Beautiful Bad Man (23 page)

“What was that about hanging the body?”

“He’s got one of those overhead signs at the end of his ranch road. I left the body hanging there.”

She hid her face in her hands. When she spoke, her voice was muffled. “Do you know what? If I were Mr. Van Cleve, I’d put a bounty on you myself. What are we going to do about that?”

He wasn’t going to let her do anything, but he liked her new attitude. “I’m not sure what to do about it yet, but I’ll think of something. He’s getting tiresome.”

“How close to dead is tiresome?”

“Pretty close.”

She took her hands away from her face and began eating again. Not, in Cal’s opinion, with the enthusiasm the food deserved. Probably nothing would take her mind off the image of a dead man hanging in the breeze like forgotten laundry, but he couldn’t keep from trying.

“Is the garden a muddy mess?”

“No. The irrigation water wasn’t really running all that time. I thought you’d like to talk to him alone.”

“He didn’t say much. Glad I made it. Wondered about me over the years. Wasn’t sure it was really me back here at first. That kind of thing.”

“Did he help his father — hurt you?”

“No. I told you. He’s like you. He’s a reason I’m still alive.”

Her hand stopped with a piece of bread halfway to her mouth. “I know you said that. I know you feel an obligation, but the way you looked at him, I didn’t think you liked him much.”

She smiled, not much of a smile but better than none. “Of course you didn’t look at me very friendly when you first saw me again either.”

“That was different. I never knew you. I just had ideas about how I thought you should be, and when you seemed different it made me mad.”

“So Jason is different than you expected?”

“No. I knew Jason, the core of him, and there’s no way that changed. He’s good, the exact opposite of devil’s spawn like me.”

“I’m going to start doing something violent every time you say those words. You know it’s not true of you or anybody else. Even saying it gives your uncle credence he shouldn’t have.”

“It probably is true,” Cal said. She looked so worried. If it would take her mind off bodies and bounties, he’d even tell her about some of the things he’d kept shoved down in the dark place all his life.

“My mother was a seventeen-year-old farm girl brought up as strict and sheltered as possible. She never said a word about my father. He must have been a stranger who forced her.”

“Or maybe he was a young man who planned to marry her, but he died. Maybe she quarreled with a lover, and he joined the army or moved away, but if he’d known he’d have come back. It would be bad enough if he was a married man who seduced her with sweet lies. You don’t need to reach for the most terrible explanation.”

“You always want to put a pretty face on things.”

“You always want to think the worst.”

They ate in silence for a few minutes before Norah asked, “What did he do?”

Cal didn’t pretend not to know who she meant. He only hesitated long enough to swallow the last of his stew. Then he told her.

S
HE HAD ALWAYS
known all his secrets were bad. People talked about good memories and happy times. Secrets were about pain. Her own secrets were about pain. He’d stopped looking at her, his voice low and dull.

“Living with Uncle Henry was better at first. Better than the brothel with my mother gone. I knew he despised me, but whatever drove him later wasn’t there yet. Or maybe it was, and he couldn’t let it loose because there were too many other people around. His wife was still alive, and he couldn’t let his neighbors, the same people he sat beside in church every Sunday, see the poison.”

Caleb had lived a year with his uncle’s family on the rented farm in Indiana. He liked working the land, and he liked caring for the livestock. He even liked his aunt and his cousins, although they were forbidden to have much to do with the bad seed among them.

“He picked what he liked out of the Bible and ignored the rest. He liked sparing the rod being spoiling the child a lot. I suppose Jason and the others should have been grateful he didn’t use a rod. He used his belt or a switch. He beat them any time he caught them doing anything he considered sinful, not just talking to me.”

The cousins obeyed their father and ignored the bad seed among them. Except Jason. The same age, Jason and Cal became friends of a sort, ignoring each other any time anyone could observe, behaving like normal boys when they thought they could get away with it.

The pattern held, even when they attended school, for Jason’s brothers and sisters knew they could lessen punishment for their own sins by betraying Jason and Caleb to their father.

