As Liam limped into the sod house on the heels of Mordecai Scott, the first thought he had was that it was difficult to blame Deborah Scott for having cleared out of that place. How a family of two parents and three children had ever lived there was hard to imagine. The quarters were close, the house rather oppressive and dark. But it was as neat and clean as a house made out of dirt could be.
Scott’s wife was named Laurel. She was evidently not feeling well, coughing a lot and looking haggard and pale. She seemed as happy to see Timothy as she was surprised to have a visitor. She scolded Timothy for having run off to town, but hugged rather than punished him.
She looked at Liam a little suspiciously but was cordial enough in her own quiet way. Supper was cooking on an iron stove: Beans bubbled in a pot while cornbread baked in a Dutch oven.
The other son was named Leroy. He seemed a little more shy than Timothy. Liam glanced around, looking for a family portrait that might show the daughter’s face, but there were no portraits. The Scotts could not afford the services of photographers.
Laurel Scott cleaned and bandaged Liam’s wounds and used rags to bind his ankle, which greatly reduced his limp. Then she served a supper that was plain but delicious, and Liam reflected that not all the fortunes of Mordecai Scott had been bad ones. He had a good family and a truly wonderful wife. And if Liam was successful, perhaps he’d have his straying daughter back again too.
“I’ve seen you before,” Liam said to Scott at the end of the meal. “You were at the wagon works sometime back. I saw you there.”
“I was there. I don’t recall seeing you, though.”
“You probably didn’t see me. I was inside the building while you were in the back. I work there now, by the way.”
“Do you? Well, that’s a good place. Mr. Moore has always been fair with me, and does good work.”
“I’ve learned a lot from him.”
“Why aren’t you working today?”
“I needed the day off to come out here…looking for my friend, a fellow named Arrowood.”
“Do you think this man who shot at you followed you from Dodge?”
“I think it’s more likely that he was in a saloon I stopped at a few miles from here.”
“Stump’s business.”
“Yes. There was a man in there sleeping with his face covered up. It was probably Mack Stanley. I believe he followed me from there.”
“Do you think he’s actually hunting you?”
“I think he saw an opportunity and decided to take it. I don’t know what will happen now. Maybe he’ll leave me be, or maybe he’ll be after me until he has a chance to gun me down. He’s tried three times now to get me.”
“You should go to the law.”
“That should be easy enough. My brother is a deputy marshal in Dodge.”
“Carrigan…” Scott paused. “I’ll be! Is he the one who wiped out that army of outlaws at the freight station?”
“It wasn’t quite an army, but yes, that was him.”
“He must be quite a fighter.”
“I reckon he is. I never thought of him that way, but after what he did, there’s no denying it: He’s a good fighter.”
Timothy spoke up. “My father was a good fighter once. Back during the war.”
“I guess I wasn’t good enough,” Scott said, touching the mask.
“He was shot with buckshot,” Timothy said. “That’s what happened to him.”
“Hush up, son,” Laurel said. “Your pap doesn’t like talking about that.”
Liam winked at Timothy. “You’re a good fighter yourself, Timothy. You had that bully thrashing for his life for a spell there in that empty lot.”
Laurel Scott didn’t look too happy at seeing her son praised for fighting, but Liam had the oddest sense that Mordecai Scott had smiled.
“I hate Billy,” Timothy said. “I’d like to kill him, I swear.”
“Tim!” his mother declared in a tone of shock.
“I do hate him, Ma. He’s mean.”
“Son, you have to learn to let things go,” Mordecai said. “I know all about meanness. I encounter it everywhere I go. If I hated everyone who did something bad to me, I’d spend my life angry and raging. You got to learn to forgive people.”
“Even when they don’t deserve it?”
“Son, the whole point of forgiving is that they don’t deserve it.”
Liam wondered if his face revealed any of the guilt that was overwhelming him at that moment.
“I’m surprised Stump didn’t tell you that this man Arrowood you were looking for didn’t live in these parts,” Scott said to Liam. “He knows everybody for miles around.”
“I didn’t ask him,” Liam said. “I guess I should have. But as things have fallen out, I’ve at least had the pleasure of your hospitality. Fine family you have here. Two good sons. You can’t ask more than that.”
Timothy, evidently the family member with the least control over his tongue, spoke right up as Liam had hoped he would. “There’s Deborah, too, but she ain’t here. I tried to bring her home, but I couldn’t find her.”
“Thank God you couldn’t, considering the places she goes and the things she does,” Laurel said in a bitter tone.
“Now, honey,” Mordecai Scott said, “there’s no call to talk so.”
“I just wish she’d…” Remembering their visitor, she did not finish whatever she was going to say.
