The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [65]
I moved fast, as I knew there wouldn’t be much light left soon, and it didn’t take long before I saw the brown hide of the mare, but no one that I could discern was leading her, and I slowed so as not to spook horse or man, and when I was within fifty yards of them, I shouted at whoever was in front to stop and turn around slow.
As he did, I kept approaching with my rifle shouldered, and I could see as he stood in the road now with his hands raised, one still holding the lead, that it was just a boy, twelve, thirteen years old at the most, and I knew what the girl had meant. The other carbine was slung over his shoulder.
“You stole our horse,” I said, my cheek in the rifle’s weld so that I could shoot the moment he might draw a pistol or try to run.
“Your horse?” he said, his voice high-pitched but cocky for a young boy.
“Drop the lead and I won’t shoot you,” I said.
“Does a week of feeding my uncle’s mare grass and water make her yours?”
Which is what I would have countered with if I was staring down the barrel of a rifle and a stolen horse pawed and sulled at my side. “If it’s your family’s,” I asked, “where are they?”
“Dead,” he said, “like everyone else.”
“Why’d you beat the girl?”
“She came after me with a stove lid, the bitch. What are you doing living there?”
“It’s no concern of yours. Not anymore. Now drop the lead and leave the horse.” He stood there, not frozen or scared, just indifferent, like we’d been talking about what price he got in town for goods that were stored elsewhere. “Drop the lead and walk on,” I said again, “or I’ll shoot you where you stand.”
He dropped the lead and brought the carbine around fast from his shoulder, faster than I thought possible, and the two of us stood in that position, duel-like. I could have killed him in the space of a breath, but he seemed pitiful to me, and yet noble for holding hard to this last remnant of his life.
“It’s not loaded,” I said.
“You don’t know that I’ve got bullets, do you?”
“I know.”
He lowered the barrel and pushed the rifle around to his back, hooked his thumb around the strap in one hand and the horse’s bridle in the other, and stood looking at me in the dusk.
“All right, then,” he said. “Shoot a man for a horse.” And he let go of both strap and bridle and stood there in the road with his arms outstretched, so that the mare thought he meant to give her some room, and she stepped into the grass to graze.
I held my rifle steady and aimed for the center of his chest, stroked the stock with my trigger finger above the guard, and breathed deeply in and out to calm myself. After a while, the boy turned and gave the horse a tug and she walked off along behind him, just as they had been doing when I came upon them, and I waited until they were out of range, ejected the last round from the magazine into the dirt, heaved the rifle into the woods, where it landed in thick moss beneath an oak, and ran at a trot back to the house and the girl.
I NURSED HER INTO THE EVENING AND NIGHT, HELD HER AND wiped her face as she came in and out of a light consciousness, and then she slept for a long stretch, so that I fell asleep, too, in the chair I kept at her bedside. She woke in the darkness of midnight, shook me awake, and said, “It’s time. It’s broken.”
I lit a lamp and looked down at the mess of sheet and ticking on which she slept and could see what looked in the light like mingled daubs of blood. She saw it, too, and said, “No, it can be that way sometimes. I was careful to shield myself when he hit me. Wash and put the water on.”
But she was still ashen and sweating, and I made her lie back down in her bed after I had stripped the soiled sheets and thrown some shirts and coats over the bare frame. For a long time, she lay resting and breathing deeply, time I took to bank the stove, get more water from the well, and fill the pot to boil.
When her labor began, I knew enough to tell that it was