We Will Not Be Taken Alive (part XIV)

Charles Hubbard was surprised to see me. He was agitated and distracted, but forced his most pleasant face.

"Good afternoon, Lucene. Your father's in the saloon."

"Good afternoon, Mr. Hubbard. Is everything all right?" Charles Hubbard had always been touched with the jitters, but his agitation was visible.

"Yes, yes, dear." He answered. "Its nothing that isn't plaguing us all. I'm simply recalculating a budget. I've lost another boarder."

"I'm sorry to hear that." I answered, trying to dampen my enthusiasm for meeting Daniel. "Isn't the saloon doing well? Pa says its a full house nearly every night."

"Yes, yes, dear." He answered again, this time rolling his eyes down to feast on the ledger in his hands. "The saloon is fine, and your father is doing a remarkable job, but the Inn is bleeding money." He said it more to himself than to me.

There was no end to the lives this drought would ruin.

"Well, I'm very sorry," I reasserted, "It'll rain soon. I'm sure of it. It has to. And when it does everything will go back to normal, just like it was before." He wasn't listening. Or maybe he was.

He looked up at me from the ledger and smiled grimly. "You're a sweet girl, Lucene, and smart." He paused. "Your father's in the Saloon." He added again.

"Actually, Mr. Hubbard, I came to see Daniel, and I'd appreciate it if you didn't mention it to Pa."

Charles Hubbard blanched. "Lucene, are you in some sort of trouble?"

"No," I giggled, embarrassed for both of us. "No, I just need to speak with Daniel. If Pa finds out he'll tease me ragged over it. That's all."

Charles Hubbard's alarm did not diminish.

"Well then you're either very unlucky or very lucky. Daniel's gone. He's the boarder I just mentioned losing. He checked out almost an hour ago. And if you ask me Lucene," Hubbard lowered his voice sternly, "we're both better off for it. Now, I know I could use the rent, but there is something about that boy that is pure trouble."

"What do you mean he's checked out? And what do you mean by trouble? What kind of trouble?" My stomach churned  in sour rotations.

"I mean he's a drifter." he said to answer both of my questions. "Whatever you think you need with him, you may have just dodged the bullet of your life."

"Did he leave anything? A message? Anything?" Panic gripped at my throat with icy fingers. It pounded at my temples with pugnacious determination.

"Nothing." Hubbard said flatly.

Tar boiled underneath acrimonious skin. Ire slithered its serpent route up my spine and dripped scorn from its forked tongue. The desk lamp blazed rusty scarlet and dyed all I laid my eyes upon. The flesh of long interred corpses pulsed vital in comparison to my decayed resolution. Daniel was gone.

"Lucene, are you alright?" Charles Hubbard's thin voice came to me as if over miles.

"I'm fine." I spat.

"I think you better have a seat." He warned.

"I said I'm fine." My own voice was shattered glass. I wheeled around toward the door. "Don't say anything to Pa." I shot over my shoulder and I walked out into the street.

Morrison Station stood as it always had, an abject testimony to the chronic misery of its people. The slat board store fronts bore veneered faces propped up with illusion and irony. The place was a hole, a vacuum that sucked up all grace, all oxygen and left nothing, not even emptiness in its wake. It made dust and specters of us all. The phantoms on the street cast no shadows. The sky and all in it, the sun and the birds were erased.

Iron rage scalded my face fortified with the undying understanding that I did this. I mocked Daniel, criticized and belittled him. I forged my admiration of him in a kiln of insecurity until it was a lethal saber, and thrust it at him relentlessly. I constructed a fortress between us, then cried when he could not break through.

I was nearly home when I became aware that the sun was, in fact, not throwing its oblong shadows all around me. The sky was not erased, it was covered. A palpable cover of thick white clouds obliterated the sun. It wasn't that there were no shadows, but rather everything was in shadow. Irrational hope pricked at me. Rain. But all fools and scholars know that no rain falls from white clouds. I marched on spiteful steps the rest of the way.

