Chapter Text
The house was the same as Lucy remembered, which was a shame as she hadn’t remembered it being very nice. Sure enough it was as run down and dirty as it had been when she left it at eighteen, grit packed so tightly in the corners it would have to be pried out with a pocketknife and the windows creaking every time the wind rose.
But it was home, all right. Couldn’t take the memories away. She wished she’d made it back before her dad passed, and she wished he could have met the boys. They were too old not to know their grandpa, although too young to know what they were missing because they hadn’t.
When she went in to collect the body she didn't recognize the sheriff, but he recognized her.
“Well,” he said, getting to his feet with a worn-out grin. “If it ain't little Lucy, come back to us looking just the same as you did when you were three feet tall.” He took off his hat and put it on the table in front of him, in deference to a woman being in the office. His skin was dark and sun-cracked, his hair thick and shining with oil.
“Good afternoon,” Lucy said, smiling back at him. “‘Fraid I don't remember you, last I was here it was Little Luke Nesbitt in the sheriff's office.”
He nodded, looking tired. “Died,” he said bluntly, his expression gone serious as quickly as it had gone delighted when she’d walked in. “That was three sheriffs ago, too. Think they only dragged me in here ‘cause I ain't got a wife any longer to make upset when I go.”
“Oh,” Lucy said, taken aback by everything in that statement. “Sorry about your wife.”
“Well.” The sheriff held out his hand. “James Vasquez. I was your pa’s neighbor until I moved into town. You used to bother my pigs.”
The memory slapped her like a wet dishcloth. Hand to her mouth she breathed, “Oh, of course.” A giggle, uncontained, broke through. “Made 'em run like they'd just seen the frying pan and knew they were next. Gosh, I’m sorry. We were real wild kids back then.”
“Aw, no worse than any of the others, I reckon.” James' smile was kind. “Didn't do much harm, and when you did, your ma and your pa set you straight.”
“They sure did,” Lucy said. Pain lanced her heart and she ignored it. “I got my own children now to set straight.”
James' face broke out into an even bigger smile. “That right? Well— we could use ‘em. This town needs some good kids. All we got are—” But he stopped and shook his head, as if he knew he was going to be impolite if he kept on. “You gonna bring ‘em down here? How old are they?”
“Fourteen and seventeen. Boys—my eldest, Michael, and his little brother Sam.”
James whistled. “Ma’am, you got men.” He sighed, a disappointed little puff of air. “I sure do miss when the town had babies,” he said wistfully. “Ain't had a baby in years, seems like. Sometimes a young couple comes through, I get my hopes up, but they don't stay. Lookin’ for land, most of ‘em, and a town that ain’t got a whorehouse.”
“Are there any of those?”
James laughed. “And that’s the truth.” He sobered suddenly. “You’ll be wanting to see your pa’s body.”
“Yes.”
“We got him in the back. Packed him in salt and charcoal ‘cause we weren’t certain how long it would take you. You got here pretty quick, though.”
He led her through the building and around the back, to where a storeroom squatted between the sheriff’s office and another multi-storied building. Bringing out a ring of keys he unlocked the padlock on the door, which creaked open to reveal a small, dark, crowded room. Boxes of paper and tools were carefully labeled and arranged, many of them stacked up to the ceiling. To the right of the door sat a coffin on a low cart, a sift of salt around its base.
James stood back respectfully and Lucy moved into the darkness, careful not to knock anything over. The ceiling was low and the space was relatively cool, protected as it was from the sun by the taller buildings next to it. She put a hand on the wooden lid of the coffin, which was unplaned pine, and took a deep, shuddering breath in. She hadn’t expected to come across the coffin so suddenly, with no kind of fanfare. In her head she’d maybe pictured some unveiling: a black cloth somberly removed; a candle or two lit in the corner. She had been picturing the coffin waiting for her in a church, she supposed. Instead she had just entered a regular old storeroom and found herself looking at it, no kind of lead up or warning. Dimly, she was aware of James stepping outside to give her some privacy.
Lucy traced the grain of the wood with her thumb. “Hi, Pa,” she whispered. “I missed you something awful. I’m so sorry I wasn’t here.”
