Chapter 14
They rode out after the Hendersons in the long gold light of the late afternoon, Marielle up on the bay and David on the gray Abe had handed over to them, the road running north out of town all amber under the horses and the brush throwing its long shadows clear across the ruts of it.
She held the pace down to an easy walk. A hard pace was remembered by anyone they passed, the dust of it and the hurry of it, and today of all days she wanted nothing about the two of them remembered by anybody.
The country opened out flat and pale on either side, mesquite and prickly pear and the long yellow grass gone to seed, and here and there a windmill standing far off against the sky.
She knew this stretch of road the way she knew the back of her own hand, every gate and every cattle guard and the place where the wash cut across it and flooded in spring.
She’d ridden it her whole life and she found she was glad of David beside her on it, of having somebody to ride it with for once instead of riding it alone with two years of nothing for company.
“You’ve been to this place,” David said.
“Sunday dinners, when I was a girl. Half the Sundays of my childhood, it feels like now.”
She watched the road come up. “Mae Henderson taught me my letters in the Sunday school in town, and Tom’s table was where we went after, more often than not.
She had a way of teaching that made you want to get the thing right, not from fear of her but from not wanting to be the one who let her down.
My father said she’d have made the army a fine sergeant, if the army had any sense and took women, which he allowed it didn’t. ”
“You were close to them.”
“As close as a child gets to her grandparents, near enough, and I had none of my own living, so they did the work of them.” She smiled a little, at the road.
“Mae used to set me to shelling peas on that porch and tell me stories the whole time about people in the town, who’d married badly and who’d come good after everybody gave up on them.
I didn’t know till I was grown that she was teaching me to read people the same as she’d taught me to read letters.
She did it so a child wouldn’t notice it being done.” She paused. “Tom would be off somewhere mending something. There was always a thing wanting mending on that place and he never seemed to mind it. A man content in his work. I didn’t know how rare that was either, till later.”
“And the husband. Tom.”
“Tom doesn’t say a great deal. Never did.
” A jackrabbit broke out of the brush near the bay’s forefeet and went bounding off across the flat, and the bay, which had seen ten thousand jackrabbits, didn’t so much as flick an ear at this one.
“He let Mae do the talking for the both of them forty years and never seemed to feel the lack of doing it himself. But there’s nothing slow about the man.
“The quiet ones out here mostly aren’t slow. They’ve just learned there’s no profit in saying a thing twice when their wife will say it once and better.”
She paused. “They’ve got more land than the two of them could ever hope to work, and no children living to leave it to, and Tom’s brother had it before him and his father before that.
It’s exactly the kind of place a man like Nash looks at across a county and sees something in it that the people living on it never put there. ”
“No children.” David said it quiet, turning it over. “None at all?”
“They had a boy. He died small, of a fever, before I was born. Mae never said much about it and Tom never said anything, but there’s a little stone out past the garden with his name cut in it, and Mae keeps it clear of weeds same as she keeps the kitchen garden.”
She looked off at the country. “I think that’s some of why she made room for every child the town would send her. A house with that much love in it and nobody small to spend it on. So she spent it wide instead of deep.”
David rode a while with that. “It’s a hard thing to ride out and tell people like that they have to run.”
“It is. It’s the hardest thing I’ve done in a while, and I’ve done some hard things lately.” She set her jaw. “But it’s a sight better than riding out a week from now and finding what’s left after Nash had his way with them. I’ll take the hard telling over the hard finding.”
They came up on the Henderson place from the south as the sun got low, the ranch house long and low and white under a stand of big live oak, a windmill turning slow and creaking off to the one side, a good tight corral and a barn in better repair than the house, and a kitchen garden behind a low fence that put her mother’s poor weed-choked one to shame even now, even this year.
Thin smoke stood up off the chimney into the still evening.
A dog the color of the dust itself came boiling off the porch barking fit to wake the county, and then got Marielle’s scent or her shape as they came on, and broke off its noise all at once and came trotting out to meet the bay instead with its whole hind end swinging.
