Backlands Page 5

  The service ended and Patrick ducked outside to wait on the street for Emma and Matt. As the congregation slowly left the church, he wondered how she would greet him. He’d missed the wake, so would it be with stony silence or a cold reserve? Either way, neither mother nor son would show him much warmth, if any, and he had little of it to offer to them himself.

  He waited with the ever-present twinge of uncertainty that always came over him just before he saw her. He never quite knew what to expect from her and often guessed wrong. Her looks, her smarts, her fierce emotions, and her strange ways had baffled him when they first met and still baffled him now.

  As Emma and Matt emerged from the church and approached, Patrick removed his hat, ran a hand through his freshly cut hair, and nodded by way of a greeting.

  Emma nodded back. “Say hello to your father, Matthew,” she said.

  “Hello,” Matt replied dutifully, his voice hollow. He looked pained and miserable.

  Patrick forced a smile. The boy mystified him. “It’s good to see you, son. Are you holding up all right?”

  Matt nodded stiffly. “Sort of.”

  Patrick patted Matt’s shoulder. “That’s the spirit.”

  Matt dropped his head and stared at his shoes, refusing to look up until Patrick removed his hand.

  “Did you just get here?” Emma asked snappishly. “You weren’t at the wake.”

  Patrick stifled a curt reply. “No, but I was in the back during the service.” Emma’s cheeks were rosy and her eyes bright, but somehow she looked fragile, although he couldn’t say why. He looked at Matt, who had walked on ahead of them a few paces. “Are Luke and Jeannie blaming Matt for the accident?” he asked softly.

  Emma shook her head. “No, they know it was Jimmy’s idea from the start.”

  “That’s good.”

  The low murmurings of the waiting mourners who’d gathered in tight groups drifted away to silence as the pallbearers carrying the casket emerged from the church, followed closely by Luke and Jeannie. Bells tolled from the steeple as the mourners slowly assembled behind the grieving couple for the short walk to the nearby cemetery.

  “Walk with us,” Emma whispered.

  Patrick nodded and joined Emma and Matt as they stepped out to join the slow-moving procession.

  At the grave site, the preacher said comforting words to console Jimmy’s parents and then read a short prayer to lay the little boy to rest. With a final amen, the casket was lowered and folks began to disperse, leaving Luke and Jeannie standing alone, frozen, clutching each other at the foot of the open grave.

  Matt turned away, walked to a nearby headstone, and stood with his back to the grave site.

  “Her doctor says she can’t have another baby,” Emma whispered as she blinked away the tears in her eyes. “She’s lost her only child.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Patrick replied, glancing at Matt, who hadn’t budged from his spot a few feet away.

  “That’s so tragic,” Emma added.

  “I reckon so.”

  “I remember how eager you were for us to have children so I wouldn’t leave you.”

  Patrick’s eyes widened. “Don’t go making things up, Emma. I never said anything like that.”

  Emma almost smiled. “You didn’t have to. The fact that you never gave a hoot about being a good father is proof enough.”

  “Are you going to chew on me about that again?”

  Emma took two steps in Matthew’s direction and halted. “No, you made an honest attempt a time or two, when I asked, but it just wasn’t in you. And I do appreciate you making an effort with Matthew as best you can.”

  “Well, ain’t I just about a worthless wreck of a man,” Patrick growled.

  “Don’t get in a dither, Patrick,” Emma soothed. “I guess I should thank you for giving me Matthew. He’s all I have to save me from Jeannie’s fate. I don’t think I could endure losing an only child. Burying Molly and losing CJ in the war were bad enough.”

  Patrick’s jaw dropped a little. He searched Emma’s face for any hint of mockery and found none. She’d divorced him after he’d forced himself on her, calling him a loathsome rapist and an incompetent father and compelling him to sign legal papers acknowledging Matthew as his natural son before the child was even born. Now she was thanking him.

  “Do you mean that?” he asked.

  Emma smiled slightly. “Don’t take it as a full pardon of your behavior.”

  “There are no halfway pardons,” Patrick noted emphatically.

  Emma shrugged off Patrick’s strong reaction. “I was just being snippy.” She walked to Matthew, took him by the hand, and continued down the path to the street.

  “What were you talking about?” Matt asked.

  “Nothing important,” Emma replied.

  Matt frowned at her answer.

  “She was telling me that I’m a damn fool who made too many mistakes,” Patrick explained.

  “Is that why you’re divorced?” Matt asked.

  “Yep,” Patrick answered.

  “I’m glad,” Matt announced.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Patrick replied.

  Matt shrugged and fell silent.

  Emma yanked Matt’s hand. “Don’t be disrespectful, young man.”

  “No harm done,” Patrick interjected.

  “Sorry,” Matt said obediently.

  Emma sighed and shook her head in displeasure at Matthew as they turned the corner onto Main Street. “Come with us to the house. We have a lot to talk about.”

  “Such as?”

  “Matthew’s future,” she answered. “Someday it will be in your hands. At least a part of it, and I want no misunderstandings between us.”

  Patrick’s throat tightened. “Got it all figured, have you?”

  “Why, yes, I think I do.”

