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
