HILLRUNNER

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

34.  GRACIE’S VEIL

 

The Sheriff was leaned back against the rock, his eyes closed.

His Apple-horse picked at what little grass was growing on the high shelf.

The Sheriff looked to be asleep, and the stallion not far from it, at least until his head came around and his ears swung on a sound and the mouth under the iron grey mustache smiled ever so slightly.

“Hello, Gracie,” he said without opening his eyes.

“Hello yourself,” she said, swinging down from her Brindle-mule.  “How did you know it was me?”

Your mule and my stallion are about the only saddle stock I’d trust up that path,” he replied quietly as she smoothed her skirts under her and sat on the vacant, thick-folded saddle blanket on the shelf beside him.

“You smell good,” he continued.  “I’ll bet you had a bath this week.”

Gracie laughed, swatted his arm.  “I’ll bet you say that to all the girls!”

“Only when I can get ‘em to laugh,” he admitted, then pushed his hat brim up with one finger.

She watched his eyes open a little, marveled yet again at how he could look so cold and hard and inflexible one moment, and so warm and open and welcoming the next, and with no perceptible change of expression.

She leaned back against the almost-smooth rock face, grateful it still held a trace of warmth from the earlier sun.

“So this is your High Lonesome.”

“Yep.”

“Here is where you come to think.”

“Yep.”

“Or seek the wisdom of the elders.”

“Yep.”
“You don’t seem surprised to hear me say that.”

“Nope.”

Gracie frowned, considered.  “Did my Grandma –”

“She never came here,” he interrupted.  “Matter of fact there’s been less than a dozen been here in the past hundred years that weren’t family.”

Gracie blinked, turning her head just a little the way someone will when they’re trying hard to catch a faint sound.

“This is a Place of Power.”

It was not a question.

“Yep.”

“And today, when the Veil is thinnest –”

“Ghosts walk.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“Don’t I?”  She saw the corner of his left eye – he sat on her right and his face was in profile – she saw the corner of his left eye tighten up a little, and the weathered laugh-wrinkles came into view.

“Sheriff, my Grandma knew much more than I ever will.  She gave me her Gift when she handed me the blade in church, but she never spoke much of it, she just seemed to know things.”

“Yep.”  He continued staring at the far horizon, blinking occasionally.

Grace looked down and the handle of his revolver caught her eye.

He doesn’t usually carry his Colts, she thought, and those grips are awfully white …

“Your Grandma knew things, all right,” the lean lawman agreed, blinking like a sleepy cat.  “She took one look at my wife and told her she was pregnant, and we hadn’t but planted the seed the night before.”  He turned his head and looked at Grace and she was surprised to see something in his expression she’d never seen in her entire life.

She saw a gentle smile.

“Since my wife died, things happened … they happen when there’s to be a birth, she’ll leave a rose on the mother’s pillow.  She’s left a rose when there’s been a death.  Folks know it, they expect it, they don’t talk about it.”  He looked back to the distant sky line, jagged with granite mountain-teeth locked in its hazy margin.

Grace blinked, confused, and she looked at his Apple-horse.

Something was different about the halter.

Something …

Newer leather? she wondered.  It doesn’t look like it did –

A voice to her left startled her and she realized she’d heard the scrape of iron shod hooves on the path:  another stallion’s head, a neck, then the Appaloosa’s chest and legs and of course the rider came into view, and Sheriff Linn Keller grinned and declared, “Hello, Gracie!”

Grace stared, her mouth open, then she turned and looked at the Sheriff on her right –

She looked back to the Sheriff on her left –

“I, what, um,” she stammered, and Old Pale Eyes rumbled, “Recall you said somethin’ about seeking the wisdom of the elders?”

Linn dismounted, dropped Apple-horse’s reins.  “He’s the elder.”

Grace seized the arm on her right, the shirtsleeved limb casually propped over a knee.

It was solid, it was warm, it was strong.

“Real enough for you?” 

His eyes were quiet, amused.

“The Veil?”  she squeaked.

“Travelin’ is easier right about now,” Old Pale Eyes admitted.  “Most times shades stay in the Hereafter, their choice or not.  Me … I like comin’ back to see what’s goin’ on.”

“He’s also helping me think,” Linn grinned. 

“Think?”  Grace echoed, puzzled, looking from one Appaloosa stallion to another.

“If I get stuck, if I need to get off by myself and think.  He has a lifetime of experience to draw on.  I’m not at all bashful to ask for that help.”

“He’s smarter’n he looks,” Old Pale Eyes deadpanned.

“Which proves the Lord is merciful,” Linn continued, never missing a beat.

“I come up here from time to time.  Sometimes it’s to ask some good sound advice.  Sometimes I just talk the situation out on the air and see what it sounds like.  Besides … up here nobody thinks I’m just talking to myself.”

“What about the other ghosts?  I mean … aren’t there a lot of them?”

Linn and the Old Sheriff both laughed. 

“That would get just awfully crowded, now, wouldn’t it?”  Old Pale Eyes said gently, his voice resonating deep in his chest. 

“More’n I can keep track of!”  the older Sheriff admitted.  “No, once we cross over into the Valley, we generally don’t want to come back, not unless it’s important.”

“Like having a question,” Linn agreed.

“I see,” Grace said faintly.

“You were afraid the floodgates would open and the whole darn graveyard would come a-strollin’ into town.”

Grace gave the old lawman a long, wide-eyed look, and nodded.

“You’re here,” she said, her voice carefully steady, “and he’s here” – she nodded to Linn – “and you’re dead for a long time but you’re here.”

“Yep,” Old Pale Eyes agreed, amusement in his voice and in his expression.  “Damned if I ain’t!”

“If you’re here … who else can get here?”

“I can,” a woman’s voice said, and a cool hand clamped around Gracie’s forehead, and of a sudden she was dizzy and the world spun around her, one quick turn, the passing granite face turning into the front of the Silver Jewel, only the curtains were different –

A hand seized her arm, pulled her back.

“Scuse me,” a familiar voice rumbled, his other arm coming around her back at shoulder blade level.

She heard the clatter of hooves – horses, running, running hard –

Grace turned her head and looked –

Firelands was not as she remembered it:  the street was dirt and a little rutted in places, the buildings were all wood except for – oh, never mind that, she thought as her eyes widened and she saw three matched white mares thundering side-by-side up the street, a big red-shirted Irishman with a fiercely curled mustache standing in the driver’s box, swinging a blacksnake whip in a big circle and snapping a hole in the air three feet above the middle mare’s ears.

Another grinning man with just as curled a handlebar and just as red a shirt hauled on the lanyard, bringing the clapper back against the bell, and she heard the pistol-shot of the whip and heard the big Irishman singing for the joy of song, she heard the fire bell and she felt the earth beneath her work boots shiver with the punishing gallop of three firehorses, set loose to do the one thing in the world they loved more than anything else, and that was to run, to run –

“RUN, LADIES RUN!” she heard, and she realized the Irishman’s song was a shout:  “ST. FLORIAN, ST. CHRISTOPHER AND THE BLESSED MOTHER, LADIES, FLY!”

Little boys and stray dogs chased after the steam powered fire engine, yelling, barking, and she gaped as the spectacle passed her, all shining red and gold trim and grinning Irishmen and she was back on the High Lonesome, her feet were flat on the rock shelf and Old Pale Eyes had her arm and his arm around behind her and she spun and seized him like a drowning man will seize a life-ring.

“I’ve got you, dear heart, I’ve got you,” he soothed, and she shivered, panting, pressing her forehead into his chest, eyes wide, still seeing the mares, the Irishman, still hearing the cast clapper strike the gleaming bronze firebell –

She was falling, falling as if she’d stepped off the rim rock, fighting to gain some control –

She was standing in front of the Mercantile, but the Mercantile as it was – she knew this, somehow – across from her, that’s where the library would be, built by Kentucky carpenters at the behest of the pale eyed Sheriff –

But where … no.

I know where I am.

I need to know when I am!

Again, horses, at a gallop:  a whistle, a yell, little boys and stray dogs came running and yelling and barking, and the stage came into town, all harness bells and sweating horses and a brightly-painted coach:  mail was tossed to the grinning boy waiting on the boardwalk, passengers unfolded themselves from hard seats and a long journey, and the driver waited until they were on the boardwalk.

“We’ll stay here for the night, folks,” he said, “the Silver Jewel yonder has the best food and cleanest beds in the Territory.  Notions if you’re inclined here in the Mercantile, get some rest, we’ll pull out at first light!”

He did not wait for a reply, nor did he really expect any; he snapped the reins and the sweating, bit-clattering chestnuts leaned into their collars and headed for the livery:  even had he not guided them there, they knew the way to grain and to water and to a rub down and a friendly pasture:  fresh horses would be harnessed in the morning, and this team would have a few days before being called on to pull the stage back the other direction.

Grace felt a familiar presence, she felt the animal warmth of the pale eyed lawman standing beside her.

“Watch close,” he rumbled, then he stepped forward, directly in front of a couple.

She saw the lean, worn-looking man shift his weight, ever so slightly, and she realized the man looked very much like –

It’s him! she thought, her chest tightening with the realization.

He’s – it’s him – it’s – oh dear God, it’s –

Old Pale Eyes stuck out his hand.  “Sullivan Maxwell, as I live and breathe,” he said, and the man shook the proffered hand, albeit with a mistrustful expression.

“Nobody here knows you.  I understand you and your family are moonshiners and carpenters.”

“Who the hell are you, mister?”  Sullivan asked suspiciously.

“I’m the Sheriff, name’s Keller, and it’s my business to know things.  I know you are falsely accused and I know you are safe here, and I know men come West to make a new life and often times a new name.  Was anyone to come a-followin’ you they’d ask for a man and wife by the name of Maxwell.  Might be time to use another one.”

Linn nodded to the neatly painted and trimmed hostelry across the street and down a little.

“Yonder is the Silver Jewel.  I’ve not et yet and I’d be pleased if you’d join me.  You figured to set down here, you’ll need land and you’ll need to know the territory.”

“How do I know I kin trust you?”  Sullivan asked suspiciously, his Kentucky accent a little subdued, but still there.

“Ask her,” the Sheriff said, nodding to the man’s wife:  “she can tell when a man is lyin’, hidin’ or cheatin’.”

The woman turned a little pale and whispered, “How did you know?”

“I know you have the Second Sight.  I know you were born with a veil over the face and you never saw your father.  You can blow fire and stop blood with the Word and you have done both, and you know when someone is going to die, and you can look at a woman and know she carries life in her belly.”

The two Kentucky natives were looking at the Sheriff with less suspicion than fear.

“Only a woman could know that.”

“Only a woman with the Sight, yes, I know.  My Mama had the Sight and if she’d birthed a firstborn daughter, she would have been the seventh firstborn female, and a Woman of Power.  She got me instead.”  His eyes were pale, but not cold, and not hard:  Gracie watched closely, listened closely.

“I’ve got just enough of her Gift to scare me.  Now if we keep talkin’ my stomach is gonna start t’ chew on my back bone.  I’d be pleased if you two would stay but we’d best start with a meal before I die of starvation!”

Gracie staggered back against the rock wall, gripped a stony projection, shivered as she got her bearings.

“You’ll learn to handle it,” Linn said reassuringly, gripping her shoulder:  she reached up, seized his wrist and whispered, “Don’t let go of me!”

“No more travelin’, Gracie,” Linn replied in a quiet and fatherly voice.  “You just met your first relatives to move out here.  More came and joined them.  You just met your namesake and she kept looking at you like she knew you.”

“Sullivan,” Gracie whispered.  “And Peetie.”

Linn nodded, smiling a little.  “Her name was same as yours.  Patricia Grace Maxwell.  Old Pale Eyes said Sullivan always called her Peetie.  He did it to tease her, when they were children, and then it became his name for her.”

“How did all that happen?”  Gracie whispered, not daring to release the reassuring solidity of the Sheriff’s wrist.

“You’ll learn to control your Gift, with time and with practice.  Old Pale Eyes had to take hold of you to keep you from a-goin’ off on your own.”

Grace looked at him with frightened eyes.

“I would have gone on my own?”  she squeaked.

Linn nodded solemnly.

“I’m glad he had a good hold on me!”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

35.  “OURS!”

 

That pale eyed old Sheriff with the iron-grey mustache stood slowly and sized up the taller individual with the well-dressed visitors.

He wore a traditional Chinese suit and the black slippers the Chinese preferred, he wore a funny little hat and his hair was braided into a pigtail, but this is not what held the Sheriff’s attention.

This man smelled of death, and of swift death, and the Sheriff knew that he would have to kill him very quickly indeed.

The other two men wore suits, their shoes were shined, they were very tidy in their appearance; one an American, one a Chinaman, and on the Sheriff’s desk, a leather pouch, carelessly dumped over, with gold coin cascading out as if it were a mere trifle.

“No.”

The Sheriff’s voice was hard-edged.

“Surely the price is reasonable,” the Oriental businessman said in a smooth, almost oily voice.

“No deal.  Get out.”

Silence, coldness cascaded off the Sheriff and spread like a chilled pool around him; time splintered, shivered into a thousand bright, shining shards, and he knew he was half a heartbeat away from finding just how fast and how deadly this big fellow was.

Neither man so much as blinked as a Winchester’s action snarled in the silence.

The businessman did not change expression; his eyes never left the Sheriff’s.

“That would be very unwise,” he said slowly, enunciating each word very precisely.

“You’re dead first, Long Tall dies next, after that what do you care?”

Jacob’s voice was quiet.

There was no need to raise it to be heard.

Nor was there any need to say another word – as a matter of fact there was no time – the Oriental businessman was not a stranger to violence, but the sight of the Sheriff with a revolver in hand, his draw too fast to follow, was a shock, as was the sudden fall of his towering bodyguard.

The bodyguard had turned, spun, slashed with a short, heavy butterfly sword, intending to cleave the threat:  Jacob was not where he was expected to be – he was squatted well low, barely visible around the corner, where the hallway came into the office from back between the jail cells -- and when whistling death slashed down, the .44-40 slug intended for the Chinaman’s head split on the blade, and the blade barely missed the rifle’s muzzle, a tenth of a second before the Sheriff’s pistol ball drove through the base of the black braid and ended any further hostilities.

There were two men in black, carefully tailored suits.

The one that had been negotiating, speaking with his oily voice, stood shocked at the sight of this pale eyed American, too quick for his experienced eye to follow, squirting a dirty finger of fire from machined steel that extended magically, impossibly fast, from his extended hand.

The other man in a suit – also Oriental, slightly older, perhaps – spoke first.

“Perhaps,” he said quietly into the ringing silence, “one should arrange the body’s removal.”

The two bowed to one another, and the unctuous, oily-voiced businessman hesitated before inquiring of the Sheriff, “Might one inquire of your local funeral facilities?”

The Sheriff casually reloaded his left-hand Colt, eased it back down into its carved holster, the hammer nose down on his buryin’ money. 

“Two doors up,” he said, “this same side.”

“Thank you.  I will arrange to have … this … removed.”

The Sheriff nodded.

Jacob stood casually in the middle of the cellblock hallway and watched the man leave before sliding a fresh round through the ’76 rifle’s loading gate.

He waited until the two were gone before bending down to pick up the still-warm empty.

 

Linn Keller frowned as the diplomat laid out his case.

The Bear Killer, it was claimed, is descended from a rare animal, lost in a San Francisco fire.  The family would like to have that rare lineage back.

Linn frowned.

“If I understand rightly,” he said slowly, “that escaped pair of black Mountain Mastiffs bred with another pair, either red or brindle, ‘long towards Nevada, and there’s Rocky Mountain wolf in the mix as well.  I don’t see how this could be the same strain.”

“Nevertheless, I am tasked with obtaining your Bear Killer on their behalf.”

Linn’s eyes turned just a bit pale.

“No.”

“Eh?”  The representative of the Diplomatic Service was a man unaccustomed to the sudden appearance of a brick wall:  his was the world of negotiation, of discussion, of compromise.

“The Bear Killer is neither for sale, nor is he a commodity.”  Linn’s voice took an edge, something else the representative was not used to.  “He is part of my family.  I would not sell my son.  I will not sell The Bear Killer.”

“Perhaps …”  The diplomat spread his hands.  “Perhaps a better price, then.”

“The hell with your money and the hell with theirs as well.  The answer is no.”

“But surely –”

“There might be a solution.”

This, too, took the diplomatic negotiator aback. 

Usually he was the one to suggest an alternative approach.

“It would be easier to transport seed.”

“Seed?”

“Artificial insemination, ever hear of it?”

The representative looked uncomfortable.  “I don’t see how –”

“You would not fly a stud bull in here from France to get a particular strain in your herd, you’d fly in a vial of seed and inseminate the fresh heifers.  Same here.  If your client wants that blood line back, I can offer a vial of seed.”

“I … will see if that is acceptable,” the representative said, as if he’d bitten into something distasteful:  he rose and ignored the Sheriff’s extended hand.

Linn waited until the man left his office before picking up the phone, punching a number.

“Connie, is The Bear Killer in sight?  Good, keep him inside and if any strangers show up, prepare to repel boarders, I’m on my way.”

Connie Keller hung up the phone, quietly, very precisely, then she reached up, coming up on tiptoe, gripped the shotgun hidden above the cupboards.

The Bear Killer came to his feet at the sight of the abbreviated pump gun.

Connie turned it over, looked at the magazine and saw cartridge brass, pressed the release and brought the breech block back, saw an empty chamber.

She turned, looked out the kitchen window, swung left and right, scanning as wide a view of their back yard as she could manage, then she slipped into the living room, opened a sliding door, turned on a bank of monitors, turned on the sound pickup from the barn.

If anyone wanted to come after the house, the barn would be a logical staging point, and the horses would not be happy with strangers.

Connie looked down at The Bear Killer, who yawned, showing off his impressive array of fighting dentistry.

The baby and two-year-old Wes were both asleep upstairs.

She turned, looked out the window toward the driveway, anxious for the appearance of her husband’s approaching Jeep.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

36.  CODE NAME VALKYRIE

 

The man was obviously Oriental, and very much out of place.

Linn stopped and stillness and death flowed from him like an enveloping cloak suddenly gone liquid, death and silence formed an invisible, black, very hungry pool around him as he stood in front of his closed office door.

“You are Pale Eyes,” his visitor said, the epicantic folds creasing a little – a smile, an intimidation? Linn thought.

“I would speak,” the stranger said.

“Talk, then.”  Linn was assessing the newcomer’s appearance, his stance, where he might be carrying weapons, what they might be:  he stood ready to rush, duck, draw and fire –

The stranger turned, looked at a large book, like a scrapbook, on the table beside him.

He reached over, laid nail-trimmed fingertips on the book.

“Your mother,” he said, “is here.”

Linn nodded to the door on his left.  “In there.”

Barrents came in the front door, walked into a palpable wall of tension:  right away Linn saw his segundo’s shoulders round a little, and he seemed to compact just a little and the Sheriff knew his right hand man was instantly ready for a fight.

Barrents could smell death on the air and he was ready.

The black-haired visitor in the Chinese coat and loose trousers picked up the book and smiled ever so slightly, then turned to face the Navajo chief deputy.

“Your father,” he said in a slightly-accented voice, “is here as well.”  His black eyes never changed as he added, “Your father cut my father’s throat.”

 

How did I ever get into this mess?  Willamina thought as a bullet spanged off the rock beside her.

She saw movement, a gunbarrel; she brought up her M4 carbine, took a quick sight, squeezed off one round, saw the enemy head snap back, saw red blood and white teeth and the gunbarrel rise and then fall as her bullet took the man between the eyes.

Colonel Willamina Keller’s segundo, a black-eyed Navajo, grinned when he saw her flinch away from the bullet-strike, then fire one, and only one shot.

“One shot, white man get meat,” he declared happily, and then froze as he saw another man, this with a scoped rifle, climbing a little rise, looking toward his boss’s position.

Barrents slung his rifle and scrambled after him.

He knew he’d need both hands to get through the steep terrain, and he saw the narrow path along the rock he’d have to travel, and his obsidian eyes tightened a little at the corners, for he’d traveled goat paths in the mountains for the sheer fun of it, and this would not be different.

 

Willamina looked at the one man who faced her.

He was black-eyed and black-haired and dirty, and he had an expression of sheer hate on his face, a look she knew well.

Her eyes were pale and hard and she felt the flesh tighten across her face and her blood was up and as he tossed his Kalashnikov to the side and drew his curved native blade, Willamina’s lips drew back to reveal even, white teeth, and she set her M4 carbine aside, propping it against a rock, and she drew her Ka-Bar.

She brought the blade up, licked its edge, spun it in her grip, taking it point-down like an icepick.

She’d spent hours working on the knife, she’d gotten the edge shaving-sharp for its entire length, then she worked on the false edge, getting it just as sharp:  she practiced knife fighting with the best edged-weapon fighters she could find, draft or bully into pairing off with her:  she’d killed them and they’d killed her, all in practice, and now, now she was going to see if all that hard work was worth it.

Nobody was there to see the contest, none but a lone sniper, settling into position, working the butt of his rifle into his shoulder, frowning, shifting his rifle’s scarred fore-end a little, getting his hand palm-down ahead of him, the fore-end riding in the web of his hand, almost as if he was resting an arrow just before releasing its string.

He lowered his head, pressed the smooth cheekpiece against his face, studying the scene a couple hundred yards away.

He never heard the whisper of Navajo moccasins on Afghan rock behind him, he never knew death was upon him until a hard hand seized his forehead and yanked his head back, not until a honed blade parted his throat from Adam’s apple to spine.

The sniper rifle fired, but the shot went well high and to the side.

“Your ancestor,” the Chinaman said, “was known to my fifth great grandfather.”

“Oh?”  Linn’s voice was cold; he stood back a little from the table as his visitor opened the scrapbook.

“Your Republic,” the black-eyed visitor said, “had visitors.”  He looked up at the Sheriff, his face expressionless.  “Your Lincoln guested dignitaries from all over the world.  Your forces had … observers.”

“Observers,” Linn echoed.

“Every war has them.  We have observers at war.  Your mother –”

He turned a page, turned the book around.

It was a photograph taken with a long lens; it showed two people at the end of a narrow footbridge, a dynamic photograph:  it showed a man bent backwards, head thrown back in agony, bloody teeth gleaming in the sunlight and arterial blood spurting from one side of his throat, and his opponent, crouched a little and gripping the dying man’s off wrist, was obviously driving something – a fist, maybe? – into the man’s belly:  it was a power thrust, he could tell, the shoulder was dropped, one leg back and stiff –

The page turned and Linn’s pupils dilated and he tasted copper.

His mother’s face was pale, her eyes like chips of burnished glacier, her teeth bared, a horrible expression, almost that of a screaming, triumphant skull:  the man was falling away from her, doubled up, and her red-wet blade caught the sun with almost a scarlet glow.

“She was effective,” the Chinaman said quietly.

“Too effective.  A sniper was ordered to …”

He smiled a little.

“Your phrase is ‘take her out.’”

His voice was soft and Linn tasted copper, wondered how soon this fellow was going to pull something, knowing if he did produce a blade, or even attack him barehand, it would mean death for them both.

“My father’s rifle had a recording device.”
Another page, another photograph.

A rifle’s crosshairs, studded with the mil-dots, superimposed over his mother:  they rested on her upper chest, perfectly centered; Chinese characters marched in two vertical lines along the left of the round-edged image.

“These” – he traced his finger down the two neat, vertical rows – “give date and time, distance, his finger was on the trigger” – another page, and this was a man, dead, his throat cut, head laid back, eyes wide and staring and very, very dead.

“This was less than a minute after an invisible warrior rose from the rock, and seized my father’s head, and cut his essence free of his body.”

He turned and looked at Barrents.

“Your father had a name.”

He turned back to Linn.

“Your mother had a name.  I believe you refer to it as a code name.”

He turned again.

“Your father’s code name was Silent and Invisible Death, in my language” – he pronounced it, the word was flowing, multisyllablic – “Wúshēng wú xī de sǐwáng”

  – “and hers …”

He actually smiled, just a little.

“Her code name was” – another word, another smile – “Valkyrie.”

He looked at Barrents.

“Your father killed my father.”  It was a statement of fact, nothing more.

“It was war, and he was a good soldier.  He was protecting” – he turned and looked at the pale-eyed Sheriff – “his Valkyrie.”

 

Connie slammed the fore-end back, slammed it forward just as her pale eyed husband taught her.

“It’s a pump gun,” he explained, “and it’s designed to be SLAMMED open and SLAMMED shut and you do NOT want to baby it, it’s designed to be run at full wartime throttle and you want to DRIVE it into battery and RAM it open and RAM it shut” –

The Bear Killer stood at her right heel, the fur standing up from the base of his skull to the root of his tail and across his shoulders, lips peeled back from ivory fighting canines, a menacing rumble starting somewhere about ten feet below his black-paw-pads and amplifying in the cavern of his battle-bred lungs, an invitation to death and ruin if ever there was one.

Death cleared its throat when a woman, alone with her babies, took up a shotgun when a demanding fist beat on her front door; Death’s bony skull grinned a little wider when a sinners-heart-black mountain Mastiff bristled and snarled and quietly invited the would-be intruder in to be dinner.

“THAT’S MY DOG AND I WANT IT!” the voice demanded.

Connie flipped open her phone, hit one button, wedged it between cheekbone and shoulder, brought the comb of the buttstock up into her armpit like her pale eyed husband taught her: she clamped her arm down on it, her hand was as far forward on the fore-end as she could, she gripped the ridged Winchester’s walnut with an absolutely crushing grip, and a twelve gauge house cannon took an unblinking look through the glass window of her locked front door, at the angry-sounding  pair on the front porch.

The Bear Killer was not as patient.

He launched himself at the front door, yammering his full-voiced challenge, roaring defiance, clawing at the door, trying to dig is way through, desperate to bring war to the enemy and absolutely uncaring who knew it, or how he managed it.

Back at the Sheriff’s office, the visitor explained in his quiet, polite voice how the Sheriff’s fifth-great grandfather knew the Sheriff’s fifth-great grandfather: a Japanese Samurai, he’d been a wartime observer, sent to see how this young nation handled its internecine war:  he stopped talking as the Sheriff’s cell phone rang.

“Excuse me,” Linn said civilly, withdrew the phone, and he hit a button.

The screaming, chopping roar of an enraged Bear Killer yammered out of the speaker.

Linn’s eyes were pale, hard, his jaw set:  he turned his head slightly and brought glacier-hard eyes to bear on the visitor.

“I can help,” he said.

Three men strode out of the conference room, three men with a determined stride, three men with war singing in their veins, and a moment later, the Chinese visitor with the impassive face was thrust deeper into the Jeep’s seat as the Sheriff mashed his polished Wellington boot down hard on the throttle.

It was not often the Sheriff burned ‘em off right in front of God and everybody, but when he did, it was with both axles engaged, and all four tires left several miles’ worth of tread as smoking black smudges in front of his parking space.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

37.  GO STRAIGHT TO HELL!

 

It was not often that the Diplomatic Service experienced the first hand wrath of a truly unhappy Western Sheriff.

Simply being seized by the necktie and hauled off the ground was more than intimidating, especially when the throttling effect spotted the man’s vision, when death hissed in his ears, when he realized he was going to die suspended somewhere between the blue heaven above and the earth his feet no longer touched.

This changed, of course, when the Sheriff hauled him back and then slammed him against the log front of his house – hard.

The diplomat had never in his life been in a good knock-down, drag-out fight, and so the experience of his head bouncing off peeled logs was completely unknown to him.

It was not so foreign to the man Barrents fist-drove in the belly, kicked in the crotch and threw a remarkable distance, over the porch rail and into the gravel driveway, where the fellow skidded and rolled, wound up into a fetal ball and hurting too much to even think about trying to escape.

The third man stood, paralyzed, as the big Oriental smiled, just a little; the intruder shrank back into the corner, the strength running out of him like water poured out of a boot.

The Diplomatic Service has a motto:  “Softly, softly,” and their stock in trade is gentle persuasion, negotiation, offers and counter-offers.

The Sheriff’s approach was far more direct, much simpler, and absolutely without any chance of misunderstanding.

The diplomat stood frozen, the Sheriff’s forearm across his throat:  the diplomat stood with his palms flat against the log wall behind him, he stood up on the tippy toes of his servant-shined shoes.

The Sheriff reached behind his neck and brought out a very sharp knife.

He’d forged it himself, he’d hand cranked a coal forge and he’d hammered it out and folded it and hammered it and dusted it with Twenty Mule Team Borax for flux, he’d rolled it in chopped straw after the Japanese fashion and folded and hammer forged it again, and again, and many times more:  he’d drawn the blade out and anvil-shaped it, calling on the iron in his blood, calling on the blacksmithing skills of his five times great Grandfather:  he’d shaped it and quenched it, ground and honed it and polished it, he’d fitted it with checkered maple grip panels, and he carried it in a neck sheath, and now he laid that knife against the diplomat’s cheek and drew it slowly, slowly down the man’s smooth shaven face.

“I shave with this blade,” Linn whispered.  “It’s actually a finer edge than a surgeon’s scalpel.”  He lifted the blade, turned it, looked at the edge, at skin oil and dead skin and a very few whisker stubbles:  he wiped this on the diplomat’s suit coat shoulder.

“You do not ever, EVER come to my house,” the Sheriff whispered, eyes wide and very pale and absolutely unblinking.  “You do not ever, EVER send someone to beat on my door and tell my wife she has their dog.  You do not ever, EVER try to strongarm me into selling” – his voice, at a whisper, dropped to near inaudibility as he thrust his face into the diplomat’s, until their noses just touched and his pale eyes filled the shivering man’s vision and his mind – “you don’t ever try to get me to sell ONE OF MY FAMILY!”

The diplomat squeaked and almost collapsed, for the Sheriff’s final words were a full voiced roar with all his controlled fury focused on those four words.

The diplomat and the shrinking soul in the corner had no time to gather breath for a scream; each was flying over the porch rail, each hit the gravel drive, hard, and each rolled a little before stopping, their eyes screwed shut with pain, both bruised and both terrified, but – for a miracle – neither had a broken bone.

The last thing the diplomat remembered before he passed out was the Sheriff’s full voiced roar.

“YOU GO TO HELL!”

 

Jimmy’s finger tightened on the narrow, grooved trigger of his single shot .22 rifle.

The rimfire cartridge was a loud BLAP in the confines of the wide staircase.

His young eye was steady behind the rear peep, his young hands were without shiver or tremble as he remembered something his father said, and he imagined the face on which he placed the front bead was a terrorist and wearing a suicide vest, a man that had to be taken out with a sniper’s shot, a brainstem shot, and his artist’s mind saw a three-dimensional drawing of the interior of the man’s skull, and he placed his shot to slip through the hollow sinuses and down at an angle into the lizard-brain.

Connie turned, thrust the shotgun forward and slammed it back against her shoulder and sighted, but she lowered the gun, tucked it back under her arm:  instead, she reached behind her, unlocked the front door, seized the knob and pulled.

She heard the precise, metallic sounds of a rifle’s bolt open, she heard it shut, she heard the final, quiet click as the cocking knob was pulled back into battery, then Jimmy’s young voice, loud and a little scared:
“MAMA THEY CAME IN THE BACK!”

 

Kick a hornet’s nest and it will buzz and snarl for some time.

Firelands resembled a hornet’s nest.

In much less than overnight, the Silver Jewel and the boarding house both were full to capacity; the street was crowded with dechromed government vehicles, quiet and watchful men in suits occupied most of the tables in the Silver Jewel, and even the drugstore, where – despite serious expressions and quiet-voiced conversation – they still enjoyed eating in a genuine, throwback-to-the-fifties atmosphere.

The Bear Killer tolerated a trip to the vet, and the less than dignified procedure that followed; a vial of precious material was given, but for more than five times the already-generous price initially offered, there were official apologies offered to the Sheriff, promises of severe punishment to those guilty of such an egregious breach of the peace, and perhaps this event was taken more seriously than normally would have been, because the Sheriff’s mother was married to an FBI agent, and both were well known to their government for deeds that might not come public for half a century, if ever:  whatever the case, there were quiet proceedings in guarded rooms, where a little boy with an artist’s gift was pronounced not guilty, where the event was declared to be defense of home and family, although his drawing of the moment before the shot was taken into evidence, and never seen again by the artist or his family.

Especially the detailed second drawing he’d made, a view of the interior of the human skull, as seen from his position on the top landing of the stairs, looking down over the barrel of a .22 rifle.

When all was said and done – and he did not talk about it, not until snows were deep and nights were cold, not until stars were bright and hard overhead, not until the frost giants pulled on Tarquin’s boots and strode boldly out of the frozen north – not until then did Jimmy look up at his pale eyed Pa as he was tucked into bed.

“Pa?”

“Yes, Jimmy?”

“Pa, I killed that man.”

The Sheriff reached over, gripped a chair, spun it in place beside his son’s bed.

“Yes, son, that did happen,” he said, his words carefully neutral.

“Pa, what about Thou Shalt Not Kill?”

Linn nodded and considered, then lifted the cover, found his son’s hand, gripped it gently.

“Jimmy,” he explained, “that passage actually says ‘Thou shalt do no murder.’”

Jimmy blinked, considering this.

“Someone breaks into an occupied structure commits a crime called aggravated burglary.  Ag burg with a weapon is an automatic high felony.  Matter of fact it’s a capital crime.”

Jimmy frowned.  “Capital crime?”

“Death penalty offense.”

“Oh.”

“Someone breaks into a home with somebody in the home, and they have a weapon, Jimmy, they’re bought and paid for.  They’re breaking in with a weapon because they intend to use it.  You kept your Mama alive and you kept you alive and likely you kept Wes and the baby and maybe even The Bear Killer alive.”

Linn’s other hand slipped under the edge of the covers, enveloped Jimmy’s young hand in both his big callused hands, forming a warm and strong and protective shell around the boy’s mitt.

“You did a man’s job, Jimmy.  You did what a man should rightly do.  I am sorry you had to do it at such a young age, but when it came to keeping your family safe, you did the right thing.”  He squeezed, very gently, for emphasis.

He released his boy’s hand, pulled the covers down over and patted Jimmy’s chest through the covers. 

“Pa?”

“Yes, Jimmy?”

“I’m not sorry I shot him.”

Linn stood, nodded.

“You’ve nothing to be sorry about, Jimmy.  Never be sorry for doing the right thing.”

Linn hesitated, frowned, then looked very directly at his son.

“One more thing, Jimmy.”

“Yes, sir?”

“You did not kill that man.”

Jimmy blinked, tilted his head a little, confused.  “Sir?”

Linn’s face was solemn as he looked hard into his son’s young and trusting eyes.

“He killed himself, Jimmy.  He committed suicide.  You’ve heard of suicide by cop.”
It was a statement, not a question, and Jimmy nodded.

“He did the same thing, same as if he’d jumped on a sword planted blade-up in the ground.”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

38.  BACK WHEN DIRT WAS YOUNG, AND SO WAS I

 

Prairie grasses, the native prairie grasses that gave the home of the buffalo the nickname of “The Great American Desert,” have roots, and so do people, and those roots run long and deep, just like the native prairie grasses.

The pale eyed Sheriff has roots that run long into the past, and well to the east.

Back generations before, back when Old Pale Eyes was not old, back before he was slickered by a glib tongued rider into joining one of Ohio’s volunteer cavalry outfits, he’d been a young man, and before that, he’d been a boy, growing up in what was the Ohio frontier.

Ohio was the West, before that damned War, and a very young Linn Keller knew what it was to run the hills and ridges not much north of the river the natives called O-Y-O, that pristine, broad stream the French named La Belle Riviere, not far north of the Ohio that would later become a boundary, a frontier between two warring nations.

Linn’s Pa was a gunsmith and a gunmaker, and his heart’s delight was the octagon barrel, patched ball rifle:  he made shotguns and fowlers, yes, he made pistols, both small ones to carry in a man’s coat pocket, or bigger ones, worn on a belt hook from a man’s middle, but his greatest love was for the rifle.

Linn back then was no older than Jimmy was now, when he rode on the dapple gelding up to the Town:  Corning was but a village and barely that, but it had a tavern, and a tavern was a place of commerce and conversation, a tavern offered meals and lodging and hospitality to native and to traveler alike.

Young Linn rode up with a flint rifle slung across his back and another across the saddle in front of him:  he dismounted, threw the reins over the hitch rail, confident that no one would be stupid enough to try to make off with the dapple.

A man tried once, a stranger they’d found out later was in the habit of stealing horses and anything else he could get his hands on, and when the dapple kicked him to death right in the middle of the street, why, it was not considered a great loss, especially when a child of less than ten years walked up on the wall-eyed, blowing horse, and took him by the trailing leathers, and walked him back to the tavern as if nothing at all were amiss.

Today, young Linn brought a repaired rifle to meet its owner:  his father restored the lockwork, he’d fashioned a new main spring after the original broke in the bend.

The price was reasonable, and not at all exhorbitant; greedy eyes watched as coin changed hands, and although the sum was not great, it was desired, and two who watched the transaction, slipped out of the tavern, and lay wait for the boy along the narrow roadway they knew he’d be taking.

The pale eyed old lawman slouched against the post in his stout built barn, looking into the distance, remembering as his quiet-voiced words spun the picture for the much younger, pale-eyed lawman who listened attentively.

“I was no older than your boy when I drove a rifle ball through that first fella,” he said after a hesitation, “and I run the other one down.  I just plainly run attair dapple horse right into him and knocked him galley west.  I know Dapple hit him chest-on and trompled him with one hoof anyway.

“I put my heels to Dapple-horse and got around the bend, I stopped and reloaded without gettin’ out of the saddle. 

Dapple, he turned and was a-watchin’ where we’d come from and he didn’t like it much and I don’t blame him.   He’d throw his head away to the side when I fired a shot from the saddle and I didn’t do it often, and I hadn’t never run him into anyone before.

“I went on home and me and Pa come back with the wagon and throwed ‘em in, one dead and one damn neart and he quit breathin’ by the time we got t’ town.

