One Thing Left

Arizona Territory, Summer 1867

His name before was Callum Drey and he did not use it anymore.

He had left it in a farmhouse outside of Tucson with the man who had given him most of his scars and he did not think of it as killing so much as a correction, the way you correct an error in arithmetic, drawing a line through it and moving on. The stepfather's name had been Orville Marsh and he had come into Callum's life when Callum was nine and his mother was still hopeful about things, and Orville had extinguished that hope the way you extinguish a candle, simply by being in the same room with it long enough.

The mother had died in the winter of sixty-four.

After that there was only Callum and Orville and the farm and the belt and the particular silence of a house where the only woman has been taken out of it.

He had waited until he was seventeen.

Not out of patience. Out of calculation. He had understood from an early age that Orville Marsh was a large man and that a small boy's hatred, however sincere, was not adequate to the arithmetic of the situation, and so he had waited the way you wait for a drought to break, with no certainty it would. He had grown. He had worked the farm and taken what was given to him and stored it in a place inside himself where it could not be reached or altered or taken back.

On a Tuesday evening in April of sixty-six he had come in from the field and Orville was at the table with a bottle and the bottle was nearly gone and Orville had started in about the fence line that Callum had not finished and his voice had that particular quality it got when the bottle was nearly gone, oiled and slow and promising something, and Callum had stood in the doorway and looked at him.

He had picked up the woodsplitting maul from beside the door.

He did not think about it. He had thought about it for eight years and the thinking was done and what remained was only the doing. Orville looked up from the bottle and saw what was in Callum's face and something happened in his own face, some fast and terrible understanding, and he started to rise from the chair.

Callum did not let him finish rising.

He stood over Orville Marsh afterward in the lamplight and he was not shaking and he was not sick and he was not sorry, and the absence of sorrow was the thing that stayed with him longest, that traveled with him out of Tucson and into the territory and became part of the inventory of what he was. He was a boy who had done a thing and felt nothing about it except that it was correct. He did not know what to make of that. He suspected it was important.

He had been riding with Richter's outfit for five months when the summer started its slow dying.

Richter ran four men besides himself. There was Dade, who was from Tennessee and thought carefully before he spoke and was therefore the most dangerous man in any room. There was Calhoun, young and hungry and trying not to show how much he wanted to be approved of. There was Prospero, the Mexican, who smiled often and meant none of it. And there was the Runner, the German boy grown into something that was not quite a boy anymore, sixteen now, with eyes that had been old since before Callum had known him and a stillness about him that made horses calm when he stood near them.

And there was Callum, who had no name yet.

In Richter's outfit you earned a name or you didn't. It was not a spoken rule, not a ceremony or a test with a stated rubric, but the fact of it was as present and as plain as weather. Prospero was simply Prospero, which may have been his real name or may not have been, and with Prospero you did not ask. The Runner had his from Richter and the story of it was known to all of them.

Callum was called boy. He was called kid. He was called hey and you and once, by Dade, in a tone that was not unkind, nobody.

He understood this was accurate.

He had nothing yet. He had the maul and Orville Marsh and the farm and the years of it, but those were private things, interior things, and a name in this country was an exterior thing, a thing witnessed and confirmed by the people who would use it. What happened in a farmhouse outside Tucson in the lamplight with a bottle on the table was between Callum and God and Orville Marsh and none of those three were going to give him a name for it.

Summer in the territory was a physical fact. It pressed down on everything with a weight that was almost contemptuous, as if the land itself was testing what it would tolerate. The sky went white at noon, not blue, white, the color of something heated past the point of color, and the rocks gave off heat in waves you could see if you looked at the horizon, the distance shimmering and uncertain. Men and animals moved slowly or not at all in the middle hours and the nights were not cool so much as marginally less lethal than the days.

They were camped in the red canyon country northeast of Tucson, in a place Richter knew that had a spring and good cover and angles of approach that favored the people already there.

Callum watched the summer and felt it going.

He knew this desert. He knew how the heat shifted in August, the nights carrying something in them that July did not, the light coming different off the rocks in the early morning. He could read the season the way you read a man's face, and what he read was that it was running out.

