10

They passed along a red clay road, with wagon ruts and mule tracks carved out and preserved in the dried mud like tributes to a long-ago rain.

Charlotte rode at the lead, and Randall watched her. She sat tall in the saddle, her shoulders down and back in an effortless posture. Her dark curls fell halfway down her back until the heat of the day forced her to collect them under her hat.

Randall stared at the sweat on the back of her neck.

“What’re you thinking about, Mr. Dawson?” Tad asked, and Randall nearly lost his seat.

“Nothing,” he replied, embarrassed. “Just riding.”

“Oh. Okay. I thought maybe you was thinking about Harry.”

Randall turned to the boy and saw the downcast look he wore.

“Were you thinking about him?” Randall asked.

Tad shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. Been thinking about him a lot. It’s just, he was my best friend. My only friend, really. He was always asking me questions about the horses and whatnot. I think he wanted to be a trainer.”

“So you’re the one who taught him?”

“’Course I am. You didn’t think he was gonna learn something like that from you, did you? No offense intended.”

Randall laughed. “I suppose that’s fair.”

“He was a natural, though,” Tad said. “I’ll tell you that much. A real hand.”

“I’m glad he had you to teach him. I’m sure you made a fine instructor.”

“Dang right. None of them lazy curs you got working for you know half as much as me.”

Randall laughed again.

“Alright then,” he said. “Teach me something.”

“Now?” the boy asked.

“Sure. Why not?”

“Well,” Tad looked around, then looked at Randall’s horse. “I know Mara ain’t hardly been rode outside of a pen before this.”

“How’s that?”

“Look there at her shoes. See how they’re worn down around the outside? That’s from turning in circles in a pen. She may have seen a pasture or two but not long enough to even everything out. You got to give a horse wide-open spaces, else them hooves will crack and peel and wear down.”

“Is she in pain?”

“Naw. It ain’t too bad just yet. And you been riding a while with her now, she’s starting to find her own balance.”

“That’s pretty impressive.”

“Harry would’ve spotted it too. He was as good as me, maybe better, before he . . .” Tad took a deep breath in through his nose, trying not to cry.

“I know, son,” Randall told him. “It’s alright.”

* * *

There came what might have been a distant structure, and it shimmered and wavered on the plain before them as if it were meaning to dance in the sun but found itself instead tethered to the cruel immobility of the desert. They put the horses forward and with each rise and fall of the road the dancing building disappeared and appeared again closer and with added dimension until at last they saw it was a town and that the first building was flanked by others, though not as many as there may have once been.

They started down the main stretch and looked to one another for some acknowledgment of life beyond their own breathing and the breathing of the horses but there was none to be had on the street and they were ready to leave things to the ghosts when a young boy came into their path and there stood staring up at them, his faced shadowed by an oversized hat.

“Hello there,” Randall said and his voice seemed to set the boy in motion, as if the child had been waiting for words—any words—so that he might know the travelers as true and not some apparition blown in from the desert on the rising winds. He gathered the horses without speaking and led them all, riders and mounts, past broken and boarded windows of faded and falling buildings.

“What happened here?” Randall asked, but the boy did not look back, instead pointing upward with his index finger as he walked, and they looked, the three of them, skyward and there they saw a lone buzzard circling and beyond it there were thin clouds fleeting in their makeup and, willing or not, soon to dissolve into the nothingness of the world below and above. They saw the sun as it held court over the land it had birthed and the land it would one day destroy and they saw, each of them, something from their past and all were silent.

The boy walked and though they had not gone far he dropped the reins as if he were too tired to go on bearing the weight of the horses and their passengers, and he turned and stood and again stared up at the strangers and it was any man’s guess as to which party was the more curious.

“Are there no others?” Randall continued with his questioning as though each time the boy did not answer that was in and of itself some passing of knowledge and thus called for further inquiry.

“Momma,” the boy said and pointed once more, this time toward the caved-in roof of what looked to have once been a café or mercantile of some sort.

“Your momma in there?” Charlotte asked, leaning forward on her horse as though proximity would wrest a more complete telling from the child.