“Hey, Ranger,” Marielle said down to it, and the old dog’s name being what it was, named for her father by Tom as a joke that had outlasted itself, put a small ache in her she didn’t let show.
Tom Henderson came to the door of the house with a rifle held loose in the crook of his arm, and the rifle came down the moment he made out who it was crossing his yard, though it didn’t go away.
“Marielle Vaughn.” He looked past her to David, and the rifle stayed down but his eyes went careful and stayed careful. “Been a long while since you came up this road.”
“Too long, Tom. And I’m sorry to come up it now with no warning at all.
” She swung down off the bay and let the reins trail.
“This is David. He’s a friend, and what I’ve ridden out here to say is for the both of you, you and Mae together, and it won’t keep till a better time. There isn’t a better time coming.”
Something in the way she said it took the last of the welcome off his weathered face and put an older thing there in its place.
He’d buried a brother on this land and outlived more than one president off it and he knew the sound of bad news when it came riding up his road in the gold light with no warning ahead of it.
He looked at the rifle in his arm a moment as if he’d forgotten he was holding it, and then he looked back at her.
“Come in, then,” he said, and stood back from the door. “Mae’s got coffee on. She always does, this hour.”
The kitchen was warm and close and smelled of fresh bread and old woodsmoke, and Mae Henderson was smaller than Marielle had carried her in memory, and grayer, gone a little stooped through the shoulders, but the eyes in the soft old face were the very same, quick and warm and missing not one thing that passed in front of them.
She had Marielle by both hands before she was full through the door, exclaiming over her, holding her out at arm’s length to look and pulling her back in again.
“Look at you. Look at the woman you’ve gone and made of yourself when my back was turned.” She pressed Marielle’s hands. “I think on you, child. I think on you and your mother out there. I’d have come, only Tom doesn’t travel good anymore and I don’t like to leave him, and the road—”
And then she got a clear look at Marielle’s face in the lamplight and read what was written there, and her welcome thinned out and went quiet the same way Tom’s had out in the yard, the words drying up in her mouth.
“Sit down, child,” Mae said, and drew her toward the table. “And tell it. You’ve a face on you like your father used to come in wearing, the nights he’d a thing to say none of us wanted to hear. Sit and tell it out.”
So she told it. Not the whole of it. Not Samson down in his hole in the timber, nor Abe’s federal paper, nor the rifles coming up off the raft at the crossing in the dark. Only the part of it that was theirs by right to know, and no more, because more might get them killed for the knowing.
That Nash had found a use for their land.
That he meant to have it, and have it inside the week, and have it quiet.
That when their neighbors came asking after the Hendersons, the way neighbors would, they’d be told the old folks had sold up and gone off to family, the way old folks do, and that nobody would think to wonder at it, which was the whole of why Nash had chosen them.
She watched it land on the two of them. Tom set his coffee cup down on the table and didn’t pick it up again. Mae’s quick hands went still and folded themselves in her lap and stayed folded.
“How do you come to know this?” Tom said. Not a challenge in it. A man wanting the ground of a thing before he stood his weight on it.
“I heard him say it. Yesterday, with my own ears. I won’t tell you where, Tom, for your sake more than mine, but I heard the words come out of his own mouth, plain as I’m saying them to you, and the sheriff sitting his horse right alongside him nodding along to every one of them.”
“Briggs.” Tom said the name the way a man spits out something gone bad in his mouth. “That one would nod along to the devil himself, and hold his coat while he worked, if the devil owned the bank and paid on the first of the month.”
“He near enough does own the bank,” Mae said quietly from across the table. “Or near enough to it that it makes no difference which. There’s not a man in this county owes money that doesn’t owe it to Nash one way around or another, and a man you owe is a man you don’t cross.”
She looked at Marielle, and her old eyes had something hard come up in the back of them.
“Your father knew about Nash. He told Tom so, didn’t he, Tom.
Years back now. You remember it. You came in off that ride and you sat at this table and you didn’t eat your supper, which you’ve done maybe twice in forty years. ”
“Told me to watch myself,” Tom said. He looked down at his big still hands on the table.