Epilogue #3
“You could have not told me,” Samson said at last, low and even.
“I’d never once have known. He’d only have been a man who stopped sending letters, and there’s a hundred reasons a man stops sending letters, and I could have gone the rest of my life telling myself one of the kinder ones.
You could have ridden off and let me wonder and kept your own hands clean of the telling of it entirely. Easier for you by a mile. Why.”
“Because I’ve had my fill of the easier thing,” Abe said.
“The easier thing is the very thing I chose that night over your hole, the not-telling, and it sat in me and ate at me every mile from there to here, and I have decided I’ll not choose it again to spare myself a hard hour.
You have a right to know your brother is dead.
You have a right to know whose hand did it.
And you have a right to do with the both of those facts whatever a man does with such facts, and I’ll sit here on this stool on this side of these bars while you work out what that is, and I’ll not flinch from whatever you land on, because I have it coming.”
Samson looked at him through the bars a long while, this man who had killed his brother, and who had hauled him up out of a flood of his own enemies in a burning timber, and who had carried him north to a court of law instead of handing him to Flores or to a rope, and who had now ridden days on a broken leg to tell him the one truth that cost the teller everything and bought him nothing, and there was no reading off the man’s face what he felt, because it was past doubt too many things at the one time to come down to any single one of them.
“There is one more thing,” Abe said, and he got himself up off the stool, slow, taking up the cane.
“My next stop from this place is the law. The federal man that’s handling your case.
I am going to make a statement to him, on the record, the full of it.
That you were a man held, and not a man willing.
That your family was killed for the refusing of Flores, and that you were kept alive after only by the hold they had on you through your brother.
That you turned, in the end of it, and told us the whole of what you knew, and that what you told us is the reason Mateo Flores lies dead in a canyon and the western hand of this thing is finished and a town down on the river is still standing today with people in it.
“I am going to say the whole of that, on the record, in your favor, because it is the truth, and because you have earned a truth told for once in your favor after a whole life spent paying for a truth that was told against your grandfather.”
He stood there, leaning on the cane. “It may not be enough. The charge against you is treason, and the courts are the courts, and I’ll not stand here and promise you a thing I can’t put in your hand.
But it is the thing I can do, and I am going to go and do it, and I wanted you to have heard it from my own mouth before I went and did it.
That is the other half of what I rode here to say to you. ”
Samson Jennings stood at the bars and looked at the man, and after a long time he gave a single slow nod. It wasn’t forgiveness. Abe didn’t take it for forgiveness and hadn’t come the long road for forgiveness and wouldn’t have known what to do with it had it been offered.
It was only a man, at the bottom of everything, acknowledging that a hard and a true thing had been carried to him and set down honestly in front of him by the one man in the world who owed it and the one man with the least cause to come and pay it, and that acknowledgment was its own kind of square between the two of them, the only kind there could ever be, and it was enough, because it was all there was.
“Go make your statement,” Samson said. And then, as Abe turned for the door, “And Auer?”
Abe stopped.
“Thank you for the telling of it. I’d not have believed, before this hour, that I could thank a man for a thing like that. But there it is, and I find I mean it. A man ought to know what became of his own blood. Thank you for letting me know.”
Abe went out from the cell block into the gold of the afternoon, and he went and found the federal man. He made his statement, the full of it, on the record, in Samson Jennings’s favor, every word he’d said he would.
And then he turned the horse back south and west, toward the border country, toward the town on the river that was building itself back up board by board, and toward the woman who was running it, the last of that long hard year’s accounting set down at last and squared behind him.
THE END