Chapter 21
They walked out a little way from the porch and the tied man and the others, out to the corral fence where the horses had quieted at last, and stood at the rail in the small hours with the town gone to a dull red line along the south. Marielle had a thing she meant to say.
“We don’t split up. Whatever we do next, we do it together, the both of us and whoever else can sit a horse.
I’ve spent two years going at this alone and it got me a stack of nothing, and the one stretch of it that’s moved at all is the stretch since you rode in.
So we don’t split up. We go at Nash together, and then we go south together, and we keep each other alive doing it. ”
“No,” Abe said.
He said it gentle, and that was worse than if he’d argued it.
He was looking south at the red line, not at her, and there was a settledness on him she’d come to read in the few days she’d known him, the look of a man who’d already walked all the way down a road in his head and come back and was only telling her now where it went.
“There’s two things want doing,” he said, “and they’re in two directions, and there’s no waiting on the one to do the other.
The men that burned your town tonight are riding for that ranch across the river right now, and every hour we let them sit there safe is an hour they spend regrouping, counting what’s left of them, deciding whether the western hand of this thing is dead or only winged.
If it’s only winged they’ll come back and finish it, and there’s other towns up this river than yours.
“That has to be put an end to, and it has to be put an end to before they’ve had time to lick the wound and stand back up.
That’s mine. I’ll go south after what’s left of Flores and Nuestra Tierra, and I’ll finish it across the river where the law won’t, because there’s nobody else who can and I’m already across every line a man can cross. ”
He turned and looked at her then. “And Nash is yours. He has to be while he’s still off his feet, before he’s built me into a thing he understands and sat down with Briggs and got his story square.
You’re the one he’ll answer to in the end, anyway.
It’s your father. It was always going to be you that made him say it. Not me.”
“You’re hurt. That leg won’t carry you across a yard, let alone across a river and three miles into a country full of men who want you dead.”
“The leg will carry me as far as it has to and no further, the same as it has all night.” The door shut on it, flat and final, the way it had shut on the leg before. “I’ll not argue the leg with you. I’ve argued it with myself and lost, and I’m going.”
She looked at him a long moment in the dark, and she knew what it felt like to lose an argument when she was inside one, and she let the leg go.
“What do we do with the survivors?” she said instead.
“The ones I’m sending south to this ranch, the ones already here.
There’ll be more by morning, the ones who got clear and hid out.
I can’t take them across a river after Flores and you can’t drag a column of burned-out townsfolk into Mexico behind you. What happens to them.”
“I don’t know.” He said it plain, no shame in the not-knowing.
“That’s not a thing I’m fit to decide. I know how to track a man and how to kill the men around him and how to get a thing finished, and I don’t know the first thing about what a town does the morning after it’s been burned down over the people in it.
You do. They’re your people. They’ve known your face their whole lives and they don’t know mine from a fence post, and the only name I’ve got in this county is a false one I gave a man’s wife. ”
He looked at her. “That part’s yours, the same as Nash is yours. I’ll leave it to you, because you’ll do it right and I’d only do it wrong.”
She didn’t know, after, what came over her.
She’d think about it later and never quite locate the place it had come up out of.
But she stepped in and took the front of his coat in one hand and kissed him, quick, a stride past a peck on the mouth and no further.
She stepped back again before he’d hardly understood it was happening.
He looked at her. For once the settledness had gone clean off his face and left something younger and plainer underneath it, a man caught flat-footed for the first time since he’d come up behind her in the brush at the river.
“What was that for?” he said.
“You’ve got a look on you,” she said. “You’ve had it since you sat down in that chair on the porch.
I knew it the second I saw it because I saw it once before, on my father, the night he put on his good coat and walked up the road to Nash’s and didn’t come back.
It’s the look of a man who’s already decided that he might not be riding home from where he’s going. That he’s spent.”
She held his eyes. “My father wore it out the door and I let him wear it out the door and never said a word, because I was fifteen and I didn’t know yet what it meant.
I know now. So I’ll not let a man ride south wearing it without giving him one good reason to make damn sure he comes back to collect on it.
That’s what it was for. You come back, and there’s the rest of it owed you. ”
Abe was quiet a moment. Whatever was working in him he kept mostly off his face, but not all of it.
“That’s a hard kind of reason to give a man,” he said. “A thing owed, that he only collects by surviving.”
“It’s the only kind I’ve got to give tonight,” she said. “Take it or don’t.”
“I’ll take it.” He almost smiled but didn’t quite get there, the night too close behind them for it. “We meet back at the house. Your family’s house, not the ranch. Whichever of us is first waits on the other.”
“Whichever of us is first waits,” she said. “However long it takes.”
He didn’t make her promises about the waiting and she didn’t make him any about the coming back, because they’d both of them seen what came of that kind of promise, and the not-making of them was its own kind of honesty between them.
