Robert Lautner - The Road to Reckoning

‘I hear the word trouble again, salesman.’ Heywood came closer. ‘You keep saying that word, salesman. Do you like that word?’

I hold that my father did not know how to speak to these men.

‘What do you want?’ he asked.

‘Am I repeating myself again?’ Heywood came yet closer, he and my father like bride and groom. ‘All you have, I said, didn’t I?’ He lowered his gun, looked at his trash around us. ‘But first I want you to show me how much you love that horseshit pistol of yours. I want you to get that pistol, salesman.’

I suppose now that they had followed us from Milton. Our Brewster would have left marks. They had probably drunk in a saloon in Lewis while we ate and maybe they had kept an eye on Jude Brown and our Brewster on the street. Their wickedness planned with laughter and rum. The banality of evil is in the joviality of the simpleminded.

‘Get yourself a pistol, salesman.’

My father looked over to me.

Heywood laughed. ‘Oh, see him, boys!’ He waved the pistol to my direction. ‘Go on, salesman. Go on! Grab your boy in front again! Bet yourself that I won’t shoot through him!’

The others laughed as cowards laugh around a bully. These men had no wives or children or work that paid. Nothing but themselves. They were children more than I. Their violence and reasoning the same as children, only with lead now instead of sticks, and if there had been no lead or steel it would be sticks still. Everything my father said would be wrong. I had seen boys like this when I backed away from our windows at home. My father could not win. He was me backing away from the laughter in the street.

‘Get your pistol, salesman.’ Thomas lifted his cocked gun and the giggle from Indian-hatband came again.

My father straightened up. ‘If I take it, you will shoot me, or your men will shoot me. If I leave it you will shoot me and take everything anyway. So why not just rob me and be done. And me and my boy will leave these mountains. We will go home, I assure you. We will go home. I am done now.’

‘Rob you? Rob you? Am I a thief now, is it? Are you saying I would shoot you and rob you without a chance? Is that what I am? Am I that low in your eyes?’ He was mad now. It was done.

‘No,’ my father said. ‘It is whatever you want. I will tell no-one. Just let me and my boy go. Take the wagon and the horse and we will walk out of here now and you gentlemen can have it all.’ He moved toward me with his head down, his back to Heywood.

‘You turn your back on me again, you son of a bitch?’

And that was it.

Thomas Heywood fired into my father’s back with a snap of his wrist like throwing a stone. Like nothing. It flashed and sparked like the fire just minutes before and the trees quaked. I think I cried out. My father fell to his knees and disturbed our mugs in the fire, which sputtered with the tea and coals and startled the others to unload into him, their guns lighting the trunks of the trees four more times, Heywood emptying another pistol, and Jude Brown raised his hooves and tried to jump from his tether.

He still whinnied and snorted as my father lay still and the dark came back like a lamp snuffed. Indian-hatband giggled again.

I had never seen the top of my father’s head before. He was going bald. It is foolish how you notice these things.

You may have heard that the dead twitch and jerk as they go on and they may, but I had been saved from that sight. My father simply fell and lay like a cut log, only the dust from his fall showing that he had weight. He had no more movement. His neck was angled and his arms were underneath him, his shoes pointed together.

‘You want the horse?’ asked the man who had left my side as if I was not there.

‘Why would I want a horse with no dick?’ Heywood said. ‘Leave the wagon. Get the guns and the money. Take it all. Leave the boy and the ground.’

The hatband giggler stopped his mirth. ‘Leave the boy?’

‘He’s a boy. Get moving.’

I do not think this was mercy.

I had not stirred past looking at the top of my father’s head. I watched the silver-haired man take Father’s watch and purse and kick him back over again. Someone rubbed Jude Brown’s nose and he settled down while they robbed the wagon. There was laughter at the discovery of the wooden gun and they threw it on my father’s back.

I did not notice them leaving. They said nothing to me and just melted away.

I sat in the dark for a half hour, I guess. Jude Brown tried to talk to me. He just wanted to know that everything was all right, so at some time I stood up and rubbed his neck. I sat up on the Brewster and played his reins through my fingers.

I sat there for hours listening to the owls and the forest creaking, watching shooting stars and hearing things snuffling just outside our camp. Branches fall at night, did you know that? You can be sitting in silence and suddenly something falls and you jump.

Eventually false dawn came and I got down and went to our tin of char cloth and striker. I made a fire. There were flying insects everywhere, even on my hands as I sparked and they did not care. I pulled out the cups from the ash and drank what was in them. They had taken the oven pot.

My father’s body gurgled but I knew he was not alive. After an hour I rolled him over. I recognized nothing about him, and in a way this was easier to me. His mouth was open and bloodied wet and his eyes stared up. I tried to close them but they would not. I tried to close his mouth but his teeth just ground and it flopped back open. It felt like rubbing a brick against another and the feeling of it through my arm made me throw up my belly.

I went through his pockets and got just his compass and spectacles. I picked up the wooden Paterson and stuffed it in my belt. They had tossed away my father’s order book and I stooped and plucked each one of the white paper chits like picking cotton and placed them back.

Dawn now and the birds tried to get rid of me again with their cries. I knew I could not pick up his body. I was not strong enough. I have had to live with that.

I covered him with our blankets, not thinking of the next night, and me and Jude Brown went back the way we came.

I did not cry. Not once. It is very important for you to know that. I would not get anywhere with crying. I wooed Jude Brown and clucked when I wanted him to get along. I do not think he cared anything about what had happened and he stopped when we cleared into wide ground until I fed him. He took an age with his bag, and I chewed corn dodgers for breakfast and waited for him. There was no satisfaction in my eating. I could taste nothing.

When I got back up onto the seat my feet touched the loaded Paterson that my father had practiced with. He had left it underneath and it had moved as I rode. Heywood had not seen it. I took out the wooden one and put it at my feet and put this steel one in its place. Jude Brown took us to a creek and I had to untie him to let him drink. I washed for I had the smell of gunpowder and smoke all over.

I would go back to Milton, back to mister Baker. He knew me and my father. That would do for now.

I had done back through Lewis and on to Milton. It had taken the best part of the day and the town had gone quiet for suppertime when I reached Baker’s store. Mercifully he was still open. I put the guns in the sofkee bag and hid it under the seat.