The Road to Reckoning (4 page)

‘“Long is the way, and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.”’

I threw back the bedclothes and he turned to me.

‘Thomas?’ he said. ‘I thought you were asleep.’ He uncocked the gun. Pistols do this reluctantly.

I ran from the bed and around the chair. The gun was in his lap and his arms wrapped around me. I felt the pistol’s coldness against my belly through my shirt. He patted me closer and my cheek touched his, which was damp.

‘Oh, my boy … my boy.’ He chuckled and it was the nicest music.

You may have had a father or you may have had a man who lived in your house. If he beat you or left you I will suffer you that and if you carry it with you then you can have some pity. But I saw my father’s shame and he passed it on to me. If he had hit me I could abide, I could overcome. The Lord does these things so we do not do it ourselves. This is how man changes his generations, the way birds move on from barren lands, and we abide.

I told you when I started that my life began when I was twelve. It was there in that room. I did not exist before that night and I am still that boy.

He held me away. ‘I was only loading the gun so I could learn. So I could show Mister Baker in the morning.’ Then, as if to avow to himself rather than settle me, ‘I am sure that man will not be there then. We will do our business and be gone with Jude Brown.’

‘We could go home,’ I said.

‘We could. But there is no need, Tom. We will be on the road tomorrow. Everything will be well. Here, let me show you how fast I can load this thing. It is a marvel, I swear.’

I wiped my eyes and he rubbed his, lamenting his tiredness and concentration. I noticed he had only loaded one chamber.

I watched him play the gun like that piano outside. The gun in its simplicity and pleasing mechanics coaxed confidence from his hands; it forgave the amateur. And there was the V cut into the hammer as a back sight, the blade at the end of the octagonal barrel, and if you lined them up, aimed your eye down that V, down that steel-barreled extension of your arm, you would shoot the thing in front of you. But the gun does not know how to pull the trigger.

I did not ask him why he could not have practiced with the wooden gun. It separated and loaded just the same and even had wooden caps and balls. I never thought of it, or why the loaded gun did not go back to its green baize bed.

We packed and fetched the Brewster and Jude Brown first thing. Jude Brown was reluctant to leave either the food or the company of horses although as a gelding they should have smelled like dogs to him. We rode to Baker’s in silence. My father did not tip his head to anyone, which was not his custom and a bad habit for a salesman. His little gold glasses kept slipping down his nose with his sweat and he was forever confusing Jude Brown by lifting the reins to set them glasses right.

Baker’s reached, my father jumped down. I had no will to follow but still he said, ‘Wait here.’

He took two naked belt guns, whose barrels were about five inches, made for as they sounded, and he intimated such by tucking one in his belt.

‘I will not be long.’ He slapped the reins into my hand.

I watched the door close and looked at the back of Jude Brown’s head so as not to meet the eye of anyone on the street. There was a black boy in cotton-duck overalls on the porch sweeping but with no intention on cleaning. He was moving the dust around with the strength of a marionette and studied me and Jude Brown. I played the reins through my fingers and looked up at the mountains covered in cloud, the endless trees on them in the early morning still blue-green like the sea. It was not yet ten. I would not think that a man like Thomas Heywood had got out of his filthy bed by now.

I could not help but look at the door once or twice and each time the black boy grinned a gapped mouth. I chiseled my face like a man with fury in him. I did not truck with boys. I had a wagon and a horse. I had a sack full of guns. I dipped my hat to a milkmaid who instead of smiling or blushing looked at me scornfully. I pulled the brim down as if this was originally my intention.

I do not know how long I sat but it seemed as if the whole world passed by, their clothes getting smarter with every minute as the work they traveled to shifted from strong back to desk and pen, for the earlier you have to get up the harder you have to work. My father was taking his time. I thought on the two guns he had taken in and then I could think of nothing else except Thomas Heywood’s white, wide eyes.

The door and its bell exploded like a gunshot and I jumped, which made Jude Brown toss his head and curse me with a snort when nothing happened. My father was there and shaking mister Baker’s hand. He climbed up onto the seat and took the reins, adjusting them tighter where I had been running them through my hands.

