Murdering Sam was the only one left.

Rachel came in the shack almost right away after me. I was a little surprised, but I guess the Family was busy enough with the others. Her silent presence comforted me, even if she kept her distance. That was more normal for her; all this hugging and fear was for Sawyer’s benefit, I knew. She was wise, this one, and feared the Family no more than you fear a flood or a tornado. If it was your time, you went, and there was nothing to be done. Being afraid made no sense.

There was more shooting, more horses being killed, the shack wall took another hard, drumming hit. It sounded like when a wave hits the side of a ship and you’re down below.

I lay on my cot, eyes open, waiting it all out, like I always did. There was quiet for a time, maybe a breath. The guns had stopped long minutes ago. The eating sounds began.

I heard boots on the porch; one, two quick, hard, steps, and then the door was pulled open, and Sam just flung himself in, no rifle, no pistol, no knife, just himself barehanded and covered in horse’s blood, eyebrows to boots.

Sam coughed and shook and watched the door, the whites of his wide-open eyes bright as a jackrabbit’s tail in the red that covered him. Through the door, there was nothing but sky and just the very tops of the tall grass at the bottom of the hill, the tips of the blades rippling like water, and seeming to glow a bit, as I had said before. Catching light that came from nowhere.

He kept watching the grass, even after Rachel shut the door.

By daylight, Murdering Sam was nearer to his old self. To his credit, he didn’t hold it against us, seeing him scared like he was. Many men I’ve known would have taken it as an insult, our seeing them scared.
He stood in the shack, gunless and not liking that, but he’d cleaned himself up as he could, and he was standing straight. “They come out in the daytime?” he asked.

“Some.” I said. “Not usually, after a feed like that, though.”

He looked to me. He might have killed me just then, if he had a simple way to do it, but he didn’t look up to throttling, and besides, he needed all of his strength for what he was to do next. Sam went outside.
Many men wouldn’t have. Gone outside, I mean. Curly didn’t want to, after that first night, when the Family took our horses and that Pony Express rider. But Sam went. He was still shook, you could see that. What man wouldn’t be? He walked slow, but his steps were steady, and his boots sounded out on the wood of the porch. He wasn’t sneaking out; he was walking, scared, shook and all.

The dooryard wasn’t bad, but the sides of the shack were painted red. The left, where Gibs had gone, was less so, and Gib’s Winchester was still there, pressed down into the fouled mud by one big three-toed foot. Sam lifted it up, popped the lever and looked to see if it was still loaded. The gun would have to be cleaned, but it was a gun, and Sam wanted all the guns he could carry.

Rachel was in the back, working the pump. Sam had used all our inside water cleaning himself up. She was surrounded by something out of the war, all blood and bodies and gore.

I hadn’t seen any of the big battles, but what I saw at Cooper’s Mill or Bethesda was enough for me to know I didn’t want to make a life at fighting, the way some folks seemed to. The Family didn’t have cannon, or scatter guns, or bayonets, but they could work a number on a horse, or a man. One horse was still here, mostly in bits, all the guts – what we’d call the ‘sweet-meats’ on a chicken – were gone, and the throat had been pulled out, but they left the rest of it for me, as they will. The blood from the torn neck had hit the side of the shack, and we’d heard it. There were more flies than there ever could be, out here in the middle of nothing. Where did all those flies go, when the Family wasn’t killing?

The other two horses had been dragged off. The grass was pressed flat where they had been pulled, maybe still kicking. Sam walked past Rachel to look at the trail the Family had left. The blades still standing on either side of the crushed ones were red with blood, black with flies. Going in there, with the tips of the grass closing overhead, would be like going into a mine, but a man could do it: he could follow the trail of flat grass, back to where they lived, or at least where they ate. I’d seen some Indians do it. Sam didn’t look like he wanted to do that.
He spent some time picking through the backyard, coming up with a knife, a pistol, a coil of rope, a good bridle. The saddles and all had been off the horses and up on the post. They’d been fouled by the blood, but a man leaving on foot couldn’t carry all that. Sam meant to leave on foot, I knew.

