Payback at Morning Peak (5 page)

Jubal felt no pain on his trip down Morning Peak. Only a quiet sensation in his hip. Pru felt light, like she was a part of him.

The charred remains of the family barn lay in the distance, the house and front yard bordered by a copse of singed cottonwood and ponderosa. Jubal sat down behind a large boulder and took it all in.

As he poked his way through the damp forest, a small strawberry bush yielded a handful of bitterly unique fruit. It reminded him of Pru and ma making a tart strawberry jelly that he so loved. It took nearly the entire morning to make his way to the valley floor. He paused occasionally, listening for sounds of the men, but felt they would have no need to return, since they had already ravaged everything in sight.

Still, he waited, listening to the sounds of the mountain, the whispered leaves and occasional high-pitched calls of the ravens. Young’s Valley seemed at peace.

As he approached the homestead, something like music came across his ears. He hesitated, listening. It drifted from an area of the house hidden, from where he stood, by a stand of large pines, then waned. Faint lilting sounds hung in the air. A strong breeze moved the branches of the surrounding trees, and he realized he was listening to his mother’s wind chimes, still hanging on what was left of the front porch.

“Jube, what have you done, dear?” Jubal’s ma said to his pa.

“Oh, it’s nothing, really. Just a poor copy of a thing I saw hanging in McNeil’s store. I was going to buy it, but I thought we could use the money best on bacon and salt.”

Jubal’s father had made the chimes from broken glass, horseshoe nails, and long strands of rawhide. He had hung a worn-out rim from his wife’s small garden wheelbarrow horizontally, then strung the glass and hardware with bits of baling wire.

She loved it.

“I’d wondered where my long-lost thimble went.” She looked closely at the hanging apparatus.

Pru giggled.

Bea continued, “Hmmm, and there’s the other half of those broken scissors. Will miracles never cease?”

The family burst into grins when a breeze kicked up and teased a melody from the glass and horseshoe nails, all clinking together in a delicate symphony. Pru, standing with arms raised, announced the “Young Family’s Mountain Orchestra!”

The pile of gingham rags that once were his mother’s lay in a sodden mess. The rain had diluted the rust-colored bloodstains. As Jubal made his way to the back side of the barn, he dreaded seeing his father’s body.

Half the barn was destroyed, and the fire had finally burned through the rope, depositing his father’s broken body on the damp earth. Upon inspection, it appeared as though the renegades had taken their fallen brethren with them.

Jubal sifted through the charred timbers of the farmhouse. A blackened chair in his room, stark among the waste. A trunk with old clothes at the foot of his parents’ bed, still intact.

He bathed his wounded side, then wrapped one of his mother’s tattered dresses around his waist. He raised it first to his face and wept at the soft scent of his ma’s lilac-water perfume. He reprimanded himself for his indulgence and continued to prod around the gutted remains. An ovalshaped tin of talcum powder with an elegant sailboat on the lid reminded him of earlier, better times.

“Tell us about your voyage, Ma.” Prudence loved the story of her mother’s trip from Ireland.

Gene Hackman

“Pru, sweetheart, you’ve heard that story so many times.”

“Please, Ma.”

Jubal sat in a charred hard-backed chair and stared red-eyed at the oddments of the living room. The roof of the house, gone. The two walls left upright formed an L shape opposite the stone fireplace, standing like a soot-covered gravestone.

“Tell the story, Bea, the children love it.”

Jubal could feel his sister’s excitement as his mother told of the thunderous storm that hit the good ship
Bonne Daye.

“We were all so very sick, near to thirty days at sea. The waves beat terribly against the sides of the boat, tossing us like skirts on a windy-day clothesline. My daddy, your grandfather, said if he lived through this, he was going to put a boat’s oar over his shoulder and walk inland and the first person who asked what it was, that would be where he put down his roots.”

Jubal loved his father’s stories. She loved her mother’s.

“Jube, the children want to hear about your exploits. Tell about your fishing days.”

