Chapter Twenty-Eight
Evelyn came up out of it the way you come up out of a fever.
Consciousness came slow, a piece at a time.
Ears first, and her ears couldn't rightly make sense of it, because the sound was wrong somehow.
Big and echoey like a barn but flatter, like a barn that had been empty a long time.
Then her mouth, and she realized something was in her mouth.
Cloth, a rag jammed in behind her teeth and tied off around the back of her head so tightly that her jaw ached from her ears down.
Her tongue tasted whiskey and something else, that turpentine-rot smell from before, still on the cloth.
Then her hands.
Her wrists were crossed behind her back and roped. She flexed her fingers, and they moved, so she still had her hands, which was more than she'd been ready to swear to a second ago.
She opened her eyes, and the light hurt, not much light, just a shaft of it coming down through a gap in the roof somewhere behind her, dust drifting in it thick as flour. But her eyes had been shut a while, and they stung.
She was on her side on a plank floor, cold coming up through her shoulder and her hip. The floor smelled of old grain and mouse and something metal, and above her, way up in the dark, she could make out the ribs of a roof and beams running crossways with hooks on them.
A warehouse, or what used to be something for grain. There were hoppers along one wall, wood ones, half rotted, and a broken chute coming down out of the loft. There were no windows she could turn her head to see, and no door in her line of sight.
She'd counted the steps in the pines, two hundred and something.
Then the rag and the pines had gotten tall and dark and gone away, and now here she was in here, wherever here was.
How long? A day? Two? She had no way to say.
Her mouth tasted like she'd been out a good while, that thick, furry taste that came off you when you'd slept too hard through the middle of the day.
A boot scuffed the floor.
Behind her.
She went still. Everything in her went still, the way a rabbit goes still when a shadow passes.
"Miss Granger."
That voice. Lord, still cheerful.
He came into her sightline. Amos Wilkes.
She got her first proper look at him now that she wasn't fighting him or being dragged, and he looked normal.
That was the awful part. He looked like a man you'd see in Harlow's buying flour.
He was a medium-built fella in his middle thirties, dark coat, a little bit of gray coming into the beard along his jaw, three long scab lines down his right cheek, dark and crusted, where she'd got him with her nails.
She'd got him good, actually. That was a mean thing to be pleased about, but she was pleased about it anyway.
He crouched down.
Not close, maybe six feet off. He hunkered down on his heels the way a hand hunkers down at a campfire, and he set his hands on his knees and looked at her.
"You come back to us."
She glared.
"Don't glare, now. Ain't no need for glarin'. I ain't hurt you, have I? Beyond what was necessary."
She kept glaring, because what else was there to do with a rag in her mouth.
"Sam Cooper's woman. Well, I'll be. Ain't that a thing?"
She flinched at Sam's name, and she couldn't help it. Wilkes saw it—he noticed it the way a man notices a coin drop, quick and interested.
"There it is. Yes ma'am. There it is right there."
He straightened up out of his crouch and started to pace, slow at first, boots on the plank floor, one step then two then a turn. He kept talking. Whether to her or himself, she wasn't sure, maybe both.
"I want you to understand somethin', Miss Granger.
I don't take no pleasure in this here. In you.
In the roughness of it. That ain't my way.
My way is man to man, and business done between 'em, and each party walkin' off with what they come for.
That's how I like it. Been how I like it since I was, oh, sixteen years old maybe. Seventeen. But your Mister Cooper—"
He stopped pacing and turned toward her.
"Your Mister Cooper has been on my back trail nigh on twenty year.
You know that? You know how long twenty year is, sittin' in the back of a man's neck?
It's a good long spell. You get to feel a fella.
After twenty year. You get to feel him back there like a boil that won't come to a head.
You commence to dream about him. Wake up thinkin' about him.
Ride into a town wonderin' has he got here first."
He crouched down again, closer this time, four feet maybe.
"His mama. His daddy. That was a job of work. Wasn't never s'posed to be more'n a job of work. We come for the strongbox and the old man he wouldn't step aside and, well, one thing led to another. The barn caught. Fire got away from us. Weren't no plan to it. Just how it fell out."
He said it the way you'd tell a story about a cow that got into the wrong pasture, with a small shrug and a small shake of the head.
