hole in my calf itched and ached, but the bone was not shattered. That gave me confidence that my future might be a walking one. Cave Wyatt had shown off his nursing qualities and kept the thing clean and bandaged. Holt could reach his own wound and tend it, as it was mainly a bruise and a rip, so he did.
“I appreciate this of you,” I said to Orton.
“Well, I have heard of you and I am proud to help a southern man no matter how funny his name.”
“Oh, he ain’t just a southern man, Ort,” Sayles said. “This boy here is the Shelley girl’s fiancé.”
Orton raised his brows at this news.
“Good, good. I am glad to hear she has a fiancé, ’cause she is in need of one.”
“Hey, now,” I said. “I never told you I was her fiancé.”
That got me a cruel expression from Sayles.
“Aw, goin’ back to your old tricks, eh, Dutchy?” he said, then gave a soft kick at my calf. “She’s with child and you want to quibble.”
“She ain’t with child,” Orton said.
“That is for certain,” said Wilma in a stern Baptist tone. “That girl has got child now. A brown-eyed butterball of a girl child.”
When I heard that, I wanted to see that baby. I had a real need to study the face of Jack Bull’s child and dote on any resemblance.
“Where is she?” I asked. “Where is Sue Lee and the baby?”
“I’m not for sure,” Wilma said. “I believe she carried the little girl out for air. They’ll be back any time, now. They won’t stay out in the dark.”
From the house I had a view of a steep hillside, thick with oak and hickory, and a deep, clean streamed valley. It was a soothing landscape and one that made me feel safe. For the first time in a long while, I could relax and leave it to nature to concoct my cure.
Orton and Wilma and the boys jawed around as the sun went behind the hill. Howard Sayles’s wife was in Hillsboro, Texas, with his father and mother and two children. The Browns had news from there, so they shared it.
Me and Holt were off to one side of the conversation. This conflict had forced us to rely on each other, and we had learned to do it. I felt obliged toward this particular nigger. He had demonstrated backbone and superb nerve. I hoped I had done the same.
“After we get healed back healthy, what shall we do, Holt?”
“More, I reckon,” he answered. He did not face me when he said it, and it may not have been true.
“Uh-huh,” I said, harnessing my own thoughts. “More is right, but could be it’ll be more of something else. I ain’t riding with boys that’ll shoot me no more. Them days is gone.”
He nodded briskly several times.
“You got yourself a new family now,” he said. “I understand it that you don’t want to bushwhack no more.”
I’ll tell you, odd events at which I had been a mere witness were now conspiring to manage my fate, and I wasn’t used to having so little say.
“Now, Holt, that ain’t my kid and you know it.”
“It ain’t that simple,” he said, all puffed up with mysterious logic. “What you say is the truth, far as that goes, but it is too simple. And this ain’t that simple.”
I guess I have myself to blame. I listened to him. Then I sat there, throbbing at my wounded calf, somewhat absent of insight, and pondered his riddle.
When she come in, she reacted like she had seen me at the waterhole yesterday. Zero fluster came over her face. She was calm and beautiful in her scar-faced way, serene with motherhood, I supposed.
“Are you hurt again?” she asked me.
Those were her first words to me. They did not flatter me with a gush of feminine concern.
“Well, yes,” I said, “but I didn’t do it to myself, you know.” I conjured up a forlorn look. “I been shot.”
She clucked her tongue and swung the cuddly armful of babe that she carted.
“Bushwhackers have to expect that,” she said. She then smiled a wide one and sat next to me. The baby murmured and Sue Lee actually leaned over and kissed my forehead like she had the right. “It is good to see you, Jake. And you, too, Holt.”
“I hear you saying it,” I whimpered. My expectations had not been specific, but warmth and concern had been in them all. “Let me see that baby.”
“Proud