Rhizomnia, Part 12

“Your ribs was all popped out of place,” said Shorty. “Shifted over, with their tethers all twisted. You’re all right now, ain’t you?” He picked up his Winchester from among damp clumps of buffalograss, and held out a leathery hand for the fallen man to take. “Go ahead and get up on your feet and see if you can walk.”

Doran briefly considered coming around to the man’s other side and offering another hand, but he thought it best to stay back and ready in case there was trouble.  Shorty had a good grip on the Winchester, but if the man lunged for the rifle, Doran could step up and push him down as long as he had a couple steps’ head start.  

The man rolled forward on his dusty knees, then cautiously pushed himself up from the ground, waiting to straighten his back until he had taken an experimental deep breath. Satisfied, he had a change of attitude. He now stood upright with his shoulders rolled backward into a defiant posture, so that he both leaned back in a contentious man’s slouch and at the same time pushed his jaw forward as though daring Shorty or Doran to swing.

Shorty used the rifle to indicate the trail behind them. “Let’s go on back to the barn and see what kind of damage has been done.”  

Shorty deftly stepped around the bearded man and moved quickly toward the barn. The heels of his boots began to spray little bits of dust and grit backward as he rapidly pounded his way back down the hill toward the center of the homestead.  The bearded man followed Shorty, and Doran, unarmed, was left to watch the captive’s back.  Doran felt ridiculous in his nightshirt and mulehide boots, which exposed his skinny, stringy arms and legs. He wished Shorty would have given him the gun, as he was sure the prisoner would bolt away and find another hole in the barbed wire fence.  

As the three men navigated the dark trail, barely decipherable in the windy, dark Nebraska night, Doran studied the man in the middle.  His broad shoulders were stooped and rounded in a way which was very familiar to Doran.  He also recognized the muscular neck, the shaggy hair which grew down the nape of that neck, and the fleshy ears which drooped away from the man’s head.  

This was definitely one of the men who had led away the horses when Doran and Shorty had come to see John Sayre at his ranch. Carter or Ames?  Ames.  And yet that wasn’t all.  The distinctive shape of the shoulders and upper back, so wide and yet so bowed with defeat and misery --  where had he seen this form before?

His mind returned to a struggle in the bright moonlight.  He saw again his fiddle-box on its slide downhill into the thicket of raspberry canes. His mind's eye showed him the thick wooden heft of an axe handle thud into the dirt, leaving a dent eight inches deep.  He remembered seeing a form against the moonlit sky, a broad form with wide, rounded shoulders. That man’s ears had the same droop as the ones he saw this minute, and the thick hair grew down toward the forehead and curled down behind the ears. The man Doran remembered from the attack had had hair which was grayer than this man's. The man in front of him now had a full beard, but Doran could still tell that his face was younger than that of the man Doran was remembering. That face had been deeply-lined, with a short horizontal scar just under the right cheekbone.  

Yes, obviously he man with the axe handle had been an older relative of the man who now marched against his will between Shorty and Doran. An uncle, a grandfather, or his father. No doubt his father.  Doran knew, suddenly, that it must be true. And his fury rose. 

Though his man, who stumbled after Shorty, crushing tufts of wild garlic underfoot and scenting the air with its sharp tang, had not touched either Shorty or Doran, Doran wished he could pick up a stone, a fallen branch, anything, and beat the man unconscious. Doran felt again his panic on the night of the attack, his digust with the the cowardice of two men swinging an axe handle at him while he was alone and unarmed. Doran remembered the pain in the sight of his fiddle-box, its white holly inlays glowing in the moonlight, sliding away from him into the dirt. The image hurt and infuriated Doran, both at the same time. 

He knew, of course, that he could not beat the son for what the father had done. And the situation had turned around. Now he, Doran, was part of a pair of armed men, and he could not bully the captive and prove himself a hypocrite.  But still.  Doran made himself drift back a step or two, as the back of the man’s head, above the sloped shoulders, was a tempting target for his closed fist.  

At last the trio came in sight of the barn.  The door was still open, and from inside the dark recess, Redboy whinnied angrily. The thud of his hooves hitting the barn walls brought Doran down the hill, past the younger Ames and past Shorty.  Inside the dark doorway, Doran felt for the tin lantern, founded its cool metal brim, and took it down from its rusty nail.  He intended to carry it up to the house and light the wick from a stick of stove kindling, but Shorty, pushing Ames forward until the big man faced the wide slats of the open barn door, held out a sulfur match to Doran.  Doran flicked the match head with his rough thumbnail, and quickly slid the lamp’s mantle up so that he could touch the yellow flame to the wick before the flare of light was gone.

Then Shorty had roughly pulled the lantern from Doran's hand, and shoved the Winchester into Doran's arms. The cold metal chilled his forearms and even his chest through the worn threads of his old nightshirt.

