The Heavenly Table(49)
The man quit bawling immediately. “You don’t want to mess with that,” he said, sucking in his snot and wiping at his eyes. “That’s a special order for Mr. Haskins.”
“What’s so special about it?” Chimney said, as he started to pry the box open.
“Mr. Haskins is not a man you want to—”
“I’ll be damned,” Chimney said. Inside the crate, wrapped in oiled paper, lay a new Lee-Enfield and two wooden boxes of cartridges. He tore the paper off and picked the rifle up, aimed it at the storekeeper’s head.
“You take that gun,” the man said, swallowing hard, “Mr. Haskins is going to make me pay for it. It came clear from England. Please, boys, I’m just barely makin’ ends meet now.”
“Well, that’s between you and this Mister feller you keep going on about,” Chimney said, as he turned and walked out the door, loaded down with groceries and the Enfield and one of the shell boxes, the heels of his new cowboy boots clicking loudly on the scarred wooden floor, the few dollars he’d taken from the register sticking out of his front pocket. “Come on, Cob, let’s go. And don’t forget that other sack. I got some peaches in there for you and Cane.”
Cob looked at the clerk and shrugged his shoulders and put his pistol back in his holster. Then he picked up the gunnysack and started out, the cans clanging against each other. The man stared after him grimly, his spectacles a little crooked on his long, narrow face, thinking there was more food in those two pokes than his wife and seven children sometimes got to eat in a month. Again this morning, breakfast had been a corn cake so thin you could have read the fine print on one of Mr. Haskins’s loan agreements through it. He realized suddenly that he had finally arrived at his own personal crossroads, just as his grandpa had said would happen someday if he lived long enough, and that what he did in the next few seconds mattered more than anything else he’d ever done in his life. For once, his fate was in his own hands and not somebody else’s, and though his hands were trembling with fear, he reached under the counter.
At the door, Cob stopped and said, “Well, been nice talkin’ to you about the rain and all.” Because the man seemed to be in such a bad mood over Chimney taking the gun, he didn’t really expect a response, but he turned and looked back at the clerk anyway, just in time to see him bringing a Winchester repeater to his shoulder. Dropping the sack, Cob ran for his horse. Bullets started flying through the open doorway and crashing through the windows, the sounds of rifle blasts and glass shattering echoing down the street. He was throwing his leg over the saddle when he got hit. As Cane emptied his pistol into the front of the store, Chimney grabbed the reins of Cob’s horse and led him out of town at a gallop. Within two hours, after poring over the blood drops in the dirt and the wanted poster the sheriff passed around, a group of citizens, including the store clerk, gathered together a few supplies and horses and headed out of town to make their fortunes.
Luckily, the slug that tore into Cob’s thigh hadn’t hit an artery or the bone, but because of the constant jostling from the horse, he kept losing blood, and eventually his boot was overflowing with it. He became so woozy he couldn’t keep his eyes open, but whenever they stopped to rest, the posse from Russell appeared in the distance; and they had to tie him to the saddle to keep him from falling off. By the time they came across an abandoned farm the following afternoon, his brothers were beginning to worry they might lose him. “Well,” Cane said, as he looked at the overgrown yard around the house, “this might be the end of it.”
“How you figure?” Chimney asked.
“We can’t ride no more till he gets better, so if they track us here, we’re f*cked.”
Leaning over the horn of his saddle, Chimney spat and then said, “Well, I don’t know who those ol’ boys are back there, but I don’t figure they can shoot any better than we can.”
“Maybe, but there must be fifteen of them in that pack.”
“So?” Chimney said. “That many don’t even amount to one box of shells.”
Cane shook his head and started to climb off his horse. “You’re quite the optimist, ain’t ye?”
“What’s that? One of them words you got out of your dictionary?”
“Means someone who’s always lookin’ on the bright side of things.”
“Well, might as well, the way I figure it,” Chimney said. “A man gets to thinkin’ he’s beat, he just as well hang it up. Besides, they’ll be enough of that doom and gloom shit when we’re dead.”
They loosened Cob from the saddle and eased him down, then packed him to the house, through tall patches of milkweed and broomstraw and past a few blighted stalks of corn growing out of the top of an ancient rubbish pile. Thick vines infested with tiny brown spiders draped across the front of the rotting porch, and Chimney hacked a path to the door with one of the machetes. Kicking it open, he watched a long black snake slither across the rough pine floor in the summer shadows and disappear through a crack in one of the walls, leaving a winding imprint of itself in the soft dust. He spread a blanket near a fireplace made of clay bricks, and they carried Cob inside and laid him down. “I’ll take care of the horses,” he told Cane. He found a large black pot in the kitchen, covered with a lid and half full of a dried-up lump that had probably once been a soup or perhaps a stew. After banging out the mess on top of a rough pine counter, he carried it back outside. He tethered the animals in the shell of an old lean-to and unsaddled them and began hauling guns and supplies into the house. Then he walked about the property until he discovered a caved-in well, hidden in a thicket of wild roses. Even though it was dark by the time he finished cutting a way to it through the briars, he carried water to the horses in the pot, and by the time he came back inside the house, it was long after midnight. In the light from a candle stub, he watched Cane pour some whiskey into the bullet hole in Cob’s leg and then wrap it in a fresh bandage. “How’s he doing?” he asked.