Percival Everett - Wounded

“Okay.” Tears were streaming down Morgan’s face now.

I gave the horse the shots. Morgan watched as I found the vein, pulled a little blood into the syringe, then pumped the drug into the horse. In just a few minutes, Square’s head was hanging low.

“Is she all right?” Morgan asked.

“High as a kite,” I said. “Come and stand over on this side.” I took the rope and let Morgan walk around me to the right side of the horse. I set the speculum in Square’s mouth, essentially a piece of metal to wedge between the horse’s back teeth, and said, “Morgan, you’re going to have to hold this right here for me, okay, honey?”

She nodded, taking the metal tee of a handle and bracing it against the nose band of the halter.

“Oh, John, what if you can’t get it out?”

I didn’t say anything at first and then I thought that my silence might alarm her more. “This thing, whatever it is, is probably just sticking up through her soft palate. Shouldn’t be a problem.” Of course I didn’t know that at all. The horse began doing what horses do and that was chewing. At least she was trying to chew; the coil of metal of the speculum was in her way. But she was chewing enough that she was catching my knuckles. It hurt like hell, but I had to get the thing out. I couldn’t let this crush Morgan. Instead, my hand was getting crushed. I grabbed the object and it poked me; it had thorns. I didn’t pull back. I was in there now. I grabbed it, a thorn piercing my thumb, and I worked it free and slowly pulled it out. I held it out for Morgan to see. It was a four-inch-long wishbone of a rose twig.

“That’s it?” she said.

“That’s it.”

Morgan looked at my bleeding knuckle and my bleeding thumb. “Your hand,” she said.

“It’s okay.”

I was about to tell her I was all right, to take the horse back and not worry about me, but I was proud that I made a good decision for once, a selfless and right decision, a smart one. I let my friend take care of me. I let her look at the damage, wash me and bandage me and it was good. I let her take care of me and it was right.

I drove to town to pick up butte powder for Morgan’s horse and more for my supplies as well. I needed other things and tried to remember as best I could. Gus had told me to go take care of that and to pick up some groceries and a paper, too. He could feel, I imagined, that I was starting to worry about him and he was essentially kicking me out of the house until I came to my senses.

At the feed store, Myra was shaking her head. “Emily,” she said. “I thought she’d live forever. I thought she and old Clara Monday up on the reservation would never go. But I guess everybody does.”

“Sounds right,” I said.

“How’s Morgan?” she asked.

“It’s hard.”

“It always is,” Myra said. She looked at my stuff on the counter. “Let’s call it fifty even.”

“Okay.”

“You tell Morgan she can call me if she wants to talk. I lost my mother just last year.”

“Myra, I didn’t know. I’ll tell her.”

I walked out of the store and I guess I was looking down or not looking at all because I bumped into somebody. I excused myself and then saw the skinny face of one of the men who had fought with David and Robert. I remembered him immediately. The face of his partner was close behind him.

“Watch yourself, nigger,” the man said.

I’m a grown man with more than my share of self-control, so I ignored him and moved toward my Jeep.

“I said, watch yourself, nigger,” he repeated and gave me an open-handed shove in the shoulder.

I didn’t bother explaining to the malformed creature that he had chosen the wrong man on the wrong day to say the wrong thing. If I had, he might not have been so surprised by the quick left that started in my middle and launched from a coil that had been tightening for years. The bandage on my hand became red again, but not with my blood this time as the idiot’s nose exploded under my punch. The man’s apish friend took a dash at me, but I guess it was the look in my red eyes or the recocking of my bloody fist that stopped him. The bigger man examined his friend’s face, then renewed his resolve and glared at me.

I readjusted my package under my right arm. “And I kinda liked him,” I said and didn’t move away.

He looked back to the bloody face.

I walked to my rig and drove off to the grocery market, feeling bad and good, relieved and soiled.

I wouldn’t tell Gus about the confrontation. At best, the story would have reaffirmed his suspicion of this part of the country and, at worst, he would have wanted to drive into town and find the bastards. I was putting the food away when he came downstairs into the kitchen.

“How’s Morgan?” he asked.

“Good.”

He let out a soft whistle and from the blanket the little coyote dragged herself across the floor toward him, almost balancing on her three legs, almost hopping. Her little face was open and panting.

“How about that,” I said.

“Something, eh?”

I nodded.

“I’ve named her.”

“Again? I thought her name was Spirit or some such thing.”

“Her name is Emily. Do you think Morgan will mind? I mean I’m not going to tell her today.”

I watched Gus go to his knee and give the puppy a scratch. “I don’t think she’ll mind at all, Gus. I think she’ll like it.”

“By the way, that mule is out.”

“Well, of course he is,” I said.

“Been out better part of the day.”

“He’s going to have to stay out. I can’t be fussing with that fool animal tonight. I’m going to feed and then go over to Morgan’s.”

“Good. I’ll make a dinner plate for her.” Gus gained his feet and walked over to the refrigerator. “And I don’t want you rushing back in the morning. I can feed everybody here and if I go out there and find a horse with an extra leg or a bear in the tack room, I’ll call you.”

Emily’s funeral was a quiet affair. She had not been particularly religious during her life and no one saw fit to impose that on her now. A couple hundred people showed up at the Lutheran church where the Lutheran minister apologized for being a minister and mentioned a couple of nice things about the deceased, among them the fact that she had once repeatedly hauled her stock trailer up a burning mountain to rescue horses and the fact that she had come to sit with his own dying wife years ago. The minister said, “Emily didn’t express or show objection to my praying by my wife’s bedside and I won’t insult her beliefs by praying now.” Everyone mumbled agreement and the service was over in fifteen minutes.

“Now, that’s a funeral,” Gus said.

There was no graveside ceremony. Emily would be cremated and her ashes picked up by Morgan on Thursday. On that Monday, about fifty people gathered at Morgan’s house and ate food they had brought and more or less got in the way, hanging about in changing clusters in the kitchen, living room, and in the yard.

Duncan Camp and I stood on the porch and looked out over the pasture. I told him about Square’s twig.

“Horses,” he said. “Suicidal bastards, every one. You’re lucky it stopped in the front like that. And that she didn’t gnaw your finger off.”

“You got that right.”

He took a long, deep breath. “You think Morgan will do okay here alone?” Duncan asked. “This is a big place.”

“She’ll do fine.”

“I guess so. She and the old lady held it down pretty good.”

“They did,” I said.

“Well, we’ll check on her, won’t we?”

I nodded.

Myra came outside, screen door smacking shut behind her. She pulled her sweater tight against the chilly air. “John, Morgan went upstairs. She asked me to find you and tell you to get your ass up there.”