Johnston - I Promise (7 page)

“How about riding horseback with me tomorrow afternoon?”

She glanced at his face in the glow of the dash lights he had turned up to give them some relief from the darkness. “I want to, but my father . . .” She swallowed hard. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

“If you change your mind, I’ll be at the windmill by your north pasture gate, under the live oak, around one. Good night, Delia.”

“Good-bye, Marsh.”

She closed the pickup door quietly and watched him back a ways down the road before he whipped the truck around, nearly hitting one of the pecan trees that stood sentinel on either side of the drive. He punched the headlights on and headed off of Circle Crown property.

She turned to look at the house. There were no outside lights on, but she could see a yellow glow upstairs in her mother’s bedroom, which opened onto the veranda. She knew the kitchen light would be on, too, because everyone in this part of the country entered and left their homes from the back door. The front door served only for funerals and strangers.

She half expected her father to be sitting at the kitchen table waiting for her, and heaved a sigh of relief when he wasn’t.

Ray John Carson wasn’t really her father, he was her stepfather. He had adopted her and her sister four years after he married their mother. She had loved him dearly at the time.

When Ray John had come into her life, he had been the third man in as many years wanting her to call him “Daddy.” Her own father had been gored to death by a rodeo bull when she was five. Her mother had remarried a year later to another cowboy, a drifting man. He was gone within a year, but not before he had stolen her six-year-old heart with his big smile and throaty chuckle. He had left her sister, Rachel, as a parting gift.

Two years later Ray John Smith, another devil-may-care cowboy, had entered their lives. Delia had been wary of liking him, certain that he, too, would abandon them. Gradually, Ray John Carson—her mother had insisted, as she had with her first two husbands, that it made more sense for Ray John to change to the venerable Carson name when they married—had won her over. He always had been a glib talker.

Delia headed toward the stairs at the front of the house that led to her bedroom, which took her past her father’s gun room. A single light was on over the massive pine desk Ray John used as a work surface when he was cleaning his guns. The glass door to one of her father’s gun cabinets hung open.

“Daddy?” She stepped tentatively into the high-ceilinged room. It was a totally masculine place, with a saddle brown leather couch, built-in bookshelves along one wall filled with dark tomes some long-ago Carson had purchased, and which she was certain none of Hattie’s three husbands had ever touched. It also contained Ray John’s pride and joy: several locked wood and glass cabinets full of antique rifles and revolvers her father had collected since his marriage to her mother.

Wooden shutters kept the ivy-papered room perpetually dark, and Ray John used an elbow lamp on the desk to give him enough light to work. The lamp highlighted the ring of old skeleton keys that opened the various gun cabinets. That was odd, because usually Ray John kept the key ring locked inside the rolltop desk. He kept the desk key in his wallet.

Delia watched for Ray John in the shadows as she made her way on tiptoe up the carpeted stairs. She didn’t want to run into her father tonight, didn’t want to remind him of her existence, fearful that the sight of her would make him decide to visit her later, when the house was asleep.

Her bedroom was at the opposite end of the upstairs hall from her mother’s bedroom. Rachel slept across the hall from Delia, and more than once Delia had cautioned Ray John to be quiet, lest he wake her sister. She knew where the creaks were in the old hardwood, and walked along the edge near the wall to avoid making a sound.

Her bedroom door was closed, the way she had left it, and a glance showed that Rachel’s door was closed as well. She glanced back down the hall over her shoulder and saw light spilling into the hall from her parents’ bedroom. Her mother was probably reading. She wondered where her father was.

Her bedroom was a place of moonlit shadows when she stepped inside. She leaned back against the door as she closed it behind her and waited for her eyes to adjust to the absence of light. Soon she could make out the familiar shapes in her room. And realized someone was lying on her bed.

“Daddy?” she whispered.

Her heart pounded as the dark figure rose from the bed without saying a word. Had someone broken into the house? Was that why her father’s gun room had been left in such disarray?

“Daddy?” she said, her heart thundering so loud and fast she was afraid it was going to burst.

“Shh,” her father said. “Don’t make a sound.”