  “I’m not going home,” Matt said, yanking free from Emma. “I don’t want to hear it, not ever.” He clamped his hands over his ears and scowled at them.

  Emma pulled his hands away from his ears. “Stop that.”

  Matt struggled, broke free, and covered his ears again. “I shoulda caught him!” he cried. “I shoulda stopped him. It’s my fault Jimmy’s dead.”

  “No, no, no,” Emma said, reaching to embrace Matt, who turned and took off running full tilt down Main Street.

  “That boy is hurting something fierce,” Patrick said as he watched Matt dart around pedestrians on the sidewalk and disappear down a side street.

  “It’s not just that. Ever since the accident he’s been asking me when I’m going to die. He hates the notion of it now more than ever.”

  “I hate that idea myself.”

  Emma raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Aren’t you going to fetch him back?”

  Emma shook her head. “Let him go. Are you coming to the house?”

  “I surely am. I can’t wait to hear what you’ve got cooked up for the boy.”

  Emma looked up at Patrick and smiled. “The boy is your son, Patrick, and I’d appreciate it if you call him by his name.”

  “I’ll surely try.”

  “Thank you. You probably won’t like what I have to say to you.”

  “Well then, let’s get it over and done with.”

  ***

  Patrick Kerney sat silently at the kitchen table over a cup of coffee as Emma skimmed through the general terms of the trust she’d established for Matt. It effectively cut him out from any say or control over how her assets could be used to benefit the boy. While she made it sound like it was all simply the best for Matt, Patrick took it as a slap in his face. Her trust document might as well have just come out and said that he was a scoundrel not to be counted on to look after his own flesh and blood. It made him plenty irate.

  When Emm
a finished talking, Patrick took a long minute to stifle his aggravation for fear she’d fall silent at any hint of displeasure and send him away before he learned more. Instead he asked, “How much will there be to care for him?”

  “Enough to see him to his eighteenth birthday,” Emma replied.

  “I didn’t ask how long it would last. I asked how much.”

  “Why do you need to know that?”

  “The boy will be living with me. It’s helpful to know.”

  Emma took a moment to consider her answer. “It’s money for Matthew only.”

  “I understand that. I ain’t gonna steal from him, Emma. How much?”

  “You’ve always put your own needs first, which is why I’ve made these arrangements. He’ll have fifteen hundred dollars a year.”

  “That’s more than most ranchers earn,” Patrick said, taken aback. “The boy won’t need near that amount to get by on.”

  “Then with luck there will be money left to give him a good start on his own. Will you stop calling him the boy?”

  “I meant Matt,” Patrick amended. “So if Matt needs something, I go hat in hand to the banker fella and your lawyer and ask for it, correct?”

  “It will only seem humiliating if you take it that way,” Emma said sharply.

  “But that’s the way it is.”

  “I don’t care one smidgen about your wounded pride. Matthew’s trust will be managed in confidence by two men I have full faith in. I warn you not to raise a stink about it.”

  Patrick shrugged, galled by her attitude. “It’s your hand to play.”

  “Yes, it is,” Emma replied firmly.

  Patrick pointed at the trust papers in Emma’s hands and shook his head. “How did we get to such a sorry state with all of this rigmarole between us?”

  Emma frowned at him, glared at him. “You know what I lived through as a girl. You saw it with your own eyes. Before we married, I made you promise never to raise a hand against me or take me against my will. Never, never, never, and still you did.”

  Patrick looked away. “Does Matt know?”

  Emma’s eyes widened in surprise at the question. “Heavens no, and he never will.”

  “Well, that’s something, I reckon. Maybe he’ll warm up to me in time.”

  “Promise me you’ll do your best by Matthew.”

  “I swear to it,” Patrick replied. “But I’d rather have you stay around to raise him up. That would be best.”

  Emma glanced warily at him. “I think you actually mean that.”

  “I do, in more ways than you know.”

  It earned him a genuinely agreeable smile, one he hadn’t seen on Emma’s face in years. It was too dangerous to say more; he might start begging for forgiveness. He reached for his hat. “I’ll be going.”

  He said good-bye at the front door, heard it close slowly behind him, and walked down the street without looking back. He’d never felt so alone, not since he was a miserable young child in the gold-mining camps of northern New Mexico, virtually abandoned by his lunatic aunt and her drunken lover. He’d survived by trusting no one, caring for no one, believing in no one.

  Only with Emma had he come close to breaking free of the suspicious, doubting nature entrenched in him since those harsh early days—but never for very long and never completely.

  It pained him, angered him, to still love the woman who’d walked away from him, and it pained and angered him even more to relive time and again his shameful drunken idiocy that had caused it.

  He walked down Main Street toward his hotel wondering how long it would be before a rider came to the ranch to report Emma’s death. Or would he find out at the Engle post office the next time or two he collected the mail? Or maybe Matt would just show up one day in a Tin Lizzie accompanied by the lawyer and the banker with a copy of Emma’s legal trust document in hand.

  He had no doubt Emma wouldn’t want him to know she was dying until the dying had been done. And he knew her well enough to know she was fixing to die. He could see the strain of staying alive etched on her face. It gave him a shiver, and a great thirst for a whiskey or two came over him. Hell, maybe he needed a whole bottle.

