Power in the Blood (36 page)

Silan was carried to the house and set down on the parlor settee. Dr. McNab bathed his head to expose what appeared to be a minor laceration of the scalp at the base of the skull. Sophie wandered in and out of the room, dazed. When Silan suddenly emptied his bowels, she attended to him without a word, first making the men leave the room.

“The wound’s in a bad place,” McNab told Clay. “A blow to the head can be a serious shock to the brain. That’s likely the reason for him not responding to anything. He’s unconscious, but with his eyes wide open.”

“How long will it last?”

“I’ve heard of cases that continued for several days, others that lasted just an hour or two. It could be he’ll come around before suppertime, with nothing more than an aching head to show for it. Or it could take longer; I just don’t know. When Mrs. Dugan has finished in there, you may as well put a nightshirt on him and put him to bed. At least he’ll be more comfortable.”

Silan did not come to before suppertime, on that day or the next. There was no perceptible change in his condition. He would eat, if food was thrust into his mouth, and drink water poured into him, but his eyes would not close. Not a limb, not so much as a finger, showed any inclination to twitch. Silan lay utterly still, his mouth gaping slightly, eyes fixed on the ceiling.

Sophie stayed with him most of the day and evening. Clay slept in a chair beside Silan’s bed at night, following his rounds of the town saloons. He would enter Silan’s room, rouse Sophie from the chair and take her place. For a long time he would stare at the boy’s wan face with its staring eyes, then he would arrange himself for the hours of sleep that refused to come until near dawn. He spent several hours each day asleep in a cell at the office, while his deputies took care of business and kept things as quiet as they could.

Silan’s twilight state persisted for forty-seven days. Dr. McNab instructed that he be turned, like a side of beef on a spit, four or five times every twenty-four hours, to prevent the onset of bedsores, and this operation was carried out with diligence by the parents. Silan’s body did not waste away, since Sophie fed him as much as his champing jaws could accommodate, in fact he became heavier than a boy his age should be. Sophie cleaned up his bowel movements without fuss, and seemed not to expect Clay to participate in this, the least acceptable sickbed task. On the one occasion when Clay was obliged to perform it, in the small hours of the morning, he did not communicate to Sophie his outrage that anyone other than a baby should require such treatment. Whereas Sophie’s attitude toward Silan’s condition remained essentially unchanged from the beginning, Clay was aware of a fundamental alteration in his thoughts.

He asked Dr. McNab, “Can he go on this way?”

“I’ve heard of such instances, yes. The patient is sometimes able, with constant care, to maintain the bodily functions for considerable periods of time.”

“But without getting better.”

“No. It’s my understanding that once the comatose condition has been entered into for more than a week or two, there is no return to normalcy. I don’t say that my knowledge, or lack of it, is the last word in such instances, but I won’t hold out to you any false hope. I know you for a man who appreciates the unadorned facts, and these are what you have. Mrs. Dugan is perhaps not ready to accept them.”

“Thank you for being honest.”

“A great many things are in the hands of God, probably more things than we know of.”

Clay nodded, doubting it.

Clay was temperamentally disinclined to allow a situation beyond his control to persist indefinitely. It was against his own nature, and against nature in general, that a boy five years old be allowed to lie like a log in his bed, eating and excreting without the slightest indication that he was aware of his own humanness. It wasn’t right that such a thing be permitted to continue, without any end in sight, without hope of restitution or redress. There lay Silan, a wonderful boy about to enter the stage before manhood, now reduced to a form Clay could not bring himself to recognize as that of his son.

He began to drink, guardedly at first, then with an openness that surprised his deputies and shocked Sophie.

“That isn’t the way,” she said. “You won’t help him by getting drunk.”

“Is that so. And how
will
I help him? Tell me that.”

“By believing.”

“In what?”

“The strength and mercy of God.”

Clay’s braying laughter made Sophie realize just how far her husband had strayed from the path of righteousness. He never did anything more than silently mouth the hymns in church every Sunday, never discussed religion with her, or prayed, or read the Bible. He was an unbeliever, and it was likely that his sin was in part responsible for Silan’s tragedy. The laughter was unforgivable. Sophie hated Clay more intensely at that moment than she had at any other time, and recognized her hatred as the kind that left a permanent mark on the memory, a hatred from which there could be no returning.