“We throwed ‘em out in front of the marshal’s office an’ the Sheriff was in town f’r a visit and he allowed as we saved him the expense of hirin’ a hangin’, so warn’t no problems with them two bein’ dead.”

“It’s not an easy thing to kill someone when you’re a man grown,” Linn observed quietly, as quiet and confident a voice as his namesake’s:  “might a boy that young be troubled?”

“I warn’t,” Old Pale Eyes rumbled.  “Course that’s back when dirt was young and so was I.”
“Ever have any trouble with the Mark of Cain?”  Linn asked casually.

“Have you?”  Old Pale Eyes challenged.

“Nope,” Linn said firmly.  “I figgered the Mark of Cain was for a murder, and a murder is not justified.  Ever’one I killed deserved it.”

“Yep,” Old Pale Eyes nodded.  “Figger so.”

 

Jimmy set up in bed, fully dressed, with no covers over him.

He rubbed his eyes, swung his legs over the side, stood.

“Good morning, Sunshine,” a pretty lady in an electric blue dress smiled.

Jimmy smiled back, his belly feeling happy inside him, because he was a little boy, and little boys will have a happy belly when they see someone they genuinely like.

“I understand,” the Pretty Lady said, tilting her head a little to the side, “that you kept your Mama and your brother and sister safe.”

Jimmy nodded solemnly, remembering his pale eyed Pa told him he’d kept them safe, and he was proud of him for doing that.

“You did the right thing,” she said firmly.  “When an evil soul breaks in and they intend you harm, when they intend your family harm, it is not a sin to stop them.”  She blinked, looked levelly at the little boy.  “If a thief breaketh in and a man smiteth a thief such that the thief die, the man shall be held blameless.”

“Huh?”  Jimmy said, his brows puzzling together.

The Pretty Lady smiled. 

“Very Old Testament,” she explained.   “Hebrew law, as a matter of fact.  Talmudic Law.”

“Oh,” Jimmy said, not understanding, but accepting as fact whatever it was she just said.

The Pretty Lady rose, crossed the room, knelt gracefully and took Jimmy’s hands in hers.

“You kept your family safe,” she whispered.  “I am very proud of you.”

Jimmy’s ears turned red as she kissed his forehead, and then she disappeared, and Jimmy blinked, for he wasn’t dressed anymore, he was standing barefoot in his jammies.

He frowned and then turned back to his bed, he worked bare feet into fur lined moccasins (just like his Pa wore!) and he slipped downstairs, because when a little boy wakes up at night, he generally has to go tend the call of nature, and he did.

 

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

39.  NIGHT

 

If one were to intrude on the privacy of the Sheriff’s bedroom, one might see a bed, occupied; a crib beside the bed, also occupied, and maybe – just maybe – if one used one’s imagination, one might see a shadow, where a shadow shouldn’t be.

It could be a curtain, yes; it could be a trick of the light, an extra fold of darkness, yes; such things happen in a darkened bedroom, where body and soul are relaxed, warm and safe under quilts and sheets that smell of sunshine and mountain wind.

Step closer, look into the crib.

It’s a very old crib, not as old as the house itself, but old, and it’s known generations of the get of pale eyed souls:  baby boys, baby girls, children that outgrew their little bed, and who is to say the memories of these many young might have soaked into the hand shaped spindles, into the plaited cording underlying the mattress?

Or perhaps it’s other memories that move in the darkness.

Mother and father, husband and wife, lying side by side, each relaxed, each with their defenses down:  one, hardened by conflict and combat, bearing scars visible and not visible, marks and memories of moments where life hung balanced on a honed knife’s edge:  these hard lessons, these signs that the lean waisted, pale eyed lawman survived those who struck from hiding, also meant that part of his mind never slept.

Part of his mind sat, awake, watchful, listening to the night, restless.

Beside him, just as relaxed, her hand warm in his, the wife and mother, relaxed and breathing easily, quietly in the darkness, part of her mind awake as well.

A mother’s mind never truly sleeps; it, too, listens to the night, listens for her child’s cry.

And beside them, in the old, experienced crib, their child, warm and smelling of soap and milk and sunlight and wind, but the child’s eyes are open, looking around, searching the dark, searching.

The child’s mind was yet developing:  it had made some association between things it felt inside its young body, and the wet diaper that made it cry, and it felt its urgency, its need, and it knew the diaper was going to be wet and uncomfortable.

Like little babies will, it balled its fists and waved them and its face reddened – or would, if there were light enough to see her face – and her expression screwed up and prepared to give a few choking, false-start whimpers, before it cut loose with a full-voiced declaration of its distress.

Here is where the shadow moved, the shadow that should not be there.

The little baby girl’s eyes opened suddenly, surprised, and its first little protesting hiccup disappeared before she could make a sound:  motherly and experienced hands picked her up, carried her; the shadow was soundless, and the child was whisked downstairs, down to a folded blanket that waited on the floor, and the shadow knelt in the nighttime household’s darkness.

The little girl-child had not yet learned to contain her body’s fluids, but they were absorbed and her little bottom was washed and dried and powdered, another diaper, warm and soft, was snugged around her, and she gave a drowsy little wiggle and chewed happily on a little pink fist.

Upstairs, the mother felt a familiar weight on her chest, smelled the soap-and-baby-powder scent of her daughter; the child was hungry, as a little baby always is at night, and the mother’s arms came up to enfold and cover her child, her mind satisfied that all was well, all was as it should be:  when the child was full, the mother felt the child’s weight lift, and she heard the gentle patting of a hand on the child’s back.

The wakeful part of the mother’s mind imagined it was her husband, giving her respite and allowing her slumber, while she was comforted by the husband’s hand in hers as they lay side by side under quilts and sheets that smelled of sunshine and mountain wind.

Were we to actually observe this nighttime scenario, we might see the child’s truly prodigious yawn, the little blanket drawn up about its chin, and we might see a shadow rise from the crib, and withdraw a step, and then walk … walk through the closed window, and be gone.

Let us follow.

Let us follow as the shadow leans out, stretches like spilled ink and streaks, swifter than Death’s arrow and just as dark; we keep up, easily, following and a little to the side, watching.

Stars move slowly above us, but the ground beneath travels in a blur, until we slow, until we see a river, bending in a slow crescent; there are lights, shapes, regular and geometric forms, and we descend, steeply:  the shadow is a long streak that touches the ground, and resumes its shape, the same shape we saw in the darkened bedroom.

Listen.

There, do you hear it? – footsteps – footsteps in the fog – the river fog is thick, enveloping, hiding the granite teeth of the graveyard.

We look around as what has become a woman, a woman in mourning black, in a McKenna gown from the late 1890s, strikes a Lucifer match and touches flame to wick, and sets the broad-based, red-enamel lantern on the grave.

Look closer.

Look, and listen – it’s quiet here, the fog mutes the city’s mutter, its perpetual restlessness – listen closely, and we can hear her thoughts, or perhaps we are feeling her emotions.

She kneels and she looks at the gravestone, and she reaches a black-gloved hand to caress the polished granite stone, her fingertips caressing the name, the engraved scramble, the insignia of a chief officer.

Here, step closer, into the light, draw near:  bend down and read you, read the name sandblasted into the mirror-finished stone.

Llewellyn, we read.

Daffyd Llewellyn.

We look up, for another joins us, a slender man with pale eyes, a man wearing the insignia of the Cincinnati fire department, and he wonders at the sight of a woman in an old-fashioned dress, with a kerosene lamp, kneeling before a familiar tombstone.

A woman with tears running down her face.

You see, we’ve been here before.

We know the man who’s just joined us wears the same name as the dead man long buried beneath this stone:  he, like his namesake, is a firefighter, and a good one:  we’ve been here before, and we’ve seen this moment before, and we realize now why the woman weeps.

We realize that she misses her son, who she last saw as a boy of twelve years, a child she carried, bore, raised, loved, and parted with in a moment of harsh words and stubborn pride.

We know now that she is still a mother, for no woman who carries life and gives birth ever ceases to be a mother:  who is to say that this maternal longing continues even after death, and she who changed a child’s diaper not an hour ago, did so because she remembered what it was to raise a child, short on sleep, and needing just a little longer in the bunk?

Let us withdraw, now, treading silently, carefully, here in this garden of stone:  before we turn and return to the skies and streak back to our native Firelands, we see the firefighter kneel in the circle of light, there in the fog, hidden from the eye of even the watchful patrolman who treads his beat just without the iron graveyard fence.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

40.  SUNDAE ROSE

 

Gracie did not often indulge herself.

Gracie was the Matriarch of what was now the Clan Maxwell.

Gracie assumed her matronly duties naturally, easily, exercising the full authority of the woman whose name she’d borne since birth, and her family accepted her office, accepted her as such.

To her surprise, so did the community.

Gracie knew she was needed, she just wasn’t sure where, so she took the pale eyed Sheriff’s advice:  she’d heard him advise one of his green deputies, “When in doubt, son, follow your gut” – and she did.

Gracie saddled her riding mule and took her loaded-full withie basket with its red and white checked cloth cover and rode down the mountain, down into town, a little bit of a frown as she looked around, listening with more than her ears.

Patrolman Roger Halasz looked up as Gracie tied her mule off in front of the drugstore.

“Dispatch, Four,” he said into the grey-enamel microphone.

“Go, Four.”

“I’ll be out at Winneberg’s drugstore, available.”

“Roger, Four.”

He hung up the microphone, shut off the cruiser’s engine and pulled the keys, stood up and closed the heavy driver’s door.

He knew it would lock automatically when he got ten feet from the vehicle, but he hit the lock button anyway:  dropping the keys in his pocket, he swung around the front of the car and headed for the drugstore.

Gracie looked around once she was inside, restless; she had the general feeling she was where she was supposed to be, that whatever – or whoever – needed her, would come to her.

John Winneberg looked up, smiled:  “Get you something Grace?”  he called from behind the counter.

“I think,” she said, looking through the cooler’s curved glass lid, “I would like a sundae, please.”

“Whipped cream, cherry, nuts?”
“All the above!”  she laughed.  “Do you know, I haven’t had ice cream since I left for school!”

“You’re overdue!”  John declared, slinging water off the ice cream scoop before he reached in and turned a big curl of vanilla.

Roger removed his eight point uniform cap, tucked it under his arm and stared at Grace.

She was different … she was the same, but she was different … and of a sudden he felt awkward and uncertain, at least until she turned and looked at him and he saw that same shy smile he remembered.

He could have pulled the beating heart out of his chest and laid it at her feet.

Grace considered the suddenly-red-faced officer looking at her like he was either constipated, or short of breath:  her gut told her this might be a reason she was here, but the main reason was yet to arrive.

She turned, looked at John:  “I’m sorry?”  she blinked, then smiled as he slid the Sunday across the stainless steel counter.

“I’ll get that,” Roger said, approaching awkwardly:  he looked at John, and to the drugstore owner’s credit, he didn’t laugh at the look on the town cop’s face.

Roger Halasz looked for all the world like a tongue tied kid.

“Get you something, Roger?” 

Roger blinked, nodded.  “Yeah … I’m sorry, yes please.  Another one of those, that looks good!”

John grinned and started assembling another of the same.

“Both on the same ticket?”

Roger grinned, his ears an incredible shade of red:  “Yes, thank you,” he mumbled.

“That’s very kind,” Gracie said, tilting her head a little and regarding him frankly, which only made his face redder.

Gracie felt it before the door opened:  she turned, quickly, swinging the basket out and onto the nearest tabletop.

Connie looked around, saw her, came almost skipping over to her, an anxious look on her face.

“Thank God I found you!”  she blurted as Roger turned and picked up both sundaes:  he stepped back, circled around the women, set the sundaes down on either side of Gracie’s basket.

He looked at John.

“Maybe if you’d make another one,” he suggested, reaching around for his wallet.

Connie and Gracie sat down, Connie looking worried and Gracie looking … looking far more mature, far more …

Wise.

That’s the word, Roger thought.

“Gracie,” Connie said, and Roger heard the worry in her voice, “you can see things.”

Gracie sat very still, knowing she was where she was supposed to be, feeling at once grateful that she’d made it to where she was needed … and feeling suddenly very, very inadequate.

Connie planted her elbows on either side of the sundae, dropped her forehead onto the heels of her hands, and groaned.

Gracie laid a hand on her shoulder.  “What happened?”  she almost whispered.

“Last night,” Connie said, speaking to the cherry on top of the whipped cream, “I … Linn woke up and changed the baby.”  She took a long breath, sighed it out.  “I was just so very tired.”
“You’ve got four kids to take care of,” Gracie said sympathetically, and Roger wondered at this:  he knew the Sheriff and his wife had the new baby, had Jimmy, had young Wesley Harold, and … and he grinned as he realized Gracie was making a joke, for the Sheriff must be the fourth kid.

Connie nodded almost miserably.

“I needed that rest,” Connie almost groaned.  “But when I woke up –”

She reached into her purse and pulled out a rose, looked at Gracie, and Roger was surprised at the look on her face.

Fear, he thought.

And dread.

“Gracie, I can’t be pregnant,” Connie whispered, desperation in her voice.  “I’m still breastfeeding, I can’t be pregnant!”

“You’re not,” Gracie said, caressing the rose with the back of her finger, scenting its delicate fragrance.

“It’s not a death notice,” Connie said – a statement, not a question.

Gracie nodded, smiling a little, a knowing smile Roger had seen on Old Gracie’s face.

He studied the mountain woman’s face, wondering what she saw, what she knew.

“No.  Not a death notice,” Gracie smiled.

Connie laid the rose down on the table, turned to Gracie, took her hand, looking into Kentucky-blue eyes, half-hoping, half-dreading.

“Gracie, what does it mean?”  she quavered.

Gracie reached up and touched Connie’s cheek, smiling a little as she did.

“Grandma,” she said, and Connie’s eyes went suddenly very, very wide.

“Marnie?” she squeaked, and Gracie nodded.

Connie squeaked again and the two women embraced, and then Connie drew her arms back, her fists against her mouth as she looked through the shining steel wall opposite.

“Marnie,” Gracie smiled.  “A fine healthy little –”

“Don’t tell me,” Connie interrupted, holding up a hand, then changing her mind a little:  “Healthy?”

Gracie nodded.

“Normally,” Roger suggested carefully, “this would call for a drink, but I’m not a drinkin’ man.”  He waited until the women looked at him (even if they did look at him like he had a fish sticking out his shirt pocket) before continuing, “We’ve each got a real good ice cream sundae in front of us.”  He dipped up a spoonful of chocolate sauce dripping delicacy.  “Here’s to new life!”

Connie blinked, giggled, picked up her spoon, as did Gracie.

New life was toasted with chocolate ice cream sundaes, and the participants declared it good.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

41.  THEY CALLED HER HILLRUNNER

 

Gracie led the brindle mule up the path.

She’d come from the drugstore elated, distressed, confused, delighted:  she’d left half her sundae uneaten, she’d hugged Connie and laughed with her and promised that yes, she would make a fine grandmother and yes it was perfectly fine for grandmothers to spoil grandchildren absolutely rotten:  she’d given Roger a big-eyed, innocent look, distressed when she felt just how hard he’d fallen for her, and now as she labored up the path, she could have kicked herself for making the poor fellow feel so absolutely smitten by her.

Gracie didn’t feel she was worth a man’s attentions, to be honest:  when she was a girl, yes, she’d dreamed of the day when a man would look at her the way she saw men look at eligible young women … but now?

Now?

Now she was …

What was she?

She’d stopped by the Sheriff’s office, tying off the mule outside, where the Sheriff not uncommonly tethered his own mount.

Linn was looking over some papers, frowning a little, when she came in:  he looked up, pale eyes concerned, and he laid down the file jacket, placed the papers on top, gestured her into the conference room.

He didn’t speak; he poured her a coffee, and one for himself, set the open carton of milk beside her cup and waited until she was seated before sitting himself.

“I need your advice,” Gracie blurted.

Linn nodded.

“You’re thinking this is odd.”

Linn’s eyes tightened a little at the corners and she felt the laughter that hid behind those pale eyes.

“You’ve gone to Grandma … you went to Grandma when she was still alive.”

“Many times,” he nodded.

“I … don’t … I’m sorry, I …”

“Free advice is often worth the price you paid for it.”

“No.”  Gracie shook her head.  “No, Sheriff.  You are a wise man and I need your help.”

“Then say unto me how I may be of service, good Lady.”  He raised an eyebrow, lowered his head, then put his hand behind his head and stuck up three fingers, wiggling them like animated feathers.

Gracie laughed.

“That’s what I was looking for,” Linn grinned.  “Now that I just broke your ice, what help do you need?”

Gracie sighed, still smiling.

“Sheriff, I think I’m falling for someone.”

Linn nodded slowly.  “Go on.”

“I don’t know if I’m supposed to.”

Linn closed one eye meditatively, regarded her solemnly.

“Stop that!”  Gracie protested.  “You’re making fun of me!”

“I’m picturing you with a fine young man.”

“You know!”

“Of course I know.  I am the Great Know-It-All.”

“Then you know about your wife.”

Linn grew very still … like a supercooled lake suddenly turning crystalline and solid after a careless pebble disturbed the water’s serenity:  he was not only unmoving, Gracie could feel a physical chill as stillness flowed off him in an expanding puddle.

“What,” he said slowly, “about Connie?”

Gracie hesitated.

“Gracie,” Linn said, still speaking very slowly, “you have the Second Sight.  You know things.”  He was standing now, one boot on the seat he’d just vacated, arms crossed over his upraised knee.  “Tell me what you know.”

“It’s not Connie.”

“Gracie, I was visited last night.”
Gracie turned a little pale.  “Not you too,” she murmured.

“You see shades and memories.”  It was a statement, not a question, and Gracie nodded.

“So do I.  Mama had the Second Sight and I have a little of it, just enough to scare me.  You’re holding something back.  Out with it.”

Gracie shook her head.

“No.  Not yet.  I will, just … not yet.”  She looked pleadingly at the Sheriff.  “Linn, am I supposed to … have feelings?”

Linn raised that eyebrow again.

Never – not once, ever – had she called him Linn.

Always Sheriff.

He considered for a moment, then he carefully lowered his booted hoof to the floor:  he took a step, took another, went to one knee, took Gracie’s hand in his own.

She’s trembling, he thought.  Put her at ease.

“Gracie,” he said, sandwiching her hand between both of his, “what do you feel?”

“Your hands are hot,” she whispered, her throat suddenly dry, her eyes widening with sudden realization.

“I have hot hands, a Healer’s hands,” Linn said matter-of-factly.  “A mountain witch once to me that.”

“Grandma.”

He nodded.

“You can blow fire.”

“I’ve done it.”

“You can stop blood with the Word.”

“Done that too.”

Gracie shook her head.  “No.  No, that’s not possible, only women –”

Linn smiled, just a little.

“You’ve seen ghosts.”

“No one’s supposed to be able to see –”

“I live with them.”  His voice was flat, leaving no room for argument.

Gracie’s eyes were uncertain, a little afraid.

“Gracie.”  His hands tightened a little on hers.  “What am I feeling?”

Gracie looked at the Sheriff … no longer the Matron of the Mountain, she was a pretty young woman, a little afraid of her own feelings.

“Gracie, I feel life,” he answered for her.

He shifted his grip, pressed a practiced finger against her wrist pulse. 

“Feel that?”  he whispered.  “That’s life, Gracie.”  He lifted his hand, bent his fingers, laid the backs of his curled fingers very gently against her cheek.

“Gracie, you have every right to your feelings.  Unused though they be, confused and turbulent as they may be, they are uniquely and specially yours.

“You have every right, Gracie – every right – to enjoy the attentions of whoever you choose to let into your life.”

Gracie remembered the Sheriff’s words, the Sheriff’s touch, as she led her mule up the narrow, twisting path.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she hissed at herself.  “You don’t deserve –”

She shook her head.

“Yes I do,” she argued with herself.  “He’s a fine man, you could do worse –”

She looked up hill, glaring at the mountain looming above her.

“Damn you,” she hissed.  “Damn you and damn your kinfolk, I was never able to climb you before but by God! I will climb you!”

Nobody disturbed Gracie as she pulled the saddle off her mule, as she rubbed him down, as she turned him into the back pasture, as she pulled the double gun from its scabbard.

Gracie opened the action, saw cartridge brass shining at her, closed the breech and looked back up at the mountain.

She remembered running with the track team back East, her in a skirt and work boots, keeping up easily with their best runners, her heart and her blood and her lungs accustomed to the high altitude and her native mountains.

They had a nickname for her, this odd young woman who joined them after their run started and disappeared before it was done.

She was the Hillrunner.

“Hillrunner,” she smiled mirthlessly.  “Let’s see how far I can get today!”

Gracie took off, running with that easy, steady pace she’d learned and perfected as a child, running with her laughing, grinning brothers, and she ran the path she’d run as a child.

Gracie was a Hillrunner, and she ran with the single minded determination that had long been her trademark.

 

Two days later, Linn waited beside his dispatcher’s desk, a steaming mug of coffee in his off hand.

The dispatcher knew something was afoot; when the boss stood there waiting, it was because someone was coming, and soon.

As usual, he was right.

Gracie hauled open the heavy glass doors, then the inner doors.

“Coffee’s ready,” Linn deadpanned, gesturing toward the conference room with his mug, careful not to slop any on the gleaming, polished floor.

That he was waiting on her did not surprise Gracie in the least.

“I made the mountain last night,” she said without preamble.

“Figured so.”  He turned and walked into the conference room, not looking, knowing she would follow.

He drew her a mug of coffee, set the sweating-cold carton of milk beside it, waited until she was seated before propping his boot up on his chair’s seat.

Gracie sat very properly, her hands in her lap, not even looking at her coffee.

“Sheriff, you said you live with ghosts.”

“Yep.”

“I don’t.”

“You see much more than the shades of what have been.”

She nodded.

“You saw my little girl is carryin’.”

Gracie nodded.  “Your wife brought me the rose.”

Linn showed just the bare trace of a smile. “You should have seen her face when she saw it on her bedside table.”

“I saw her face when she came in the drugstore, looking for me.”  She stopped, looked at the Sheriff, realization dawning with equal parts of enlightenment, surprise and fear.

“She knew where to find me,” she said slowly, “because you told her.”

Linn laughed quietly, looked down into his mug, took a noisy slurp.

“You give me too much credit,” he smiled.  “No, she looked for your mule.”

“Oh.”  Gracie felt her ears heating under her coarse auburn hair.

“We all have our gifts, Gracie.  For good or for ill, the great cloud of witnesses that surround each of us manifest every now and again.  I’ve seen a few, several times.”

“Your … mother?”  Gracie asked, almost hopefully.

Linn shook his head.

“No,” he admitted.  “No, but Marnie did.”

“I, um … Marnie?”

Linn nodded.  “Just like my fifth-great-grandfather manifested for Mama when she was desperately in need.”

Gracie shook her head.  “I’m sorry … I don’t understand.”

Linn grinned.

“Marnie, not all Westerns are set in the 1800s, nor are all of them set in the West.”  He took a long breath.  “Let me tell you about Mama and the first time she saw Old Pale Eyes.”

 

Gracie lay awake for a long time that night.

Her hips ached, her lungs burned, her throat was sore, her quads ached, her hamstrings ached, her Achilles tendons ached.

She considered the Sheriff’s words, seeing again the movie played on the screen of her imagination, imagining how it must have been for his pale eyed Mama to lie on her back, blown into a crater by a nearby explosion, an empty pistol in one hand and a knife in the other, screaming defiance, just before a man with pale eyes stepped up to the edge of the crater and addressed the grinning enemy with a both barrels of a mule eared, double barrel shotgun.

In her imagination she could hear the pale eyed lawman with the iron grey mustache roar, “NOBODY SHOOTS MY LITTLE GIRL!” … just before he disappeared, fading into invisibility, and how she wished someone would say that about her.

She thought about Roger and how he looked at her, and how bashful he looked, how suddenly awkward, like the boy he’d been when they were in school together.

She stared at the night-dark ceiling and felt very, very alone.

“Grandma,” she whispered into the silence, “I wish you were here!”

 

Was it intervention from another plane, or was it coincidence, or sheer and random chance?

Perhaps this is one of those questions that we really shouldn’t try to answer.

Sometimes the result is worth grasping without considering exactly how it came about.

Gracie’s mule was tethered to the hitch in front of the drugstore when she took out running, her skirt drawn up, work boots pounding against the sidewalk as a rage seared into life somewhere just south of her breastbone.

Gracie drove into the would-be carjacker’s side, hitting him shoulder-first, knocking him away from the woman’s car he was trying to fight into:  the driver, terrified, discovered she was no longer facing a pistol, that the dirty-knuckled hand was no longer gripping her collar:  she slammed her car door, twisted the ignition, dumped the shifter into gear and screamed away from the attacker, tires turning the air blue with the desperation of her hard-throttle flight.

The holdup rolled over, came up on his knees, raised his handle-taped pistol, just before Gracie came up on all fours:  she felt a fury she’d never know, her hand thrust into the slit in her skirt, gripped the handle of her own pistol –

Gracie tasted copper and she saw the skin over the carjacker’s trigger finger turn pale as he began to pull the trigger –

Gracie pulled the short, blocky revolver free of its holster, began to raise it as a child’s singsong chanted Too late, too late, you’re gonna die, you’re gonna die --

Five shots, loud and close – five shots from just behind her, quickly and evenly spaced, near enough it felt like she was being slapped across the back of the head with each shot, and the pistol that had been thrust at Gracie fell, as did the hand that gripped it, as did the body attached to the hand, and Gracie heard a voice from behind her, very near, loud and angry, a voice that started at a good man’s boot tops and gained strength as it focused through the lens of his diaphragm and blasted out his enraged throat.

At the absolute top of his voice, with all the power of a warrior’s focused rage, Patrolman Roger Halasz of the Firelands Police Department’s voice rang in the shocked-still street, echoed off the building fronts, landing shining and upright on a pretty young woman’s heart:

“NOBODY SHOOTS MY WIFE!”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

42.  REFUGE

 

Grace picked up the bread dough, turned it over, dusted it lightly with flour and dusted the tabletop before kneading it out some more.

Grace always thought better when she made bread.

She used to make bread with her Grandma – they made all their own bread, store bought bread was not found on their table, there was no substance to it – Gracie and her Grandma would knead, and talk, and mix, and dust, and laugh, and Gracie smiled a little as she thought of the Maxwell young – even the children were using their true ancestral name – and how they would come home from school, and the girls would pile in the kitchen to help her with whatever was fixin’.

At the moment, she needed to think, and if she could think and make bread, why, she would do just that.

Gracie greased the loaf pans and floured the loaf pans and set dough in them to raise, covered them with a dishtowel, nodded her satisfaction as she wiped her hands on the towel that lived over her left shoulder.

The eldest Daine stopped in briefly – only briefly, they were fixin’ to run off another batch of distilled lightning – but he stopped and smiled and allowed as it smelled good when Grace made bread, and she looked so much like Gracie, and then he was gone, and Gracie suddenly felt kind of hollow and lost.

She looked at the rank of bread pans and knew it would be a little before they were ready to bake – they should be ready when the first batch came out of the oven -- and her eyes swung to the parlor, and she followed her gaze as if drawn.

Gracie opened her fiddle case and brought out the curlyback fiddle, smelling rosin and sawdust and oil and varnish, and she stroked her bow across the rosin block and tapped it twice to knock off the excess:  she plucked delicately at the strings, barely smiling as she assured herself its tone was still true.

Gracie closed her eyes and brought her arm around in a great, showy arc, let the bow settle like a perching bird, wondering what music would come of her efforts.

Gracie would do this as an exercise, as a gauge, back East:  she would disengage her mind and will her fiddle to speak for her, to tell her what she was feeling, and she was surprised at the first bright, sprightly notes from “Fiddler on the Roof.”

She tilted her head just a little and her smile grew just a shade, and the familiar notes rolled like an artesian spring from the horsehair bow and steel strings:  she played for the joy of playing, she lost herself in the music, she played the same way lovers or fencers engage:  disconnect the mind, then proceed.

She played from her very soul, and the house was filled with liquid beauty.

 

The pale-eyed Sheriff steepled his fingertips and looked at the uncomfortable young man across the table from him.

“Roger,” he said, “I won’t tell you not to worry.  I’ve been a lawman for a while and I still worry.”

“Yes, sir,” Roger replied, reminding the Sheriff of a little boy trying hard not to fidget while seated across from the grade-school principal.

“You understand that the Sheriff’s office has to investigate a line-of-duty shots-fired, so your police department can’t be accused of being the fox investigating losses in the henhouse.”

“Yes, sir.”  Roger did not smile – he had, the first time he heard that phrase used, back in the Academy – but this time, when his was the hand that fired the shots, he smiled not one little bit.

“Roger, tell me what you saw.”

“I saw the deceased trying to jack a woman,” Roger replied without hesitation.  “He had a revolver in one hand and he had hold of her with the other.  I remember her seat belt was still across her and he was still trying to jerk her out of the car.”

“What else?”

“She grabbed his wrist and shoved the gun up, out of line, and that’s when Gracie tore into him.”

“Tore into him?”

“Yes, sir.”  Roger leaned forward, laced his fingers together, rested them on the table top.  “I’ve known Gracie … hell, we went to school together and I had a crush on her since the first time I offered her my milk money.”

Linn nodded.

“I’ve never known her not to wear a dress, no matter the weather, and she always wore clodhoppers.  One of her brothers teased her about ‘em and called her Minnie Clodhopper and she tore into him but how!”  He shook his head.  “He was two years older than her and she lit into him like a bobcat with hemorrhoids!  God help us, Sheriff, when she got into it with them brothers and half brothers of hers, she was war on two legs and no two ways about it!

“When they started playin’ football she did too, least when her Mama didn’t see her.  She learned to tackle and she put that shoulder to good use rammin’ into her brothers when they teased her.”  He blinked, shook his head.  “That’s what she did today, Sheriff.  She dropped whatever it was she was a-carryin’ and she took out at a run and she drove her shoulder right into that fella, knocked him galley west.”

Linn nodded.  “Go on.”

“That woman didn’t waste any time at all.  She yanked into gear and got the hell out of Dodge and how.”

“Where were you when you saw all this?”

“Maybe twenty yards up the street.  I was on foot, headed down to get another steno book to split for a field notebook.”

Linn nodded again; he, too, had the local office supply shop shear a steno book down the middle to make two field notebooks – one for everyday use, then at end of shift, the useful information was transcribed into the “official” field notebook … minus punch lines for dirty jokes, chocolate chip recipes and unflattering cartoons of the boss.

This proved most useful when an attorney subpoenaed the officer’s field notebook.

One generally does not want to explain dirty jokes, cookie recipes and unflattering cartoons of one’s superior while under oath.

“I saw her drop what she had and take off running toward the carjack.  She dropped her shoulder and hit him like a freight train.  He spun around the door and hit the ground and rolled, once, and came up with his gun raised.

“Gracie came up, too, her hand went to her middle and I had to stop him before he shot her.”

“What happened then?”

“I realized someone was shooting my pistol.”

“Explain that.”

Roger looked confused and uncomfortable.

“Sheriff, your Mama taught our firearms section.  She said when you get enough years to need bifocals, a red dot would be the best pistol sight so I figured why not start now, when I get that age I won’t have to unlearn any bad habits to change over.”

Linn nodded.  “Reasonable,” he agreed.

“She was right when she told us that when it hits the fan you’ll tunnel vision in on the threat.”  His face was solemn, his voice quiet:  “I surely did.

“I looked at where I wanted the bullet to strike and that red ball followed my want.”

“What happened then?”

“I fired five times.”

“Why five times?”

“I fired until the threat was stopped,” he said, as if reciting a practiced mantra.

Linn nodded slowly.  “Were these aimed shots?”

“I believe they were, yes.”

“I heard you fired quickly.”

“No.”  Roger shook his head.  “No, Sheriff, I took my time.  When the first shot went downrange I grabbed hold of myself and I set that red ball right between his eyes and I eased back til the trigger broke.  I placed deliberate and aimed fire, Sheriff, I put controlled rounds into the target.”

“I think you’re describing tachypsychia.”

“Likely so.  I don’t know how fast I actually fired but it felt like it was deliberate, aimed, slow fire.”

“What happened then?”

“I saw him start to collapse so I held my next shot.”

“Go on.”

“I was crouched some and I come upright and moved up with my gun muzzle a-coverin’ him.”

“What about Gracie?”

“She was still on two feet and a hand with her other hand to her middle.  I got up beside her and saw she had a handful of pistol her own self and she slid it back into her skirt.  I wanted to make sure she wasn’t hit and she wasn’t.”

“Did you say anything through all this?”

Roger considered, shook his head.

“No, Sheriff, not as I recall.”

Linn propped up his computer pad, touched a button, turned it so Roger could see.

It was a cell phone video shot from across the street.

Linn watched the younger man’s eyes widen when five fast shots hammered out of the speaker, and he saw honest surprise as Roger’s voice followed.

“I said that?”  Roger whispered.

Linn nodded.

Roger swallowed, looked at the Sheriff.

“Hell of a way to propose, ain’t it?”

Linn nodded.

“Yep.”

 

Gracie stepped out the door and took a long, appreciative breath.

She always did like the smell of cooking off a batch.

She’d delighted in grinding sprouts with her Grampa, with setting mash, with stirring it and taking an experimental taste.

She loved helping her Grampa make their famous, small batch moonshine whiskey, she loved the way he scoured the still and the vats, how he insisted on cleanliness, how he showed her with a professional’s pride how he pasted the cap on the still with strips of burlap, dipped in wheat paste; as she grew, she helped, until she was doing a man’s work and more in the family distillery.

She’d learned to play fiddle in the distillation barn, she and her great-grandfather that she just called Grampa, and as she closed her eyes and took another long breath, she remembered how he would grip her shoulders and lean down and whisper in her ear.

She remembered what her father said when they buried the fine old man.

“And King Solomon went into the Great Temple, and prostrated himself before the Holy of Holies,” he’d said, “and he prayed ‘Lord, I am an old man and full of years.  Let me not grieve for what no longer is, let me rejoice for what has been.’

Gracie opened her eyes, looked up the mountain, toward the family graveyard.

“I am grateful for all that was,” she whispered, wiping at the damp dribbling out of one eye, “but I still miss you both!”

 

Not long after, when the batch was run, when they folded up for the night, Gracie set out warm loaves of bread and dished up big bowls of stew, set out the churned butter, pressed into a lump the size of a man’s two fists; family set down and laughed and talked and the kitchen smelled as she remembered it, and sounded as she remembered it, and after the dishes were done, her father said quietly, “Gracie, play us an air,” and Gracie opened up her fiddle case and smiled.

Family and home, supper and “an air,” and she knew this... this was her refuge.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

43.  SPOONING

 

"But Pa," the boy protested, "she ain't supposed to have no fella!"

A long tall Kentucky moonshiner looked down at his tall and skinny son.

The boy was looking with distress toward the house, toward the stranger he knew was inside, toward this interloper who came to see his Gracie.

In his young mind, Gracie was more than his big sis.

Somehow she'd become what Old Grandma had been.

She cooked the same, she hummed the same when he come in and she was fetching biscuits out of the oven and she'd pull three of 'em, real quick-like, and she'd juggle three hot biscuits like a circus performer, and then she'd toss them to him -- one, two, three -- and laugh ... 

Just like Old Grandma used to.

She wore her hair up the same way, she wore Old Grandma's shawl, she even give the boys that look and shook her wooden spoon at them when they misbehaved.

She even smacked her older brother just like he’d seen Old Grandma smack his Pa, years ago.

Her brother come in and allowed as some feller in town asked him when did he reckon was a good time to come and call on Gracie.

“He’s a-gonna caaaaaalllll on yew,” he drawled teasingly, “maybe you got yer degree in telephone back East at attair fancy school, hey?”

Gracie stirred the pot of stew, quietly, moving the hand carved wooden spoon in slow, precise figure-8s.

This alone should have been a warning.

“Gracie’s got a boy-friend, Gracie’s got a boy-friend,” her brother singsonged, the same way he used to tease at her when she was a little girl.

Her Pa raised his head in the next room and laid down the newspaper.

He started to rise and then stopped.

Gracie lifted the spoon from the stew, turned it sideways and tapped it twice against the side of the heavy kettle – a brisk rat-tat – and her brother advanced, thumbs in his ears, making kissing noises.

Gracie moved faster than her Pa’s quick eye could follow.

She lashed out, hard, smacking her brother across the ear with the flat of the wooden spoon, then she turned a little and drove what she knew was called a “Side-Snap Kick” into his gut, driving the full fury of her inflamed energies through the focus of her work boot’s flat heel:  her brother grunted painfully and doubled over, and Gracie seized him by the ear and steered him toward the back porch door.

Her Pa heard the back door open, then he felt the house shiver as something hard hit something harder.

Gracie come back in sight, holding her wooden spoon before her like a scepter:  she marched back into view, stopped, looked squarely at her Pa and said, “Supper in fifteen minutes,” and began setting the table.

He noticed her face was white and pinched and she worked with her lips pressed together, and her Pa could not but fancy that, if Old Gracie ever got her dandruff up when she was a young woman, why, this was exactly how Old Gracie must have looked as that stirred up young woman.

 

Supper was subdued, conversation quiet:  Grace said almost nothing through the entire meal, though when she did speak, her voice was as gentle and as pleasant as it usually was.

Her big brother was careful to speak politely, the very few times he spoke.

Her Pa noticed the discolored lump right at his hairline and figured Gracie must have run him head first into the porch post before throwing him down the stairs and into the back yard.

Her Pa didn’t address the matter.

He knew he didn’t have to.

 

Roger Halasz had never been up on Daine Mountain.

It might be Maxwell’s Knob now, or whatever they were calling it these days, but he’d always known it as Daine Mountain and he really didn’t think of it any different … hell, most roads hereabouts had three names anyhow – Fay Iver Ridge had been officialy renamed Cornstill Road, and it also bore the County Road 32 designation, so if Daine Mountain was also Gobbler’s Knob or Gum Boot Slope or Maxwell’s Peak, why, that was just business as usual.

