Haxan (16 page)

He regarded the white bundle in his arms. “Morning Star’s spirit also wishes to thank you. Now she will cross to the other side and have me as a guide to make sure she won’t get lost again. She will rest in the morning sky where she belongs, thanks to you.”

“Goodbye, White Hawk.”

“Goodbye, Long Blood.” He started to go. “Magra was right. You are a man who can also be a brother.”

Everyone drew back, leaving White Hawk to himself. He placed the body of Morning Star on the pyre and raised his face to the starry heavens. There was a little night breeze that ruffled Morning Star’s hair, which had escaped its tight wrappings.

White Hawk lifted his hands and began to sing. Tears fell from his eyes into his open mouth.

When he finished he raised a flaming brand from the small fire and lighted the base of the dry wood. It caught easily. He stepped into the smoke and flame and stretched out beside Morning Star.

The flames leaped higher, whirling around their bodies like a tornado. They burned for a long time. After a while the wood beneath them collapsed and they fell into the spirit world forever.

When it was over the remaining Navajo braves melted back into the night without a word. By the time the fire died down the sky toward the east was tinged with pink.

There wasn’t much left of the pyre. I picked up a smouldering brand and walked toward the far wagon.

Graves threw himself at me, his face wild and livid. “No, you can’t. I won’t let you.”

Hickle grabbed the older man’s shirt and wrenched him back. “Dr. Graves, those Indians are still out there. We have no other choice. We have to do it or we won’t live out the day.”

“Out of the way, Graves.” I elbowed him aside and pitched the lighted brand into the rear of the wagon. There must have been loose straw or something back there because it caught fast.

The other settlers were packing their wagons in a hurry and getting ready to pull out in the grey morning. Hickle wrestled with Graves until the latter suddenly lost any fight he had left in him. Graves watched his specimens and artefacts literally go up in smoke and crackling flame.

He turned on me. “Does this give you satisfaction, Marshal?”

“As a matter of fact, Graves, it doesn’t. But I don’t expect you to understand that.”

I put my back to him and walked out of the circle of wagons to find my horse.

“You must realize you haven’t changed anything,” Graves shouted behind me. His voice sounded thin in the wide-open prairie.

“The west will die,” he said, “and the Indian culture will die, and nothing you or I or anyone can do will ever change that. Marshal! All you did was destroy the memory and record of that change. All you did was destroy yourself.”

A half hour later I caught my horse and rode along the spine of a hogback. Half a mile away three covered wagons creaked west. A tiny dot followed on foot.

I watched them disappear in the desert haze.

Magra. She had long hair tied back Indian fashion and it smelled clean and crisp. I wanted to see her.

I turned my horse toward a bright star rising with the morning and rode straight into it.

T
hat same morning I rode into Santa Fe and wired Fort Sumner. I also wired Washington. Telegrams flew thick and fast over the next four days. I had to remain in Santa Fe to help coordinate everything. Tensions were running high, but it looked like things were going to stand down. The Navajo came back on reservation, reluctantly. There could have been reprisals on the part of the Army, but cooler heads prevailed. For once, people on both sides recognized they had dodged a deadly bullet. Best not push their luck.

On my last night in Santa Fe I checked into La Fonda, had a hot bath, and caught up on sleep. I awoke early, looking over the central plaza from my high bedroom window. I thought of Magra and wondered what she was doing.

That morning I attended a meeting at the Governor’s Palace and had a late dinner with Judge Creighton. We talked about the Rand case.

By midday I started the long ride back to Haxan. I spent the dark nights in country staring at the stars and thinking of White Hawk. I had spent a lot of time alone with the man. I understood the lengths he had gone to restore the pride of his people, and the woman he loved.

White Hawk had called me Long Blood. That Old Indian Grandfather in the tent city had called me the same thing. I wondered what it meant, and what they knew about me that I didn’t know myself.

Magra might have answers to that, I reasoned. I looked forward to seeing her again.

Haxan didn’t look too much different than when I had left. Some of the windows were still boarded up from the Indian scare, but they were coming down.

Jake had done an admirable job in my absence. I found Magra waiting for me outside the Haxan Hotel. The sun was in her face. I didn’t care who was looking or what people might say. I took her in my arms and held her close.

“Are you okay?” She touched my face with gentle fingers.

“I am glad to be home.”

But this was Haxan. Nothing ever stayed the same for long.

I was walking out of the hotel early the next morning on the way to the jailhouse after a rough night keeping peace and filing the cells with drunks and spoilers, when I saw Phaedra Finch riding into town.

It was first time I saw her up close. The last time I saw her, she had a gun pointed at me.

