Gunlaw

Gunlaw 16

Chapter 7

Mikeos sank and kept on sinking. The last fragments of Jenna's conversation spiralled down with him.

"You know it too," the woodkin said.

"Damn you."

"It's not so hard, Jenna. Just sharing. Isn't that what the blood magic is? Tell Mikeos the story of himself and he'll come on home?"

She grew faint, indistinct. ". . . can't . . ."

Just that one word now, sinking with him. "Can't."

Mikeos!

I'm dead. Go away.

Mikeos!

Dead.

Wake up. Don't make me do this.

Dead.

Wake up, Mikeos Jones.

...

Damn you. I can't do this. I can't.

Mikeos raised no objection. He didn't want her to do anything. Didn't want anything. Didn't want.

"I took my father's gun from its holster." Jenna's voice. His story but Jenna's voice. Mikeos tried to say no, tried to tell her to stop, but her mouth wouldn't speak his words. He felt her hex upon his forehead, sharp lines of pain, both the hot kind and the cold.

I took my father's gun from its holster. The smooth and worn leather gave it up too easily. Mother had hung the belt on the high peg at the back of the larder. It waited there above the preserves in their jars, above the molasses, above the dried corn shucks that hung there waiting to rustle. A gun's always waiting too. A gun is as patient as it is final.

Jonas had brought the gun to the house an hour past noon, with Dai Gunder hanging back behind him in his black coat, black hat, pretending sorrow, neither in the street nor in the house but flapping in the doorway, shadow thrown across the parlour floor, dark and dancing.

"Davy would have wanted me to bring his gun," Jonas said, hat in his hand, eyes watching Mother's shoes. "For the boy. When he's older."

"Mikey don't want it," she said. But she took the belt as if to refuse it would be to refuse Father's memory.

She hung it up high then went up to their room, to her mirror with the dried posies, the big clean mattress reaching from one iron bed end to the other. Father brought those bedsteads home last fall, grinning because he knew how she would like them, scroll worked twists between the bars, freighted in new from Ansos. She had hung the belt up and an hour later I opened the larder door to watch it while she sobbed upstairs, quiet as she could, so I wouldn't hear her crying.

High isn't high enough. My grandfather taught me that. Far isn't far enough, he'd say if they ran on him, the murderers, rustlers, bushwhackers out on the Dry Trail. He'd chased them all down in his time. I remember him saying it, craggy like rock, white bristles, deep folds at the corners of blue eyes, cornflower blue. Grandpa Ray let me hold my first gun too. I needed both hands and the strain shook my arms. I aimed it at him. I loved the old man but it seemed a gun had to be aimed at something that mattered, or else what was the point.

"Point a gun at someone long enough and it will fire itself," Grandpa Ray told me.

"But it ain't got no bullets, Grandpa."

"Even so." He didn't flinch or nothing but, even knowing the chambers were all empty, that old lawman didn't like the black eye staring at him.

Plains winters and long summers, all raw sun and dust, just made Grandpa Ray meaner and tougher, like them buttes that stand proud when the wind's stripped away the softer dirt. Didn't seem the years could find much purchase, but the cholera got its claws in him, in his gut. He died stinking and screaming. Mother took me in to see him near the end, in a hot little room at the Belle Temps hotel, the air thick with lavender oil and rot. He sat in that bed trying not to shake. A skeleton with skin stretched over it is how he looked. Like when a steer dies out in the Dry and the buzzards tear a way in and eat out its guts from the inside.