XxXxX

5

Joe

They made me believe Adam was all right.

“He’s restin’ up,” Hoss said every time I asked, “same as you ought to be doin’.”

I believed him. I believed Adam was just resting. I didn’t know he’d barely opened his eyes for the better part of three days. I didn’t know how close he’d come to dying.

I still don’t know that he won’t.

It took me three days to convince Hoss I was fit enough to visit our older brother. Although…I reckon Hoss hadn’t just been waiting for me to be fit enough. He’d been waiting for Doc Martin to tell him Adam might not die after all. It makes sense now that I’m finally here.

Adam isn’t all right. And he isn’t just resting. All that fretting and all that worry I’d kept seeing in Hoss’s eyes…. It hadn’t been about Adam being counted an outlaw.

And Pa…. It’s no wonder he never stopped in to see me whenever he went back to the hotel to get some sleep. He never went to the hotel, because he never left Adam’s side. And he never left Adam’s side because he was afraid Adam was dying.

And Hoss never said a word.

I reckon he knew I would have fought him harder if he’d told me the truth. He would have had to hogtie me to keep me in that hotel room. I sure as heck wouldn’t have been able to rest up like he’d said I needed to.

“Hoss should have told me.” The words shake their way out past the lump swelling up in my throat; but I know Pa heard me. I don’t need to look at him to know he’s moving closer. And I can’t look at him, because that would mean looking away from Adam.

“I asked him not to.”

Pa’s words are soft, too. But I sure as heck heard them. And now I have to look at him. But that lump’s grown so big I can’t say anything.

I reckon I don’t know what I’d say, anyway. I don’t know whether to be angry, or…or just plain worried. Pa looks more haggard than I’ve ever seen him. He looks like he hasn’t slept for three days. And like he hasn’t stopped worrying for even a single minute in all three of those days.

“I couldn’t bear to imagine,” Pa says, “what would have happened to you, had you known.” Sounds like his words had to shake their way out, too. But after he clears his throat, his voice gets stronger. “It’s been difficult enough to face the possibility….” And his back is getting straighter. “…That one of my sons might not be coming home.”

And now he looks like Pa again, stern and strong and…and knowing…the kind of knowing that tends to make me feel like I know nothing at all. “You needed sleep, Joseph. You still do. But if Hoss had told you, you would have insisted on being here. And if you had been here, you would not have gotten the sleep you needed. And if you had not slept….” And suddenly all that strength seems to be seeping right back out of him. “If you had been allowed to spend all these hours….” Yeah, his voice is getting shaky again, too. “…Worrying over your brother…. I’m sorry, Joe. But I needed to know that you, at least, were safe. That you, at least, would be coming home again.”

And now that lump’s so big I can hardly even breathe past it. He’s coming home, Pa. That’s what I would say, if I could. He’s not dying here, like this. And he’s not going to the gallows. He’s coming home, and everything’s going to be just like it was before.

It’s getting hard to see now, too.

Pa’s hand falls on my shoulder, and I feel like I’m a little boy again. I want to be a little boy again, a little boy who’s confident that his pa knows exactly what to do to make all the monsters go away.

Make this monster go away, Pa. Please. Make it go away. Tell Adam he has to wake up now. Tell him…. Tell him I’m sorry I wasn’t strong enough to fight back up at that cabin. Tell him I’m—

“Joe?”

That wasn’t Pa’s voice. No. That sounded like…like….

“Adam?” Pa’s hand clamps down tighter on my shoulder, and then he drops to his knees beside my chair, at Adam’s cot.

And now…now I can see why. Adam’s eyes are open. Not by much, but they’re open. And he’s looking right at me.

And I can’t help but feel like Pa did it again. He made the monsters go away.

XxXxX

Adam

“I believe you.” Reginald Healey’s eyes betray the honesty in his words—a truth I’m sure he is none too pleased to admit.

It’s hard to imagine I’ve just spent the better part of an hour telling him…everything I’ve told him. Why did I say so much? I’ve shared far more than I’d thought myself willing to admit. I’m sure it was far more than he could have expected to hear when he’d arrived on the noon stage.

How many more of Marshal Danbury’s telegrams will bring strangers to Virginia City for the chance of…of what? Saving me? Or hanging me?

First it was the young woman from Folsom. “I told the sheriff you were in trouble.” Her eyes, too, had shown me she was speaking truly. “I told him they were forcing you to do things you didn’t want to do.”

“You couldn’t possibly have known that.”

“That’s what the sheriff said. But I did. I did know that. I could see it in your eyes, all that suffering, all that torment. I just knew you needed help.”