She rode across the empty plaza on her piebald mare, dragging a mesquite travois that left parallel tracks in the sand drifts.

Lashed to the frame was the body of a man, a red blanket swathed about his face.

I ran up and caught the rope bridle of her horse. Phaedra’s head was down, her blank eyes fixed on the pommel horn. She wore tattered tent canvas around her shoulders like a Mexican serape. Her feet were bare and dirty, and her red, blistered hands hung limp at her sides.

“You’re Phaedra, aren’t you? What happened to you?”

She blinked as if coming out of a long sleep. Her disarrayed hair was white-blonde and needed a curry comb, but her lips were red as pokeberry juice. She looked older than her twenty-five years. I wasn’t surprised. From what Magra had told me, and hearing the whispered gossip, living with a man like Abel Finch on a mean plot of land above the timberline for six years would sap the youth out of any woman.

“Phaedra. Can you hear me?”

“It’s Abel, Marshal. My husband. He’s dead.” Her voice dribbled like tired water over worn stones. The morning sun was in her face. She fought hard to swallow back tears. “I brought him to Haxan to be buried. He never thought we had a real home, even though I tried to make one. I guess I was never much of a wife, anyway.”

“How did he die, Phaedra?”

“He went riding. Yesterday, it was. Came on a rattlesnake, I guess. His horse threw him and his foot caught in the stirrup. The horse dragged him and his head hit a rock.”

I didn’t say anything for a long time. “Are you the one who found him?”

“Clayton did.” Clayton Finch, as I recalled, was her stepson.

“Where is Clayton?”

“Up at the homestead. He doesn’t care to see his daddy buried. I had to come do it myself.”

“Come down off that horse, Phaedra. I’m going to take you to Doc Toland.”

“I don’t need a doctor, Marshal. I want to bury Abel.”

I took her arm and said soft, “Come on, Phaedra. You need help.”

She slid off the saddle without a fight, half falling into my arms. She felt more like bones than girl under that canvas.

“What happened to your hands? They’re all blistered.”

“I don’t remember,” she murmured.

I helped her limp across the wide plaza. “My horse,” she said, trying to turn out of my arms. “Abel.”

“I’ll have my deputy take care of them. Don’t worry.”

Doc Toland’s office was only two doors down from mine. I had to carry Phaedra up the steep steps. I propped her against the wall and banged on the door with my fist. “Doc,” I cried.

The door opened. Rex Toland was in shirtsleeves instead of his usual black frock, and his hair was tousled.

“John Marwood, why are you hammering on my door at this ungodly hour?” He saw Phaedra limp against the outside wall. Her face was stoic. Only her tears left tracks on her dusty cheeks.

Doc Toland sighed heavily. “Oh. Well, I guess it’s been a long time coming. All right, Marshal, bring her inside. I’ll see what I can do.”

I left Phaedra with Doc and went down to the office. Magra was sweeping the floor while Jake poured fresh coffee.

“Good morning, Marshal,” he said with a bright smile. “Care for a cup?”

Magra stood her broom aside. “Hello, John.” She waited a beat for my answer. When one wasn’t forthcoming her face changed. “John. What is wrong?”

“Trouble. There’s always trouble in Haxan.” I felt like kicking one of the chairs. Or hitting somebody. But there was nobody good to hit. Even the prisoners I had in back had taken their lumps last night when they decided they wanted to continue their drunken brawl with me using a saloon chair. The barrel of my Colt cracked across their skulls had changed their minds quick enough. We even had Sheriff Olton’s prisoner waiting on transportation to Hays City. Olton had sent the man on a stage under guard when he learned I was out country helping White Hawk.

“John?”

“Phaedra Finch rode into town a few minutes ago. Her dead husband is strapped to a mesquite drag. Jake, get the body and hold it for Doc Toland. He’ll have to autopsy it.”

“Where’s the girl, Mr. Marwood?”

“She’s up there with Doc. He’s examining her.”

Both Jake and Magra fell silent. I had learned in the past people often turned quiet when Phaedra’s name was mentioned in polite company.

“Better see to it now, Jake. With her in town there’s no telling how this will break.”

He put down his coffee cup with exaggerated care. “Yes, sir. Morning mail is on your desk.”

“Thanks.” I didn’t care about that right now. If Conrad Rand were to walk through the front door I would not have been aware.

Jake hurried out of the office. I watched his broad back and green suspenders pass beyond the window and out of sight.

I sat behind my desk. Collapsed was more like it. What with the Ben Tack shooting, chasing that idiot Graves all over the desert, and last night’s arrests, I was done in.

