Читать книгу The Last Ride - Thomas Eidson - Страница 7

The two days that Baldwin had said Jones could stay on the place had stretched to four. The rancher wasn’t certain why, unless it was that he felt sorry for the old man. He guessed he did. It was early morning on the fourth day, the air cold, mist rising off the watering tanks. Baldwin was leaning on a shovel in the pasture watching Maggie as she walked slowly from the house toward the western slope. He wondered anew who this old man was, and how he fit in her life. Or didn’t fit.

Samuel Jones appeared as good at doctoring as he was at shooting – the two Mexican kids were now darting over the yard as though they had never been sick. Their mother was still bedridden, but improved. Regardless, the old giant’s success hadn’t softened Maggie. Baldwin had never seen her behave the way she did to Samuel Jones. She was against him from the moment she saw him. It was crazy.

He could see the little picketed enclosure out of the corner of his eye. Maggie’s sister, Thelma, and Julia, Mannito’s wife, were buried there. And Maggie visited their graves whenever something was bothering her.

Baldwin tightened his grip on the shovel. The old man had walked out of the barn, moving in his careful strides in Maggie’s direction, the mule and the little dog trailing along behind. He was barechested and wearing a battered black cowboy hat, a Sioux hair pipe breastplate, breechcloth and deerskin boots – a crazy mix. His Indian tales and dress were a hodgepodge of tribes: Pawnee, Apache, Sioux, Navajo. Stiffly old-fashioned and out of touch, Jones might also be losing it a little in the head. And Baldwin knew he drank too much.

Maggie was standing by the picket fence, her head bowed, her Bible held in both hands. If she knew the old man was beside her, she didn’t let on. Jones took his hat off and looked down in the same manner. She didn’t acknowledge him for a long while. They just stood there, shoulder to shoulder, like a couple about to be hitched, the mule nibbling at the old man’s boots. Chaco sat beside Maggie, as if he might be giving her away at the make-believe wedding. The two Mexican kids lined up behind them, the boy with his toy bow and the little girl with the Tihus doll, seemingly sensing that this was a solemn event. Baldwin jumped the creek.

Maggie was talking to the old man now. Moments later, as if they were actors in some strange kind of play, she whirled and slapped his face, then the two of them were turning and marching away; Maggie to the house, the old man back to the barn.

That was it. Baldwin could accept a lot of things, but when Maggie took to slapping strangers who drank too much, who carried heavy hardware and shot the way the old man did, it was high time to end it.

Baldwin let his eyes adjust to the barn’s weak light. Mannito had ridden out with James and Dot to check the calving, turning the stock out before he left. The barn was quiet, shafts of sunlight slanting into the shadows from the open windows, a few flies buzzing lazily in the air. Baldwin glanced around for the man. Nowhere.

‘Jones?’

No response. He turned and walked a few paces down the row of stalls. The old man had been sleeping in the last one on fresh straw Mannito had pitched for him. The Mexican had a heart. Interestingly, the two ancient warriors seemed, Baldwin thought, to have struck some sort of truce. Not friends, but willing to co-exist in the barn. Baldwin stopped and listened. Chaco was whining.

The old man was sprawled face first in the stall, the dog lying on top of him and licking the back of his head. Chaco bared his teeth as Baldwin knelt beside the man.

‘I’m not going to hurt him, boy.’

The little dog growled but didn’t move when he felt for Jones’ heart. He rolled him over, and Chaco hopped out of the way, continuing to growl beside them. Blood trickled out of the side of Jones’ mouth. He still had a fair heartbeat and was breathing. Baldwin propped him against a bale of hay, spreading a blue Indian blanket over him, and waited. The little dog sat looking mournful by the old man’s side. Baldwin got the feeling that Chaco had witnessed this scene before, and didn’t like it.

Jones tossed and turned and mumbled for a while. Twice, Baldwin heard him call out, ‘Yopon.’ Lost in his own shadow world, Samuel Jones was struggling desperately against something Baldwin couldn’t see but sensed.

