Bittersweet

One-handed, David was pouring himself another whiskey. His right hand lay on the bar, already begi

“Better let me take a look at that hand,” Liam said.

“Stay the hell away.”

“Go on,” Mac urged. The driver and the swamper sidled past David and went upstairs.

Fully dressed, the covers pulled up around her chin, Sarah lay in bed, her eyes fixed on the door. In the hall, the pendulum clock struck. For three hours she’d lain awake, listening to glass breaking and furniture being overturned in the next room. Around one o’clock there had been a terrific crash, as if a chair had been hurled against the wall, and shortly afterwards her bedroom door was opened a crack. It was Matthew, awake and afraid, coming to crawl in with her.

She turned to look at the small face on the pillow next to hers. “My son,” she whispered, and kissed his cheek tenderly.

The familiar smack of the front door banging against the side of the house made her start, and Matthew stirred in his sleep. Sarah sang a lullaby softly. He didn’t awaken and she lay back, listening, but there was no more to hear.

Near four o’clock, as the moon was setting, Sarah fell asleep. The sun was above the horizon and Matthew was gone from her side when she awoke. She slipped on her shoes and hurried from the room, her dress crumpled and her skirts askew.

Mac and Coby were cleaning the main room. The air was warm with the smell of coffee. Matthew poked sticks into a growing fire while Liam and Beaner slurped their coffee and threw out bits of advice to Mac. Mac’s sight was so weak he’d confined himself to righting upended tables and chairs. There was a sizeable pile of broken glass swept up near the hearth. Coby, broom in hand, had worked his way down to the other end of the room. Sarah stopped in the doorway.

Matthew caught sight of her. “Momma, Uncle David tore up the room and broke all the glasses.” He ran over from the fireplace to take her hand. “Looky,” he said, leading her to the far end of the bar. There was a dent in the wall the size of a horse’s hoof. “Mr. McMurphy said Uncle David did that with his hand and broke it all to hell.”

“To pieces,” she corrected him. “Don’t swear, Matthew, I’ll give you a licking.”

“Mr. McMurphy just said.”

“Hush, honey. Why don’t you go bring in some kindling from the woodpile.”

Coby looked up from his dustpan. “Looks like you better order some glasses before Liam takes off. I don’t think your brother missed a one.”

“Where is he?” Sarah asked.

“He took off around two, three o’clock this morning, Sarah,” Mac replied. “Said he was going to walk as far as he could and sleep till the coach came.”

“Was he okay?”

“His hand was mashed some. Swelled up three times its regular size. He was feeling no pain, but it’s going to hurt like hell when he comes to this morning. He’ll be all right. There’s nothing on this desert going to mess with your brother, the mood he was in. Mean enough to bite a snake.”

Sarah laid a hand on the old man’s arm. “I’m glad you were here, Mac.”

“What do you figure set him off like that?”

“Somebody get the door for me,” Matthew called, banging on it with his foot. His arms were full of wood.

Sarah opened the door for her son and picked up the trail of kindling sticks he left across the floor. “I don’t know, Mac. He used to get that way about Pa sometimes, when I was a girl.”

The Fort Bidwell stage arrived shortly after noon. While Liam and Beaner traded gossip with Ross and Leroy, Mac wandered out across the road to lean on the paddock fence. His dim eyes were on the bright alkali flats and the blue shadows of the Fox Range beyond. A breeze came to him over the sage, and he quivered his nostrils like an old dog reading the news on the wind.

“Hello, Mac. Sarah told me you’d come.”

Mac jerked, his half-blind eyes peering into the darkness of the barn. He took a sharp breath, and for a moment his eyes seemed to light up from inside. “Miss Grelznik…”

“It’s Karl Saunders, Mac.” Karl stepped partway into the light. His clothes were dust-streaked and the side of his face was scraped raw. He took Mac’s hand. The stumped fingers and knobby thumb had browned and twisted over the years into the likeness of a gnarled old root.

“Karl…” the old man repeated, squinting into the light. “I thought…”

“Karl Saunders.”

Mac shook his head. “You get old, your mind plays tricks on you. Good to see you, Karl. You get that deer you went after?”

“Never did, Mac.”

“Missed a hell of a show here. I expect Sarah told you all about it.”

“I haven’t talked with Sarah.”

“David find you?”

“He caught up with me a mile and a half from here. Those long legs of his really cover the ground.”

“Something between you two set him off?”

“He didn’t say anything to you?”

“No. Closemouthed as an old squaw.”

“I don’t know what it was, then.”

Mac nodded to himself and chewed thoughtfully on a splinter he’d levered off the fence rail with a fingernail. Karl studied the seamed face; darker spots, burned black by years in the weather, dotted the old man’s cheekbones like outsized freckles, snowy hair stood upright in the breeze. Karl smiled and dropped his hand gently on Mac’s shoulder. “It’s good to see you again, my old friend.”

Mac shivered. “Your voice…somebody steppin’ on my grave, I guess. Something’s give me the willies this morning.”

“Aayah!” Liam barked.

“Guess I’d better get a move on, or the coach’ll leave without me.” He spit over the rail, carefully downwind. Karl walked with him to the mudwagon and saw him off.

Karl didn’t return to the house, though Sarah motioned to him from the window. Instead he shouldered an ax and set to work.

The dull fall of the ax, chopping out a regular rhythm, stopped. Karl dragged another log across the woodcutting rack, settled it snug with a kick, and the beat started again, hollow-sounding in the west wind. Sweat was ru

The kitchen window opened with a screech. “Karl,” Sarah called. “You’ve been at that all afternoon and you were up all night. You’re being silly. Stop before you chop yourself.”

Karl grunted and swung the ax. It bit deep and he couldn’t pull it free.

“Answer me!” Nothing. Sarah banged the window shut.

He rocked the ax back and forth, then planted his foot near the head and jerked. The handle pulled free of the head and Karl stumbled back into the small figure of Matthew Ebbitt. The boy stood square-shouldered, feet wide apart, ready to take on the world. Karl blinked at him, unseeing for a moment, then let the ax handle slide to the ground.

“Momma was crying,” Matthew said accusingly. “Are you mad at her because she let Uncle David break the dishes?”

Karl pulled his kerchief from his hip pocket and mopped his face. “No, son, I’m not mad.”

“Momma said you won’t talk to her. She told me to come tell you she said you could tell me about Moss Face if you wanted to.”

“Sarah said that? That I was to tell you about Moss Face?”

“That’s what she said.”

Karl leaned the ax against the wood stand and upended a chunk of wood to sit on. He folded the damp kerchief into a neat square and stared out across the desert so long that Matthew began to fidget. “Come here,” Karl said at last, and his stepson came to stand between his knees. Karl pulled him up on his lap and wrapped his coat around him. “Last night I thought I heard something,” he began, “out by the chicken coop. When I went out to see what it was, I saw Moss Face. He was with a pretty lady coyote. They ran out toward those mountains together.” He pointed south to the blue Fox Range. “He grew up, Matthew, and had to go back to the wild to raise a family. Maybe we’ll see him again, come spring. Or maybe we’ll see puppies and they will be Moss Face all over again.”