Haints Stay (21 page)

The woman caring for Brooke's wife introduced herself as Wendell's
sister. They'd made camp after several hours of slowly working their way back in the
direction from which Brooke had first started out. They were headed back to the
corpses of the men who had captured him, the stagecoach that had once been his
transport.

Marston pulled a crate of rocks from the back of one wagon and arranged
them into a circle for the fire pit. He dug a shallow hole, spitting and cursing as
he did. He was thin and not well suited to the work.

“My name is Irene,” said Wendell's sister. She offered Brooke a sip of
water from a thin aluminum saucer.

Brooke accepted, but took only enough to show he appreciated the
offering.

“John,” said Brooke.

“Right,” said Irene. “How long have you and your wife been on foot ?”

Brooke shrugged. “The only honest answer is that I lost count.”

“Where are you headed ?”

“My wife and I,” said Brooke, “we lost a child not too long ago.”

“I know,” said Irene. “She's said as much.”

“She has been wandering ever since, and I have been following her. At
first, I tried to stop her, but she would not be stopped.”

Irene nodded.

“Dorothy lost hers,” she said. She gestured to the woman
who spoke at a slant. “Some six years ago, maybe ? It was born dead.”

Brooke nodded.

“She is lucky to have survived,” said Brooke. “I've seen a stillborn do
much more damage.”

“We are lucky,” said Irene. “I'm not sure what she is.”

“We won't be any trouble to you all,” said Brooke.

“I know,” said Irene.

“We appreciate your help. We'll uncouple ourselves from you at the first
town we come to, if you like. I think my wife needs a bed and a good meal. Maybe
we'll find a small place to call our own. We had a ranch once, but we cannot go back
there.”

Irene nodded.

“Haints stay where and as they please,” she said.

Because of the snow, the creek was enormous now and moving quickly. There
was less food to be found, but there was still food to be found. When they slept,
they tied the horses together and blocked the wagon's wheels. Many of them chose to
sleep outside, beneath the stars. Wendell and his sister took to one of the wagons.
Brooke slept in the third wagon, beside the woman he met in the snow. She spoke
throughout the night, every so often. Some bit of nonsense or another. She took no
notice of him. He listened to her for some time before he began to respond.

“I was told to do as I did,” she said.

“By the earth,” he said.

“I could feel I'd done wrong as soon as I did it.”

“I know that feeling,” said Brooke. “I have felt it often.”

“It would not stop screaming,” she said.

“It goes away,” said Brooke.

“Until I put it down, it would not stop.”

“But then it stopped,” said Brooke.

She began to cry then.

“Then it stopped,” she said.

The bodies were water-logged and delicate. Bird lifted the arm of a
young man and the skin shifted, the body cracked as if Bird could tear loose the
limb without much more than a tug. He dropped the arm and retreated to Mary where
she stood on the porch, her hands over her eyes, still speaking out in protest.

“You must stop,” she said.

“We cannot move them,” he said.

“You should not,” she said.

“It would be impossible,” said Bird. “They are too full of water and too
far gone. We cannot move them.”

“We have to leave,” said Mary.

Finally, Bird agreed.

Mary spent the evening preparing food for the journey : baking loaves of
bread and gathering butter, salt, and cured meat into manageable sacks to be carried
on their backs. Bird checked the houses again and found more bullets, another
pistol, rotten meal, and some more jerky. The houses groaned as he moved through
them. They were each tilted on their foundation, sagging and heavy with water. The
roofs of several had already collapsed. He moved through them, navigating the
rubble. They were lit cleanly by the blue sky above. He found two more bodies. Two
children huddled in a basement. He covered them with blankets from a nearby dresser.
He did not mention them to Mary.

They set out for the woods. Mary walked in front and Bird took up the
rear. He carried several sacks on his shoulder, but
dropped them
again and again, claiming to have heard some sound or another. Birds launched from
bushes and startled him into withdrawing his pistol. And every time, in order to do
so, he had to drop the sacks.

“You'll mush the bread,” said Mary. “You mustn't drop them.”

“Carry a pistol then,” said Bird.

She took one, but did not like it and kept it unloaded.

“It is no good that way,” said Bird.

“I will not shoot off my foot,” said Mary, “carrying a loaded pistol in
my belt and with several sacks in each arm. I'll do things my way.”

They had to stop often. The sacks were too much for them. They kept the
sun behind them. Mary insisted there were several towns founded at the far edge of
the forest, directly opposite the desert towns. She had never traveled from one to
the other, but John had, and had told her as much. At the far end of the woods would
be either mountains or a town where they could eat proper food and find some safety.
They walked for hours and hours, until the sun began to set. Mary did not like it
one bit. Each step was painful and unpleasant and the bags kept slipping and
swinging and making her gait unsteady. Bird was silent. He seemed neither
comfortable nor struggling. She made the decision not to complain, though there was
plenty to complain about.

“We've probably walked fifteen miles,” said Mary. “Maybe even
twenty.”

“I don't think so,” said Bird.

“How many do you think ?”

“Five,” he said. “Or six. Hardly any. These bags are slowing everything
down, and you keep stopping. So we're crawling.”

On the far side of the woods, she would consider the
possibility of leaving his side. She had thought about it long and hard and she
did not want to marry him. She wanted to marry someone nicer and smarter. Bird was a
violent nuisance. There was nothing to him that made her want to stay.

Bird insisted that they cover themselves when they slept. What the
blankets could not reach, a sack would cover. The more they seemed to be a pile, the
better. He slept with a bag of bread on his face. Mary found it funny and refused to
do so. The treetops seemed miles above them. They tilted and groaned in the wind.
She wanted to consider them as she prepared herself for sleep.