I sat there feeling used up. I wasn’t looking at anything. I didn’t want to.

“John.” Magra, again.

“Yeah.”

“It’s not your fault.”

I looked her way. I had come a long way to love Magra Snowberry. We never talked about it much. We didn’t have to. Maybe it was because she knew who I was and why I had come to Haxan. Or maybe because when two people cared about each other they didn’t have to speak a lot of words.

I can’t explain it. I don’t understand everything about the world. I just know it was that morning, with me sitting behind my desk and the sun pouring in through the grimy windows, that I knew I loved her more than anything else in my life. It didn’t matter one whit that she was half-Navajo and all-desert wild.

“People are going to say Phaedra got what she deserved.” My voice sounded prickly to my ears. It ran up the walls and got stuck in the corners of the room.

“John.” Magra’s voice was sharp with reproach.

“I’m not saying I believe that. It’s what the people of Haxan are going to think.”

Magra moved closer to me. “Since when do you care what the people of Haxan think, John Marwood?”

I put an arm around her waist. It wasn’t proper conduct for a government office, but I didn’t care.

“This is going to be bad,” I told her. “The townspeople of Haxan aren’t going to stand having Phaedra in town, even for burying her husband. Especially for that. Not with Clayton Finch waiting back at the mountain for her to return. All open like, if you know what I mean.”

“What Phaedra and Clayton do is their own private business,” Magra said. “Abel learned to live with it in his way. Everyone else should, too.”

The world was often basic to her. She lived in the desert. Her roots went deep that way. For her people the desert was simple. It was sun and wind, food and hunger, life and death and love. There wasn’t much else, except survival, thrown into the mix. It sounded like a pretty nice way to live.

“Yeah, private.” My chair creaked as I got up and went for the door. “But the people of Haxan aren’t going to see it that way, Magra. You know that’s true.”

I returned to Doc Toland and met Jake coming the other way. He waved at me and loped across the plaza. His back still stiffened on him after a night’s sleep and he always had to work the kinks out by favouring his off leg.

“I put her horse in the livery stable, Mr. Marwood. Abel Finch is lying in the empty grain warehouse. I thought I would try and hide him in there rather than the dead house. But a couple of people saw me carry him inside.” He made a helpless gesture. “They’re already starting their talk.”

“That’s fine, Jake. You see Magra back to the hotel, will you?” Most days she and I had breakfast together. There wouldn’t be time for breakfast. Not today.

“Yes, sir, I will. I’ll see the prisoners are fed, too. You want me to hang around after?” He meant to look after Magra.

“No, she’ll be all right.” If Rand were truly headed for Haxan he would be here soon. But I didn’t think he would try anything in broad daylight. So far as I could tell he didn’t like operating in the open.

“Once you see her to the hotel come back here. I’ll likely need you before the day is out.”

He watched the shuttered windows of Doc Toland’s office. “Yes, sir, I figure so. See you later, sir.”

“Keep your eyes open, Jake.”

I ascended the wooden stairs to Doc’s office and entered without knocking. The examining room was in back but he was out front behind his desk, writing in a big black book.

“Hello, John,” he said without raising his eyes. “I guess you want to know how my patient is doing.”

“That’s right. I guess we’d better make it official.”

“Well, she’s in a bad way. A very bad way.” He put the ink pen aside and sat back, his hands thrust into his trouser pockets. He pursed his lips. “She’s been hurt, John. Badly hurt in both mind and body. I guess you know why. Most people have heard the rumours.”

“I know something about it. This seems to have been a dark secret in Haxan for many years. What can you do for her, Doc?”

“First, I’m going to ask you a personal favour, Marshal.”

“’Course. Anything.”

“I’m going to need that bottle of laudanum.” He quickly amended, “Not for my own use, but for my patient. I put salve on her wounds. Tried to get her to sleep. It’s like her mind is racing in a thousand directions now that she’s free of Abel Finch.”

“I understand, Doc. I’ll bring it over, no problem.”

He scratched a lucifer across the sandpaper block and lighted one of his black cigars. “She told me how her husband died.” His eyes found mine and settled. “I just let her talk. I didn’t pay it no heed.”

“Yeah. But I have to, Doc. I don’t have a choice.”

“I don’t envy you in that regard, Marshal.” It didn’t escape either of us that he had addressed me by my official title. But he meant what he said and I was glad for the sentiment.

“Can I talk to her, Doc?”

“Won’t do any harm. Not any more than Abel Finch has already done.” He looked like he wanted to slam his fist down. I realized I wasn’t the only man in town who wanted to kick a chair that morning.