There, the shout came a heartbeat before the bullets. The dust exploded around Silas Merrick's boots as he sprinted across 50 yards of open canyon floor. Winchester clutched to his chest, loose shale sliding beneath him. Above him, five soldiers were clawing up the goat trail, hand overhand, fast toward the cliffs where the children were hiding. He hit the base of the rock just as the first bluecoat hauled himself over the ridge.
Silas threw the rifle to his shoulder. "Drop it!"The bearded lieutenant spun and froze because the man aiming at him was an Apache. He was white, a rancher's face, a cavalry tracker stance, standing with the enemy. Half a second of hesitation.
Silas squeezed the trigger. The lieutenant fell. A sledgehammer slammed into his shoulder. The Winchester flew from his hand. He hit the dirt, clawing for a pistol with an arm that would no longer move.
The three rifles swung down toward his chest. A hammer clicked back. Then a shadow fell across his face. The wind did not blow across the borderlands. It scoured.
It came down off the blue spine of the mountains like something with teeth, carrying grit and heat, and the far-off smell of a storm that never delivered its rain. But the earth beneath it was cracked open in a thousand small mouths, ochre and rust and burnt umber, stretching flat and merciless toward a horizon that refused to end. Silas Merrick rode the fence line like a man attending a funeral, which in a way he was 32 years old, weathered past his age. A face carved by squinting into 40 sons a season, lines deep enough to hold the dust that never quite washed out. He sat his bay gelding easy, the way a man sits when riding has become the only thing his body still remembers how to do without thinking.
The cottonwoods along the creek were dying early this year, losing their leaves before Autumn even asked them to. He passed the third water hole and did not need to stop to know what he'd find. He stopped anyway because some rituals you keep even when they hurt you, especially then mud, sludge, the smell of alkali and rot where good water used to be. 19 head in this pasture. He counted them without meaning to.
The way a man counts his own ribs after a bad winter. There should have been 40. He turned the horse toward home. Except home was a word that had stopped meaning anything warm three years ago. The cabin sat low and tired porch, sagging on the left side like a man favoring an old wound.
No smoke from the chimney. No reason for smoke since there was no one waiting inside to need it. Silas didn't go in. He never did first. He climbed the gentle rise behind the house instead, boots, crunching dry grass hat in his hand before he even reached the top.
The two wooden crosses weathered gray. The names cut deep once, though the wind had spent three years trying to sand them back into nothing. Josephine Merrick, Amos Merrick. He knelt between them the way other men kneel in church because this was his church now. The only one that would still have him.
Fences down on the south ridge again, he said, voice low, rough like something dragged over gravel. Might be rustlers. Might just be the coyotes dragging carcasses through the wire. A pause. I'll fix it tomorrow.
He always said tomorrow. But tomorrow was the only tents he trusted anymore. He turned to the smaller cross, the one that still after 3 years made his throat close up like a fist. Josie, just her name. That was all he could manage some days.
The irises didn't come back this spring either. Son took them again. I tried hauling water from the creek, but there's nothing left to haul. His hand found the dirt at the base of her cross, pressed flat against it like he could feel her palm through six feet of earth. I'm sorry.
He was always sorry. Sorry had become the only prayer he knew. And underneath the sorry, quieter, uglier. The truth he never said out loud to the crosses. Because even the dead deserve better than his excuses.
That he had helped point the army toward people who never should have been hunted. That his brother had died wearing a uniform because of a war. Silas had helped draw the map for but that somewhere out past those blue mountains there might be women who woke up every morning to graves of their own and he had put them there. He put his hat back on, walked down the hill with the shaming pace beside him like a dog that wouldn't be shooed off. The two days later the flour ran out.
So did the axle grease which meant town whether Silas wanted it or not. The settlement was a huddle of clapboard and sunbaked adobe. Buildings pressed shoulder-to-shoulder like they were afraid to be caught standing alone in all that empty. The main street was a river of churn dust. Silas tied his horse outside Barrow's general store and stepped from blinding light into the dim grainsed dark and walked straight into trouble he had no business surviving.
Barrow was leaning over the counter, face red, voice loud enough to rattle the tin roof. In front of him stood a small Apache woman wrapped in a faded blanket, a handful of coins held out like an offering nobody wanted. I told you. Barrows voice cracked the air. I don't trade with your kind.
Take your money. Get out. The woman didn't move, but pointed instead at a sack of cornmeal on the shelf behind him. No. Barrow grabbed a broom off the wall, brandished it like a rifle.
Go on, get. Silas stood by the door, hands curling into fists at his sides without his permission. He knew this woman. Washed clothes for the miners on the edge of town. Harmless, starving, probably same as everyone this year.