Читать книгу San Antone - V. J. Banis - Страница 13

Chapter Seven

The hearings were mercifully brief. Alice Montgomery, sobbing and threatening every few breaths to swoon, told essentially the same story Joanna and a subdued—even a surprisingly sober—Lewis told. It took the judge only a matter of minutes to hand down a verdict of self-defense.

Lieutenant Price, who somehow blamed himself, had taken care of everything, or so it seemed—attorneys hired, doctors brought (Lewis was entirely unscathed, not so much as a bruise to show for the incident), the whole family moved to a boardinghouse the lieutenant found.

“You musn’t blame yourself,” Joanna said, not once but it seemed a score of times. “It wasn’t your fault.”

The wagons that had been assembled for the journey northward were in shambles from the storm. One of the Hartes’ could be fixed up; the other was completely destroyed—it would have to be built anew.

Lewis surveyed the wreckage grimly. “We’d better hope that train gets through with our household goods,” he said, and wandered away, leaving Joanna to worry what exactly their financial position was.

She’d never concerned herself with money before; she’d never had to. But it took no great insight to see that this adventure had already proved expensive. A delay of several more weeks—a new wagon, the expense of boarding the entire family while they waited.... She would have liked to ask Lewis about the money—would have liked, in fact, to take over the responsibility for it—but he looked so beaten down with despair, so humbled. His shoulders drooped when he walked, and when he spoke to her now, it was in a much chastened voice, with none of the curtness, the insolence, that had marked his attitude toward her in the past. She couldn’t bring herself to embarrass him further, to do any more damage to his pride.

The court hearings had not been easy on him. It had been necessary to tell of Clifford’s assault on her. And how could she explain shooting the man without telling of Lewis’s falling down, his defenselessness? He had held his head down while she spoke, refusing to look at her, at anyone in the courtroom.

So, she did not ask him about the money, but she began to think of ways they could save a little—not big things, not things that would be conspicuous, and force Lewis to be extravagant just to show they weren’t in straits. Little things, here and there. At the boardinghouse Lieutenant Price found for them, she put all three of the children in one room—to general dismay.

“But, you and papa have your own rooms,” Melissa protested. “And I’m sixteen.”

“Which is quite old enough to be looking after your brothers for me,” Joanna replied.

Gregory looked pained, and Jay Jay said flatly, “I don’t need looking after.”

Alone with her brothers, Melissa was quick to inform them. “I heard the whole business that night. Everything!”

The boys, whose comprehension of what “everything” entailed was only slightly scantier than hers, remained unimpressed.

“We’ll all be sleeping in the same wagon on the trail,” Gregory said, following some train of thought incomprehensible to the other two.

“I might not be,” Melissa said. “I’ve already met Doña Sebastiano and her daughter—they’ll be traveling in the train, but they’ll have an actual driver to handle the team for them, so they won’t have to work. And they’ve already hinted that I might prefer to ride with them.”

“Everyone has to work on a wagon train,” Gregory said, and was ignored.

“Meskins?” Jay Jay asked; he had already picked up the local pronunciation.

“They’re Spanish, which is a different matter altogether. Actually, she’s full-blooded American, she came from Baltimore, but her husband is a Spanish grandee—that’s like a nobleman. And they’re going to be our neighbors, practically. Nancy, that’s the daughter, plays the piano. She’s going to teach me when we get to San Antonio.”

“I’m going to ride with William Horse,” Jay Jay announced.

“They’re going to be our neighbors?” Gregory asked. “In San Antone?”

“She says it’s no distance at all, by Texas standards. Whatever that means.”

“Did she say what it was like there? What it looked like?”

“Not really.” Melissa frowned thoughtfully. “I don’t think she cares much for it, actually. I think they’d both rather stay in Galveston than go back there.”

“Why don’t they, then?” Jay Jay asked.

“Because her husband’s there, silly.”

“So what?”

“It’s something you’re too young to understand,” Melissa said primly. “And you can’t ride with William Horse. He’s an Indian—he’s liable to scalp you when no one’s looking.”

“Mama would be looking,” Jay Jay said. “Did you ever notice? She’s always looking. Only, sort of sideways, so you won’t catch her.”

“It’s good to be observant,” Gregory said.

“I think she’s afraid,” Melissa said. “I don’t think she wanted to come any more than I did, only she doesn’t want us to know.”

“I don’t see why she’d be afraid,” Jay Jay said. “I’ll protect her.”

“Lieutenant Price wouldn’t let anything happen,” Gregory said. “That’s what he’s here for, to protect everyone.”

