Chapter 5
It came three days before her train, on a night with no moon in it.
Samantha had counted every hour of that last week the way a prisoner counts. Seven days. Then five. Then three. The ticket lay under the straw tick with the letters. Every night she slept on top of it with her hand flat on the ticking, as if it might climb out and walk away.
She had done all Amos said. By day she kept near the house. The well she went to only when the old man was in sight of it. When dusk came, she was in the kitchen with the lamp lit, and she did not go out again.
Three days. It was so near she could taste it. It tasted like coal smoke and cold glass.
That evening, Nathan sent Amos to the far field.
He did it at supper, in the flat voice he used for orders. The line fence at the north end was down again, he said, and the neighbor’s steers were through it. He wanted it mended tonight, before the whole herd walked over. Amos looked at him across the table for a moment.
“Be full dark before I’m halfway there.”
“Take a lantern.”
“Fence’ll keep till morning.”
“The steers won’t.” Nathan did not raise his voice. He never did. “You work for me, old man. Or you don’t. Take the lantern and go.”
Amos went. He had no choice, and all three of them knew it. He put on his coat by the door, slow, and picked up the lantern from its nail. As he passed behind Samantha’s stool, his hand came down on her shoulder for the space of a breath. It pressed once, and was gone.
Then the door closed. She heard his boots go across the yard. Then the yard gate. Then nothing.
Nathan finished his coffee.
She washed up with her back to him and her ears straining.
He did not move from the table. He sat with his chair tipped back, watching her as he always did.
If she could only finish the plates and climb the ladder, she thought, she would be all right.
He had never come up the ladder. Whatever else he was, he had never done that.
The last plate was dried. She hung the cloth. Then she turned toward the loft ladder.
“The mare’s down,” Nathan said.
Samantha stopped.
“Cast herself in the stall this afternoon. I meant to say.” He stood, unhurried, and took his hat from the peg. “She’s foaling, or trying to. I don’t know one end of a horse from the other in that state, and you do. Bring the other lantern.”
The mare. She had sat up with that mare through two foalings already. She had pulled the last one herself, at three in the morning, with Mr. West asleep in the house.
And Amos was a mile away in the dark, mending a fence that had not been down.
She knew it. She knew it standing there by the ladder with the dishcloth still damp on her fingers. It was the plainest truth she had ever known. But there was no other soul on the West farm to know it with her. The man was already at the door with his hand on the latch, waiting.
If she would not come, he would come to her. It was as simple as that. There was no lock on the loft.
She took the lantern.
The barn was black as the inside of a boot.
Samantha went in first, because he stood aside for her at the door with a courtesy that made her skin crawl.
The lantern threw a small yellow circle on the straw.
Beyond it the stalls were dark shapes, and the loft above was darker.
She heard the mare shift in the end stall, quiet, easy.
A horse shifts like that when it is not down, not foaling, not in any trouble.
Behind her, the door swung to.
She turned. The bar was not across it. He did not need it. He stood between her and the door, hat pushed back, hands loose at his sides. In the lantern light, his face was pleasant. That was the worst of it. He looked like a man about to say something reasonable.
“There’s no fence down,” she said.
“No.”
“And the mare’s not foaling.”
“She is not.” He came a step nearer, into the light. “Three days, girl. You thought I didn’t know? I found the ticket this morning. Under the tick, with your letters. Very fine letters. I put them back where they lay. I wanted to see how far you’d go.” He smiled. “Texas.”
The lantern shook in her hand.
“Twelve years, my father fed you,” Nathan said. “And you’d walk off this place with a stranger’s ticket in your pocket and not so much as a thank you. No.” He shook his head, gently, as if she were a child who had disappointed him. “I told you. I keep what’s mine.”
She backed a step. Straw whispered under her boot heel. Behind her was the mare’s stall, the wall, and nothing else. There was nowhere in the barn to go, and they both knew it. He came on, still unhurried, and put out his hand toward the lantern.
“Set that down before you drop it,” he said. “You’ll fire the place.”
She did not set it down. He took her wrist instead. His hand closed all the way round it, hard. She cried out, once. The lantern swung wild and threw their shadows huge up the wall.
Nobody heard. There was nobody in all the wide dark to hear.
Then the door came open behind him.
Amos had not gone to the far field.
He had gone as far as the gate. There he had stood in the dark until the kitchen door opened, and seen the lantern cross the yard to the barn.
He came in now the way an old man comes, slow, bent nearly double, with the barn-bar in both his shaking hands.
It had come out of its brackets by the door.
Oak, four feet long, heavier than any load he had lifted in years.
Nathan heard the door and turned, still holding her wrist.
“I told you to go,” he said.
“I did go,” Amos said. “I come back.”
There was no more talk than that. Nathan let go of her and started toward the old man.
Samantha saw the strength go out of Amos’s face, and another look come into it.
Not strength. Something older than strength.
It was the look of a man who has made his decision and will not be moved off it, whatever it costs.