“You are an evil person,” she declared.

His laughter stopped immediately. “Say that again.”

“You have no love inside you for anyone, even your son. You won’t make the least effort to bring him back to us.”

“Bring him back? What the hell can I do? Oh, you mean
believing,
am I right?”

“I mean you should get down on your knees this instant and beg the Lord for mercy! Beg with all your heart, and Silan may yet come back to us! I have! Why should you not!”

He stared at her, feeling some sympathy for her plight. Here was a woman who expected divine intervention because she had prayed for it. There could be no further conversation between them that would mean anything. They might just as well have attempted communication in different languages. He felt sympathy for his wife because she would never get the thing she wanted, for all her efforts. It made him only slightly irritated that she would blame him, not the absence of God from the world, for the continuing farce of Silan’s death-in-life existence.

“I’m sorry; I can’t.”

“Then on your head be it,” she said, and swept from the room. Clay picked up his whiskey, the little shot glass twinkling merrily in the lamplight. “My only friend,” he said, and then saw himself as an unbearably pathetic individual, smart enough to understand he could do nothing to alter things, cowardly enough to cope with his sadness through liquor. It had been a long time since he felt so weak, so maudlin. Another drink would fix that, and another one or two would allow him to forget anything he wished to.

After sixty-one days without a change in Silan, Clay made a decision. He drank nothing all day, and his deputies exchanged dour expressions; was Clay Dugan about to climb out of the hole he’d dug for himself and start acting like a lawman again? They had protected him against too much public scrutiny since the accident, knowing his pain, but it was about time he took control of himself, whatever the misery in his private life. Keyhoe and the surrounding county needed a drunk running things the way it needed more mud in winter.

When Clay returned home to assume the nightly watch over Silan, Sophie left them alone without a word. Husband and wife had reduced their domestic exchanges to the barest minimum of words and glances. Most tasks could be accomplished in complete silence. Clay found he preferred this stunted intercourse to the pointless arguing that would have resulted from actual conversation.

He waited for more than an hour, to ensure that Sophie was fast asleep, then lifted Silan from the bed and carried him outside. Sophie’s house was near the edge of town, and Clay was able to carry his boy away from the streets and buildings, out to the empty prairie and the long horizon of Kansas, a ruler-straight edge to the canopy of stars. He set the boy down and knelt beside him. The evening was cool; fall had come.

“That’s quite a sky, don’t you think? No one can ever count the stars, there are so many, like dust in the air. You asked me once how many there were, and I said I didn’t know, and you looked at me like I should have known. Well, I didn’t. I don’t know much about anything, as a matter of fact. I know you won’t ever get better, though. That I do know. And I know it isn’t right to let you be the way you are. It isn’t your fault, but it isn’t right either. I mean to change the way things are. I have to. There’s some who wouldn’t let me, so we have to do this together, just you and me, so it can get done like it should. I always loved you. You’re my darling boy. That … that’s why I have to do this. If there’s a tiny part of you way deep inside that can hear me and understand what it is I’m saying, please forgive me. This is the only way, Silan, the only way out. If there’s a hell, and I have to burn there forever for this, I’ll do it gladly, anything but look at you day after day, turning into something that isn’t even you anymore. It isn’t right, and so we’re out here, you and me, to put it right. Good-bye, son. I love you.”

Clay took from his pocket a large handkerchief folded neatly into a square. He lifted Silan’s head, cradled it tenderly with his left hand, and pressed the handkerchief firmly against the boy’s mouth. Soon the body that had moved not a muscle since being thrown from Sunrise began to thrash feebly, its jerkings without coordination, the instinctive response to oxygen starvation. Clay hugged him close, and held the handkerchief tighter. An end to movement came with surprising swiftness.

When all movement had ceased, Clay lifted the boy in his arms. The walk home seemed endless. Clay had to stop once in the shadows while a drunk staggered by. He was sure no one had seen them as he returned Silan to his bed.