When the letter had come she hadn’t believed it. How could her father die, and only forty? Then she’d done the math—forty when she’d left, and Michael was seventeen. But fifty seven still seemed too young to die, and there’d been no indication he was in poor health in any of his letters to her. The shock had sent her reeling: she’d done plenty of things in those next few days she wasn’t proud of. Leaving her husband wasn’t one of them.
The coffin was cool, and smelled of a different kind of place—someplace salty and laden with life, like how she imagined the sea. She leaned down until she could rest her cheek on it, thinking of the last time she’d seen her father. He’d been standing on the road, his arms crossed, watching her and Jake ride the wagon towards Nebraska. Michael was in her belly then, and she’d known already that her pa and the baby wouldn’t meet for a good long while. She hadn’t realized they never would.
“The boys should’ve met you,” Lucy said now. A tear dripped off her nose onto the wood, staining it darker. “You would have liked Sam. You and Michael would have fought awful, but you would have loved him, too. They’re good boys. They had to come a long way this week.”
She sniffed, and patted the wood. “I guess maybe you’re in a good place. But I wish you could be here and show me around the house. I can’t explain half of what’s in there. You got a strange sense of design since I left, huh?” She smiled thinking about Sam’s face when he’d walked inside. The boys were at the house now, and she suddenly wished she’d brought them along with her, if only because she could picture what Michael’s face would be doing right now, watching her talk to a dead body. The nervous pinch of his eyebrows and the sideways twist of his mouth.
“How am I gonna do this?” she whispered. “How’d you do it, after Ma died? Can’t’ve been easy, raising me alone.” There wasn’t any answer from the wood under her cheek. She tried to imagine what he would have said when he’d been alive, and came up short. Maybe she hadn’t known him as well as she’d thought.
Pushing herself back up, she wiped her face on her sleeve and pulled out her handkerchief to blow her nose wetly. “Thanks for keeping the home fires lit, Pa. We’ll take care of the house and the horses.”
With a final pat, she turned from the coffin and opened the door of the storeroom again, stepping out into the bright, hot sun. James was standing a polite several yards distant, smoking a pipe and pretending to be absorbed by the horizon. When the door opened he turned to look at her, his face carefully neutral.
“I suppose he wanted to be buried on his own land?” Lucy asked, realizing she didn’t know.
James nodded. He tapped the bowl of his pipe into the dirt, then blew it clean. “Had a will drawn up and everything. That was years back, but I don’t think he was much of a man to change his mind.”
Lucy laughed. “No,” she agreed. “He wasn’t.” For a moment they both stood in silence, looking out over the plains. Then Lucy asked quietly, “Who found him?”
“A neighbor. Saw him sitting on the porch, rode up to say hello but he wasn’t moving. Doctor said his heart went. He hadn’t been out there long— the animals hadn’t gotten to him. Although maybe that was all the garlic,” James added with a laugh. Then he remembered who he was talking to and looked abashed. “Beggin’ your pardon,” he said, embarrassed. “Only we used to give him a ribbing for that.”
Lucy waved him off. She knew how people talked, and her father had given people quite a lot to talk about. Straightening her cuffs and pulling her shoulders back, she suggested to James that she should be on her way home. Jumping into action, the sheriff called in his deputy and they had her father’s coffin loaded onto the wagon in ten minutes. Lucy took her leave of them both, letting them know she’d be back in town tomorrow, when she and the boys were settled.
“Come on back down here,” James said cheerfully. “I’ll introduce you to the locals. “
As she drove the horse back up the road, bumping along in the wagon with one hand behind her on the pine coffin, she shivered to herself despite the heat, reflecting on something the deputy sheriff had said as they loaded the box. He was a tall, scrawny young man with a spray of teenage acne still crowding his chin—a boy, really; startlingly young to be a deputy—and he had shaken her hand without quite looking her in the eye. As they loaded the coffin he muttered to nobody, “At least they found this one.”
“Hush, now,” the sheriff said quietly. “Respect for the dead, Edgar.”
But Lucy had heard it, and she was curious by nature. She asked what he meant. The boy blushed, then his spotty chin went up defiantly. “Round these parts, bodies usually go missing. People,” he corrected quickly, glancing at the sheriff. “People go missing round here, usually. Your pa got lucky, the way I see it. We found him before they—” Another glance at the sheriff, who was glaring at him. “I mean, you got him back.”