It wasn’t two hours before Sam was ready. He cleaned his rifle and revolvers, filled his water bottles, he even helped the girl and me cut up the horse and hang some of it out. I had salt from the wagon the girl had come on, so we salted some of it down. No one talked much. Sam was near as quiet as Rachel, speaking only when he wanted to know something or wanted me to know something about the work we were busy with.

About an hour before noon, he went around back for something, and the horse carcass was gone. We had just been in the front, cleaning some of the blood off of the bedrolls and other gear that had been left out back in the night. We hadn’t left it alone for very long, and Sam looked pale, knowing that the Family had come up and pulled that horse away, with no noise that we could hear. I was used to that by now. He didn’t say anything about it, or anything else, until he was ready to go. Then he spoke. That was about half-past noon.

Sam stood in the door that the grass made where the dooryard met the road. He stood and looked back at us, rope and bridle over his shoulder, rifle in his hand. He wore two guns now, instead of the one that he had rode in with. He wore one belt reverse because both belts were right-handed draws.

Sam looked at Rachel and me for a while, us up on the porch, me sitting in my chair, her standing and looking out at him, and him staring right back. When he had his words chose, he spoke.
“I’ve done some things,” he started, “that a man can’t be proud of. Some of them might have needed doing, others, I might have just done for anger, or to get something back.” He raised the rifle to me, but just to point. “But what you are doing out here, living with those things…” he was close to tears, I could see that. “You bring people here, with your shack.” He looked around, afraid to say what he was thinking, but maybe then he remembered that Mickey Sawyer wasn‘t here to laugh at him anymore. “That Family keeps you alive so more people will come,” he said, teeth held together tight, “and you know it. People come, and you know they will come, and then you take their things and eat their horses.”

I watched him and didn’t say a word. I thought how he looked younger, when he was angry. You could see through all the killing he’d done and the robbing and the war, and see he was still just a boy.

“They chose me.” I hadn’t meant for it to show, but I could hear the pride in my voice. “I didn’t choose them.”

Sam let the rifle come down, and he spit on the ground. He reminded me of a deserter I had seen executed once. That man had tried to run off to save his farm from something or other, I never learned what. When they brought him back, he was scared, but not repentant. He stood up and let them shoot him.

Sam had that look when he walked off. Scared of dying, but not of death.

They never let someone go. It’s maybe three miles, on foot, from where the grass first starts to come up to the plain where the river runs. That’s a long walk, in that narrow track, with the grass growing up tall on both sides, and only your thoughts for company.

They hit him less than a mile out. I climbed to the roof and watched it. I don’t know why. Maybe I wanted him to make it; maybe I wanted to see him to die for what he had said to me. I couldn’t see Sam, most of the time, the road is too narrow and the grass too high to see the road itself, but you can see where the road is, like a crease running up the prairie. In any case, I watched the grass on either side of the road, knowing that was how they would come.

There was a breeze, so the grass was lively, but I could still see the Family, all four of them, out there like fish in dark water, told not by the sight of them, but the waves that they make.

When all the four ripples came together, I knew that was it for Sam.
All those guns, and he never got a shot off.

I let the afternoon pass, up on the roof, cross-legged like an Indian. Something was eating at me. The Family wanted only one living thing on this hill. It wasn’t about eating, or food, for the Family. It was about the way these creatures wanted things. They had left the dog for a piece, but he wasn’t the first dog. They always took the others, and they would have taken that one, before too long. They would certainly come for the girl.

I let Rachel do what she chose, but I knew she wouldn’t be staying. They wouldn’t have more than me.

I saw it as soon as I came down.

She’d changed the whole place around, making it the way she wanted. There wasn’t much to work with, but what there was, she’d moved. A bunch of my things were on the porch; what clothes I had, my boots, which I hardly ever wore.

She was sitting up on a barrel, her feet just above the floor of the shack. She was sewing on some cotton fabric she had over her lap. I could see it was some of her mother’s dresses. She was making curtains.