“Momma,” the boy repeated and this time pointed to a different building and all three riders leaned back in their saddles uniformly in an unspoken agreement of the boy’s insanity and into the street came a pale man marked with boils and sores of a present nature and the scars of those past.

“My friends,” he called, “come, join us for supper.”

“Ain’t even three o’clock,” Tad said, looking at the sun and its position and finding the gaze of both Randall and Charlotte and shrugging his shoulders.

The robed man, who they each took to be a priest, looked also to the sun and there he stared for a long while and after that while he turned back to the riders.

“Even so,” he said. “We do not get many visitors here and it would be a good thing, I believe, for the child to have the interactions necessary for a supper.”

“He your boy?” Randall asked.

“The boy is of no blood relation to me, though he is a child of God and thus is my brother and my son and also my father.”

“Well, hell,” Tad said, “that don’t make no goddamn sense a’tall.”

“I see you have not taught your own son the ways of our Lord,” the priest said, though not unkindly.

“He’s not my son, but yes, he is not versed in many Christian customs, the least of which is taking the Lord’s name in vain.”

“Ah,” the priest smiled, “so it is that we both find ourselves in the charge of young men not of our seed and yet bestowed upon us in one way or the other by God.”

“I ain’t been bestowed, mister, I rode my horse,” Tad protested, and Randall shot him a look and that was the end of it.

“Please, sup with us and rest here tonight,” the priest requested again.

“We’ll break bread,” Randall replied, “but seeing as it’s early yet, we’ll have to ride on after.”

“I understand,” the priest said, and if he was disappointed or desperate, neither showed. “The boy will show you the way to our stables, such as they are.”

The stables, as suggested by the priest, were not stables but a makeshift overhang of rusted tin resting on reclaimed pine and oak which had at some time been cobbled together with no great care at a length wide enough for their three horses only, and all them near scraping the low points of the tin with their heads. The boy tied the horses and ran around the corner of one of the buildings as though being chased and returned sloshing a washtub of water thick and brown with film and flies. Randall waved him off and the boy had seen this gesture before and reacted in kind by dropping the tub and covering half his own breeches with water. The three of them watched, the horses too, as the boy stood in a motionless silence for a time and after that time he reached into a rusted bucket and from it produced a brush and made for the horses and Tad stepped up to stop him, but Randall held him back and they watched still as the boy ran the brush along the backs and haunches of the horses.

“Fine job,” Randall lied when the boy was finished and he put two dollars in the boy’s hand and Tad’s dismay was audible.

“Fine job,” Randall repeated and the boy closed his fist around the money and once more sprinted beyond the face of the buildings. This time he did not return.

The three of them walked back into the street and there the priest sat in the dirt, his robes folded about his knees and thighs and he arose at their coming.

“It was the railroad,” he said and he lowered his head as if in some grand apology. “It was supposed to come and when it didn’t the town moved on and the Indians and outlaws picked over what was left and fought among themselves and those who died I buried and those who lived I prayed for.”

The priest paused and looked out over the ghost town and the country beyond it.

“Still, there were those who remained,” he said. “Then came the sickness. A plague upon my flock. In the end I became a gravedigger, not a priest.”

“And the boy?”

“The boy has been here since I can remember though I do not recall his coming, nor his mother or father. I cannot say that he is of the town or the plains or that he is not the second coming of Christ himself, and he can also not say these things, as he does not speak, though he hears very well. I have seen him perk up in the night at the sound of things far away, things even I can neither hear nor place. He is not a normal child, and yet I fear I do not know how to make him so. It is good you are staying.”

They walked with the priest to the church he would not abandon and it was set into the world through the molding of mud and clay, the latter making it red in the sun, and above it stood fastened an iron cross and when Randall asked why it wasn’t wood the priest stared up with one hand shielding his eyes as if he’d never before noticed or as if looking at the cross would bring forth the answer. In the end the priest shrugged his shoulders.

Though the sun was not yet down, the church was dark inside and they ate by candlelight. On the table was a single cut onion, a bowl of browned carrots, and a tough meat of which Randall did not ask the origin. Instead, he complimented the priest on a fine meal and commenced his arduous chewing and the rest of his party did the same.

