Longarm kicked him in the ribs to shut him up. “Get up and show some grit, you yellow-bellied nothing- much. Look, I’m taking my gun rig off. I’m tossing it aside, so’s you can show me what a ferocious he-man you are. Get up and fight a man, instead of women and children, for a change. Don’t you want the world to admire how ferocious you are? Ain’t that the whole point of all your man-of-the-house heroics?”
Big Dan, as he’d made them call him, stayed right where he was, at Longarm’s feet, as he blubbered, “I can’t fight you, I’m hurt, and you’re too big.”
Longarm sunk another boot tip into him, spat on him, and said, “You got that backwards. A grown man would be too big for you if you was feeling fine and he was five feet tall. Me or any other grown man could piss on you right now, if I felt like pissing right now, and you’d just enjoy the shower like the shit-eating dog you are. Ain’t that right? Ain’t you nothing but a whimper-faced woman-striking shit-eating dog?”
The man groveling at his feet didn’t answer until Longarm toed him again and made him say it aloud, every word. Then Longarm strode over to recover his gun rig from the grass, strap it back on, and say, “You can get up now. I won’t hit you no more, now that we’ve both agreed on what you are. We’d best have a look at that scalp, and your upper lip’s getting a mite fat, too.”
He led the man back inside and sat him in a corner on a nail keg. Then he stood over him with the canteen and a dish cloth, saying, “hold still. I only mean to wash the yard dirt off and let you scab clean. Chicken-dust in a cut can infect nasty as hell.”
The slightly injured man whimpered as Longarm tried to clean him up a little. Longarm said, “Mat scalp could do with a few stitches, but it ain’t so bad.”
Big Dan said, “My own boy done that to me. Hit his own dear daddy with an axe, he did!”
Longarm said, “Good for him. Had he buried the blade in your thick skull, there ain’t a jury in this country as would have found him guilty of anything more than doing right by his own mother. I want you to ponder them words, you dumb bastard. I fear your days as the ferocious ruler of this pathetic roost are numbered. Your boy’s growed big enough to fight you back like a man, and we both know woman-beaters ain’t up to fighting men, don’t we?”
The man of the house sobbed, “I never meant to hurt the boy. I never meant to really hurt Blanche, yonder. But she kept nagging me and nagging me, and you’ve no idea how sharp that little gal’s tongue can cut a man when she really gets to work on him about every bitty little mistake he’s ever made.”
Longarm said, “You’re wrong. Show me a man who ain’t been fussed at by a woman and I’ll show you a deaf monk. That’s just the way the Good Lord created the unfair sex. It ain’t their fault. It ain’t our fault. It’s just the way men and women was created. Women get to fuss at us because they ain’t big and strong enough to beat us up. We got to take it from ‘em because that’s just their nature and it just ain’t right to beat up anybody smaller, softer, and prettier than you are. Even if they ain’t pretty no more.”
“But she kept going on and on about how shiftless I am and how poor we’ve ever been,” Big Dan protested.
“I ain’t finished. But since you brought it up, I can see as good as any woman that you are shiftless and poor. I don’t know why you picked such a poor place to homestead any more than she did. But you did, and you’re either mighty lazy when you’re sober or drunk most of the time. For this spread is a disgrace and you know it. It wouldn’t cost you a cent to chink these walls with free mud and straw. A man with the ambition of a robin-bird would have sodded the roof by now, and at least drilled in some turnips and spuds. But let that go. I suspect she’d already told you that much, and more, before you beat her half to death. Let’s talk about why men beat women in the first damn place.”
The now battered husband stared blankly up at him to say, “I thought we’d just agreed on that.”
Longarm shook his head. “Not really. I know of a rich minister in Denver who beat his wife to death for not bringing his pipe and slippers fast enough one night. It’s a fact of nature that men and women annoy one another now and again. It’s also a fact of nature that most men don’t kick the shit out of their women. They have the manly option of paying them no mind or leaving them. Yelling back don’t help, and hitting them is just plain wrong. Ninety-nine out of a hundred men are able to accept them rules of nature. The few like you who can’t ain’t really beating women. They’re beating their own feelings of fear and helpless rage at a world they ain’t men enough to stand up to like men.”
Big Dan started to protest. Longarm said, “Shut up and listen. I may be saving your life, if your wife lives. For in my line of work I have to study on how folk get in trouble. So I know where hitting gals can take a man.”
He paused to reach for a smoke before he said, “Men start out abusing women and children because it makes a weak man feel more strong, at first. A man who’s afraid to face a male boss or a bully can still rant and roar about his own house like the cock of the walk, and neither his wife nor his kids is half as likely to back him down as the world all around outside is. But you see, Dan, deep down inside, the domineering cuss has to know this. So no matter how much his family cowers from him, it don’t give him the full satisfaction he’d get from winning just one fight with another man. He wants to feel brave. He wants to feel respected. So he has to push harder at home, He has to feel he’s got his wife and kids scared skinny of him and, even when they are, he has to keep proving it by acting meaner and meaner until, sooner or later, something like what just happened here today just has to happen.”
Big Dan started to cry. Longarm said, “Aw, hell, you could at least try to act like a grown man,” as he turned away in disgust.
That was when he saw the gal staring soberly at him from the open doorway. She was younger and prettier than he’d expected a midwife to be. She wore a blue dress and a matching sunbonnet over her light brown braided hair. She had a black oilcloth medical kit in one hand. He didn’t know how long she’d been there or how much she’d heard. He said, “Howdy, ma’am. I didn’t hear you ride in. This cuss on the keg ain’t hurt bad. I think the lady on the floor, yonder, has a concussion.”
The pretty midwife nodded and moved to drop to her knees by the battered wife. As Longarm watched, Little Dan came in from tethering Ramona and her cart horse, out front. He looked awkwardly at his father and stammered, “Howdy, Pappy. I’m sure glad I didn’t kill you, after all.”
The nester rose, weeping like a baby, to grab his son and hug him, sobbing, “Oh, I’m so sorry, son.”
The young midwife looked up at Longarm. “You were right. There’s really nothing we can do for her now, but wait and see.”
Longarm glanced at the sun-slant outside and asked, “How long might that be, ma’am? I’m a lawman, working on another case. I got to get up to Atlantic City as soon as I can.” The young midwife said, “I can’t answer that yet. She could come out of it any time between right now or a couple of days. Or she could become another
