Chapter 3
He rented a sorrel mare from a Denver livery the next morning and rode west out of the city, with the mountains filling the whole sky ahead of him.
He’d slept poorly in a dollar room over a saloon, his coat folded under his head with the map inside it and his boots on, waking at every creak of the stairs for the long coat and that colorless stare to come through the door.
The man hadn’t come. By dawn, Nate had decided the watcher could watch all he pleased. A man who meant to do murder in a crowded depot would have done it, and one who didn’t was only trying to put fear in him. He had a long acquaintance with fear. It hadn’t killed him yet.
So, he paid the livery, pointed the mare west, and let the city fall away behind him as the country opened, grass running to the foot of the peaks, hawks turning slow circles over it.
It was nothing like Boston. There was no Boston in it anywhere.
He couldn’t say whether that eased him or hollowed him out.
The road thinned to a track, and the track to a memory. He had been seven the last time he came down this way, half asleep in the bed of a wagon, and he shouldn’t have known the area at all. But his body knew it. His hands knew the bend where the creek crossed the road.
Something drew up tight under his ribs a mile before he understood why, and then the track climbed a long grassed rise, and he came over the top of it. The mare stopped without being asked, and there below him in the cup of the land was the place where he was born.
The house still stood. That was the thing he hadn’t let himself expect. Fourteen years of weather had silvered the boards and stripped half the paint. The porch roof was bowed at one corner, and the corral rails had gone gray and gap-toothed.
Brush had grown up against the north wall to the height of a man. But it stood. Smoke hadn’t taken it and neither had time. It waited down there in the long grass like a thing that had been holding its breath since the night he left it.
He sat on the mare a long while before he could make himself ride down.
Inside, the air was close and brown and full of dust that turned slowly in the bars of light from the broken shutters. Sheets had been thrown over the furniture once and had slid half off, and under them the shapes of his whole childhood waited.
The table where his mother rolled out dough. The chair by the window where his father took his coffee. He moved through the rooms like a man walking through deep water, and the past came up to meet him whether he willed it or not.
The cedar trunk stood against the wall, where it had always stood.
He lifted the lid. The winter quilts were still folded inside, gone to must and moth, and the smell of cedar rose at him exactly as it had that night.
For a moment he was small again and his mother’s white face hung above him saying, Not a sound, Nathaniel, whatever you hear.
His hand had shaken on the raised lid. He had crossed an ocean of years and half a continent of track, and the smell of an old blanket could still reach into him and make him seven and helpless in the dark.
He let the lid down softly and stood with his palm flat on the wood until his hand went still again.
The window he’d looked through. The rectangle of glass, grimed now, where the moon had caught one side of a killer’s face.
And by the front door, in the planks of the threshold and the top step beyond, a dark stain, gone almost black with the years, soaked too deep into the wood for any rain to carry off.
He stood over it a long time with his jaw aching and his hands closed into fists at his sides. Then he heard the horse.
A rider was coming up the track at an easy walk, an old man on a stocky bay, a rifle in a saddle scabbard under his knee.
Nate’s hand dropped to his hip before thought, reaching for the iron that wasn’t there, that had never been there, and finding only the rough cloth of his coat. He stood empty-handed in the doorway of his dead father’s house and waited.
The old man drew rein at the foot of the steps and pushed his hat back.
A broad, weathered face came clear, deep-creased around the eyes, a thick mustache shot with white.
He looked at Nate for a good while, and his eyes went wet and bright.
“Lord above,” he whispered. “You’ve got your daddy’s jaw. ”
“You knew him.”
“Knew him better than any man living.” He climbed down, stiff in the knees, holding onto the saddle horn.
“Josh Bodine. Last I laid eyes on you, boy, you came up about to my belt buckle, and you were scared of my mustache.” A rough laugh, though the wet stood bright in his eyes. “Eldon Ralston’s boy. Come home.”
A knot he’d carried for fourteen years loosened a half turn in his chest. “Nate,” he said and put out his hand, and the old man took it in a grip like a vise of bone and gristle.
They built a fire in the cold stove, and Josh produced coffee and a battered pot from his saddlebags as if he’d been carrying them against this very day. They sat at the dusty table while the light grew long and amber through the shutters, and Josh talked.
He’d kept an eye on the place all fourteen years, he said.
Couldn’t bring himself not to. Rented the grass to neighbors a season at a time so the county wouldn’t think it abandoned and move in.
Ran a few of his own cattle on it, mended what he could of the fences.
“Wasn’t mine to keep up,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck.
