Black Hills (9781101559116) (5 page)

Theirs was a Conestoga wagon. His pa had explained to him that most folks simply used a farmer's wagon with a tarp over it to protect the goods and passengers. A Conestoga wagon was more costly but could carry a heavier load, and although it leaked a little, would float long enough to get across most streams and rivers. Usually pulled by a team of four or six oxen, with its white top flopping gently in the breeze, it was a sight. His pa had said some folks called the wagons land sailors because they resembled a ship with sails; he sure couldn't see it.

“Good luck,” Cormac told her, shifting in the saddle and gesturing toward her approaching wagon; he watched her leave. He had learned in a short period of time, as she was going to learn, that life does not always come in a sweet and pretty package all tied up with a nice ribbon. He had also learned that womenfolk looked at things differently than menfolk. He had no desire to listen to her folks being told what had happened, what a terrible person he was, and being stared at like he was Lucifer himself.

“Boy! You blow the heads off four people and right away you're a bad guy,” he said to himself. Apparently, the recent events had hardened him. He could almost hear his pa. “Very funny,” he would have said, just before cuffing Cormac on the back of the head. “You just killed four people, and you're trying to be funny.”

Cormac didn't agree. They weren't people; they were animals and deserved to be treated as such. No, that wasn't true. Animals deserved better treatment. Watching until she reached her wagon, he started home; he had more graves to dig. He was becoming a regular mortician.

It was near dark when they rolled through Cormac's front gate. He said it aloud just to see how it sounded. “My front gate.” He didn't care for it much. He liked “our front gate” much better, but offhand he could think of nobody who particularly cared what Cormac Lynch did, or did not, think. The hole was mostly dug when he first heard their wagon. Recent rains had kept the ground from packing down, but the rich Dakota soil, normally a joy to work, this time was not. It was a downright shame to contaminate it with the rot that he was putting into it. If the one hadn't been so all-fired big, the grave would have already been done.

Well
, Cormac thought,
it was to be expected.
He had hoped they would just keep on going and leave him be, but apparently that was too much to ask, what with a woman's natural instinct toward mothering and all. After all, there he was, a poor child recently orphaned, miles from other people, lost, and not knowing what to do next. Poor thing. How could she possibly leave that be? At least that's how he figured she must have figured. Cormac had no such inclinations his own self.

He had worked through much of his mourning period digging the graves for his mother, pa, and Becky. Cormac's pa had taught him how to work, and he had always found it to be a good salve for his mind, a good time for thinking. Whilst his hands were busy, his mind could work out whatever was bothering it. This was going to take a lot of working out.

He had talked to his family a lot while he was burying them and asked them what he should do now. They hadn't had much to say. Cormac's pa was the most help. It had been a comfort talking to him. When the hole was mostly dug and Cormac was standing in the bottom looking out—he had dug them all plenty deep, there weren't no animals gonna get them—he felt a calmness come over him. His pa would have told him to get on with it. “You can't do anything about what's done,” he had said on several occasions. “Just brush the dirt off your britches and keep a goin'.”

A time or two, Cormac had just curled up into a ball in the bottom of a grave in misery, and as he packed the last dirt on each grave, he told them how much he had loved them and how much he was going to miss them.

When the chore had been completed, he had fallen asleep; but when he came out of it and had his crying binge, he had accepted the situation as much as such a situation could be accepted. He was still mighty sad and would be for a long time to come whenever he thought about them, but being sad wasn't gonna get the corn picked or the cows milked or the pigs and chickens fed. He had a farm needin' care, crops that would soon need harvestin', and the job was his for the doin'.

Digging this grave, now, was a horse of a different color. His family had been avenged and done for as much as could be. Now he had to finish getting rid of the lowlifers, as his pa would have called them, but they weren't about to get their own graves. If they liked being together so all-fired much, they could just stay together and rot into a single pile of filth, worse even than manure.

They were all goin' into the same hole. If they hadn't been lying in his front yard, he would have just left them for the critters. “His front yard” was also going to take some getting used to.

Cormac still had an unrealistic hope that if he just kept digging and ignored the newcomers in the wagon they would leave him be, but that was simply not going to happen.

“My name is Gertrude Schwartz,” said the soft voice above him, heavy with an unfamiliar accent. “I'm Lainey's mother.” She pronounced it
Schwartz
. He had ignored the rustle of her dress as she approached in a weak hope that she would turn back and leave.
Not going to happen
, he realized dismally.

The voice did not fit the strong face looking down at him: dark and piercing eyes over a hawk-like nose and high cheekbones with a small mouth formed with leathery skin. It would take a strong woman to wear a face like that and she pulled it off. Her body was stout and solid with no sign of soft flab, and she appeared to be comfortable inside of it. Soft eyes looked out from a craggy face. The sympathetic smile she wore was trying hard to make her face handsome and very nearly succeeded. In spite of what Cormac knew she was about to say, he found himself drawn to her.

“I'm Cormac Lynch,” he answered finally

“We wanted to come and thank you for rescuing Lainey,” she said, “and to apologize for her attitude. From what she told us, I am sure she treated you right poorly. She can be downright obnoxious when she puts her mind to it. She felt the way you dealt with the situation was very extreme.

“My husband and I both told her that for one boy to rescue her from four fully grown men was nothing short of amazing and would have taken extreme measures. I think she understands.” She went on, “How did you do it? Lainey said you got them all with one really loud shot. We saw the bodies still lying there. What kind of gun does that much damage in one shot . . . or was she hysterical and remembering it wrong?”