I paused at the edge of the farm and prepared to greet Frank with an open heart. His kid's coat was no match for my daggers and he deserved none of them. I measured my breaths in counts of ten and steadied my hands, but the breath burned, white hot coals in my lungs when my eyes fell upon the great black draft stallion hitched to the barn door. The regal beast watched me earnestly  from dark pooling eyes. He capitulated a sighing snort and lowered his head. I sprinted for the door.

"Hiya!" Frank ran to me cheerfully. "You're friend is here."

Frank grabbed my hand with the innocent wonder that so often refreshed and restored me. Daniel stood dead center of the kitchen, Samson nestled in the crook of his chiseled arms.

"Hiya." He echoed with a wraith's rasp.

"Hiya yourself." I stood facing an apparition, conversing with the recently departed.

"Frank I and I were just getting acquainted." He said, the baritone returning to his voice. "He was telling me that you think he has your mama's smile and little Samson here has your pa's. Says he can't figure who's you got." His eyes penetrated mine, as straight and sharp as Tell's arrow.

"Is that so?" I asked giving Frank a sideways glance. His face beamed a bright imitation of the full moon. Pride and joy shot out of him in silvery rays. I floated there, sailing on Frank's intentions, pinned by Daniel's stare.

"Guess you got one all your own," Daniel said. An eternity passed between he and I as he watched me watch him. Above the tangled curls of his beard his mouth drew an impossibly straight line. No bend of grin or giggle betrayed him. A sobriety collected itself at the corners of his eyes and wrinkled the skin there. He said nothing more.

"Guess so," I answered meeting his intensity. Blood boiled in my cheeks. I waited on a high wire, swallowing the sensation that anything might happen. And then Samson gurgled out a high pitched and throaty laugh. It was a wet laugh and before long it was a laugh he choked on. Instinctively I dipped down and scooped him from Daniel. Balancing Samson on my shoulder I narrowed my eyes on Daniel. "Where did you learn to hold a baby?" I asked.

He gave a small shrug, shook his head and walked to the window. I watched him there for a while with silence stretching between us. He ran his hand through his thick hair as he had in the stables. A quiet sadness shrouded him.

"Frank, take Sam and give him a bottle, will you? You can put him in the highchair if your arms are tired. Daniel and I are gong to go outside for a while." I handed Frank the baby and beckoned Daniel to follow me.

I led us on a slow stroll toward the barn. Gesturing broadly toward the fields I explained, "that's where the wheat grew. It was mole hills for a while, but even they've moved on now." He looked, but said nothing. When we reached the barn I leaned against the door frame and beheld the great grey brown swatch of land that was our homestead. Daniel looked too.

"Why did you come here?" I asked.

"They're cute," he said, nodding toward the house and falling back into contemplative silence.

"Thanks," I offered, taking a wide berth around his mood so that it might grow and sprout a vocabulary.

"So that's it, huh?" He asked.

"That's what?" I was hungry to hear him speak, to know his meaning, to know why he was here, why he was leaving, why he ever came to Morrison in the first place.

"Frank told me about your ma," Without meaning to I bit down hard on my bottom lip. Daniel didn't look at me, didn't notice.

"I assumed you already knew all about that. Everybody knows." I wore my words like scabs and scars.

"Nah, I didn't know." He offered no apology or condolence, and it was refreshing. "I knew something was chaining you up here. Guess I just wanted to see it for myself. You think you gotta finish what she started." His observation was matter of fact, and he wasn't asking me.

"You don't know so much." I deflected. "Besides, just because your skeletons are buried better than mine doesn't mean you haven't got them for yourself."

He turned to me then. "Have I?" His expression married his tone to challenge my assertion. "Like what?"

"Like where did a cowboy from Abilene learn to speak with such proper English, for starters? And where did you learn to tame screaming Mustangs, and hold babies? And where is it you keep drifting to or from?And how come you can look at me the way you do without a moment of fear or hesitation?" The questions spilled from me as honest and clean as water.

"Who says I'm drifting?" His question was armor, meant to deflect my own.

"I went by the Inn."

