Novel 1959 - The First Fast Draw (v5.0) Read Free Page B

sun and rain.
    The sun, the rain, the wind let nothing alone, but they worry at it, smooth it and rough it again until it is their own. I was like that, myself. A man shaped by storms and hot suns, but most of all by the thousand storms I kept buried inside, all of them crowding at my lips and eyes for expression, working their way down into my quiet fingers, feeding anger through my veins that I’d had to fight back, again and again.
    For what they said of me was true. I was a killing man, a man of frightful rages that all my life I’d had to keep back inside me. Once in a while when something would go against me, I’d tear loose and it frightened me, for I had no grudge against any man, nor did I know what it meant to hate. To be wary, yes, for I knew there were hating folks about, but for myself, I hated no man. Only there was a point beyond which I’d not be pushed, and when beyond that point the fury came up in me, cold, dangerous and mighty.
    Swinging down from the saddle I opened the gate, taking my time, almost scared to go in, for opening that gate was opening the memories I’d fought back for a long while now.
    It seemed any minute Ma was going to open the door and call me for supper, or Pa would come, holding out his hand to greet me. Only they weren’t going to come out, and nobody at all was coming to that door, which had remained unopened these two years now.
    Leading the mule through the gate I dropped the bridle reins and walked slowly forward, and in my throat there was a lump.
    Nobody was there. The kitchen door hung on old strap hinges, dried and shrunk from the neat fit Pa had given it when he built the place with his own hands, me helping as much as I could. A boy then I’d known little of the slights a man learns by working with his hands, and all I’d had to help was a strong back and arms for lifting.
    The boards on the stoop were warped and gray, and brown leaves had gathered in the corner between the stoop and the house. Only the iris still grew along the path where Ma had planted it, and the redbud tree Pa and me dug up from the river’s edge was well-grown now and making like a tree more than a shrub like they usually are. These things can last, I think, the trees a man plants and the wells he digs…I do not know if the buildings last.
    The door opened stiffly under my hand, and when I went through the door there were tears down my cheeks like I was a pigtailed girl.
    Empty, the way it was, it looked like I’d never seen it. Everything a body could carry off had been toted away except the big copper kettle near the fireplace which was unhandy to load on a horse. The rooms were empty and here and there the chunking had fallen from between the logs in the log part of the house which we had built first. Later, Pa started to build the rest of it with planks, and he was fixing to give Ma a real home at last. He never done it though, and hard work caught up with Ma first; she’d never been real strong.
    She was buried out there back of the orchard, where they’d put Pa…somebody told me that; I’d not been here myself.
    An owl had been roosting in the kitchen and left his sign around the way an owl does. A body would think there was fifty of them rather than one. There was dust over everything, and when Ma had lived there never was dust. She never had much to do with, but she made out, and that place had been spic and span like I’d never seen another place. It had been a home blessed by care if not by money.
    At the fireplace I could see where night-stoppers had left the remains of their meal—only the mice had been at it.
    Outside again, not liking the hollow sound of my feet on the board floors, I saw the weeds had grown up among the roses, and I could see there would be a sight of work to keep me busy.
    “Well Pa,” I said aloud, “what you wished it to be, that’s what I’ll make it.”
    When I went outside once more that old buckskin mule was cropping grass like it was the day