Chapter 7

Mikeos sank and kept on sinking. The last fragments of Jenna's conversation spiralled down with him.

"You know it too," the woodkin said.

"Damn you."

"It's not so hard, Jenna. Just sharing. Isn't that what the blood magic is? Tell Mikeos the story of himself and he'll come on home?"

She grew faint, indistinct. ". . . can't . . ."

Just that one word now, sinking with him. "Can't."

Mikeos!

I'm dead. Go away.

Mikeos!

Dead.

Wake up. Don't make me do this.

Dead.

Wake up, Mikeos Jones.

...

Damn you. I can't do this. I can't.

Mikeos raised no objection. He didn't want her to do anything. Didn't want anything. Didn't want.

"I took my father's gun from its holster." Jenna's voice. His story but Jenna's voice. Mikeos tried to say no, tried to tell her to stop, but her mouth wouldn't speak his words. He felt her hex upon his forehead, sharp lines of pain, both the hot kind and the cold.

I took my father's gun from its holster. The smooth and worn leather gave it up too easily. Mother had hung the belt on the high peg at the back of the larder. It waited there above the preserves in their jars, above the molasses, above the dried corn shucks that hung there waiting to rustle. A gun's always waiting too. A gun is as patient as it is final.

Jonas had brought the gun to the house an hour past noon, with Dai Gunder hanging back behind him in his black coat, black hat, pretending sorrow, neither in the street nor in the house but flapping in the doorway, shadow thrown across the parlour floor, dark and dancing.

"Davy would have wanted me to bring his gun," Jonas said, hat in his hand, eyes watching Mother's shoes. "For the boy. When he's older."

"Mikey don't want it," she said. But she took the belt as if to refuse it would be to refuse Father's memory.

She hung it up high then went up to their room, to her mirror with the dried posies, the big clean mattress reaching from one iron bed end to the other. Father brought those bedsteads home last fall, grinning because he knew how she would like them, scroll worked twists between the bars, freighted in new from Ansos. She had hung the belt up and an hour later I opened the larder door to watch it while she sobbed upstairs, quiet as she could, so I wouldn't hear her crying.

High isn't high enough. My grandfather taught me that. Far isn't far enough, he'd say if they ran on him, the murderers, rustlers, bushwhackers out on the Dry Trail. He'd chased them all down in his time. I remember him saying it, craggy like rock, white bristles, deep folds at the corners of blue eyes, cornflower blue. Grandpa Ray let me hold my first gun too. I needed both hands and the strain shook my arms. I aimed it at him. I loved the old man but it seemed a gun had to be aimed at something that mattered, or else what was the point.

"Point a gun at someone long enough and it will fire itself," Grandpa Ray told me.

"But it ain't got no bullets, Grandpa."

"Even so." He didn't flinch or nothing but, even knowing the chambers were all empty, that old lawman didn't like the black eye staring at him.

Plains winters and long summers, all raw sun and dust, just made Grandpa Ray meaner and tougher, like them buttes that stand proud when the wind's stripped away the softer dirt. Didn't seem the years could find much purchase, but the cholera got its claws in him, in his gut. He died stinking and screaming. Mother took me in to see him near the end, in a hot little room at the Belle Temps hotel, the air thick with lavender oil and rot. He sat in that bed trying not to shake. A skeleton with skin stretched over it is how he looked. Like when a steer dies out in the Dry and the buzzards tear a way in and eat out its guts from the inside.

He looked at me that time, the last time, just the once. Turned his head, a skull turning on a stick, and saw me with his eyes, still that blue and fever-bright. Didn't say nothing with those dry lips, only looked and waited.

And that's the thing with a waiting eye, the blue eye of an old man dying, the black eye of a gun, the placid brown of a horse seeing but not knowing – you get to wondering who's looking through it, and where they are, and what they're waiting for.

Nine years that six-shooter had waited for me, it had waited my whole life. Nine summers that took me from swaddling cloth to faded jeans, too big and too wide for a skinny boy. It waited all those days until the one on which Jim Bright killed my father. Jim Bright they called him. Sometimes Jimmy Quick, sometimes Jimmy Sharp. Fast enough for a gunslinger, folk said. Too dark of heart ever to take that pledge though. The stories they told about Jim Bright and the Dead Walker would keep you awake all night listening for the creak of a door.

