West With Giraffes(76)

As I come closer, though, I see the mare’s brown-apple eyes move to stare up at me. I feel sick, because I know she is dead, but she just doesn’t know it yet.

Then, and only then, do I see the rifle in Pa’s fist. He is holding it out to me, ordering me to put the mare out of its misery, because I should learn to accept death as part of living, because I should start acting like a man. He is saying it in a way he knows I will obey or wish I had.

But I don’t take it. I gaze back at the horse’s wide, scared, suffering eyes and I know I should. And I know I can’t. I don’t have it in me. Because that old mare is the only animal I’ve known for my entire miserable life—since I first pulled breath. Since I was big enough to jabber at her and tend her and plow behind her. God help me, I know, at that moment, she is the only living thing I have ever loved besides my ma. I cannot be the one to take away her life, not when her life takes in my whole life. Not even if it is an “act of mercy,” because mercy holds no meaning for me. It is all I can do not to yell this at Pa, even though I know he does not abide such disrespect, and I have felt the whip of his belt at even the hint of it. This time, though, I don’t care about his belt. I don’t care about his hollering. I just stand there. So, he shoves the rifle into my ribs until I take it.

“Time you carried the load around here!” he says. I notice a thing in his eyes that isn’t ire or panic or grief but something cold beyond them all, like his small, pitiful heart has shriveled and died with Ma, and I was about to find out what was left.

“Do it!” he yells.

I still can’t.

Marching back to the house, he returns with his Great War pistol, loading it as he comes. “Do it!” He slaps the barrel shut and, brandishing the revolver, marches straight at me. “Do it now!”

But it’s not the pistol that scares me most. It is the wild, gone-wrong look in those eyes that is sending a shiver into my bones. So I point the rifle in my hands at him, sure that he will lower his pistol at the sight. Yet he does not, as if I’m pointing a toy at him, as if I’d never shoot. He is still marching toward me, pistol still up, aiming those crazy eyes at me so devil-fierce I forget to breathe.

“It’s just an animal!” he is hollering as he gets close enough to slap my rifle barrel away. “And you ain’t no boy in knickers no more. It’s time I made a man outa you!” Pistol to my neck, he is shoving me with his free hand, pushing my rifle barrel toward the mare’s head, her scared eyes looking straight at me. “Do it! Or as God is my witness, I’ll do it to you . . . you lily-livered, yellow-bellied worthless excuse for a son!”

And I do it. The mare jumps with the power of the shell hitting her head and goes limp, her blood splattering my face and my boots, her dead eyes still staring my way. I begin to blubber like a baby, feeling the puke rising, hating my pa for making me shoot my horse, and hating God Almighty if mercy be a thing so hateful.

Pa is talking, his pistol bowed only slightly. I think he will surely say what will save us both. That it’s time to give up. Time to go to Californy like everybody else. Time to live instead of die.

Instead, his voice oddly quivering, he says what I cannot abide. “All right then, let’s get it hauled into the barn. We’ll skin it, sell the hide, and dry what meat there is to eat. That should keep us going till we get a new crop in the ground. Rain’s coming, you can feel it.”

With that, I swivel the rifle back his way, because I know he is never going to leave. He’s going to stay and breathe dirt until his lungs fill up like Ma’s and my baby sister’s, and he thinks he can make me do the same.

I move in front of the mare, and I am now the one hollering. “I’m not skinning her and I’m not eating her—and you’re not either—I’d sooner shoot you dead!”

Gaping at me, his spineless son talking back for the first time, Pa lowers his gun. I know if I lower mine, if I pull myself back from the fury that’s possessed me, this will stop. I will feel the sting of the back of his hand and it will be over. We will go on with our misery, since there’s no one to put us out of it. Because that is what we do. Because quitting the misery takes the kind of heart and soul neither of us has ever had.

But I do not lower my rifle.

Instead I keep spitting out words I know he can’t abide. “If that made me a man, I should put you out of your misery!” I holler, now the one brandishing a firearm. “If that made me a man, then you’re not a man or you’d have put Ma out of her misery!” I holler on, now the one spewing, seething. “If that made me a man, then you’re not a man or you’d put yourself out of my misery—”

The crazed thing in Pa’s eyes disappears. I watch it go, my fury tamping down as it flickers. In its place, though, something dead passes through his eyes that I shudder to see even now. He raises his pistol again, training it on me. I see his finger moving. He is squeezing the trigger. I scramble backward, rifle up, gaping at that trigger finger, not believing what I am seeing. My life slows to nothing but staring down my rifle barrel at my pa’s trigger finger. For all of my flamed-up fury talk, I am sure I could not shoot my pa—nor could I believe he’d shoot me. Yet there we are, two dead-inside beings holding guns on each other.

Until I realize something new . . . I’m seventeen. I don’t have to stay even if he does.