Chapter 14 #2
“Two years back, near enough, maybe a little more. We’d ridden the south fence together, him and me, the way we’d do, and he was quiet the whole of it, and then over the supper he came out with it.
Said Nash was building himself a thing he didn’t like the shape of, and that good open land set well out away from the town was going to start looking valuable to a man like that for reasons that had nothing to do with running cattle on it. ”
He turned one hand over and looked at the palm of it.
“And I’ll be honest with you, girl, I thought he was just being a Ranger about it.
Seeing trouble out ahead because trouble was his trade and a man sees what his trade trains his eye to.
I told him I’d been on this land sixty years and meant to die on it and no town man was going to change that.
He looked at me a while and he let it lie.
He was good about letting a thing lie when a man’s mind was set. ”
His jaw worked. “Then he went off up the road to that dinner and he didn’t come back from it, and I quit thinking your father saw trouble where there wasn’t any to see. Haven’t thought it since. I expect I never will again.”
The room held quiet a moment. The dog had come in at some point and dropped itself down under the table against Tom’s boots with a long groan of contentment, untroubled by any of it.
“You can’t stay here, Tom,” Marielle said. “Not this week. Maybe not for a good while. You’ve got people somewhere you can get to?”
“My sister’s down in Uvalde,” Mae said. “Widowed these six years, in a house too big for her, and she’s been after us to come down and visit and we’ve been putting it off and putting it off. Every letter. Come down, come down, what are you saving yourselves for.”
Her mouth pressed. “I’d thought we were saving ourselves for the comfort of dying in our own beds. That seems a foolish thing to have been saving for now.”
She looked across the table at Tom, and Marielle watched forty years of marriage pass between the two of them in a single look, the whole long conversation of it carried in the one glance with not a word spent. “Maybe it’s come time we stopped putting it off, old man.”
“And just hand him the place,” Tom said. There was no give in it at all, none. He’d gone up straight in his chair.
“Walk off sixty years of my life and my brother’s life and my father’s because a man in a fine house up in town has decided he wants what’s mine and sent word he means to take it.
My father broke this ground. There wasn’t a fence post in forty miles when he came here.
He’s buried out past that garden and my brother beside him and my boy beside them, and I’m to leave the three of them to a man who never put a day’s honest work into anything he’s got”
“I’m not telling you to hand him anything,” Marielle said, and she leaned in across the table to say it.
“I’m telling you to be alive to fight him for it.
There are people working on Nash this very day, Tom.
Today. Right now, while we sit here at this table.
Your being gone a few weeks isn’t surrender.
It isn’t giving him the land. It’s not being standing here on it when he sends men out who don’t care one way or the other whether you’ve signed his paper or not, men who’d as soon do it the quiet way as the other and have done it the quiet way before, to people quieter and harder to miss than you. ”
She held his eyes hard. “You staying doesn’t keep the land.
You staying just means he gets the land and you in the bargain, and your father’s stones get a fresh one beside them with your name on it, and the place is his all the same.
Where’s the sense in that? Where’s the fight in dying easy on your own porch and making it simple for him? ”
“A man ought to be able to stand on his own ground.”
“He ought. In a country with any justice left in it he ought, and there’s no arguing the right of what you’re saying.” She softened it, because she could see the right of it was the whole of what he had left to stand on.
“But the ground doesn’t know you’re standing on it, Tom.
The ground will be here when this is done.
It’s only you and Mae that won’t be, if you stay.
My father would tell you the exact same thing if he could sit at this table and say it.
You know he would. He’d tell you a dead man can’t fight for his land, but a man in Uvalde can come back and fight for it.
Live to fight. That’s all I’m asking of you.
The harder thing. Not the standing. The living. ”
That reached him where her own words alone hadn’t, the invoking of Emmett, the putting of her father’s voice behind her own.
He looked over at the rifle he’d leaned by the door, and then at Mae across the table, and something went out of the set of his old shoulders, some long-held stiffness, and Marielle knew she had him.
“He would, at that,” Tom said, low. “He’d say just that.
Live to fight.” He let out a breath that seemed to take some years with it.
“Damn the man for being right about it two years gone. He always did have the trick of making the thing you didn’t want to do sound like the only thing a man with sense would. ”
“Because it generally was,” Marielle said.
“Because it generally was.” He almost smiled but didn’t, and he looked at his hands again. “Go to Uvalde. I hear you. I don’t like a word of it but I hear you.”
“Go in the morning, first light, before the town’s awake to see you go.
Don’t tell a soul on the road more than that you’re off to visit Mae’s widowed sister, which is the truth and a thing nobody can wonder at.
And don’t you sign one piece of paper any man puts in front of you, not for any sum of money, no matter who he is or what badge he’s wearing, until you’ve heard from me direct that it’s safe to come home and safe to refuse. ”
“And who’s to tell us it’s safe,” Tom said. “You?”
“Me.” She held his eyes. “I’ll get word to you in Uvalde myself.
Or”—and here something came up in her that was nearly a smile and wasn’t quite one—“you’ll read it for yourselves, in the newspaper, in the plain fact that Nash isn’t the mayor of this town anymore.
One or the other. Watch for the one or the other. ”
Mae made a small sound across the table that might, in some easier year, have been the start of a laugh. “Listen to her, Tom. Come into my kitchen and sat down at my own table and giving us our marching orders like a colonel.”
She shook her gray head, and a wet shine come up in her old eyes.
“You sound just exactly like him, child, do you know that? Not the look of him, you’ve your mother’s look.
But the way of him. That same flat certainty about a thing that hasn’t even gone and happened yet.
He’d say a thing was going to come out a certain way like he’d already been ahead and seen it come out so, and you’d find yourself believing him against all sense, and the worst of it was he was usually right and you’d no satisfaction even in doubting him. ”
“He was right more times than he was wrong,” Marielle said. “By a long way.”
“He was. Oh, he was.” Mae reached across and pressed her hand once, hard, and then she stood up from the table, and the grief went out of her bearing and a brisk decided practicality came into it instead, a woman who had her course set now and packing to get done before morning.
“Tom Henderson, you go and get the small trunk down from the loft, the one with the good brass on it. We’ll travel light and we’ll go at first light, the way she says. The hens can fend a few days and Bell’s man can see to the stock if I send word.”
She turned back to Marielle, and her voice gentled.
“But you’ll sit and have your coffee before you ride that road back in the dark.
I’ll not hear a word against it. You’ll have coffee and a piece of bread under you both or you’ll not leave my house, and that’s the last order to be given in this kitchen tonight, and it’s mine, not yours. ”