He was an odd character, Baldwin thought, as he glanced around. Beneath his brutal features there was a certain sensitivity and style. He had dressed the box stall into a home of sorts. There were sacred pahos – colorfully painted prayer sticks, decorated with feathers and kachina-like figures – hanging on the walls. Three southwest tribes made them: Pueblos, Apaches and Navajos, so he couldn’t be sure where these were from. A clutch of dried maize tied with red and blue beads hung next to the pahos. A large parfleche trunk of painted rawhide looked Apache.

He wondered again who this man was, this man Maggie hated. She had never mentioned any living kin. Looking around the stall, Baldwin felt as though he was sitting in the sacred hogan of a Zuni or Apache shaman. Was the old man a half-breed? His outfit was an odd collection from different tribes. Lined in a row on a bench sat six full bottles of mescal whiskey. He had arrived at the ranch fully illuminated and he hadn’t quit since. He had the habit. And Baldwin bet he could kick the lid off.

They just looked at each other for a while when Jones came to. The old man sat carefully picking straw from the blue blanket. When he had finished, he folded it neatly and stored it in the parfleche trunk. Baldwin watched. The blanket was obviously important to him.

Finally, Baldwin said, ‘How long have you been like this?’

Samuel Jones didn’t try to play games. ‘Six months, maybe seven.’

‘Much pain?’

‘Some.’

‘Seen a doctor?’

‘Both.’

The expression on Baldwin’s face said he didn’t understand.

‘Apache and white.’

‘And?’

Jones held his hand up in a loose fist, palm toward Baldwin, then dropped it as though he was tossing something to the ground. It was the silent language and Baldwin knew this gesture meant ‘bad’. He nodded at the old man, who just watched him and scratched the little dog’s head. Chaco looked happy again.

Maggie was sitting in the rocker on the porch, her Bible lying on her lap, her hands squeezing a twisted rag until the knuckles were cream white. Baldwin stood on the steps and watched her for a moment, then he turned his back and studied the valley. She gazed past him at the sandstone mountains.

‘He came to die,’ he said.

He could feel her eyes on the back of his neck. He turned and looked at her. She was crying without sound, tears running down her cheeks. ‘Who is he, Maggie? Why did he come here to die?’

‘I don’t care,’ she sobbed.

‘He traveled hard so he could end it here.’ He watched her. ‘Because of you. He calls you Ama. Who is he?’

Maggie seemed to convulse with her crying, her arms wrapped around herself as if she were cold. He held her while she sobbed. When she finally stopped, she walked to the railing and stood looking out at the far mountains.

‘Maggie?’

‘He’s my father.’ She sounded exhausted.

They sat together on the porch until the sun had leaped the creek and started to drop toward the redstone of the mountains. Lily came out a couple of times but Baldwin shook his head and she went back inside. Maggie sat with her head clamped between her hands, gazing out across the pasture.

‘I want him gone,’ she said.

‘I thought both your parents were dead.’

Maggie shook her head slowly. They sat quietly for a while, then she again said, ‘I want him gone.’

‘No, Maggie.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he’s dying.’

‘He can die somewhere else. He got here, and he can leave the same way.’

‘We can’t do that.’

‘I can.’

‘No. We can’t. And,’ Baldwin hesitated, ‘he’s going to take his meals in the house.’

It was as if he had slapped her face. ‘I can’t have that man in my house. I can’t, Brake.’ She sounded desperate.

Baldwin pulled hard on his cigarette, then blew the smoke out in a long rush. ‘We have to, Maggie.’

‘Don’t ask that of me, please,’ she moaned.

‘He’s your father, Margaret.’

She was crying hard again. Her voice sounded controlled when she spoke. ‘I was ten when he left. Mother was carrying Thelma. We never had much – but we had something. We had an old farm. After he left we lost it all. Mother cleaned for people, washed clothes at night, cooked for the railroad.’ Baldwin watched her hands – they were twisting and pulling on the wash rag until he thought the material would tear.

