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Twister coming along the way.
He could see the plum-and-wine clouds, gathering fast and darkening the afternoon into a bastard figment of night, though the plains far below remained clear and yellow-bright. The air was stale, heady from a previous rain and scratchy with grass and dirt picked up by howls of wind. Just an hour ago, all the world for miles had seemed cast under a surreal, brown veil; the clouds were moving fast, however, and had shunted the gold and tan back down to earth where it belonged. They now churned that deep, bruisey color that predicted only hazard.
Twister weather, just as sure to Jack Marston as Heaven was reachable. And he seemed to himself the only living thing sitting out in it. The small part of his heart which still stubbornly clung to his old, gentle nature drove him to corral his remaining animals into the barn, when a branch had very nearly struck him in the pasture. And Lord knows there weren’t another person around for miles.
Jack sat beneath the tree high up on the hill which housed his family: in all practicality, the worst place to be if a twister should begin to shape from the wind and clouds and come to claim him. But anywhere else, he couldn’t see it all so clearly.
He thought he’d feel the wind. Indeed, some gusts would come down and nearly bowl him sideways, but while the sky churned and the branches whipped about above him, the air just at Jack’s level was mostly still and tense, flooding around him as if he were sunk to the very bottom of a river. Ross must have felt something similar, before they’d dredged him up from Don Julio, the ducks he’d been shooting at swimming contentedly above him.
The branches swam against the current of air above Jack, their tide choppy and violent, and the sky winked in and out between their movement, like sneering, gray eyes.
Jack pointed up at one of the eyes, lifted his thumb such as he was pointing a gun, and closed an eye, aiming. Pa’d been lame in an eye— why he had to close it when pointing. Jack just wasn’t as good a shot.
He’d still got Ross.
The gray eyes stopped blinking above him, staring blankly now that the wind seemed to take a moment to catch its breath. Jack let his hand fall to he dirt, and his eyes fell, too.
Ma and Pa and Uncle didn’t move, of course. He’d hammered down their grave-markers just after locking away the animals, and set a few extra rocks around them just to be safe. They were all poorly made, by his own hand— if he had to make them all over again, he figured that was just his lot in life. Jack wondered if he’d one day become a better carpenter. He was good with them tools: what Pa’d told him, last they spoke, on the strange and impossible day he’d stopped shooting. (Or maybe Jack was a prophet. If so, he was rather as poor a one as he was a carpenter, predicting only his own misfortune. Or else, God only had such in store for him.)
Jack scratched at his face, where the dusty air had irritated raw-rubbed eyes and fresh razor burn. Just beyond the gate of Beecher’s Hope, a hawk of some sort battled against a flurry of wind, swooping up and down and tumbling over itself in the air. Whether it was trying its luck at the critters running for shelter below, or else trying itself to get out of the gale, Jack couldn’t guess, but he watched its mighty struggle nonetheless.
Ma would have wanted Jack to go inside, with clouds dark as that. Pa too, with less urgency but more insistence. Uncle would have urged him along, but stayed on the porch to watch the storm until he was dragged in as well. They all three of them had the right of it, he knew— sheltering Jack was just about the one thing all three of them could ever agree on.
‘And here I am, making real proud by their efforts,’ he thought, halfway amused and halfway sick with guilt.
He and Ma’d buried Pa in his good suit: the one he’d been married in. Ma, he’d not had the extra help with changing, but had struggled her into her nice pieces nonetheless, the lace from her wedding dress torn out to pillow her head away from splintering coffin-wood.
He’d burned the clothing Pa’s been shot in— just wasn’t any use for it, stained up and full of holes. All but his hat: the only piece of John Marston hadn’t been ruined by that firing squad. It now sat in Jack’s lap, trembling at times when the wind seemed interested in stealing it, but he held firm. He wore one of Ma’s old handkerchiefs about his neck, fray-edged and musty, but the same pale pink she’d seemed to favor for herself.
Didn’t really have nothing of his own, now Jack thought about it. His books, but he’d stopped reading them the evening he burned his father's clothing. They felt like a boy’s treasures— too precious for the likes of him now.
Them gunslingers he’d read for pages and pages never seemed to mind killing those wronged them. Pa’d never seemed to mind it, neither.
And all them had something to lose by it.
The animals in the barn were raising their unease, mooing and neighing and squawking as the air seemed to change it’s mood— pressed headier against the world, and began to cough out distant spells of thunder. The clouds were moving faster, too: starting to swirl and dip, far out on the horizon, beyond Broken Tree. The hawk shrieked and disappeared, blown out of Jack’s sight.
The crosses wouldn’t dare budge, but he was yet a poor carpenter.
He let out a breath and closed his eyes on empty, dusty lungs.