Savage Country Read online

  “I suggest you do not covet that horse.”

  “Fair enough,” Whitechurch said, and the paper slid back and forth across the desktop several more times until there was a number Michael found acceptable. Whitechurch, having gotten all he could, sank back in his chair.

  “A bird in the hand,” he said to the air.

  “Draft the papers,” Michael said, lifting the saddlebag onto the table.

  “Call in the penman,” Whitechurch said.

  The old grandfather returned with his grandson. In his case were steel pens, paper, blotting paper, ink, and a chamois pen wiper. He set to work with a flourish, and when the document was complete with the language of their agreement, Michael began counting out twenty-­dollar gold pieces. Whitechurch fixed his eyes upon the gold, his lips moving as Michael counted.

  Chapter 3

  When Michael finally took up the road, the hour of twilight had come. He did not want to be in this town any longer and knew to move on as quickly as possible.

  He’d made the depot the moment the mail sacks were being loaded and the engineer was getting up his steam. There were so many people who were broken and buying their tickets out. They possessed the clothes on their backs and whatever fit into the carpetbags they clutched.

  He left behind the littered streets and miserable shacks and rode into the gloom. Behind him was the clang and cough of the boiler, the successive exhausts of the high-­pressure engine, the smokestack pouring out soot and ash, the steam whistle resounding. He turned in the saddle to see a column of sparks burst from the stack. Jets of lightning flashed over the town. He knew Whitechurch would take what hard money he could get. He knew he’d be caught out by the darkness.

  He rode into the red sky of the westering sun. He kept to no single beaten way but rode by many turns of lane and crossed streams and traveled through thickets and over rough hills, his eyes ever turning in the direction of his back trail.

  He let down the setter to run alongside and rode with the shotgun across the saddle before him. He looked about for the red dog but could not find him. He knew the value of the signed documents he carried and the number of double eagles still in the saddlebag.

  He topped the crest of a hill where he could look off in every direction. He pushed back his brim and stood in the stirrups. He scanned the darker line of the horizon. He ran his eye along a line of timber and came off the hill just as quickly.

  He called in the setter and she came running. His right foot was clear of the stirrup and he swung it idly. His left hand held the shotgun perched upright on his thigh and with his right he gripped the cantle at his back.

  “What now, Sabi?” he said to her.

  The setter uttered a low whimper and once or twice wagged her tail. He slung the shotgun over his shoulder. He said her name again and she leaped up to him where he caught her in his arms.

  In that same instant he saw its gray mottled coil and upraised head, lifted and steady. Without warning, the deadly rattlesnake struck from where it lay poised in the grass. It threw itself thrice its length and hit the stirrup iron, its fangs pumping their venom into his boot heel before falling away.

  The horse bounced and jinked sideways from where the snake coiled in the grass to strike again. She flung round her head and her ears pricked. A tremble shivered through her body. She champed at the bit, pawed the ground, and collected.

  He unclenched himself and caught his breath and felt suddenly the sadness of his brother’s death.

  “Damn your eyes,” he said.

  He uncurled his whip, a sjambok made of hippopotamus hide. The sound broke off as short and sharp and with a single stroke he took off the snake’s triangular head. No, there was something more to come, more than this snake and more than David’s death, and its experience could not be avoided.

  The setter shivered and whined softly as he pulled the thistles and cockleburs from her long hair. She was footsore and cut by the hard sun-­burned stubble of the old grass. He rummaged in his saddlebag until he found small leather moccasins to cover her feet.

  He urged the horse another mile. They crossed the road and in some trees he reined up. He threw his leg over the saddle horn, slipped to the ground, and let drop the reins. He took a position in a small glade with the shotgun tucked under his arm. The night was chill, damp, and dark. It’d begun to vapor a little and the dank grass was bending under dewdrops. He petted the setter and told her to stay quiet.