“He beat them, but I can’t remember him touching me. He probably did believe I had some devil inside that could jump out and catch him because he didn’t like to get close. Right from the start, when I broke his rules, it would be no supper tonight, no breakfast tomorrow, like that.”

Norah wanted to touch him, but he got up and started pacing. She rose too, cleared the table, fed the dog. She had the dishes in the dish pan by the time Caleb continued.

“I never saw any sign he cared about Aunt Florence. She died one night in the middle of supper, just fell down and never got up. He had us all packed up and headed west before the month was out. He bought a full section under the Preemption Act, and once he had his kingdom on the prairie, he really came into his own.”

Caleb stopped pacing in front of the east window, picked up the hem of the curtain there, and held it as if studying it.

“He built the first house out there and some other buildings out of sod like everyone else. There was one small building, a storage shed it was supposed to be. I helped build it. We all helped build them all. It was maybe eight by eight, no windows, a heavy door. If I ever knew where he got the lumber for that I can’t remember now.”

He paced again, picked up the curtain again, and this time held it bunched in a fist.

“That shed was where he decided I should live. I never saw the inside of the sod house. The day we took Grace’s daughters there was the first time I stepped foot inside the frame house. He’d shove a plate of food across the floor with his foot morning and night. It was never enough.”

Norah closed her eyes, remembering how Caleb had reacted to her setting out a single plate of food for only him the first time he’d been in the house. She dried the last dish, poured two cups of coffee, and sat at the table again.

Caleb paced. The light of the single lamp wasn’t bright, but she could see the dark splotches of sweat spreading on his shirt.

“I did some digging in the beginning, trying to escape, but a sod wall almost two-foot thick isn’t so easy to get through with your bare hands, and he’d see the signs, repair the wall and — get after me for it. It wasn’t so bad most of the year, but in winter — one blanket. I got one damn shoddy blanket.”

He stopped pacing and leaned against the wall in the farthest corner of the room where she could only see him as a shadow. “Of course I was out all day so I could work. I worked right alongside the others, and they pretended I wasn’t there. Except for Jason. Jason slipped me food when he thought no one was looking.”

She cradled her full coffee cup in her hands, wishing it would warm them, because she knew what was coming and didn’t want to hear it. But if Caleb could tell it, she could sit and listen.

“Sooner or later one of the young ones would see him and tell. Maybe they thought he’d go easier on them. Maybe he did. He’d whip Jason and make us all watch, and Jason would act like the others for a week or two after. Then he’d start again, slipping me food. It went on like that for the first couple of years, but finally Uncle Henry realized he had to do something different.”

He paced back to the window, seized the bottom of the curtain in both fists, and hung on.

“The next time one of the girls saw Jason give me something, Uncle Henry threw him in the shed with me at night. At first I thought that would be better, easier on him, company for me, but he went crazy.

“I couldn’t see him, but I could hear him, screaming and shrieking how sorry he was, promising his father he’d never do it again, throwing himself at the walls. He wore down by morning, but it was the same the next night and the next. He spent every night in there with me for I guess a week or so. He never got any better.

“We didn’t get much more food for the two of us than what I always got, but I don’t think he ate any, so you could say he gave me extra food again.”

Caleb dropped the curtain, made as if to smooth the crumpled cloth, then came back to the table and sat across from her.

“Uncle Henry stopped forcing him in there every night because he broke him. He broke him right down to a good and sinless son who never looked at me again. He didn’t look at me the day he slipped me a knife and walked away, and he didn’t look me in the eye today.”

Norah put her cup down, stretched her arms out and took his hands.

“Put a pretty face on that, partner,” he whispered.

“You know I can’t. Why didn’t you visit him when you first came back? Why didn’t you grab hold and hug him today?”

He tried to pull his hands away, but she held on, and he gave in. “That’s a woman’s way of thinking.” After a moment. “Because of the knife. He didn’t give me that knife to dig out and escape. He gave it to me to kill his father. I knew I wasn’t strong enough, and I didn’t try. I spent the night digging out instead.”