He snapped Jude Brown off and the black boy smiled good-bye and waved us away with a wide, pendulous swing as if hailing a raft from the shore to warn of white water ahead.

We left Milton at the west end and there were more tents outside here than coming in and skinny dogs barked at us, danced at Jude Brown, bit at our wheels then wagged their tails back to their masters proud that they had seen us off.

A great weight lifted off me that I did not know was there. Later we were talking again and pointing out jaybirds. My father had taken an order for six pistols and sold one for mister Baker’s own use. At dinner he put back the pistol from his belt to the wagon. He could not unload it, as is the way with guns (they only empty one way), but he said that would not be to any detriment.

‘It will be provident if we see us a rabbit.’ He smiled but it had no weight to it and my smile back was even lighter.

We had a new plan for our journey. We would head south, follow the mountains, to make the Cumberland road. This was the national road, as you may recall, a redbrick toll road that would carry us safely through the mountains and west into Illinois. It closed in ’38, I believe, when the money ran out or the road ran out, whichever is truer. Over six hundred miles long, and the trail to get down there would add three or four days onto our month, Cumberland being near two hundred miles. But the thought of a good and busy road with civilized turnpikes was comforting. It was the sensible thing to do. Getting there, however, in the shadow of the mountains would be rough country.

We crossed the Susquehanna at Lewis, where we took a cooked supper but did no business, keen as my father was to get on and leave Milton far behind. This was a pity as Lewis seemed like a bustling, money-heavy borough.

With mister Baker’s eight dollars for a pistol and even with our expenses we now had us thirty-two dollars. My father was a good accountant. Already the trip had turned profit.

We camped under the mountains and as it grew dark I looked up into the trees and saw the friendly glow of other travelers’ fires like the tips of cigars, a thousand feet above, separated by miles of forest. The mountains were alive and I did not feel lonely. And I was with my father and he was happier now.

‘If we are up with the sun I reckon we could make Huntingdon by tomorrow evening,’ he said. ‘I will do some business and get us a bed there. We shall need a good sleep. It will be another two days before we can get to Cumberland.’

We spoke like we were mountain men, as if we followed the stars and that two hundred miles were just stepping-stones across a creek. If we were real foresters we would have followed the creeks and the mills and seen towns we did not know existed. But our Brewster would have been no good along a creek. These trails as they were did not do too much to improve its wooden springs.

‘Could we not sell the wagon?’ I inquired. ‘Get another horse? We might travel quicker.’

He looked at me harshly and I blushed. This had been my mother’s wagon. ‘You are too young to ride. And I would be worried about bears if we did not have the cart to sleep on.’

I had not thought about bears and I looked about into the trees and made sure that I did not rattle the pot or my spoon as I ate the Indian meal.

Night, and the sparrows and tanagers had ceased nagging us to get out. We had only a middling fire left with white coals and chars of wood. I could see nothing except my father and the shape of Jude Brown standing like a statue in the dark. I was not tired and my father insisted on one more enamel mug of tea and he drove a stick through the coals and put our mugs directly on them.

The coals sparked and I watched them sparks drift up like angry wasps. My neck went back to follow them to the stars and I missed the men step out of the trees. When I came back to earth they were there like they had always been with us, as if they were the trees we had thought our walls.

Four of them. In surtout coats like old soldiers and wide wool hats. Each had a rifle in his hand and belt tied outside his coat with flap holsters or pistols tied by lanyards. They had made a circle around us. They were bearded and dark below their hats although I could see that one had shaved silver hair close about his ears and a fat mustache. I saw this because he was at my side like a giant. I was sat cross-legged, tailor-wise, and I looked down from his face to his boots. They did not match or one had been fished out of a river.

My father had rolled up and stood with his hands raised. No-one had asked him to do this.

‘What do you want?’ he asked.

It was too dark to see clearly, as the voice that answered was in front of the dying fire to me, but I knew it at once.

‘All that you have, salesman.’ It was Thomas Heywood.

