Epilogue #2
She understood it without being told, the way she’d come to understand most things about the man.
He had quietly gone, the way he’d said he would, the way he did all things, slipping out of the noise and the press the moment her back was turned and her people had her—asking nothing, making no leaving of it.
She felt the small cold drop of it go through her, the old fear, the road taking another one she cared for.
And then she set it aside, because the man had said I’ll see you after, plain, the way he said the things he meant, and she had learned that whatever else might be said of Abe Auer, the man kept what he said.
If he said after, then there would be an after, and she would wait on it the way she’d told him at the corral fence she would wait, however long it took.
He had gone to Bandera.
The leg would take a horse again by then, with the cane lashed across the saddle for the long flat stretches where he wouldn’t need it and his to take up at the ends of the days when he would.
He made the ride slow and easy over some days, north and east out of the border country into the hill country, and came into Bandera in the gold of an afternoon.
He went straight to the jail, where Samson Jennings was being held against the slow grinding machinery of the federal courts, which were yet making up their collective mind what was to be done with the last living son of a traitor’s line who had, when it came to the point, refused to be the traitor himself.
They let Abe back into the cell block, the jailer knowing him by now from the delivering of the man, and he drew a stool up outside the bars and sat down on it, the bad leg out straight. Samson came to the bars from the inside and looked at him through them.
He was a changed thing from the wreck Abe had hauled up out of a hole in the timber. They fed a man in jail, three times in the day whether he’d earned it or no, and there was a roof over him that didn’t leak and a cot that wasn’t a grave.
The months of it had put flesh back on the frame of him and cleared his eye and let him begin, slowly, to look like a man again instead of the hunted animal Abe had first found leveling a pistol up out of the dark.
“You look near to human,” Abe said.
“They feed you in here. It’s the strangest thing, after the hole. Regular as a church bell, morning noon and night, and a man can lie on the cot of an afternoon and not have to listen for dogs.”
Samson studied him through the bars, taking in the cane lashed to the gear, the careful way Abe held the leg.
“You came. I’ll own I didn’t think you would.
A man collects his bounty and rides on to the next one, mostly.
He doesn’t turn around and come back to sit on a stool outside the cell and look at what he caught. ”
“I came because there’s a thing I owe you,” Abe said. “And I have put off the paying of it about as long as a man honestly can, and I find I’ll not put it off any further. I’ve carried it too far already.”
Something in the flat plainness of his voice changed the air between them, and Samson Jennings went still at the bars, the particular whole-body stillness Abe had seen come over him once before, in a hole in the dark with the dogs coming on through the timber.
“You asked me, that first night,” Abe said. “Down in the hole, before the dogs. You’d started to tell me there were things I needed to know, and then the dogs came up out of the west and there was no time for it. And, after there was never the right moment for it.
The honest truth, Samson, is that I made sure there was never the right moment, because I’m a coward in the one exact way that I couldn’t find it anywhere in myself to be the man who said this thing to you.
So I’ll say it now, late, and badly, because late and badly is better than never, which is the road I’ve been on with it. ”
He kept his eyes level on Samson’s through the bars and did not let them drop. “Your brother. Jeremiah.”
“What of him?” It came out of Samson very low, and very careful, a man stepping out onto ice. “What of Jeremiah?”
“He’s dead, Samson. He has been the whole long while you were down in that hole keeping yourself alive for the keeping of him alive. He died in Arkansas, in the timber by a river, before ever I came south after you, before I’d so much as heard your name spoke. And I am the man that killed him.”
He didn’t look away from it and didn’t soften it.
“I was on your trail, and the trail of you ran through your brother, and I came on him at his place and he came out his door with a rifle already up in his hands. We traded fire across his yard in the early light, and I put a ball into him and he ran for the river, and the river took him down.
There were two of Flores’s men there, waiting, the men set to move him from one hold to the next, and the seeing of them there is the whole of how I came later to understand what he’d been to you, a hostage and not a willing man, the hold they kept on you through him.
“But that understanding came after. After.
The killing came first, in the yard, in the early light, before I understood any part of it.
I killed your brother before I knew there was a brother in the world who loved him, and you went down into a grave in the dark and you stayed in it two months to keep alive a man I had already put in a river months gone, and every single day of that keeping was for nothing.
I stood over your hole that night and I knew it, and I let you go on not knowing it because the knowing was too hard a thing for me to hand you.
That is what I owe you. That is the whole ugly weight of it, and I have carried it here to set it down in front of you, because you have every right to it and I have got no right at all to keep carrying it off where you can’t see it. ”
Samson Jennings stood at the bars and for a long time said not one word.
His face worked through a number of things, one after another, none of them settling, until it came at last to a kind of terrible stillness—the stillness of a man who has just had the last of his family in the world taken from him, and the last reason he’d suffered and starved and buried himself alive taken away in the same breath.
And he’d learned in that same single breath that the man who took it from him was the man sitting on a stool on the other side of the bars, come a long way on a broken leg to be the one to tell him.