Flood Waters
Jan. 7th, 2010 01:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dirigoThe year his mother died there was a flash flood, leaving behind dirt, dead cows and a strange deer-like animal that Saul had ever seen before. The water must have been traveling in a long way, she’d said to him as they watched the men shovel stinking mud from the front porch of the saloon, to carry in a creature like that. It had curled horns and a bushy white tail. Doc Andrews called it an antelope, but Saul knew they didn’t have anything like that around here. The land was too dry, too dead for such an animal.
The Sunday after the flood, Reverend Thomas told the story of Noah and the Ark. Mrs. Kaminzki turned all the way around in her pew and stared hard at Saul and his mother. He looked up at his mother as well, but she never looked away from the Reverend as he told his tale, explaining very clearly how God had saved Noah and his wife because they were good, honorable people, and the rest of the world had needed cleansing. Mrs. Kaminzki just kept staring with her owl eyes.
Saul would sit downstairs in the saloon when his mother was with a man. Jesop, who tended bar in those days, would give him an old jar full of twigs and Saul would play pick up sticks by himself. When his mother took especially long he would cry and Jesop could give him a shot of whiskey. On days like that, she would come downstairs to find Saul sleeping soundly under a table.
They lived two buildings down from the saloon, but Jesop let her conduct her business in the spare room upstairs because it drew in customers. Couldn’t go out whoring and not drink, he would say jovially to the young boy who looked up at him with big, confused, brown eyes.
Six weeks after the flood, his mother was dead.
--
Saul Ward killed his first Pinkerton when he was seventeen. Three weeks away from the town he’d grown up in and already he was a wanted man. Of course, he wasn’t wanted badly, but enough that it was better for him to stay behind with the cattle while the others went into town to drink and find women. He didn’t mind. It had been a necessary death, anyway. An accident, for the most part, but there had been intent in Saul’s mind and so he claimed the murder, owned it. He’d done it and everyone knew it. No one blamed him for it.
As it was he preferred to sleep out next to the idly shifting cattle and watch the cereus bloom bit by bit once the sun had gone down. He would stay awake on and off through the night, wondering how long he’d been sitting there in the darkness. It was a good way to lose track of time and he enjoyed it. There were some nights where the cloud cover was low and the sky was void of stars, just a blackness stretching out around him on all sides. He liked how the prairie swallowed him up until there was nothing left and sometimes imagined the men would come back from town to find a pair of empty boots.
They would pass abandoned homesteads on the trail as they drove the cattle in front of them. Saul smiled whenever he saw them while the rest of the men would shake their heads and mutter.
“What a pity, what a pity.”
Saul thought it was beautiful. His favorites were the dugouts with grassy slopes for roofs and earth for floors. He imagined the people who lived in them were as brown as the hill around them. Little brown people in their little brown houses. The abandoned ones were overgrown. The prairie had claimed them again, the grasses growing over the chimney and the occasional pot left behind.
Not all the farms were abandoned, though. The people they did see would come out of their homes to watch the cattle stream past, a river of wealth they were unable to dip from. The adults always looked worn smooth by the wind, blank eyed and expressionless, but the children would run after the cow hands on their horses. Their eyes and teeth gleamed like the boss’s fob watch. It was hard for Saul to look away from them and their laughter, but the trail was never ending. They always passed by without more than a second glance, leaving the grey, spent-wheat-stalk parents behind with their shining children.
--
He rode the trail five times. Men left because of the distances, the poor pay, the Indians. They would complain of missing their families, of wanting a roof over their heads, of disease and starvation. Some left because it was their time and the other hands would continue on without them, leaving behind a small mound of earth and a crude cross made out of whatever they could find. Just their time.
Saul left because he killed another Pinkerton and the boss couldn’t keep him around anymore.
“You’re a damn good hand, boy,” he said as he wrote out Saul’s last check, “but if I get them damn lawmen on m’back, that’ll be it. Curtains for me, the damned, rutting, bastards.”
Saul said he understood, which he did, and went on his way.
Four weeks after he left the trail, Saul robbed his first stagecoach. He’d signed on with a crew that he’d met at the local bar. They were loud and messy, both with their behavior and their plans. They strewed about the fact that they were planning the robbery as liberally as they spilled their drinks, so it was easy for Saul to buy them shot after shot until they agreed he was the best man for the job.
