Black River (19 page)

“Yeah? Why's that?”

“'Cause I knew you'd be pissed as all get-out. Fact that you're swearing up a storm tells me I wasn't wrong.” He slowed his pivot a little, said “Easy” in that same low voice Wes had heard Dennis use before, and the buckskin fell back into a hurried trot.

“Well, someone tells me that Bobby Williams of all people has gone and—Farmer, would you leave the goddamned horse alone for two minutes and talk to me?”

Farmer turned toward Wes and quit moving. Abruptly, the horse slowed to a walk and then came to an uneasy halt, legs awry as though frozen midstep. “Good boy,” Farmer said absently. He tugged on the brim of his hat, crossed slowly to where Wes stood, but stayed on his side of the pipe fence. He looked very much the cowboy today: jeans, the hems brown with dust, stacked over work boots with curled kilties; a chore coat with cuffs that looked chewed on; his well-worn bone hat. A new uniform. He raised one foot to the first rung of the fence, pushed it forward until the boot heel hit, crossed his arms over one of the other rungs. Then he looked at Wes in that way he had that let a man know he had Farmer's full and unwavering attention.

Why the hell did Wes want to talk to Farmer about this, anyway? So they'd been friends once, married to sisters. So they'd played in the same band and worked the same shit job. That was all a long time gone, and there was plenty Wes didn't like about the man, shared history or no. He was too good at everything. Too ready to involve himself, to provide balm for other people's troubles. Altogether too eager and too earnest. But perhaps that was itself the reason—because while Wes and Farmer had sat in the same pews and listened to the same sermons all those years, Wes was pretty sure Farmer heard something in them he didn't, something that let Farmer believe it all without the doubts Wes had to battle through.

He waited Wes out now, not rushing him. The horse walked across the soft dirt, neck and tail swinging with each step. It stopped behind Farmer, stretched its neck to sniff at the back of Farmer's head, nostrils flaring.

“Nice colt,” Wes said.

Farmer held out a hand without turning, and the horse took one more step forward, accepting the reward of a gentle touch. “You didn't come to talk about the colt.”

Wes mirrored Farmer's posture, leaned forward over the hitching rack, crossed his own arms at the wrists and let his hands hang loose. Yes. That felt right. Casual. “How long ago this supposedly happen?” he asked. “Williams . . . seeing the light?”

“Been awhile, Wesley.” Farmer moved his boot, and the pipe rang. “I heard about it before I took my pension. Probably ten years ago. A little more, maybe.”

“It's all cooked up to impress the parole board.”

“Most likely.”

There had been plenty of inmates like that. Always with a Bible on their bunk, a frayed ribbon marking the page. Painstakingly copied verses of scripture and maybe a cheap print of a bland, blue-eyed Jesus on the wall of their cell where other inmates put up girlie pictures. Lining up for the call to chapel even before the COs announced it. For most of them, Wes knew, it was a calculated decision, designed to look good on paper when it mattered. For a few, religion seemed like a hobby, the way weightlifting or watching the soaps were hobbies for other inmates. And maybe—maybe—it was more for some. For some.

Wes leaned sideways, spit. Felt his molars find each other and grind hard. “Farmer, you don't think he could have really changed.” He looked up. “Do you?”

Farmer's eyes searched his, and Wes wondered what he was looking for. If he found it. “I don't know, Wesley.” Farmer slid back the gate's bolt and slipped out, closing the welded pipe against the colt. The horse took one step backward, then turned and crossed the pen, muzzle bent to the dirt. Farmer joined Wes at the hitching rack. He moved slowly, as though he were living in a world in which everything happened at a slightly lesser speed than it did for everyone else. “Do I think a man can come to religion and be the better for it? Yes, I do.” He glanced back at the mountains suddenly, at the sun hovering above. “But do I think Robert Williams can be that man? That I just don't know.” Wes tried to catch Farmer's eye, but now the other man seemed to be deliberately avoiding it, fixing his gaze just a little over Wes's shoulder. “What Williams did to you was evil, Wesley. I know that. I don't know as I could forgive it, if it'd been done to me. I mean, I seen some of what he did to you,” he said, his voice dropping low, “and I seen some of how much it's hurt you since. But no one was there when Williams did what he did but him and you, Wesley. Way I figure it, that means you know him best. Better than anyone else on God's earth. There ain't no one can say whether he might've changed but you.”