The lamp was brought closer, its wick turned up for an inspection of Silan’s face for telltale marks around the mouth. There was none that Clay could see. It was not that he considered the suffocation a criminal act; he simply had no wish to share knowledge of the event with anyone but the dead boy. It was too personal an episode to allow outside his heart.

Clay returned the lamp to the dresser and settled himself into his customary armchair. He wanted a drink very badly, but would deny himself, he wasn’t quite sure why. It seemed important to maintain sobriety, so he would, clear through until morning, when he would break the sad news of Silan’s release to his wife. He would definitely need a drink after that.

Dr. McNab pronounced Silan dead of natural causes arising from his unfortunate condition, and a funeral was held as soon as could be arranged. Many townsfolk attended, out of respect for their leading lawman and his grieving wife. The parents conducted themselves in public with stoicism and dignity, and the community wished them well in their hour of loss. It was hoped that they would have the chance for another son, but Sophie’s three miscarriages following Silan’s birth did not augur well for a continuance of the Dugan line.

Clay kept his drinking to a tolerable level. Those who were aware of its subtle effect on his work made no comment, allowing him more time for his personal grief. At home, he was able to tolerate the presence of his wife only by way of whiskey, and spent as little time there as he possibly could.

Sophie had embraced religion with a fervor he had not suspected she was capable of. When he married her, Clay thought Sophie a fairly hardheaded woman who gave the church its due as a force in the land, without subscribing overmuch to its tenets of belief. Silan’s accident, and then his death, had brought out in her a penchant for mysticism he found alarming. She would not leave him alone, and insisted on convincing him that the error of his ways was based on the twin evils of alcohol and atheism. The harder she proselytized for his salvation, the deeper Clay plunged into both.

“I don’t want the comfort of the Lord,” he told her, “and I don’t need it, because it isn’t there, so I’d be a fool to be wanting it and needing it, now wouldn’t I.”

“Then you must think that I’m a fool.”

“Just let me alone, and believe what you like.”

“Aren’t you the least bit concerned that Silan is watching, and feeling anguish in his heart over the way you refuse to see what must be seen?”

Clay performed an elaborate inspection of the corners of the room from his chair. “I don’t see him.”

Sophie sniffed. “He is with us anyway. You would be aware of his presence if you would only allow yourself to turn in the direction of the light.”

Clay turned to face the oil lamp on the table and squinted fiercely at it. “Still don’t see him.”

“Playing the fool does not become you.”

“Woman, I’m not the fool in this room. He’s gone, and you and all the preachers in the world don’t know where he went any better than I do, so don’t be telling me you know what you don’t.”

“You simply will not be guided.”

“Not by you.”

“There’s a darkness in you, Clayton Dugan, that will eat your heart.”

He lifted his glass. “Here’s to its appetite.”

Sophie dashed the drink from his hand, her face twisted with sudden fury. “You monster! You blind fool! He sees us! He sees everything, hears every word …!”

Clay was out of his chair and shoving her against the wall, shouting, “He sees nothing and hears nothing! He went where I sent him because your precious Lord didn’t have the mercy to send him there from the start! He’s dead and gone, and
I’m
the one that spared him, not God or Jesus Christ!”

Sophie’s mouth dropped open. She stared at Clay’s face, inches from her own, and stopped trying to wriggle out from between him and the wall. Watching her eyes, seeing in them a horror he had not anticipated, Clay realized he had said too much in anger. She had never looked upon him like that in their entire married life. Her face was screwing itself into a knot of loathing, her lips attempting to shape themselves around the words to condemn him. Clay released her and stepped away. He kept an eye on his wife, as he would a dog he half expected to attack if he turned from it. He needed to be out of Sophie’s house, as far from her as he could get, and he needed a drink as never before.

Sophie watched him leave the room, heard him pause in the hallway to pick up his hat and shotgun, then open and close the front door. She sagged to the floor, slid down the wall Clay had pinned her against, and allowed her body to find its own position against the skirting boards. She felt the side of her head touch the edge of a rug. It felt comfortable there, so she made no further move to adjust herself; she could not feel the rest of her body in any case.