Lucy glanced at the sheriff. “That right?”
James was still glaring at Edgar, but after a moment he sighed and ran a hand through his thick brown hair. “We got ourselves a few cases of missing people,” he admitted. “I daresay it’s not a whole lot more than any other border town in Texas, only ours had to go and get a reputation for it.”
“Got in the papers and everything,” Edgar put in. “But they didn’t get it right, they didn’t get all the facts. The facts are, nobody’s proved all the missing people were murdered. They probably were, though,” he added.
Lucy looked between them, confused. James shook his head, looking exasperated and embarrassed. “A reporter came out and got everyone here yapping,” he said to Lucy in low, confidential tones. “Next thing we knew we were in the fancy papers from New York, and anytime people were coming through they had to tell us what they’d heard about us. Haven’t heard the end of it since. Somebody finally brought us a copy of one of the papers, and Edgar’s wanting to make a new town sign with the headline.”
“It’d warn people,” Edgar said stubbornly. They’d clearly had the conversation many times before and were content to drive it over the same worn-down tracks. “Make people act smarter ‘round here.”
“I’d say it’d send the wrong message,” James said to Lucy. “Sign like that, you stop getting people come through at all.”
“They’d come through,” Edgar said, sounding sure. “It’d be like—a call to action. And maybe we’d get some real muscle around here to fight back. ‘Santa Carla’,” he said, hand moving sideways in front of him like the sign was already there and he was only reading off it. “‘Number One Murder Capital of the World’.”
† † †
The house was full of garlic.
“Gee,” Sam had said when they’d walked in, looking around with his mouth wide open. “You think he liked it or what?”
The bulbs hung in clusters next to every doorway, from every ceiling beam, from every shelf on every case. There were bulbs in bowls on the table, on the windowsills, and on the floor of both bedrooms, pushed into the corner with their stalks uncut, left long and crisping. The house smelled strongly of it: skunky and pungent. Michael could only imagine what it would have smelled like when the garlic was fresh, instead of dried and wrinkling from age. He broke off a bulb from one of the clusters hanging from the ceiling and closed his fist over it, crushing it gently into cloves. They came away from each other easily, paper skins drifting out of his hand to the floor. Each clove was a shriveled memory of what was once bulbous and oily.
“Must’ve,” he said. “Or he just liked how it looked all strung up.”
Sam touched one of the bouquets nailed to the wall and his nose wrinkled. “Can’t be that.”
Even their ma hadn’t known what to say about the garlic. She’d mostly ignored it, preoccupied with turning around again to fetch the coffin. Michael didn’t see what the hurry there was—the man was long dead, after all—but Lucy was out of the house again in ten minutes, leaving him and Sam to their own devices.
Michael brushed his hand over the table and it came up sticky with dust and grime. There were bowls encrusted with months-abandoned food on the table and a fur of dirt over everything on the shelves and furniture. Nobody had entered the house since his grandpa had died, and it smelled like neglect and decay… but mostly of garlic.
“I miss home,” Sam said gloomily, poking at a stuffed and mounted bird. The bird—like every stuffed animal in the house—looked like it had only just died, but also like it had died in a slightly unnatural position. Every creature was perfectly preserved, but mounted in a slightly off-kilter pose, almost jaunty in its manner. The bird’s head was twisted slightly too far around, like it was trying to peer at them upside down. There was an armadillo looking over its shoulder at them, its front paws held to each side as if to say, ‘Well?’ A buck’s head on the wall appeared to be winking at them.
“This is home now, Sam,” Michael said, staring at the buck.
“I miss Arkansas.”
“Well, tough shit,” Michael snapped. “We left, we ain’t going back.”
Sam didn’t answer. When Michael glanced at him he was running his finger along the spines of a meager book collection, his expression grim.
The bedrooms were identical except that one faced north; Michael took the one with windows that would get the full glare of the morning sun instead. Sam followed him in and looked around. “One bed?” he asked, horrified.
“We’ll make a second one,” Michael said. “Should only take me a few days once I got the wood.”
