Saviours of Oestend Oestend 2 (7 page)

On the morning Dante and Cami were to leave for home, Jeremiah followed Dante to the barn to help hitch the team to the wagon. It was a job Dante could have easily done himself, but he could tell by his father’s quiet reserve and nervous habit of clearing his throat that he had something to say. He seemed to be having a hard time working up the nerve, though. They had almost finished the job by the time Jeremiah finally spoke.

The horses were between them, so Dante couldn’t see his father’s face. “Why would I be?” he asked.
“Well, the ranch, for one. Seemed logical at the time to let Deacon have the BarChi. I thought you’d be happy for a chance to start fresh, but I worry now it was wrong.”
Dante shrugged, although his father probably couldn’t see it. He’d always wanted Deacon more than he’d wanted the BarChi. Being sent away had hurt, but not for the same reasons his father was alluding to. “It’s fine.” He tightened the last buckle on his horse and when he looked up, he found his father watching him over the team’s back. His cheeks were red with embarrassment.
“I remember the day my pa caught you and Deacon together in this barn.”
Dante felt his own cheeks begin to burn. His father had never mentioned the incident, and Dante wished he hadn’t brought it up now. “So do I,” he said, and he hated the way his voice broke on the words.
“I was angry at him for making such a fuss. You were just boys.” Jeremiah ducked his head and pushed his hat down low, much as Deacon often did when something made him uncomfortable. “The thing is, I never realised how much damage he did. I was busy with the ranch, and with your brothers. You and Deacon had been inseparable your whole lives, causing me no end of trouble, and I thought for sure you’d be back to it in a matter of days. It was months before I realised you couldn’t even look at each other.”
Dante ducked his head. He swallowed hard against the lump in his throat. Why did his father want to dig it all up now? “It’s over,” Dante said. “It don’t matter anymore.”
“It does.” Dante was surprised to hear the strain of unshed tears in his father’s voice. Jeremiah came around the horses to face Dante, although Dante couldn’t quite make himself meet his father’s eyes. He kept his gaze on the straw at his feet. “I should have realised,” Jeremiah said. “I should have seen how hurt you were, and how confused. I should have seen how much you were struggling. I should have told you then it was all right. I should have told you and Deacon both, but the time I realised how bad things were, it was too late. I let my pa take something innocent and turn it ugly, and I hate myself for it. You should never have been separated, you and Deacon…”
His voice caught. His words stumbled to a halt. Dante looked up in surprise. Jeremiah’s head was down. The wide brim of his hat hid his face, but it was obvious he was crying. He sniffled and put his hand up to wipe his eyes. Dante had only seen his father cry one other time, the day Dante’s mother had died giving birth.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Dante said.
“It was. I should have protected you. I should have had the balls to stand up to my pa, but he was so mean—”
Dante laughed. “Don’t I know it!”
Jeremiah looked up at him. His eyes were red, his cheeks still damp. “I’m your father, and I should have been there. And I’m sorry.”
The words touched Dante. It was an old wound, one he’d learned to ignore, but his father’s words soothed it a tiny bit. “All this time, I thought I’d failed you.”
Jeremiah reached out and put his hand on Dante’s shoulder. “Never. The Saints know you caused me enough trouble over the years. You’ve always been impetuous and hardheaded and downright ornery. But you’re my son, Dante. I love you with all my heart. The fact that you think you let me down only proves that I’m the one who failed you.”
Dante shook his head. He wanted to say no, that Jeremiah hadn’t ever let him down, but the words wouldn’t quite come out. How much different might things have been if Jeremiah had stood up for him all those years ago? How much might it have mattered to know that his father understood?
“I can forgive you,” Dante said, his voice a hoarse whisper, “if you can forgive me.”
Jeremiah pulled him into a tight hug and pounded him on the back. Dante hugged his father back, feeling like the child he’d once been. If only his father had hugged him like that the day Old Man Pane had horsewhipped him for daring to love another boy.
“I want you to be happy,” Jeremiah said. “Promise me you’ll find a way to be happy.”
Dante nodded. “I’ll do my best.”