‘You can have it,’ my father said. ‘I do not want trouble.’

‘You give me trouble, salesman? Is that what you said?’ Thomas threw down again, only with a proper pistol this time, a good Ketland percussion. He punctuated his words with its terrible click.

There was the fat giggle again from near Thomas and I could just make out that this would be the man from Chet Baker’s store. He had an old face that should have known better, with a grizzled, rough shave like he plucked his beard with tweezers. He was short and threw down also. He had a hat with a beaded band like something of an Indian decoration. He grinned with teeth the whole time as if he were showing them to a surgeon. I could not see the fourth man at all other than his raised rifle. He was all in black with a high collar to hide him.

‘No. I will give no trouble,’ my father said, and took off his spectacles and folded them into his waistcoat. I do not know why he did this. It would blur them all. At my mother’s funeral he had also taken them off but I thought that for vanity.

‘I hear the word
trouble
again, salesman.’ Heywood came closer. ‘You keep saying that word, salesman. Do you like that word?’

I hold that my father did not know how to speak to these men.

‘What do you want?’ he asked.

‘Am I repeating myself again?’ Heywood came yet closer, he and my father like bride and groom. ‘All you have, I said, didn’t I?’ He lowered his gun, looked at his trash around us. ‘But first I want you to show me how much you love that horseshit pistol of yours. I want you to get that pistol, salesman.’

I suppose now that they had followed us from Milton. Our Brewster would have left marks. They had probably drunk in a saloon in Lewis while we ate and maybe they had kept an eye on Jude Brown and our Brewster on the street. Their wickedness planned with laughter and rum. The banality of evil is in the joviality of the simpleminded.

‘Get yourself a pistol, salesman.’

My father looked over to me.

Heywood laughed. ‘Oh, see him, boys!’ He waved the pistol to my direction. ‘Go on, salesman.
Go on!
Grab your boy in front again! Bet yourself that I won’t shoot through him!’

The others laughed as cowards laugh around a bully. These men had no wives or children or work that paid. Nothing but themselves. They were children more than I. Their violence and reasoning the same as children, only with lead now instead of sticks, and if there had been no lead or steel it would be sticks still. Everything my father said would be wrong. I had seen boys like this when I backed away from our windows at home. My father could not win. He was me backing away from the laughter in the street.

‘Get your pistol, salesman.’ Thomas lifted his cocked gun and the giggle from Indian-hatband came again.

My father straightened up. ‘If I take it, you will shoot me, or your men will shoot me. If I leave it you will shoot me and take everything anyway. So why not just rob me and be done. And me and my boy will leave these mountains. We will go home, I assure you. We will go home. I am done now.’

‘Rob you?
Rob you?
Am I a thief now, is it? Are you saying I would shoot you and rob you without a chance? Is that what I am? Am I that low in your eyes?’ He was mad now. It was done.

‘No,’ my father said. ‘It is whatever you want. I will tell no-one. Just let me and my boy go. Take the wagon and the horse and we will walk out of here now and you gentlemen can have it all.’ He moved toward me with his head down, his back to Heywood.

‘You turn your back on me again, you son of a bitch?’

And that was it.

Thomas Heywood fired into my father’s back with a snap of his wrist like throwing a stone. Like nothing. It flashed and sparked like the fire just minutes before and the trees quaked. I think I cried out. My father fell to his knees and disturbed our mugs in the fire, which sputtered with the tea and coals and startled the others to unload into him, their guns lighting the trunks of the trees four more times, Heywood emptying another pistol, and Jude Brown raised his hooves and tried to jump from his tether.

He still whinnied and snorted as my father lay still and the dark came back like a lamp snuffed. Indian-hatband giggled again.

I had never seen the top of my father’s head before. He was going bald. It is foolish how you notice these things.

You may have heard that the dead twitch and jerk as they go on and they may, but I had been saved from that sight. My father simply fell and lay like a cut log, only the dust from his fall showing that he had weight. He had no more movement. His neck was angled and his arms were underneath him, his shoes pointed together.