The Stories of Richard Bausch (41 page)

“Can I stay here for a few days?” he asked.

“Look,” I said. “It’s complicated.”

“You don’t want me to stay even a little while?”

I said nothing for a time. We were just looking at each other across the short distance between us. “You can come up to the cabin,” I told him. “But I need some time to prepare my mother for this. I don’t want—and you don’t want—to just be riding in on her.”

“I understand,” he said.

Mother had some
time ago taken to sitting in the window of the cabin with my old breech-loading rifle across her lap. When she’d done baking the
bread and tending the garden, when she’d finished milking the two cows and churning the butter, when the eggs were put up and the cabin was swept and clean and the clothes were all hanging on the line in the yard, she’d place herself by the window, gun cocked and ready to shoot. Maybe two years earlier, some poor, lost, starved, lone Comanche had wandered down from the north and stopped his horse at the edge of the creek, looking at us, his hands visored over his eyes. He was easily ninety years old, and when he turned to make his way west along the creek, on out of sight, Mother took my rifle off the wall, loaded it, and set herself up by the window.

“Marian,” I said. “It was just an old brave looking for a good place to die.”

“You let me worry about it, son.”

Well, for a while that worked out all right, in fact; it kept her off me and my liquid pursuits down at Grafton’s. She could sit there and take potshots at squirrels in the brush all day if she wanted to, I thought. But in the last few months it had begun to feel dangerous approaching the cabin at certain hours of the day and night. You had to remember that she was there, and sometimes, coming home from Grafton’s, I’d had enough firewater to forget. I had her testimony that I had nearly got my head blown off more than once, and once she had indeed fired upon me.

This had happened about a week before he came back into the valley, and I felt it then as a kind of evil premonition—I should say I
believe
I felt it that way, since I have the decades of hindsight now, and I do admit that the holocaust which was coming to us might provide anyone who survived it with a sense that all sorts of omens and portents preceded the event. In any case, the night Marian fired on me, I was ambling sleepily along, drunk, barely able to hold on to the pommel, and letting the horse take me home. We crossed the creek and headed up the path to the house. The shot nicked me above the elbow—a tiny cut of flesh that the bullet took out as it went singing off into the blackness behind me. The explosion, the stinging crease of the bullet just missing bone, and the shriek of my horse sent me flying into the water of the creek.

“I got you, you damn savage Indian,” Marian yelled from the cabin.

I lay there in the cold water and reflected that my mother had grown odd. “Hey!” I called, staying low, hearing her put another shell into the breech. “It’s me! It’s your son!”

“I got a repeating rifle here,” she lied. She’d reloaded and was aiming again. I could actually hear it in her voice. “I don’t have any children on the place.”

There is no sound as awful and startling as the sound of a bullet screaming off rock, when you know it is aimed earnestly at you.

“Wait!” I yelled. “Goddammit, Marian, it’s me! For God’s sake, it’s your own family!”

“Who?”

“Your son,” I said. “And you’ve wounded me.”

“I don’t care what he’s done,” she said and fired again. The bullet buzzed overhead like a terribly purposeful insect.

“Remember how you didn’t want any more guns in the valley?” I shouted. “You remember that, Mother? Remember how much you hate them?”

She said, “Who is that down there?”

“It’s me,” I said. “Good Christ, I’m shot.”

She fired again. This one hit the water behind me and went off skipping like a piece of slate somebody threw harder than a thing can be thrown. “Blaspheming marauders!” she yelled.

“It’s me!” I screamed. “I’m sick. I’m coming from Grafton’s. I’m shot in the arm.”

I heard her reload, and then there was a long silence.

“Marian?” I said, keeping low. “Would you shoot your own son dead?”

“How do I know it’s you?”

“Well, who else would it be at this hour?”

“You stay where you are until I come down and see, or I’ll blow your head off,” she said.

So I stayed right where I was, in the cold running creek, until she got up the nerve to approach me with her lantern and her cocked rifle. Only then did she give in and tend to me, her only son, nearly killed, hurting with a wound she herself had inflicted.

“You’ve been to Grafton’s drinking that whiskey,” she said, putting the lantern down.