Roger knew this line of thought was a distraction.

He gripped the steering wheel with damp palms.

Daine Mountain was one place you just never, ever went.

Just wasn’t done.

Now he was headed up there and he was headed there to see someone, and he had a bunch of flowers on the seat beside him and a lump of something in his throat that matched the lead in his belly.

You’re nervous as a whore in church, he chided himself. 

You’re going to see a girl –

No.
No, not a girl.

I’m going to see Gracie.

He flexed his fingers, gripped the wheel again, eased up the long gravel drive.

It was well maintained – of course it is, dingle berry, he berated himself, they’ve got to get timber and supplies in, and moonshine and finished lumber out, and they’re master carpenters and they built most of –

He shook his head, dismissing the mental flogging he knew he shouldn’t be giving himself.

He came up beside the house, backed up to where he hoped he’d be out of the way, shut off the engine.

He heard the steam engine’s steady chuffing, heard the spinning blade sing as it parted a log:  a late order came in, and material was being sawed for sale on the morrow – ordinarily nobody would work after supper, but this was a special order, and the buyer was paying good money for their work.

Roger got out of the car, shifted the flowers to his off hand, a habit he’d gotten into early in his career as a badge packer.

Soldiers and lawmen will keep their strong hand free, or at least their right hand:  the former, to return a salute; the latter, to access their sidearm.

It was enough of a habit that Roger did this without thinking.

One of the several long, tall Kentucky moonshiners was headed his way, apparently bound for the sawmill; he was rubbing his forehead and gave Roger an uncomfortable look.

“She’s inside,” he said, never breaking stride:  Roger thanked him and closed his car door.

He saw a large white Shepherd dog watching him solemnly from the corner of the house – not moving, not growling, just … watching.

Roger got halfway to the house and looked again, and where the dog had been was a little wisp of fog, almost a curlicue that seemed to twist down into the ground.

Roger dismissed this from his mind, raised a hand, knocked.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

44.  BOOTS

 

Linn straightened, put a hand to his back, gripped the hay fork with his other hand, using it like a walking stick to hold himself upright.

Jimmy watched from below as his Pa suffered in silence in the loft, and he considered that maybe this was something he hadn’t ought to draw.

Boys prefer to think of their Pa as strong and wise and important and the anchor and foundation of their very universe, and it’s uncomfortable when the boy realizes that the Grand Old Man may be less than absolutely godlike.

Linn considered that maybe it wasn’t as wise as he’d thought, to work himself like he was still eighteen; this was distressing to him, and he tried to tell himself this was an anomaly and it wouldn’t recur.

Somehow he didn’t believe himself.

He parked the hay fork and turned to the ladder, started to descend.

As Linn set boot leather on the packed dirt floor, he smiled a little, just a little, for the horses were apparently enjoying the results of his hard labors.

The stalls were scraped, and well cleaned, fresh straw down, fresh hay down; he’d thrown bales, dollied out the steaming wheelbarrow, dumped it; if it wasn’t freezing weather, he’d have hosed out the Irish buggy, but as-is, he dumped the load, used the edge of the shovel to scrape out the excess, and called it good.

Jimmy, too, had labored, but Linn was careful not to over work the lad, and when Linn allowed as he’d done enough work for one day, Jimmy, shivering a little inside his mackinaw, accompanied his long tall Pa back to the house.

They left their boots on the back porch, the man-size boots and the boy-size boots, side by side, the way they’d worked, the way they’d gone down to the barn, the way they’d come back from the barn.

Connie looked at the two pair of boots and smiled, for that’s how the two of them generally associated, for when it was possible, Jimmy was at his Pa’s side.

She kissed the little girl baby she held, kissed her fine reddish hair beside the tiny ribbon barely clinging to the fine little wisps, and whispered “If I didn’t know anything about your father, those boots would tell me all I needed to know.”

Her little girl-baby turned pale-blue eyes to her Mama and smiled a big happy baby-smile.

 

Another pair of boots, another porch:  Gracie’s carpet slippers were silent as she danced a little and laughed and fiddled a quick, sprightly air, as her own Pa and her brothers took turns clogging:  laughter was a frequent visitor under their roof, and after the men-folk tired themselves out, her sisters took their turn.

Gracie’s music was a little lighter, a little quicker when the women danced:  she tailored the rhythm for their abilities, she smiled quietly as she played.

Roger sat in the comfortable old rocking chair and watched, and rocked, and listened.

He felt a tug, tug at his pants leg and blinked, surprised, looked away from Gracie, realizing with some surprise his eyes hadn’t moved from her since she started to play.

He looked down, and to the side, and saw a little girl with great big blue eyes looking solemnly at him, a pretty little girl with big blue eyes and a big ribbon bow in her hair and a big-ruffled, little-girl’s dress, and she held her arms out to him.

Call it grandfather’s reflex, for that might be the most accurate, though Roger was far from being a grandfather, at least not just yet – but he did not hesitate – he reached down and took the child under her arms and hoisted her into his lap, rocking a little as he did.

The little Maxwell girl cuddled into his chest as Roger hugged her gently to him, and she gave a contented little sigh, and said clear as day, “Gwampa.”

Roger tightened his arms around her and rested his cheek down on top of her head, and he realized that this felt right.

Then he realized that something was changed.

The girls were not clogging and that indefinable sixth sense a lawman develops, told him he was being looked at.

Roger opened his eyes and found that he was being pinned to the rocking chair like a butterfly pinned to a cork display board, by every last pair of Maxwell-blue eyes in the room.

Gracie lifted the bow from her fiddle.

She was squarely facing him, across the room, and Roger focused on her, feeling suddenly like he just might be the guest of honor at a horse whipping at least, or maybe a lynching, and it did not help a bit that he saw Gracie start to tear up.

A woman came over and plucked the child from his lap, whispering to the girl, and Roger rose, uncertain, remembering there was a door behind him, considering his pistol held only so many rounds –

A lean mountaineer gripped his shoulder.

He looked into the oldest Maxwell’s face, and the lean old man with stubbled cheeks and weather-browned face nodded, once, and Roger saw the old mountaineer's Adam’s apple bob once as he swallowed:  a lean and callused hand shook his own, and the old man followed the woman and the little girl out of the room.

One by one, every last Maxwell, man, boy, girl and woman, came to him:  the men shook his hand, even the boys, but none said a word.

The women came to him, gripped his hands quickly, lightly, looking at him with – what, with hope?  Appreciation?

For what?

Finally Roger and Gracie stood alone in the room, in the parlor, the ancient Maxwell parlor that had been filled with laughter and with music, and Roger walked slowly across the room, feeling kind of like a man who barely got off the railroad tracks before an oncoming freight locomotive went screaming through the space he’d just occupied a tenth of a second before.

Gracie swallowed and set her fiddle back in its case, laid the bow beside it, reached for his hands, gripped them tightly.

“I’m sorry,” Roger whispered, “I didn’t mean to offend –“

“Offend?”

Gracie’s mouth was open, her expression astonished.

“Offend?”  she squeaked.

Roger blinked.  “I, um … when she … everyone looked at me and I figured … she grabbed that little girl and …”

Gracie’s hand went to her mouth and she gripped Roger’s forearm, pulled him into the kitchen.

Gracie did what she did best when she wanted to think.

She fed someone.

She sat Roger down and grabbed a loaf of bread, her hands shaking, and she fumbled awkwardly in her Grandma’s knife drawer before coming up with the scallop edged bread knife:  she sawed through the fresh loaf, cutting it crooked, wedge shaped, and she sawed off four quick slices, then dropped the knife with a clatter as she could not contain herself any longer.

Roger rose, gripped her shoulders from behind, and she felt his thigh just touching her backside.

She turned, seized him, hugged him with desperation.

Roger was confused as hell, but it was apparent he was going to be neither horse whipped nor hanged, so he held the pretty young woman until she was ready to be not hugged.

Gracie drew back, looked up at Roger.

“You don’t know, do you?”  she whispered, not trusting her voice.

Roger pulled out his white hankie, pressed it carefully to the damp dribbling down her one cheek, the other cheek.

“No,” he admitted.

Gracie swallowed.

“Roger,” she whispered, “when you … kept me from bein’ killed …”

She dropped her eyes and gripped his arms again, looked back up at him.

“Roger, you said nobody shoots my wife.”

He nodded.

“Roger, I took off my boots tonight.”

Roger turned his head a little, the way a man will when he’s bringing a good ear to bear.  He’d seen the Sheriff do this and he knew it was a wordless way of showing someone they had his undivided attention.

“Roger …”

Gracie swallowed.

“My family … my Grandma wore work boots all her life and so have I.”

Roger nodded, once, carefully.

“Roger, I don’t take off my boots for nobody but my husband.”

Roger held very still, looking at Gracie’s face, feeling her hands on his arms, feeling her animal warmth as she stood very close to him.

“Roger …”

Gracie swallowed.

“I took off my boots because you were coming tonight.”

Roger felt like someone run a gallon of ice water through his veins as he realized what she was saying.

She looked up at him again.

“Roger, that little girl you picked up …”

Roger nodded just a little. 

“Roger, she called you Gwampa.”

Roger nodded.

“Roger …”  Her hands tightened, hard, on his arms, and she sagged a little, then straightened as she looked intently into the lawman’s eyes, looked with an intensity he’d never seen before.

“Roger, she’s never spoken.  That was the first time she’s ever said a single word.”

Roger’s mouth went dry.

“Everyone knew this and you didn’t.  Everyone knew … they knew you were coming and I wanted you here and …”
She looked a little helpless.

“Roger, they knew I took off my boots for you.”

Roger nodded.

“Every one of them came to you and …”

Gracie sniffed and Roger pulled her into him and let her cry.

“Roger,” Gracie sobbed, “the family gave us their blessing when they did that!”

It was Roger’s turn to go weak in the knees and he hugged her a little tighter, and with his face buried in her hair, he mumbled, “The Sheriff was right.”

She felt him laugh silently as he continued, “He said that was a hell of a way to propose to a girl!”

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

45.  I WON’T BE GRAMPA!

 

Two men received the same news at about the same time.

The pale eyed Sheriff was sitting in front of his computer with his wife on one side of him, with Jimmy and The Bear Killer on the other, facing the little round pore in the top of the laptop’s screen he knew was a camera.

The transmission from Mars was delayed by many minutes, as it always was:  the electronic communication was more like one party sent a prerecorded video, when commo was optimized; the signal was digitized, which greatly improved signal quality – when it was there, it was clear as a bell, and when the signal degraded, it just disappeared.

Tonight’s had been received, processed, downloaded, and waited patiently for the Sheriff to get home, to have supper, to relax a little and listen solemnly to Jimmy’s report of what he’d learned at school today, his observations on the horses, until he’d picked two-year-old Wes up and just touched his blond head ever so lightly against the ceiling, which brought a cascade of happy giggles from the grinning lad (and guaranteed another of Jimmy’s sketches) plus the slow-tail-sweep attention of The Bear Killer, and Connie’s patient, tolerant smile.

Connie had informed the Sheriff that Marnie had sent a video and she really thought they should watch it, and so they all sat down together, fresh popcorn perfuming the air and The Bear Killer bumming a bite as he always did.

After the official NASA logo and the usual disclaimer, Marnie and her grinning husband, Dr. John Greenlees Jr., came on the screen, sitting very close together, Dr. John’s arm around his wife’s shoulders, and Marnie looking more like a giggly teen-ager on her first prom than the chief law enforcement officer of the Second Martian District.

“Daddy,” she said, holding a rose under her chin and slowly turning it between her fingers, “I have something to tell you.”

Connie, of course, already knew what it was, and she brought her own rose up under her own chin and began turning it, slowly, just as their daughter did.

Connie already knew the news.

She looked over at her husband to see how he would take the news.

Linn never changed expression.

He reached forward and touched a key:  the video froze, and he turned to look at his wife.

“Jimmy,” he said quietly, “stand up and step back.”

Puzzled, Jimmy did, one arm going around The Bear Killer’s shoulders, as if to draw reassurance at this uncertain action on the part of his solemn-faced Pa.

“Jimmy,” Linn continued after a moment, “I need you to hold your baby sis.  You might want to go set on the couch with her.  Wes, you go with them.”

The Sheriff’s voice brooked no argument:  Wes might have been deep into his Terrible Twos, but when his Pa spoke in THAT TONE OF VOICE, he knew there would be no arguing.

Two boys and a baby girl went over to the couch and parked themselves.

Linn stood, as did his wife, and they slid their chairs back.

Connie looked a little bashful and she still held the rose under her chin.

“You knew,” Linn said softly.

“A woman knows,” Connie whispered back.

Linn moved fast, he moved with strength and with power and Jimmy blinked as his Pa snatched his Ma under the arms and off the floor and spun her around, hosting her overhead, spinning them both around and laughing a great, joyful Daddy-laugh.

Jimmy felt his baby sis twitch with surprise and open her eyes and he picked up the pacifier and slipped the Storm Plug into her opening mouth before she could protest the sudden noise.

It worked.

Linn spun them around again, lowered his wife, hugged her tight, tight, kissed her delicately, carefully, caressed her cheek with the backs of his curled fingers.

His eyes were bright, soft, a look Connie loved to see, and she knew that waiting for Marnie’s recorded image to tell him, was the right thing to do, the right way to give him the news that he was going to be Grampa.

Up on Maxwell’s Mountain, the oldest living Maxwell, Gracie’s Pa, glared at Gracie, his bottom jaw thrust out and his greying beard a-quiver.

“She told you what?” he said, incredulous.

Gracie gave her Pa a patient look, set the wooden spoon down in its rest, wiped her hands on the towel that lived on her shoulder.

“You,” she said, her eyes merry, “are going to be Grampa!”

The man sat down hard, staring incredulously at nothing:  he shook his head and he stood, looked at Gracie, set his jaw.

“Gracie,” he said, “you are the woman of the mountain now.  Your sister might be pregnant and that’ll make you Grandma but I will NOT be called GRAMPA!”

He turned and snatched his battered, weathered-pale hat off its peg, mashed it down on his head:  he turned, glared at Gracie, shoved out the door, let it slam shut behind him.

One of Gracie’s little sisters looked at her, big-eyed.

Gracie looked at her and smiled.

“Don’t worry,” she smiled.  “As soon as he holds the young’un, he’ll be Grampa, all right!”

And so it was, in the fullness of time, after winter had passed and summer approached again, that the Old Man of the Mountain held his first grandchild, and as he looked at the bright and blue-eyed face and the little toothless mouth, as the little one made a happy little baby sound and reached for his grey beard, why, the Old Man was all of a sudden more than happy to be called Grampa.

But that’s yet to come and we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves.

 

A family’s roots are often as tangled and twisted as the root of the Osage orange.

The Sheriff’s mother had been really deep into ancestry research, and she’d explored the Clan Daine’s antecedents and found a connection to the Clan Maxwell back east.

She never knew of the false accusation that drove the original Maxwell pair to their mountains, and so she never knew she was not looking at a branch or a relation, but the same family.

She’d spoken of them to her son, for she’d found a familial tie-in with their own blood, and so Linn trod the familiar ground of his Mama’s account, until he came to new material he’d never read.

 

It was the Depression, and his name was Albert.

He’d started mining coal when he was nine, in an era when it wasn’t legal to mine coal until you’d reached the ripe age of twelve.

Skinny young boys were favored to work the thin veins the big coal concerns didn’t bother with; skinny young boys could, and did, lay on their sides and swing the pick sideways to excavate a coal seam a foot thick, and Albert had.

He’d fallen off a coal tipple at sixteen and broke his back.

The fracture hadn’t compromised his spinal cord; he wasn’t paralyzed, but he was laid up for some time, and he lived the rest of his life in constant pain, but he worked every day of his life and raised a family and he even put a daughter through college.

Albert, like most men of his era, did whatever he had to, to put meat on the table, keep a roof overhead and clothes on his back, and that meant making moon likker.

Moonshining was illegal in those days, which stopped him not at all.

A man had to provide.

He made the white moon that went into quart jars, and his product was known for its good quality:  he sold this jarred up moon and it was carried to school by little boys, carried in gunny sacks slung over young shoulders, stacked in the cloakroom until lunch, when these little boys would take their sack and stagger down to the depot and sell them to Chicago men who wore fine suits and flat straw hats, men who rode the steam train in and paid them in cash money.

The schoolteachers did not hold with drinking at all, but they knew this was the only way some of the families had to make money, and so they paid this no attention.

Albert set his still up where he could keep it hid, where he had water; one time he was found by another moonshiner, a sly fellow who implied that his daughters would live a healthier life if Albert was never discovered, and he could guarantee nobody would find his still if Albert would pay him fifty dollars.

Albert drove a charge of shot from a bolt action .410 right in the gut.

He’d set up his still in a sandstone overhang, a natural cave hollowed out by running water; he knew this man was sly and sneaky, and so he moved his still, and then he used a pick and dug into the top of the overhang, used a star drill and a short handled sledge to drill holes, and then he set blasting powder and blew the cave down and covered the site and the murder forever.

Linn nodded as he read this, then he leaned back and considered, and his eyes turned to where he knew Maxwell Mountain was:  he smiled at the thought of a father who responded instantly to this threat to his family.

“I don’t blame him one little bit,” he whispered aloud, and he turned the old office chair a little to look at his Mama’s portrait.

He frowned, looked outside, rose:  sock feet silent on the floor, he walked across the living room and picked his rifle off the rack, set it by the door.

He shoved sock feet into his waiting boots, shrugged into his blanket lined coat, set his Stetson on his head:  not long after, he was riding across the frost-crisped grass, cutting cross country to where tomb stones glowed in the moonlight.

Apple-horse stepped lively, lightly, breath gusting out into the cold mountain air, and the Sheriff cut between the used-car lot and the back of the Silver Jewel, across behind the church and the schoolhouse and the bank, ducked around the hospital and gave Apple-horse knees and heels and held his rifle at high port as the bitless stallion gathered himself and picked up speed on the little bit of a downgrade before he thrust hard against the frozen earth and sailed easily across the creek, landing light and sure-footed and assaulting Graveyard Hill as if charging a personal enemy.

Linn steered his stallion with knees and with balance, as he always had, and he rode up a particular row, a familiar row, and he rode to the end of the row and rode back slow, the way he always did.

He stopped before the wide tombstone, the one that bore his own name, and his pale eyes tightened a little as he saw there was a fresh rose at the very center of the stone, halfway between LINN KELLER, LOVING HUSBAND AND SHERIFF, and ESTHER KELLER, LOVING AND DEVOTED WIFE.

“I reckon,” he said aloud, “that means you know already.”

Apple-horse threw his head high, then low, as if nodding a hearty agreement.

“Old Man,” Linn declared, “I’m a-gonna be a grampa!”

He walked Apple-horse along the row of stones, and on each one that bore his family name, a fresh rose lay, dew-beaded and fragrant, and he saw the rose on Sarah Llewellyn’s stone, and he saw the rose on his Mama’s stone.

He dismounted, walked over to this newest marker, knelt on the frosted ground, laid gentle fingertips on the polished quartz.

“Mama,” he whispered, “Marnie is with child.”

He looked up, over the stone, and The White Wolf looked back at him, slit-eyed, then sat, unconcerned, and yawned.

“I reckon,” he said to the apparition, “that means she’ll deliver a fine healthy child.”

The White Wolf blinked and then was gone, just a twist of fog looking like the mist was corkscrewing into the ground, and then nothing.

Linn gripped the top of his Mama’s stone, stood, looked at the marker for a long time.

It, too, was a double marker, his Pa’s name on one side, his Ma’s on the other.

“Pa,” he said, “I don’t know how to be Grampa.  I didn’t know how to be Pa until Marnie come along.”

He blinked and smiled a little.

“I reckon you set me a good example, though.”

“Yes, he did,” a voice said from behind him, and he turned suddenly, turned to see an amused-looking woman with Kentucky-blue eyes and a shawl around her shoulders.

“Didn’t hear you come up.”

“I was waiting for you.” 

“You were waiting.”

“I knew you’d be here.”

The Sheriff nodded.  “My wife said a woman has a way of knowin’.”

“She’s right,” Gracie smiled. 

“The White Wolf didn’t seem worried when I told Mama.”

Gracie smiled a little.

“I’d like to think that means a normal birth without defect.”

“Shouldn’t it be?”

“She’s on Mars.  They have no atmosphere to block radiation and damn little magnetic field, and what about the trip there and back?  Have her ovaries been irradiated, will the child be normal?”

Gracie gave him a patient look.

“What color are your daughter’s eyes?”

“Marnie’s?  They’re pale just like mine, why?”

“What about your baby daughter?”

Linn grinned, that quick grin of a father thinking of a favorite memory.

“They’ve changed since her birth but it looks like they’re going pale too.”

“You realize Jimmy is very closely related to our family back East.”

Linn stopped, raised an eyebrow. 

“No.  No, I did not realize that.”

Gracie nodded, stepped closer, caressed the Sheriff’s cheek.

“You’re right, by the way,” she smiled.

“Oh?”

“Yes.  For more than one.”  She reached under her coat, pulled out the bulldog .44 he’d given her before she went off to college.  “This, for instance.  It’s what I reached for when I thought that … that man was going to shoot me.”

Linn nodded.

“You were right to give this to me.  It fits my hand better than any of the others I’ve tried.  Connie had me try several but I always come back to this.”

“I like mine.”

“You have good taste.”

“Flattery,” Gracie smiled, “will get you everywhere!”

They laughed quietly, then Gracie continued, “You were right about Roger’s delivery.  That wasn’t quite how I expected to be proposed to!”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

46.  SOME THINGS ARE WORTH IT

 

Linn smiled quietly, nodding a little with approval, and Connie felt his hand tighten ever so slightly on hers.

He turned and looked at her and murmured, “Draft from the unorganized militia,” and Connie wasn’t really sure quite what he meant.

Gracie, for her part, didn’t hesitate.

She was used to accompanying the piano player on Sunday, playing her curlyback fiddle in church, adding her native song to that of the upright 88, at least until this Sunday, when their piano player was at home, flat on her back, fevered and sweating and ill, and Gracie realized Sunday’s church music wouldn’t come from the piano as it usually did.

She turned from the Parson, who came over to her, bent a little and murmured quietly in her ear:  she picked up her bow, pointed to her youngest sister, flipped the bow up, summoning the bashful child to the front of the church.

Linn watched as Gracie turned and looked at the board up beside the Parson’s pulpit, then frowned and turned back, consulted the church bulletin handed out to everyone coming through the door:  she and her little sister flipped through the hymnal, her little sis sat down on the piano bench and plopped the hymnal on the music rack, flipped quickly through the well-thumbed pages, stopped, splayed little pink hands to hold the pages open.

Gracie whispered something to her, reaching down to touch her sister’s fingers, and Connie felt Linn’s belly quiver with silent laughter as the child gave an audible, “Oh!” – and then moved her fingers, so Gracie could see the entire page, see all the notes.

Linn knew Roger was somewhere behind him and to his left, he wasn’t sure quite where, and he was a little surprised that Roger wasn’t the one holding the hymnal for Gracie.

He turned and looked at Connie, and his wife knew the look on his face.

She knew his gut told him something wasn’t right.

He released her hand – they always held hands in church – he rose easily, turned, strode down the aisle, his pace businesslike, and he made no attempt to keep his unbuttoned coat from flowing open a little with the wind of his passing.

 

 The Bear Killer tasted the wind, moist black nose working a little as he raised his head, scenting the airborne newspaper.

Black eyes looked to a particular quadrant of the sky, a section too light for stars to show, far too light for the red reflection of a nearby planet to be seen, but he didn’t need to see the tiny red dot to know who was there.

The Bear Killer’s tail began to swing and he gave a happy whuff! and chopped his jaws, the way he did when he knew family was coming home.

 

Ordinarily it would have been their designated telegrapher, their modern day Lightning, a young fellow who’d learned Morse code as a second language while still a child at his ham radio operating Pappy’s elbow … normally their young Lightning would have brought the message, but it was the road deputy who rolled to a stop in front of the church, wound down the window and handed the Sheriff the folded sheet, fresh from the dispatcher’s printer.

“Hot off the press, Boss!”  the grinning deputy declared, then accelerated away, heading out to check a complaint.

Linn’s jaw thrust slowly out, he unfolded the paper, read it, read it again, then he looked up toward the sky and started to grin.

Inside the church, the Parson asked all the veterans to stand and be recognized, as Gracie began playing the Marine’s Hymn.

She was halfway through the first stanza, her bow-strokes sure and her notes powerful, when the entire congregation heard it.

From outside, at the top of a lean man’s lungs, a powerful statement, unmistakable and clear.

Loud as he could, powerfully as he could, arms thrown wide and hands clenched into fists, Linn threw his head back and screamed to the heavens:

“EEYAAAHOOOOOO!”

Gracie blended smoothly into the “Wild Blue Yonder” about the time the church door opened and Linn came in, grinning, red-faced and looking kind of sheepish:  The Bear Killer slid in with him, looking not at all abashed:  tail swinging, the mountain Mastiff fairly strutted alongside the red-eared Sheriff as they proceeded down the aisle.

Linn settled in beside his wife, looked up at the Parson, gave him a reassuring gesture and a thumbs-up:  he handed the paper to Connie, who unfolded it, read it, looked wide-eyed at her husband, clapped her hand to her mouth and bounced a little and gave a little excited squeak, then husband and wife embraced, absolutely disregarding that they were in front of God and everybody, and the entire congregation was openly staring, for it was obvious that something just happened.

The Parson waited until Gracie finished her medley, and thanked her solemnly for a beautiful rendition; he asked the congregation to stand, and to bow their heads, and he gave a mercifully brief but thoughtfully comprehensive prayer of thanks for their veterans, for their service men and women, and when he was done, after the collective, respondent “Amen,” the Parson said, “And now the Sheriff obviously has some good news.  Sheriff, can you share your good tidings at this time?”

Linn was on his feet like a cork ripping to the surface from being held too deep underwater.

He held up the paper with the official NASA logo at its head, its neat lines of precise black print, the official words at odds with the delight they generated.

“Folks,” he declared, “I’m gonna be a grampa!”

There was a moment’s slience, a little laughter, and then applause, and Linn held up his hands, waved them down to silence.

“That’s not all,” he added, grinning with a little boy’s delight:  “Marnie and her husband are on their way home, right now!”

This time the applause was less polite and far more enthusiastic, and even The Bear Killer added his happy voice to the general confusion.

Jimmy was on his feet as well, and looking around, as was his habit, and he looked to his left – through the wavy-glass panes, toward Graveyard Hill – and he saw a white dog, maybe a Shepherd dog, he thought, and through an undistorted patch of glass, he saw the creature clearly.

To his artist’s eye it wasn’t exactly like a Shepherd dog – there was something different, but something familiar – and it looked very satisfied with itself.

Jimmy looked away, momentarily, looked back, and it was gone.

Gracie began to play an Irish jig – very much at odds with the solemn nature of coming together of a Sunday, to gravely worship the Creator of the Heavens and the Earth – but she’d read Blake’s comments on God’s Machineries of Joy, and she firmly believed that happiness should be seized while we yet draw breath, and consequently, the fiddler danced a flatfoot beside the mute piano, and the Sheriff and his wife danced before the Altar that day

Some things are just plainly worth celebrating.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

47.  HOW COME, PA?

 

Abigail reached for the printer, lifted her head to look down her nose at the communication, raised it to shoulder height.

Linn relieved her of the proffered paper and Abigail shoved her spectacles impatiently back up the bridge of her nose with a vicious punch of her stiff middle finger.

“How are the new bifocals?”  he asked quietly.

Abigail brought her off hand around, looked at her wrist watch.

“I never knew how bad my eyes were,” she admitted, “until I looked at my watch and realized I could actually read it again.”

Linn nodded.  “Mama said she hated bifocals.  She used readers.  I think she got ‘em down at the drugstore.”

“Lucky her,” Abigail muttered. 

She cocked an ear as a familiar voice came from the console’s speaker, stepped on the transmit pedal.

“Roger that, Two, advise when clear.”  She released the foot switch, looked at the clock, marked time and call in her log, then looked at the Sheriff.

He hadn’t moved out of his footprints from the moment she’d handed him the printout, and his eyes were pale and hard, and he was being very, very quiet.

“It’s not good news,” Abigail said, and it was a statement, not a question.

“No,” Linn agreed, his voice barely audible.  “No.  It’s not.”

 

Gracie was riding herd on one of the preschoolers, teaching her about the kitchen and detailing her tasks appropriate for a child of four years, when she, too, froze.

She seized the towel from her shoulder with one hand and her skirt with the other and she hit the back porch door with her shoulder to open it, leaving a little girl big-eyed and surprised in her slipstream.

Gracie was halfway across the yard before the first scream of pain split the cold mountain air.

 

Barrents’ eyes were obsidian-black as he read the notification.

“Not until she’s delivered,” he muttered, looking up at his pale eyed boss.  “Whose bright idea was that?”

“I’d understood she was cleared for the return trip.”  Linn sat down for all of three-tenths of a second before he was back on his feet, restless as a cat.

“Why wait?”  Barrents mused.  “Wouldn’t it make more sense to send one package than two, so to speak?”

“Makes-a no sense ta me, Buddy Joe,” Linn said, his voice tight.  “I got no idea.”

Barrents laid the sheet on the Sheriff’s green desk blotter.  “She’ll make it home, Boss.  You’ll have a new little one to spoil.”

“Damned right I’ll spoil her,” Linn muttered.  “I’ll make up for lost time.  She’ll need a horse and a saddle to fit, she’ll need a riding outfit and boots –”

He stopped, turned toward the smooth-muscled Navajo.

“If I drown my sorrows in another chocolate sundae I’ll be big around as a church, and if I try and soothe my nerves with coffee I’ll have the clanks the rest of the day.”

“Not to mention stoppin’ to water every fencepost between here and there,” Barrents deadpanned.

“That too,” Linn nodded.  “Might be I’ll take up drinkin’.”

“A man could do that.”

Linn shook his head.  “Nah.  Tried it once.”

“Once?”

“Yep.”  Linn nodded solemnly, his eyes distant as he looked into his wild and misspent youth at the only time he really tied one on.  “I didn’t have a morning after, I had an entire day after!”

“Was it worth it?”

“Hell no it wasn’t worth it!”  Linn declared.  “I’ll have a sociable beer now and again and maybe a good tilt of Who Hit John if I feel a cold comin’ on, but that’s about it!”

“Glad to hear it.”

Linn raised an eyebrow.  “How’s that?”

“The stuff’s too easy to drink.  I don’t dare even have a sociable snort.  I’m afraid I’ll like it too well.  That’s why your Mama never drank.  She told my father that her mother was not just a drunk, she was a damned drunk, and she carried the genes for alcoholism.”

Linn took a long breath, nodded.

“Yeah,” he rasped.  “She’s right and you are too.”

“In that case how’s for bacon and eggs?”

Linn straightened, reached for his Stetson.  “Bacon and eggs sound good!”

 

Blood shot in a bright arc as Gracie took her knife and split the jeans up the side seam, one quick, sure slice, easy to repair and quick to get the offending material out of the way.

Part of her mind recognized the squirt as arterial and the rest of her mind was working too hard with her hands to bind the wound and stop the blood loss.

She got the towel wound around the boy’s calf, closing the wound the freshly sharpened ax made, while his older brother explained impotently that he’d missed his stroke and hit the edge of the chunk and it bounced off and caught his leg –

Gracie did not hear a word he was saying.

She laid a hand on the rapidly reddening dishtowel and started to talk, quietly, the way her Grandma had when Gracie fell and cut herself on a broken canning jar when she was but a wee child.

“And I saw Gerald Frances Maxwell in the ditch wallowing in Gerald Frances Maxwell’s blood and I said until Gerald Frances Maxwell, Live; yea, I said unto Gerald Frances Maxwell, Live.”

Her hand tightened over the boy’s laceration and he felt it suddenly warm, as if she’d shot heat out of her hand into the wound, and then Gracie let go of the leg and ran an arm under his knees and the other around behind him, stood.

“Frankie, start the truck.  Malachai, open the passenger door and call the hospital, tell Doc Greenlees I’ve got a sewin’ job for him!”

Men had come runnin' out of the distillation barn, up from the sawmill, men stood back as they saw Gracie at work, as they saw her hands were fast and sure and her face was set and pinched a little, and they offered neither a word of interference nor a get-in-the-way.

They knew better.

They watched as this whirwind in a grey skirt stood and ran lightly, quickly, as if she wore dancing slippers instead of work boots, ran with the injured child in her arms, and they watched her climb awkwardly into the cab, the boy rolled into her like he was the most precious thing in the world and she would not ever let him go.

The eldest Maxwell tilted his beat-up hat back on his head, laid his other skinny claw of a hand on young Malachai’s shoulder.

“Boy,” he said quietly, “did you see what Gracie just did?”

Malachai’s mouth was still dry and all he could do was nod.

The elder Maxwell squeezed the young man’s shoulder.  “You just saw woman’s magic, son.  You just saw her stop blood with the Word.”
He swallowed, remembering when old Gracie did the same for him.

“Go on in an’ give attair doctor a call.  He’ll need time t’ b’ile up some horse hair f’r sewin’ with.”

“Yes, sir,” Malachai gasped, leaning forward until he was just off balance, then running only fast enough to keep from falling on his face.

 

Roger Halasz looked up as the comic book alarm went off on his radar.

He looked up, startled, as the pickup whistled past him headed the other direction.

He recognized the truck and he saw Gracie in the passenger side and he knew this meant there was trouble.

He didn't bother with the roof lights -- there was only one place a fast moving pickup would be headed, on this end of town, and when they made that particular turn ahead of him, he knew he was right.

Roger pulled the cruiser in gear, checked his mirror and pulled out behind them, followed them in to the hospital.

 

Gracie’s work boot hit the pickup truck's door hard, kicking it wide open because it didn’t open fast enough for her.

She slid down out of the seat, the tall, gangly boy in her arms, hit the ground flat footed and she packed him at a fast walk through the glass double doors.

Roger saw the red, gleaming-wet rag wrapped around the boy’s calf, how the pants leg was split open, blood soaked and dangling beneath, how Gracie’s apron was red-stained, how her face was white and pinched and even her pressed-together lips were almost colorless.

He followed her in before the automatic doors even started to close.

Roger stood and waited until Gracie came back out the doors marked AUTHROIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

She almost ran into him.

Gracie’s hands were red and her eyes were big and she grabbed Roger around the middle like a drowning man will seize a life-preserver and he ran his arms around her, and he felt her shivering like a scared little rabbit.

“Roger,” she quavered, “I didn’t think I could do it.”

Her voice was muffled a little as her face was pressed into the front of his zippered, black-nylon uniform jacket.

“You got him here,” Roger said reassuringly, hugging her to him.

Gracie looked up at him, her eyes big and afraid.

“No, you don’t understand,” she whispered.  “I stopped the blood!”

“I saw you’d wrapped –”

“No, Roger, that’s not what I mean,” she gasped.  “I need to sit down!”

She sat and looked at her hands and looked up at Roger, still shaking.

“Roger … I can stop blood.”

Roger frowned a little and turned his head just a bit. “How’s that?”

“When I was a little girl,” Gracie explained, “Grandma … I fell on some broken glass and it was a bad cut.” She raised her right arm, traced a red-tinted finger down a scar she didn’t have to look at, in order to find.  “She stopped … it was arterial, Roger, I could have bled to death, and she … she spoke the Word.”

“I’ve heard of that,” Roger said slowly.

“I just did it, Roger!”  Gracie shivered like a ghost just caressed her very soul with graveyard-cold hands.  “I … I am … I did it … just like Grandma …”

Gracie closed her eyes, shook violently for a moment, took a long breath, blew it out, then opened her eyes and looked at her hands.

“Oh goodness,” she blurted.  “I need to go wash!”

Roger rose and Gracie looked around.

One of the little old receptionist volunteer ladies had been watching her; she helpfully pointed across the waiting area to a door marked LADIES.

“I’ll be right back!”

 

It was not far to the hospital.

The Sheriff and his chief deputy made it on the run, not bothering to go back for a vehicle.

They’d seen the familiar truck, they'd noted both the truck's velocity and the look on Gracie’s face, the fact that she had one of the Maxwell boys on her lap, cradled to her the way a woman will when one of her own has been hurt.

Bacon and eggs were forgotten before they even made it into the Silver Jewel.

They pushed through the hospital’s automatic doors, not waiting for the automatic opener to function.

Roger rose as they strode into the waiting area.

“Report,” the Sheriff said quietly and with absolutely unmistakable authority.

“Gracie is all right,” Roger said, his voice low and urgent, “but one of the boys has a cut leg.  She said something about stopping blood with the Word.”

Barrents and the Sheriff exchanged a look.

“Sheriff, your Mama could stop blood,” Roger said slowly, “and I heard you can too.  Is that what she’s done?”

“I don’t know,” Linn admitted, “but it sounds like a good possibility.  The boy’s in there?”

“He’s in ER, yessir.”

“Doc Greenlees is on today.  Best surgeon I know of.  Any idea what happened?”

“No, sir, just that his leg was wrapped up and bloody.”

Gracie came out of the ladies’ room, the howl of the forced-air dryer diminishing as the door shut behind her.

Gracie took Roger’s hand, turned to face the Sheriff.

“It was accidental, Sheriff,” she said.  “He took a bad cut at a splittin’ chunk.  The ax bounced and took him just outside the shin bone.  He hit an artery, from the way it shot out.”

Linn winced.  “Daggone, Gracie, that hurts to think about!”

“I had Zachariah call ahead so Doc Greenlees would be ready.”

“Likely he was, then.”

Gracie blinked, looked at the Sheriff, almost puzzled:  she laid a hand against his face, looked deep into the man’s pale eyes.

“Sheriff,” she said warningly, “what happened?”

“Nothing to worry about, Gracie.  How long has he been in with Doc?”
“Not long.  Something …”

Her fingers shifted on his cheek, her eyes widened.