I took Father's gun to the corral. Maybe I should have gone in the dark of the moon with only starlight to glimmer on the horses' backs. But I went in the dusty day under the same unforgiving sun that saw my father draw too slow and take a bullet rather than give one out. It seemed a fair sum, the way Jonas told it. Two men, one bullet. Dai Gunder would be boxing him even now, in raw pine and spike-nails, before the flies got busy. And Jim Bright already on his way, riding out into the barrens. One job done, on to the next.

Flounce came to the rail when she saw me, sniffing for sugar or carrots, two other mares following her over, a roan and a pale that Seth Hartson brought in off the Dry. She came sniffing, drawn by the question. What's Mikey got? That questionmark enough to shift the weight of her in the heat of the day, little swirls of dust lifting with her hooves. The curiosity stayed in her legs though, no hint of it in her eyes.

A horse has waiting eyes. It's in their nature. Waiting eyes, big and dark and liquid. There's no fear in them, not of a gun leastways.

I stood back from the rail. The gun didn't feel heavy. It didn't shake. Cold purpose in my hand. A horse is for riding. My father could have ridden out of town. He didn't have to stay. Trouble would have blown through, tumbled on the wind. He could have gone a-visiting and Jim Bright would've rode on his way. Father wasn't a gunslinger, not even a free-fighter, for all that he grew up in the shadow of Ronson Greeves. He only had a gun because a friend gave him one. Closer than brothers he said they were, him and his friend. Handed him a gun and headed west, this brother. Like it was a gift and not a death warrant.

The horse watched me. Flounce Father called her, for her way of walking, but a horse only carries a name like they carry a rider. It's no more to them than saddle and tack.

I came in close. Close enough to feel the warm wetness of her breath, to feel the pickle of moisture and the depth of her snort. Sounds took on new clarity, the soft clomp of her hooves in the dust, the high song of birds unseen against the sky, the rumble and creak of distant wheels back along Main.

"You don't want to do that, son."

"I ain't your son, Jonas Brook." He'd come up behind me without dropping so much as a footstep.

"Your father loved that horse, Mikey."

"He should have ridden out," I said, feeling the weight of that gun at last.

"Wasn't in him to run, Mikey, not your Pa."

That wasn't true though. He'd run before, backed down, given way. He compromised every day. Marriage is a compromise he used to say – and he stayed married every day. Something made him choose this day out of all the rest, and make it the day he took his stand.

"It's not–" Not what? Not right? Not Fair? Even at nine I couldn't ask for fair anymore.

"Don't shoot the horse." Not an order, a plea. The crack in Jonas' voice made it sound like he loved old Flounce. Of course Jonas knew more than horseflesh rested on the moment.

"Why not? Isn't she mine now? Are they gonna hang me for my father's horse?"

"Your Pa—"

"Loved this horse?" The anger in my voice surprised me. "He should've loved us more."

"Mikey—"

But if you point a gun long enough it will shoot itself. I've wondered since where the decision was made. At what place along the line was it stolen from me? When Jonas told me not to? When I stood on tiptoes on the high back of Father's chair and lifted his belt from the larder peg? When he chose to make a stand rather than run?

The look in that horse's eye . . . nothing, just a waiting eye with a whole other world watching out from the other side.

"Why do you even care, Jonas Brook? Soon as she's lame she'll be dog meat and leather. And there's plenty across the Dry don't see a horse as nothing but good eating, an odd-shaped cow is all."

"A horse ain't a cow, boy. Anymore than a man's a—"

"Ancient times they'd have killed the horse to carry the man on his way from the grave." The trigger pushed hard against my finger. "Ancient times they'd have slit her throat, dug a bigger hole, pushed her in. I don't e-"

The bark and the kick of the gun cut off any reply Jonas might have had to that.

Point a gun too long and it will shoot. There's a lesson there. About choices, about the illusion of choice. About how we all got so many things pointing our way, across the years, and all our choices are stolen before we even know they were there to be made.

We both knew it that day. Jonas and I. We both knew that bullet would reach out, tear in, punch through. That big dark eye ruined, bone and blood and horsehair all tumbling after the slug long after it had gone its way. The tremble in four legs, the wobble, that last breath drawn in, half snort, half neigh, and so many pounds of dead flesh falling.

I took my father's gun from its holster. It held six bullets and I spent them all.