One Morning Came Brightly
by Allen A Glick
Copyright 1987 AAGlick
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CHAPTER ONE
The heavy pistol felt as malignant in his grip as the handshake of a sinister stranger. Favor was no stranger to weapons, but like a long since spurned lover, he had forgotten the passion of first touch.
Abruptly, he set the pistol down on the bureau.
The pawnshop owner had assured him that there were few finer revolvers... Colt Trooper, three fifty seven, and the man had droned on familiarly with the tiresome litany all gun lovers can deliver. But Favor tuned him out. He knew ballistics in a very personal sense—not from cardboard targets—but from the bloody physics of rice paddles and jungle mountain slopes. Favor could not debate the muzzle velocity of a round fired from an M-16. But a part of him winced each time he recalled how the bullet tore a man apart.
Still, he had purchased the pistol, not clearly knowing why. Fifteen years had passed since he had owned a gun.
That November morning in the motel room in Fort Worth, when he set the pistol abruptly on the bureau, the knock of metal on wood made his daughter stir in bed—as delicate and innocent a gesture as human can make—and his heart swelled as it always did when he dwelled on his child.
Like a thief, though, he quickly hid the pistol in a drawer; and the squeak and clatter of cheap furniture woke her.
“Good morning, big girl.”
“Morning, papa,” her blue eyes fluttered softly, still wanting sleep, and she yawned and stretched and Favor could see in the cast of muscle and bone what a beauty she would someday be. Like her mother had been.
“You can’t go back to sleep, honey. I have a busy day today.”
“Am I going to Aunt Kay’s?” she asked hopefully, sitting up.
Favor smiled in a tight-lipped way and stepped to the bed. He sat down to stroke Laurel’s hair. “I didn’t tell Jack and Kay that we were coming to the city.”
He watched as the news seemed to digest on her brow, as though a reel of film was passing behind her face, her eyes the lens that projected her opinion of whatever confronted her. Part of growing up, Favor suddenly realized, was the inexorable blanketing of that wonderfully honest lens.
“Am I going with you, papa?”
“I’m sorry, Laurel, but you can’t.” He saw the concern in her sleepy face. “There’s a very nice day care just down the street,” he went on quickly. “It’s like Teacher Mary’s.”
“But I won’t know any of the kids!” Laurel thrust out her lip and furrowed her brow.
Favor did not answer, only touched her silky sorrel hair and ran the back of his hand along the peachy jaw that was beginning to set in protest. Laurel was not yet five. In the year since her mother had died, he thought she had blossomed into a much older child, less prone to argue but with a more determined set of mind.
“Where are you going, papa?”
Favor glanced away, seemed to be staring deeply into the bare motel wall. “It’s business, honey. Just business. I promise I won’t be very long.”
“Then can we go to the zoo? Please?”
“If the rain stops, yes we can. But I don’t think this rain is going to stop. Now let’s get up and dress and we’ll eat a good breakfast. Okay?”
He marveled sometimes at how compliant she could be. Were four-year-olds supposed to be so agreeable? Favor had no basis for judgment. He had bulled through life with hardly a glance back until the day he watched awestruck as his beautiful wife wrestled this child to birth; and, once accomplished, once he saw mother and daughter together, as if sharing some great preordained secret, he had asked few questions at all. He simply basked.
So was Laurel like other four-year-olds? He did not know. She was simply Laurel, as he and Molly had so passionately made her.
He paced the small room restlessly while Laurel went about her morning toilet, peeked open the drawer to glance at the pistol, and then shut the drawer sheepishly. This was crazy. He could trust Harry. Couldn’t he trust Harry?
But no echo came back to him. Fifty thousand untraceable dollars was a lot of cash.
Nervously, he switched on the TV to see the bright bulk of Big Bird grinning at him blankly. Well, fifty thou isn’t birdseed, that’s for sure. Then he could not help but grimace, half in humor. Bird seed was hemp seed. But he’d grown none of that. Not a seed in the lot. Sin semilla, as the Mexicans say: without seed; and he had wrapped it all up prettily and given most of it to Harry Sykes. And that’s why Favor was so nervous.
Because he meant for it to buy them a new life.
“Hey, I know!” Laurel announced with her own perfect logic, while she dressed and watched the tube. “We can go to Sesame Place in the rain, and it doesn’t matter!” Her voice sometimes was like a song.
Favor’s face brightened, wrenched from worry to Laurel’s own playful reality. “That’s a good idea,” he told her. “And we’ll do that if they’re open. If, Laurel, if they’re open. After all, it’s winter time. Big Bird might go south, like the geese.”
“No he doesn’t, silly. And besides, we are south!” She spun around then for inspection and praise, which he lavished on how pretty she looked in her new blouse and corduroy jumper and her new saddle oxfords which she tied all by herself.
“I’m hungry, papa.”
“Then put on your coat and we’ll go.
It was overcast and windy outside and a cold rain fell steadily. While Laurel stood in the threshold of the open door, the wind pinking her cheeks, Favor stepped quickly to the bureau. As he turned to block her view, he lifted the magnum from the drawer and tucked it in his belt, beneath the heavy coat, hoping he would not need it, not even knowing what the hell he would do if he did.
The gun was simply there. The man had invented his own necessity.
Grimly, guiltily faking a smile, he hurried out the door with his daughter.
After the war, Favor Rousseau lived most of his life in the woods and scrub brush of Texas, drifting between jobs that always came easily because he was strong and good with tools. His pals were mostly veterans, or old girlfriends who no longer loved him quite enough to tumble again. Favor could shrug and let go, so some of those ladies remained close to him.
He wanted little of life until he met Molly. In her easy going and lively fashion, she began to open Favor’s eyes to the significance of the rest of the world. It was no easy task. He had been a bright, romantic kid turned inward upon himself by the carnage of Vietnam. Coming home, he kept a very focused existence, content to study what passed beneath his nose and ignoring all else.