“Marnie.  She’s … not coming.”

Linn took a long breath.  “No.  Not until she delivers.”

Gracie’s expression hardened.  “They want to see what effects …”

“Likely they do,” Linn agreed.  “I wanted to ask Doc if he’d heard his son would be delayed as well.”

“I’m sorry, Sheriff.”  Gracie slid her hand down his neck, gripped his shoulder, sagged a little as she did, and Linn caught her around the waist.

“Roger,” he said, and Roger grabbed her hips and went into a deep forward stance, something he’d learned in Karate and later learned from the Sheriff’s mother how to use it if someone went faint on him.

He pulled Grace’s backside down onto his knee as he took a very deep stance:  Linn steadied her from the front, Roger from beneath and behind, and Gracie shook her head, protested “I shouldn’t be this weak!”

Linn laughed.  “Weak?”  he chuckled.  “Gracie, of all the souls I know, you are absolutely the LAST one I would EVER call weak!”

 

Marnie Keller gripped the handles of the weights she’d had fashioned out of sintered Martian stone.

They’d been heated and almost cast into shape; the rock she’d chosen took well to being heated and re-formed, and she’d actually had weights made.

These ones she used for doing push-ups.

She wore additional weights across her back in a vest she’d fabricated for the purpose; she almost punished herself with her conditioning routine, refusing to allow herself to acclimatize fully to the lower Martian gravity.

Whether she ran the indoor track, whether she did push-ups or squats or sit-ups or the other exhausting exercises she’d been doing every day since their arrival, Sheriff Marnie Keller drove herself without mercy.

Her belly had yet to swell with new life, but new life there was:  her Olympic skinsuit had the happy effect of blocking all but the strongest radiation, and NASA was only too happy to send replacement suits to accommodate the changes she and they expected in her physiology – suits that would protect the wearer, both mother and unborn child, from radiation that penetrated the weak Martian magnetic field and its near-nonexistent atmosphere.

At the moment, though, Marnie was sweating, breathing deep, dropping to the floor and pushing off in the harsh, punishing rhythm of “In the Hall of the Mountain King” as vigorously played by a group of European cellists.

It was the music her grandmother Willamina preferred for her own workout routines, and Marnie found it was very much to her own taste as well.

Marnie waited until after her quick, economical shower, until after she’d dried and brushed her short hair, that she and her husband sat down to dictate their video to their parents, and when that video crossed space and survived sleet-storms of radiation and came to visible and audible life on the Sheriff’s laptop screen, Jimmy frowned as Marnie carefully explained how she wouldn’t be home until the baby was born, and she was sorry but that’s how the scientists wanted to handle it.

Jimmy knew there was no use at all in addressing any query to the glowing screen, so he waited until after the transmission was finished, and he turned to face his serious faced Pa squarely, and he asked the pale eyed lawman the question Linn was wondering himself.

“How come, Pa?”

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

48.  ONE YEAR LATER

 

Sheriff Linn Keller looked steadily at the young man with the crew cut, the young man in a black suit and a narrow tie, looking very much like the stereotype of the FBI agent during J. Edgar Hoover’s administration.

He’d come downstairs wearing his white boxers and an irritated expression, he’d come downstairs with a double handful of double-barrel shotgun.

Apparently the individual standing outside his door was expecting such a reception; the other silent young man wearing a black suit and an impassive expression stood beside the front fender of a dechromed, black, government sedan.

The first man in a black suit held up a badge wallet.

Linn recognized the credentials, opened the door.

To his credit, this professional young man offered neither comment, nor change of expression, at finding himself received by a barefoot man in his undershorts, holding a double 12-bore with the mule ears drawn back to full stand.

The young man’s quiet words pulled the ground out from under the pale-eyed Sheriff’s gut and he felt his belly drop about two hundred feet, straight down.

“Your daughter’s re-entry vehicle was hit by shrapnel,” the quiet-voiced young man explained, “from the collision of two dead satellites.  They had to fall back on a tertiary escape system.”

“What kind of tertiary escape system?”  Linn asked, his voice as quiet as the government agent’s had been.

“Imagine an egg,” came the reply, “with a clear cover.  Your daughter will be on a contoured couch inside the egg.  It’s thick on the bottom, and as it falls through the atmosphere, the thick bottom will ablate and expose contoured resistance layers that will form wings.  The egg will now fly, of its own accord, it will fly in great spirals, and we’ll get a radar fix as it spirals down.  Once it reaches a predetermined altitude, the lateral aspects will break free and release the parachute.  This will decelerate the egg sufficiently for a safe splashdown.”

“Sounds kind of old fashioned.”

The agent nodded.  “It … has never been used in a real-world situation before.”

 

Sheriff Marnie Keller snapped open the trash bag.

It looked like a trash sack, it was heavy as an industrial trash sack, the size of a trash bag, she crushed the beer can sized container in her other hand and shook it – once, twice, thrice, mixing the binary compound --and threw it into the industrial trash sack, waited for the components to react and expand:  her husband John Greenlees handed her their little girl, blinking and wiggling in her tiny little atmosphere suit, smiling behind the clear plastic visor, her breath fogging it a little as she did.

Marnie placed her in the middle of the expanding foam pad, making a custom fitted deceleration couch for their baby in the space beside her own generic deceleration couch.

An alarm blared and Marnie slammed the inner lid shut over the child, confining her wiggling little girl quickly, inescapably.

It latched and sealed, Marnie jumped into her couch, pulled the harness over her shoulders, across her belt, drove the latches home.

“John,” she called, “get in and let’s get out of here!”

John looked at the monitor, looked at his wife.

“Marnie, the mains just went off line!”

“John, set the timer and get in!”

John looked at the monitor, set the timer, then reached over and slammed the lid shut.

“JOHN!”

“The mains are offline, Marnie, the launch system is dead!  I’ll take the next bus!”  he yelled.  “Get out of here before we fall apart!”

John stepped into the airlock, pulled the door shut, heard the seals expand, then he hit the emergency release with the heel of his hand, hit it hard, as if hitting at outrageous fortune that brought them across a trackless void, only to shred their shuttle and probably kill all three of them in the process.

The end of the launch tube would normally swing open, there would normally be a decompression cycle before it opened, the last-ditch escape capsule would normally be lifted on mag-lev and sent gently on a precise course at a precise velocity, given a computer-generated path to follow to a predetermined landing zone.

Dr. John Greenlees slammed his palm on the red stud and a ring of Primacord blew the end off the launch tube, blowing his wife’s escape capsule into space as the last of the shuttle’s atmosphere blasted into the orbital void.

Marnie felt like she was falling – she felt like she’d just been dropped off the edge of a cliff, and she saw what was left of the re-entry shuttle above her, at least until it shrank and disappeared among the cloud of debris, most of it from the shotgunned shuttle itself.

Sheriff Marnie Keller looked over at her baby’s life-bubble, uncertain whether she was more frustrated at being Spam in a can, unable to pilot her vehicle, or by being a mother unable to hold her baby.

She looked out at the surrounding blackness, the sharp edge of earth’s horizon below her, she took a long breath and whispered something very sincere and very, very profane.

“John Greenlees,” she concluded, “damn your protective male hide, if you die on me I’ll never speak to you again!”

 

Gracie stopped kneading the pie crust, blinked, seized the edge of the table.

Dizzy … why am I dizzy …

Gracie shivered, collapsed into a chair, seized the edge of the chair and closed her eyes.

Why am I so very afraid?

 

Jimmy sat up in bed, eyes wide, breath shallow, quick.

He woke up terrified, not understanding what he was seeing, not understanding what he felt.

Jimmy did the only thing he could think of.

 

The agents had only just departed.

Linn sagged against the closed door, dropping his face in his hand.

It’s been said that men are born with a Mr. Fix-it hat – the Sheriff certainly was – and when a husband and father ran into something he couldn’t fix-it, it didn’t set very well, and right now his little girl was in deadly peril, and here he stood, barefoot in his own living room, feet on the ground, and his little girl was God knows where –

If she’s still alive.

Linn felt a deep snarl beginning somewhere deep in his chest when he heard it.

His head snapped up like he’d been clap boarded across his backside.

His boy screamed with fear, shrieked the one word that launched the Sheriff up the stairs at a dead run, a father ready to do war with whatever just caused his boy’s shivering scream –

“DADDEEEEE!”

Linn shoved through the door, crouched, gun at high port –

Jimmy was sitting bolt upright in bed, wide awake, staring, not having a nightmare, he was seeing something, seeing something –

Linn straightened, took two long strides across the room, climbed on the bed behind his boy, set down on Jimmy’s still-warm pillow.

If a dog is bristling and staring at something that’s not there, Linn remembered, crouch down behind the dog and sight between its ears.  A dog with angel eyes can see spirits and if the dog is seeing a spirit, look between its ears and you will too.

Linn looked just over Jimmy’s head and he felt cold water run through his veins.

 

The third Sea Stallion lifted off the deck, flying the dirty bird:  just like team trapshooting, the third man in the squad would fire at the bird if the first two missed.

This was the Dirty Bird, and the third pilot drew short straw, so Max got to pick the bird for the mission.

Max picked the all-black Sea Stallion, the one with the articulated pickup arm underneath, the one helo Max flew best of any.

This bird felt like something Max read once, read in a western written in the 1890s by someone named McKenna, a Western that said a warrior’s spirit will flow into the warrior’s true weapon, and they then become greater than just man and device:  it was something that happened when an engineer drove the perfect locomotive, when the Ninja swung the perfect katana, and Max didn’t belt down into the pilot’s seat.

Max belted on the big black Sea Stallion like a Western Sheriff belts on a gunrig.

 Max strapped on speed and power and all that the helo could possibly be.

They knew the Mars shuttle was hit with shrapnel from space junk, and their missionwas to pick up the survival capsules.

If any made it out.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

49.  LIEUTENANT MAXWELL’S RIDE

 

John Greenlees jumped into the second capsule as his ears popped.

What was left of the shuttle was losing atmosphere, fast, and he yanked the tempered glass canopy down over his couch with the desperate speed of a man who didn’t want to explode in the vacuum that would very, very soon claim the interior of the shuttle.

He hadn’t been able to set the timer to blow the end off the launch tube, and for a long moment, the dread knowledge that he was suddenly trapped in a crippled, unsurvivable shuttle, with no possible escape, turned his blood to ice.

He needn’t have worried.

The shuttle groaned and twisted, and what used to be the last remaining airtight compartment kind of disintegrated from around him, and he began to fall.

John reached up, pulled the harness down over his shoulders, very precisely, very exactly inserted the tongues into the buckles’ latches, trying not to think of the damage he’d noticed on his wife’s pod just before it blew out the launch tube.

 

Marnie closed her eyes, wishing most sincerely she could hold her child.

She remembered an impossible moment, a moment in her office back on Mars when a rider on a black horse smiled, just before the horse spun and kicked and slammed the horseshoe into the plasticrete wall behind her chair, she remembered the impossible moment on the bare, near-vacuum, freezing-cold Martian surface when a woman in a riding dress and boots drove the contents of both barrels of a shotgun into the miner who was trying to murder Marnie.

As she fell into the ocean of air, as the winged capsule began to glow from friction with the thickening atmosphere, Marnie remembered reading about a big black horse, and she wished she were on a big black horse with wings instead of falling to earth in a concrete egg with a curved glass lid.

 

The Sea Stallion’s turbines sang as they converted JP-4 and sea-scented air into flight, and Lieutenant S. Maxwell – Max, to everyone on board ship -- grinned as they turned onto his new heading.

Two capsules made it out of the shuttle and were on descent.

Max knew as their bellies burned off to reveal the airfoils, they would begin a large, slow spiral, designed to shed energy and trade velocity for heat, that they would glow and smoke and finally they would deploy parachutes and then descend vertically to the ocean below, where they should float as buoyantly as any cement boat.

If they weren’t damaged when the shuttle was shredded.

 

Linn held onto Jimmy, and Jimmy gripped his Pa’s arms desperately, unable to take his eyes from the scene in front of him, unable to keep from feeling pedals under laced-leather boots, unable to keep from feeling the weight of the flight helmet, smelling burnt JP-4 exhaust and hearing the deafening clatter of carbon-fiber blades punishing the air and feeling the collective’s contoured handle in his right glove, unable to keep from seeing sky and clouds and a wide, shining sea, and clocks.

Lots and lots of clocks.

He could not shut these things out, but he could feel his Pa holding him, and he knew as long as his long tall Pa had hold of him, they would get through whatever this terror was.

 

The lead element was three miles east, following the radar vector.

The survival capsule’s path was not according to projection; they were constantly correcting with radar, and high-res scan showed structural damage to the main body.

How much damage, they didn’t say, but any damage was too much.

If it broke up in mid-air, there would be no survivors.

If it fell apart when the chutes deployed, there would be no survivors.

If the chutes deployed and worked successfully, they might break up on impacting the water’s surface.

“Come on, darlin’,” Max muttered, willing the big black Stallion to make it, make it, make it!

 

Gracie reined her riding mule down the path and across behind the firehouse.

She looked up the other side, at the graveyard, she knew it’s where she had to go.

She had no idea why, but she knew she had to go there.

 

Marnie opened her eyes, dismissing the futile wish for a flying Valkyrie on a black horse with wings.

She could barely move as gravity built up, as she was pushed deeper into her acceleration couch, and she knew her baby would be likewise mashed into her own foam couch.

Marnie felt tears being pulled from the corners of her eyes as she clenched her teeth and forbade herself to cry.

You are the Sheriff, she thought viciously.  You WILL NOT CRY!!!

She felt her hand try to lift a little, try to move, try to reach futilely for the sealed, tempered-glass dome covering her daughter, knowing such a young child’s brain was never, ever meant to be mashed against the back of her skull with the increasing gravities of re-entry.

She knew the searing flames enveloping the clear canopy wasn’t actually flame, that it was the underbelly of her capsule being vaporized, heated from friction, streaking brightly through the atmosphere like a falling star.

She had no way of knowing she’d already started to spiral, describing a circle just short of a mile across, nor that radar clawed at her, calculating her position, speed, attitude, velocity, rate of descent.

She had no way of knowing the fiery ablation now reduced her capsule to kind of a winged egg, nor that the wings would break off at a particular moment in the ablation, that the parachutes would deploy at that time.

Not, at least, until the wings snapped free and she fell, feeling like she was in a suddenly dropped elevator, and then fireproof, woven straps fluttered into view, and above it, the red and white stripes of a reinforced Nomex parachute.

 

Jimmy gasped as he felt the world tilt around him, felt himself accelerate through space, fear being replaced by exhilaration.

He felt like he was chasing something very important.

Many’s the time Jimmy rode behind his Pa, both of them straddling the Sheriff’s horse and Jimmy felt like he had the many times he and his Pa galloped across a pasture, riding for the pure joy of riding, and the Sheriff, sitting on his son’s pillow, his arms around his boy’s middle, felt the same exhilaration Jimmy was feeling.

He didn’t understand it either, but now he knew what it felt like to ride back seat on a galloping horse.

 

Max heard the lead element’s report.

“The chute is failing.”

Max dropped the Sea Stallion’s nose and picked up speed, trading altitude for velocity.

Lieutenant Maxwell would need every bit of speed the Stallion could manage if they were going to catch this falling star.

“Max, whattaya doin’?”

Lieutenant Maxwell looked over at the co-pilot, grinning that reckless grin so well-known aboard ship.

“I’m gonna catch that pod!”

The black Sea Stallion burned a hole through the air as it screamed across the ocean, following the projected path of the falling pod.

 

Gracie rode up into the graveyard, swung a leg up, slid out of the saddle and landed flat-footed on the cold, packed ground.

She walked up to the stone, the polished quartz marker with the name LLEWELLYN, the stone that showed a young woman riding a great black horse, a horse with wings.

Gracie stared at the image, crouched slowly, studying the sight of a woman, flying, on a great, absolutely black horse with wings so utterly white as to almost look silver.

She shivered, her breath coming quickly, feeling like someone just stepped on her grave.

Gracie looked down the row of stones, looked at the several markers, frowned.

“No roses,” she whispered, blinking, then she rose, turned, seized her mule’s bridle and reached for the saddlehorn.

She knew where else she had to look for a fresh rose.

She had to talk to the Sheriff’s wife Connie.

 

Marnie looked up at the chute, at the tear spreading in its canopy.

She saw it rip away, felt herself start to fall.

“I’m sorry, Willa,” she whispered to her baby, not bothering to stop her tears now.

 

Max’s teeth gleamed with a feral joy and the big Sea Stallion sang power and Max’s very soul surged into every cubic centimeter of the great mechanical stallion.

The turbines were turning better than a hundred percent, they was running over full wartime emergency, overspeed and overtemperature, Max was pushing the black Sea Stallion harder than it was ever supposed to run.

“Deploy the recovery arm.”

“Aye, sir!”

Max felt the bird start to shiver with the turbulence the lowering arm caused:  it was a big V, it was designed to catch a balloon coming up, not a chute falling down.

Max saw the capsule, the chute above it, Max saw the canopy with a big gap ripped in it, the stick eased itself forward ever so slightly –

 

I'm going to die, I'm going to die, I'm going to die, she thought, my daughter will die like an egg dropped on a sidewalk and I can't stop it, damn me I can't stop it, it's my fault, my fault, my fault --

Marnie blinked, looked at the blue sky through the ruin that used to be a chute.
This is the last thing I am ever going to see.

At least it's a pretty blue sky.

 

Lieutenant Maxwell felt the added weight, adjusted for the greater mass, swung his black Sea Stallion like an inverted pendulum –

Marnie screamed as the capsule jerked, swung, and as her capsule was hauled wildly about and then up, then she saw it, saw the big black Sea Stallion as she came up just above rotor level out at at the end of the tight-clamped retrieval arm.

Marnie screamed again, and laughed, and clapped her gloved hands to the visor still sealed over her face.

She recognized the helo as a Sea Stallion, and her scream of surprise dissolved into hysterical laughter.

A big black flying horse had caught her after all.

 

The Admiral watched from the bridge’s thick windows as the three helos approached the flight deck.

One and Two peeled away as the third helo, the all-black Sea Stallion with a big white snowflake painted on its nose, settled over the deck, eased the scorched capsule down to just barely touch:  half-bent-over sailors ran out onto the deck with squared timbers, slid under the rounded-bottom capsule to keep it from wobbling on the flat deck.

Sheriff Marnie Keller hit her harness release with a closed fist, gripped the canopy release, pulled.

The mechanism, damaged somewhere between orbit and landing, sheared off, leaving the canopy locked down.

Marnie waved at the team – she knew these men specialized in air-sea rescue, in getting pilots out of a damaged aircraft on the flight deck – she waved them away, then flipped the protective cover off the detonator.

“STAND CLEAR!  CANOPY BLOW!” came the shout, and men fell back, crouching a little, waiting to see which way to dodge to miss the descending, polished canopy.

There was a sharp BANG! and the canopy leaped away from the capsule, flying some twenty feet in the air:  men stepped aside as it dropped to the deck, with a sharp, almost-metallic BANG, rocked a couple times:  Marnie sat up, reached over and opened the canopy covering her little girl.

She picked up the unmoving baby, swung her legs over the still-hot edge of the capsule:  strong hands steadied her as she dropped the foot-and-a-half to the deck, and she looked around, then reached under her chin and pinched open her faceplate, slid it up and out of the way.

“CORPSMAN!”  she yelled, putting all her gut into the scream.  “CORPSMAAAANNN!!!”

A man with a big red cross on his front and wearing a bug-eared helmet shoved easily through the crowd:  he made a linebacker look like the Tooth Fairy, and as he approached, Marnie screamed, “PLEASE TELL ME YOU HAVE A PEDEATRICIAN ON BOARD!”

“YES MA’AM WE DO!”  the corpsman boomed.

“DECELERATION INJURY, SHE SHOULD BE MOVING!”

“I’LL TAKE CARE OF HER MA’AM!”

Willamina nodded, looked around at the surrounding crowd of young men regarding her as if … what?  As if she were Venus, rising naked from the sea? – then she remembered she was wearing her Olympic skinsuit.

I might as well be naked, she thought.

Marnie grinned, inhaled deeply, savoring the salt air.

“Oh God,” she groaned, “this is the first real live air I’ve breathed in three years!”

Marnie ran her arm around a sailor’s shoulders, hugged him quickly, tightly, then she released the grinning, red-faced young seaman and staggered a little.

Marnie turned, eased between two men, until she saw the flag:  she straightened, saluted, looked around.

“Who’s the biggest brass hat here?”  she yelled happily.  “I need to ask permission to come aboard!”

“That would be me,” an authoritative voice declared, and Marnie turned and found she was facing an Admiral.

She saluted.  “Permission to come aboard, sir!”  she shouted.

“Sheriff,” the Admiral shouted back, “you know how to make an entrance!”

“Admiral, may I ask a favor?”  Marnie shouted happily.

“Name it, Sheriff!”

“First I want to kiss that pilot that caught us as we fell!”

The Admiral turned, bellowed “MAX!” and then looked at the pale-eyed woman in the white Olympic skinsuit with the six point star embossed on the breast, and the old-fashioned Smith & Wesson revolver on her belt.

“What else, Sheriff?”

Marnie’s expression was suddenly serious.  “I need to know if my husband made it out.”

“We’ll find out,” the Admiral said, and the Sheriff had no doubt at all he would do just that.

“Last on the list.”

“Yes, Sheriff?”

“Admiral, I knew a woman seven years ago.  She was Ombudsman for new Navy wives, and I never saw her happier than when she spoke of dancing with admirals.”

Sheriff Marnie Keller bit her bottom lip, looked away, looked back.

“I would like to dance with an Admiral.”
The Admiral stepped closer, took her shoulders gently between his large and capable hands.  “Sheriff,” he said quietly, “I think we can arrange that.”

Lieutenant Sarah Maxwell took off her helmet and walked slowly toward the crowd and the capsule, raised a hand to acknowledge the Admiral’s summoning gesture.

“Sheriff,” the Admiral said, “may I introduce your rescue pilot.  Lieutenant Sarah Maxwell, probably the best helo pilot –”

Marnie’s jaw dropped and then she shoved past the Admiral, sprinted toward the grinning pilot, who ran through her crewmates to SLAM into the Sheriff:  the two women seized one another and jumped up and down like two excited teen-agers, screaming in delight.

 

Sheriff Linn Keller’s expression was solemn as his daughter’s face filled his computer screen.

“Papa,” she quavered, “I’m safe and the baby’s safe, but John –”

Marnie put the back of her wrist to her lips, closed her eyes for a long moment.

“They thought another capsule made it out, but I don’t know.  I’m … I don’t know if John is …”

Linn waited, wishing he could reach through the glowing screen and hold his little girl.

Marnie took a long breath, composed herself, opened her eyes.

“Papa,” she said, “a Navy pilot made a midair catch when my chute failed.”  Marnie held up a cell phone, held it close to the camera.

Linn saw his little girl, her arm around a grinning pilot’s shoulders, the pilot’s arm around Marnie’s, and they stood in front of a big black helo with a white snowflake painted on its nose.

“It’s Sarah Maxwell,” Marnie almost giggled.  “My God, all this distance and I fall from heaven onto a carrier deck and I find someone from home waiting for me!”

Linn grinned, nodding.  “I remember Sarah Maxwell,” he said quietly.

Marnie lowered the phone, looked up, smiled, thanked someone who handed her a wiggling little baby.

“I hoped to bring her home so you could hold her right away,” Marnie said, looking down at the little girl in a blue-and-gold Navy blanket, then she looked at the screen again.

“I’m looking forward to introducing you,” Marnie smiled quietly, proudly.  “Papa, she has pale eyes!”

“It’s a good thing she looks like you,” Linn laughed.  “I sure wouldn’t wish my ugly looks on her!”

“Papa, they’re taking us back to NASA for a while.”  Marnie was serious again.  “They … want to see how well a child will … they know men and women will …”

Marnie shook her head.

“Papa, do you remember telling me … you quoted Martin Luther and you said that you cannot bring fire and straw together and forbid smoke.”

Linn nodded.

“We’re going to have a permanent colony on Mars now, Papa.  We showed it’s possible.  We’ve been there long enough … we’ll be mining underground to live sheltered from radiation and meteor strikes.”  She took a long breath.  “We’re there to stay, Papa.  It’s going to be a permanent colony.  We can live there now, we proved it.  We’ll be raising families there, and our daughter is the proof!”

Sheriff Marnie Keller looked up at the knock, and the Admiral came in, raising a finger to request her attention.

Marnie looked up and Linn saw his daughter’s eyes widen.

Sheriff Marnie Keller was suddenly flanked by a pair of corpsmen, a third reached in and relieved her of her child, because Sheriff Marnie Keller, the second Sheriff of the Second Martian District, survivor of an orbital explosion and a failing parachute, blooded warrior, and daughter of a long line of western Sheriffs, did something she’d never, ever done before in her entire young life.

She fainted.

When Sheriff Marnie Keller looked up as her husband, Dr. John Greenlees, came into the room behind the Admiral, she started to rise, and the color ran from her face like red ink out of an eyedropper, and her knees buckled as a sparkling curtain descended over her vision, and when she came back to her senses, she was flat on her back on the deck, her husband was grinning at her and bouncing their daughter a little, and he looked down and said, “Honey, your father is on the line.”

“Help me up,” she gasped, and strong hands helped her back up and into her chair.

Husband and wife crowded shoulder to shoulder and held a squealing, smiling little baby girl up with them, and Willamina said “Papa, this your granddaughter. 

“Her name is Willamina Lynne.”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

50.  DIAGNOSIS

 

The ship’s surgeon was a good natured sort, fatherly and reassuring:  Marnie watched as the man unwrapped her baby girl, stripped her down to the altogether:  his hands were sure, deft, gentle, and he seemed to see as much with his fingers as he did with his eyes.

So far little Willa had tolerated the CT scan (and the dignity of being immobilized on the papoose board), she’d allowed the ultrasound (the doctor explained that he’d warmed both the sound-conductive gel and the smooth, stainless-steel ultrasound head first), and now, while the images processed, he held the naked little baby on his lap, on a blanket and a waterproof pad, and he cupped the blinking, wiggling child’s skull in careful hands.

Marnie watched as the physician closed his eyes and very gently, very carefully, explored the back of her child’s skull:  satisfied, the man opened his eyes, picked Willa up and placed her back on the paper-covered exam table.

Dr. John Greenlees was being debriefed, elsewhere on the ship; Marnie’s gut told her the ship’s surgeon was a man to be trusted, and so she wasted no energies wishing her husband was here.

The doctor wiped and powdered and diapered the smooth little bottom, got her into a flannel one-piece (where did they come up with that? Marnie wondered), and finally he carried the bright-eyed, pale-eyed little girl over to her Mama.

“I understand you have some questions,” he said quietly, pulling up a stainless steel, three-legged stool and planting his backside on its unpadded surface.

“Is she all right?”  Marnie asked simply.

“I’d like to review the CT scans,” the surgeon said guardedly.

“Then please do so, Doctor.  I am not given to hysterics, histrionics or screaming fits” – she smiled – “in spite of finding Sarah was the one that kept us from dropping like an egg on the sidewalk!”

The physician laughed a little and nodded.  “I thought you two might know one another when I saw that,” he agreed, “and I have a daughter about your age.”  He looked at the Sheriff with something between amusement and approval.  “She’s done much the same when … well, I remember she grabbed her best friend and they jumped up and down and screamed just like that.”

Marnie could hear the smile in the man’s voice.

“Excuse me, Sheriff.  I’ll go take a look at those scans.  The ultrasound looks fine and your use of the expanding foam to make her contour couch kept her skull from damage.”

“It’s not her skull I’m worried about.”

“You’re thinking brain damage.”

“Yes.”

The doctor looked around, frowning, then looked up.

“Looking for this?”  a familiar voice said, and the ship’s surgeon nodded, reached for the trinket Sarah held out to her.

“I’ll let you two talk,” he smiled, “while I look over those scans, but Sheriff, I want to show you something.”

The trinket was a miniature helicopter on a string, a plastic model no longer than the man’s finger:  it was all black, with a white snowflake on its nose, fabricated by an anonymous crewman:  Marnie knew if she studied it, the detail would be phenomenal, and all hand painted, but she was more interested in the pediatrician’s purpose.

“Watch this,” he said, lowering the little black bird to where the baby could see it, letting it spin a little.

Willa squealed happily and reached for it, batting at it, trying to grasp it.

“The brain’s vision center is at the rear,” the physician explained, trying to sound reassuring and not pedantic:  “deceleration would impact that area first.  As you can see” – he spun the tiny little Sea Stallion again, and baby Willa grasped it, pulled it down, chewed happily at its underside – “she has both functional and apparently binocular vision, her coordination is not adversely affected.”  He gently dislodged the tiny black helo and replaced it with what Marnie earlier called her “Storm Plug,” and Willa happily chewed toothless gums on the pacifier.

“I’m willing to bet the scans show there’s nothing to worry about.  Excuse me.”

Sarah regarded Marnie with a quiet smile.

“You know he’s had her on every table in here.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“Oh, yes.  He even had a half dozen cribs assembled and she’s been in each one of them. They’re torn down and stored away again” – Marnie, surprised, looked around the sick bay, looked back – “he wants to be able to say the most famous baby in the world laid in that crib!”

Marnie laughed quietly, lifted her little daughter, hugged her gently to her bosom.

“You’re not a year old and you’re already a rock star,” she scolded.  “However will I keep the boys away from you now?”

 

The hangar deck was one of constant activity.

Men swarmed over the black Sea Stallion, specialists ran diagnostics on its many systems, the engines were checked for their critical tolerances:  its pilot had already stood in front of multiple inquiries, some demanding she explain every decision she made in the entire flight, others reviewing her aerial maneuvers with the computer assisted imaging system, and one exasperated officer had run his fingers through thinning hair and gestured almost violently at the computer screen and shouted, “BUT WHAT YOU DID IS NOT POSSIBLE!  THE COMPUTER SIMULATIONS ALL SHOW FAIL!”

“With respect, sir,” Sarah replied quietly, standing at a very correct parade rest, “the computer sim shows bumblebees cannot fly and a Warthog cannot keep station beside a carrier at cruising speed.  I did it and that’s all that counts.”

She’d been lectured on the idiocy of risking tangling her rotors in the streaming chute, she’d been chided on the possibility of her captured capsule swinging up into the rotors, she’d been chastised on running the Sea Stallion – “the Navy’s Sea Stallion, not Max’s Sea Stallion!” the red-faced Master Chief roared, pounding his fist onto his desk – “overspeed and overtemperature and God knows how many Gs you pulled coming out of that dive!” – the man stood, fingertips on his desk top, head lowered like an irascible old grizzly.

“Max, if you hadn’t just saved two of the most famous people in the world today, I’d bust you back to mop bucket last class!”

He scowled from under shaggy eyebrows.

“That was some of the best flying I’ve ever seen, Max.  I’m proud of you.”

 

“See that, Doc?”

“I see that.”

“Think it’ll resorb?”

“It should.”

“How much do you think it compressed during decel?”

“Too far.”

The CT tech was experienced and knowledgeable, and the surgeon knew it, and the surgeon knew what he had to tell the Sheriff would not be comforting at all.

He had to tell her that her daughter should be blind.

 

“Pa?”

“Yes, Jimmy?”

“Pa, what did we see?”

Linn was quiet for a long moment, remembering what it was to sit behind his terrified son, remembering how his boy shivered like a terrified rabbit in his Pa’s arms.

He remembered what it was to see what Jimmy saw, to feel what Jimmy felt.

“Jimmy,” he said finally, “what you saw was called Air-Sea Rescue.”

“Huh?”  Jimmy wrinkled his nose up a little.

“Your sister …”

Jimmy saw his Pa stop and swallow and look down, his bottom jaw thrusting out.

“Your sister,” he tried again, harrumphed, coughed.

“You mean Marnie, the Sheriff?”  Jimmy asked, wide-eyed.

“Yeah.”

Jimmy wasn’t sure quite what his Pa meant, but he did know he was getting scared at his Pa’s reaction.

“Is she dead?”  he asked in a small little voice.

Linn looked up, surprised, then shook his head.

“No, Jimmy.  No, she’s fine and so is her baby.”

“Oh.”  Jimmy blinked, frowned, then asked “But what happened?”

Linn took a long breath, shoved his jaw out.

“Jimmy, you know what it is to ride Stomper.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You know what it is to run flat-out, just as fast and just as hard as Stomper can run.”

Jimmy grinned, quick, bright, the sudden flash-grin of a little boy.

“Sure!”

“You know how good it feels – here! – the Sheriff slapped his flat belly.

“Sure!”

“That’s what it feels to fly, Jimmy.”

“Fly?”  Jimmy blinked, confused again. 

“You were riding a big black stallion,” a woman’s voice said, and Jimmy turned, quickly, delight on his face and in his voice:  “Miss Sarah!”

“Don’t you ever knock?”  the Sheriff asked, annoyed.

“I’ll bet you say that to all the girls.”  The very properly dressed young woman assumed a very proper appearance and lifted her chin, rested a very properly gloved hand on the Sheriff’s shoulder.

You feel pretty damned real to be a shade, he thought, and she gripped his shoulder in reply – a quick, companionable squeeze, just enough to let him know he’d thought too loudly, and she’d heard him.

“Jimmy,” Miss Sarah said, “you remember my big black horse Snowflake.”

Jimmy nodded, eyes big.

“Snowflake has wings, you know.”

Jimmy grinned quick and broad.

He knew Snowflake had wings, big white ones that looked kind of silvery in the moonlight when the Pretty Lady came to see him at night sometimes.

“Jimmy, not all horsepower has four hooves, and not all wings have feathers.”

She raised her hand as if casting a handful of glitter into the barn’s interior, and a sparkling cloud became the ocean, and instead of seeing it with a bank of clocks below his line of sight, Jimmy saw it from the side.

Jimmy saw a big black helicopter, rotors a silver disk above, screaming across the ocean, extending a silver, articulated arm from its broad, flat belly.

“You see, Jimmy, sometimes when we scream really, really loudly, people far away hear us, and not all screams are from fear.  Sometimes –”  she smiled, a quiet smile as if remembering something delightful, something very personal, something she cherished – “sometimes it’s a scream of triumph, a scream of absolute delight, like your belly tickles real loud when Stomper is running really, really fast!”

Jimmy nodded.

He knew what that big tickle in the belly felt like!

“What you felt was someone related to us.  Her name is also Sarah, and she was running a Sea Stallion.  Do you know what that is?”

Jimmy shook his head, then looked at the glitter-cloud again.

“That?”  he guessed, pointing to the black copter in profile.

The pretty Miss Sarah nodded, smiling that secret smile of hers again.

“Jimmy, what is my big black mare’s name?”

“Snowflake!”  he declared happily.

“That’s right.  Now watch this.”

The black Sea Stallion in the glitter-cloud turned, revealing the single white snowflake on its nose.

“I’ll give you one guess what Sarah Maxwell named her big black Sea Stallion!”

“Is that what we felt, Pa?” Jimmy asked, eyes wide, awe in his voice.

“I reckon it is, Jimmy,” Linn said quietly, staring at the Sea Stallion and the scorched, white capsule swinging under it from what he knew was the remnants of a ruined parachute.

Jimmy wondered why his big strong Pa turned a little pale as he watched it.

Jimmy looked at the pretty Miss Sarah, who smiled at him, and turned, took two steps, and disappeared.

 

Gracie slid off her mule and landed flat footed in front of the same tombstone as she’d visited two nights before.

She stared long at the laser engraving on the polished quartz, the engraving of a woman on a big black horse with big white wings.

“I wish you were here,” she said out loud.  “I wish I could thank you.”

Gracie smiled a little, remembering her sister Sarah, the one that went off and joined the Navy.

Gracie remembered how she always wanted to fly.

A hand rested on Gracie’s shoulder and she smelled lilacs and soap, the womanly smell of a schoolteacher, a very proper schoolteacher, and she raised her hand and laid it on the anonymous, gloved hand on her shoulder.

“I understand she got her wish,” a voice said, and Gracie nodded.

“Yes,” she said, smiling as she did.  “Yes, she did.”

Gracie turned, and no one was there.

No person, anyway.

Beside her mule was a horse, and it was big, and it was black, and it made her mule look small, but that wasn’t what seized Gracie’s attention.

The big black horse was just folding its big white wings.

Gracie blinked, shook her head and rubbed her eyes, and when she opened them again, her mule was standing there alone, and she looked back at the tomb stone, absently reaching up to touch her shoulder where she could have sworn someone rested their hand a moment ago.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

51.  HOMECOMING

 

Gracie was a study in steady movement – not perpetual motion, she left that to the children, they were so very good at it – no, her moves had all the economy of a woman at home in her kitchen, a woman who delighted in making the necessary preparations, a woman who planned with efficiency, and having achieved efficiency, was able to close the dampers on the stove, pick up her curlyback fiddle, and go skipping outside like she used to when she was a little girl.

The sawmill was in full production, they had timber to reduce to planks, they had an order to fill, and the menfolk were divided according to their strengths:  those better at making moon likker were busied with their small-batch production, while the others tended the timbering and carpenter work.

Several of the newly renamed Maxwell clan turned and grinned, a quick recognition before they turned back to the labors at hand:  the fireman slung another couple slabs into the steam boiler’s firebox, closed the door, straightened, looked over at the fiddler, standing beside the laboring steam engine like she loved to do.

Gracie claimed the engine sang when it worked.

She loved the deep, powerful thump-thump-thump-thump of the steam engine when it was laboring – its rhythm regular, its volume pronounced, distinct, but unchanging, unlike the steam locomotive with its more syncopated ka-chuff, ka-chuff, ka-chuff, offset ever so slightly, she knew, so no matter where the drivers came to rest, one of the pistons would be in position to push.

Gracie closed her eyes, gently, almost dreamily, then she brought her bow up in a big, showy turn of her arm, floated it down on the strings, and she began to play, setting her rhythm to the belted-up steam tractor’s breathy chant.