“Mama’s door is open, and her light is on. What are you doing in here?”

“Shut up!” He snarled. He grabbed her arm in a viselike grip, and she felt something small and cold pressed painfully against her temple. It took her a second to realize it was the bore of a gun.

“Where were you tonight?” he demanded.

“I went to the movies.”

“Who was with you?”

“Peggy and I—”

“Don’t lie to me!”

Her stomach shifted sideways. He knew. Somehow he had discovered she was out with a boy. Someone in the theater must have seen her holding hands with Marsh. Or maybe someone had seen her waiting in the truck while Marsh went inside the 7-Eleven to buy Cokes.

“I was with a boy,” she said hurriedly.

“What boy?”

“I won’t see him again, Daddy. I promise. I—”

He manhandled her over to the bed. “Sit down.”

She perched at the very edge of the bed, poised to run if that became necessary, unsure what he was going to do next.

He turned on the light beside the bed and sat down beside her. “I thought I’d made it clear I don’t want you going out with boys.”

“You did, Daddy.”

“You stay away from them. All of them,” he said. “Otherwise, I’m going to have to take matters into my own hands and get rid of the next boy myself. It would be just this easy.”

He rolled the chamber, put the revolver to his temple, and pulled the trigger.

Delia gasped.

The gun clicked on an empty chamber. “Bang,” Ray John said with a ghoulish grin.

Delia shivered with revulsion.

It was something she had seen him do before when he had his guns out cleaning them. He almost always had a grin on his face, and he made a big production out of pointing the revolver at his head, knowing she was scared to death he would get hurt.

She would beg him to put the gun down. Before he did, he would pull the trigger while she waited with her heart in her throat to see if he really was going to splatter his brains all over the room. He never had. His behavior had always seemed stupid to her, but never sinister, as it did now.

He spun the chamber and put the gun to her temple again.

Fear constricted her chest, because as crazy as Ray John was acting, she wasn’t sure whether there might not be a bullet—perhaps more than one—in the gun. She squeezed her eyes shut and made a whimpering sound as he pulled the trigger.

It clicked on an empty chamber.

“Have you got the message, Delia, honey?”

“Y-y-yes, Daddy,” she said.

“Now get undressed for me and get in bed.”

“But Mama—”

“Your mama’s not home. She had to go to San Antonio to pick up some special medicine for that Grand Champion bull of hers. Don’t expect she’ll be back before midnight.”

Delia glanced at the wind-up alarm clock beside her bed. “It’s eleven-thirty now!”

“Then you better hurry on up, girl, hadn’t you. Ray John’s got an itch, and he wants it scratched.”

That night, for the first time, Delia dreamed of murdering Ray John Carson. She shot him in the head. His brains splattered all over her pillow.

Chapter Four

Marsh drove his pickup to the back door of the Texas dogtrot home that had been the North ranch house for generations. In the old days, the one-story house had consisted of a central hallway—a shotgun blast going in the front door would come out the back—with two large rooms on each side.

Years later, someone had added a shaded porch out front with a couple of willow rockers for sitting and watching the sun set. A kitchen had been appended to the back of the house and, more recently, a mud porch behind that. The yellow clapboard house, with its slanted porch, peeling paint, and lopsided shutters, looked every bit of its 150 years.

Marsh had spent a great deal of his youth sleeping on the screened-in mud porch, and he had fond memories of nights lying there on an iron cot listening to the crickets and the lowing cattle and the occasional raccoon that came by to raid the garbage can out back. Sleeping outside hadn’t been entirely a matter of choice. In the first years after his grandmother died, it had been safer to keep the back wall of the house between himself and his father.

Their relations hadn’t improved much since.

The kitchen door wasn’t locked, and Marsh let himself into the darkened house. He went directly to the knotted string that turned on the bare lightbulb above the sink. One of these days he was going to replace the broken bulb cover.

The red-and-white checkerboard linoleum laid over the hardwood floor in the 1940s had worn black in front of the sink and the refrigerator, where he retrieved a bottle of Pearl. He set the cap against the Formica counter and popped it off, then took a long, cold swig.