It was badly executed. Two of the crew were dead before they even got the coach to stop, but after that it was a turkey shoot. Two more Pinkertons for Saul to add to his list. He was twenty-one. Twenty-one and then that night while the others indulged in the beginnings of a three-day drunk, he took the money and the horses. The fools, he thought as he rode off at a leisurely pace, leaving behind the raucous sound of saloon revelry. They hadn’t even bothered to get his last name. He would never be such a fool. Saul, from the moment he’d first seen his mother take a man upstairs on the promise of credit, had known he would never be a fool. Whether it was foolishness born out of stupidity, or foolishness born out of kindness, he would have none of it. His gaze was sharp as he headed west. He would have none of it.
--
Saul didn’t know the war was on until it was halfway over. He didn’t give a damn about state’s rights, considering he didn’t spend any of his time within state lines anyway. It didn’t much concern him. He liked to shift between Kansas Territory and the Indian Territory below. They didn’t mind him down there, not like they minded the army and the railroad. Just him and the couple men he’d picked up along the way, after all. The first job had started him out good. The only detraction was that he’d made a name for himself. Saul Ward up on all the wanted posters. It was messy. He never did like too much attention. He never had. He didn’t like people looking or asking him questions and somewhere along the way he’d picked up enough of a temper to let this be plainly known.
“Don’t mention his mother,” was the first thing the other men told newcomers to their slowly growing crew, “whatever you do, don’t mention his mother.”
Then, when the boiling sun of July was evaporating the sweat off their backs, Saul met Jack Gray. Gray wore a confederate jacket and a blond beard. He hated yanks, carpetbaggers and Pinkertons. He’d been dishonorably discharged from the Confederate army after taking it upon himself to execute an unacceptably large group of Union prisoners. Gray told all of this to Saul from his jail cell where he’d been thrown for shooting a rancher who’d irked his delicate, confederate sensibilities.
“Just waitin’ to hang,” he said, his hard, blue eyes making Saul feel oddly young and inexperienced. “Don’t much want to talk about myself, but what is there when you’re just waitin’ to hang?”
“Save it,” Saul told him before drawing his pistol. “I’m gonna bust you out.” He was enamored in the way only a young man can be.
That night they killed the Sheriff and four of the railroad men stationed in town, making off with the sizable amount of cash in the railroad office’s safe. After that there were always two names on the wanted posters. Saul thought they went nicely together; Ward and Gray. They just looked pretty, sitting there on the yellowed paper.
After Jack Gray a steady stream of men broken and battered by the war made their ways into Ward’s crew. The Union had won and there was nowhere else for them to go. They were bitter; chewed-around-the-edges men who never made it easy for Ward to lead them. Saul didn’t like to admit it, and he didn’t do it often, but he owed much of his success to Gray. He’d saved Gray’s life and in the ex-soldier’s crazed mind, that meant he walked on the goddamn water. Sweet Messiah, Gray called him every so often. He liked to quote the psalms; liked to pray over the men he killed, as though praying over a fine supper. The other men were scared of him, and he seemed in awe of Ward, so they didn’t ask questions.
It wasn’t hard, however, for Saul to make his reputation real. He bolstered it without much effort, taking the crew on fifteen successful high-jackings. He never left a man alive; saw to that himself, and his brains kept the railroad men with their Pinkertons always ten steps behind. He never once asked himself what turn he’d taken to end up here, but he would fall asleep with his mother’s face against the black of his mind. She always looked as she did in his last memory of her; eyes open wide, cheeks bloodless, throat slit.
--
The fact of it was that Saul Ward didn’t have much use for money. He acted out of greed, perhaps, even if he wasn’t a particularly extravagant man, but he chased down the stagecoaches for other reasons. He would toss the bundles of cash at the members of his crew and begin planning out the next job. It wasn’t even the thrill of the chase, which is why Gray loved it so, clearly. It was proving them wrong. This money wasn’t theirs, it was his. He could take it from them as easily as they had mistreated his mother and her ragged child. Not vengeance, he would think to himself, just proof. They meant nothing; their money meant nothing, not when they faced the barrel of his pistol. He could make rich men beg and all the money in the world wouldn’t protect their lives from him. It was why he smiled so when he shot them. There,, he would think, spend your money now.