“You hate guns,” I told her. “Right?”

“I’m not letting you sleep it off in the morning, either.”

“Just don’t shoot at me,” I said.

But she had already started up on something else. That was the way her mind had gone over the years, and you never knew quite how to take her.

And so that
day when he rode up, I told him to stay out of sight and went carefully back up to the cabin. “Mother,” I said. “Here I come.”

“In here,” she said from the barn. She was churning butter, and she simply waited for me to get to the window and peer over the sill. I did so, the same way I almost always did now: carefully, like a man in the middle of a gunfight.

“What?” she said. “What?”

I had decided during my stealthy course up the path that my way of preparing her for his return would be to put her out of the way of it, if I could. Any way I could. She was sitting there in the middle of the straw-strewn floor with a floppy straw hat on her head as though the sun were beating down on her. Her hands looked so old, gripping the butter churn. “Mother,” I said. “The Reverend Bagley wants you to bring him some bread for Sunday’s communion.”

“Who’s dead?”

On top of everything else, of course, she’d begun to lose her hearing. I repeated myself, fairly shrieking it at her.

“Bagley always wants that,” she said, looking away. “I take the bread over on Saturdays. This isn’t Saturday. You don’t need to yell.”

“It’s a special request,” I said. “He needs it early this week.” If I could get her away from the cabin now, I could make some arrangements. I could find someplace else for our return visitor to stay. I could find out what he wanted, and then act on it in some way. But I wasn’t really thinking very clearly. Marian and old Bagley had been seeing each other for occasional Saturday and Sunday afternoon picnics, and some evenings, too. There could have been no communication between Bagley and me without Marian knowing about it. I stood there trying to think up some other pretext, confused by the necessity of explaining the ridiculous excuse for a pretext I had just used, and she came slowly to her feet, sighing, touching her back low, shaking her head, turning away from me.

“Hitch the team up,” she said.

It took a moment for me to realize that she’d actually believed me. “I can’t go with you,” I told her.

“You don’t expect me to go by myself.” She wiped her hands on the front of her dress. “Go on. Hitch the team.”

“All right,” I said. I knew there would be no arguing with her. She’d set herself to my lie, and once her mind was set you couldn’t alter or change it. Besides, I was leery of giving her too much time to ponder over things. I’d decided the best thing was to go along and deal with everything as it came. There was a chance I could get away after we got to town; I could hightail it back home and make some adjustment or some arrangement. “I have to tie off what I’m doing with the fence,” I told her. “You change, and I’ll be ready.”

“You’re going to change?”

“You change.”

“You want
me
to change?”

“You’ve got dirt all over the front of you.”

She shook her head, lifted the dress a little to keep it out of the dust, and made her slow way across to the cabin. When she was inside, I tore over to the fence and found him sitting his horse, nodding, half dozing, his hat hanging from the pommel of his saddle, his sparse hair standing up in the wind. He looked a little pathetic.

“Hey,” I said, a little louder than I had to, I admit.

He tried to draw his pistol. The horse jumped, stepped back, coughing. His hand missed the pearl handle, and then the horse was turning in a tight circle, stomping his hat where it had fallen, and he sat there holding on to the pommel, saying, “Whoa. Hold it. Damn. Whoa, will you?” When he got the horse calmed, I bent down and retrieved his hat.

“Here,” I said. “Lord.”

He slapped the hat against his thigh, sending off a small white puff of dust, then put it on. The horse turned again, so that now his back was to me.

“For God’s sake,” I said. “Why don’t you get down off him?”

“Damn spooky old paint,” he said, getting it turned. “Listen, boy, I’ve come a long way on him. I’ve slept on him and just let him wander where he wanted. I’ve been that hungry and that desperate.” The paint seemed to want to put him down as he spoke. I thought it might even begin to buck.

“Look,” I said. “We need to talk. We don’t have a lot of time, either.”

“I was hoping I could ride up to the cabin,” he said.

I shook my head. “Out of the question.”

“No?”

“Not a chance,” I said.

He got down. The paint coughed like an old sick man, stepped away from us, put its gray muzzle down in the saw grass by the edge of the water, and began to eat.

“A little congestion,” he said.

