Unbury Carol(56)

“We’re gonna take a break here, old girl.”

He led the horse onto a path overgrown with ferns and moss-coated logs. Off the Trail the dirt was more like clay, and the horse stopped. Moxie patted her hide gently, encouraging, and the pair set across it. The beast’s hooves crushed black leaves and snapped dead branches. The sun came through fractured, unwelcome in this dying landscape. He could see Jefferson’s home, a brick rectangle between the withered trees; an old one-room schoolhouse Jefferson found soon after the pair stopped riding together.

Moxie could use some help. The sight of Jefferson’s home was a good one.

He guided the mare through a yard covered in junk. Barrels, wagon parts, broken chairs stuck into the earth. Bales of hay, too. Beside a moss-grown cabinet, he dismounted and looped the horse to an old hitching post half covered in mushrooms, once used by the teachers. Above the house he saw the blackened top of a chimney, soot that reached down the length of brick like black oil oozing.

Someone was moving inside.

Moxie saw the shape of a man behind a blanket covering a cracked window. The place, the setting, felt funereal. Moxie thought of holes in the earth. The trees surrounding the home were dying. The grass was yellowed. Dishes were piled on the front stone step. And the shape within did not move well.

A cripple, Moxie thought.

Cautiously, his eyes on the window, he removed the gun from his right holster. Rinaldo’s warning burned hot.

Was the triggerman ahead of him? Here?

He cocked the gun.

The shape within crossed the breadth of the window and stopped.

The thin blanket was pulled aside and Moxie saw the face of his old friend and he exhaled, lowering his gun.

It’d been a long time since Moxie had experienced that type of rush. But the sight of his friend trumped the rising nostalgia.

Jefferson had taken a turn for the worse.

The door opened and Jefferson came out hunched forward. One hand was on his lower back, the other already extended to shake Moxie’s.

“Hello, friend,” Moxie said, smiling for the first time since the telegram told him Carol would be buried.

“Jimmy! Jimmy…I tell you it’s been too long, boy. Too long. Why…it’s been a decade or more!”

“Almost,” Moxie said.

They embraced.

Jefferson’s back was in bad shape. He could hardly stand. His clothes were ragged, and he smelled of sweat and urine. He smelled of meat, too.

“You been cooking?” Moxie asked.

“Oh, yes I have, Jimmy. You want some?”

Moxie considered. “I do, Jefferson. Come on over and meet my horse.”

Jefferson leaned farther forward, one hand craned to his back, and followed Moxie to the looped mare. “That’s a good horse, Jimmy. She sure is.”

“I know it, Jefferson. Rode all the way from Mackatoon yester morn’.”

“Shudders, Jimmy! Mackatoon yesterday?”

“Got to be in Harrows by nightfall.”

“You’ll make it. You’ll make it.”

Jefferson stroked the mare’s neck. “What’s her name, Jimmy?”

Moxie gave the horse water and considered. “Never named my horses, Jefferson. I think Old Girl will do.”

Jefferson’s face lit up. Moxie liked to see that.

“Old Girl is a fine name, Jimmy! Just fine! Let’s get her fed.”

Moxie made to help him but Jefferson stepped to an open bale with a pitchfork beside it and brought some hay to the horse. A goat watched before walking deeper into the tall weeds of the yard.

“There you go, Old Girl,” Jefferson said, wincing.

Then Jefferson asked Moxie if he’d like to see his place. Moxie said of course he would. Moxie untied the green sack from the saddle, and they crossed the yard and entered the schoolhouse.

The first word Moxie thought upon entering, before the words filth or disarray, was books. The schoolhouse was stuffed with them. Stacks of books from floor to mid-wall, shelves too high for Moxie to read the spines, certainly too high for Jefferson to get to now. Loose pages covered the floor like carpet and crunched beneath his dirty boots. Tabletops barely supported the weight of biblio-pyramids: towers from countertop to stone ceiling. Still, nothing matched the spectacle on the walls. Handwritten words covered the bricks, grease marks from a greasy hand. Words everywhere, some bigger than others, titles, chapter titles, footnotes, some sloping at the corners, finding room. Moxie bent to read a passage.

“Are these your words?” he asked.

Jefferson nodded. “That’s right, they are, Jimmy. Been writin’ my own book.”

On the walls, Moxie thought.

Moxie smiled again. But Jefferson did not look good. For Moxie, this was hard to see, and yet the help he needed from Jefferson was not in the form of Jefferson’s person.

There was no separation of rooms in the house. It was one long rectangle where once a teacher lectured. A well-dressed small Trail-towner, Moxie imagined; a man or woman certainly no better read than Jefferson. A child’s desk remained from those days, and Moxie saw that Jefferson still used it: Papers were piled upon it, some written by Jefferson, some torn from other books. Difficult, long words were carved into the wood of it, too. A map of Ucatanani and Miskaloosa counties hung from the wall, and string connected town to town on the Trail.

With his trigger finger, Moxie followed the string from Mackatoon to Harrows.