Scott peered at Liam through the hole in the cloth; it looked so strange that Liam honestly wished he’d just remove the mask. “Our daughter is wayward,” he said. “She’s hurt her mother, and me, by the way she’s gone. I don’t know exactly why she did it. I’ve always felt it had something to do with living with constant shame over how I look and how I tend to isolate myself from folks because of it. Somehow it just drove her to turn her back on her family and go down some very wicked paths.”
“I didn’t mean to bring up a hurtful matter,” Liam said.
“You couldn’t know.”
He had known, of course—part of it, anyway—but there was no call to share that with the family.
“Every now and again, especially when Laurel is feeling poorly, our boy Timothy there gets the notion he’ll go into Dodge to find his sister and bring her back,” Scott said. “He walks all the way by himself. Usually we notice it and bring him back before he gets far. This time he made it all the way to Dodge. I had to look for him a long time to find him.”
“That’s quite a walk. Do you know for certain that Deborah lives in Dodge?”
Scott looked down. “A lot of the time. Sometimes she goes off to other towns, so nobody knows where she is. There’s times that for weeks at a stretch she has gone home with…To tell the truth, I’d as soon not talk about it. It’s not easy to confess to someone that your daughter has made a harlot of herself, but it’s the cold fact.”
“She ought to be proud of you, sir. You seem a good father and a good man, from all I can see.”
“Thank you. But how can you be proud of a man who has to hide his own ugliness?”
“We’re proud of you, Pa,” Leroy contributed. “Me and Tim and Mama, we’re proud.”
Mordecai nodded under the mask.
Liam decided to be bold. “Sir, I wish you’d take off the mask. You needn’t hide from me. To be honest, I already saw beneath it when you were at the wagon shop, and today when you rode in on the wagon. Go ahead. You needn’t wear that thing in your own home.”
Scott slowly reached up, hesitated, then took off the mask.
Even though he had caught glimpses of Scott’s disfigurement before, this was the first truly close and clear look that Liam had gotten of the damage he’d done to this man all those years before. He did his best to maintain an expressionless face, but he was sure his shock showed through.
“I’m sorry if it bothers you to see it,” Mordecai said.
“Nothing to be sorry for,” Liam said. “I’m pleased you decided not to hide from me.”
Conversation waned. There was no dessert in so poor a household, but Laurel boiled coffee and that served as a good substitute. As time went by and Liam became accustomed to Mordecai’s shocking appearance, he found that it bothered him less and less to look at him.
Maybe, if he’d not hidden his face so much over the years, Mordecai might have been able to find community acceptance. People had the ability to grow used to things, and there were plenty of disfigured people since the war.
It struck him that maybe the worst damage he’d done to Mordecai Scott in the farmhouse that day hadn’t been to his face but to his self-respect. And that seemed to Liam the saddest thought he’d had in a long time.
* * *
The next afternoon Mordecai’s wagon rolled to the edge of Dodge and stopped. He was wearing his mask again, for he’d entered busier climes, where there were more people to stare, point, maybe laugh or express horror.
“If you don’t care, this is as far as I’ll take you,” he said to Liam. “I try to stay out of town if I can. I don’t take much to seeing people, you know.”
“This is fine.” Liam climbed off the wagon, went around to the back, and removed his saddle and saddlebags.
Liam carried his goods back up to the front of the wagon, tossed them on the ground, and reached up to shake Mordecai’s hand. “I hope to see you again,” he said forthrightly. “I hope to find your daughter and persuade her to come home.” It was the first time he’d told Scott of this ambition.
Mordecai mumbled something, apparently unable to think of anything to say.
“I may not succeed, but it would be a way of making things up to you. For putting you out, I mean. Eating your food and so on.”
“You owe us nothing.”
“Still, if I can do that for you, I’d be honored.”
“If you could bring Deborah home, I’d be in your debt, Mr. Carrigan. Forevermore I would. But she’s a stubborn young woman. She’s rejected everything we taught her. That’s the fact, though I never say it so plain in front of her mother and brothers. But it’s the truth, and there’s no point in varnishing it. She’s a whore, and a lost and sad young woman. I miss her, but I’d forgive all she’s done in half a moment if only she’d come back.”
“Reckon she knows that?”
“I don’t know. She won’t see us to talk to us.”
Mordecai Scott shook Liam’s hand again, then brought the wagon around and began to drive away. Liam was picking up his saddle when Scott stopped, turned around in his seat, and said, “By the way, if you do find Deborah, she won’t be using that name. She gave that up, too, when she turned her back on her upbringing. She uses a variety of names now, but most of the time she just goes by the name of Lilly.”