He found his father in the parlor. An eerie glow from the television provided the only light in the room. Cyrus North was sitting frozen, eyes glazed over, holding a longneck Pearl braced on the arm of a ragged, overstuffed chair. It looked like a scene from “The Twilight Zone.”

“I’m home, Dad.”

His father didn’t answer. Marsh was already headed toward his room when he heard his father’s favorite cop series, “Starsky and Hutch,” break for a Ford Mustang commercial. His father’s head swung around, and he said, “Where the hell have you been?”

“What the hell do you care?”

His father came out of the chair as though to backhand him and seemed to realize belatedly that Marsh was four inches taller than him and wasn’t budging an inch. Cyrus halted in his tracks. A scowl appeared on his craggy face as he took a belligerent stance across from his son.

“If I’d ever talked to my father the way you talk to me, he’d have knocked me flat,” Cyrus said.

Maybe he was more of a father to you than you’ve been to me,
Marsh thought. But he said, “I do my share of the work around here. I don’t have to account to you for where I go.”

“If your mother was alive—”

“She isn’t,” Marsh interrupted. “She’s dead. Been dead since I was born.”
I’m all you’ve got left, Dad. Why can’t you love me?

The commercial ended, and as though a bell had sounded for the next round, Cyrus turned abruptly and settled himself back in his chair. Eyes glued to the TV set, he said, “Make sure you mend that fence along the south pasture tomorrow. Got a call from the Circle Crown foreman that a few of my cattle have strayed onto Carson property.” His father smirked. “Seems that Santa Gertrudis bull Hattie Carson is so persnickety about was giving out free stud services to North cows.”

Marsh made a disgusted sound in his throat as he turned away. His father had been talking for weeks about how easy it would be to shove down some fence and let a few of his cows in season stray over to where Hattie Carson’s prize bull could get a sniff at them. Come spring, Cyrus would have himself some pretty good-looking calves. Damned if the old man hadn’t done it.

“I’ll take care of it, Dad,” he said.

His father wasn’t listening. He never listened. Mostly he ignored his son, except when he wanted the stock fed, or the barn roof repaired, or some fence mended. Then he wanted it done quick and done right. He had used his belt liberally, along with his fists, to give instruction—until the day fifteen-year-old Marsh had punched him back.

Marsh had been as astonished as his father when the old man hit the ground that day nearly six years ago, but it hadn’t been necessary for either of them to repeat the lesson. After that his father had browbeat him with words, but he hadn’t laid a hand on him again.

Marsh stepped into his bedroom and closed the door behind him, shutting out the sound of a police siren across the hall.

The room reminded him of his grandmother, the one person in the world who had ever given a damn about him. He missed her. He bought a lavender sachet at the H.E.B. every so often when he was grocery shopping and hid it under his pillow, because that was the scent she had always worn.

Doilies Grandma Dennison had crocheted adorned his bedside table and the chest. She had made the quilt on his old sleigh bed from colorful scraps of material that each had some family history she had explained to him.

“This here red is the dress your mama wore on her first date with your pa to the high school dance. Ooo-eee they were so much in love! That’s why your pa gets so testy sometimes that she’s not here with us anymore. And this is a piece of your pa’s Air Force uniform. In the Big War he was stationed in Burma refuelin’ fighter planes.

“This lace-covered satin bit is from my wed-din’ gown. Don’t pay no ‘tention to all these wrinkles I got now. Believe you me, I was one bee-u-tee-ful bride! And this flowered calico is a piece of your great-grandma Hailey’s Sunday-go-to-meetin’ dress.”

He listened to the stories sitting cross-legged at her feet, the porch creaking as she kept her rocker moving with a boot-shod toe.

They were wonderful tales. Like, how Great-grandma Hailey had locked Great-grandpa Hailey out of the house one spring until he tilled her garden. “This piece of chambray is from the shirt he had on that day,” she confided to him.

“This is part of your great aunt Eulalie’s dress she wore on the train to St. Louis to meet her beau. Only, she borrowed it from me without askin’, so I guess her claim to this here scrap of cotton is only secondhand.