She stared at him.
He was mad. She got that clear, sudden and complete. Not raving mad, not foam-at-the-mouth mad, but the quiet kind, the kind that had convinced itself of a thing so long ago it couldn't tell the difference between the convincing and the truth anymore.
"Now the boy pulled the little sister out.
I saw that. I was up on the ridge. Boy come out that window with the little one in his arms. And I thought to myself, I thought, well, there's the end of that.
Boy'll grow up, boy'll forget, boy'll take up some trade, that'll be the end of that.
Sisters and brothers, that's what folks do. "
He shook his head.
"He didn't take up no trade. He took up me. Now I ask you, Miss Granger. Is that reasonable? Is that a reasonable thing for a man to do with his life?"
He wanted her to answer. She could tell. He'd stopped, and he was looking at her with his head tilted a little, and he actually wanted her to give him an answer through a rag.
She glared.
"Ain't reasonable. That's my point. It ain't."
He got up and paced again.
"Now here's the meat of it. I sent your Mister Cooper a letter yesterday mornin'. Told him fetch three hundred dollars up to the old Marley claim by sundown today, come alone, or you don't see another sunrise. You follow?"
Her chest went cold.
"He'll come. I know he'll come. He ain't the kind that don't come.
That's what's made him such a devil to shake all these years; he's got the come-along in him bone-deep.
" He stopped pacing again. His voice got quieter.
"But here is the thing I want you to have clear, Miss Granger, on account of I want somebody in this whole business to have it clear, and it might as well be you.
That three hundred dollars ain't the point. "
He came over and squatted down right in front of her.
"He walks up that trail to the claim. I got the high ground. I take the money off him. Then I put him down. That's the shape of it. That has been the shape of it since I sat down and wrote out that letter. The money's just to make him come."
He looked at her a long spell.
"You mind, though. I like you. I truly do. You showed some sand out there on the road. Most gals'd have fainted dead away, and you wanted to take my eye out. That's somethin'. That is somethin'."
He reached out and hooked a bit of hair off her cheek with one finger. She jerked her head away, and he laughed, actually laughed, a small dry laugh like a cough.
"You made him weak, you know. Your Mister Cooper.
Before you come along, he was somethin' to worry about.
He was a mean, lonely thing, and he was comin' straight on, and I'll allow, Miss Granger, I'll allow it.
There was nights I lost sleep over him. Then you turn up and start bakin' pies in his kitchen, and now he's a man with a house to protect, and a house to protect makes a man slow.
Makes him careful. Careful gets a man killed. "
He stood up.
"I owe you thanks for that. Truly."
She screamed into the rag.
She screamed at him, and none of it came through but a muffled noise that sounded like an animal, one that shamed her more than anything he'd said. Wilkes looked down at her with a small, tired smile, like she'd done something touching.
"Now, now."
He crouched again and produced another length of rope from his coat pocket.
He rolled her onto her stomach on the plank floor, and she fought him with her knees and her shoulders and her whole body.
He rode it out the way a man rides out a colt, patient, no wasted motion.
He tied her ankles together, then tied a shorter length from her ankles up to her wrists so her knees bent backward and her whole body arched, and it hurt in a specific tight-pulled way in her shoulders and her hips.
"That ain't comfortable, I know it. Won't be for long."
He checked the rag in her mouth and tightened the knot at the back of her head another turn. She tried to work her jaw and couldn't get any purchase.
"There. Now you can't holler when we move."
He picked her up.
He got her under the arms and behind the knees and hoisted her against his chest the way a man carries a rolled rug. He wasn't a tall man, but he had a wiry strength to him she'd felt on the road. She felt it worse now because there wasn't any part of him giving under her weight.
He carried her out of the warehouse through a door she hadn't been able to see from the floor.
Outside there was a wagon, a little buckboard meaner than Sam's, with a mule she didn't recognize hitched in the traces.
He laid her in the bed of it under a horse blanket that smelled like the horse it had come off.
"Now hush up under there and don't kick and we'll get on down the road."
He clucked at the mule.
The wagon started moving.
She could see through a moth-hole in the blanket, not much—sky, branches passing overhead. She lay there with her shoulders screaming from the way he'd tied her, and she made herself count.