“Did he say that’s why he gave it to you?”

“No. The others were close by. He just shoved the knife in the back of my britches. It cut me a little.”

“Then you don’t know that’s what he wanted.”

“I know.”

“Why does it bother you? You made your living doing that kind of thing for years.”

“I hate it that Uncle Henry was right about me, and I hate it more that Jason could see it too.”

“He wasn’t right, and you know it. If your mother had lived, your life would be different. If you’d never met your uncle you’d be different. You were two little boys tormented by an evil madman. Jason saw a chance to do something that might change things and took it. He probably didn’t even know what he wanted to happen.”

“We were fifteen, not little boys.”

It went so against what she believed, the words seemed like a foreign language she didn’t understand. Then she realized he had described events that took place over years, starting when he was eleven.

Still, she wanted to reject it. “You couldn’t have been. I saw you. You were twelve, no more than twelve.”

He opened one hand and laced his fingers through hers. “You can feed a body just enough to keep it alive, but not enough for it to grow. When I started getting enough to eat, I grew so fast my bones ached for a year.”

He smiled a little. “So you thought you teamed up with a green boy and you’re having trouble believing I’m the senior partner?”

That wasn’t the part of what he’d said causing a terrible ache in her throat. Could he tell her voice was unsteady because of tears she could never shed? “You should talk to him, really talk to him.”

“Tell him I’m sorry I didn’t kill his father? Tell him I’m sorry for whatever happened to him after I got away in such a panic I left the knife behind?”

“Tell him the truth, whatever that is.”

He shook his head and ran a callused thumb over the back of her hand. “Ah, Norah. I like that dress on you, you know.”

“I do know. You say so every time I wear it.”

“I’m glad you got rid of that gray thing.”

“You mention that pretty often too.”

“Let’s go to bed.”

“Will you hold me after?”

“Only if you hold me back.”

C
AL COULD SEE
doubt all over Norah’s face.

“Too ugly for you?”

“If it works, I don’t care how it looks, but won’t the first good wind tear that roof right off? It’s made of sticks.”

“If it does, no loss. We put up more sticks and they’ll make shade again.”

“A ramada.” The roof of the flimsy-looking structure was made of branches from bushes that grew along the creek woven in and out of slim poles. Leaves and all.

“That’s what they call it down in Texas. When we rebuild the frame house, we’ll have a veranda.”

For the first time in his life, Cal understood the urge to build things, things that would make a woman’s life easier, things that would put a smile on her pretty face or even make her laugh.

Early moved out of the shade of the new addition, stiff and growling. Cal grabbed his rifle and pushed Norah inside the house. Two riders came on, waving. Cal let the rifle droop toward the ground but didn’t put the gun down until he could identify the men — Archie Carbury and his youngest son.

Archie looked as dubious as Norah over the practicality of the ramada, but this wasn’t a social call.

“We’re passing word on like we agreed. Preston’s men have been making trouble up north near your cousin, and one of them boasted they’re coming for you. I know you’re staying on guard, but six, seven men riding in here guns blazing.... You can come to our place you know. You’d make a sixth rifle. We could give them what for.”

Cal nodded. “We may take you up on that. Let me think on it.”

Message delivered, the Carburys left. No one wanted to be far from home if Preston and his men came rampaging.

“I guess building a bench along the wall there is going to have to wait,” Cal said.

“You aren’t going to hide out at Carburys’, are you?”

“No, but you are.”

“I am not leaving.”

“Didn’t you promise to obey?”

“Don’t start that. Just don’t start. I’m not leaving.”

“Don’t make me worry about you. I can’t do anything unless I know you’re safe.”

She stared into the dark eyes, wanting to believe he cared enough to worry about her. “All right. I’ll go if you tell me what you’re going to do, and if you promise not to get hurt.”

“Stay inside with Early for a while, keep the pistol to hand, and I’ll tell you when I get back.”