‘She never stopped. She tried to give us something. But we were just drifters, town to town. Always searching for him. Always on some quest that neither Thelma nor I really understood. Never a home. No friends. All we had was the Godawful searching.’ Maggie looked off into the distance. ‘I loved him then, used to pray at night for him to come back. I’d pray every night, Brake, until I fell asleep. I thought I could will him to come home. I felt that everything would be okay if he would just return. He never did. And now that he’s come, and I see who he is, I know things wouldn’t have been okay even if he had.’

Maggie tipped her head forward onto her knees. ‘I think mother went a little crazy,’ she said quietly. ‘She never stopped acting like he was still with her. I used to hear her late at night – talking to him as if he was in the room with her – and I’d be terrified by the sounds. I came to hate him because she couldn’t stop loving him. I still do. She just broke and died.’ She raised her face to him. ‘That man you’re so worried about, Brake, killed my mother. I can’t have him here.’

She continued to rest her head on her knees for a while. Then she raised it and looked up at her husband. ‘He took up with an Indian woman. He left me and my mother for an Indian whore.’ She was sobbing softly. ‘I can’t have him here,’ she said again.

Baldwin stood watching the cottonwoods moving in the slow breeze, then he looked down at her. She seemed small and childlike, sitting there with her arms encircling her knees, her Bible clutched in one hand.

‘We have to do it,’ he said softly. ‘This isn’t about you and him.’

‘No? Then who’s it about?’

‘Our children. That old man is their grandfather.’

‘So?’

‘We can’t have them watch us drive him off, near dead the way he is, like he’s some scavenger. He’s their blood. They have a right to know him – good or bad. You and I don’t have a right to stop them.’ He paused. ‘And they’ll know him in our house.’

‘Then I’ll live in the barn.’

Baldwin studied her face and knew she meant it.

Lily had been arguing with her father for the past half hour. Now she was sitting stiffly on the fireplace hearth, sandwiched between her brother and sister, and looking worn out and near tears. Neither Dot nor James had uttered a single word. Not for, or against. Baldwin guessed their awkward quietness was due to their learning they were blood relations to Jones. But he knew there was more to it. They were frightened by their mother’s sad appearance. She was sitting in a chair a few feet away, preoccupied with seemingly dark thoughts. Normally lively and talkative, her melancholy bothered her younger children more than the news they’d just heard. Still, he figured they’d warm to their new grandfather soon enough.

But glancing at Lily and seeing the cold resolve behind her eyes, he knew she would fight kinship with the old man for a long time. Perhaps forever. Samuel Jones simply didn’t fit in her world. Didn’t fit at all. Since she was a youngster, Lily had wanted her life to be romantic, like the lives she read about in her magazines. He felt badly for her. But feeling badly wouldn’t change what was. Neither would daydreams or passing fancies. And Jones was blood kin.

Baldwin didn’t discount the fact that his oldest daughter had a feeling for the finer things. But he also knew that kind of person rarely fared well in this wilderness. She had to face reality, not try and wish things into something they weren’t.

‘He’s not my grandfather,’ she said morosely.

‘Yes he is. And you’ll treat him with respect,’ Baldwin countered firmly.

‘Mother?’

Maggie looked up at Lily, but didn’t respond. She and Brake had never interfered with one another in the handling of the children. And, upset as she was, Maggie wasn’t about to start now.

Brake respectfully gave his wife time to reply, then when he was certain she wasn’t going to do so, he looked back at Lily. ‘You don’t need to ask your mother how to behave toward your grandfather. None of you children do.’

It was near dark when Dot approached Samuel Jones at the far edge of the cornfield. The full moon was rising, shining over the tall plants and splashing light onto the old man. He looked mysterious in its pallid glow, sitting bare-legged on the ground in a worn yellow buckskin medicine shirt that was covered with green beads and white porcupine quills, a bright red blanket wrapped around his waist. He wore Apache boots with their curled-up toes, his hat gone and his long gray hair done up in thick braids covered in soft-looking deerskin; his ears held great brass wire rings. He was shaking a small Navajo rattle in one hand and chanting quietly. Chaco sat beside him. They both seemed to be looking at something in the shadows of the valley. She could smell alcohol on him.