He had one thing he needed to do before it ended.

He needed to do something they would name him for.

The problem presented itself in the first week of August in the form of a man named Teague.

Teague rode into their camp in the late afternoon without being invited, which was either stupid or a statement, and nobody in Richter's outfit was unable to calculate the arithmetic of that. He was a compact man, weathered to the color of old saddle leather, with a marshal's badge on his chest that he wore the way some men wear faith, not as an article of belief exactly but as a declaration of alignment, I am this and not that.

He was alone, which was the thing that made the situation strange.

He sat his horse at the edge of camp and looked at them all in turn and came to rest on Richter. I'm looking for a boy, he said. Goes by Callum Drey. Wanted in Pima County for the murder of one Orville Marsh. He pulled a paper from his coat and read from it without looking down, which meant he had it memorized, which meant he had been looking a while. Seventeen years of age. Brown hair. Scar above the left eye. He looked up from the paper he was not reading. Any of you seen him.

Nobody spoke.

Richter was sitting on a rock with his hat pushed back and his expression was the expression of a man at rest, a man with nowhere to be and nothing on his mind. He looked at Teague the way you look at weather, neutrally, with only practical interest.

Can't say as we have, Richter said.

Teague looked at each of them again, slowly, taking inventory. His eyes stopped on Callum and Callum felt them stop and did not look away. There was a scar above his left eye and it had been there since he was eleven. He held Teague's gaze and breathed.

Teague looked at him for a long moment. Then he looked back at Richter.

Man that did it used a splitting maul, Teague said. Took some will to do a thing like that. He refolded the paper and put it back in his coat. Orville Marsh was not a man widely mourned, I'll tell you that. But the law doesn't run on mourning. He gathered his reins. I find him I find him. He looked once more at Callum. You ride careful out here, son. Country'll kill you if the men don't.

He turned his horse and rode back the way he had come.

The camp was quiet for a moment.

Then Dade said, without particular urgency, he'll be back with company.

Richter was looking after the marshal, already small in the distance, the red dust rising behind him. He will, he said.

Callum was already standing.

He went alone.

This was not something anyone told him to do. It was not something anyone told him not to do. It existed in the space between those two things, the space where a man either steps into or doesn't, and he stepped into it without deliberation the same way he had picked up the maul, with the thinking already done, with nothing left but the doing.

He took his horse and his rifle and three days of water and he went after Teague.

The country between the camp and the flats was broken and red and fractured, arroyos cutting through every half mile, scrub thick in the low places and the high places bare. Callum moved through it quickly.

He found Teague's trail and followed it.

It was late afternoon and the sun threw his shadow long in front of him and he followed the shadow and the track both. He was not thinking about what he would do when he found him. He had learned this from Richter without Richter ever stating it, that the thinking and the doing are different operations, that a man who is still thinking when the doing is required is a man in trouble.

He found Teague at a seep in the rocks as the light was going.

Teague had his horse watered and was filling his canteen and he heard Callum's horse on the rock and turned. He did not go for his gun. He looked at Callum on the horse above him and he looked at the rifle and he looked at the sky as if checking the light, as if he was calculating something.

Figured it'd be you, Teague said.

Callum said nothing.

Teague stood up slowly and held the canteen at his side. You know I've got a good look at you now, he said. Wasn't sure in camp. Light was bad. I'm sure now.

I know it, Callum said.

Teague looked at him without animosity. He had the face of a man who had made his peace with the likely shapes of his future a long time ago, who had decided what he was worth and priced himself accordingly and was not surprised by the bill coming due. He was not afraid, and the absence of fear in him did something complicated inside Callum that he did not have a word for.

You kill that man because of what he did to you, Teague said. It wasn't a question.

Callum looked at him.

I've seen it before, Teague said. Not the first boy come up in a situation like that. Not the first one reached the end of his patience. He set the canteen down on a rock beside him carefully. I've got no particular grief for Orville Marsh. He paused. But I've got a job and the job don't run on my particular grief.

I know it, Callum said again.

Teague looked at the rifle. That how it's going to be.