  He waited in the trees beside the road, scrutinizing the darkness, and then Khyber signaled by throwing up her head and snorting and it was not long before he saw the band of horsemen, one dark figure after another looming out of the darkness, bending low in their saddles, lashing their horses, and galloping ahead with noiseless rapidity two hundred yards away, one hundred yards, and then the ruck of their hoof tracks telling plainly. The tall man was in the lead, riding the black runner, and strung out behind him were the hard boys.

  There were six of them and their dark and fleeting forms were going at a slashing rate.

  A force inside him came surging back.

  He stepped into the unoccupied road after the last one had passed, and waited. He stood motionless, watching, and soon enough, lagging behind the others, the big raw-­boned sorrel with the heavyset man was bearing down on him.

  Now is a good time, he thought as he raised the shotgun to his shoulder.

  There was a moment of breathless pause as the horse and rider came down on him and then from the roadside was the red dog, sharp, agile, hard-­biting, and on a dead run. The red dog leaped into the air and flew straight at the horse’s head and struck full with its massive jaws. So sudden was the shock, both horse and rider turned in a somersault, and still the red dog held on.

  Michael stepped aside as they skidded by at great speed over the rough road. The horse, so violently hurled to the ground, was shaken and trembled as it stood. The heavyset man made no effort to rise. The heart side of his chest had been crushed by the fall. His left shoulder was separated and wedged behind his back.

  Michael reached down and grasped the man by his tallowy cheeks. There was no breath, no death rattle, to be heard. He lit a match to his eyes, but there was no reaction. The man stared glassily, his chest crushed and his neck broken. In one second he was alive and in the next he was experiencing the awfulness of sudden death.

  The red dog came to Michael and sat at his feet. There was a flap of skin where he was torn at the shoulder. From deep in his throat came a murmur, a sound more like words than a growl.

  “May the devil come take your soul,” Michael said to the man.

  He gathered the man’s long greasy hair in his left hand and twisted it in his fist. With his knife he slashed once and twice, a circle around the top of the man’s head. He slid the blade beneath the skin and with a quick jerk he took the scalp. He held it up and then left it on the man’s chest where it could be found.

  He swung into the saddle, made a nicking sound, and Khyber reached along in a brisk, swinging walk and then jumped into a lope. The red dog came into her moon shadow. He ambled along as the country unfolded itself in undulations of grass and fallow land, trees in islands and ribbons, wheat fields and cornfields picked clean.

  Michael eased on the reins and Khyber responded with stride and speed. She lowered her head and flattened her back and the world pressed against him as she built to full speed. The black ground flew beneath them as they traveled on by the moonlight.

  Soon, carried on the wind, came the faint smell of wood smoke, and the road they picked up was dirtied with cow manure and beneath the darkness he found the lights of Meadowlark.

  At the top of the lane he thought they’d be waiting for him, but they weren’t. Overhead was a squanking sound. Geese had lifted off the water and were flying south for the winter. He watched as they made their arrowed passage across the moon.

  In the valley below, beside the barn was a long shed filled with farm implements and the three big wagons painted
blue. The grass-­plotted yard was fenced in white pickets twined about with honeysuckle vine. He’d known the house from David’s letter, its red shutters, green door, and gilded vane and on the verandah the wicker-­back rockers and a glider painted white.

  He let down his neckerchief to spit into the dust. He sat perched in the saddle, with a leg curled round the horn, the shotgun cradled in his lap. From his case, he lit a cigarette he’d rolled.

  Fence country, he thought, and spanning out before him were thousands of feet of strong and high board fences enclosing the gardens, cattle yards, and horse pastures, and beyond that were four-strand fences of double-twisted and barbed wire that ran straight as a die as far as the eye could see where the cattle grazed. To the windward grew a permanent fence, a prickly hedge of Osage orange ten years planted.

