Thomas Eidson - The Last Ride

He was an odd character, Baldwin thought, as he glanced around. Beneath his brutal features there was a certain sensitivity and style. He had dressed the box stall into a home of sorts. There were sacred pahos – colorfully painted prayer sticks, decorated with feathers and kachina-like figures – hanging on the walls. Three southwest tribes made them: Pueblos, Apaches and Navajos, so he couldn’t be sure where these were from. A clutch of dried maize tied with red and blue beads hung next to the pahos. A large parfleche trunk of painted rawhide looked Apache.

He wondered again who this man was, this man Maggie hated. She had never mentioned any living kin. Looking around the stall, Baldwin felt as though he was sitting in the sacred hogan of a Zuni or Apache shaman. Was the old man a half-breed? His outfit was an odd collection from different tribes. Lined in a row on a bench sat six full bottles of mescal whiskey. He had arrived at the ranch fully illuminated and he hadn’t quit since. He had the habit. And Baldwin bet he could kick the lid off.

They just looked at each other for a while when Jones came to. The old man sat carefully picking straw from the blue blanket. When he had finished, he folded it neatly and stored it in the parfleche trunk. Baldwin watched. The blanket was obviously important to him.

Finally, Baldwin said, ‘How long have you been like this?’

Samuel Jones didn’t try to play games. ‘Six months, maybe seven.’

‘Much pain?’

‘Some.’

‘Seen a doctor?’

‘Both.’

The expression on Baldwin’s face said he didn’t understand.

‘Apache and white.’

‘And?’

Jones held his hand up in a loose fist, palm toward Baldwin, then dropped it as though he was tossing something to the ground. It was the silent language and Baldwin knew this gesture meant ‘bad’. He nodded at the old man, who just watched him and scratched the little dog’s head. Chaco looked happy again.

Maggie was sitting in the rocker on the porch, her Bible lying on her lap, her hands squeezing a twisted rag until the knuckles were cream white. Baldwin stood on the steps and watched her for a moment, then he turned his back and studied the valley. She gazed past him at the sandstone mountains.

‘He came to die,’ he said.

He could feel her eyes on the back of his neck. He turned and looked at her. She was crying without sound, tears running down her cheeks. ‘Who is he, Maggie? Why did he come here to die?’

‘I don’t care,’ she sobbed.

‘He traveled hard so he could end it here.’ He watched her. ‘Because of you. He calls you Ama. Who is he?’

Maggie seemed to convulse with her crying, her arms wrapped around herself as if she were cold. He held her while she sobbed. When she finally stopped, she walked to the railing and stood looking out at the far mountains.

‘Maggie?’

‘He’s my father.’ She sounded exhausted.

They sat together on the porch until the sun had leaped the creek and started to drop toward the redstone of the mountains. Lily came out a couple of times but Baldwin shook his head and she went back inside. Maggie sat with her head clamped between her hands, gazing out across the pasture.

‘I want him gone,’ she said.

‘I thought both your parents were dead.’

Maggie shook her head slowly. They sat quietly for a while, then she again said, ‘I want him gone.’

‘No, Maggie.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he’s dying.’

‘He can die somewhere else. He got here, and he can leave the same way.’

‘We can’t do that.’

‘I can.’

‘No. We can’t. And,’ Baldwin hesitated, ‘he’s going to take his meals in the house.’

It was as if he had slapped her face. ‘I can’t have that man in my house. I can’t, Brake.’ She sounded desperate.

Baldwin pulled hard on his cigarette, then blew the smoke out in a long rush. ‘We have to, Maggie.’

‘Don’t ask that of me, please,’ she moaned.

‘He’s your father, Margaret.’

She was crying hard again. Her voice sounded controlled when she spoke. ‘I was ten when he left. Mother was carrying Thelma. We never had much – but we had something. We had an old farm. After he left we lost it all. Mother cleaned for people, washed clothes at night, cooked for the railroad.’ Baldwin watched her hands – they were twisting and pulling on the wash rag until he thought the material would tear.

‘She never stopped. She tried to give us something. But we were just drifters, town to town. Always searching for him. Always on some quest that neither Thelma nor I really understood. Never a home. No friends. All we had was the Godawful searching.’ Maggie looked off into the distance. ‘I loved him then, used to pray at night for him to come back. I’d pray every night, Brake, until I fell asleep. I thought I could will him to come home. I felt that everything would be okay if he would just return. He never did. And now that he’s come, and I see who he is, I know things wouldn’t have been okay even if he had.’

Maggie tipped her head forward onto her knees. ‘I think mother went a little crazy,’ she said quietly. ‘She never stopped acting like he was still with her. I used to hear her late at night – talking to him as if he was in the room with her – and I’d be terrified by the sounds. I came to hate him because she couldn’t stop loving him. I still do. She just broke and died.’ She raised her face to him. ‘That man you’re so worried about, Brake, killed my mother. I can’t have him here.’

She continued to rest her head on her knees for a while. Then she raised it and looked up at her husband. ‘He took up with an Indian woman. He left me and my mother for an Indian whore.’ She was sobbing softly. ‘I can’t have him here,’ she said again.

Baldwin stood watching the cottonwoods moving in the slow breeze, then he looked down at her. She seemed small and childlike, sitting there with her arms encircling her knees, her Bible clutched in one hand.

‘We have to do it,’ he said softly. ‘This isn’t about you and him.’

‘No? Then who’s it about?’

‘Our children. That old man is their grandfather.’

‘So?’

‘We can’t have them watch us drive him off, near dead the way he is, like he’s some scavenger. He’s their blood. They have a right to know him – good or bad. You and I don’t have a right to stop them.’ He paused. ‘And they’ll know him in our house.’

‘Then I’ll live in the barn.’

Baldwin studied her face and knew she meant it.

Lily had been arguing with her father for the past half hour. Now she was sitting stiffly on the fireplace hearth, sandwiched between her brother and sister, and looking worn out and near tears. Neither Dot nor James had uttered a single word. Not for, or against. Baldwin guessed their awkward quietness was due to their learning they were blood relations to Jones. But he knew there was more to it. They were frightened by their mother’s sad appearance. She was sitting in a chair a few feet away, preoccupied with seemingly dark thoughts. Normally lively and talkative, her melancholy bothered her younger children more than the news they’d just heard. Still, he figured they’d warm to their new grandfather soon enough.

But glancing at Lily and seeing the cold resolve behind her eyes, he knew she would fight kinship with the old man for a long time. Perhaps forever. Samuel Jones simply didn’t fit in her world. Didn’t fit at all. Since she was a youngster, Lily had wanted her life to be romantic, like the lives she read about in her magazines. He felt badly for her. But feeling badly wouldn’t change what was. Neither would daydreams or passing fancies. And Jones was blood kin.