I do remember her. She’d been working at the hotel, and had handed me the room key more than once. Each time her hand had lingered over mine—enough to make me wonder as to what drove her to respond to the marshal’s inquiry. Just what might she expect of me, when all this is over?

But now…now it’s Nick Healey’s older brother. There is no question in my mind that he’d come here eager to see me hang. But…he just said he believes me.

“Between those witness statements in your favor the marshal managed to dredge up, and…and your story….” His words trail off. It’s clear he doesn’t want to believe me. Yes. He wants to see me hang all right. He wants to hate me, to lash out at me, to see me suffer for the suffering he and his family have endured these past weeks. I can hardly blame him. He’d found his young brother dead, and soon after had discovered me running away.

I can still hear him calling my name. Adam Cartwright! I hadn’t recognized the voice. How could I? I’d spoken with Reginald Healey only once before, and only in polite conversation. On that night…on that…horrific…night, there had been no polite conversation. I’d heard instead an accusatory shout from the lips of an enraged brother, one whose blood had been embroiled by the sight of the blood of his younger brother, a young man—barely yet a man—whom he’d been duty-bound as much by love as by responsibility to protect. Of the small group spotted running across his family’s estate, I’d been the only one whose face Reginald had known.

I can imagine how I must have haunted his dreams in the days following Nick’s death. It would have been no different for me, had our situations been reversed—if the young man lying in a pool of blood at Reginald’s feet had been Little Joe. Oh yes. I can imagine the hate Reginald Healey would have felt, would have nurtured and allowed to grow, to fester, to drive him to mount a campaign to destroy me, to target me, to put me square into the crosshairs of every bounty hunter in the territory.

It had been Reginald Healey, not the marshal, who had prompted the printing of those wanted posters. It had been Reginald Healey, not the federal government, who had put up the funds for the reward on my head.

Yet now, at this moment, as I lay wounded in both body and spirit, left alone—against my father’s wishes, but in alliance with my own wish to spare Pa details he has no need to hear—left alone to face the man who wants so much to hate me, I can see that his fever has passed; the raw emotion that had been driving his rage…his grief…has broken. With those three words, “I believe you,” his shoulders sag. There is no fight left within him—at least, not against me.

I don’t understand it. I can’t. “I’m so sorry.” I nearly choke on the words. They feel weak and sound weaker still.

What right have I to hope? What right have I to consider the possibilities for a future that has been denied young Nick Healey? I could have stopped Sam Clayborn before Nick’s life was made forfeit. I should have stopped him. I should have stopped all of them long before my knife was used to extinguish one young man’s life and to threaten the same for my brother, for Little Joe.

“I should have….” But I can’t speak it. I can only shake my head as the pain in Reginald Healey’s eyes tempers the selfish anguish in my own heart. My guilt is nothing to his grief.

“You should have what?” I can see that Reginald doesn’t expect an answer. “They were playing games with you, games no man could hope to win.” He steps from the chair beside the cot and turns his back to me, his gaze moving upward, focusing well beyond the ceiling. “I would have done the same. I’m sure of it.” His shoulders rise and fall with steadying breaths, and then he looks to the window, perhaps to the street beyond where the good citizens of Virginia City are living out their lives, pursuing their daily activities as though nothing has changed—proving that the world at large has not been affected by the death of one, innocent young man.

Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.

John Donne’s words be damned; those people’s lives have not been diminished. But my own…and Reginald Healey’s…and his father’s…and—

“You had to protect your brother.” Reginald startles me as he swivels back around to face me. His previously twisted brows are now smoothed, his eyes, calmed…or…becalmed, like a sea temporarily quieted in the heart of a hurricane. “I would have done the same, I’m sure. I suppose I’m the one who should be sorry. I wanted vengeance more than truth.”

“You deserve to have your vengeance.” Have I said those words for him or for myself? I deserve his anger. I deserve his vengeance. Not this. Not his understanding, and certainly not his forgiveness.

His eyes flare and his brows curl, this time more in anger than in anguish. “I deserve to have my brother wearing at my patience with his perpetual energy and dizzying good humor!”

Joe must have heard Reginald Healey’s shouts. He’s standing at the door now, still holding the knob and looking from Reginald to me. My stubborn little brother has apparently decided he’d rather intrude on our conversation than continue to rest on the porch, where he’d stubbornly gone after refusing to return to the hotel as Pa, Hoss and I had all insisted he belonged. He’s still a long way from being healed himself.

“To have him endlessly nipping at my heels.” I’d very nearly forgotten about Reginald, but his voice cuts into my thoughts as his own brotherly reverie continues. “Like an eager hound, anxious to prove himself!”

