It doesn’t have to be you, I’d told him, and he’d told me we had adiffering opinion.
“He thinks it’s his responsibility?” I guess. “To intervene?”
She nods. “I didn’t understand how much until…well, I’m sure you have no trouble believing all my girls took a quick liking to him. Every one of them thought he was sweet as pie. All half in love by the time the week was through.” She chuckles. “Wanted to take him in like a stray cat.”
I do laugh a bit at that, unable to think of a more perfect description for him and the nine lives he seems determined to burn through at an alarming pace.
“The people he was riding with,” I prod, preferring to turn the conversation away from Cypress’s demise. “You said they were a bad sort?”
“They were. Didn’t really know how bad at the time.” She looks down at her hands for so long I worry she’s fallen asleep right before she says, “Cypress though…”
“He knew,” I say, thinking of the way he’d focused in on those two men earlier tonight. The way I’d learned right then the sort they were and been able to tell he did, too.
“The night his old crew left town, they decided to take a few of my girls with them,” she says, a sudden unsteadiness in her voice. “Took them right from their beds like cowards. I tried my best to stop them. Hit one of them in the back with my shotgun as they were taking off, but the bastard died before I could make him tell me where they were headed. I went after them as far as I could, but when I lost the trail…I didn’t think I’d ever see them again.”
I close my eyes briefly, knowing that pain all too well. How it feels to lose people and to feel completely helpless while you do.
“Where was Cypress in all this?” I ask, thinking of tonight’s events, trying to marry them and Dolly’s clear affection for himwith the story she’s telling now. “He wasn’t part of—”
“I’ll admit to you that I thought he was,” she says, finishing my sentence for me. “I can still remember catching sight of him looking back at me before he raced off with them, and I wondered how I had gotten him so wrong. How I missed that he was playin’ us all that time. Forweeks, I cursed that boy’s name and all the while…” Her voice tapers off, wearily. “I still feel sorry for it.”
I’ve stopped eating again because of the look on her face, not sure if I can stomach it right now no matter how good. “What happened?”
She sighs, wincing with the effort of adjusting her chair so that we’re better facing one another. “My girls showed up again three weeks later. They’d been let loose longer but…Cypress had warned them not to come straight back. Told them which way to go and where to lie low. Gave them food. Money. Everything he could to make sure they got home.”
“But he stayed?” I ask, already suspecting the answer. “He freed them and stayed behind? Why?”
She stares at me long enough for an earlier part of our conversation to come back to me.
He doesn’t know when to quit.
I’m not sure he thinks he can.
“Fuck.” I stand from my chair, unable to stay still as I begin to wander back and forth, remembering how scared he’d been when I held that knife to his throat, when I’d hit him and he’d told me he’d experienced worse. “Fuck…he went back to deal with them.” I feel like I want to break something…someone. “And they got the upper hand on him?”
She nods, watching me pace for a time before she tells me softly, almost gently, “He showed up another week after they did. Must have taken a more direct path, but when he did, I…I barely knew him.”
Everything inside me goes quiet, a waiting tension ready to snap. I see the thin scars on his face now in a new light. “They hurt him?”
“To this day, I have no idea how he even made it here.”
I swallow past the lump in my throat, surprised at how much it’s bothering me to hear this, how much I want to go find people that are likely already dead for a man that a few weeks ago, I didn’t even know. “He tell you what they did?”
“I can only give you my part of the story. He’s never told me his. Not all of it,” she admits, neither of us missing the grim significance of there being something that evenCypresswon’t talk about. “As I said, he was hurt. Feverish for days. And what he did tell me didn’t make much sense back then.”
I’m grateful I don’t have to ask this time for her to keep going, for her to know I want to hear it anyway.
“He kept saying he’d lostthem. Over and over. No matter how many times I reassured him that all my girls were back. That he’d done right.” Her gaze looks past me to another time completely. “I wanted him to have some peace. Just in case he didn’t pull through. But he wassoinsistent on it. Kept trying to get out of bed. Kept saying he had to findthem. That they’d met him in the dark, and he couldn’t leave them. That they’d be looking for him, too.”
“Did he ever say who?” I ask, standing near her again as I lean my hip and brace my hand against the table for support.
“I suppose he did, in a way.” Her eyes flick to mine, searching my face, but her body is starting to sag in her chair, and I can see again how weary she’s getting. “At the time, I thought it was nonsense. But he’s never wavered on it after all these years anytime I’ve asked him. Imagine my surprise, then, when he walked up with you…” She chuckles. “I didn’t get it then, but I think maybe I do now.”
“Get what?”
She reaches out a wrinkled hand, patting the side of my face. “You’ll take care of him for me, won’t you? You and the little bird?”
The little bird?