On the way back from the BarChi, Cami asked if he minded going slower than normal so she could walk along through the prairie collecting plants and flowers.
“Can’t you do that at home?”
“No,” she said, in a tone that told him he was being a fool. “The ice killed them all, but here, they’re still green.”
They had plenty of time, so he obliged her. She gathered armfuls of plants, which she stuffed into a burlap bag she’d brought from the BarChi. He was confused by her choices. Some were flowers, but none of them were particularly bright or pretty. “What the hell do you need them for, anyway?”
“Different things.”
“Like what?”
“Well, for one, I’m going to make potpourri. It might help with the smell.”
Dante didn’t have a blessed clue what ‘potpourri’ was, but he decided it was worth accommodating her, if it would ease the foul odour in their house.
Dante had failed to see the difference in the landscape on the way from the Austin Ranch to the BarChi, but on the way back, he was forced to see it. By the second day, Cami’s bag was full, and so they travelled faster. Dante noticed how green plants gave way to brown, the long grasses of the prairie lying flat and dark, mouldering in the sun rather than blowing in the wind.
“It’s sad,” she said. “It came too soon.”
Dante wasn’t sure about sad, but it was going to prove downright problematic. How much of his hay had been ruined? He had some in reserve, but he’d been counting on one more harvest to get them through the winter. And it wasn’t just the cows that had to eat. “What about the garden?” he asked.
She shook her head. “About half of it was lost. Everything leafy is dead, except maybe the kale. Tomatoes are hit and miss. The ones closer to the outside are ruined, but some of the others were sort of sheltered underneath them, and should be usable. We’ll still have potatoes, turnips and carrots. Peas, peppers and beans, I’m not sure about yet. My guess is, I can still use them in stew. They’ll be mushy and won’t taste as good, but it’s better than going hungry.”
“We won’t go hungry. We might eat nothing but beef all damn winter, but at least we’ve got plenty of that.” And without feed, he might have to slaughter some of them sooner rather than later anyway.
He was so busy worrying about cows and feed, he didn’t notice anything unusual ahead until Cami put her hand on his wrist.
“Dante, look!”
She pointed ahead of them to where the ranch lay just out of sight over the hill. What he saw made the blood run cold in his veins.
Buzzards. Dozens of them. Probably more than a hundred. More of them than he’d ever seen in one place. Some circled high in the sky, and some much lower, but they were all clearly centred over the ranch.
“Holy Saints,” he breathed.
“Do you think everything’s all right?”
He wanted to say, “I’m sure it’s fine,” but he couldn’t. In truth, he was picturing something like what Deacon had discovered so many months before, but he didn’t want to alarm her.
He quickly judged the distance to the farm. The wagon was full of coal. It was far too heavy to make the horses pull it faster. He could get there quicker on foot, but they were still too far out for him to run the whole way without killing himself in the attempt. If he’d used quarter horses, he could have unharnessed one and ridden it bareback, but he’d brought the sturdy drafthorses, and they weren’t trained to carry a rider.
He grimaced. There was nothing to be done but bide his time, as much as it pained him to do so.
They rode in silence, but he could sense Cami’s unease. She was tense and fidgety, and it grew worse as they drew closer.
“Part of me wants you to go faster, and part of me doesn’t want to get there at all,” she said at last.
“I know what you mean.” The more he thought about what might lie ahead, the more he felt he didn’t want her to have to see it. Things as gruesome as he was imagining weren’t easily forgotten. “I can get there quicker on foot. You know how to drive a team?”
“Only in theory.”
“I could tie them here, and send somebody out once I know everything’s all right.”
“And what if it’s not all right?” she asked. “Who will you send, then?”
Dante cursed. She was right. If the worst case scenario were true, and everybody was gone, they’d have limited to time to figure out what had gone wrong. If it was a problem with the generator again, he’d need every minute to work on it. He wouldn’t be able to waste time running back to get her.
At least this close to the ranch, he didn’t have to worry about conserving the horses’ energy. He urged them to speed up as much as he dared.
When they were finally within sight of the ranch, he watched for movement. He’d been prepared to see more buzzards on the ground, feasting on death, but below the funnel of circling birds, everything looked normal. He could see men walking around. The dread inside Dante’s chest abated some. Beside him, he heard Cami sigh.
Although the last hundred yards seemed to take ages, they finally pulled into the ranch. Simon came out to greet him. He was wearing a long duster with the hood pulled up. The weather didn’t call for such a thing, but the spots of bird dung on it gave away its true purpose.
“Hey, boss. We meant to watch for you and send somebody out to ease your mind, but you caught us during supper.”
“What the blessed hell is going on?” Dante asked as he jumped down from the wagon.
Simon shrugged. “Don’t rightly know. They started showing up three days after you left. They been circling overhead ever since.” He looked up into the sky. “Think there might be fewer today, to tell you the truth.”
“No idea what’s brought them?”
Simon shook his head. “Thought at first there must be something dead out in the fields, but we haven’t found anything. Got the men spooked, though. Cattle and horses, too. Had a bitch of a time feeding the last two mornings, ‘cause the horses don’t want to leave the barn.” He frowned. “Another thing—I don’t know if it’s the birds or what, but that milk cow in the barn quit producing, too. She’s been dry the last three days.”
It was the damnedest thing Dante had ever seen, but there was nothing to be done about it. He breathed a sigh of relief it wasn’t something worse. He wasn’t sure what he would have done if he’d come back to find all of his hands dead.
It was eerie having the birds overhead. They cast a strange, ever-moving shadow over the entire ranch that was surreal and a bit unnerving, but other than having to be careful about looking up, it didn’t change the day-to-day running of the ranch. There was still livestock to be fed and chores to do.
On his third morning home, he came into the kitchen to find Cami standing in the doorway, looking up at the sky.
“How’re our feathered friends?” he asked.
“They’re gone,” she said. “Every last one of them. And the cow must be making milk again. She’s been fussing all morning.”
“Thank the Saints for that. Maybe things will finally start being normal around here.”
Somehow, he doubted that would be the case.

