Gabriel's Story Read Free

afraid even more that his words were futile. “It’s better you get a view of the place in the daylight. This here candle don’t do it justice.”
    No one responded, but Solomon kept pushing himself through the motions of host. He showed the boys where they’d be sleeping, in a corner, on bedding of straw and hemp. He seemed to find words harder and harder to create. He indicated the space Eliza and he would share, with a nod and an attentive study of her face. Their bed, small for two but made up neatly and displaying an old quilt, was separated from the rest of the room by a curtain.
    Eliza asked no questions. She suggested that the boys go to sleep, adding, “We’ll get a proper view in the morning.” She slipped behind the curtain before the boys could respond.
    They stood there, seemingly the only ones shocked by the appearance of things. Gabriel thought back to the brownstone they had left in Baltimore. They had occupied only the upstairs apartment, and it had never seemed so special or spacious before. But now it stood out as infinitely grand: those wide stairs and high ceilings, the bay windows facing a busy street, the kitchen, and the dining room with its inset fireplace and flowered wallpaper. The bedroom that he and Ben had shared had seemed too intimate a space. But that room, with its iron-frame bed and view onto the alley three stories below, was nearly as big as the space they were all to share now. He glanced at his brother, for a rare moment seeking some camaraderie. Indeed, he read similar thoughts written on Ben’s troubled features.
    Gabriel glanced at the curtain behind which his mother had disappeared. His mouth worked, as if he would call her out and demand some explanation, point out to her the impossibility of what this man had just presented to them. But his tongue couldn’t form the words. He moved over to the bed when Solomon offered to get a little fire going to keep the night warm. He sat on the firm pallet and watched the man, his eyes dark and brooding in the candlelight.
    THE TWO MEN RODE EAST to San Antonio, where they passed
three days in a haze of alcohol and sex. From there they rode on to
San Marcus and Mountain City and into Austin, where the white
man drew on his bank account and so further fueled their
debauchery. They spent time and money in Waco and Fort Graham and Dallas, leaving behind them two men near death, a
string of damaged saloons, and three prostitutes who cursed the
men by name and description and asked that God do them the
one favor of tearing these men from the earth and throwing them
to the fires of hell.
    The white man harbored a rage that had been newly stirred but
that had begun before anything he could name and plagued him in
his dreams, both sleeping and awake. He thought up tortures for
his enemies, and when they were exhausted, he thought up new
enemies and so continued. The black man watched it all with
quiet eyes and waited.
    Outside of a saloon in Dallas, the white man took the butt of a
rifle across his forehead and lay immobile as blood trickled into his
eyes, wondering if this was what death felt like, wondering if the
fires of hell were actually liquid, and if so, could they be consumed? The black man carried him away and sat him on his
horse, and they rode down the Trinity River and camped at one of
its forks and sobered up. The white man cursed everything, himself included, and struggled with the demons within, and tried to
push them away because they were not his demons but had been
planted in him. They need not be his, and this need not be the
course of his life. He stared into the flames of their mesquite fire
and listened to the coyotes and watched the progress of suckerfish
in the river and thereby found a new sanity. He nursed his mind
gently and watched it grow calm.
    GABRIEL WOKE EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, chilled to the bone and damp. His brother pressed against him, his mouth open, breathing with a peaceful