I gave a sigh and sat on the cot.

“Rachel,” I started, thinking I needed to tell her about it. I don’t why, I never told any of the others. “There’s a thing you should know.” She looked at me, mute, with no tell to her face. Then I knew how to say what I needed to say. “When I first come here, back just after the War, there were three of us. A Pony Express rider, and Curly, who was the groom for the ponies we were to keep here. I was the telegraph operator. I forget the rider’s name. Anyway, it wasn’t two days when an Indian come up and told us the story, how the Family wouldn’t have us here. He said the Family would let only one person stay, a man who had done a special thing. They would keep that man, they would bring him food, and he would grow wise in his years, as he lived here, naked under the sun and sky. The Family would even protect him, and kill any who came to harm the Medicine Man of the hill, but there could be only one man, and the Family chose him.

“We all laughed, of course, even if it scared us a little. That grass is tall, it could hide lots of things, but we didn’t think there was anything like he was talking about out there. The Indian didn’t care what we thought, of course. He went out into the grass to meet them, thinking that he had done that thing the Family wants from a man.

“He never came out of the grass, but that night, the Family did. They took all the ponies, and rider ran off along the track. We never heard from him again, but I don’t think he got very far.

“The next day, Curly wanted to run. See, the Indian had told us what the Family wants, Rachel, and what it wants is a man to have killed another man, and even though Curly and I had been in the army, and the War, we had never done such a thing. We’d both been clerks.
“Now, just killing a man is no proof against them. They’ve killed many killers. It’s how it’s done, and the mind of the man who did it. The man must be like them; he must kill without fear or remorse. He must do it coldly and with purpose, just as God himself does. Not many men can do this, Rachel, and before I killed Curly, I wouldn’t have suspected it of myself. "

That wasn’t what I meant to say. I sat quiet for a minute, looking at my hands on my knees. They were an old man’s hands, the skin was growing thin, and the tendons and veins rose up high over the bones.
“I killed him as quiet and cold as winter.” I didn’t know why I was still talking. I may have been cold in my killing, but Curly hadn’t been cold in dying. Killing him had been a chore I’d rather forget. “Then I threw all the guns into the grass, for they Family won’t have guns here. And everyone who has come since, I watched them die. I watch them get killed, as uncaring and far away as Jesus must have been when he was watching the War.” There was something going inside of me, some muscle that had been clenched was opening, or some nerve that had been dead was coming back to life. In a minute I was crying, Rachel watching, her sewing on her lap.

“I know all this,” Rachel said. Her voice startled me. I had forgotten how much Arkansas there would be in her words. I didn’t like how it sounded. “I dreamed it, the first night, in the wagon. That’s why I killed Mr. Sawyer up on the roof last night.” I listened to her, and that near forgotten muscle began to clench again. “I pushed him off the roof. The youngest one got him.” Her eyes were on me, but they were seeing that moment, seeing the littlest one –I called him Squab, having given all of them names—coming out of the grass, low and beautiful, his beak a sort of yellow ivory, the head striking out on that long neck like a feathered snake.

“They told me I can stay,” she said. “They said all I need to do is get rid of the other.” She pulled the sewing off of her lap, and I saw she had one of Sawyer’s pistols underneath. The silver Walker Colt looked huge in her small fists, but she held it steady.

I realized then that I had told her the wrong thing: I had told her how to keep living, but not how terrible living could be, how each death lingered, no matter how many there were, and how much we tried to pay them no mind.

In those first troublesome days, when I was not used to the idea of living and dying here, I had prayed for salvation. But after I had been living on the hill for years, a white man surrounded by Indian magic, sheltered by things made by their gods, not ours, I gave it up on prayer. I threw Curly’s Bible away into the grass with the guns. I would have thought that by now, I would have lost all faith in the puritan God of my own people.

But I had not. When she started shooting, my words and thoughts were to the God I had prayed to as a boy.

I thought he might know what this felt like.

THE END