cross streets off it, and what Nuestra Tierra men were left in the town, the ones who had stayed behind to finish the firing or to pull what they could out of the burning houses under cover of the chaos, he killed.
He killed them the way he did everything, methodically, with no anger showing anywhere in the doing of it however hot and cold the thing underneath it ran.
He came on one of the men dragging a strongbox out of the wreck of the assayer’s office, LANDRY AND SONS still legible on the scorched new sign above him, and the man looked up into the dark too late and Abe shot him over the box and went on.
He came on two together at the back of the church where the heat had driven them out, and took the first and the second turned to run and he took him too, and the cracked bell tolled once above them as he did it.
The townsfolk he found alive he sent south.
He found them where people go to ground in such a night, down in root cellars with the doors pulled over them, crouched behind stone water troughs, folded into the black gaps between buildings where the fire hadn’t yet reached, a whole family of them under an overturned freight wagon with the mother’s hand clamped over the smallest one’s mouth.
He gave them no time for their fear and none for their questions, because there was time for neither and kindness in neither.
South, he told them, sharp and short, the white house under the live oaks a mile and more down the south road, go that way and go now and don’t stop running till you’re under those oaks. He got them up and moving and turned to the next doorway.
Samson he kept the whole while close at his shoulder, roped, stumbling on the bad ground, hauled bodily through hell because there was no other place to put him and no hand to spare to make him a better one, and the man came, and watched it all out of his sunken eyes, and said not a word.
When the street had gone quiet at last, when the gunfire had stopped because there was no longer anyone in the town to fire at and no one left in it firing back, when it had become plain that the rest of them had taken what they came for and what they could carry and fled south for the river and the safe far bank of it ahead of any reckoning the night might bring, Abe stopped in the middle of the burning street.
He stood a moment in the heat and the slow-falling ash, the two rifles in his hands, and made himself let the cold standing flame in him bank back down to coals, because a man couldn’t carry a flame like that and do what was left to be done with any care.
And there was one thing left to be done with care.
He went and got David.
He wouldn’t leave him in the road. Whatever else this night had cost and would yet cost, he wouldn’t leave the man who’d bought the road lying in the middle of it for the fire to reach or the buzzards to find with the morning.
He gathered him up, and the bad leg shrieked under the dead weight of him and Abe paid it no more mind than he’d paid it all night, and he carried David to the gray and got him up and laid over the saddle and tied him there, careful, the way he’d had to tie the living man behind him a few hours before in the timber, and the grim sameness of the two tyings was a thing he marked and added to the long bill he carried.
The quick man roped to the one horse and the dead one roped to the other, and Abe between them on foot leading both, because he couldn’t ask the gray to carry both the dead and himself, and the tired horse he gave to Samson, and he walked.
He took Samson and David both back to the Henderson ranch, leading the horses down the dark south road out of the dying glow, the leg going under him at every step and holding, the town burning itself out behind them.
Marielle was on the porch when he came into the yard.
She came down off it into the dark, and he watched her see the shape laid over the saddle of the gray, watched her see what it was and what it had to be, watched the understanding of it go into her and land and settle, and she stopped where she stood in the middle of the yard and did not come the rest of the way.
“What happened?” she said. “Abe. What happened in there?”
He didn’t answer her. There was an answer, and it was the plain obvious one, and it was lying across the saddle of the gray in front of her where she could read it for herself.
Saying it aloud would do nothing in the world but make her hear it a second time, once off the horse and once off his mouth, and he didn’t have it in him tonight to be the second telling of it.
He got the tired horse stopped and got Samson down off it by the ropes, and walked the man over to the porch post and tied him to it. He checked the knots twice out of old habit, though the man hadn’t the strength left in him to work loose of a shoelace.
Samson slid down the post to sit in the dirt at the foot of it and put his head back against the wood and shut his eyes and was, for once and for the first time, no trouble to any living soul.
She hadn’t moved from where she’d stopped in the yard. When he straightened up off the knots, she was looking back over her shoulder at the dark open door of the house behind her, and he understood from that, before she said it, that there was more bad waiting on him inside than he’d been told.
“Tom and Mae are in there,” she said, the level of it held down with both hands.
“Somebody came ahead of the fire and did it quiet. I covered them. There wasn’t anything else to do.
” She brought her eyes back to him. “I have to get to my mother. If they did the known people first, she’s a known one too, out at the place alone, and she’s the whole of what I’ve got left. ”
He gave it the plain answer it had earned. “First light. Not the dark road, not with those men loose on it. You’ll do her no good lying in a ditch halfway there. First light I’ll take you to her myself.”
She held his eyes, and he watched her want to argue it and watched the sense of it win instead, and she gave him a single nod and spent no words she didn’t have.
Then Abe went up onto the porch, the leg barely his own under him now, and lowered himself into the chair at the end of it.
He got the bad leg out straight in front of him on the boards, and he looked out south over the corral and the dark land toward the place where the town still burned, the orange of it lower now and dimming as it ran out of things left to eat, and he said nothing more.