Landmarks, Sam's word. A quarter mile. She had to give him something. If she got out of this and she couldn't tell him where, none of it would matter.
Overhead was mostly pine now, then aspen mixed in, bare white trunks. The wagon turned—she felt the turn in her body, a left. Then a rise, the wagon nosing up, and more pine. A creek she could hear off to the right, ice cracking somewhere in it.
She tried to count time in Mississippis and lost track around three hundred.
The wagon stopped.
Wilkes clucked to the mule again, and it started up, then stopped again—started, stopped, like he was picking his way. Then a proper stop and he got down off the bench, the wagon rocking with him, and she heard him talking to the mule low and easy while he tied it off.
The blanket came off her.
Cold air hit her face, and she squinted against the light, late afternoon light, the kind that came sideways and hurt after you'd been under a blanket.
They were in trees, pines, a narrow trail, rocks up on her left rising into a slope. Off to her right, the ground fell away into a little draw she couldn't see the bottom of.
He picked her up again and carried her about thirty steps off the trail, and set her down against a rock with her back to it, so she was sitting up more or less, her ankles roped to her wrists still, the whole bent-back arrangement holding her in place like a broken doll.
"Now you sit real still."
He crouched down in front of her and pushed the hair back off her forehead with one finger, almost gently.
"He'll be along directly. Sun's about halfway down."
He got up and moved off through the trees. She lost sight of him behind a bit of scrub. Then she caught him again, further up the slope, working his way up to a spot where a big rock stuck out over the trail. He got behind it and settled in.
He had a rifle. She hadn't seen him carry it out of the wagon, but he had it now, laid across the top of the rock, and he was down behind it looking out over the trail.
The trail she'd just come up.
The trail Sam was coming up.
Her whole chest went to ice.
Sam.
She tried to yell, and all that came through the rag was a hum—not even a hum, a wet, muffled nnnh sound that died an inch from her face.
She worked her wrists behind her back. The rope had no give. She could get her fingers around it but not through it. She twisted her shoulders, and the shorter rope pulled tighter. She bit down on the rag and screamed into it and made no more noise than a person coughing in the next room.
Sam. Sam, don't. Sam, don't come up that trail.
She could see the trail from where she was. Wilkes had set her where she could see it—he’d done it on purpose. She got that clear as a bell all of a sudden: he'd set her where she could see Sam walk into it.
She heard a horse.
Way off, down the trail, the soft crunch of a horse walking through crusted snow, slow, careful. One horse, one rider.
No. No, no, no.
She thrashed, her whole body. She got maybe two inches of movement in any direction, and her shoulders felt like they were coming apart, and she kept thrashing because two inches was still two inches. It was still something; it was more than not moving.
Nothing gave.
The horse came closer.
She could hear it clearly now, a steady walk. The rider was letting the horse pick.
She turned her head as far as it would turn, straining against the rope, and she made her eyes as wide as they would go, and she stared down that trail, and she thought: look at me, Sam, look at me first, don't look at the rock up the slope, don't look at where he'd be, look at me, look at me—
He came into view.
He was on the mare, his body wrong on the saddle, tilted, favoring one leg so hard the mare's stride had picked up the tilt too. His hat was pulled low, and she couldn't see his eyes yet.
He was fifty yards off.
Forty.
She stared, and she screamed into the rag.
She banged the back of her head against the rock behind her, because that was the only part of her that would move enough to make sound, and she made a small, dull thump with each try—thump, thump, thump.
The mare's ears flicked at it, maybe, or Sam's did, and his head came up—
He saw her.
His whole body changed, that coiled thing she'd watched him do a hundred times in the kitchen, only fifty times worse. He froze the mare where she stood.
Their eyes locked.
She tried to move her eyes. Up the slope. Up the slope, Sam. She rolled them hard to her left, to where Wilkes was behind the rock, then back to Sam, then hard left again. Up the slope. Look. Look.
He looked at her face.
He didn't look up the slope.
He said something she couldn't hear from that far off—one word maybe, her name maybe. He swung down off the mare on his good leg, and his bad leg buckled a little, but he caught himself and started walking.
Toward her.
Straight up the trail, right under the rock.
She screamed into the rag. She screamed until her throat tore. Nothing.
Sam.
Sam, please.