 

It was a subtle irony that the most modern communication methods were used to transmit information to the aircraft carrier, information that was translated by laser cutters and automated stitchers into a proper McKenna gown of the mid-1880s.

Marnie had no idea why they had material of that particular shade of sky blue, and frankly she did not care:  she was perfectly at home in an Olympic skinsuit where everyone around her wore pressure suits, but with an entire ship full of people wearing regular clothes, she felt less than entirely comfortable in an unnecessary and rather revealing atmosphere suit.

She didn’t detail to her husband how she came across the other items of a lady’s attire, and he did not ask; when she emerged in the fitted gown, he stared at her for a long moment, the way he stared when he saw his high school girlfriend in a prom gown for the first time.

Although her fame could have granted her the privilege of wearing her revolver on board ship, she knew this was against custom; ever the diplomat, she discreetly secured the obsolete sidearm within her garment.

She knew there had been some communication with her family, she knew that probably there would be messages for her from home – God knew there were enough messages from everywhere else in the world, heads of state and notables of every stripe sending congratulations on her safe return, news agencies clamoring for an interview, but only one claimed her attention.

She was busy preparing to fly off the carrier with her daughter, bound for a children’s hospital two hours away by air:  the ship’s surgeon was a pediatrician, but he knew his limits, and after finding the sequelae of a posterior brain bleed, he wanted the Sheriff’s little girl to receive the full attention of a pediatric facility staffed with pediatric specialists, and Marnie agreed.

The Admiral came to sickbay, stopped and openly stared at the pale-eyed young woman in the very proper, very old-fashioned gown.

“I have a message,” he said without preamble as Marnie rose:  he touched a control, spoke into a communications grille, then turned a knob.

Marnie’s eyes widened as she recognized the music.

It was a Strauss waltz, played on a single instrument, and in the background, the steady chant of a steam engine at labor.

Marnie bit her bottom lip, then gave the Admiral a very proper, very ladylike curtsy:  the Admiral bowed, stepped closer, and offered his arm.

In the sickbay of a US Navy carrier, a Martian Sheriff and an Admiral of the Fleet danced to a Strauss waltz, played by a Colorado mountain fiddler standing near a Case steam tractor, flanked by a half-dozen high-school geeks and a grinning Firelands County Sheriff, a series of microphones, what seemed like several hundred yards of wires of various thicknesses, and a satellite transmitter with a parabolic dish the size of a child’s snow saucer.

“Nancy,” Marnie said softly, “this one’s for you!”

“I beg your pardon?”  the Admiral asked, hesitating.

Marnie smiled up at him.  “Dance,” she whispered, and laid her head against his chest, and the man didn’t have to be told twice.

An Admiral in Navy whites and a pretty woman in an electric blue gown waltzed to a Strauss air, and for a moment, for just a moment, they both left the screaming urgencies of their respective lives somewhere else.

 

Gracie was waiting with the Sheriff as the flying silver panatela’s engines sang themselves to sleep and the side door unfolded and became a set of stairs.

She was a little surprised the Lear jet didn’t say US NAVY, but she need not have worried, because the first one off the jet was a uniformed Navy pilot, an attractive woman who almost ran down the stairs, then turned and waited for the other passengers to disembark.

The flight was not announced to the media, and the Sheriff had told only one other person that Marnie was coming home:  Gracie kept that confidence, and for twenty-four hours, Dr. John Greenlees, his wife the Sheriff, and their pale eyed little girl, enjoyed the company of the family they’d only seen as videos on a glowing screen.

Marnie had called ahead one special request, and her pale eyed Papa had it ready when she wanted it.

Before the brass band, before the parade, before the arrival of the inevitable media circus, before the obligatory interviews and TV cameras and selfies with these interplanetary pioneers, three women with a common upbringing laced on their old comfortable work boots and took off at an easy run up a particular mountain path, the way they used to run the mountain when they were not many years younger.

Sarah – or Max, as her crewmates knew her – began to sag a little, as she’d been away from the thin mountain air for some time now, but Marnie and Gracie were well matched – Gracie was re-acclimatized now, after her miserable time back East at the University, and Marnie’s lungs and blood couldn’t tell the difference between the mountain air and the air in their surface habitat (other than it smelled a great deal better!)

Even little Willamina, looking around with bright and marveling eyes from the security of a papoose backpack, seemed to breathe easy enough.

In her turn, she, too, would become a Hillrunner.

But that’s a story for a future time.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

52.  BRINGER OF LUCK

 

The church hadn’t been this full in a very long time.

The Sheriff had to have a full complement of lawmen on hand to ensure things weren’t going to get out of hand.

Gracie and Roger were getting married.

That alone guaranteed the church would be well populated.

Gracie’s matron of honor, though, was the big draw:  news vans outside, cameras peering through the wavy-glass windows, the few that could gain entrance, served notice that the world was hungry to see this far traveler, this Martian, this Sheriff Marnie, as she’d become known worldwide.

Marnie wore a McKenna gown again – what she wore was emerald green, because she’d read about Esther Keller’s love for the shade, and she wanted to wear a gown of that color at least once while she was home – and when the piano player gave the happy fanfare, the introduction into the Wedding March, Marnie looked at Gracie with the expression of a co-conspirator and whispered, “Showtime!”

The piano player was in on the secret, too.

You see, she actually didn’t know how to play piano.

Marnie coached her to hold her fingers spread – so! – to press these particular keys – so! – “Dum da-da-da-dum, dum, dum, dum” she’d chanted, and the two worked on it until the schoolgirl could get it right – and then she lifted her fingers from the keys and, folding her hands in her lap, spun about on the round piano stool and smiled.

She didn’t have to play another note, because Gracie took care of that.

The Firelands church had known rousing joy and crashing grief, it had seen weddings where laughter was a welcome guest, church services where a big black dog and a scolding little girl interrupted the good-natured Parson’s sermon, and the man (experienced at his craft, he was!) was able to weave the interruption seamlessly into his message, at least until the wee child fell over backwards, her little legs stuck straight in the air, and the big black Bear Killer came over and gave her a good face-washing, prompting both a young avalanche of happy giggles, and a distressed mother scooping up her errant child and shushing her, red-faced and embarrassed.

The little whitewashed church had seen at least two weddings where the recessional was “Turkey in the Straw,” but until today, it had never seen music provided by the bride as she paced slowly up the aisle, playing the Wedding March on a curly back mountain fiddle.

Marnie did her best to set a dignified pace, tried hard to look like a proper Matron of Honor, and she almost managed:  no law dog ever truly lays down their mantle, and her eyes were restless, going to the windows, one side, then the other, scanning over the crowded pews, finally stopping and tipping a quick wink at the awe-struck little boy she’d finally been able to meet.

Jimmy, for his part, turned around in the pew and standing on his knees, made multiple mental notes about the sketches he intended to draw, and draw he did, not just of his sister he’d just met, but as soon as Gracie came abreast of him, he sat down and began applying pencil to paper, frowning a little as he did, getting his mental snapshots down quickly, before they evaporated from his memory.

Gracie drew out the final note as she turned, her Grandma’s wedding gown twisting a little around her as she did.

She handed the curly back fiddle to Marnie, took both Roger’s hands and whispered, “Hello, handsome!”

“You know how to make an entrance,” he whispered back.

After the service, after the dinner at the Silver Jewel, after they’d gone back to the Sheriff’s house (all but the newlyweds, of course!) Jimmy was still sketching, still putting memories down on paper, until finally he laid down his knife-whittled pencil and declared “Done!”

He turned and regarded his Mama and declared, “I’m hungry!” – which Connie was expecting – she thrust a still-warm, split-and-buttered biscuit into his still-open mouth, then she looked down at his final sketch.

It showed a laughing bride, playing a fiddle, drawn in mid-skip; beside her, a groom in a suit and tie, also laughing, matching her skipping pace, and Connie smiled as she remembered Gracie as she retrieved fiddle and bow from her Matron of Honor and declared, “There is something of a tradition for weddings performed in this church.  This has been done before, and we’re a-gonna do it again!” – and so saying, Gracie began to play “Turkey in the Straw,” and she and her groom skipped happily down the aisle, while Marnie, red-faced, stood at the altar end of the aisle, bent double, red-faced and laughing.

Connie’s baby cried during the wedding, which brought the Parson’s good gusting laugh, and he’d happily declared, “A crying child bring luck to the wedding!” – and as if on cue, the surprised child looked around, offering no protest as the storm plug was slipped into her little pink bow of a mouth, and the wedding continued without further difficulty.

Up on Maxwell’s Mountain, the family politely made themselves scarce while the newlyweds held hands and walked up to the porch as they’d done who knows how many times before.

Gracie stopped, and Roger stopped with her, looking at her half-bashful, half-excited.

Gracie closed her eyes and shivered, recalling how her Grandma described how she felt when Grampa swept her up and carried her across the threshold:  her eyes were still closed when strong arms swept her up and she gave a little squeak of surprise as Roger swept her up and carried her across the threshold.

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

 

53.  "I'LL LET YOU KNOW"

 

The captain looked at the case number, scanned the shelves, the several sealed envelopes with neatly-numbered, hand-written cards attached at intervals.

He hummed a little as he looked, remembering some of the numbers, recalling how as a rookie he came into the evidence room and brought utter chaos into order, found items lost, discovered others were missing altogether; he established the system of crosschecks to make sure things just didn’t get lost anymore.

It wasn’t always successful, but it was a world better than what had been.

He found the sealed brown envelope, compared it to the card he held, nodded.

He didn’t bother to open it.

He slid it into a bigger envelope, one addressed to SHERIFF L KELLER FIRELANDS COUNTY COLORADO and handed it to the patiently waiting courier, along with a clipboard and a pen.

“Sign here, son.”

 

Men gravitate to what they do well.

The lean Kentucky moonshiners up on Maxwell’s Mountain were as they’d always been:  if they set their mind to it, they did it – whether it was taking a flint rifle and heading out at a Hillrunner’s a jog-trot to fetch back meat for the table, whether it was grinding sprouts and setting mash, whether it was running off a batch of white moon likker, whether it was working in wood, anything from cabinet making to building an entire structure.

Those of their clan who worked in iron were especially revered, for there is a magic in ironworking.

They forged their own tools, made most of their own parts; they were craftsmen, artisans in wood and in steel, they were tall, lean, blue-eyed, skilled and gifted, and chief among them were those few whose shirt sleeves were plumb full of arm, those few with iron in their blood, those few who swung a standard sledge hammer with its handle sawed off at the half way mark.

The Sheriff came a-wheelin’ up like he owned the place – he was one of the few who could do this, a man who was welcome at any time – and he got out with a padded brown envelope in hand.

He went into the smithy and several sets of blue eyes followed him in, but none followed, for the smiths were already within, and that long tall lawman obviously had business.

Nathan came over, curious:  he and the Sheriff shook hands, and Linn set the envelope face-down on the table, pulled the red string, reached in pulled out another envelope, one marked EVIDENCE ATHENS POLICE DEPT

Nathan looked from the envelope to the Sheriff, his eyes quiet.

“Should I ask how you did that?” he rumbled.

The Sheriff unfolded his pocket knife, sliced off the end of the envelope with one quick stroke, and Nathan’s eyes showed the quiet approval of a truly strong man.

Paper dulls a knife fast, but it tells the tale about the edge, and when a honed edge can slice through a hand held envelope, unsupported by a hard surface beneath, the edge is genuinely sharp and uniformly honed.

Linn turned the envelope up, its cut edge just touching the work table, and a knife slid out.

The handle was checkered, maple, copper riveted; the blade was hand forged Damascus, and forged out by an old master:  Nathan’s eyes told him this much with the first look, and as he studied the blade longer, he realized he’d seen that particular knife before.

“Should you ask how I did that?”  Linn echoed, smiling tightly with half his mouth.

“No.”

Nathan nodded, planted big, callused hands on the work table on either side of the knife, bent a little closer and studied the hand forged blade, nodded.

“That’s the one she took with her.”

“Yep.”

Nathan moved his head to the left, catching the light across the blade, nodding.

“Do you reckon she will want it back?”  Linn asked.

Nathan looked sharply at the Sheriff, frowning.

“She didn’t tell you?”

Nathan frowned and Linn knew she hadn’t.

She’d told him, that dark night at the kitchen table with her beloved Grandma, when she had to shed the dread weight from her soul that she’d killed an attacker and crippled another, that she’d made it look like the two of them attacked each other, and she’d left the knife her Grampa and she made, in the hand of one of the two, sacrificing the artifact in exchange for her freedom.

“Sheriff,” Nathan said, “that looks like it’s been used.”

Linn nodded.  “Yep.”

Nathan looked up, one eyebrow hoisted, regarded the Sheriff levelly.

“Sheriff, is there somethin’ I should know?”

“Yes.”  Linn straightened.  “I need another one of these, it’s a gift.”

“For Gracie.”

“She won’t want this one back, I don’t reckon, but … I reckon if a man was to make another, it would mean something to her.”

Nathan nodded.

“I’ll get Seamus to find straight grain maple for the handle.  He’s good at checkering.”  Nathan looked solemnly at the Sheriff.  “Did you see that last checkering job?”

Linn shook his head.

“He called me over and swung that magnifying light over the wrist on that model 12 of his.”  Nathan’s smile was barely there, but his eyes shone with approval.  “Not one single flaw.  Not one single over run.”

Linn whistled.  “I’ve tried my hand at checkering,” he said slowly, “and that is just pretty darn hard to do!”

Nathan shook his head slowly, like an old bear.  “He made it look easy,” he said mournfully, and the Sheriff knew Nathan had tried it, too, and discovered the hard way checkering was not nearly as easy as it looked.

“I recall when the Old Man made that blade.”  Nathan nodded.  “I recall how he made it.”  He considered a moment longer, then picked the brown-stained blade up between thumb and forefinger, placed it on a sheet of paper, traced around it:  he made some notes, quickly, his block print clear and distinct, and finally he nodded.

“Yep.  I can do this, Sheriff.”

“Don’t tell her.”
Nathan grinned at the lawman.  “Sheriff, this is ugly on my face, not stupid.”
Linn laughed a little, for he’d used that line himself.

“I’ve got the right steel for the job.”  Nathan folded his arms and frowned a little and the Sheriff could almost hear the gears turning.

“I can leave this if you’d like.”

Nathan nodded.  “Best,” he affirmed.

“Nathan.”

The blacksmith looked up at the Sheriff.

“I’m hirin’ this work.  It’s for family but I’m hirin’ the work.  Sharpen your pencil and figure your cost and don’t short yourself none.”  He laid a hundred dollar bill on the table and saw Nathan’s jaw thrust slowly out.

“I’m takin’ you from your other work.  It wouldn’t be right to ask you to do work for free.”

Nathan took a long breath, nodded.

“I’ll let you know.”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

54.  MOUNTAIN WITCH

 

Sheriff Linn Keller leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes.

It had been a long week and he was glad Firelands was no longer hosting the crowds that descended when his daughter’s presence was finally revealed.

The Silver Jewel, the old Spring Inn, the drugstore, everyplace in town that sold anything found business to be suddenly and almost catastrophically good; every bed was filled, every plate was put to work, even their hospital saw a surge of business as a mercifully small number of visitors fell prey to altitude sickness.

It had been good to see his daughter, he'd delighted in finally holding his granddaughter, he'd had a long and very enjoyable talk with the younger Dr. John Greenlees, and he remembered wondering if he was feeling like his own ancestors when family allowed as they were headed west.

Marnie was going back to Mars, she and her husband and their little daughter, a pale eyed child that wasted no time a’tall in wrapping her long tall Granddad around her tiny pink little finger.

Matter of fact, Linn joked that if she stayed here, he would have to have a standing appointment with the Bone Cracker to keep his spine from assuming a permanent spiral from being wound around that cute little finger so tight.

Marnie and John went up on Maxwell’s Mountain and spent some time with Gracie and her sis, the pilot on leave from the Navy.

The Sheriff knew Sarah, knew she’d taken the name Maxwell when she enlisted – his Mama was a great one for ancestor research, and she’d found a blood tie with the Clan Maxwell back East, but she missed that the seminal Daine couple were Maxwells on the dodge.

Linn wasn’t sure if Sarah knew that or not, but she’d taken the Maxwell name early, and now she was famous as well as the pilot that made an impossible catch and kept the falling Martian Sheriff alive.

He stretched, considering that it was not yet mid-morning, and he wished sincerely he could go home and crawl back in the bunk, when a delicate knock at his closed office door interrupted his wish.

Linn rose.  “Come on in,” he called in a tired voice.

Gracie pulled open the door, slipped in, drew it closed behind her, turned.

“I understand I have you to thank,” she said, drawing a hand-forged blade from her sleeve.

Linn’s eyes tightened a little with approval.

“I understand one of my ancestresses favored a sleeve sheath,” he observed.  “That works well for a light weight knife.”

Gracie brought her hands together, drew them apart, displayed the new blade.

Linn tilted his head a little, nodded.  “Very nice,” he said.  “Does it fit your hand?”
“Yes.”  Gracie blinked.  “My blade from back East …?”

“I have it.”

Gracie blinked, looked away, brought her forearm up a little as if she were looking down her arm toward her elbow, and carefully slid the handmade knife back into its sheath.  “I won’t ask how you got it.”

“Have a seat, Gracie, we need to talk.”

“Yes, Sheriff, we do.”

Linn raised an eyebrow.  “Oh?”
“You were going to tell me about purging an evidence room, and how the subjects are all dead, that there is no further chance of any appeals and so the evidence associated with the case can be destroyed.  You were going to tell me that evidence scheduled for destruction can lawfully be used instead for law enforcement purposes, such as training.”

Linn nodded slowly.  “The exact words I’d prepared.”

Somehow he was not surprised that she knew his words before he spoke them.

Gracie smiled thinly.  “Now it’s my turn.”

“Go on.”

Gracie rose and set her withie basket on his desk, reached in, brought out a stack of papers a little more than a half inch deep – they appeared hand written, but very neatly done, and his quick eye took in that the characters marching in regular black and cursive ranks across the first page had been written with a dip quill.

He looked up at Gracie, his quirked eyebrow as distinct a question as a verbal query.

“Your mother and my Grandma were working on something,” she said quietly, “and I thought you should have it.  If you want to continue it I’ll help, of course, but that’s just the start.”

She reached in and brought out a thick bundle of handwritten pages.

“Your mother wanted to publish.”
Linn frowned a little.

“She had the Journals published and she didn’t realize how popular they would be.  She never published any of her own – she didn’t think they were interesting enough – but she was fascinated by the pale eyed women of her line.”

“They are women of your line too,” Linn said quietly.

“We know that now.”  Gracie’s eyes looked old, old and kind of sad.

“We know that now, Sheriff, but then … all your Mama knew was that my Grandma was a Mountain Witch, and there had been such in her own line, and there was some kind of blood tie way back, and she thought their story might be interesting.”

Linn reached for the first stack of papers.

“Mama’s project?”  he asked, and he felt his throat tighten a little.

“Your Mama’s project.”

He withdrew his hand, pressed his foreknuckle against his greying handlebar mustache, his pale eyes big, staring.

Gracie leaned over and laid her palm on his other hand, white-knuckled and almost fisted on the desk top.

“Sheriff,” she whispered, “we’re blood kin.  Your Connie has been working on your Mama’s ancestry and we’re blood.  It’s no wonder you’ve seen things –”

Linn looked sharply up at the fiddle playing mountain woman.

He had never, ever spoken to anyone about the things he’d seen, about conversations with shades that had every appearance of being solid and real, he’d never, ever told anyone – not Barrents, not his wife – about knowing, knowing something was going to happen, and it did –

“Don’t worry, Sheriff,” Gracie whispered.  “It’s just another secret of the Mountain Witch.”

She picked up her basket and turned, and the Sheriff stared at the two stacks of papers on his desk.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

55.  “DON’T LIE TO ME!”

 

Gracie stopped, smiled a little, and took a quick step to the side, then turned and gave the dispatcher one of those I-know-a-secret looks.

The dispatcher was honestly surprised.

“Should I get –” she began, then stopped talking as a commotion arrived at the front door, wearing a long white apron and hauling a kicking, yelling teen-ager with him.

“SHERIFF!”  the dispatcher yelped as Bob Parsons, owner-operator of the town’s grocery store, fought the outer door open, twisted and threw the fighting kid into the inner chamber.

The Sheriff’s door banged open and the long tall lawman strode across the polished quartz floor, his cheek bones standing out and his jaw set.

The kid scrambled to his feet and tried to launch out the doors, but the big-eared grocer was holding them shut:  the Sheriff shoved through the inner doors, seized the kid by the belt and yanked him off his feet, dumping him face-down onto the floor, lowering his weight quickly onto the yelling kid’s spine.

“SHUT UP!” he yelled, “QUIT FIGHTIN’ OR I’LL GIVE YOU SOMETHIN’ TO YELL ABOUT!”

He rolled back onto the balls of his feet, seized the kid by the back of his collar and by the belt, and stood, bringing the fighting, twisting teen-ager off the deck.

When a long tall lawman picks someone up off the ground, it’s both surprising and most disturbing:  the Sheriff had, in the past, seized men by the shirt front, slammed them against the wall and then hauled them off the ground, one-handed.

It’s a very intimidating experience.

It certainly was for the kid.

“Come on in, Bob,” Linn called.  “Open that door for me, my hands are full.”

Gracie smiled a little to herself as the Sheriff packed the kid into the lobby.

“Now what brings the two of you here?”  Linn asked, his voice deceptively mild, and the kid yelled “I didn’t do nothin’!  He’s lyin’! I didn’t –”

Linn looked up, saw Gracie, saw her shake her head just a little.

Linn jerked the kid hard.  “DON’T LIE TO ME, BOY!” he yelled – and the Sheriff was not a man to yell.  “Bob?”

Bob took a long breath and the Sheriff could see he was trying to control his breathing.

Bob was a war veteran, a man known for his good nature, his quick laugh, but he was a man who had limits, and he’d obviously reached that limit, and was now short winded from fighting this juvenile miscreant all the way from his store up to the Sheriff’s office.

“He was stealing –”  Bob began, and the kid yelled “I DIDN’T STEAL NOTHIN’!  YOU’RE LYIN’ YOU CRAZY OLD MAN!” – Gracie shook her head just a little and Linn rolled the kid up, pressed him like a barbell toward the ceiling, rolled him back face-down, apparently without much effort.

“You can quit lyin’ to me,” Linn said mildly, his voice quiet now, “or I can throw your miserable carcass in the calabozo and leave you for a while.  By the way, Bob’s place has video surveillance.  It’s a good comprehensive system.  I know, I positioned the cameras myself.”  He looked up at Bob.  “Did you have time to look at the recording?”

“No.  Didn’t have time.”

“Hm.”  Linn dropped the kid’s belt, held onto his shirt collar.  “Bob, you wanta press charges?”

“You’re damned right I do,” Bob snarled.

“Good enough.”  Linn grabbed the kid’s hoodie at the bottom, peeled it off him, fast.

It wasn’t his brightest move.

A bottle of Mogen David spun out from the garment, hit the floor, shattered; Linn felt more weight in the hoodie, tossed it to Bob.

Bob caught it, juggled it a little as another bottle tried to escape:  he managed to catch it, and Linn seized the kid’s wrist, cranked his arm up behind his back.

“Don’t step on the broken glass,” he suggested, then reached down for the kid’s belt and hauled him back up off the ground.  “Bob, I’m gonna strip this thief down and lock him up.  I’ll be right back.”

Bob and Gracie watched the Sheriff haul his swearing, protesting, threatening guest back to the back hallway:  before he disappeared, he looked back at his dispatcher and said “Make sure you get our own surveillance copied off, we’ll need it for court, especially that bottle that just splattered all over the floor!”

“Right, Boss,” the dispatcher called.

“Where’s your broom and dustpan?”  Bob asked.  “I’ve got a mess to clean up.”

“You might find there were two others,” Gracie suggested.  “Do you really have that video surveillance?”

“No,” Bob admitted, “but it sounded good.  If it puts the fear into him –”  He shrugged.

“Do you remember the other two?”

Bob shook his head.  “No.  Never saw ‘em.”

“When you saw this one, you got tunnel vision” – Gracie’s hands came up, converged, as if she were looking through a peephole – “and the other two got away.”

Bob looked away, swore.

“They’re right outside,” Gracie offered.  “They’re looking through the doors at you.”

Bob whirled, surprised, started through the doors, then leaned back, let the door shut.

“I don’t think I could catch ‘em,” he admitted.

“Do you recognize them?”

He nodded.

“Good.  Go write down their names.  The Sheriff will want to talk to them.”

The dispatcher rose, pad and pencil in hand.  “I’ve got to go look at the surveillance, be right back.”

Gracie sighed.  “I suppose I’d better get home and fix supper.  The Sheriff will want me when the kid’s attorney gets here.”

She was right.

 

The Sheriff’s supper was late that night.

In spite of the shoplifter’s attorney, Gracie’s silent analysis of both the lawyer’s words and the prisoner’s, enabled the Sheriff to conduct a truly uncanny interrogation:  he managed to unbalance both of them sufficiently to elicit a confession – and when the attorney finally realized his client had incriminated himself, he shook his head and muttered, “I should have had you invoke and shut up to start with!”

Linn sat at his supper table, staring at the steaming bowl of chicken soup as if to draw some ancient secret from its fragrant depths.

“Dearest?”  Connie asked gently.  “Is something wrong with the soup?”

Linn looked up at his wife.

“Dear heart,” he said in an equally gentle voice, “if I ever doubt your instinct – if your gut tells you one thing and I start to do another – if you would say the words “Mountain Witch,” I would be very much obliged to you.”

Connie managed to look innocent.  “I take it Gracie visited you today.”

“She did.”

“Good.”

And that’s all Connie would say about it, at least until she tucked Jimmy and his siblings into bed:  in response to Jimmy’s question, she said simply, “We women have our ways of finding things out,” and Jimmy (like boys of every age and era) realized that his Mama was perhaps, to a degree, magical, and that it was a certainty that he would not ever, ever get away with anything!

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

56.  IT’S BIG, IT’S BLACK, IT’S IN MY HOUSE!

 

Gracie’s belly hurt a little, as did her low ribs, and she knew her face was red.

She slabbed off an eighth of a pie to hide the laughter bubbling barely below her surface; Jimmy thanked her with big and innocent eyes, and Gracie set down a saucer with some sliced off scrap meat for The Bear Killer, and he managed to look innocent as she set it down on the floor in front of his huge furry paws:  he looked up at her and gave a quiet “whuff” before dropping his muzzle and indelicately gobbling up the offering.

Gracie held it in as long as she could, and then she picked up her apron and held it over her face and began making approximately the same noises as a chicken laying a meteor.

One thing about Gracie.

When she laughed, everybody knew it!

 

Jimmy and Stomper made good progress up the back path, twisting up Maxwell’s Mountain, disdaining the roadway – someone in a truck might need it, Jimmy reasoned, and besides, he hadn’t asked if he could go see Gracie – Stomper, for his part, really didn’t care:   he was out and putting his hooves over new territory, which always seemed to please the big red Frisian.

Jimmy was careful not to run the rocky trails, remembering what his Pa said about Frisians being barefoot, and shod only if they were going to be on rocks:  Stomper got along fine without horse shoes, and Jimmy saw to it he never got ridden where he hadn’t ought – so far as the ground underfoot, at least.

The Bear Killer paced along with them, tongue out, the image of a happy canine, a huge dog keeping company with a huge horse, and the pair of them making Jimmy look even smaller, even if he was saddled on Stomper-horse’s back.

He’d ridden up to the farmhouse, waved at the lean, blue-eyed Kentucky moonshiners:  they knew him, they waved back, and Jimmy found a handy mounting block that doubled as a chopping block, and dismounted.

Gracie had been writing something in a recipe book when Jimmy knocked politely at the back porch door.

She hadn’t seen The Bear Killer until the mountain Mastiff paced in with the lad, moist black nose working, for a kitchen is a hub of activity in the household, and a dog’s sensitive nose was more than capable of reading every page of this olfactory activity-ledger.

Gracie, for whatever reason, did not see The Bear Killer until she’d risen and come around the table to greet Jimmy.

Not that a dog with a head the size of a bushel basket is hard to miss.

Jimmy came to ask Gracie about the pictures he’d drawn at her wedding.

Gracie held her mirth until she’d fed Jimmy and The Bear Killer, and when she was finished with a good laugh that left her young guest a little puzzled, she wiped her eyes and apologized.

“Jimmy,” she said, “I am sorry, really I am!” – and then she was off again, pointing at The Bear Killer (who, for his part, sat there looking immensely pleased with himself!) – when she wound down from this new attack of the Mirth and Merriment, she took a deep breath and tried again.

“Jimmy, when I saw The Bear Killer, I didn’t realize he’d come in with you, and all I could think of was, ‘It’s big, it’s black, it’s in my house!’” – and this time she managed to stifle her laughter, at least enough to give Jimmy a hug and to accept a companionable hand-lick from the great mountain Mastiff.

“Now,” she said, “let’s talk about those delightful drawings!”

 

Patrolman Roger Halasz pressed the red-plastic button on the corner of his cruiser’s microphone.

“Dispatch, I’m in pursuit of a red Toyota Tundra, high rate of speed outbound west, shots fired, stand by for plate.”

His foot was heavy on the throttle as he closed the distance with the stolen truck:  Roger knew the road intimately, he knew his cruiser, he knew just how fast he could take the curves coming up, he knew the Tundra couldn’t corner as well as he could –

The Tundra screamed into the first corner, tires barely edging a gravel filled pothole in the pavement, a hole that was supposed to have been fixed two months earlier, while the weather was still good.  Passing traffic kicked gravel fill out of the hole and onto the pavement, and when Roger came into the turn, he ran over scattered gravel instead of bare pavement.

It was enough for him to lose traction.

The cruiser rolled twice after its tires hit the edge of the ditch, spinning into the air, it came down on its top, rolled over on what used to be its tires, skidded a few feet and stopped in a cloud of smoke, steam and dust.

Engine silent, siren speaker crushed, coolant hissing out of the twisted and split radiator, only the radio speaker seemed alive.

“Advise status of pursuit,” a voice said, then other voices, full of concern:  the Tundra was found not far away, its thieves long gone:  doors open, engine at idle, the stolen vehicle was left, apparently abandoned when they saw the police cruiser skid off the curve and spin into the air.

Up on Maxwell’s Mountain, over the quiet hiss of gas fired burners in the still house, over the retreating log carriage and the rhythmic chuff of the steam engine, a woman’s scream shivered the cold air.

Every man there stopped, every man knew what that scream meant, for they’d heard it before, they’d heard it when Old Gracie’s husband died …

No.

No, this was different.

This was fear and this was pain and this was a keening mountain woman’s wail that is only given voice when it’s a violent death.

Outside the grade school, outside the fourth grade window, a black mountain Mastiff raised his black muzzle to the heavens and began to grieve, voicing that ancient mourning howl that has sung over warriors’ deaths for more years than men have cared to record history, and a rose appeared on the police chief’s desk blotter, with no hand seen placing it there.

 

The back porch door didn’t so much slam open as it kind of exploded open, lacking only shards and splinters to complete that description

Grace Maxwell came running out the drove-open door, work boots silent on the frozen ground, running with her winter coat around her and her shawl over the coat.

Grace ran for the back fence and charged it and threw one hand out and slapped it down on the top rail and vaulted the shoulder high board, spinning in midair and coming down in a running crouch.

“Reckon we’d ought go too?”  a voice asked.

A lean hand reached into a corner and brought out a double gun and a warbag.

“Yep,” came the clipped reply, and the Clan Maxwell followed, all but the bare handful it would take to keep the mash from souring or the steam boiler run cold and freeze and bust.

Lean men with long rifles, hard men with shotguns, paced after the running woman, setting into that familiar, mile eating jog trot they’d learned as children and practiced ever since here in the granite mountains.

 

The Sheriff stood beside his uncle, two tall men with arms folded and pale eyes hard upon the abandoned vehicle, now swarming with forensics techs.

It had been hauled up on a rollback, deposited in the big round barn – they could keep it secure there, and out of the weather – a generator purred outside, feeding the portable lights that illuminated the stolen vehicle.

Of course there were more prints to be lifted than a man could count:  the rightful owner and his family, his mechanic and everyone having anything to do with the vehicle all had to be both fingerprinted and palm printed in order to exclude their traces; it would take some time to run all they lifted, but both men knew with a hard certainty that they would have answers before sunup, because a lawman had been killed, and they were going to have justice, peacefully or otherwise, and they genuinely didn’t care which.

 

Gracie took a pinch of ground herbs from the little poke and put it between gum and lip like she would a dip of snuff.

Unlike snuff, the herbal compound could be swallowed without harm, provided it was swallowed in small amounts and over a long period of time.

Gracie knew she would need all the help she could get for what had to be done, for what needed doing, only she could do.

Behind her, nearly a dozen long tall Hillrunners followed, strung out over a mile and a quarter, all moving with that long-legged, easy stride that was known clear back to their moccasin wearing native ancestors back in the mountains of the Dark and Bloody Ground.

Gracie ran through sunset and into the dark and she ran steadily, not a hard sprint, she breathed easily in the thin mountain air, she paced through the increasing darkness.

Gracie coasted to a stop, drew up in a brush screened clearing.

Magic was called for, woman’s magic, and she knew how to do it.

Gracie brought out another poke – salt it was, and finely ground – she sprinkled it in a circle and sat down cross-legged and closed her eyes and began to hum, just a little.

The men came into the clearing, stopping as they saw the woman in the shawl begin to sway a little, and they drew back to the edge of the clearing, gradually surrounding her but not drawing near.

They knew they didn’t want to be near to her when she did these things, for these were things women understood and men did not.

Gracie lifted her head, raised her arms, palms up:  she held without moving for the space of several heartbeats.

Twice a dozen eyes saw the fog start out of the ground, twisting out like it was a misty corkscrew, and they saw it take form and become solid, and a White Wolf looked at the woman, then sat, waiting.

Gracie lowered her hands, placed her palms on her knees, felt the wool skirt, opened her own eyes, lowered her head.

The White Wolf blinked sleepily, yawned, its pink tongue flicking out and over its nose.

Gracie said something – her voice was low, her words clear, teasing the listeners, for though they could hear her syllables clearly, they could just almost, almost! – grasp what the words were – almost, but not quite.

Gracie didn’t stand.

She went from cross-legged and seated, to standing, but it was as if she floated up instead of muscled up with her legs.

The White Wolf stood as well, paced up beside her:  it was bigger than they’d realized – it walked under her relaxed right hand, such that her hand was laid over its shoulder.

“Wait here,” she said quietly, and she turned, and the White Wolf turned with her.

They walked through the brush screen, and were gone.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

57.  HARD NEWS

 

It was almost new and only a little dirty, and it was stuffed in a stainless steel can, the can’s lid was in place, and it sat beside the Sheriff.

The pale-eyed Sheriff looked over at The Bear Killer.

The big mountain Mastiff, perched happily on the passenger seat of the Sheriff’s Jeep, just plainly filled the passenger half of the Wrangler.

“Bear Killer,” Linn said, “I got me a notion I’ll need your nose.”

The Bear Killer’s nose snuffed at the windshield, making a foggy patch, then he drew back and looked at the Sheriff again.

“That sweatshirt” – he tapped the stainless steel evidence can with impatient fingernails – “came out of the stolen vehicle.  It’s not the owner’s nor any of his family.  Chances are it belongs to someone that killed Roger and I am going to have them.”

“Firelands One, PD One.”

Linn reached for the radio mike:  it was his uncle, the acting Chief of Police.

“One-to-one go.”

“Meet me at the corral.”

“Roger.”

Linn looked over at the Bear Killer, his eyes tightening a little at the corners.

“Showtime!”

 

Maps were spread over the cruiser’s hood, satellite images were overlaid, plans made, discussed, re-made:  when the two men were satisfied, they called their troops together in the big round barn.

In years past they would have ridden out as a posse.

In this modern age they drove out, a long line of lawmen’s vehicles, maintaining radio silence, showing no emergency lights.

The Chief’s wife rode with him:  she was editor of the local paper, and he knew the folly of trying to exclude her – not because she was his wife, but because he knew the value of letting the newspaper know what the actual facts were.

He also knew that his wife knew when to duck.

 

“I hate to kill a man’s dog.”

The listener’s head nodded.

The animal in question was chained outside the house and was scenting the wind, restless, and the Kentucky men knew the dog was about to raise the alarm that there were intruders about.

The back of a man’s hand tapped gently against his companion’s shoulder.

“Might be we’ll not have to.  Look.”

A woman glided, almost ghostlike, across the clearing toward the run-down house.

She approached the dog, the White Wolf at her side, stopped and bent and seemed to talk to the chained guardian:  she caressed its blocky head fearlessly, then straightened and walked past it, toward the house.

The dog’s ears had been laid back:  now they were upright as the dog watched her departure, its stub of a docked tail vibrating approval.

A dozen Kentucky hillrunners circled the house, silent, watchful:  half faced in, half faced out, but all waited for the woman.

Those who faced inward saw the White Wolf stop, turn around, then twist into the earth like a wisp of fog, as the woman walked through the door without opening it first.

Their hands tightened on their weapons as one scream, then another, came from inside the weathered structure.

 

The next day, about noon, the Sheriff knocked on Gracie’s back door.

“Come in, Sheriff,” she called, ladling up a bowl full of chili.  “Been expecting you.”

The Sheriff opened the door carefully, removed his Stetson, flipped it backhanded onto the peg.

Gracie set the steaming bowl on the table.  “Crackers,” she said, setting down a stack of saltines, “and cheese” – she had a bowl of shredded cheddar on the table already.  “Bread’s fresh, butter was churned up yesterday, and if you don’t sit down and eat, Sheriff, my feelin’s will be hurt.”

The Sheriff stared at the quiet-voiced woman, so different from the girl he’d seen go off to college and return.

“Gracie,” he said, “I was out yesterday to tell you of Roger’s death, but you were gone.”