Sam looked mollified. He flopped onto the mattress, then jumped back up coughing as a cloud of dust billowed into the air. Michael laughed at him, and Sam picked up a pillow and hit him with it. By the time their ma came up the road in the wagon, there was down fluff everywhere on top of the dirt and grime. Sam ran out to greet her, yelling: “He hit me first!” which was a downright lie.
Lucy glanced over their dirty faces, eyes catching on the feathers stuck in Michael’s hair and stuffed down Sam’s shirt. He watched her decide not to ask. Clambering out of the wagon, she unhitched Duck and led him to Michael, who took the rope and let Duck into the fenced-off yard. The trough inside was full of water, and Twist stood quietly near it already, recovering from having carried Michael and Sam together for the last leg of their long journey. Both horses were serene and steady creatures, unfazed by the long ride and new quarters. Michael was envious of them for this.
When Michael walked into the house, Lucy and Sam were standing together quietly, Sam gathered in Lucy’s arms. “My baby,” she was saying softly, into his hair. “You’ll like it one of these days. It’s different, I know.”
Michael hovered in the doorway, embarrassed for Sam. The kid was fourteen and still letting himself be coddled in his ma’s arms like a babe. When Lucy met his eye over Sam’s head Michael looked away, then backed out of the house again to start unloading their trunks from the wagon. When he came back in with one of them Sam had been put to work stripping the beds and Lucy was rolling up her sleeves, preparing to tackle the dirty stove.
“Thank you, honey,” she said distractedly, as Michael set the trunk down. “Pull up some water, will you? And find the soap flakes—this dirt ain’t gonna shift easily.”
“What’re we gonna do about Grandpa?”
“We’ll bury him tomorrow. There’s a boy coming over in the morning who’s been helping with the horses, he’ll help you dig.”
Digging a grave was a damn ominous way to be introduced to a new town, but Michael didn’t argue. Better they got him in the ground then let him sit on the wagon. “Why’d he hang all this up?” he asked, poking at one of the clusters of garlic hanging from a roof beam. When he did, a little shiver of dust fell from the dried stalks to the floor.
Lucy looked around, shaking her head. “Dunno,” she admitted. “The house didn’t look like this when I left. He got a taste for it, I suppose.” She laughed. “He must’ve smelled to high heaven. It’s a wonder anyone could stand his company. And I heard he had a lady friend, too. Imagine that!”
Michael could not. But he had never met his grandpa, so it was hard to imagine him doing anything, and every new fact uncovered left him even less sure of what the man was like before he’d died; the man whose house they were inside seemed like a different man entirely from the one who Lucy described, or who wrote them letters at Christmas.
In the end they decided to throw all the garlic away, tossing it into a pile behind the house for the pigs. The house didn’t look much cleaner after they’d done it—it was still cluttered with stuffed animals, carved bits and pieces of wood, old books, and broken furniture. If the old man had ever thrown anything away Michael couldn’t imagine what it would have been, it seemed that he’d kept any old item that had ever come into his possession. Lucy kept uncovering things she remembered from her childhood: a wooden rattle; a broken drum; a frayed scrap of quilt she said had been her baby quilt. By the time the sun had set they’d only just cleared the table well enough to set it, Lucy putting down three bowls of stew and sitting down with a groan.
“We’ll have to go into town tomorrow,” she said. “Or this is the only good meal you’ll get ‘til Sunday.”
“I’ll come,” Sam said, his mouth full. He swallowed and wiped his hand across his face, leaving a smudge of new dirt across the old. They were all filthy with it—travel dust and whatever they’d picked up cleaning the house—and Michael itched under the multiple layers of sweat and grime. “Can I?”
Lucy reached over and swiped her thumb over his cheek. It didn’t so much remove the dirt as displace it. “‘Course,” she said fondly. “Michael, you too. I’ll need a strong back.”
“After the gravedigging,” Michael said. He ate mechanically, not tasting the stew. He was going to jump in the river after he’d eaten, wash the worst of his own filth off. Every inch of him wanted out of the house, into the open air—he felt cooped up and restless, even as tired as he was. The stuffy air and the dust in his nose was making him nervous, somehow: he didn’t like how the house felt abandoned, undisturbed, even after they’d been working in it for hours.
The other two had gone quiet at the reminder of the task they had to complete the next day. When Lucy spoke again, it was to change the subject.
