Wanderlust Creek and Other Stories (22 page)

I’d gone maybe a mile and a half, following
the wire on my left hand, when I saw a couple of men on horseback
up ahead. They were too far off for me to see much more than their
outlines, but I made out that they were sitting their horses on
either side of the fence and appeared to be talking across it.

They never noticed me. The fence line bent
around a little here so I was almost coming up from behind them. As
I got closer their voices drifted down to me, and I made out by the
tones that they were arguing. I slowed down a little, not wanting
to intrude, but I kept on walking. I wanted to get to town, and it
wasn’t my fault that they’d chosen to have an argument right in my
shortcut.

So I was reasoning, when all of a sudden,
without any warning, one of them reined his horse back and pulled
out a gun. The other one must have done so too, for a couple of
shots rang out one right after the other, and the fellow on my side
of the fence, the one who’d drawn first, pitched off his horse and
rolled in the grass.

I started to run toward them. I didn’t think
for the moment that I wasn’t carrying a gun, and that I might
easily have been drilled if the other fellow was trigger-happy and
I spooked him by rushing up. But I don’t think he even saw me. He
just sat there a minute, sawing on the reins to steady his plunging
horse and staring at the fellow he’d shot, and then all of a sudden
he whipped the horse around in a kind of panic and galloped away
across the field.

“Hey, you! Come back here!” I shouted after
him. I could have told him, since I’d seen the whole thing, that it
was plain he’d fired in self-defense and he had nothing to be
afraid of, but he was already gone.

I ran up to the place where the shooting had
happened and found that the other one wasn’t even dead; he was
trying to drag himself up off the ground and not doing too well at
it. As I reached him he fell back again and lay still, with a sort
of stunned, bewildered look on his face. He was only a youngster,
about sixteen or seventeen. He’d been shot through the left
shoulder and it was bleeding pretty badly.

He didn’t seem startled when I knelt down
and bent over him; during a crisis of one sort or another is a time
when people aren’t surprised by strangers turning up unexpectedly.
I made him lie still and ripped my handkerchief into strips to tie
up his shoulder the best I could, until a better hand could tend to
it. He didn’t make a sound, other than wincing a little when I
knotted the bandages; just lay there trying to catch his breath,
looking at me with no particular expression. I suppose the shock of
what had happened had knocked him for a loop.

“That should hold it for now,” I said. “At
least till a doctor can take a look at it. Do you live near
here?”

“That way,” he said weakly, moving his good
hand a little, “about a mile. There’s a clump of trees…you can see
them down below...”

I looked and nodded. “I see them. What’s
your name?”

“Lew Kelly.”

I started a little at the name. Like I said,
I’d been through Clemson before. It hadn’t been for long, but it
never takes long, if you’re a stranger, for a native who likes to
talk to tell you all about the more interesting people belonging to
a place. I’d heard of the Kellys—a hard-bitten, hard-working family
who kept to themselves and owed nothing to anybody. The way people
talked about them, it sounded like they were a little contemptuous
of them and a little in awe of them at the same time. They were
supposed to have money, but never made any show of it, and that I
could believe, for the kid was dressed in the plainest of old jeans
and a faded gray shirt, and the horse he’d been riding didn’t look
like much either. I couldn’t help feeling a lot more curious about
these Kellys, given the interesting little scene I’d just
witnessed, but it wasn’t the time for asking questions.

I lifted the boy to his feet. He was
unsteady, and I had to hold him up as I got him to the horse and
then boost him into the saddle. As I was about to pick up the reins
I happened to look round and saw his gun lying in the grass, and I
picked it up and shoved it back in his holster. I’d have done
better to let it lie.

