One
There are plenty of things that someone needs to be taught to know. I needed to be taught about salvation. I needed to be taught about arithmetic. And I needed to be taught not to get friendly with strangers. Because when you’re a newborn babe in the world, you don’t just come out knowing.
You know nothing about the Lord’s sacrifice that redeemed mankind. You don’t even know that mankind needed redeeming. Someone tells you, and they show you, and you learn that you hadn’t been seeing the whole picture.
When you come out as a little babe, you don’t know what two is. You’ve seen two things together, but there’s no concept of numbers. Then, your mama or your tutor teaches you a little of the world and you find out that there’s a whole way of describing the world you didn’t know about.
Strangers seem friendly enough, to a child. And they usually are. Which creates the most insidious trap of all, because the ones that aren’t friendly are the ones you have to watch out for the most. If nobody teaches you that lesson early, then the first mistake can be the last one you ever get to make.
But I did learn all of those things. I learned them as a little girl, and they were all very important. I have to go forward and teach God’s word. I have to take care of money, since Jodie’s not old enough and Dad’s gone. Mama’s not in any shape to do it herself, not any more. And I have to make sure to be polite, but not too trusting, with strangers.
There are other lessons, though, that you don’t need to be taught. You have to be taught the individual parts. But once you know what a gunfighter is, you don’t have to be taught that those kind of men live short, violent lives. It came together like it was obvious. For all they who take the sword shall perish with the sword. It follows that the Lord wasn’t simply referring to swords. Guns probably followed the same pattern.
I adjusted my scarf and leaned closer to Jodie. He stood straight. He was only fifteen, five years my younger, but he was already almost half a foot higher than me, and already weighed twice what I weighed. And at some point, numbers would get put into his head and he could take care of these chores. It was just a matter of time, and I was more than ready for him to take over. After all, a woman only has so many marriageable years to live.
The bank was busy today. I never preferred to come in when it was busy, but we only came into town for Church and to buy supplies, and we weren’t about to go back home and wait for another day while the hens went without feed.
I sucked in a breath and stood up on my toes to speak into Jodie’s ear.
“Come on, let’s get this over with.”
He nodded and started walking. He was stiff. Still unused to going into town in the first place as far as I could tell. It was something that would pass. There was no trick to it other than to practice. He just had fewer years of having to act like a man than I had trying to fill in for Mama. It would come.
I stepped into line and he turned away and walked away from me. I watched him go curiously; he shrugged off his coat and hung it up on the rack. I didn’t understand what he was doing, but he was free to do whatever struck his fancy. I wasn’t about to jump on him about it, at least.
The door swung open. Hard. It struck my brother in the nose and he went down grabbing at it, blood pouring out. I moved almost by reflex, and stopped after two steps. A man stepped through the doorway, holding a long gun. Like he was used to it.
The lessons about men with guns flashed through my head. Some of them I had been taught; others I’d reasoned out for myself. But there were plenty of them.
All men had guns. Out here, you have to have them. Have to make sure that you can keep the farm safe. I’ve held Papa’s rifle a few times. It’s heavy for me. So when we need to scare off a cougar, it’s usually Jodie these days who does it. He can hit a coffee can at twenty paces. I can’t.
Some of the men with guns, though, weren’t planning on using them to protect themselves. Some of them were planning on using them on other people.
Those men were criminals. They lived a hard life. Men with hard, violent, short lives tended to pick up injuries. It was part of what made their lives so short.
All of those things flashed through my head so fast that for a moment I didn’t even understand what I was looking at when I saw the man in the doorway.
He didn’t have any injuries. Not so far as I could tell. There was a carnival that came through on occasion. They had a boxer who would take all comers. Jodie had already been knocked on his bottom three years running. It would be a fourth this autumn, I knew.
The boxer had a twisted, mangled ear from having it smashed into his head a hundred hundred times. He had a nose that was all twisted up. The boxer wasn’t a good-looking man in spite of his obvious size and his jaw that could have been handsome once.
This man didn’t have a smashed-up ear. He didn’t have a twisted, broken nose. He didn’t have a thick scar across his face.
“My name,” he said in a low, threatening voice. “Is Baron Euler.”
It was a lie, because I knew the name. I’d been in the Sheriff’s office once, when someone, who turned out to be that drunken lout Hillary Rubles, had been stealing our cows.
Baron Euler had his name stamped on a poster, marked Wanted, with a drawing of a man’s face. He looked exactly like I’d have expected a gunfighter to look. Grizzled and pock-marked and scarred up.
This man wasn’t any of those things. His hand moved slightly, and I heard the rifle in his hands rack a shot.
“If everyone cooperates with me here, nobody has to get hurt.”
I didn’t think before I spoke. I was so stunned by the whole thing that I didn’t even think for a second.
“You can’t be Baron Euler. That’s impossible.”
The man with the rifle, the man calling himself Baron Euler, smiled.
“You willing to bet your life on that, little lady?”