Chapter 26
Abe hadn’t come back by morning.
They’d said the house, her family’s house, and they’d said whoever came first would wait.
Marielle had come first, and through the night and the morning of the burials she’d half expected him to ride up out of the south at any hour, the tired horse and the bad leg and that flat closed look on him, done with his work the way she’d been done with hers.
He had not. And when the second morning came up gray and washed and he still wasn’t there, she knew the thing she’d been holding off knowing, that something had gone wrong south of the river.
She got up before the light and saddled the bay and went after him, because there was no one else to go and because she had told a man at a corral fence that there was a thing owed him that he only collected by coming back, and she hadn’t meant for the collecting to be his work alone.
The river had dropped off its night flood but it ran high still and fast and brown, and she sat the bay on the bank a while reading it the way Abe had taught her to read men, where the current ran hardest and where it slacked, and then she put the horse across at the slack stretch above the bend, aiming high of her mark the way you crossed fast water.
The bay fought it and swam it and came up the far bank streaming, and she was over.
She found the canyon by the track of the flood.
There was no missing where the water had come down, a great brown scar of churned mud and stranded timber and the bloated carcasses of horses laid along it, the flood’s leavings strung down the watercourse from the mouth of the canyon out toward the river.
She rode up it slow, into the cut, reading the ground, dreading what the ground would show her.
She found him not far inside the mouth of it, half buried in the drying mud where the flood had set him down as it spent itself and drained away.
She thought he was dead. She got down off the bay and went to him through the drying mud, certain she’d come to fetch home a body the way she’d fetched home her father.
She got her hands under him and turned him and found, against all of it, that he was breathing.
Shallow, and slow, and his color bad, and the leg bent a way a leg should not bend and the one shoulder sitting wrong, but breathing.
Alive.
Battered near to death and broken in more places than one and chilled through from a night half buried in flood mud, but alive, and breathing, and when she got his head up out of the muck and said his name his eyes moved under the lids though they didn’t open.
“You came back,” she said to him, though he couldn’t hear it. “You damned stubborn man. You came back far enough for me to come the rest of the way for you.”
She dug him out of the drying mud with her hands. She got him cleaned off enough to move and she got him up, which was its own long hard labor, a deadweight unconscious man and a bad leg and a broken shoulder and her own strength near the end of itself.
She got him over the bay and across the saddle the way Abe himself had gotten David across the saddle, the living this time and not the dead, and she walked the horse out of the canyon and down to the river and across it again, holding him on with one hand the whole of the crossing, and she brought him home.
She doctored him in the days that followed.
The leg was broken and the collarbone with it, and she set the leg as her father had taught her to set a leg when she was a girl who’d wanted to learn tracking and got taught everything else besides.
She bound his shoulder, and she sat up the nights with him through the fever that came and went.
Her mother sat up some of them too, the two of them taking turns at the bedside of the strange battered man who’d ridden into their lives off the river a handful of days and a whole age ago.
And it was, though she’d not have said it aloud, a mercy of a kind. The doctoring of Abe was something to do with her hands and her hours that wasn’t the other thing, that wasn’t her father in a box in the wheelwright’s shop and the funeral that had to be survived.
She survived it, though.
They buried Emmett Vaughn proper, in the churchyard by the church with the cracked off-key bell, what was left of the town gathering in its mud and its bandages to put the great Ranger in the ground at last after two years, and Marielle stood at the grave with her mother on one side of her, sober and upright and gray, and an empty place on the other side where a man with a broken leg couldn’t stand, and she got through it, and didn’t break, and came home from it.
The Texas Rangers came, in time, the way they came after such things, too late to be of any use but in time to take down the account of it.
They arrested Charlotte Nash, who had stayed in the ruined town and helped with the dead and made no move to run, and who told them the whole of it plainly when they came—the affair and her husband and Mateo Flores and the grave behind the house.
She went with them quietly, and Marielle watched them take her and felt no satisfaction in it and no grief either, only the flat closing of one more thing that had needed closing.
Abe came up out of the fever on the day she came home from the funeral.
She came into the room still in her dark clothes and found his eyes open and on her, clear for the first time in days, and she sat down in the chair by the bed where she’d sat so many of the night hours.
“You’re awake,” she said.
“I appear to be.” His voice came rough and weak. “How long?”
“Days. You broke your leg and your shoulder and you near drowned in a canyon, and I pulled you out of the mud and brought you home, and you’ve been raving with the fever the better part of a week.” She kept it level. “Mateo Flores.”