 

Wes liked church. The ritual of it, the way going every week without fail made him feel like he was doing something decent, something unequivocally right. Odd, he supposed, that he should cling so hard to a habit that had done his own father so little good.

This week the reading was from the Gospel of Mark, the sermon all about the rewards of faith. Wes expected frustration during services—his mind ran a constant stream of objections against his efforts at faith—but the anger was new. There was something pathetically trite in being angry at God, and for such a clichéd reason:
How could He do this to me?
Wes had avoided that kind of anger after the riot, after his hands went crooked and stiff. But losing Claire . . . Williams up for parole . . . these things were too much.
The rewards of faith.

Wes lingered in the sanctuary at the end of the service, managed to be one of the last to reach the lobby. The pastor was there. Greetings, some brief small talk. Wes calculated, let just enough emotion show in his voice and face. Garnered an invitation to talk in the office.

Wes had been there once before. Alone, a kid of fifteen. He'd sat silently as the pastor at the time offered his enlightened view of the spiritual fate of suicides, providing unasked-for reassurances that Wes's father was in a heaven that even then Wes couldn't really believe in. The office had changed little: small, a sharply angled ceiling, brown and white wallpaper with visible seams. He didn't remember the chairs, but they were old, the seat leather shiny and sunken, the brass buttons on the arms tarnished. An odor in the air like coffee exhaled from damp mouths.

“I'm very sorry for the loss of your wife,” the pastor said, and Wes waited for the platitude, the biblical wisdom, but it didn't come. His estimation of the man rose a notch.

“She was . . . ,” Wes said, meaning to say something like
special,
but more accurate, less trite, and could think of no right word and so left the sentence hanging, unfinished. The pastor seemed not to notice. He was even younger than Wes had thought; he'd been fooled by the receding hairline. Wes wondered how a man so young could be certain enough of God to go into the ministry, and he wondered if he would still be a pastor a couple decades from now. “I ain't really here to talk about her,” Wes said finally.

The pastor sipped at his coffee. Wes had declined when the other man offered it, and the pastor hadn't tried to cajole him into it, but hadn't put his own mug away, either. “I heard about the parole hearing,” he said.

“You got a history with this?” Wes asked. “Family in corrections, anything like that?”

The pastor shook his head. “A sister in social work,” he said. “Closest I come.”

“Ever done prison ministry?”

“I've never been called to do so.”

“You think it does any good?”

The pastor didn't answer. Wes watched him, but broke off eye contact after a few seconds. Not like him. “I get the sense,” the pastor said, “you want to ask something else.”

There was a crack in the leather over the arm of the chair. Wes's fingertips found it, worried it. “You've heard about the hearing,” he said. “So you know about the riot.”

“I know you were held hostage,” the pastor said. “I know you were tortured.”

Wes's fingers tightened on the arm of the chair, and he found he couldn't relax them at will, like they were spasmed. He despised the word.
Torture.
The label made it worse. (Was this what Claire had felt when she heard the word
rape
?) He thought of torture as something that happened to political prisoners, to mobsters in movies, to people who knew things other people wanted to know. What Williams had done to him had been cruel, yeah. Brutal, even. But torture? Aggravated assault, maybe. That's what they'd called it in the paperwork. “The inmate who did it says he found God.”

Another long silence. The smell of exhaled coffee was getting to him. The size of the room. The fact that he was saying these things aloud and hoping for a reply that would help it all make sense.

“You believe he's being dishonest.”

“He's an inmate.” Wes met the pastor's eyes. “Saying he's dishonest is redundant.”

No judgment. “Tell me this, then,” the pastor said, steepling his hands in front of his face. It was an odd gesture, somehow too old for him. “If it were true—and just go along with the ‘if' for a minute, say this guy's suddenly become the world's best Christian—would it change the way you want this hearing to turn out?”

Wes heard Williams's laugh in his memory, bursts of hot air against his ear. “No.”