Ames, who Doran now thought of as Ames Junior, was still in the exact position in which Shorty had left him, but he was talking, his voice echoing against the wood of the flung-open barn door.  Inside the barn, Shorty was alternately swearing and murmuring comfort to Redboy.  Doran didn’t want to be out in the breezy night in his night clothes, guarding Ames Junior, while Shorty saw to Redboy, though he knew in his heart that if the chestnut was this upset, Shorty was the one who needed to be in the barn. The horse calmed, and now Doran could hear patient, calm Ben whuffing out companionably to the younger horse.

“I didn’t hurt him,” Ames Junior was saying, his face turned to the barn door. “I just wanted to see, I just wanted to ride him around a little. I wasn’t going to take him.  Just ride around a little.”

Doran had no idea who Ames Junior thought he was talking to.

From inside the barn, Doran could hear the heavy clops of Redboy’s hooves moving along the barn floor, and he angled himself and the rifle away from the dark opening, more directly in line with Ames Junior’s back.  But instead of being brought out of the barn, Redboy was moved back toward his stall, and I could hear Shorty drop a little scoopful of oats into Redboy’s feed bucket, then another little scoop into Ben’s bucket.

When Shorty emerged from the barn, he was shadowed by the light from the lantern, and the lines in his face showed how angry he was.

He walked to Ames Junior’s shoulder, and pushed at him, hard, to make him turn around.  Shorty put his face close to Ames Junior’s.  “Don’t you know nothing?” he said, and then turned his head to spit in the dirt. “You don’t tie a horse to a rail like that, you use a post. And you tie high up, above the withers.  You know what the withers are, surely you got that much sense. Tie up higher than the withers, so the rope don’t work down. That horse had the rope wound around his leg just now, that’s what you get when you tie up too low. And I never seen such a knot as that. You could have broke his neck, you know that?  You got to tie a let-loose knot, a loop inside a loop, when you tie a horse. He got that rope around his leg and he was pulling back on that rail, and he could have broke his neck. Or pulled the rail out. What’d you want to untie him and then tie him up all wrong like that?”

“I was hurrying,” said Ames Junior.  “We heard you coming, and I didn’t want him to get loose.  So I tied him up right quick, and I didn’t have time to -- “

“We don’t want to hear none of this!” said Doran, so angrily that Shorty reached out and took away the Winchester.  Doran, freed of the gun, stepped forward and shook his finger an inch from Ames Junior’s nose.  “What was the reason for being in the barn to start with?  What was the plan?  Burn it down?  Steal the horses?”

“Carter was going to,” said Ames Junior, turning his face away from Doran’s hand. “He was going to burn the barn, with the horses in it.  And I told him not to, it wasn’t right.  I told him we could just, you know, leave a sign that there was going to be more trouble.  Just tip some things over, throw the tools out in the yard, such like as that.” Ames Junior swallowed. “We argued, you know, back and forth.  He said Sayre wanted you all gone, and this was the best way.  And I said Mr. Sayre never said to burn no horses, that’s not right.”  

Ames Junior remembered his former defiance, and he slouched down and stuck out his chin.  “And then you come, and Carter run off and left me, and never cared if I was killed.”

“That’s how your father done him, that night they come through the fence and tried to knock my brains out,” said Doran.  He reached forward and backhanded Ames Junior, hurting his sore shoulder as his knuckles banged against Ames Junior’s hard jawbone.

Ames Junior lunged forward at Doran, getting a grip on the neck of Doran’s nightshirt, which bunched up tight and began to choke him.  Shorty lowered his head and drove his body between those of Doran and Ames Junior.

“Now, stop!” he shouted, and the echo of his deep, booming voice drove even the nighttime crickets into silence. “I’m going to bust heads in a minute!”  He took a breath, then used the business end of the Winchester to poke Ames Junior sharply in the breastbone.  “mes Junior winced but said nothing.  “Now you run on back to Sayre’s place. You and your pa ought to roll up your duds and whatever you got in your bedroll and you ought to light on our of there, you know it?  If I see any of you fools over here again, I ain’t going to check and see is it a man or is it a bobcat, I’m going to shoot. Now run on back and if you’re going to wet yourself, wait till you get through the fence!”

Ames Junior missed the last of this advice, for he was already loping down the hill, past the raspberry patch, and straight for the unrepaired gap in the barbed-wire fence.

Doran, slow to realize that Shorty had set the prisoner loose, pursued Ames Junior but his late start, and the cling of his clammy nightshirt, slowed him too much and Ames Junior was through the fence and disappearing into the brushy ridge line before
Doran had reached the torn, dented earth near the raspberry patch which marked the site of the struggle tow nights before.

Doran wheeled to accuse Shorty.  “You let him go!”

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