Chapter 7
Nate’s hands still carried calluses from the fence posts the morning Josh put a rifle in them: cold steel and worn wood, heavier than he’d expected. They went out to the dry creek bed below the south pasture that first time, and they kept going out there every morning after.
Josh set up a row of tin cans along a deadfall log and handed Nate the Winchester. “Don’t yank it,” he said. “You don’t pull a trigger. You squeeze it like you’re surprised when it goes.”
The first shot threw the can clean off the log. The second missed. The third didn’t.
“Huh,” said Josh, around his mustache. “Well, now.”
“Beginner’s luck.”
“Maybe.” Josh reloaded for him. “Or maybe your daddy’s hands. He could shoot the eye out of a jack at a hundred yards. Do it again.”
He did it again. By the end of that first week, the cans went off the log five times in six, the kick had stopped surprising him, and the rifle had begun to feel less like a tool he was borrowing and more like a part of his own reach.
The Colt came next, faster and less forgiving. Josh drilled him on the draw until Nate’s arm ached, and his ears rang. The smell of burned powder soaked so deeply into his shirt it wouldn’t wash out.
“Pistol’s for when it’s already gone bad,” Josh told him. “Rifle’s for keeping it from getting there. A wise man does most of his arguing at a distance.”
The first time a tin can leaped and spun at the touch of his finger, Nate didn’t expect the cold satisfaction, and it shamed him a little. The fists he’d thrown his whole life had to be paid for. A man you knocked down got up with friends, or a grudge, or a knife the next week.
A bullet asked no such price. It crossed a hundred yards in the time it took to blink, and there was nothing the far man could do about it; no size to him that mattered, no reach. It frightened him a little, how naturally it came. He didn’t say so to Josh.
Then, one morning, the old man unwrapped the Sharps. He kept it in oilcloth in a long box under his cot, and he handled it the way other men handled a Bible. It was heavier than the Winchester, longer in the barrel, a single-shot breech-loader with a tang sight that folded up like a little ladder.
“This here’s a Sharps,” Josh said, low, almost reverent.
“Buffalo gun. A good man with this can reach out and touch a fellow the better part of a half mile off, farther than that man’ll ever dream you can.
” He laid it across Nate’s palms. “Heavy, ain’t she?
She’ll teach you patience, or she’ll teach you nothing. ”
Nate set it on a forked rest Josh had planted in the gravel and tried for a white rock far up the slope, a thing so distant it swam in the heat. The recoil drove the steel plate into his shoulder hard enough to bruise. The shot kicked up dust six feet wide of the rock.
“Wind,” Josh said. “Drop. Patience. You’ll learn her. Took me two years.” He clapped Nate’s bruised shoulder, which didn’t help. “Keep at it. A day may come you’ll bless this old gun. Reach a man you got no other way to reach.”
So, Nate kept at it. Every morning, last of all, after the cans and the pistol drills, he laid the heavy rifle on the rest and sent one slow shot up the slope at the white rock and learned her an inch at a time.
The wind off the foothills came down the draw at an angle, and you had to hold off into it. The barrel threw high until it warmed and then it settled. The big bullet took a full beat to arrive, so that you heard the strike a heartbeat after you’d thought the shot already done.
By the end of the second week, he could put one within a hand’s breadth of the rock four times in five, and Josh stopped saying two years and started saying nothing at all, which from Josh was the highest praise.
The shooting was only half of it. In the afternoons, Josh taught him the rest, the quiet skills a Boston man never knew he lacked. How to read the ground: a bent grass blade, a turned stone, the difference between a track laid that morning and one laid the day before, a shod hoof and a bare one.
How to gentle a frightened horse and read its ears for what its rider couldn’t see.
And how to move, how to put a foot down heel-soft and roll it, how to go through brush without snapping a twig.
How to use the wind and the low ground and the long shadows so a man twenty feet off would never know you’d passed.
“Came up hunting elk,” Josh said when Nate asked where an old rancher learned to ghost through timber like a Ute. “And there was a stretch, after the war, a man did well to move quiet and ask no questions. Never mind that. Point is the loud man gets seen. The quiet man gets close.”
He drilled Nate on it past calm patience. Made him cross a gravel wash without a sound while Josh sat blindfolded in the middle of it, and every time a pebble turned, the old man’s hand shot out and tapped him, dead caught.