But it was when Gray began burning down ranches that Saul realized he had a problem. He’d become a hard man, ten years after his first job, but he didn’t enjoy the tears and misery Gray liked to bring down upon the families who had Union men at the heads of their tables. Saul had no alliances when it came to the War of Northern Aggression. He only knew what Gray told him, and Gray was a very disreputable source. Saul never had any illusions otherwise about that. But he drew a line at looting and pillaging. These ranchers had absolutely nothing of worth to him, no fresh men to join him, no cash. There was barely any food worth stealing and even if there had been, he always remembered the faces of the people outside their ramshackle homes, how they stood and watched the cattle stream by with hungry faces. It didn’t sit right with him. Never would.
He told Jack this and they fought. Gray insisted he didn’t give a good goddamn if they were just poor ranchers; they were scum-sucking yanks who weren’t worth the ground he spat on. Saul didn’t know why he did it, but he punched him. It was foolish. Jack Gray was his best asset. Couldn’t afford to lose him. Still, a struggle ensued, both men kicking up dust and cursing vividly and upon reflection, Saul could only consider himself lucky the others weren’t there to see. It ended with Saul straddling the smaller man’s chest, the barrel of his pistol jabbing intrusively under his chin. Gray’s eyes blazed with a mix of senseless fury and the kind of adoration with which he looked upon Saul regularly, and which made Saul deeply uncomfortable. This man is not sane, he told himself, he should not be allowed to live, but he stood up anyway and holstered his weapon.
Gray would not stop watching him after that. It was impossible to tell if he looked on Saul with hatred or love. The two seemed so closely linked for the confederate. He had a same terrible grin whether he was killing Pinkertons or counting the haul. Saul felt the pull of that madness every time he squeezed the trigger and he resisted, but it yanked on his heart, made no easier by Gray’s voice whispering in his ear, like the devil on his right shoulder.
Burn it, he would hiss every time they passed a ranch or an outpost, burn it, burn it. Saul was terrified that he craved destruction just as fiercely, so he hid himself away, did not let himself speak or think on the days he spilled blood. But he realized one morning that the shirt he pulled on after bathing in a murky stream was more blood than plaid, almost none of it his own. He put the shirt on anyway. He had no other shirt. He had no other skin to wear. Gray was right. He was no different than the rest of the men, try as he might. And ultimately, Jack’s voice whispered, although the man was still asleep back at camp, Saul was no different than the Pinkerton who’d slaughtered his mother.
--
Twenty-seven years after his mother’s death, sixteen after his first job, Saul trailed a few feet after Gray as they charged between canyon walls toward a stagecoach. The sound of the horses’ hooves pounding echoed against the stone and so no one heard the sound of the flash flood rushing in behind them. The man driving the coach certainly saw it, and Saul was close enough to see his expression change from grim determination to rigid horror. It made him glance back over his shoulder and the wall of thick, brown water was so familiar it made his heart stop in his chest. Brown water that carried in all the filth and waste of the world; carried it in and then swept it away.
The men’s horses were panicking and breaking from the tightly uniformed pack. The coach didn’t have time to stop, the driver was too terror stricken to try, and it ripped through the crew that had just been intending to rob it, knocking both men and animals into the sandstone walls. Saul didn’t look back to see the coach collide with the quickly advancing wave, but he heard the unearthly screams of the horses. He was sprinting alongside Jack Gray, both men stretched out over the necks of their foaming mounts.
This is it, he thought as he watched the wild-eyed man next to him, uncaring of where his horse was taking him, it doesn’t matter now, because it’s carrying us away.
Jack must have felt Saul’s eyes on him because he turned his head. The two men stared at each other, hot dust whipping their faces and the roar of the water filling their ears. Gray’s cracked lips were moving and Saul recognized the words of a song he’d heard sung in church a long time ago.
Oh sinners, let’s go down, come on down. Oh sinners, let’s go down, down to the river to pray.
Saul laughed at the man’s devilish irony. Jack was ripped off his horse first, the water taking the animal right off the ground so the man went flying backward. Saul didn’t have time to see where he landed, but he knew Gray hadn’t fought, just as he didn’t when he felt the water hit him like a freight train. The thick, brown water would clean out the canyon; rid it of greed and filth. It would clean up Saul Ward and carry him away, but he wouldn’t be gone, just passed to the front step of some unlucky rancher.