"Ah," he said leaning in to the other side of the door frame. "Moving and drifting aren't the same. A man's got a handful of good reasons to move, but only one real reason to drift. A man moves when he's after something. When he's seeking. A man only drifts when he hasn't got any place to be."

"And which are you?" I asked.

"Not so sure about that at the moment," he answered sincerely, "but I aim to find out."

We stood muted for a long time. Frothy white clouds tumbled over one another seamlessly. They collided and contorted invisibly, but we watched just the same. Sweat pooled at the base of Daniel's neck and beads of it rolled down my back like tears. His breathing and mine fell into synchronized rhythm and persisted until a gathering wind deafened my ears to the subtlety of exhalation. I watched him secretly through stolen glances at the periphery of my field of vision. The wind cooled and dried his neck, and fluttered through my skirts.

"I'm sorry," I said abruptly. "I haven't been kind to you, and my hostility hasn't been honest. I didn't trust you." I didn't look at him when I spoke, and I evacuated the words like pebbles from my mouth.

"Didn't?" He was staring at me now. I could feel it, feel him, his heat burning through the very side of me, but still I didn't look. I thought briefly of a pillar of salt.

"I wanted to." I explained, "That's why I went to the Inn. I wanted to tell you everything. Mr. Hubbard told me you'd left. So I thought maybe I was right. Maybe I don't trust you, can't trust you. And now you're here. Why are you here? What is it you're seeking?"

"It's not your life Lucene. It was hers."

"Stop it. Stop saying that. Why won't you answer me?" Frustration furrowed my face into tight knots. I turned cold, hard, stone eyes on him. "It is my life and I wouldn't expect you to understand. But then you don't have to understand do you? You don't have to know sacrifice. You don't have to know commitment.You're not forced to bear witness to the pain caused by your love. You don't need to concern yourself with the expectations you see in the eyes of young children and grieving men. You can roam or drift or move or seek as easily as you see fit. You know the freedom of being unattached. You can hitch and unhitch yourself as you please. Well good for you, Daniel, but we don't all know such luxurious freedom. You have no idea what loss can do to a person, how it can bind." He was close, a matter of feet from me, a matter of degrees, a step away, but entirely unreachable.

"I know you don't belong here. And I know you know it too." He clenched his teeth so tightly the whiskers on his jaw jumped and danced, pulsed and shook over a coolness we wore like armor.

I stepped closer, so close I could feel the heat radiating from him. It was impossible to be unaffected by him. I tried and failed. His heat infused with my own, a furnace fueled by desperation and a pointed determination to penetrate that calculated exterior "Did you really come here with the notion of a solution? Did you think I was some broken toy you could fix and play with? You were right when you said I was like you. You could see instantly that I was tarnished and corroded because we are the same, bent, broken, useless creatures. You think if you can fix me, if you can save me then you can save yourself." I lowered my voice, almost to a whisper as I leaned in to his ear, "You can't save me. You can't save either of us."

He turned on me then with a terrifying force. With a squeezing grip on each of my shoulders he threw his weight into me. I stumbled backward until I was clamped between the wall of the barn and his thick chest and broad shoulders. His heart pounded frantically against my sternum. His fingers sank deep into the flesh of my arms. I craned my neck as far as I could, but still I could feel his hot, wet breath on my cheek. And though his lips didn't touch my skin, I felt them move when he spoke.

"You don't know half of what you think you do." He choked out hoarse words. I turned my face up at his. Less than an inch separated us then. At such proximity he was obvious. Sorrow glowed on him. Hope and fear and lust seized him and bent his features. Loneliness and the small promise that I might just understand him after all gripped him tighter than he gripped me.  "Do you want me to go?" he whispered. I stared at him, dumb. He rattled me in concussive convulsions. "Tell me!" he roared, "Tell me to let you go! Tell me to let you go and go away from here forever!" He trembled miserably. The skin on his arms and face twitched and grew goose flesh.

"I -" I stammered, shaken, "I - I can't. No."

When he pushed his mouth into mine, I pushed mine back.