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14

Adam was no stranger to fear, but never before had he felt it so thoroughly, so completely as that which overtook him the moment he stepped across the threshold of Micah Ferguson’s cabin. All conscious thought gave way to a numb, detached sensation that froze time for one horrific moment. He watched helplessly as the world floated around him, painting an eternity of seconds in such excruciating detail the moment might as well have been branded on his soul.

Little Joe was hanging by his neck like the worst of criminals, his hands tied behind him, his body jerking in a desperate, final struggle for life. The boy’s face was as red as the growing stain on the floor where the reopened wound in his leg bled freely. Joe’s teeth looked far too white surrounded by all that red as they parted for his ever-thickening tongue. And his lips looked far too blue.

Adam could feel his own blood go cold when Joe’s too-red eyes found his.

And then….

Little Joe’s eyes rolled upward. His lids shuttered closed. His jerking motions stopped.

The taut rope creaked in complaint at the limp body swaying like a pendulum in a clock that had reached the end of time.

And Adam slipped on his brother’s blood. He had to throw his arms wide to regain his balance, awakening a raw pain in his shoulder.

“Adam!” Pa shouted. His hands were clasped tightly around Joe’s waist so he could hoist the boy upward and ease the pressure on Joe’s neck. “The rope!”

But Adam was already reaching for it. He clumsily dug shaking fingers into the fibers and drew back the knot, cursing his shoulder wound for hindering his efforts.

“Hurry!” Pa hollered.

Adam had barely managed to lift the rope up and over the boy’s head before Pa started moving. Pa crossed the room in three strides and tossed Joe to the bare mattress on Ferguson’s cot. There was nothing gentle in his actions. He moved like a madman intent on thrashing Little Joe back to life.

Adam could do nothing but look on, mired in horror.

“Breathe, boy!” Pa held Joe’s shoulders in what had to be a bruising grip and frantically shook him. “Do you hear me, Joseph? I said breathe! Breathe, son!” His voice faltered, cracked…faded. “Please, Lord,” he added softly, raising his eyes to look upward. “Not now. Not this.”

As though in direct answer to that prayer, Adam began to hear a quiet rattle. It was a ragged, raspy sound, but it might as well have been an angels’ choir. Joe was breathing.

Pa sat heavily down on the cot beside Adam’s little brother as Joe’s quiet rattle evolved into a series of shorter, frenzied gasps. That the boy was coming awake was made even more evident when those gasps became so frenzied they caused Joe to start gagging. Adam was sure the boy would have coughed, had he enough air to do so.

Pa abruptly took Joe in his arms, clutching the boy to his chest. “Easy, son. Easy, now. It’s over, Little Joe. I promise you…I swear to you it’s over. That man will never bring harm to you again.”

Trembling and suddenly feeling ill, Adam stumbled backward toward a chair at Micah’s table and fell into it, barely steadying his descent with his good arm. He tried to concentrate on lengthening his own quick gasps of breath while Joe’s spasms slowly gentled into quiet sobs. Joe is alive, he told himself. Despite everything Adam had done wrong, Joe was alive.

He watched his father holding his brother as his own breathing grew stronger. Yes, Joe is alive, he repeated silently. Perhaps Adam had done enough things right–just enough. And Pa had done the rest.

Brushing absently at a trickle of sweat that traced its way from his own forehead to his chin, Adam dropped his hand back to his lap and then noticed that the drops of moisture he saw there were red and thick. Blood.

“Adam?” Pa called to him softly. “Could you help me with this rope?”

Adam’s eyes moved instantly to the rope overhead.

“Joe’s hands are still tied,” Pa added, his tone sounding far calmer than Adam knew he must feel.

Quick to respond, Adam started to push himself to his feet, but his head swam and his sense of nausea grew troublingly strong. “Sorry, Pa.” He swallowed back a rising pool of saliva as he settled back into the chair. “I…I’m not sure I can just now.”