“Yes, I was, wasn’t I?”  She dipped up a half bowlful for herself, turned, placed it:  soup spoons and butter knives dropped into place as she passed her hands over the table.  “Now sit down, Sheriff, you have questions.”

Linn pulled out his chair, waited until Gracie was seated, then sat slowly, suspiciously.

“Gracie, I usually give the news of a lawman’s death as soon as I can.”

“I know that, Sheriff.”  Gracie tore a thick slice of fresh sourdough in two.

“I did try.”

Gracie sliced through the lump of butter, spread it on the half-slice she held.  “I know that, too, Sheriff.”

“We found the pair that Roger was after.”

“I know.”

Linn regarded the fiddle-playing Hillrunner with pale eyes, his jaw easing forward as he considered.

“Gracie, what can you tell me about the pair?”

“You found them, Sheriff.  You already know about them.”

“I know they are screaming insane, Gracie.  I know right now they’re both in straitjackets in a padded cell and they’re staring pop-eyed at something and screaming for it to get away and they’re sorry and they didn’t mean to kill him.  I know you were there last night because they had a home surveillance system – apparently one drug dealer didn’t trust another – and I know you put your fingertips on either side of their head, one, and then the other, and I know you spoke to them when you did.”

Gracie stirred grated cheddar into her chili, stirred it.  “And what did I say, Sheriff?”

Linn shook his head.  “I couldn’t make out the words,” he admitted.

“And what about that surveillance recording?”  she asked quietly.

Linn frowned a little as he stirred his chili, took a taste, nodded.  “Good stuff,” he murmured, then looked up again.  “When we tried to replay it, there was nothing there.  Almost as if it were either wiped … or nothing was recorded in the first place.”

“I see.”  Gracie’s tone was neutral.

“We’ve sent it off for forensic restoration.”

Gracie gave him a knowing look.

“There isn’t anything to be restored, is there?”  he asked suspiciously.

“No.”

“You were there last night.”

“I was, Sheriff.” Gracie set down her bread and her spoon, pressed her forearms into the edge of the table.  “Why don’t you ask me what I did to them?”

“All right.”  He looked directly at her.  “Gracie, you’ve never lied to me and I’ve never lied to you.  Without that recording – and I’m the only one who saw it – there is nothing tying you to being there.  I only just got word that the pair had a variety of drugs in their system, but nothing that I know of that would cause such a screaming insanity.  That leaves only some direct action.  What did you do to them?”

Gracie’s direct gaze told the Sheriff that she was not in the least bit intimidated by his pale eyed glare.

“I showed them what they’d done,” she said quietly.  “They became Roger in his last moments.  They tasted his final regret, that he would never know a married man’s happiness again, that he would not be able to provide honorably for his bride as a man ought.  They realized to the bottom of what little soul they have … the regret of never seeing the child he’d just fathered.”

“Go on.”

“Sheriff, I showed them what they did, and they felt what they’d done, I showed them the sorrow of a new widow and the loss a child feels when they know Daddy was murdered.  I showed them all the tomorrows Roger and I would never know together, everything from waking up and looking at the sun rise over the Eastern range, from morning coffee and holding hands at the breakfast table … everything, Sheriff, clear to an old couple sitting in a double rocking chair on the front porch, watching our children’s grandchildren that will never know their old Great-Grampa Roger.”

Her voice was quiet, measured, devoid of rancor. 

It was … factual.

That’s the word.

Every syllable was spoken with the emotion cloven from it, the way a man will cleave a rock along a natural seam.

“That full knowledge that it was all and entirely their fault, the full realization of everything they’d just done, is what drove them insane.”

“You intended their insanity.”

Gracie thought of how she might word her answer to more completely justify the action, then she gave the correct, complete and detailed response.

“Yes.”

Linn took a long breath, leaned back in his chair, dropped his hand to his thigh with a noisy slap.

“Gracie, this is not the first time I’ve had this conversation.”

“Oh?”  she asked archly, stirring her chili again, taking a taste.  “Needs salt.  You?”

The Sheriff smiled just a little.  “Your Grandma … Old Gracie.  She did that same thing, did you know that?”

Gracie blinked a few times.

“No, Sheriff.  I didn’t know that.”

 

Bible study was that night, and understandably, but uncharacteristically, Gracie was not there.

Linn asked the Parson if he might address the assembled, and with the sky pilot’s assent, the Sheriff stood at the head of the aisle, where not very long before, a fine young man he’d known stood and swore the ancient oaths of wedlock with his beautiful bride.

“Folks,” he said, “I’ll be brief.”

His expression was serious and he looked tired, but his voice was strong and carried well.

“Gracie is a widow now.  I’ve known widows in the emergency services and they all tell me the same thing.”  He shifted his weight, the way a man will when his back is troubling him.  “For the first couple of weeks, everybody and their uncle is wearing a groove in the sidewalk bringing pies, fresh baked bread, casseroles. Offers to sweep the floor, do dishes, get your groceries.”

He swallowed, paused, looked around, thinking to himself the group was half again bigger than normal … probably a response to Roger’s death.

We all tend to come back to church when it’s one of our own.

“By the end of the first month they drop off. Six months and they’re rare.  At one year you say ‘The Widow Smith’ and people say ‘Who?’ – so please, folks … don’t forget the widow on into her widowhood.”

Connie looked down at Jimmy’s sketch of his pale eyed Pa, and Connie was struck by the lined appearance of her husband’s face, and she realized Jimmy had drawn more how the man sounded, and perhaps felt, than how he actually appeared.

She looked back up at her husband, and realized she could not take exception to the accuracy of Jimmy’s drawing.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

58.  FAMILY

 

Jimmy knew the significance of the black strip of tape across his Pa’s badge.

He knew every lawman he was seeing had one, and he saw the black diagonal stripe across the door of every cruiser, a strip of black electric tape that declared the passing of one of their own.

Jimmy went with his folks up to Gracie’s place and was immediately put to work – along with his Pa and his two year old little brother – packing in saw horses and planks and draping them with bedsheets to form the coffin’s table.

It wasn’t the first time a long box would set in the parlor overnight, and it would not be the last, and the family allowed uniformed men to stand watch with them:  lawmen in immaculate uniforms and solemn faces, lawmen who spoke in hushed and formal words, lawmen who Gracie set down at her table, one at a time, and fed, and talked with, and took their hand between both of hers:  the widow was comforting those who came to give her comfort, and she got every one of them to talk, there in her kitchen, to tell her of their families and of their young and of their memories, and somehow – somehow, none of them could really tell how, but they all agreed that she’d done it – she managed to get every one of them to laugh, just a little, and she’d told each of them there was still good in the world, and that they were part of that proof.

Lawmen, and a few women in uniform as well, stood at the head and at the foot of the long box, with the still figure within, a man taking his last rest under his own roof.

The coffin arrived with escort, and was carried in at shoulder height between a double row of saluting lawmen; the Sheriff watched solemnly as the long box was placed, opened, arranged, as the detail marched out.
Gracie had this prepared, as well:  each soul on this solemn detail went home with a wrapped loaf of something fresh baked and still warm, and her personal thanks to each one:  every man remembered the quiet voiced widow and how she’d taken pains to thank me – me! – someone she’d never seen before, someone she didn’t know, but someone she took pains to speak to in this, her own hour of sorrow and of loss.

Her sister came in just as Jimmy was discovering how to whip mashed potatoes nice and fluffy with a power mixer – fortunately he hadn’t tried lifting the beaters while they were still running – Jimmy looked up and said “Hi!” over the noise of the mixer, and Sarah Maxwell laughed and said “Well hello again!” just as Grace swept back into the kitchen.

Jimmy carefully, slowly added the milk and the butter and carefully, deliberately did not look up from his assigned task:  Gracie and her sister retired to the screened in back porch, the screens covered with clear plastic and surprisingly warm in spite of the day’s chill, and thanks to the length of their sisterly conversation, Jimmy kept whipping the potatoes, to a truly remarkable degree of creamy smoothness.

His brother Wes, tired of listening to the men talk, and not wanting to do “Girl Stuff” in the kitchen, did what any young boy would do in that situation.

He curled up on the couch and went to sleep, The Bear Killer laid out on the floor in front of him, snoring.

“This isn’t how I wanted to have Thanksgiving dinner,” Sarah admitted.

Gracie gave her an understanding look.  “I know,” she said.  “I didn’t either.”

“What do you need?”  Sarah asked, nodding toward the kitchen.

Gracie sighed.  “I’ve most of the cooking done, people have been bringing stuff …”

Her voice trailed off as Gracie turned and opened the door.

Jimmy looked up and grinned again, that bright, engaging, little-boy grin of his. 

“Hi!  Didja bring your Sea Stallion?”  he asked hopefully.

“No,” Gracie admitted.  “I had to fly a regular jet.”

“Oh.”  Jimmy looked disappointed, then he turned off the mixer.

“Is this good enough?” he asked, and Gracie came around, tried the mixture, raised her eyebrows in approval.

“That,” she declared, “is superb!”

 

Jimmy and his brother followed their Pa out, and the men folk gathered out in the work shop.

“Kind of traditional to hunt rabbit while the women folk tend the kitchen,” Linn said, “but I don’t really feel like trompin’ out in the cold.  You?”

Brothers, half-brothers, in-laws and a couple outlaws and a good handful of lawmen all indicated in the negative.  Five gallon buckets were turned over and wiped down, settin’ benches were given a lick and a promise, everybody arranged a seat of some kind:  the conversation turned to the unfinished, octagon barrel, flint rifle under construction, and to the checkering job being done on a double gun:  conversation started and men started talking about man stuff, and Jimmy watched as the discussion went to forging and tempering, and he watched closely as the flint rifle’s main spring was carefully heated and then buried in wood ashes to cool slowly.

Jimmy didn’t understand all that he saw, but he watched, and listened, for that is how boys learn.

“Now this’n ought to fit you,” one of the Kentucky men said, and brought a smaller version of the unfinished flint rifle over and handed to Jimmy.

“Step over here now and fetch it up – no, not to your shoulder, this crescent fits right here” – the Kentucky gunsmith guided the silver crescent butt plate into the little hollow between Jimmy’s stringy young bicep, and the bulge of his shoulder – “there, right like that.  A shotgun you set in on your shoulder but this is a flint rifle and it sets out here.  Like to shoot it?”

Jimmy’s eyes lit up and his grin was like a hundred watt bulb as he exclaimed, “Yeah!”

Linn smiled quietly and watched as the lean Kentuckian with big knuckles and an untamed beard showed Jimmy how to dispense the powder charge from a horn into the horn-tip measure, and then set thumb and forefinger on the muzzle on either side of the bore when he poured the powder in, to make it easier to get everything down the hole.

“You’ll want ‘er at half cock now” – he reached back, brought the striker to half stand, flipped up the frizzen – “and set your battery piece before you run a ball down.”

He showed Jimmy how to properly chaw the pillow tickin’ patch – “I don’t shoot nothin’ but a spit patch ‘nless I’ll have ‘er loaded for more’n a day,” he mumbled.  “Now we’ll set that patchin’ acrost the muzzle like this an’ see this flat place on the rifle ball?  That-there’s the sprue.  Your Pa” – he looked up – “Hey Pale Eyes, you cast yer own rifle balls?”

“Not for some time,” Linn admitted.

The gunsmith looked back at Jimmy and winked.  “Yer Pa is neglectin’ yer education.  I’ll show ye how here in a day’r two.  Now set yer ball on the patchin’ with the sprue up.”
“What’s a screw?”

“Sprue, son, that’s the little flat on the rifle ball.  You got a knife?”

Jimmy nodded.

“Fetch it out.  Now take the end of the handle an’ push that ball down just below surface.”
Jimmy did.

“That blade sharp?”

Jimmy nodded.

“Good.  Dull knife’s no good, it’s the dull knife that’ll cut yet, jist like an ax.  Fetch up that patchin’ an’ saw it off.”

Jimmy did; his knife was evidently sharp, as it sliced easily through the spit-damp pillow ticking.

“Fold ‘er up an’ drop ‘er back in yer pocket.  Now fetch out the ram rod.  See that brass jag on the end?”

Jimmy nodded.

“Set that on the ball and push ‘er down.  Don’t beat on it, just two long easy pushes an’ set ‘er down on th’ powder, just like that.  See that ring in the ram rod?”

Jimmy nodded.

“That’s how you tell the ball is plumb down on th’ powder.  Now come on outside.”

Gunsmith, grinning boy and a double handful of men-folk came out into the sunshine, out in back of the work shed.

The Kentucky gunsmith squatted, flipped the battery-piece forward, Jimmy watching closely.

Linn saw approval in the instructor’s blue eyes; he looked up at the Sheriff and nodded, once.

“This-yere is a primin’ horn.  Made this from a fork in a deer antler.  Now I’ll show ye a trick.”  He winked at Jimmy and pulled a pipe cleaner from his shirt pocket. 

“Now folks thinks you have to pack that touch hole full of powder.”

Jimmy nodded.

“Worst thing t’ do.  Yer fahr has to burn from grain to grain to grain to get to the main charge an’ that makes a real bad hang fahr.  You want that touch hole open.”

He ran the pipe cleaner into the touch hole, spun it, drew it out, did it again, nodded.

“Now” – he took the stopper between strong, yellowed teeth – “prime.”

He tapped a surprisingly small amount of 4F into the pan.

“Don’t take much.  You want the fahr to flash through that touch hole” – he stoppered the priming horn, dropped it back in a flannel shirt pocket, tapped the side of the stock to bring the powder up against the touch hole – “now snap yer battery piece down.  You ever shoot set triggers?”

Jimmy shook his head.

The gunsmith flipped the frizzen forward, set the back trigger.

“That’s a real light front trigger.  I always favored a light trigger for good shootin’.  See that tin can yonder? – that red one?”

Jimmy nodded.

The gunsmith handed him the rifle.

“Shoulder that and take a sight.”

Jimmy did.

Men watched, silent, unmoving, remembering how their own fathers, or uncles, or grandfathers, took the time to teach them something, knowing this was such a moment, knowing Jimmy would remember this for the rest of his life.

“Now take a sight on attair red can.  When she’s right, touch that trigger.”

Jimmy was no stranger to a precise shot, he was not a stranger to using a rifle.

He was, however, being watched by a fair sized audience.

To his credit, he kept the sight picture, reached forward, felt the trigger ….

Snap.

“See how light attair trigger is?”

Jimmy raised his head.  “Yes, sir.”

“Put these on” – he took the rifle under the forearm, handed Jimmy a boy sized set of safety glasses – “and screw these in yer ears.”

Jimmy thrust the clear shooting glasses on his young face, twisted the earplugs in.

The gunsmith flipped the battery piece shut, drew the striker back to full stand, handed the rifle back.

“When ye’re ready,” he said, “fetch back on that back trigger until she clicks, she’ll be set.  Take your sight an’ fire when ready.”

Jimmy took a long breath, brought the rifle into that little pocket he’d just been shown.

He stilled his thoughts as the bright spark of a front sight settled on the battered, red coffee can about thirty yards out.

Men blinked and grinned as the rifle went sn’BAM! and the tin can rocked a little as a .36 ball whistled through it.

Jimmy raised his head, grinning, and took his first whiff of the smoke from the Holy Black, and Linn grinned just as broad his his boy.

Father and son and every man there knew, in that moment, Jimmy was bit by the black powder bug, and every man there was grateful for this moment’s respite from the hard reality of a lawman’s – and a kinsman’s -- death.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

59.  THAT OLD RUGGED CROSS

 

The Commissioner spoke quietly, as did everyone in the Maxwell’s parlor.

A steady line of lawmen from a remarkable distance came to pay their respects – so many that the Sheriff had to arrange the use of one of the sawed-off school buses so they could leave the many jurisdictions’ cruisers below, parked in the same field as the potter’s cemetery, and bus the lawmen up Maxwell’s Mountain.

So far as possible, the rest of the county was requested to do the same; the short bus made a regular back-and-forth shuttle, and Gracie’s kitchen wished for the good old wood stove that had long ago been replaced by a gas fired model, for the door to the back porch was open more than it was shut, so many were the hushed, respectful folk who came to speak to Gracie and look upon the still form of her husband.

Gracie seemed to be everywhere:  she could not stand still, she didn’t dare:  here she was giving a hug, or getting one; there, pressing the hand of an uncomfortable State Trooper; her kerchief, gently pressed to a damp cheek, an understanding word as someone she knew suddenly realized they had no idea what to say to the new widow.

Gracie wore a quiet, understanding smile as she wore her hand-knitted shawl:  naturally, easily, and in her orbits of the parlor, she swung near to where the county commissioner and the Sheriff were talking.

She stopped and tilted her head a little.  “Bert,” she said with an easy familiarity, “thank you for coming.  You didn’t have to, you know.”

“I brought a meat tray,” Bert replied, his ears reddening.  “I didn’t figure anyone would be in the mood for a full meal so I brought something people could graze on when they got an appetite.”

Gracie laid her hand gently against his cheek, a motherly gesture, and she nodded and said “Thank you.  That was kindly of ye,” in a voice the Sheriff last heard coming from Old Gracie’s throat.

He looked closely at the crown of her head and saw a half dozen grey hairs shining in amongst her Clan Maxwell red.

“Gracie, I spoke with Roads and Bridges, and they said –”

Gracie put her fingertip to his lips.

“Now Bert,” she said gently, “I don’t have a crystal ball and neither did they.  Nobody could have predicted what happened, so don’t talk to me about fixing potholes or gravel on the road.  You have always done your very best and I can’t ask for more that that.”  She looked past the two lawmen.  “Excuse me” – and she was gone.

So it was for most of the day, and in spite of the perpetual interruptions, Gracie was still able to set out a good supper for her family, and continue preparations for the Thanksgiving meal the next day, after the funeral.

After supper, once the table was cleared, once she’d set away everything that needed refrigerated to keep until the morrow’s big meal, Gracie went into her bedroom and stopped and looked around.

The watchers in the parlor pretended not to notice the muffled sobbing from the bedroom, from behind the gently closed door, and when Gracie finally emerged, she was composed, her face freshly washed, and she was in a long black dress, with a matching brooch and a necklace of what looked like black pearls.

She glided like a ghost into the room, went up to the coffin, looked at her husband’s still, pale face, then turned as another pair of lawmen paced silently up to relieve the pair currently standing honor guard at the coffin’s head, and at its foot.

Gracie waited until salutes were exchanged, until the formal “I relive you, sir,” was met with “I stand relieved,” then she stepped forward and stopped the relieved officer.

She took his hand between both his and whispered through a tight throat, “Thank you for watching over my husband,” and bit her lip, and looked down, then she turned to the other officer, and thanked him as well.

Her sister, in the front row, wept quietly into a bedsheet handkerchief, trying not to make a sound.

 

Jimmy delighted in his Mama’s kitchen.

Connie, too, was preparing a Thanksgiving meal.

Unlike Gracie, she hadn’t been drafting from the Unorganized Militia.

Linn knew she was troubled by Roger’s death and the grief she knew Gracie was feeling, and he knew she was handling it the same way he was.

He and the boys went down to the barn, and Linn whistled up his Apple-horse, and began grooming out the stallion.

Jimmy grabbed a five gallon bucket and turned it over for a step stool – Stomper was big and Jimmy wasn’t – and he emulated his long tall Pa’s example, while Wes busied himself stalking one of the calico barn cats.

“Pa?”

“Yes, Jimmy?”

“Pa, did you get the bad guys that killed Uncle Roger?”

Linn was quiet for a long moment as he thoughtfully brushed out his Apple-horse’s mane.

“Yes, Jimmy,” he said at length.  “We got ‘em.”

“Good.”

Stomper grunted and blew and stomped a couple times, the way he did when Jimmy hit a tickle spot.

“Did they go to jail?”

Linn blinked a couple times.

“No, Jimmy.  No, they went to a …”
He stopped himself before saying “insane asylum.”

“They went to a special kind of a hospital.”

“What special kind of a hospital?”  Jimmy persisted.

“The kind people go to when they’re not entirely sane,” Linn said carefully.

Jimmy heard the tension in his Pa’s voice and decided further interrogation would not be terribly wise.

 

In a padded cell in that unnamed hospital, a barefoot, wide-eyed patient in a straitjacket and canvas pants scooted backwards across the padded floor, eyes wide and panicked.

He dug in his heels and pushed away, pushed back from whatever horror was advancing across the small cell, until his back hit the padded wall:  he slid along the wall to the corner, where he curled up, alternately whimpering like a terrified child, and screaming like a damned soul.

He buried his face in his knees and screamed again, begging whatever it was to go away, and he offered no resistance as staff came into the cell, as strong hands seized him, bared his backside, as a needle stung its way into him and delivered a payload of something that at least quieted him, relaxed his muscles, even if it didn’t deal with the screaming fear they continued to see in his wide, staring eyes.

A gentle voiced woman in an old-fashioned shawl and work boots caressed his cheek again and he could not so much as flinch back from her touch.

“Let me show you what you’ve done,” she said for the ten thousandth time, and just like every time preceding, her voice was quiet, soft, not at all threatening.

“How long will that shot hold him?” the doctor asked a nurse.

“Fifteen minutes, if we’re lucky,” came the flat-voiced reply.

“Fifteen minutes.  Dear Lord!”

“Do you want another injection in fifteen?”

The doctor considered, rubbed his face.

“No.  No, we’ll go with the antipsychotic and see how that works.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

 

Sarah looked over at her sister.

Gracie was sitting on a wooden folding chair – she’d declined anything padded – and the Naval aviator thought her sister was asleep.

She wasn’t.

Gracie’s head was back and her eyes were closed, but she was very definitely not asleep.

Sarah got up, slid over beside her big sis, and Gracie’s hand opened as if it had eyes, and closed on her sister’s.

“I can feel the sky in your grip,” she said without opening her eyes.

Sarah wasn’t really sure how to respond, so all she said was “O-kay.”

“It’s so very hard, Sarah,” Gracie admitted in a whisper, lowering her head and turning to look at her sibling.  “It is so very hard!  Roger … was my life.”

Sarah nodded.

“I don’t have the words, Sarah.  I don’t know how I’m going to get through this.”

“Did Roger have any family left?”

“None.  He was an orphan.  That’s why I made sure my family accepted him.”

Gracie rose quickly, went over to a shadowed corner.

Sarah heard two latches open.

“I know what I can hold onto,” Gracie said, plucking the strings, checking them quickly for tune.  “The only thing that’s keeping me from drowning right now.”

Gracie began to play, her eyes closed, there near the head of the coffin.

Gracie played because she had not the words, but she had her fiddle, and she let the fiddle strings testify on her behalf.

Gracie played with her eyes closed, she played for her dead husband, she played because her heart was too full of sorrow to address any spoken words to the Almighty, but she knew God listens to more than words, and the tears of a widow are in and of themselves a most powerful prayer.

Gracie played “The Old Rugged Cross” because it was the only thing keeping her going, it was the anchor she held onto to keep from being dragged into the black pit of despair, the float to which she clung in a crashing sea of grief, and the next day, when they hoist the coffin to shoulder height and carried it with solemn routemarch to the family cemetery, after the Parson’s simple service, Gracie played again:  the widow’s fiddle sang a final farewell, the honor guard fired three volleys into the blue heavens, a distant bugle and its echo sang against the mountains, and the mourners filed solemnly away from the fenced-in family cemetery.

Linn hung back, as did Sarah, and before the simple wooden box was lowered into the ground, the hair stood up on the back of the Sheriff’s neck as Gracie laid her hands on the coffin, and threw her head back, and keened her widow’s grief to the uncaring sky above.

Linn and Sarah walked back to the house, Gracie holding onto each of their arms:  she stopped halfway to the house, and they stopped with her, and she looked from one to the other and whispered, “Thank you both for being here,” and then she resumed their short journey to the back porch.

The family waited until Gracie emerged from her bedroom, no longer in widow’s black:  she was once again herself, a study in perpetual motion, and she sat her family down and laid out Thanksgiving dinner, and she saw to it that her family ate with a good appetite.

 

“Pa?”

“Yes, Jimmy?”

“Pa, how come she buried Roger today?”

“How do you mean?”

“Well … today’s Thanksgiving … shouldn’t …?”  He left his question unfinished.

“Next year today won’t be Thanksgiving, Jimmy.  Next year it’ll be just another day.”

“Oh.”  Jimmy puzzled over that one a moment, shook his head, but decided it was one of those adult things he wasn’t supposed to understand.

Connie called from the kitchen, “Anyone wants turkey sandwiches, help yourself, I quit, the kitchen’s closed, hire a maid!”

Linn laughed quietly and leaned close to Jimmy, murmuring “She says that every year.”
Jimmy grinned the quick grin that passes between two men in on a common secret, at least until Connie called “I heard that!” and Linn shot back “You’ve got ears like my mother!” and he and Connie laughed.

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

60.  THE BEAR KILLER, AND THE BEAR

 

Gracie lay awake in what had been their bed.

Her hand slid over to where his used to be, slid a little further to where Roger had been … not that long ago … warm, solid, his belly furry, hard-muscled, like a man’s belly should be, but all she found was smooth, cool sheets.

Gracie blinked the sand out of her eyes, threw the covers back, reached for her socks.

I can’t sleep.

I might as well do something.

She sat up on the side of the bed, socks dangling from two fingers, leaning her palms on the edge of the mattress, half sick with the terrible realization that, as long as she lived, she would never, ever feel him against her again.

She didn’t realize how much she’d wanted … just to hold …

She shook her head, took a long breath, blew it out, cheeks puffing a little as she did.

She pulled on socks and work boots, her wool skirt and a flannel shirt, she turned to the doorway, a creature of the night, at home in the dark.

Gracie’s boot soles were silent on the clean-scrubbed floor; she slipped through the house, hesitating in the kitchen, remembering with its smells how her family came together and ate with a good appetite.

She’d had plenty of help, to be sure, but the orchestra of her meal was at her direction, she’d swung the baton and conducted the players …

Gracie spun her coat around her shoulders, thrust into the sleeves, ran nimble fingers down metal buttons, and finally whipped the shawl over her head and down onto her shoulders.

She didn’t really need the shawl, not with the coat, but she felt better with it across her back.

She hesitated, then drew a tall glass of water, downed it, drank another.

She felt like getting some mountain under her feet.

 

A black shadow flowed down the stairs, silent on big canine pads:  The Bear Killer knew if he went to the back door and pressed against the hinged doggie door, it would open and let him out, but it would latch behind and would not open again.

This did not trouble the big mountain Mastiff.

He had business up on the mountain.

Jimmy, curled up on his side, slept easy, warm and safe under his handmade quilt, completely unsuspecting that his boon companion was trotting across the frost-bright pasture.

 

Gracie skirted around the graveyard.

She did not fear it, nor had she any real desire to look upon it – not yet, not tonight – she walked past the work shed and down the back path, down the little dip and up onto the path curving up the mountain.

Her pace was steady, unhurried, deliberate; there was enough moon to see by, and her eyes were well used to the dark.

Gracie climbed for some time; the moon sailed across most of the sky before she came to a high meadow, an old place with memories, and she saw what called her.

Gracie’s hands came together and she drew the hand forged Damascus blade, gripped it in her good right hand, considered the bulldog .44 in the pocket holster in her skirt, then smiled a little, a humorless smile that did not expose her teeth.

To her right, something black flowed across the frosted grass, something moving like a swift, oval shadow.

Gracie didn’t care.

She started walking faster, approaching what she knew was up here.

 

The grizzly was a long way from home.

It had made its way down out of Canada, carefully avoiding men and their dangers, but here, here in this ancient meadow, it waited, for it too was an old soul, and it too had old memories.

Gracie walked up toward the hunched-over mass of shimmering darkness and she said, “Have you come for me, then?”

The bear turned toward her, unhurried, then stood on thick, muscled hind legs, coming suddenly upright, looking surprisingly manlike in the moonlight.

Gracie tightened her grip on the Maxwell-forged knife and lowered her head a little, stopped, blade forward, her other hand bladed across her chest.

“HAVE YOU COME TO KILL ME?” she screamed.  “IF YOU THINK YOU CAN DO IT, JUST TRY!”

The bear rumbled, swung its head a little to the side, triangulating on the intruder with nose and with ears more than with nearsighted eyes.

“GO AHEAD AND KILL ME!”  Gracie challenged, her voice loud, sharp on the still night air.  “ROGER’S DEAD!  WHY DON’T YOU SEND ME TO HIM!”

Gracie felt a moment’s dizziness and the world twisted around her, and then she saw a human female screaming defiantly in front of her, a human female in an old-fashioned shawl, with a sharptooth in her hand, defying the she-grizzly’s strength and speed and power and if a grizzly could feel laughter or understand humor, she would have laughed.

Gracie tasted the night air with the bear’s moist black nostrils, she heard sounds insensible to the human ear, she felt the power in ursine muscles, and suddenly she was back in her own body, blinking in surprise, and a feminine voice said, “I don’t think it’s a good idea to try her.”

Gracie watched as an immense black dog and a woman in an old-fashioned, shimmering-yellow dress walked up beside the female grizzly, stood beside its upright form:  the bear came down on all fours and the woman seemed to say something to it, and laid her hand on its shoulders:  the bear turned and lumbered away, disappearing into the woods behind.

The woman approached her, the yellow, long-skirted dress almost glowing in the moonlight.

The Bear Killer walked up to Gracie, tail swinging a slow, happy greeting, and the woman in the shimmering yellow dress tilted her head and looked Gracie in the eye.

Gracie blinked, looked closer.

The woman had … pale eyes …

Very pale eyes.

Just like the Sheriff, she thought, and the woman smiled a little and said “That’s right.”

“You’re his daughter.”

“Yes.”

“I … wait a minute, aren’t you on Mars?”

The pale-eyed woman laughed, a pleasant, almost tinkling laugh.

“You’re thinking of your Sheriff’s daughter.  I’m … my father was … older.”

Gracie’s mouth went dry as she realized who this had to be.

“Sarah.”

Sarah McKenna smiled a little.

“I lost a husband,” she said, “and it hurt like hell.”  She placed a hand on her own belly, a very maternal gesture.  “My Daffyd planted a good seed the night before he died, and I knew there was new life.  A woman knows.”  She looked meaningfully at Gracie’s belly, then back up to the fiddler’s Maxwell-blue eyes.

“It hurts so badly you wish a mama grizzly would rip you open with one swing of her paw, open your carcass so your soul could shed your miserable, sorrowful body like you'd shed a worn, soiled cloak.”

Gracie tried to swallow, nodded.

Sarah smiled, just a little.

“If you’ll notice, the bear isn’t here now.”

“I kind of noticed that.”

Sarah gave Gracie a long look.

“The veil is thin tonight, Gracie, that's how I'm here.  Roger is safe.  He …”

She hesitated, debating what and how much to tell her.

“Gracie, he hated to leave you.  He fought as hard as he could to keep from losing control and when he went over, he tried to throw himself to the side to keep from being injured when he went upside down.”

Gracie bit her bottom lip, imagining what it must have been like in those final moments.

“He’s in the Valley,” Sarah whispered.  “The Valley of the Shadow is not a dark and foreboding place.  It’s green, it smells of springtime, it smells of a thousand green growing things.  Roger is there, and he is safe now.”
A tear trickled down Gracie’s cheek.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

Sarah tilted her head, looked down, smiled.

“Nice knife,” she said frankly, then looked up at Gracie.  “Remember not to hand it to anyone until you’re ready.”

Gracie nodded.

“Ever try throwing it?”

Gracie blinked, surprised.

“You might be in a situation where someone wants to disarm you.  Don’t hand the knife to them.  Give it to them but don’t hand it.”  Sarah bent her elbow, extended her hand; a knife was in her grip where one hadn’t been a moment before.

She turned to her left, made a quick, underhand cast, and the blade stuck in something invisible.

“Underhand for up close or from seated.  No spin.  Think you can do that?”

Gracie nodded.

“Good.”  Sarah twitched her fingers and the knife flew backwards, out of the invisible something it was stuck in, back into her grip, where it disappeared.

Sarah took a step closer to Gracie, took her hands.

“You’re not alone,” she whispered.  “And it’s chilly out.  Why don’t you go crawl in your nice warm bunk.  Get some rest.  You’ve had a long and difficult day.”

She took a step back, turned, and inside of three steps she’d disappeared.

Gracie stared at where the woman had been, at where the grizzly had been.

“I wanted to say thank you,” she whispered.

It took a little while for Gracie and The Bear Killer to walk back to the house.

She was honestly surprised at how much ground she’d covered.

Gracie slipped in through the kitchen, hung her coat on the peg, and her shawl; The Bear Killer was gone – he’d been there one moment, the next he’d taken a different path – Gracie looked around, then walked slowly to her bedroom.

She started to unbutton her flannel shirt, stopped, reached for something square and white on her bed.

She turned it a little, to catch the faint light from the window, and one hand went to her mouth.

She’d whispered after the departed shade that she hadn’t thanked her.

On the paper, in the loveliest handwriting, were the words: 

You’re welcome.

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

61.  YOUR MOTHER TAUGHT ME

 

Nathan bent down a little and looked past the bend in the Sheriff’s knee, watching as the lawman picked up the green-glass casserole with the clear-glass lid.

He’d rolled a blanket into a horse shoe to hold the rounded-bottom casserole upright, and this is what caught the blacksmith’s eye:  “Daggone, Shurf,” he said softly, “did ye make a nest for it?”

Linn shifted his grip, took the casserole by its ears.  “You could say that.”  He bent his leg, hooked the corner of the door, closed it with a quick swing of his foot. 

“I one time lost a whole casserole all over my floor boards,” he admitted, “so I figured if I propped this up good –”

He grinned, and so did the tall Maxwell.

“Let me ketch attair door for ye.” 

“Like the old preacher said,” Linn replied good-naturedly, “all donations cheerfully accepted!”

Gracie was just inside the door, wearing a set of oven mitts and an anxious expression:  “Oh, that’s hot,” she said the way a woman will when she knows someone is in pain.

The Sheriff let her take the casserole, slinging his hands as if slinging off hot water:  he stepped quickly to the sink, turned on a thin stream of cold water, stuck his protesting flesh under good cold wellwater, carefully refraining from any spontaneous utterance that might be less than entirely gentlemanly.

Gracie set the casserole on the white-enamel countertop, gave the lean lawman a sympathetic look, then pulled off her oven mitts, snatched the towel from her shoulder and tossed it across the kitchen table at him.

Linn caught the towel, dried his hands, draped it over the back of a chair.

“Thank you,” he said quietly.

“Didn’t take you long to look at the horseshoe?”  Gracie teased.

Linn laughed quietly.  “No,” he admitted, circling around the far end of the table to flip his Stetson onto its resident peg.

“How’s that fine little baby of yours, Sheriff?  Is she chasing the boys yet?”

“No, but she’s got me cranked right around that little pink pink of hers!”

Gracie laughed.  “Why am I not surprised!”  She turned, began slicing a loaf of fresh sourdough.  “How’s for a sandwich?”

“Talked me right into it,” Linn muttered uncomfortably.

Gracie turned, slammed the bread knife down on the counter, shook her Mommy-finger at the Sheriff.  “Out with it, young man,” she scolded, ignoring the fact that he was significantly older than she:  “something is eating you, now let’s have it!”

Linn nodded.  “Saw me off another slab of attair sourdough,” he said solemnly, “unless you’re makin’ me a cheap sandwich with no lid!”

Gracie turned, sliced easily through the fresh crust and the soft, fragrant interior; she turned, plucking up a plate without looking, opened the refrigerator and proceeded to build the lawman a sandwich.  “Mustard, mayonnaise, ketchup, floor sweepin’s, gear grease?” she teased from over the rounded top of the ancient Frigidaire.

“Gut grease is fine,” the Sheriff said quietly, leaning against the top of a chair, frowning a little as he took the bend out of his lower back.

Gracie drew back and closed the refrigerator door, walked quickly around the table, laid one hand on the Sheriff’s and the other spread out over the small of his back.

“Lay down,” she said in a brisk, no-nonsense voice.

“What?”

She looked over a non-existent set of spectacles.  “On the deck, on your back, knees bent, do it now!”

The Sheriff raised an eyebrow.  “Yes ma’am,” he said quietly, lowering himself to the spotless floor.

“Now.”  Gracie gripped his knees.  “Heels together.  I’m going to show you a trick.”

Gracie swung down just past his boot toes, sat cross legged, her bottom-of-the-knee, full-circle skirt preserving her modesty.

“Now, Sheriff,” she said, “palms on the floor or behind your head or play a hand of poker, whatever you like, but here’s what you do for your back.”  She leaned forward, gripped his knees.  “Swing slowly to one side or the other, take it down as far as you can until you hit resistance.  No, now” – she smacked the side of his thigh as if swatting an inattentive child – “let your pelvis roll, Sheriff.  Let it roll and twist your spine, that’s right, just until you get resistance, hold for a count of one, two, three, four, five, now come back upright, slowly.  That’s right.”  She released his knees, sat back, crossed her legs again.  “Now the other direction, same like-a one like-a two.”

The Sheriff swung his knees in the opposite direction.

Gracie could not see his expression, but she felt his left thigh quit burning.

“When your back troubles you – when your leg feels like ten thousand red ants running under the skin surface – you lay down and do that.”  She smiled a little, sitting like a little girl shooting marbles with a big brother.  “Try to lay down where it’s clean.”

The Sheriff sat up, crossed his own long legs, stared at her in honest amazement.

“How,” he said, “did you know – those were – Gracie, I never spoke those words!”

“I know,” she smiled. 

“You heard me anyway.”

Gracie shrugged.  “It’s not the first time I spoke the words you were thinking.”

Linn took a long breath.

“No it’s not,” he admitted, “and yes that’s what it felt like” – he rubbed the side of his left thigh, looked at it and then back at the quietly smiling woman with the first few silvers showing in her scalp.

“I wonder if the Old Sheriff ever felt like this,” he muttered.

“Excuse me?”  Gracie blinked, not at all sure what the Sheriff meant.

Linn grinned.  “Sarah Lynne McKenna.  She was a troublemaker from the word go, she was pale eyed and she had the Gift.  Like you.  Only different, I think.”