He remembered the evil of finding his mother dead on the floor. He remembered the men shoveling stinking mud from the front porch of the saloon.
The Sunday after the flood, Reverend Thomas told the story of Noah and the Ark. Mrs. Kaminzki turned all the way around in her pew and stared hard at Saul and his mother. He looked up at his mother as well, but she never looked away from the Reverend as he told his tale, explaining very clearly how God had saved Noah and his wife because they were good, honorable people, and the rest of the world had needed cleansing. Mrs. Kaminzki just kept staring with her owl eyes.
Saul would sit downstairs in the saloon when his mother was with a man. Jesop, who tended bar in those days, would give him an old jar full of twigs and Saul would play pick up sticks by himself. When his mother took especially long he would cry and Jesop could give him a shot of whiskey. On days like that, she would come downstairs to find Saul sleeping soundly under a table.
They lived two buildings down from the saloon, but Jesop let her conduct her business in the spare room upstairs because it drew in customers. Couldn’t go out whoring and not drink, he would say jovially to the young boy who looked up at him with big, confused, brown eyes.
Six weeks after the flood, his mother was dead.
--
Saul Ward killed his first Pinkerton when he was seventeen. Three weeks away from the town he’d grown up in and already he was a wanted man. Of course, he wasn’t wanted badly, but enough that it was better for him to stay behind with the cattle while the others went into town to drink and find women. He didn’t mind. It had been a necessary death, anyway. An accident, for the most part, but there had been intent in Saul’s mind and so he claimed the murder, owned it. He’d done it and everyone knew it. No one blamed him for it.
As it was he preferred to sleep out next to the idly shifting cattle and watch the cereus bloom bit by bit once the sun had gone down. He would stay awake on and off through the night, wondering how long he’d been sitting there in the darkness. It was a good way to lose track of time and he enjoyed it. There were some nights where the cloud cover was low and the sky was void of stars, just a blackness stretching out around him on all sides. He liked how the prairie swallowed him up until there was nothing left and sometimes imagined the men would come back from town to find a pair of empty boots.
They would pass abandoned homesteads on the trail as they drove the cattle in front of them. Saul smiled whenever he saw them while the rest of the men would shake their heads and mutter.
“What a pity, what a pity.”
Saul thought it was beautiful. His favorites were the dugouts with grassy slopes for roofs and earth for floors. He imagined the people who lived in them were as brown as the hill around them. Little brown people in their little brown houses. The abandoned ones were overgrown. The prairie had claimed them again, the grasses growing over the chimney and the occasional pot left behind.
Not all the farms were abandoned, though. The people they did see would come out of their homes to watch the cattle stream past, a river of wealth they were unable to dip from. The adults always looked worn smooth by the wind, blank eyed and expressionless, but the children would run after the cow hands on their horses. Their eyes and teeth gleamed like the boss’s fob watch. It was hard for Saul to look away from them and their laughter, but the trail was never ending. They always passed by without more than a second glance, leaving the grey, spent-wheat-stalk parents behind with their shining children.
--
He rode the trail five times. Men left because of the distances, the poor pay, the Indians. They would complain of missing their families, of wanting a roof over their heads, of disease and starvation. Some left because it was their time and the other hands would continue on without them, leaving behind a small mound of earth and a crude cross made out of whatever they could find. Just their time.
Saul left because he killed another Pinkerton and the boss couldn’t keep him around anymore.
“You’re a damn good hand, boy,” he said as he wrote out Saul’s last check, “but if I get them damn lawmen on m’back, that’ll be it. Curtains for me, the damned, rutting, bastards.”
Saul said he understood, which he did, and went on his way.
Four weeks after he left the trail, Saul robbed his first stagecoach. He’d signed on with a crew that he’d met at the local bar. They were loud and messy, both with their behavior and their plans. They strewed about the fact that they were planning the robbery as liberally as they spilled their drinks, so it was easy for Saul to buy them shot after shot until they agreed he was the best man for the job.