“Dead. The flood took him and the last of them, down in the canyon, and it near took me with them.”
He shut his eyes a moment. “I had them run to ground in the cut and I’d not leave off them, not for the weather nor the sense a wiser man would have had, and the storm we’d all been waiting on broke and came down that canyon in a wall in the dark while we were still at it.
I got a hand on a root in the wall and held it.
They didn’t. I held that root the better part of the night with the whole river trying to have me off it, and listened to it take them in the dark, one and another and another.
When it set me down in the morning mud I was the only thing left in that canyon still drawing breath. ”
He opened his eyes and looked at the bound leg. “I’ll not stand a man up and say I killed Mateo Flores clean, the way you put down Nash. The water did that. But I was the one stayed down in the cut to see it got done, and I paid the water its toll for the staying, near enough.
Nuestra Tierra’s western hand is finished.
There’ll be no more of them coming up this river, not from the west. Whatever’s left of them is east, a long way from here, and it’s somebody else’s to finish now.
” He looked at her then, at the dark clothes she was still wearing. “You’ve been somewhere today.”
“My father’s funeral.” She said it plain, the way the saying had to be done. “I found him. He was behind Nash’s house the whole two years. Nash had Flores’s men take him off the road that night and kill him, before he ever reached the dinner. Nash buried him out back where he could see the place.”
She didn’t give him the rest of it, the why of it, the affair, not yet, not today. “I found him, and I got the truth of it out of Nash, and then I shot Nash, and his wife’s been arrested, and my father’s in the churchyard now where he ought to have been two years ago. That’s where I’ve been today.”
Abe was quiet a moment, taking the weight of it.
“I’m sorry about your father,” he said. “Truly. Two years hunting him and the answer was a thing nobody should have to find. I’m sorry you had to be the one to find it.
” He didn’t reach after comfort beyond that, didn’t dress it up, and she was grateful for the plainness the way she’d been grateful for his plainness from the start.
“But you found him. You did the thing. He’s in the ground proper and the man that put him in it isn’t. That’s not nothing. That’s the most of what there ever is, at the end of a thing like this.”
“I know it.” She looked at her hands. “It doesn’t feel like much yet. They tell me it will, in time.”
“It will, and it won’t. Both.” He shifted against the pillow and winced at the shoulder.
“The Nuestra Tierra is done, Marielle. The town’s safe from them at least, whatever else it’s lost. You can tell your people that and it’ll be true.
They did what they came to do and the river killed them for it and there’ll be no more. ”
She leaned over and kissed him, quick, the way she had at the corral fence, and sat back.
“What’s that one for?” he said. “I’ve a memory you owed me an explanation on the last one and never quite paid it.”
“That one’s for coming back,” she said. “You collected. That’s all it was for.”
He almost smiled, the fever-weak ghost of it. They sat a while in the quiet, the late light coming in the window.
“What’s next?” she said finally. “For you? The job’s done. Samson’s the last of what you came for, and he’s in a cell in Bandera waiting on you to carry him north. There’s nothing holding you here now the thing’s finished.”
Abe looked at the ceiling a while, and then at her.
“Would it be alright,” he said, “if I stayed around a while. Once I can stand. I find I’m in no hurry to be anywhere, and there’s worse places a man could mend than this, and worse company.
” He said it carefully, a man laying down a thing he wasn’t sure of the welcome of.
“Just a while. I’d not want to be in the way of you, with all you’ve got ahead of you here. ”
And it made her happy, the asking of it, happier than she’d have thought a thing could make her on the day of her father’s funeral. She didn’t trouble to hide that it did.
“Stay,” she said. “Stay a while. You’d not be in the way.”
Her mother she told the whole of it, in the days after the funeral, at the kitchen table where the two of them had sat out the worst of the two years.
She had turned it over on the long nights at Abe’s bedside, whether to hand her mother the ugly heart of the thing or to bury that part as deep as Nash had buried the man and leave her the husband she had grieved instead of the one the truth made of him.
She found she couldn’t do it. Her mother had a right to her own husband, the whole of him, the betrayal along with the rest, the same right Marielle had claimed for herself in a dark study with a rifle in her hands.
A truth kept back to spare a person was the very thing Nash had made his quiet life out of, the body in the yard and the wife made to know it and never say.
So she told her, all of it, the affair and the why of the killing and the grave behind the house, and didn’t look away while it landed, and her mother took it upright and gray and didn’t reach for any bottle.
When it was told, the two of them sat in the kitchen a while and said nothing.
And it was, in its hard way, a thing set down at last and no longer carried alone.