“But it wasn’t in me to watch it fall down, neither. ”
“Why’d you stay near it?” Nate asked. “A man could’ve sold his own place and moved on. Found country that didn’t have ghosts in it.”
“Could’ve.” Josh studied the bottom of his cup.
“Didn’t seem right, somehow. Leaving him out here with nobody to remember which way was the truth of it.
” He was quiet for a spell. “And maybe I figured a day might come when somebody’d ride back up that rise wanting to know.
Didn’t rightly believe it. But I kept the coffee pot, all the same. ”
“And the man who did it?” Nate kept his voice flat. “Fourteen years. Did the law ever name anyone?”
Josh’s face closed like a fist. “Law.” He said it the way another man might spit.
“Sheriff we got is Budd Trisler, and Trisler does what Cisco Chambers tells him to do. And that’s the start and end of the law in this county.
” He turned his coffee cup slowly between his hands.
“Folks talk when there’s no Chambers man in earshot.
Talk says Chambers wanted this land, or wanted something on it, and your daddy wouldn’t sell, and then your daddy was dead, and the case was closed inside a week.
Nobody saw nothing. Nobody ever does, out here.
A man speaks up against Chambers, his barn burns, or his cattle die or he just plain disappears, and so a man learns to keep his mouth shut and his eyes on his own dirt. ”
The name again. Three times now in two days. Chambers.
The girl at the depot had said it too. He still had the slip of paper she’d given him, folded once in his coat pocket. He hadn’t thrown it away. “You think it was him.”
“I think it the way I think the sun’ll come up.” The old man looked at him steadily. “But thinking ain’t proving, and proving’s what’ll hang a man like that, not what an old fool believes in his gut.”
The fire crackled in the stove. Outside, a meadowlark let go a long, falling note and went quiet.
“I’ll stay on, if you’ll have me,” Josh said.
“You can’t work this place alone, and you sure can’t ride into that county green as new grass.
You don’t know one end of a horse from the other anymore, I’d wager, and I’d bet my boots you’ve never fired a rifle in your life. Boston don’t teach a man that.”
He set down the cup. “I’ll teach you. Ride, shoot, read sign. Get this ranch on its feet. It’s the least I owe your daddy, and I owe him more than I’ll ever pay.”
“Why?” Nate watched him. “Why do you owe him?”
The old man didn’t answer that. He rubbed the back of his neck again and looked at the dark stain by the door, and whatever lived behind his face, he kept it there.
“I’ll take the offer,” Nate said. “On one condition you hear me out on. I didn’t come back for the grass or the cattle, Josh.
I came back for him. The man who stood on those steps and shot my mother and father while I watched through a crack in that trunk.
” He nodded at the cedar chest. “I’m going to find him.
Whatever it costs me. I’d sooner you knew that going in. ”
Josh was quiet for a moment. “Your daddy’d say revenge is a poor crop to plant a life in.”
“My daddy’s not here to say it.”
“No.” The old man’s jaw worked. “No, he ain’t.” He reached across and gripped Nate’s shoulder once, hard. “All right, boy. We’ll find your man. But we’ll do it, so the doing don’t cost you the rest of you. Agreed?”
Nate didn’t promise. He nodded, which wasn’t the same, and Josh let it pass.
That night, by lamplight, Nate took the sealed envelope from inside his coat and laid the soft, old sheet of paper open on the table between them. He’d not shown it to a living soul. It had been his alone since the lawyer’s office in Boston, his father’s last secret, folded small.
“My grandfather kept this fourteen years,” he said. “Sent to him from out here, before. The lawyer gave it to me with the deed and a line that said my father trusted it to his keeping, and that I’d know what to do with it.”
He smoothed a curling corner flat with two fingers.
“I don’t. I’ve looked at it till my eyes crossed.
A creek. Some canyon. That mark up top like a steeple, and a few notches I can’t make sense of.
” He turned it for the old man to see. “I figured the whole way out here it was just an old man’s keepsake. Mean anything to you?”
Josh leaned into the lamplight, and the blood went out of his face like water out of a tipped glass. His finger hovered over the steeple mark and wouldn’t quite touch it.
“I’ve seen this,” he whispered. The hand hung there over the steeple mark, trembling now.
“Lord help us, boy. Your daddy showed me a sketch of this very thing, the fall before he died. Drew it out by this same lamp, near enough, and made me swear on my life I’d never speak of it to a living soul.
And I never did. Not in fourteen years.”
He raised his eyes to Nate’s, and the fear in them was an old man’s, deep and true. “I think this paper is the reason they killed him.”