“I see,” Gracie murmured, thinking of her own encounter the night before.

Linn looked sharply at the suddenly thoughtful mountain witch.

“You saw her, didn’t you?”

Gracie looked at the Sheriff, swallowed, nodded.

“You talked with her.”

Gracie nodded again.

Linn turned his head just a little, as if bringing a good ear to bear:  it was a habit his Mama had, it was something the shade of his own pale eyed, several-times-great granddad had done, and he did it unconsciously.

“I woke,” Gracie admitted.  “I thought I was grieving Roger.  Maybe I was.”  She looked away, looked back. 

“Sheriff, the mountain …”

She dropped her head, looked back up.

“I run the mountain, Sheriff.  I’ve done it since I was very young.  As long as I can run the mountain, I can keep up with my brothers and they won’t send me back to the house because I’m just a girl.”

Linn looked at Gracie with honest surprise.

“Gracie, you are a girl and a pretty one,” he said frankly, “but don’t ever think you’re just a girl!”  They both laughed a little and Linn added, “And don’t even think you’re a mere girl.  There’s nothing at all mere about you!”

Gracie laughed again, the color coming to her cheeks, and Linn saw the girl he remembered in the woman who sat before him.

They both got up from the floor and Linn dusted his hands together, looked at the sink.

“Wash you hands,” Gracie said in a fondly maternal voice, and Linn laughed, remembering how often his own Mama gave him that same admonition.

Gracie sat, knowing the Sheriff would not sit until she did; she waited until he was halfway through his sandwich before speaking.

“Thank you for the casserole,” she said. “It does smell lovely!”

“Connie made it, guaranteed good.”  Linn took a quiet slurp of coffee. 

“I only just have room in the fridge, but it’ll fit!”  Gracie sighed.  “I remember when she brought that casserole to the Ladies’ Tea Society last week, before all this happened.  It was so very good, and I didn’t …”

Gracie’s expression was suddenly heavy, sorrowful, like her voice’s sudden change.

“I meant to tell her how good it was,” she whispered, and another black wave of grief hit her like an ocean wave:  she lowered her head, fumbled for a kerchief.

Linn set down his sandwich, got up and came around the table, knelt and hugged the new widow:  she leaned her head down on his shoulder, ran her arm across his back.

It wasn’t the first time the Sheriff let someone dampen his shoulder, and it would not be the last, and like he usually did, he let the other party’s grief determine how long he stayed put.

He stayed down on his prayer bones for some time, for the black waves of Gracie’s grief hit her three times in fast succession, or maybe it’s that she’d just backed up that much sorrow until such time as it was safe to discharge it, or maybe she needed that shoulder in order to let it all go.

Whatever the case, Gracie kind of slid out of her kitchen chair and clung, kneeling, to the Sheriff, and the Sheriff hung onto her, for he knew what sorrow was, and he knew what it was like when those black mountains of grief reared up and just plainly slammed his soul flat on the floor.

They sat facing one another, cross legged again like a pair of kids, and Linn said, “Gracie, I wish I could tell you it won’t hurt after while.  I can’t lie to you.  It’ll hurt for the rest of your life.  Mama grieved for the rest of hers, after Pa and my brother were killed in that wreck.  Might be that’s why I’m so hard on a drunk.”

Gracie nodded miserably.

She’d forgotten that the Sheriff lost his father and brother to a drunk driver, and this lapse made her feel all the worse.

“Now don’t be beatin’ up on yourself like that,” Linn said quietly, and Gracie smiled wanly.

“Now who’s reading minds?” she whispered.

“What can I say,” Linn grinned, a quick, boylike grin:  “I’m psychotic.  I mean psychic!”

Gracie laughed, sniffed, laughed again: she wiped her eyes, blew her nose – loudly, not at all ladylike, but more like that hurt little girl she looked like – and when the Sheriff suggested that if they didn’t get up his hips were likely to break apart, she nodded and they both go awkwardly to their feet.

“Thank you, Sheriff,” Gracie said quietly, trying to compose herself, trying to be the mature Matron of Maxwell’s Mountain.

Linn knew better.

He turned, picked up the rest of his sandwich.  “I’ll take this to go,” he said, drained the last of the coffee, set his coffee cup in the sink and dribbled a little water in it as he always did.

He turned, frowned, leaned back against the sink.

“Gracie,” he admitted, “I’d ought to be able to tell you something educational, informative, uplifting, mildly amusing and nonfattening, but my mind just went blank!”

Gracie laughed a little as Linn shook his head mournfully and added, “You’ve heard of a mind like a steel trap.  I’ve got one.  She’s all rusted up and the main spring’s broke but by golly she’s mine!”

He took another bite of the sandwich, chewed thoughtfully.  “Thank you for that back work.”

Gracie smiled quietly.  “Your mother taught me.”

Linn’s eyes softened and darkened a little at the news.

“I’d be damned,” Linn murmured, biting into the last of the sandwich. 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

62.  CHUCK WAGON

 

Like anyplace else, Santa came to town after Thanksgiving, and he came with great fanfare.

Marching band, fire trucks, Mexican vaqueros on prancing horses, pretty senoritas in long dresses and mantillas, modestly blushing behind upheld fans as they rode in gleaming carriages; a contingent of mounted cavalry, all pennants, blue shirts, gleaming chestnut geldings and high leather boots:  Jimmy was wide-eyed, grinning, his quick eye picking out his distorted reflection in the mirror-bright, stainless-steel Kenworth fire truck's 2000 gallon tank idling past like a great and powerful beast behind the cavalrymen:  their emergency lights were on, spitting alarm and demanding attention, but out of respect for the horses in the parade, they did not wind up sirens, nor did they fire a blast from the roof-mounted, polished-chrome, three-foot-long air horns.

Jimmy waved enthusiastically at the men in the cab, jumped up to catch the wrapped caramel creams they tossed at him and his excited, jumping-up-and-down little brother by the red-shirted fireman driving.

He caught another few pieces tossed at them when the pumper came by; two of their Irish Brigade rode the tailboard – the only time they could ride in this ancient and customary manner, as tailboarding had been verboten some years before.

Jimmy could hear the Marching Band at the head of the parade, now well on down the street, but his attention was on the tail end, where the Great Guest of Honor was arriving, riding on top of a genuine chuck wagon.

Jimmy did not care for the fellow in the white suit and long white beard, he wasn’t waiting anxiously for the famous harbinger of the season, nor was he particularly anxious to hear the jolly man’s ho-ho-ho:  no, he was thrilled to see the man’s transportation, drawn by a pair of mules, patiently following the fire department’s boxy red rescue truck.

Jimmy had helped build this chuck wagon; he’d frowned at drawings made better than a century before, he’d studied precisely drafted drawings made from a real, honest-to-God chuck wagon of the period; Jimmy was taken patiently under the tutelage of a master carpenter, a cabinet maker who also built wagons, and together, the old man and the young boy, they took measurements and laid them out on plywood and plank, he showed Jimmy how to make cuts with a table saw, a band saw, a circular saw, a jigsaw:  Jimmy showed a surprising aptitude for the craft, and when he began discussing dado and biscuit and the advantage of screws over nails, the old carpenter rested an approving hand on the boy’s shoulder, for there are few things to warm the heart of an old grandfather like the honest attention of a young boy.

Jimmy paid no attention to the Santa atop the chuck wagon.

He stared at the slow-turning, spoked wheels, remembered sanding the spokes, remembered the magic of heating the steel rims and handling the hot circles of steel with long handled tongs and pliers, working with the old carpenter, coordinating quickly and efficiently to drop the hot rim over the wooden wheel and then tap it into place with an Osage orange maul, and then splash it with buckets of water to cool it and shrink it in place.

Jimmy blinked as a package of candy hit him in the forehead:  he flinched back and his little brother seized the falling bounty, yelled “Mine!” – and Jimmy shook his head, watched the chuck wagon retreat down the street, following the rest of the parade.

He grinned, with no one to see it, because when he watched the chuck wagon rumble past, he was watching an awful lot of work.

He’d done some of it, and he took pride in that.

 

Jimmy watched his little brother climb happily onto Santa’s lap and giggle bashfully as the kindly old man with the white beard tickled him and asked if he’d been a good boy, and what would he like for Christmas:  Wes laughed and replied that he’d like a dump truck, and Santa said he’d see what he could do, and then it was Jimmy’s turn.

Connie watched as Jimmy set himself carefully on Santa’s left thigh and looked speculatively at the red-cheeked fellow, and Connie bit her knuckle as she listened to their exchange.

You see, when Santa asked Jimmy what he wanted, Jimmy remembered those terrible days when he walked on eggshells and flinched at every raised voice, every raised hand, afraid he’d be beaten again, afraid his beloved Stomper would be killed, and he remembered how all that was absent since his pale eyed Pa ‘dopted him.

Jimmy looked across the room, where his Pa was looking at him, and Jimmy looked at Santa and said “I got ‘nuff stuff, Santa.  I don’t need any more.  I got my Pa” – he pointed to the Sheriff – “an’ I got Mama an’ a brother and sister.” 

He grinned, bright and quick, and added, “An’ I got Stomper so I got all I need.”

 

 

Santa set up shop in the Silver Jewel, his chuck wagon parked out front.

A woman in a long dress and with her red hair drawn back and ribbon-tied came out the front doors, a woman with Irish-green eyes:  her name wasn’t Daisy, but for the day, that’s what she was called;  she was a year from being graduated from the local high school, she was athletic, slender waisted, and she’d been groomed and cultivated for her position because of three attributes:

First, she had those lovely, Irish-green eyes that bespoke the heritage of the Hibernians, those wild Celts that the Roman Empire was utterly unable to subjugate; second, she had the shining, gorgeous red hair of the same ancestral people; and third, she had an aptitude for cooking, and whether she was preparing on a wood fired, cast iron stove or whether she was in perpetual motion in the more modern kitchen here in the present-day Silver Jewel, what she fixed was little short of just flat forevermore good!

She came out the heavy doors of the Silver Jewel, wiping her hands on the towel that lived on her right shoulder; she flipped the towel back into place and picked up her skirt, delicately, a very feminine gesture, and stepped down to street level, staring fascinated at the chuck wagon.

An old man was explaining for a small knot of interested spectators how the spokes had been shaped, shaved and fitted, and showed them the jig he used to ensure their ends were of the right diameter; his wrinkled old hands caressed a corner and explained how he and a talented little boy beveled the edges and screwed to a reinforcing block behind the boards, he drew out one drawer, then another, explaining how the joints were made, and at almost every turn, he spoke of the lad that turned out to be of immense help on the wagon’s construction.

Daisy – we’ll call her that, it’s not the name she was born with, but it’s the role she played, in the Silver Jewel and elsewhere – tilted her head curiously and regarded the several drawers, some sizable, others less so, and she imagined how she might outfit such a rig in order to feed young and hungry men on a cattle drive.

Curiosity, cooperation and a quiet word from the Sheriff:  an elevated fire ring was obtained and set up, flour was brought out from the Silver Jewel’s kitchen, and other ingredients, and soon Daisy had her sleeves rolled up (it was a mild day and she wasn’t too cold! – besides, there was the fire!) – and as spectators watched, she kneaded dough with quick, practiced strokes, she greased up a Dutch oven and pinched off balls of kneaded dough, placed them in concentric rings in the cast iron cooker, set it down into what was now coals, and scooped coals on the ditch-rimmed lid.

There was room enough to the side for her to set a kettle of stew a-simmer; someone ran over to the Mercantile and came back with a stack of picnic bowls and plastic spoons, and as people came into and out of the Silver Jewel, Daisy began handing out bowls of really good stew, with a couple fresh baked biscuits.

Jimmy, of course, partook thereof, for boys his age are a walking appetite on two hollow legs, and he’d refrained from the parade-tossed candy his little brother happily gobbled, so he’d not spoiled his appetite.

Even Santa came out to eat at the chuck wagon, and the next day’s weekly paper had a photo of Daisy, dripping ladle in one hand, handing Santa a bowl of stew and biscuits, and the other half of the photo had a blushing Daisy sitting on Santa’s lap, laughing as she stuffed a biscuit between his rosy red lips.

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

63.  “THAT’S A TAN BOOM!”

 

Jimmy gripped the freeze proof yard hydrant’s handle with both hands, gritted his teeth and hauled up on the cold cast iron, sending a cascade of water onto the concrete apron.

He washed off his boots, used the broom they kept for that purpose to remove the stable muck from his yellow rubber overboots, rinsed off the broom’s bristles like his Pa always did, jumped up and used both hands to shut off the yard hydrant, and then swung the broom briskly around in a big circle to sling the water out of the brush.

It may not have been the most efficient way to dewater the bristles, but for a third-grader, it was the most fun!

His little brother was squatted in the driveway, making vroom-vroom-vroom noises as he used an empty soup can to scoop up gravel, lift it to a ridiculously awkward height and dribble it back to the ground in pious imitation of an earthmoving crane, or maybe an end loader:  the exact device was visible to the busy little boy’s inner eye, but not the casual onlooker.

Wes’s quick ear heard his big bother singing, so he dropped the tin can and came running over as Jimmy hung the broom on its nail on the tall fence post.

“O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum,” Jimmy sang in a perfect pitch, and Wes frowned and demanded “Whatsa tannabomb?”

Jimmy grinned, stood cross legged like a drunken stork so he could see his boot sole.  “Tannenbaum,” he explained, “is German for Christmas tree!”

“Howcum don’t they sayit Christmas tree?”  Wes asked, his voice excited; he ran his words together when he was excited, and Christmas, Jimmy could tell, excited his sibling.

“I dunno,” Jimmy admitted, and the pair started for the house.

Jimmy, as the Responsible Big Brother, picked up the discarded tin can, and Wes yelled a juvenile protest:  never mind he’d dropped it when his attention shifted to something else, never mind the can was discarded carelessly and would bring comment from their pale eyed Pa, never mind it was the responsible thing to do for Jimmy to pick it up:  that was Wes’s tin can, and Wes jumped and grabbed, and Jimmy let go of it in a hurry, for one time he hadn’t and the sharp inside edge cut his finger when Wes jerked the earlier version from his responsible grip.

Connie smiled as she watched the two coming back toward the house:  Jimmy, with his usual introverted gait, self-possessed, quiet, observant without seeming to be, and Wes, more jumping than walking, boisterous, spontaneous, loud, the typical little brother.

The Bear Killer was stretched out in front of the gas stove, “soaking up warmies” as her pale eyed husband put it, and the baby was asleep between his great paws; Connie smiled as the boys ascended the front porch stairs with as much stealth as a herd and a half of white-faced Herefords, and she had to laugh at the sudden delight in their eyes when she said “You’re just in time for dinner!”

Jimmy stepped on the boot jack, quickly and expertly divested himself of the still-wet yellow overboots, peeled off the plastic grocery sacks from his polished black Wellingtons (that’s what his Pa wore!)  and he scampered inside after his happy, noisy, chattering little brother.

Wes charged for the kitchen, skidded a little as Connie admonished “Wash your hands!” and turned, running for the stairs, climbing the stairs on all fours as swiftly as a grown man might ascend on the Quick Step:  Linn offered his opinion, upon seeing this, that the lad had the advantage of four wheel drive, and Connie gave him a patient look.

“At least these are the only stairs he climbs like that,” she sighed.  “I don’t want him to get in the habit!”

Jimmy followed his little brother upstairs, waited while Wes positioned the step stool, washed his hands (with much inefficiency and splash) and then jumped off the stool and ran back downstairs.

Jimmy quietly, patiently, set the step stool off to the side, parked it where it usually sat, washed his hands and then dried not only his own hands, but the counter and the mirror and a few spots on the floor:  he hung the towel back up, trudged downstairs just as Wes set his sandwich back on its plate, a bite taken out of it, his cheek bulging and looking innocent, as only a little boy can.

Jimmy knew Wes ran down and seized his sandwich and would have devoured it, save for his Mama’s patient admonition:  he seated himself, carefully not looking at his squirming little brother as their Mama brought in their little sis and got her situated in her high chair.

“Your father,” Connie said as she ladled soup into their bowls, “will be cutting a Christmas tree for the Silver Jewel tonight.  I understand he’s looking for some help.”

“Me!”  Wes exclaimed, dropping his spoon – it didn’t hit the floor, but not by much – he looked down, looked back, managing to give his Mama an absolutely innocent expression, and the grinned, that quick spontaneous grin that can’t help but endear a little boy to his Mama’s heart.

Jimmy patiently ate his sandwich, then picked up his bowl and carefully, deliberately drank his chicken noodle soup – very neatly, very efficiently, without slurping; he lowered his bowl, saw his Mama was giving him The Look, and then was even less comfortable when Wes picked his up and drank, with a steady stream of broth running down his chin and his shirt front.

“I’m sorry,” Jimmy said in a small voice as he realized how Wes’s mess was the result of his Big Brother’s Leading Example.

 

Linn’s voice was quiet in the barn as he stroked the ax blade with the round, hand-held stone.

“Saddle Stomper,” he said, not looking up from the double bit ax, and Jimmy grinned and turned to the big red Frisian.

Linn elaborately pretended to study the ax as if it were the most fascinating thing in the world, allowing Jimmy to set up his own bales to climb in order to saddle the tall red gelding.

Jimmy had proven himself competent in the past and Linn knew, if he were left free of distraction, he’d get the job done – maybe not as fast as a grown man, maybe not as efficiently, especially with his little brother yelling “I help!” and grabbing for the girth about the time Jimmy was gathering his belly muscles to swing the saddle up into place.

It didn’t surprise Linn at all that Wes fell off the stack of bales; he’d fallen who knows how many times before, and there was enough straw to pad the fall, and as usual – when it was just the guys – Wes rubbed the banged body part and hissed “Ooo,” and made kind of a face and then got back underfoot.

“I help!” he yelled as Jimmy cinched up the saddle, yanking the strap from his brother’s hand, and Linn saw something cross Jimmy’s face – anger, perhaps? – then Jimmy closed his eyes and Linn saw him shiver, and he opened his eyes and said “I can get it” in a quiet voice.

“No!  I help!”  Wes protested loudly, and Linn set the ax aside:  taking his protesting, arm-swinging, futilely-grabbing son under the arms, he pulled him away, set him up on a bale.

“Stay put,” he said in the Voice of Authority, and Wes ran his bottom lip most of the way down to his belly button as he crossed his arm in a good old-fashioned pout.

Jimmy gave his pale eyed Pa a grateful look.

“Wes, fetch me in my Apple-horse.”

Wes jumped off the hay bale – or, more exactly, kind of slid off the high bale, bounced his backside off the next stairstepped bale, hit the floor flat footed at a dead run – somehow he pulled off the contradiction and made it look easy – and disappeared out into the gathering dusk.

“Pa,” Jimmy asked, “do you know where the tree is?”

“I do, Jimmy,” Linn said quietly, wrapping the leather piggin strings around the ax handle, snugging the leather sheath in place over the gleaming-sharp blade.  “It’s one of the trees you and I scouted last week.”

“You can find it in the dark?”  Jimmy asked, half-hopefully, half-suspiciously.”

Linn winked but made no other reply:  he whistled, and Apple-horse came trotting in to him, pursued by the running, stumbling, protesting three-year-old.

“I got!”  he yelled as he panted his way into the barn, landing on the bale of hay he’d recently bounced off of, kicking his feet up and pulling his coat up to cover mouth and nose while he panted vigorously.

“Got more wind than you can blow,” Linn observed quietly.  “I was the same way myself.”

“You were?”  Jimmy asked, surprised, and Linn grinned again – that quick, ornery grin of his, and Jimmy saw his Pa as somehow younger than he’d been a moment before.

“Saddle up.”

Linn swung up into saddle leather, sidled Apple-horse over to his bright-eyed, reaching-for-his-Pa youngest son, hoisted him awkwardly onto the saddle skirt behind him.

They paced out into the dark, two horses, three Keller men and one ax, and when they came back they had a tree, a boy had memories of his Pa showing him how to swing an ax, how a tree was properly notched to drop it in a particular lesson, how his little brother yelled “I help!” and insisted on taking a couple swings with the ax (and he smiled a little as he remembered his Pa waited until the tree was about to fall, so his little brother’s futile and underpowered stroke was all it took to drop the pine!)

They delivered the fragrant candidate behind the Silver Jewel, where its ax-cut butt was sawed off square, tapered a little to expose the inner bark for watering, and fit with the base:  Jimmy knew when they saw it next, it would be standing inside, instead of lying on the ground behind, and it would be trimmed and decorated and looking really good.

Sure enough, when they came back the next day, the tree was up and trimmed and looking (and smelling!) like a Christmas tree ought.

“Fellas, you like the way she looks?”  Linn grinned, his arm around each of his boys, and while Jimmy gave a quiet, “Yeah,” Wes was not nearly so reserved.

He thrust out an excited, pointing finger and yelled, “It’s a tan boom!” and Linn looked at Jimmy, raised an eyebrow, and Jimmy explained, “He means Tannenbaum.”

“Tan Boom!”  Wes corrected loudly.

 

That night, after Jimmy got the door and Linn packed the sleeping three-year-old into the solid old log house, Linn packed Wes upstairs, stripped him down and got his flannels on him, laid him in his own bunk and pulled the covers over him:  Wes was relaxed and warm and he’d been safe in his Pa’s arms and somewhere deep inside his little boy’s psyche, he saw no reason at all why he should wake.

Linn turned to Jimmy and winked, put a finger to his lips and the pair cat footed back downstairs.

“Jimmy,” Linn said once they got to the bottom of the stairs, “I need you to show your little brother something.”

Right about then the phone ran and his Pa had to leave – Sheriff’s business, Jimmy knew, and he waited til his Pa kissed his Mama and the baby and he’d gone that he, too, kissed his Mama and went upstairs to bed.

Connie watched him go, thinking he would very likely have pine scented dreams of Christmas trees.

Unfortunately, she was right.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

64.  TO DESTROY A NIGHTMARE

 

Jimmy remembered the voice.

He was laying under the Christmas tree, looking up through the branches, looking at the decorations from the inside, the colored balls, the lights, and the voice, that angry, half-drunken voice, and he knew he was going to be beat, he knew it was coming --

He twisted a little in his sleep, almost completely paralyzed:  his full-throated scream of utter terror was barely a raspy whisper, a terrified struggle to escape the grasping hands that would smack across his face, his backside, anywhere they could reach – he smelled that funny odor that occurs when a man’s hand slaps a child’s face hard – he felt the hands grab his ankles and yank him out from under the decorated, fragrant Christmas tree –

I was just laying under it, he heard his voice screaming in his head, right before a hand the size of a ship’s sail slammed across his young face, throwing his head painfully to the side

Jimmy woke, shivering, sweating, eyes snapping wide open in the dark:  terror hammered at his heart, panic clutched his throat from the inside, he shook so hard the bed vibrated, and slowly, slowly he came to realize he was safe, he was in his own bedroom, his little brother was asleep in the bed over against the wall, it was quiet, there were no hard hands seizing him nor rearing back to belt him –

I’m safe, I’m safe, it’s only a dream, only a dream, he told himself.

Only a dream.

Had Jimmy been older, he might have screamed Dream, hell! – but that was not yet part of his vocabulary, nor of his thoughts:  terrify a child at a young age and they won’t fight back for the rest of their lives, not without some extraordinary event.

Jimmy looked fearfully to his right.

The Pretty Lady was sitting there, watching him with those lovely pale eyes of hers.

She sat on an invisible chair – she did that sometimes – and she tilted her head as she regarded him with a gentle expression.

“I know someone who was hurt, too,” she whispered, and he heard her whisper in his head instead of with his ears.  “My brother Jacob.  He was able to hurt back and he never stopped hurting back anyone who hurt him.”  She reached out, laid a gentle hand on the bedcover, resting her gloved palm on the hand stitched quilt over his shoulder. 

“A devil hurt Jacob terribly, and he learned he could fight the devil.  Your devil is still tormenting you.”  Her eyes were soft and understanding, her voice gentle and kind.

“You weren’t able to fight back.  Your devil taught you to be a victim.”  She smiled a little, the way a woman will when she truly understands what the sufferer has been through. 

“I want you to go see Gracie.  Ride Stomper up to see her.  She’ll tell you what to do.”
Jimmy blinked, looking at the empty space where she’d been.

“Can’t you help me?”  he whispered hopefully, but the silence did not make reply.

Jimmy sighed, looking at the vacant space where The Pretty Lady had been a moment before.

She tended to do things like this.

Jimmy lay back and stared unseeing at the night-dark ceiling and considered, blinking in the dark, then he yawned, rolled up on his left side, and dreamed no more the rest of the night.

 

Gracie smiled as she spooned up a huge gob of fresh-spun whipped cream, whipped from genuine cream from their own cows, sweetened with a little honey and just a dash of cinnamon:  the fluffy white confection splatted with a satisfying sound as it landed on the slice of still-warm blueberry pie.

She was expecting company, and she was not disappointed.

She felt his approach more than heard it, and as he raised his fist to knock, she called “Come in, Jimmy,” and Jimmy accepted this as normal.

This was Gracie, and Gracie knew things.

She smiled as he came through the door, held up a fork.  “You’re just in time,” she smiled, “grab it and growl,” and Jimmy almost laughed, for that’s what his Pa said sometimes when they sat down to eat – “Grab’er and growl” -- and he happily seated himself and began to partake of this unexpected bounty.

“I understand your baby sister is walking well,” Gracie smiled as Jimmy did full justice to his pie.

Jimmy looked at his benefactor and swallowed uncertainly.  “Yes, ma’am,” he said hesitantly, unsure whether he could make conversation about little sisters and baby stuff and the things women talked about.

“Does she tag after the two of you?”  Gracie asked, and Jimmy saw a laugh hiding behind her soft eyes, and he nodded:  as a matter of fact, his little sister adored him, and when he was home, if she wasn’t cuddled up against The Bear Killer, she was cuddled up against Jimmy.

“I did, too, when I was her age,” Gracie admitted softly, smiling a little:  “my brothers would try to run me off or run away from me, and I would run after them.  Sometimes they would run off up the mountain and I would take after them, trying to keep up, and my Pa called me his little hillrunner.”

Jimmy considered this, picked up the crust – all that was left, the pinched rim of baked piecrust – and nibbled it like he might a stick of pretzel.

“That’s not why you’re here, though, is it?”  She slid a glass of milk across to him.

Jimmy blinked, surprised.

He hadn’t seen her pour it, nor to fetch out a glass, he didn’t see where it came from –

But he swallowed the last of the pie crust and took the milk, took a long drink.

For the moment he was content that he’d come here for pie and milk, and Gracie understood the mind of a little boy, and so she waited until he placed the empty milk glass on the table and said “Thank you,” in a proper voice, and Gracie smiled and whisked the empty glass and his plate and fork over to the sink, rinsed it out, set it in the right hand side with the other items to be washed.

Gracie turned, leaned back against the sink, tilted her head a little and looked at Jimmy as if sizing up a side of beef.

“I think you need a nap, Jimmy,” she said frankly.  “Come with me.”

Jimmy stood, puzzled; he didn’t feel sleepy, and he felt like maybe he was being punished, maybe he should not have come here, maybe he was being made to take a nap because he was being a nuisance –

Gracie placed a gentle hand between his shoulder blades, guided him into the living room, steered him toward the couch, sat and patted the cushion beside her.

Jimmy sat obediently.

Gracie whispered, “Close your eyes,” and he felt her hands, cool and soft and kind, like he remembered his Mama’s hands, and she cupped one hand around the back of his head and the other across his eyes and he felt himself relax, and then he was falling, falling –

Jimmy blinked, spread arms and legs as he fell, landed in … sand? – it was soft, he didn’t land hard, he straightened, dusted his hands off and then wiped them on his jeans, looked around.

It was hot.

It was hot and it was dark and there wasn’t much light and what light there was looked kind of red, like … coals …

Jimmy turned, tasted copper, knew he was afraid –

“There’s no need to be afraid,” a familiar voice said, and Jimmy spun, staring, at what he must have known was Gracie, but he’d never seen Gracie all dressed up.

She was wearing an old fashioned long dress and her hair was all jacked up on top of her head and she set her fiddle against her neck and raised her arm in a big showy circle and the bow caressed the strings, and in this strange place with the low red ceiling and shadows of stalactites like dark and red-tinged teeth, this place of boulders and hillocks and red-shadowed darkness, Gracie teased “Pop Goes the Weasel” from her fiddle, plucking a string with a trimmed fingernail so instead of “Pop” it was more a musical “Ping,” and in spite of himself, Jimmy felt laughter bubbling up in his young heart.

Gracie turned toward him, fiddle and bow disappeared, and she folded her hands very properly in front of her.

“You are dreaming,” she explained.  “This is your dream, Jimmy.  Your dream.  You are the ruler of this kingdom.  Not me, not anyone else here.  You.”

She smiled, stepped closer, caressed Jimmy’s cheek with the backs of her fingers.

“It’s time you learned that.”

“Learned what?”  Jimmy asked, but Gracie was gone, and Jimmy raised his hand to his cheek, where her fingers had been a moment before, and fear claimed him again.

“Hello?”  a little girl’s voice said, and Jimmy spun, blinked.

A little girl in an old-fashioned, knee-length dress and white stockings looked hopefully at him, then reached up to adjust her flat topped, white straw hat.

“I’m lost,” she said.  “I dunno what to do.”

“Me too,” Jimmy said, and he wondered, What would Pa do? and so he stepped toward her and took her hand and said “We’ll be okay,” and a deep, echoing voice from over the edge of the black dunes echoed and rumbled, “I’LL GEEEET YOUUUUU!”

The little girl gave a squeak of fear, seized Jimmy, clung to him.  “Help me,” she whimpered, “he’s going to hurt me again!”

“This is your dream, Jimmy,” he heard, as if Gracie were whispering directly into his ear.

Jimmy looked around, searching, then reached out and snatched up his .22 rifle.

It hadn’t been there a moment before but he didn’t care.

He opened the bolt, saw cartridge brass, closed the bolt and pulled the cocking knob, looked up.

Something black and manlike, vague and almost shadowy labored over the black sand dune, something with glowing red eyes and a glowing red mouth with downturned corners, something that moaned like it was in pain and in anger and Jimmy felt the waves of hatred coming off it, and the little girl whimpered again and shivered, and Jimmy felt himself change and he brought the rifle to shoulder and he yelled “YOU GET OUT OF HERE!” and something like a ring of lightning seared into crackling life around the breech of his rifle and sailed out and turned into a rippling silver fist that opened into a great hand and slapped the hulking, ceiling-tall monster-thing, knocking it end-over-end, tumbling slowly as it screamed in frustration and in pain, and they heard it disappear into the distance, and then fall into a deep and glowing pit, and they knew the pit closed and swallowed the monster-thing and they were safe.

Jimmy lowered the rifle, blinked, looked at the ancient single-shot Remington and breathed, “Wow!”

He turned, and the little girl wasn’t there.

It was The Pretty Lady, and she was smiling with approval.

“You see?”  she said, caressing his cheek with the backs of her fingers.  “This is your dream, Jimmy.  If you don’t want to be scared, you don’t have to be scared.”

Jimmy blinked.  “That was you?”  he asked.

The Pretty Lady laughed.  “That was me when I was a little girl, Jimmy.  Very bad things were done to me and I had bad dreams as well, until a Wise Woman taught me that I ruled my dreams.”

Jimmy saw the scene change around him, he saw a dirty room with a cracked, fly-specked window, a gaunt, worn, hopeless-looking woman standing barefoot in a stained shift, staring out the window.

He felt fear and he saw a man, laughing and cursing, reaching for a little girl – the same waif that had clung to him in fear a moment before – but she was dirty and her dress was little short of filthy, it was torn and patched and she was unwashed and he felt the hand close around her ankle and he knew he was going to do something terrible to her –

“This was my terror,” The Pretty Lady whispered.  “This is what was done to me.”
The waif snarled and twisted, spun and kicked the flat heel of a knee-high cavalry boot into the man’s face, the steel-rimmed heel busting the bridge of his nose and driving it into his face:  the waif was waif no more, but a grown woman, a woman who brought a singletree around and laid it hard against the side of the snarling man’s head:  Jimmy watched as she took the full measure of the man, beating him into senselessness and kicking him down the stairs, and she turned and looked at the wide-eyed little boy.

She held up the bloodied, steel-tipped war club and smiled.

“I didn’t have a rifle that shot lightning rings,” she explained, and disappeared, and Jimmy was back in that hot, dry, dark place with the spiky-stone ceiling and dunes of black sand.

“JIIIMMMYYYYY!” his tormentor’s voice roared, amplified and echoing, the way it did in his dreams.

Jimmy’s heart would normally have cowered and filled him with a screaming, paralyzing weakness.

Jimmy understood he had a choice.

He held the rifle in both hands and turned toward the sound, and then he advanced, his jaw set.

“GIVE ME THAT GUN!  I’M GOING TO SHOOT THAT DAMNED HORSE –”

Jimmy felt something powerful surge within him.

Jimmy felt himself grow, felt muscles bulge and bones lengthen and he came into a man sized body and he advanced on the monster who’d beaten him and his Mama so often and so terribly and made his life a walking-on-eggshells, afraid-to-do-anything existence of sheer, cowardly immobility.

“NO!” Jimmy shouted, surprised at the power in his voice, and the word slammed into his tormenter like a fist.

Jimmy knew he could beat his tormentor.

He knew he could draw back the rifle and SLAM the black-plastic buttplate into his face, bust his nose, cave in his skull, he knew he could draw back his knee and kick his tormentor hard in the gut and fold him up like a cheap suit –

“I’LL GET YOU FOR THIS!” his dead father raged, and Jimmy cut loose.

Jimmy felt power he’d never known, he focused a new anger and a new ability and he shoved into the man, seized him by the throat, squeezed, picked him up off the ground, felt the windpipe crush under his grip:  he lifted, knowing the dead man’s feet were a foot off the sand, brought his nose to within an inch of his tormentor’s.

“Now,” he grated, “do you really want to beat me again?”

He brought his knee up as he brought the man down, a quick and powerful blow guaranteed to immobilize, to paralyze with an absolutely, incredibly agonizing sunball of utter and absolute PAIN, and then he raised him again, his hand still crushing that hated, stubbled throat, and Jimmy strode over to a stone pillar, a rough and irregular column of native stone joining ceiling and floor, and he hauled back and slammed his tormentor into the rock – once, twice, he drew back, brought the dangling head and tongue-lolling face close to his own –

“Come back again,” Jimmy hissed, “and I will do worse!” – he hauled back, SLAMMED him into the pillar just as hard as he could, and the pillar exploded, rocks and gravel blasting out the back side –

Jimmy jumped, looking around, wide-eyed, his heart hammering, his mouth dry, his breath quick and cold in his throat, and he looked wildly around him, getting his bearings.

Gracie sat beside him, looking kindly and patient, the way she always did, and Jimmy relaxed a little as Gracie took his hand in hers and patted it a little in a reassuring and grandmotherly way.

Part of Jimmy’s mind knew Gracie was well younger than his Mama, but she still had that grandmother’s touch, and that was very reassuring to the little boy who was still trying to sort out what-all he’d seen.

“You were dreaming,” Gracie explained.

“I, um, where was I?”

“You were in a terrible place where nightmares come from, Jimmy, and you faced one of your nightmares.  Do you remember that?”

Jimmy blinked, looked around.

Gracie picked up his rifle, handed it to him.

Jimmy opened his mouth, closed it, took the rifle, looked at Gracie.

“I … didn’t bring this with me,” he said in a small voice, then he blinked again and looked at Gracie in evident confusion.

“Pa said my rifle was in evidence until the last appeal was exhausted,” he said, “and he said I might as well figure that rifle was gone –”

“Is that the same rifle?”  Gracie asked gently, and Jimmy blinked and looked at the receiver.

It was identical to his rifle, the one he’d used when he shot the intruder from the top of his stairs, only … only instead of the Connecticut gunmaker’s cartouche, there was a lightning bolt stamped into the barrel, and inside the zigzagged bolt, the words Zerstörer von Alpträumen.

Jimmy studied the stamping, looked at Gracie.

“What’s that say?” he asked, wrinkling his nose the way a puzzled little boy will, and Gracie laughed.

“It says Destroyer of Nightmares,” she said gently, then rose.

“Remember, Jimmy, you rule your dreams.  You rule.  You can guide your dreams, and your nightmares are dreams that you have to seize and bend to your will.”  She bent and kissed the top of his head.  “Now I think it’s time you headed back to your house.  Your Mama will be expecting you!”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

65.  ONE OF THOSE NIGHTS

 

Daffyd Llewellyn sat hunched over his coffee, listening to the nighttime firehouse.

It was quiet, even the furnace sounded drowsy as it breathed warm air throughout the station:  they had their own gas well, part of an ancient system that still supplied much of Firelands with natural gas, though it had been bought and modernized, new pipe laid, odorant added:  he knew this made it safer, and for this he was grateful, for back in Cincinnati he’d responded to more than one gas explosion, and he knew how bad a gas leak could be.

Across from him, the pale eyed Sheriff sat, leaned back, looking as relaxed and confident as if he’d had a full night’s sleep.

“I don’t see how you do it,” Llewellyn grunted.  “I feel like my eyes are full of sand, I’m wore out –”

Linn nodded understandingly.  “I felt that same way when Connie was carrying Marnie.”

“You?”  Daffyd grunted, then chuckled.  “Sheriff, I don’t think you’d get rattled if you were disarmin’ a bomb!”

“You should have seen me afterward,” Linn admitted ruefully.  “Once I got it taken apart and made safe, I set down beside it and shook so hard I near to rattled the fillin’s out of my teeth!”

“You’re not a drinkin’ man, I take it.”

Linn looked at him and grinned crookedly.  “Daffyd, if I was a drinkin’ man, I would have swilled down a gallon of Old Crud Cutter, I’d have belched a fireball and been stone sober afterward!”  He shook his head, took a long breath.  “How’s your wife handlin’ knowin’ she’s got cancer?”