When Molly hove into view, though, Favor lifted his eyes to the horizon. Her friends became his friends: people lacking his fatalism, and without his brutal images to wake then from sleep. Favor began to think that the world was a normal place. And after Laurel was born, he figured that life was really quite fine.
The drunk who veered into Molly’s car had walked away without a scratch, while Molly had lingered for two terrible days. Favor’s first urge was to teach that drunk about horrible pain, to reduce him to raw nerve ends before he killed him, as once they had reduced that Vietnamese scout who led them into ambush, one violent day down South in the Nam.
Favor nearly went over the brink again—a brink he had been fleeing in disgust all those days of his solitude.
But there was Laurel, the only restraint to hold him in such angry grief. So he swallowed his hate, though it nearly choked him; and he struggled doggedly to become all things to his child.
They owned some land deep in the East Texas woods, where they had planned to build a dream house. In the meantime, they rented a comfortable cottage. Favor stayed on there after Molly died. For weeks, he rocked Laurel to sleep at night while she clutched him in fear that he would suddenly leave. For months, she woke crying at night and Favor went bleary-eyed to work, to worry about Laurel all the day through.
Molly had kept a modest life insurance policy, which Favor banked and was loathe to touch. But after distressing months of Laurel’s emotional trauma, he quit his steady carpenter’s job to risk contracting on his own—and Laurel began to go to work with him. He packed their lunches, she took her dolls and playhouse, and after a week or so, the child learned to keep from underfoot. Those days when she could not go, Laurel stayed with Teacher Mary, a big loving black woman who adored her.
It became a manageable routine, but Favor was not satisfied with the seemingly transient life his daughter led. For the first time he began to think of big money, and what it might do for them.
In his plans, the first marijuana crop was to be a modest one: enough to augment his income and leave him more time with Laurel. More importantly, that first crop was to widen markets for his next crop, which he wanted to be a whopper. But during that first season, in the rich sandy loam of the piney woods, those forty or so female plants had grown to towering heights and—quite amazed—Favor harvested over seventy pounds, when he had planned on only twenty.
That rainy winter morning as Favor drove the old turnpike, to Dallas—having sadly left his daughter among strangers—he was beginning to question his trust in Harry Sykes.
They’d been high school pals in Fort Worth. Sykes had done such bigger deals than the fifty-five pounds for fifty thousand dollars that Favor had offered him. That was why he had not hesitated when Harry first made his proposition. Growing marijuana, Favor had found, was easy as could be. Hiding it was harder. Selling it for big money was hardest of all, and greatly increased the chances of being caught.
So let Harry sell the bulk of it, he’d reasoned. Hell, Favor could trust him.
But when he drove to the quiet Dallas suburb, where his old chum lived—one day ahead of schedule—he noticed right away the small U-Haul truck that meant Harry Sykes was moving.
A low groan churned deep in Favor’s throat as, still a block from the house, he pulled his Blazer to the curb to stop. The cold gray rain had slacked to a drizzle that seemed to sluice down the gutters of Favor’s gullet to turn to slush in his gut.
He shut off the Blazer and reached under the seat for the magnum, to then stare at it as if he barely understood what the pistol was for. Angrily, he jammed it in his belt and zipped his leather coat, and clambered from the cab. He knew in his heart—if he was about to be ripped off—that the worst he could probably do was beat the hell out of Harry. A voice seemed to shout that he put the gun away, but Favor paid his conscience no mind.
It was a neighborhood of short streets and stunted trees, and all the houses seemed dark and cloistered against the cold. The door to Sykes’s was unlocked and Favor stepped into a drab and dingy cottage, totally bare but for the few boxes that remained.
Harry’s eyes bugged and his jaw dropped, and in those first moments of his stammering grope for composure, Favor recognized what had always lain just beneath the skin: Sykes’s utter disregard for anyone but himself.
“I’ve come for my money, Harry.”
A story began to spill forth, a staccato burst of words that had no meaning for Favor, though some bit of coherence emerged “—ripped off, Favor, I swear! I was going to call, man, after I split. I knew you’d want to kill me. It wasn’t my fault, man! They burned me bad!”
He was talking when Favor hit him. Sykes was about the same size, but he did not swing a hammer all day like Favor did, and he was no match. When he came off the floor, his nose dripping blood, Favor knocked him down again.
“You’re lying, Harry. I want my money!” The voice and the countenance were blistering hard. His pose was all malice. But inside Favor Rousseau squirmed a small boy who had never liked to hit—or be struck—and the man’s threatening pose was a learned facade. He‘d never thought of himself as a tough guy. It was as if, in training for the war, he’d learned to briefly fill another man’s suit.
“You’re lying!” he accused again, reaching to lift Sykes by his shirt, his ears filled with yammering protest. The screech and whine, prevented him from hearing as the door slid open behind him, and creeping feet stepped inside.
Favor was clouted suddenly aside the head, and he tumbled in a daze into the wall. The lights flicked out, flicked on, seemed to flutter. Through a fog he heard hard-edged laughter and saw the blur of two huge figures, then the blur of a booted foot swinging into his ribs.
Favor’s throat closed in pain as he was lifted free of the floor, a bile-gagged throat, hard-lumped valve, that let air neither in nor out. Choking, crashing on the floor again, he spat the bile and fought to gulp air that burned like acid in his lungs.
The laughter was shards in his eardrums.
“Who’s the punk, Sykes?” a graveled voice growled.
“It’s him, man! The dude who grew the pot.”
“Well now. He must be pissed at you, Harry.”
“Did you bring my money?”
Favor’s eyes were regaining focus. Dimly, he saw a fat yellow envelope dropped on the rug where Sykes still sat, bloody-faced.
“Remember, weasel, we’re paying you off because you promised us some more action.” It was the other voice, not as graveled but heavier with threat. “You come through for us, Harry, or you’re hamburger.”
When Favor managed to turn his head, still sucking air, he glimpsed two very large man, rock featured and coarsely haired, as wide as a doorway. They were too much alike not to be brothers. Favor struggled to lift his head from the floor, but only gagged from the effort.
