Vengeance, My Heart is a work of serialized fiction. Jump to key story links to read earlier content.
The man who had taken the hare from the stranger spit the carcass and seared it over the flames. The stranger noticed the woman who had poured the coffee was too close a resemblance to be anything but the man’s daughter and watched her cut up root vegetables and put them into a small kettle of boiling water. It would not amount to much, but it was luxurious fare for those used to the road and even a small tin cup of the stuff was better than hardtack and stale water sitting in a skin all day.
She was lean, but not a sinewy, spindly leanness. Her father did well enough doing whatever he did to keep her modestly fed.
A young man sat in the family’s wain, hat pulled low over his eyes, a long gun cradled in his arms. He seemed to be napping for a watch against the roaming desert nightgaunts that liked to nest near the mesas when true night decided to stop for a visit. Probably the older man’s son.
It told the stranger that this family was no stranger to the wastes. They had traveled the Road before.
Aside from low conversations coming from the other side of camp, a silence came over the stranger while the man pulled the meat into strips and added it to the soup the woman had prepared.
The woman approached the stranger with the pot of coffee.
“There’s still some left,” she said. “Care for another cup?”
The stranger nodded and held out the empty tin cup.
She smiled as she poured. “It’s sure nice to meet some other folks on the trail,” she said. “There are times we’ve crossed the wastes that we don’t run into a single soul that ain’t a pilgrim looking for handouts or—”
She briefly glanced over at Dee and the other side of the camp. The smile returned. “Well, I just thought I’d extend you some hospitality of our own and let you know that you’d be welcome to put down over here when you decide to call it a night. ‘Least we can do for your offer of the hare.”
The stranger nodded. An acknowledgment of the offer, neither accepting nor refusing it.
Watching from across the campfire, the stranger noted Dee’s lips grew tight and flat.
“Gawdammit, Dee. We gotta talk.”
Dee looked in the direction of one of the rougher men from her side of camp who came to her with a storm brewing behind those slate-grey eyes. Dee’s eyes narrowed as she looked at him, but maintained an amused expression all full of smile until someone got to looking closer. The lack of patience for whatever was coming was plain to see if one paid attention, which everyone gathered around the camp made a point of not doing. Except the stranger. She paid close attention.
“Well talk then, Cord. Hope it’s more than the flapping noise your lips make most of the time if you think it is so damned important as to interrupt my relaxin’ time.” She took a sip from a flask and then pointed at the man she named as Cord with the mouth. “You do have something more to say than the drivel you talk most night, right?”
She took a nip from the flask before closing the cap and resting the battered steel between her riding chaps.
That stole some of Cord’s heat and fire. He changed his tone, as if suddenly remembering who he was talking to.
“Is just about gettin’ me some new horseflesh, Dee. It’s unmanly to be riding in the back of the wain and the motion makes me sick to my stomach.”
At the mention of ‘horseflesh’, the working man who had accepted the hospitality of the trail turned away and muttered something inaudible into the gloaming and the wind. Not inaudible enough, it seemed.
“You watch your fuckin’ mouth, ya ol’ geezer. I weren’t talking to you, so you just mind yer fuckin’ manners,” said Cord. Not shouting, but loud enough that everyone in camp tensed and monitored the situation — either from the corner of their eyes, or outright taking in the scene.
“Ain’t talkin’ to you,” he said by way of reply. “I was holding conversation with the winds.” The stranger watched his hand gravitate toward a shotgun leaning against the family’s wagon, reconsider, then drift back down.
“Well I find your mutterin’ to the winds to be a distraction to my negot—”.
“Leave it, Cord,” Dee said flatly. It was a tone that brooked no arguments. “Or you’ll walk to Absalom for all I care.”
Cowed, Cord looked down at his feet.
“I’m just asking that, opportunity comes up…” He struggled to find the right words. “Well, could you see it in yourself to get me a replacement?”
“So you can run that one into the dirt too? I’m tired of paying for your inattention to those minor inconveniences like feeding and watering your ride.”
“I would have, but you keep such a tight fist on our shares that I can’t always aff—”
“Really? You’re gonna blame me for spending your earnings on whoring and boozing instead of maintaining your equipment?” She stood up slowly, with the economy of a feline. “A horse is no less important than maintaining that cheap revolver your pappy gave you back at the ranch I found you at before you went and daylighted him.”