  ***

  In his hotel room, Patrick changed out of the new duds he’d bought for the funeral service and went out for a meal. He found a Mexican cantina in a small adobe house off Main Street, walked quickly past the long bar, lined with customers, sat in the back dining room, and ordered a meal of enchiladas, beans, and tortillas. He stopped short of asking for a whiskey.

  Although Prohibition had recently become the law of the land, it hadn’t changed the behavior of hard-drinking New Mexicans much. They still frequented the saloons and cantinas, where bartenders now splashed liquor into coffee cups instead of glasses and kept the booze bottles out of sight so as not to rile any Anti-Saloon League members who might appear and cause a ruckus.

  With truckloads of high-quality liquor smuggled day and night across the nearby Mexican border and nary an Internal Revenue agent in sight, customers and connoisseurs with a taste for good whiskey didn’t have to settle for hundred-proof moonshine or rotgut. Many establishments were quickly transformed into private clubs, and most customers practiced good behavior in order to keep from drawing attention to their God-given right to engage in the illicit consumption of alcohol. It got so civilized in bars that drinking became mostly a genteel pastime. In appreciation of improved community tranquility and fewer drunken brawls, local sheriffs and town marshals tended to look the other way.

  Pleased with his self-restraint, Patrick finished his meal, returned to his room, stretched out on the bed, and tried to not think about how pleasant it would be to wet his whistle with an after-dinner whiskey. The thought of it made him too restless to stay still, so he worked with pencil and paper, figuring exactly how much barbwire he needed to fence the two sections. To save money, he’d cut juniper in the high country for the fence posts.

  He tallied the cost and realized he had more than enough reserve cash on hand to pay for the wire. All he needed was the time to cut the posts, haul them down from the high country, set them, and string wire. But with spring and fall works, routine ranch chores, caring for the cattle, and training the ponies, putting up the fence on his own could take several years.

  More than once, the urge for a drink forced his mind to wander. Twice he almost stepped out to buy a bottle, reining in the impulse just short of putting on his coat. He shook off the desire by going over his calculations again, estimating how many fence posts he’d need to cut and how many wagon trips it would take to haul them down. He drew a map of the two sections from memory and sketched in areas where the fencing spanning a gully or running up the side of a hill would be more difficult to do.

  Weary eyed and tired, he thought he’d licked the yen for a drink and was about to turn in for the night, when the craving came on stronger than ever. He tried to fight it off. Drinking a bottle of whiskey alone was a bad idea. Knowing that didn’t keep his need for a whiskey at bay. He stopped and looked in the mirror above the washstand. He’d been sober for two years. Nursing one whiskey at the Mexican cantina bar wouldn’t turn him into a drunk again. Reaching such a logical conclusion felt reasonable. He grabbed his coat and hat, jingled his spurs down the hotel stairs, and headed straight for the cantina.

  ***

  Patrick finished his third whiskey at the bar and called for another just as a short, stocky man sidled next to him and nodded a greeting. Although the dim light and thick tobacco smoke made it hard for Patrick to see the stranger clearly, he nodded back and reached for his refilled coffee cup.

  “I know you,” the man said genially. “You’re Pat Floyd.”

  Stunned to hear that name, Patrick put his cup down and studied the stranger. He had a chubby face and a button nose and looked vaguely familiar, but Patrick couldn’t place him. “You’re mis
taken, friend. That’s not my name.”

  The man smiled. “That may be, but I knew you in Yuma Prison as Pat Floyd. I guess that was your go-by name.”

  Twenty-five—no, twenty-seven—years had passed since his time in Yuma Prison, just about long enough for Patrick to mostly forget about it. He had no need to be reminded. “I’ve never been in prison,” he said, “there or anywhere else.”

  The man laughed. “Well, I ain’t gonna argue with you, but I swear we were cell mates. You had a bunk high up and I slept on a straw-tick mattress on the ground with the centipedes and spiders. Eight, sometimes ten of us crammed into those damn tiny cells. Hot as hell they were, couldn’t sleep a wink in the summertime. Everybody called me Squirrel. Remember?”

  Patrick shook his head. “Sorry, but you’ve got the wrong man.”

  The man shrugged. “Look, I ain’t meaning to cause you any trouble or embarrassment. It was a long time ago and some things are best left behind.”

  “In spite of mistaking me for someone else, there’s truth to that,” Patrick replied, giving the man a closer look. His coat was ragged at the cuffs, his worn-down boots hand-patched with pieces of leather, and he needed a bath and a shave. “You said people called you Squirrel,” he ventured.

  Squirrel smiled. “Real name is Vernon Clagett, but I answer to Squirrel as well, although I don’t like the handle much. Maybe I was mistaken.”

  “No harm done,” Patrick replied, finally recognizing the skinny kid inside the body of the stocky, beat-down man. He’d earned his nickname in prison by selling and bartering goods the inmates needed, like tobacco, soap, and liquor. “Let me buy you a drink, and you can tell me what brings you to these parts.”