“Grab your gear and get out,” one of them said to Harry. “I’ll be sure to leave your buddy with the right impression.”
Favor had lain once on the perimeter of a firebase, stunned from concussion, the bunker blown apart and his rifle just beyond reach. He could not move—could not will his hands toward the rifle—until he saw the little brown soldiers creeping across the sand. And then his hands had moved of their own will, just as they seemed to move that day in Dallas when Favor saw the sap come out of the big man’s pocket.
His hands clawed beneath his coat for the magnum, yanked it out desperately as the man stepped toward him. There was an explosion and the man screamed as the bullet took him in the shoulder and spun him around. Blood seemed to mist on the air as a crimson-bearded hole was punched through a sheet-rocked wall. The pungency of gunpowder was like cold water on Favor’ face, and he scrambled painfully to his feet while Harry Sykes turned ghostly white and the other big man went sallow and wide-eyed as be carefully raised his hands.
Everything seemed frozen, that appropriately balanced moment when the rest of creation seemed only a pivot, only a fragile stage, for the act of fear you have contrived.
Favor’s mind began to rush. He had to get out. When he moved, that moment of balance was lost. As he stepped to Sykes to fetch the envelope, his eyes lost focus and the big man saw it. He started to leap. The magnum boomed. A bullet shaved the man’s ear and he yelped. He brought away blood-dabbed fingers.
“I meant that for your ugly face,” Favor wheezed. “Get on your belly! Now, goddamnit!”
The man dropped, cursing him, while his partner groaned and bled on the carpet.
“We’ll get you! You shot my brother you sonuvabitch and now you can’t run far enough!”
Favor snatched the heavy envelope and began to crawfish toward the door. Harry Sykes had his face on the floor, his arms clutched over his head, and he was trembling like a sick pup. The other man’s face was dark and mean, and he glared hatred.
“We’ll get you, sucker! You’re dead meat! You hear me! YOU’RE A DEAD MOTHERFUCKER!”
Favor turned and ran out the door, his ribs throbbing, the screaming threats rebounding in his skull. It was pouring rain. He gasped as he ran, glanced back but saw no one come from the house. His head was soaked when he reached the Blazer and he wretched and spat bile and breakfast, then clambered is the cab. Shivering but wide awake, alert enough finally to be afraid, he dug for his keys and began to panic, his glance darting down the street as his he fumbled the keys to the ignition.
The Blazer rumbled reassuringly.
Oh Molly! Molly! What have I done!
The panic was building in him. He had to get Laurel and get the hell away!
Wild-eyed, Favor put the Blazer in gear and turned a vicious u-turn, tires-squealing as he sped down the rain-slicked street.
They were the Kiley brothers, Lyle and Leroy, and they were a definite social hazard. The one who took the slug, Leroy the older, had killed two men, one with a knife, the other with a sap. But the one time he went to prison was for a burglary he’d bungled. Lyle the younger was the one who shouted the threats, and had his ear singed by the bullet. He had never killed a man, but he had beaten a few almost to death and he was eager to equal his brother.
They were accustomed to blood and pain. That rainy day, after Lyle put more lumps on Harry Sykes’s head, the Kileys looked up a medic they knew, one who patched holes in criminal bodies. Within hours, Leroy was patched and taped and doped and disinfected, while the pain brought the glass-edged meanness out.
“Where the hell is that?” Leroy growled, wincing as the four-eyed medic eased a sling around his left arm. “Who the hell ever heard of a place called that!”
“It ain’t on the map, Leroy. But I know it’s somewhere in East Texas.”
“Eleeshun Fields, for chrissake!”
The medic blinked, owl-eyed, and snapped his fingers. “The Elysian Fields! Greek mythology!”
“Sounds like friggin’ fairyland!” Leroy spat.
“I passed it going to the races in Shreveport,” the medic told them. “Just off the highway, I think.
Lyle nodded with a twisted, crooked toothed smile. “We got him now, Leroy.”
“You’re a dickhead, Lyle! If you’d packed a piece like I told you, we’d have the scumbag right now! You hear! He’d be right there at my feet and I’d be stomping his puss! Like I ought to stomp on you! Next time I tell you to pack, you’d goddamned well better pack!”
“Sure, Leroy. Okay.” Lyle curled a little on himself, in submission, just the slightest slouch of his shoulders but the medic noticed and grinned while he worked.
“What else did you learn from that weasel, Sykes?”
“About what?”
“You dickhead! About that favor flavor saver whatever his goddamned name is!”
“He’s got a little girl. He’s raising her by hisself.”
“She’s an orphan! You hear me! The kid is a goddamned orphan!” Lyle nodded intensely, his brow furrowed as one ham-like fist slammed the flat of a hand. “Let me take him for you, Leroy.”
“You’ll hold my fucking hat, and that’s all! You understand?”
“Sure, Leroy. But I can hurt the punk before you take him out,”
Leroy looked levelly at his kid brother, his expression softening to something akin to fondness. “Yeah, maybe I’ll let you. I’m sorry I called you a dickhead, Lyle. My shoulder hurts bad.”
“That’s okay, man. When we catch the punk what shot you, you’ll feel a lot better.”
Leroy only nodded and closed his eyes, the sweet vision of that mayhem already flooding his mind.
Nobody messed with the Kiley brothers.
Favor drove, first to the motel, his eyes in the rearview mirror more than on the road. Fort Worth was a fast forty minute drive, and he had calmed some by the time he arrived.
He hurriedly threw their clothes into suitcases, wincing as the sudden motions nagged his sore ribs. Favor knew the heavy flyer’s jacket had saved the ribs from breaking, but the knowing didn’t ease the pain. His pistol lay, reloaded, on the bed beside the envelope. Not until the suitcases were packed did Favor count the money.
There was ten thousand dollars in hundred dollar bills, and Harry was supposed to find them another sucker. Favor smirked bitterly in the motel mirror, as if staring through himself. Harry wouldn’t have been paid off a second time. He was just too ripe a plum.
