"You may have been afraid of too much," he said. "Widows sometimes are, women alone. My being here will help you get over that. Maybe I will be good for you."
"Good for me?"
"Yes. I have never been afraid of anything. Cautious, yes, but that's different. Maybe I can bring out the spunk in you. I'm sure it is there."
The turn of the conversation disquieted her. She rose quickly. "I must get started with supper." She moved toward the door.
Since her back was turned, and she could not see the effort it required, he hauled himself upright. "Before you go, Mrs. Rogers, there's a favor I'd like to ask. I have been in this room too long. I wondered if you would go for a drive in the country with me tomorrow morning. I will hire a hack."
"Tomorrow? Oh, I couldn't, Mr. Books, thank you just the same. Don't you know about tomorrow?"
"No."
"President McKinley will be in El Paso. There's to be a parade, the McGinty Band will play, and all the school children are to march, carrying flags. He's expected to speak in the plaza. I couldn't miss that."
He leaned on the back of the armchair. "Are you sure that is your reason?"
"I certainly am."
"I wish you would reconsider. If there is a big shindig downtown, that's fine. We can skin out of town with no one the wiser. I do not care to be seen. Just for an hour or two?"
"Mr. Books, I appreciate—"
"You don't care to be alone with me. O.K., have your boy come along for a chaperon."
"It isn't that, I assure you. I've been widowed only a year. People would—"
"People." He scowled. "Ma'am, if I have to work on your sympathy, I will. This may be the last chance I will have. Doc Hostetler says there will come a day when I can't get out of bed. Before that day I want to see the world again—the skies and spaces—and I do not fancy seeing it alone. I have been full of alone lately. All we have done, you and I, since I moved in here, is scratch at each other, and then apologize. Well, if I am going to die in your house, I think we should try to be friends. So I wish like hell you would go with me. I apologize for the language."
Bond Rogers had not imagined he had that many words in him, or that much eloquence. It was true: under the menace, below the profanity, at the end of the fuse of violence which smoldered always, was the child with a stubbed toe who needed comforting. She had come upon that child in Ray, although the qualities which obscured it were kindly in his instance rather than reprehensible. Behind her husband's smiling face was a soul. Under this man's coat there were guns. She wished with all her heart that she had loved Ray more while she had him, and let him know it. For suddenly it was too late, he was gone forever. This man, awaiting grimly her response, would decline day by day, but die he would, just as surely as Ray, and much more terribly, and under her roof, too. It seemed to her that she must not make the same mistake twice. She feared what Books was, she despised what he had been, but she had taken him into her house and permitted him to remain when he had informed her almost casually that his case was hopeless; the least she could do in his last days, then, was to extend a kind though decorous hand. She searched for a text, and found it. "And the greatest of these," she sermonized herself, "is Charity."
"I will go with you," she said.
"Capital." It was the first genuine smile she had seen on his face. "Let's make it ten o'clock. Just for an hour or two. Invite your son along. And will you ask him to trot down to the livery in the morning and bring us a rig?"
"Yes," she said.
"I am very much obliged," he said.
She decided to test Gillom. She had not been invited anywhere by a man for a year. His reaction might reveal something she should know.
She told him, but he was inscrutable. He said that was swell. She learned nothing.
Then she added that he was invited too. His face lit up like a fiesta. He smacked a palm with a fist. "Hot damn!"
"You'll miss seeing the President."
"Who cares? How many men's McKinley killed?"
"I scarcely—"
"J. B. Books and us! Gosh, Ma, d'you think he'll bring his guns along?"
"I hope not."
"What if somebody sees him that hates him? What if there's a shoot-out and we're in on it?" Gillom crouched, drew, and fired his finger. "Bing! Bang! Bango!"
What his mother learned about her son was not what she had expected to.
At ten o'clock Books donned his vest and frock coat, which was tailor-made in the Prince Albert mode but single-breasted rather than double, so that he had quick entry to his vest, adjusted his Stetson, started, then returned for a spoonful of laudanum. He had determined to leave his pillow but, given the torment his rump would be sure to take in a gig or a buckboard, he did not believe he could do without the intercession of the drug. It was his first morning dose, though he relied on it afternoons now, as well as nights.
Mrs. Rogers waited for him on the porch. He took her arm. Gillom Rogers waited behind a team on the front seat of a phaeton—not a gig or a buckboard but a phaeton—a black four-wheeled, spring-seated, gilt-spoked, folding-top equipage fit for a king or a president or the madam of a high-priced parlor house.
"Mighty stylish," Books commented.
"I didn't think you ought to ride in any old hack, Mister Books. Mose Tarrant had to dust this one off. He says he don't rent it too often, except for funerals. Hop in, ladies and gents!"
"Keep to the back streets," said Books.
"Yes, sir."
Books opened the door, seated his landlady and himself in the rear. Gillom took the reins and clucked. The team stepped out smartly.
Their way was eastward. The streets were empty, for most of El Paso's populace and traffic had gravitated to the plaza for the McKinley parade and speechifying. Brass music drifted down the hollow thoroughfares. Between closed and shuttered stores the drumbeats loitered. Gillom chauffeured them north and, as the political discord faded, followed San Antonio Street out of town along the valley of the Rio Grande.
It was a drear day. Under a gray sky, under an impassive mountain, under a crow which accompanied it for a time, the phaeton rolled, the only sounds the inquiry of the crow, a grit of pebbles, a creak of harness, the snort and footfall of the team at a trot. Weather in west Texas this time of year depended on the whim of wind. When it came down the pass from the north as now, snow was not uncommon, though transient, but an immigrant wind from the south, from Old Mexico or the Gulf, turned the valley tropical overnight, drenching it often with rain and bloating the river into flood. When either of these winds desisted the hours were dry, the sun shone, the air glittered.
In the front seat, his jacket collar up against the chill, Gillom tended to his knitting. Books asked his guest if she wished the top raised. She did not, thank you. She was protected by an ankle-length coat, her head and shoulders by a shawl of black wool.
They dusted through Ysleta, a huddle of small adobe houses and a church with a broken cross. Children with brown and ancient eyes stared after them, and starving dogs gave chase. Then they were out under the gray sky again, into the silence and the long, long valley. They passed between vineyards, the vines sere and leafless, between barrens of stub corn and the winter tatter of squash and beans and melons. They saw a yoke of oxen in the distance, plodding toward the edges of the world.
Books leaned forward, pointed at a line of cottonwoods. His driver nodded, reined the team off the road and into a field and to a stop alongside an acequia, or irrigation ditch. He gangled down, tied the team, and opening the rear door, bowed low.
"Time to stretch your legs, folks."
His passengers alighted. From a pocket he slipped a pint bottle, offered it to Books. "Time to grease your tonsils, too."