Dot wanted to talk to him, but she felt a little nervous. The old man still had the meanest face she had ever seen. But she was getting used to him. She cleared her throat. Neither he nor his little dog moved. Then suddenly she was feeling strange – as though she was being watched. She looked nervously at the expanse of shadows around her, unable to shake the strange sensation. Nothing. But still the unsettling feeling wouldn’t leave her. Somewhere off in the darkness something disturbed a flock of tree sparrows and the little birds set up a racket with their constant chirping in the night. Slowly they settled down. She wondered what had spooked them.

Dot listened for a while, then she shrugged off the feeling of unease and turned back to the old man. He was looking over his shoulder at her. Chaco was showing his teeth, as if he was smiling or maybe eating sour grapes.

Dot stepped closer. ‘Are you really my grandfather?’

‘Is that what your mother says?’

‘That’s what my pa says.’

He nodded. ‘I guess I am.’

Dot crossed her arms and scrutinized the side of the old man’s face, then turned and studied the young corn plants for a while, cogitating on things in her head. She looked back at him and asked, ‘What should I call you?’

He didn’t answer.

‘What do others call you?’

‘Jones.’

She shook her head. ‘My pa would make me say Mr Jones or Grandpa Jones. And that doesn’t seem right, us being closely related.’

He didn’t respond.

‘Pa said you once lived with the Sioux.’

He nodded.

‘What did they call you?’

‘Gut eater.’

‘That’s not going to work,’ she said quickly. She couldn’t imagine herself sitting at the dinner table next to Lily and saying, ‘Gut eater, please pass the gravy.’ She scratched at an itch and puzzled on the problem for a moment.

‘Maybe just Grandpa.’ She paused. ‘Is that okay?’

He nodded and Dot nodded in return, and grinned. She suddenly enjoyed the thought of calling this wild-looking old man, Grandpa. Something about him, a thing that seemed dangerous and different, made her like being around him and being blood kin. She didn’t care what Lily thought.

‘Where you from?’

‘The mountains.’

‘Which?’

‘Madres of Mexico.’

Dot squinted her eyes at him. ‘You funning me?’ She knew Mexico’s Madres mountains were a good six hundred miles south. Six hundred miles of dry waste. She marveled that the old gray pony had gone the distance carrying the huge silver-covered saddle and her grandfather.

He reached out a big hand and stroked the little dog’s back, the hand gnarled and badly busted up.

‘You came all this way just to see ma?’ Dot asked, her eyes on the old hand with its liver spots.

‘My daughter,’ he said, as if the words explained everything.

Dot thought for a while, then said, ‘How come you never came before?’

The old man didn’t answer.

They both went to listening to the long-eared owl in the cottonwood near the creek. She hunted the pasture almost every night. Lily had named her Veronica. Crickets were loud in the cool air. Dot tipped her head back and looked up at the stars that seemed close enough to touch, and wiggled her toes in the sand. She loved the ranch.

‘If you’re Indian, then I’m Indian. Right?’

‘I’m Indian – but not blood Indian.’

‘How can that be?’

He pointed at his chest.

‘That’s nothing.’

The old man didn’t reply.

Dot felt that she had won the point. And a moment later, she started in again, feeling more at ease with his brutal features. ‘Ma says you aren’t a Christian.’

He stared at the night.

‘That true?’

‘Once.’

Dot studied his face, waiting for him to explain. When he didn’t, she said, ‘I’ve never known a heathen.’

He nodded.

‘Why are you sitting out here in the dark?’

The old man took a long time to answer, as though deciding whether or not to dismiss her. Finally he said, ‘I’m talking to the spirit powers.’

‘Who’s that?’ She scrunched up her face and looked as if she thought he might be crazy.

He watched her for a few moments. ‘If you can’t learn about things, then go and leave me be.’ His voice was firm and deeply serious.

