Juval cuffed the right side of my head so hard I spun to my knees. Next thing he gripped one shoulder and set me back on my feet, saying, “Listen to me now.” It was difficult, as a high tone occupied my right ear, but Juval earnestly told me five or six specific things he found discouraging about my character. If you don’t mind I’d rather not restate them, but they were by and large true, and seeing no advantage in disputing the more captious charges I agreed with them all, as the broken must. Concluding, he said, “You’re pretending, aren’t you? To have remorse.”
If not for the belt in the ear I’d have quickly reassured him my misery was authentic, but as I said, I wasn’t hearing well. I thought he was asking did I feel bad about the horse.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
He cuffed me again, same ear, and walked back to the men while I knelt in the snow.
They made Lonnie Ford as snug as possible, carrying him into a short thicket and laying him on a bed of gathered juniper. Though unconscious, the rancher had begun to twitch and mutter. When Juval was satisfied Ford wouldn’t freeze solid he gathered the others, who checked cinches and spoke unhappily among themselves as they climbed aboard.
Only now did I see they were leaving me with Ford and going on to hunt Davy without me.
“Did you think we’d have you along all the way?” Juval asked. “We’d have stationed you back with a deputy anyway. Now you’ll just have to keep an eye on Ford.” The palomino wheeled about.
Lucky I was muzzy from being hit—more lucid, I might’ve wept for grief and outrage. As it was all I thought to do was yell, “What should I do if he wakes up?”
“Tell him a story,” Juval called back, his voice already reduced against the Badlands.
Looking back, though, it was better to be stuck with poor Lonnie Ford than be baby-sat by a deputy. It gave me work. It kept my mind from the aches in head and soul. Every time despair came courting, Mr. Ford would moan and thrash. I held his limbs when he dreamed and rebunched his juniper pillow. After a bit he started to shiver. His whole body seemed to contract and stiffen. It was spooky, a skeleton dance, and I wondered what it would be like if Mr. Ford died and I had to stay who knew how long beside his body. What if it got dark? What we wanted was a fire.
Which sent me back to the horse. I’d forgotten about him—the poor downed animal lying a few yards away. He was alive though resigned, the side of his belly rising and falling, nothing else moving but his eyes. I opened the accessible saddlebag, for he was lying upon the other, and took out a can of all-purpose oil, a heavy black pouch containing harness and leatherpunch and other tools more foreign, also a book called Old American Houses with a stained blue dust jacket. At bottom lay a small concave bottle of whiskey, wrapped against concussion in a chambray shirt. For whiskey or against whiskey, you had to admire that bottle. Battered down a hillside, bounced on by a horse—with its swaddling peeled away it lay like an amber ornament in my hand. The red paper seal was unbroken.
The horse sighed heavily. An animal that size gives off so much heat I’d snuggled against its belly. It seemed to like the company, and since Lonnie Ford wasn’t making any noise I stayed awhile. I knew the horse should’ve been shot after the fall. The only reason he wasn’t was our nearness to Davy’s cabin. Juval wanted to preserve surprise. I tried to brace up. To think of anything besides the likelihood of gunshots from the hills. We were awfully close—within a mile certainly—and the men had already been gone some time. Half an hour? How long could it take? I imagined Juval quietly issuing his orders, the men spreading out, staying low. Swede had told me how the James gang were ambushed in a farmhouse in exactly this way. My decision to tell Dad everything now lay revealed as foolishness. Swede was right. I was among the disgusting double-crossers of history. I was one of the crumbs. Cole Younger, you will recall, came out of that farmhouse with eleven gunshot wounds. I didn’t think Davy could survive eleven gunshot wounds. I hoped he’d come out with his hands up when offered the chance. I hoped Mr. Juval would give him the chance—I had doubts, despite his promise to Dad. I doubted lawmen in general. Cole Younger was sitting in a kitchen chair, Swede said, reading a newspaper, when so many rifles started popping the house shredded like papier-mâché. Among his other wounds were porcelain shards in arm and face; cup of coffee got shot right out of his hand.