“When we’ve got the horses back we’ll see about breeding,” she said, scraping the last of her stew out of her bowl. Her portion had been smaller than theirs, Michael noted, although she had been working just as hard as they had all day. “Could take us a little while to get it right, but your grandpa had a good reputation for horse breeding and you’re not too bad at breaking them yourself, Michael. We’ll have money coming in soon enough.” Her face was set and determined.
After he’d finished eating, and while Sam was distracted pawing through some of their grandpa’s old clothes, Michael saddled Twist and rode her to the river, which ran clear and shallow at its bend closest to the house. It took him all of a minute to shuck off his clothes and wade in, yelping at the shock of cold before his body got accustomed and he could lie down in it, letting the water eddy around him.
The bruise on his ribs was faded and yellow, but it still hurt him when he twisted too hard to the right. His black eye was gone, which was a blessing if they’d be going into town tomorrow—it wouldn’t be wise to show up in a new place looking like a brawler, no matter how his ma tried to spin it or lie about it. When he stretched out the fingers of his right hand they ached, but he could use them well enough to clean floors and dig graves. All in all he wasn’t much more worse off than the times he’d been thrown from horses—maybe better, except that the horses hadn’t called him names and threatened to kill his ma.
After a few minutes he sat up and started scrubbing himself, careful around the bruise. When he moved wrong and the pain twanged through him he paused, sitting still and watching his own dirt float downstream, letting the river take Arkansas away. When he was moving the noise of splashing traveled far out over the horizon into the fading, golden light; when he was still he could only hear the soft folding of water over sand and the faint rustle of chaparral moving in the intermittent breeze.
He got as clean as he was going to get by river water before he waded out and sat in the grass naked, reluctant to get back into his filthy clothes. If there were animals about besides Twist he hadn’t seen them yet, but they had probably seen him and were eyeing him up, waiting to see if he meant any mischief. Keeping a watchful gaze for snakes he lay back and let the last of the sun warm his chest and legs. If somebody came along he’d hear them long before they saw him, enough time to drag on his pants and boots, get himself decent for viewing or for fighting, whichever he needed to be fit for. Across the river was Mexico and the stories he’d heard of fighting at the border were fierce and terrifying, but he’d see somebody coming from there even farther away than he’d see somebody coming from Texas.
He hadn’t put a finger on Texas yet, when it came to whether he’d like it or not. His ma liked growing up here, but Michael had done all his growing already. If there was growing to be done it would be done by Sam, and Michael supposed Sam was going to grow up queer anywhere, locale wouldn’t help or hurt. He hoped there were boys Sam’s age in town, or close-by neighbors. He also hoped Sam wasn’t too strange towards them when they met, or not until they accepted him anyway.
He closed his eyes thinking about it: Sam meeting new people. He hadn’t yet made Sam realize that people didn’t want to hear all your thoughts straight out first thing. They wanted to hear them in bits and dribbles, after they’d figured they could trust you. New people were like horses: you had to approach them with caution, and with a quietness. Sam hadn’t ever been good at horses and he hadn’t ever been good at people, either. Back home—back in Arkansas, Michael corrected to himself—he had been lonely. But maybe here it would be different.
It was a new moon, and it was getting dark enough that Michael began to worry about Twist stumbling in the dark. Reluctantly, he got up and put on his clothes, dragging the salt-encrusted shirt over his shoulders and tightening his belt with a wince. He clucked softly at Twist, then swung on to the saddle. The pain lanced through him, as it had every time he’d done that for a week, but he was used to it by now. He breathed through it, then gently nudged Twist into the walk home.
† † †
Trouble was, one bed wasn’t nearly enough for two full grown men, which Michael and Sam basically were. Sam was a little shorter and a little slighter but not by much, and each of them took up enough room for two men once they were asleep and got to dreaming. Michael kicked something awful and Sam liked to have room to roll around. Back in Arkansas he’d had it: just one more reason not to have left.
When he got tired of Michael kicking him in the belly in the early hours of the morning he rolled up and out of bed, glaring at the lump of covers where Michael’s head was and considering giving it a wallop with a pillow. In the end he decided it wasn’t worth the trouble Michael would cause if he woke up yelling; Lucy was treating him with kid gloves since their pa had been a little rough with them and Sam had a feeling his own viewpoint wouldn’t be looked upon too favorably just now. He put down his weapon and slipped out of the bedroom instead, settling himself into an old rocking chair and staring out the window at what he could see of Texas.
