Chapter 5
Sixteen he was when the end came, and it came over nothing at all.
A horse had gone lame in the near pasture. It was no fault of the boy's. The animal had stepped wrong on a stone in the dark, as horses will. But Esra Craw was in one of his black tempers that night. He needed a place to set it down. The boy was the place he always set it.
"You did this," the man said, low and ugly, in the swaying lantern light of the barn. "Careless. Worthless. After all I've fed you, all these years."
"The ground was bad," the boy said.
Tired he was, bone-tired, and the words came out flatter than was wise. He was past minding his tongue that night. "It wasn't me. The stone did it, not me."
To his belt Esra's hand went.
A hundred times the boy had taken that belt.
More than a hundred. He had bent his back to it and swallowed the sting.
Each time, he had told himself it would buy him something in the end.
Some softening. Some place. But the boy who had believed that was gone now.
He was buried out in the cold, far field beside old Proutt.
The one who stood in the barn that night was someone else entirely.
Up came the belt. Down it came.
And the boy's hand shot out, quick as a snake, and caught the man's wrist in midair.
For a long moment, neither of them moved.
Huge upon the barn wall, the lantern threw their two locked shadows.
The boy held the wrist fast. In his own grip, he felt his strength.
All those years of hauling and lifting and splitting had built it into him, year by year.
He had never once stopped to notice it growing.
Esra Craw was no young man anymore. The boy was nearly grown now, and hard as wintered oak.
The two of them knew it in the same instant.
A change came into the man's eyes.
It was a small change, but it was unmistakable. The boy had seen it in cornered animals. It was fear.
"Let go," Esra said. Not so certain now, that voice. Not so cold.
The boy let go.
He stepped back, out of the man's reach. Nothing was left to say, and so he said nothing. There were no words in him for this. There was only the cold, sure knowledge of what had just changed between them, forever.
Both of them knew it, in that long quiet moment.
He would not be staying. Never again would that belt fall across his back. That whole part of his life was over and done. A door had swung shut between two rooms, and the bolt thrown home. The boy felt the truth of it settle in his chest, cold and clear and strangely calm.
Slowly, Esra lowered his arm.
He coiled the belt back around his fist, not looking at the boy, his jaw working. Then he turned and went out of the barn into the dark, and said not another word. Alone in the lantern light, the boy stood, his heart pounding against his ribs. He waited for the shaking in his hands to pass.
Sleep did not come to him that night.
In the straw of his stall, he lay with his eyes wide open, watching the dark, and made his plans. They were simple plans. They did not take long to make. He had been making them somewhere down deep for a long time without knowing it.
Before the first gray light, he rose.
The few things he owned, he gathered, and few indeed they were.
The rough clothes he stood up in. A spare shirt gone thin at the elbows.
The little pine horse from his pocket. The old clasp-knife, warm against his palm.
After six long years of his labor, that was the whole of it.
That was all the Craw farm had given him to show for his childhood.
Bread he took from the kitchen, half a loaf, no more.
It was less by far than he had earned ten times over.
Beyond his honest due he would not steal so much as a crust. His pride forbade it.
And his pride was about the only thing the Craws had never managed to take from him.
They had taken his childhood and his trust and his hope. They had not got that.
At the door, he stopped once and looked back at the dark and silent house.
No lamp burned in any window. No voice called him back.
Little Thomas slept warm in the good room with the real bed.
Esra and Greer slept on, easy in the dark.
Not one of the three would wake to find him gone before dawn.
Not before the chores went undone, and the cows stood unmilked, and the fire unlit.
The work they would surely miss. Him they would not.
That was the plain truth of it, and it no longer had the power to wound him.
Out of the yard he walked, down the rutted lane, and did not look back again.
Pale under the last of the stars lay the road south.
He walked fast, lengthening his stride, putting hard miles between himself and the farm.
With every mile, a band in his chest loosened a little more.
One that had been drawn tight for years.
Where he was going, he had no clear notion.
Only the direction did he know. West. West, where old Proutt had said a man could stand on his own two feet.
West, away from everything he had ever been.