He thought furiously as he paced. Who the hell are those apes? And what do they know about me? Damn you, Harry Sykes! You’ll tell them everything you know!
Later, as he raced and wove through traffic, to get to Laurel, his mind leap-frogged among his options—rejecting one, then another until enough had fallen into place to form a plan. At least, the beginning of a plan.
He doubted that the man he shot would be immobilized for very long. He looked far too strong. The bullet might not have struck bone and, besides, it was not a magnum round but a soft-nosed .38. And Favor remembered that, as he was retreating out the door, the wounded man had sat up with a painful, moaning curse... Jesus, what pair! Redneck Neanderthals. And they know where I live. They know where Laurel lives!
Perhaps they would leave him alone. Favor grabbed at that notion. After all, he’d shown them that he could hurt them. He wasn’t a plum like Harry. And how much money had they already stolen? The motas—the flowering buds—that Favor had grown were thick as a man’s wrist, and they were cut and packaged in dazzling two foot lengths. They could easily sell for more than the thousand a pound that Favor thought was fair.
They might have made, sixty, seventy thou, Favor reasoned, not counting what they paid to Harry... Maybe they’ll be content with that.
But something within him denied it. Favor had seen their kind of fanaticism, and it scared him.
Right away, Laurel sensed that something was wrong—she had learned to read her father’s face—but Favor lied and faked responses, and then he told her they had to leave town.
She whined and pouted. At the daycare center a lady had told her that, indeed, Sesame Place was open. So Laurel accused him and, grumpy and in a stew for being left with strangers, she would not be content. Traffic was heavy and unusually fierce. He grew aggravated at the delays and, at the highpoint of Laurel’s complaint, he shouted at her and then felt like a worm.
Laurel sobbed and turned her face away.
Favor plowed on through the traffic.
He vaguely recalled that, as he had fled Harry’s, there was a big black pickup parked in the drive. It was brightly chromed and hog-tired and it looked fast. Favor kept searching for it and, going through Dallas again, heading east, Favor constantly glanced around. But beyond Fair Park the traffic slackened and he cruised at sixty with a good field of fire, thinking caustically, welcome back to the war, marine.
The brothers, or one of them, might be waiting anywhere along the road. The thought would not leave his mind. He cursed himself and bit his tongue.
The rain began again.
Laurel was fast asleep as a chill winter’s evening fell sighing into the pines, and Favor turned off the freeway toward home. In his state of mind, the off-ramp seamed a likely ambush zone, so he kept the pistol tucked gingerly beneath a leg. But there was no sign of a black pickup. A few lonely miles south, along the forest bordered road, Favor began to relax. These were deep woods criss-crossed by a score of nameless dirt lanes, and strangers would be slow to find him. They would be safe, at least through the night.
Laurel had learned to sleep with her seat belt fastened. Her torso twisted awkwardly as she leaned against the door, Favor’s coat for a pillow. He nudged her awake and talked to her sweetly. He was sorry he’d been a grump. He wouldn’t be a grump again for a whole week. She looked at him sleepily, in the dimness of the cab, and she smiled like Molly.
“Do you promise, Papa?”
“Well, I promise to try very hard... It should be easy, because starting right now we’re going to have a whole lot of fun.”
That news perked her up. She cocked her pretty head and her eyes widened, shining moistly in the glare of the dash light. “What kind of fun?”
“Well, we’re going on a long vacation, honey. In fact, when we get home, you’ll have to help pack. You’re a big girl and you can pack your own things. And your dolls, too. We can’t leave your dolls if we’re going on vacation, now can we?”
“Nooo,” she shook her head. “I like going places with you, Papa. Maybe we can go someplace where the sun is shining, and there’s lots of things to do!”
“That’s right, Laurel. I know just the place. And girl, will you love it!”
She giggled while she listened as her father made it sound like a fairytale adventure to a place where the winter was short and spring came soon, to a land of parks and swimming holes and picnics in the flowers. She did not know what the “hill country” meant, but it sounded swell because papa would stay with her all the time and they would have great fun.
And thinking desperately, Favor was sure they could find a quiet place for themselves, near a small town deep in the hills, where he could see someone coming for a long, long way. And they could hide. And Laurel would be safe.
CHAPTER TWO
Later that very same evening, far to the southwest, Homer Steadham snored and stirred in a creaky brass bed. What woke him finally was the rumble of thunder as the wind moaned round the corners of the old house. The wee morning sky flickered faintly. Homer felt the air change as the low pressure moved across the ridgeline, and it roused him. When he sat up the bed squeaked, as did many things in the house, and his tailbone barked at him. Thunder rumbled again deeper and nearer, and through the gap in a window Homer could smell the rain. Still more rain, and already many hill country rivers were swollen.
Sarah stirred beside him. Homer watched her thoughtfully as he dressed, the flickering lightning showing her softly obscure, old and then young again, the prettiest girl in Kerr County. He sighed and picked up his boots as he tip-toed from the room.
In the hallway, past the rooms that once were his children’s, there was a faint light on the landing at the head of the stairs. Homer sat on the top step to pull on his boots. When he stood, he was facing the displays framed on the wall. He looked at the square-jawed young man who stared at him from the picture, then his eyes moved to the medals hanging there—a Silver Star and a Purple Heart—framed in deep velvety black. A bronze inscription read: Jarrell R. Steadham, 1st Lieutenant, USMC, 1946-1970.
There was nothing to read in Homer’s face as he stared at the picture of his son. In his mind, though, his own daddy told him sternly—remember boy, life gives to take away.
He padded down the stairs, through the living room with its high stone walls, shaking his head drowsily. Once he checked the stock pens he would go back to bed. The clock in the kitchen read two thirty. The tap water was deep-well cold and flung open his eyes with an ache. Switching on the outside lights, Homer stepped through the back door, across the screened porch, and down the short steps.
