Chapter 10
She watched the doe until something carried to it that her own ear missed, and it lifted its head and stood a long moment carved out of the gray, and then it folded up and was gone over the fence in two bounds without seeming to gather itself for either.
She dressed and went out to the kitchen.
Abe had beaten her to the kitchen. He sat at the table with a cup of coffee in front of him and his gun belt already buckled around him and his hat hung on the chair back at his shoulder, and he had about him the settled look of a man who’d been awake a good while and had made his peace with the early hour rather than fighting it.
He glanced up when she came in and went back to the window and the gray yard beyond it.
“Coffee’s hot,” he said.
“I can see that it is.” She poured a cup and stood at the counter with it rather than sitting, the way she took her first cup most mornings. “You sleep any?”
“Some.”
“On that sofa.”
“I’ve slept worse ground than that sofa, and on worse nights.” He looked down into his cup. “Your mother was up in the dark. I heard her moving through the front room a while, around three.”
“She mostly is, around then.” She drank. “There’s a stretch of the night she can’t seem to stay down through. Has been since my father.”
He nodded and let it lie there and didn’t reach after it, which she was grateful for without deciding to be.
David came out of the front room hauling his suspenders up over his shoulders, his hair pushed flat to one side from the rug and standing up on the other.
He took in the two of them already up and the pot going on the stove, poured himself a cup, and sat without a word, a man who’d learned somewhere along the way to wait and find out the shape of a morning before he spent words on it.
Marielle put together what breakfast the larder would give. Eggs from the three hens that still bothered to lay. The last of the dried beef, soaked soft overnight and fried up in the pork grease. The heel of the cornbread.
Her mother came out partway through the cooking, moving slow and holding the doorframe a moment before she trusted the floor, and lowered herself into a chair without a word to any of them.
She sat and studied Abe across the table for a while, frank and unhurried, the way only the very old or the very drunk will study a man to his face.
“You’ve got a wife,” she said.
Abe looked up at her and met it square. “I did,” he said.
She nodded slowly, the way a woman nods when a thing she’d already settled in her own mind has been confirmed for her out loud, and reached for her coffee, and asked him nothing more about it. Marielle looked from one of them to the other and held her own tongue.
They ate. The early sun cleared the hills and came through the east window and laid a long pale bar of light down the middle of the table, across the cups and the plates, and out past the glass the washed yard stood bright and still and steaming faintly where the sun first touched the wet ground.
When the plates were cleared away Abe looked at Marielle. “Elizabeth Reyes. You said southeast.”
“Her father’s place. He keeps a few goats and not much else.
It’s a thin living out there.” She turned her empty cup on the table.
“I know her some. She was three or four grades behind me at the schoolhouse, before she stopped coming. She’ll not open up to a stranger on her own front step about Samson Jennings, not in a hundred years.
She’s had her fill of strangers asking after that man. ”
“Which is why you’re along.”
“Which is why I’m along.” She drank off the last cold swallow.
“She’s had a hard two years of it. He left her with the child in her belly and not a dollar to her name, and she’s been living since on her father’s charity, which from what I hear is given grudging.
She owes Samson Jennings exactly nothing, and she knows down to the bone that she owes him nothing.
But knowing you owe a man nothing is a different thing from wanting to sit and talk about him to people you don’t know. ”
“What would she want,” Abe said. “If she wanted anything.”
Marielle thought on it a moment. “To hear that he’ll answer for something, somewhere, before it’s done.
Even if it’s not for what he did to her.
Especially if it’s not, maybe. There’s no court going to make him answer for leaving a girl with a baby.
But a federal rope, for treason.” She looked at him.
“She might find she could live with that. As a substitute.”
Abe took it in and turned it over. “I can give her that much and not have to lie to do it. The rope’s a real possibility. I’ve seen it come down for less.”
“Then we’ll get on, the two of you.” She set the cup down with finality. “David.”
He looked up from the dregs of his coffee.
“You’re with us.”