I swung up behind him and took the reins,
for he was in no shape to make it home on his own. I turned the
horse toward the clump of cottonwoods he’d pointed out, a hazy
green smudge away down the slope of yellow hayfields. The horse was
a smallish one and the double load was a little much for it to
carry, so I took it slow. The boy didn’t make a sound, but I could
hear his breath shuddering through his clenched teeth and knew that
shoulder must have been hurting him terribly. The afternoon was
hot, with the cicadas humming in the distance and the sun shining
hot on the dry grass that crackled under the horse’s feet. After
we’d gone on a while the boy reeled in the saddle and I had to put
my arm around him to hold him up. By the time we got near enough to
the cottonwoods that I could make out glimpses of a house through
the gaps between the trunks, his head was hanging over on one side
and I knew he’d fainted.

The house sat down in a hollow beyond the
grove of trees. It was a big, roomy-looking brown farmhouse with
three dormer windows and a wide, shingle-roofed front porch, the
kind of place you’d expect a big family to live in and fill out
with plenty of noise. But it was quiet. It was very quiet even for
a lazy summer afternoon.

As I guided the horse through a gap in the
split-rail fence at the bottom of the grove, I saw three men by the
house. One was on the porch and the other two standing in the yard.
That was the whole family, and somehow after I saw them I could
never picture anyone else ever having lived there. They saw me at
about the same time, and they all stood perfectly still and watched
as I walked the horse across the open space toward them. Then the
two in the yard started to walk forward. They were probably in
their early twenties, and plainly the brothers of the boy I’d
found.

I actually wondered for a second or two if
they were nearsighted, or if I’d somehow come to the wrong place,
they took so long making some kind of reaction. The taller one in
the lead came up close to the horse as I halted it, looking
straight up at the two of us.

“It’s Lew,” he said over his shoulder to the
other one in a low, quick voice, but without any extraordinary
emotion.

They didn’t ask me what had happened. They
didn’t ask me who I was, or what I was doing with their brother, or
why he was covered with blood. My bandages hadn’t been too
effective, and the left side of his shirt was pretty well soaked
and dripping down onto the arm I was holding him with. One of the
two brothers held the horse, and the one who had spoken helped me
get down and slide the boy out of the saddle, then took hold of his
legs and between us we carried him to the house.

I looked over my shoulder to see where I was
going, and looked up at the man on the porch. I remember the first
thing I noticed about him was his eyes. They were ice-blue, so cold
you’d have expected to feel a frost if you passed your hand close
in front of them. He was middle-aged, probably around fifty; a bit
below middle height and solidly built, just this side of what you
would call stout. He moved aside to let us come up the steps,
without speaking. The way he looked at the boy struck me oddly—he
didn’t look worried, or distressed, or anything you’d imagine a man
would at seeing his youngest son brought home hurt, but the way he
had those cold blue eyes fixed on him said that he was looking at
something very, very important.

He didn’t have us bring him into the house.
The dim front room inside the door looked like it would have been
stuffy on a hot day like this one; but there was a little breath of
air coming round the corner of the house and under the shade of the
porch roof, and it was here that he motioned for us to lay the boy
down. Without knowing anything about them other than their faces I
had an idea this was a family that didn’t mind roughing it.

Jack Kelly got down on his knees by his son,
taking a little time about it; he seemed somewhat stiff in the
joints. He started undoing my mess of a bandage. Matt Kelly, the
oldest boy, had gone into the house and came back now with a
pitcher of water and some rags for bandages, and he knelt down next
to his father and began to help him. Sam Kelly was standing next to
me with his arm hooked around one of the porch pillars, looking
down at his younger brother with a very slight frown, and I stood
and watched too. To the Kellys I might as well not have existed
just then, but I wasn’t going away without seeing the finish of
whatever it was I’d been started on, however accidentally.

“I’ll go for a doctor if you want,” I
offered.

Jack Kelly gave me one short look. I
couldn’t read anything in it. Then he looked down again and it was
as if I’d never been there, let alone spoken.

Young Lew Kelly had come around by this
time, and he was just as quiet while his father and brother were
working on him as he’d been before. Nobody spoke, but somehow there
was tension in the air. The Kellys’ faces were practically
emotionless, but I felt that they were one of those iron-knit
families that stick by each other to the death, however little they
may show or say. They all looked fairly alike, with burnt
blondish-colored hair and blue or gray eyes, though none of the
boys had the same startling blue as their father. Sam was the only
one built like him, slightly shorter and solid; Matt and Lew were
tall and lean.

