Things might of gone different for him if he hadn’t run, so that a ten-year old girl had to smoke him out for us. Now our blood was up. We glugged down the rest of that whiskey and yanked his trousers down and took out a sharp knife. Held Griselda, made her watch, sobbing. After, I saw Harlan’s cur loping away into the night with Ryne’s manhood.
*****
Cora, she hung tight to me the whole ride home. Six miles over the hills, cold wind cutting us all the way. First couple miles, didn’t neither of us say nothing.
“He going to live, Pa?” Cora finally asked.
“Not well. But he ain’t going to die, if that’s what you mean.” We rode on a ways. “You understand, don’t you?” I asked.
“You can’t go rutting someone you ain’t married to,” Cora said.
“That’s right.”
“I like this horse, Pa.”
“He’s a good one, all right.”
That Mustang was, too. He’d ride me right up into the mountains and carry the furs out. Keep me off the wages. Cora behind me patted the Mustang’s shanks.
“You going to take me up with you after the bears?” she asked.
“How’d you know about that?” I said.
She shrugged. “I know.”
Magpie by Hilary Davidson
The sheriff who called about my mother-in-law’s death sounded genuinely sad about it. “She looked like she was called up to the Lord all peaceful-like,” he said, in a deep voice that had a lingering drawl to it. “She went in her sleep, I reckon. I’m sure she didn’t feel no pain.”
He told me that she’d died of a heart attack, and that it had probably happened a couple of days earlier, given the state in which she was found. “Couple of her near neighbors hadn’t seen her about, so they went over, and then they called me. Poor Mrs. Carlow. Let me give you my number so your husband can call me.”
I dutifully wrote it down, then folded the paper and put it into my purse. It was just before noon, and Jake was probably with a patient, maybe even in surgery. Telling him the news about his mother over the phone seemed heartless. I could drive to his office and reveal all in person, but given that he hadn’t spoken to his mother in years, that seemed like overkill. The news could wait until evening, after he got home. There wasn’t anything either of us could do about it now. His mother had lived in the western edge of Ohio, close to the border with West Virginia. Jake and I were in Los Angeles, where we’d moved for his medical practice. We’d been there almost five years, and even though his roots were in hill country and mine were in Cleveland, the West Coast felt completely like home.
