It irritated her beyond measure to see people nodding to her husband on the street, as if they were his proud owners. His nodding in return to the men, or smooth touching of fingertip to hatbrim for the benefit of the women, struck Sophie as the quintessence of hypocrisy. She knew for a fact that he despised almost everyone in town for a fool or weakling who could not stand up to a stiff breeze without the assistance of hired help. That was his puzzling description of his twin professions—hired help—yet he made no secret of his enjoyment in their practice.
Sophie concluded that this was because the work allowed him to be a bully. He enjoyed his dominance over others in a way her first husband never could have done; Grover Stunce may have been a man of extensive personal limitation, never truly comfortable with the power that was his to wield, but no one could ever have characterized him as a bully. Sophie felt it should be possible to make people do what the law obliged them to, without smashing the side of their head with a sawed-off shotgun, or emptying its barrels into the more obstreperous of them. No, there should be a method somewhere between Grover’s benign fumbling and Clay’s remorseless administering of public order.
An even greater source of Sophie’s anger was his behavior at home. Clay did not love his wife, probably never had, and took no pains to hide this unpleasant truth from her. He never bothered to approach her as a wife anymore, and spent his sleeping hours alone on the sofa. It was the final insult, this rejection of her flesh. She heard no whisper, saw no evidence of another woman, but such a figure began stalking her thoughts more often. Was Clay so inhuman as to have no need of the marriage bed? His purely masculine needs should have directed him to her, whatever the state of their love. His abstinence was wholly unnatural, and Sophie saw herself as its victim. She had her needs, and not one of them, apart from being maintained in a comfortable home, was being met by her husband. He spoke seldom, and would not respond when she cautiously broached the subject of their life together.
Sophie’s only comfort was Silan. He was a loving boy, still too young to be aware of the gulf separating his parents. When he was with Sophie, he enjoyed following her from room to room as she performed the domestic chores, and even offered to assist her with them. That endearing habit ceased when Clay came home unexpectedly one afternoon, to find Silan happily washing dishes. Clay ripped the apron from him and said, his voice heavy with controlled anger, “Don’t you ever do that again, boy. That’s women’s work, not something for you to be getting into, you hear me?”
“Yessir.”
Clay looked forward to teaching Silan the things a boy should know: riding and shooting. Silan told his mother he wanted to be the sheriff and the marshal himself when he grew up, just like Papa. Sophie gave him a sickly smile and informed him that there remained plenty of time in which to find his own path in life. Silan’s expression indicated that he didn’t see the need for being anything other than what his tall and famous papa was. Sophie felt heartsick for days afterward.
Clay rode Sunrise as often as his official capacity allowed. Being responsible for the entire county, he was able to ride its length and breadth whenever he chose, and would often take the time to serve legal papers or collect small fines from the county’s furthest corners himself, rather than send one of his two deputies. Clay knew why he did this; it was simply to escape from his wife and the town of Keyhoe for a while. Alone beneath a sky so broad it appeared curved, he could appreciate what it meant to be himself. Not husband or father, not lawman: just plain Clay Dugan.
The feelings that invaded him on these extended rides among the badlands of his inner self disturbed Clay. He could not quite get a handle on precisely who he was. The things that defined him—his twin badges, his shotgun, his horse of many colors, which had become every bit as much of his popular image as the healed-over holes in his cheeks—were not enough to reassure him that he was indeed the person everyone accepted as their custodian, their guardian. Was anyone standing guard over Clay? He felt something missing, some essential part of himself that was nearby but separate from him: a key; a dislodged brick from some wall around a secret.
He wondered if the missing part of himself was so obvious a thing as the brother and sister he had thrown away hope of ever finding. Could the answer be so simple? The clearly limned portraits his memory had retained of Drew and Zoe were blurred now, reduced to a few facial expressions and bodily or vocal characteristics that he was aware were being steadily eroded by time. Once, alone by a campfire, he felt a presence so strongly beside him he snatched up his weapon and turned to the darkness in fear. He thought he saw a girl standing just beyond the firelight’s reach, a girl with some kind of partial mask over her eyes, but then she was gone, probably a fragment of a waking dream Clay had not even been aware was taking place within his mind. Shaken, he built up the fire, then found himself crying, his mustache soaking up the inexplicable tears.
One of Clay’s pleasures on these lonely rides around his county was the sight of his horse cropping grass in the shining moments just before and just after the appearance of light in the sky. So aptly named, Sunrise glowed like a spectral creature from an earlier time, a fairy horse stripped of wings, confined to earth until some magical spell could be broken. The sight always moved Clay in ways beyond his understanding.
He found cause for sorrow in the fact that his senses were never so moved as when he saw Sunrise at the special time of dawning. He should have felt such wonder when looking at his wife and child, but he did not. Even Silan could not provoke in Clay’s chest the same elation, the same sense of perfection, as Sunrise, a dumb beast. The fault for this misplacement of emotion lay in himself, he was sure. He was an incomplete man. Those parts of himself that were present were arranged in all the wrong places, and it seemed there was nothing he could do about it.