At his back, the sun came up over the world.
It lit the long grass to running gold. It threw his shadow far out ahead of him on the road, a tall, thin shape striding ever westward.
Never in his whole life had he felt so afraid.
And never had he felt so free. The two ran together in him, the fear and the freedom, until he could not tell the one from the other.
Toward midday, a great cloud of dust rose up on the southern road. Beneath it came the bawling of cattle.
A trail outfit it was, driving a herd north toward the new ranges.
Hundreds of steers moved together in a slow brown river, flanked by riders on either side.
The dust climbed off their backs into the white midday sky.
At the roadside, the boy stopped and watched them come on.
A longing stirred in him toward the sight of it, toward all that motion and freedom and open country.
He could not have put a name to what it was.
A rider broke off from the herd and trotted his horse over.
He was broad and weathered, with a heavy gray mustache, the trail boss by the look of him.
"You lost, son?" the man called down from the saddle.
"No, sir," the boy said. "Looking for work. I'm good with stock. Cattle, horses, anything you've got. I'll do the hardest job in your outfit and not say a word of complaint."
Over him, the trail boss ran a long, judging look.
He took in the lean, wiry frame, the steady gaze that did not flinch, the thick calluses on the young hands. He was a man short of two riders already. The long drive north went hard on the few he had left.
"You ride?"
"Yes, sir."
"Rope?"
"I'll learn whatever I don't know. Fast. You won't have to tell me twice."
The boy's flat, quiet certainty seemed to settle the matter.
Toward the moving dust, the trail boss jerked his head. "Got a spare horse and an empty saddle. Pay's poor and the work's worse than poor. You'll eat dust all day, sleep on the hard ground all night, and curse the hour you ever asked me. Still want it?"
"Yes, sir," the boy said. "I want it."
"Then climb on. We don't wait for any man."
A horse was given to him.
Up into the saddle he swung, and into the great brown herd he rode.
The dust closed warm over him. The bawling of the cattle and the drum of a thousand hooves swallowed him whole.
At the flank of the herd, he found his place and held it.
The trail boss watched him work a while.
He nodded once to himself and rode on up the line.
The other hands let him be.
They saw that he was quiet and asked no more of him than that. They saw that he could sit a horse and never once shirked a hard turn. Out here, on the long trail, a man's past was his own business. They asked him nothing. He told them nothing. That suited him down to the very ground.
The work was hard, harder than the farm in its way, but it was honest. A man was paid for it in coin, not in welts.
The days were long in the saddle. The nights were cold on the ground.
The dust got into everything, into his food and his eyes and his teeth.
But no fist pounded a barn door at dawn.
No belt waited at the end of a careless hour.
He ate beside the fire with the other men. He took his turn at the night watch. He slept his few hours under more stars than he had known were in the sky. It was the first work of his life that was simply work, and not a debt he could never pay down.
North into a vast new country, the drive carried him.
The grass ran clear and unbroken to the edge of the world. The sky stood without end above it, bigger than anything the boy had known could exist. Room enough out here, he thought, looking at it. Room enough that a man might lose the boy he had been, and never have to go and find him again.
Through the long days, he rode. With each beat of the hooves beneath him, he made his vows over.
Never again would he need another living soul. Never again would he beg to be kept. Never would he let himself be merely useful to any heart on this earth. For being useful was the very cheat that had cost him his whole childhood. He had paid that price once. He would not pay it twice.
His letters he would learn one day, he swore.
Land he would buy, a great deal of it, more than the Craws had ever dreamed of owning. Free and clear he would own it, every acre. And no man living would ever again pry open his mouth to count the worth of him as a man counts a mule.
Somewhere along those long, hard miles, the unwanted orphan quietly buried the child he had been.
Of that boy he spoke to no one. In time, he would scarcely speak of him even to himself. The pine horse he kept, and the clasp-knife. But the child who had hoped, he folded away and put from him.
On he rode into the dust of the great herd, alone among rough strangers, into the wide and waiting country. And there, mile by weary mile, beneath that endless sky, the boy from the train began to make himself into a man.