The Last Supper of Thomas Dade

Arizona Territory, Autumn 1867

He knew.

He had known since morning, the way you know weather before it arrives, something in the pressure of the air, something in the way the others moved around him with that particular carefulness men adopt when they are managing a secret the secret already knows about itself. Richter had not looked at him directly since sunup. Calhoun had been too quiet. Even Prospero, who smiled at everything and meant none of it, had kept his face arranged in a neutrality that cost him something to maintain.

Dade sat with his back to the canyon wall and watched the fire and did not say anything about what he knew.

His name before had been Thomas. Thomas Elias Dade, born in Carter County Tennessee in the year of our Lord eighteen twenty-nine, the second son of a man who believed in Scripture and hard work and the back of his hand in roughly equal measure. He had left Tennessee at sixteen with a horse that wasn't his and a rifle that was, and he had not gone back, and the Thomas had fallen away somewhere in the years between there and here the way names do when they are no longer needed, when the country you are in has no use for the person the name belonged to.

He was just Dade now. Had been for a long time.

Richter had sent the Runner and Mercy into town that afternoon for supplies, which was the tell. You did not send two men for supplies. You sent one. Two men was an errand that was also a removal, a way of arranging the camp so that what needed to happen could happen without witnesses that were not prepared for it. The Runner and Mercy were not prepared for it. They were young enough to still believe that the things Richter decided were decided for reasons that had something to do with justice, and Richter, who was not a sentimental man in any other respect, had chosen to preserve that belief a little longer.

Dade did not begrudge him that.

He watched Richter lay the fire and he watched Calhoun tend the horses and he watched Prospero sit on a rock at the edge of camp doing the thing Prospero did in the evenings, which was to take a small carved wooden figure from his coat pocket and hold it in both hands and look at it without expression, some private ceremony the origins of which Dade had never asked about and now never would.

He thought about Tennessee.

Not with longing. He had not been a man prone to longing, had regarded it as a kind of weakness, the way regarding the road behind you slows the road in front, and he had kept his eyes on what was ahead for thirty-eight years and it had served him. But tonight, with the fire building and the smell of the desert in the cooling air and the stars coming out one by one in the enormous sky, he let himself think about the particular green of the mountains back home, the way the light came through the hardwoods in October, the cold of the creek behind his father's property, which he had hated as a boy and which seemed to him now, in this red dry country, a thing of almost unbearable richness.

He thought about a woman in Nacogdoches whose name had been Clara.

He thought about a man in Abilene whose name he had never known and whose face he still saw sometimes in the dark between sleeping and waking.

He thought about the particular sound of a cavalry officer's voice in the spring of sixty-three outside Murfreesboro, the voice of a man who believed that the correctness of his position was demonstrated by his ability to give orders, and what Dade had done about that belief, and what it had cost, and what it had bought, which was a wanted notice in three states and Richter's outfit and the years after, which had been, on the whole, what they had been.

He did not think these thoughts with regret exactly. He thought them the way you take inventory before a long trip. Noting what is present. Noting what is not.

Richter cooked.

This was itself a thing. Richter did not cook. He ate what was prepared and acknowledged it or did not and that was the full extent of his relationship to food as a social enterprise. But tonight he had taken the haunch of the deer Calhoun had brought in two days prior and he had built the fire up properly and he had set to work with a focus that Dade recognized from other contexts, the same focus Richter brought to the cleaning of his weapons, to the planning of a job, to any task that he had decided deserved the full weight of his attention.

He cooked the meat slow over the coals, turning it, tending it. He found the last of the dried peppers in the supplies and worked them into the drippings. He produced from somewhere a small cloth sack of coffee that Dade had not known they had and set it to boiling.

Calhoun watched all of this without speaking.

Prospero put away his wooden figure.

The smell of the meat moved through the camp and out into the desert and the night came down around them fully now, the stars riotous and cold above the canyon walls, and Dade watched the fire and felt the warmth of it on his face and thought that warmth was an underrated thing, that a man spent his life taking it for granted and that this was a reasonable error to make but an error nonetheless.

Richter brought him a plate.

It was a real plate, tin, and the meat was on it properly cut and there was a heel of bread beside it from somewhere and the coffee was in a real cup. Richter set it in front of Dade with a care that was not quite ceremony and not quite apology but carried elements of both and he did not say anything when he set it down, only looked at Dade for a moment with those pale gray eyes that had the whole country in them, all the years, all the weather.

Dade looked at the plate.

He looked at Richter.

Iss, Richter said quietly. Eat.

Dade ate.