For a while at least, things did seem to be back to normal. Cami spent all of her free time playing with her plants. Some she simmered on the stove. Some she crushed. Some she even put in an old still she’d found somewhere. She dried others and mixed them in big bowls. Dante had no idea what all she was doing with them, but he had no reason to mind.

He found out potpourri was a mixture of dried plant pieces. Pretty soon, every room had little bowls of the stuff. She made packets of it that she burned in the fireplaces. She wrapped some of it in loose cheese cloth and hung them in the doorways to catch the breeze. Dante was constantly bumping his head into them, and they made him sneeze more often than not, but he had to admit, the smell of death was slowly being eradicated.

He asked Simon about the barracks and learned things were better there, too. Cami had given Simon pots full of liquid and plant pieces to boil over the fire in the barracks. She’d also washed the curtains from the barracks in saleratus, and scrubbed down the wooden floor with the water she’d boiled the plants in.

He had to give the woman credit. She’d told him she’d fix the problem, and it seemed it hadn’t been an idle boast.
“I still can’t figure how a freeze like that could hit us, but not the BarChi,” Simon said to Dante one day as they were restringing barbed wire where a group of cows had pushed their way through. “You think it’s something to do with the mountains?”
“Hell if I know.”
They’d hashed it over more than once since Dante’s return, but they were no closer to having an explanation for the ice than they were for the buzzards.
“Strangeness all over,” Simon said. He gestured to the cattle grazing in the field. “They’re acting odd the last few days. You noticed?”
“I did.” Dante had hoped it was only his overactive imagination, but having Simon say it confirmed his fears.
“Not just the animals,” Simon went on. “The men, too. Some of them are nervous, but a couple are getting mean. We’ve had fights in the barracks three nights in a row now.” “Somebody in particular I need to—”
“Dante!”
The shout came from the direction of the house, and Dante and Simon both turned to see Frances running across the compound towards them.
“Something wrong?” Dante yelled back.
Frances pointed towards the house. “Cami needs help!”
Dante ran. Frances was out of breath, and his words came tumbling out at a frantic pace as Dante rushed by him. “I tried to stop him, but he said to either help and take my turn after him, or get out of his way.”
Anger was too simple of a word for what Dante felt. Frances’ words about going second with Cami stoked the fire in his blood. Rage had always dwelled just below the surface for him. It took little for it to boil over and blot out all reason. By the time he burst into the kitchen, he was beyond thinking. His wrath blurred the periphery of his vision, narrowing his sight to one clear, brilliant focus.
In a fraction of a second, Dante took it all in. Foster was in the kitchen. His back was to Dante. He had Cami bent over the supper table. She was fighting hard, which was good, because it meant Foster needed both hands just to hold her down. He hadn’t yet managed to lift her skirt.
Dante grabbed the nearest thing without even quite knowing what it was and bashed it over the man’s back. Foster reeled backward, letting go of Cami, and Dante hit him again. The wooden chair burst apart at its joints. Foster fell to his knees. One chair leg was still intact in Dante’s hand, and he hit Foster with it again.
And again.
And then again.
“Stop!” Cami yelled.
Dante did. He took two deep, ragged breaths, waiting for the rage to subside enough that he could think.
Foster lay on the ground, trying to protect his bleeding head with his hands. He wasn’t dead. That was a bit disappointing. Dante was halfway tempted to kill him and be done with it, but then he’d be down a man. He threw the chair leg down in disgust and looked up, thinking to check on Cami, but as he did, he realised he had an audience. It seemed every hand on his ranch had come running, and they all stood by the door at the opposite end of the room, watching, their eyes wide.