“Bea, I was trying to make a living. There were few ‘exploits,’ as you describe them.”

“Weren’t you swept overboard once, Pa?” Prudence asked. “Where was it, off Halifax or someplace?”

Jubal could still see his father taking time to light his pipe.

“It was off Prince Edward Island, we were a group of four boats. Mostly youngsters like me—”

“Youngsters”—it was hard to believe his father had ever been a young man. And now? He could never get any older.

Jubal poked around in the ashes of his home for several hours. A small round-topped chest, blackened, stood next to his parents’ bed, the little steamer trunk’s brass lock and fittings holding it together. He opened it and found inside a locket of his mother’s. The fire had fused the clasp to the thin chain.

A silver brooch in a half-moon shape had survived intact. Jubal picked it up, rubbed the dust away, and slipped it into his pocket. His mother’s Bible, protected in a leather-bound pouch, held papers and old letters stuffed between the pages. Jubal carefully removed the crinkled souvenirs, then placed them back in the leather pouch for storage in the root cellar. The Bible, he decided, would for now accompany him inside his shirt. He discovered a delicate ring Prudence kept in a painted tin box. His father’s soot-covered pistol lay in the ashen rubble of the kitchen cabinet, the wood handle partially burned away but the tarnished steel frame of the weapon still in one piece.

“We were snot-nosed youngsters and this ole gal who ran the Blue Heron in Halifax—”

“She ran a blue heron?” interrupted Pru.

“The lady was the proprietor of a drinking establishment called the Blue Heron.” Pa smiled. “Audrey was huge and didn’t take guff from any of the rowdies. A couple of them got to squabbling, and this… Amazon, I guess would be the best way to describe her—”

Pru looked to her mother for an explanation of the strange word.

“Greek mythology, dear. Female warriors.”

“Do you want to hear this story or not?”

“Yes, Jube, dear, please proceed.”

Pru and Jubal giggled as their father continued.

“Well, this old gal grabbed these two ruffians by the scruff of their necks and marched them right out the door. When she came back she stood in the center of the saloon. Any and all you roughnecks want to get to fussing and fighting in my drinking house, step up!” Jubal, Sr., paused. “I still remember the silence that drifted over that room. You could hear a mouse breathing. God a-mighty, she was challenging all of us.” He had a faraway, bemused look. “Years later when I won that weapon in a poker game, I named it after her.”

Pru raised her hand to ask a question. “But, Pa, why does a stinky old gun have to have a name?”

“It doesn’t really, sweetheart. It was just something that reminded me of a different time in my life.”

“A better time?”

“No, just different. More hectic, kind of full of youthful troubles and the like. Audrey the Argument-Settler. Never really had to use it in that regard. Fact is, it was never really loaded, but it was always there… just in case I ever needed it.”

In a cracked mason jar in the root cellar, Jubal found a few bullets that had survived. He pocketed them, in case Audrey would need to settle any new arguments.

He had never fired a pistol. His father’s gun had always been treated as a sacred object, kept hidden and rarely taken from its dark sanctuary. Now Jubal held it, moving the weapon slowly in his hands, pleased with its weight. When he pushed the release tab for the cylinder, it opened partially, soot and ash restricting its movement. Jubal shook the gun and blew hard against the machined pieces to clear them of debris. Once open, the cylinder spun freely. He slid six rounds into the awaiting chambers and pushed the apparatus back into place. It seated with a satisfying click.

He carried the pistol at his side and walked the perimeter of the small valley, wishing he could come upon just one of the men who had raided the farm. A noise from inside the tree line startled him. He spun toward the sound and fired, the slug ricocheting off a large rock several yards to the right of where he’d aimed.

The white tail of a fawn retreated swiftly through the thick forest.

Startled, not only at the power of the gun but at the undisciplined response he had to the deer in the woods, Jubal realized he had a lot to learn about Audrey. She was risky, as his father had warned, and needed to be handled with care and respect.

