Of Men And Angels. Victoria Bylin

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      Jake held his breath.

      “Charlotte! You can do it! Push!”

      The torture went on for a small eternity, until the baby squirted out of the womb and landed in the angel’s hands. Covered with blood and a waxy white cream, it seemed small and gray in the vastness of the plateau, and far too quiet to be alive. The angel reached into the baby’s rosebud mouth and cleared away the mucus. She held it upside down and slapped its bottom, and still there was no sound.

      He saw panic in her eyes, but she choked it back and blew oh-so-gently into the baby’s mouth. He heard a cough, then mewling, and then a healthy wail. Tears spilled down her cheeks, and he blinked away his own.

      “Alex…” The mother’s voice was weak.

      “It’s a boy, Charlotte. He’s little but he’s perfect.” The angel set the baby on the mother’s belly. “We’ve got to get the afterbirth.”

      From his vantage point on the trail, Jake saw the angel cut the cord with a knife. The afterbirth followed the baby, and fresh blood gushed from Charlotte’s womb. The angel’s eyes burned with fear. She reached for a cloth to stanch the bleeding, and in a minute it was soaked.

      A cloud shifted. A dark shadow fell over the three of them. He saw Charlotte’s face relax. Her fingers stilled and her chest sank emptily against the sand. The only sign of life was the baby stirring on her belly, its mouth opening and closing like a blooming flower.

      The angel pressed her hands to her cheeks and wept.

      There wasn’t a thing Jake could have done to keep the woman alive, but he could dig her grave. Silently he climbed off the bay and led the horse into the ravine. The woman named Alex looked up at him.

      “If you tend to the baby, I’ll see to the mother,” he said.

      “Who are you?” Her voice was hoarse, and he could see every minute of the past twenty-four hours in her face. Something stirred in his gut, and an un-characteristic urge to be kind softened his eyes.

      “My friends call me Jake.”

      “I thought you were…” She shook her head. “I thought I imagined you.”

      She looked as if she could still hear Charlotte’s moans, and he wondered if she would ever sing that hymn again. He looked at her eyes, red rimmed and inflamed with the dust and the sun, and somehow he knew she would sing it again this very day, just to make a point.

      Brushing off her hands, she rose and smoothed her skirt. Jake tethered the bay to the stagecoach and inspected the mule writhing in the harness. If the animal could walk, perhaps the woman and baby could ride it.

      “Whoa, boy,” he said, but the beast didn’t want anything to do with him. A broken foreleg told Jake all he had to know. He pulled his Colt .45 from its holster, cocked the hammer and put the animal out of its misery.

      The angel gasped at the sudden blast. He expected her to be hysterical or sentimental about the animal, but she didn’t say a word and he had to admire her. She had been a fool to travel the Colorado Plateau alone, but she wasn’t softhearted about life.

      Jake holstered the Colt and opened the driver’s boot. The mail was ruined, but the tools were in place and he took out the shovel. He wondered about the driver and man on shotgun, but the watermarks in the gorge made the facts plain. The two men had drowned in the flood.

      Jabbing the shovel into the ground, Jake took a pair of leather gloves from his saddlebag and looked for a suitable grave site. He wasn’t about to bury Charlotte where a flash flood could steal the body, so with his black duster billowing behind him, he climbed over the cascade of rocks on the far side of the gorge.

      The iron-rich plains stretched for a million miles, but just a few feet away he saw a sprig of desert paintbrush. It was the best he could do, and he started to dig. When the hole was deep, he collected rocks from the streambed and piled them nearby.

      Two hours had passed when he wiped his hands on his pants and looked at the sky. The sun was lower now, as bright as orange fire, and above it, flat-bottomed clouds boiled into steamy gray peaks. Another storm was coming, he could smell it in the air.

      He jabbed the shovel into the earth and strode down the rocky slope. The angel was holding the baby, crooning to it in that sweet voice of hers. It was bundled in something clean and white, and she had managed to dress the mother in a fashionable traveling suit.

      Without a word, he brushed by the angel and scooped Charlotte into his arms, rocked back on his heels and rose to his full height.

      He felt the angel’s gaze as he walked past her, and rocks skittered as she followed him. As gently as he could, he laid the dead woman to rest, picked up the shovel and replaced the dirt. He half expected the woman named Alex to pray or say a few words, but she settled for a mournful humming that made him think of birds in autumn and the wail of the wind.

      Down in the valley, the valley so low,

      Hang your head over, hear the wind blow.

      One by one he piled jagged rocks on the loose earth. Alex didn’t flinch. The child mewled now and then, but her humming soothed him. It should have soothed Jake, too, but it didn’t. His head had started to pound, his back hurt, and his stomach was raw with bad whiskey.

      A few hours ago he had been on his way to California, or maybe south to Mexico. He was alone by choice, and now he was stuck with a woman and a child. His life had taken a strange turn indeed.

      He set the last rock on the grave with a thud and took off his gloves. Studying the angel’s profile, he said, “I’m done.”

      She turned to him, and in her eyes he saw the haunted look of a person seeing time stop.

      “I suppose you should say a few words,” she said.

      His mouth twisted into a sneer, and he stared at her until she understood he had nothing to say. Bowing her head, she uttered a prayer that told him Charlotte was a stranger to her, this child an orphan, and the angel herself a woman who had more faith than common sense.

      A determined amen came from her lips. The baby squirmed and, cocking her head as if the world had tilted on its axis, she looked at his face.

      “You’re hurt,” she said.

      He shrugged. Bruises were common in his life, like hangnails and stubbed toes. Bending down on one knee, he straightened a rock on the grave. “She had a bad time.”

      The angel’s skirt swished near his face. He stood up and she sighed. “I’ve never seen someone die before.”

      “I have.”

      She gaped at him, and he felt like Clay Allison and Jesse James rolled into one. The corners of his mouth curled upward. He wasn’t in the same class as the James Brothers, but with his black duster, two black eyes and a three-day beard, any sensible woman would have crossed the street at the sight of him. He could have scared her even more with the truth. He’d shot a man, and depending on Henry Abbott’s stubbornness, Jake was either a free man or wanted for murder.

      “Death isn’t a pretty sight,” he finally said.

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