He went and got the tired horse, and she helped him up onto it because the leg wouldn’t let him do it clean on his own. He took it grudgingly, her shoulder under him, and once he was up he sat a moment looking down at her in the dark.
“Ask him cold,” Abe said. “Nash. Don’t go in hot, however much you’ve got the right to be hot. A hot question he can dodge all day. It’s the cold ones that find the seam. You watched him do it to you twice. Do it back to him.”
“I’ve had two years to learn how he does it,” she said. “I’ll do it back to him.”
He nodded once, and turned the horse south, and rode out of the yard into the dark toward the river, and she stood and watched him go the way she’d stood and watched her father go until the dark took him, and then a while past that, looking at the place where the dark had taken him.
Then she turned around and went back to the porch, because there was no use in the looking and there was a great deal of use left in her yet, and the night wasn’t finished with any of them.
The survivors had gathered in close while she’d been at the fence.
A dozen of them now, more than had been there an hour ago, the ones Abe had sent south coming in off the road in twos and threes, and the ones who’d been hiding closer creeping up out of the dark toward the one lit window and the one face among the strangers they knew.
She climbed up onto the porch step so they could all see her and so she could see what she had to work with.
Old men and women. A clutch of children, too quiet, the way children go quiet when they’ve seen a thing children shouldn’t. A young mother with a baby and a burn up one forearm she was holding away from her body.
Huerta the baker, his eyebrows singed off, still in the apron he baked in. Two grown men she knew by sight, a third she didn’t. Most of them were hurt some way or other. All of them looked at her the way people look at the one person left standing who seems to know what comes next.
She didn’t soften it for them. There was no softening it and they’d know a softening for the lie it was.
“You all know me,” she said. “Marielle Vaughn. Emmett Vaughn’s daughter. Most of you knew my father, and some of you trusted him. I’m asking you to lend me that same trust tonight on his account, because I haven’t time to earn my own.”
Nobody said anything. The baby fussed and the mother hushed it.
“Here’s the truth of it, all of it, because you’ve earned the truth if anybody ever has.
The men who did this to your town are Nuestra Tierra.
They mean to take Texas back to Mexico by the gun, and your town sat in their road, and they decided it had seen too much to be let stand.
They’ve run south, across the river, where the law can’t follow.
There’s a man riding after them right now to see they don’t come back and do it again to the next town up the water.
And there’s a man behind the whole of it on this side, in a fine house, that some of you have voted for, and I’m going to go and have the truth out of him before this night’s much older. ”
She looked across their faces, the firelight from the south still faint on them. “That’s where I’m bound, and after it. But it’s not where the need is this minute. The need this minute is back in Colinas Rojas.”
“There’s nothing left back there,” one of the men said, low. “We watched it burn. We barely got out of it.”
“There’s people back there,” Marielle said.
“There’s people in cellars and behind walls who got down and stayed down and are still down there this minute, hurt and afraid and not knowing the men have gone, thinking every sound’s a rider come back to finish them.
There’s people trapped under what fell who’ll die under it by morning if nobody goes and pulls them out tonight. And there’s the dead.”
Her voice didn’t waver on it and she made sure it didn’t.
“There’s the dead lying in that street and those houses, your neighbors and your kin, and they can’t be left to lie there for the heat and the animals.
They’ll be seen to right. That’s a thing we do for people.
It’s near about the last thing we’ve got left to do for them and we’ll do it. ”
She straightened on the step.
“So I’m not going to ask all of you. The hurt ones, the children, the old ones, you’ll stay here—this ranch is empty and it’s safe and there’s water and there’s a roof, and you’ll keep each other through to morning.
But I need the ones of you who aren’t hurt, or aren’t hurt bad, and who’ve got it in them tonight, to come back with me.
To go through that town with me, careful, and find who’s living and get them out, and find who’s dead and do right by them, and put out what fire we can still put out so there’s something left to come home to when this is over. ”
She looked from face to face. “I won’t lie to you that it’s safe.
I won’t lie that it’ll be a thing you’ll want to have seen.
But it’s got to be done tonight, and it can’t be done by one woman alone, and there’s nobody coming from anywhere else to do it for us.
” She let it sit a beat. “Who’s with me? Who’s whole enough, and willing?”
For a moment nobody moved, and the night held its breath. She thought she might have to go alone after all.
Then Huerta the baker pulled the singed apron off over his head and dropped it on the boards and stepped forward out of the clutch of them, his bare scorched face set.
“I’ve buried my whole street tonight in my head a dozen times over already,” he said.
“I’d as soon do it with my hands and know it’s done right.
” He came up to the foot of the step. “I’m with you. ”
And after him a second man stepped up, and then the third she didn’t know, and then the young mother handed her baby off to an old woman behind her and held up her one good arm, and one by one out of the dark and the smoke-smell they came forward and stood, until there were enough of them, more than enough, standing in the yard in the last of the firelit dark and looking at her and waiting to be told where to start.
“Alright,” Marielle said. “Then we ride.”