“If you are spotted,” said Bird, “we will have trouble.”

“I have a pistol,” she said.

“You will get us both tortured, eaten, or killed,” said Bird.

“That is silly,” she said.

She knew it wasn't silly. She was carrying twice the sacks he was able to
because the woods had shown him precisely what there was to be afraid of. Still, she
had her pistol, and was intelligent and strong, and she would not be told over and
over again by him what to do and how to feel. They were not a family and they were
not in love. The moon was out, and it was full.

The next day went much as the previous. They walked and stopped and
walked and stopped. They found a small stream and drank from it. They filled their
canteens and a cup to carry each. Mary spotted a bird's nest with a mother bird on
its edge. She did not mention it to Bird.

“I like it out here,” said Mary. “It is pretty and I like the air.”

“You're a fool to fall in love with it,” said Bird.

She did not answer. The mother bird lifted and sought food for the hidden
young.

“You would do better to speak less,” said Mary.

“The same could be said of you,” said Bird.

“Perhaps,” she said. “But you are predictable and your position is clear.
If you said nothing, I would nonetheless know how you felt about anything we might
experience.”

“How do I feel about what you've just said ?”

“You feel hurt, perhaps, but you also think that I am wrong.”

“I am not hurt.”

That night, Bird was less insistent about the sacks. He did not cover his
face, and said nothing when Mary set her blanket down on the ground, rather than
over her bright muddy white dress.

They were quiet for some time, but neither slept.

“Do you know any constellations ?” said Mary.

“What are they ?”

“The stars,” said Mary. “The shapes they make.”

“I see clusters,” said Bird, “flickering like a bunch of little fires on
the hill.”

“Several points make an identifiable shape,” said Mary. “If you imagine a
line drawn between them.”

“Like what ?”

“I have only been told of them, and I do not know them,” said Mary. “So
every time I look, they are different.”

“What are they now ?”

“I am too tired to see anything other than a big soft bed for me to sleep
in.”

“I will make money in town and we will buy a big soft bed,” said
Bird.

Mary did not respond.

It was a cold night. The trees seemed not to break the wind at all. The
mouths of the bread sacks slapped the earth and neither of their blankets would hold
still. They hardly slept. They
lay awake, staring up and trying to
settle things. In the morning, they walked. They walked and walked and walked. They
were losing their appetites, though they were working harder than they had for some
time. When they were alone in the building with the kitchen, the amount of bread it
took to fill them up was less and less with each day. Typically, they were still
hungry after they were finished eating, but their stomachs could take no more of
what it was they had to give it. In the woods, even that small amount seemed too
much to the both of them. They forced it down, knowing they needed the energy to
keep themselves on foot and moving forward. It was painful and Mary would throw up
every now and then, after a meal. When she did, Bird made them stop and eat more.
She knew he was right, that she needed to eat, but it was miserable and she hated
him for it.

On the fourth day, the trees broke and they discovered a meadow. There
were white flowers scattered throughout, and clusters of yellow ones. Bees crowded
the blossoms. At the far end of the meadow, a thick brown moose vanished back into
the woods.

On the fifth day, Bird spotted a fence. They had crossed the meadow and
back into the trees. These trees were thinner, more spread apart. Finally, they gave
way to a slope of rolling hills. It was on the edge of one of these hills that Bird
saw the shadow of four parallel lines, breaking the light that was vanishing beyond
it.

“On the other side of that hill,” said Bird, “we will find a house.”

Mary did not believe it. Or she was not willing to let herself believe
it. That this early on, they would discover a home, a fireplace, a matching set of
chairs and people in them.

They walked on and discovered it was true. They spotted the
smoke first, and then the ponies. Trained ponies moving about
within the confines of the enormous gate. They investigated the two of them from a
comfortable distance. The pen was large enough to vanish over a second hill, and it
was the hill from behind which the smoke was rising. It was blue in the dusk light,
lifting casually and thinning.

“I would like to pet them,” said Mary.

“Do as you like,” said Bird. He set down his sacks. He removed his pistol
from his belt and approached the far hill. He crested it, kept low, and descended
toward the house. He spotted no bodies on the porch or in the distance of any
visible direction. It was a log cabin, relatively new. He crept to the window and
crouched there. He listened, but heard nothing. Then he heard the floorboards groan.
He spotted a cat lapping water from a puddle by the porch. A young girl appeared at
its edge. She set herself on her belly, reached down and gripped the cat, and it
scratched her. She began to cry, and an older man appeared behind her to
investigate.

“Who are you ?” said the man.

He held his daughter behind him then.

“What do you want ?”

Bird had the pistol trained on him. He was trembling.

“Are you hurt ?” said the man.

Bird did not respond.

The cat bounded beneath the porch. The girl's head appeared to the right
of her father's hip.

“He's lost an arm,” she said.

“Are you hurt ?” the man said again.

“No,” said Bird. “Where is the nearest town ?”

“About ten miles up that road,” said the man, pointing to a
path leading from the front of the house. “Are you here to hurt or
rob us ?”

“No,” said Bird. “But we'd like to eat.”

“We ?”

“My wife and I,” said Bird.

“But you can't be more than… fourteen ?” said the man.

“I am older than that,” said Bird. “We've been walking for days.”

“From where ?”

“The woods,” said Bird, “that way.” He signaled with the barrel of the
pistol then directed it back at the man.

“Wolf Creek ? But it's winter…”

Bird did not respond.

“You were in the valley when it snowed ?”

Bird nodded.

“With your parents ?”

Bird did not respond.

“Alone then.”

“I want to meet his wife,” said the man's daughter. She was all the way
out at his side now, gripping his hand as he held it to her.

“She's with the ponies,” said Bird.