He swung the bar.
It was not a good swing. He was old, the bar was heavy, and Nathan was quick.
But Nathan was quick toward him, not away, and the bar took him across the side of the head as he came.
There was a sound like a fence post going into wet ground.
Nathan West went down in the straw like a sack, and did not move.
Amos stood over him with the bar still in his hands. He was breathing like a man who has run a mile. His whole body shook with it.
Samantha could not move. The lantern was still in her hand. Nathan lay face down in the straw with his hat gone. There was blood in his hair, black in the lantern light. She could not tell if he was breathing.
“Amos,” she said.
“Go.”
“He’s...”
“Go now.” The old man did not look at her. He was looking at Nathan. “Get your papers. Get your bundle. Get to that depot. Get on the first thing that’s going south, and don’t you look back at this place, girl. Not once. You hear me? Not once. And don’t you ever come back.”
“But you...”
“I’ll see to what’s here.” His voice was quiet. It shook, and it was harder than she had ever heard it. “That’s mine to see to. Not yours. Yours is that train. Now go, before he wakes, or before he don’t. Either way, there’s no time. Go.”
She went.
Across the yard she ran, into the house, up the ladder.
She tore the ticking open with her hands and dragged out the letters, the ticket, the folded feed bills.
Her bundle was under the eaves where it had been for twelve years, with the borrowed coat still wrapped around the little she owned.
She caught it up. She did not look at the loft, or at the square of window no bigger than a Bible.
Down the ladder she went so fast she missed the last three rungs, then out through the kitchen. The door stood open behind her.
The barn door was open too. Light showed in it. She did not go near it. She went the other way, out the yard gate and onto the road. Behind her, faint, she heard a sound.
It was a man’s voice. Roaring. Wordless and thick. A man roars like that when he has come up out of the dark with his head split and found his feet under him.
Nathan was awake.
She ran.
Nine miles to the depot. She had walked it once, years ago, behind the Wests’ wagon, when a wheel broke, and they made her get down to lighten it. She had not known then that she was learning the road. Now she knew it.
Every turn of it came up out of the dark to meet her. The bend by the dead elm. The culvert. Then the long straight past the church. Her boots found the ruts. Her breath tore. The bundle banged against her hip until she hauled it up in both arms and ran with it like a child.
Twice she stopped, because she had to. She stood bent double in the road with her heart slamming, listening behind her.
Nothing. Then a dog, far off. Then nothing again.
Was he coming? Could he sit a horse with his head like that? Had Amos stopped him at the door, and how could a bent old man stop a man like that? Was the roaring the last of him, or the first? She did not know. She only knew that a man who kept what was his would not stand in a barn and let it run.
So she did not stand either.
The town came up black against the stars, with not a lamp lit in it.
The depot was shut. She sat in the shadow of the water tower with her bundle in her arms. She did not sleep.
She listened for hoofbeats that did not come.
The first light came instead. With it came a train, breathing steam at the platform, and a man in a cap walking its length.
Southbound. She read the board with her chest heaving. It was not her train. Hers was three days off. But it was southbound. It was leaving. She had a ticket in her hand that said Texas on it, and she did not care what else it said.
The man in the cap looked at the ticket, then at her, then at the state of her. He took his time about it.
“This ain’t for today, miss.”
“Please.”
He looked at her a while more. She did not know what he saw. A girl in a work dress with straw in her hair, a bundle in her arms, the whole night in her face. Whatever it was, it decided him. He punched the ticket without another word and jerked his head at the step.
She climbed up. The car was nearly empty. She fell into a seat by the window as the whistle blew.
The platform slid. The depot lamp went by, then the last of the street, then the church spire small in the gray. Then the fields. Then the long flat road she had run all night, running back the other way now, empty. The sun was coming up red at the end of it.
Samantha pressed her face to the cold glass and watched Iowa go.
Twelve years. Every home she had ever had, and every friend. The loft, the corner of the table, the milky glasshouse panes, an old man’s thumbnail moving under the words. All of it fell away behind her at the pace of a train. If anyone had asked, she could not have said whether she was crying.
Nobody asked. There was nobody to ask.
She never learned what became of Amos.
Not that day, nor any day after. Whether he had held the door.
Whether Nathan had turned on him in the straw, with his head running blood, and what an old man’s bones would have done against that.
Was Amos alive when the sun came up over the West farm?
Or did he lie in the barn where she had left him, having bought her one chance with the last of all he had?
She would never know. There was no one to write to. There was no one who would tell her the truth if she did.
So the not-knowing rode south with her, in the seat beside her, all the long way down. It rode with her through Missouri, into the red country, on toward a Hill Country town. There, a man in good plain clothes had written that he would be waiting.
It would ride with her the rest of her days. She understood that already, watching the last of Iowa go. It was the one wound the train could not carry her away from.
But the train was carrying her. That much was true. It was carrying her south, fast, and every mile of it was a mile no living soul in Texas knew a thing about.