him well away and would not release him till he swore not to resume the attack. But still kept themselves between them.
John Roger saw none of that. He had gone straight to the boy and sat down and gathered him up with his arm and rocked him and wept. James Sebastian stared at his father’s hunched figure. Then over at the black horse, still bawling with every effort to rise. With a one-handed flick he worked the lever to open the breech and saw the empty chamber and the ready bullet levered into the breech from the magazine. He worked the lever again, inserting the bullet in the chamber, and walked over to the crippled horse. The black saw who it was and ceased its agonized struggle. It watched him and snuffled hard. James Sebastian set the rifle muzzle between its eyes and said, “You’re a damn fine horse.” And shot it. Then dropped the rifle beside the horse.
Blake Cortez rode up, leading John Samuel’s mount by the reins. “You manage?” he said. James nodded and took hold of the mount’s saddle horn with his left hand and put his left foot in the stirrup and with a loud grunt and an awkward move pulled himself up onto the saddle.
Their father yet sat rocking the dead boy in his arms. He had not turned at the rifleshot. Seemed not even to have heard it. John Samuel yet lay supine, being attended to. They hupped their mounts and rode away, bearing wide around the ranch house.
They did not go back to the casa grande but to the compound stable, where they always left their rucksacks on arriving from the cove. Blake Cortez told the stableman to fetch a couple of short wooden slats to serve for a forearm splint and some cloth strips to bind it. The man was quick to do it and then Blake told him and his helper sons to go outside. He would brook no witness to his brother’s pain as he doctored his arm. Both bones of it were broken and the top one dislocated and it took Blake several tries to align it properly. His own right hand was swollen thick as a mitten from punching John Samuel and was clumsy in its working. But it wasn’t broken and he knew his pain was picayune in comparison to James Sebastian’s. At Blake’s every effort to set the bones, James groaned through clenched teeth, his face pale and dripping sweat. When Blake at last judged by feel that the bone was set right he splinted the arm and bound it and fashioned a sling for it. He helped James Sebastian to get his rucksack slung across his chest and then shouldered his own and they headed for the river trail and the long hike home to Ensenada de Isabel. The stableman and his boys waited until they were into the trees and out of sight before going back into the stable.
Excepting John Samuel, who would for the rest of his life blame the twins for what happened, everybody who was there agreed that it was an accident. Some would say it must have been that the horse was frighted by a snake, though it might have been a rabbit, a turtle, an armadillo. But most would ridicule the idea of any such thing scaring a horse that was moving at a gallop. Besides, the horse didn’t try to veer, it had gone straight down, so it had to have stepped in a hole, a gopher hole, turtle hole, or on a large rock that gave way under its hoof. Some few others would say that the horse may have seen a snake or stepped in a hole or slipped on a rock, but given the horse they were talking about, the snake or the hole or the rock may have existed only in the crazy horse’s head. Who could know what really caused the black to fall? The only thing they all knew for sure was that, to the dead boy’s family, it could hardly matter. And that, had John Samuel not bought the crazy horse, his son could not have been killed by it.
The dark news came to Maria Palomina and Sofia Reina in a letter from Bruno Tomas. Mother and daughter cried together over the loss of a young kinsman they never had the chance to meet. John Roger’s own letter was later in coming and its sorrow even heavier and the more pathetic for being that of the boy’s grandfather. When Amos Bentley arrived for his regular visit and heard the news, he sat with the women for the rest of the day, listening without interruption when they wanted to unburden themselves to him, holding silent with them when they had nothing to say.
DISTANCES
Even as he began to accommodate his grief, John Roger remained deep in dejection. He was given to morbid fancies and memories. Lying awake one night, he recalled a circus bear he and Sammy had seen at a traveling show one Portsmouth summer. The bear was old and mangy and sat in a wagon cage. It had a red fez strapped to its head and a tin drum strapped to its belly and its dull eyes seemed to stare at nothing as it beat and beat on the drum in unceasing monotony. Sammy had been disdainful of the bear, saying it should refuse to play the fool and instead grab the first man it could get hold of through the bars and tear his throat out before somebody could shoot it. But John Roger’s heart had felt a secret pity for the animal. Unlike Sammy, the bear could not reason nor entertain choices but only go on beating and beating the drum simply because, as with a living heart, there was nothing else for it to do.
John Roger well understood the pain of John Samuel’s loss, but he could imagine too how the twins felt about being the agent of the boy’s death. And could understand the protective imperative the one must have felt on seeing John Samuel pointing a rifle at the other. Could understand the rage of all three, but that his sons had tried to kill each other was an iron weight in his heart.
He knew why the twins were staying away, but as the months passed, he missed the boys more and more. He thought of going to Ensenada de Isabel to see them but could not bring himself to do it. It would be hard enough to talk to them without the distraction of being reminded of Elizabeth Anne every minute he was there. Besides, what if they weren’t there? What if they’d gone away, perhaps forever? The thought of being at the cove absent both her and them infused him with such cold loneliness he had an urge to weep—and the impulse in turn made him angry. His lachrymose feelings of late had more and more confused him. You have become an old fool, he told himself. The worst kind of all.
He had not seen them in almost six months when he decided to send Bruno Tomas to the cove to see if they were there, and told him what to tell them if they were.
When Bruno informed Felicia of his mission, she gave him a Saint Christopher medal to give to the twins. Tell them to share it, she said. He took a load of supplies for the cove house and two men to assist him, a pair of wranglers named Mongo and Stefan. They rode out on burros and trailed a pack donkey, each man armed with a revolver.
Bruno had thought the forest flanking the compound and Santa Rosalba was as dense as forest could be— until they made their slow way along the narrow jungle track leading to the cove. They spent the night on the trail, making an in-line camp between a pair of lanterns they let burn all night, but they slept very little for the burros’ braying nervousness. The following day, about two hundred yards from the cove—though they did not know yet how much farther it was—the trail was blocked by a felled tree nearly four feet thick.
How long you suppose it took them to chop down
Then there the house was, and beyond it the cove. The pier stood boatless. The twins were away.
They found a store of food in the house and a cabinet with casks of beer and shelves lined with green quart bottles sealed with clipped corks. The men grinned. In a shed in back of the house they found the brewing vats. John Roger had left it up to Bruno, if he found the twins gone, whether to wait a few days in case they came back. The place was so pleasant, and with beer at hand besides, he decided to wait.
They had been asleep but two hours that night when they were awakened by a frantic braying from the jungle. “Los burros!” Mongo shouted. The braying was so loud it seemed the donkeys were not a hundred feet from the house.
They had left a verandah lamp burning low, and were quick to light another and yank on their pants and boots. Holding the lamps high and with pistols in hand they ran down the steps and around the house and entered the solid blackness before them. They hied along the narrow trail, the brush slapping at their arms and faces, their shadows disjointed in the wavering lantern light, and arrived gasping at the barrier tree, where the burros were still