Jubal stood in the open yard in front of the family house, guessing this ruined shell was now his. He would find the rest of the devils who did this, and he would make them explain their reasons, just before they begged forgiveness from their sainted mothers. He would shout to them as they lay on their heathen backs, staring up at him from the bottom of their earthen pit.

He slept in the root cellar, on a bed of straw salvaged from the barn, using smoky patchwork quilt remnants and tattered curtains from the house to keep warm. Everything smelled like smoke.

Awakened by the sound of a high-pitched whinny and approaching hoofbeats, Jubal quickly found his slim rifle. He cracked open the cellar door and listened. If the bastards were back, he would be ready for them.

The hoofbeats grew louder, and a shadow crossed his line of vision. He felt relief when he realized it was Frisk, one of his pa’s draft horses. She wandered about, tossing her head, snorting and fractious, her mane singed by fire. Jubal spoke softly and led her by the halter to a tree stump, where he mounted her. He coaxed her several times around the yard. Protesting, she danced in tight circles, but the warmth from her back reassured him. The horse,
alive and familiar, was a solid thing he could hold on to. He stroked her neck, gentling her.

Jubal chose a small rise on the north boundary of the valley to bury his family. Frisk, hooked to the buckboard, served as a bearer to transport the bodies.

He dug three separate graves and laid his family to rest. Prudence in the center, sheltered on either side by her parents. He had washed their faces, straightened their clothing, and lowered them into the fresh ground, still moist from the melting winter snows.

He recited from his mother’s Bible, and afterward he returned the earth as he had found it.

Jubal loaded the wagon with as much food as he could find, emptying the root cellar of other provisions he thought might be of help. He took his time gathering what was left of the leather tack from the toolshed and put together dried jerky and beets from his mother’s larder. His father’s rain-soaked hat smelled of damp tobacco. Snapping it several times against his leg, he tried it on and was pleased at the fit. The remains of several burnt-cornered books lay in the rubble.
The Count of Monte Cristo
in the center of the pile had survived. Less fortunate,
Don Quixote,
burned to an almost perfect oval shape, the text in the center of the pages barely readable. Jubal riffled through the scorched pages, stopping occasionally to read snippets of Quixote’s pleas. “‘… my endeavor not to disappoint…’ “It was as if the character were speaking to him. “‘… even at the expense of my life, or even more, if more were possible.’”
Strange.
He held the book in his hands. “Wait and hope.”

With Frisk hitched to the buckboard, he drove out of
the valley not really knowing where he was going, thinking he should tell someone of this occurrence—who that should be, he wasn’t quite sure.

At the crest of a hill, Jubal looked back, the wasted farm standing out in sharp contrast to its verdant surroundings. He was reminded of one of his pa’s favorite sayings.
If you can stand on a hill and look back at your land with your arms outstretched, and your land exceeds your fingertips, you’re in God’s graces, indeed.

Frisk snorted as if something were in the air. Jubal turned her and proceeded northwest.

After nearly an hour, a trail opened through a pleasant valley, the place where his family had driven through on their last trip into Cerro Vista.

Jubal’s father guided the team carefully into town.

“Pa, can I get a what’s-you-call-it? A sarsaparilla?”

“And a hard candy, if Old Man McNeil has them still.” Jubal, Sr., regarded his wife and daughter. “Spend anything your hearts desire, girls—as long as it’s under four dollars.”

The women chuckled as they dismounted and went into McNeil’s, while Jubal, Sr., asked his son to take the wagon down to Blacksmith Charley to have a look at Frisk’s right rear shoe.

Jubal nodded, proud to be given the responsibility. “Sure, Pa. Where you off to?”

“I’ve got to see Will Davis about our land transfer. Evidently nothing important, a few papers to be signed, something about the former owner. Shouldn’t be long.” With a wave, he stepped down from the buckboard.

Jubal wheeled the wagon around and pointed Frisk back toward Charley’s. As usual, a crowd was gathered at the blacksmith’s, the favorite place for locals to hang out and swap stories. “I hear tell he was so fast he could blow out a candle and be in bed before it got dark.”