Читать книгу The Searchers - Alan Le May - Страница 7

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Dawn was near when they got to the house. Amos had been hard at work. He had laid out his brother Henry and the two boys in one bedroom, and put their best clothes on them. He had put Martha in another room, and Mrs. Mathison and Laurie took over there. All the men went to work, silently, without having to be told what to do. These were lonely, self-sufficient people, who saw each other only a few times a year, yet they worked together well, each finding for himself the next thing that needed to be done. Some got to work with saw, boxplane, auger, and pegs, to finish the coffins Amos had started, while others made coffee, set up a heavy breakfast, and packed rations for the pursuit. They picked up and sorted out the litter of stuff the Indians had thrown about as they looted, put everything where it had belonged, as nearly as they could guess, scrubbed and sanded away the stains, just as if the life of this house were going to go on.

Two things they found in the litter had a special meaning for Martin Pauley. One was a sheet of paper upon which Debbie had tried to make a calendar a few weeks before. Something about it troubled him, and he couldn’t make out what it was. He remembered wishing they had a calendar, and very dimly he recalled Debbie bringing this effort to him.

But his mind had been upon something else. He believed he had said, “That’s nice,” and, “I see,” without really seeing what the little girl was showing him. Debbie’s calendar had not been hung up; he couldn’t remember seeing it again until now. And now he saw why. She had made a mistake, right up at the top, so the whole thing had come out wrong. He turned vaguely to Laurie Mathison, where she was washing her hands at the sink.

“I ...” he said. “It seems like ...”

She glanced at the penciled calendar. “I remember that. I was over here that day. But it’s all right. I explained to her.”

“Explained what? What’s all right?”

“She made a mistake up here, so it all—”

“Yes, I see that, but——”

“Well, when she saw she had spoiled it, she ran to you....” Her gray eyes looked straight into his. “You and I had a fight that day. Maybe it was that. But—you were always Debbie’s hero, Martie. She was—she’s still just a baby, you know. She kept saying——” Laurie compressed her lips.

“She kept saying what?”

“Martie, I made her see that——”

He took Laurie by the arms hard. “Tell me.”

“All right. I’ll tell you. She kept saying, ‘He didn’t care at all.’ ”

Martin let his hands drop. “I wasn’t listening,” he said. “I made her cry, and I never knew.”

He let her take the unlucky sheet of paper out of his hand, and he never saw it again. But the lost day when he should have taken Debbie in his arms, and made everything all right, was going to be with him a long time, a peg upon which he hung his grief.

The other thing he found was a miniature of Debbie. Miniatures had been painted of Martha and Lucy, too, once when Henry took the three of them to Fort Worth, but Martin never knew what became of those. Debbie’s miniature, gold-framed in a little plush box, was the best of the three. The little triangular face and the green eyes were very true, and suggested the elfin look that went with Debbie’s small size. He put the box in his pocket.