Dot put her hands on her hips and started to sass, then changed her mind, and didn’t know why. ‘What are you talking to them about?’

‘Things. My things. They are of no importance to you.’

She shifted her weight onto one bare foot and placed the other against the inside of her leg.

‘Where are they?’ Dot looked nervously around her, thinking again of the sparrows that had been disturbed at their night roost.

Jones had resumed his chanting and didn’t respond. The moon’s glow was on him fully now, and he looked like a holy man to her.

Dot squatted down and absent-mindedly reached a hand out to touch the little dog. He snapped at her and she jumped back, a drop of blood welling on a finger. She waved the stinging hand in the air and then sucked on the bite. The spell of the moment was gone. ‘I ought to shoot him,’ she said angrily. The little dog eyed her back and seemed just as angry.

Jones paid no attention to their squabbling.

Dot stared at the old man for a few moments. He had turned his back to her and was shaking the rattle again.

‘Grandpa.’ Jones didn’t turn. ‘Grandpa. Can you find things?’

He didn’t answer.

‘With your chanting – can you find things?’

‘What things?’ he asked finally, not looking at her or stopping the steady shaking of the rattle.

‘A cat?’

‘How long has he been gone?’

‘She. Two weeks.’

‘That’s a long time. Coyotes like white men’s cats. I will see whether she still lives.’

She looked relieved. ‘Thanks. Her name is Harriet.’

He began to chant and then broke into a rough coughing spell. When he finished he sat catching his breath and staring at the darkness. ‘Stay out of the hills for a while.’

‘Why?’

He didn’t say anything else. She thought he was mean looking but funny. She liked the sound of his chanting.

‘Will you teach me Indian medicine?’

He looked off across the shadows in a serious way, not angry or annoyed, just quiet and appraising, and was starting to answer, when Maggie’s voice cut him off, ‘No. He will not. He will keep his pagan ways to himself. Or he will leave this ranch.’

Jones didn’t move.

Dot turned to see her mother standing a few feet away, watching the old man. ‘Ma, I need to find Harriet.’

‘You won’t find her through Indian magic. You’ll just make your soul sick. If you want Harriet, pray to the Lord.’

The old giant turned now and stared into Maggie’s face, his strange features hard to read. He studied her until she grew more upset.

‘If you have something to say: just say it,’ Maggie challenged.

He shook his head slowly.

She continued to glare at him. ‘No, go ahead. Please,’ she said, sarcastically, ‘say whatever you’re thinking.’

Jones tipped his head down and appeared to be examining the material of his blanket.

‘Say it,’ Maggie said firmly. ‘Be honest for once.’

‘Ma?’ Dot was squirming.

Jones looked up at his daughter’s face, examining her fine features, and seeing something else, her stubbornness, and sensing she wasn’t going to stop until he told her what was on his mind. Finally he said, ‘I was just thinking about what you told the child.’

‘What about it?’

He hesitated for a moment, then continued. ‘That she should pray to the Christian god.’ He stopped talking and it was apparent he didn’t want to continue, felt he had gone too far already. But it was too late.

‘Go on,’ she demanded.

The old man weighed his response carefully, then said, ‘It won’t work, that’s all.’

‘How dare you!’ Maggie exploded. ‘Dot. Go to the house, please.’

The two of them watched the girl trotting away. When she was out of earshot, Maggie turned slowly and stared angrily down at him. ‘Listen. You ran off with some Indian woman. That was your choice and your business. Now you’re here. Here because my husband has a good heart. But if you start teaching Dot your heathen beliefs—’ Maggie stopped and watched his face for a moment. ‘I’ll kill you. I promise.’

The old man turned and stared into the night for a while before he looked back at her. ‘It still won’t work,’ he said quietly. ‘Your god won’t find the cat.’

‘I can reach my God any time I want,’ she snapped, her voice trembling with anger. She turned and walked off toward the barn.

He began to chant once more, his voice rising in the night air, his eyes following her. He continued the droning singsong long after she was gone, calling on his power to tell him what was causing him to feel this nagging sense of dread. Was it simply a premonition of his coming death? Or was it his inability to accept the fact that Maggie hated him? Somehow he didn’t believe it was either.