It wasn’t much. Texas was as dark as Arkansas when the moon wasn’t out, and the glass in the windows was thick and warped, making whatever view there was wavy and indistinct. Sam sighed and let his head fall back against the back of the chair, wishing once again that their grandpa hadn’t died, which was what—from his viewpoint—had caused this whole mess in the first place. Basically Lucy had lost her mind a little bit because of it and it had caught their pa at a bad time—he’d been down on his luck at the gambling tables and drinking a bit too much besides. It wasn’t Lucy’s fault, of course—anybody’d lose their mind when their pa died. But everything got thrown out of proportion when Michael waded into the fight and now here they were: cleaning the house of a man who had a taste for garlic and stuffing dead animals, both of which were perfectly fine tastes, Sam supposed, unless you had them in excess, which his grandpa certainly had.
Sam yawned. He made a comfortable chair, though. Say whatever you would about the man, he could make a chair you wanted to sit in.
“Honey? You awake?”
Sam opened his eyes to find light streaming in through the window and Lucy standing over him, smiling. She reached out and wiped drool off the corner of his mouth. “Michael hogging the covers, huh?”
“And the pillows and the mattress,” Sam said quickly, sitting up. “If he could have carried off the whole bed he’d’ve done it. Ma, we gotta have a second one or I’m gonna die from no sleep.”
Lucy laughed and ruffled his hair. “You and your dramatics. You look like you got some sleep right here.”
“And a crick in my neck to boot,” Sam grumbled. “He kicks, Ma. He’s a danger to me.”
“Your brother isn’t a danger,” Lucy said, rolling her eyes. “Kick him back if you want.”
“Then I’d die,” Sam said, decisively. “You don’t even know. He’d kill me just like that, probably, and blame it on a wild animal. He’d say a monster came in and ate me.”
Lucy sighed. “There’s no monsters in Texas.” She turned away to start fixing breakfast. “We left those behind us,” she added, in a quieter tone that Sam wasn’t sure he was supposed to have heard.
The sourdough biscuits were ready and the bacon frying before Michael deigned to show his face, stumbling out of the room looking mussed and annoyingly ill-rested for somebody who had had the whole bed to himself for the better part of the last three hours. Sam glared at him and took a vicious bite of his biscuit, smeared liberally with the last scrapings of jam from the pot.
“Mornin’,” Michael said. He slid into a chair at the table. “Ma, I thought we had no food left.”
“This is the last of it,” Lucy said, sliding a piece of bacon onto a plate and placing it in front of him. “You got a big job ahead of you today.”
Michael grunted and shoved the bacon in his mouth, then picked up a biscuit and the jam pot. Running his knife along the inside he found it empty. When he looked at Sam, Sam looked right back at him and took a giant bite of his jam-slathered biscuit. Michael looked like he was going to say something, but then he just put the jam pot back down and took a bite of his own biscuit, dry flakes of it crumbling onto his plate. “Who did you say was coming to help dig?” he asked Lucy, ignoring Sam’s victorious open-mouthed chewing and stealing a second piece of bacon off the frying pan.
As Michael and Lucy talked about where the grave would be dug, and by whom, and how much to pay a helper, Sam began to think about how to broach the subject of a magazine subscription. He’d taken a long look at his grandpa’s bookshelf and found it sorely wanting; mostly it was old, crumbling books about history or weather records or folk tales. Back in Arkansas Lucy had been subscribed to several magazines that came all the way from England, and Sam probably read them just as much as Lucy did, if not more. He liked the old editions with Dickens stories best, but he read each new one cover to cover and waited breathlessly for the next installment to come in the mail. He hadn’t asked directly, but he was pretty sure that in their flight west his mother hadn’t thought to update her mailing address for the magazine subscriptions. It was a goddamned waste (Sam silently apologized for swearing in his ma’s presence, even if it was only on the inside of his own head)—their pa wasn’t going to be reading any of them and they’d only collect dust until they were thrown away or somebody snagged them for the library.