The paint coughed into the grass.

“I can’t ride in?”

“On that?”

He looked down.

“Look,” I said. “It would upset her. You might get your head shot off.” He stared at me. “Marian has a gun?”

“Marian shoots before she asks questions these days,” I said.

“What happened?” he wanted to know.

“She got suspicious,” I said. “How do I know?” And I couldn’t keep the irritation out of my voice.

He said nothing.

“You can use the barn,” I told him. “But you have to wait until we leave, and you can’t let her see you. You’re just going to have to take my word for it.”

Again he took the hat off, looking down. Seeing the freckles on his scalp, I wished he’d put it back on.

“Wait here and keep out of sight until you see us heading off toward town,” I said. I couldn’t resist adding, “There’s a preacher who likes her, and she likes him back.” I watched his face, remembering with a kind of sad satisfaction the way—as I had so often told it—he’d leaned down to me, bleeding, from his horse and said, “Tell your mother there’s no more guns in the valley.”

He put the hat back on.

I said, “I’m hoping she’ll be tied up with him for a while, anyway, until I can figure something out.”

“Who’s the preacher?” he said, staring.

“There’s nothing you can do about it,” I said.

“I’d just like to know his name.”

I said the name, and he nodded, repeating it almost to himself. “Bagley.”

“Now will you do as I say?” I asked.

“I will,” he said. “If you’ll do something for me.” And now I saw a little of the old fire in his eyes. It sent a thrill through me. This was, after all, the same man I remembered single-handedly killing the old cattle baron and his hired gunfighter in the space of a half second. I had often talked about the fact that while my shouted warning might have been what saved him from the backshooter aiming at him from the gallery, the shot he made—turning into the explosion and smoke of the ambush and firing from reflex, almost as if the Colt in his flashing hand had simply gone off by accident—was the most astonishing feat of gun handling and shooting that anyone ever saw: one shot, straight through the backshooter’s heart, and the man toppled from that gallery like a big sack of feed, dead before he even let go of his still smoking rifle. That was how I had told the story; that was how I remembered everything.

“All right,” I said.

He took a step away from me, then removed his hat again, stood there smoothing its brim, folding it, or trying to. “This Bagley,” he said over his shoulder. “How long’s he been here?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and I didn’t exactly. Nobody ever counted much time in those days, beyond looking for the end of winter, the cold that kills. “Sometime last winter, I guess.”

“He’s your preacher.”

“I guess.”

“Ordained?”

In those days, I didn’t know the word.

“What church is he with?”

“No church,” I said. “Grafton’s. His own church.”

“Set up for himself, then.”

“Every Sunday. He preaches from the gallery.”

“Does he wear a holster?”

“Not that I know of.”

“You ever see him shoot?”

“No,” I said. Then: “Listen, shooting the preacher won’t change anything.”

He gave me a look of such forlorn unhappiness that I almost corrected myself. “Maybe I won’t be staying very long at all,” he said.

“Just wait here,” I told him.

He nodded, but he wasn’t looking at me.

On the way to town, I kept thinking of the hangdog way he’d stood watching me go back to the cabin for Marian—the vanquished look of his face and the dejection in his bowed stance. I wasn’t prepared to think I could’ve so defeated him with news, or with words. Certainly there was something else weighing him down. Marian rode along beside me, staring off at the mountains, her rough, red hands lying on her lap. To tell the truth, I didn’t want to know what she might be thinking. Those days, if asked, she was likely to begin a tirade. There was always something working on her sense of well-being and symmetry. Entropy and decline were everywhere. She saw evil in every possible guise. Moral decay. Spiritual deprivation and chaos. Along with her window sitting, armed to the teeth and waiting for marauders, I’m afraid she’d started building up some rather strange hostilities toward the facts of existence: there had even been times, over the years, when I could have said she meant to demand all the rights and privileges of manhood, and I might not have been far from wrong. That may sound advanced, to your ears; in her day, it was cracked. In any case, way out there in the harsh, hard life of the valley, I had managed to keep these more bizarre aspects of her decline from general knowledge. And I’d watched with gladness her developing attachment to old Bagley, who had a way of agreeing with her without ever committing himself to any of it.