Daffyd’s expression was bleak.  “She’s scared,” he admitted.  “Th’ doc said it’s highly treatable, he said it’s encapsulated, he said once they take it out there should be no spread, he said she’ll have a short course of chemo” – he turned his coffee cup slowly, speculatively, and the Sheriff could see the man’s hands were shaking a little – “she’s … she said it’s easy to say that when someone else has th’ cancer, Sheriff, but she said when it’s her body, it’s somethin’ different!”

“I recall Edgar said that same thing about his cardiac bypass,” Linn agreed quietly.  “He said it’s almost a routine procedure nowadays, but he said when it’s his plumbin’ they’re working on, it’s not routine!”

Daffyd nodded.

“You never said what brings you here at such an ungodly hour.”

“Couldn’t sleep, just like you.”

Daffyd looked sharply at the Sheriff.  “Connie?” he asked.

Linn shook his head.  “Healthy and well and so are the kids.”

“Too many memories, then.”

“Aye.”  Linn took a long breath, blew it out.  “Daffyd, I carry grief and loss enough to last ten men their lifetimes, and I ain’t done yet.”

Captain Daffyd Llewellyn of the Firelands Fire Department nodded his understanding.  “I understand that one,” he muttered.  “It’s hell carryin’ this many ghosts.”

“Yeah.”  Linn took a sip of coffee.  “Mama had a … friend … name of Bob Beymer, rest his soul.  He come on scene and a rookie was looking green as spring grass and ready to throw up a week’s worth of lunches.  The kid asked Chief Beymer afterward how come the burnt body in the torched car didn’t bother him and Beymer said “Boy, that ain’t me in there, that’s why” – Mama said it sounded hard and uncaring, but she realized it’s how he survived all those unholy memories.”

“That’s the one where the deputy’s son was shot in the back of the head an’ his car set afire.”

“That’s the one.”

“Did they ever catch the perp?”

Linn gave Daffyd a long, speculative look.

“The murderer,” he said carefully, “was never brought to trial.”

“Ah.”

“Yes, ah.”  Linn smiled a little.  “The state came through not long after and filled in all the coal mine air shafts they could find, and they buried a hell of a lot of evidence when they did.”

Llewellyn favored the Sheriff with a curious look, raised an eyebrow, and the Sheriff nodded and said “Yeah,” and the conversation went no further.

 

Gracie drew the latch on the wrought iron gate.

It opened with the tiniest of metallic groans; she slipped through, closed and latched it behind her, paced slowly through the family cemetery, with its hand carved monuments gleaming in the moonlight.

She walked slowly, looking around, reading names, remembering faces and hands, always the hands, she remembered the way her Granddad smelled, she stopped and stared at her own name on a stone, the stone where her beloved Grandma slept, and then she moved on, to the back, where there was still room for burials, where a fresh mound and a new stone waited patiently for her.

Gracie tilted her head and regarded the frost-sparkled dirt, then she brought the curly-back fiddle up and set her chin on the rest and brought her arm around in a big, showy circle.

Her breath steamed in the still night air as she smiled and turned, her skirt flaring as she danced – light, on her toes and the balls of her feet, and she skipped as she danced and she played “Pop Goes the Weasel” and then she danced a quick flatfoot to an Irish jig; she turned and sat on her dead husband’s stone and played several measures of Handel – she did so love his Vassermusik – and then she rose, turned, knelt on the cold dirt, laid a hand on the stone and stared at the name incised into native quartz.

Roger Halasz, she read, beloved husband of Grace, a date of birth, and that terrible date of his death:  the stone was double wide – when it was her time, she would sleep forever beside her husband, and there was room on the stone, beneath the Grace Maxwell, devoted wife of Roger, to add her date of death.

Her own birth date was already carved, her resting place was already prepared.

Grace rose, turned, sat on her husband’s stone, raised her fiddle again, closed her eyes.

A woman spun her sorrow into silver notes in the moonlight, her grief taking wing and flying on the night air, until her sorrow was spent and she felt empty and lost.

A man waited for her at the gate; Grace walked tiredly across the nighttime graveyard, smiled as he opened the gate for her.

“Thank you, Sheriff,” she murmured.

“You couldn’t sleep either.”  It was a statement, not a question.

“I suppose it’s normal,” Grace admitted, “widows do this kind of thing.”

Nearby, Apple-horse drowsed, head down, hip shot; lying beside him, relaxed, The Bear Killer yawned, white-ivory fighting fangs gleaming in the moonlight.

“Come on in, Sheriff.”

Linn followed her into the kitchen, tossed his Stetson onto its peg; he stood respectfully as Gracie back-knuckled the coffee pot.

“I’ll have to warm it up,” she said.

“Not much for me,” Linn chuckled, “or I’ll have to water every fence post between here and there!”

Gracie turned a low flame under the pot, parked her fiddle, drew out a chair, sat.

“I heard about Jean White.”

Linn nodded.

“She was ninety-some, wasn’t she?”

Linn nodded again.

“That’s not why you can’t sleep.”

He shook his head slowly.

“It’s the suicides.”

Linn’s jaw thrust slowly out and he nodded.

“What happened?”

Linn took a long breath, exhaled silently, accepted the coffee.

“You know I can drink a gallon of this stuff and sleep like a rock.”

Gracie nodded.

“I knew the man and liked him,” Linn said without preamble, and Gracie didn’t have to ask who – she knew the name – “his wife went to the cancer center for a final checkup.  She was supposed to be in remission.  When she didn’t get home by the time she was supposed to … she was overdue, she was late, he left a note on his workbench.”  Linn looked up, his eyes haunted.  “I found the note, Gracie.  He said she was overlong and that meant the cancer was back.  He wrote he could not live without her so he set up the ladder and tied off a noose on the rafter in his garage and stepped off into eternity.”

Gracie waited; she knew the Sheriff, she knew how he paused sometimes in his conversation.

“His wife and daughter went to the cancer center and they came back full of triumph and purchases.  She’d been declared cancer free so they went shopping.  His wife hit the garage door opener and there he hung, deader’n a politician’s promise.”  He swallowed.  “I was first on scene and I cut him down.”

Gracie nodded, waited patiently as the Sheriff took a long pull on his coffee.

“The girl that killed herself wrapped the pillow from her own bed around her head so she couldn’t hear the train coming up behind her.  She knew the freight came through at noon, she knew it came through at a good velocity and the biggest piece of her we found was a patch of thigh the size of my hand.”  He held up his hand, stared at it, and Gracie could see the haunting memory in his eyes as he looked at his own splayed fingers. 

“Her brain was ejected from her skull.  We found it on the gravel ballast just as nice as if someone set it there.”  He had what Gracie heard called that thousand meter stare, at least until he blinked and broke its spell.

“It’s been one of those nights,” he admitted, and Gracie nodded.

“I understand you helped Jimmy with his nightmares.”

It was Gracie’s turn to nod slowly.

“Thank you.  Whatever you did has to help.  That poor kid has been tortured by nightmares, for years.”

“It’s not an instant cure, Sheriff.  I taught him we direct our dreams, they’re our dreams, they belong to us and we control them.”

“Wish I did,” he muttered, rubbing his face.  “God Almighty, it’s been one of those nights!”

Gracie looked toward the refrigerator, running a mental inventory of what she might offer her pale eyed guest.

“I’d best go get my beauty rest,” Linn mumbled, swilling down the rest of his coffee.  “Last I looked in the mirror, I need all the help I can get!”  He rose, smiled a little.

“Thank you, Gracie.  I needed that listening ear.”

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

66.  OUROBOROS

 

The lizard was emerald green and shiny, with bright yellow eyes and a forked, flat tongue and bright yellow claws:  it had a spiked ridge down its spine and down its tail, like Jimmy had seen in illustrations of dinosaurs in his schoolbooks, but this was alive … alive, active, fast!

He didn’t laugh – he didn’t want to startle it, he didn’t know if lizards could hear but he suspected they could, and he saw a flat, round place behind and below its shining, swinging eye, and he reckoned this must be what served as an ear.

The Pretty Lady lifted her gloved hand, the lizard draped over her knuckles, and she stroked under its chin and cooed to it, and the lizard turned in profile and belched out a sudden squirt of fire.

Jimmy blinked, his eyes widening.

The Pretty Lady smiled at him, then brought the lizard’s head near her lips and whispered something:  the lizard snapped its tail up, began eating it, quick, greedy chomps, and then it disappeared – it had eaten itself, and there was nothing left.

Jimmy blinked again and his young mind told him this shouldn’t be possible, but it had just happened –

“It’s called an ouroboros,” The Pretty Lady explained.  “The dragon eating its tail.”

“Oh,” Jimmy said, blinking uncertainly.

“It means an end of everything.”  She tilted her head.  “That’s a little advanced for your stage of education.”

“Yeah,” he agreed.  “I’m still working on general math.”

She laughed – a pleasant, rippling sound, gentle and relaxing, and Jimmy’s quick mid returned to the memory of the shining, scaled lizard.

“Is the lizard dead?” he asked uncertainly.

The Pretty Lady smiled, but did not reply.

“You’re on your own tonight,” she said, seated primly on a nonexistent chair beside his bed.  “Your dreams are your own and you’ll run your own dreams.  Remember, Jimmy, fear is a choice.  Danger is real but we choose how we respond, and fear is a choice.  If I do not choose to be afraid, then I can think more clearly and I can fight more effectively.”

“Yeah, but I’m just a little kid,” Jimmy protested uncertainly.

“You’re a little kid who faced up to and faced down one of his biggest fears,” The Pretty Lady whispered, patting his hand encouragingly.  “We use dreams to sort out the day and to resolve those unresolved issues that nag at us when we’re not expecting it!”

She kissed the top of his head, and then she was gone, and Jimmy took a long breath, wondering what he was supposed to do next.

Wes, over in his bed, whimpered a little.

Jimmy slid out of his own bunk and padded barefoot over to his little brother.

He reached in, placed gentle fingertips against the side of Wes’s close-cropped scalp, and he felt Wes’s fear, he felt this child’s nameless, overwhelming terror.

Jimmy knew that terror and he knew what he had to do.

He was a Big Brother and his job was to keep his little brother safe.

Jimmy gripped Wes’s head in both hands and he closed his eyes and he dove into his little brother’s dream.

 

The gruff old gunsmith sat across from Gracie after the family breakfasted.

“I saw you up on the mountain this morning,” he rumbled.

“Oh?”  Gracie was clearing the table, planning her morning, arranging her womanly tasks in her mind to accomplish the most work in the least time.

“You were skylined against the first of the sunrise.”

Gracie set the stack of dirty dishes in the sink, turned and tilted her head a little as she regarded the deep-voiced, big-handed kinsman.

“Did you like what you saw?”  she asked with a mischievous smile.

He placed his hands flat on the table, rose.

“Grace,” he rumbled, his voice starting somewhere about his boot tops and resonating through his blacksmith’s chest, “you know I still miss my Loretta.”

Gracie stopped and looked directly at him.

“Yes,” she said frankly.  “I know you do.”

“I’d go up on the mountain.”

She nodded, once, slowly.

“I could never … I wanted the words …”
He frowned, considered, looked over at the stove, looked back.

“Gracie, when you went up on the mountain I heard you play.”

Gracie blinked, looked closely at her red-bearded kinsman.

“You give voice to your sorrow.  I listened to your fiddle crying when you couldn’t.  You’d go out in the graveyard and your fiddle would sorrow all over that fresh dirt.

“When you went up on the mountain your fiddle said you still miss him but you’re still alive and this mornin’ when the sun was just startin’ to shove over the rim of the world, I heard some happiness.”

Gracie nodded slowly.

She’d been spending more time than she realized up on that mountain.

“The sunrise was lovely this morning,” she said softly, her eyes gentle, far away.  “Roger did so love the sunrise.”

“So do you.”

She looked long at the man with the Clan Maxwell-red beard and the big hands, the hard-muscled arms and the gentle, Kentucky-blue eyes.

“Yes,” she agreed.  “Yes.  I’ve always loved sunrise.”

“It still hurts, Grace.  I still miss her.  Reckon part of me always will, even if I find me another woman.”  He looked down at the table and Gracie saw his shoulders sag a little, as if a great weight pressed them down, then he straightened, squared his shoulders, threw his head back, and Gracie expected a fierce roar of defiance.

He was silent instead, and finally stood, said “Thank you for breakfast, Grace.  That was good.”

Gracie watched him turn and walk deliberately out the back porch door, ponderous, like an old bear -- slow, deceptively slow – he was incredibly strong, but he was incredibly fast, and he could move with utter silence when the notion struck him, and Gracie knew what others might take as slow was actually deliberation.

Her mind ranged quickly over a series of subjects, paused once to wonder if Jimmy actually benefitted from his recent visit, then looked over at the empty pie tin and added baking to her already lengthy mental list of things she needed to do.

Her eyes shifted, swung to the curtained window and the great mountain beyond, and a smile tugged at her, and she remembered how surprised she’d felt when she looked at the sunrise and realized there could still be beauty and happiness and yes, even joy, in her widow’s-black-rimmed world.

Grace remembered how her fiddle sang happiness when she looked at that spectacularly colored sunrise, and how she smiled when it did, for she’d almost forgotten what happiness felt like.

 

The fear was vague, nebulous, nonspecific.

Wes jumped and gave a short, bitten-off scream of terror as Jimmy gripped his wrist.

“It’s okay,” he said.  “I’m here.”

Wes seized Jimmy desperately around the waist.  “I scared!” he exclaimed in that terrified, little-boy voice Jimmy heard so often from his own throat, or heard in his mind and never dared let out his throat – Jimmy knew terror and he knew it too well, and he'd known it far too long.

Jimmy hunched over, gripped Wes’s head in both hands, looked him square in the eye.

“Wes,” he said, “this is YOUR dream and NOTHING can hurt you here unless you want it to!”

He turned and a looming dark wall of fog developed amorphous, clawed hands, reared up as if to seize the boys in a grip of utter horror.

Jimmy thrust out his hand – it was an immense, three-bladed fan – there was the sound of his Mama’s box fan, only deeper and more powerful, and he drove the fog-monster with a wall of fast-moving air, blowing it into the distance, gone.

Jimmy flexed his fingers, made a fist; the fan collapsed and he had a normal hand again.

“There,” he said, turning.  “See?”

Jimmy had the impression of relief cascading off his burr-headed little brother like water rolling off an oilskin, then he pointed at something behind him.

Another vague figure, sort of like a child only vague and menacing, and Jimmy thrust out his arm.

Wes saw a shining, emerald, scaled lizard with its long, spike-spined tail wrapped around his big brother’s arm several times, its clawed legs gripping his big brother’s wrist and hand:  Wes yelled “Git ‘im!” and the little lizard inhaled, ballooning out to a ludicrous, cartoon-like degree, then stuck its muzzle straight out, squinted its eyes, and erupted a long, blossoming tongue of bright-yellow flame.

Wes felt the heat and Wes heard the deep-throated roar as the incinerating blast utterly devastated the terrifying night-invader.

When the lizard was deflated to its original dimensions, it sat up on its snakelike bottom, picked its teeth with a claw and let out a comical little belch, puffing out a tiny cloud of smoke as it did.

“This is Ouroboros,” Jimmy explained.  “He’s a friend of mine.”

“He’s a dwagon!”  Wes exclaimed with a child’s delight, then he demanded, “Whereja gettim?” 

Wes reached for the shining green fire breather, and Jimmy squatted, letting Wes pet the cool, slick scales with a suddenly tentative forefinger.

“The Pretty Lady,” Wes explained, then he looked up over Wes’s head.

“Here, hold ‘im,” he said abruptly, and Ouroboros flowed off Jimmy’s forearm and into Wes’s arms, wrapping its tail around his neck and chirping happily at the switch:  Jimmy stepped around his little brother, faced the oncoming, angry man, the man who’d hurt him so often and so badly, the man who used to beat his Mama and him both with a belt.

Jimmy thrust out an accusing finger and yelled “YOU GET OUTTA HERE, YOU BAD MAN!”

“I’M GONNA BELT YOU, BOY!” came the enraged roar, and he slashed the air with a diagonal belt-strike.

Jimmy gathered his anger and drew back his hand, drove a flat palm out as if slamming it into a bully’s oncoming nose:  “GO!” he yelled, his voice high-pitched and cracked, and the roaring man-figure slammed back, and rolled head-over-heels backward, floating back into the distance, spinning out of sight, his voice fading until it was gone.

“YOU LEAVE MY LITTLE BROTHER ALONE, YOU MEANIE!” Jimmy yelled after him.  “AND DON’T NEVER COME BACK!”

He turned and Wes was standing there, calm and unruffled, petting the Ouroboros with a gentle fingertip.

“You okay now?”  Jimmy asked, and Wes looked up and nodded.

Ouroboros chirped happily, spread a set of shining, emerald wings neither boy knew he had, flapped strongly at the air, then unwrapped his long tail from around Wes’s neck:  he folded his wings, started chomping the end of his tail, and in a half-dozen greedy gulps, *poof!* he disappeared.

Wes’s eyes were big and delighted and he gave a quiet, “Wow!”

Jimmy looked around, put his arm around Wes’s shoulders.

“We’re done here,” he said with finality.  “Let’s go home.”

 

Gracie just finished sorting dirty clothes, getting ready to wash another batch, when she stopped and she smiled and called, “Come in, Jimmy.”

She heard the porch door's spring and a young tread stopped to wipe polished Wellington boots on the mat before coming into the kitchen.

“In here,” she called again, and Jimmy went off into the anteroom where the wringer Maytag hummed and rocked back and forth a little, almost like it was dancing.

Gracie punched the red button (Jimmy thought of this as the washer’s bellybutton) and shut off the agitator:  she raised an eyebrow, gave Jimmy a knowing look.

“Well?” 

Jimmy handed her a drawing – he’d done it in colored pencils – it was a grinning little boy standing before a pretty lady in a long yellow dress, and the little boy had his forearm up across him, and on the forearm was an emerald-green lizard with a spiny ridge down its back and its tail, looking at the viewer with a very pleased expression.

“I used what you taught me,” Jimmy said as if it explained everything, “and it worked.”

Gracie looked at the picture and smiled, and she realized that she really didn’t understand his drawing at all, but it must mean things worked out.

She nodded and handed the drawing back to Jimmy.

“I’m glad it worked.”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

67.  BOOT SOLES

 

The Sheriff grinned at the two sets of boot soles.

One set was small and the second set was considerably smaller, both of them lay toes-up, and they stuck out from under the ornately decorated tree in the Silver Jewel.

Linn had his boys in for a bite to eat, and he ended up talking with a couple fellows at the bar, a casual conversation that garnered him information he needed on a current case; he was good at drawing men out with easy conversation, and finding out things that were of use to him.

Jimmy and Wes, their meals finished and no prospect of dessert – their Pa was up front talking, and they knew better than order without their Pa’s let-be – instead slipped quietly over to the tree they’d brought in not two nights earlier.

Jimmy slipped under first with the green plastic, long spouted watering can, the kind his Mama used to water her African violets in the window sill; he topped off the red-enamel water reservoir that was part of the tree’s base, and Wes slid under with him, elbows banging happily on the tree skirt as he did.

Jimmy set the green plastic can back down where he’d got it and whispered “Hey Wes!”

Wes looked over at his big brother, grinning, and Jimmy said “Roll over and look up through the tree!”

The boys rolled over, carefully, and looked up through what was to them a magical, secret, hidden kingdom, a cone of intricately branched beauty, a special sight that only they got to see.

Two other men at the bar turned and looked, following the Sheriff’s gaze.

“You ever do that?”  Linn asked one of the fellows, grinning, and the old man with watery eyes and a perpetually mournful expression twitched his wet, pendulous lip, reached up and gave his wrinkled old nose a brisk rub and finally nodded, a memory just coming visible in his sad old eyes.

“I used to do that,” he almost whispered, “when I was their size.”  He looked at the Sheriff, reminding the lean-waisted lawman of a basset hound’s face.

“I would make faces at myself in a yellow bulb.  Always a yellow bulb.”
He withdrew into his ancient, cherished memory, a memory he hadn’t looked at in better than four decades, and he turned back to the bar and hung his head sorrowfully over his half consumed beer, staring into its effervescent-gold depths and remembering, for a moment, what it was to be young.

“My kids used to do that,” the other fellow said softly. 

“They’re grown up and gone now, I take it?”  Linn asked – he already knew, but he knew the fellow needed to say something about it, and sure enough, he was right.

“They’re grown up and gone, Sheriff.  None of ‘em come around anymore, hell hardly none of ‘em even write nor call.”  He leaned back against the spotless mahogany, set a heel up on the brightly-polished bass rail.  “I didn’t know my grandson broke his arm until someone told me about it on the street a month later.  I think they saw it on Facebook or something where he was talking about getting his cast off.”

“Marnie used to do that,” Linn said gently.  “She read about it in one of the Old Sheriff’s Journals and she nearly dove under the tree to roll over and look up through the branches.”

 

Another sheriff in an earlier century, a man with pale eyes, leaned against the door frame of his stout log home:  under his tree, three sets of small shoe soles were thrust out, and three girls lay under the tree, giggling and making faces in the bulbs.

He shook his head, smiled.

Sarah was the oldest and he knew – he knew now, he corrected himself – she was the get of his loins, but she’d been raised by Bonnie McKenna, now Bonnie Rosenthal; he did not find this out until a few days before, when he opened a Bible that Sarah’s birth-mama’s husband (pardon me while I spit!) sold the book for a drink, back when the Silver Jewel was a dirty saloon and a dirtier whorehouse.

Times were improved and much for the better:  the Silver Jewel was clean, rebuilt, brightly painted, well cared for; the upstairs was no longer a crib, a cote for soiled doves:  those women who wanted out of the business either married and left, or hired on with Bonnie in her dress works; the upstairs was gutted, overhauled, remodeled, and turned into a hotel.

The Sheriff, of course, owned it; he saw to it that it did turn a profit, but he saw to it that his people were taken care of, as was the business.

Sarah was over at his house to visit his little girls, Bonnie and Esther were talking the way old and dear friends do, and Linn … Linn had his shoulder set against the door frame, a steaming mug of after dinner coffee in hand, and if he was to describe his own expression, he’d likely say that he had a big idiot grin on his face, watching the girls lying under the tree, making faces in the shining glass bulbs and giggling.

 

Let us return to our own age, our own time, our own era:  Old Pale Eyes likely had slouched against this very mahogany bar, and looked in this very same direction, at where a tree was placed, back when:  our modern day Sheriff remembered reading in one of the Old Sheriff’s Journals how ladylike, how self-possessed Sarah Lynne McKenna was, even at the age of fourteen –

Linn blinked, considered that in the age of Old Pale Eyes, fourteen was not only marriageable, but generally married and with child:  she was, by all he’d read, a perfect lady, though with a mercurial temper:  in his mind’s eye, he could see a dignified young woman, eyes properly downcast, walking slowly back to the decorated tree, there in the back of the Silver Jewel’s tables:  she would have looked left, she would have looked right, and then she would have squatted, quickly, slid under the tree, flat on her back, and gazed again into that complex, branched cone of color and sparkle that was the secret interior of a Christmas tree, a sight seen only by children young enough to appreciate magic when they saw it.

Linn blinked, and the imagined scene was replaced by two sets of boot soles thrust out at him, at the sight of two boys lying on their backs under the tree, and Linn walked quietly across the room, squatted.

Three sets of boot soles stuck out from under the tree.

 

“Mama?”

Connie was wiping down the table, bent over and making big, wet, circular strokes:  she looked over at the burr headed little boy in the doorway and smiled.

“Mama, can Santa bring me sumfin else for Crifthas?” Wes asked, his bright eyes wide and sincere.

“I don’t know,” Connie admitted. “I’ll try to find out.  Did you think of something you’d rather have?”

“Uh-huh,” Wes nodded hopefully.  “I don’t wanna dump truck no more.”

“You don’t?”  Connie straightened, wiping her hands; she spread the wet rag out, hung it on a steel arm over the sink to dry.

“Nuh-uh.  I wantsit da fire breathin’ lizardt.”

Connie managed (somehow) not to laugh, but she did smile a little.

“They’re really neat an’ they really blowit da fire an’ they he it wrapsit da tail aroundit my neck an’ he’s cool an’ slick an’ he’s green!”  Wes gushed, all in one breath.  “An’ he breathes fire!”

“Now that’s quite a tall order,” Connie said thoughtfully.  “I don’t know if Santa has any of those in stock.”

“Oh.”  Wes managed not to look too disappointed.

 

Jimmy leaned back, placed his colored pencil back in its upright rack, looked at his drawing.

“I like that one,” he murmured.

It showed a little girl in an old-fashioned, knee-length dress and white stockings and a flat little white straw hat, her palms and laughing face upturned, and around her head, a green lizard with batlike wings flew happily in a circle, squirting out a curved feather of flame from its leathery green jaws.

Jimmy turned back a few pages in the spiral bound sketch book, studied what he’d started.

This one was difficult.

He had a clear mental picture of what he’d seen, but transferring that memory to paper was going to take longer than he’d anticipated.

When Connie finally paged through his sketch book, as she generally did after he’d gone to bed, she stopped at that page:  she smiled as she looked through her little boy’s eyes, through this page of paper and colored pencil, as she recognized the distorted faces of both her boys in a yellow bulb, and she delighted at seeing what he saw, at the sight of looking past that yellow bulb and up the inside of a decorated tree.

She remembered Wes’s declaration that he wanted a scaly green fire breathing lizard, and then she turned the page, and she froze and just plainly stared at the scaly green fire breathing lizard perched on young Wesley’s forearm, its long spike-spined tail wrapped companionably about his shoulders, the delighted expression on her young son’s face, flawlessly captured by his big brother’s quick eye and flawlessly and very realistically rendered on the page before her.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

68.  OINTMENT

 

Gracie frowned a little as she scooped up a gob of freshly mixed, pleasantly scented ointment, twisted the gleaming curl of herbal unguent into the blue-glass jar, wiping the excess off her middle finger before digging up another and wiping it into the recycled, repurposed jar.

She wiped her finger on a paper towel, very carefully capped the jar and dropped it into a sandwich baggie, then thrust this into the pocket of he wool skirt:  she seized the red-plaid wool cap with the turned up front flap and turned down ear flaps, jammed this down on her head, thrust her flannel shirtsleeved arms into her brown canvas coat, and picked up her double barrel shotgun.

Patting he coat pockets, she made sure she had reloads, both heavy shot and deer slugs – she did not anticipate taking down any birds today – and her step was purposeful as she headed for the back pasture.

Brindle came slouching over to the board fence, one ear laying back and the other swinging back and forth, making up for its partner’s sloth.

Gracie got Brindle saddled, her double gun in the carved sheath, and she stepped into the saddle as nice as you please, and turned her riding mule toward the open gate.

Brindle waited until the gate was latched behind before letting out a raucous HAAAWWWW and setting off down the mountain road.

 

Linn pushed up off the ground.

He tasted copper and his blood was up and singing in his veins and he twisted, quickly, a dirt-covered boot missed his cheek bone by no more than an inch:  he surged up, hooked the rising leg with the bend of his elbow, his good right fist drove into a denim-covered crotch.

Another fist just grazed the side of his cheek and he felt more than heard a deep, powerful, utterly enraged roar begin somewhere very deep in his soul.

It wasn’t quite what you expected to see, right out in front of God and everybody – matter of fact, it was squarely in the very center of the street, directly between the Sheriff’s Office and the diagonally-opposite Silver Jewel:  two men, each obviously intent on causing the other a great deal of harm:  one who tried to knockout-game the pale-eyed Sheriff; the lawman, strenuously objecting to this less than sociable behavior.

Linn unwound, twisting from the hips, drove his closed fist under his attacker’s soft ribs:  he hit with full intent to drive his fist clear through the attacker’s belly and stick out the other side, and the effect was immediate but not terribly effective:  Linn knocked another punch out of line, dropped and whipped a leg around.

Whatever this John Doe was on, he couldn’t feel pain and apparently couldn’t feel the anoxic agony of having the wind knocked clear out of him, but Linn knew if he got the man’s legs out from under him, he’d not be fighting quite as well as he had been.

Barrents was ready to swear the lawman pulled a ground-fighting move close to the Olympic horse exercise called the Thomas Flair:  his hands were on the ground, he’d whipped his legs around and now he was coming up on the balls of his feet, just in time to rear up his knee and drive down through the focus of his boot heel into the downed fighter’s solar plexus.

This really didn’t slow the man any and Linn’s ankle found itself seized in an unbreakable grip.

The world whipped out from under him and Linn tries to twist out of the fall but ended up hitting flat on his back:  he hauled his good leg back and kicked, kicked again, felt something break:  he kicked a third time and the hand released.

Linn rolled away, rolled again, came up on all fours, charged.

The attacker tried to punch with his left, his right arm dangling, paralyzed, apparently broken between elbow and shoulder:  Linn deflected the punch, grabbed the man around the neck, clamped down hard, going to one knee and bending the twisting, growling, foaming-at-the-mouth attacker over his knee, bending him backward and shutting off his circulating and choking him until he went limp.

Linn let go, shoved him away, stood, raised a hand to his bloodied cheek, winced.

He looked up as he heard the squad pull out of the firehouse.

Barrents came sauntering over, rifle casually upright over one shoulder, big blunt fingered hand casually around the rifle’s wrist.

“Nice work,” he commented, looking down at the beginning-to-stir subject.  “What’s he on?”

“Damned if I know,” Linn admitted, wincing:  a hand went to his ribs and he realized he was in more pain than he realized.

“Look around,” he gasped.  “Known associates?”

“Boss, you okay?”  Barrents’ black eyes were hard, concerned:  he gripped Linn’s upper arm.

Linn nodded, clamped his upper arm down hard against his ribs, his breathing shallow.

“Reckon once this Jack Doe is secured I’d best be seen,” he admitted, and Barrents was immediately worried:  Linn wasn’t the kind to admit to being hurt.

“I’d say secure this Jack Doe,” Linn gasped, his breathing quick, shallow, the way a man will when he’s got busted ribs and he doesn’t want to do anything to hurt them any worse:  “I broke his arm so –”

He looked down, frowned, went to one knee just as the squad rolled up beside them and men in red bib front shirts and polished boots jumped out and strode over.

Linn looked up, two fingers pressing down into the downed man’s carotid groove.

He looked up at Barrents and said something that does not bear repeating in polite company.

 

Connie’s eyes went to the cheap little four-channel scanner.

It was old, it was a crystal job, but it picked up the channels she listened to, and she was listening to the squad calling in to the hospital.

“Firelands ER, Firelands Squad One inbound code blue one male patient, monitor shows asystole, IV attempted times two, CPR in progress and airway established, bagging effective with ETA two minutes.”
“Roger Squad One, we’ll be standing by.”

“Second patient,” she heard, then the carrier dropped, as if the speaker released the key on his microphone. 

Connie picked up her heavy knife, the one her husband Linn sharpened the night before, and began chopping carrots with quick, precise, exacting, quick little strokes.

“Second patient transporting via Sheriff’s cruiser, complains of rib pain, no other information.”
Connie heard the rhythmic one-and-two-and-three-and-four-are-five chant in the background, apparently from the CPR currently in progress, and her cell phone vibrated and gave its Oogah-horn ringtone in her apron pocket.

She reached in, swiped the screen and smiled.  “Hi, honey,” she greeted her husband.

Linn’s voice was edged with pain.  “Honey, I’ll be late for supper,” he grated, and Connie placed the knife on the cutting board, carefully, deliberately, her eyes going big and round as she looked up at the cupboard door.

She turned quickly at the delicate rat-tat at her door.

“How bad?”  Connie asked, her voice clipped as she skipped quickly out of the kitchen, toward the front door, her mind running around and around and around like a rat scurrying quickly around the inside of a galvanized trash can –

“Precautionary transport,” she heard her husband’s pain-edged voice grunt.

“Liar,” she muttered, reaching for the doorknob, thinking fast, thinking how to best get rid of this unplanned interruption so she could get to the hospital, how she would handle two children while she did –

Connie yanked open the door, opened her mouth --

Gracie held up the wide-mouthed, blue-glass bottle with the broad, flat lid.

“He’ll need this for his face,” she said, handing the salve to the open-mouthed housewife:  “I can watch the little ones, you scoot now!”

Connie gave a single nod of acknowledgement, then  pulled back a little, snatched her jacket off the halltree, squeezed a pocket to make sure she felt keys inside, and a moment later she was behind the wheel of her Jeep, trying to fit the key into the ignition and wondering why it was suddenly such an impossible task.

Gracie closed the front door, turned the knob on the deadbolt, walked thoughtfully toward the kitchen, smelling the results of her friend’s labors so far:  she smiled a little at the unfinished kettle on the stove, looked at the carrots, picked up the knife and proceeded to cut the sliced carrots into very fine little dicies.

Gracie finished preparing the chicken dish, washing up as she went; she found the oven was apparently preheated, checked Connie’s supplies, and began mixing a batch of sweet-roll dough, smiling as she did.

Her Grandma used to make sweet rolls, and Gracie used to help her, and she did so love the odor of rising dough.

When Connie got home with her perpetually hungry little ones, they would find supper was ready, and a big bowl of nice fresh sweet rolls, covered with a dishtowel, would be in the center of the table.

Sweet rolls in the oven, the chicken and dumplings at a low simmer (chicken slurry, Connie called it, and Gracie smiled as she remembered the Sheriff’s wife complaining that she could never, ever make decent dumplings, it turned out more like a thick chicken soup!) – Gracie carefully rinsed the cans so they wouldn’t stink up the trash.

“Canned chicken,” she sighed.  “What is the world coming to!” – then she smiled, for she’d been known to reach for canned chicken herself when she was short on time.

She gave the dumplings one last stir, turned down the heat, rinsed off the wooden spoon and turned toward the back porch, where Connie did her laundry.

She might as well help out there, too.

 

Linn glared at the opposite wall, gripping the trapeze bar overhead as the nurse wrapped his ribs.

“At least it’s a wrap and not tape,” he muttered.

“Be thankful for small favors,” the nurse murmured quietly.  “I would hate to tape your ribs, Sheriff.  You’d sing an unhappy song taking the tape off!”

“Been there, done that, didn’t like it a’tall,” Linn grunted.

“What did your wife put on your cheek bone?”

Linn breathed in shallow little gasps, trying hard not to expand his chest against the elastic wrap.  “Don’t know,” he admitted.  “Gracie mixed it up.  Reckon it’s supposed to restore my boyish good looks.”

“She made Doc something … I forget what he used it for, but he swears by it.  He can’t prescribe it, of course, and he can’t use it officially, but it works.”  She smoothed the end of the wrap down, pressed the Velcro end in place, wiggled it slightly to make sure she had capture.  “There now.  Let me see if Doc wants anything else.”

Linn looked sourly at the eye chart across the ER from where he sat, naked to the waist, on a treatment bed.

“You’re not a drinking man, are you, Sheriff?”

Linn looked at her, trying hard to look stern, failed in the effort:  he grinned, that quick, genuine grin of his that she remembered so well, and she knew from the flicker of pain that followed that he almost chuckled, at least until his ribs persuaded him otherwise.

“No,” he admitted, “but right about now I’d be willin’ to start!”

He looked up as his segundo approached.

“How is he?”  Linn asked without preamble.

“Dead.”

Linn raised an eyebrow and Barrents saw his bottom jaw ease out.

“Boss, you’re lucky to be alive.  Doc said he had such a Duke’s mixture of drugs in him, you could have run over him with a tank and he’d not have felt it.  Said it burst his heart.  You didn’t kill him – hell, I don’t think you’d have been able to!”  He looked closely at his boss’s face.  “Damn, Boss, he tagged you a good one!”

Linn nodded.

“Gracie’s grease?”
Linn nodded again.

“That’s good stuff.  She give my wife some for our boys.  Heals ‘em right up.”

Linn nodded again.

“Connie’s outside.  You want me to send her in?”

Linn nodded again.

 

Jimmy looked at his Pa with big and concerned eyes.

“Pa,” he almost whispered, “are you going to be okay?”

Linn nodded slowly.  “I’ll be fine, Jimmy.”

“Gracie came and watched the kids,” Connie offered, “and she finished my Chicken Slurry and made light rolls.”

Linn nodded, breathing carefully, pacing slowly out into the kitchen.

“She added crumbled bacon,” Connie continued, setting out bowls, hoisting their little girl into her high chair, Wes onto his raised cushion:  Jimmy hung back, uncertain, feeling the tension in the air, old memories crowding in on him, memories from a very bad time in his life.

“Jimmy,” Linn said quietly, and Jimmy heard an edge to the man’s voice, “I’ll need your help after supper.”

“Yes, sir?”  Jimmy asked, blinking, feeling his blood cool several degrees.

“I can’t run a fork – a barn fork,” he added with a hint of a smile – “I’ll need your help with the barn tonight.”

Jimmy blinked, nodded.  “Yes, sir,” he said uncertainly – this was nothing new, Linn generally worked with Jimmy, tending the barn, and on occasion Jimmy had done the whole job himself – and Linn added, “Jimmy, a man tried to hurt me at work today.”

He hesitated, took several obviously painful breaths, his eyes closed, then continued, “He hurt me, all right.”

Linn looked at Jimmy, saw fear in his son’s expression.

“I’ll be okay.  It’ll take me a little while to heal from busted ribs.”

Jimmy nodded, shivering.

He knew about busted ribs.

“One more thing, Jimmy.”

Jimmy looked at his Pa with the expression of a little boy, fearful that his big strong Pa wasn’t as big or as strong as he’d wanted to believe.

“Gracie came out and give your Mama some ointment for my poor bruised up cheek bone.”  Linn raised careful fingertips to his colored-up xygomal arch.

“She also finished supper that Connie started, she washed up a bunch of laundry and she wiped down the kitchen and mopped off the floor.”
“Yes, sir?”

“I’ll need you to ride up there and take her something for us.”  He grinned crookedly at his wife, trying not to hurt the damaged side of his face.

“I’m gonna send flowers to another woman.”

Connie laughed and threw him a sweet roll.