head sadly, knowing the answer too well. It didn’t matter. It was over. He could change nothing.
Their two images alone would have been enough to bring the sadness, but there was another person in the tintype: a small brown-haired girl of eight or nine. It was she who shattered whatever rigid structures were left inside his being, so that his emotional world sagged. A bittersweet pain coursed through him as he stood before the dresser.
He had never seen her before. He knew only that she had been born after he left, and that she was dead. Seeing her now was both a mysterious gift and a curse. He fought a moaning sound welling within him. He had heard that her name was Thelma. His throat tightened. It had been his mother’s name. He smiled wistfully: just like Susan to have honored him, even after he had dishonored himself. He kissed the photograph of this child he had never kissed in life, never known.
It was a long time before he could stop looking at her, staring so hard at the small face that her image began to blur. He relived times that he hadn’t thought of in a long while. Why had he left, when they had needed him so? He pulled himself up straighter and set the picture back in its place. He knew the answer. He knew he would do it again. He also knew with painful clarity what he had lost. And what he had found. He took his glasses off, then turned and walked out of the room.
He was riding stiffly, he and the gray picking their way carefully up a narrow trail through the pines on the western slope. Chaco was sitting on the pony’s rump. Alice ambled along behind with all Jones’ worldly possessions strapped to her back. He didn’t want to ride any more. He wanted only to lie down and sleep. He was ready to take the last long trail.
He fingered the old Sharps absently, every once in a while taking a pull on his bottle and turning to look back down at the ranch house. Earlier, he had tried to say goodbye. She hadn’t acknowledged him. It was best, he thought. It gave him a chance to look closely at her. He had placed Baldwin’s loaded shotgun across her lap. Still, she had not paid him the slightest mind. Not a glance.
He drew a shallow breath and told himself to stop. It was over. He tried to visualize Thelma’s small face, vaguely seeing her, the sadness creeping over him. Things were now so different from what he had once believed. Life had seemed so alive, so real and tangible, so easily toted up and carried from place to place. But he realized now it never had been; the things of greatest worth he had never touched.
An aspen, its bark girded by the claws of a bear, stood dying beside the trail, its yellow leaves dropping silently in the breeze. He watched the sunlight shining on the tree, making it look like a sparkling, spiritual thing, the leaves floating in random patterns down towards the earth, drifting away on their separate journeys. At one time, the tree had been a whole thing, unified in life and purpose, now it was disassembling, its different lives dying different deaths, each alone. He felt much like that.
Only superficially had he sensed life’s essence, the unseen things which held its true meaning, which throughout the years had touched him like a soft breeze to the skin. Now they were drifting away, leaving him to journey on without them. He was truly alone.
The hills were still, making the sounds of the animals seem loud and intrusive. It didn’t matter. If there was trouble ahead, whoever was going to cause it already knew he was coming, and what he was carrying, and from what direction he rode. He thought again of the Indian face – the face he’d seen in the vision in the cornfield two nights earlier – wondering who he was and what he wanted … and why he bothered him so.
He picked up Baldwin’s and Lily’s trail in the red clay above the pines, then spotted the hoofprints of the old Mexican’s horse; the little man was riding to the side so he could read the signs without ruining them. In a couple of places, he could see where Mannito had turned off and sat watching his back trail to see if he was being followed. The Mexican knew some things, Jones figured.
As soon as Jones saw the cactus, he cocked the hammer on the Sharps, squinting his eyes and studying the path through the broken plants. He sat still, and listened. The gray felt tense under him, her ears pitched forward. Chaco whined. He raised a hand to silence him.
The steer had been skinned in some blue bunch grass; its hindquarters were missing. Jones sat squatting next to what was left of the carcass, ignoring the buzzing flies and the stink, while he counted footprints and pulled as much information as he could from their sign. There was a mix of them. All moccasins – badly worn; not a prosperous bunch. He looked for the one who had gone after Lily the night of the sandstorm, some dark echo in his head tugging at him.
He found his glasses and fumbled them onto his face, and leaned down closer over the dusty prints. Different breeds: Chokonen, Chihenne and Mescaleros, all Apaches, but an odd, motley bunch. They didn’t figure to fit together.
His eyes, focused now behind the glasses, moved carefully over the tracks. He studied the criss-crossing, the repeated circles, the back-and-forth patterns. He looked up at the sky and tried to visualize each of the men, committing their walk, size, weight and habits to memory. When he felt he had a good picture, he looked back down at the dirt. Then he saw the lone set of footprints and understood why the track had appeared strange to him that night.
Apaches were all dangerous. This one, he sensed, was somehow worse. Jones moved closer, studying the imprint, the right foot turned and dragging some. It wasn’t a fresh wound, maybe lame from birth. He wondered what bothered him about the man. He was big. Short framed. There were splashes of dust at the front of the tracks indicating the Indian’s heaviness. Jones guessed him to be over 200 pounds.
He reached down and closed his eyes and touched the track softly, reading its telltale characteristics, feeling the disturbances in the earth. The bad feeling stole over him again and he pulled his hand away.
He could smell fire and saw smoke drifting near the crown of an oak. He moved cautiously toward it. A dark shape was swinging grotesquely from a branch in the tree. He stepped closer trying to stay out of the breeze and the nauseating smell it wafted. The object came into a fuzzy kind of focus: the green cowhide. It had been sewn into a big bag and a fire built under it. Lily’s dress was in the dirt next to the fire. ‘Bastardos,’ he muttered in Mexican, as if the word might reach those who had done this. It was a language the Apaches knew well.
Thick smoke rose and shrouded the hide and made it harder to see; then a breeze came and the smoke cleared, and he saw a small blackened foot protruding from a break in the tightly stitched seam. Staring at that foot and thinking of Lily’s grandmother and mother, Jones vowed to find the cripple – and kill him.
He took a deep breath and then held it and slit the stitching of green thongs; the cowhide flaps spread wide, releasing a cloud of putrid smelling steam, and Jones gagged on it, turning away. Death, in general, had never bothered him much. But this one did.
The body was curled in a tight ball and disfigured to the point where it was almost unrecognizable. Nevertheless, he knew it wasn’t Lily. He picked up one side of the cowhide and rolled the corpse onto its back. Mannito. The little Mexican was naked and covered with thousands of tiny puncture holes; but those had not killed him. His death had come from the green cowhide. The fire slowly drying it, shrinking it, until it finally crushed his ribs and suffocated him.
Jones studied the little man’s shattered face and felt the bad sense creeping inside his guts. He had never had much truck for Mexicans, but this one had been somehow different. In just a few days, they had come to a silent understanding; and he felt that the Mexican would have honored it. There was something about the little man that he had trusted. He felt pressure building in his chest and he stood quickly. He’d been close to few people during his life. Hard as it was for him to understand, he believed the little man could have been one of them.
Now
