“Well. S’pose you can take some consolation, then, knowing they won’t need to rely on your return.” To Haugh: “And what about you, Sergeant? For I do hear you made a place for yourself on the other side of things, putting your skill at preying on your own kind to good use.”
“I was a marshal, or close as makes no never-mind. Took a wife, made a son. Got another coming.”
Reese nodded, with just a hint of sympathy. “It’s a hard world for those abandoned, and that’s the truth. But it’s hardly their fault the man they call father and husband can’t be trusted to recall how he made his true troth-pledge years back, to me.”
“That, between us—that was boys’ foolery, Sartain. Spartan fun, best kept for Army days.”
“Was that all? No, I don’t think so; much as I pity this gal you tricked into bed with you, least she’ll make your child a home and pray for you after, little as you deserve any such thing. You and I, though?
?we’re shield-brothers sworn, blooded together in battle, now and hereafter. Remember the song you taught me, riding away from Lincoln? That was prophecy, ‘friend,’ disguised in tune. Don’t believe I’ve ever let it out of my mind since.”
And here he tipped his gory head back, conjuring a low and moaning refrain—some dour Appalachian holler slowed ‘til its verses stuck fast in the mid’s crevasses, harmfully catching, like lines from a Satan-inspired hymnal.
Oh the owl, the owl
Is a lonesome bird
It chills my heart
With dread and terror
That’s someone’s blood
There on its wing
That’s someone’s blood
There on its feather . . .
A pause, followed by this conclusion, with a mindful glance Haugh’s way—
But now I know
That time has come
When you and I
Shall be as one.
“Not now,” Bart Haugh denied it, in return, his voice like dust. “Oh God, no. Not now, not now . . . ”
“As well now as any other time, don’t you think—for given all you’ve done, did you really believe there’d be no consequences to come?” Reese gave a cold sketch of a smile. “If so, consider yourself schooled, for here I stand, a walking object lesson; your destiny’s sketch, guilty on every charge, with only the barest fraction of my due payment yet rendered. And I did nothing at all, Bart, that you hadn’t done first, or told me to.”
“My job, it began as a jest, yes—but I was good at it. I’ve got a boy.” Hopeless: “Doesn’t that count for anything?”
Reese shrugged. “Should it?”
Maybe not, Jenkins thought, too exhausted to stay even minimally upright. And fell face-down before he could hope to stop it, filling his bloody mouth with dust—dry dust turning pink, then red, becoming mud.
He choked himself to sleep, in fullest expectation of never waking again.
***
Much later, after he did revive, laid up convalescent in what had been Bart Haugh’s bed—or Fred Willicks’, rather, a notion he never could bring himself to disabuse the Widow Willicks of, even once she’d finally agreed to swap her lost spouse’s name for Jenkins’ own—Jenkins made sure to tell her how “Willicks” had gone down fighting, bravely managing to transpose himself ‘tween Jenkins and their supernatural foe, and paying the price for his heroism. He slathered detail on detail, ‘til by the fourth repetition, the story ended with “Willicks” throwing his life away gladly by all but grabbing “One-Shot” Reese and dragging that troubled creature single-handed good down to whatever cell awaited him in the Infernal realms, instead of . . . the opposite, basically.
T’was Phyllida he had to thank for his life, it turned out—said she’d had a dream, or been sent one, and used her God-lent strength to trace his and “Willicks’” trail at as high a speed as the ox-cart would support, with little Simon riding literal shotgun. They’d picked up a doctor in one of the towns Reese’s route had barely grazed and found Jenkins in dire straits, his wound miraculously glued shut by a fortuitous chemical coincidence of blood-mud trapped ‘neath Jenkins’ flopped trunk forming a loose poultice which unseasonably fierce overnight frost turned to ice, plugging things deep enough to prevent further infection; he’d suffered through fever and bronchitis before mending yet emerged hale, regaining his strength with surprising rapidity.
Miraculous, his eventual wife called it, and Jenkins didn’t disagree, since if there really was nobody up there looking out for him, it seemed bad form to throw that sort of happy synchrony back in the universe’s face.