Nelson Nye: Rafe

Rafe

Nelson Nye

1962

*****

Rafe jerked his pistol, firing as soon as it cleared the holster. The middle horse reared and, toppling sideways, crashed into the one on its left, kicking frantically. Something jerked at Rafe's vest. The pfutt pfutt of slugs was around him like hornets. He shot the third horsebacker out of his saddle and ran on, trying in the confusion of kaleidoscoping shapes to sight Spangler. The shots and gunblasts beat at him like hammers. A whickering riderless horse slamming past nearly bowled him over and then, unbelievably, the street was empty, the drumming of hoofbeats rapidly fading in the south.

*****

I

It was hotter than the bottom of Lucifer's skillet. Heat hung like smoke above the Sulfur Springs Valley, turning the Cherrycows gray as slate; and the lesser mountains north and south were almost lost in the shimmering haze that draped them like a tangle of cobwebs.

The hands stood straight up on Rafe's tarnished watch and, squinting into the glare, he cursed. He had run out of grub the other side of the pass and two mornings ago had chewed the last of his jerky; his canvas watersack, snagged by thorns, refused to yield even so much as a gurgle. Pitching it away in disgust he stepped down, for his skewbald mare was about at the end of her rope by the look. Peering into the sky he shook a fist at the buzzards. "Bastards!" he croaked in a cracked off-key whisper.

He was a yellow-haired man, gaunt in ragged red shirt and baggy-kneed trousers. The yellow silk of a Confederate cavalry sash was partially obscured by a brush scarred vest which had once cost money and was attractively spangled with flowers embroidered by somebody's needle. Likewise showing a deal of hard usage were the boots into which his pants had been stuffed, but the spurs were silver and bright as new coins where the sun struck across them.

Now his eyes sharpened. A streamer of dust crept up out of the west. Coming from low hills were a number of specks; horses, Rafe decided, and humping along like the devil beating tanbark.

Straight out across the flats they spilled in a ragged line, hellity-larrup like a bunch of red Indians. They were still too far off to be heard but would cross his tracks hardly a quarter mile away. He climbed back on the mare and, swinging his reins, whipped her forward in a shambling run.

It was all open here, a cactus-strewn waste of wind-riffled sand. What air there was was like the breath from a furnace, but as the horsebackers bore down he started waving his hat in great circles, hoarsely shouting to make sure he was sighted.

There were seven in the bunch—he could see that much. They showed no intention of pulling up or veering toward him. Badly rattled, Rafe fired his six-shooter. They couldn't fail to hear that.

When they kept straight on he could scarcely believe his own eyes. They never even turned their heads to peer back at him.

He pulled the floundering mare to a halt, conscious of the trembling of her legs beneath the leathers. Some of the things he yelled would have set a white oak post to smoking. But the outfit kept on, a swirling, swift-dwindling column of dust eventually lost against the far horizon.

Long before this Rafe was out of the saddle, dragging the black-and-white mare by the reins, shouting and cursing, plunging furiously after them, stumbling, falling, scrambling crab-fashion up and erratically staggering, the breath sawing through his cracked lips like gagging. Not until exhaustion left him sprawled on the sand like a ruptured duck did he finally give up, great tears of rage rolling over the weather-toughened, beard-stubbled cheeks.

When reason returned and he got his chin from the grit, the yonder slopes were red with the last rays of the sun. He got up slowly, half fried from the heat, his bleared vision taking in the empty waterless flats, the barren hills all about. A terrible sigh welled out of him. The mare lay on her side, spavined legs stuck out, half sunk in the burning sand, tied to his fate by the reins still clutched in a tight shut fist.

It took a good while, a deal of yanking and prodding, to convince the fool critter she was not beyond aid. Moving around to her rear he tailed her like a bogged-down cow. He got her hind end up and there she stuck, groaning piteously. He might have gone off and left her if his case hadn't been so desperate. He whacked her rump with a piece of rope cactus; she lunged onto her feet squealing like a stuck pig. Then she whirled, ears flat, trying to bite when he caught up with her. A lump of sugar from his pockets consummated an uneasy truce. Reins bent over his shoulder he set off, pointing east, in the tracks left by the inhospitable seven.

He lost count of the times their waning strength forced halts. Ever and again they went stumbling on while the moon came up and millions of stars winked down, bright as sparkling emeralds; but Rafe had no mind for beauty. There was a bulldog clamp to the thrust of his jaw and he kept his stare hard-fixed to the trail.

But even a concentration as indomitable as his could not withstand entirely the needs and adjustments of nature. He was seeing things now which no longer had substance—faces and shapes floating out of his past. He was beginning to babble the croakings and gibberish that accompany delirium. His father's face came up out of the tracks. He saw young Duke and his sister Luce, the hardscrabble hills of the Bender farm with the sedge pushing up from the worn out earth, the frowsy tangle of sassafras and locust, just as he remembered from the day he'd gone off with his squirrel rifle to find Jeb Stuart and whip the Yanks.

Eleven years ago! It seemed like only yesterday he had marched away with a heart filled to bursting and a head full of nonsense. There hadn't been a bit of romance to it! War was blood and guts and the stink of broken bodies. Cannon smoke and bullet screech, the screams and curses of mutilated men.

He was screaming himself as the ugly sights took shape in his brain. The skewbald mare reared back on her bits, snorting and shaking; by main strength he dragged her on into the flare and the flashings while the big guns rumbled and banged all about him. Retching and grasping he went stumbling on through the stinking mud, his one good hand holding hard to the reins, mind clenched fierce to his faith in Jeb Stuart—someway old Beauty would pull him clear.

Next thing he knew he was flat in the mud—sticky end slimy as a fistful of slobbers. The moon was gone and a cold wind blew, whining through the sparse grass and ghostly patches of chaparral; far away on his right tiny points of light were blinking like a huddle of fireflies.

He didn't know, by God, if he could get up or not, but he finally made it. The growth near enough to touch and to feel was beaded with moisture and the night wasn't far enough gone for dew. He had no memory of rain, but the clammy bind of his sodden clothes and the quaggy give of the ground underfoot appeared to imply there'd been patches of time which had got clean away from him.

A peculiar sound, like castanets, crept into his notice and was suddenly pinned down for the chatter of teeth; with this awareness he began shivering and shaking as the damp bit deeper into his bones. He guessed he was probably coming down with something. His head felt funny and his face, when he touched it, was hot as a stove lid. He knew damned well he couldn't walk another mile.

He tried to get onto the skewbald mare but his foot and the stirrup wouldn't get together. He got hold of the horn but his bumbling attempts to heave himself up eventually wore out the animal's patience. With a panicked snort she flung up her head and fled from his reach.

The goddamn wind was rough as a cob. It shoved him around like a cork on a fishline. When the lights spun into his vision again he set off, stumbling toward them, muttering like a man in his cups. He saw Duke again, the Old Man and his mother, the side-hill farm that was back in the Ozarks and the bull-tongue plow he had bucked through the stumps.