“Safe,” said his mother, as if it were something that defied belief. “Safe and alive and home again. My boy! My darling!”
He held her close while one thin hand reached up and stroked his hair.
“I prayed,” his mother said. “I prayed and prayed and…”
She was sobbing quietly in the coming darkness and her hand kept on stroking his hair and for a moment he recaptured the little baby feeling and the security and warmth and love that lay within it.
A board creaked beneath his father’s footsteps and Benton looked up, seeing the room for the first time since he had entered it. Plain and simple almost to severity. Clean poverty that had a breath of home. The lamp with the painted chimney sitting on the battered dresser. The faded print of the sheep grazing beside a stream. The cracked mirror that hung from a nail pounded in the wall.
“I have been sick,” his mother told him, “but now I’m going to get well. You’re all the medicine that I need.”
Across the bed his father was nodding vigorously.
“She will, too, son,” he said. “She grieved a lot about you.”
“How is everyone else?” asked Benton. “I’ll go out and see them in the morning, but tonight I just want to…”
His father shook his head again. “There ain’t no one else, Ned.”
“No one else! But the hands…”
“There ain’t no hands.”
Silence came across the room, a chill and brittle silence. In the last rays of sunlight coming through the western window his father suddenly was beaten and defeated, an old man with stooped shoulders, lines upon his face.
“Jingo Charley left this morning,” his father told him. “He was the last. Tried to fire him months ago, but he wouldn’t leave. Said things would come out all right. But this morning he just up and left.”
“But no hands,” said Benton. “The ranch…”
“There ain’t no ranch.”
Slowly, Benton got to his feet. His mother reached out for one of his hands, held it between the two of hers.
“Don’t take on, now,” she said. “We still got the house and a little land.”
“The bank sold us out,” his father said. “We had a little mortgage, your mother sick and all. Bank went broke and they sold us out. Watson bought the place.”
“But he was right good about it all,” his mother said. “Old Dan Watson, he let us keep the house and ten acres of land. Said he couldn’t take everything that a neighbor had.”
“Watson didn’t have the mortgage?”
His father shook his head. “No, the bank had it. But the bank went broke and had to sell its holdings. Watson bought it from the bank.”
“Then Watson foreclosed?”
“No, the bank foreclosed and sold the land to Watson.”
“I see,” said Benton. “And the bank?”
“It started up again.”
Benton closed his eyes, felt the weariness of four long, bitter years closing in on him, smelled the dust of broken hopes and dreams. His mind stirred muddily. There was yet another thing. Another question.
He opened his eyes. “What about Jennie Lathrop?” he asked.
His mother answered. “Why, Jennie, when she heard that you were…”
Her voice broke off, hanging in the silence.
“When she heard that I was dead,” said Benton, brutally, “she married someone else.”
His mother nodded up at him from the pillows. “She thought you weren’t coming back, son.”
“Who?” asked Benton.
“Why, you know him, Ned. Bill Watson.”
“Old Dan Watson’s son.”
“That’s right,” said his mother. “Poor girl. He’s an awful drinker.”
The town of Calamity had not changed in the last four years. It still huddled, wind-blown and dusty, on the barren stretch of plain that swept westward from the foot of the Greasewood hills. The old wooden sign in front of the general store still hung lopsided as it had since six years before when a wind had ripped it loose. The hitching posts still leaned crazily, like a row of drunken men wobbling down the street. The mudhole, scarcely drying up from one rainstorm till the next, still bubbled in the street before the bank.
Benton, riding down the street, saw all these things and knew that it was almost as if he’d never been away. Towns like Calamity, he told himself, never change. They simply get dirtier and dingier and each year the buildings slump just a little more and a board falls out here and a shingle blows off there and never are replaced.
“Some day,” he thought, “the place will up and blow away.”
There was one horse tied to the hitching rack in front of the bank and several horses in front of the Lone Star saloon. A buckboard, with a big gray team, was wheeling away from the general store and heading down the street.
As it approached, Benton pulled the black to one side to make way. A man and a girl rode behind the bays, he saw. An old man with bushy, untrimmed salt and pepper beard, a great burly man who sat four-square behind the team with the reins in one hand and a long whip in the other. The girl wore a sunbonnet that shadowed her face.
That man, thought Benton. I know him from somewhere.
And then he knew. Madox. Old Bob Madox from the Tumbling A. Almost his next door neighbor.
He pulled the black to a halt and waited, wheeling in close to the buckboard when it stopped.
Madox looked up at him and Benton sensed the power that was in the man. Huge barreled chest and hands like hams and blue eyes that crinkled in the noonday sun.
Benton reached down his hand. “You remember me?” he asked. “Ned Benton.”
“Sure I do,” said Madox. “Sure, boy, I remember you. So you are home again.”
“Last night,” Benton told him.
“You must recall my daughter,” said Madox. “Name of Ellen. Take off that damn sunbonnet, Ellen, so a man can see your face.”
She slipped the sunbonnet off her head and it hung behind her by the ties. Blue eyes laughed at Benton.
“It’s nice,” she said, “to have a neighbor back.”
Benton raised a hand to his hat. “Last time I saw you, Ellen,” he said, “you were just a kid with freckles and your hair in pigtails.”
“Hell,” said old Madox, “she wears it in pigtails mostly now. Just put it up when she comes to town. About drives her mother mad, she does. Dressing up in her brother’s pants and acting like a boy all the blessed time.”
“Father!” said Ellen, sharply.
“Ought to been a boy,” her father said. “Can lick her weight in wildcats.”
“My father,” Ellen told Benton, “is getting old and he has lost his manners.”
“Come out and see us sometime,” said Madox. “Make it downright soon. We got a few things to talk over.”
“Like this foreclosure business?”
Madox spat across the wheel. “Damn right,” he said. “Figure we all got taken in.”
“How do the Lee boys feel?” asked Benton.
“Same as the rest of us,” said Madox.
He squinted at the black. “Riding an Anchor horse,” he said and the tone he used was matter-of-fact.
“Traded,” said Benton.
“Some of the Anchor boys are down at the Lone Star,” said Madox.
“Thanks,” said Benton.
Madox snapped his whip and the team moved on. Ellen waved to Benton and he waved back.
For a moment he sat in the street, watching the buckboard clatter away, then swung the horse around and headed for the Lone Star.
Except for the Anchor men and the bartender the place was empty. The bartender dozed, leaning on the bar. The others were gathered around a table, intent upon their cards.