She walked back up the staircase, her shoes clipping softly on the wood. When she reached the top she turned and found thatTommy hadn’t moved. Hunched forward, his head hanging, worrying his hands together, the wounded and the good, as if tryingto rub them clean.
Chapter 43
Tommy McBride
The grave couldn’t have been much longer than the shovel they’d dug it with. A five-foot plot with a low iron fence, and awhite marble headstone bearing Mary’s name and dates. No flowers, but that wasn’t surprising. Flowers never lasted out here.
Tommy touched his fingers to his lips then rested them on the headstone, out of obligation more than anything, it had beenso long ago. What was left in him now was not so much grief as the vivid memory of that grief, of standing hollowed-out atthis graveside on the day they’d returned from the dispersal, only to learn that their sister was dead.
It had been Katherine who had told them. Funny how things come around. She had buried Mary while they were away to stop thebody from rotting, and John Sullivan had nearly shit himself that a McBride now lay in his land. Tommy smiled at that one.Glanced across the little cemetery to the mottled gray headstone that bore that fat fucker’s name—who was buried on whoseland now? For eternity Sullivan would lie there fuming in McBride soil; would have watched Billy take his station, marry hiswidow, raise their kids. Tommy didn’t really believe in the afterlife, but it was nice to imagine sometimes.
On his way out of the cemetery, he spat on Sullivan’s grave.
A boy was waiting for him when he reached the backyard gate. Tommy could guess who he was. Tall, dark-haired, his father’s image, but there were parts of himself, or maybe his own father, in there too. Freckles on the kid’s nose and cheekbones. A seriousness in his stare. He stood with his arms rigid at his sides, his fingers picking his trouser legs and itching his palms. Tommy came through the gate and the boy stepped determinedly forward with an outstretched hand.
“Glad to meet you, Uncle Tommy. My name’s Thomas McBride.”
It took him a moment to recover. Uncle Tommy—he’d never heard anything so strange. But he shook the boy’s sweaty hand, anexaggerated flapping up and down, then swallowed and managed to reply, “Glad to meet you too, son.”
“That’s your sister buried up there,” the boy told him, like this might be news.
“Aye, it is.”
“Aunt Mary.”
“Aunt Mary?” Tommy echoed, laughing.
He nodded. “She was the same age as me when she died.”
“Which would make you eleven, I take it?”
“Yessir. I’ll be twelve soon. Daddy says he’ll take me mustering then.”
Tommy winced. The laughter faded from his eyes. “I heard you liked cattle work. Skilled on a horse too, eh?”
“Daddy says I’m about as good as you were when you were a boy.”
“Is that right now?”
“Yessir. Better than him even, and he’s the best I’ve seen.”
“Billy said that? That I was better than him?”
“Only with the horses. Not with nothing else.”
Tommy smiled tightly. A short quick laugh through his nose. He looked at the boy standing earnestly before him and could feelthe lump rising, a thickness in his throat. He reached out and scuffed his matted hair, warm and wiry in his hand, and atthat moment the back door opened and Katherine was standing there, a girl peering past her, clinging to her waist. “Thomas,”she scolded, her voice catching, her breathing ragged. She’d been crying. Tears stained her cheeks. “What did I tell you?I’m so sorry, Tommy—I warned him to leave you in peace.”
“I’m glad to have met him at last. No wonder Billy’s so proud.”
He glanced again at Thomas, beaming at the praise, cupped his shoulder then turned to the girl hiding at Katherine’s side. He stepped forward, crouching slightly, attempted a reassuring smile. “And you must be Suzanna?” he asked her. She gave a shy nod. Tommy knelt on the steps and touched her arm ever so gently with his left hand, the little girl watching his missing fingers like there might be magic there. “I read about you in a newspaper once,” he told her. “Now look how big you’ve grown.”
* * *
Katherine dismissed the kitchen staff early that evening, and she and Tommy sat around one end of the long rough-wood table,drinking wine and picking at cuts of bread, meat, and cheese, in the light of a single candle flame. Neither could stomacha formal supper. And Tommy held dark memories of that dining room. Dark memories of the whole house, in fact, but maybe thesewere the kind of memories he could manage to let go. Leave them all up here, where they belonged, find a way not to take themback home. Beginning, perhaps, in this kitchen, a room like any other, four walls, a table and chairs. There was no evil inhere. Just him and Katherine, his sister-in-law, eating and drinking, sometimes laughing, swapping stories about Billy, rememberinghim, beginning to mourn.
“There was this one time,” Katherine said, her hand whirling, loosened by the wine, “Billy got it in his head there was moneyto be made in camel breeding—did you ever come across a camel, Tommy?”
“Once or twice. Thought they were the strangest-looking horses I ever seen.”
“Well, Billy bought a pair off this trader—I don’t know where he met him, Billy met lots of men—and came back one day with the two of them plodding along behind, that funny walk they have, the bend in their knees. Anyway, I remember it, I was in the backyard, and I saw him lead these things into the old corral. Like Hannibal with his elephants, he was. Not sure I’d ever seen him so proud. ‘What the hell are they for?’ I asked him, and of course he says we’re going to breed them, sell them, or even make use of them ourselves. Well, you can imagine my reaction, but there was no telling him sometimes, not when he’d got an idea in