None of them even bothered to mention their father’s protecting them. He was automatically included in the “everyone” looked after by Lieutenant Price.

“Don’t you think,” Melissa said, “if she’d just let herself go a little—bend, sometimes.... She always looks like she’s afraid something’s going to slip out of her fingers.”

“She’s carrying a lot on her shoulders these days,” Gregory said sagely.

“Mama?” Jay Jay looked puzzled from one to the other. “I never see her carrying anything.”

* * * *

Joanna was surprised when Lewis came to her room the night of her acquittal. He had gone back to the bottle. Lewis’s drinking seemed to come in waves, like the ocean’s surf, sometimes receding, only to return, bigger, more advanced.

She was in bed. He came in the dark, wordless. She heard him undressing: the twin thump of his shoes on the floor, the scratch of wool over hairy legs. Hands clenched into fists, she lay on her back and waited.

A listening pause; why did he linger, what did he expect?

He belched, the sound sending the stillness fluttering like startled birds. Joanna turned her head away.

His hands felt foreign, and impatient; she could feel their tension, her skin soaked it up, and gave it back, magnified.

“Did you want him to?”

The question, the sound of his voice, startled her. They had been performing a mime; his question made it real.

“Want...who? What?”

“Montgomery. Was that the only time?”

She felt a growing stiffness against her thigh. The question’s significance angered her more than its impertinence.

She slapped him, not very hard; the position made it difficult. “Get off me,” she said, pushing.

“I’m your husband,” he said, struggling to achieve his goal.

“Was that what you wanted? Was that why you were never here?” she demanded, still struggling against him. “You thought he’d tame your wife for you? You thought that was what I needed?”

“What do you need, Joannie?” he asked. “What is it that I can’t give you?”

She stopped struggling all at once. “A man,” she said. “You were half right anyway, Lewis. I do need a man. Not the way you thought, unfortunately.”

His efforts continued a moment longer, but it was obvious they were doomed. Finally, he let out a long sigh and rolled off her.

The silence came back, descending heavily upon them. She felt ashamed of her cruelty, and angry with him for making her ashamed.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

The bed moved. She heard him retrieving his clothes. “So am I,” he said. “I knew it wouldn’t work. I knew that before I came in.”

“Then why...?”

“I felt I owed you.”

Owed me? She had to stifle the retort that rose to her lips.

“You saved my life.” He hesitated; when he went on, his voice was bitter. “I came out a laughingstock, you know. A man, couldn’t protect his wife’s honor. Falling down, you had to rescue me. I could see people’s faces there in the courtroom, see it in their eyes. Snickering. Embarrassed for me, some of them. I don’t know which was worse. I don’t know how I’ll ever forgive you for that, Joannie.”

“Would you rather I’d let him kill you?”

“Maybe. Then you’d never have forgiven yourself for that, either, would you?”

“Probably not.”

“’Cause you’ve wanted me dead so bad yourself, sometimes?”

She felt suddenly tired; not just tired, but wearied. “Yes, sometimes. God forgive me, but that’s the truth.”

She was afraid she’d angered him again; he was a long time in replying.

“I can understand that,” he said at last. “Sometimes I’ve felt the same way. About you. About myself. Maybe I did know, maybe I saw, when he looked at you, and wanted to give him an excuse to kill me. I am a coward.”

She sat up; she could barely see him in the gloom. “Not completely,” she said. “It took courage to bring us here, after all, to leave everything behind....”

He chuckled softly. “I didn’t come to here, I came from there. I should have left you behind, Joannie. You’re what I was running from, now I think of it.”

“Me? Or yourself?”

He didn’t answer. She was surprised when the hall door opened a moment later; she hadn’t heard him cross the room.

“I won’t bother you like this again,” he said from the doorway. “It’s no fun for either of us.”

He went out, closing the door softly.

She lay for a long time, thinking of what had just happened, and of the things he had said.

Was it me? she asked some lingering essence of her husband, the ghost-husband that was never really gone from her side, that owned her, in a way her real husband could not. Did I do this to you? Did I make you what you have become?

She thought of Lewis lying in the mud and the rain, sobbing, waiting for a man to kill him, and she felt a pang inside her breast, a wrenching as if she was giving birth to a new—what? Not love for her husband, surely. Empathy, perhaps. How odd it was. For a time, not long after their marriage, she had come to hate the man she had wedded. Yet it seemed the lower he sank into his dissolution, the harder it became to hate him.

Or was that only the power of the weak over the strong?