Authors: Brian Hodge

Wild Horses (44 page)

BOOK: Wild Horses

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She came without promises and with few expectations. It was the way survivors lived — betting no more against the world than they could afford to lose. She came only agreeing to try, and learn if the way in which they’d touched each other during those last few hundred miles had been genuine, or only inspired by the fear of death, and enchantment by an ever-changing road.

She came for a week and the week became two, and by early December the northern Gulf shores felt the gray and cheerless grip of an otherwise mild winter.

Late one afternoon she trudged alone down a grassy slope that fell away from his house, past spiky thickets of palmetto, then on to the deserted beach. Until now he had forgotten the way she’d told him she wanted to rid herself of the revolver used to kill her father. She left with the same sense of purpose, even if she didn’t have the gun anymore. Tom watched her shrink at the end of a meandering line of footprints dimpled in the sand, a slim figure in leather, her wheat-colored hair snapping behind her on the frigid Gulf winds, until he lost sight of her altogether. Gulls circled and screeched, swooped low and soared high.

It was too cold for the ritual as she’d described it three months ago, the water gray as iron and unfriendly for wading, but the rest of it he imagined she might just as easily go through with, so long as she had something to throw. And when she came back, after a good long brooding time, she looked as though she might be free of one more clanking old chain.

“What was it?” he asked. “What did you throw in?”

She merely smiled with serenity and intrigue. She touched a finger to her lips, then kissed his, and went to hang up her new jacket. He recalled that he’d never been sure what had become of those sought-after disks. But whatever she’d thrown, he decided it was best not to know, for it was natural that men and women have their secrets from one another, and make of themselves mysteries that were better for remaining unsolved.

She’d come for a week and now it was five, and finally Tom decided that it was time for the trip he’d yet to suggest. They went to the cemetery and walked among its stones and its tattered shrouds of dead leaves, and they stood before the newer of the two graves marked ST. JOHN.

“I’m sure Mom would’ve preferred meeting you before now,” he said, “but you do what you can.”

At his side, unmoving, she gazed upon the headstone, its graven masks — one in laughter, one in tears. She stared so long it was as though they held some special meaning for her already.

“Dwight told me about it,” she finally admitted. “I knew all along what you’d done here.”

“Dwight,” he said. “What else did he tell you?”

“More than you probably would’ve wanted him to. Don’t be mad at him. He loves you and he just wanted me to make an informed decision.”

Tom nodded, sidestepping for a moment the issue of informed decisions. “So. The headstone. You like it.”

“I think it’s perfect. More than you probably ever intended,” she said. “I think those masks belong on every single one of these stones.”

He decided that she was right, for while few would ever set foot upon a stage, there was a greater truth that cut to the heart of each of them, player and audience alike. That we are born, and that we laugh, and we cry, and if in the end we’ve managed to do the former a little more often than the latter, then we can have achieved no greater triumph over the script and scripter of our lives.

“That decision you were talking about,” he said, thinking he knew the verdict already, still wanting to hear it from her lips. “Are you staying?”

She looked at him with most of her mysteries intact, from past and present and future, and he would take them, good and bad. Take them one and all.

“Wild horses couldn’t drag me away,” she said.

He thought for a time of taking her to visit the other graves that had brought him here before — Sweetwater, and the other St. John — then decided to leave them for another occasion, or perhaps none at all. Because the dead were at rest, all of them, for the first time in forever so far as he knew, so maybe for today it would be best to leave them that way.

END

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