Then I wondered what Davy would think, should he surrender, to see me there with Juval and the rest. Somehow this hadn’t entered my thinking till now, but it made up for lost time. In this picture I saw no forgiveness for myself—not from Davy, not from Swede, not from anyone but Dad, who was so forgiving it almost didn’t count.
It seemed necessary just then to touch base with the Lord. Shutting my eyes, I leaned into the horse. I prayed in words for a little while—for Davy, of course, and for Mr. Ford, whom I could hear making chewing sounds in his sleep, and for my own future, which seemed a boarded-up window—and then language went away and I prayed in a soft high-pitched lament any human listener would’ve termed a whine. We serve a patient God. In the midst of this came the conviction I hadn’t prayed for Martin Andreeson. Nor thought of him since we set out. Nor Jape Waltzer, nor Sara, who were sharing in every way Davy’s hazardous morning. I’m afraid I discharged this duty quickly regarding Waltzer. Later I would wish I’d spent more on him particularly. Andreeson, whom I’d despised, now appeared to my mind as he might’ve to a worried brother. Talk about an unwelcome change. There in the cold, curled against Mr. Ford’s sighing horse, I repented of hatred in general and especially that cultivated against the putrid fed. A pain started up, as of live coals inside, and like that I knew where he was. Knew, with certainty, why he hadn’t come back out of the blizzard. I began to weep. Not only for Andreeson—weeping seems to accompany repentance most times. No wonder. Could you reach deep in yourself to locate that organ containing delusions about your general size in the world—could you lay hold of this and dredge it from your chest and look it over in daylight—well, it’s no wonder people would rather not. Tears seem a small enough thing. Thus I cried some, then remembered I still had to pray for Sara. It’s mysterious how comfort arrives; for this too should’ve been full of torment, given her imminent peril. Yet thinking of her calmed my shaken spirit. I imagined her walking with friends in a sunlit park in a small town. Laughing around a supper she had not cooked. I thought of her pleasure in knowing someone like Swede, for whom all the world was an epic poem. Delivered from Waltzer and his conjugal ambitions, who knew what goodness lay in store?
“Otter!” cried Lonnie Ford, in an arid voice.
I scrambled to him—he was twisting around, mashing down the junipers. When he saw me he relaxed, panting, and looked away.
“Aunt otter,” he said. His lips were parted and thick. Between them his tongue lay dry as a toad.
“Just a second.” I ran back to the horse and returned with the whiskey. He didn’t like the taste much, and it probably stung, but it restored his enunciation.
“I’m busted up,” he observed.
“Yes sir.”
“Where’d they all go?”
“After my brother,” I replied.
He shut his eyes at this, in resentment or resignation; he shut his mouth too and tried breathing through his nose, but it was blocked and made only the merest squeal.
“How long ago?”
“An hour maybe.”
“Give me more of that.”
He couldn’t use his hands. I had to pour the whiskey in his mouth by capfuls.
“Where’s Billy?” he asked, at length.
His horse.
“A little ways—that way. He can’t lift up his head, Mr. Ford.”
“They didn’t shoot him.”
“No sir.”
He lay thinking about this. “Those buggers.”
We sat in silence a long time. Remembering Juval’s advice I asked Mr. Ford if he’d like a story. He’d gone sullen and wouldn’t answer. It was hard to blame him. In the end I retrieved the book from his saddlebag, Old American Houses, and read aloud from a chapter describing the ruinous attempts of modern citizens to update architecture better left intact. In building for themselves, the book said, many a nineteenth-century workman had indeed built well enough for the ages. It was a pretty good book, I suspect, making the case for honor, but I didn’t get to read much, for soon Juval and the rest came trotting back in the blackest of moods. They’d come to the cabin, which lay open and empty with snow drifted in; they’d found no sign of any person save Andreeson, whose felt fedora sat in rumpled condition on the cold stove. In silence Juval presided over the further binding of Lonnie Ford and the construction of a travois by which he could be carried home; then we all mounted, Juval last. He shot the horse Billy through the head, and we got away from there.