Power in the Blood (30 page)

Bryce neither ate nor drank, so it was not to be wondered at that he did not budge from his armchair to visit the outhouse. Zoe and Omie had to, and each time ran a gauntlet of townspeople now openly tramping around the backyard. An illustrator from the
Chieftain
was rendering the fateful stone in India ink for posterity on page one. It was some consolation when evening came and the crowd departed.

It was an insult, the way Bryce had chosen to ignore the needs of Zoe and Omie, and brought down on all their heads the humiliation of public fascination. She still could not understand why he was as he was. The pain of Patrick’s death, harsh though it assuredly had been, did not require such extravagant sacrifice to ease its passing. Bryce’s life in exchange for Patrick’s was a bargain no god could sanction, and Zoe certainly didn’t. She recognized a growing resentment inside herself, a bitterness at having married this man and borne him a child, in expectation of a life filled with the usual joys and hardships. Nothing had prepared her for this. It was more than a disappointment; it was a betrayal. The cause of Bryce’s grief did not justify his extreme reaction to it. He had seized upon their misfortune in order to exorcise himself of some other, darker secret, or so it seemed to Zoe. There was no means of knowing what thoughts swam in his mind.

Zoe remained in the sitting room with Bryce throughout the night, sending Omie to her room when the clock struck nine-thirty. She slept fitfully, kept the lamp burning low in order to see at a glance if her husband was still there whenever she woke up. He always was. If she could have been sure of his immobility, Zoe might have spent the night comfortably in bed. It was one more unnecessary annoyance.

Next day her neighbor delivered to Zoe a copy of the
Chieftain
’s morning edition.

GIRL FORESEES TALE OF WOE

UNCANNY PREDICTIONS BY YOUNGSTER

TOMBSTONE INSCRIPTIONS REVEALED

DAYS IN ADVANCE

Zoe took it directly to Omie. “Did you tell that man about what you saw? Did you?”

Omie hung her head. “Yes.”

“Why! Why did you! Now they’ll never leave us alone!”

“I didn’t mean to. He said Mrs. Grimes next door told him her little girl told her I told Lucy I saw the words on the stone before Papa put them there. He asked me was it true. I didn’t want to tell a lie.”

Zoe sat beside her and put an arm across Omie’s trembling shoulders. “So you know you saw a thing that hadn’t happened yet.”

Omie nodded. “I thought at first he really was making the words but saying he wasn’t. Then I believed him, but the words were there anyway, like they were waiting to come out of the stones.… I didn’t mean to do it.”

“I know you didn’t. It’s something you have inside you, a kind of gift.”

“Gift?”

“An ability, so to say. You can … see things happen before they really happen, because you have … a special eye, I suppose you’d call it. It’s a very unusual thing, but you don’t need to be frightened by it.”

“I’m sorry I told the man.”

“It doesn’t matter now. Have you seen anything apart from the words on the stones? Have you seen us … burying Papa in the ground?”

“No. Why did I get the thing inside me, the special eye?”

“I don’t know why, but I know where it comes from.”

She told Omie of her mother’s faculty for seeing events of the future. Omie was particularly impressed by the story of the brother railroad engineers who ran into each other and died along with so many of their passengers.

“Will I see something like that too?” she asked, excited at such a dramatic prospect.

“I hope you never do. I hope you see only good things, happy things that will happen later on. It isn’t fair for a little girl to have to see bad things.”

“Is it because of my blue mark?”

“No, no, it has nothing to do with that. It isn’t a punishment, either thing, the special eye or the blue mark. They’re both just things that you happen to have. They’re part of what makes you … you.”

Omie considered this, then said, “Is Papa still in the chair?”

“Why don’t we find out.”

He was, but Bryce’s immobility was the only calm aspect of that day. The newspaper article on Omie’s clairvoyance caused a sensation, and the crowds around the Aspinall house doubled. Soon people were at the door requesting that Omie give them an estimate of their own mortality, or that of a sick family member. She was asked also to diagnose various maladies the town doctors were unsure of, and to prescribe a cure for these. Several young women wished to know if their young men were fated to marry them, and some begged Omie to describe in detail young men as yet unmet. Zoe allowed Omie to talk with none of them, fearing that a single interview, however disappointing it would assuredly prove for the one who came wishing for knowledge of things to come, would open the floodgates to even more comers than had already knocked upon the door. It was an impossible state of affairs.