There was also two-day-old fry bread warmed in a clay bowl and set in the middle of the table. Tad wrapped his meat in the bread and ate it as a sandwich.

“Momma,” the child said to Tad and he copied the older boy’s movements.

“I ain’t your damn momma,” Tad told him.

Randall looked at Tad and motioned to the priest.

“Sorry, Padre,” Tad managed, his mouth full of food.

The priest waved him off.

“A word is only a word,” he said. “Our Lord created the heavens and the earth and the things upon it. He governed life long before words and I do not believe He hears the thoughts on our tongue but rather those in our hearts.”

The priest stared down at his own plate. The food was untouched.

“Yes,” he continued. “There is no hiding what is in a man’s heart.”

“How come you didn’t move on?” Charlotte asked him.

“I am an afflicted soul, ma’am.”

“In what way?”

“I am cursed with a need for drink. A heavy need. And no doubt this is why He has punished me. To be spared when all around you are suffering will harden even the most compassionate of souls.”

Randall watched as the priest pushed his plate toward the child who looked at it and grinned excitedly.

“Momma.”

The priest smiled, weary.

“I am too ashamed to leave this place. I fear no other congregation would take me, and if they would, what kind of terrible things might come to pass? So I stay. I offer empty blessings in exchange for wine or ale. I am no example of God or even a man.”

He shook his head and excused himself from the table.

“Father,” Charlotte called after him, and he turned and lifted his brow in response. “We will stay here tonight, if that’s alright by you.”

The priest brought his hands together and gave a half bow.

“Thank you, my child.”

They slept stretched out along old pews to stay off the cold floor. The wind howled through the cracks in the adobe walls where they met the slumping roof. Randall imagined his feather bed and the warmth of the stove and the smell of bacon and coffee in the mornings. The strange meat sat heavy in his belly and he heard Tad’s snoring and the child’s whimpering and at some point in the night Charlotte rose and went outside with her rifle. He was asleep before she came back in.

In the morning Randall felt a hand on his shoulder and he startled awake and Charlotte was before him with her finger to her lips. He sat up and she motioned for him to follow her. They walked out into the dawn and stood in the street and Randall wiped the sleep from his eyes. Once he’d done so, Charlotte pointed to the roof of the church and Randall turned to see.

The rope was made of horsehair and ran nearly twenty feet in length. It had been doubled back on itself and tied to a bosal like the ones Randall had seen his grandfather use to train young horses. It was looped and knotted around the base of the iron cross at the church’s highest point and from it the priest swung and turned in a slow rotation a few feet above the doorway.

The two of them stood in the street and did not speak for a long while. The sun came on and its light shone brightly against the building and the span of the rope became engulfed in it and all but disappeared so that the body of the priest seemed to be suspended in air by some dark magic.

* * *

They stood—Tad, Charlotte, and Randall—outside the church. Charlotte had cut the body down and Randall dug a grave. He’d said a few words and quoted from the book of Matthew and that was the end of it and now there was nothing left but to push forward and so they would but different than they’d arrived.

“I don’t like this one damn bit,” Tad said, incredulous, looking at the boy as he stood in his typical silence near their horses. “That is one unnerving child.”

“Well, we can’t just leave him here,” Randall said.

“Okay, then put him up on a horse and slap its ass,” Tad argued.

“There aren’t any more horses.”

“If there ain’t no horses, how the hell is he supposed to ride with us?”

Randall and Charlotte glanced at the child who was standing with his ear against the red-orange stallion.

“Oh, no. Oh, hell no,” Tad said.

“He could be your friend,” Randall said.

“He’s too strange to have friends,” Tad answered back.

“Them horses seem to like him alright,” Charlotte said. “I ain’t never known a horse to be wrong about nobody. Even Pumpkin took a liking to him.”

“No, he ain’t neither,” Tad snapped. “Pumpkin does what I say.”

“Pumpkin,” the boy called from across the street and pointed to Tad’s animal.

Tad rolled his eyes and scoffed.

“Well, hell.”