Chapter 20
Samson sat roped against the porch post where Abe had tied him, his head back against the wood and his sunken eyes open on the dark, and he watched the two of them come down off the porch toward him.
He didn’t trouble to pretend he hadn’t heard every word that had been spoken up there in the chairs.
There was no pretending left in him. Two months in a hole and a night like the one just past had scoured it out of him along with most everything else, and what was left sat against the post and waited to be made to talk, the way a man waits on a thing he’s known a long time was coming.
Marielle took the lead of it. She’d meant to from the moment she came down the steps.
Abe came with her, and he’d put in a word where a word was wanted, but the cold weight of the town was still on him, she could see it sitting on him like a wet coat he hadn’t the strength to shrug off, and he hadn’t the edge tonight for the kind of asking this was going to take.
So she took the edge herself. She had it to spare. Two years of dead ends, a burned town at her back, and two old people lying under a quilt in a kitchen she’d been fed in as a child had honed the thing in her down to something she could near about have shaved with.
She crouched down in front of him so her face came level with his in the spill of light from the kitchen window.
“You said you’d talk,” she said. “You came up out of that hole this morning swearing you’d tell the whole of it if a man would only get you clear of here.
Well. You’re clear of the hole, and you’re clear of Flores, and a man bled for the getting of you clear and another man’s dead in my yard for it, so the price on your talking has gone up considerable since this morning, and I mean to collect the full of it now. ”
She held his eyes. “All of it, Samson. From the start. And don’t you leave the hard parts lying in the ditch where I’ll have to come back for them later, because I have had a long bellyful tonight of finding out the hard parts a day too late to do one thing about them.”
Samson looked at her a moment, and then past her to Abe standing at her shoulder, and then back to her, and something in him gave way to the plain inevitability of it, the look of a man who has carried a thing so far and so long that setting it down at last comes almost as a relief, whatever the cost of the setting.
“Nuestra Tierra,” he said. The cracked voice worked at the shape of it. “You want to know what it is, under the burning and the guns. I’ll tell you, and you’ll wish I’d kept it.”
He wet his lips. “It’s sons. That’s the heart of it.
Sons of men who soldiered for Mexico in the war, the big one, the one that settled all this when our fathers and grandfathers were young.
Those men fought, and those men lost, and when the smoke cleared the land had been drawn over onto the American side of a line some clerk put on a map in a room a thousand miles from any of it.
“And the sons grew up on the wrong side of that line, in the towns and the ranchos their fathers had bled for and not kept, hearing every day of their lives, at every supper table, the story of what was taken and who took it.”
He looked from her to Abe. “They mean to take it back. Not a stretch of riverbank to run rifles across. Not money, though there’s money in it. The whole of it. Everything Mexico lost in that war, taken back by the gun. The war fought over again from the start, and won the other way ’round.”
“That’s madness,” Marielle said.
“It’s madness, surely. But it’s madness with thirty years of grief stacked up behind it and crates of repeating rifles in front of it. And that is the dangerous kind of madness—the kind that’s been fed and watered a long time and has got patient.”
He shifted against the post, the ropes creaking. “You asked me this morning what any of it had to do with me. With the Jenningses. I’ll give it to you, and you’ll wish I hadn’t, same as you’ll wish about the rest.”
He looked at the dirt between them a moment, and the shame came up in his face plain, an old shame worn smooth from long handling.
“My grandfather. He was living down here in Texas, back in that same war, a poor man on poor ground right up against the line.
And a Mexican officer, a lieutenant, came to him with money.
Paid him to pass word on the American troops.
Where the columns were moving and how many and how provisioned, the kind of thing a man living right on the border could see plain and a soldier on campaign never could.
And my grandfather took the money and sold it to him. Sold his own neighbors’ boys to the other side of the war for it, because he was poor and it was more money than a poor man ever sees, and he told himself whatever a man tells himself to do a thing like that.”
“Flores,” Marielle said.
“You’re ahead of me, and you’re right. Mateo Flores, that burned your town tonight and that took my hand off him in the woods for it”—he nodded at the dark where Abe had done it—“he’s that same lieutenant’s grandson.