  There was a granary, chicken coop, hog yard, a cow barn crowned with cupolas, and stables for twenty horses. The corncrib was full of cobs, and in the coops and pens, chickens, geese, and hogs were asleep. There was a bake house, bunkhouse, cottages, and quarters for the laundress traced by the swinging clotheslines in front.

  Rising in his stirrups, he surveyed the horizon, its suggestion of the dark infinity beyond and then again the direction ahead.

  How strange to him the abstract theories of finance that so much could be worth so little.

  Chapter 4

  Elizabeth was sitting by the light of a small lamp. The on-­sweeping darkness had condensed and closed on the windows. The veil-­fold of another somber night had come to her in her terrible solitude and she could not quiet the aching in her heart, the trembling balance inside her body. She was so tired, but in recent days she’d rarely slept for more than a few hours at a time and when she awoke her body ached. If her heavy eyes closed, she opened them again with a start. She felt to be some coasting vessel adrift on a stormy sea and the shore ever receding.

  That day she had washed David and dressed him and with the help of Aubuchon they settled him inside his coffin. How many accidents had brought her to this place so many miles from the bay and Nova Scotia? Where now were those promiseful days she trusted and thought she knew so well?

  A big intractable stallion had lashed out wildly with its furious heels. The horse had struck David on the forehead and buried a small piece of hoof in his head. He went down and when they picked him up he was in convulsions. They removed the scrap of hoof from his forehead and bathed his head in cold water. He asked for his pipe and then lay down and not again did he utter a sound or a groan.

  For days she’d been living in painful suspense, longing for David to recover, struck by panics and spasms as she passed her time in the middle of a half-­waking dream. How palpable the feeling of disquietude, the loss and emptiness she felt without him, the void that could not be filled.

  He had no business being alone with that wild horse. And now she’d come to learn their prosperity was not real. Whitechurch, the banker, told her David had bought foolishly. He bought without sense or forethought. Everyone had and now they all had to pay up. Whitechurch shamed her and badgered her and she’d fought her tears to maintain her dignity, and then she watched helplessly as a hundred head of cattle were driven off the farm to service the debt and in the morning a hundred more would be driven off.

  They’d always done a busy trade with the railroad: contracts for wood, milk, eggs, meat, produce, and labor. Her husband had always told her to make money you had to spend money and however much he spent on land, livestock, buildings, implements, the prospect of money was always in the future. Wages and income had already declined, but then the locusts came ruining farmers with even the smallest of debt.

  How much was owed she was still learning. As a woman she was removed from the world of money. He’d spared her the truth. Could love survive such concealment come to light? There would be a small settlement from the American Life Insurance Company, but it wouldn’t be near enough. She was afraid and angry. She’d fooled herself and no longer expected to return to the happiness she’d experienced every day of their life together. It’d all been a bright and beautiful hallucination.

  On this night, her heart like stone, not a tear, not a sigh, she fussed with her wedding ring. She thought of the things she did not want to think about, his dark moods, her longing to reach him in those awful bouts that could last for days. She tried to chase these memories from her mind even as she conjured them. None of that mattered now. She wanted to close her eyes and sleep in the heavy silence, but she was afraid to.

  A commotion outside brought her from her solemn loneliness, brought her from her chair across the dark floor and to the window.

  It was Michael returned from town. The setter dog rode in his lap and the long-­nosed dog, as red and rough ­coated as a wolf, loped behind. His flat back, the erectness of his carriage in the saddle, the square set of his shoulders—these were the characteristics of military training. When he left for town that morning she wished he’d not come back but keep going and return to wherever he’d come from. He was a stranger and yet he was hauntingly familiar to her. He was David’s brother, but she’d not met him before and had not known he was coming and did not know his intentions and did not trust him, his arrival coincident with such tragedy. What rights were hers and what rights were his, the brother of the deceased?

  Aubuchon came from the kitchen with tea and honey to tell her Michael had arrived and when he saw her at the window he quietly set down the tray and went back to the kitchen.