It was badly executed. Two of the crew were dead before they even got the coach to stop, but after that it was a turkey shoot. Two more Pinkertons for Saul to add to his list. He was twenty-one. Twenty-one and then that night while the others indulged in the beginnings of a three-day drunk, he took the money and the horses. The fools, he thought as he rode off at a leisurely pace, leaving behind the raucous sound of saloon revelry. They hadn’t even bothered to get his last name. He would never be such a fool. Saul, from the moment he’d first seen his mother take a man upstairs on the promise of credit, had known he would never be a fool. Whether it was foolishness born out of stupidity, or foolishness born out of kindness, he would have none of it. His gaze was sharp as he headed west. He would have none of it.
--
Saul didn’t know the war was on until it was halfway over. He didn’t give a damn about state’s rights, considering he didn’t spend any of his time within state lines anyway. It didn’t much concern him. He liked to shift between Kansas Territory and the Indian Territory below. They didn’t mind him down there, not like they minded the army and the railroad. Just him and the couple men he’d picked up along the way, after all. The first job had started him out good. The only detraction was that he’d made a name for himself. Saul Ward up on all the wanted posters. It was messy. He never did like too much attention. He never had. He didn’t like people looking or asking him questions and somewhere along the way he’d picked up enough of a temper to let this be plainly known.
“Don’t mention his mother,” was the first thing the other men told newcomers to their slowly growing crew, “whatever you do, don’t mention his mother.”
Then, when the boiling sun of July was evaporating the sweat off their backs, Saul met Jack Gray. Gray wore a confederate jacket and a blond beard. He hated yanks, carpetbaggers and Pinkertons. He’d been dishonorably discharged from the Confederate army after taking it upon himself to execute an unacceptably large group of Union prisoners. Gray told all of this to Saul from his jail cell where he’d been thrown for shooting a rancher who’d irked his delicate, confederate sensibilities.
“Just waitin’ to hang,” he said, his hard, blue eyes making Saul feel oddly young and inexperienced. “Don’t much want to talk about myself, but what is there when you’re just waitin’ to hang?”
“Save it,” Saul told him before drawing his pistol. “I’m gonna bust you out.” He was enamored in the way only a young man can be.
That night they killed the Sheriff and four of the railroad men stationed in town, making off with the sizable amount of cash in the railroad office’s safe. After that there were always two names on the wanted posters. Saul thought they went nicely together; Ward and Gray. They just looked pretty, sitting there on the yellowed paper.
After Jack Gray a steady stream of men broken and battered by the war made their ways into Ward’s crew. The Union had won and there was nowhere else for them to go. They were bitter; chewed-around-the-edges men who never made it easy for Ward to lead them. Saul didn’t like to admit it, and he didn’t do it often, but he owed much of his success to Gray. He’d saved Gray’s life and in the ex-soldier’s crazed mind, that meant he walked on the goddamn water. Sweet Messiah, Gray called him every so often. He liked to quote the psalms; liked to pray over the men he killed, as though praying over a fine supper. The other men were scared of him, and he seemed in awe of Ward, so they didn’t ask questions.
It wasn’t hard, however, for Saul to make his reputation real. He bolstered it without much effort, taking the crew on fifteen successful high-jackings. He never left a man alive; saw to that himself, and his brains kept the railroad men with their Pinkertons always ten steps behind. He never once asked himself what turn he’d taken to end up here, but he would fall asleep with his mother’s face against the black of his mind. She always looked as she did in his last memory of her; eyes open wide, cheeks bloodless, throat slit.
--
The fact of it was that Saul Ward didn’t have much use for money. He acted out of greed, perhaps, even if he wasn’t a particularly extravagant man, but he chased down the stagecoaches for other reasons. He would toss the bundles of cash at the members of his crew and begin planning out the next job. It wasn’t even the thrill of the chase, which is why Gray loved it so, clearly. It was proving them wrong. This money wasn’t theirs, it was his. He could take it from them as easily as they had mistreated his mother and her ragged child. Not vengeance, he would think to himself, just proof. They meant nothing; their money meant nothing, not when they faced the barrel of his pistol. He could make rich men beg and all the money in the world wouldn’t protect their lives from him. It was why he smiled so when he shot them. There,, he would think, spend your money now.