Winter’s first bite was on the wind. Homer stood a moment to watch the shadows dance in the yard, listened to the live oaks flayed. In the pens beyond the fringes of the light his steers were lowing. From the shadows two Catahoula hounds appeared, wag-tailed, and they cold nose snuffled at Homer’s big hands. He knelt and let them nuzzle his face, stroked their floppy ears. They were too well trained to jump on him. When Homer stood, a hand gesture and snapped fingers sent the hounds wheeling before him on patrol.
There was a circuit he made on stormy nights, around the pens that lay hard against the barn, and around the henhouse. The hounds dashed ahead and came back, dashed ahead again and trotted back like over-wound toys. The wind picked up as the storm bore down from the northwest, where a huge thunderhead blotted the sky darker. Lightning cracked to show the heavy-shouldered outlines of Homer’s steers, noses up, and wide eyed, and bunched close. He could not grasp why a man should love the smell of cow shit and trampled hay, but somehow he had always loved it. His steers were sleek and fleshy, and come auction they would keep the bank at arm’s length. That was another battle he could not win, perhaps, but he had not lost one yet.
On the far side of the barn the henhouse door began to slapflap noisily. Homer walked there and locked it tight, shivering. The wind bore an November cold from high off the prairie that stretched north forever to Canada, and it gnawed through his denim and flannel. He hurried back to the house as the first big drops began to hit the ground.
Christ! Don’t hail!
Sarah was in the kitchen: a fine-boned and autumn-ing woman, handsome still and trim in the way that horsewomen manage to keep themselves, though she had not seriously ridden in years.
“Is it a bad one, Homer?” She stood at the stove, her robe bright and fetching.
“Looks to be. You don’t need to be up, honey.”
She shrugged. “I felt the bed empty. I thought you’d want something in your stomach.”
“Cocoa?”
“Mm hmm. Would you like some toast?”
“No, Sarah. Just something warm then back to bed. You watch this storm make extra work for us.” He sat down at the kitchen table.
“It doesn’t seem like these hills can hold more water.”
Homer snorted. “Damned river can’t get any higher and keep to its banks. Funny how a land can be so bone dry one season, and wring water like a sponge the next. Could have used this rain on our short grass in July.”
She placed a cup of cocoa before him. “We could have used a lot of things, dear.”
He cocked a brow and grinned.
“The rye grass is already over your ankles,” she told him, “and that triticale is coming on well. And I’ll wager you haven’t spoken a word of thanks.”
“Just cautious, woman. Thanks ain’t due ‘til the butter’s in the bucket.”
The rain began to fall with a sudden slashing fury, and the house seemed to draw itself up beneath the lash. Sarah drew her robe tighter and sipped her cocoa, and Homer took her hand in his. Pensively, they listened to the storm. It used to be that the children would scurry to the kitchen, and they would all sit around at times like these, Jarrell close to his momma and Joelyn like an elf princess in her daddy’s big lap.
“She’ll be here with the boys soon.” Sarah mused.
Homer raised his brows, his mind somewhere out in the storm. “What’s that?”
“Joelyn will be home any day now. You’ll need to trim the hooves on that brown mare.”
“Maybe. I’ll have a look at her. She’s a good little mare. Michael rides hell out of her, though.”
“I’m certain those hooves are cracking, Homer. Don’t you dally on that.”
“I’ll look, Momma. Don’t fret. That mare’s been running loose for two weeks. She might have roughed them out herself, you know, slicker than any damned farrier.”
Sarah’s mouth turned down at the corners. “And if she hasn’t, and you dawdle, you’ll decide at the last minute that Michael can ride the big painted horse he’s been after you about.”
“Woman, I never dawdle. And I can’t have those rascals making extra work—”
“Homer! I don’t want that child on that big paint horse! And neither does Joelyn.” She put down her cup firmly and set her bright blue eyes onto Homer’s, whose glance slinked away out the rain streaked window.
“Now, do you think I want to see my grand boys hurt?”
“Of course not. But you treat them older than they are. Michael’s only eleven years old and—”
“And that brown mare isn’t horse enough for him anymore,” Homer interrupted. “The boy is a born horseman, just like his uncle was. It seems a natural graduation to give him a bigger horse and leave the mare for Jeffrey.”
“But that paint horse, Homer!”
“All right, Sarah.” He raised his hands in placation. “Suppose I trade him off for something not quite so snorty?”
The lines around Sarah’s mouth softened. “Can you make a trade soon?”
“Sure. I’ll give Red a call and see what he has. Landry, too. That paint’s a good horse. Be damned if I’ll trade down.”
“You’ll still need to trim up that mare for Jeffrey.”
“Sure enough, Momma. Don’t fret. Those boys ain’t china.”
“Stop telling me not to fret. You and the damned fool things you always do with those boys! I swear, Homer Steadham, that last visit about exhausted all my patience. You had those babies in the river bottom all through the night, and I never saw two more bedraggled and weary children. Jeffrey caught a cold!”
Homer grinned at her. “You think that runny nose bothered him any? Hell, the boy shot his first coon out of a tree. He was so proud he swelled up like a toad. Reminded me the way Jarrell was when—” But Homer could not finish. As the memory returned, something lodged in his throat, spawned by the image of a tow-headed boy so long ago, dragging his coon home by the tail, a grin on his face as big as all of Texas.
Sarah watched him, saw his face turn down and his eyes fade. Framed against the rain streaked window and the passing storm, he seemed as sad as a man could ever be.
“I was such a fool, Sarah. Such a damned fool not to see a mountain that was about to fall on me.”
Sarah could not reply. Her grief was greater, but more resolved. Homer shook himself like a tired old dog and smiled only around the mouth.
“Must be the weather, eh? Let’s go back to bed, gal. Everything’s tied down,”
Sarah nodded silently and took the cups to rinse. The same memories were hers... young Jarrell marching into the kitchen, the coon dripping blood and little Joelyn shrieking with delight as Homer came up behind, muddy and laughing and bragging about the shot his boy had made, and it had all been very fine... But where Sarah’s memories were to cherish, Homer’s always seemed to stir the ashes of self recrimination.
