It was more like resolve, or determination, or something that had no name as yet.
He didn't know what to call that hard thing growing in him, but he knew what it was steeling him up for, all right.
He was going to hunt down Ollie and the others, one by one, if necessary. He was going to hunt them down and kill them the same way they had killed his family and all of the good men now lying dead under those breeze-ruffled blankets.
And each one, he vowed, was going to know why his life was being taken.
He walked to the front of the wagon and lay the Winchester and the cartridge boxes next to the Henry.
He knew then what that hardness was that was forming and growing inside of him.
It was the gun, the six-gun, the beautiful Colt his father had given him. It was the gun.
The gun that he would ever live by, henceforth.
6
A PAIR OF BLUE-WINGED TEALS FLEW UP THE CREEK ON whistling wings. A chipmunk ventured down to the campsite seeking crumbs, its caramel stripes rippling on its furry coat as it stopped, sat up, then crept forward again, its bright eyes glittering, tail flicking with nervous twitches. A small cloud passed over the sun as John and Ben lifted the body of Clare Savage onto the wagon bed. John had folded her arms across her chest after he removed the blanket.
He pushed a lock of her hair away from her face, and something lodged in his throat, shut his breath off for a moment. He closed his eyes and sighed.
Next, they loaded little Alice, placing her next to the body of her mother. Her arms were folded the same way. John did this with each body, his father Dan's, his uncle Donny's, Ben's brother, Lee. The cloud slid away and sunlight sprayed John's taut features with sudden light that illuminated the grim cast to his expression, as he and Ben covered the bodies with blankets. Ben pulled down the brim of his hat to shade his eyes from the sudden glare.
Ben's facial expression was no less grim than John's as he gently closed the tailgate. A jay berated the chipmunk with a stream of avian invective. The chipmunk barked a series of raspy bleats as it picked up a small piece of biscuit, sat up straight, holding the crumb in its tiny hands. It began to nibble on the crumb, tail flicking back and forth like a bristling metronome.
“Take your seat, Johnny,” Ben said.
John didn't answer. He walked to the front of the wagon and climbed up, sat on the spring seat. It groaned under his weight. He looked up at the trees, the play of light on the pine needles that protruded like viridian tassels, their shades of green changing from light to dark as the other limbs swayed in the breeze. He looked at the eternal mountains that rose snow-peaked in the distance, as if searching for something permanent, some monument to life that could overcome death. The solemn trees stood like silent mourners above the creek, their branches swaying gently, back and forth, as if they were waving farewell to the muted beat of music no human could hear.
The wagon trundled up the road, jouncing over the ruts. John had helped Ben in the building of it. They had dug trenches along each side to mark the width of the road itself. Ben had cut dynamite sticks in half, placed them four inches apart while John watched the way he did it. Ben placed caps in each stick, burying them in the sawdust laced with nitroglycerin. Then he had cut fuses to length. When Ben lit the fuses, they both had run and hid behind large boulders. When the dynamite blew, rocks and earth hurtled through the air with deadly force, smashing trees, crashing into the rocks where they were concealed. When it was over, they had two drain trenches along either side. And a road. John had been fascinated with dynamite, but had never handled it until Ben thought he was ready. But he had failed to wear gloves and now he had a king-sized headache. His head was throbbing still.
“There's a pair of gloves on the floorboards, Johnny, and a knife you can put on your belt.”
“I'm going to cut the dynamite?”
“If you want to.”
“I do.” John picked up the gloves and slipped them on. They were made of leather, tawny deerhide, and they fit him. He took the gloves off, shoved them in his back pocket, and picked up the knife.
“Found it in the tack room when I was looking for some rope to use when we do the buryin'. Your daddy must have left it there when he was last up to the barn.”
“I recognize it.”