Maybe he could make his point without resorting to death just yet.
Dante pulled his knife from his boot and stood over Foster.
“Dante?” Cami said from behind him, her voice low and shaky, but he ignored her. He addressed the men in front of him.
“You all are new to the prairie. Maybe you don’t know how things are done, so let me be the one to fill you in. See, back before there were wraiths, when the settlers first came here to the Wild, they met the Old Ones. And the Old Ones taught them that all living things have a place. Wolves. Bears. Prairie dogs and badgers. They’re all part of the whole. They all have a right to be.
“Then one night, something happened. A man like Foster here took another settler’s daughter into the woods and had his way with her. When they caught him, her daddy wanted to string that man up by his balls, but the chief who was there said, ‘How will the whole be served?’ And that man realised the chief was right. ‘Cause you see, wolves have got to eat too.
“So that night, they came up with what we call Wild Justice.” Dante leaned over. He grabbed a handful of Foster’s hair and lifted him partway off the floor, far enough that he could lean over and put the tip of his knife against the man’s throat. He spoke into the man’s ear, although loud enough that the other hands could hear. “First, we cut off your hands. Now, that may seem bad, but that ain’t even part of the punishment. That’s just to make things easier. ‘Cause once a man’s hands are gone, he tends to quit fighting back.”
He moved the tip of his knife to Foster’s gut. “Second, we open up your belly. Not deep enough to kill you, though. Just deep enough to make you bleed. Makes you smell real good to all those hungry things in the Wild.
“Then, we take you out to the woods, and we tie you to a tree.”
He looked up at the boys in front of him, letting his gaze fall on each one of them in turn, forcing them to hear what he had to say. “There’s lots of hungry things out there. You all hear them in the night, I know. You hear the wolves howling, and the coyotes when they try to get the hens. That ain’t all, either. There’s bear. Mountain lion, too. They mostly leave you alone, but when you’re tied to a tree with your intestines hanging out, they just might be tempted enough to come in close.
“‘Course, that ain’t all. We got the wraiths now, too. Wild Justice may be the only time a man prays for the wraiths, ‘cause if you’re lucky, they’ll find you first. If you’re lucky, they’ll steal your breath before the wolves show up to steal your meat. If the wraiths get you, we’ll never even hear you scream.” He grinned, and he hoped it looked as evil as it felt. “But if you’re
not
lucky, and some hungry animal finds you first? Well, let’s just say, you
will
scream then. You’ll scream a long, long time.”
His ranch hands were mostly young, green boys, and right at that moment, they really were green. One looked close to tears. Even Simon looked a bit shaken, which was surprising. Only Frances remained nonplussed. He actually seemed amused.
That was fine. Dante wasn’t worried about Frances.
Dante dropped Foster back to the floor and stood up to face the men.
“Now, maybe this is my fault. Maybe I ain’t been quite clear on exactly what is or isn’t allowed on my ranch, but you may have noticed, when I get pissed off, I don’t waste time asking for an explanation. So while I have your attention, let me lay it all out for you, clear as can be.” He pointed behind him to Cami. “Any one of you touches this woman without her permission—hell, you even look at her in a way that pisses me off—I guarantee you’ll only have ’til nightfall to regret it. And believe me when I tell you, this is the only warning you’ll ever get. We clear?”
Wide eyes were his only response from most of them. A few bobbed their head. Nobody said a word.
Good enough.
Dante stepped back and kicked Foster hard in the ribs, just because it felt good to do it. “Somebody get this piece of shit off my floor.”
Simon and Frances came forward. Not, he knew, because they gave a damn about Foster, but because they knew somebody had to do it. The rest of the hands were still frozen in place.
“Storytime’s over, boys,” Dante said. “Get your asses back to work.”