Cups on the drain board, Sarah dried her hands and sighed deeply as she remembered a long time back, the big war almost over and the soldiers coming home. All of them were heroes in the local folks’ eyes: Landry and Red and Tom Baxter. And of course Homer, with his wounds and his medals, was the biggest hero of all. For twenty years, at the clubs and at the picnics, the stories were told and retold and…what else is a boy to do, Sarah wondered, but follow in the footsteps of his daddy? In her mind, it was as simple and as tragic as that. But to Homer, the matter ran deeper.
“Ready, Sarah?”
She nodded and let the memories be, stepping before him from the kitchen, and he turned out the light. The storm had weakened to a steadily drumming rain. As they climbed the steps to their room, each of them glanced at the picture of Jarrell, handsome in uniform. In a very short while, they were both fast asleep.
Morning came brightly, the leaves swollen and hung heavily, the grasses laid over like a fat man after dinner. Homer’s breath steamed as he stepped across the yard, feeling the wetness through his boots. In the barn, he filled a small bucket halfway with crimped oats. One side of the barn opened on a fenced pasture, and half a dozen horses grazed there. Out among them was a tall red gelding, muscles rippling as it craned its neck to crop grass.
“Hey, Stretch! C’mon, big boy!”
The rattled bucket made all the horses perk their ears. But the red gelding was the first to wheel about to gallop toward the barn. Mane flying, it skidded to a stop on the wet ground and quick as a snake its nose was in the bucket. Homer led the beast inside and shut out the others that milled about for feed. The big snorty paint horse nipped and kicked his dominance, once Stretch was removed.
In a stall, feed splashed in the trough, Stretch whuffled and slobbered oats while the man walked about, stroking the horse gently. Homer had turned fifty when the horse was foaled and it was now a ten year old. One to go the distance with, Homer always thought, and he’d been downright sentimental about the beast: never used spurs or a running W, never struck it, never worked a cutting bit in its mouth.
Homer inspected hooves and ankles, felt for muscle knots, picked off the last of the season’s ticks. Then he bridled the horse, and saddled it with his old double-cinched roping rig. Soon, he led Stretch from the barn toward the house while the hounds danced about, eager for a run.
The barn stood two hundred feet from the limestone house, which gleamed pearly white in that early morning light. The house was simply a big oblong box, sixty feet by thirty feet, two storied and tin roofed. Its long front faced southwest, overlooking the river, and there was a narrow, two storied, post and rail porch built along the front.
Perhaps another two hundred feet from the house, the valley crested ruggedly—steep cliffs along some stretches, more gradually sloped along others. Indeed, for a quarter mile along the broad yard before the house, the valley was a gentler though still formidable slope.
As Homer walked the horse nearer the house, Sarah poked her head from the back porch.
“Good breakfast, Momma.” he called, swinging into the saddle.
“You be careful”
He waved. “I’ll be hungry.” And urged with a light heel, the horse galloped smartly away, Homer straight backed and fluid with the motion while the hounds paced alongside. He rode northwest, upriver, along the lane that linked them to the ranch-to-market road. Half a mile on, the lane traversed to the valley floor and ran across the pasture to a concrete bridge that spanned the river. This was the upriver corner of Steadham land, where a cypress-bordered creek spilled down to the river.
Homer reined to a stop at the crest, rising in his stirrups to peer into the valley. The shimmering yellow elms and burnished oaks seemed to flame. Scrub grass flashed purple and sumac shone bright red. But there were no cattle to be seen. The norther would have driven them southeast along the river, through the bottomland pastures of good bluestem that Homer seeded and fertilized. Some of the pasture was cleared, and some was partially wooded. A mile and a half downriver began his broad bands of winter graze: oats and ryegrass and triticale, grasses not intended for graze until November had passed.
Homer shook his head sorrowfully. He suspected that the winds might have driven the cattle through his fences, and at that very moment they were slobbering all over that lush winter graze.
He heeled, and the horse moved down the lane to the pasture in the valley. Homer heard the creek tumbling to his right, and later—as he neared a dense wood line—he heard the heavier rush of the river, unseen through the trees. His bottom land was widest here, and the wood line bordering the river was thickest, open only to the lane that led to the bridge. Homer rode across the lane, upriver, to the very corner of his land where the creek joined the river. It was a junction of tall trees, but not enough brush to hide a cow. He peered a moment into the shadows, and the hounds lapped creek water.
A month’s succession of gulf storms had saturated the thin hill country soil. Then a sudden turnabout of winds had brought cold rains from the north. It was unusual weather that made for floods at an unusual season. The river that Homer glimpsed through the trees was dark and debris filled.
Homer spoke to his beasts and the work began, a rugged zigzag of limb-ducking, knee-banging effort through the thick woods along the river, the hounds nosing into every thicket. Stretch was tall for a brush horse but keen-eyed, and not likely to pass a contrary cow laid out hiding. They scouted the woods a quarter mile downriver, until the tree line greatly narrowed, but flushed no cattle. It mattered little. Homer had expected to find none. But into the broader pasture downriver, dotted with great old oaks, he began to run up some cows. Stretch quick-stepped as each cow broke and ran, the horse eager to work, bobbing and blowing and Homer talked gently to settle the animal down. The hounds worked ahead on the wings, to funnel the cattle into a rough herd, and the count piled up: eighteen, twenty, twenty-three, rear ends bouncing, hooves tossing mud, one of the suckling steers sometimes charging the hounds.
Soon they were scouring the pasture that lay below the house. Glancing up, he saw Sarah waving from the crest and he swept his hat in a great arc. But then a great brute of a cow, half Brahma, broke from the herd to lumber upriver and Stretch darted sidewise to cut it off. Homer loose-reined to let the horse do the work, and they were into some trees as the cow rejoined the herd. When Homer glanced back at the ridge, Sarah was gone.