The meat was good. Richter had done something to it with the peppers and the rendered fat and it was better than anything they had eaten in weeks on the trail and Dade ate it slowly and with attention, the way you read a letter you know you will not receive again. The bread was hard but the coffee was strong and he held the cup in both hands and felt the heat of it come through the tin into his palms.

Calhoun ate and said nothing.

Prospero ate and said nothing.

The fire spoke in the language of fire.

Dade set down his cup.

He looked at Richter across the fire and Richter looked back at him and neither of them performed anything, neither asked the other to pretend. They were men who had known each other for eleven years in conditions that stripped pretense the way weather strips paint and there was nothing between them now that needed the cover of pretense.

I'd like to know what it is, Dade said.

Richter was quiet for a moment. Then he said: Billings.

Dade closed his eyes briefly. Billings. He had not heard that name in four years and had not expected to hear it again and it arrived now like a stone dropped into still water, the rings of it moving outward, touching everything.

Augustus Billings was a man in Tucson who moved money and men and other things between parties who could not move these things themselves, and Dade had worked for him twice before Richter's outfit, and what had happened the second time was a thing that Billings had not forgotten and apparently had not forgiven, and the economics of it were clear.

How much, Dade said.

Richter told him.

Dade nodded. He looked at the fire. He picked up his coffee and drank the last of it and set the cup down on the rock beside him with a small and final sound.

It's a fair price, he said.

Ja, Richter said. He did not say it with satisfaction. He said it the way you confirm a fact that gives no pleasure, a thing that is simply true and must be acknowledged.

I'd have taken it myself, Dade said. At that price.

I know it, Richter said.

Calhoun made a sound that was not quite a word and Richter looked at him once and he was quiet.

Dade looked at the canyon walls above them, the rock dark against the darker sky, the stars above the rim thick and cold and impossibly far away. He had looked at a lot of sky in his life. He had looked at it from fields and from saddles and from jail cells and from the beds of women who had been kind to him when kindness was not required, and he had not always appreciated the looking, had sometimes wished the sky would simply be a ceiling like any other and leave him alone. He appreciated it now.

He set his plate aside.

He looked at Richter.

The Runner and Mercy, he said. You'll see them straight.

Das verspreche ich, Richter said. I promise it.

Dade nodded. He looked at Prospero, who was watching him with eyes that were, for once, not smiling and not performing anything, that were simply present and dark and human in a way Dade had not seen in them before. He looked at Calhoun, who was young and who was not managing this well and who would manage it better later when later arrived, and for whom Dade felt something that was not quite paternal but lived in that neighborhood.

You'll be alright, he told Calhoun.

Calhoun looked at the ground.

Dade stood up.

He was a lean man and he moved the way lean men move, economically, without excess, and he walked to the edge of the firelight and he stood there with his back to them and he looked out into the dark desert and he breathed the cold air and he thought about Carter County Tennessee and Clara in Nacogdoches and the man in Abilene and the cavalry officer outside Murfreesboro and all the accountings of a life that do not resolve neatly but must be carried anyway, carried until there is no one left to carry them, and then they pass into the ground with the man and the ground takes them and does not distinguish them from anything else.

He heard Richter stand behind him.

The desert was very quiet.

He did not turn around.

There are worse things, Dade said, than to be known. He paused. Than to have a man know what you're worth and pay it.

Richter said nothing.

Dade looked up at the stars. The Milky Way was a bright wound across the sky, the same sky that had been there before any of them and would be there after, patient and enormous and utterly without mercy, which had always seemed to Dade not a condemnation but simply a description, the sky being what the sky was and not what men wished it to be.

He thought the coffee had been very good.

He thought that was enough.

They buried him in the canyon in the red earth at the base of the wall where the rock would shade him in the mornings and the sun would find him in the afternoons, and Richter said words over him in German that the others did not understand but that carried in their sound what words in any language carry when they are spoken over the dead with intention, which is the acknowledgment that a thing of weight has passed and that the passing deserves to be marked.

Calhoun marked the place with a flat stone.

Prospero said something in Spanish and crossed himself and put the wooden figure back in his pocket.

When the Runner and Mercy came back from town the camp was quiet in a way that told them before anyone spoke. The Runner looked at the stone and at Richter and Richter met his eyes and the Runner said nothing, only unsaddled his horse with a deliberateness that was its own kind of grief. Mercy stood at the edge of camp for a long time looking at the marked earth and then he sat down by the dead fire and he sat there until the dark was complete.

The coyotes called in the distance.

The canyon held the dark the way it held everything, without judgment, without preference, taking in whatever the desert offered and giving nothing back.

Dade's cup was still on the rock where he had set it.

No one moved it that night.