Jack Kelly broke the silence at last.

“Well,” he said in a voice as stolid as his
face, “who did it, Lew?”

“It was a fair fight,” I began rather
suddenly. “I saw it.” The thought had come to me that it would not
be a good thing if these silent Kellys were to get the wrong idea
about the man who had pulled the trigger, whoever he was. But the
next second I remembered that Lew Kelly had been the first one to
pull a gun, and I fell silent. By the same token I wasn’t sure how
they would take that information coming from me.

“It was Bob Reeves,” said Lew, gritting his
teeth against the pain in his shoulder. There was a sound of
reluctance in his voice, though, that seemed to come from something
different.

“Who drew first?” said Jack Kelly.

“I did.”

“Why?” Very matter-of-factly; not sounding
the least bit surprised or outraged.

“We were—we had an argument,” said Lew—and
then he broke off with a groan. This time I caught on to the fact
that he’d taken advantage of the real pain to avoid speaking—he’d
borne enough of it in silence up till now.

“Don’t you think you ought to get a doctor?”
I put in, and my concern, similarly, was about half genuine. I felt
an impulse to help him out; I didn’t know why. “I think that
shoulder may be broken.”

“Never have a doctor in this house,” said
Jack Kelly without looking at me. “We get along all right without
them.”

If it had been anybody else, I might have
answered that being healthy and independent was all very well, but
in this case it might be very well to have a doctor at least on the
porch, if not actually in the house. But as it was Jack Kelly
speaking, I only opened my mouth and shut it again, even though I
really did think Lew ought to have been seen by a doctor.

Kelly was obviously waiting for his son to
go on, as plainly as if he’d said “Well?” I suppose Lew could have
kept quiet if he wanted to, but something seemed to drag him into
speaking. It looked like a struggle. He bit his lip and hesitated.
I guessed that he didn’t want to lie to his father, but there was
something about that argument that he would rather not have told
him.

“He said something I couldn’t let go,” he
said at last.

I saw Jack Kelly lift his ice-blue eyes and
fix them on Lew’s face, and Lew added with an effort, as if some
outside force were directing him, “About a girl.”

There was a pause.

“Well,” said Jack Kelly with a kind of
skeptical growl in his voice, “you could expect trouble.”

The lay of the land was a little plainer
now. Evidently there was a girl that the boy’s father didn’t
approve of mixed up in it somewhere, and he’d wanted to avoid
bringing her into the explanation of that fight. I wondered what
his brothers thought. I glanced at Sam Kelly, but he appeared to be
thinking about something else entirely. His face was almost as
unreadable as his father’s.

Those Kellys could have made anybody feel
like an intruder, I think. I was no more susceptible than the next
man, but no less, either, and I decided it was time for me to drift
on. But I wished I could make somebody at least notice me before I
did. “Are you sure you don’t want me to get a doctor?”

Jack Kelly heaved himself slowly to his feet
and faced me, and I almost regretted it.

“I told you,” he said slowly, “no doctor
ever comes near this place. We’ll do what needs to be done.”

I was tempted to retort, “How much do you
know about setting bones?” but I couldn’t. He just affected me that
way. Instead I pulled my eyes away from his face and leaned over
past him to look down at Lew. “I’ll be going then,” I said. “Good
luck, sonny; hope you’re all right.”

Lew nodded up at me, but didn’t speak. His
face was pale and sweaty.

Sam Kelly said abruptly, “Have you got a
horse?”

“No, I don’t. I had a ride as far as the
crossroads…”

“You can take one of ours to go to town if
you want. Leave it at the livery and one of us’ll pick it up later
when we come in.”

That sounded like all the goodbye I was
going to get. But as I turned to go down the steps Jack Kelly
stopped me with his left hand and held out his right. He said,
“Thank you.”

We shook hands, and then I walked down the
steps and picked up the reins of the kid’s horse.