Two sets of eyes met his then, both Pa’s and Joe’s. In Pa’s, he saw a trace of renewed worry, followed by an understanding nod. But in Joe’s…. In Joe’s eyes, Adam saw that noose again. The boy’s eyes looked raw, more bloodshot than Adam would have thought possible. And his nose was bleeding, slow but steady drops falling to Pa’s shoulder. Surely both effects were a reflection of that rope being drawn so tight…so tight that Joe should be dead now, that he would be dead now if Pa and Adam had arrived a moment later.

And suddenly Adam didn’t feel anything at all. Not the burning ache in his shoulder or the pulsing pain in his head. He went numb in mind and body, seeing only what his brother had just endured…was still enduring. Rising without even being aware of the motion, Adam was beside his father and brother in an instant, kneeling by the cot and pressing his neckerchief against Little Joe’s nose. “Take this, Pa,” he said in an oddly commanding voice, one that sounded too strong to be his own. “I’ll get his wrists.”

“Adam?” Pa’s voice was a whisper.

“I’ve almost got it,” Adam lied. Not quite as numb as he’d thought, his shoulder protested his efforts and left him fumbling with the knots.

“Adam?” Pa said again. “I can–”

“Almost there.”

“Adm?” Joe’s quiet rattle and the subsequent gasp stilled Adam’s hands.

“Try not to talk, Joe,” Adam urged.

“Srry.”

“You’re sorry?” Adam asked, suddenly more confused by Joe’s apology than by the unnatural strength in his own voice.

Joe bobbed his head in a very small nod.

“Sorry for what? Joe, you didn’t do anything to be sorry for!” Adam returned to the knots with added vigor, until, drawn by his brother’s silence, he looked to Joe’s raw, red eyes and saw them exploring the cause of his profound headache and the blood tickling his cheek. “This isn’t your fault.” Adam sighed, giving his attention back to the knots. “Look, Joe, if anyone should be sorry, it’s me. I should never have left you alone.”

From the corner of his eye, Adam noticed Joe’s head moving slowly from side to side. It was the best argument the boy could give at that moment. The only argument. “Hss?”

Joe’s soft hiss was not lost on his brother, and it provided a welcome distraction from the course of their stilted conversation. “Hoss will be just fine.” Adam tried to smile as the last of the knots began to come loose. “His head’s much harder than mine.”

“I left–” Joe lost the rest of his words to another round of choking, painful sounding gasps. The instant his hands came free, he reached them around his father, twisting his fingers into the fabric of Pa’s shirt with a grip every bit as fierce as Pa had used moments earlier.

“Shhh, Joe,” Pa soothed while Adam moved from his knees to sit cautiously on the floor, resting his good shoulder against the frame of the cot. “Easy. Leave the talking for later. There’ll be plenty of time, plenty of things to say after we get you home. After I get you both home,” he corrected.

There was a trace of guilt in his tone. Bizarrely, Adam came close to laughing when he heard it. Joe, lying half dead on that cot, felt guilty for a grazing wound in Adam’s scalp. Pa felt guilty for relying so heavily on Adam, when it was clear that Adam, too, would soon need help. And Adam, himself, felt guilty, for leaving Little Joe to face the man–the men responsible for all of it.

Yes, Adam almost laughed. And when he held the bubbling laughter in check, he very nearly cried, instead.

Shock. Panic. Adam could think clearly enough to know there were words for what he was experiencing. But he couldn’t think clearly enough to combat it. Shakily catching another trickle of blood with the back of his hand, he began to realize why. He’d been shot, after all. Or, at least, shot at.

But, craning his neck for another look at Joe, at the boy’s chafed neck and wrists, and then at the blood-drenched pant leg they’d yet to address, Adam reached a different conclusion. He had witnessed the unthinkable: A boy he’d eagerly welcomed into this world, a brother he’d taken it upon himself to protect at all costs, had been clinging to life–barely–at the end of a rope, leaving smears of blood on the floor from a leg wound the sheriff had tried to dismiss as the work of a drifter.

And then Adam looked at his father, at the man who had given that boy life…and he marveled at Pa’s ability to keep his own shock at bay.

 

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