It runs down both the bloodlines together, you see, the buying and the being bought, the betraying and the being betrayed.
Two families chained at the ankle to each other across fifty years by one poor man’s bad bargain. ”
He let out a breath. “When the other Americans worked out at last what my grandfather had been about, they came for him with a rope, the way men do out here when they’ve found a traitor and the law’s too far off to bother with.
He ran. Got clear up to Arkansas with his neck still on him and not a great deal else, and he made himself a new start where nobody knew his face or his name.
But he never cut the old thing off clean.
“That’s the part I can’t account for and never could. He kept up a line of letters, quiet, careful, passed hand to hand, with the men on the Mexican side he’d dealt with, the ones who’d grow up into Nuestra Tierra. Insurance, maybe, against the day they came looking.
Or maybe just a man who’d done a thing the once and could never fully step back out of it after.
I don’t know what was in his head. He’s been in the ground twenty years.
But the line he kept open outlived the man who opened it, and it came down to us, his sons and his sons’ sons, like a debt with our names already signed to the bottom of it before we were born to sign anything. ”
“And it came due,” Abe said. The first he’d spoken. His voice came flat out of the dark above her.
“It came due on my generation.” Samson nodded slow.
“Mateo Flores came north into the southwest corner of Arkansas where we’d all settled, and he sat in my own father’s house, and he made it plain as plain that the old arrangement was a family debt and that we were the family that owed it.
He had men with him. Forty, fifty. They’d been drilling down in the bottoms, where the cane’s high and nobody goes, drilling like soldiers, because that’s what they meant to be.
And they laid the whole of it out across my father’s table. ”
He looked between the two of them, and his voice dropped.
“An attack on Texas. From the two sides at the once, like a man closing his two hands together on a thing. From the east, up out of Arkansas and Louisiana where they’d been gathering their strength quiet for years.
And from the west, from down here, from Colinas Rojas, that sits right on the river and had a mayor they’d already bought and paid for.
The east hand and the west hand, and Texas caught between them when they closed. ”
“And your family wouldn’t do it,” Marielle said.
“My family wouldn’t do it.” His jaw set.
“We were the sons and grandsons of a traitor, and God knows we’d no call to think ourselves better than the man whose blood we carried.
But we weren’t going to be the traitor our own selves, not for that.
Not to throw open the door to a war that’d put ten thousand people in the ground, Mexican and American both, over a line some clerk drew on a map before a one of us drew breath.
My father stood up at his own table and told Mateo Flores no. ”
The cracked voice thinned. “And Flores killed us for it. Most of us. You’ve seen tonight what the man does with a town that’s come to know too much.
He does the very same with a family that won’t kneel to him, only quieter, and closer to home.
He killed most of mine inside a month of that no. My father first.”
“How many?” Marielle said, quiet.
“Enough that I don’t say the number out loud. It doesn’t help to say it.” He swallowed and went on, because he’d built up the momentum of the telling now and a man on that kind of grade can’t easily stop himself.
“The ones he didn’t kill, he kept. By use, and by hold.
He’d a use for me, you see, on account of the badge I could get.
He sent me down here ahead of their western arm, ahead of all of it, to get myself inside the town and make myself useful.
So I came to Colinas Rojas, and I took the deputy’s star off Briggs, and I sat there in that office two years, a Nuestra Tierra man with a lawman’s star pinned on his vest, waiting on the day the thing would start. ”
His face twisted on it. “And Jeremiah—” The name caught in his throat and stuck a moment and he had to work it loose.
“Jeremiah he kept back in Arkansas. Kept him as the hold on me. So I’d stay where I was put and do what I was sent to do and never once think about running or turning, because the day I did either, Jeremiah died for it, slow, and they’d send me word of how it went.
One brother down here, useful, with a star on. One brother back there in a cellar, a hostage against the first one. That’s how the man keeps a thing he can’t trust. He finds the one piece of you you can’t bear to lose, and he sets his hand on it, and then you’re his.”