Jones stopped, convinced he would receive no answer this night. He was struggling to stand, his breath coming in pained gasps, when suddenly his body stiffened, his eyes locking hard on a fleeting vision: a man’s face – Indian – a face beyond time and place, floating in the night sky. Then it was gone. The tree sparrows chattered again, then settled back to their roost.

Samuel Jones was shaking.

A couple of hours later, Baldwin saw Jones looking like a lovesick cow, standing in the moonlight and staring in through the barn door at Maggie as she sat reading her Bible in the lantern’s glow. She was held in a sort of reverential awe by the old man. It was crazy, but Baldwin understood it better now. Then Mannito had come out of the barn and joined Jones. Neither spoke, two solemn sentries in the night. The mismatched pair stood mutely side by side, straight and stiff, for more than an hour. Then Jones began to chant. And a few minutes later, Mannito had joined the chanting. Two old men, one Indian-in-his-heart, and the other, Mexican; two old men standing shoulder to shoulder in the darkness, chanting together like half-mad savages. Baldwin couldn’t figure it.

Maggie sat in the barn straw trying to read a passage from the New Testament in the lantern light, and trying unsuccessfully to block out the sound of the shrill chanting of the old men, ignoring the anger building in her breast. What was Mannito getting involved with him for anyway? Both of them crying in the dark like lunatics. It wasn’t like the little Mexican. Maggie pressed her lips together in frustration and watched a mouse scurrying in the shadows by the barn wall. The man had the ability to infect people with his crazy beliefs. She had seen it before.

Maggie tried to ignore the smell of fresh pine drifting in the air. The bough was hanging from the barn’s rafters overhead. She shut her eyes. She knew he had done it. He used to do the same thing in their old barn on the farm, whenever she and her cousins were going to sleep outside. She was surprised he had remembered. It was pinon-juniper, which meant that he had ridden miles into the high country to find it. It didn’t matter. It didn’t change anything.

It certainly didn’t erase her knowledge of the Indian woman, or his sin against her mother. She imagined the woman with rotting teeth, dirty hair and body lice. Probably not far from the truth. He had left them for pagan vermin. She shook her head.

Maggie worked to shut out the monotonous incantations, but couldn’t. She clutched harder at her Bible, opening it to where her thumb marked a passage of Luke: ‘Ask and it will be given you.’ She had been reading the line over and over, remembering his insult about God not helping. She started to pray, then hesitated.

Maggie rarely asked God for anything. In fact she couldn’t recall ever having done it, except when the children were sick. If she had, she didn’t remember receiving anything that resembled a divine response. That last thought bothered her and she closed her eyes and her Bible and squeezed the little book hard. ‘Dear God. This may seem like a small thing. But I need Your help. I need to prove to Dot that You will help her if she needs You.’

Maggie felt silly, ungrateful, asking God for such a thing. She started to open her eyes but the shrill chanting had increased in volume and she clutched harder at the Bible, her resolve stiffening. ‘Lord. I need Your help to find Harriet the cat.’

The croaking of the grass frogs near the creek was loud in the summer night as Baldwin entered the barn. Mannito had retired to his room at the back of the cavernous structure. The three children were in the house getting ready for bed. Jones was asleep, or looked to be, wrapped in his Indian blankets on the ground in front of the barn, his faithful little band of animals dozing around him.

Maggie was still sitting on the blanket, still reading her Bible in the lantern’s pleasant light, the little lamp making a small hissing sound. The sound wasn’t loud enough to block the peaceful noises of the horses in their stalls, their animal warmth rising pleasantly in the cool air. Baldwin felt a slight chill across his shoulders. Something in the darkness beyond the barn door – something that seemed wrong or out of place – was still bothering him. He had tried to figure it, but couldn’t and shrugged off the uneasy feeling.

Though Maggie was aware that he was standing before her, she refused to look up from her book. He smiled to himself and settled down on the blanket with a playful groan. She continued reading.

