The Road to Reckoning. Robert Lautner

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      Night, and the sparrows and tanagers had ceased nagging us to get out. We had only a middling fire left with white coals and chars of wood. I could see nothing except my father and the shape of Jude Brown standing like a statue in the dark. I was not tired and my father insisted on one more enamel mug of tea and he drove a stick through the coals and put our mugs directly on them.

      The coals sparked and I watched them sparks drift up like angry wasps. My neck went back to follow them to the stars and I missed the men step out of the trees. When I came back to earth they were there like they had always been with us, as if they were the trees we had thought our walls.

      Four of them. In surtout coats like old soldiers and wide wool hats. Each had a rifle in his hand and belt tied outside his coat with flap holsters or pistols tied by lanyards. They had made a circle around us. They were bearded and dark below their hats although I could see that one had shaved silver hair close about his ears and a fat mustache. I saw this because he was at my side like a giant. I was sat cross-legged, tailor-wise, and I looked down from his face to his boots. They did not match or one had been fished out of a river.

      My father had rolled up and stood with his hands raised. No-one had asked him to do this.

      ‘What do you want?’ he asked.

      It was too dark to see clearly, as the voice that answered was in front of the dying fire to me, but I knew it at once.

      ‘All that you have, salesman.’ It was Thomas Heywood.

      ‘You can have it,’ my father said. ‘I do not want trouble.’

      ‘You give me trouble, salesman? Is that what you said?’ Thomas threw down again, only with a proper pistol this time, a good Ketland percussion. He punctuated his words with its terrible click.

      There was the fat giggle again from near Thomas and I could just make out that this would be the man from Chet Baker’s store. He had an old face that should have known better, with a grizzled, rough shave like he plucked his beard with tweezers. He was short and threw down also. He had a hat with a beaded band like something of an Indian decoration. He grinned with teeth the whole time as if he were showing them to a surgeon. I could not see the fourth man at all other than his raised rifle. He was all in black with a high collar to hide him.

      ‘No. I will give no trouble,’ my father said, and took off his spectacles and folded them into his waistcoat. I do not know why he did this. It would blur them all. At my mother’s funeral he had also taken them off but I thought that for vanity.

      ‘I hear the word trouble again, salesman.’ Heywood came closer. ‘You keep saying that word, salesman. Do you like that word?’

      I hold that my father did not know how to speak to these men.

      ‘What do you want?’ he asked.

      ‘Am I repeating myself again?’ Heywood came yet closer, he and my father like bride and groom. ‘All you have, I said, didn’t I?’ He lowered his gun, looked at his trash around us. ‘But first I want you to show me how much you love that horseshit pistol of yours. I want you to get that pistol, salesman.’

      I suppose now that they had followed us from Milton. Our Brewster would have left marks. They had probably drunk in a saloon in Lewis while we ate and maybe they had kept an eye on Jude Brown and our Brewster on the street. Their wickedness planned with laughter and rum. The banality of evil is in the joviality of the simpleminded.

      ‘Get yourself a pistol, salesman.’

      My father looked over to me.

      Heywood laughed. ‘Oh, see him, boys!’ He waved the pistol to my direction. ‘Go on, salesman. Go on! Grab your boy in front again! Bet yourself that I won’t shoot through him!’

      The others laughed as cowards laugh around a bully. These men had no wives or children or work that paid. Nothing but themselves. They were children more than I. Their violence and reasoning the same as children, only with lead now instead of sticks, and if there had been no lead or steel it would be sticks still. Everything my father said would be wrong. I had seen boys like this when I backed away from our windows at home. My father could not win. He was me backing away from the laughter in the street.

      ‘Get your pistol, salesman.’ Thomas lifted his cocked gun and the giggle from Indian-hatband came again.

      My father straightened up. ‘If I take it, you will shoot me, or your men will shoot me. If I leave it you will shoot me and take everything anyway. So why not just rob me and be done. And me and my boy will leave these mountains. We will go home, I assure you. We will go home. I am done now.’

      ‘Rob you? Rob you? Am I a thief now, is it? Are you saying I would shoot you and rob you without a chance? Is that what I am? Am I that low in your eyes?’ He was mad now. It was done.

      ‘No,’ my father said. ‘It is whatever you want. I will tell no-one. Just let me and my boy go. Take the wagon and the horse and we will walk out of here now and you gentlemen can have it all.’ He moved toward me with his head down, his back to Heywood.

      ‘You turn your back on me again, you son of a bitch?’

      And that was it.

      Thomas Heywood fired into my father’s back with a snap of his wrist like throwing a stone. Like nothing. It flashed and sparked like the fire just minutes before and the trees quaked. I think I cried out. My father fell to his knees and disturbed our mugs in the fire, which sputtered with the tea and coals and startled the others to unload into him, their guns lighting the trunks of the trees four more times, Heywood emptying another pistol, and Jude Brown raised his hooves and tried to jump from his tether.

      He still whinnied and snorted as my father lay still and the dark came back like a lamp snuffed. Indian-hatband giggled again.

      I had never seen the top of my father’s head before. He was going bald. It is foolish how you notice these things.

      You may have heard that the dead twitch and jerk as they go on and they may, but I had been saved from that sight. My father simply fell and lay like a cut log, only the dust from his fall showing that he had weight. He had no more movement. His neck was angled and his arms were underneath him, his shoes pointed together.

      ‘You want the horse?’ asked the man who had left my side as if I was not there.

      ‘Why would I want a horse with no dick?’ Heywood said. ‘Leave the wagon. Get the guns and the money. Take it all. Leave the boy and the ground.’

      The hatband giggler stopped his mirth. ‘Leave the boy?’

      ‘He’s a boy. Get moving.’

      I do not think this was mercy.

      I had not stirred past looking at the top of my father’s head. I watched the silver-haired man take Father’s watch and purse and kick him back over again. Someone rubbed Jude Brown’s nose and he settled down while they robbed the wagon. There was laughter at the discovery of the wooden gun and they threw it on my father’s back.

      I did not notice them leaving. They said nothing to me and just melted away.

      I sat in the dark for a half hour, I guess. Jude Brown tried to talk to me. He СКАЧАТЬ