‘You turn your back on me again, you son of a bitch?’
And that was it.
Thomas Heywood fired into my father’s back with a snap of his wrist like throwing a stone. Like nothing. It flashed and sparked like the fire just minutes before and the trees quaked. I think I cried out. My father fell to his knees and disturbed our mugs in the fire, which sputtered with the tea and coals and startled the others to unload into him, their guns lighting the trunks of the trees four more times, Heywood emptying another pistol, and Jude Brown raised his hooves and tried to jump from his tether.
He still whinnied and snorted as my father lay still and the dark came back like a lamp snuffed. Indian-hatband giggled again.
I had never seen the top of my father’s head before. He was going bald. It is foolish how you notice these things.
You may have heard that the dead twitch and jerk as they go on and they may, but I had been saved from that sight. My father simply fell and lay like a cut log, only the dust from his fall showing that he had weight. He had no more movement. His neck was angled and his arms were underneath him, his shoes pointed together.
‘You want the horse?’ asked the man who had left my side as if I was not there.
‘Why would I want a horse with no dick?’ Heywood said. ‘Leave the wagon. Get the guns and the money. Take it all. Leave the boy and the ground.’
The hatband giggler stopped his mirth. ‘Leave the boy?’
‘He’s a boy. Get moving.’
I do not think this was mercy.
I had not stirred past looking at the top of my father’s head. I watched the silver-haired man take Father’s watch and purse and kick him back over again. Someone rubbed Jude Brown’s nose and he settled down while they robbed the wagon. There was laughter at the discovery of the wooden gun and they threw it on my father’s back.
I did not notice them leaving. They said nothing to me and just melted away.
I sat in the dark for a half hour, I guess. Jude Brown tried to talk to me. He just wanted to know that everything was all right, so at some time I stood up and rubbed his neck. I sat up on the Brewster and played his reins through my fingers.
I sat there for hours listening to the owls and the forest creaking, watching shooting stars and hearing things snuffling just outside our camp. Branches fall at night, did you know that? You can be sitting in silence and suddenly something falls and you jump.
Eventually false dawn came and I got down and went to our tin of char cloth and striker. I made a fire. There were flying insects everywhere, even on my hands as I sparked and they did not care. I pulled out the cups from the ash and drank what was in them. They had taken the oven pot.
My father’s body gurgled but I knew he was not alive. After an hour I rolled him over. I recognized nothing about him, and in a way this was easier to me. His mouth was open and bloodied wet and his eyes stared up. I tried to close them but they would not. I tried to close his mouth but his teeth just ground and it flopped back open. It felt like rubbing a brick against another and the feeling of it through my arm made me throw up my belly.
I went through his pockets and got just his compass and spectacles. I picked up the wooden Paterson and stuffed it in my belt. They had tossed away my father’s order book and I stooped and plucked each one of the white paper chits like picking cotton and placed them back.
Dawn now and the birds tried to get rid of me again with their cries. I knew I could not pick up his body. I was not strong enough. I have had to live with that.
I covered him with our blankets, not thinking of the next night, and me and Jude Brown went back the way we came.
I did not cry. Not once. It is very important for you to know that. I would not get anywhere with crying. I wooed Jude Brown and clucked when I wanted him to get along. I do not think he cared anything about what had happened and he stopped when we cleared into wide ground until I fed him. He took an age with his bag, and I chewed corn dodgers for breakfast and waited for him. There was no satisfaction in my eating. I could taste nothing.
When I got back up onto the seat my feet touched the loaded Paterson that my father had practiced with. He had left it underneath and it had moved as I rode. Heywood had not seen it. I took out the wooden one and put it at my feet and put this steel one in its place. Jude Brown took us to a creek and I had to untie him to let him drink. I washed for I had the smell of gunpowder and smoke all over.
I would go back to Milton, back to mister Baker. He knew me and my father. That would do for now.
I had done back through Lewis and on to Milton. It had taken the best part of the day and the town had gone quiet for suppertime when I reached Baker’s store. Mercifully he was still open. I put the guns in the sofkee bag and hid it under the seat.
I hesitated before my hand reached the door. I realized I had not spoken to anyone since last night and that I had not thought of what I was to say or why I was to say it. I was childishly embarrassed. I was used to not piping up when I got the small piece of pie, to be thankful for the warm buttermilk. I sat quietly in corners and let adults talk. But I knew I needed the company and security of good men. I would say it all just as it was. They would know the right thing to do and I would go back to sitting quietly in corners while they made the world right again. I opened the door.
Mister Baker was behind his counter, I doubted if the town recognized him without a bar of wood in front of him. He stopped wiping something and fixed me with a questioning look, then recalled me and looked over my head for my father’s shape. I had frozen in the doorway for I had heard lewd laughter and the chime of glass from the dark area. I had not thought on the possibility that I was coming back into the den where I had first seen beasts.
The change in me had not gone unnoticed and mister Baker came closer to me along his counter.
‘What is it, son?’
I took off my hat and stepped up to the brass rail along the foot of the bar.
‘My father,’ I said. My voice was dry and I swallowed to moisten my throat but I had nothing in me to wet it. ‘He has been shot and killed. I would like to go home now.’
Mister Baker had no wife but he found a neighbor who held me tight to her bosom when she heard and gave me a good stew and dumplings, which I did prefer more. She had no children, which was to the good. I would not know how to address myself to them now, my usual shyness of other children presently deepened by my horrors. She called me ‘dear’ at every word and made me a cot in her parlor. I kept the sofkee bag with the guns beside me.
I was a little fearful when mister Baker left to take care of Jude Brown but I comforted myself that he was only across the street. The neighbor did not leave me a light when she ‘deared’ me good night, which at first worried me, but I realized that no-one would have reason to look in through the window of a darkened room. Before settling I got out from under the four-patch quilt and checked the locks on the windows. I slept a little. I dreamed a lot. I do not want to write about them dreams.
There was no law in Milton. That would come when they got a post office. The bank had men on a payroll of a dollar and a half a day to protect its interests and they could be persuaded to keep order on a Saturday night. Mister Baker informed me in the morning after he had opened and set me down in a chair with my bag by my feet that we would have to apply to a judge in Lewisburg and make Thomas Heywood a matter for the marshals.
I dreaded the concept of repeating my entire story to a man in black who did not know my father from a hole in the ground but I trusted mister Baker as a man who had at least conversed and traded with my father. He was kin to me now. Even today every shopkeeper reminds of him whenever I see a