To put a stop to it, Zoe allowed a reporter, the one Omie had talked with through her window, into the house. She had schooled Omie in her statement and the responses she would be obliged to make to his questioning. Omie shuffled her little boots and told the man she had lied about seeing the names on the stones. It was a big fib, she said, and she was sorry now for having said it. When the reporter began badgering Omie, hoping he could get her to admit she was lying about having lied, Zoe showed him the door.

“You did very well,” she told Omie.

“He didn’t believe me.”

“No one likes to believe things that sound sensible and everyday. They prefer to believe things that are silly and can’t happen.”

“But it did happen,” Omie reminded her, and Zoe could only nod ruefully.

Another night in the chair. In the early morning hours Zoe grew angry at her discomfort and took herself to bed, leaving Bryce on his own in the dim lamplight. She was sure he would still be there come morning, and her own increasingly nervous condition required a decent night’s sleep. The bed was wonderfully roomy and accommodating without her husband in it, and Zoe drifted off with ease. Her rest was deep and untroubled, and this caused her extra guilt when she discovered, on rising next day, that Bryce was gone.

He was not in the house, not in the yard, not even at the cemetery, where Zoe fully expected to find him lying across Patrick’s grave. Word quickly spread, and a good number of Pueblo’s citizens began a search of the town. By evening it was generally accepted that the man in the chair had vanished completely, just walked away while no one, including his wife, was watching.

The incident received much coverage in the newspaper, which had yet to print a word about Omie’s retraction. Zoe couldn’t decide if this was a good thing, or bad. At least this way her daughter was not branded a liar. That might have been preferable, though, to having been labeled a prophetess. For the next three days the
Chieftain
’s editorial asked, encouraged, and finally dared Omie to locate her father by means of her unique ability. Zoe considered making trouble for the paper by telling the dwindling crowds around her house that Omie had already admitted her story was untrue, but Omie begged her not to.

“I don’t want to lie again. I hated telling that man a lie!”

“Very well, we’ll cope with matters as they are.”

In the following week interest in mother and daughter waned slightly, then was revived by the
Chieftain
’s revealing at last that Omie had confessed her second sight was nothing but a hoax perpetrated upon the gullible citizenry of the town. The article was cleverly worded, creating the impression that Omie had only now admitted her prank, and it was further hinted that the disappearance of Bryce Aspinall might very well have been similarly planned to excite public interest, with a view to winning sympathy for the family, and possibly monetary support.

Zoe was outraged, but knew there was little she could do. When a rock came through the window she decided to sell the house and move on. The sale was quickly accomplished, bringing renewed attention to what the
Chieftain
called “a saga of deception not yet ended.” Zoe’s last act of interest in Pueblo was to install Bryce’s headstone in the cemetery. Even if Bryce was not known to be deceased, he might as well have been, so she wished his stone set up next to that of their son. The sexton objected to such an unusual request, maintaining that a gravestone should be raised only when there was a body to accompany it. He obliged her, though, when Zoe gave him ten dollars over the common fee. It was a bargain, since he didn’t even have to dig a hole.

The two remaining Aspinalls (Zoe made up her mind to resume the Dugan name as soon as possible) bought tickets on the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad and journeyed north by west, into the mountains that supplied the ore for Pueblo’s smelters.

Traveling through the magnificent cleft of the Royal Gorge, the sky a mere strip of blue far above, Zoe asked herself if she had mourned enough for her son. It seemed there had been no time for prolonged grieving. No sooner was Patrick dead than all attention had been turned to Bryce and his peculiarities. Patrick’s demise had been overtaken by events begun by Bryce, expanded by the newspaper, and finally ended by Zoe. Every hour since Bryce climbed down from his wagon had been unreal, an exaggeration of misfortune, without room inside its coils for true feeling. And now it was somehow too late. She had wept for Patrick, but not enough, and now could weep no more. Zoe felt numb inside, could barely recognize as her own the girl beside her with the blue birthmark swirling from her eye. Bryce had destroyed a part of her, she felt, and into the hollow place left behind, Zoe could pour nothing of herself that was not required elsewhere.

