Chapter 13 #3
“He warned Emmett and couldn’t save him and saved his own self instead and ran.
A certain kind of man can’t live with having done that.
It eats him. So he came back to finish the thing he set out to do the first time, or die in the trying of it, because the trying was the only way left him to look at his own face. ”
She folded her hands. “It’s not the brave ones who come back. It’s the ones who can’t bear what their running made of them.”
The kitchen was quiet around her.
“Then we hand him one,” Marielle said.
She said it, and knew even as she said it what handing the man a way out was going to cost, and in what order the cost would have to be paid. She turned to Abe.
“There’s a thing you don’t know yet,” she said. “Yesterday, David and I lay up in the brush above the river crossing and watched a run come across. Nash was down on the bank. We got near enough to take his words off the air.”
She held his eye. “He told the sheriff the Hendersons can’t stay on their place.
Said Flores needs ground that’ll hold that many men and that much freight without the county taking notice, and the Henderson place is the right size of it, and far enough out that nobody rides past.” She paused.
“He said inside the week. And we don’t know what day of that week we’re standing in. ”
“Then those two old people have to be warned,” Abe said. “Before anything else.”
“It has to be me. I’ve known them my whole life, and they won’t take it from a stranger.” She looked at David. “You’ll come with me. I’d as soon not be on that road alone, the way things stand.”
David nodded, no argument in it.
“And you,” she said to Abe. “You mean to go back to Nash.”
“I mean to be sat across a table from him before he’s had the time to set his feet.” Abe turned the cup on the wood. “You’ve sat across from the man. I haven’t. Tell me the man.”
She took her time with it, because she’d thought of little else in two years. “He’s careful,” she said.
“But not the way a frightened man is careful. Careful like a card player, thinking three hands ahead, already working the conversation that comes after the one he’s having with you while he’s still having it.
I went to him after, and he took my hands and grieved at me, every word of it correct, and I walked out knowing he’d lied to me from the first word to the last, and knowing just as certain I’d never prove a syllable.
Because he’d thought through every question I might bring before I ever lifted my hand to knock. ”
She turned the cup. “Nobody with any weight behind them has ever once put that man in a room he didn’t have the running of.
Hollis sat across a desk from him and took the exact help Nash had decided beforehand to hand him and rode back to Austin thanking him for it.
That’s the lock on the door. Two years.”
“Then that’s the room I mean to put him in,” Abe said. “He doesn’t have the run of a room he walks into not knowing who’s already in it. I gave his wife a name on his front step this morning. By now he knows a stranger by it stood at his door the same hour his stable burned.
He doesn’t know who I am under the name, nor what I came for, nor what I’ve already watched come up off that raft. He knows his stable’s gone, and he knows it was no lightning strike, and he is going to want, the way a man wants air, to know whose hand was on the fuse.”
He stilled the cup. “A man who wants a thing that bad, and can’t get it, and doesn’t know what you know—that’s a man off his feet.
It’s the only kind of room Nash can be pushed in, and it won’t keep.
By tomorrow he’ll have sat down quiet with Briggs and built me into something he understands, and a Nash who understands you is a Nash you can’t touch. ”
“He’ll have Briggs to hand,” she said. “And Briggs doesn’t go far from a gun. If Nash takes one look across that table and decides you’re a danger to him, before you’ve got out of him what you came for.”
Abe looked at her, level. “Then that’s the cost of the thing.
There’s generally a cost, in this work, and a man learns to stop being surprised by it.
The only question worth a damn is whether what you’re reaching for is worth the reaching, and this is.
Your father’s at the end of it, one way or the other.
So’s the rope they’ve got waiting on Samson Jennings, who I’d sooner hand a court than hand Flores.
” He set the cup down. “It’s worth the table. ”
“And then Samson,” her mother said. They looked to her.
“He was ready to go with you the once, before the dogs turned him off it. He’ll be readier now, not less, whatever fear’s in him.
Nuestra Tierra has run those woods with dogs and come near him, and a man knows when the ground’s gone out from under his hiding place. ”
She laid her hands flat on the table. “You go to him tomorrow night. After the old people are warned and clear, and before those men go back through that timber a second time.”
“It’s what I had in my mind to do,” Abe said.
“I know it is. I’m saying it out loud so that every soul at this table knows the shape of what comes next, and nobody’s working blind on their own corner of it. That’s how things go wrong. People working in the dark on their own piece of a thing.”
She looked from Marielle to Abe. “She warns those old people and gets them clear. You go into the timber for Samson. And then we sit at this table and we hear what Samson Jennings has carried in his belly two years.” Her voice went lower.
“And then, God willing, we learn at last what was done to your father.”