Eventually, he made his feet and stood there swaying, squinting upwards. He felt for his watch, popped it open, checked the time and reckoned which direction might be north accordingly: left a bit, where that dry ravine-mouth hid the horizon, aided by scrubby bushes. Some hours’ hard walking to anything resembling civilization, probably, which alone argued for getting going. Yet he stood there a moment more, unsteady, wishing with all his considerable might that he could simply lie back down and sleep, this time without fear of waking.
His mouth already too dry for spit, he drew a cambric handkerchief from one pocket and used it, fastidiously, to scrub his sticky lashes clean. His eyes burned.
Grimly, he staggered forward.
***
Never fully alone, even in this emptiest of places; as the sun moved overhead, shimmering mirages lit the corners of his eyes. Reese seemed to hear distant laughter, footsteps behind and whinnying horses ahead, even brief snatches of song—a plaintive hill-holler tune from old Missouri, Mother of Outlaws, sung in the most easily recognizable of light baritones:
I wish I wish . . . my baby was born . . . and sittin’ on . . . his daddy’s knee . . . and me, poor gal, was dead and gone . . . and the green grass growin’ over me . . .
. . . at which point he fell, taking almost a whole half-hour to rise again. Lay curled ‘round his pain once more, cracked lips fresh-split, and sang the chorus back in a bare whisper all the while, not even one-quarter so effortlessly pretty:
“ . . . but that’s not now, nor never will be . . . ’til the sweet apple grows . . . on the sour apple tree . . . ”
He had a man kept in his mind to go with that voice, same as always: last thing he’d seen before that dark crack between then and now first gaped wide, not to mention the only thing he’d remembered consistently, since. Those mocking eyes finding his, full-on, right before obscene pain broke his world apart in a spurt of gun-smoke. They had looked at each other, and then he had been looking at the ground, and then he had been looking at nothing. And then—
—and then, after . . . much later . . . he had woken up once more, dew-stiff and cold on the hard desert ground, his heart apparently having been replaced by an open wound. With someone else’s blood dried to a sticky mask all over his stupidly dumbfounded face.
He rose back up, walked on, ‘til the sun met the horizon. ‘Til everything went gold, then red, then black.
***
The next town he crossed over into—sometime after sunset, under a mean sprinkling of stars—was so small he somehow knew (as he always did, these days) it only had one whore left working, and her kept so indifferently busy, she often had to take in piecework to make ends meet. They’d had setbacks, obviously, almost since foundation; a virtual parade of ill-luck with no apparent cause (or cure), forever conspiring to rob the place of reason for being. Hope of mining had first inspired settlers to congregate there, ‘til the claims dried up. They’d then switched to raising livestock—sheep, pigs, cattle, horses—’til various sicknesses forced those not bankrupted outright to cultivate a host of crops, all of which similarly came to nothing. Now there was intermittent talk of the Railroad, which might (or might not) be drifting towards their territory.
Jesus, too, had persisted strongly throughout all of the above—camp-meetings, revivals, the occasional church of some Revelation or other always raising itself up and flourishing briefly before falling away again to ruin—though that in itself had never, as yet, proved much of a draw for attracting new citizenry.
He passed the gutted shell of one such project on the town’s west-most outskirt. Someone had propped a sign against its door-lintel, done unpunctuated, in shaky red letters of varying size: MaNy cry in Truble & Are not hEard But to there SalvatioN.
“Saint Augustine,” he said, out loud, recognizing the words as ones his former “friend” had once quoted him, in time of particular moral quandary—for the man in question did love to read, and loved even better to let others know just how well-read he was.
That struggle with his own impulses—let alone their shared actions—had been a passing one, he now recalled; easily overturned by sentiment, if not by argument. As ever.
Because: We’ve all done things we regret, I expect, his “friend” had allowed, though both of ‘em knew full well the other probably didn’t think he had. To which he’d paused and considered, trying his level best to summon even one instance in which he’d genuinely questioned himself. Replying, finally—
I do wish I hadn’t stayed my hand, at Lincoln.
His “friend” smiled at that, narrowly: Didn’t much, from what I hear.
Not too much, no. But whenever I did, I wish I hadn’t.
And did he feel differently, now? Could he even tell how he felt, if—indeed—he felt anything, at all?
But here were the lights of what passed for a main street, at last: open doorways, noise and music, faces peering out to greet him as he limped towards them in his dusty motley, his sticky crimson finery. He aimed to at least reach that storefront which claimed a doctor resided within before he pitched over, face-forward, to wait for them to decide what best to do with him . . . and this he was indeed able to achieve, before darkness reclaimed him. The never-quite-broken-off song rising undimmed in his ears, like blood, like tide:
I wish I wish . . . my love had died . . .
And set his spir
it roaming free . . .
So we might meet where ravens fly
And never longer parted be . . .
(But that’s not now, nor never will be)
“Mister. Mister, do you know where you are?”