  Elizabeth watched as Michael let the setter to the ground, dismounted, and dropped the reins. He unlashed a lanyard, the game loops full with a dozen birds. He entered the gate down the flagstone path, pushing his hat back onto his shoulders. Then she could hear the heels of his boots on the steps, on the floorboards of the verandah. She buttoned her dress at the throat. She held a hand to quiet her beating heart as she waited for the knock at the door.

  When she opened the door he beheld her sorrowful face, thin and heart-­shaped, and her cheekbones were high and her hair was a mass of blue black, with the greater part pulled into a loose chignon at the top of her head and encircled by a black velvet ribbon.

  The setter dog slipped in behind him. She was a swirl of long-­coated dog as lithe as a cat, and he said, “Sabi,” as she dashed about the room.

  Elizabeth looked fixedly at him, her tremulous lips parted as if to speak. His bearded face was naturally melancholy. His eyes were faded and pale and held a sort of dark spell. She had the vague thought the sadness was one he always carried.

  “You have been gone all day,” she said, making herself stand straight and sturdy and strong, her blue eyes fixed intently. She studied him with intense concentration. His eye seemed indifferent and he appeared to look neither to the right nor left. He was here and not here at the same time. He was so strange, silent and alert. He was a fine-­enough-­looking young man, but she could not escape the idea she distrusted him. He arrived yesterday, unannounced, and was if he’d been to a place and had yet to find his return. All day long she wished he’d ride on and not come back.

  Michael felt her watchful eyes upon him. He wanted to say something, but there was nothing he could think to say. It was lodged in his chest, the ache and murder he felt.

  “Michael,” she said.

  “I have to stitch the dog,” he said.

  While he washed and stitched the red dog’s wound, Aubuchon removed the breasts from the birds. He wrapped them in strips of bacon secured with a sliver of wood and sautéed them. He toasted bread and there was wine, coffee, and cream.

  “I am so tired,” Elizabeth said, her hands resting in the lap of her mourning dress, “the sort of tired that can’t be helped by sleeping.”

  She watched as Michael pinched close the dog’s hide and worked the needle.

  Aubuchon was standing in the doorway to the kitchen.

  “Madame,” he said faintly, raising his eyes. The manner in which the old servant treated Elizabeth had in it far more tha
n respect. As a much younger man he’d been educated for the priesthood but had never taken holy orders, never married, never had children of his own.

  “Yes,” she said. “Thank you.” Aubuchon nodded once and returned to the kitchen. When Michael finished stitching the red dog, she asked that he sit and their supper would be served.

  “If only we knew you were coming,” she said. “David might have held on a little longer.”

  He held out his left hand, a gesture, he did not know what to say. He’d written from England, New York City, Chicago, and St. Louis, but they’d not received his letters.

  “On devrait souffrir comme le Christ,” Aubuchon whispered, setting the plate between them.

  “Aubuchon made coffee,” she said, “and I am wondering if you’d like some.”

  He shook his head no. Where she was stricken by grief, he harbored a resentment for how cruel and unjust life can be, for the black seam that ran through it. It burned inside him. He wanted to say how bitter his heart was, but he did not.

  “You should know his death arrived quietly,” she said, her anxiety for the future a mere breath away.

  “I am sorry,” he said.

  “Please, no pity.”

  “I am sorry for myself,” he whispered.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, how secret his feelings, how severe his detachment. “You’ve seen many dead people?”

  “Quite a few,” he said, and then, “You also.”

  “The slaughterous American war,” she nodded, recalling her days as a nurse. “Quite a few of the men and boys did not recover from their wounds.”

  He searched for his grief. His brother’s death was the death of an idea more than a man, the death of family, and something he was not ready to consider. He’d done what he could. He’d paid off his brother’s creditors and soon he would be moving on. But for now he changed his mind and decided upon a cup of coffee.

  “You are not a believer?” she said.