Omie was attempting to see the top of the gorge, high above. The train was a toy winding through the narrow defile, buried deep in noonday shadows.

“Will the cliffs tumble down on us, Mama?”

Zoe shook her head.

16

When their son was born, Clay and Sophie named him Silan. He grew to be a sturdy boy, with his father’s powerful hands. Both parents were relieved to see that his face resembled Sophie’s, rather than Clay’s. He was a handsome boy, and they were proud of him. Silan was the center of their marriage, its cause, and the reason for its continuation, but the parents allowed no hint of that to pass their lips when the boy was within earshot.

It had become clear even before Silan was born that Sophie and Clay had nothing in common but their shared sense of guilt for having betrayed Grover at the hour of his death. It was not enough to build love upon, barely sufficient for mutual respect. Sophie had another lawman in her life, and Clay made it clear he liked the work; he would not be persuaded to quit. He had been elected marshal without opposition, and took pride in not requiring a deputy to assist him in keeping things tamed in Keyhoe.

He had killed another man shortly after assuming the office. That man had refused to set down a rifle he walked out of a store with, after declining to pay the proprietor. For all Clay knew, in all the shouting, the rifle was loaded, so when the thief refused to release his hold upon it, Clay counted down from three. Incredibly, this was accepted as some kind of dare by the thief, who died with a show-me smile on his lips. He was not a local, and no one laid any blame at Clay’s feet for his death. The rifle, it turned out, had not been loaded, and this reinforced Clay’s belief that stupidity, in conjunction with conscious lawbreaking, had resulted in the demise of an individual no decent person need shed tears over.

He gave much of himself to the work of making Keyhoe safe, and was on first-name terms with most of the citizens. Clay could muster what it took to make small talk on the main street with storekeepers and passersby, but always felt more like his true self when silent, unaccosted by people he had no real interest in. He sometimes thought of them as cattle he had been hired to protect. His aloofness, a handicap in any other field, was Clay’s ally in law enforcement. News of the tall preacher-like figure, with a sawed-off shotgun he didn’t hesitate to use, spread throughout the county and beyond, and Clay learned that a reputation is as powerful a weapon as anything from a gunsmith’s forge.

He was capable of appearing at any time of the day or night, in any part of town. Some people spoke of having entered Clay’s office and found him staring at them from his upholstered chair, but they formed the impression his eyes had been closed a fraction of a second before their hand rattled the doorknob. Though no one ever caught him with his eyes closed, it was said that the marshal catnapped frequently, conserving himself for the endless hours consumed by his duties.

Sophie saw him with closed eyes often. Clay seemed to fall asleep whenever he came home, which was generally only a few hours in the early evening, for a meal and a pipe. After eating, he used the sofa to stretch out on while he digested and smoked, and when his bowl of tobacco ash was knocked out, he would sigh deeply and fall into a profound sleep not even Silan could penetrate with his squalling. For his wife, Clay had little time and less conversation. He occasionally mounted her, but never with sweet endearments to ease the ritual of penetration.

Sophie often stood by the sofa and stared at him as if he were some embalmed object of ancient times, interesting enough in its features, but so remote from everyday life as to arouse no emotion whatsoever. This was her husband, this sleeping man, and she felt nothing for him that a wife should feel. The frustrations of their first year together had slowly yielded to an understanding, on Sophie’s part, that Clay saw the marriage as something he had been forced into by circumstances, a regrettable compromise in a life otherwise unblemished by concession. It baffled her still, his utter lovelessness.

The cruelest aspect was his revelation of a tender side, reserved exclusively for short periods spent with Silan. Let Sophie so much as enter the same room, and Clay’s playfulness was stuffed back inside himself with alacrity. It was a miserable marriage, a miserable household, and Sophie dreaded the day Silan was old enough to comprehend the sterility around him.