Silan always expressed admiration for Sunrise. He begged Clay often to let him share the saddle on the colored horse, and was always refused. “He’s too tall for you, boy. When you’re older I’ll get you a pony of your own.”
“You could hold me on. Why can’t I, just for a little while?”
“Because I say. He’s my horse, and I’m your father, so you heed what I tell you if you don’t want a switching.”
“You never switched me yet, so I don’t believe you.”
Clay laughed. He knew he indulged his son. “Comes a first time for everything, so you watch your tongue, you hear?”
“But can I ride on Sunrise with you?”
“No, and don’t be pestering me again about it.”
Sophie overheard this exchange in the yard from the kitchen window. There was never awkwardness between Clay and the boy, the way there was between husband and wife. Inside the man there was a small wellspring of affection, but none ever ran in Sophie’s direction. She was herself loving toward Silan, but only when Clay was not present. Like him, she felt it was not appropriate to fuss over the boy while under spousal scrutiny. The family spent so little time together in one room that the tension between Sophie and Clay, and the mutual ignoring of their son, never became obvious enough to cause embarrassment.
On a day in midsummer when he found his duties irksome, Clay finally relented, and agreed to take Silan up onto the saddle before him while he rode Sunrise from one side of town to the other. There was no real risk, since his arm was around the boy at all times, squirm though he might with excitement at finally being allowed onto the horse he considered the most wonderful in the world.
Together, father and son reached the edge of town and turned to amble back to the livery stable. That was when the dog, someone’s mongrel, rushed from a yard to attack the horse. Sunrise reared to his highest reach. Clay grabbed with both hands at the reins to control him, and Silan, panic-stricken by the commotion and sudden elevation, fell backward against Clay’s stomach, rolled sideways without encountering the supporting arms he was expecting, and slipped from his perch. He was gone from the plunging saddle in an instant. Clay made a futile grab at his
receding jacket, then had to concentrate on reining in Sunrise before he was thrown himself from the horse’s back.
When he had control again, Clay saw Silan’s body lying still on the ground. He leapt from the saddle and allowed his horse to gallop away down the street. Scooping Silan into his arms, he murmured the boy’s name over and over, a low babbling of sound that came directly from his heart. The back of Silan’s head was caked with dirt and blood. The dog had followed Sunrise along the street. A crowd was gathering around the two figures in the dust.
Silan was carried to the house and set down on the parlor settee. Dr. McNab bathed his head to expose what appeared to be a minor laceration of the scalp at the base of the skull. Sophie wandered in and out of the room, dazed. When Silan suddenly emptied his bowels, she attended to him without a word, first making the men leave the room.
“The wound’s in a bad place,” McNab told Clay. “A blow to the head can be a serious shock to the brain. That’s likely the reason for him not responding to anything. He’s unconscious, but with his eyes wide open.”
“How long will it last?”
“I’ve heard of cases that continued for several days, others that lasted just an hour or two. It could be he’ll come around before suppertime, with nothing more than an aching head to show for it. Or it could take longer; I just don’t know. When Mrs. Dugan has finished in there, you may as well put a nightshirt on him and put him to bed. At least he’ll be more comfortable.”
Silan did not come to before suppertime, on that day or the next. There was no perceptible change in his condition. He would eat, if food was thrust into his mouth, and drink water poured into him, but his eyes would not close. Not a limb, not so much as a finger, showed any inclination to twitch. Silan lay utterly still, his mouth gaping slightly, eyes fixed on the ceiling.
Sophie stayed with him most of the day and evening. Clay slept in a chair beside Silan’s bed at night, following his rounds of the town saloons. He would enter Silan’s room, rouse Sophie from the chair and take her place. For a long time he would stare at the boy’s wan face with its staring eyes, then he would arrange himself for the hours of sleep that refused to come until near dawn. He spent several hours each day asleep in a cell at the office, while his deputies took care of business and kept things as quiet as they could.
Silan’s twilight state persisted for forty-seven days. Dr. McNab instructed that he be turned, like a side of beef on a spit, four or five times every twenty-four hours, to prevent the onset of bedsores, and this operation was carried out with diligence by the parents. Silan’s body did not waste away, since Sophie fed him as much as his champing jaws could accommodate, in fact he became heavier than a boy his age should be. Sophie cleaned up his bowel movements without fuss, and seemed not to expect Clay to participate in this, the least acceptable sickbed task. On the one occasion when Clay was obliged to perform it, in the small hours of the morning, he did not communicate to Sophie his outrage that anyone other than a baby should require such treatment. Whereas Sophie’s attitude toward Silan’s condition remained essentially unchanged from the beginning, Clay was aware of a fundamental alteration in his thoughts.
He asked Dr. McNab, “Can he go on this way?”
“I’ve heard of such instances, yes. The patient is sometimes able, with constant care, to maintain the bodily functions for considerable periods of time.”
“But without getting better.”
“No. It’s my understanding that once the comatose condition has been entered into for more than a week or two, there is no return to normalcy. I don’t say that my knowledge, or lack of it, is the last word in such instances, but I won’t hold out to you any false hope. I know you for a man who appreciates the unadorned facts, and these are what you have. Mrs. Dugan is perhaps not ready to accept them.”