Soon they flushed the first bull, a thick-necked and short-legged Hereford, four years old and easily fifteen hundred pounds. He was a muley, a polled, or hornless, bull. The beast did not look quick but it could stay with old Nestor, Homer’s huge Santa Gertrudis. Once, they tore down a hundred yards of new fence; as Homer looked on helplessly while the monsters bashed heads and circled and snapped cedar posts like straw.
But the Santa Gertrudis was nowhere in sight. The count had grown to forty-four. Discounting late calves—of which Homer had few, dropped by newly purchased cows he’d not had time to synchronize with hormone shots—not counting those calves, the herd should have totaled ninety-three with fifty-two heifers serviced by the bulls. Homer culled the older calves, kept the good young heifers and either sold the yearling steers or fattened them on separate pasture. The older steers penned by the barn were the final step, finished for slaughter.
Homer reined the gelding and let it crop. He stood in the stirrups to stretch, dug a tin of snuff from a pocket and tucked a pinch behind his lip. The hounds lay in the sun, lolly-tongued and panting, their ribs like the teeth of a comb. Stretch tore at the grass noisily. The air was so crisp it nipped the hairs in Homer’s nose, and he could smell the river.
They moved on. With the dogs on his flanks, he could scoop a swathe forty or fifty yards across. The herd bunched ahead and showed hooves, but the man did not push them hard. His count was sixty-six when they neared the end of the bluestem pasture and the muddied, trampled ground where the fence was pushed over.
Homer groaned and cursed uselessly. There would be a mix-up with his culled yearling steers, and much work to sort them out.
He turned the herd down the fence line, towards the river to let them run out and mill. Then he stepped the horse across the damaged fenced into the ankle-deep rye grass. It shined beautifully verdant in the sun, a joy to his eyes at any other time.
Dismounting, he let the horse graze and tried to guess what had passed. Ten sections of wire were loose and floppy, over a hundred feet. In the middle two, steel posts were bent and laid over flat. The big bull must have jumped and brought his weight down on the wire, to collapse three or four sections. Then he must have thrashed and kicked his way across. Whatever cows were with him, storm spooked, would have followed through to worsen the damage.
Homer put on gloves and took a fencing tool and some baling wire from a saddle pouch he’d rigged. The flattened tee posts were bent ninety degrees right above the spade, useless to him. He unsnapped the clips that held the barbed wire to the fence posts, and then loose—strung the wire across the thirty-foot gap.
“Goddamnit! Flaps like an old witch’s tit!” The horse cocked one ear to glance towards the tirade, then turned back to the rye grass.
The storm had downed limbs from many of the oak trees. Homer wanted at least the appearance of a fence, to keep the sixty-six head pastured on the bluestem. So scrounging some stout limbs he built three ragged tripods, a man’s height, one over each flattened post. When he restrung the wire to the tripods. The fence held sturdily enough to discourage the average ornery cow. It would have to do.
The red gelding stood still as a statue as Homer approached to step into the saddle. Leather creaked, and the hounds jumped to their feet. Then they were off, Homer’s mood considerably dampened, and shortly there were more cattle to count. Two weeks before, he had loosed thirty young steers into the rye grass pasture—some from his herd and some purchased cheaply. Now they were mixed with his regular herd, and Homer had to make two separate counts: sixty-seven and two, seventy and five, seventy-three and eight. He did not attempt to herd these cattle, keeping intent on the main trail of crushed grass. In a quarter mile they were through the rye and into the oats, paler green and not as lushly thick.
There stood the great bull, other cattle milled around, their noses up briefly before dropping to feast. Old Nestor sniffed the air.
Homer barked: “You no good sonuvabitch!” But the bull ignored him, eying the hounds with a mean glint instead. The dogs whined and kept their distance, waiting to see what the man would do. Homer rode closer. There were some barbed wire cuts on the bull’s chest and flanks, but none needed stitches. He leaned way over in the saddle to peer at the beast’s belly. There was some torn hide, but it was nothing salve would not heal. He’d have to pen the bull, then work him into a holding chute.
Stretch began to snort. Horses are the biggest things around, until one meets a large bull. It galls some horses and Stretch was one of those. The horse took Nestor as a personal affront, and was never as eager as when the time came to work the bull to a pen or pasture. It was a contest of wills, with Homer along for the ride. That morning though, when Stretch began to bit-chomp and blow, Homer spoke a sharp word and his mount settled down.
Homer counted: seventy-five and eleven, seventy-seven and fifteen. The young steers milled with the herd confused his tally. He lost it and started again. Eighty-six and twenty-five were the numbers he reached. The others would not be far.
“Giddup!”
The horse pranced and flung his tail and carried the man across the last of the oats pasture. A field of new triticale marked the end of Homer’s bottomlands, where he kept his cattle through most of the winter. Homer Steadham owned three sections of land, and it bordered the river for three miles. It would be spring before he loosed his stock into the hills—late spring, after most the calves had dropped. And his pastures would go to summer grasses.
Homer rode the horse down the line between fields, toward the river. The wood line broadened along there, though it was not dense, and there was a watering trail frequented by his cows. Quickly, they were in among the cottonwood and pecan and the carpet of leaves softened the horse’s steps. The trail led to the river bank and Homer reined to watch the dark whirl of the water, musing in his way the contrast between the sweet air and wondrous sky that shone above this torrent of barely contained fury. Then he heeled the horse to a walk.
A calf broke from cover to quick step before him. One of the hounds had been off in the woods, and at that moment ran up beside the calf. The creature bawled and whirled in fright, and poised an instant on the edge of the bank. The soft earth gave and the calf tumbled into the current and was swept away.
In a wink, Homer’s rope was shaken to a loop as Stretch raced downriver. In a flurry of hooves and mud the horse bounded ahead of the calf, and Homer reined to halt on the slick embankment as the calf swept toward him.