She crossed over to Cord and brought her face close enough to kiss him if she leaned forward a little bit more. She took the cap off her flask, this time drinking deeper than she had most of the evening since the stranger had arrived.
“Please tell me you ain’t sayin’ it was ‘cos of me that your horse went and died ’bout ten miles back.” She took a step forward and Cord’s backstep mirrored it.
“No Dee. I’m sorry, Boss. It were me and my darned lack of watching my funds that done killed that horse.”
Somewhere along the way, Dee’s hand had gone to the gun in the holster at her hip and the barrel was pressed up against Cord’s jaw.
“Because we might have to have words if you are saying that instead of just having ourselves a friendly little chat.”
“Su-sus-su-sor-sorry Duh-Duh-Dee—” stammered Cord. “I forgot my place.”
“And have you found where you misplaced it,” she said in monotone.
“I-I-bel-I believe s-s-so,” Cord replied.
“Music?” asked the young women from the family as Dee opened her mouth. She really was a pretty thing, thought the stranger, with her flaxen hair cascading over a plain dress that nonetheless accented her curves instead of masking them. In most places, she’d have already been married off for the dowry, but her father did not appear to want to be rid of her just yet.
She was holding a beat-up guitar in one hand as if it had been there all along.
Her brother’s wide brim was up now, eyes showing and alert. He had been playing at possum earlier then. The stranger considered maybe it were not so much the nightgaunts he was keeping an eye on as the other predators on the prowl.
“The long gloaming goes quicker with a couple of tunes to show it on it’s way.”
Dee nodded and holstered her gun, wandering back to the place the stranger had found her when she rode Fallow into camp. She sat down and took a nip from the flask.
“Dee, she likes them maudlin kinds of tunes. Something sad. Know anything like that?”
The stranger was so intent on watching Dee, she missed who had made the helpful suggestion. If the crow had been around…
On cue, the blue-eyed crow appeared from somewhere in the twilight world they roamed and alighted on a branch of mesquite just outside the circle of light cast by the campfire.
The man’s daughter nodded and sat down on one of the large rocks littering the base of the mesa and tested out a few chords, tuned one of the strings and started to play a sad, meandering song with words of a lost love, down by the riverside.
Dee caught the stranger’s eye, nodded over her shoulder to the west.
“Headed to Absalom?” Dee asked, the way one asks about weather.
“That general direction,” the stranger said.
“You alone?”
She looked at Dee and did a little narrowing of her eyes herself. “Appears so.”
Dee shot her a friendly-looking smile. “Road’s rough for a solitary woman.”
“Road’s rough,” the stranger agreed, and left it there.
A long pause. Dee’s eyes seemed to wander over the camp, but the stranger knew that to be a distraction. They drifted back to her, lingered on the tattoo on the stranger’s cheek — not long, not obvious, just a reading. Then back to the fire.
“You a Ward woman?” she asked. Lighter than the question deserved.
“Not anymore,” she replied.
The girl let the song trail off into the gloaming. One of the quieter ones on Dee’s side of the fire tossed a stick into the flames and watched the sparks rise.
“You folks happen to cross paths with a man calling hisself the Preacher on the road?” he asked the family. “Big man. Asks a lot of questions.”
The older man and his daughter exchanged the briefest of looks.
“Passed him some days back,” the man said. “Headed this direction. Seemed best to keep talk short.”
He didn’t elaborate. His daughter found a string on the guitar needing tuning.
“Yeah. Creepy as fuck, that guy — pardon my language, ma’am.” He pulled his hat down over his eyes.
Nobody pressed it. The subject stopped the way subjects stop when everyone present has decided simultaneously not to continue it.
The young woman started strumming again, her voice rising clear into the gloaming — an old standard, the kind that had been sung at too many bedsides and gravesides to belong to anyone anymore. The words were about a promise made before a wedding that never came.
The stranger watched Dee listening and wipe away a tear she thought no one saw.
The stranger sipped at her coffee and said nothing.
Dee let both the camp and fire settle before she spoke up again.
— Story Links —
Beginning of Vengeance, My Heart
❧
Begin with part 1 of the current episode
Next Part (coming soon)
❧
Next episode
❧
Table of Contents for Vengeance, My Heart
Leave a comment. Markdown use is permitted.