McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales - Michael Chabon [80]
“Aye? May it do ya fine. I never got the taste for it myself.”
The barn was far bigger than the ranch house, at least fifty yards long and fifty feet high. The front was festooned with reap-charms in honor of the season; stuffy-guys with huge sharproot heads stood guard. From above the open bay over the main doors, the butt of the head-beam jutted. A rope had been fastened around this. Below, in the yard, the boys had built a good-sized stack of hay. Oy stood on one side of it. The dog was looking up as Benny Slightman grabbed the rope, gave it a tug, then retreated back into the loft and out of sight. Oy began to bark in anticipation. A moment later Benny came pelting forward with the rope wrapped in his fists and his hair flying out behind him.
The boy let go, flew into the haystack, disappeared, then came up laughing. Oy ran around him, barking.
Roland watched Jake reel in the rope. Benny lay on the ground, playing dead, until Oy licked his face. Then he sat up, giggling.
To one side of the barn was a remuda of workhorses, perhaps twenty in all. A trio of cowpokes in chaps and battered shor’ boots were leading the last half-dozen mounts toward it. On the other side of the yard was a slaughter-pen filled with steers. In the following weeks they would be butchered and sent downriver on the trading boats.
Jake retreated into the loft, then came pelting forward and launched himself into space along the arc of the rope. The two men watched him disappear, laughing, into the pile of hay.
“We bide, gunslinger,” Eisenhart said. “Even in the face of the outlaws, we bide. They come . . . but then they go. Do’ee ken?”
“Ken very well, say thankya.”
Eisenhart nodded. “If we stand against ’em, all that may change. To you and yours, it might not mean s’much as a fart in a high wind either way. If ye survive, you’ll move along, win or lose. We have nowhere to go.”
“But—”
Eisenhart raised his hand. “Hear me, I beg. Would’ee hear me?”
Roland nodded. Beyond them, the boys were running back into the barn for another leap. Soon the coming dark would put an end to their game.
“Suppose they send fifty or sixty, as they have before, and we wipe them out? And then, suppose that a week or a month later, after you’re gone, they send five hundred against us?”
Roland considered this. As he was doing so, Margaret Eisenhart—Margaret Henchick that was—joined them. She was slim, fortyish, small-breasted, dressed in jeans and a shirt of gray silk. She was a pretty woman. She was also a problematic woman, stuffed with unspoken rage. After meeting her father—he that was called the heart-stone, he with the uncut, ungroomed beard which signified that he was childless—Roland thought he understood that rage a little better. As far as Henchick was concerned, this woman was bound for hell simply for the ankle she showed the world below the cuff of her jeans. And her husband? The children they’d made together? Better not to ask Henchick’s opinion of them, and Roland hadn’t. Sai Eisenhart’s hair, pulled into a bun against her neck, was black threaded with white. One hand hid beneath her apron.
“How many harriers might come against us is a fair question,” she said, “but this might not be a fair time to ask it.”
Eisenhart gave his sai a look that was half humorous and half irritated. “Do I tell you how to run your kitchen, woman? When to cook and when to wash?”
“Only four times a week,” said she. Then, seeing Roland rise from the rocker next to her husband’s: “Nay, sit still, I beg you. I’ve been in a chair this last hour, peeling sharproot with Edna, yon’s mother.” She nodded in Benny