Chapter 19 #3
For a moment he held still under it the way he’d held still under everything else she’d watched him hold still under, a man braced against a thing landing on him.
Then his hand turned over slow beneath hers and closed around it and held, and the two of them sat that way a while with the town going to coals in the south and neither of them saying anything, and it wasn’t nothing, and they both knew it wasn’t nothing.
She had carried a thing through the whole of his telling, and the holding of his hand made a place where it could be said.
“You named someone to me once,” she said.
“Back at the start of this, before I’d any reason yet to keep it.
A name. Layla.” She felt him go still again under her hand.
“She wasn’t in the story you just told. Your mother was in it, and your father, and your two sisters. She wasn’t.”
For a while she thought he wouldn’t answer at all. “No,” he said. “She wasn’t. She’s a different telling, and I haven’t got it in me tonight, not on top of this one.”
His hand tightened the once over hers. “But she was real, and you kept the name of her, and I find that’s worth something to me tonight I didn’t look to find anything worth. Ask me again. Some night that isn’t this one. I’ll tell you the whole of her.”
It was as much as he had to give and more than she’d looked to get, and she let the name go back down into the dark between them and didn’t reach after it.
Marielle was quiet a long while. The honest response, she’d found across the hard part of her life, was most often the quiet one, and the thing a grief like that wanted was not to be argued with but to be heard all the way down to its bottom, and so she gave him the quiet first, and let his telling finish settling in the dark between them before she set anything beside it.
“My father walked up that road to Nash’s sure he was going to win,” she said at last.
“Sure of it the same way you were sure at that table. Twenty-eight years of winning had made him sure of it, and that surety is the thing that walked him up the road and through the gate and got him killed. And it may well be it’s the same surety that started all the rest of this rolling downhill toward us, the same as you believe your fire did.
“I won’t pretend otherwise. Men who go toward things instead of away from them get other people hurt standing too close.
That’s a true thing about the world and I’m not going to sit here in the dark and tell you it isn’t, because you’d hear the lie in it and you asked me not to, and because it would be a lie. ”
She looked south with him, at the low dying glow. “But hear the other half of it, since you’ll take the hard half so easy. The men who went toward things aren’t the men who burned that town.
“You didn’t burn it and my father didn’t burn it and David didn’t fire it.
The men who burned that town are three miles south of here right now, lying up easy across a river your law can’t follow them over, and they’ll sleep tonight, and they did this, not you.
You can carry your share of it. I’ll not try to take it off you, since you’ve made it plain you won’t have it taken, and maybe a man ought to carry his share, maybe the carrying’s the only honest thing left to do with it.
But you’ll hand those men their share before you go drowning yourself in the whole weight of it alone, because there’s nobody else left alive in this country to hand it to them, and a man who can’t carry his portion doesn’t earn the luxury of going under from the weight of everybody’s.
Not tonight he doesn’t. Tonight there’s still a thing wants doing, and you’re still the man best fit to do it. ”
He looked at her, and something in the flat, dead emptiness of his face moved, not toward ease, she could see it wasn’t ease and didn’t pretend to be, but toward use, a man being taken by the shoulder and turned by a steady hand back to face the work that was still in front of him.
First light and her mother sat fixed in her like the one pole the whole reeling night turned on, the thing she’d ride to the moment the sky grayed and not a moment before, because Abe was right that the dark road was no good to either of them.
But first light was hours off yet, and there were hours of dark to be spent before it, and she did not mean to spend them sitting in a chair.
“There’s a thing the two of us can do tonight,” she said, and stood up out of the chair.
“We can go down to that post and get out of the man roped to it everything he knows, all of it, every last piece. He came up out of a hole in the ground swearing he’d tell it, and we’ve every one of us been too busy bleeding and burning and burying since to hold him to the swearing. I’d like to hold him to it now.”
She looked down at Abe in the chair. “Come and question Samson with me. It’ll do more for whatever’s eating the heart out of you than sitting in this chair the rest of the night will, and it’ll do more for my father, and for those two old people under a quilt in that kitchen, and for David in the yard. Come on.”
Abe sat a moment longer, looking south. Then he got his two hands on the arms of the chair and pushed himself up onto the bad leg, and stood, swaying once and steadying.
That was answer enough and she didn’t ask for more.