If Sam could find a way to subtly mention the magazines, maybe his ma would remember about them. He would find a way to sneak it into the conversation in such a way that it didn’t seem like he was angling for anything, or putting another task on her already full plate. He could do it subtle, like. Work the magazines in when the talk turned there naturally.
A sentence cut through his scheming. His ma was saying something about people gone missing from town with no warning and the sheriff didn’t know what was taking them: man or animal.
“Like in the magazines!” Sam yelped.
Lucy and Michael both turned to him. “Like in ‘The Open Door’,” Sam added helpfully. “You know—the story from your magazine, ma? Man or beast… but it turns out to be a ghost! That was a good story,” he finished, lamely.
Lucy blinked. “Honey, you’re too old to believe in ghost stories.” She smiled at him. “No monsters in Texas, remember?”
“I know,” Sam said defensively. “I was just—it was just joking.”
Lucy reached over and patted his hand. “Finish your breakfast,” was all she said.
Sam was still sulking about it when there was a loud rap on the door and Lucy got up. “That’ll be him,” she said. Then she opened the door and said “Oh! Hello—can I help you?”
Sam craned his neck to see around the door frame. There was a long-haired boy standing outside, short but sturdy. “Alan, ma’am,” he said. He held out his hand and Lucy hesitated, then shook it.
"You’re Alan?”
The boy drew himself up. “I am,” he said, nodding firmly, still shaking Lucy’s hand. The handshake had gone on a bit too long. When Lucy finally let go, she still didn’t immediately invite the boy inside. “It’s real good to meet you,” Alan said. “My brother is just tying up the horses.”
“I didn’t know—” Lucy’s gaze shifted behind Alan’s head and she looked surprised again. “Oh, Edgar! Hello again.”
“Good morning,” said a second, polite voice, and another boy stepped into view. This boy was taller and lankier, with curly, short hair rather than long, straight hair. His eyes skittered past Lucy into the house before he met her gaze. “Figured this might be a three person job, so I came along with my brother here.”
Lucy paused. “You’re brothers?”
The two boys looked at her for a long moment. Sam didn’t understand why his ma was being so odd—the boys didn’t look much alike, but families came in stranger configurations. In Arkansas there had been a family with a single stringy redheaded child amongst a whole mess of black-haired pudgy ones, and the parents both black-haired and pudgy themselves, and everybody knew something had gone screwy at the birthing or before, but nobody said anything except when they’d had a bit too much to drink. Sometimes Sam had wondered if he himself was in the wrong family—mixed up with a baby from the neighbors or something—he and Michael were so absolutely different in every way. But sometimes his ma said exactly what he had been thinking a second before she said it out loud, and he and his pa had identical teeth down to their respective sweet tooths, so he knew he must have come from them. Maybe it was Michael who was the neighbor’s baby.
“Of course you are,” Lucy said, when neither of the brothers said anything. She stood aside, ushering them into the house. “Come in, we were just finishing up breakfast. Would either of you like a biscuit?”
Both boys took one and started chewing, looking around. Sam side-eyed them, waiting to get a feel for their type. The tall one’s looks reminded him a bit of a kid in Arkansas who liked to throw rocks at him, or worse, throw rocks at the feet of the horse he happened to be riding. Sam had only made the mistake of riding a recently-broken horse into town once, and had lost the horse and broken an arm for it. Now he was always on the lookout for kids who seemed the rock-tossing type.
“Got rid of the garlic?” Alan asked after a moment.
“Oh, yes,” Lucy said, with a laugh. “I don’t suppose either of you know what he was doing with all that, do you?”
Alan and Edgar looked at each other. “No,” Edgar said, after a moment. “Sure don’t,” Alan echoed. Sam narrowed his eyes. He knew liars when he met them, and these guys weren’t even trying very hard to act like they weren’t lying. Also, now that Alan was standing next to him, chewing on a biscuit and peering around at the transformed room, Sam was beginning to see why his ma had questioned these two being brothers.
There was an awkward pause, and then Lucy said brightly: “Michael will show you where we’re digging today, won’t you Michael?”
Michael grunted. He was also eyeing the brothers with suspicion, but he stuffed the last of his own breakfast in his mouth and got to his feet. “We got a plot about a mile from here that’ll work,” he said. “We’ll keep the horses out and keep it neat. You boys ever dug a grave before?”