It was a beautiful skinning knife his father had made back in Arkansas. It had a deer-antler handle that fit his grip perfectly. He had made the blade from an old wagon spring, and drilled through a chunk of brass for the guard that curved up on one side, down on the other, just like an old pirate's cutlass, or so John imagined. He had always admired the knife and begged his father to make him one just like it. But Dan had never found the time. The scabbard was homemade, too, sewn with sinew, sturdy leather taken from one of their Poland China hogs.
“I don't have my belt on,” John said, realizing how incongruous it sounded. But just then, everything was incongruous. Everything he saw and felt seemed out of place, of no consequence, slightly off-kilter. He tried to shut out thoughts of the dead lying in the wagon like so many waxen figures under blankets.
A bald eagle rose in the air from its perch above the creek, the wind catching its pinions and flinging it into an air current that would sail it over the land like an errant kite, the fan of its tail feathers shifting, adjusting to every whispering whiff of breeze, the tips of its wing-feathered fingers grasping for purchase on a ledge of wind.
The wagon rumbled onto the green meadow that lay at the end of a long valley. On the high end rose a majestic mountain peak, its top clad in ermine-white snow. Tall pines bordered the meadow on both sides and at the top. At the bottom, there was a sloping drop-off that led to the creek below. Hobbled horses, more than a dozen, grazed in various places on the greensward. Some lifted their heads and whinnied at the mules, others switched their tails and shook their heads up and down, tossing their long manes into the wind that blew them into wild fragments that settled back down on their necks. A red-tailed hawk floated above the trees, its head moving robotically from side to side as it hunted field mice or conies, and its shrill cry pierced the silence like a referee's whistle, the sound torn to shreds by the high wind that floated him on cushions of air.
Ben headed the wagon toward the barn and corral on the near side of the meadow.
“Pick up the dynamite, caps, and fuses,” he said laconically. “Got 'em set out.”
John nodded, caught up in the beauty and grandeur of the land, the sky, the towering mountains silhouetted against a blue, cloud-flecked horizon high above timberline.
He slipped his gloves on and helped Ben load the half-full box of dynamite. Ben placed a box of caps and a fuse coil under the seat next to their rifles, then climbed back up on his perch. John hauled himself up, and after he sat down, the wagon rolled toward the other side of the vale, just off the foot of the bottom end.
The two men were silent as they crossed the small creek, splashing through its amber-gold waters, and pulled up next to a copse of spruce and fir trees. Beyond, John knew, there was an open place of shade and serenity, an untouched garden amid the tall pines.
Ben reined the mules to a halt, after twisting the wagon into a half turn, and set the brake.
“This the place you had in mind, Johnny?”
John nodded.
“Figured. Nice place.”
“Let's do it,” John said, that hard, cold place in him darkening, getting colder, harder as those terrible images of men shooting down his family and friends in ice-laced blood. The precision of it. No missed shots. No ricochets. No wild bullets flying in space. Every shot hitting home, drawing blood, smashing bone and flesh, crushing beating hearts, tearing up lungs and windpipes, blowing black holes in faces and bodies. The horror of it emblazed on his mind like painted figures on the cave walls of his mind, as vivid as if it had all happened seconds ago, as if it were still happening.
“I'll lay it all out,” Ben said. “You cut me a dozen sticks. Don't touch your forehead with them gloves.”
John took the box of dynamite from the wagon. He drew the knife from its sheath, knelt down and began to gently saw through each stick, cutting each one exactly in half until he had twenty-four half sticks laid out in a neat row. A small gray bird flitted in the brush just outside the glade, chirping as it landed on each new branch. John saw it out of the corner of his eye, and then it was gone, like some ghost bird, leaving only a gnawing silence as if some silent thing was eating at the far fringes of his mind.
“Bring 'em over, Johnny.”
John scooped up the sticks, carried them in his arms over to where Ben had shoveled twenty-four depressions in the earth. There was the smell of moss and pinesap, the aromatic fragrance of spruce and fir, the delicate scent of a lone blue columbine just catching the sun at the edge of the meadow like some small and forlorn orchid sprouted for just that moment.
“I'll cap 'em and bury 'em. You bring me that coil of fuse in the wagon.”
