“That’s the surprising part?” Stot asked.
“I don’t believe you killed a woman you married.”
Starlight shimmered above like salt or dust in the bruised-purple sky. I smelt something soft, like pecan pie, and the grassy balm of boundless space.
Stot pressed his bootheel along the dirt. “In essence.”
“You can’t killin essence.”
“No, but it was my fault all the same.”
The portrait of the woman and the ice-blue lace in his satchel, perhaps it was hers. “You gonna tell me?” I asked.
“Will you?” He gripped the creases of his Stetson.
I didn’t want to speak of Lark and Magnolia, of the havoc I’d left back in Kansas. I didn’t want to pull the past forward. I wanted to leave that whole lost universe there, away in time. And yet—I must know about his wife. I nodded. He leaned back on his forearms, tipped his head to the cloud-feathered sky. “You can’t share this, you know. It keeps us safe, for folks to be fearing me.”
I motioned for him to continue.
“Yes, I was married,” he said. “I loved her, endlessly. She was delicate and gentle—the kindest woman I’ve known.”
It was agonizing glimpsing how deep this man could love. I scraped a clump of dirt off my bootheel, my hands calloused, mud smudged. Nothing about me was soft. “So what happened?” I asked.
I felt his gaze and glanced up. His expression had a wash of misery and the weight of past, but also, a smirk edged his mouth. “Well, I was the county sheriff.”
I gasped. “You were not.”
He grinned. “I was.”
A laugh caught in my throat. “Of course you were,” I said. “The Lawman.”
He adjusted his legs, spurs thumping the ground, forearm across his knees. An upland chorus frog chattered from the oat grass, its raspy call wrathy, reminding me of the incessant noise of a summer field full of cicadas and crickets. Stot told that the Dalton Brothers had come through his territory, and they’d tussled. He’d essentially vanquished them during the Coffeyville robbery.
“Well, damn.” I shook my head. Those robberies had become immortalized, frontier legends. “Wait.” I studied his bearing. “Are you one of the Guardsmen?”
“No,” he said. “I mean yes, I ran with Heck Thomas and the Three Guardsmen for a few years. Taught them to track some.” He resettled his Stetson, straightened the brim. “Better pals with Bass Reeves, though. He’s a good man.”
I considered the line of Stot’s trousers, his crisp white paper collar. I’d known he was unflagging, tenacious, that he sought honor with ruthlessness. After all was summed up, I supposed I wasn’t surprised to learn what his life had once been.
“A few in the Dalton Gang had been neighboring sheriffs and marshals. After their oldest brother’s murder, they began to muddle, to ask questions of justice and order, of the nature of law.” He removed a cigarettefrom his chestnut-brown leather case. “We were tossed on opposite sides of that discussion. I foiled some of their exploits, made myself an enemy.”
He twisted the whiskey bottle in a slow circle, holding the decanter by the neck. It brushed the grasses in a soft swish. “She was pregnant.” He rotated the bottle, the lit cigarette a broken curve of light along the glass. “We’d just found out.”
The moon tumbled from the clouds and tossed erratic, ghostly tree-limb impressions across my pasture. It was monochrome and static and suddenly too cold.
“They came for me, but I wasn’t home,” Stot said. “I didn’t protect her.”
I pressed my hands over my breastbone.
“They murdered her,” he said. “Left her for me on the doorstep.”
“Oh God.” I grasped his hand. “I’m so sorry.”
He slid his palm along mine, let me hold on. His other fist gripped the neck of the decanter. “It’s past.”
“Past is an awful bitch.”
“True.” He stubbed out his cigarette in the dirt. “And yet I wouldn’t erase what once was. I have remembrances of her, the belief that somewhere, sometimes, there’s beauty in humanity.”