“No, ma'am. She didn't remember it wrong. It was one shot, ma'am, but from both barrels of a double- barreled ten-gauge shotgun at the same time.” He paused for a moment and then decided to give her both barrels, too. If she wanted to know about it, he was just the one to tell her and see how she handled it.

“I wanted them dead and didn't want no discussion about it,” he said.

Her eyebrows and the corners of her mouth rose only slightly.

“Well then, you sure went at it the right way. Lainey said you told her they had killed your parents. What happened?”

Cormac wasn't sure he could talk about it. He knew he didn't want to think about it, but figured when you kill somebody, or somebodies, some explainin' was in order.

“They tore the clothes off my mother and sister and treated them real bad. And when Pa came to help, they killed them all. They thought I was dead, too, but they was real wrong about that, and I made right sure they knew it.”

She nodded. “I see.” Her face took on an expression Cormac couldn't read. “I believe that hole is plenty deep for the likes of them. Climb on out of there, and I'll help you drag them over here and dump them into the hole. Poppa is feelin' poorly, or he would help, too.”

Cormac got a horse and towrope from the barn, and Lainey showed up and began unbuckling their gun belts. “No sense in burying perfectly good guns. You may need them sometime. You want to see if they have any money?”

“No!” Cormac Lynch was emphatic.

She pitched right in then, and with three of them working, the burial went quickly. Lainey Nayle was obviously no stranger to hard work or a shovel. It occurred to him that maybe she wasn't such a brat after all, and he realized for the first time that she sure was right pretty and had an awful lot of shiny red hair.

He helped them get Mr. Schwartz into the house and into his mother and pa's bed. Cormac's pa had never let him get away with calling his mother Ma. He said it wasn't showing her the respect she deserved. By then, it was hungry time again, and Cormac started to rustle up some dinner, but Mrs. Schwartz wouldn't hear of it. “We'll take care of this. You go light someplace,” she said, and then stopped to stare at the back door. She had never seen a cabin with a back door.

A thinking man with an uncommon amount of common sense, John Lynch had designed the twenty by twenty cabin in an unusual manner. During his meticulous search for a home site on which they were going to spend a lot of years, he had made an unusual discovery. A short distance from a slow-moving creek, out of a small hill beside a large stand of cottonwood trees ran the main reason he had chosen this particular location for their home: an artesian well from which bubbled a year-round continual supply of clear, fresh, cool water from some mysterious source deep underground, pumped out of the ground by a bunch of little people called Artesians, also deep in the ground, according to his pa's story. Even as a little boy Cormac didn't believe that one. After first building a wooden trough to direct the water into a tank from which an overflow would then irrigate an area for Amanda's vegetable garden, John Lynch designed a unique cabin that was to become the envy of every woman who had the opportunity to see it.

There was a back door just five steps from the water tank, a door that would provide easy access to all the water they would need for drinking, cooking, or bathing, and when both of the doors were left open in the summer, a cooling draft of air flowed through the cabin. With the Indian wars in mind, he built into each of the four walls two one-by-one holes from which to shoot, each covered with strong, tightly fitting shutters, and then he did something very unusual—he put in a wooden floor.

In the side of the hill close to the well, he found a small cave slanting downward into the hill which he made into a root cellar by building shelves along the walls for the cool-storage of canned goods and such; finishing it by adding a secure door, enabling the cave to double as a storm cellar and refuge from the occasional tornado searching for a place to cause trouble. All told, the total home plan elicited much praise and made Amanda Lynch the envy of every woman who ever heard of it.

Mrs. Schwartz and Lainey were a well-matched team. With few words and no wasted movements, they took over the kitchen. It was amazing how they seemed to know where everything was; maybe it was a woman thing. Was it instinctive? Did all women put things in the same places? He watched briefly. He had to admit that them being there was a comfort; he had not been looking forward to being alone.

“Okay. Thank you,” he answered. “While you do that, I'll empty the slop bucket. It's starting to get rank.”

Taking up the bucket from its place by the counter, Cormac walked out into the night. The bucket was for collecting all of the kitchen scraps and could get to smelling real bad, but the pigs loved it and would be all grouped up in the pigpen, bumping and pushing and oinking and squealing as soon as they saw him coming cross the yard with it.

The evening was awkward and uncomfortable: the food was tasty, but unfamiliar, and the conversation was forced by Mrs. Schwartz and nonexistent with the girl. Later, sleep was evasive. It was strange to think of strangers sleeping in the bed his pa had built to please his mother, and a sullen teenaged girl sleeping in Becky's bed on the other side of the blanket, which divided the room, with her head on the pillow cover his mother had made especially for Becky. Cormac wasn't liking that much.

He missed the even breathing sounds of his pa mixed with the softer and higher pitched breaths of his mother and accented by Becky's cute little snore about which he had always teased her as being deep and obnoxious. In the darkness, he lay rigid and unseeing, staring at the ceiling, fighting back the tears and the sobbing that were struggling for release. Somewhere in the night, exhaustion overwhelmed him, his taut muscles relaxed, his tear-filled eyes closed, and his horror-saturated mind found escape. Cormac Lynch slept.

In spite of his wishes, morning came again. The rooster announced the event as the sun was rising, the chickens began scratching around the yard for food, the cows bawled to be milked, the pigs squealed to be fed, the birds sang their morning songs, and the weeds in the fields continued to grow.