“The explosion's going to ruin this place, Ben.”
“No. Not the way I'll do it. We'll still have some digging to do. Not much, I hope.”
John went back to the wagon and got the length of fuse, carried it to where Ben was kneeling in the shade of the trees. Ben buried each stick deep so that only the very top was visible. He carefully pushed a cap into the center of the sawdust mixture. John watched him. He knew that the caps were dangerous. If one went off while Ben was pushing it down into the dynamite it would blow his hand and arm off, a grisly thing to contemplate just then.
When Ben was finished, he measured the fuse, counting off seconds in his mind. Shadows shifted in the glade, appearing and disappearing, stroking the grass like shadowy fingers, pulling away, then pushing back over soft green grass and dank moss, the coarse bark of the trees.
Ben walked the end of the fuse away from the planted sticks of dynamite, to the edge of the meadow. He stopped and looked around for a place to hide.
“Better drive the team up the meadow and as close to the trees as you can get. Just wait there. Crouch down in front of the seat and put your fingers in your ears. Take that box of dynamite with you.”
“What about you?”
“I'm going to run into the woods. See that big old rock over there? I'll hunker down behind it. You'll be all right where you are. Most of this stuff's just going to plow ground underneath it. Be a few small rocks, maybe, flying like bullets. But they won't go far. A hundred yards or so, I figure.”
“You're the powder man,” John said.
“That's what I am, Johnny. Now git.”
John walked over to the wagon, carrying the unused coil of fuse with him. He set the box of dynamite and the fuse material into the wagon and climbed up, released the brake. He drove the wagon far up the meadow, nearly five hundred yards from where Ben stood, waiting to light his match. After he stopped, he looked back, then doubled over in the well beneath the seat. He waited, the stillness around him as deep as a mountain well back home.
The explosion was nothing like the one he'd heard that morning when Ben blew the wall inside the mine. This one made a deep
whump
sound, and then he heard the rain of dirt and rock through the trees like hail hitting a sod roof. He raised up and saw white smoke hugging the grass, creeping though the trees, billowing out into the air. The wind caught the smoke and severed it into wispy scarves that pirouetted in graceful arabesques until they vanished against the blue of the sky.
He drove back down the meadow to where Ben stood waiting for him. They took their shovels and began to scoop the loose earth out of the wide depression created by the blast. They dug into soft earth until they struck rock and could delve no deeper.
“Not six feet,” Ben said, “but they ought to be all right here. Bears and wolves won't be able to smell 'em, and we can haul rocks in here to put over the graves. That all right with you, Johnny?”
“I reckon. I don't want to think about it right now.”
Ben softened.
“I know.”
They carried the bodies, which had become stiff by then, into the glade. They wrapped the corpses in blankets until they resembled large cocoons and laid them side by side, packing them close. They had five more bodies to haul up there. But there was room for those they had left behind.
“I can cover them, Johnny, if you want to sit down somewheres by yourself.”
“No. I'll help. They're gone. I can't bring 'em back.”
Ben looked at the young man who had been growing old before his eyes. He felt the hardness in the youth, and he thought he could see that dark place where his soul had gone. He said nothing, but he knew that could be a dangerous sign in one so young as John Savage. Life shaped a man, and some men bent under its withering winds, its freezing chills. But a strong man weathered the bad times and grew taller and straighter and stronger. He hoped Johnny Savage was such a man. But he knew that this was a turning point in his life, a dangerous crossroads in light of all that had happened that day.
He watched as John got the shovels and brought them back, handing one to him. He stood there for a moment, his shovel at the ready, watching John start to throw dirt onto one of the bodies. Beneath the flung dirt lay Dan Savage. John had started the burying with him, his father.
Ben started shoveling loose dirt onto the corpses at the other end, his own brother and Clare's brother. For a long time there was only the sound of dirt spattering onto the blankets, and the wind sobbing through the trees, the far-off piping of a quail and the eerie whistle of a young bull elk.