He nodded. No argument in it, no questions either.
She’d already marked that he didn’t waste himself fighting the small things, that he kept his back up and his heels dug in for the things that mattered to him and let all the rest run off him like the rain off the tile.
This put him ahead of the general run of men she’d known, who seemed to her to spend most of their starch on nothing.
They left her mother with coffee and the heel of the bread and word to keep to the porch and stay clear of the larder.
Her mother took the instruction sitting straight-backed in her chair—a woman who had heard exactly what was being said underneath it and chose, with what dignity the morning had left her, not to make a thing of how it was said.
The road southeast ran soft and dark from the night’s rain, the clay building up heavy under their boot soles step by step until they had to stop and scrape it now and again, and the goats on the rise to the right of the road tracked them along the fence with their strange sideways eyes and their jaws working at nothing.
The morning smelled of soaked ground and cedar and something flowering low in the brush that Marielle had never been able to put a name to though she’d smelled it after every rain of her whole life.
“How long have you been on Samson?” she said.
“A year, near enough now.” He walked with his hands loose and open at his sides, and she’d noticed by now that he never put them in his pockets, not once, not even in the cold of the early morning.
He wanted his hands where they could be of use.
“Started up in Arkansas, at the family place. His brother Jeremiah was the first thread I had to pull. He didn’t come to much in the end. ”
“Jeremiah’s dead,” she said. Not quite a question.
He glanced at her sidelong. “Yes.”
She let that walk along with them a few steps. “And it brought you down here. The thread.”
“Two names a marshal up in Arkansas gave me, men who’d run with Samson at one time or another, and both names played out down here in the end. And there was a woman in Matamoros who set it past doubting. She’d had a letter off Samson, postmarked out of Laredo, and Laredo pointed a man south.”
He looked off down the road where it bent around the rise. “Colinas Rojas came up twice from people who’d never met each other and had no way to compare notes. When a thing comes up twice clean like that, it’s usually worth the riding.”
“You do a lot of this kind of work.”
“Enough of it to be tired of it and not enough to quit.”
“And before the tracking. What were you.”
He was quiet a beat, the way he went quiet before the things he meant to answer rather than the things he meant to turn aside.
“This and that, and none of it for long,” he said.
“Came off the boat at New York in the spring of eighty-one with forty dollars folded in my boot and one bag to my name, and I worked my way west doing whatever was set in front of me to do. A man takes what work there is, the first years.”
He paused. “The tracking found me more than I went looking for it. There was an editor up in Missouri whose wife had run off with a printer and he wanted them found, and I found them, and it turned out I had the temperament for the work even if I hadn’t known I was looking for it.”
David made a sound on her far side, close kin to a laugh.
“What?” she said, looking past Abe to him.
“Nothing.” He kept his eyes on the road ahead. “Only he tells it small. The temperament for it.” He shook his head. “He’s the best tracker I ever saw cut sign, and I rode two years with men who did it for the army, so I’ve seen a few who thought they were good.”
“You two have known each other long, to be taking each other’s measure like that.”
“Few days,” David said. “Feels a sight longer than that, though, the way these last few have gone.”
Abe said nothing to it, but the corner of his mouth moved, and Marielle marked that too.
The Reyes place came up around the bend in the road, a low adobe house behind a fence of stacked dead cholla, three goats in the near pen with their heads through the rails, and a wash line strung between two leaning posts with a child’s small clothes pinned to it, still dark and heavy with the rain that hadn’t dried out of them.
A dog set up barking from somewhere out behind the house, the high steady complaint of a dog that knew its whole job was the barking and meant to do it.
Marielle went through the gate first.
Elizabeth Reyes came out onto the step before they’d crossed half the yard. Twenty-three or twenty-four, dark-haired, thinner than Marielle remembered her, with the quick wary look of a woman who’d learned to read whoever came up her road and to read them fast and act on the reading.
She took in Marielle, and then the two men a pace behind her, and her hand went to the doorframe and stayed there.