I meet Joe’s eyes and see that he looks younger than he should, younger than he’d looked that day on the trail, before we’d reached the cabin, when his own perpetual energy and dizzying good humor had begun to wear thin my patience. Yes. He looks younger. He looks confused and afraid…and hurt—in more ways than one.

“To have him shouting at me,” Reginald continues, “for the way I dismiss his ideas when I already know what must be done, to have him….” His shoulders sagging once more, he eases himself back into the chair, props his elbows on his knees and lowers his head into his hands. “God help me; what I deserve is to have my little brother looking to me for help when he’s finally ready to admit he needs it. I should have been there. I should have helped him. I should have stopped him. I should have—”

“How could you?” my own little brother asks as he steps further into the room, pulling Reginald Healey’s attention as well as my own. “Did you have any reason to think something was wrong?”

“I should have.” The words are a whisper.

“How? Did you hear anything? See anything out of the ordinary?”

“Not soon enough. Not until my brother’s…murderers…were already on the run.” He’s avoiding my eyes now. I had been among those murderers. He can’t deny that, no matter what he believes.

“Then how could you have done anything different?” Joe prods further.

Reginald looks from Joe to me, and holds silent.

I understand. I understand as Joe never will, as he could never hope to understand. “It doesn’t matter, Joe.” I hold my eyes on Reginald’s, though my words are for my brother.

“Of course it matters!” Joe hollers back. “How could it not matter? How could anyone have done anything different if there wasn’t any reason to think his brother needed help?”

“Reginald Healey isn’t just anyone, Joe.” I wait, but he doesn’t ask. “He’s Nick’s older brother.”

“So? So what? That doesn’t change anything.”

“I was supposed to look out for him!” Reginald shouts back, jumping from his seat to confront my stubborn, young and still hurting little brother.

“Yes, you were!” Joe shouts back. “When he was ten!” Joe stops to take a halting breath, and I can see that the shouting has cost him. “But as I understand it,” he says then, his voice much softer yet somehow more demanding, “Nick was a long way from ten. There comes a time when brothers look out for each other, and it doesn’t matter anymore which one is older. Did it ever occur to you that maybe Nick was looking out for you when he went into that room? That he was looking out for your whole family by trying to find out what was going on?”

“Of course! But—”

“But he did what he thought was right. Don’t diminish that. Don’t take it away from him.”

Reginald Healey’s eyes widen beneath his troubled brows. “I’m not—”

“Yes. You are. You’re blaming yourself for a decision he made, a decision that was his to make.”

Reginald looks as stunned as I feel, and neither of us knows what to say.

“Nick did what he thought was right,” Joe repeats after the silence has already grown thick, “what he thought he had to do to protect you. That’s what you should remember about that night, because right now, nothing else matters. The man who killed him is dead. You and the rest of your family are safe. And so is my brother.” Joe slips a small smile my way. “And our family.”

There’s something new in Joe’s eyes, a trace of relief, or, perhaps, acceptance. It’s almost as though he has made a decision, unlike Nick’s but…not entirely different, either…as though his own words have taught him something, as much as they’ve taught Reginald Healey, judging by the considering look in the man’s distant gaze…and as much as they’ve taught me.

Yes. Nothing about that cabin matters anymore, does it? The games, the threats, even Reginald Healey’s accusations…it’s all over. Ruby will soon be en route to an asylum. Her two henchmen are dead. Doc, who’d as soon use medicine to hurt as to heal, and Gabe, who cares more for metal than people, are behind bars just the other side of that door across the room. Only Mac remains unaccounted for, and with Marshal Danbury at his heels I doubt he’ll remain so for long.

“Mister Cartwright?” I turn to answer, then see that Reginald is looking to Joe, not to me. “Here. You’d better sit down before you fall down.”

As he ushers my little brother back to the chair beside me, I see how much this conversation has affected Joe. He’s swaying on his feet. I’d been too preoccupied to notice. But…it’s okay, isn’t it? Little Joe’s not ten anymore, either. He’s a man grown, fully capable of making decisions of his own, whether those decisions involve sitting down when he needs to, or speaking up for his older brother…or speaking out for another man’s brother, one who has lost his voice. Joe doesn’t need me watching over him constantly, but only when it really counts, when a threat is real and too big for him to handle alone. Just like I need that from him. Or like Pa needs it from all of us. When it counts.

After we’d been snared by Ruby’s trap, each of our efforts to be watchful had proven futile. But now…I honestly don’t know that I could have done anything differently. Even Reginald Healey has admitted, “I would have done the same.”

Something’s changed here, hasn’t it? I feel…calmed. Not becalmed, but simply…calmed. And maybe…. Yes, maybe even…absolved.

As Joe flashes me a weary grin, I can even feel myself starting to smile.

XxXxX

end