Then he had him circle the cabin in the dark and come up on the lit window without throwing a shadow across the glass. Made him stand stone-still in cover while Josh walked the brush, calling him a fool until Nate’s legs cramped, teaching him that the man who could be still longer usually won.
Slow work, and dull, and Nate soaked it up like dry ground soaks rain. He had a use for every scrap of it, and the use had a face. The face had a heavy jaw turned half into the moon. Nate remembered. He was good at remembering. It was, he sometimes thought, the only talent he’d ever truly had.
He was getting cocky on horseback by the second week, and the horse cured him of it.
They were loping an easy circle across the flat when a rattler buzzed up out of the bunchgrass under the gelding’s nose.
The animal came apart beneath him, a sideways lunge and a twist that put the entire sky where the ground had been.
Nate hit the dirt on his shoulder hard enough to drive the wind clean out of him. He rolled up gasping, dirt in his teeth, and there, not a yard from his boot, the snake had coiled, thick as his wrist, its tail a blur of dry warning, its wedge head drawn back to strike.
He had no time to be afraid. The crack of the Sharps came from behind him, flat and enormous, and the snake’s head simply wasn’t there anymore, and the body whipped and knotted in the dust.
Josh lowered the rifle and walked over and looked down at it, unhurried, calm as a man checking the weather. “Diamondback,” he said. “Big one. You hurt?”
Nate found he was shaking and made himself stop. “Just my pride.”
“Pride heals.” Josh put out a scarred hand and hauled him up. “Horse smelled him before you did. They mostly do. You want to learn to feel it through the animal, that gather-up just before they bolt. Saved my life twice, that.” He nudged the dead snake with his boot.
“We’ll skin him out. Hatband. Waste not.” And he helped Nate catch the trembling gelding and put him back up on it, because a man thrown who doesn’t remount, Josh said, stays thrown.
That evening they sat on the mended porch with coffee while the light bled out of the sky behind the mountains. The weight of it hit Nate all at once, now that the work had stopped and left him nothing to do but feel it.
He thought of Lucy: the note she’d pressed into his hand on the train, how she’d said Chambers’s name before he’d asked, like she’d had it ready. She knew more than she’d told him and had decided not to say it yet, and he hadn’t pushed.
Should he have? And was she all right tonight, behind that hotel desk, carrying what she knew alone?
“He’s got an army,” Nate said quietly. “Chambers. Money, the sheriff, men like the one in the brush. And I’ve got an old gun I can’t hit anything with past fifty yards and a borrowed pistol.
” He turned the cup in his hands. “Some nights I lie up there and I think I’m a fool.
That I came two thousand miles to get myself killed on the same ground my father died on and call it justice. ”
Josh was quiet a while. The first stars came out.
“Your daddy,” he said at last, “was the bravest man I ever knew. And I don’t mean he wasn’t scared.
Brave ain’t the same as not scared, boy, that’s a child’s notion.
Eldon was scared plenty those last weeks.
He just didn’t let it turn him. A coward lets the fear decide.
A brave man’s scared down to his boots and does the right thing anyhow. ”
He reached over and gripped Nate’s shoulder, hard. “You’re scared and you’re still here. That’s your father in you. Don’t you dare call it foolishness in front of me.”
Nate didn’t trust his voice, so he didn’t use it. He gripped the old man’s forearm once in return, and they sat and watched the dark come down, and that was all either of them needed. He slept better than he had in years.
In the gray of the morning, he came out to start the fire and stopped dead on the top step. A rattlesnake hung from the front door, a big one, nailed clean through the back of its head into the wood so it dangled the full length of the planks, still and dusty and dead.
Driven through the meat of it, pinning a square of brown paper to the door, was a second nail. The note had been printed in heavy pencil by a hand that pressed hard.
LEAVE OR JOIN YOUR PARENTS.
Nate stood over it a long while in the gray light, the cold of the morning crawling up under his shirt. They’d come in the night, past the dog, past Josh’s rifle by the door, right up onto the porch where his mother had died and hung their threat on the very wood that still wore her blood.
The hand that pressed so hard on the pencil had pressed a trigger once, fourteen years back, on these same boards. He was almost sure of it.
He did not run. The fear they meant to put in him wouldn’t come. What came instead was a cold, level anger he could use. He reached up and worked the nails loose and lifted the snake down gently, almost respectfully, and folded the paper square into his shirt pocket to keep.
“Josh,” he called, and his voice came out levelly and strangely to his own ears. “Come see what the wind blew in. And bring your coffee. We’ve got planning to do.”