“Claire, I’m going to put the baby back . . .” He stopped in mid-sentence. There was nobody in the bed, and in fact, the bed was still made.
“What?” he asked aloud.
She couldn’t have gone anywhere, her horse was still in the lean-to.
John stepped outside. “Claire?” he called. “Claire, are you out here?”
John heard something from the garden, low and guttural, like the sound of wolves, feeding.
“Get the hell out of my garden!” he shouted loudly, and, with yelps, the animals ran.
John started out to the garden to see what kind of damage the wolves might have done. That was when he saw the two bodies . . . one large, and one small. Or at least, what was left of the bodies.
“NO!!!!!” The agonizing cry of horror and despair rolled back from the walls of the little canyon. “God in heaven . . . no!!!”
John fell to his knees in the garden beside the bodies of his wife and baby, and wept aloud as he hadn’t done so since he was a small boy.
Old Main Building
“Please, stop the recording,” Smoke said.
Professor Armbruster waved at Wes, who stopped the session.
Smoke sat there for a long moment, his eyes closed as he pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Are you all right, Smoke?” Professor Armbruster asked.
“I need to walk around a bit if you don’t mind,” Smoke said.
“No, I don’t mind at all. Go ahead, walk around the campus all you want. I’ll be in my office when you are ready to resume recording. You do intend to continue, don’t you?”
“I don’t know,” Smoke said. “This has become . . . difficult,” he said. “Much more difficult than I ever imagined it could be.”
“I understand.”
Smoke forced a smile. “I’m glad you understand, because I’m not sure that I do. In the first place, this happened many years ago. And in the second place, I’ve told this story before without it affecting me as it is now.”
“But the way you are telling it now is different,” Professor Armbruster said. “You have never before been as powerfully absorbed in the story as you are now. This intense immersion has heightened your reaction to the events so that you are, in effect, reliving, rather than merely retelling the details. There is a psychological explanation for this. It is called ‘cognitive context-dependent memory.’ You see, you lost your own wife and child by an act of violence, much in the same way as John Jackson lost his. And now, in the retelling of this story you are, in effect, redoubling and experiencing again, your own trauma.”
Smoke smiled, wanly. “Yeah,” he said. “Something like that.”
As Smoke walked around the campus he heard the sound of an engine from above, and looked up to see an airplane passing overhead. Across a landscape covered with fallen leaves, and under a tree he saw a group of college students. They were listening to music on the radio, and two young girls, wearing bobbed hair and short skirts, were doing some sort of dance that seemed to require a lot of kicking.
He couldn’t help but think what drastic changes there had been within his lifetime, and as he looked at the students, he wondered how many of them could have stood up to the ordeal of a two-month-long wagon train trip, or a winter in the mountains with nothing but their own wits for survival.
But even as he contemplated such patronizing thoughts, he recalled the Great War so recently concluded, and he realized that despite the outside trappings, nothing had really changed. The principles of courage, honor, and self-reliance were still present, and he was satisfied that these young men and women would be able to rise to whatever challenges they might meet in the future.
He wished he could go into Longmont’s Saloon for a beer, but knew that, even if he were back in Big Rock, that option wouldn’t be open to him. He wondered if the country would ever come to its senses and repeal the idiotic amendment that was prohibition.
Finally, the melancholy he had been experiencing since the moment he told of John finding the half-eaten bodies of Claire and Kirby passed. He turned and started back toward the Old Main building, the fallen leaves crackling under his feet.
When he returned to the recording room, he saw a glass of amber liquid sitting by the microphone, and he smiled.
“Something tells me this isn’t tea,” he said.
“I thought you might need a little . . . what is it you men called it in the old days? Snort?”
“Snort, yes,” Smoke said. He picked it up. “And, yes, I do need a drink right now.”
He tossed the drink down, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, and nodded.
“I’m ready when you are,” he said.
On the other side of the window, Wes brought his hand down, and Smoke resumed talking.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Montana
John carried Claire and the baby back into the house and he laid them both on the bed. The same bed that he and Claire had shared, the same bed on which Kirby had been conceived. He covered their bodies with a bright red blanket, then he pulled a chair up beside the bed and sat there, staring at the covered mounds on the bed.
As John sat there, unbidden, episodes of his past flashed through his mind. He saw himself as an acolyte in his father’s church, and as a student at the University of Pennsylvania. Terrible images of the war tumbled by, as well as his difficulty in adjusting when he came back. He recalled his rejection by Lucinda, and his experiences in Annam.
But nothing, nothing in his entire life, had ever hurt him to the degree he was hurting now. The pain was unbearable, and he wanted to scream until he had no voice left.
“God, why?” he asked aloud.
He remembered asking that same question to his father after he came back from the war, when he was having such a difficult time adjusting.
“Why, if He is a just God, would He allow such evil things to happen?” John had asked.
“God allows things to happen for His reasons, whether or not we understand them,” John’s father had answered. “Above all, however, we must remember that He is a good, just, loving, and merciful God. I know that things have happened to you that are beyond your understanding. But you must trust in the Lord, and put aside all doubts.”
Nathaniel’s short homily had done nothing to ease John’s inner turmoil then, and recalling his words was doing nothing toward easing his pain now.
“Why, God! Why?” John shouted at the top of his voice. Then, in an angry snarl he added, “Never mind. I’ll set things right on my own.”
When the sun rose the next morning, John went out into the garden where he gathered every flower that had been planted. Bringing them in, he spread them on top of the bed until the bed was covered with colorful blooms and petals.
That done, John emptied a container of kerosene, then he set fire to the house. He stood out front watching the flames leap up around the logs that he and Claire had cut, shaped, notched, and put into position to build the house.
He could feel the heat of the flames, and even though it was uncomfortable, he made no effort to back away. He stood right there, until the cabin was completely consumed by the fire, so that there was not one recognizable thing about it remaining. He looked where he thought the bed might be, but could see nothing but blackened ash. He made no attempt to look closer.
Not until the last wisp of smoke had died, did he mount his horse and ride away. In less than twenty-four hours, his life had taken a turn that closed off his previous thirty-five years, as if none of it had ever happened. He was now a man consumed with hatred, and a determination to avenge his wife and child.