But it was when Gray began burning down ranches that Saul realized he had a problem. He’d become a hard man, ten years after his first job, but he didn’t enjoy the tears and misery Gray liked to bring down upon the families who had Union men at the heads of their tables. Saul had no alliances when it came to the War of Northern Aggression. He only knew what Gray told him, and Gray was a very disreputable source. Saul never had any illusions otherwise about that. But he drew a line at looting and pillaging. These ranchers had absolutely nothing of worth to him, no fresh men to join him, no cash. There was barely any food worth stealing and even if there had been, he always remembered the faces of the people outside their ramshackle homes, how they stood and watched the cattle stream by with hungry faces. It didn’t sit right with him. Never would.
He told Jack this and they fought. Gray insisted he didn’t give a good goddamn if they were just poor ranchers; they were scum-sucking yanks who weren’t worth the ground he spat on. Saul didn’t know why he did it, but he punched him. It was foolish. Jack Gray was his best asset. Couldn’t afford to lose him. Still, a struggle ensued, both men kicking up dust and cursing vividly and upon reflection, Saul could only consider himself lucky the others weren’t there to see. It ended with Saul straddling the smaller man’s chest, the barrel of his pistol jabbing intrusively under his chin. Gray’s eyes blazed with a mix of senseless fury and the kind of adoration with which he looked upon Saul regularly, and which made Saul deeply uncomfortable. This man is not sane, he told himself, he should not be allowed to live, but he stood up anyway and holstered his weapon.
Gray would not stop watching him after that. It was impossible to tell if he looked on Saul with hatred or love. The two seemed so closely linked for the confederate. He had a same terrible grin whether he was killing Pinkertons or counting the haul. Saul felt the pull of that madness every time he squeezed the trigger and he resisted, but it yanked on his heart, made no easier by Gray’s voice whispering in his ear, like the devil on his right shoulder.
Burn it, he would hiss every time they passed a ranch or an outpost, burn it, burn it. Saul was terrified that he craved destruction just as fiercely, so he hid himself away, did not let himself speak or think on the days he spilled blood. But he realized one morning that the shirt he pulled on after bathing in a murky stream was more blood than plaid, almost none of it his own. He put the shirt on anyway. He had no other shirt. He had no other skin to wear. Gray was right. He was no different than the rest of the men, try as he might. And ultimately, Jack’s voice whispered, although the man was still asleep back at camp, Saul was no different than the Pinkerton who’d slaughtered his mother.
--
Twenty-seven years after his mother’s death, sixteen after his first job, Saul trailed a few feet after Gray as they charged between canyon walls toward a stagecoach. The sound of the horses’ hooves pounding echoed against the stone and so no one heard the sound of the flash flood rushing in behind them. The man driving the coach certainly saw it, and Saul was close enough to see his expression change from grim determination to rigid horror. It made him glance back over his shoulder and the wall of thick, brown water was so familiar it made his heart stop in his chest. Brown water that carried in all the filth and waste of the world; carried it in and then swept it away.
The men’s horses were panicking and breaking from the tightly uniformed pack. The coach didn’t have time to stop, the driver was too terror stricken to try, and it ripped through the crew that had just been intending to rob it, knocking both men and animals into the sandstone walls. Saul didn’t look back to see the coach collide with the quickly advancing wave, but he heard the unearthly screams of the horses. He was sprinting alongside Jack Gray, both men stretched out over the necks of their foaming mounts.
This is it, he thought as he watched the wild-eyed man next to him, uncaring of where his horse was taking him, it doesn’t matter now, because it’s carrying us away.
Jack must have felt Saul’s eyes on him because he turned his head. The two men stared at each other, hot dust whipping their faces and the roar of the water filling their ears. Gray’s cracked lips were moving and Saul recognized the words of a song he’d heard sung in church a long time ago.
Oh sinners, let’s go down, come on down. Oh sinners, let’s go down, down to the river to pray.
Saul laughed at the man’s devilish irony. Jack was ripped off his horse first, the water taking the animal right off the ground so the man went flying backward. Saul didn’t have time to see where he landed, but he knew Gray hadn’t fought, just as he didn’t when he felt the water hit him like a freight train. The thick, brown water would clean out the canyon; rid it of greed and filth. It would clean up Saul Ward and carry him away, but he wouldn’t be gone, just passed to the front step of some unlucky rancher.
He remembered the evil of finding his mother dead on the floor. He remembered the men shoveling stinking mud from the front porch of the saloon.
