Colin Winnette - Haints Stay

“No.”

“Would you like a family some day? Do you believe this town could restore itself? If we help, maybe? Do you think we could keep this town in some kind of decent shape, for when more people come? When the town grows again?”

To this, he said nothing. He was watching out the window. The snow was burying them. It wouldn’t stay forever. They could dig themselves out and get back to work. They had only a few more days of this. A week at most. They were not trapped. They were not in danger. They had only to wait.

The infant would not stop screaming. She had no milk for it, no liquid with which to feed it. Only a few scraps of food and the snow she could melt in her hands for drinking. She chewed a bit of dried beef and tried to spit it into the baby’s mouth, but it would not accept it. She rode on through the night and put the sun at her back as it began to rise. The horse was flagging. She was flagging. The baby was screaming and screaming and screaming. She did not know this baby. She did not have the body warmth to keep it alive. She did not know the man she had killed. From what she could tell, everyone from the town was dead. Everyone except for Mary and Bird. And they needed her. She had to survive for them and find her way back. She rode until the horse began to falter. She pushed it a bit farther and it finally bent its front knees and brought her down into the snow. The baby fell from her. It disappeared into several feet of snow without a sound, like a twig into a canyon. But then it began to scream again. The horse’s hocks gave then and she was suddenly in the snow and thanking the heavens that the horse had not crushed her. The child would not stop screaming. She had made a poor decision, coming out here. She had put herself at risk and the child was no better off. She had pursued the man unthinkingly and brought herself to this low point. There was no way of anticipating the snowfall. Now the snow would fall and it would keep falling and falling, as the baby kept screaming and screaming.

It was difficult to move. She wasn’t pinned, but was bound up by her clothing and finding it hard to lift or turn. She dropped to her side, into the snow and shook her sleeves back from her wrists, opening up the space around her elbows. Snow poured in, wedged itself between her coat and dress, and began to melt. She lifted herself onto an elbow and rose. She separated herself from the horse. It turned onto its side, obviously disliking the snow but without the strength to rise and shake it from its hair. She shook what she could from her arms and torso and lifted the baby from its pocket of snow. She removed a crude knife from the few belongings she’d taken from the man she’d killed. She plunged the knife into the belly of the horse and brought it down. The horse screamed and thrashed and landed a blow to her side, likely cracking a rib. She rose and opened the animal, releasing a pocket of steam. Blood and slick innards she could not identify spilled onto the snow for a moment but then seemed to reach an equilibrium and come to rest. The horse protested then, but only for a moment before going still. She wrapped herself around the infant and squeezed whatever parts of herself she could into the horse’s husk. Everything from her waist up was still exposed. Her legs were slick and sliding out. Nothing would stay put. She warmed slightly, but not for long. Her pants were wet now. There was nothing to set her heels upon. Nothing that would hold her. Only the snow and the meat and the hard bits she slid from. The baby was still screaming. She couldn’t think, so she didn’t try to.

Brooke started thinking about love once the snow began to fall. He’d met his wife during a brutal snowstorm, many years ago. The circumstances weren’t far from those of his current situation. He’d left the riders he was with. He’d struck out on his own. They were getting a reputation, and with that came a sense of obligation to this or that, and they started spending more time deciding who they were going to hunt down and how than actually getting after it. It wasn’t a bitter parting, but a necessary one. Hunting or no, they took the desert paths when they could. Slept in caves or alongside springs. It was by riding with these men that he had learned how to best survive the situation in which he’d currently found himself. He knew it well. Even if life did not repeat itself, there were certainly echoes that rang out forever. He had no doubt that he could survive out here for as long as it would take him to find the next place to be. There was water. Some plants. He didn’t need much. It wasn’t fun, and he was losing weight like a broken bucket drains water, but he could keep it all going if he had to.

It was clean. Or clean enough, their parting. They’d stopped for water and Brooke told one of the men he was thinking of riding off and trying to see if the rumors were true about making money digging in the earth. There were stories all the time about men finding a life’s fortune in rocks or oil, just under the sand, or in their own backyards. He figured he would take a stab at it. Ride out a bit and see what he could find.

“So you’re done here?” said the man.

Brooke could not picture his face.

“I think so,” he said, or something equally plain.

And that was that. The man Brooke could not remember went to the water to fill his canteen like every other man, and Brooke rode on. He had no interest at all in digging in the dirt, but it was time to get away. Going off on your own was enough like greed to be made sense of and not resented. These men understood greed. They even liked it, provided it did not interfere with a plan. Some of the most pleasurable exchanges they had over the campfire were about all the rotten things they’d done, or all that had gone wrong, in pursuit of a dollar or two, or a woman, or both.

Brooke had been full of stories then, full of the lives of all those men. He’d felt as if he’d lived one hundred lives. Walking up and down along this desert creek now, it was hard to distinguish this from that, or to remember who said what or how any story ended or began. There was a lot of middle. A lot of in between. The edges of each tale were worn and indistinguishable.

He remembered that one man was able to escape a hanging because the sheriff who had captured him left the cell unlocked. How such a thing could have happened, or what the man had done after, Brooke had no sense of. He remembered picturing the man’s hand as it came down upon the cell door to rest, and the door just squeaking open then, and all the joy and surprise the man must have felt realizing that he had back his freedom.

Many of the men at his side had lost their families. Most to violence, a few to disease. Some to their own bad habits of drinking or gambling. Brooke’s head was filled with images of outfits, gangs, marauders, riding right up to a ranch’s front door and taking everything they pleased then destroying the rest. That was just the way of things. They themselves weren’t so different. Between each of the towns was pure wilderness, and what came bearing down upon civilization was beyond imagination, for most. He’d seen plenty, but he was still capable of surprise. He was not hardened to a measure of awe and respect for what the wilderness was capable of producing. Snow was bearing down upon him. Snow was obscuring the rocks and shrubs and horizon. The stream was still undeniably at his side, but if the snow kept up it would freeze and get buried with the rest. Brooke was now of the mind that once a thing began there was no use in expecting it to end any place short of total devastation. The first few flakes of snow signaled an impending snowstorm, regardless of how the sky looked. He was to be severed from and discarded by the world. Here and now, he would meet his quiet end.