“Marielle Vaughn.”
“Elizabeth. I’m sorry to come on you with no warning at all.
” She stopped at the foot of the step and kept her hands where they could be seen and her voice easy.
“This is Abe. He’s got some questions about Samson, and I’d take it as a kindness if you’d hear him out a minute before you decide against it. ”
Elizabeth’s eyes moved to Abe and stayed on him.
“Questions,” she said, and the word came out flat as a board.
“I’m looking for him,” Abe said. He didn’t crowd the step, didn’t lean in, kept his distance and let her keep hers.
“I work for the federal courts. He’s wanted on a serious charge, and I mean to find him and take him in to answer it.
” He held her eyes. “I’m not here to make a hard life harder.
I know he left you, and I’ve got a fair idea what that cost. What I need from you is a small thing, and giving it won’t add an ounce to what you’re already carrying. ”
She looked at him a long moment, weighing him.
A child came around the curve of her hip then, a small girl with her mother’s dark hair and a fist knotted in her mother’s skirt, who looked up at the two strange men with the open, fearless curiosity of someone who hadn’t yet been given a reason to learn fear.
“That’s his daughter,” Abe said. It came out gentle and it wasn’t a question.
“She is.” Something moved across Elizabeth’s face and was smoothed away. She set a hand on the child’s head. “What is it you want to know?”
“Did he ever reach out to you? After he ran? A letter, a word passed through some third party. Anything.”
She was quiet a moment, and her hand moved on the child’s hair, and Marielle watched her decide.
“One letter,” she said. “Eight months on, near enough. Postmarked out of Laredo, but the letter itself said he wasn’t in Laredo any longer and not to write back there or anywhere.”
She looked down at the girl and then back up. “Said he’d got into a thing he couldn’t get clear of, not yet, and that he was working at finding the way out of it. Said when he was clear he’d send money. As if money was what was owed.” Her mouth thinned. “I never heard from him again after.”
“Did he name the thing? What he’d got into?”
“He had better sense than to put a thing like that on paper, even to me. Maybe especially to me.” She looked at Marielle then, and her face closed down careful. “I burned the letter the day it came. I didn’t want it under the same roof as her. Didn’t want it in the house at all.”
“Did he say anything in it,” Marielle said, “about my father? About Emmett Vaughn?”
Elizabeth held her eyes, and the careful look deepened.
“He said your father had got hold of something that was going to get him killed,” she said. “Those words, near enough. Said he’d tried to warn him off it and your father had told him he’d see to it himself, that he’d handle it his own way.”
She paused, and the hardness in her gave a little. “That’s the whole of what he wrote about it. I think it sat heavy on him, the warning and what came after. For whatever that’s worth to you. Which I expect is not much.”
The goats shifted at the rails. The dog out behind the house had given up its barking and the morning lay over the little yard without a sound in it but the drip of the wash line.
“When you find him,” Elizabeth said to Abe.
She had her chin up and her eyes were dry and level, the eyes of a woman who’d done all her crying a long while back and had walked out the far side of it onto hard dry ground and built what she could there.
“You tell him his girl is alive, and that she’s got his face on her, every line of it.
You make him sit with that one a while. That’s all I want out of any of this. ”
“I’ll tell him,” Abe said. “Word for word.”
She held on his face one breath longer, taking the promise and weighing it and seeming to find it would hold, and then she turned and went back inside and drew the door shut behind her without another word to any of them.
Through the front window, the little girl climbed up onto something to keep them in sight and watched them all the way out the gate with her two hands flat on the glass.
None of them said a word on the road back until the Reyes place was well behind them and the goats were out of sight, and it was David who broke it, quiet, almost to himself.
“She raised that child up to look out a window,” he said, “instead of teaching her to hide from men who come up the road. That’s a braver thing than most of what I’ve seen with a gun in it.”
Marielle looked at him, and didn’t answer, because there was nothing to add to it that wouldn’t have made it smaller.