“Why not?”

He felt the flare of temper, reined it in before the pastor could see it. “Because a person doesn't deserve to walk around free after doing what he did.”

“So it's a matter of justice.”

“Guess so.”

“Then is there any reason you can't hope the man has welcomed Christ into his heart and still hope he's denied parole?”

“He doesn't deserve it.”

“People usually don't deserve forgiveness,” the pastor said, his voice frustratingly gentle. It was a lulling sort of voice, the kind that made a man want to listen. “But forgiveness doesn't forestall justice.”

“That so.”

“I realize that the prospect of forgiveness can seem unfair. Like you're being asked to take on yet another burden when you've already endured so much. But there's something freeing, I think, in the realization that forgiveness is a choice God has given you the power to make, independent of anything this man has done, or will do. And you must understand that there cannot be true justice—and now I'm talking about justice for you, justice in the big scheme of things, not legal justice—without forgiveness.”

Wes leaned forward in his chair, waited until the pastor mirrored him. “Look,” he said. “I never told anyone this before. I kept it from my wife. Not 'cause she wasn't strong enough to hear it, but because she shouldn't have to hear it. That whole time during the riot, Bobby Williams never once looked at me. He looked
through
me. Like I wasn't nothing to him, not even a person. You know how you sometimes hear about a kid who kills the neighborhood dog for fun? Just to see how long it will take, and what noises it will make while it dies? Williams was that kid, and I was a dog he found. He's soulless. Or—what do they call it now?—a sociopath. But there's something not right about that man, and it wasn't right when he was born, and it ain't gonna be right till the day he dies.” He sat back, forced deep breaths into his lungs, forced his hands to relax. “Tell me, Reverend, you think someone without a soul can find God?”

The pastor sighed. So much compassion there on his face. So much it made Wes sick. “I believe,” he said, “that all men, even wicked ones, have souls. And I believe in the power of Christ's love to lift up all—”

“I didn't mean forgiveness,” Wes interrupted. Couldn't listen to all that.

“I'm sorry?”

“When I said he doesn't deserve it, I didn't mean Williams doesn't deserve forgiveness.” Wes closed his eyes. The pastor waited. “I mean God. He doesn't deserve God.” He opened his eyes again. The pastor was still watching him, and nothing obvious had changed on his features, but Wes saw something different in his eyes. Suspicion, maybe. Or merely sorrow. “A man like that doesn't deserve to believe,” Wes said, “when I spent my whole life trying and still can't do it.”

 

The red horse and the mule were missing when he returned to the house. A couple halters dangling from the hitching rack, Dennis's truck parked beside the workshop. Wes squinted toward the slopes, but he saw no glint of sun on silver, no movement through the trees. Rio stood alone in the pasture, looking, so far as Wes could tell, none the worse for wear after his struggle during the snowstorm. He watched Wes from across the yard, and though Wes liked the black horse, he didn't like this. The way he watched.

Wes opened the passenger door of his truck, twisted his key in the lock on the glove compartment. His revolver was satisfyingly heavy in his hand. It was a .38 Smith and Wesson Special with a six-inch barrel, the kind COs had used way back when officers still carried sidearms. His father's before him. When he was younger, Wes had been a pretty fair shot with a rifle; he was competent with the revolver, nothing more. It made him nervous in a way the rifle never had. Claire hadn't liked it, even before that night with Dennis. Urged him more than once to get rid of it.

He was careful now. The gun wasn't loaded, and he kept his finger outside the trigger guard. Sighted only at the pile of firewood beside the workshop, and felt guilty even so. Wes shot with his left hand now. Williams hadn't snapped his left thumb the way he had his right, and Wes had a marginally better grip with that hand. Enough years gone by that it no longer felt entirely awkward. He went to the range once or twice a year, fired off a few rounds and paid the price in pain later.

Wes knew as well as anyone that a weapon could be used against its owner. There was a reason today's COs checked their firearms at the gate. Dangerous enough to carry what they did. (His handcuffs. Lane's baton.) But all this talk of Williams. All these memories being stirred up. Wes would be lying if he said the weight of that revolver in his hand didn't make him feel better.