He was clear of limbs, and he made a sweet toss, like a boxer’s jab, and the loop caught the calf’s head. His attention was on the calf as he reined Stretch backward. The fallen tree that boiled downriver went unnoticed until the rope caught up in its roots. Then the horse was yanked sidewise into the current and Homer was snatched by a tangle of rope and tack, and branches seemed to coil around and he plunged over and over in the frothy water.
As the shock of cold filled him, he was some seconds in a panic. Part of him noticed the horse scramble up the bank, snapped rope trailing, and the hounds that ran frantically along. He tried to hold onto the tree, caught it tightly but the current slammed him into a boulder and he felt the skin split over his ribs. The breath left him. Homer gasped and swallowed water, choked it out and sucked for air. He was bounced off another rock, and another. His head was struck a wracking blow and he nearly blacked out.
Ahead, the river narrowed. There was an outcrop of boulders and Homer somehow sensed his last chance for a handhold. Beyond, the river was a deep and swift channel for a mile.
He was swept toward the boulders too fast, grabbed at the rocks but they were slick and his hands slipped. Then his feet struck a ledge and in one desperate lunge he caught onto the last rock. Homer hung on frantically. He could hardly feel the stone, fingers too numb to grip, but he bent his will to it and ever so slowly inched his way onto the boulders. He froze, muscles stiff, fearful any movement would sweep him away. Yet he found the strength to kick and pull until, finally, he rolled from the current altogether.
Homer gasped as he lay on the cold stone. A deep and rolling fog began to form in his mind. His heart pounded with great booms in his ears, and he rolled onto his back as he passed out. He dreamed that he opened his eyes and the fog was everywhere. There was no sun and no sky.
He sensed something stirring in the fog. In Homer’s dream, he strained to see, and a shape began to emerge to walk toward him.
It was Jarrell. He looked so damned fine in his uniform. Homer dreamed that he allowed consciousness to slip away. It was all right. His boy was coning to save him. It was the sweetest calm the rough-edged cowman had ever known.
CHAPTER THREE
As Homer was riding down the ridgeline that morning, Favor Rousseau was hastily packing to flee.
At the crack of dawn he had driven Laurel to the safety of Teacher Mary’s, some five miles away, where he found the big cheerful woman in slippers and robe. Refusing coffee, and with an offhand lie of explanation, Favor had hurried back to the house.
They lived in the village, that sprawl of homes—some rich, some poor—that comprised the piney woods community of Elysian Fields: two stores and a post office, four gas pumps, a wood yard, a church and a bank. The sun had reappeared that morning to light a vivid Texas fall, one to compare to the autumns in the North but for the ever-present verdure of the towering pines. It was as though some frenetic artist had splashed rainbow colors all over a dark green canvas.
But Favor took no time to notice. He kept glancing all about for a big black pickup.
His own truck was nearly loaded: clothes, food, toys, tools and all his important paperwork. The magnum lay handy, just beneath the seat. He turned his head as a door slammed on the white frame cottage next door, where his neighbor stepped onto his porch. Pop Woodley was also his landlord. Favor treaded the wet grass toward him.
“You ain’t clearin’ out, are you boy?” Pop was a spry little man, spindly-armed, with bright hard eyes still quick to pick a deer out of deep woods shadows.
“Not permanently, Pop. But we’ll be gone a couple months.” Favor dug into a shirt pocket. “Here’s a check for the next two months rent. Pays me up till the first of February. You’ll be hearing from me before that.”
The old man took the check without a glance and slipped it in his coat. “Where you be bound, Favor?”
“Ohh, a friend has offered me a job down on the coast. Might be a good way to pass the winter... Say, Pop, I’m leaving all the furniture here. And I’ve turned off the water and the gas. I’m hoping you’ll keep an eye on our belongings.”
“Sure will, son. Don’t worry ‘bout nothin’.”
“Do you still have that saddle gun, Pop? The one you had for sale?”
“Yep. Didn’t offer it to no one but you.”
“I want to buy it.”
“Right now?”
“Yes, sir. In ten minutes, I hope to be gone.” Favor glanced around the neighborhood, trying not to seem nervous, while the old man shuffled back inside. Through the houses and trees Favor could see the farm road that passed through the village, a hundred yards away. It was the only way that strangers could come. And he knew that most folks could tell them exactly where Favor lived. All the brothers had to do was ask at one of the stores.
The old man came back to the porch with the rifle, a .30-.30 lever action Winchester, a couple of decades old. “It shoots danged straight, son. I’m throwing’ in this box of shells.” And he palmed the greenbacks that Favor offer, again without a glance.
They shook hands.
“I’ll write you a letter in a few weeks,” Favor told him.
“Take care of that sweet Laurel. Tell her ol’ Pop’s going to miss her... and I know a certain married gal going be missing you.”
Favor blushed and looked quickly at the ground. “What’s a man supposed to do on a lonely night?”
Pop chuckled wisely and his bony shoulders heaved. “That husband of hers ought to get out of his oil fields once in a while... You’re doing it right, son, leaving like this. Sooner or later, he’s bound to figure you out.”
Favor started to speak, and his mouth hung open, but no words came.
“Hard to keep a secret in a small town, boy. And by the way, I wouldn’t flash no more cash around this village, if I was you.”
He looked deeply into the old man’s eyes, but they gave away nothing. Favor had heard plenty talk about old Pop in his bootlegging days. He nodded with a wry smile. “You’ve been a good friend.”
“Be seeing you, son. Take good care of Laurel, you hear.”
Favor walked through the cottage one last time, locking windows, tightening faucets, touching objects with histories that only he knew. How many times had he made love with Molly on that couch, or on the throw rug by the fireplace? How often did her laughter tumble through these rooms? Perhaps he needed to leave.
Outside, Favor used the open Blazer door to hide the rifle as he loaded it. He propped it, barrel down, beside the console. As he was glancing about, silently saying goodbye, he spied the shiny black pickup as it cruised the long curve through the village, like a marauding beast; and he heard its big motor suddenly race, and it’s tires squeal, and he knew that he’d been spotted.
This time though, he felt no tight-throated panic. They were on his turf now.