Both Alan and Edgar both drew themselves to their full height; for Alan this was not saying much. “Plenty,” Edgar said, at the same time that Alan said solemnly, “More than you know.”
“All right,” Michael said, and pulled on his jacket. “Come on, then.”
When they were gone, Sam looked at Lucy accusingly. “They were my age,” he said. “I could’ve helped.” He wasn’t saying this so that she’d send him up to the plot with them—he still wasn’t sure he wanted to be around those kids for long—he was mostly saying it to point out that she’d underestimated him again. She was always treating him like a little kid, even though Michael had been doing things with grown men since he was Sam’s age, and maybe even earlier.
“I didn’t know they’d be so young,” Lucy said. “The sheriff said he’d send a boy, but I didn’t think—” She trailed off, looking thoughtful. “Well, anyway,” she said after a moment, clapping flour off her hands. “I need you here. We got the whole rest of the house to get in order, and I’m ready for clean clothes, what about you?”
All the complaints Sam was about to make flew out of his head. “Finally,” he breathed, springing to his feet. “I’ll fetch water.”
† † †
The funeral service was short and intimate, just the three of them. Edgar and Alan had left after the grave was dug, stopping in briefly to offer their condolences and to shoot last looks around the house. Lucy had noticed Sam watching them out of the corner of his eye, and she also noticed them watching Sam out of the corners of their eyes. A part of her dearly hoped that these kids would take to him so that Sam would have somebody his own age to talk to. She couldn’t help but be a little curious about Alan, who was very clearly a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old girl wearing boy’s clothes and a lot of bluster. But the pair of… brothers… seemed harmless—even helpful. The grave had been dug quick, and although Michael hadn’t said anything out loud—when did he ever—he seemed more or less satisfied with the job they’d done of it.
They lowered the coffin into the ground carefully, Michael on one side and Lucy and Sam on the other. Lucy said a few words, then started crying in great gulping sobs that surprised even her. It was queer: she’d been devastated by the news when it had come to her a month ago, and there were whole days of mindless grief at the beginning she couldn’t even remember now, days lost to lying in bed, weeping until she didn’t have any water left in her, eating nothing and sleeping whenever the racking sobs let her. But then there’d been the whole mess with Jake, and she’d been on the road with Michael and Sam shortly after, and somehow all of that—the fighting; the fear; the flight—had pushed the immediate grief down deep into her body. She’d been able to forget it for hours at a time, even days. Even picking up the body, seeing the coffin: she’d cried, but it hadn’t undone her the way the news had back in Arkansas. She’d still had a job to do, which was to get the body home and into the ground.
Well, now it was. As she threw a handful of dirt on top of the coffin the sobs started and the grief came pouring back in waves, gathering power and height. It wasn’t just her pa, though. Her whole life had up and died with that letter. She couldn’t go back to Arkansas, not if Jake had progressed past hitting her to hitting her children. She hadn’t had a lot of friends up there, but she’d had enough to miss, and she’d left a lot more behind besides. Security and safety, in some ways—although she’d left plenty of danger behind, too. She wouldn’t miss Jake’s moods, but she’d miss the money he brought in when he could hold a job down. She’d miss the feeling of a man next to her in bed when things were bumping around outside. She’d never been good with a gun, and Jake had been.
No, she wasn’t regretting leaving Arkansas. But there was still grief there for what she’d left behind, and fear for what was to come. And not having her pa through any of it wasn’t something she’d planned on.
The tears slowed eventually, became silent tracks down her cheeks. Sam had tucked himself under her arm and she finally registered that he was there and hugged him closer. She held out her other arm and Michael joined them, stiff but tolerant.
“My boys,” Lucy whispered. Her nose was running but both of her hands were too full to do anything about it, gripping Michael on one side and Sam on the other. It was all right; there was nobody around but her kids to see. “We’re gonna make a new life here, you’ll see. You boys are going to like Texas. We’ll be happy here, and safe.”
Michael didn’t say anything, but he relaxed slightly under her arm. Sam had pushed himself close into Lucy’s body, his hand curled the fabric of her dress. He was still staring down into the grave, looking somber. When he spoke it was quiet and earnest, as though he was trying to convince her that her own words from earlier had been true. “No monsters in Texas.”