Callum looked at him across the distance between them and the last light was going and the first dark was coming and the rocks were giving back their heat and the desert was very quiet.

No, Callum said. He lowered the rifle.

Teague was still.

You ride east, Callum said. You ride east tonight and you keep riding and you don't come back into this country for a month. He heard his own voice as if from a distance, even and flat, the voice of a man speaking a fact. By the time a month's gone we'll be gone. There won't be anything to find.

Teague looked at him for a long time. He picked up his canteen from the rock.

You just want to live, son, he said. That's all you want.

I want to earn something, Callum said. Something that's mine.

Teague considered this. He looked at the sky. The first stars were coming out and the sky was going from copper to violet to the deep permanent black the territory put on at night.

He mounted his horse.

He looked down at Callum from the horse and his face was unreadable in the fading light.

Der Teufel schützt die Seinen, he said. His accent was bad but the words were right. The devil protects his own.

Then he turned east and rode into the dark.

Callum sat his horse for a long time after.

The seep murmured beside him in the rocks and the desert went about its nighttime business and the stars came out in their numbers, indifferent to the smallness of the things beneath them.

He thought about the rifle. About what it would have meant to use it and what it meant that he hadn't, and whether hard was even the right measure.

He thought about Orville Marsh.

He had thought that what he had done in the lamplight was a door closing and not a door opening. He understood now that he had been wrong about this, that what you do with a maul in a farmhouse in April is not something that closes, it is something that opens, that the opening is permanent and that what comes through it is not always what you expect.

He had let the marshal go.

He did not know if this was mercy or strategy or simply that there was still something in him that was Callum Drey, the boy with the mother and the hopeful years before Orville, and that the boy had made a decision the man might not have made. Neither weakness nor strength. Only the complicated truth of being unfinished.

He rode back to camp.

They were all awake when he rode in. The fire was low and they were arranged around it in the way of men who are waiting, and they looked at him as he came in and he dismounted and tied the horse and came to the fire and sat.

Richter looked at him.

He tell you about the maul, Callum said. It wasn't a question.

Richter nodded.

Callum looked at the fire. He's gone east, he said. He won't come back. He paused. I didn't kill him.

The fire said something in the language of fire, a shift and a small collapse of coals, a brief uprising of light.

Dade looked at Richter. Richter was looking at Callum with the same expression he'd had on the hillside when he looked at the Runner, the expression of a man locating something he had thought was rare.

Why not, Calhoun said. The question was genuine, not a challenge.

Callum thought about this. I needed him to make a choice, he said. A man makes a choice like that, rides east when he doesn't have to, that's something that belongs to me. Something I made happen. He looked at Richter. You understand.

Richter was quiet for a long moment.

The summer was ending. Callum could feel it even now, in the smell of the air coming off the high rocks, something cooling that had not been there a week ago, some first draft of the season turning, some preliminary statement of the cold that was coming.

Gnade, Richter said. He said it the way you say a word you have been waiting to use. Mercy. He looked at the others. That's what the Germans call it. He looked back at Callum. A hard man who can still find it. That's rarer than the hardness.

He ain't got a name, Calhoun said.

Richter looked at Callum. The firelight did to his face what it always did, made it ancient, made it the face of something that had seen the full inventory of what men were capable of, the best and the worst accounts brought into the same ledger.

Gnade, he said again. He let the word sit. Then in English, flat and final, the way he had said der Läufer to the Runner three years before on a different fire in a different desert, the same country, the same dark, the same indifferent stars: Mercy.

That's what they'll call you, he said.

Callum looked at the fire.

The summer ended sometime in the night, quietly, without announcement, the way most things end, the way his mother had ended and Orville Marsh had ended and Callum Drey had ended, not with a sound but with a change in the quality of the air, some shift in what was present and what was gone.

He was not Callum Drey anymore.

He was not nobody.

He was Mercy, and the name fit him the way a scar fits, which is to say it was his and it was permanent and it had cost something to get it, and in this country, in this life, among these men, that was the only kind of thing worth having.

The fire burned low.

The stars turned above the canyon.

The desert went on in every direction without end.