‘Why don’t you come back to the house?’ he said quietly.

She shook her head.

‘I asked him if he wanted to sleep inside, but he won’t do it.’

‘He’s gone native,’ she said. ‘And he’s stubborn.’

‘Oh,’ he said, grinning. ‘I’m glad you didn’t inherit any of that.’

Maggie turned her head and looked at him and he realized he had said exactly the wrong thing.

‘Just joking.’ He waited for her to say something. When she didn’t, he said, ‘He’s sleeping out front. Come on back in.’

‘I can’t.’ Her voice was soft but firm sounding.

‘Why, when he’s not there?’

‘Because if I do, it’s like I’ve accepted him being here. And I won’t, Brake. I won’t let him have that victory over me.’

He watched her from the side for a moment. ‘This isn’t a sporting contest.’ He paused. ‘Think of the children.’

She tipped her head back to keep her tears from running and studied the shadows near the rafters of the barn. ‘I am. They don’t know about him. But I do. You wouldn’t want me to just forget what happened to my mother.’

He studied her for a moment, then cleared his throat and said, ‘Yes, I would.’

Through the thick adobe walls, they heard Jones begin his monotonous chanting. Maggie started to sob hard and Brake put his arms around her and held her tight against him.

‘I can’t,’ she cried. ‘It hurts as if it just happened.’

‘It’s just seeing him again after all those years – you’ll get over that.’

She shook her head. ‘Not until he’s gone.’

He examined her beautiful face in the soft light of the lantern, feeling the warm glow inside him again, and then stretched out on the blanket beside her. ‘You’ve got to.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’m too old to sleep on hard ground during cold nights.’

She laughed and cried at the same time, then listened to Jones’ soft litany. It was an oddly soothing sound, mixed with the rhythmic shaking of the rattle. A sound that seemed as if it might drift forever in the darkness.

Later that same night, Lily was in her downstairs bedroom brushing her hair and counting the strokes. She brushed 250 times, every night, stroking carefully from the roots to the ends of her brown locks to add luster. The house was still and quiet. Her family was asleep upstairs. All but her mother. Lily was proud of her opposing the old man. She felt the stirring of a slight breeze from the open window behind her, the fabric of the curtain ruffling softly.

Unhappily, her thoughts drifted back to Samuel Jones. She wondered what her school friends would think if they knew he was her grandfather. They’d laugh. Pure and simple. She shuddered at the thought. The one good thing about the ranch, perhaps the only good thing, was that it was stuck so far out in this wilderness that her friends would never visit. Would never find out about him. The place was like a tiny dust mote in a vast dirty universe. At least that would keep her school mates from accidentally stumbling across Samuel Jones. And she certainly wasn’t going to tell them about him. Ever. The old man was an embarrassment.

She studied her fine features in the dresser mirror and tried to figure what her mother would say if she knew about the bustle. She could guess what her father would say – or at least how he’d look at her. He would more than likely make a joke about it. And it wouldn’t be funny. She decided not to tell either one of them. She was grown now. Bustles were the vogue. She would wear it when she returned to school.

Lily lowered her arms to rest them. She was still watching herself in the mirror when she first got the feeling. It was a tingling sensation on the back of her neck that someone was standing behind her. ‘Dot,’ she said. ‘Don’t start sneaking up on me. You know I don’t like that.’

Lily turned and was surprised to see the room empty. The curtain fluttered slightly in the night breeze. She looked back to the dresser and resumed her strokes. Her eyes moved over the small marble bust of Lord Byron that her roommate had given her on the day they left school. She smiled. Sarah was such a sweet person. Lily stopped, the brush still to her hair, and listened. She could not shake the troubling feeling that someone was behind her. She turned again.

The room was empty. But Lily’s eyes were on the window curtain. It was drawn but she had the gnawing sensation that someone was outside. Trembling, she walked over and stood shaking in front of it. She reached out a hand and yanked the curtain back. Nothing but the night and the scolding of a bird in the distance.