“Thank you for being honest.”
“A great many things are in the hands of God, probably more things than we know of.”
Clay nodded, doubting it.
Clay was temperamentally disinclined to allow a situation beyond his control to persist indefinitely. It was against his own nature, and against nature in general, that a boy five years old be allowed to lie like a log in his bed, eating and excreting without the slightest indication that he was aware of his own humanness. It wasn’t right that such a thing be permitted to continue, without any end in sight, without hope of restitution or redress. There lay Silan, a wonderful boy about to enter the stage before manhood, now reduced to a form Clay could not bring himself to recognize as that of his son.
He began to drink, guardedly at first, then with an openness that surprised his deputies and shocked Sophie.
“That isn’t the way,” she said. “You won’t help him by getting drunk.”
“Is that so. And how will I help him? Tell me that.”
“By believing.”
“In what?”
“The strength and mercy of God.”
Clay’s braying laughter made Sophie realize just how far her husband had strayed from the path of righteousness. He never did anything more than silently mouth the hymns in church every Sunday, never discussed religion with her, or prayed, or read the Bible. He was an unbeliever, and it was likely that his sin was in part responsible for Silan’s tragedy. The laughter was unforgivable. Sophie hated Clay more intensely at that moment than she had at any other time, and recognized her hatred as the kind that left a permanent mark on the memory, a hatred from which there could be no returning.
“You are an evil person,” she declared.
His laughter stopped immediately. “Say that again.”
“You have no love inside you for anyone, even your son. You won’t make the least effort to bring him back to us.”
“Bring him back? What the hell can I do? Oh, you mean believing, am I right?”
“I mean you should get down on your knees this instant and beg the Lord for mercy! Beg with all your heart, and Silan may yet come back to us! I have! Why should you not!”
He stared at her, feeling some sympathy for her plight. Here was a woman who expected divine intervention because she had prayed for it. There could be no further conversation between them that would mean anything. They might just as well have attempted communication in different languages. He felt sympathy for his wife because she would never get the thing she wanted, for all her efforts. It made him only slightly irritated that she would blame him, not the absence of God from the world, for the continuing farce of Silan’s death-in-life existence.
“I’m sorry; I can’t.”
“Then on your head be it,” she said, and swept from the room. Clay picked up his whiskey, the little shot glass twinkling merrily in the lamplight. “My only friend,” he said, and then saw himself as an unbearably pathetic individual, smart enough to understand he could do nothing to alter things, cowardly enough to cope with his sadness through liquor. It had been a long time since he felt so weak, so maudlin. Another drink would fix that, and another one or two would allow him to forget anything he wished to.
After sixty-one days without a change in Silan, Clay made a decision. He drank nothing all day, and his deputies exchanged dour expressions; was Clay Dugan about to climb out of the hole he’d dug for himself and start acting like a lawman again? They had protected him against too much public scrutiny since the accident, knowing his pain, but it was about time he took control of himself, whatever the misery in his private life. Keyhoe and the surrounding county needed a drunk running things the way it needed more mud in winter.
When Clay returned home to assume the nightly watch over Silan, Sophie left them alone without a word. Husband and wife had reduced their domestic exchanges to the barest minimum of words and glances. Most tasks could be accomplished in complete silence. Clay found he preferred this stunted intercourse to the pointless arguing that would have resulted from actual conversation.
He waited for more than an hour, to ensure that Sophie was fast asleep, then lifted Silan from the
bed and carried him outside. Sophie’s house was near the edge of town, and Clay was able to carry his boy away from the streets and buildings, out to the empty prairie and the long horizon of Kansas, a ruler-straight edge to the canopy of stars. He set the boy down and knelt beside him. The evening was cool; fall had come.
“That’s quite a sky, don’t you think? No one can ever count the stars, there are so many, like dust in the air. You asked me once how many there were, and I said I didn’t know, and you looked at me like I should have known. Well, I didn’t. I don’t know much about anything, as a matter of fact. I know you won’t ever get better, though. That I do know. And I know it isn’t right to let you be the way you are. It isn’t your fault, but it isn’t right either. I mean to change the way things are. I have to. There’s some who wouldn’t let me, so we have to do this together, just you and me, so it can get done like it should. I always loved you. You’re my darling boy. That … that’s why I have to do this. If there’s a tiny part of you way deep inside that can hear me and understand what it is I’m saying, please forgive me. This is the only way, Silan, the only way out. If there’s a hell, and I have to burn there forever for this, I’ll do it gladly, anything but look at you day after day, turning into something that isn’t even you anymore. It isn’t right, and so we’re out here, you and me, to put it right. Good-bye, son. I love you.”
Clay took from his pocket a large handkerchief folded neatly into a square. He lifted Silan’s head, cradled it tenderly with his left hand, and pressed the handkerchief firmly against the boy’s mouth. Soon the body that had moved not a muscle since being thrown from Sunrise began to thrash feebly, its jerkings without coordination, the instinctive response to oxygen starvation. Clay hugged him close, and held the handkerchief tighter. An end to movement came with surprising swiftness.