He wrote Randall frequently, describing the majesty of the West and the unbridled opportunity of expansion and wealth. It was poetic and it called to Randall, and so he read and wrote of these spectral visions in his mind. Whether they were memory or fantasy or some crude conjunction of the two, he could not say. He knew only that his destiny, like that of his country’s, would be found among the red rock and deep canyons of the storied frontier.
* * *
“You brought this upon me.” Joanna’s words were glazed in a frost, and when he turned to her she would not face him. “You gave me nothing save death and hardship and then at long last there he was and he was mine and you let them take him away.”
“Joanna, we must not—”
“You let them take him,” she cried and there was a craze in her voice, and Randall thought of the child that was never born as they’d first journeyed west, and the girl taken by fever only days after entering a world that wouldn’t keep her. They’d tried many times and nothing would take, and then there was Harry and he brought back a light once lost and now lost again, perhaps forever.
“I am sorry, Joanna, truly,” he said, and his own grief burrowed inward as his nature was to tend to hers instead.
“I don’t want your apologies. I don’t want your ranch or your cows or your goddamn poems. I don’t belong here,” she wept and looked to be on the verge of collapse, but before Randall could move to embrace her she stiffened again.
“You don’t belong here,” she said, flat. “This is a cold, wild place, and for better or worse you are neither.”
“What do you want?” he asked and there was an urgency in his asking and she heard it and she looked at him and answered.
“I want you to kill them. I want you to find those boys and I want you to kill them for killing your son. My son.”
“What?” he asked, having expected a plea to go back east for a visit or even for good. Though he knew it to be inappropriate he was close to laughter at the thought. “I’ve already sent word to Sanford in Texas.”
Joanna turned away again and folded her arms and was silent and this caused him to continue. “The brothers Bentley were seen headed south and with the political upheaval along the borderlands they will surely turn east. There are two marshals, very fine lawmen, in New Mexico who are no stranger to our family, and Sanford’s Rangers are camped just a few days’ ride into the Texas plains. They will have nowhere to go.”
Still there was silence and again Randall attempted to talk the shadows away from his wife’s soul.
“Darling, you can’t possibly believe I’m better equipped to hunt these men than a trained officer of the law.”
There was movement and Randall hoped it was a spark of reason and she turned to him once more.
“I do not believe you better equipped,” she told him. “I do not believe you remotely equipped for this or any other action outside of scribbling falsities on parchment, but I do believe—I know—that it was your son they killed. Your son. Not Sanford’s or his Rangers’ or any other man’s. Yours. And I also know that I cannot bear to live another day with a man who would not seek to avenge his own son. That is what I know with God as my witness, Randall. Your line has been broken, and though it pains me greatly I will try again to give you another son but not until you have set this right, do you understand? You set it right, Randall. You set it right for our Harry.”
And then the tears came and again he moved to embrace her but she pushed him away and retreated into the house, and he was left alone with a soft wind and the faraway howling of a single coyote calling out for anyone to answer.
3
We were two days through Santa Cruz, keeping the river as a barrier to our west, when we came to the border. We crossed a few miles east of the Sonoran city of Zorrilla. The river was shallow, its current weak. The land on either side mirrored the other, two halves of an equal world.
We rested the horses, then led them up the southern bank and onto a ridge overlooking the new country. We stayed on the ridge, bearing west until we chanced across a bygone path too narrowly trodden for cattle and followed it away from the river and across the salt flats and into the wastelands.
When one trail gave out another started up, and even in this remote and uncultivated landscape there were signs of those who’d come before, those who’d carved out from the desert their own bearing and set forward across the plains and lived in ways followed and ways abandoned, all the while a reminder that no course is left uncharted, no lesson learned of its own accord but rather taught. Always taught. And in these observations, be they fruitful or sterile, we can see only what we’re shown. The world builds of itself, knowledge carried and stacked like bricks and with such heights, such illimitable reaches before us. And so we are forever engaged in the quest for the greater, our ambitious eyes blinded to the footprints of our ancestors and the bones and dust left behind and also ahead, and so on in rhythm, in pounding percussion.
Still we forge onward, as if ours were the first world, as if we alone by our very existence are inimitable across the vastness of the universe, and in doing so we elevate our own creations to undeserving positions of power and importance. And for all that is ennobled there are those left lowly, those who are bound to carry upon their bent spines the worries of a burning world—a world which will rise again from the ashes and bury its transgressions shallow, in graves overflowing, and set about the search for a new fire, so all might burn once more.
The matrix of intersecting game trails and old Indian bridle paths and the decisions made therein brought us at last to the prominence overlooking Zorrilla. The outskirts of the town lay desolate and depraved upon the desert, and were it not for the crude homesteads, the scene could have easily belonged to some lost world, some fallen kingdom.
I put the horse forward and we navigated the unstructured placement of a half-dozen hovels and lean-tos, each shack more tumbledown than the last. From one such structure came a three-legged dog, not much larger than a newborn kid, and the small creature commenced to yapping and bouncing about. My horse, none too impressed, studied it as we moved on. Two women, one old and one not, crouched over stained buckets and shucked corn. They looked up as I passed, and I stopped my horse and touched my hat. The old woman paid me no mind, but the younger one rose and walked out to meet me. Her hands on her hips, she looked up at me as if I were some oddity to behold.
“Hola,” I said.
She nodded.
“Hola.”
“Dónde es saloon?” Shelby shouted and the girl backed away.
* * *
We moved through the shanties and back onto the plains.
“We’re Mexicanos now, bud,” Shelby said, taking off his hat and waving it in celebration. His shouts and yips carried across the Sonoran Desert and died before reaching the horizon.